LIVING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

h ow s e l f -awa r e n es s becomes self- empowerment

b y D o u g l a s H o lw e r d a

living from the inside out b y D o u g l a s H o lw e r d a

Living from the inside out

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contents

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02

1 empowerment: 3 parts

19 emotion

2 Becoming What We Are Meant To Be

5 part 1: begin within 7 Nothing New 8 Self-therapy 1 0 Self-knowledge, Self-awareness & Self-awakening

17 the basics: emotions, body & thought

1 9 Where Do They Come From? What Purpose Do Emotions Serve?

23 Case Study 01: James, Managing Jealousy 2 4 Emotional Intensity 2 7 Emotion Regulation 2 8 Emotional Intensity Scale

31 Case Study 02: Todd, Overcoming Intense Anger 3 4 Hidden Emotion: The Subconscious Influence

35 Case Study 03: Steve, A Boy With Hidden Guilt 4 0 Painful Emotions

44 Case Study 04: Gena, Understanding Anxiety

51 Case Study 05: Maria, Isolation & Resentment

53 Case Study 06: Hoa, Undiscovered Trauma 5 5 Emotion-Based Infuences 5 8 Emotions: Culture, Personality, Gender & History

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03

04

65 body

73 thought

6 7 Coming To Our Senses

70 Case Study 07: Tony, Being Here Now

7 3 What Is In Our Mind?

7 8 Thought Structures: Schemas, Stereotypes, Beliefs & Memory 8 0 Fixed & Growth Mindsets 8 2 Applying Self-knowledge & Self-awareness to Our Thoughts 8 3 Patterns of Thought

88 Case Study 08: Lan, The Art of Letting Go 9 2 Expectations: Finding the Realistic 9 8 Internal Conflicts 1 0 1 Cognitive Dissonance 1 0 2 Double Bind Situations

103 Case Study 09: Lisa, Beyond Coping

05 109 in a nutshell 1 0 9 Summary & Conclusions

115 Index of concept maps

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EMPOWERMENT: 3 parts “Like a plant which from a seed becomes an Oak tree, man becomes what he is meant to be…but we get stuck.”

Carl Jung The sections of the book are a guide. It starts with coming to know more about our inner lives, “Begin Within”. Creating methods to increase awareness about our emotions, bodies and thoughts and how they influence the way we function in the world. Taking responsibility for ourselves means knowing what we value and regulating our inner process to match what we want and dream for ourselves.

From an increased awareness of ourselves we expand to consider Part 2, “Relating to Others”. By seeing patterns within ourselves and those around us we can learn to navigate the relational aspects of life in a way that wants no more, nor no less for ourselves than we want for others. We look at the importance of a sense of self-worth and how it shapes the persons we become. Many live beneath their potential, disempowered, but never without the potential to move through and overcome the limitations we might have.

1 • e m p o w e r m e n t: 3 p a r t s

Much of what helps us to overcome the limits of life is to understand the ways that childhood shapes what we think of ourselves. Many of us enter adulthood ill-prepared, disempowered or playing out unresolved aspects of our childhood experiences. Part 3, “The Importance of Childhood” speaks to how we might look back on our childhood as a way of understanding how we have been socialized to think about ourselves, the ways we have been shaped and influenced by those around us. Our childhood sets us up for the set of tasks that follow throughout all of life. Our 20’s is the time to discern who we are from who we were brought up to be. Throughout our life we face new questions, find new developmental tasks and make choices to face or avoid reality, all enroute to being our whole true self.

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Becoming What We Are Meant To Be It is relatively recent in human history that we realize we are cocreators of our own existence. We can influence the change that determines who we are, both as individuals and of humanity itself.

We are learning more about how we get stuck in the process of becoming, and ways we can overcome the limitations of that stuckness. A small percentage of people realize the potential that exists to become the full and whole being we are “meant to be.” Others might recognize that something is unfulfilled in their lives but seek answers to feel better in ineffective ways. While we have all heard the advice to “be yourself”, we are less aware of what that actually means and what we might do to empower ourselves to do just that. In fact, in order to gain awareness of ourselves we might need to change aspects of how we function, where we place our attention or who we listen to.

E. E. Cummings, a poet known for his unique style, said, “To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle anybody can fight, and never stop fighting.” It is not easy, but it is worth it.

These ideas are not new and throughout this book you will see quotes from many who have struck the same chords. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson for example who said, “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” And, “Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.”

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Abraham Maslow is an American psychologist who coined the term, self-actualization, not much different than Carl Jung’s notion of selfrealization. Confucius presented his idea of the ideal human in the term Junzi. Every culture holds the concept of wisdom, a peaceful knowing about the ways of life. These point toward our ability to

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understand that possibilities exist for humans that we can learn and strive for. Here we will look at ways to empower ourselves to find our whole and true potential.

“I think of a self-actualized person not as an ordinary person with something added, but rather as the ordinary person with nothing taken away.”

Abraham Maslow

3 e m p o w e r m e n t: 3 p a r t s

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BEGIN aWITHIN rt on

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part 1: Begin Within “He who knows others is learned. He who knows himself is wise.”

Lao Tzu

nothing new Who am I? What influences me to do what I do? To know myself…

What does that mean?

Philosophers from all parts of the world and as far back as written language permits us to know have offered ideas about the nature of being human and what gives human life meaning and purpose. They have played an important role in the expansion of what is possible through the medium of ideas. They have grappled with questions to address our fundamental need to see order and to make sense of life.

“Poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with the idea of the true self, and the betrayal of the self has been a typical example of the unacceptable.”

D. W. Winnicott

7 • part one: begin within

In more recent history the field of psychology has formed. It is the application of the scientific method to theories and ideas that philosophers, religious figures and ordinary people have been asking and answering for a long time. Research, in the field of psychology, has been successful in helping us to understand and predicting human behavior. Psychologists have studied individuals as well as the influence of the social environment on the individual. It is a field which has taught people how to identify and understand variances in human behavior and to help people reduce the negative impact of psychological conditions. Psychologists have developed groupings of symptoms and behaviors that we categorize into diagnostic labels and have systematized it into diagnostic manuals that are used universally to determine what we call pathology. Psychology has been a major area of study in universities everywhere, reflective of the continuous curiosity humans have about themselves and others. From the field of Psychology a variety of therapies have developed which offer

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guidance for those who want to overcome difficulties or understand themselves better. Methods vary according to the theoretical perspective of the practitioner. Psychotherapy is the right support for us at times when the stuckness is too much for too long. Help is available from those who know how to help.

“To thine own self be true.”

Shakespeare in Hamlet

Self-Therapy “At the center of your being you have the answer, you know who you are, you know what you want.”

Lao Tzu The renowned psychologist, Karen Horney became the first major therapeutic writer to suggest that it was possible to gain the insights attained within psychoanalysis outside of it--through self-analysis. She said, “There is a central inner force, common to all human beings and yet unique to each, which is the deep source of growth. The is the real self, the inborn potential, the core of the personality.”

While there is a lot to be gained by studying the ideas that have been written both in philosophy and psychology, what this book prompts or challenges us to do is to look inward for the truths of who we are. It will show where to look, what there is that we can know about ourselves and how to be aware in the on-going moments of our lives.

Many of us are lacking a literacy of our inner self. We live without knowing our own emotions and the ways in which they influence our thoughts, our bodies and our behavior. We might not be aware of the mechanisms that produce limits to being our whole true self.

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This book is a pragmatic look at how we can know more about our inner life and apply it to the living of life. It comes with a question, “are you ready to change?”. Some of those changes might be challenging. It might mean that we need to tear ourselves away from being too externally focused; the ballgames, the Facebook page, the TV news, the entertainment and images that draw us in and occupy our mind’s time. It might mean we choose to seek solitude,

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purposefully, to discover our inner life. It might mean getting off the treadmill of daily life long enough to see that we are running in place, avoiding the deeper and more real parts of who we are.

This book is not about tweaking a few things. For some of us it is a radical departure from the way we are living. These are ideas that teach us to stop coasting along, to stop claiming victimhood, to stop conforming to the undo expectations of others, to stop being part of the herd. It challenges us to take responsibility for ourselves; as a way of discovering and creating a different reality for ourselves and the world we are in. The reward is intrinsic; a turning toward the inner self to discover the direct experience of living one’s own life, less encumbered by unseen obstacles and freer to live the ideals we know to be true. We discover satisfaction, joy, peace, and compassion by engaging a life that is ours to be lived.

Not only can we do it, it is our responsibility to one another...to be the best version of ourselves. Our individual empowerment feeds into the collective. Psychotherapy with a trained therapist who is dedicated to this process and is undoubtedly helpful, but we can do a lot of the work ourselves, particularly when we have a roadmap to guide us in that work. Knowing ourselves, relating to others, and seeing the tasks that come from the unmet needs of childhood, are the work of anyone who seeks to mature and to integrate the experiences of life into an empowered self. Self-therapy develops a sense of accomplishment when we have found our own way, we have overcome our own obstacles and earned the freedom we discover.

Beyond the value it offers each of us it extends to what is possible for humanity. Each of us is part of a whole and what we contribute to ourselves, we contribute to that whole.

9 • part one: begin within

“Given the proper conditions... “the human individual…will develop then the clarity and depth of his feelings, thoughts, wishes, interests; the ability to tap his own resources, the strength of his own will power…the faculty to express himself and to relate himself to others with his spontaneous feelings…In short, he will grow substantially, un-diverted toward self-realization.”

Karen Horney

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“If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatrics from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight-as if there was something really wild in the universe which we, with our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”

William James This book will start with what we already know, basic to our personal psychology, what we can relate to about ourselves. We will ground ourselves in aspects of the human experience that are recognizable and familiar and ask ourselves whether knowing more is helpful to our lives.

Self-Knowledge,Self-Awareness and Self-Awakening

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No one can deny that we all feel emotion (what emotions affect your mood now?) and experience the world directly through our five senses; (pause a moment to notice touching, tasting, seeing, hearing and smelling something now) and think thoughts (our mind is working all the time). The steps to understanding our inner life are to look more closely at how these feelings, sensations and thoughts occur. We will look at the influence they have on each other and the influence we have on them. The process is one where we consciously choose to increase both our self-knowledge and our self-awareness concerning what we are feeling, what we are experiencing through our senses and in our bodies and what is happening in our mind. Implicit in this observation is the experience we all have of being both the observer and the observed, the reader and the book. It is this interface, one’s relationship to one’s-self, which holds the greatest opportunities for the changes that affect not only each individual, but also our role in humanity.

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“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.”

William James

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Self-knowledge comes when we apply to ourselves the same observations we apply to others as a way of knowing them. We have self-knowledge when we understand our personality, our tendencies, our preferences, our habits and see how we follow patterns of behavior to express the person we are. It is knowing our own character. It is not surprising to know that we humans have internal structures that govern the patterns and tendencies of the ways we function. We are each unique but also fall into human groupings with others who share many of the same characteristics and patterns of behavior.

“There is a definite inherited complexity. We are born into a pattern; we are a pattern. We are a structure which is pre-established.”

Carl Jung Understanding this process can be more sophisticated because of personality inventories like the Myers-Briggs and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) which give us feedback about the ‘who I am’ structures that prove to be consistent over time.

These profiles categorize people according to responses they give to a standard set of questions. How many of us look up information about our Astrological sign to see traits? We are curious about ourselves and wonder about what shapes our personalities and our destinies. Other systems assign us behavior characteristics based on the time or year we were born or other influences that shape our place in the universe.

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We can see in the early stages of life that a child has a disposition, a personality that comes though long before they have developed language or other ways to express themselves. These things all become part of the great debate in psychology as to what influences us more…nature, what we are born with or… nurture, what we take from the experience of life. It asks, what aspects of being human are innate to our being versus what aspects of our personality are shaped by our environment. Self-knowledge is recognizing that each of us has tendencies, which can represent strengths or limitations, and that none of us is fully “whole”, having the characteristics of all others.

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The enneagram is a model that offers nine types of personality and suggests that wholeness is the collective of those nine. An individual can move through a process of attaining the strengths and overcoming the limitations of each stage as part of a selfdiscovery process.

These ideas suggest there is a structure that shapes a continuous being who has the capacity to morph and change in ways that are consistent with the patterns that precede themselves. While we will never become a different person altogether, we can grow with the intention to find our most true, actualized and empowered self.

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“If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because selfknowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.”

Aldous Huxley Self-awareness focuses more on the thoughts and feelings of our inner life and the experience of our senses, which connect us to a particular place and moment in time. When I ask, “What am I feeling right now? What is in my mind doing right now?”, I am bringing awareness to my inner life. We often experience life with a limited awareness of what our inner life is telling us. Much of our attention is focused outward, engaged in the world around us, sometimes to the point where we even feel detached or unaware of our inner life.

More commonly, we are moderately aware of what we feel or what our body might be telling us. We do have the ability to check in with ourselves, to observe what we feel, to notice what our thoughts are about and what our body is telling us. To improve this process is to create a stronger sense of meta-awareness, the ability to see how our emotions influence our thoughts, especially in ways that might not be helpful, and often that follow a pattern. Meditation is a wellknown practice, the purpose of which is to separate ourselves from the unconscious patterns of our thoughts and emotions. We can consciously observe from some distance the stream of thoughts, the emotional overtones and the places in our bodies that speak to us through discomfort or pain.

While we can benefit from an increase of intentional awareness as we go about lives that are largely full of the tasks that take our attention, we might also consider the value of going deeper into self-discovery

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by embracing solitude. Instead of allowing the fear of loneliness or the stimulation of distractions to direct our attention outward we can learn that being alone with ourselves is where rich and deep understanding can occur, maybe the only place.

“Solitude for the mind to be as essential as food is for the body.“ Dostoyevsky

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“I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings.”

Carl Jung We also have the potential to become acutely engaged in the moment through our senses. We can extend beyond hearing by drawing our attention to listen. Beyond seeing, we look closely and with intention. We all recognize the difference between eating food unconsciously and focusing on the subtleties of the tastes and flavors in the food. Athletes depend on an acute awareness of what’s happening around them, using all their senses and being present to the cues they have learned to master their skill. When we make a jigsaw puzzle, we are reading the contours of the shape and the color pattern in each piece. Our senses connect us to the world around us and the present moment.

“What is necessary to change in a person is to change his awareness of himself.”

Abraham Maslow Self-knowledge and self-awareness are the methods that bring us closer to the “sense of self”, which guides the choices we make. When we know ourselves and are aware of what is happening with ourselves, we have a conscious choice about our actions. Here is where we discover the difference between reaction and response. Reactions are often unconscious, automatic and habitual actions, sometimes fueled by emotional intensity. Those choices might represent how we behave in ways that are distant from our “sense of self”. Our actions precede our awareness. Responses are conscious and deliberate actions, in line with our values and ideals, and connected to knowledge and awareness of who we are. We are less likely to regret our choices when we are certain to understand who we are and what is happening internally at any given moment. With practice we can align our behaviors to our values, the intentional version of who we are.

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When we see this as the process of “being and becoming”, we can focus on what we can know and also recognize that we are expanding into what is possible, an ideal version of ourselves. We bring a conscious awareness that we are each a work in progress, living on the forefront of our own lives, representing ourselves in the things we say and do.

“Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report.

An openness-an empathy- was necessary if the attention was to matter.”

Mary Oliver Self-awakening Shifting from knowledge and awareness to awakening includes the recognition that, while we are unique and are having an experience of life that is within the structure of a self, we are not separate from the forces of life itself. This shift results in ownership for our part in the co-creative process. We live life and life lives us. A dance that is most graceful when we are neither too passive, only along for the ride... nor too forceful, attempting to dominate. Awakening is when we see and take responsibility for the persons we are, shifting from conformity, compliance and conventional lives toward the freedom that comes with taking responsibility for ourselves, joining, and aligning with the flow of higher consciousness.

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part one: begin within

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The Basics Emotion, Body & Thought Emotions, our body and our thoughts make up much of what we see as the conscious part of our inner life. We can recognize what we are feeling, what we see, taste, touch, smell and hear and what our thoughts have to say. It is part of what we know and are aware of, to varying degrees. By spending time increasing self-knowledge and self-awareness, we might discover deeper or more subtle aspects to this inner process, particularly how these parts affect each other. We, also, begin to bring awareness to sub-conscious aspects of who we are, the deeper repressed thoughts and emotions that manifest in our bodies and influence who we are. We all tend to hold beliefs about ourselves that shape our choices, have buried emotions that influence our perspective, and carry manifestations within our bodies of messages received long ago.

17 • begin within: the basics

When we have a balance within our inner life between our emotions, body and thoughts we function intuitively.

Each part informs us of what is important and relevant, even below the level of our consciousness, and we find ourselves solving problems and making decisions in a way that is intuitive.

Intuition is said to be‌knowing without knowing how we know. In contrast, when we are too analytical or too emotionally driven or too preoccupied in a kinesthetic sense, we get lop-sided and seem to struggle. We cannot flow naturally. We can lose the freedom of being intuitive, we get stuck in our head, heart or body. This is a real and common problem and one that self-knowledge and self-awareness can help regulate.

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emotions

EMOTION

intuition thoughts

body (senses)

Where Do They Come From?

What Purpose Do Emotions Serve?

The first part of our inner life that we will delve into is our emotions.

Emotions are inner experiences that come as a result of events outside our selves or past events which remain in our subconscious.

Emotions are a source of information which, combined with information from our body and mind, can govern the choices we make and the person we choose to be. Feelings, another commonly used word for emotion, are facts. Emotions seem to happen to us, we don’t choose to have an emotion, but we can choose how we experience it and regulate it. An important part of self-awareness is learning how emotions influence our thoughts, our bodies and our behavior.

Emotions vary in intensity and the ways that they affect our behavior.

For example:

19 • begin within: emotions

Emotions serve an important purpose, that of giving us information about our relationship to the world around us. Emotions are part of how we experience life and complement what we experience through our senses and our thought process. Emotions connect the persons we are to the experiences we have, sometimes in a simple and direct way and sometimes distorted by cognitive interpretations or subconscious baggage.

