Living Well, Feeling Good

Have you ever found yourself in an argument that was a no-win situation?  Sometimes these situations arise from two perfectly rational individuals arguing some sort of deeply ingrained belief regarding morality, religion, politics, or what they see to be right and wrong. Other times, it is possible to find yourself in a conversation with someone – coworker, boss, friends, acquaintances, in law – who is saying something you can’t believe anyone could possibly see as truth, and before you know it the two of you are fighting tooth and nail to convince the other of your respective opposing beliefs. These debates are characterized by feelings including desperation, irritation (or sometimes outright anger), frustration, indignation, rejection, and overall exhaustion. It is exhausting to try to sway people over to your side of thinking. Even if you are 99% sure that you are “right” on the issue, the energy output it requires to convince somebody else (which will in all likelihood not actually happen), is immense.

I don’t think that everyone finds themselves in these types of interactions often. People who are afraid of conflict may more likely find themselves nodding and uttering “um-hmm” in agreement when they don’t actually agree. Others who are more competitive and self driven into conflict, may find this happening more often, and getting into it can be a largely unconscious/automatic reaction.

These are the type of arguments that are not won by either side. People’s core beliefs are not easily changed and are especially not changed by left brain, rational rhetoric. If they are changed, it tends to come from life experience directly imposed on the person, often in the form of a challenge or significant struggle, which forces people to endure the stress and discomfort of facing the uncertainty of discarding old beliefs and adopting/formulating new ones. In other words, no amount of cleverness, sneaky rhetoric, forcefulness, or persistence, is going to win the type of arguments.

It is far more likely to affect some small change on another person’s belief system by surrendering to the reality that you cannot change anyone directly. This paradox is that once you let go of trying to change someone else, there is a much higher chance of change actually occurring, although it will not occur through force.

There are many ways to stay connected to another person while disagreeing with them, in a way that provides both of you the respect and dignity of having your beliefs honored by the other as well as conserving your energy.   One of the most powerful ways to affect change is with silence.

The key when doing so is not to react by “cutting yourself off” emotionally from the other person. Emotional cut off occurs when you create a psychological distance from the other person in an effort to protect yourself from the unpleasant feelings that are arising as the other person disagrees. The most common unpleasant feelings that can occur when some someone disagrees with you are anger, hurt, and rejection.  People often feel that when their ideas are rejected, that they are rejected (this is a distortion).  One way of dealing with these feelings is to “zone out”, avoid eye contact, retreat into your own thoughts, decrease or shut off the attention you’re giving the other person, or otherwise thinking and behaving in ways that will help you to not feel.

This is not what I mean when I talk about using silence as a tool. In order for this to be effective, you must divert your energy into maintaining an interpersonal connection with the person who is disagreeing with you. Rather than focusing on making a case for why they are wrong, use your cognitive and emotional resources to regulate and manage your own emotions that arise as your ideas are (sometimes disrespectfully) stomped on by the other person. Some helpful thoughts you can tell yourself to keep your anger and anxiety low while also remaining connected to the other person are:

• “this is only one person. Many other people agree with me”

• “this belief that they have likely protects them from something, which is why they are defending it so ferociously,”

• “I’m sure that my beliefs are true for me. I know this because…,”

• “Trying to convince them of what I think will certainly exhaust me and will most likely not work. I’m going to conserve my energy. They can wear themselves out if they want to.”

Often, when people spend so much emotion and energy making a case, they later realize that they may have a lot less information and evidence than they need to warrant such a passionate discourse. But if you are arguing back just as passionately, they will attribute their energy expenditure to trying to ward off your energy, rather than the actual purpose of their distorted belief, which is to protect themselves from some underlying vulnerability.

When using silence, I recommend keeping your body language and facial expression open and neutral. Don’t nod your head if you don’t agree. Doing so is incongruent and creates internal dissonance – a feeling of being untrue to oneself. Instead, simply look the other person in the eye and accept that what they’re saying is their belief, even if you don’t believe the same thing. Give yourself the freedom to entertain the idea as you would a fictional story.  You may decide that you actually agree with some grains of truth in their belief, and choose to focus on those and add some input which can become common ground on which the two of you can stand.

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One of the fundamental challenges of parenting is balancing the amount of freedom that you allow your child with the amount of limitations and age-appropriate restrictions that you have to impose on them to give them appropriate choices and responsibilities.  The ideal amount of freedom to give a child consists of those choices (and only those choices) that are age-appropriate, and reasonable for your child’s level of development. This is not mean that your child is going to make the best choices, but that, given one or several experiences of making poor choices in a certain area, they will be able to learn to make better choices as they learn from their own experience and suffer through the consequences of making poor choices.

