Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • Mistrust, Hope, and Meaningful Connection, Part 1

    “I have trust issues.”

    Have you ever said that? What does that mean to you? Where do those “issues” come from?

    When I explore trust issues with people, we often discuss all the ways they’ve been failed and betrayed by people they trusted, or wanted to trust. They might also talk about the ways they leap into trust with every new relationship, hoping this one won’t disappoint, only to be bitterly crushed again. Others feel terrified of trusting their relationships at all, afraid of that seemingly inevitable disappointment.

    More deeply, they may feel unable to trust themselves. They’ve disappointed themselves, feel they’ve set themselves up to be hurt, believe they deserve the pain, engaged in self-defeating behaviors.

    In every relationship, we must reckon with the issue of trust. How much do I trust? Does mistrust keep me safe? Are the benefits of trust or mistrust worth the costs?

    Trust vs. Mistrust

    Erik Erikson described one of the first Western psychological models of development that encompass an entire life. The first stage he called Trust vs. Mistrust. This begins from birth through infancy, in which the child learns that their environment may or may not respond to its needs appropriately. If the infant expresses need and the need is met, then trust in the world grows. If the infant’s needs are met sporadically, neglected, or punished, then mistrust in the world grows. When both ends of the spectrum are felt and integrated, the virtue of Hope becomes possible.

    Problems reconciling the developmental crisis of Trust vs Mistrust leads to imbalances that affect later stages of development. We can very easily name undesirable consequences of too much mistrust—anxiety in relationships, irritability, paranoia, constantly feeling on guard and reluctant to let someone in due to believing eventually they will screw you up. But those who have lived through mistrust-engendering relationships could tell you the dangers of too much trust—opening themselves up to being taken advantage of, the deep pain of betrayal, and excessive credulity leading to the premature forgiveness of abusive and disrespectful behavior.

    People with extensive relational trauma or deep-seated mistrust cannot simply set these aside to trust in a loving, benevolent universe. They know the universe is vast and includes pain, abuse, and evil. People who have experienced relational trauma often need to learn how to find trustworthy people and repair damaged trust while also maintaining healthy protective boundaries against people who would hurt and abuse them (clinically known as “assholes”).

    An image of a person with long brown hair and a white shirt. Around this person's head is a blue scarf. The arrangement of scarf and hair obscure the person's face, and it is unclear which direction they are facing. Behind is an open sky and expanse of water.
    photo by Oscar Keys, via Unsplash

    The Experience of Mistrust

    It took me a long time to recognize “Mistrust” as more than simply “the absence of trust.” Mistrust is its own attitude with collections of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Mistrust will look differently based on your personality and the experiences that sparked it, but here are some qualities that often appear in some form:

    • Guardedness – Stand-offishness, unwillingness to share your experience and thoughts openly without getting a temperature of the room or other person. Giving brief, curt answers to open questions.
    • Suspicion – Constantly feeling “on edge.” Irritability. Regular concerns that the other person is acting deceptively, setting you up for some harm, or talking about you behind your back. Needing to constantly check out the other person’s claims for truth value. May include some deceptive behavior like snooping or testing the person.
    • Anxiety – Tension in the body. Constantly going through the same cycles of thoughts over and over, regardless of any evidence for the thoughts. Difficulty relaxing, especially around people. Going “blank”, fearful, or hostile when asked direct questions.
    • Holding Grudges/Building a Case – Keeping a mental list of all the failures, abuses, and oversights committed by others. Sometimes you might dwell on these and bring them up to the other person when angry or afraid, even if the other person has apologized and tried to make amends. Other times you may keep this list to yourself, “building a case” not to trust the person, until you finally explode and throw all these accusations against the person who didn’t see them coming.
    • Cynicism – More broadly, mistrust generates a worldview that no one is trustworthy, there is nothing worth aspiring toward, and there is no reason to exert any effort to improve one’s life or community.

    One thing I find interesting is that inwardly the person is experiencing a desire to know if they can trust the other person, but outwardly they behave in ways that undermine their own trustworthiness. Guardedness often elicits guardedness; if I wonder why you’re being self-protective, I may become self-protective. Being suspicious and holding grudges may well inspire the other person to respond in turn.

    This becomes a internally coherent cycle of creating relationships that validate the mistrustful attitude. These behaviors are not conducive to the process of making amends and restoring trust.

    That said, these behaviors and feelings aren’t “bad” and you’re not “crazy” to experience them. If we were to look through your history, we might fully understand why you’d be protective of yourself and why it’s hard to trust. Feelings of mistrust might be completely valid intuitive warnings from the part of your brain that isn’t wholly logical but nevertheless is picking up on subtle signals of danger.