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ess edn t r hea

sadness The feeling of grief that comes when we experience a loss, literal (a person or possession) or figurative (what might have been). It provides catharsis a kind of release and helps us to determine what we value.

anger A response to the perception that something is not fair or right. It also serves to give us a sense of power in the face of fear, a way of gaining control.

ge ra

aggravation an n oye d ma d in fu ri a t ed

n dow s pines unhap

despair

mis ery de sp on de nc y

joy To validate the pleasure and awe possible from life’s experiences.

It inspires us toward what is possible to feel.

pi n ha

s es

delight

tri ump h

ju

bi la ex ti hi on la ra t io n

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Try this: Name two other emotions and identify the purpose they have. Then find other words for the emotions that reflect different levels of intensity: Less Intense Emotion More Intense Emotion i.e. irritation i.e. rage

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di sc om fo rt em b arr asm ent loss of fa ce y indignit ion iliat h um

shame fear

The fear of shame is meant to protect us from too much exposure in situations where we are not feeling safe. Most often it feeds off of low esteem and tells us we have little worth and deserve little of the joys of life.

ha

bl e unw ort hy

h y

ve si en eh pr ap ed ar sc d rme ala

re pr oc

distressed

m ew o rt

terrified

Their purpose & levels of intensity

e bl si e on sp bl re ta un

emotions:

co ac

bl a

Protect us by informing us we are perceiving a danger or threat.

g u i lt

The feeling we have when we violate our own conscience. It can influence our choices.

confidence

t ec sp e r lf ty se ni g di

nt ide o nf c r ove ed inflat

se lf-aggra n

arr oga nt va in

dizing

21 • begin within: emotions

ntmen t

h ea lt hy

cont e

ion

un

sa t is fac t

Healthy pride is internal validation, a sense of satisfaction that comes with a strong sense of self. It allows us to have humble confidence, to show up, wanting no more nor no less than we want for others.

In an unhealthy way pride can be an extension of selfishness, which is a compensation for low esteem.

y h ea lt h

pride

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Any of us can make a longer list of emotions that most of us are familiar with and have experienced at one time or another. If we have not experienced feelings of a particular kind, we have witnessed those feelings in others. They are familiar. This is part of what we all know.

It helps us to be consciously aware of their importance to give us useful information and to be aware that emotions affect other aspects of our inner life, our thinking and our body’s ability to be present to our senses.

Let’s take jealousy, an emotion many of us have experienced but did not choose. The purpose of jealousy is to be protective of our own emotional vulnerability and possibly of the trust that is inherent in an intimate committed relationship. While the alarm that it raises might be too loud, jealousy is a reminder of feelings we have for another person who we share intimacy or commitment with. If we perceive a threat to that intimacy our instincts warn us to pay attention. Once we feel it, it becomes ours to regulate. If it becomes an unruly inner storm, we might say and do things that are regrettable. It colors the lens of our perspectives, generating beliefs inside our expanding imagination. If we calm the storm and work to understand our feelings, we can choose our responses and behave in ways that better represent who we are. While our emotions can be triggered by circumstances and situations outside ourselves and be amplified by feelings we have below the surface, we do better when we are aware enough to regulate the intensity of those emotions. Let’s look.

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CASE STUDY 01

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J

ames found himself flooded with jealousy when he happened across the woman he was in the early stages of a relationship with having dinner with her ex-boyfriend, someone who had broken up with her 6 months prior. He had known she was going to dinner with a friend but was shocked when he saw the two of them laughing together.

He stopped himsel from confronting her on the spot but had all he could do to calm himself down before he would see her later in the evening.

James’ imagination was running wild, telling him stories about what she was feeling and doing together with her ex-boyfriend. He was angry, felt betrayed and momentarily lost all trust in the words she had said to him about her feelings for him.He decided to go for a walk rather than to try to study because beneath his thoughts he knew that his jealousy was misguided and could do damage if he could not reduce the intensity of what he was feeling.

It worked. He was calm enough to let her know that he had a reaction to seeing her with her ex-boyfriend, and that it was his problem to manage.

He asked her for some time to work on it and whether she could help him by answering a few questions about her friendship with the man she had dinner with earlier that evening. She was willing to talk about it with him and assured him in ways that helped him gain back some of the trust in what she had said before. He also explained to her that he had been cheated on by a former girlfriend and how he was afraid that he could be hurt like that again.

Managing Jealousy

James’ story is a good example of thepower of emotions to influence our thoughts and our behavior. Fortunately, James accepted responsibility for his feelings and understood that he could do things to regulate the intensity. He was able to choose his response rather than to believe his thoughts and to react. He was supported by the woman, who allowed him his feelings and was willing to offer information that proved to be helpful to him. He acknowledged that he had been influenced by a past experience where he had been hurt. There are many scenarios that occur everyday of how jealousy becomes a powerful negative aspect of a relationship. Most often, a jealous person asks or demands that the other person change in order to relieve them of their emotion. It can be a recipe for relational dysfunction and emotional pain.

23 • begin within: emotion

The Therapist’S Lens

James,

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Emotion Intensity Emotional intensity is a key concept. Simply put, it considers not only the emotions we are feeling, but also the intensity of those emotions. It focuses on how emotion affects our thinking and what we experience in our bodies. An emotion at a high level of intensity is quite different than what we experience with the same emotion with less intensity. With intense emotions we are less able to see clearly the context of the experience, we tend to react rather than respond to the situation and we may not recognize the distortions in our thinking.

We do not completely have choice about what we feel, but we do have choice of how strongly we feel. We can regulate ourselves by managing our emotional intensity.

a closer look: when anger becomes rage In order to closely consider the impact of an intense emotion, let’s imagine someone in a state of rage…a form of anger rated an 8 or 9 on an intensity scale of 1 to 10. First, let’s point out that anger is a natural emotion that occurs when a person has the perception that something is not right or not fair. Its purpose is to inform us that a situation is occurring that might have a detrimental effect on ourselves or others. Lower levels of anger might include irritation, agitation or being peeved. Rage is anger out of control.

Let’s consider the risks and consequences of rage: 1. Rage reduces our ability to receive input from an outside source.

Our ability to listen and integrate information is reduced greatly in a state of rage. (The calmer we are the more we can consider. The more we can consider, the more likely we will respond thoughtfully and effectively rather than react in a flood of emotion.)

Extreme anger lends itself to black and white, all or nothing, thinking.

Fig. 03: Risks and Consequences of Rage

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2 Self-perpetuating Beliefs Less Able To Listen

1

Distorted Thinking

4 Stress Response Kicks In

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Out Of Control

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Turn Violent Or Agressive

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Moderate anger lends itself to understanding various points of view and makes room for humility.

2. Rage fuels our emotion with thoughts and ideas that increase the intensity of the emotion. Often, we are drawing on past experiences or beliefs (schemas or stereotypic) that appear to be relevant to the situation that influenced the initial anger. Looking for evidence that reinforces our perspective adds fuel to the fire and is how we get wound up.

3. We begin to experience distorted thinking, believing that our perception of reality at that moment is complete and accurate, when, we see later, it fails to see many contextual considerations that would offer a clearer and broader view.

4. Rage creates physical signs of our emotional condition. We experience an increase in our breathing rate, heart rate, adrenaline, sweating, muscle tension, increase in volume to speaking voice, movements that appear to be aggressive or self-damaging, etc.

5. We become less able to self-regulate or reduce the intensity of our rage, making us feel trapped or “out of control”. An additional problem begins to present itself, “how can I change the way I am feeling?” Feeling out of control is responded to with an effort to gain control. It is like putting more fuel on the fire.

6. We might destroy something or say something regrettable to break the tension of the emotion. Self-harm is a real danger, as is harm to property or another person. Reversing the escalation is more difficult the higher one is on the scale.

Abandoning Values, Causes Regret

8 Creating Judgement & Fear In Others

9 Come To No Solution

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10 Fear Of Repeating The Episode

11 Turn To Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms 12 Generates Self-hatred

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7. We might say or do things that are inconsistent with the values we hold or the way we would want to be. Often, we feel regret, guilt, shame, self-doubt after the episode of rage is over. It can become part of an internal belief system that feeds the idea that “I am no good”, “I am stupid” or “I am a bad person”.

8. We generate thoughts and emotion in those around us. Possibly judgement, fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, guilt or shame. The aftermath results either in increasing the “baggage” we carry as we go through life. We tend to either resolve or avoid baggage.

9. We are not likely to resolve the issue related to the purpose of the rage. We are more likely to generate fear or defensiveness in another person, which will cause them to avoid the situation or to enter conflict in a dangerous way, particularly if they are similarly in a rage.

10. We create a fear of it happening again, developing a story about who we are or what our problems or weaknesses are. It also generates the unhelpful desire to control the possibility of it happening without having the tools we are lacking in.

11. We are likely to turn to coping strategies such as alcohol or drugs as a way of reducing the internal tension, putting ourselves at a higher risk of abuse and/or reduced self-regulation.

12. We are likely to reinforce negative core beliefs that tell us, “I am no good, not worthy, unlovable.”

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Rarely do we look closely at the harmful by-products of this intense emotion. It is an example of how most of us do not want to be. Not much good comes of it and the after-effects can have long term, on-going, destructive influences for ourselves and others. But, by increasing self-awareness it can be addressed.

d o u g l a s h o lw e r d a

Let’s back up to what was stated as the purpose of the emotion anger or, at least, to what it seems to correlate to. In social settings where justice and right behavior towards others governs the ability for a

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society to function, anger plays an important role. We feel it when our sense of fairness or our moral constructs are being violated. It is a good thing for the collective order to express anger in ways that serve to correct the behaviors that are inconsistent with what a social group needs to carry on peacefully and cooperatively. Assertiveness is fueled by moderate anger, aggressiveness comes out of emotional intensity, to the point of rage.

Later, we will look at anger again to see ways that it can also be a tool which is used by those who seek power and want to generate fear in those around them. It can be a form of control.

Emotion Regulation Emotion regulation is an important aspect of our relationship to ourselves. It represents the degree to which we understand the emotions that we are experiencing. Self-awareness is the first step to moderating our emotions, and influencing our body’s response and what is generated in our thought process. It starts with an awareness of what we are feeling. The intention is to find a balance which helps us avoid the extremes of feeling out of control or shut down. It is how we attain equanimity, emotional stabilization and consistency. Along with understanding our thoughts, understanding emotion is clearly a relevant and poignant place to “begin within” and part of what is pragmatic in the discovery of empowerment.

Self-awareness includes the awareness of our emotions and how they are affecting our thoughts, our bodies and the choices we make.

When we are emotionally regulated we can also effectively assess our social situation in order to know the effectiveness of our emotional communication.

27 begin within: emotions

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Living from the inside out

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Emotional Intensity Scale Take a look at the model of the triangle, the base of which correlates to 0 and the top which correlates to 10.

10 loss of perspective

5

intense emotion

reacting rather than responding

loss of equanimity

responding rather than reacting grounded and regulated

1

broad perspective emotionally neutral emotional baggage

unresolved feelings

beliefs

expectations interpretations

childhood

self-judgement

Fig. 04: Emotional Intensity Scale

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The widest part is 0 the narrowest part is 10. The bottom, the baseline, represents emotional neutrality, having no noticeable emotions. It also represents the place, within ourselves, that has room for the broadest perspective. When we are in a very calm place within ourselves, we can contemplate and consider a range of options and perspectives.

Our bodies are producing hormones that are part of our relaxation response. We could say that it is the state where we access our inner wisdom. It is not very common that people feel deeply calm, but it

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is possible. It is an ideal. Meditation, breathing techniques, physical exercises and mindfulness practices have all been developed to help us attain a deeper sense of calm.

Half-way up the center pole is 5, where the sides are half as narrow as the bottom. Here, we are in an emotional state where we are at risk of escalating upward. Here we have lost some breadth of perspective. Our emotions are more intense and start to influence our thoughts. Our bodies are starting to produce hormones in stress response mode.

At level 8 or 9 we are in an emotional state that dominates our thinking, generating more thoughts which reinforce the intense emotion. We are wound up and unable to easily reverse the course of the emotion. Here we have lost a lot of broader perspective. While considering rage we looked at a list of all the potential ramifications of this emotional condition. These apply to other emotions as well.

In order to paint the full picture, we could say that 1, 2 and 3 are in the green zone, we are safe; 4, 5 and 6 the yellow zone, where there is a threat of emotional danger and 7,8,9 and 10 the red zone, , where we are in the storm of our own emotions. The calmer we are, the broader our perspective and the greater our ability to respond to a situation with choices that are in line with our values, the person we want to be. The higher the number of our emotional intensity the more likely our decisions are reactions, not responses, and the higher is the likeliness that we will have things to deal with in the aftermath of that emotional experience.

29 • begin within: emotions

One of the key factors in experiencing emotion has to do with how much unresolved emotion we carry with us that feeds off the situational experiences we have. An example of this might be the fear that is generated from an encounter with a barking dog by someone who had been badly bitten in a previous situation. Most of us carry emotions related to experiences we have had in the past. People who have been traumatized carry emotions that, if unresolved, can affect daily life. Situations can become “triggering” events which affect emotional intensity and the difficult challenge of blending past experience with a current situation.

Living from the inside out

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We tend to repress, restrain or express emotions, often based on what we have learned from the social environment or how developmentally ready we are to respond to situations that we might experience. What we repress becomes part of our subconscious, our unresolved baggage. Restraint is a form of inhibiting the expression of our emotions, particularly in situations where we do not feel safe or empowered enough to trust that our feelings will be heard. We might share them with close friends or family, but do not feel open or able to express them freely. Emotional expression is spontaneous communication of emotion through words, body language or action.

This is most likely when we are safe within ourselves and understand the social context in which we are expressing emotion. Our ultimate goal is to regulate our emotions.

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CASE STUDY 02

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T

odd came to see me seeking help for what he called his “anger issues”. He cited several examples of situations where he found himself having become extremely angry and behaving in ways that caused him to not like himself. He felt he had changed and was becoming older and grumpy, not unlike qualities he had disliked in his father. He had two young sons of his own and he hoped he could learn something in therapy that would set a better example for them as they grew up.

In each case that he described to me he felt that his anger was being caused by the person or people whom he was angry toward. To him, what they had done was not right and violated common principles that everyone should know. It was hard for me to disagree, the examples he gave were of people being unfair, disrespectful and aggressive toward him. It appeared they were acting in self-interest with little regard for him or how he felt. While I was not in a position to hear their side of the story and thereby know the greater truth, I could easily understand the reasons for his anger and let him know that anger was a natural response to what had happened to him. I made it clear to him that this was not about whether to have anger or not, it was about the intensity of anger and the difference between responding to a situation in a way that it increases the likeliness that it can be resolved versus reacting out of intense anger and making the situation more complex and regrettable. He could acknowledge to me that he had “lost it” more than once and said and done things that he was not proud of.

He also acknowledged that he was drinking too much as a way of coping with these feelings, “to take the edge off.”

For several weeks Todd came in and talked about the things that made him angry. We watched together how the process led from aspects of his daily life to anger that he had buried long ago about his father, the abuse he endured and about ways that he had made choices that were harmful to himself. We looked at the Emotional Intensity triangle and identified the numbers that correlated to the anger he felt and we drew a line across the base at the level of 3, below which was stored this backlog of unresolved anger toward his father, himself and towards how unfair life had been. It was easy to see how quickly he could go from that 3 to a 6 or 7, the intensity level which reinforced itself, which attracted more things to be angry about and which was difficult to back down from. At this point we were working together simply to be the observers of what was true for him and adding some methods that could help him relax and de-escalate when he noticed himself getting wound up. He was an angry person and we could see

Todd,

Overcoming

Intense Anger 31 begin within: emotion

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CASE STUDY 02

Living from the inside out

the reasons for that truth. By simply observing what was true and having validation and empathy from me in therapy, Todd noticed that he was feeling less reactionary.

He had reduced his typical reaction of yelling or cursing at those who “made him angry”. But it was not the place for therapy to end. He was still having outbursts and feeling bad about things he said and done to his wife and kids. He had not found any resolution with the neighbor, with whom he felt he was in constant conflict. And he felt confused about what he could say or do regarding his father and the unresolved issues that had never been spoken about between them.

We agreed together to shift the focus from talking about what made him angry to what he might do to have less experiences of that feeling. We began to discuss whether other people can make us angry or whether we bear some responsibility for the emotions we feel or at least the intensity of those feelings. We generated some questions around what role expectations have in what we might feel. We re-looked at the notion of “common principles that everyone should know”, something we had agreed on earlier.

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In doing this we entered into a conversation that pointed out the difference between the real and the ideal. In an ideal world people would live up to principles, treat one another right and fair and show respect one for another. In the real world we all point to examples of how people fail to live up to those ideals. We also looked at how we fit into that category as well, not meeting up to our own standards of right and wrong, of fairness and respect. We watched a short video together of a lorry driver who drove daily in the streets of London and who…daily…lost his temper, honking, swearing and showing signs of road rage that were dangerous. We both laughed at the absurdity demonstrated in his inability to accept reality as it was, day in and day out on the streets of London. He kept thinking it should be different and kept being angry about the fact that it wasn’t. A lightbulb went on for Todd around this time. He decided to set aside his anger toward his neighbor and instead of ignoring the person as he walked past, he decided to offer a slight smile and nod, a signal that he was not as angry as before.

He was quite surprised to be met with the same from this guy who never had said a kind word in the past.

I could see that something had shifted in Todd, mostly that his sessions were about himself and what he was able to do, rather than others and what they were doing to him. He had made the realization of the difference between what is inside his control and what is not. Others are not…he and his emotional responses are. Todd ended therapy after about 7 months. A year later he wrote me an email saying that he had decided to go back to his home country to visit his dad, whom he had not seen in 9 years. A month later he wrote me again telling me that his visit had not really gone well, his father was still a jerk, but that he was glad he had gone. He had said things he needed to say. It resolved something for him and gave him some freedom as a result.

CASE STUDY 02

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Todd had gained an ability to self-regulate. It came from self-knowledge, the ways he looked more deeply into himself and his life. He saw what influenced him, what represented unresolved aspects of his past. He also gained self-awareness, the ability to recognize what he was feeling and how it set a pattern in motion that he could undo. He learned to redirect himself at critical moments rather than allowing things to escalate. Through the therapeutic process he re-discovered that he mattered and had value, not based on his behavior or some ideal or standard he held himself against. He saw through those temporary versions of himself, when he acted in ways that were out of alignment, to his truer, deeper essence, the flawed and perfect example of himself.