Deciding whether or not your child is old enough to make a specific choice can be very difficult and causes parents a great deal of anxiety. To complicate things, there are no ironclad answers to fit each child at each age in each family, everyone is different. For example, how old should your child be when you allow him the choice to moderate the amount of desert that he eats? Most would agree that a five-year-old should not be given endless access to candy and ice cream whatever they want. Most would also agree that we should not be telling our 17-year-old what they should be eating, because they will be on their own shortly and will have to be making those decisions on their own.  Like learning a foreign language, learning to follow rules is most easily done as a child.

Giving children too much freedom chronically typically results in kids being out of control, whereas giving children too little freedom tends to paralyze them (which is a less obvious problem to adults, but nevertheless causes many difficulties for the child later on).

Problems resulting from giving children too much freedom

As adults, the out of control person manifests as someone who breaks laws, may be in prison, gets fired from jobs due to breaking rules for not following through with responsibilities, and has a difficult time maintaining relationships with others due to infringement on the rights of other people. These people are used to being able to do whatever they want, because as children, they were given far more freedom than they should have been, and so they lack the practice operating within and organizational system that imposes limits.

Difficulty following rules can result in difficulty functioning within society, school, work, a company, or a family. If people don’t learn how to follow rules early in life, they will simply break them whenever they get frustrated with rules as adults. If they do this in their interpersonal relationships, their friends will fill resentful and turn away from the eventually. If they break rules in society they may be punished by the legal system. Children who have difficulty following rules are typically diagnosed with disruptive behavior disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, or conduct disorder (from least to most severe).

In my experience, many kids with oppositional defiant disorder aspire to join the military. I find this very interesting. It is as if these children know that the military is going to teach them the things their parents never taught them. For these kids, the idea of someone yelling at them while they do push-ups in the mud for waking up too late is highly appealing to them. They seem to unconsciously know that they are going to learn discipline responsibility and that this will help them become successful in life.

One name given to parents who do not do this job is permissive. These parents generally let the child do too much of what they want, and do not hold them accountable to age-appropriate rules and responsibilities, often because they are afraid of what the child will do (be angry at them, throw a tantrum, try to get even) if they hold the line.

Most permissive parents I have observed have become quite angry by the time they seek professional help. They tell me that they are “tired of being walked all over.” They tell me that they are “tired” in general, and that they tend to do most of the work around the home, because their children don’t help out with household chores, because there is no incentive or reinforcement in place that would give them a reason to do so. Permissive parents are also often “helicopter parents”, parents who (literally or figuratively), followed closely behind their children compensating for and correcting any errors or mistakes their children make, causing the consequences of their child’s poor choices to fall directly on their shoulders, rather than on the child’s. In other words, helicopter parents “rescue” their children from experiencing any hardship in the short term. The problem with this however, is that their children will end up experiencing much more hardship in the long-term, because they have become “enabled” to be irresponsible and careless, and gradually become more and more dependent on being in relationships with someone who is able to protect them from adverse consequences. Permissive parents sometimes tend to spoil their children, because their children have learned over time that all they have to do is demand, yell, and threaten their parents and they will get whatever they want. The parents experience a mixture of anger, guilt, powerlessness, and confusion as they realized that they just handed their child $20 for the movies when the child was swearing at her and calling her names just a few hours ago, and hasn’t done any chores for two weeks.

In many cases parents are explaining limits to the child verbally, and this is a good thing and is important. However, usually the problem lies in that there is no follow-through of consequences for not following limits. Children take rules without consequences as simply advice or optional recommendations. Parents will tell me, “he knows right from wrong”, but with the child really knows is what the parents think is right and what the parents think is wrong. The reality is that the children have their own opinions about what is right and wrong, and it is often different from the parents opinions, often the children realized a long time ago that there’s no point in verbalizing their opinions because they will not be listened to. It is great when parents explain right and wrong to their children, and bestow them with verbal pearls of wisdom, but this alone does not teach the child how to live life successfully. The child needs to experience their own consequences (good or bad) from making their own choices, in order to decide for themselves what they believe is right or wrong. The task of the parents then becomes shaping the child experience and environment by giving them age-appropriate choices and allowing them to make whatever choice they deem fit (even when the parent does not agree on the choice), and experience the consequences of their own actions in order to practice effective decision-making.