    I do not think eradicating or suppressing feelings of mistrust is useful to grow as a person and forming meaningful attachments. We might need to take some time to befriend and get to know mistrust while also exploring when and how to build trust. Next week, I will write more on the qualities of trustworthiness.

     

  • To Know My True Name: On Identity and Belonging

    do you think
    just like that
    you can divide
    this you as yours
    me as mine to
    before we were us?
    if the rain has to separate
    from itself
    does it say “pick out your cloud?”
    – Tori Amos, “Your Cloud“

    Identity is not who we are, though our English language around identity suggests it points to something essential. There are many identities to claim, as many as there are ways to complete the statement: “I am a/an …” Today I am a son, brother, husband, therapist, and mentor. I might be deeply invested in these identities, deriving significant meaning from them. Is identity who I am, though? There is a Vedic practice known as “Neti Neti” (or “Not this, Not that”) in which one asks one’s self, “Who am I?”, waits for the answer, and then rejects the answer. For example, “Who am I? I am a man… No, I am not a man, that is a gender role assigned to me. Who is the I that is gendered male?” This practice continues until arriving at the answer that feels correct, which for me corresponds with a sense of knowing, a sense of Yes, this is it. (And the answer that was right ten years ago is not the answer that is right today.)This and similar practices lead us toward the Self, greater and deeper than we can fathom, a creative center of each person’s existence that expresses itself in the world. Identities, in this way, are names for various expressions of this Self. Some identities are names for things the Self has experienced—like “survivor.” Others are names for systems of belief that resonate with the self—like “Stoic,” “socialist,” or “Christian.” Identity is how we put our understandings of Self into language, making it possible to analyze, explore, and understand ourselves and communicate with others. 

    Identity is also relational. Those words “son,” “mentor,” infer relationships that “I” have with others—one is not a son without claiming someone or something as a parent. To identify as a “Stoic” is to put one’s self in community with others who ascribe to Stoicism, or have a stoic personality. Here we reach the more complex and political dimensions of identity. To claim an identity is to claim membership in a community of those who share the identity. A lone person who has thoughts and feelings unlike anyone else around them must struggle with feelings of alienation, confusion, shame, or fear that something is deeply wrong with them. The choice seems to be either accepting this alienation or cutting off the parts of them that don’t fit the majority. If those thoughts and feelings have a name an identity, suddenly that person has an opportunity to experience dignity and pride as they are. Thus, the “alphabet soup” of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, questioning, intersex, and increasingly more identities that are sexually, romantically, or gender non-majority is so vital and continues to expand. Each letter of the LGBTQIA acronym is a declaration of existence and validity for each of those communities, and hope for those who realize their feelings match one of those identities.

    Here, in the facet of relationship, is also an opportunity for deep wounding. If I say I am this thing and everyone around me denies it, undermines it, rejects it, or simply ignores it, then that part of me suffers and collapses. Perhaps I can maintain its health through personal work and sheer willpower, but that drains the energy I might spend on other things. I may become defensive, hostile, fearful, anxious, or overwhelmed when my identity is under attack. Though I am cisgender—I was assigned male at birth and continue to identify as male—there have been times when others have explicitly or implicitly questioned whether I am “a man” because I did not behave or look like what they thought “a man” should. This fostered injuries to my identity—a defensiveness and anxiety that arises when I hear a particular phrase, a particular tone, or someone insults me in a way that resembles earlier insults. Intellectually I may understand “being a man” as a complex, shifting cultural and historical set of norms—but I may find myself manipulated into doing something I don’t want to do, simply because someone implied I’m “not a man” if I don’t do it. (At the same time, there are ways my maleness is not questioned in the ways a transgender man’s might be—most people refer to me by male pronouns without my asking; I can use the men’s bathroom without fear; and peers and authorities accept my maleness without any effort on my part.)

    Photo by Thomas Lefebvre

    As social creatures there is, I believe, an instinctive part of us that needs belonging. We know that babies thrive when they experience touch and warmth from their caregivers. We know that solitary confinement fosters mental illness in prisoners. Threats of exile and abandonment are experienced by parts of us as threats to well-being and survival. I believe this belonging-needing part of us suffers a kind of trauma when it experiences bullying, exile, abandonment, or any experience of being made to feel it is unwelcome. This is one reason why real harm is done to trans and gender nonconforming folk when others refuse to use their names and pronouns.

