Step one

She collapses on my sofa, and I hear myself thinking Looks like shit.  Carelessly dressed, hair disheveled,  circles under her eyes.  Pale.

But you don’t tell clients they look like shit.

“How are you?” I ask.

“Shitty,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

“I can’t do it anymore,” she says.

“Do what?”

“Any of it.  All of it.”

I know what she’s talking about.  We’ve been over this ground many times.  She lives with a self-absorbed, unpleasable husband.  Her three adult kids are needy and crisis-prone.  Her aging parents call her at all hours with requests, demands and emergencies.   And she belongs to a volunteer organization, a peace group apparently unable to function without her.

“I just can’t manage it all.”

I’m quiet.

She looks at me.  “Can you help me?” she asks.

“Manage it all?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

She sags into the cushions.  “Why not?”

I think a minute.  Again, not new territory.  I’ve explained over and over why what she’s attempting is impossible.

But this woman is a control addict.  And like any addict, she can‘t see the obvious.  No matter how often life spells it out for her.

She’s no dummy, though.  Now she looks at me and reads my mind.

“I know,“ she says.  “I know.  I’m not getting it.  I’m sorry.”

“It’s nothing to apologize for,” I say.  “It’s part of the problem.  A symptom. Like throwing up when you have food poisoning.”

“But I need to get this, Steve.  Please.  Explain it again.  Why can’t I manage it all?  What’s wrong with me?”

That control can be a problem is hard for many clients to accept.  It can take months for them to get past seeing control as the solution to just about everything.  At our last session I’d suggested we speed up this process by relating every problem she brings up to her addiction.

Now I say, “Know anything about the Twelve Steps?”

“Sort of.  I went to Al-Anon when my first husband was drinking.”

“I’m thinking of the First Step now.  Remember how it goes?”

“Admitted we were something or other,” she frowns.

“Admitted we were powerless over X – fill in the blank — and that our lives had become unmanageable. 

“For the alcoholic that means powerless over alcohol.  For the overeater, it’s powerless over food.  For the control addict, it’s powerless over people, places and things.”

“I remember now,” she says.  “I always hated the idea of being powerless.”

“Me too,” I say.  “But I think powerless is the wrong word.  I think what Step One really means is beyond our control.”

“Aren’t power and control the same thing?”

“No.  Powerful means able to take care of yourself, get your needs met, do what’s necessary.  Controlling means trying to make people, places and things the way you want them to be.  Most of the time, they’re opposites.  The more controlling you are, the less powerful you become.   That’s why you feel like shit now.”

“Because I’m always trying to control things.”

I nod.  “So hard, and so constantly, that you lose all your power.  Sleep at all last night?”

“A few hours.  I kept waking up.”

“To worry about stuff?”

“Yes.”

“In other words, trying to control stuff in your head.”

“Yes,” she says sadly.  “I just can’t stop.”  Tears come to her eyes.

I pass her a box of tissues and wait.  Good, I think.  She never cries.  Control addicts rarely do.  Like sleeping, crying means giving up control, letting the body have its say.  So these tears signify a small victory.

After a moment she wipes her nose and blinks.  Now she looks angry.

“Help me stop,” she says.

“Okay,” I say.

“Where do I start?”

“Well, our Step One will be:  Redefine the problem.”

 

To be continued.

The God part

So now I’m a grandpa.  Which is odd, considering how inside I continue to feel like an adolescent.  But it does make for some interesting experiences.

Here’s one:

I’m babysitting Wyatt, who’s five months old.  He’s in his ExerSaucer, wobbling back, forth and sideways, drooling and gurgling at the brightly colored plastic sea creatures hanging around him.

I’m only half paying attention.  As usual, I’m lost in my own thoughts.

Then I notice he’s silent. 

I look over and find him staring at me.  

Just staring.

I stare back.  The moment lengthens.  He holds eye contact.  Doesn’t move.  Doesn’t blink.  Doesn’t get bored or embarrassed or nervous, as an adult would.  Just stares.  Smiling at me.

I smile too, but he’s making me nervous.  This moment of raw contact feels uncanny, like something beyond normal human experience.  I feel an urge to end it, to look away, or joke, or take a picture with my cell phone, or create some other distraction.

Instead I stare back.

And the thought comes, It’s like looking at God.

Years ago a client surprised me by abruptly asking “What’s a therapist’s job?”  A simple question, the sort that catches you flatfooted.  I felt really stupid.  I had to think.