His anger dropped, his self-judgements dropped, he started liking himself more and found a freedom he didn’t know existed. He gained control through a method quite different than the feeling anger gave him…that of letting go of intense anger and the temporary false sense of power.

It is not unusual for a client to come in expecting to be “fixed”. Part of therapy is to discover the process of change. First we look deeply at what is happening. With empathy and without judgment we simply observe feelings, thoughts and behaviors. This provides the validation that allows us to move to an assessment of what is inside and outside of our control. Our inner life guides our responses...reduces our reactions. From there we can look more deeply again at what might be the deeper, unresolved aspects that influence what we do. We shift to unlearn old patterns while taking on new ways of being...and feeling good about the changes we see. The “fix” is really a change in the trajectory of our lives. We become closer to the person we want to be, closer to our whole true selves.

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The Therapist’S Lens

“To keep repeating a baleful pattern without recognizing that we are caught up in its loop, is one of life’s greatest tragedies; to realize it but feel helpless in breaking it is one of our greatest trials; to transcend the fear of uncertainty, which undergirds all such patterns of belief and behavior, is a supreme triumph.”

Libby Sommer

Living from the inside out

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Hidden Emotion: The Subconscious Influence A close look at emotional intensity shows us one way that we alter our thinking. Every emotion has the capacity to become intense in a way that influences our thoughts and breaks the balance of the intuitive process. An unhealthy pattern is when an intense emotion can generate thoughts that shift from specific and situational to generalized beliefs that we hold in our subconscious about one’s self or others. We start making connections to past experiences, stereotypes and schemas (more later).

H i d d e n g u i lt

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Let’s use guilt as our example this time. We feel guilt when we believe we have violated our own value system, our own conscience, that which determines right from wrong. A low intensity guilt, say 3 or 4, will offer a reminder that we have done something we shouldn’t have, and we should try not to do it again. We might feel bad, which might serve as a catalyst to do what we can to make amends. Apologies come from guilt. We will maintain the connection between the thing we did and the guilt we feel. When we are experiencing guilt at a level above 6 it is likely we have done something which then connects us to that which we have done in the past. Rather than feeling bad about what we had done in this instance, the intensity of guilt tells us that we are repeating behaviors and it is me who is bad. The switch is from seeing our specific behavior, to a generalized way we see ourselves as a person. We have internal negative self-talk having come from beliefs that have formed about the kind of person we are…to have done something like this…again. Guilt is no longer a self-correcting influence; it has become a self-destructive interpretation of our character. This can create a guilt-based subtext to everything we do, a system that is self-fulfilling. The more we are guilt-based, the more we will have trouble seeing things as situational, single occurrences, and, instead we will behave in accordance with that belief about ourselves and perpetuate the belief itself. If it is a core belief, we have a subtext to our lives that tells us that we are a bad person. Our behavior then falls in line with this belief we have. It can take us away from living in the present and substitute old ideas, a priori, as an influence on the way we function. Unlike rage, which is there for all to see, intense guilt is hidden in the form of self-loathing, self-hatred. Another example:

S

teve was in 6th grade when I first met him. I was a counselor in the school he attended. The principal had asked me to meet him because of his disruptive behavior and his inability to change his ways, despite punishments and threats by teachers and mother. He was on his last warning before the school would expel him. He sat across from me in what appeared to be a state of indifference. I saw my challenge. He had been with adults before who talked to him about his behavior. How would meeting with me be any different?

CASE STUDY 03

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In graduate school where I studied to become a counselor/psychotherapist, one of my professors asked a question that, for me, became a guiding principle in the work I do.

She asked, “how do we make it safe for our clients?” I believe it was in that question that I decided not to ask Steve about his behavior or why he was about to be expelled.

Instead, I started complaining about the basketball team I liked, guessing he had some opinion about the trade they had just made. I dropped a few cuss words in the midst of our talk…then apologized for talking like that. He said it was alright and that he cussed too. So, I said it’s Ok in here then…no one else could hear us anyway. When the session was over, and we had not mentioned a word about the trouble he was in…I asked him if he wanted to come back in a few days…his choice. “Think about it,” I said, I can’t do much to help if you don’t want to be here.

Steve,

Without knowing much about Steve, his life, and the choices he was making, I knew that he was not defined by the behavior he was exhibiting. Beneath that well defended façade was a kid who was scared and couldn’t show it. My priority was to establish some level of trust and rapport because without that we would never get to talk about what was really going on for him. I would have to use patience and to withstand the ways in which he tested my reliability. I had to believe what I knew to be true, that I could not fix him and no amount of will or force would provide a solution.

A Boy with Hidden Guilt

35 • begin within: emotion

Steve did come back to meet with me, and we continued to meet once or twice a week until the end of that school year. He had made it, but what was more important was that he was able to open up to me and in doing so, gain awareness of the feelings that were operating under the surface and the ways it influenced his behavior.

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CASE STUDY 03 36

Living from the inside out

While not particularly academic, Steve was a smart person, older than most 12-yearolds I had met. Once we started to reflect on and talk about his inner life, his feelings and the ways he thought about things, he showed a remarkable insight and an ability to apply what we were learning together about who he is.

At some point, I asked him if we could do something I called a “personal history” of his life from his birth until now. Through an interview process I wanted to know details and memories he had in a chronological order. We gave a lot of time to it and when he would want to jump ahead, I insisted that we would have time for everything he wanted to tell me. I wrote down everything on a timeline, making a record, concretizing his story. Sometimes at the beginning of our meeting I would ask him a bit more about something he had told me the last time. I wanted him to know that I was listening closely and that I was interested in the truth of his life. Silently, I acknowledged his shift in moods from passion to indifference as he told me aspects of his life that were painful. His dad had left his mother and him after a big fight when he was 7. The fight had to do with how differently his mother and father felt about raising him. He heard it all and it became the moment of change in his life where the father he loved went out the door and rarely came back.

More than once his mother let it be known that it was his fault that his father left.

He told me with a stiffened indifference, as if it was no more important than when he started pre-school. I waited until we were completely through the personal history to ask him if he wanted to go back to talk about anything again, suggesting that I could see that there were some difficult parts to his life.

d o u g l a s h o lw e r d a

Without seeing it coming, Steve found himself breaking down into tears, his face in his hands, unable to speak through his sobs. I sat there, tears rolling down my face,

trying to hold the space for him to speak. When he looked up after some time, I simply said, “A seven-year old boy is not responsible for the disagreements of his parents.

You did nothing wrong.” There were more tears of a different kind. It was relief, I believe, that feeling of fresh air in what had been a stifled room.

Steve made it through the school year, due to the good fortune of a teacher who coaxed him along and adjusted her expectations to be realistic for him.

CASE STUDY 03

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I saw him once, during his senior year in high school. Like old friends, we slapped hands and backs and allowed our eyes to meet, seeing deeply into that unknown space we all have… past behavior, beneath words…to where we truly connect.

The Therapist’S Lens It is easy to see how this boy had internalized words his mother had said to believe he was responsible for the break-up of the family, which resulted in the loss of his father in his life.

He was suffering from guilt and the message it meant about him. It was not his. Shifts like this can occur more readily with younger people, who need adults to offer context and perspective to their experiences. I felt fortunate that he unburdened himself of that guilt and false sense of responsibility. He had carried it long enough.

37 begin within: emotion

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Living from the inside out

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h i d d e n f e a r … l i m i tat i o n s w e d o n o t s e e As a psychotherapist I have learned that fear is often a hidden and damaging emotion. When we look past the current experiences and probe deeper, we very often discover fear. I suspect it is because we all have a need to feel safe in childhood. When safety is not established securely in childhood it continues to be threatened by aspects of the world we are in.

The purpose of fear is to keep us out of harm’s way. When we see a danger or a threat in our immediate environment it provides us with spontaneous actions to keep us safe. When we anticipate a potential threat or danger it is a key component in the assessment of risk. What is more difficult to understand is when the fear we carry from a past experience or not feeling safe as a child, is influencing the choices we make as we go through life. Without knowing it we can limit and restrict our choices by being influenced by fear of dangers that do not really exist. We become inhibited or hesitant to interface with life when we have buried and unexplored fears. This can be true of how we perceive the world around us, but also in how we think about ourselves. When we hold beliefs that we are not good enough we, unknowingly, allow fear to inhibit our interactions. (more about this later about beliefs). Learning to gain knowledge and awareness of fear and the role it plays in our lives can make a huge difference toward feeling empowered. One of the biggest areas that fear affects in our daily life is the influence it has on our self-esteem and selfworth. Part two in this book will explore the deeper version of that aspect, but for now…it is good to know that empowerment is about the facing and overcoming of unnecessary fears. So how do we do that? Here we go.

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If the purpose of fear is to recognize what we perceive to be a threat or a danger, it is to help keep or make us safe. Feeling safe within ourselves creates a security, a stability, even when we can never feel fully safe or secure in a world that is unpredictable and dangerous. It represents the difference between what is inside and outside of our control. Low intensity fear, between 1 and 4 on the scale, allows us to think clearly, rationally and to consider the best ways to address the problem that is causing the fear. It helps us to be alert, to see

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solutions and to act efficiently and effectively. High intensity fear, between 7 and 10, increases the likeliness that we will react without considering all there is to consider. Immediate intense fear is panic.

Long-term intense fear is paranoia.

Paranoia is a strong fear loaded with interpretations that makes it difficult to determine what is true. Paranoia produces thoughts that heighten fears. A paranoid person has little sense of internal safety and is unable to trust what is happening around them. A paranoid person interprets reality through the lens of their fear and mistrust.

Others can see the distortions in their perspective, but they cannot see it themselves, believing what they think. Trust, the key ingredient to finding a secure place within, is totally lacking in a paranoid person.

Trust begins with ourself and our own judgement, which is enhanced when we gain and maintain emotional regulation. While we can never fully trust others or the circumstances of life, any minute something unpredictable can happen, we can trust that we will know how to do our best to deal with the situation we find ourselves in. When we are empowered, we feel self-reliant, able to believe we will do what is necessary when we need to do it. It means that we can face each situation in life as it occurs. We are also realistic, knowing that life lives us, even in ways that might seem unfair.

39 • begin within: emotions

Few of us are paranoid, but many of us go through life without having developed a strong sense of trust in one’s own self. Without realizing the fear underneath, we can easily become cautious to the point where we are seeking security in much of what we do. With unnoticed fear the comfort zone becomes the place of our security, while exploration, risk-taking, experimentation and openness to new and different things become less an option we choose. Fear, often unnoticed, determines the limits of our lives. It produces a protective impulse and keeps us from being vulnerable. However, being less likely to be vulnerable, means we are less likely to grow and learn. Much of the joy of life goes undiscovered when we live in a chronic state of low-grade fear or insecurity. Having knowledge and awareness of our fears helps us regulate ourselves to protect ourselves when it is needed and to be open when fear has something to teach us. Vulnerability is the place of growth where we recognize our humanness and that of others. It is the place of intimacy, closeness to others who we recognize to be imperfect like we are.

Living from the inside out

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Painful Emotions When we come for psychotherapy we are in some kind of emotional pain and desire change. Sometimes our emotional pain is a direct result of the circumstances of our lives, but not always. When our pain becomes intense for long it also precludes the desirable feelings and shapes the lens through which we see the world. While it is realistic to feel emotional pain in a world that is fraught with problems, most often we balance that pain with pleasure and satisfaction to live in an emotional zone we might call “ok-ness”.

Mood Diagnostic manuals, like the DSM-5 or the ICD-11, define mental illnesses for the purpose of creating a common language and understanding. They are divided into two categories, personality disorders and mood disorders. Simply put, personality disorders are hard wired and are unlikely to change over time, while mood disorders are subject to change. Mood, a composite of emotion, is something most of us experience daily. A mood disorder is when we get caught or stuck in a mood that diminishes our ability to function.

There are different kinds of anxiety and depression that make up most of what are defined as mood disorders.

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When we pause to ask ourselves, “What is my mood right now?” The first line of answer is likely to be, good or bad. I am in a good mood, or I am in a bad mood. Sometimes the specific emotions are less accessible, beyond good or bad, and we are not sure what we are feeling. While frustration, anger, fear, guilt, disappointment, apathy and sadness might make up a conglomerate of what we are feeling, we might never go through a process where we figure that out.

Instead we just feel lousy or low or tired or cynical or bad. Sometimes it can be so normal that we don’t even realize that we rarely feel joyful or excited or pleased with ourselves or appreciative of what we have.

Most often, the painful or heavy emotions trump the good feelings we might have.

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Anxiety Let’s look closely at a type of fear many of us know…anxiety.

We have all experienced anxiety in some shape or form at some point in life. Being nervous, worrying about what might happen and feeling painfully excited are common. Often these experiences are connected to anticipation of the future. While the intensity of these feelings can become quite strong, they usually pass as the event passes. For example, we are nervous about the game we are about to play, until the game starts. We worry while driving in the rain until we are home safe. We are anxious about the party until we arrive and get into the flow of what is happening.

Where it really causes trouble is when the intensity of emotion is excessive and feels uncontrollable, persistent, intrusive, causes distress and impairs one’s ability to go about daily life. Anxiety is not fun and, in fact, steals the enjoyment of experiences from many of us on a regular basis. It does not allow for peace or full pleasure.

Anxiety comes on like an uninvited guest and grabs hold, mostly on the chest, neck or in the pit of the stomach. I have heard people describe anxiety like an octopus that has wrapped itself around my chest and squeezing and not letting go. The pain and awkwardness of it becomes a pre-occupation and makes it impossible to be present to a situation, let alone enjoy it. It doubles up, creating additional layers, when we add the feeling that others might notice or that we will always feel this intruder in our lives.

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Panic attacks are another way that anxiety plays out for people, and are extreme in different ways. The most extreme are called panic attacks. It is not something we would wish on anyone and has been described as feeling like one is losing their mind. What happens is that anxiety builds up to a point where it escalates suddenly.

Imagine the triangle being filled with water from the bottom. The higher it rises, the faster it goes…with less space to fill until it is full.

People who have had panic attacks experience physical symptoms like shortness of breath, shaking, sweating, blood rush from the head, tightening muscles in the chest and throat, an inability to make sounds that communicate effectively to others what it is that is

Living from the inside out

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happening. They may find themselves in a fetal position, completely shut down to the point of becoming unaware of anything that is happening around them. It is horrible to go through. The few cohesive thoughts that a person might recall are usually something like, “I am going crazy” or “I feel like I am going to die”. To those who experience it panic attacks feel like they last for a long time, when in actuality they generally last between 5 and 20 minutes. Panic attacks end on their own, there is little to be done to avoid it once it has hit a certain level of intensity. A bystander can attend to the physical safety of someone in this state by making sure they avoid injury. It can also be helpful for someone to attend to someone coming out of a panic attack with gentle touch, soothing words and tones, and reassurances that they are, in fact, Ok. As with many experiences of intense emotions, panic attacks have great ramifications in their aftermath as well as in the experience itself.

Review the list of likenesses to see which ones apply to panic attacks in the same way they applied to rage.

First, it creates a platform of the fear of it happening again. It also generates the unhelpful desire to control the possibility of it happening by believing if we can anticipate it, we can prevent it. It is the same pattern we call a self-fulfilling prophecy that we have talked about earlier.

Secondly, we quickly go from “I have anxiety about X…to I am failing again to manage my feelings, I am no good. It creates and feeds feelings of shame and self-doubt.

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A third ramification is that it feeds a question, “Am I going crazy?”

Feeling out of control and helpless to stop it can be interpreted as evidence that, in fact, “I am going crazy”, which is one of our greatest fears. Images of being put away in a padded cell haunt people in the aftermath of panic attacks or long periods of high anxiety. In the aftermath of a panic attack the potential for existing at a 4, 5 or 6 (in the triangle model) is quite high. A person can lose the ability to “re-ground” themselves to a calmer state where they can trust their perspective and feel a stable and secure sense of OK-ness.

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Unlike fear, which is most often generated by a source; a snake, an intruder, being alone in the dark...anxiety is produced by the fear of the feeling of anxiety, itself. Feeling anxious, especially having a panic attack, and not feeling “in control” is the catalyst for feeling more anxious intensity. Once we have felt anxiety, we are vulnerable to feeling it again. It is a spiral that escalates upward toward a feeling of panic.

High anxiety can bring us to focus so intensely on something that we lose track of the contextual aspects that keep it in perspective. Social anxiety, health anxiety and agoraphobia are examples of anxiety associated with situational stimuli that triggers anxiety past the point where it can be easily regulated. Remember, the triangle model tells us that the calmer we are the broader our perspective is. When we can contextualize a situation, think in ways that offer a variety of interpretations, we are more likely to choose a response that is what we want it to be.

Many of us have fears that exist within our subconscious. Fear is an active part of what we think much of the time, without really realizing it. When our feelings become intense, they start to dominate the thoughts we have and generate more of those kinds of thoughts. We can get “wound up” without realizing what is happening. In this state we can lose touch with our immediate experience and find ourselves “in our head”. Raising our awareness of what we are feeling is halfway to the solution.

43 begin within: emotions

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CASE STUDY 04

Living from the inside out

G

ena is a woman who experienced generalized anxiety disorder and suffered from an inability to have the feelings of OK-ness. Almost always she felt an underlying nervous feeling. It was stronger in social situations and included thoughts she had about her health. She found herself avoiding group situations, especially if she did not have a person to go with. She also spent a lot of time looking up medical advice on google when she had symptoms that concerned her. She came to see me after a friend talked to her about anxiety she was having.

The kind of anxiety Gena had is an example of how emotion, thought and the body are all involved when we find ourselves high on the intensity scale and lack the awareness and tools to bring ourselves to a lower level, a more relaxed state. Worry, the thoughts that come as a result of having anxiety, was an everyday part of what was going on in Gena’s mind. Worry is our mind’s attempt to gain a control that can never fully exist, that of anticipating accurately what has not happened yet. We create a pattern of behavior that is based on a false belief, that if we can only anticipate the bad that might happen, we can avoid it, and thereby gain or maintain a sense of control.