    As with many psychic wounds, when we get our first taste of exile or abandonment, we develop strategies to avoid ever having to experience this pain again. In some ways those strategies succeed at reducing the pain of exile or abandonment, but they may well become toxic to our selves and relationships. The strategies become problematic to our selves and communities when we:

    • Become deeply invested in identity, trying to be “the best [x] I can” so no one can judge or exclude us. This may get us some mileage, but the trauma is magnified when we lose that identity. Someone who has spent years being “a good son” suddenly becomes utterly lost when their parents die. This is also incredibly challenging in a society in which we may hold multiple identities with widely varying norms and expectations.
    • Minimize the need for community and connection altogether, disavowing any identity that requires others’ validation. A less intense version of this might look like cultivating a kind of critical distance, so one is a member of the community but thinks of themself as on the edges, or outside, or more of an observer.
    • Develop rigid expectations of what someone in “[x]” community should look like or act like; what values they should hold; what politics they should espouse; all of which centralizes one’s own values, attitudes, and behaviors. Doing so, we begin to limit our own growth and development.
    • Express defensive outrage or excessive victimization at signs of criticism or accountability from others within the community.
    • Police community boundaries—enacting rigid identity norms by marginalizing anyone who doesn’t fit through social control strategies such as gossiping, bullying, excluding from social events or positions of influence, or straight up denouncing the person as “not a true [x]”. Thus we become hostile to the natural and productive diversity within our communities.

    Being a member of communities that are composed of socially marginalized people, I observe the above dynamics periodically. I think these come from the trauma many of us experienced growing up in communities where we felt alien or rejected. Once we find a place where we feel accepted, welcome, and seen, that taste of joy intensifies the resolve to never lose it again. (Of course, others feel unwelcome and rejected even in the communities that “should” accept them.) Unhealed, these underlying identity injuries fester, directing our actions more than we might acknowledge without reflection. Much is made of “body fascism” in gay male communities, and I suspect much of that is fed by the shame of childhood alienation, causing some men to grow up and push themselves to prove their worthiness through superlative physiques, careers, fashion, and then projecting their own insecurities onto the less-developed bodies of their peers, who experience that as reinforcing pressure to hold themselves to those standards as well. Then it begins to look like a cultural norm.

    It’s important to note that it is normal and necessary for communities to maintain boundaries and shape definitions for identities. Think of boundaries being as natural and necessary as the shell of an egg, or the edges of a living cell. To foster life, there needs to be some limit that holds in the living organism and keeps out harmful toxins in the environment. That boundary needs to be firm, but porous enough to bring in nourishment and push out what is harmful. All communities develop mechanisms by which this occurs. When these structures are not developed consciously and purposely in a way that allows for flexibility and diversity, then they tend to be enacted in the rigid ways noted above by people who feel most urgently the need to do it, without an accountability structure in place. The loudest voices tend to be the ones of rigidity and exclusion, and the people who recognize and value inclusion and pluralism have to push hard to be heard. Communities with structure have the opportunity to make this polarity a conscious part of their community agreements, recognizing the need for pluralism and boundaries.

    On a personal level, I think it is beneficial to continue developing ourselves as whole people. If one identity is taking up much of our time and attention, then it’s worthwhile to engage in other interests, connect with trusted family, or engage with friends outside of that community. This helps me to get perspective on what’s going on in my community, take it less personally, and re-engage with more of an open heart—partially because I remember that I am more than just this identity. The practice of “Neti Neti” or similar meditations of shedding layers of identity also helps to reconnect with the core Self. When I can validate my identity and also remember it isn’t “me,” I feel less vulnerable when someone attacks it. Becoming aware of what the identity means to me—what I think defines the identity based on my lived experience—I have a stronger base of authority to support me in dialogue or confrontation.

    What about on a community level? I am curious for more conversation about this, and I think it’s needed. One thought I have is to become sensitive to signs of trauma so that I can respond with compassion when I or someone else acts in the ways listed above. These days I am more interested in communities organized around shared values or a shared mission rather than a shared identity. I think that helps us to depersonalize community problems and focus more on developing just and inclusive community systems with effective boundaries.

    What do you think? What practices or policies could heal or manage some of these dynamics?

  • On Wisdom

    This space has lain silent, though it continues to speak with the archives of posts. Blogging was useful to me as a discipline of creating something weekly and putting it in front of an audience, of believing in my words and my process of exploration enough to make it available to anyone with an Internet connection. How many people clicked on the posts mattered less, though some posts were surprisingly popular and I continue to be pleased with how often my Jungian Beyoncé writings continue to get clicks. This past year, however, I felt less passion about blogging.