Eventually I told her that I saw my job as similar to Michelangelo’s.  Michelangelo is supposed to have said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

“By the time we’re adults,” I said, “we’re all crusted over with fears and defenses.  The therapist’s job is to scrape away the fears and defenses and free the person trapped inside.”

The person inside.  The natural, unafraid, undefended part.  The God part.

Sunday school taught me to think of God as resembling Charlton Heston in a bathrobe.  That was a long time ago.  Lately I’ve come to think of God as something more like The Force in Star Wars — a sort of energy which animates and organizes things, makes spring grass sprout and wounds heal and babies grow, holds things together and makes sense of life’s pain, loss and chaos.

And when it comes to people, I think of God as the part of them that gets buried in the course of getting educated and socialized.  The part therapy tries to unearth.  The spontaneous, curious, fearless, loving part we all carry around inside us.  The God part.

The part that’s staring at me now.

 

Bottled

 

x

***

Feelings can be thought of as emotionally charged energy.  When placed in storage by defense mechanisms, the emotional charge builds up as additional feelings are added.  At a certain threshold the emotional pressure reaches a critical level.

Two options are then available.

The first is an unregulated release of feelings, which may occur when more feelings are added to the existing overload.  In this case, the expression of feelings may be out of proportion to the situation, and you may feel out of control.  Moodiness, irritability, depression, impatience, and explosiveness result from this pattern.

The second option is a more gradual implosion of feelings, in the form of somatic symptoms such as indigestion, ulcers, muscular tension, headaches, and other physical ailments.  The more successful you are at avoiding feelings, the more likely you are to develop physical symptoms having no apparent cause.  This, too, will add to your anxiety.

~ Paul Foxman, Dancing with fear: Overcoming anxiety in a world of stress and uncertainty (Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996).

* * *

“We are a grade nine class of 14 students, looking to make a change in the world….

“We believe that bottling things up and keeping your secrets, fears, and regrets to yourself and not sharing them with anyone else is harmful.”

~ Intro to “Bottled Up” (2:18)

x

These kids also have a neat little website: Bottled Up.

The cost of doing business

“When you meet someone, be kind,” goes an old saying, “because he has a really big problem.”

I don’t know who said it.  

I don’t know what big problem he/she meant.

I can think of some candidates, though:

~ We’re burdened by oversized, hyperactive brains that never shut down or shut up.   They punish us for the past, scare us with the future, make it impossible to relax and be here now.  It’s a problem.

~ We’re largely unconscious, meaning we don’t know why we do what we do.  Or even that we’re doing it.  That makes it hard to stop doing stuff that’s bad for us or others.  It’s a problem.

~ We need to be ourselves.  We need to be accepted by our tribe.  Often we can’t get both needs met at the same time.  So we end up feeling needy in one way or the other.  It’s a problem.

~ Unlike other animals, we know we’ll die someday.  Despite all efforts to forget it, this knowing plays throughout our lives like background music.  Some psychologists say it’s the root cause of all anxiety.  I don’t go that far.  But it’s a problem.

Then there’s the biggest problem of all.

I’m reminded of it during a session with a young woman who’s beating herself up over some sin she committed (or thinks she did) a decade ago.

She’s crying about it.  I hand her a tissue.

“Know what your biggest problem is?” I ask.

She blows her nose, shakes her head.

“It’s my biggest problem too.  And everyone else’s,” I say.  ”The main thing wrong with us is we think there’s something wrong with us.”

She looks at me.

“We think we’re guilty or unhappy or struggling because we’ve somehow screwed up.  That we’re doing Life wrong.  We forget that everyone we know is guilty or unhappy or struggling too.”

She sniffles,  listening.

“See, most of what we call unhappiness is just the human condition.  Just the cost of being alive and doing business.  And if I could give you a magic pill which would convince you of this — that your problems aren’t your fault, and that you’re okay just as you are — it would change everything.

“You wouldn’t need therapy or medication.  You’d leave here feeling fifty pounds lighter.  You’d walk down the street with a spring in your step, and you’d be kinder to the people you meet.”

She smiles.

“You don’t have any pills like that?” she asks.

“I wish,” I say.  ”Think what I could charge for them.”

.

*  *  *

Client story:

“Self-acceptance doesn’t work for me,” said Mary, sounding weary. “I just can’t do it.”  ”Why not?” I asked.  ”Because,” she said, pointing at herself, “I don’t know who this ‘self’ is that I’m meant to be accepting.”