Gena,

Understanding Anxiety

Gena always felt like things were out of control. Anxiety has a lot to do with control, or the inherent lack of control that is part of life. Irvin Yalom says it this way, “Feeling helpless and confused in the face of random un-patterned events, we seek to order them, and in doing so, gain a sense of control over them.” A pattern forms as we feel more and more compelled to seek control while experiencing the fear of being unable to accomplish that illusion. The deep-seated truth is in the dance of life… we live life (what we can control) and life lives us (that which is outside of our control). We can have partial control, mostly of our inner life. When we become aware and accept that all potential realities exist outside the realm of our control, we can let go of the anxiety that drives our worried thoughts.

44 • d o u g l a s h o lw e r d a

When Gena learned that her anxiety drove her thoughts, most of which didn’t need to be believed, she began to break the pattern that had become so automatic for her.

Together we substituted words for the self-critical script that played out in her head whenever she was anxious. She discovered what she was doing and began to unlearn the old ways and to learn new ways of thinking about herself. Just as anxiety can produce an upward spiral…into the top end of the emotional intensity scale, so can

the process be reversed. The more she broadened her perspective the more she could see what she was, inadvertently, doing to herself. Here are some things that Gena practiced catching herself doing.

Gena learned how to catch herself whenever her thoughts were focused on what might happen in the future. We called it “future-tripping”. She replaced it with focusing on things in the here and now, connecting to her senses. She learned to recognize that the old pattern only fueled her anxiety and led her down the thought-road toward catastrophizing. We called it “the road to catastrophe-land”. We also playfully sang the famous song Que Sera, Sera by Doris Day. The important words being... “the future’s not ours to see… que sera, sera… what will be will be.”

CASE STUDY 04

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She learned to be more skeptical of what she was thinking when it pertained to the imaginal domain, which the future always is. She found that anxiety also applied to many of the symptoms that kick-started her worries about her health.

She agreed to let the symptom play out over a two- or three-day period without looking it up on Google. She found that most of her symptoms were minor, not worthy of all the attention. The result was that she greatly reduced the amount of time and emotional energy that she spent on worry.

Gena learned to see more easily the thoughts that generalized a specific concern. She could let go of the feeling that she needed to look perfect before going into any social situation. She developed a mantra and would say, “good enough” when she realized it was taking too long to get ready for going out or going to work.

45 • begin within: emotion

For a long time without realizing it Gena used comparison as a way of assessing her own status, likability, attractiveness and place in the social pecking order. We worked to shift the emphasis from external to internal. She learned how to “catch” herself having thoughts that compared herself to others. She learned to ask herself, “Does this help?” as a way of helping her let go of that thought habit.

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CASE STUDY 04

Living from the inside out

Most of what we did in therapy was to increase her awareness. Early on, when the anxiety was strong, we agreed that she should worry for 30 minutes, and even write down what she was worrying about. After 30 minutes she could close the book and stop the automatic process by redirecting her thoughts toward something else. Later she turned her writing into a daily journal that included self-appreciations and positive statements about her experiences.

She learned to seek “Ok-ness” rather than expecting an amazing life and feeling like she was failing.

When Gena stopped psychotherapy, she had learned to fight back against the automatic thoughts that were fed by an age-old anxiety. She was re-claiming more of herself and showing signs of a new kind of optimism. Her work was not over, but she felt she had some tools and some life-style changes that gave her what she needed to practice breaking the old patterns.

It was a relief for her to realize that the mechanisms that drove her anxiety were just mechanisms and that many others struggled with anxiety as well.

The Therapist’S Lens 46 • d o u g l a s h o lw e r d a

Theories of therapeutic treatment vary according to the orientation of the therapist. My standard approach with anxiety is to address the mechanisms prior to considering the cause. We can discover tools and learn the mechanics of thought to disrupt the anxiety producing process. It may be that at a later point we look for the messages that formed beliefs which result in anxiety. Sometimes we can see easily and directly what the causes are, other times we never come to understand why we have anxiety. Anxiety is an emotion whose message is to pay attention. This can include many levels, existential questions about life itself.

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depression Depression is a real problem for many of us. Depression is a psychological condition that about 50% of us experience at some point in our lives. Teens are one age group who are likely to experience serious depression.

Depression is the name for a set of emotions and the way they affect our thoughts, our outlook on life, our motivation, our ability to concentrate, the way we feel about ourselves and life itself.

Sometimes depression has been described as the heaviness of unhappiness. Without fully realizing it, we might be feeling a combination of emotions (like sadness, guilt, anger, fear and frustration), but to us it just feels like a low mood. When we feel depressed it is the low mood that dominates our inner experience so that the desirable emotions like joy, excitement, fun and happiness seem to disappear.

Teenagers experience depression a little differently than adults do. Generally, teens have more mood swings and feel things more intensely than adults do. They also have less practice regulating their mood. Teens are also in an earlier stage of knowing themselves and their identity. Social acceptance and the fear of rejection makes teens vulnerable to low mood when social pressures are highest.

Depression usually causes relational problems with our friends and family, because people expect us to be different. Our feelings are changing what we say and do. Some people understand and are

47 • begin within: emotions

Depression often becomes a downward spiral. When we feel depressed, we start to care less about the things we are doing; like schoolwork, seeing friends or what we do for fun. When we lose motivation, we do less, which produces guilt or a sense of failure, which then makes us feel worse. It produces negative self-talk. A way we reinforce negative ideas we have about ourselves…like, “I am not good enough”. It is not uncommon to find ourselves feeling quite alone, not caring about things that we used to like doing. It might feel like everything takes more effort, like walking uphill while we are tired.

It can start to generate thoughts like, “what is the point?”

Living from the inside out

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empathetic, but some people do not understand and judge us for being lazy or having the wrong attitude. All these things can give us the feeling that things are getting worse and worse and that we are trapped, with no way out. Family and friends often do not know what is most helpful when we are depressed.

Feeling depressed precludes fun, it is tiring and frustrating. We want to feel better, but don’t seem to know what to do, or we think we know what to do but cannot get ourselves to do it. Sometimes the answer seems so obvious to us, yet, for some reason we just cannot change…it feels too hard. We start to see through the lens of depression, which tells us that life is a negative experience, that people treat one another badly, that we are living a meaningless existence. Things don’t make sense anymore and effort to do something feels like a waste of time.

We can sink very low inside the cloud of depression to the point where we feel hopeless and helpless. We see no good reason to keep living, especially when we are in pain, and we see nothing that will make it change, nothing we can do to feel better. Death might feel like a better option than life, a way to escape the feelings and to be less of a burden on others. It seems to make sense when we are deeply depressed and have lost touch with the joys and pleasures of life, the feelings of love and connection.

So, what can we do if we are depressed or know someone who is depressed?

First, it is important to know it is real and that we can get help.

Depression is treatable when we break our isolation and open up to what is really happening.

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Depression is not something we choose; it happens to us. It can come when we are young or old. It can come for no apparent reason, although sometimes there are reasons. It can last a long time or pass through like a temporary visitor. Some people talk about a sudden drop in mood where everything is fine and then everything feels

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like being in a dark hole, alone and scared. Teens do have more depression and mood shifts than older people and it leads to suicide more than most other age groups.

Some depressions are clearly connected to a cause, and are part of the circumstances of life. They might include grief from losses suffered over a lifetime. Because some depressions seem to come over people with no reasons that are obvious, treatment and recovery can be quite different for each person based on the way the depression is understood. Therapy for depression has two branches.

One branch is directed at the choices we make in the present and the affect what we do has on how we feel. It is understood that passivity feeds depression and that we benefit by acting in ways that increase the likeliness of gaining some pleasure. I have often used the phrase, “We don’t sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.” So, in this branch we focus on regulating our mood by making choices that improve how we feel, which also means exploring things we are doing that perpetuates feeling bad. Often there is resistance to activation therapy because depression de-motivates us. We do not feel like going swimming or cooking dinner, we would rather watch TV or lie in bed. Sometimes it means overcoming inertia in order to get some momentum and energy back. We say, “fake it until you make it.” Make yourself do things until you start feeling like you want to. Branch 1 has its limitations and risks, however. Making a list of the things I can do to feel better, while it might be true, can also increase the sense of failure that I have when I cannot rise above my depression to act. It would be irresponsible for someone to only offer these ideas as a solution for depression. Deep depression is heavy and does not respond to willing ourselves out of it.

49 • begin within: emotions

The other branch looks more at what is going on in a person’s inner life that might result in them shutting down. We look more extensively at what is going on that has led to this point, based on the premise that our inner wisdom is telling us something that we would benefit to know. Remember, coping is a good thing when we don’t know what else to do, but coping is not meant to be a longterm solution. I have often found people to be depressed when they

Living from the inside out

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have been coping too long in the same ways and are running out of the ability to continue as they have been. Reflecting on the past, looking for unresolved emotions, or ways of believing that inhibit a person from learning and growing. If we are shame-based, guilt-based or apathy-based we are likely to be depressed because our sense of worth is diminished. Deep down we do not believe we deserve to experience life in a good way, to have true enjoyment or a sense of accomplishment. Self-hatred feeds off self-directed anger and robs us of life energy. Therapy or talking to others about our feelings breaks the spell of isolation where we can face the shame, guilt and other deprecating emotions and beliefs. Like shedding skin, we can emerge from under the weight of negative and untrue ideas that we have come to believe.

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O

ne year ago, Maria moved to Vietnam with her husband and two children, the 3rd country they are living in since they left their home country 12 years before. Each time they have moved to follow her husband’s career. Maria was struggling to make this difficult transition. We discovered that she was grieving the loss of the friends and life she had moved away from, and that she was feeling resentment toward her husband and children because they were all doing very well in their job and at school. She was second-guessing her life choices, particularly her marriage and the influence it had on her moving away from her parents, siblings and culture. Maria had started a career before they left, which she had also abandoned to live and travel abroad. She was spending time alone after her husband and children went off in the morning and had little motivation to seek social situations or activities she had once enjoyed doing. For some time, she had been watching TV and sleeping throughout the day, rousting herself to be in a good mood for when her family came home. She and her husband were fighting more than ever. Maria was feeling more desperate and having thoughts that were unrealistic escapes from her current situation.

Maria,

CASE STUDY 05

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Isolation & Resentment

51 • begin within: emotion

It was clear from the beginning that Maria’s depression was circumstantial, that she was feeling that she was living a life that was not hers.

While interjecting “branch 1” solutions to help her activate her choices, we focused mostly on her underlying emotions, anger, frustration, anxiety and guilt. We could see how her imagination was being fueled by strong emotions to the point where she was living more in her head than in her body, in the here and now. It was empathy and validation that helped Maria settle down. Her emotions were real and were giving her information about herself and the life that was hers. We wrestled with the idea of being victimized by the choices that led to where she was, gaining insight into the part she played in the decisions that were made.

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CASE STUDY 05

Living from the inside out

She shifted some anger away from her husband which resulted in feeling more empowered to act toward her own wellbeing.

Maria met with me for 3 months and then came back after a break of 2 months.

She was clearly in a different place within herself and had found her way out of the depression that shaded her view and left her feeling unmotivated, isolated and helpless. She had begun to pursue interests and people of her own and to shape a life that was in line with what she wanted and needed.

The Therapist’S Lens One aspect of depression is grief. Grief comes when we experience loss. We often associate it only with the death of someone we love, or our pets. It is not always realized that we suffer grief from the loss of things that might become part of who we are. A house, a community of people, possessions that have symbolic significance or identify with can generate grief when we lose them in the course of life. We might also find ourselves grieving the loss of dreams we had for our lives or the unlived roads we chose not to take.

Life is full of loss, even when each new chapter of life offers new and different possibilities. We can give ourselves permission to grieve... to go through a process of honoring what we loved and have lost.

Unresolved grief can become depression... carrying the burden of our unhappiness.

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CASE STUDY 06

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“W

hat’s the point?” is a difficult question to answer to a 16 year-old who has been depressed for long enough to be failing in every aspect of her life. Hoa had been a good student and was quite popular with her friends, but during the previous 3 months she barely could get up to attend school and had little interest in participating or keeping up with friends or school requirements.

She would escape into long hours of sleep, or when she did go to school, find herself hiding and crying silently in the bathroom, confused and full of self-loathing. She had regular thoughts of ending her life and had gone so far as to pick a time (on her birthday) when she would give up and end her life.

Hoa did not want to come to therapy, nor would she agree to see a doctor who might prescribe medication. She had only agreed to come for one session, the condition her frustrated parents had negotiated with her, upon recommendation from me.

After a short time of stilted conversation, I recognized that I would need to be unusually direct in order to break into her sense of helpless apathy. I asked her pointed questions which assumed she was intending to commit suicide. I learned that the only reason she was keeping herself alive was because she was afraid of the act of killing herself. Her research on methods of dying painlessly had not offered her an easy way to open death’s door. She was afraid of the act and had regrets that she would shame her family, even though she was convinced she was a burden to them if she stayed alive as well. She was stuck, wanting to die but not knowing how and when to do it. She said choosing her birthday gave her some time to figure it out (it was in three months).

Hoa,

Undiscovered Trauma 53 • begin within: emotion

I validated how horrible she felt and how it had become a downward spiral which only seemed to end in imagining death or catastrophe of some kind. She had not felt another person could understand the pain and darkness she felt. She agreed to come back. I would talk to her parents and the school to arrange for the time off and we would meet again in a few days to learn more about what it was like for her. As a way of aligning with her and validating the pain she was in, I made the recommendation that she take a leave of absence from school for the next 6 weeks. Rather than facing and failing to meet responsibilities every day, it might be worth it to see if she felt any

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CASE STUDY 06

Living from the inside out

different if we removed any expectation for her to do anything other than deal with her depression. I also was able to offer her words that described her inner experience which were difficult to come up with on her own.

Hoa and I met for the next 8 months on a weekly basis. We continued after some interruptions to therapy for a period of more than 3 years. While having a few short periods of energy and optimism, she was depressed most of the time we had worked together. For Hoa, depression was like carrying a backpack full of burdens uphill toward a place she did not want to go. She continued to go through the motions of life, doing what she should, without feeling a way to have that life represented her wishes and desires. She had resigned herself to how difficult life was and relied on therapy to find the fix that seemed so elusive.

She did OK for a while, but 3 years after she started therapy she struggled again, feeling suicidal, helpless and hopeless to change her life. Only then was able to reveal that she had been sexually molested when 13 years old. She had repressed the experience, turned away from its memory. It had undermined her ability to feel good about herself or safe in the world. It was traumatic and undoubtedly contributed significantly to her depression.

Hoa moved away with her family and was able to continue therapy that helped her to address what had happened to her. I trust that she is feeling less depressed and discovering more about herself with support and time.

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The Therapist’S Lens

d o u g l a s h o lw e r d a

It is not uncommon for children and adolescents who experience sexual abuse to repress it. They are not developmentally prepared to understand and integrate what has happened. Most often self-judgement and self-loathing are what play out, without much understanding of the underlying reasons for those feelings. It is more common that sexual abuse survivors will seek out the support of therapy 10 or 15 years after it occurred, only then realizing more fully the impact that it had on them.

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Emotion-based influences We are exploring how emotional intensity influences our thoughts, and draws on deeper, less obvious, unresolved emotions from our subconscious. Most of us have a storehouse of emotions that we carry with us that come from our experiences in our past. This is our “emotional baggage”, unresolved feelings that live beneath our awareness and show up when we are triggered by an emotional experience in the present. Underlying emotions (i.e. guilt) can influence thoughts we form about ourselves (i.e. I behaved badly again), which ultimately shapes what we believe to be true (i.e I am a bad person).

Let’s look more closely at what those underlying emotions might be and how they hijack the experience of living life. Our immediate emotion is the fuel for the kind of thought we have. We are open to the influence of fear-based, or guilt-based or shame-based thinking, particularly if we are on the stream of consciousness end of the thought spectrum (more later). We create entire stories as seen through the lens of those emotions. Our deeper emotion-based experiences also serve as a kind of filter, blocking the energy of life and keeping us from experiencing desirable emotions like joy, peace, pride and awe. Those of us who are shame or guilt-based come to believe that we do not deserve to have positive experiences in our lives. We create self-fulfilling prophecies, becoming what we believe to be true. The hierarchy model on the next page puts these emotionbased influences in an order. Shame, guilt and apathy are at the bottom, filtering the most of life’s energy and shaping a low sense of self-esteem, what we believe we deserve.

55 • begin within: emotions

Some emotions rob us of the freedom to be ourselves and to share in the joys of life. None more than those of us who are shamed-based.

Shame influences us to believe that our value or worth is so low that we do not deserve to have a life that includes feeling good. Like a filter, shame strips a person of life energy, of joy, of self-acceptance, of the possibility of truly being one’s self. Shame holds the message that…there is something wrong with me at the core, in my essence, that tells me I do not have the right to expect good things from life,

Living from the inside out

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I am no good and I do not deserve much. Shame is often outwardly unseen, but is an inwardly harsh critic, whose message has the effect of reducing the right and the freedom we have to live our own life.

Guilt-based messages are similar, the biggest difference being that the internal voice of the critic points to our behaviors more than our essence. We are guilty because of what we have done rather than for who we are. It too is a filter that blocks the flow of life energy and reinforces the idea that we are bad in some way, not deserving of much. We interpret our behavior in ways that shifts our thinking from a specific mistake we might make (I should not have done that), to a generalization about who we are (I am a bad person).

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These underlying beliefs seem to feed off inner voices that we choose to believe. They may be similar to the voices of a parent or influential adult who communicated judgmentally when we were young. They now have become our own inner critics and serve to reinforce a core belief to our own detriment. Our guilt and shame prevent us from seeing a broader view of ourselves, as imperfect beings, who still deserve a life that contains joy and pleasure and to be free to be our whole and true selves. While some religious teachings say that we are sinners from birth and can only be forgiven by a divine God. Conversely, we might apply the innocence we recognize in a baby to our whole lives. Naivety and not knowing can lead to all kinds of innocent mistakes. It is only when we believe we are bad that we behave according to those ideas about ourselves. A guilt-based person fails to accept their mistakes as part of being human, and to be separated from a sense of their own value or worth‌and right to be their whole true selves. Our behaviors will never reflect perfection, but rather, that we can only learn as we go through life and we are bound to make mistakes. It is not our behavior, our performance, that defines who we are, but our ideas and beliefs can fool us into being less than we have the right to be. At our essence we are examples of the human spirit, with a birth-right to live our life in the best way we know how.