    Ouranos, photo by Antigone059

    When I think about the Internet, I think it is in some ways a venue to observe our collective consciousness. One can read one’s Facebook feed and see the “trends” of thought and conversation, the dialogues that seem fixed, the outraged responses and the outraged responses to the outraged responses. I associate this with the astrological meaning of the planet Uranus, with its associations with community, intellectual debate, and revolutionary thinking. Astrological Neptune is association with the ocean, the spiritual realms, dreams, illusions, and in my view the collective unconscious. In Greek myth, Ouranos is castrated by Kronos (Saturn), and his phallus thrown into the ocean (Neptune), which results in the birth of Aphrodite (Venus).

    My interpretation is that the potency of our airy, conscious discourse is lost when we are unable to sink into the oceanic depths and connect with the unconscious influences there. Love makes possible, and is made possible by, the joining of our rational and irrational minds. And here I’m lost in airy analysis when I’m trying to say that I become weary by the constant dialogue and analysis made possible by the Internet. It’s exciting and feels important, it spurs anger and the desire to write and communicate, and at the same time it can be lacking in depth. We are at a point where it is possible for an event to happen in the world and less than two hours later have five different opinion pieces about why the event happened and what it means about us as people. There is not time for deep reflection and integration in which we can say something truly original, something that would truly move our conscious conversation forward. Instead we are reacting to each other based on the assumptions we already have.

    Therapy is like that. I’ve come to notice that “analysis” often happens too early and ends up being a rehash of assumptions we’ve already made, the assumptions that created the situation. “I’m feeling uncomfortable. It’s because I don’t like my job.” That has some truth, and yet that does not move us toward anything. We learn nothing new about the discomfort and we get no insight into what might change that would make the work experience better. What helps move forward is to sit with our discomfort, to try to listen in a new way, to notice the stories we always tell and acknowledge that maybe they’re not the entire truth. Maybe these assumptions are dried leaves of our mind that need to be shed so that we can lay bare and fallow for a time, being with that emptiness and not-knowing, to make space for something truly new to grow from within us.

    —-

    I’ve written all of this and noticed that I titled the post “On Wisdom,” because I thought to say more about the oddness of the rhetorical box I’ve created for myself with this blog. I’ve enjoyed writing about therapeutic process and trying to communicate psychological insights in ways that are fresh, accessible, yet challenging to pop psychological assumptions that I think are unhelpful. At the same time I’ve not appreciated how this platform and that approach necessarily narrows the scope and loses nuance. What I have learned as a therapist is that every person needs to hear something different, even if their problems look superficially the same. We are all on a unique trajectory of growth and have unique histories that shape that growth. One person needs to hear, “You are not your symptoms. It is time to live the life you want even if it doesn’t feel right.” Another person needs to hear, “What you are experiencing is not your fault. You have an illness that is out of your control.” For both of these people, one message would be liberating while the other message would be a cage.

    Or, in other words, there is a story about a Buddhist master and a student. The student comes to the master to complain. “Your advice is contradictory. You tell me to do one thing one day, and the opposite the next.”

    The master nods. “Imagine that you are standing at one side of a bridge that has no rails, and you are helping a blind person to walk across it. When the person veers too far to the edge on the right, you yell, ‘Go left!’ When the person veers too far to the left, you yell, ‘Go right!’”

    My intellectual focus on opposites, polarities, and dualism is in this spirit. My hope is to help people find their own Middle Way, which necessitates recognizing and accepting the opposites within us. This is so simple to write but in practice there is not a set of consistent, reliable codes to follow. Yet writing blog posts, I struggle to represent that, as often the topic of a blog post is “How to go right when you’re veering too far to the left,” which may be terribly bad advice for the people veering too far to the right. I could become more complex, but then my blog posts would be like this one, approaching 1,000 words, and thus unlikely to be read or shared by people on their lunch breaks.

    —

    All of this to say: I have ended my practice of weekly blogging for now, and have returned to writing longer essays and fiction to encourage me to reflect more deeply, research more, and think more critically about what I want to say.

  • Advice on Finding a Therapist

    In the past few years I’ve supported several people who are looking for psychotherapy but are unable to work with me for a variety of reasons. Finding a therapist who is a good fit is a daunting task even for the most mainstream person, but those who are in oppressed groups, non-majority ethnic groups, sexual minorities, and religious minorities, it becomes even more complicated.

    Most clients naturally want to work with someone who shares significant pieces of their experience and culture so that the client doesn’t have to worry about educating their clinician or having their clinician impose values or inappropriate cultural expectations upon the client. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to find someone who fits into all of your communities due to region and economic factors, and even when you do, the smaller your community is the more likely it will be that you experience social overlap: your clinician may go to the same rituals as you, the same parties as you. They could be dating one of your exes. None of this needs to be a deal-breaker, except maybe the ex situation, but it’s certainly something you and your clinician will discuss how to navigate.

