Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • How Am I Supposed to Feel About That?

    As a part of recommitting to my social media promotion, I will do one short video each month. This will be an evolving process as I learn and refine what I do.

    When we are passionate about cultural change and justice, we might feel ashamed of the parts of us holding onto attitudes and fears that come from an older way of being. Instead of rejecting our conflicts, we can go deeper into understanding them, so that they can support each other the way a tree’s roots anchor it so its branches can grow.

  • You Don’t Have to Work So Hard

    For more than a decade I studied my spiritual path under a teacher whom I’ve named and honored and cited frequently enough. I was drawn to them in particular because I was seeking discipline, structure, and accountability in my path, and those were qualities for which they were famous.

    During my time in study, however, occasionally I would ask questions or communicate what I thought was an expectation of my practice and my teacher would gently chide me. One treasured moment was hearing, “Tony, you don’t always have to work so hard.”

    I remember one time we had a one-on-one check in about my practice and they gave me a piece of feedback that I cannot remember with complete accuracy but it was along that theme. The specifics of the wording may be less important than the message I received, though I hesitate to attribute my interpretation to them in case we had two different conversations.

    Caveats named, what I remember was them expressing that I held my spiritual practice with a kind of rigidity and devotion that at some point would no longer serve me, and I would eventually need to let go of it.

    Whatever they were seeing in that exact moment, I find myself thinking back to that frequently. In 2016 I felt myself approaching a peak of fervor, holding myself to impossible ideals and naturally falling short. Becoming fully self-employed forced me to face the limits of my idealism around, for example, money and labor.

    Like many mental health therapists motivated by care for others and outrage at injustice, I wanted to be accessible to a wide range of people with varying incomes—but then I had to reconcile that longing with the reality of needing money for myself, my family, my needs, my goals. It became harder to take refuge in the joy of serving a higher purpose when I could not afford to take a vacation, for example, or imagine planning for retirement.

    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.

    All of this to say, even before the COVID-19 pandemic I was personally forced to look at all the ways I was incapable of being the person I thought I was supposed to be. I couldn’t be as generous, as unselfish, as loving without consideration of how it impacted me, because I have limits. I had to learn how to draw lines and create containers, work that was primarily about making money and work that was primarily about service. When I didn’t prioritize my own goals, my own needs, my own hurts, I was in a dark and painful place and hurt by people that I thought were more unselfish than they were.

    In my spiritual life, as we are all expressions of God Hirself, I had to remember that my expression is of equal worth to every other person’s, and to prioritize my own joys and work as much as I served others.

    Following this path has in some ways felt diminishing. I can say now that I have truly learned to love myself—as a practice, as a continual relationship of nurturing and care—and as I’ve learned that, my need for the validation and approval of others has diminished. But so too has been my drive to make a name for myself and be seen in public doing good works. I truly wonder whether the motivation to accomplish and succeed is proportional to the ferocity of one’s shame and self-loathing.

    In the past couple weeks, I’ve been particularly present to a pattern of thinking that is consistently self-focused and angry and critical of others. There’s a sort of unhappiness with everyone and everything—I call it my “Aries Brain”—that seems to emerge from the basic and inescapable conflict between what I want and what is available. Even in the most beautiful place imaginable, floating in the ocean, meeting new people, there’s a part of me tallying all the minor discomforts, the failures of attunement, the disappointments.

    It is exhausting. I think much of my childhood was spent avoiding this kind of thinking because it was too sinful, too selfish, and so I focused all that energy on being okay with whatever happened to me and caring more about other’s suffering than my own.

    These habits of thinking I think are the polar edges of the focus between self and other. Disappointment, misattunement, minor conflict are all realities of being in this world. Even in the best relationships we have moments of miscuing and misconnection—one person wants to fuck and the other wants to cuddle; one moment we want encouragement and the other sympathy and our best friend offers the wrong one at the wrong time; we try to be allies but express our sentiments in a way that arouses suspicion and hostility instead.

    Along with that, I find myself feeling more on the edges of my community again, mostly by choice and action. I’ve stepped out of leadership and gone quiet on issues that I know are still important but feel exhausted by all the times I’ve tried to speak on them and been ignored.

    An image of The Hermit from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot.

    This past year of my life has been governed by The Hermit in Tarot-based numerology, a time of reflection and solitude but also a time of harnessing and distilling inner wisdom into the lantern that pierces the fog. In many Tarot decks, the Hermit carries this lantern that shines their insights as an invitation for those to follow rather than a demand for their attention. The Hermit also leans on a staff that has accrued all the hard-earned lessons and skills necessary to survive in this world.