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Apathy-based influences speak about someone who has largely given up. The energy that it takes to live life is depleted and it feels like an effort to live day by day. Especially when we hold the false belief

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that we are supposed to know how to live and to get it right, we tend to tire, lose hope and shut down. We begin to believe it is better not to try than to keep trying only to fail.

The flaw in this thinking is often related to the ways we measure our successes and failures. Fixed ideas look for what reinforces our beliefs and assumptions while an outlook toward growth helps us to learn as we grow and maintains the motivation to do so.

Our Whole True Self Peace

Joy

Our Highest Potential

acceptance neutrality anger

Our Life Energy

As we get past the filtering emotions, we open to what is possible, and necessary to continue upward. We may not have realized that it does take courage to live. We may not fully understand how

apathy based life

It’s an effort to live.

I’ve given up.

Better not try. shame based life

I’m not good.

I don’t deserve a good life.

My value is low.

Fig 05: Emotion-based filters that affect our life energy.

57 • begin within: emotions

As you can see as you study the model, the higher you go the more energy sadness there is to approach what are the fear & anxiety best experiences of human potential. While fearapathy guilt based life based and anger-based My behaviour is wrong. guilt influences tend to limit the Guilty of what I’ve done. energy that life offers, they shame are less filtering than shame, Generalising my mistakes into patterns. guilt and apathy. Anger can even serve to energize a relationship to life by wanting to influence it according to values that are important for the collective, fairness and rightness. However, if we are anger-based we will often sabotage ourselves by over-reacting, adding anger that is not relevant to the specifics of that situation. Fear, while meant to be a mechanism that keeps us safe, can become a lens through which we see others, and life itself, with suspicion and mistrust, when we are fear-based.

Living from the inside out

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acceptance is an active choice that we can learn. Each step in the hierarchy leads to the next, where we get an increase of energy from life itself. Joy, peace, and love are the experiences we have more of when we get unstuck, out from the mire of the emotion-based beliefs that would keep us from knowing our whole true selves.

Psychotherapy can be the process that guides awareness toward overcoming the emotion-based beliefs that distort reality and limit the choices we have to live life fully. We can get unstuck by challenging what we have come to feel and believe about ourselves.

E m o t i o n s : C u lt u r e , P e r s o n a l i t y, Gender & History It would be naïve to talk about emotions, emotional intensity and the effect that they have on our thinking and behavior without considering the variances that exist between people based on the socialization of their culture, the natural aspects of their personality and gender.

History, particularly the exposure to traumatic experiences, like famine or war, can affect how we come to express emotion, even generations later.

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While this book is advocating equanimity, defined as mental calmness, composure, an evenness of temper, especially in difficult situations, as an ideal...reality includes perceptions that hold a high value for intense emotions, or, in some cases, the denial of emotion.

For example: Some say that someone who is extremely angry is being more honest in what they are saying and doing because they are less censored. They are speaking from their deeper truth. Some would also say that emotion disturbs rationality, making what is objective into what is subjective. Some hold that the idea of equanimity flattens out personality, reduces the value of some cultural traits, or diminishes aspects of gender differences that then create a bias.

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People have asked me if equanimity applies to desired emotions like joy, excitement or passion. Didn’t Joseph Campbell say, “Follow your bliss”? People ask, “Shouldn’t we want to feel as good as we can?”

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Isn’t it true that some cultures express emotions more freely than others? Is it not also true that in most cultures women are socialized to express feelings more freely than men, to cry or to show affection?

To answer these questions let’s look more closely at the ways we “control” emotion. Let us look at methods of how we influence what we feel.

Repression Repression is what people do to push an emotion below the immediate level of consciousness, to deny them in the present. It is done to cope with emotions that we feel have the potential to overwhelm us. Some of us have experiences in childhood that we are not developmentally ready for. It is a remarkable tool that helps us to manage through life when we are faced with duress and stress that we do not know how to deal with. This can be learned in childhood, usually from observing parents and adults who are repressing their emotions and can turn into a way of managing the influence of emotion on our thoughts and behaviors. What starts as effective coping becomes a problem when the repressed emotions which exist under the surface intrude into our daily lives. They do not go away.

Coping methods, while helpful in the short run, are not sufficient as a way of functioning over a lifetime. Repressed emotions are the baggage we carry beneath the surface that affect our lives when we are triggered or generate patterns that are ultimately limiting or destructive. We have talked about shame-based and guilt-based orientations, where emotions feed into beliefs about who we are and what we deserve.

59 • begin within: emotions

Repressed emotions are often the work of psychotherapy. We work to discover which emotions are playing an active role beneath the surface and what it might take to resolve them. We also have to learn how we have worked to maintain our control over those emotions in order to open up and relearn a more fluid way of experiencing and expressing emotions as we live day to day. Repression takes a lot of energy and can create an over emphasis on the cognitive process or result in unhealthy methods of avoiding our deeper feelings.

Living from the inside out

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Let’s look at how cultures or genders are socialized to promote the idea of repression as a way of managing emotion. It might happen when a large group of people go through an extremely difficult time in their history, as has Vietnam. When nearly everyone is suffering, from war, famine or lack of opportunity, the collective way of coping is to create norms around emotion to restrict or repress them in order to survive. Verbalizing complaints, crying, exhibiting anger, frustration or hopelessness are understood to be unhelpful in the face of suffering or danger. Resilience requires an ability to look past the immediate situation with an eye to the future. It implies that the best way to do that is to repress the emotions that might arise as a result of the circumstances that are largely outside of one’s control.

The importance here is to see this as a valuable and necessary way of coping, which is always meant to be a short-term solution, not a sustainable way of living an empowered life.

Sometimes, those who have endured the hardships of life continue the ways of functioning that got them through. To generations that follow, it can feel like an unnecessary form of control, to repress emotions that are normal. They might feel that repressing emotions creates limits that are not based on the circumstantial realities of the present situation. A generation gap can come as a result; the generation who have repressed emotions to survive might clash with the generation who might feel free to respond to life the way it is now.

The need for control can be the by-product of emotional repression.

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With a similar argument, it could be said that men in many cultures have been socialized to maintain functioning at the expense of knowing and expressing emotions freely and spontaneously. This may point to an underlying influence on why men have tended to be unfairly dominant in social institutions and family units. We can only speculate, but it is reasonable to see emotional repression as a way of maintaining control of one’s self, and thereby controlling the social situations and people around them. Men are likely to be socialized not to exhibit “weak” emotions such as sadness, fear or tenderness while it is often true that women are socialized away from expressing “threatening” emotions such as anger or authoritative assertiveness.

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In any case, emotional repression shifts the emotion from the conscious to the unconscious, from the present to the future. These emotions lose track of the influences that created them, but show up at other times in life in behaviors and actions that do not seem to correlate to the circumstances of the life being lived. They are how we become emotion-based, having a subliminal subtext to the ways we live life.

Restraint If repression has its consequences for the individual and society, even though it may be a useful way of coping with circumstances, what about the value of restraint? Restraint differs from repression in that it is a moderation rather than a denial of an emotion. We benefit from governing the degree to which we allow ourselves to feel the full intensity of our emotions. Awareness of our emotion and the level of intensity is key. When we have an emotion as a result of an experience that triggers us we can best regulate that emotion when we pause long enough to recognize it. That is why counting to 10 when we feel a surge of anger gives us the opportunity to respond rather than to react to what is happening. Awareness is 50% of the solution.

Sublimation is a form of restraint. It is when unacceptable urges are transformed into more acceptable behaviors possible resulting in the long term conversion of the initial impulse.

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It applies to positive feelings as well. While it is less desirable that we tone down happiness, excitement, joy, or even peacefulness, there is a long-term benefit to doing so. Research in the field of positive psychology points to a phenomenon that occurs when we pursue positive feelings. Simply put, the activities that produce happiness, or some similar desired emotion, lose their capacity to create the same intensity of that emotion over time. The excitement we felt the first time we bungee jumped or snow-boarded down a slope is diminished if we simply replace that experience with the same.

A fabulous meal is not as fabulous when we have had it for the 30th time, particularly if the time span is close together. It strongly suggests that pursuing desirable emotions has limits, and that novelty becomes a part of what influences what we feel. We could

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say that the emotional intensity of happiness at a 7 or 8 inside the intensity scale, has a similar effect as an undesired emotion. We lose perspective, even if we might find temporary pleasure in producing the emotion we desire.

Addictions of all kinds are examples of this mechanism. The first phase is we find it pleasurable to take a drug, drink alcohol, gamble or other pleasure producing activities. The second phase is when we learn it takes more of the same activity to reach the same level of pleasure. The need to increase the activity, the stimuli, continues until a major shift occurs. The danger exists when we get to the point where we have fed our feeling of pleasure to the point where not feeding it becomes painful. The pleasure is no longer a kind of happiness, it has become what we need to keep from feeling horrible.

Another way to consider this is to see the difference between longterm and short-term ideas of positive emotion. A deeper, more sustainable form of happiness might include the painful aspects of suffering through the difficult experiences of living. It is not when we avoid or hide away from how hard life is that we find wholeness or completeness. It is when we are able to integrate the joys of life with the sorrows, the highs, without losing track of the lows, for ourselves and others. Positive psychology’s research points to a form of happiness that comes from full engagement in activities that have meaning and value to the individual. In maintaining a broad perspective, we can temper, restrain and experience emotion as a part of our larger psyche, which includes the thought process and physical connection to the here and now.

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When we are empowered, we are experiencing our emotions as a source of information that responds to the situations of living. We regulate those emotions to maintain steady continuity of perspective and to avoid the problems that come with emotional intensity.

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A c c e p ta n c e a n d e x p r e s s i o n When we regulate emotions and have access to what we feel, we find ways to express them with fluidity. Emotions come and go, and like the weather, we feel something today and other feelings tomorrow.

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We communicate emotions in our voices, our words, with our facial expressions and our movements. Art, dance, theatre, film and literature are also great outlets for the expression of human emotion.

Fig 06: Repression, Restraint & Regulation

Fear of Overwhelming Emotions Avoiding Emotions in the Present, they intrude in our lives in the future Involves a lot of energy, producing exhaustion in the long run Used as a way to mantain control Coping Methods

Baggage we carry beneath the surface Unresolved Traumatic Experiences Generate destructive triggering patterns

RESTRAINT

s o c i a l i s e d & ta u g h t

R E G U L AT I O N

accepted & expressed

Moderation rather than denial of emotion Awareness of emotions and their level of intensity

Express emotions with fluidity Mantain a continuous and broad emotional perspective

Sublimation: to transform unacceptable urges into acceptable behaviours

Experience emotions as a source of information

Governing and controling the degree and expression of the emotion

Value painful emotions as well as positive ones Sense of Completeness

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REPRESSION Denied & Unexpressed

emotions

BODY

intuition thoughts

body (senses)

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”

Nietzsche The triad of thought, emotion and body, each representing a part of a collective wholeness of the self, is an important concept. They overlap and influence each other in ways that we are learning more about all the time. While we might be less likely to identify the body as a part of our inner psychology, it is important to see the inter-relatedness it has with emotion and thought. It has its own entry-point to understanding what is going on in the mind of a human being. It is also the part of ourselves we can turn to when we are caught up in the emotionthought continuum....living too much inside our own heads.

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Somatic Psychology is a branch of psychology that emphasizes the body/mind connection. Of particular relevance is the way that unresolved emotions, what we have called emotion-based influences, affect our body as well as our thinking. In simple terms, the hormones produced by stress, anxiety, worry, anger, guilt, frustration, shame and even apathy have an impact on our health and even our life span.

Unresolved fear and anxiety continuously tell our endocrine system to produce hormones which are meant for cases of emergency, to activate the flight, fight and freeze method of survival. The wear and tear on the body, as compared to people who do not suffer a life of

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fear, anxiety and worry, means they live 7 to 10 years shorter. Chronic depression can be more dangerous for physical health than smoking or drinking alcohol. Many physical illnesses cannot be diagnosed without understanding what emotional or psychological factors that are part of the symptomatology of the individual.

As opposed to producing stress hormones, we can also produce relaxation hormones. Research has shown that people who meditate are less likely to get cancer. People who are physically active are less likely to get depressed. People who have emotional support from people that love them are less likely to get heart disease.

Brain research in the past 20 years surpasses what we have known about the way the brain works and its impact on the thoughts and feelings that we experience. We know that neuropathways correlate to patterns of thought and behavior. While neurotransmitters tend to follow well-worn paths within the brain, there is a plasticity that allows for the continual adaptation to new and different stimuli. We are not trapped or fixed in the patterns that have formed. “What flows through your mind sculpts your brain.” Rick Hanson in Buddha’s Brain.

Our brain is not isolated, but rather, part of a system which includes our body and its response to the world we are in. Our mind is what the brain does.

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Remember the Thought/Emotion/Body triangle…the center of which represents the balance, where we function from our intuition. Many of us get caught on the continuum between thought and feeling.

Intense emotions generate a kind of thinking that increases that emotion...the upward spiral on the intensity scale. What gets left out, forgotten, is the experience of our body. We get caught in our head, thinking and feeling, and lose track of the things around us. We quit seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing and feeling with the sense of touch. It then seems important to come back to our senses, to re-engage the world we are in at that moment in time. There is a power in emotion that takes us out of time and place, into the past or the future causing us to neglect the present. For many

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people, a way of re-balancing the triangle of Thought/Emotion/ Body is to redirect oneself to the senses. There are guided mindfulness practices, which help to slow the mind down, to reorient to our senses and to gain some relief from the dominance of the intense emotions and what they would have us think.

Anxiety can be an emotional state where we get “trapped”, unable to stop worrying or seeing through the lens of our hyper-vigilance.

Righteous indignation (a form of anger) is another example. It is anger that feeds on itself because the reasons for our anger are both valid and unresolved. It continues unabated in our imagination, reinforcing itself, creating a cycle, without realizing the negative effect of that anger on one’s general perspective of life. Our body language reflects those unresolved emotions, even to the point where it affects our posture and facial expression. Shame, guilt and apathy-based emotions, the emotions most directly connected to our sense of worth, result in shaping the body, the way we walk, the position of our head in relation to our shoulders and spine, our eye movement and eye contact with others, and our ability to be physically spontaneous in our movements.

Coming to our senses

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When we come to our senses we engage directly, experiencing the present moment and what is in it. It requires concentration and a controlled mind. When we are really seeing, tasting, touching, smelling and hearing the world around us we are present, we are fully engaged. When we are unable to set aside our pre-occupations in order to fully concentrate (which happens when we are depressed or stressed), less intense focus is still helpful if it engages one or more of the senses. In the beginning it might be a purposeful distraction, but with time we can learn to redirect ourselves and discover more than what the emotion wants our mind to think.

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Obsession is a form of anxiety and a particularly difficult example of how we can get caught in involuntary thought patterns that we feel we cannot escape. It is also true with other high levels of anxiety, social anxiety or fears of flying. We experience a blurred reality and are unable to have direct experience with the world around us. Learning to reverse that process can be done by practicing meta-awareness at times when we are less anxious. By learning and practicing ways to focus, we strengthen the mechanism that we need when our anxieties rise. One practice, when we are out walking, is to look for a particular color or shape, or the differences in doors from one house to the next.

Sometimes we count the animals we see or increase our awareness of bird sounds. We can all learn to inventory the feelings in our bodies when we are walking, sitting or lying down. When we increase our awareness of minor aches and pains, we naturally adjust ourselves to positions and postures that are better for us. Much of what we experience emotionally can be understood and improved through awareness and adjustments of our bodies. Concepts like being grounded and centered refer to physical activities that have cognitive and emotional manifestations. Balancing ourselves physically supports the ways we regulate and find equanimity in all aspects of our being.

While it is true that there are negative effects of unresolved emotional issues, we also know that there are practices that are directly correlated to holistic health. Many have been drawn from age-old practices such as Tai Chi, Yoga, Qigong, Aikido, and other martial arts. Breathing techniques are associated with all the practices that bring the body into consciousness. And, of course, there are physical activities that we all know that generate serotonin and have the result of relieving stress in our lives; running, swimming, dancing, hiking, and all kinds of athletic and other forms of exercise.

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Practices which approach psychological health through the body include many kinds of massage, Reiki, the Alexander technique, Cranial sacral therapy, Physiotherapy, Chiropractic’s, The Trager method, the Bowen technique, Rolfing and the Feldenkrais method.

All these practices increase body awareness and help us to move consciously.

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Alexander Lowen talks about finding a “golden mean between spontaneity and control” that allows for a natural grace, a coordination of our inner and outer worlds. Because “the body is naturally expressive, it is constantly changing to reflect its inner feelings.”

Intuition is what occurs when we balance an awareness of our thoughts, emotions and bodies. Each contributes information to the decision-making process. We seem to know what to do without fully knowing how we know. It has been referred to as “flow” and described as a kind of inner freedom that occurs when we are not fueled or filtered by aspects of ourselves. It is a part of empowerment, where there is no hesitation to act spontaneously, assertively and authentically from a position of confidence and self-awareness.

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CASE STUDY 07

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I

Tony,

have met with Tony on and off over a 5-year period. He struck me as intellectually intelligent while also struggling to maintain a sense of order in his life. He was creative and spontaneous, but had difficulty maintaining stability in his work, managing friendships and meeting up to his own expectations. He could see his own gifts but lived frustrated with his inability to use them effectively. He often felt like he was failing, that the life he wanted and imagined was just outside his grasp and he was constantly sabotaging his efforts to make improvements on himself. Therapy, for Tony, was an opportunity to put ideas into words that gave him insight into himself.

He dominated the sessions, often following tangents and talking louder as he came to realizations that felt good to him. He often thanked me for listening. It was clear that he wanted to discover within himself what he might do to change. I did offer reflective feedback and ideas of ways he might structure his daily life but was careful not to impose my ideas on his process. He would often show up in an emotional crisis and come to therapy a few times until things had settled down.