    This lady might want to talk to somebody.

    This concern about finding a good fit does matter. Establishing a strong, supportive, warm relationship with your clinician is necessary for having good results from your treatment. If you’ve met with a person for two or three times and you find yourself unable to trust them even a little, or feel judged by them, or otherwise uncomfortable, then that is important for you to discuss with the clinician up front to either discuss ways to improve the working relationship or find someone who is a better fit for you. However! I have had some wonderful working relationships with people who come from completely different cultural backgrounds as I do, and I have had some non-working relationships with people within my cultures.

    My primary piece of advice for those in this situation is: don’t hunt for a unicorn. You might find a trained therapist who is a queer, polyamorous person of color who practices Santeria just like you, but then it turns out they live in a different state or they don’t take your insurance. My recommendation is that you start by making a list of the qualities of a therapist that are important to you, then rank the top three in order of importance. The therapist’s theoretical approach might be one of those (cognitive-behavioral, Jungian), but again you might be surprised to find you have great results with someone who does a therapy you thought you would have hated. I think one of the tasks of therapy is to confront the patterns of thinking that are keeping you stuck in a situation, and sometimes being exposed to an approach that feels very unlike your normal way of thinking creates great opportunities for change.

    Once you’ve gotten your top three, start looking at local agencies, search engines, or other resources that connect you to an array of therapists that you can sort through. If you are in a small community, you might look for therapists who advertise at events, on websites, or in publications targeted to your community. If those therapists are full, ask for a referral. Try to find one or two that meet your top three criteria, or at least two of the three.

    The next piece of advice I have is to call the therapist and, before even scheduling the intake, acknowledging any questions or concerns that you have. “I am a member of a minority religious community and I want to be sure that my beliefs will be treated with respect.” “I am involved in the kink community and am wondering if you have any familiarity with it, or if you have reservations about working with someone in that scene.” “I live outside the mainstream and I don’t want you to try to fix what I don’t think is broken.” Something like that. The importance of this question, in my opinion, is for you to get a sense of how the therapist receives and responds to your question. Maybe they have the “right” answer. Maybe they acknowledge having limited understanding of your community, yet their response communicates humility and nonjudgmental curiosity. That is gold. That is a person who will let you explore your experience, even if they personally don’t share your values, and who could challenge you in ways that help you grow.

    I might reframe my first piece of advice. Go ahead and hunt for a unicorn, but know that you might just find a good, workable horse who’s willing to wear a horn.

  • Resenting Illness, Striving toward Wellness

    In some recent conversations with healers and healthcare providers, I had a thought about some struggles we have with connecting to some of the people who come to us wanting to be healed. For the purpose of this post, I define “illness” as a state of dis-ease, discomfort, and distress and “wellness” as a state of ease, acceptance, and freedom. They are, of course, opposites of a kind that end up defining and intertwining with each other, and an illness can come from biological, environmental, psychological, or other factors.

    The conversations have been that some healthcare providers struggle with a certain portion of their clients who want wellness. This client or patient is understandably suffering, perhaps impatient, and really desires to be healed. The provider does what they do and makes recommendations for the person to follow. The person does not follow them and complains that they are not getting benefit. The person may not follow recommendations for a number of reasons, not all of which are within their control. The person may not trust their provider, or their provider’s recommendations may be inappropriate, unaffordable, or otherwise inaccessible for the person due to limits on their resources or demands of their lives. Perhaps the provider and client are not treating the right condition with the right modality.

    One piece that occurred to me recently is that one barrier to effective treatment is the person’s relationship with their illness. Most of us do not like being sick, did not choose to be sick, and resent the ways our illnesses limit our lives. When a person harboring that much resentment toward their illness meets with a provider, the dearest hope is that there will be some simple fix or pill that will make it all better. When they’re told instead that they have to make more sacrifices–spend money for treatment, take time for therapy, change their lifestyles of diet and exercise–this only deepens the resentment. “I didn’t want this, I hate what it’s taken from me, why does it have to take more?”

    Caduceus, by Luis Garcia

    We might look at this resentment of illness and see how it interferes with one’s ability to engage with treatment. I don’t think this is unusual or a sign of poor character. Illness is inconveniencing at best and debilitating at worst, it’s no surprise that one may resent it. When an illness comes about on by someone else’s behavior–such as posttraumatic stress disorder arising from violence committed against the person–then anger and resentment toward the one who caused it mixes and mingles with this other anger.