    As The Hermit, loving myself, I find my relationship to healing and spirituality is changing in ways that I’m not ready to declare in a definitive way. I see how much my healing journey and spiritual practice were rooted in a self-loathing and self-mistrust, an attitude of trying to eradicate my flaws so I could be okay. Now I see that I am okay and I am flawed, and there is nothing to fix, and that even illness is a part of me to love and include.

    The Hermit’s staff also evokes the shepherd’s crook. I think of shepherding as a solitary activity, you alone with your flock for hours, not trying to do anything but keep them together and keep them safe. The journey of inner knowing and integration feels like the relationship between shepherd and flock. My job is not to punish, kill, or fix my parts. My job is to tend them, to witness them, to bring them together in connection and community. They are truly all doing the best they can, and they need the wise guidance of spirit and Self to grow beyond their limited perspectives and skill sets.

    In that way, my practice feels much softer these days, much less ambitious, but still requires discipline. I still need to do the work of showing up and bringing presence into my life. Without presence, the lantern has no light.

  • On Changing Your Attitude

    On Changing Your Attitude

    Recently I was working with a person who has a habitual reaction to stress that isn’t working for them, and they expressed a longing to be able to change their attitude, but since they could never “feel” that different attitude, they doubted their capacity to change.

    But I think there is a false expectation there. 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.

    But isn’t that being inauthentic?

    Here is one of those confusing paradoxes of a therapist’s perspective. Because it is important that we can honor and respect our own feelings, to know and name and care for them. At times, being willing to vulnerably share these feelings in relationship is deeply authentic and connecting.

    And it is one of the powers of maturity to know how to deliberately put on a mask appropriate to our circumstances. There are numerous times when expressing every thought or feeling that passes through us, immediately and without reflection, hurts us and the people around us.

    To practice taking on a new involves recognizing and holding inner spaciousness for my difficult experiences, but also engaging will to behave as though I am a person with this attitude. I may feel frustrated, but I am going to behave like a loving, patient, considerate person. And if I find I’ve fallen back into old habits, I’ll catch myself and try on the attitude again.

    This discipline may actually make us more authentic people. Our old habits may themselves obstacles to the expression of authentic inner qualities. How often do we reflect on things we’ve said or done with shame, guilt, or regret? How often do we realize we didn’t really mean what we said, or we were unfair to the people in our lives, or we acted in ways that made us look bad when we weren’t the problem?

    The key is that taking on a new attitude is a choice, a practice, an act of will, and not a way I am trying to lie to myself and others. I don’t have to say, “I don’t feel bad at all! I’m not grumpy! My life is great!”

    I can feel completely grumpy and frustrated and still remember that I am practicing an attitude of gratefulness today. Then the work is to find anything I can offer some gratitude toward, no matter how small. Like I can be grateful to be warm, or to have a place to sleep, or to have clean running water.

    This friction makes it an actual exercise that grows us. Like any kind of exercise, it is challenging, it takes effort, and parts of us want to resist the work and go back to the movements that were comfortable and easy. It is useful to be a little uncomfortable and feel the effort of this. It’s not useful to be ignoring, pushing past, or denying any pain you’re causing to yourself.

    The authentic self is not every thought, feeling, and reaction that comes up in the moment. Neither is it some hidden nugget of gold buried beneath all of our protections and social conditioning.

    All of these things, together, are our authenticity. That is the mystery. When we can allow all of them to be known, named, and participate, that is the alchemical process that turns our lead into gold.

  • Reflections of a Gender Affirming Therapist

    Reflections of a Gender Affirming Therapist

    Almost twenty years ago, before I became a therapist, I watched a very close friend go through their transition process. They were not the first transgender person I’d ever known, but they were one of my closest friends, someone I had been assuming was a fellow gay man.

    I was startled by my own reaction to their coming out. Inwardly, I saw myself wanting to say all the things that I knew were unhelpful—doubt, disbelief, questioning. The exact kinds of things that I’d hated being said to me when I came out as gay in my teens. Blessedly I was able to keep a lid on most of it—though I’ve no doubt I telegraphed some of my process in accepting their reality.

    At the time, they were required to undergo years of therapy before they could get access to hormone replacement therapy, and then more before surgery. Once all that was finally done, there was a crisis that led to the realization that they had a separate co-occurring mental illness which needed treatment.

    I was horrified and angry. “How did you therapist miss this? You saw them for years!”

    My friend explained to me that they were so concerned about this therapist blocking their access to transition care that they’d learned to have a high level of discretion about what they revealed and concealed in therapy. So all of those struggles lay buried beneath the performance required to convince their therapist they were transgender enough to be supported in transition.

    How terrible, I thought. This gatekeeping around access to gender care created a compulsory and adversarial relationship between a person needing support and the therapist who should have been available for that support and wholeheartedly on the client’s side.