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After about 2 years of not seeing him, he requested a session. His issues were not unlike what he had said to me 5 years earlier. His emotions were intense (mostly 5 or 6), it was difficult for him to maintain focus on one topic or carry out what he had planned to talk about in therapy. He told me he just needed to talk, to express his thoughts to someone who would listen. While I do understand the value of venting to let go of strong feelings, this time I decided to set some conditions for the therapy session, to add some controls that I felt were lacking. I requested that we adjust our chairs to sit directly in line with one another, closer than is usual, and that he maintains eye contact with me as much as possible and return to eye contact as soon as he realized he was looking elsewhere. I also asked him to limit the volume of his voice, modeling a volume that was appropriate for the distance between us. I told him that I would occasionally interrupt him if his eye contact was lost for too long or the volume of his voice began to increase. I also suggested we sit with our backs straight and our legs in front of ourselves to create a form of physical symmetry.

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It was not easy for Tony to comply with these restrictions, but he trusted that they were meant to benefit him. I wonder if he would have agreed had I not developed a relationship with him over a period of time. I did remind him several times each session until it became part of what he did on his own. I saw a great deal of change in Tony during the 8 sessions we met under these conditions. More change than I had seen in the years prior. The connection between us became stronger and he expressed

The Therapist’S Lens We can learn to be grounded, centered, balanced, present and aware of our inner and outer experiences through our body. Often, it is the part of our psychological wellness that we can turn to when we find ourselves caught over-thinking or caught in an emotional storm. Therapy often starts with exploring emotions and thoughts and ends when we bring our body into our awareness. Much of our healing comes through our bodies.

CASE STUDY 07

to me how important it felt to see that I was listening to him and feeling what he felt.

It stirred up thoughts and memories of his parents and how poorly they listened, and examples of talking past and around him, minimizing his accomplishments and dismissing his aspirations. While he had come in wondering if his problem was that he had ADHD, he was discovering what it meant to maintain focus through engagement and connection, his senses being vital to the process. While my early experiences of him were that he was talking loudly into space, and that I was a bystander that could hear him, this set of sessions he was talking directly to and listening to me.

Early sessions were about venting emotions and discovering the flaws in the ways he was thinking, gaining understanding and insight, and willing himself toward better behavior. These sessions were about what was happening in the room.

We felt a more intimate connection. His body language became more relaxed, his voice became softer and more nuanced and the pace of the interaction with me slowed, feeling less hurried than before.

He also saw the difference in himself and the ways he was interacting with those around him in his life. I believe we discovered something significant together…that the answers are not out there, in the form of cognitive solutions…the answers are right here, in the form of present connection to people and place. Yes, we want to make sense of ourselves and our lives and we do that best when we are grounded and balanced in the present moment in our bodies.

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emotions

thought

intuition

thoughts

body (senses)

What is on our mind?

When we consider the capacity of the human mind, it doesn’t take long to become awed. Thoughts and thinking are responsible for what we have discovered and invented, what we have conveyed in words of all kinds and in the languages of art and music. The mind pushes the boundaries of what we know, all the time striving to integrate and create order as it changes. The mind has proven to understand deep mathematical concepts, formulas that provide reliable principles for engineering and ordering the world we are in. The mind thinks thoughts in the hypothetical domains, expanding beyond reality as we know it. It is truly amazing.

Thoughts flow through the mind every waking moment of our existence. Like a stream, they flow on, uninterrupted. We never stop having thoughts, but like emotion, we can influence them with selfawareness. We can also understand that our thoughts are influenced by the intensity of our emotions and direct engagement of experience through our senses.

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Let’s look at the model on the next page. It shows us a spectrum of what our mind might be doing at any moment. On the right we see our capacity to will our mind into the tight focus of concentration. On the left shows how our mind might follow a stream of ideas without

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of

running

wondering

daydreaming

fantasizing

healthy

Less awareness of our senses.

co nt ro writing

conversation FOCUS: more stimulation, more focus.

videogames

Ability to concentrate through will power.

Allows us to touch the subconscious thoughts and feelings below our present awareness.

Requires effort, produces fatigue.

fueled by intense emotions Subconscious & unresolved issues are indulged by our undriven thoughts.

Fig 07: Our Mind, Degrees of Will Power

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driving

Focus on what we’re doing, while also having mental space to think about other things as well.

Creates space for our unconscious to emerge.

unhealthy

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cooking

will power

s ght ou th

strea m

ss e watching a movie sn u coloring io

ed l l

co n c

middle mind

reading

learning

healthy unhealthy

Avoidance of subconscious & unresolved issues.

clear direction. In the center are thoughts which come from our need to focus on what we are doing, but not so much so that we do not have space for ideas that are unrelated to the activity. The mind is always processing...making sense of and integrating what it is we are exposed to as we journey through life.

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Concentration, or controlled mind, is when our thoughts are directed toward a particular set of ideas through the use of willpower. We have a remarkable capacity to focus our attention on and direct our thoughts in order to gain a desired outcome. Much of what we learn and retain is related to how well we have engaged with or concentrate on the subject of study. With practice, humans can use willpower to sustain controlled thoughts for hours, but not without effort and the fatigue that comes from it. It might mean we are fighting off distractions or the influences of our immediate environment in order to maintain the direct connection to what we want to be thinking about. Writers, scientists, students and builders each attach

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themselves to the process of thinking in ways that require active willpower. We can also be engaged in a singular focus with less effort or passive willpower, based on the degree of stimulation it has for us. We are more likely to be engaged this way when there is activity, movement or an internalized challenge in mind. One measure of when we know we have concentrated or been fully engaged, active or passive, is when time seems to pass without noticing it. We might be engaged in something and then realize that it has been awhile since we noticed time passing. Time we spend in controlled mind creates a positive feedback loop, giving us the intrinsic reward of time well spent. It meets our need for efficacy...doing what we set out to do as well as giving us the true value of being directly engaged with life.

Not everything about a controlled mind is beneficial, however.

Concentrating for hours can be a way of avoiding or escaping unresolved aspects of ourselves. We can slip into obsession, a thought pattern driven by anxiety which keeps us tightly focused on minutia, having lost an ability to shift ourselves to a broader perspective. We might cling to the control we have while concentrating rather than feel the discomfort of thoughts we do not know how to integrate or which do not fit into our current sense of order. In a different way, not being able to control our thoughts, to concentrate, can also be a measure of what else might be going on in our inner life. When we are preoccupied with emotion-driven thoughts we find it difficult to actively focus our attention or engage fully in external stimulation. We might choose to use our passive will to seek high levels of stimulation in order to avoid what we have come to fear. Computer games and social media are two examples of ways that we are choosing stimulation to the degree that might be detrimental to our wellbeing. The difficulty we sometimes have getting our thoughts to focus can come as a result of unresolved aspects of our emotional lives.

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On the other end of the spectrum from a controlled mind is what we call, stream of consciousness. When our mind is not consciously directed, it wanders. It is our imagination that is daydreaming or fantasizing when we are not directing what we think about. It is more likely to happen when we feel little engagement through our senses,

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or are bored. How often do you find yourself in the inner world of your imagination, disconnected from the book you are reading, the lecture you are listening to or while doing a task that you have done many times before? We benefit from stream of consciousness because it creates space for the subconscious to immerge, helping us make sense of the perceptions we have of reality and the experiences that shape our lives. It allows us to touch into subconscious thoughts and feelings which exist below our present state of awareness. The creative process combines the freedom of open consciousness and a structure that directs or contains it. Like controlled mind, stream of consciousness has an active and passive version. In a passive version we are moving away from problem solving, being with what is...in our thoughts. WIth active stream of consciousness we discover we are problem solving and might experience “aha” moments when something suddenly makes sense, or decide what to say to someone we are at odds with. We solve problems and bring our deeper selves to the surface of our consciousness.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

Carl Jung Stream of consciousness can also become the default state if we are overwhelmed by intense emotions or are unable to redirect our thoughts when necessary. It can be an indicator of depression or anxiety. We feel disempowered and out of control if we cannot direct our thoughts well enough to accomplish functional tasks or follow a plan of our own creation. A depressed person might want to stay in bed alone with their thoughts, unable to direct them. So, there are forms of stream of consciousness that are dysfunctional, where we might feel unable to face what we have avoided or the truths that guide our process.

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If controlled mind and stream of consciousness represent two ends of a spectrum, we have a combined state in between. Middle mind is a state that often occurs when the activity we are doing requires some control, so that we can focus on what we are doing, while also having mental space to think about other things as well. Of course, there is a

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range, but this is the mental state for most of us most of the time. It is not possible to chronicle the sequence of thoughts we have even for a short while. Our minds jump around, go off track and then return.

That sorting out and integration process is going on all the time as we adapt to the new aspects that enter our lives every day. Middle mind allows us to attend to the tasks at hand, function, while considering unresolved questions within ourselves as well as the meaning of life… even as we live it. It might never be as satisfying as what we might experience on either end of the spectrum, but the value of stability, sustainability and “ok-ness” has its own reward.

The danger in middle mind is that we get good at and begin to value multi-tasking in ways that keep us from discovering what our mind is made of...the depth and expansiveness we can discover. When we neither go deep into controlled mind, nor do we allow ourselves to follow our thoughts, we might experience life as superficial, a set of tasks to follow, none of which are deeply rewarding.

Often, we are rewarded for having the capacity for having controlled thoughts, while we are considered “dreamy” if we are perceived to be in a state of stream of consciousness too much. Each state of mind has the potential to be beneficial in its own way, but detrimental as well. Too much controlled mind might be a form of avoidance, too much stream of consciousness is vulnerable to the influence of intense emotions or might mean we have temporarily lost our ability to direct our thoughts and behavior. Middle mind might mean we do not connect deeply to aspects of who we are or the world around us and need some more of either end of the spectrum, to engage fully or to allow our imagination to run. We can become passively functional.

All of this is clearer and most relevant when we factor in the effect of emotion on the thoughts we are having.

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“The mind is constantly and actively integrating and making sense of the experience of living.”

Douglas Holwerda

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Thought structures: schemas, s t e r e o t y p e s , b e l i e f s a n d m e m o r y.

Looking deeper into the thought process and what the mind is doing, we see that we carry an internal framework that allows us to use past experiences to interpret present situations and predict the future. This is particularly important because it satisfies a psychological need, that of making sense of what we perceive to be true, believing our own perception of reality. Humans crave order. Think about how difficult it would be if we cannot make sense or give order to what we are seeing around us.

Without realizing it we develop schemas, outlines of what to expect which help us to see familiar patterns, thereby reducing the burden of seeing and interpreting each situation, as if for the first time.

An example would be entering a restaurant. Our schemas would suggest that we would expect to eat a meal, to be sat at a table, to see a menu, to have our food brought to us and to pay for it after having eaten.

Stereotyping is the same process as it applies to people, we create generalized categories into which people fit. While these thought processes are helpful and occur naturally, there is a danger. The danger of schemas and stereotypes is that when they become too fixed, we live too much from what we expect, rather than what we are experiencing in “here and now” reality. When we pre-decide our responses, we become less present, disproportionately seeing the aspects of things that are consistent with our stereotype rather than as they are.

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Beliefs are an important internal structure that guide us to live with the need we have to make sense of our perspective of reality. We choose what to believe. They are ideas and interpretations that we hold to be true and which govern the decisions we make. Beliefs are less certain than knowing and hold a space that can change when we learn more. Sometimes beliefs involve trust or acceptance without proof or empirical evidence. Beliefs can also lie beneath the surface in the subconscious domain where we are less aware of the

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effect they have on the way we think of ourselves and the world we are in. (Sometimes, without realizing it, we hold a core belief that is damaging to who we are…for example, “I am not good enough”.)

We can take on entire belief systems, a cohesive set of ideas, that are organized around an ideology or religious teachings. It can create an inner security to know that others believe the same ideas, interpret and see the world in the same way.

Subconscious beliefs are deeper. When we look inward, we might discover beliefs we hold that are not part of what goes through our daily thought patterns. Insight is when our awareness is increased because we look deep enough to see what is hidden. Our schemas, stereotypes, beliefs and memories can exist beneath our awareness, as can our emotion, and influence the choices we make, how we live.

Beliefs we have about ourselves that live in the subconscious often come from messages we received as children (more about this in Part 3). When we raise our awareness, it influences the perception we have, giving us more information to factor into what we do.

Core beliefs refer to beliefs we have about ourselves, others and the world we live in often which are a reflection of our sense of self worth.

They are things we hold to be absolute truths, deep down, which then influence our behavior, often without realizing it. It is unlikely for someone who has a core belief of being unlovable to sustain a relationship with another person despite the feelings the other person has toward them. People who have a core belief that they are a failure, will be significantly less likely to sustain success in any aspect of their lives. Uncovering core beliefs can be a painful process, but also provide insight into the underlying beliefs that sabotage or support our daily functioning...particularly what we aspire toward.

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Memory plays an important role in the way we make sense of reality as we live it. Schemas, stereotypes, beliefs and belief systems are all housed in a memory system that allows us to connect the past to the present in order to interpret the situation. We know that memory can be very specific, a detailed snapshot of events that have previously occurred, and can be generalized, experienced less as a thought process and more as a sensation that might include emotions, senses

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with glimpses or whiffs of a past experience. Memories live in the body as well as the mind. It is our sense of smell that connects us to the past more than other senses. We might come across a smell that initiates a memory or a person or place. Memories are strongest when the initial engagement has been strongest. That is why a person might remember every detail of an emotionally powerful situation, romantic or traumatic.

Schemas, stereotypes and beliefs and memories keep us from being overwhelmed. They create order and help us make sense of the world we are in and the change that is represented in the passing of time. It is difficult even to imagine what it would mean to understand everything we experience, as for the first time. We might feel overwhelmed, confused and living in a constant state of uncertainty.

fixed & growth mindsets This brings us to consider another continuum that we might all be experiencing without fully realizing it. On one hand we have a need to know, to make sense of reality, but on the other hand, the world is beyond knowing. Time, itself, creates newness and experiences that do not fit into the schemas and beliefs we already hold. Every day, life is new. So, while schemas, stereotypes, beliefs and memory help us to bring order from the past to the present, we will still experience an uncertainty that is disconcerting and produces anxiety. Change is difficult, more for some than others. We find ourselves making choices that either are directed toward holding and maintaining what we believe to be true... or opening ourselves toward that which is new to incorporate into our belief systems. We embrace newness or we defend against it.

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A fixed mindset is characterized by a sense of completion, that our traits or talents are determined and cannot change with effort or development. This can apply to beliefs as well, that new information either affirms what we believe, and is therefore accepted, or is adverse to what we believe and is rejected. We might feel that we have drawn

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our conclusions and therefore need to defend what we believe in the face of criticism or other challenges. Being fixed includes the idea of being right. We know enough and nothing new will change our mind.

A growth mindset refers to the ability to see beyond our beliefs or schemas to the direct experience we are having through fresh new eyes. With a growth mindset we integrate what is new or different, adjusting our perspective as we learn from experience. A lot has been written about this concept by Carol Dweck, which points to a difference in the way that people live their lives, based on what happens in the realm of their thoughts. It suggests something we discussed in the section on emotions, that emotions are not separate from thought. Emotions influence the kind of thoughts we have and our tendencies to lean toward fixed or growth mindsets. We could say that fixed mindsets are defensive and protecting of ideas, often influenced by fear. Growth mindsets are not fear-based and might be fueled by some amount of courage. It is not easy to be open to a world that is complex and that is changing at an unprecedented rate.

Fig 08: Fixed v/s Growth Mindset

fixed mindset

growth mindset

Attachments to Conclusions or Outcomes

Open to The Integration of New Information

Resistant to Change Avoids Challenges

V S

Welcomes Change Sees Challenges as a New Opportunity 81

Proof of Being Correct

Inspired by The Success of Others Gaining of New Information

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Threatened by The Success of Others

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I have often used the expression, “Know that you know what you know and know that you don’t know what you don’t know.” It is a guide to find the balance. Understanding that staying in the discomfort of not knowing is the way that we stay open to growth, learning and change. A model scientist is one who can collect data that supports his/her theory but be equally accepting of data that will disprove it. It is the updating and integration of what we learn as we go that characterizes someone with a growth mindset. Experience is the teacher, wisdom is the outcome. It is when we live spontaneously in the present, open to what is and what is possible. Unfortunately, we also might close our mind and retreat to ways of thinking that exclude what is new or different, that of a fixed mindset. In the later stages of life, we may have difficulty relating to the world around us, being spontaneous or fully engaged in the present, or become negative that others do not see things in the way that we do.

“Life is an on-going process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make growth choice a dozen times a day.”

Abraham Maslow We seek objective truth to give us an orientation, a way of making sense of the world around us. Truth is a compass that guides the process of being human. What we call truth is directly affected by how well we know our thought process and how we are continually selfcorrecting, growing into an ever-changing set of circumstances…the changing reality we call life. While science has become the measure of objectivity, truth is elusive and difficult to prove. When we know that our perspective, which is subjective, our set of expectations and our attitudes affects what we believe we can adjust ourselves with the change that is inherent in life. We gather data as we go and can integrate what we learn into what we believe to be true.

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“Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe... what we believe determines what we take to be true.”

David Bohm

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A p p ly i n g s e l f - k n o w l e d g e a n d self-awareness to our thoughts Self-knowledge might tell us what our tendencies are in the ways that we think about things. We might seek order and rational systems that we apply to what we experience and how we make sense of life. We might also tend toward expansive thinking, imagination, a world of ideas that are less grounded in analysis or the need for proof. We all have some idea of how we think, how we interpret, how we make sense of the world and what is happening around us.

Self-awareness helps us see where we might be in the process of thinking. We might see what emotions are affecting our thinking.

We might see that we are defending our beliefs and closed to the integration of new ideas. We might see that our schemas and stereotypes are influencing our ability to be in the moment, responding in a new and fresh way to people and situations. We are both the “I” and the “me”. We are the book and the reader. When we learn to take a position to see what we do from the patterns that have shaped us, we open our minds to discovering our ever-changing selves. We become empowered to become our whole and true selves.

“The greates revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

William James

Patterns of Thought

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Without knowing it our mind is working all the time to create order and to make sense of what we are taking in. We can say that these mechanisms are set up to repeat themselves, not unlike habits. Many of those mechanisms help us adapt and integrate what we are coming to know as we experience life, but other mechanisms are places where we get stuck or have learned to repeat a pattern even when it works to our detriment. Let’s look at ways that our thinking can disrupt our equanimity, and become a pattern of dysfunction. Each of the problems in cognition are resolvable when we gain perspective and catch ourselves. We can change our patterns of thought.