Problems resulting from giving children too little freedom

often the problems resulting when a child receives too little freedom cannot be seen until the children becomes an adolescent or preadolescent. This is largely due to the fact that small children are to powerless (physically and cognitively) to rebel against their parents. These parents are sometimes called “dictator parents” and have an attitude of “you will do it because I told you to, no questions allowed.” In this case, is the child usually becomes angriest, as their fundamental and underlying need for autonomy and making their own choices thwarted by the parents chronically over time. This can cause other underlying needs to become unmet as well. For example, the parent who does not let their child outside enough (e.g., due to the parents anxiety of the child getting hurt), may have unmet needs for physical movement, play, and other developmental activities that are crucial and essential to the child’s proper growth and later success in life. I’ve noticed the children who grow up with dictatorial parents have a relatively high frequency of emotional cut off in late adolescence and the rest of adulthood from their parents. They learn how to successfully navigate rules and complex limits in various organizations, however they have an impaired relationship with themselves because they have been told their entire lives that they should not do what they want to do.  Children who lie and deceive their parents often do so out of subtle rebellion against unfair restrictions that should be imposed on a child half their age.  Kids will begin sneaking, and then move over the adolescent years to more and more overt deception and finally blatant disregard for the rules, as the parents’ power over them inevitably fades with time and the cost of being caught and disapproved of diminishes.  Sometimes there will be a critical moment in which the adolescent gets in a physical fight with his dictatorial father and a relationship is never the same, as the father realizes that he can no longer overpower and dominate his child.  Of course, as the entire history of the relationship has been this way, it is often the case that neither the adolescent or the father knows how to reconcile and form a more functional relationship that has been missing for 16 or 17 years. The adolescent is at the stage of life when they will be leaving the family, and it is simply too late to begin the two-way loving respect that should have been provided to the child starting from infancy and toddlerhood.

Guidelines for giving your child age-appropriate freedom and choices

1. Talk to other parents (who you respect and think are good parents) about what they let their child decide on and what they don’t. Age-appropriate freedom is culture and time specific. What was age-appropriate for a 10-year-old in 1955 is not the same as what is age-appropriate today. What is age-appropriate for child in Mexico at age 10 is not the same as what is age-appropriate for child who is 10 years old and United States. Different contexts resulting from different cultures or time periods create a whole new set of rules and variables that affect what a child should be able to choose and what he shouldn’t.
2. Ask yourself the question, “if he makes the choice I don’t want him to make, will he be able to handle the consequences?” Most parents today are far too protective of their children when it comes to letting them experience the consequences (e.g., failing a class, falling down, being cold or hungry, getting in a scuffle or argument, spending all their money, or simply being upset, etc.). Listen to your gut feeling and only intervene if you feel that they really won’t be able to deal with the consequences or will be harmed if they do.
3. Also ask yourself, “will I be able to live with whatever choice he makes?” If he is throwing a tantrum in a restaurant, don’t give him the choice of making the whole family leave immediately if you are halfway through your hamburger. The consequences of the child’s poor choices should fall on the shoulders of the child, not make you miserable. I am constantly trying to teach parents who I work with, “focus on making yourself happy, because if you are happy, the child will be happy.”
4. Read some parenting books. This topic is one of the main points, if not the heart of, every parenting book I’ve ever come across. They can explain this topic in far more detail. Balancing freedom and limits pervades every area of a person’s life and is arguably the most important realm of preparation of childhood, along with attachment/connection to others.

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One of the most powerful interventions in therapy is to help people put their experience into words. I have found it helpful to include quotes in my documentation and to honor the language the client uses in session, as the core material or medium that is used to craft a model of the client’s world. Sometimes, clients come to therapy already with a rich variety of colors and textures in their language, and they are using them to construct a model of reality that is distorted, overly simplified, and/or impoverished.   In this case, the primary task of the therapist is to help the client utilize their raw materials (thoughts/words/ideas) to deconstruct part of their current belief system and replace it with a more adaptive and healthier one.

However, before you can help clients reorganize or improve on their current model of reality that is not serving them well, they must first have the raw materials needed.  Verbal ability is a highly variable trait among clients. Whereas some people arrive with the ability to describe their misery and unhappiness with Shakespearean artistry and color, other people may have a difficult time simply getting out the words, “I feel sad a lot.” Interestingly, this verbal ability dimension does not (in my experience) correlate as much as one might think with the client’s level of distress. Some highly intelligent people who could easily score a perfect 800 on the SAT verbal section get so lost in their excessive mind activity and ruminations that their symptoms can become quite severe. Their tools are sharper and more numerous, but their task is far more difficult as well. Other clients may actually be quite resilient and emotionally capable of dealing with very difficult life circumstances, but simply need some very basic training in verbal expression in order to complement the array of nonverbal intrapsychic skills (e.g., emotional regulation, distraction, mindfulness) that they have been developing to compensate for their initial lack of verbal ability. For these clients, providing words to describe affective states and common emotions (such as hurt, sad, anxious, afraid, angry, disappointed, indifferent, furious, guilty, embarrassed) and being a mirror for them by observing out loud when you notice them feeling certain emotions or describing events in which they felt certain emotions can be a very novel and profound experience for them.  I suspect that in this group of clients, the therapist is helping engage the left hemisphere of the brain that is responsible for verbally making meaning out of emotional experience, leading to a more integrated state in which the whole brain is working together. In the other clients mentioned previously, it may be more appropriate to slow them down verbally, thereby preventing their highly active left hemispheres from distracting them and protecting them from the potentially uncomfortable activity of their right hemispheres and limbic brains that would otherwise cause them to have to ride the uncomfortable waves of unpleasant emotions that they need to feel into and through in order to move beyond them.  Once they have done this, they may be more able and inclined to begin constructing belief structure that allows them to live more fully in reality rather than serving mainly to defend them against unpleasant emotions.