Lesson: 

The journey of self-acceptance starts when you acknowledge that you don’t seem to know much about yourself.  Your personality, or ego, finds it difficult to answer questions like “Who am I?” and “What do I want?”  Being asked to describe yourself at a job interview or for a dating agency profile, for instance, can feel excruciating and practically impossible because you haven’t really been paying attention.

~ From How self-acceptance can crack open your life: A radical 10-day plan to accept who you really are, by Robert Holden.

Trimmed

Crooked

.

.

*

Happy New Year, fellow crooks.

*

.

We try to combat not being enough by pleasing, and performing, and perfecting.

We go through our lives trying to be who we think we’re supposed to be,

doing and saying what we think people want to hear,

putting on whatever mask or face we think we need to put on for that moment.

And what that leaves us is, exhausted.

.

~ From The gifts of imperfection

by Brene Brown.

Red pills

A guy goes to a doctor.

A guy goes to a doctor. 

“Doc, I’m in awful pain.  Please help me.”

“Okay,” says the doc.  “Here’s two pills.   Take the blue one in the morning, and the red one at night.”

“I’ll take the blue one,” the guys says, “but not the red one.”

“Why not?”

“I hate red.” 

This joke kept floating into my mind last week because of a string of conversations I found myself having.

They were conversations with

~ an alcoholic who drinks due to loneliness but won’t leave his isolation to attend AA,

~ a mom who craves a close relationship with her daughter but won’t stop telling her what to do,

~ a husband who wants his wife to forgive his affair but walks away when she tries to talk about her feelings of hurt and anger, and

~ a wife and mother exhausted from meeting everyone else’s needs, but who won’t say No to any demand made of her.

Each in considerable pain.  Each avoiding some obvious step to relieve it.

Each saying I hate red.

Therapists call this help-seeking, help-rejecting behavior, and it reflects a largely unconscious cost/benefit analysis.  On some level each of these people has decided that the discomfort of solving their problem would be greater than the discomfort  caused by the problem itself.  (I hate this pain, but I hate red more.)

Pretty common, this.  We all have red pills.  They’re what we make New Year’s resolutions about.  Things we should do but just can’t stop avoiding.

Exercise more.  Watch less tv.  Eat less sugar.  Ask for that raise.  Write that damned book.

There are tons of books and articles about how to handle this.  Just this morning  I came across two new ones: Leo Barbauta’s  “The Do Plan, or why we know but don’t do”. and Jack Canfield’s “The power of determination.”

But what’s it all have to do with control?

Red-pill behavior illustrates what I call the Third Paradox*:

To get control in one place,

you have to give it up in another.

Want control of your weight?  Give up control of your food choices.  Want control of your loneliness?  Give up avoiding people.  Want your daughter’s company?  Stop controlling her.  And so on.

Here’s the key:

In practice, what “give it up in another”usually means is stop avoiding some uncomfortable feeling. 

Behind all controlling is the wish to control or manage feelings. Notice those examples above.  The alcoholic is managing social anxiety.  The mom is managing frustration with her daughter’s life choices.  The husband is managing guilt over his affair.

But in backing away from those feelings they’ve backed into new problems.  So solving those problems will mean learning to tolerate the feelings they avoid.

Again, we all do this.  We always will.  We’re all control addicts.  It’s how we’re wired.  No point in beating yourself up over it.

But:

If you have a problem of which you’re really really really sick and tired, you might reapproach it by noticing that’s it’s really a solution as well – your way of protecting yourself from some particular emotional experience.

This sort of redefinition is the essential first step towards any solution.

So:

What’s the red pill in your life?

.

________________________________

*Click here for descriptions of the First and Second paradoxes.

Expectations

.

.

.

.

Here at Monkeytraps we believe two things about expectations:

1. An expectation is an attempt to control something.

It’s a sort of demand we make on the future.

“It must be like this,” we tell ourselves.  “And if it’s not, I won’t be happy.”

Then it’s not.  And we’re not.

Which leads to my second thought:

2. Expectations are killers.

They kill all sorts of important living things.

Like

Spontaneity.  Spontaneity means freedom — being able to express yourself without fear or constraint.   But expectations are both judgmental and constraining.  (Listen up, future: I want this to happen, and not that.)  Expecting A prevents you from accepting and embracing B, or C, or D.  That includes what comes to you from your environment and what comes up inside you, your own feelings and responses.  Expectations are emotional handcuffs.