    This adversarial relationship, to my mind, negates any benefit from compulsory treatment. A therapist ideally has no agenda for the client other than supporting them in making the best choices for themselves, helping them to thoroughly explore their own thoughts, feelings, doubts, conflicts, concerns and desires to identify their own goals. When a therapist is made to be gatekeeper for access to something the client wants or needs, then it is much harder to establish trust and transparency in the relationship. A client’s protector parts are more likely to come out and block certain information, or “read” the therapist to try to say what they think the therapist wants or needs to hear.

    There are many assumptions made of mental health professionals that make no sense to me. Having been in this field as long as I have, I have direct experience of people with psychotic disorders or suicidal ideation who were able to mask long enough to convince their therapist or other mental health professional that they were doing okay. There are people who are fully capable of not showing you their struggles if they don’t trust you.

    Putting us as gatekeepers for access to gender care implies that we have some authority to discern whether a client is “really” transgender. But we have no secret tricks or tests. All we have is the relationship and the trust a client gives us to tell us their truth, and that trust is only there when a client feels like I’m on their side and not judging whether or not they deserve access to something.

    Making a therapist a gatekeeper, I’m saying, does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. We get less reliable information. We aren’t always given access to a person’s ambivalence and questions.

    When I went to school to become a therapist, I decided I wanted to be a force to reduce that gatekeeping, but to do so ethically and in accordance to professional expectations. I have had a number of clients pursue transition under my care, and I’ve written dozens of secondary letters of support for gender affirming surgery for free.

    That secondary letter truly astounds me. Clients have already seen a psychologist to receive a thorough assessment of their gender history and co-occurring disorders, and then they’re expected to see another therapist to get a second opinion on whether they’re mentally competent to make choices for their healthcare.

    I have never experienced any process so condescending when pursuing my own healthcare. Women can go get their breasts enlarged without a psychological assessment. Men can start taking Viagra without being expected to see a therapist to talk about alternatives to medication, like exploring the idea that when we age we tend to lose erectile functioning and what if you tried accepting your body instead of taking a medication to change it? These choices are between them and their doctors.

    All that said, I’ve found the speed of transition has increased significantly since I started. The year of therapy before starting hormones is largely no longer required, people are accessing surgery and living as their gender sooner, and of course there has been a growing community of medical care treating transgender and gender-questioning youth. This has been wonderful for reducing the intensity and duration of the gates that mostly slow trans people down for the needs and concerns of insurance and healthcare providers.

    And at times I’ve felt my own hesitation when a trans client seems fixated on transition as a cure-all for their distress. It’s not that transition is wrong for them, but that we should all be skeptical of thinking our problems will be solved by one big change.

    Suicidal thining, for example, is a particular response to pain and distress that requires its own specific care and attention to work with, to build the emotional tolerance and skill to find other ways of dealing with this pain. Gender dysphoria is one kind of pain that may spur ideation, but resolving that does not necessarily mean one will never feel suicidal again. It’s good to know that and work with these issues in conjunction with the larger work of transition.

    Because I generally do not practice cutting off people with ideological differences from me, I am a person who talks a lot to folks across the spectrum—trans and nonbinary people, gender affirming colleagues, and friends and family who have concerns or antagonism toward transgender identity.

    One of the things I hear from concerned or antagonistic people is an increased concern about medical professionals rushing trans people through transition, or deciding for their clients that they are trans, or pressuring people whose gender confusion might com from another source.

    Given my own history I certainly understand that if you’ve never known a transgender person, it can take some time to adjust to the reality. The hard thing about coming out as any kind of queer is that usually the person coming out has had months to years of getting clarity about their identity, and the person they’re telling may have only seconds before they’re expected to make a response. Hurtful things get said, and sometimes regretted. I also recognize that the growth of transgender visibility compels us to re-examine a number of our cultural institutions around gender segregation and how we determine who belongs in what spaces, and that brings up fear and anger. And I can even understand feeling anxious about a child making a choice that could permanently alter their bodies in irreversible ways.

    What I do not understand is responding to these fears and anxieties with an attack on the medical procedure and the professionals who help folks make these choices. I’ve heard some folks wring their hands about unethical activist advocates or doctors “pushing” transition on children and adults who may not “actually be trans,” and so it’s safer to just ban transition care for children.

    If there are such providers who are pushing trans identity on their clients and patients, they certainly are practicing unethically and should be reported and investigated. That is what we do with unethical medical providers. We don’t put blanket bans on medical care.

    From the perspective of a mental health professional who has had to deal with the tedious and frustrating bureaucracy of helping a person get surgery, I have a hard time imagining a world where a person could be rushed through the process without being rich enough to pay out of pocket. I work in one of the most gender-affirming places in the United States and it’s still a slow, exasperating process.