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In this engaging presentation full of entertaining and informative examples, Daniel Coyle makes the case that “greatness isn’t born, it’s grown” through three factors: “deep practice”, passion (what the author calls “ignition”), and great teaching. Deep practice refers to a mental/neurological process in which people are at their peak balance of challenge in a specific task that is not overwhelmingly difficult or underwhelming we boring, in which there “Reaching” for the next level just beyond their current ability. The author talks at length about the neurological mechanism involved in deep practice, myelination, the process of brain cell axons becoming wrapped in the substance myelin by oligodendrocytes. An important point is made that, once cells are myelinated, they do not become un-myelinated easily, hence the difficulty in breaking hard-won, deeply ingrained habits. Whereas deep practice is a long steady process that takes typically 10 years to develop master/expert ability in a specific area, ignition is, as the word implies, a sudden burst of energy and decision in which a person decides to take on and commit to self-improvement towards a specific task in order to alter and improve their identity in some way. The author draws upon examples such as famous athletes from countries who inspired their nationals to follow suit as they realized, “that could be me.” Great teachers, the third factor, have (through deep practice of their own in the realm of teaching) become experts in the ability of creating moments of ignition for other people and guiding them through diverse and custom specific methods to continuously experience moments of deep practice and accelerate their growth from their current ability level.

I found this book to be quite an enjoyable read and extremely relevant to the issues that many clients present with in counseling. People with poor mental health typically have a “fixed” mindset with regards to ability level. This book provides a convincing argument of and abundance of evidence for what is known in psychology research as a growth mindset, the idea that we can expect to be incompetent at tasks we have not had experience with or practice in, and can expect to become more and more confident and competent in areas that we practice. Many people in counseling have an “I can’t do it” view of life. They believe, “I don’t have what it takes” and “no matter how hard I work or what I do, I will never overcome the obstacles in my way.” They believe that the people who are successful were simply blessed and gifted with abilities that they don’t possess. As a result, they give up and stop trying because they don’t believe that they should exert any energy or effort in order to conserve what little energy they do have to help them survive another day. This book is a very encouraging and uplifting antidote to such depressing and debilitating thinking. Reading it made me reflect back on my own life, and how I was fortunately told by most people that “you can do anything you put your mind to.” There have been some things I have not been successful in life, but I can say that in most of them, I did not put in very much time, either because I disliked it so much and/or decided I wanted to put my energy elsewhere. However, areas of focus in which I have invested significant amounts of time in deep practice have always improved in proportion to the amount of strategic and careful work I have invested. Believing this about the world and about oneself is a very empowering and exciting belief to have.

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Anger is one of the most fundamental, primitive, basic, and important of all emotions.  It is also often and deeply misunderstood.  Here are a few myths about anger I find myself frequently attempting to help my clients unlearn:

Anger Myth #1:  I shouldn’t feel it

Like all feelings, anger is neither good or bad.  It just happens.  Some of us experience more of it than others, but then, some of us have more reason to be angry than others.  We might have more anger if we have had difficult pasts which are currently distorting our perspective of the present, but that doesn’t make the anger bad.  The anger is not the problem, the distortions are.

Anger Myth #2:  Anger serves no purpose

Anger serves a very important purpose.  Anger tells us that we perceive an injustice that needs to be dealt with.  If we didn’t have anger we would let people walk all over us (yes, even nice people would find it irresistible).  Just like pain causes us to pull our finger away from a flame or sharp object, anger causes us to pull away from an unfair situation, or change it.

Anger is an important informational signal, just like tasting food that has gone bad or pain when you burn or cut yourself.  It tells us that there is something to attend to.  Learn to pay attention to your anger and ask yourself, “what is this anger trying to tell me right now?”  Then take action or decide to let it go.  If you cannot let it go, ask yourself, “what would need to change for me to let go of this anger?”  Often times people who have chronic anger are angry about a pattern.  That is,they are angry about a small thing that happens over and over again, leading to a serious issue, much like typing too much at a keyboard can lead to serious health problems such as carpel tunnel or tendinitis.  The important thing is to keep on inquiring.  With persistence, you will eventually find the source of your anger and be able to address it.