    What might be on the other side of a polarity from resentment of illness? The thought I had was “striving toward wellness.” A person who strives toward wellness, in my experience, takes responsibility for their illness and their treatment. They accept that the illness isn’t their fault but know that ultimately doesn’t change what needs to happen to become more well. They are open to suggestions, try things out, and communicate honestly with their providers about what helps and what hinders wellness. They assume stewardship over illness and wellness, knowing what kind of life they want to move toward and investigating the options that will help them get there.

    Teasing these two apart suggests a “purity” that most of us will not experience. Resentment of illness and striving for wellness may cohabitate in our lives, waxing and waning according to circumstance. Some days I might feel fairly accepting of a chronic condition and do the things I need to do to keep myself well, but other days I might cry, feel all the resentment that my illness forces me to deal with these issues, and skip the self-care steps I know I need to take. What is most important, I think, is to learn to recognize these modes for what they are, give ourselves some compassion for when we struggle, and choose what steps will move us in the desired direction.

  • Poem: This maddening itch in my heart is like–

    This maddening itch in my heart is like–

    by Frank Vincentz
    • poison woven into tissue,
      sepsis radiating from the site
      where unspoken words putrefy
      in anger and hope, toxifying
      blood, anxious for salve.
    • dreams and wishes withering
      under reality’s hot sun, lost;
      an empty hole in a brick wall
      betraying its completion;
      absence yearning for touch.
    • desire unnamed, the chafing
      of which tears the hole wider,
      fraying thread and loosening
      buttons until the entire fabric
      compels thorough refashioning.
    • a deep wound beginning to heal,
      pain throbbing and dissolving
      per some strange rhythm, work
      which scratching would undo,
      requiring patience, toleration.

     

  • Observations for July

    • In the culture of the United States of America, we have internalized a belief that to work is a moral virtue, and those who do not work are deficient in morality unless they have a reason considered acceptable by the dominant culture, such as retirement or a disability incurred by accident or in the course of doing one’s job. At the same time, we love and embrace technological advancements that increasingly render the kinds of work available to us obsolete while outsourcing other forms of labor, narrowing the field of work opportunities to tech fields, service labor, or middle management. We once had a vision of the future in which machines did most of the labor for us, freeing us up for family, leisure, creativity, research, passion, or contemplative pursuits. Instead we demean people who value those things over work and productivity as lazy or immoral and, on the average, have made ourselves busier than ever, more distracted, hustling harder and harder to do what Professor David Graber calls “Bullshit Jobs.”
    • The value of a person is intrinsic, it does not need to be justified by measurements according to use, money, productivity, or social worth.
    • Rivers, mountains, forests, and animals might also be considered persons with intrinsic value.
    • If we start with this foundation, then perhaps our economics and styles of relationship will shift. We no longer have the green light to exploit and pollute wherever we feel like it. We act with the knowledge that our actions cause harm to other beings—it’s unavoidable, it is a part of being a living creature–but as conscious beings we are accountable to the damage we cause. We cannot treat each other as objects to be used and thrown away. We cannot allow ourselves to be treated as objects to be used and thrown away.
    by Missiondolores
    • Depression, despair, and anxiety might be telling you that the way you’re living your life isn’t lining up with your deepest values. Your anger might be telling you there is real injustice that you want to push against, though you might not recognize exactly where it is at first.
    • Letting yourself be bled to death and postponing the activities that give your life meaning is not a moral act, even if done for ostensibly noble reasons.
    • We can have lives of loving responsibility to those we care about while also following the truth of the heart. The trick is to give up our ideas about what these things are supposed to look like. The mind’s predictions are at best weather predictions–helpful for planning purposes, but then you might as well throw them away. If you’re out in the rain but insisting that it was supposed to be a sunny day, you’re not allowing yourself to be responsive to what is happening. You lose the chance to stay dry or simply enjoy the rain.
    •  Guilt and shame are great for social control but terrible for growth and intimacy. When I’m feeling shamed by someone else, then usually I feel angry, defensive, or start wallowing in self-pity and self-abasement. I rarely think, “Oh, that’s a good point, I’ll try to change my behavior.”

  • Be Excellent to Yourselves

    In the past I’ve written that I am not a fan of positive thinking. (Though I am a fan of Zap Mama’s song “Vibrations” in which that is the prime message.) What I am coming to realize is that I am a fan of kindness, gratitude, and generosity. I suspect the origins of “staying positive” were more in line with these three qualities, but as I see it now, I think the whole concept has drifted into something that keeps people stuck and isolated.