Pleasure.  However else you define pleasure, it’s certainly a feeling.  And expectations generally undermine our ability to feel.  They’re born in our heads, while feelings live in our bodies.  They’re future-oriented, where feelings occur only in the now.  They’re controlling, where feeling (especially the feeling of pleasure) involves surrendering to an experience.  And they’re born out of fear (I really don’t want X to happen).  And nothing kills pleasure deader than fear.

Love.  Real love, the kind we all crave, depends on safety – knowing you can be yourself and not be punished for it.  How can you feel that if you’re worried about meeting someone’s expectations?  How can they feel it if they’re worrying about meeting yours?

You may wonder why I’m writing about expectations just now.

Well, Christmas is coming.

‘Tis the season to be expecting.

And expectations are the main reason so many people suffer emotionally at this time of year.

We expect to feel a certain way, and usually don’t.

We buy with one eye on what people expect of us, and the other on what we expect of them.

And we compare where we are this December to where we were last December, and to where we’d expected to be by now.

Let’s be realistic, though.  Expectations are difficult to give up.  No one who reads this is going to suddenly stop expecting.

But you can take note of what you’re expecting.

And you can distinguish the expectations that are really important from the one are just bad habits.

And you can consider tossing out a few of the less important ones.

See how you feel.

Better, I bet.

Lighter.  Freer.  More accepting.  More loving.

Not a bad way to feel heading into a new year.

.

*

In an Italian plaza, orchestra and chorus assemble one by one, and perform Beethoven’s Ode to Joy for delighted passers-by.

Watch and smile:

Ode to joy.  (5:41)

Supplies

Recently a husband struggling to save his marriage from his own infidelity asked me the saddest question I’ve heard in years:

“What kind of a person would cheat on his wife just because he thought he could get away with it?”

“A hungry blind man,” I said.

I went on to explain how I see narcissism.  It happens to people, I said, who didn’t get what they needed in childhood.  This left them emotionally hungry, painfully and chronically so.  And their hunger makes them preoccupied with feeding themselves and blind to the needs and feelings of others.

That, as I said, is how I see narcissism.

Here’s the thing, though:

We’re all a little hungry and a little blind.

Most people enter adulthood having not received enough of what’s called narcissistic supplies – attention, acceptance, approval, affection, acknowledgement.  The five A’s.

Our need for these supplies is built into us, and non-negotiable.  We can’t not need them.  We need what we need because we need it.

Our only choice is how we go about feeding ourselves.  Narcissists do it by putting themselves first.  Codependents do it by putting others first.  But both act out of the same hunger.

Narcissists and codependents have three other things in common:

~ They’re externally focused — i.e., intent on getting other people to feed them.  Among other things, this makes them not very skilled at self-care.

~ They have an either/or view of relationships.  “Either you’ll get what you need”  they reason,  “or I’ll get what I need.  But we both can’t get what we need at the same time.”  This logic forces them to approach relationships as a sort of competition.

~ The either/or view also sabotages their chance for healthy relationship, which is  rooted in the idea of mutuality: that what’s good for you is ultimately good for me, and vice versa.

So what to do about all this?

We can start by becoming more aware of two things: how hungry we are for narcissistic supplies, and how we go about trying to get fed.

What’s not helpful?

Pretending we don’t need what we need.

Denial doesn’t make needs shrink or go away.  It just invites them to take over our lives.

We need what we need because we need it.

*

For more on narcissism and codependency, see “Scratch a codependent” and “The split level relationship. “

Snakes

Twenty years of practicing therapy makes you aware of certain patterns. 

One is the series of questions I ask clients struggling with an intractable problem:

1. What have you done to solve it?
2. What was the result?
3. What did you do then?

My clients’ answers, too, tend to follow a pattern:

1. I did X.
2. It didn’t work.
3. I did X again.

Ruth’s son is failing academically. He hates school and refuses to study.  This scares Ruth, so she forces him to go to summer school.  Result: Ruth’s son is failing academically.

Jay’s wife distrusts him since his affair.  “Tell me the truth,” she begs.  Jay craves her trust, but hates criticism and conflict.  So he keeps secrets and hides his feelings.  Result: Jay’s wife distrusts him.

Sandy feels inadequate and unlovable.  So she tries to win love and approval by solving everyone else’s problems.  This encourages everyone to bring their problems to Sandy, which she finds overwhelming and exhausting.  Result: Sandy feels inadequate and unlovable.