Anger Myth #3:  I should not let others know I’m angry

It is actually important to let others know when you are angry at strategic times.  It is the way that you let someone know that matters.  If you keep your anger to yourself and don’t let others know when you are angry, they will usually be more likely do inadvertently inflame your anger, leading to unnecessary conflict.  As Aristotle wrote, “Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.”

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In Carl Rogers book, On Becoming A Person, he writes that he is “appalled” every time he tries teaching patient. He writes that he has absolutely no interest in being a teacher because of the “dismal” results that inevitably come from an attempt to teach the client something that they do not have experience about. I often have the same experience in therapy. Whenever I try to teach someone a concept directly through intellectual input, I can tell that there is very little receptivity going on. Sometimes I get blank stares.   Sometimes they begin talking about something completely unrelated (“yeah, well um anyways…”). While it may make a good billable progress note for managed care entities to say that I covered/provided psychoeducation on emotional regulation, mindfulness, or automatic thoughts, the feeling in the session is stale, and there is disengagement in the air.   This is more apparent in kids, but adults just hide it better.  Kids are more endearing in their disregard for sparing my feelings when they communicate the depths of their boredom they are experiencing.

Besides the ineffective results, teaching saps a lot more energy on my part. It is a lot of work to be talking 80% or 90% of the time, especially when you have the anxiety that naturally flows from feeling ineffective.   This tends to happen when I’m giving a “lecture.”   It shuts down the client and exhausts me.

I have been practicing recently turning my statements into questions.  Instead of telling someone, “It usually doesn’t work when____” I will ask, “what do you think would happen if ____?”

Asking questions works especially well for challenging.   Instead of,  “Your wife is probably putting her family first because you aren’t paying attention to her” I will ask, “Have you ever put someone first in your life when they didn’t give you the time of day?”

Asking questions turns people’s brains on.  It is as if a switch turns on that says, “something is required, it is time to think!”   Asking questions also puts the spotlight on the client, privileges their worldview, and provides rich information for understanding their behaviors and choices.

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People feel put off by advice most of the time. It can be one of the most frustrating experiences to have someone tell you what you should do before they even understand the problem.

1.  Before giving any advice, make sure you thoroughly understand the other person’s situation, experience (thoughts and feelings).
2.  Make sure you have a positive relationship with the person. When giving someone advice, you are putting yourself in a position of an expert. The metacommunication of this is: “I have an answer that might work for a problem that you been struggling with. I might be better at solving this, even though you spend a lot more time with it.”  Most of us have a difficult time admitting we can’t handle a situation. If you don’t have a positive relationship with the recipient, he will very likely be closed off or respond negatively your advice, because he will not feel safe being in the vulnerable position of the one who can’t solve his own problem. Since building a relationship takes time, the best thing to do probably withhold your advice and just listen. If you do this, you will be giving the person a precious gift: providing a nonjudgmental audience. The next time they might feel safe enough to ask for your advice.
3.  Withhold any advice that is judgment or critical. Much of the time when we think we have good advice for someone, we are often actually simply judging them. Yes, we are listening to them talking, but most of the time we are thinking judgmental thoughts, such as “why on earth are they complaining about this… it is not that big of a deal” or “they’ve completely gotten themselves into this” or “Everything would be better if they would just…” Or “this always happens to them. Because they’re so…”  Then, just when the person feels validated and understood (because we are keeping these thoughts to ourselves), out comes the advice and ruins a beautiful thing.  We open our mouth and release a semi-filtered pearl of wisdom peppered with criticism. For example: “I think if you worked on liking yourself better than you wouldn’t care so much what other people think about you”  or   “you really need to be more organized” or “I think people get mad at you a lot because you can be kind of abrasive. This is what happens when you aren’t nicer”.  All of these statements within advice, yes. But they also contain self-esteem crushing criticism.

Most of the time, people know what their own flaws and weaknesses are. With they tell you about a problem, they’re not looking for advice. They’re looking to be heard. They are looking for someone to listen to them reveal their flaws and suspend judgment, and instead show them a vote of confidence that they can draw their own conclusions and learn their own lessons.

If someone asks you for advice, that is a different story. They’re giving you a green light to help them. They are essentially saying, [I feel safe enough with you to trust that you are going to be gentle and not criticize me in your efforts in helping.] Do not betray this trust. Give them loving advice, free from criticism. Even when people ask for advice, don’t  take advantage of the opportunity to try to mold them into your own image of what you believe is best.