    I do not personally work with children or anyone under the age of 18, so I cannot speak to the experience of providing gender care to such people. I think it scares non-trans people because they see that kids can be easily confused, easily duped, stupid, or get caught up in trends and peer pressure.

    I think of myself at the age of 13 realizing I was queer, and then all the adults who told me I didn’t know myself and should keep quiet about it because I could change my mind. And here I am almost thirty years later, and I can tell you now that I was completely correct about my identity and that the signs were there from a really young age. And my friend, whom I doubted, is still who they are.

    That’s only a certain amount of anecdotal evidence, and I have heard other anecdotal stories about people being pressured to transition by family, friends, and spiritual community, but I don’t have numbers showing this as an enormous social problem other than general fear.

    There are kids who might have gender dysphoria for a while and decide they are cisgender, which is an incredibly small 2.5% based on current evidence, kids who have gender dysphoria at 6 that resolves around 10-13 to cisgender identity. (With that age gap, do these kids even get any medical interventions?)

    I have friends and peers who transitioned and later transitioned back to their original gender identity, and the reasons for this are complex and aren’t always because they weren’t “really” trans. In some cases, the social pressure and antagonism proved greater than the benefits of transition. In some cases, the medical side effects of transition were untenable. In some cases, their gender experience just changed again.

    When we’re talking specifically about adults, I question the concern about these cases. Adults are allowed to make all kinds of decisions about their bodies and lives that are inalterable and life-changing, and part of life is learning to live and adapt to the unforeseen consequences of these decisions. I’m not sure how medical transition is such a concerning event warranting this level of gatekeeping compared to other choices like enlisting in the military, getting a tattoo, having babies, getting married, all of which have unforeseen life-altering consequences.

    It is very American to insist on individual liberty for the things that make sense to us and to not want individual liberty for other people’s choices when we do not understand or agree with them.

    The backlash against trans people is only the tip of the spear of the right-wing pushback against all the gains queer people have made in my lifetime, and it’s bad enough, and I expect it will worsen before it gets better.

    But when it changes again, there will still be gender-variant people.

  • Poem: A God Offers the Choice of Three Paths

    Poem: A God Offers the Choice of Three Paths

    The Path of Will

Arrow’s tip parting air, 
committed velocity 
forsaking origin 
to pierce, utterly change—
even misses leave marks.

The Path of Desire

Hedge of roses, a maze
tempting lost ones to taste
thorns, grasping for blooms,
missing the open path
to satiety’s center.

The Path of Longing

A vast and winding road
beneath starlit expanse
upon which empty hands,
aching, lift in wonder,
and nothing reaches back.
  • The Resentment of Finally Getting What You Needed

    The Resentment of Finally Getting What You Needed

    If you’ve been around activists for a long time, you might have noticed an oddity when they start getting success. When people finally are ready to hear their message, or show up newly awakened to problems and ready for direction and guidance.

    Sometimes, that activist who’s been at it so long doesn’t respond in kind with gratitude or enthusiasm. Sometimes, they respond with resentment, bitterness, and a kind of collapse. Sometimes, they’re pissed at the newer people for taking so long to see the issues. Sometimes, they’re utterly unwilling to continue the work of educating.

    This sucks for the folks new to the work, who could use the mentorship and wisdom of the ones who have been on the journey for a while. It sucks when we blast our new would-be allies and co-collaborators with more hostility than we’d direct at our adversaries. It feels unfair, and disillusioning, and may alienate new folks or lead them to marginalize the cranky elder.

    It also seems self-defeating. Why would a person who’s tried for so long to get attention to their causes be so dismissive when people begin to care?

    This emotional pattern shows up also when the resentful leader in the organization cannot stop complaining about their work and obligations but is also wholly unwilling to relinquish them. There’s a longing to be supported and mistrust that anyone could shoulder these burdens.

    I’ve never understood either of these expressions until I began practicing Internal Family Systems therapy. Then I began to see a parallel experience in the inner work. When we as clients are finally able to access our Self energy and turn toward our protectors and our wounded parts with love or caring, the response is not always joy and gratitude. Frequently, it’s some angry version of:

    “Finally! Why now?”

    This response may feel daunting, like our connection is unwelcome, but now I see it as a sign of finally connecting. These parts of us have felt neglected and alone for too long, fighting a tough battle to keep us safe or endure their personal suffering.

    As much as they may hate it, our parts also tend to cultivate a kind of pride and righteousness in their capacity to endure: I hate being alone, but it’s because I’m the only one strong enough to do this.

