Identify your vulnerability and put it on a t-shirt.

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Therapyisdandy

That’s basically today’s suggestion. I mean it. Maybe not literally, but at least for you and those you trust to know what is on your hypothetical-if-not-real-therapy t-shirt. I have had bad ideas when it comes to t-shirts in the past, but I don’t think this one is so bad.

Last time there was a lot of talk about negative self talk and the vulnerability we try to hide from. So putting our biggest vulnerability on a t-shirt is a sign that you are no longer willing to accept your own mind’s perceived status quo. It’s strange, I admit, but also totally fearless. Bruce Lee would be, I imagine, proud of us.

I can’t take credit for the origin of this idea. A fellow counselor in Portland shared the idea in what seemed to be a rather spontaneous suggestion. So, thank you for that.

The message on our t-shirt—metaphorical, literal, or otherwise, is the vulnerable belief, fear, worry that when triggered, we feel our most vulnerable. And then from that vulnerability we react defensively, emotionally, critically, angrily, to whoever it was that triggered our vulnerability.

In past blogs, and in Gestalt therapy, I have used the term introject. An introject is a belief, idea, or process that we have about ourselves that can have a negative affect on our behavior. Introjects come from our environment, from what people may have said about us, maybe by how we were punished, or praised, or just observed. We can pick up introjects from anywhere really. But influential people and close relationships are the usual suspects involved. We can have many, many introjects, just like vulnerabilities. The introject is what goes on the t-shirt. The word vulnerability is just clearer and more of an obvious concept. I can’t imagine an honest person admitting to having no vulnerabilities whatsoever. Unless I was talking to Superman. But most people would just shake their head at you if you asked them what their introjects were.

Because we may have many if not dozens of vulnerabilities, try to distill yours down to a central theme. There could be a lot of similar sounding branches of the same vulnerability tree.

Examples of what your t-shirt might have on it. Feel free to email me with what you come up with, and I will add it to this list.

 

Am I important?

Am I good enough?

Does anyone love me?

Am I loveable?

Everything is my fault.

I am broken/lazy/bad/etc.

I have a secret.

I can’t fail.

What if I fail?

What if I am wrong?

I feel empty.

I am empty.

I gave up.

No one cares.

Do I matter?

No one listens to me.

I have to make others happy.

I am afraid.

I don’t know what I am doing.

I am trapped.

I destroy things/people/happiness.

Obviously there is potential for a lot of our messages to be very close to others, just derivations of the primary message. That’s okay. It is your message, remember. No one can tell you that you are wrong.

What we secretly believe and experience as our vulnerability may in fact surprise the heck out of those we share it with. That speaks volumes to how well or effective we might be at hiding that particular vulnerability. It also speaks to the nature of vulnerability. What we are secretly afraid of being vulnerable about, no one else thinks we are that thing. So, that kind of unexpected reveal is really a very important thing to find out!

Go forth and be brave. Just admitting our vulnerabilities to ourselves is all we need to do first.

Next time, we are going driving. Honest.

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Interrupt and Intercept the Critical Thoughts and the Emotions will follow.

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Therapyisdandy

I haven’t had an opportunity to talk about Bruce Lee for a while and it occurred to me last time that all this talk about interrupting negative self talk also had me thinking about intercepting them, as in The Way of the Intercepting Fist, aka Jeet Kune Do.

So, let’s interrupt and intercept together! It will be like church, but without all the boring parts. And Bruce Lee is way more charismatic than, well, most people.

Today’s question is: if we get to the place where we interrupt and intercept all those critical, negative self talk messages in the interiority of our minds, what would happen next?

Let me try to ask that question in another way.

What if the negative self talk and critical bs that we throw at ourselves is really only the distracting ruse from the real villain in the movie that is your life?

Let me clarify one more time.

What if the negative self talk is the maladaptive way in which we avoid the real (if only perceived as) danger to ourselves?

Sound promising? I agree.

The real danger, well what is it?