People change when they are loved and accepted. Once they feel loved and accepted by you, you can typically get them significant doses of advice, provided you are tuned into the cues they are giving you about when they will be receptive and when they are feeling criticized. Most of us, however, err on the side of giving way too much advice and not enough empathic listening or nonjudgmental attention.

The art of counseling is the balance these two essential components of a relationship: validation and challenging. Some clients want more validation and some clients want more challenging than others.  In families and friendships, and the same is true. People who are especially self-critical are likely to want more validation, because they are constantly challenging themselves on an hourly or every-minute basis.

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If I had to give one piece of advice for shopping for a therapist, it would be to ask yourself if the therapist possesses the traits and abilities that you yourself want to practice and acquire. The question is then, on what criteria should the therapist be evaluated?  We judge a surgeon by how successful he is surgical cases measured by survival rate, etc.  We judge a dentist by the results of his drilling and restorative work, measured by how our teeth feel and how long our crowns and fillings last, etc.   But what does a therapist DO exactly?

Usually when people go to therapy, they are there to address issues such as depression, anxiety, grief, anger, etc. These are the symptoms — the negative things that they are trying to eliminate. They are the psychological equivalent of physical illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.  Just as many doctors are now working from a “creating health” approach, I too try to focus on increasing mental health rather than decreasing symptoms.  If these markers of health are increased, the symptoms of depression, anxiety, anger, etc. usually are eliminated in the process. Here is a list of some of the most common “products” by which a therapist’s services can be valued:

Reality-based thinking — Perceiving the world with minimal distortions.  Making accurate inferences and interpretations of what is “out there”

Emotional regulation / Self- Regulation — Being able to control impulses and emotions.  Not letting emotions lead to bad decisions that come from fight or flight reactions.  Being able to tolerate emotional (and physiological) discomfort when needed in order to make a better choice that requires delayed pleasure or gratification.

Emotional/physiological/experiential Awareness — Letting emotions be informational signals that give us important information about the world and our relationship to it.  Understanding that unpleasant feelings in the body are only bad when they control us and are actually vitally helpful as information that guides us.

Genuineness / Authenticity / Congruent communication – words, behavior, thoughts, feelings and body language all match and send clear and consistent messages that convey our intentions.  Saying what you mean and meaning what you say.  Not being afraid to let the world know what you think and feel, and who you are.

Mindfulness – Being aware and conscious of all of your experience (cognitive, emotional, physicological, spiritual, behavioral, relational) as it unfolds in the present.

Flexibility and Openness – Being secure enough to engage with outside systems (familial, societal, ideological, etc).  Welcoming new input, ideas, tools, and relationships with the recognition that they can potentially enrich and empower you, rather than threaten you.

Engaged Boundaries – Letting in the good (people, ideas, things, places, habits) and keeping out the bad.  As opposed to “diffuse boundaries” (letting in everything) and “rigid boundaries” (keeping out everything).

Self-Worth – Acceptance of yourself just as you are, at your current age, status, abilities, limitations, flaws, strengths, etc.  Feeling relaxed and comfortable with who you are paradoxically facilitates growth and positive change, whereas resistance of who you are and self-judgement blocks growth.  High self-worth also leads to better relationships because others feel more accepted by you.

Differentiation – The ability to hold on to one’s own thoughts/feelings while remaining connected to another.  As opposed to “fusion” (giving up your own opinions and feelings in order to stay connected) or “emotional cutoff” (turning away from others in order to maintain your own position).

Detriangulation – Eliminating distractions/persons/places/things (e.g., addictions, substance abuse, worrying, rumination, TV, porn, affairs, fighting, hate, politics) from that which needs to be attended to or focused on (important work, relationships, community ties, projects, etc).

Identity – Having a coherent narrative about who you are, while being open to modifying the narrative as new experiences unfold. Balancing “assimilation” (fitting new information to our model of reality) and “accommodation” (fitting our model of reality to new information).

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Emotional regulation the ability to recognize and acknowledge feelings without letting them control you, your behavior, your words, and even your thoughts.   Emotional dysregulation can take the form of angry communication (tone, words, body language) or anxious communication (silence, fear, and nervousness).  The feelings themselves are not a problem, but when a therapist becomes controlled by their feelings and unable to accomplish their goals (e.g., listening to and staying completely present with the client, conveying compassion and nonjudgment, being genuine and authentic, and challenging even when it is uncomfortable), then the therapist’s lack of ability to regulate themselves may get in the way of the therapist doing good work. Furthermore, it would be difficult for therapists to convey the concept of emotional regulation when they themselves have not yet internalized it.

