Therapy – Page 2 – Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

You Don’t Have to Work So Hard

February 9, 2023 by Anthony Rella

“A part of me still has internalized the Catholic injunction to become a saint, an exemplar of virtue who shows humanity what it is capable of. When I was younger, I felt my failure to become a saint was a sign of my intrinsic awfulness. At this stage in my life, I now appreciate that saints are rare because that life is incredibly taxing. I further appreciate how many saints could only accrue the spiritual and internal force necessary to hold that virtue by renouncing other paths such as marriage, family, career, or living in the society of their time.

There is a spiritual path of living in the world and cultivating one’s soul and being, and it’s been known in many religions and cultures. Gurdjieff called it the Fourth Way, but I think of it as the path of the Red Mage—in the original Final Fantasy video game series, the Red Mage had some skill in fighting and some skill in general magic but mastery of neither.

That is the path I walk, and in walking the path I find these moments of feeling the costs of not committing to one or the other. A part of me dreams of the monastic life of solitude and devotion to spirit and my awakening, while another part of me wonders what would have been possible if I’d dedicated my considerable discipline and willfulness toward accruing money and power in this world.”

Culture

On Changing Your Attitude

January 3, 2023 by Anthony Rella

“When you commit to a change in attitude, you are probably not going to “feel” any different for a while. It is more like putting on a different mask at first. You might wake up as cranky, sore, and easily irritated as you did yesterday. But if you have resolved to meet this day with an attitude of patience or courage, then you will practice holding those experiences differently than you did yesterday when you flailed and complained. “

Culture

Reflections of a Gender Affirming Therapist

December 27, 2022December 22, 2022 by Anthony Rella

Thoughts from a twenty-year witness to the transgender culture wars.

Culture

A Dream of Power and Freedom from Control

November 8, 2022November 3, 2022 by Anthony Rella

“I see power and control as two ends of a spectrum. Power is the embodied knowing that I can influence my inner and outer worlds toward my safety and meeting my needs and desires. That when I know what I need, I can get it. That when I need something to stop, or to start, I can make it happen.

The efforts to exert control over another, and the acceptance of another’s control, both require the giving away of power. Controller and the controlled are hooked to each other, like the two Piscean fish, unable to swim without pulling the other along.

We may imagine that the control of abusers, dominators, and authoritarians gives them freedom, but in practice they are unable to tolerate dissent or the normal conflicts of adult relationships and engage in compulsive moves to reassert control. Similarly, we tend to imagine the passive controlled victim who utterly surrenders, but in practice even the most assaulted person has all manner of ways in which rebellion, resistance, undermining, and sabotage emerge. Humans are creatures who can never be fully tamed, even unto themselves.”

Culture

For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust

October 25, 2022October 20, 2022 by Anthony Rella

“The reason the Nice Guy strategy fails tends to come down to underlying shame about yourself, your passivity, and your inability to tolerate another person’s boundaries. The loneliness you’re trying to cure through romantic connection becomes your greatest hindrance. Loneliness is true suffering, it is incredibly painful, and makes us more sensitive to rejection from the people with whom we want to connect.”

Culture

Becoming Dissonant

October 18, 2022October 14, 2022 by Anthony Rella

“On a broader cultural level, I believe we are witnessing this unfolding in the polarization and fights over disinformation and who controls the story continues. We talk about it as right versus left, which is itself an attempt to reduce dissonance by making simple dichotomies, and it is also a reflection of the weakening of a cultural ego. Those former arbiters of culture—a shared religion, a shared valuation of certain sources of news, even trust in the government—seem to be struggling to find a unifying story to smooth out inconsistencies.

Perhaps it relates to the United States’s Pluto return, in which the wandering star Pluto has returned to the position it inhabited when the United States emerged as its own national entity. In Western modern astrology, Pluto draws out what has been psychologically repressed, particularly those uncivil energies of the will to power at the expense of harmony.

My sense is that Pluto’s movements demand a confrontation of dissonance and recognition that old ego stories no longer serve, but have become too restrictive, too much at odds with these buried drives, and those stories need to be shed so that we can grow large enough to encompass our multitudes and find a new story.

Or there might just be death. “

Therapy

We’re Never Greater than Our Basics

October 11, 2022October 13, 2022 by Anthony Rella

In therapy recently, this kept coming up for me in conversation with some clients around ambivalence toward “being basic.” We may want to feel our problems are so unique and complex that they could not possibly have basic solutions. We may feel belittled by attending to the basics. We may be so lost in the complexity that we would not begin to know which basic to grasp.

These responses make so much sense, especially when we’ve spent years struggling to get help, attention, or care for our struggles, and have wrestled with them, alone and misunderstood. It’s like walking onto the mat and being attacked with a flurry of punches and kicks with no instruction as to how to respond, and then being criticized when you find your own instinctive survival solution of collapsing or flailing your arms or running away in terror.

Our problems are incredibly complex, and the basics alone are not enough to master them, but what Aikido has offered me is the wisdom to meet and engage with the complexity until I can find a basic I can use to bring the situation back into harmony.

Culture

Feelings are gross.

September 13, 2022September 12, 2022 by Anthony Rella

Recently I’ve been listening to spiritual teachers, coaches, and even some therapists who seem to promise that if you work hard enough you’ll reach a state where you are fully healed and un-triggerable. Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?

Yet I think such aspirations are not only unrealistic but that they become a hindrance to healing and growth in time. We reach a point where we’re feeling the same old disgust and impatience with ourselves, but now it’s dressed up in more refined spiritual or psychological language that boils down to “I don’t want to deal with this!”

This mindset of healing is quite aggressive—that our needs and wounds must be uprooted, or transformed, or eradicated to reach a particular desirable state of consciousness. When we merge with this perspective, we tend to be uncharitable, condescending, and inhospitable to those parts of us that are younger, shyer, more tender, more unruly. We cannot meet our needs on their own terms, and so we cannot work with them.

Culture