Consider the many things we have been talking about. And I mean since I began this blog. Our fight/flight/freeze response to stress. How shame manifests regarding our failures and perceived weaknesses. Our need for attachment and validation from family and friends and loved ones. Our anger and our frustration when we are denied the latter and held hostage by the former.

What if on some wacky illogical emotional fulcrum, our negative self talk is less damaging to us than the real villain in this story?

What if we do all these terrible things to ourselves to avoid feeling vulnerable?

For a four syllable word vulnerable does have a lot of oomph. But for my money it doesn’t have nearly enough.

I want to suggest that vulnerable is one of the most important words for all of us to consider. Our relationship to it, our experience(s) of it, our beliefs and actions about ours but also others, has a tremendous impact on our mental health, our lives, and our pursuit of happiness.

We as a people have built actual walls in the past to keep out the undesirables, to stave off our (again, perceived) vulnerability to those undesirables. And that idea of building walls to keep undesirables out hasn’t really lost its appeal, unfortunately for voters in the 2016 presidential election. Our negative self talk are the walls we erect within our own interiority to avoid feeling that most terrible of terrible things: our own sense of vulnerability.

In this way of thinking about vulnerability, it is crucial to understand that what we are intercepting, what we are interrupting, is our own personal history regarding the unbearable experience of feeling vulnerable.

That’s something worth fighting, isn’t it?

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Professional Interruptions Part 2. The Car Accident.

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Therapyisdandy

Or how to interrupt your internal negative critic.

As much I said this post is a continuation on the professional interrupting idea from last time, I have to acknowledge that this is also about the nature of emotion and how it can interact with stress and trauma and every day decision making. So, that’s a huge undertaking, and we all might fall down the rabbit hole together if I can’t keep it all on topic…

Alright, caveat aside, let’s jump into it.

A word that I think helps explain the following conflict is borrowed from literature. And not surprising at all I guess is that in my own fiction I was somewhat good at writing about this. The word is interiority. It is everything that goes on in the character’s mind/head that only you the reader get to experience. It’s a great word. One of the best maybe. It’s a word Donald Trump wishes he could use.

Within the interiority of our own mind there is not just one voice that talks to us. There are a multitude. Walt Whitman was right. When we are hungry, our hunger gets our attention. When we are excited, we hear from the enthusiastic voice. When we are angry, we think angrily. When we are in the mood for love, our inner playboy/femme fatale is the one talking to us. No better recent example of this exists than the recent animated movie Inside Out.

Some of us, depending on our early childhood environments, attachment styles, and many other factors, can have a different kind of interiority. That’s okay and normal. People who are on the Autism Spectrum for example would have an interiority different than someone who was diagnosed with Borderline or Histrionic Personality Disorder. I know it can be rather intimidating when psychology is always talking about what is normal. Think spectrum of a rainbow, my friends. Please don’t feel shame for who you are. Fuck shame, right?

A key contributor to a lot of mental health issues can be laid at the feet of one pernicious aspect of our interiority. Negative self talk. Negative self talk doesn’t care if you can run a seven minute mile in the rain. Negative self talk doesn’t care if you sold more cars this month than your closest competitor—Fritz—at the Subaru Dealership. Negative self talk doesn’t care what your spouse or partner said about how you are the best in bed.

Negative self talk cannot be reasoned with because it is not a “reasonable with” part of you.

Negative self talk is your very own emotional cocktail of fear and anger within the interiority of your own mind.

So what does any of this have to do with interrupting, Henry? And where is the car accident you promised us?

Step one is to acknowledge negative self talk exists. If you don’t agree then I have some unfortunate news to share.

If you don’t think you have negative self talk, it is probably because the negative self talk is transmitted so fast and you react to it so quickly, you don’t even hear what is being said to you. Consider road rage. Consider anytime that your own reaction surprised even you. That is negative self talk at the speed of thought. Which is quite, quite fast.

Step two is to pay more attention to your own interiority in order to notice the amount of negative self talk that can be happening all the time.