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A c c e p ta n c e a n d w i l l : Y i n a n d Ya n g “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the strength (courage) to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Reinhold Neibuhr This prayer is part of what Alcoholics Anonymous uses as a theme.

Will or willpower is an important component to what makes us human. Will refers to our ability to apply effort in the direction of a desired outcome. It has had a lot to do with the ways that we, as human beings, throughout history, have shaped the world we live in. Will directs choice and creates change. It is the combination of motivation and direction. Ambition and determination measure the degrees of will. They can influence what we do and how we feel about ourselves. Will is oriented toward the future by changing what is... to what it can become. Will drives toward possibility, often in the form of measurable goals and focused intentions. We identify the ability to make change through the application of will or willpower as primary control.

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There are three common problems when it comes to the application of will: One is that we might find ourselves thwarted and blocked from our goal by influences that are outside of our control. We may not realize this and based on the desire to overcome obstacles as a way of reaching our goal, we double our efforts or rearrange our strategies.

Often these methods help us break through to accomplish the goals we set out to do. But, when we are truly up against obstacles which we can do nothing to overcome, we become frustrated, angry, anxious and discouraged and can feel trapped in the process of trying and failing and trying again. For those who have become accustomed to having primary control, the power to overcome obstacles, this can be a painful position to be in without the option of acceptance.

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The second problem is that goal orientation can focus our attention on particular outcomes that are attainable without asking bigger and broader questions about our ultimate goals, our higher-level intentions. In this way we can become accustomed to creating change

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4. Future

Broader Goal

What do I want?

Who am I now?

3. Secondary control

3. Secondary control

acceptance

nt

c

Immediate Goal

Tiredness Frustration Keep trying to reach immediate goal repetitively.

Confusion Non acceptance of the obstacles.

Dissapointment Anxiety Anger

c o

a 2. o b s t

Ability to see the broader goal and other ways to reach it.

ro l

Not using effort to make change.

See things as they are, with less attention to what they will become.

Sense of serenity or peace.

non acceptance

le s O ur utside o

1. primary control will power

To apply effort in the direction of an immediate goal.

Directs choice and creates change.

Fig 09: The Limits of Will...

Finding Acceptance

Motivation + Direction

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but may lose track of whether the change we seek is reflective of the change we really want. We can say that, “We lose the forest for the trees”. Societies have formed around desires that may bring financial gain to some who have mastered their ability to hit targets to goals that have been self-serving, but at the expense of the society at large.

Narrow focus precludes broad perspective…and goal orientation tends to narrow our perspective. It is not unusual for highly successful

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people to find themselves lost during the mid-life years when they realize that meeting goals is not the same thing as creating a meaningful life. Small successes do not always add up to a sense of satisfaction.

The third problem that comes from the application of willpower or control, is that it can narrow our focus such that we use it as a way of avoiding what we do not want to face inwardly. Avoidance keeps us from seeing or knowing what is unresolved in our lives. It keeps us outwardly focused and detached from aspects of our inner life.

We might measure our successes through the lens of those we impress, rather than from an inner source, an intrinsic knowing. It is also difficult to apply will to a process that is largely one of discovery, and increased awareness. We miss a lot when we are forcing ourselves to see.

In Eastern thought, will fits into the yang side of the duality. Emphasis is on the complementary nature of these two parts of a whole. Balance is the result of a dynamic process which shifts between the two parts.

Yang is often considered male, and reflects active, light, expansive and overt energies. It learns to give way to the yin side of the duality, much like will can learn to value the importance of acceptance.

A c c e p ta n c e Acceptance or nonacceptance is what we experience without the presence of willpower. This is called secondary control. When we are not using effort to make change, we are left with what is. In a state of acceptance, we see things as they are, with less attention to what they will become. Acceptance does not negate that change is occurring but does not seek to direct the change. As the prayer says, the benefit of acceptance is to gain a sense of serenity or peace.

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Acceptance is not as easy as it sounds. We will all experience times when we are at the limits of our will but have not accepted what is. It is the state of non-acceptance where we are feeling frustration, anger, disappointment, anxiety, confusion, tiredness and may find ourselves worrying. While we are not successful in applying will, we do not yet feel we can let go of the desired results.

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Will and acceptance are equally important responses to what circumstances indicate to us. Knowing when to apply our will and when to accept what is‌is the wisdom that knows the difference.

It is in the coordination of these two aspects of our relationship to change that we are most effective. We can and should use will to effect change, and we can and should accept that which is beyond our control, finding a serenity that helps guide the process and seeing our place in the world around us. When we find the balance of will and acceptance we broaden our perspectives to see the possibilities of our higher intentions, our ultimate goals.

Acceptance is not the same as approval. It is a painful truth that sometimes we have to accept what we would never approve, for the sake of our healing. Acceptance is always of what is true, but not always what is desirable. Letting go involves facing what is, accepting what is rather than clinging to something that is outside of our control, our willpower to change it. It might be in reference to something that has already happened or to what we believe we have the power to change.

In Eastern thought, yin is the acceptance side of the duality. Qualities are associated with the feminine. They might include, rest, receptivity, space and darkness. They compliment and participate in a dynamic process seeking balance with the yang energies inherent in life.

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CASE STUDY 08

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L

an is the director of an NGO in Vietnam, who originally hails from the United States. She is highly educated and has worked her way through the ranks of her employment because of her natural intelligence and dedication to working hard.

She told me that she was a high performer in school for as long as she can remember, encouraged by her parents and teachers.

At the age of 42, Lan is struggling. She decided to see if she can get some answers in therapy that she has not been able to find for herself about why she feels so frustrated with herself and her life. She came in with specific requests for tools, skills and methods to overcome the obstacles she was facing. She could not remember a time when she felt more helpless and now, she was scared that it meant that she was not really successful, but rather a failure.

Lan,

Lan had come to Vietnam three years prior to run an NGO that was staffed by Vietnamese, many of whom did not speak English. Most of them had worked for the NGO upwards of 5 years under 2 previous directors. Lan, whose family originated from Vietnam, was being brought in to help improve the numbers, measures of objectives, that were in line with the mission of the NGO and its current project.

The funders and sponsors were questioning the value of their investments because the company was not meeting up to the objectives and goals it had created. Lan had a history of success as a manager and seemed the perfect fit for this NGO whose performance was sub-par.

It became clear after a while in therapy that Lan was blaming herself for not being able to create the improvement that was needed in her company. She described how hard she worked, not leaving the office until early evening many days, coaching her employees patiently and with sensitivity to culture and difference, and setting up systems of communication that had been so helpful in other places she had worked. When I offered ideas that might reflect influences that were outside of her control, she would turn away from them, as if I was trying to sabotage her efforts.

The Art of Letting Go

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It seemed clear to me that the frustration, anxiety, anger and helplessness she felt came from a dependency on a belief she had that she could control an outcome through the power of her will. When I asked her directly whether she believed that, she told me that she believed in ‘grit’… passion and persistence is what it takes to

reach any goal. She came to tell me how her family had escaped Vietnam, in the immediate aftermath of the war. Her family had to start over in the States, knowing little English and having no proof of their credentials. Her father took work far beneath his training and experience and her mother focused on seeing to it that the 4 children were looked after and that they studied to succeed in school. Lan was the youngest and benefitted from having older siblings who led the way. They were all proud of her and to fail would be to fail them as well.

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I showed her the AA prayer…focusing on the three ideas; serenity, to accept; courage, to change; and wisdom, to know the difference. For the first time, she could see that pushing up against obstacles that she could not fully understand and could not control, was how she produced frustration and other emotions that were eating away at her. She knew she was tiring, and her fears were growing. She admitted to me that she was feeling desperate, like for the first time in her life she might not be able to accomplish what she set out to do. She was now more confused and disheartened than she could ever remember being. She told me that she was also frustrated with me, because I had not yet given her the tools and methods to solve the problem. Her idea of a solution would be to gain the strength to make the changes.

It scared her to think that she might have to accept that these changes were outside of her control…it was not what she had experienced before and it felt to her like giving up, failing. In a state of agitation, she said to me, “I don’t know how to do that.”

I thought she might walk away from therapy, but she came back the following week and asked me if I could show her how to accept those things that were outside of her control. She had found vulnerability, the place where change can occur.

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Like most things that are new, it took a while, it took practice, it took softening and feeling uncomfortable. I find the hardest work in learning to change, to break old patterns and beginning with a new set of options…is learning how. Many of us can see what we are doing wrong, or what produces the same old outcomes we are tired of but knowing how to change is another story.

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CASE STUDY 08

Living from the inside out

It comes from two important mindsets. One is to realize that we learn by living, we grow through having experiences that teach us, we can’t expect to know because we are perpetually naïve, innocent, discovering the ways to live life. The other is that, “we live life and life lives us.” It means that there is that which represents decisions we make and controls we can have…and there is always that which is beyond our control, variables of change that affect us that we cannot anticipate, but which require us to adapt and to integrate. As an empowered person we swing more easily between the two, realizing the limits of our control and applying it when we can and being open to what life has to offer.

Lan got it. She slowed herself down at work and focused herself on, what we called, self-care. It was important for her to step away from being goal oriented as much as she was. We talked about finding weekend days for relaxation, being off the clock, taking the day as it comes. We talked about what she likes and wants, some of which were difficult to admit, because they felt selfish to her. Slowly I saw her relax and feel less frustrated that the goals hadn’t all been met and that she could still feel ok. She noticed a shift at work as well and felt a better connection with her staff.

After a year of working together weekly, I asked her if she felt we were nearly done with the work she came to see me for. Her answer surprised me for a moment. She said she wanted to talk about not having children of her own. She said that maybe now she had the courage to face what she knew she had been avoiding. It was in high school that she first remembered not being able to imagine how she could be professionally successful and have a husband and children as well, so she kept her focus narrow and never gave herself the option of a family life. She had had some love interests, none of whom felt right for her, and so rather than distracting herself from the successful career path she was on, she took that option off the table. Now she was beginning to wonder if she had made a big mistake.

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In therapy, it is not unusual to find ourselves working on issues and topics we did not even know about when therapy started. When we uncover our pain and work through the issues we have avoided, we discover that we have been coping. There may be more for us to realize and integrate about who we are and what it means to be our whole true selves.

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“Feeling helpless and confused in the face of random unpatterned events, we seek to order them and, in so doing, gain a sense of control over them.”

Irvin Yalom

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p r o b l e m s o f w i l l & A c c e p ta n c e Let’s come back to the topic of will and acceptance to see how each can be detrimental to us in some way. We can see the value of acceptance when we are too dependent on willpower and we have yet to learn how much or little we do control. Acceptance can also hold within it the potential for disengagement. Passive acceptance negates the degrees to which it is our responsibility to act on our own behalf and is unresponsive to problems that face us. Learned helplessness is an example of how we might respond to the demand life makes on us. Avoidance is the primary method of functioning when we passively accept abuse, or unfair treatment of any kind.

Passive acceptance turns into active avoidance. It comes from and feeds into a low sense of our own worth. We do not initiate change or solve problems when we passively accept the ways things are.

We might believe we can not successfully impact others or the world. We might feel defeated before we start, or not believe we are worth the conflict we may have to confront... especially if we have avoided things for a while. It leads to increased resentment and a reinforcement of beliefs that we are not good enough or capable enough.

While too much will leads to the use of power, control and an inflated sense of what we can do, too much acceptance, disempowers us to become by-standers in our own life, unable to seek no more nor no less than we would want for others.

Willpower has its limits and which then requires acceptance.

Acceptance also requires willpower, in order to take our place in the world, to get our needs met and to stand up for what is fair and right.

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It is understanding the benefits of both acceptance and will that we find a peace of mind, while taking responsibility for ourselves and our place in the world. As we have seen throughout our exploration of the inner life, it is balance and regulation that gives us a new ability to navigate life and to find the freedom to be ourselves.

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The development of a third position, not unlike seeing the yin/yang symbol, helps us to realize the dynamic process. We can shift back and forth between these energies when we can see how they do complement each other and how they represent a balance that exists outside ourselves.

EXPECTATIONS: FINDING THE REALISTIC I N T E R N A L E X P E C TAT I O N S Expectations hold a place in our thought process, the anticipation of what is to come. We are subconsciously creating stories (schemas) about what we expect before the events occur. In some cases, it is a benign imagining of what will occur (like imagining a place we will visit where we have never been before). When we attach our standards and aspirations (the way it should be) or our doubts and fears (what we worry about) to our expectations we generate an additional layer, with an additional response. We can easily lose track of what is realistic, when we expect others, expect ourselves or expect the circumstances of life to be a certain way.

It is an amazing phenomenon that the human mind can hold ideas that only exist in the hypothetical domain, our imagination. The problems come when we create expectations that are aimed too high or too low. We generate emotions and interpret outcomes from a position that is not realistic or grounded in the way things are. It is when we find the place of balance between the two extremes to see the real value of expectations and how we handle them.

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Let’s look at both the value and danger of creating expectations, this place in our thought process. Tip: The word “should” indicates what our expectations are. Increasing our awareness of the use of that word can help us see where we attach expectations to outcomes for ourselves and others.

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High Expectations are goals, dreams, aspirations, standards, ideals, and hopes. They are ideas that exist in the hypothetical domain which serve to guide our intentions toward a higher purpose. We might

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imagine them above us, as in a cloud, representing what we value and what is possible for the life we are living. They can serve as a guide, in abstract form or maybe as represented by those who have attained what we would aspire to. They serve to give our life direction and a place to apply our will toward meaning or purpose.

Sometimes we focus on a desired outcome and make it into a goal. We believe that with the proper motivation and persistence we will attain or achieve what we intend. Part of the success of those achievements comes in believing we can do it. It turns into an expectation. Time and again we expect ourselves to reach the goals we strive for, and we do. It becomes a self-fulfilling system...we believe we can live up to our ideals...we do...and we reinforce the idea that we can, giving us confidence in ourselves and the motivation to continue the effort.

There is a danger, though, when we start to align our expectations with the cloud of ideals, standards, aspirations and goals. While they represent what is possible, they also represent what might be difficult to attain. It is not uncommon to believe that if we are motivated toward these aspirations we can expect to live up to them. We start to believe we should be able to achieve what we can imagine. We might not factor in all the variables that might prevent us from being successful. Failure to achieve, then, leads to frustration, disappointment, being upset or angry, or even anxiety from a loss of the feeling of control. Apathy and depression can also come as a result of a belief that we should be able to live according to expectations we have created about ourselves, others or life itself.

We begin to measure ourselves downward and interpret our failure to mean we are a failure when we cannot meet expectations that we “should” meet.

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Many of us fall into a pattern of thinking where our commitment to our expectations has developed unconsciously. Perfectionism is when we attach expectations to standards and ideals that cannot be attained, at least consistently. While, in the short run, it can produce high levels of mastery and give us a sense of the strength of our own will, it is ultimately destructive toward our sense of self-worth.

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Perfectionists believe that if a goal is possible, we should expect ourselves to accomplish it and to not reach that goal demonstrates failure. As this develops in us so does a series of negative effects. We can become negative in our judgements toward ourselves and others.

It creates a diminished sense of worth, the avoidance of tasks (why try if I cannot do it perfectly), a double bind… to fail if I try and to fail if I don’t try… and strong emotions such as anxiety, frustration, anger, guilt and eventually apathy. It is a real problem for many of us who also fail to live up to the standards and expectations we are holding for ourselves.

Low expectations are also hypothetical, but in a more passive way.

We do not imagine ourselves in successful scenarios, but rather picturing what it looks like when we fail. When we have expectations that are fear-based or failure-based they become self-fulfilling prophecies. With that orientation, If we happen to be successful, we interpret it as luck, but when we are not successful we see it as representative of our competency or value. It is not surprising that low expectations influence motivation, concentration, and the likeliness of failure in what we do. We tend to become what we expect ourselves to be. Recurring failure leads to apathy, the tiredness of trying. Once we have come to believe we cannot attain, we quit aspiring to do so.

We resign ourselves to standards below the potential we hold. We sabotage who we can become...our empowered whole true self.

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Realistic Expectations align our expectations with an openness toward that which is unforeseeable and factors that are outside of our control. On one hand we believe that circumstances, or outcomes will be as we hope, but we are also prepared for a reality that does not match what we expect. Through the lens of a growth mindset, we recognize that we have not yet learned what we intend to learn.

There is no failure and we are able to regulate our disappointments and frustrations, so they serve to help us learn from the experience.

We see our experiences in the context of fluid reality, with less reference to what we imagine or hope for. We remember that we live life and life lives us. It is not to say that aiming for hopes and dreams or holding high standards always leads to frustration or anxiety.

Those aspirations can inspire us toward our higher self, our ultimate

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goal. One that includes self-acceptance and an appreciation for our humanness (fallibility) and the challenges of living life. When our expectations are realistic, we spend less time being critical, feeling disappointed, frustrated, angry or judgmental. We prioritize the value of the process over the value of the outcome.

E x t e r n a l E x p e c tat i o n s Cultural or Social Expectations come from sources outside ourselves. It is easy to find ourselves in internal conflict when internal and external expectations are not aligned. If we tend to passively accept what comes our way in life we are likely to conform to cultural or social influences without due regard for our place in things. On the other hand, if we are using too much willpower we may try to control others or function in ways that are adversarial to the social world around us. Finding the balance is seeing how and when to adapt ourselves or to represent ourselves in the face of external expectations that are not consistent with our values, or who we are.

Living in Vietnam, as my clients and I do, creates many situations where we find ourselves at odds with how others think things should be. The schemas we have come to know do not always apply here.

I am sure this is true, as well, for many of my Vietnamese friends as they experience me, and other foreigners, and the way we go about things. It can create confusion, frustration, anger, and the desire for control when what we experience does not match what we think it should be. How many times have I listened to someone who is indignant about some aspect of behavior that is different to theirs?

Here is where it is important to realize that… should is the doorway to the hypothetical, ideas we hold in our mind. In a foreign country the set of ideals, standards, assumptions, and expectations are likely to be different than the ones we have come to think are true. When we stand back far enough, we can see that our perspective is… just that… our perspective.