    When it turns out there is a well of strength, love, compassion, and caring that is available and ready to take over leadership, our protectors might experience a rush of resentment and mistrust. Where have you been all this time? Now you’re going to come in and take over? And beneath that, What will happen to me if I lose my only job?

    One source of this anger is the eruption of all those unmet needs and dreams deferred in service to the mission. Our protectors may have endured years of hard, unappreciated work to fight a threat that seems obvious to them and yet somehow invisible to everyone else, which only hardens that sense of I’m the one who has to do it.

    All along, what these protectors have needed is concerned, caring attention. To be heard and understood and taken seriously. To be supported in community. To know that others were watching out for the same threat so there could be time for rest, or play, or enjoy the comforts and ease that those oblivious to the threat appear to enjoy.

    So in these moments, that spark of anger and resentment is a good sign. Finally feeling heard and understood means there’s enough safety to feel all that exhaustion and need for care.

    When we are doing our inner work from the IFS model, we have the resources of the greater Self to build trust and take over leadership from those worn-out parts, and let them take a true rest knowing their concerns are being addressed. That Self only needs to be with the resentment and the sadness, the exhaustion, offering its compassionate understanding and witness until trust is restored.

    In the outer world, such ease is harder to draw upon without a larger community or spiritual body to serve as that font of care and compassion. Trust is a tricky qualit. It requires nondefensive presence, clear expectations, and making promises that are kept. In early stages, it’s easy for one mistake to undo all the gains.

    When I think of my own experiences in community leadership, I was able to let go of resentful exhaustion when I felt there were protocols and people in place who were attending to the important work of the community without it all having to be my responsibility. I could let go even more deeply once I accepted it truly was not my responsibility to save anyone—that all my skills and brilliant ideas actually exist in various forms across the world, as though some larger intelligence keeps offering them to those ready to listen. So many of us are doing the work of liberation.

    In observing this emotional pattern, it seems to me a kind of psychological law to understand rather than a problem to solve. Now I feel great compassion for the cranky activists I’ve met whose irritability felt so confusing and personal. I feel, too, great compassion for the newly awakened and ready to work, unsoiled by cynicism and too many years of defeat, who could not be expected to tolerate a torrent of resentment that isn’t really about them specifically.

    In my dreams, we build communities with rituals of care, honoring our elders and giving them space to process these feelings with loving witness, and honoring the newly awakened to bring them joyfully and gradually into responsibility for the work we are doing. Until such rituals are in place, we can begin by honoring our own resentments, our own hard work, and to have gratitude for those cranky, battle-hardened protectors in us that were given more responsibility than one person should bear.

  • A Dream of Power and Freedom from Control

    A Dream of Power and Freedom from Control

    Recently I had a powerful dream. In it, I was sleeping next to a person who started touching me in unwanted ways, and I turned toward him and told him very clearly and directly that it was unacceptable, not consensual, and that if he continued he was knowingly violating my boundaries.

    The person left in a huff, and my dream avatar got angry, thinking this person thought of himself as the victim. I followed him out the door, determined to confront him and force him to see how he was really the asshole.

    Suddenly dream-me had a moment of clarity: it didn’t matter if he felt like the victim. All that mattered was that I was safe and the person was gone. What meaning he made of the situation was none of my business, and pursuing it would only get me more hurt.

    I woke with pride that my dream-self was able to speak for himself and set a forceful, if dramatic, boundary. Prior dreams showed me in similar situations feeling frozen and small, unable to resist. Or I would attempt to speak and find my mouth unable to push the words into the air, or the sound would be drowned in noise. This speaks to my personal story around feeling invisible and unheard, struggling to assert myself, and this new iteration feels like a marker of growth.

    Most intriguing was the clarity at the end of the dream, catching myself in the desire to condemn one who would never accept he was wrong. In my life, it’s taken me a long time to see how much I get hurt when that tendency takes over. I’ve gotten into all kinds of weird manipulative indirect interactions in the hopes I could persuade or trick someone into admitting they’re wrong and the asshole, and often it’s ended up making me the asshole.

    What the dream offers me is the notion that setting a clear, unambiguous boundary—a strong no without concern for another’s feelings—frees me from both sides of that toxic victimhood. When I could only endure harm quietly, that rage and vengefulness would inevitably follow. Instead of breaking off connections with harmful people, I would stay entangled with them while trying to make them see my hurt, and end up more hurt.

    When our lives are such that we feel unable to protect ourselves from harm, rage and powerlessness is inevitable, and we may become crusaders. Unable to heal our own buried feelings of powerlessness and trauma, we may become crusaders against others causing similar harm. These are efforts of exerting control over self and others, trying to control the conditions of life to prevent further harm from happening.

    For me, power and control are 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.