    In practice, “staying positive” seems to be about minimizing suffering and trying to pretend everything’s okay. “I’ve been crying every day, but I’m doing just fine!” More and more I think the culture of “being positive” is more about “looking like I am positive.” When we’re uncomfortable with someone else’s pain, we say “just be positive!” as a way to basically shut them up so that we don’t have to feel dragged down. This is understandable when I think of people who seem relentlessly pessimistic, cynical, or driven to demolish everyone else’s good time—and yet we could also say this about the activists and truth-speakers who have to break through denial to raise awareness.

    In all, however, I’m not sure the injunction to “be positive” is very useful. I have come to dislike the way we moralize our feelings. This seems like another layer of that, in which certain experiences are okay to have and talk about while others are somehow corrupting one’s well-being or the mood of the group. Someone who is experiencing genuine suffering needs space to talk about it, to be heard and seen and not to be fixed. We need to allow ourselves this space as well. “I should be positive” is another way we criticize ourselves and try to keep parts of us stuffed in the Shame Closet.

    “All Smiles,” Martin Cathrae

    Recently I have started encouraging clients to try being kind to themselves, rather than trying to stay positive. Kindness is the practice of treating one’s self and others humanely, with basic dignity and worthiness. Kindness is not about blunting the truth of one’s perceptions, minimizing pain and anger, or lying. It’s about behaving and speaking in a way that is considerate, warm, and compassionate.

    For example, we might look at the self-talk of “I’m an idiot for forgetting that deadline.” This appears to be coming from a place of self-criticism, speaking as though one is globally flawed (an idiot) for this lapse. Someone who’s trying too hard to be positive might have that inner self-talk but attempt to cover it over with, “Everything’s fine.” That jump takes us directly into minimizing or self-deception and it doesn’t work. Feeling and witnessing our emotions is what helps them to move. Without that step, they tend to become stuck. If we try starting with kindness, we might say something like, “I missed this deadline, and I feel upset about it.”

    If we can start with kindness toward ourselves and others, we have a stronger foundation from which we can move into an outlook that is affirming and likely what is truly meant by being positive: “I’ll be able to try again next year,” or “I did my best.” In summary, positive thinking is a problem when we try to bypass pain and discomfort. You are a whole and beautiful creature and all of your feelings have worth and value. If you need to genuinely talk about something distressing so you can process the feeling and move on to being a powerful, kick-ass human being, and someone shuts you down by saying “just be positive,” you tell them to come talk to me.

  • Are there bad feelings?

    Are there “bad” feelings? In brief, my answer is no. Increasingly I am coming to challenge the language we use to describe our feelings, both for myself and for my clients. Saying that I feel “good” or I feel “bad” is a common verbal shorthand that really tells us very little other than we have internalized the cultural norm in which emotions, with all their variety, texture, and specificity, get swept into two giant buckets labeled “Acceptable to Have” and “Unacceptable to Have.”

    This fosters an unhelpful division within ourselves in which we try to push away unacceptable feelings and cling to acceptable ones. Feelings are an important source of information about ourselves and our environment. If I generally get along with most people, but one person in particular always seems to elicit feelings of defensiveness and fear, that is important information about myself and my relationship with this person. Perhaps this person is not emotionally safe for me to be around. Perhaps something within me wants to stand up to them but perceives other barriers that keep it stuck. Feelings are ultimately not logical and easy to reduce to one verbal statement, often they are more easily understood symbolically (capable of meaning multiple things but retaining an essential quality around which those meanings are organized). If I refuse to acknowledge that defensiveness and fear because it’s “better” to be either angry or happy, then I am likely to stuff down, ignore, deny, avoid, or minimize this information and it’s value is lost to me.

    The more restricted our range of acceptable feelings is, the more limited we are in our capacity to feel. Ultimately, our capacity to feel emotions that cause discomfort is the same capacity that lets us feel emotions that cause pleasure. The feelings we avoid stay stuck within us, getting stickier and more toxic, unable to move. Bringing loving or at least nonjudgmental awareness to these feelings is what helps them to begin to move, helping us to become more open to other feelings.

    Phoenix rising from its ashes

    I recently read an article in which a writer discussed how she disagreed with the injunction to “feel your feelings,” stating that there are some feelings that are destructive to her, such as the feeling of wanting to commit suicide. I am not linking to that article in part because I cannot find it and in other part because I do not want to come across as arguing with or disrespecting her process. For those struggling with self-harming behaviors or actively wanting to die, the priority is making sure you are physically safe and getting the mental and emotional support you need. (If you don’t have a therapist and don’t want to go to the hospital, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).) In this situation, then finding strategies not to fixate on those thoughts and feelings is life-saving.