Step three is to interrupt the negative self talk. An easy suggestion is within your interiority you talk back to the negative self talk. You tell it to calm down. You label it is as negative self talk and imagine putting it all in a small box and closing that box. You respond with validating self compassion. You try to balance the amount of positive and negative self talk going on. Because only you can do this. No one can deal with your negative self talk better than you can. It’s why those of us who meditate and have meditation practices are so much better at dealing with negative self talk than those of us who do not. Yes, I am giving you my endorsement. Go, meditate. Please. Just finishing reading this before you go.

But enough abstraction. How about a real world example? How about a car accident for example?

Unlike what can often be shown in films and television, the moment that my car was hit by another car (several weeks ago, nobody was hurt, I am fine, etc.) was not a silent, frozen in the moment snapshot of white noise and stunned silence.

I didn’t even see the other car until after it hit me. As soon as I did see it though, I began a tirade of intense swearing that my Croatian mother would be so proud of. I am pretty sure I almost broke my steering wheel with the amount of beat down I gave it in those first few moments after the accident.

I was mad. I was pissed. I was however directing my anger and frustration at the accident itself. Not at myself—not yet anyway.

The point I want to make is that despite the accident happening, I immediately expressed my emotional reaction to it happening. I didn’t hold any of it in. And as a result, something interesting happened.

For about 24 hours I felt oddly fine about the accident. I was safe, the other person didn’t have a scratch on the car or themselves, and my car insurance would take care of the repairs to my car. I didn’t really want to talk details about the accident, but that may have been a little bit of shock. I didn’t want to relive the accident so soon after it had happened.

And there is a good reason for that. That’s where we have to jump back into our interiority.

After about a day, my reaction to the car accident started to change. What happened? My negative self talk kicked in.

As much as my immediate emotional reaction to the accident was, for lack of better wording, immediate and genuine and honest, it was also appropriate for the moment. I was practicing a kind of here and now focus. I let myself be mad and that helped me process the immediate experience. It stinks to get into a stupid car accident. I would say I felt equal parts anger and, unfortunately, shame and embarrassment.

A day later though, instead of being mindful and keeping my self and my interiority in the here and now, it started to drift towards future paced complications.

Me (pervasive negative self talk): Shit. How am I going to get to the gym now? How am I going to get to the grocery store? This messes up my self care plans. I don’t need this. And screw taking the bus. This is a total nightmare. I have no freedom. Life is hard. I better get on the phone and order some Fire on the Mountain. I should also Netflix all of Daredevil season 2. And play lots of video games.

Me (responding to negative self talk): Uh, crap. This is exhausting. And hard. I don’t want to do anything actually. I’m a terrible person for not keeping all of this together.

And then what happened?

Long, long story short is: I lost pretty much all the mindfulness to the emotion of the accident and let my negative self talk that was obsessed with details and problem solving overwhelm me until I had a fight/flight/freeze up kind of response. And I froze.

Me (avoiding my feelings): If I just sit here and not do anything, then I will be okay.

Me (starting to see through my own bullshit): I don’t know if this is working the way you want it to work. In fact, your solution seems to be making you miserable. You can still go jogging. That will make you feel better.

Me: Oh, I guess. I’ll give that a try. But I won’t like it!

And I slowly got out of my fight/flight/freeze version of emotional avoidance.

The good news is I was able to watch my own anxiety/fear reaction after the car accident. And that experience illuminated how I can experience strong emotion and the anxiety it can cause. If this son of an immigrant can do it, I believe that you can too.

Well, I think more interruptions are planned for next time. I have a lot more to talk about, I think, and I ran out of space for all of it here. See you soon. Hope you have a happy April.

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Be a Professional Interrupter

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Therapyisdandy

Hello everyone. It’s been a little while, but lets jump right into a topic.

I know I have heard the statement many times before—and have used it myself from time to time—that a counselor is a professional listener. Also there is the argument that we as people so rarely listen to what is being said to us by others because we are just waiting for our turn to talk in the conversation. I don’t disagree, at times. But I want to say something new about this professional listener/waiting to talk argument.