    In my dream, the creepy sleeper attempted to exert control by touching my dream-self’s body in unwelcome and unpermitted ways, and my dream-self sought control over the narrative by chasing him down to persuade him of his wrongness. Saying no, and letting go of control over the story, brings us to our personal power and freedom.

    Even if we get hurt while expressing our power, that experience is profoundly different from being harmed and powerless, which is one of the conditions that gives rise to post-traumatic stress.

    Being hurt while knowing we stood for ourselves and did not participate in our own victimization offers a psychic protection. Instead of shame, we might feel gratitude and pride in ourselves. The dignity we have not allowed to be taken is a balm against the humiliation of loss. Liberation is greater than the smallness of bullies and the resentment of the righteous.

  • For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust

    For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust

    While scrolling through Facebook I came across what appears to be a Reddit post retweeted by AskAubry about a male university student who felt spurned by the female lab partner he’d wanted to befriend and love. The post has since been deleted, and its author has likely received enough Internet fame, so I won’t share the text here. But reading it did make me think about Nice Guys and incels.

    My understanding is that an “incel” is a person who identifies as “involuntarily celibate,” who wants love and sex but is unable to find a willing partner. Straight men who come to identify as incels and participate in incel-spaces seem to support each other in their bitterness and resentment of women as a while, expressing a sense of being unfairly denied the love and intimacy they deserve.

    Nice Guys are not necessarily incels, though many of them seem to end up there. They’ve been around for decades. Nice Guys think of themselves as, well, nice. Good men who love and care about women, who want to nurture and protect them, and want to love and be loved. But Nice Guys tend to approach their desire for partnership indirectly, through first befriending women and becoming emotionally close with them, all the while hoping these women will come to see them as valuable romantic partners.

    (There are Nice Guys who are queer, and likely many who aren’t guys at all, but the dynamic tends to be parallel. If you feel like a Nice Guy who isn’t a straight man, you could see what in this post still works for you, or check out my other writings on queer relationships and loneliness.)

    If you’re a Nice Guy, you may think of yourself as different and better than “horny” guys who openly pursue sex and romance, but you they feel aggrieved is that the woman you desire ends up with the horny guy and has no interest in you as anything but a friend. Nice Guys and incels used to call this getting “friendzoned”—maybe they still do, I assume that must be a dated reference by now—officially taken out of the “zone” of potential romance and never considered again.

    As a Nice Guy, you might be idealistic, hoping for that romantic movement of gradually being rewarded for your loyalty and devotion and being the one to rescue or heal your beloved from her disappointments and tormentors. Though this path can lead to dark places, there is a genuine sweetness here. The problem is, this approach tends to fail, and your idealism curdles into bitterness and cynicism.

    My genuine hope is that all of us who want it gets to experience authentic love and joyful, consensual sex. It’s a real sorrow that what Nice Guys do to pursue those desires ends up getting in their way. You might have come to your idealism honestly, listening to the women in your life complain about being hurt and used by men, and thought you were doing something different. You might feel ashamed of your own desires for sex and love because you worry they’re the same as those horny men you learned to dislike. That makes it even more confusing and frustrating when the women you like keep going back to the men who hurt them and not seeing you.

    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.

    The Nice Guy strategy tries to avoid experiencing rejection by not being up front about what you want—love, or sex—and instead settle for friendship with the thought that you’re playing the long game and will eventually be seen by your beloved without having to take any risk. But when the game becomes too painful, or you finally make it clear what you want, you’ve created the conditions for a really painful rejection that would have been much gentler if it had happened before you got so invested.

    Men who have not experienced the kind of emotionally intimate friendships that women enjoy tend to get confused when they first encounter it. It feels so special and rare in comparison to the kinds of connecting that younger men do, that it’s easy to sexualize it or confuse it for romantic intimacy. So Nice Guys may feel betrayed when you finally accept that this person only wants friendship from you. The woman you befriended, who didn’t realize there was this other agenda all along, also feels betrayed. It’s not good!

    Men need emotional intimacy, companionship, friendships, and nonsexual touch as much as we need sex and romantic love. When you feel ashamed about any of these desires, you may pursue them with desperation, with resentment, or in these indirect ways that are tantamount to digging a love pit and hoping someone falls in.

    None of which is sexy. What is sexy is confidence. Confidence suggests a person who has strength and resilience, who can respect another person’s needs and boundaries, a person who won’t be easily broken or overwhelmed, a person who has direction. Confidence is willing to put his agenda forward and experience rejections and setbacks because those clear the board for a good partnership. When you’re lonely, confidence may feel impossible to achieve.