On the other hand, it would be possibly even worse to have a therapist who was not in touch with their emotions and cannot recognize when they are feeling angry/anxious/vulnerable/please/ashamed/etc.   Emotions are very important informational signals, just like sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Emotions are processed by the most ancient hardware of our brains that evolution has been refining for much longer than our cognitive hardware has been developed.  Research shows that people have physiological and emotional reactions to stimuli far sooner than they are consciously aware of them. One very important trait of a healthy person is that they are acutely aware of their internal responses to the outside world. A therapist may have the surface impression of someone who is highly emotionally refined by being nonemotional, but this should be because the therapist is able to recognize and regulate their emotions, not because they are oblivious to them.

Emotional regulation and emotional awareness usually go hand-in-hand, however, because in order for one to regulate their emotions they must first be conscious of them and therefore, an increase in emotional awareness leads to greater emotional regulation.  However, I think that some people are disconnected/cut off from their emotions, therefore I do believe it is possible to have a situation where people are showing no signs of emotional dysregulation but also not aware of emotions because they are buried so deeply.

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In a recent training I attended on collaborative documentation, I raised the issue that taking the last 10 minutes of the client’s session time (or even adding 10 minutes of the end of session) to collaboratively write a progress note with them could take people out of an emotional place that they have reached during the past 50 minutes and into a more cognitive place, reactivating their already normal modes of thinking cognitively.

Some therapists did not see a problem with this.  Why would you not want people to activate their prefrontal cortex? After all, isn’t that what we’re trying to do in therapy, help people take their raw experience and verbalize it?

To this I say, not necessarily. For some people, emotional reactions may be their primary mode of operating. It may be a rare exception when they actually take a step back and observe their experience from a more cognitive standpoint. For these people, the therapist may be try to exercise this cognitive “muscle” in their brain during the entire session, and another 10 to 15 minutes to review therapy goals and take stock of the session summary and create action plan for the week may just help them gain momentum in that direction.  However, I believe that there are many clients (perhaps most in our society) whose primary mode of operating is already cognitive, and have a more difficult time accessing their deep emotions.

Anger may be an exception. On the emotional spectrum, anger stands out to me as a very commonly accessed feeling by many people. This might be because, when we are angry, we do not feel vulnerable or anxious.  Beneath anger however, there are most certainly deeper and more vulnerable feelings, and anger can be much less painful cover, allowing us to direct our energy towards other people and outside circumstances as opposed to our own limitations and shortcomings, thereby protecting our sense of self-worth.

At the training someone argued that we should not send clients out into the world in an emotional state.  I know that from my own personal therapy or deep intrapersonal or interpersonal experiences, there have been times when I left the interaction and went back out into the world at the complete loss for words. During these rare interactions, I would access a deeper part of experience that I’ve never touched on before, and I believe it would have been utterly premature to try and start explaining the feelings with words to someone. The rest of my day changes color, one way or another. Maybe I feel very lighthearted, and find myself laughing at things I would not normally. Maybe I feel a heaviness about me that helps me to let go of a million little things that suddenly seemed to have very little importance.  These different feelings allow me to go out into a new day and experience at least one day, at least a few hours, as though I were a different person.  I definitely would not want to sit down and have someone ask me how I got into that space and what it all meant. I simply want to experience it, let it linger, because I know that the thinking and sense making will all come later (probably much too soon).

If you ask someone to reflect on what they did over a period of time, whether that is over the last several months over the last several weeks or even the last hour, it puts them into an analytical mode, or a sense making mode. The human mind can make an explanation out of anything, irrespective of the reality or truth of that explanation. Sense making and meaning making can be very powerful and useful modes of thought. For example, after people have experienced a traumatic incident, and can help to take them through the traumatic incident from an analytical, outside perspective, as an objective observer, looking down at what happened to them from a safe distance above. Research suggests that this is healing for people, because they make sense of what happened to them and identify causes and effects which increases their sense of control over avoiding future traumas. It also helps them consolidate the experience, eliminating painful details from their memory with each retelling of the story. For an unpleasant or traumatic memory, this is intuitively helpful. Just as though you would not fill up your photo albums and walls with pictures of unpleasant memories such as funerals and breakups, you don’t want your brain’s memory banks to be full of details of upsetting, frightening, and hurtful past experiences. By telling the story of the trauma, you’re able to simplify and abbreviate it, throwing out the unnecessary pain and distilling the experience down to the most important elements: what happened, why/how did it happen, and how can it be avoided in the future.

This kind of sense making and meaning making and consolidation can actually be stifling and stunting when it comes to positive experiences. Unlike negative or traumatic experiences, positive experiences should be reveled in. When we have the experience of simply enjoying something, such as looking at a beautiful flower, or enjoying the experience of a rich and flavorful meal, we are taken out of that experience by our own thoughts about that meal or someone else’s words. When we tried too hard to explain the world, we become we become observers of it rather than participants.  Research also suggests that people who write about positive experiences in their past do not benefit therapeutically the way people benefit from writing about traumatic experiences.