If counselors are professional listeners, then we are also professional interrupters.

The art of this skill is finding an incongruous way to interrupt a person that not only doesn’t derail the narrative, but actually adds to it, and perhaps even deepens the experience of the person talking (and being interrupted).

It takes a lot of practice. And this kind of interruption is not about what I want or am thinking about, it is more like I am trying to fill in some of the gaps or color whatever it is the client is sharing. It certainly requires active empathy and staying with a client’s shared experience.

I would say that a good half of my interruptions of a client are done so to confirm or reaffirm emotional components of what is being shared. Sometimes I just want to validate what is obvious or I want to bring awareness of an emotion into whatever is being shared. It may sound complicated, but I don’t know if it really is.

Example:

Client: And there I was on the train having this conversation with a stranger about the death of my sibling.

Me (interrupting): That sounds like it was intense.

Client: (thoughtful pause.) Yes, yes it was.

Me (now validating): Can you say more about how it was intense for you?

See how that works? It’s great. And it is very much an extension of being a good listener. Imagining myself on that train talking to a stranger about a death would be intense. How could it not be? I picked the word intense because I didn’t want to assume a particular emotional state, like scary or sad. That part can get further defined later. The word intense opens the door for either of those later. Either by me or by the client.

Now, the same example with a bit of a twist.

Client: So there I was on the train having this conversation with a stranger about the death of my sibling. Then we talked about chess. And manchego cheese.

Me (interrupting): Wait a second. On one hand you are talking with a stranger about your sibling dying and then you also talked about chess and cheese. Those are very different topics. Can you remember what you were feeling when you were talking about those topics?

Client (somewhat suspicious): What do you mean?

Me: You mention death, cheese, and chess all in the same conversation. I wonder if talking about cheese or chess AND death had a way of making it easier for you to open up. Maybe even a way of trivializing or distancing yourself from the painful topic of your sibling dying.

Client: Oh. That. It just felt like another whatever topic. Something that people do.

Me (interrupting again): If I am hearing you correctly, it sounds like talking about death is not bringing up a lot of feelings for you. Not a lot of emotions. It’s like talking about cheese or checkers for example.

Client: yeah.

Me: It sounds kind of like maybe it makes you feel nothing, or perhaps numb is an accurate feeling?

That’s how you can interrupt and bring emotion back into a conversation that doesn’t seem to have the emotion one would expect.

So, that’s a little bit of professional interrupting.

For next time, and the post is already half written, I will focus on interrupting our own negative and/or critical self talk. Which I think honestly is the more important tool to sharpen for our lives. I think you will like it. It involves a car crash and the helpful and the not so helpful ways to talk yourself through it.

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Trauma can be a pretty intimidating word

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Therapyisdandy

So why don’t we try to cut it down to size for easier consideration?

As stated elsewhere in the blog once upon a time one of the best parts of my profession is that I get to read a lot of books. And then I sift through those books and recommend to you all: clients, readers, the curious, the best of the best. To make the pursuit of positive mental health a little less daunting. And a little bit more effective. More bang for your buck. That is a dandy endeavor indeed.

This post is inspired by a book that I am still reading, but I have known about the book for a while. For any of you who experience symptoms related to trauma, or for those of you who know someone who experienced trauma, this is a must read.

The book is called The Body Keeps Score and it is written by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD.

This is the best book about trauma that I have ever come across. He and it are sort of a big deal right now. And he deserves the reputation and accolades.

If you have PTSD, if you ever wonder if you have PTSD, if you know someone with PTSD, or just want to know how the brain responds to trauma (as of all our scientific inquiry up to the year 2015) then you should read this book.

As concise, as brilliant, and as illuminating as this book is, the issue for many is just what we bring to the word trauma.

For some, it may be too easy to disengage and distance ourselves from the word. Trauma, thanks to films media and the internet, means soldiers and warzones, refugees and the homeless, rape victims, children of drug addicts or maniacs, but not normal people. Not anyone you might know. Or be.