    For all my lonely clients, I strongly encourage taking a break from searching for love and romantic partnership for a while and instead investing in cultivating friendship and community. We tend to burden romantic love with too many of our needs for acceptance, validation, belonging, connection, and meaning, which is especially heavy for the early stages of meeting and dating.

    Having a community of friends, having a strong and supportive family relationship, all of these can meet many of your needs and teach you important lessons about the give and take of relationships without being so explosive. It can blunt the sharp edges of loneliness and help you find confidence and cultivate your interests. Some of those men that you think yourself better than may end up being great teachers and mentors.

    End those relationships with women where you’re secretly pining for them—either take a break or come clean. It’s not good for you. Eventually you’ll find love, but you won’t see good partnership if you’re staring at these unfulfilling friends.

    Take six months and focus on friendship and working on your anxieties and shame. Get a journal or a therapist. If you can exercise, do that. Get into your body. Practice flirting in a mirror. It’s probably weirder when you’re flirting with yourself, but watching yourself is a great way to reduce shame and get more comfortable expressing your sexual and romantic desires.

    After several months, try taking risks with women you find attractive. Don’t immediately rush to asking them out or propositioning them, and don’t send them dick pics when they haven’t asked for them. Try a month of just smiling and saying hello, and if that goes well, asking a few questions about their lives. Make that the goal—once this week, I’ll smile and talk to a woman I find attractive. The goal isn’t to get their phone number or find your soulmate, just to start building your tolerance for taking risks.

    Whether they flirt with you or reject you, it’s all part of your strength-building practice. You can practice being with the excitement of success, and you can practice tolerating the pain of rejection without lashing out and blaming her or yourself.

    As you get successes, you can try taking bigger risks. What’s most important is that you are able to hear and work to take care of your own needs. Confidence comes when we can see ourselves being resilient, able to keep going and looking for a person who can really connect with us rather than settling for unfulfilling relationships or loneliness. When your needs know that you care about them and take them seriously, they become easier to bear and to care for. It starts to become clearer when you can take a risk and when you need to protect yourself. And then you really get better at being able to do that for friends and romantic or sexual partners in your life, and accepting only those who will offer that in return.

    If you’re a straight man who has read this far, here are a few additional thoughts:

    • Be wary when you’ve created a fantasy relationship about a woman you barely know. Keep in mind you’ve invented an idealized partner and do not know the actual person. It’s not horrible to do this, but it’s a big problem to forget to get to know the real person.
    • Avoid approaching potential friends and partners with a showing-off, dominant attitude. That is what men do with each other when we feel insecure, anxious about being attacked, and want to establish a place in the social hierarchy. It’s a defense against rejection that it gets in the way of real belonging and intimacy. Pay attention to when you do this, and try being curious about the other person instead.
    • Observe how you behave toward women and ask yourself, “If I were talking to a man I respected, would I behave the same way?” Really sit with that question. It can lead you to unexpected places.

    The paradox of being a grown up is that I need other people to help me meet my needs, but no one else is obligated to do so. I must be responsible for my needs, which means I keep going until I find a relationship where we can meet each other’s needs with pleasure and enthusiasm.

  • Becoming Dissonant

    Becoming Dissonant

    When we talk about “the ego” we are talking about a function of our psyche that serves, on a personal level, the function of managing cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we perceive multiple contradictory or inconsistent pieces of information, which can range from benign to overwhelming. If, for example, someone you really trusted and admired came out with a red balloon and made a big deal of saying it’s a blue balloon, you would experience dissonance—my perception tells me the balloon is blue, but this person I completely trust is so confident, it doesn’t make sense.

    On the level of the self, we experience dissonance all the time when we try to cling to one belief about ourself and manage all the contradictions of it. We think of ourselves as strong and confident but we have moments where we want to lay in bed for a day and be sad. We think of ourselves as health-conscious and find ourselves eating a huge bag of processed chips. The ego attempts to resolve this dissonance into a coherent, manageable story.

    We excel at creating simple stories about ourselves and the world as a form of energy conservation. If you spent every moment of your day parsing through every dissonance and inconsistency, you would get little done. You might be paralyzed by indecision or confusion, especially if your awareness of these contradictions was not grounded in acceptance.

    Our tendencies toward stereotyping and making big, grandiose declarations are efforts to reduce dissonance and avoid confronting these inconsistencies. If I’m supposed to live in the greatest country in the world but everyone around me is struggling to survive, that is dissonance. If I think of myself as a strong ally but the people to whom I’m allied are calling me out, that is dissonance.

