Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • 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.

  • 4 Principles – Desiring and Fearing Presence

    3. We desire and fear presence.

    I define presence as the experience of being in full awareness and acceptance of one’s immediate physical, emotional, spiritual, relational, and cognitive experience. In action, presence is simple. It is experiencing the present moment as it is. Engaged in life as it is unfolding. Connected to the environment and beings we are in relationship with and connected to the inner experience. This is in an aspirational capacity that most people do not have without effort and practice, but I think it is what we long for and forget we long for.

    Experiences of grief and loss awaken us to this longing most acutely. When something or someone important to us is lost, we face the reality of death and the realization that we have not been wholly alive. We think of how much we missed out on, how we failed to savor the moments we had, how taking for granted the existence of these important people and experiences also meant allowing us not to be fully engaged.

    This is one facet of the human condition. I might spend hours planning and preparing the perfect meal for the perfect dinner party, only to spend most of the evening caught up in my anxious thoughts and worries about whether the party is going well, whether the food is really okay or if people are pretending, whether people are having a good time. At the end of the night, I might realize that I did not actually attend my party. I forgot to savor it, and now it’s over.

    Mental, emotional, and behavioral problems intensify this struggle. People stuck in a deep depression are both disconnected from the moment because of their depression, and also struggle to find the motivation to become present, because being present means feeling exactly how poorly they feel. Anxiety pulls us out of the moment. Addictive behavior is in part a turning away from presence, chasing an experience that is only fleetingly glimpsed through substance or behavioral abuse and avoiding the raw immediacy of being.

    Full presence also comes with a feeling of intimacy and vulnerability that might be painful for those unused to it. This reminds me of the moment in the Adam and Eve story in which they gain the knowledge of good and evil, and God wants to speak with them, but they feel ashamed because they are naked. One might read that as the dawning of conscious awareness, realizing that one is a human being among other conscious beings, seen exactly for who you are, unguarded, unprotected. Most of us want to run away from that. Most of us don’t want to see ourselves exactly as we are. And yet I believe we also have a deep longing for this, this experience that we try to describe through phrases like “being seen” or “being heard.” Both point to this experience of authentic, vulnerable connection in presence, witnessing and being witnessed. This state is in itself healing. Those parts of us that are fearful of rejection, criticism, and shame flourish when they are finally recognized within a state of full presence and acceptance.

    Accessing states of presence happens to all of us in moments, but we need practice and diligence to really cultivate and expand them. Many religions offer such practices, whether that is the stated intention or not, to help people become more connected to the here-and-now and less imprisoned by habits of thought, feeling, and action. Psychotherapy offers its own tools and practices, in part by helping to name and dissolve the blocks in our personality that make presence so painful and challenging. Presence is also a modality of healing. Therapists offer this witnessing and presence to the client, who ideally begin to internalize this and develop their own capacities for self-witnessing and becoming present.

  • 4 Principles – As Within, So Without

    2. As within, so without.

    This is a tricky one and requires context and balance. It begins with the assumption that we exist with an inner world of feelings, thoughts, fantasies, drives, desires, aversions, and all those complexities–and we exist in an outer world of people, circumstances, actions, and consequences. The principle further assumes that there is a more-than-incidental relationship between the inner and outer worlds, that they reflect and create each other in ways that are difficult to comprehend rationally.

    Already we are nearing dangerous territory, opening up the possibility for that spiritually abusive maxim that a person is somehow responsible for their miseries, failures, or traumas–that these happened because the person was sinful, or did not have enough faith, or unconsciously invited them to happen. This perspective is quite damaging for someone in the depths of shame or depression. This is why I underline that the inner and outer worlds coexist and influence each other but they are separate. Even with the premise that one person’s thoughts or inner world can cause things to happen in the outer world, we must think about how that is true for every single person, which means the outer world is constantly manifesting in response to thousands of wishes, hopes, fears, and inner conflicts.

    All of that said, when sitting in the therapy room with one’s therapist, we are not in a place to heal the social, economic, cultural, and historical forces that contribute to one’s suffering. What we have are the people in the room and the inner psychic images of the world we carry with us. Often what we see within are mirrors of what is happening without. The anger I feel at a person who constantly criticizes me may arise because I find my inner criticism so painful. When I feel no one listens to me, I might not be listening to myself and speaking in a way to be heard. Or the trauma my ancestors experience might be literally living in me.

    As Above So Below, by KyoukiGirl

    When we’re feeling trapped in life or stuck in relationship patterns we hate, typically this comes with some stuckness, some limitation or attachment that keeps us from seeing all the available options. In therapy, we tend to recreate these dynamics between therapist and client. If a client feels powerless and unable to change their lives, they might look to the therapist for salvation but refuse or shoot down every suggestion the therapist makes. This creates the opportunity to look beyond the content and at the process being enacted. With some reflection, the client might discover that within them this same dynamic plays out–a part of them feels powerless and defeated, and another part of them makes suggestions that are dismissed or diminished. Sometimes even a thought that causes them to feel empowered is met with intense anxiety that feels intolerable, so the dismissal of the thought returns the person to a state of calm, though deeply unsatisfied, existence.