So, I encourage you to consider the less severe experiences that can fall under the umbrella of trauma, and traumatic symptoms and experiences.

Intense emotional and physical pain

Heartbreak

Betrayal

Isolation or estrangement

Death and loss

That list is a little more accessible, isn’t it? All of you reading have experienced one or more of those experiences, right? That’s right.

And just as happiness or sadness can be considered on a spectrum ranging from full on Walt Whitman style positivity to melancholy to abject depression, what if we consider trauma, and the brain’s evolutionary function to trauma and pain, on such a continuum?

I think understanding trauma better will help us understand our own experience to emotional pain, and, just as importantly, emotional pain management.

Because if you don’t what your mind is doing, then how can you change what your experience is?

Sound good? Enjoy. It has been fantastic so far.

 

 

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Breaking Internet Silence

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Therapyisdandy

Therapy is still quite dandy here in Portland Oregon, but I know the blog has been quiet for some time. Hope you are doing all right where ever you are reading this from.

So, I have been rather preoccupied with getting prepared for my state licensure exam. That’s a big long topic in it self, but the punchline of it is that once I am considered a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) I will have the option of billing health insurance for current and new clients. Being licensed is the requirement healthcare companies require before “allowing” counseling services to be reimbursed. How nice of them. Really.

Up until now, I have only been able to accept cash. So, this is a big step and a potentially very positive leap forward.

I will share more once it is official.

One other reason the blog has been so slow to return, ironically, is the Internet itself. I find I dislike using it more and more. Specifically, I find myself wasting oodles of time not working by all that the Internet can distract us with. I even opened an Instagram account for goodness sake. Lately I do not feel productive or helped by the web’s omnipresence in our culture. Which is ironic since you are only reading this blog because of the Internet. I try to share interesting articles on the Facebook page here, but that is also a destination I mean to avoid as much as possible.

So, that’s my dilemma. How to keep writing blogs that I believe are helpful and enjoyable for me to write in a medium that is really a drag.

And that leads me to a general question, if any of you would like to respond. How do you all deal with the Internet?

I will try to blog again before the end of October. Maybe another Halloween themed article or something.

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Let’s get defensive

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Therapyisdandy

We all know the term, and we all have experienced it—both in ourselves and in others—but I want to suggest that getting to understand ourselves better also involves a better understanding about why we get defensive.

Why is a far more important kind of question to ask than what defense are you or that person using? Let me explain.

Psychology has talked about defensives for a long time, and here is a good list of the commonly used and understood defenses of our time. Spend some time with them and you will start to see them everywhere. But beyond the cataloging and identifying of defenses, I want to suggest something far more relevant for you to pay attention to.

Behind every use of a defense is the urge to protect an emotional vulnerability. Specifically, we act defensively in order to NOT feel a particular emotion or have a particular kind of experience.

That would be why it’s called a defense: we are protecting ourselves from coming into contact with an emotion or experience that, consciously or unconsciously, we are trying to avoid.

This is also where all that mindfulness you are practicing is supposed to come in handy. Acting mindfully will allow you to witness yourself while being defensive.

The most commonly avoided emotions are going to be a pretty familiar list. But don’t think this is by any means a comprehensive and inflexible list. What you or someone you know may be reacting may be something not on this list.

Emotions or experiences one may avoid by way of defenses:
Anger

Sadness

Fear

Shame

Embarrassment

Vulnerability

Helplessness

Men, speaking very broadly, can have a hard time admitting helplessness, vulnerability or sadness, so they act out all blustery or full of testosterone. It’s a smokescreen, my friends. Pure theatre. But psychologically important. Exposing that experience of vulnerability or helplessness at that moment, when a person does not feel safe, can cause a lot more complications. But the smokescreen is just the first piece. There is something else underneath it all, and that is the puzzle for you to unravel.