    Our ego tendency to make a workable story to smooth out this dissonance serves us in a number of ways, but that service is also deceit. Imagine a dream in which you’re sitting at dinner with a walrus, and the walrus is your girlfriend that you’re breaking up with and is making a big scene in the restaurant. You might have a thought like, “Wait, I don’t date walruses.” And then that thought is followed by, “Oh, that’s why we’re breaking up.” Such moments in dreaming give us a window into how the ego works to smooth over dissonance. Instead of leaning into the realization that something is not right in this moment, and realizing you’re dreaming, we are lured into a deeper dream by a very plausible-seeming explanation that confirms and extends the story.

    In waking life, this can happen so quickly that we don’t even catch what’s happened. On the other hand, life will occasionally hand us a situation in which the dissonance is irreconcilable, and our sense of coherence becomes fractured into multiple competing narratives.

    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.

    I no longer entertain the fantasy that I have some useful insight into navigating hard political realities, but as a person riding this out with everyone else, I find myself sitting with troubling questions about whether Truth exists or whether there are simply multiple competing narratives, and whomever has the most power in any situation is the one whose narrative is considered reality.

    While there seems to be a kernel of truth to that in terms of ongoing social unrest, my sense on a psychological level is that Truth exists and cannot be reduced to a story that smooths out dissonance. Truth encompasses all the contradictions and inconsistencies, it must because all of those conflicts exist and are real and no iteration of Truth can be valid if it rejects anything that is real.

    On the inner level, we need to give the ego a break sometimes and allow ourselves to attend to our inconsistencies. We can let each part of us express its world, its reality, its values, and attempt to see the validity of each without needing them to agree with each other. The expression of this multiplicity and differentiation actually leads to peace—rather than picking a side and forcing everyone else to shut up, all of our inconsistencies become more like planets that find harmonious orbits around the sun of our Self, and can express their nature in relationship with each other.

    Whether that is possible on a collective or national level is too big of a question for me for this moment. I can guarantee it will not be possible if we cannot practice this being with ourself. If we cannot tolerate our own dissonance, then we will really struggle to accept the dissonance and multiplicity of thousands of people and hundreds of years of history.

  • We’re Never Greater than Our Basics

    We’re Never Greater than Our Basics

    Having practiced Aikido for more than six years, there are certain foundational movements that I’ve done perhaps hundreds of times now. They are the basics, what we teach a person in their first days walking into the dojo, and what we continue to practice and study years down the line.

    Early in my practice, I felt very happy to stay in focusing on the basics and reluctant to move into the more advanced techniques. But one of my personal guidelines as an adult has been to notice when I feel afraid or disturbed in a situation where my life or wellbeing aren’t in actual danger, and to move toward whatever elicits those feelings with curiosity. My instinct was that pushing myself to the more challenging techniques would show me parts of myself that had been suppressed, and could teach me how to liberate and integrate these qualities into my wholeness.

    And in my dojo, my teachers did not allow me to stay stuck in safety but have continued to keep nudging me toward the next step of growth. So whether I wanted it or not, I would be introduced to these more advanced techniques, many of which begin with an attack and end with one of the basic moves.

    This extension of myself into a more complex scenario helped me to better understand the basic. “Oh, this is why I have to move this way, or why I’d choose to use this pin instead of that one.” And then it would return me toward renewed passion and curiosity toward the basic move, seeing its depth and power, seeing how much depended on its execution.

    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.

    So often we feel upset with our own suffering and confusion and long to “be fixed,” by which we imagine some magical escape from all we dislike about ourselves, but a more enduring solution is to find a practice with ourselves that we can continue to hone and refine and return to no matter what situation arises. If you’ve done therapy for a long time, it can start to feel repetitive, and that repetition is our practice of the basics.

    In my practice, the basics include slowing down the breath, feeling the ground under the feet, sensing into what’s happening in my body, and seeing if I can invite in curiosity toward whatever in me is having a strong reaction. Basics could include journaling or calling a good friend to sort through the thoughts about what is happening. Other basics include our daily habits of health and nourishment. Have you drank water lately? Are you hungry? How much did you sleep last night? When did you last move your body?

    There are more, but these are the skills to which I turn toward when I’m feeling lost and overwhelmed. We can turn toward these skills when in the midst of climate grief, the loss of a loved one, being laid off from our jobs, getting a phone call that your child is in jail, or the daily experience of suffering marginalization and belittlement.

    In therapy, our desire to run past the basics looks like trying to solve these complex problems together and not staying with the experience of the moment. Though this feels “faster,” it is actually slower, because the intensity of our untended emotional energy is flooding our nervous systems and making it hard to think clearly and separate out the present moment from the crush of personal history.

    Basics are the base upon which our lives rest. Strong, well-practiced basics offer us a sturdy foundation upon which to engage with more complex lives. But if we are living without a sense of the basics, and we feel lost and overwhelmed or angry or fearful often, it is worthwhile to find a discipline that calls to you and take on the practice.