    However, in the long-term I think it is useful to learn to befriend one’s feelings. When my clients are relatively safe and stable but still have thoughts like “I feel like I want to die,” one of my annoying habits is to encourage them to tease apart thoughts and feelings. It’s another verbal shorthand in our culture to communicate thoughts and opinions through the language of feeling, like, “I feel like the [political party] are going to destroy the country.” Part of this, I think, is trying to acknowledge intuition as a source of information, as intuition is a way of rational processing connected with feeling. However, emotions and feelings are almost always single words, nouns or adjectives, not statements. I would encourage the person making the above statement to reframe it as, “I am feeling fear, and I am having the thought that [political party] is going to destroy the country.” In the case of wanting to die, I would still want to explore this more deeply. “I want to die” is a thought, an interpretation about what is happening in the spirit, heart, and body, but what is the feeling connected to this thought? Is it despair? Humiliation? Disappointment?

    If we can name the feeling, then we have a chance at freedom with it. We can recognize how painful this feeling is and we can talk about it. We can mindfully bring awareness to it. We can seek the support we need for it. We might learn that we do not have to be so afraid of it, that a feeling can just be a feeling, a thought can just be a thought, and all of it can be information and not destiny.

  • 4 Principles – Wholeness is in Relationship Between Parts

    4. Our wholeness is in our relationship between our parts.

    I approach the self as both multiple and whole, differentiating between parts of self that have varied and at times conflicting wants and needs. Sometimes clients, when coming to see the truth of this, wonder if that means they have multiple personalities. I do not see this as the case.

    We have this structure within ourselves called the “ego” whose job it is to create a unified concept of “who I am.” When this ego is working effectively, we engage in our lives, accomplishing valued goals and managing distress. People whose egos are severely damaged tend to have lives that are chaotic and turbulent, highly reactive and dependent on others or highly rebellious. The ego has a bad reputation in some spiritual circles, particularly those Western spiritualities informed by Eastern understandings of selfhood. In part this is in response to the exaltation of ego in Western thought, in which the ego is heroic striver, emerging from chaos and weakness to carry out mighty feats and hold the coherent “I.”

    We need the ego, and yet the ego has a blindness that can create its own problems. Part of the ego’s work is to create a coherent narrative of self and cling to a unitary sense of truth. If “I” am upset in this moment by something a coworker did, “I” might become convinced that I am being unfairly victimized and this person is a persecutor. Because I have become identified with this feeling of persecution, the ego will generally suppress or deny any evidence to the contrary–for example, the possibility that I might have done something to upset my coworker first. Or if “I” do become open to this, then “I” might jump to become identified with the role of the persecutor and deny that I was victimized in any way.

    I think of the ego as something like the command chair in a spaceship, or the Iron Throne of Westeros. It is an empty chair that runs the conscious self-system, but whomever sits in the chair is effectively the “I”. When we are not present to ourselves and our paradoxical behaviors, we might not recognize that what we think of as “I” is composed of many wants, needs, fears, beliefs, impulses, all attempting to actualize themselves and working at cross purposes. When we start to reframe these conflicts as parts of self, we gain needed distance and perspective. “Part of me feels mad at her for what she said in the meeting, and another part of me feels guilty because I insulted her first.” This shift does not immediately solve the problem, but it gives us space to clarify what is happening and what we need to do.

    The more I explore my Self as a system of connected parts, the more I see that many of my problems arise from dysfunctional relationships between parts. There is a part of me that wants safety and comfort who might act up when I follow another part of me that wants visibility. Perhaps I apply for a job that I know I can do and want, but once I get to the interview, another part of me creeps in and starts filling me with anxieties and doubts. This part, the anxious part, has something of worth and value to add. Perhaps it senses something in the work environment and realizes that this job isn’t what it looked like on paper. Perhaps it’s trying to get my attention to convey something important, but the part of me that wants to look good at all costs keeps trying to push it aside and dismiss the anxiety as unimportant. In response, the anxiety increases–partly because it’s trying to be heard, partly because now I am at war within myself.

    Every part of self is part of my wholeness, and by accepting and listening to these parts I can begin to shift these inner relationships to one of greater integrity and depth. I don’t need to be afraid of the part of me that gets depressed because I also have the part of me that keeps me engaged in life. Every part has a voice and a vote, and none have the run the show. The ego can keep managing my life and thinking of being an “I”, but a more democratic, inclusive “I”. That is why, in some sense, the Self is not unitary but a system of relationships; in another sense, the Self is an individual being that includes all of these relationships.