Obviously, women can have just as much trouble with helplessness, vulnerability or sadness as men do, but the defenses they may use can be quite different. That’s social and gender roles for you. And for women, from that socially acceptable perspective, they may have much more trouble admitting feelings of anger or aggression than men do.

Men, unfortunately, love to Hulk out way too much.

Still having troubling knowing what your defenses are? Ask those around you: your spouse or partner, your best friend, someone who will be honest and compassionate with you. They have seen it, even if you have not.

This is going to be it for this post, as it is too damn hot to keep writing in this heat (don’t know how southern writers did it before A/C—but I think all the gin and moonshine helped). The follow up post will be on expanding your understanding of your defenses and what emotional issues are lurking underneath.

Happy summer to all of you!

 

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People want to be right.

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Therapyisdandy

Therapy can be hard. I know I haven’t posted a lot recently, but it’s because therapy can be really hard. I mean the kind of hard that makes you hate it. It can make you hate yourself, hate your therapist, hate the whole fricking predicament. Better off to go eat at Fire on the Mountain, or play the Xbox or get lost in some virtual hangup.

But those are just temporary distractions. You came to therapy to get to work. And work we shall.

Therapy challenges what we think we know about ourselves. What you want to believe about yourself versus what you actually are. And when that button gets pushed—watch out.

Fear or Anger will be the most likely responses.

Fear or Anger directed back at your self. Fear or Anger directed at the therapist. Directed at the slow moving driver in traffic in front of you. Or directed unspecified to all the world around you in some free floating paranoid screed. It has to go somewhere. Or it fizzles out and goes back down out of sight.

The Fear and Anger can protect us for a while (temporarily, poorly) but they also separate us and get in the way of our ability to connect to other people. Because if we are too angry or too afraid, we will never let anyone get close enough to us. If they get too close they would see what was really wrong with us (or the things we believe are wrong about us).

This kind of Fear or Anger doesn’t want to be expressed directly though. We learn to hide ourselves and our awareness from it. We learn to armor ourselves to not feel these scary, awful things. These scary and awful things that your counselor just provoked.

But these scary awful things live inside of us. In our memories, in our experiences, in how we think of ourselves. These scary awful things that are constantly whispering to you, punishing you, judging you, criticizing you and making you feel smaller than you actually are.

And part of you knows that. The part that feels something is not right, and went looking for a counselor. That part of you, for all its noble intent and purpose, is going to get scared and it is going to get angry. In some way.

Those awful scary things need to be exposed, and they need to be felt to be understood. Talking about it is a good first step, but you must work to allow yourself to feel the Anger or the Fear. Because you have to fight fire with fire—psychologically speaking. You have to take back the Anger or the Fear. You have to own them, and ultimately understand why they were created in the first place.

Fear and Anger protect what we are most vulnerable to. They protect the most fragile parts of our psyche. And they can do their job incredibly well.

“I don’t feel anything about my time in captivity/in a war zone/in a abusive marriage. I’m over it. There is nothing for me to talk about anymore.”

“It’s your fault that I am angry. You brought this up, not me.”

“I don’t want to talk about my feelings. My feelings only cause me pain.”

These forces, Fear and Anger, keep us from being the best version of ourselves possible. Understanding what is beneath the Fear and Anger is being in touch with our true selves. And if you know your true self, no one can manipulate you with Fear or Anger because you have already overcome those forces yourself.

It’s the part of the movie where the evil genius tries to subdue the hero. Sometimes they do. Sometimes not. It’s Darth Vader telling Luke the truth about who his father is on Cloud City. Luke can’t accept it, can’t accept the feelings that this revelation brings up, and he nearly dies as a result. It’s Hannibal Lecter grilling Starling about the story of the lambs. It is Clarice at her most vulnerable. It is a story that connects her to her frightened younger self: just having lost her dad, in a strange place, and hearing the animals being slaughtered. She connected with the fear, accepted it, and much to Lecter’s twisted delight, she never let that fear define her emotional landscape. She grew beyond that frightened child holding that innocent lamb.