    Looking at this reflection of inner and outer, and learning to differentiate between what is within and what is without, helps us to make deeper changes. Instead of blaming ourselves or someone else for our problems, we can look at the relationships between behaviors and begin to make shifts. If we can learn to accept the inner critic and use its advice skillfully, then we might become less defensive when a partner offers criticism, acknowledging what is useful and discarding what is not. If we can accept the presence of anxiety within us, we can respond to anxiety-provoking situations with greater calm and clearsightedness. Changing our behavior then begins to ripple out in changing systems around us.

    Sometimes we need to make outer changes to promote inner wellbeing. We might step away from relationships, attachments, and obligations that feel harmful or draining. Healing the personal consequences of oppression only goes so far if the external systems of oppression continue unabated. People who do not have a strongly internalized sense of structure and boundedness tend to have it imposed upon them by systems of policing and imprisonment or mental health containment. When those who struggle with addiction, mental illness, and homelessness are provided the external supports they need, such as housing and a basic income, that outer stability supports them in gaining inner stability, leading to vastly improved recovery outcomes.

    In my personal work, I have discovered profound and bizarre changes occur when I work earnestly on myself. I once worked through some unresolved grief and pain I had with a person I had known for years but hadn’t been in contact with, only to have her call me within the next day. I once sat in my therapist’s office, working on a dream about cats that I found upsetting due to some of the content. His office had a glass door to a garden, and as I described one of the cats, a living stray cat meeting my dream cat’s description came to the door and looked in on us. These “meaningful coincidences” are what is known as synchronicity, in which the inner and outer worlds seem to be communicating with each other in profound and unexpected ways. Self-work is not the solution to all ills, but it is powerful.

  • 4 Principles – Purposeful and Paradoxical

    For the next four blog posts, I will look at four key principles that inform how I approach psychotherapy. These come from practical experience and study of several theoretical approaches. They are not the right or only principles, simply formulations that work for me. I write these here for current or future clients who might want to understand why I do what I do in session. Some therapists are great about explaining to their clients therapeutic principles and providing a very clear context about their interventions in session. This is not my style, and at times I wonder if this is confusing for the client.

    1. Human behavior is purposeful, and its purpose is often paradoxical.

    People rarely start therapy when their lives are working well and they feel wholly authentic. Typically people come in when lost or overwhelmed, when life doesn’t seem to work, or someone else has pushed. There is often a disconnect between thoughts, feelings, actions, impact on others, and what is believed about one’s self. The person entering therapy might not understand why they’re feeling, thinking, or doing the things they are.

    When I am sitting with a person telling their story, I sit with the view that very little if any of their behavior or “symptoms” are random or purposeless. Many of our behaviors are solutions to problems we’ve encountered in life, either discovered or learned from family that became rigid. When people are stuck, typically we are entangled with our solutions and have lost touch with the creativity that produced the solution in the first place. Then we are consistently applying the solution in ways that no longer work well, or cause us and others harm.

    If someone comes in with a “drinking problem,” one of the questions that is always an open question is: what does this drinking problem solve? If this client managed to control her drinking, what would she need to confront next? One theory of posttraumatic stress disorder, for example, is that the traumatic incident causes a psychic wound and the one who suffers experiences this as a part of self that feels like the trauma is happening in real time when reminded of it. The person with PTSD often finds themselves caught in a bizarre bind of constantly trying to avoid reminders of the trauma while another part of themselves constantly tries to re-experience it. With enough severity, the sufferer may turn to addictions as a way to numb the stress of PTSD.

    In this example, one solution is the addictive behavior–drinking to oblivion solves the problem of re-experiencing, though it also creates many new problems. The other solution is the re-experiencing itself, which some researcher think is the psyche’s instinctive way of healing itself from trauma. The theory is that those with PTSD engage in avoidance strategies that keep the trauma from being integrated–the natural solution is experienced as itself a problem.

    by LuciaSofo

    The paradoxical part is that much rigid behavior also has an inner incongruence. The person who can’t stop talking and dominates the conversation may have an inner, unconscious or semi-conscious, feeling that he is not being heard–but the people around him don’t realize this, because they are experiencing that feeling themselves and see him as the person who does not listen. This assumption provides an interesting field of inquiry because it does not seem to make sense initially. With exploration, we might find that in fact he is not being heard because he is not saying anything that truly matters to him. His excessive talking is a way of distancing himself from the connection he craves, pointing in every direction except the one that matters most.

    When a part of us is stuck, we are very skilled at re-creating the circumstances in which we feel stuck. Perhaps we do this because we hope one of these days we’ll finally be proven right. Perhaps we do this because the familiar feels safe, even when it’s miserable. Perhaps it’s because the story we tell about ourselves is hiding some deeper truths that we’re avoiding. One of the gifts of this principle is that even avoidant behavior contains clues that point to these deeper truths. If someone appears to be pushing too hard in one direction, I become curious about what lies behind them.