Bert struggles with writer’s block.  Fearing failure, he finds ways to avoid working on his book.  The more he avoids writing, the larger his fear of failure looms.  Result: Bert struggles with writer’s block.

And so on.

Here’s the thing:

Whatever our goal may be, our deepest priority is usually emotional comfort.

It’s why we cling to our so-called comfort zones.

It’s also why we’d rather do something familiar and ineffective than something new that might actually work.

So, like snakes eating their own tails, we go around and around in the same circles.

“Insanity,” wrote Einstein, ”is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

Take a look at your most persistent problems.

You may find that you’re just a bit crazy.

Slowing

.

The world we live in now is a world stuck in fast-forward.

.

A world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster, with cramming more and more into less and less time.

.

Every moment of the day seems like a race against the clock.

.

To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, “These days, even instant gratification takes too long.”

.

And if you think about how we try to make things better, what do we do?

.

Well, we speed them up, don’t we?

.

We used to dial; now we speed-dial.

.

We used to read; now we speed-read.

.

We used to walk; now we speed-walk.

.

We used to date; now we speed-date…. 

.

We’re so marinated in the culture of speed that we fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives — on our health, our diet, work, our relationships….

.

~ From

Carl Honore praises

slowness (19:18).

.

.

.

*

Be mindful how you approach time.  Watching the clock is not the same as watching the sun rise.  

~ Sophia Bedford-Peirce

.

.

* * *

Beyond Control is a collection of articles, talks, interviews and whatnot illustrating how different people practice the three alternatives to control – surrender, responsibility and intimacy.  

Read more about the alternatives here: 

 

Thank you, thank me

The way I got interested in this was I noticed in myself, when I growing up and until a few years ago, that I would want to say Thank You to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me — and I’d just stop it.

.

And I asked myself, Why?

.

I mean, I felt shy.  I felt embarrassed.

.

And then my question became, Am I the only one who does this?

.

So I decided to investigate.

~ From Laura Trice suggests we all say thank you (3:28)

.

.

.

Beyond Control is a collection of articles, talks, interviews and whatnot illustrating how people practice the three alternatives to control – surrender, responsibility and intimacy. You can read more about the alternatives here: 

http://monkeytraps.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/the-alternatives/

Not knowing

Today Steve won the argument we’ve been having about self-hosting this blog.  He signed up at Blue Host, and I had a small anxiety attack.

I hate when he does this shit.  It’s what I call an AFGO.  Another Fucking Growth Opportunity.

I know nothing about self-hosting.  And I hate knowing nothing about anything.

Not-knowing is the thing I hate most in this life.

So I light a stick of lavender incense and sit at my desk and try to meditate the anxiousness away.  I inhale and exhale.  I try to focus on breathing.  I begin thinking instead.

And the first thought that comes is:

Better to know than not to know.

That’s a Spenser saying.  (I’ve been rereading Parker’s Spenser series, so his voice is sort of stuck in my head.)   It could also be my life’s theme song.

I’ve spent my life trying to Know.  It‘s why I collected thousands of books and spent decades burying my face in them.  Why I went to college and grad school and postgrad training.  Why I became a teacher and therapist and writer.  Teachers and therapists and writers are people who Know.

I made a fetish of knowing.  I thought Knowing would make me safe.  I thought Knowing would give me control.  A handle on Life.

But now I find myself thinking,

Life has no handle. 

Inhale, exhale.

Life is bigger than handles.

Inhale, exhale.

Life’s a mystery.  And what you know is always outweighed by what you don’t.

Inhale, exhale.

Better make peace with not Knowing.

.

* * *

.

I got out of bed on two strong legs

***

*

Otherwise

.

I got out of bed

on two strong legs.

It might have been

otherwise.  I ate

cereal, sweet

milk, ripe, flawless

peach.  It might

have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill

to the birch wood.

All morning I did

the work I love.

.

At noon I lay down

with my mate.  It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks.  It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

.

~ Jane Kenyon

 

 

*

*

Problematic

.

Feelings are problematic

not when they hurt us

but when they threaten

our greatest need.

.

If I’m angry, will you love me?

If I’m scared, will you accept me?

If I cry, will you pull away?

We start asking

right after birth.

.

We keep asking

through childhood and beyond,

and the answers we receive

determine our fate,

how we live thereafter:

.

as adults, in a world

of our making,

or as permanently

frightened, shallow-rooted

guests.