So, you want to be right? Then it’s time for you to own your scary feelings and stand up for what those feelings are trying to protect. Because no one else ever can. Even if they could, you really wouldn’t want that.

Honest.

I am totally not making this up, but as I was writing this I was just listening to “I am a Rock” By Simon and Garfunkel, and it is all right fucking there, my friends. Simon and Garfunkel for the win.

 

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Social Anxiety

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Therapyisdandy

(It sucks)

The small town I grew up in had a public school system with a progression that was: elementary school, junior high school and then high school.

Junior high was 7th grade to 9th grade. So, as a freshman, you were not actually in high school yet. Whatever. That changed around my senior year, when the junior high became a middle school.

Entering junior high at 7th grade was a serious step up from elementary school. You had electives. You had block classes. No more recess (!). No more being big man on the elementary campus. You had your own locker and locker partner. Freshman looked like giants and had facial hair and other advanced secondary sexual characteristics that made 7th graders look like toddlers. Good times. Or terrible bouts of bullying and teasing.

For simplicity sake, I will focus on the locker. This was a kind of civic and educational responsibility I had never experienced before. All your stuff had to fit inside! And junior high made sure you had lots of stuff to cram in there. I wont even bring up the peer pressure of having your locker in the right area of lockers, meaning that your locker was next to the cool kids, thereby making you that much cooler yourself. That was totally random, totally out of your control. You did get to pick your locker partner. That was good. People went with what they assumed at the time were their best friends. That could change a lot in junior high, and nothing prepares you for that either, unfortunately. But the locker itself and the embedded lock was all your responsibility. You HAD to remember your locker combination. And when you went to PE class (where showering with aforementioned giants was mandatory) there was a different locker for you there. TWO combinations? It was a lot for my 11 year old brain to hold on to. Point being that I still remember my locker combination for locker #20 at Lincoln Junior High school. It was 20-10-12. Hard to forget. That I remember this arcane and useless piece of information says something about my earliest sense of social responsibility. Maybe. If you are feeling extremely generous. That I have had nightmares ever since the 7th grade where I cannot remember my locker combination says something about my social anxiety.

Junior high was (and I imagine still is) quite a transition from the small, tiny children we all once were who would rather goof off and play during recess, reciting lines from Star Wars or the A Team, to the sweaty, acne prone, slouching, inarticulate, hormone dazzled train wrecks experimenting with smoking, drinking, and socializing, but also teenage rebellion, Joy Division/Metallica/Led Zeppelin/pick your favorite, and maybe trying to get to second base with the love object of your choosing.

All of that going on need I remind you while under the immediate and merciless scrutiny of our peers and those only slightly better off in the puberty/hormone conundrum. Judgment becomes so much more explicit—social judgment from our peers. All those other sweaty, insecure, dopeheads who are mostly still too young to have jobs or vote, but still exude a power over you that you can’t explain and challenges most known conventional armies in destructiveness and loss of productivity.

Judgment then, whether from them or from within ourselves, really comes out in full force. But it, like the four horsemen of apocalypse, doesn’t ride alone. No, no. It brings friends. Along with judgment comes our idealized future self. Because junior high was a place we all had to endure, but no one ever wants to stay there. The goal was to move on to high school. To our future self over there, after puberty and after the pimples, any maybe a real job, and a real boyfriend or girlfriend and real honest to goodness sex. So, for the purpose of my story today, junior high is about being stuck somewhere when what you really want is to hurry up and go (be) some where (one) else. Your future idealized self.

Judgment and our idealized future self then tag team against poor little us. Maybe you have had some of these thoughts (since your time in junior high).

No one at this party will like me.

No one wants to talk to me because of my (fill in the blank with vulnerability of your choice.)

I don’t have anything interesting to say, or offer, or do.

I will just feel really out of place.

I will disappoint them.

I will start to sweat, or stutter, or mumble, or drink too much, or talk too much, or…

No one would miss me if I didn’t show up.