Maybe it is because I’m a very cognitive/analytical person myself, but I do not feel that most people want to collaboratively write their progress note with the therapist at the end of session, although most would not realize why this does not feel good. I think that, in our culture, most of us think way too much and try to explain reality constantly in order to name every possible cause-and-effect (whether real or not), in order to enhance our illusion of control and alleviate our anxiety. But all this thinking comes at a cost. I believe it is important to help clients put there experience into words, but I do not believe this is purely a “cognitive” process.  Writing a progress note at the end of session is divorced from the present moment in at least two ways. First, it is asking the client to look at the past, albeit in the past that happened recently (the past 50 minutes). It is not asking them to reflect on what they are feeling and what their current experiences right now. Secondly, it is a task oriented process.  Both the therapist and the client know that there is a desired outcome (to complete the note), which is primarily for the therapist’s benefit, not the client’s.

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There is a big difference between validating someone’s feelings and validating their thoughts or actions. I recently heard a colleague say, “validation doesn’t work with this client!” It soon became clear that she was concerned that validating the client would cause them to use that validation as a confirmation that they were correct in their beliefs and their habit and that they did not need to change. Of course, it is a therapist’s tendency to become anxious when we feel like we’re inhibiting positive change rather than creating or nurturing it. I believe in this instance, anxiety and confusion was coming from a semantic problem with the use of the word “validation.” When many people think of validation, they think of the idea that they are telling someone that they are right, or condoning their actions, habits, thoughts, or beliefs. For me, validation, in therapy, has a different connotation. It means to simply let the other person know, [I see you and I’m not going to try to change you.  I accept your experience].

For me, validating someone’s emotions is simply an acknowledgment that they are experiencing those emotions.  A validating statement I would make would be, “I can see that you’re feeling very…” This statement is a simple fact. However, if I were to say, “you are right to be feeling…” then this could be misinterpreted for condoning a particular belief system, habit, or schema.  Here are a couple of other examples of condoning thoughts, habits, beliefs, and behaviors:

“He should not have done that you!”

“You are right to do that.”

“I think most people would’ve felt the same thing.”

I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with making such statements, if you believe them, but if you don’t, it would be disingenuous and inauthentic to “validate” someone in this way. Even when I do believe such statements, I try to limit their use. For one, I don’t know if all of the information I have is correct. How can I make a judgment about whether or not I think a particular habit or beliefs is adaptive when I don’t have all the facts?  Most of the time, therapists only have a small set of opinions from the few people in the client’s social system who come into therapy. Secondly, why should I even make a judgment at all?  Making judgments and evaluations is a burden to me and robs the client of the chance to practice their own decision/evaluation making abilities.  In some cases, I think it can be helpful for clients to get an “expert opinion” to help them make a decision that they are unconfident about in the short term. However, this is not a goal I necessarily have for people. My goal for most people is that they make their own decisions and their own evaluations as needed, not take those of any other person, including me.

I believe that validation is at the core of therapy, and I have never met a fellow human being who did not find it nurturing that their experience was accepted without judgment by another.

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The word resilient evolved from the roots “re” (back) and “salire” (to leap).  To be resilient means to “leap back” or “spring back” when challenged with a setback. Many people think of resilience as a fixed character trait in people (“he is a very resilient person”). However, if you look at the word resilient as defined above, it is actually more of a verb than an adjective. In other words, people can be resilient by acting resiliently at some times and not others. Resilience is not about being “tough” and not feeling anything. It is perfectly possible to be going through intensely painful emotions and still be behaving resiliently. Resilience is about your actions, what you do after experiencing disappointments and loss. Of course, it is often very difficult to “spring back” when we are in pain. This is what makes resilience difficult, and what makes resilient behavior so rare and admirable when we see it in others. We know that they are likely suffering a great deal, and yet they are doing what they need to do, taking care of business anyways.

Putting our focus on the past or the future makes resilience much more difficult. Looking towards the past, we relive the loss or setback that we need to spring back from. It takes on more life as we experience it over and over again. We get discouraged as we focus on what we once had and where we thought we were going and compare it with our current situation. Looking towards the future, we see unclear or undesirable images as we adjust our expectations and simultaneously become overwhelmed by the amount of work it will entail to recover.

At these times, I find it best to focus on the present moment as much as possible. I know that I will be better off if I “spring back,” and that this can only happen in the present.  If I spend my energy longing for what I once had, I become depressed.  If I think about everything I’m going to have to do to get back to where I wanted to be, I usually become overwhelmed. However, if I think about the one thing that I have to do right now, the first broken piece I have to pick up, I can usually do it with relative ease.

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