I don’t contribute enough to make an impact.

No one listens to me when I try to talk about (fill in the blank.)

I just won’t have any fun.

This one time at a different party something happened that I didn’t like and no one cared or noticed.

Social anxiety is what can happen when your own judgment tag teams with your idealized future self and they beat you down with their fears, their taunts, and their torments.

It’s two against one. And as much as I want you and I to be more like Bruce Lee, you and I are not Bruce Lee.

So, social anxiety is a real thing in my life, and I imagine if not for you, then someone you know or love.

The thing to remember, to hold on to, to grow, is that you are not and never have been your judgments or your idealized future self. Never. Now, I am sure you are pleased to know that about the former, but I also suspect you don’t like what I am saying about the latter.

Anyone who has seen me for counseling in my office or via Skype knows what comes next. You put that sense of judgment or the idealized future self in the empty chair and you talk to it. Because they sure as hell talk a lot to you. It’s about time you leveled the playing field. And as you talk to these constructions your awareness grows and you change your relationship to them. You can take your power back from them. And then you don’t have to spend so much internal energy fighting them off. Because they just don’t matter as much as they used to. Just like those kids and all their opinions back in junior high or middle school.

Right?

Some of you may be asking: what’s the moral of this story, Henry?

The moral is I have remembered my locker combination for over 25 years but I had two-count them TWO-locker partners decide they didn’t want to be my locker partner anymore. Because of reasons. I am pretty sure they don’t blog.

More stuff to come next time. Thanks for reading.

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Counseling is Yoga for your brain

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Therapyisdandy

As in it gives you increased flexibility, endurance, and strength. It’s really quite that simple.

When our bodies lose flexibility, strength or endurance, we tend to want to do something about that. Some loss happens with age, but exercise can slow much of that. The same thing happens to us emotionally and cognitively, but since we can’t “see” it so easily it gets less cheerleading. When our thoughts and our emotions lose their capacity for flexibility, for endurance and strength—when we start to resort to black and white thinking, reactionary impulses and a lack of empathy—then chances are your life is going to be more difficulty, happiness is going to be harder to achieve, and you will feel worse about yourself or those around you. And you need help. And asking for help is what civilization is about. Not capitalism. Or greed. Or whatever. Right?

(And welcome to the last blog post of 2014 from Therapy is Dandy—I have been rather reticent, I know. Life. And work. And exercise. And video games.)

So, any questions about counseling as yoga for your brain?

I am going to beat this analogy to death because it is quite simple and rather clever (And it’s the end of the year and I have to get this thing written). Practitioners of yoga have much better spatial awareness of their own bodies. They are more “in” their bodies than not. Their bodies have strength and resilience that is different than someone who is just mindlessly pumping iron. Their strength comes from the core and from the spine. That makes them quite solid and grounded. That is admirable and it is a trait we should all be so lucky to have ourselves.

Now this is where I veer off into a tangent, a thing, something very important but also optional to consider. There is no difference between the mind and the body. They are absolutely connected and react/playoff/distract/resemble/resonate/frustrate/ all the time. I won’t even try to convince you if you don’t agree. Chances are you wouldn’t read a blog called Therapy is Dandy if you had a rigid and atrophied perspective on life. Or maybe that’s precisely why you are here. Either way, I just want you to consider what I am suggesting. Do you let yourself laugh? Do you let yourself cry, when needed? Do you express anger and frustration without becoming the Incredible Hulk? Are you able to explain to yourself or those around you what you are feeling and why—without an intervention style procedure? A lot of this is related to the idea of armor—an idea from Reich I have mentioned more than once before. Our bodies, and the way we carry them, are directly connected to our thoughts and our life experience—how could they not be?

What does your body carry for you?

And what is your body telling you about your emotions and your life experience?

Do you even listen?

I hope you have had an excellent 2014, and that 2015 is amazing and challenging and fulfilling for you and yours.

Thank you very much for showing up here and reading. It boggles my mind that I get web traffic at all.

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