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An example: The most obvious example is driving in traffic in Vietnam. In most Western countries traffic flows according to a shared set of ideas or principles and the system that legislates it. Just like forming a queue

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to buy tickets at a movie theatre, we line up our cars or motorcycles between the designated street lines at a red light. Laws and rules govern the choices we make while driving, most often having learned them in driver’s education class. We function with a silent agreement that as long as we collectively abide by the laws of traffic, we will be able to travel to and from our destinations with relative ease and without undo fear. We might also be aware of being caught by vigilant police whose job it is to ticket the misdeeds of drivers.

“Meet the world on its own terms and respect the reality of another as an expression of that world.”

Martin Buber Vietnam’s traffic system is quite different than that of most Western countries. While there are laws, streetlights and lines, most Vietnamese drivers drive relationally. More like a high school hallway after the bell has rung, drivers find their way to their destination by navigating through traffic. It is not in anyone’s interest to have a collision, so weaving through traffic has become more relational, with cues and clues that are enough to keep traffic flowing. And, as with the lines for the movie theatre, drivers are more likely to look for the gap to fill than the place they “should” be. It is a different system, more organic and one that comes from a time when most people rode bicycles and motorbikes as the primary means of transportation.

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For many foreigners who experience traffic in a major city like Hanoi it is a challenge to the hypothetical domain that exists as that cloud.

They will go through a transition in order to adapt themselves to a reality that is different than the one they know…and may see it as the way it “should” be. While some do make the adjustment, many find themselves producing emotions that are undesirable…frustration, anger and fear. They also might find themselves with negative judgements about the Vietnamese people who do not match their idea of what is the right way to do something.

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This system of holding our ideals and standards as a measure that we judge downward from keeps us from being empowered. We judge others, or we judge ourselves in ways that point to failure. We see

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reality, not as it is, but through the lens of what we think it should be.

Unless we realize this tendency, we will continually be in an adversarial relationship to life.

It is not easy to turn that around because there is so much in life that does not live up to our ideals, our ideas about the best ways of doing things. Remember acceptance is not the same as approval. We do not have to think that the Vietnamese version of traffic is the best way to accept it for what it is and to adapt ourselves to it, rather than be frustrated or angry that it does not fit what we think it should be.

We can remember that we have a “need” to make sense of the perspective of the world around us. This leads to forming ideas of what is “right” and what is “wrong”. Whenever we say something “should” be a certain way, it is coming from the hypothetical domain, where we hold our ideals and values. Seeing things in an either/ or duality is an easy pattern to fall into when we believe that we or others or the world should match our ideas of right and wrong. When we have a fixed mindset, we are more likely to draw conclusions about success and failure or good and bad. When we have a growth mindset, we see things as degrees of an ideal, able to hold both the aspiration of the ideal and the variables included in what is real.

Instead of measuring against an expectation that is ideal and feeling less than, we can see the ways in which we are approaching the ideal and what there is yet to be done.

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As with understanding the limitations of willpower, acceptance is a key aspect of how we keep ourselves living with realistic expectations and avoid the damage of expecting too much from the hypothetical domain. Acceptance takes into consideration the human condition, that which includes personal flaws and blind spots as well as a broader view…that we are in a process of growth and development toward a higher consciousness and are only ever part of the way to those highest ideals. It does us no good to feel like a failure. Of course, we are less than what we can imagine…but we are some degree of that measure and learning as we go. We can better build on a foundation based in reality when we are humble and compassionate with ourselves and others and we adjust ourselves to what is real,

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while aiming at what is ideal, for ourselves and the collective we are all a part of. It is what a growth mindset teaches, that we have not accomplished what we aspire toward…yet. It is OK.

Internal conflicts One of the activities that happens in the subconscious areas of thought is the on-going process of making sense of our perception of reality. We are constantly gathering information from the experiences we have as we proceed through life, informed by our emotions, our senses, and our thought process. We use this process to guide decision-making, which then shapes our behavior and ultimately, our character. The brain, which is the source of much of the cognitive process, integrated with the mind, goes through a developmental process and shapes its own course.

“The mind is what the brain does.”

Rick Hanson, Buddha’s Brain Early on, until the age of 12 or so, we experience life in a direct way without much interpretation due to the primary use of the amygdala in our brain, a less developed area that generates more direct reactions.

As we get into our adolescent years the use of our brain expands into the frontal cortex, where most of our rational thought is organized and processed. The period of transition, during adolescence includes a pruning process which allows us to be more selective and specialized in the way we think as well as the development of myelin, an insulating layer to our nerve cells that causes cells to communicate and to create brain pathways. The potential is for a coordination of thought, an ordering that leads to a cognitive integration.

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How does the information we get from the combination of emotion, body and the changing nature of our thought process and brain development guide the decisions we make as we proceed through life? How do they add up to demonstrate behavior that is congruent with who we are? Do we always know what to do? Can we have conflicts between parts of ourselves?

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Let’s pause to consider how amazing it is that we are discovery in motion, an ever-developing individual who comes to live life in a way that is uniquely reflective of ourselves. We make hundreds, if not thousands of decisions every day, all of which add up to the person we become. We do not know all the steps and stages of the process, but we do know that the process involves inner conflict, identity confusion and an inexact way of discovering what makes sense as we proceed through life.

We have inner conflicts reflecting aspects of ourselves and our thinking that are unintegrated and seem to be inconsistent.

We are making decisions all the time that reflect the dilemmas that life presents.

In therapy, we often look at parts of ourselves which have different needs and desires that might not be coordinating their efforts to maintain an integrated whole. One example of this would be the inner conflict we often see between the executive function and the inner child. It represents one of the dualities that can create confusion and inner conflict.

The executive function represents the part of us that understands the consequences for the choices we make, is future-minded, is responsible, serious and is providing pragmatic and moral guidance.

The executive function aligns standards with expectations and is often protecting us from the risks that are part of life.

The inner child is present-minded and generally wants to do what it wants when it wants to. The inner child is more interested in play, enjoyment, what is happening in the here and now, without consideration for responsibilities or other aspects of adult life, like considering others.

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Using this metaphor, it is easy to see aspects of ourselves that want different, and even opposing, things. It is not uncommon for a person who has not integrated these aspects of themselves to swing between extremes and often in an inner conflict that has to do with controlling oneself.

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Integration of these two parts involves the recognition of the value they each have. They represent parts of a whole self, which, when in concert, guide our decisions by balancing the needs of each part.

An adult who lives up to the responsibilities they have, while giving themselves time to enjoy life as it is lived.

An example: Hue is 15 years old high school student. Academic achievement has been important to his parents and Hue has made them proud by producing grades and scores that demonstrate his competence.

He has had a strong executive function, able to get his school work finished without much oversight by his parents. Lately, Hue has become interested in a girl who is in his class. They message each other in the evenings, the time when Hue is usually doing homework.

He is enjoying the flirtatious exchanges he has with her and looks forward to seeing her in classes they share at school, even though they do not talk much at school. At one point, Hue found himself anxious, feeling confused and guilty. The big project he was supposed to be working on was due soon and he had failed to do the research and was now in a predicament. He feared he would not get it done on time or it would be poorly written, neither of which was acceptable to him. Yet, he felt unable to end his chatting with her even when he was watching himself fail to do what he was supposed to do. His inner child was dominating his choices and it was creating a painful internal conflict. For the first time he felt unable to demonstrate the efficacy that he had mastered as a student. He had always been able to make a plan and carry it out. The intensity of his loss of control generated anger, first at himself and later at the girl who seemed to lose interest in him.

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Because Hue had come to expect himself to accomplish what he set out to do, he had little experience with the inner child. Rather than understanding the need to enjoy aspects of life and others with enough balance to continue his responsibilities, he got caught up in the enjoyment of play. Many of us can relate to the power of pleasure as an obstacle to doing what we believe we should do.

Cognitive dissonance Example 1: Joe smokes a pack of cigarettes each day. He knows they are bad for his health. This creates a cognitive dissonance that can only be resolved with rationalization or justification.

CASE STUDY 09

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We have a need to believe our own perception of reality. Internal order relieves the anxiety that comes when we are confused or ambivalent. Daily we are taking in new information and attempting to integrate it into the constructs that are already part of what we believe. In the short run it is less important that we get it right than that we have a place to put it. Sometimes we are holding ideas that conflict with one another, both cannot be simultaneously true, and yet they co-exist within our thought process. We can either name and acknowledge our internal conflicts or develop rationalizations and justifications that allow us to maintain what we are doing. We can fool ourselves. If it is a dissonance that has to do with moral decisions, we create justifications to avoid the feelings of guilt.

Example 2: We might learn and come to believe that eating beef is bad for the environment after reading a book or watching a documentary film on the topic. (cognition 1). We might also enjoy eating beef, a common part of our diet since childhood (cognition 2).

If we continue to eat beef we are faced with an internal dilemma. We reconcile that internal dissonance either... by quitting to eat beef or by rationalizing why we do not change. By rationalizing and justifying we maintain the cognitive dissonance... it goes unresolved.

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Many of us live lives that are organized around rationalizations and justifications which keep us from changing our beliefs as part of us recognizes what is true. It points to a remarkable instinct we have that guides our choices if we choose to listen and self-correct. While uncertainty, confusion and ambivalence are a part of life, we have an inner desire to reconcile the truth as a way functioning. When we are honest with ourselves, we live more closely to what we learn about life as we live it. Fixed mindsets are ultimately depending on rationalizations to persist.

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CASE STUDY 09

Living from the inside out

Because objective truth falls under headings like rational or common sense, and no perspective is unbiased, we have trouble finding truth we all agree on. When we stray too far from the rational or the consensual versions of reality, our perceptions are delusional. Some would say that superstitions or beliefs in miracles are examples of delusionary thinking. When we attach ourselves to beliefs that we have been taught or indoctrinated into, rather than what we discover for ourselves to be true, it becomes more difficult to trust in the inner process to guide us down life’s path.

The Double bind dilemma A double bind is when we find ourselves in a dilemma for which there appears to be no correct solution, no painless way to proceed. We feel that no matter what choice we make we cannot get it right. It often comes from dualistic thinking, either/or, all or nothing. We swing between two sides of a problem, never satisfied or able to accept where we are, and increasingly frustrated with the perpetuation of inner conflict. This situation can cause intense emotional distress, a sense of helplessness and, over time, a feeling of defeat or ultimate failure. People often describe feeling trapped and start to feel anxiety and even panic in the situation. It is not uncommon for the experience of a double bind to lead to thoughts and acts of suicide.

This concept was made famous by a book called Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, which paints a bleak picture of the human condition offering only choices in which we are left to discern which option is the lesser of two evils. The common summary of the concept is, “damned if we do, damned if we don’t”.

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CASE STUDY 09

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L

isa was feeling desperate when she first came into therapy, with intrusive thoughts of killing herself that seemed to come out of no-where. She felt embarrassed to feel she had to come and was unable to manage herself on her own. She was looking for a few sessions that would help her regain a sense of control that was feeling threatened. She was successful in some aspects of her life, but also felt a sense of frustration that she could not find a partner or other friends who cared about her more deeply.

As part of the process of sorting out what might be influencing these thoughts and feelings she was having, she talked to me about her childhood and the relationship she had and has with her family. It became clear quite quickly that Lisa’s parents were not ready or prepared to have a child when they had her and that she was largely neglected while her parents continued a life-style that exposed her to things that she was not developmentally ready for. When she was old enough, she then was put in the role of care-taking her parents, through their marital conflicts and divorce. She was parentified...given responsibilities beyond the scope of her capacity. The story of her childhood extended into her adult years and the present, where she described situations on the phone of talking her father out of a drunken rage or of tearful threats of suicide. Her mother also expected her to be her confidant, while doting on her younger sister. At no point was she able to convey to them her own struggles or gain a degree of empathy for the hardships that had come along with her life.

Lisa,

Beyond Coping

So, while part one of her treatment had to do with the understanding of what had happened to her in childhood, relative to what she needed from her parents, it was only a preliminary process to sort out how she had learned to cope in ways that were increasingly ineffective. Instead of a few weeks to realize why she felt these intrusive thoughts, she was needing to face what she had successfully avoided as a way of coping with what she wasn’t ready for.

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Her story of extreme neglect and manipulation formed an internal response we might call insidious trauma.

While there is no single traumatic event to point to, the cumulative effect of her neglect and her role has had a profound effect on her well-being and caused the urgency of her current situation.

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Coping is a good thing. We are remarkably able to find ways to manage life when we do not know what else to do. Children are creative in the ways they respond to what they might not be ready for. But coping is meant to be a short term solution and invariably wears thin as time goes on. Lisa’s ability to cope was wearing thin.

Lisa had become highly functional. She channeled her energy into being a good student and getting good jobs, all which she saw as a measure of her worth. She was proud that she had overcome the problems of her family and they also let her know that they valued her because of her successes. She had learned to attach her value to her performance, and used the focus required of accomplishment to avoid the underlying trauma. She was disciplined in the gym as well as in the office. She kept her apartment in order, a stickler for cleanliness. While things looked good on the surface, Lisa was missing much of her authentic self underneath.

Lisa discovered her double bind when she realized that the way she had learned to cope, that of maintaining control of her behavior, was at risk. Because the emotional storm that she had repressed to her subconscious was finding its way to the surface she felt she was losing control. Facing the realization of her parents inability and irresponsibility and the ways that it affected her was a calculated step in the direction she felt she had to go. It offered her some relief. She noticed that her mood had lifted and she was having less intrusive thoughts. But, what became a bigger challenge was how to mitigate the degree to which she had to let go of control. She was all executive function and the inner child still had no place to find a place in the world.

It had worked so well, performing as this high functioning person, but then it seemed it was all falling apart.

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Not unlike a rock climber who finds herself frozen on a perch that appears to offer no route, up or down or side to side, Lisa found herself so dependent on the control she had given herself to survive as a way of coping, that she could find no way out.

For her letting go could only feel like

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failure. Vulnerability was the very thing that every effort was meant to guard against.

The anxiety rose to 6, 7 and 8 when she could see no way out of this trap. She could only feel the fear and frustration of thinking...I can’t be in control and I can’t be out of control.

Suicidal thoughts visited her daily. She started to use a knife to cut her arm which gave her some temporary relief, but also fed an idea of herself as disgusting. She could barely concentrate at work. She dreaded being home alone. She started drinking to the point of black out, followed by days of self-loathing and shame.

Lisa would drop out of therapy saying it wasn’t working for her. After a few months she would contact me in a worse condition. Once again, living the double bind of not being able to be in therapy and not doing well without it. She knew she needed more support than I could give her with weekly sessions, her shame kept her stuck, barely functioning because she could not let other people know her inner truth.

She continued to mask her underlying inner storm, only allowing me to know her private hell.

Another double bind, she wanted to die but feared the act of killing herself. For months she stayed frozen near death’s door, rejecting life but unable to act on her desire to die. She would perform the work requirements and then come home to the pain of her inner life. Her ambivalence did not allow her to make a choice, to die or to live.

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I felt like time was running out. We were now only managing the crisis of her life with little insight, understanding or sense of progress. We explored where she might go for a respite, one we would plan in order to create structure and safety. (Normally, I would have encouraged her to go to The New Life Foundation, a retreat center in Thailand, but because of COVID 19 crossing the border was impossible). Instead we designed our own set of activities, based on materials that taught methods to access the parasympathetic nervous system and some new means of expression. We agreed to slow everything down, to balance structure with opening to acceptance of what she had been avoiding. We also practiced naming the double binds she had found herself in and agreed to observe as she would swing between one side of the conflict and then the other. Then we watched the change that comes from degrees of acceptance and degrees of will.

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It might be the single most important lesson in life, to realize that we are not in ultimate control. We live life and life lives us. We steer a small boat on a big river which has its own current and might be fraught with dangers. Somehow we can find peace with that arrangement. Somehow we can find enough safety within ourselves to face the dangers and threats that exist outside. Learning to let go, to accept that which is beyond our control, can be very difficult for those who learned early to generate mastery or to pursue a goal. It is to see our place in the context of life itself.

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The Therapist’S Lens

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in a nutshell summary & conclusions As Carl Jung has said, “Like a plant, which from a seed becomes an Oak tree, so man can become what we are meant to be…but we get stuck.”

The problem we are facing in this book is that we have not yet learned how to individually and collectively rise to the fulfillment of our human potential. Many of us are stuck in lives which are limited by a lack of self-knowledge and the self-awareness to free ourselves from what holds us in place.

The empowerment of the self begins by looking inward where we can understand the relationship between our emotions, our physical self, our thoughts and our behavior. Only then can we respond thoughtfully to the circumstances of life in ways that align with our whole true self.

Each emotion has a purpose and the potential to inform or to limit us.

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Emotions happen to us in response to situations outside of us or from the baggage we carry with us from the past. They give us information and engage us in life. We can learn that balance, regulation, stability and equanimity come from self-observation and self-awareness.

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It is the intensity of our emotions that we can learn to understand and to regulate. When we allow ourselves to experience what we are feeling, those feelings move through us informing us to pay attention.

If we repress emotions they become part of what subconsciously influences our thoughts and behavior.

When we become emotion-based, burdened by emotions that are unresolved, our perceptions become distorted and influence core beliefs that are not true. At the bottom of an emotion hierarchy, shame-based thinking tells us we do not deserve to have the life that is ours.

Undifferentiated emotions collect into moods of depression or anxiety that create a lens through which we see life. We can learn the power of restraint rather than repression.

We can learn what social conditions have affected the way we access our inner lives and the emotions we have. Childhood is a time when we depend on parents and adults to meet our needs. The degree to which this occurs directly affects the persons we become and the emotional challenges we face.

Our bodies are systems that respond to and influence the whole of who we are. Our body and our mind are not separate, but rather produce a complex messaging system meant to protect us and to allow us to open to what is possible.

Our senses connect us directly to the time and place we are in. Our bodies hold information that is unresolved. Knowledge and awareness of our body to be grounded, centered and balanced empowers us to live in the present through our senses.

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We can learn how to set aside the attraction of external stimuli for the purpose of gaining self-knowledge and awareness. It is from our selfawareness that we live more closely to values that reflect who we are.

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When we find balance in our thought process, we can focus when we need to (concentrate), open ourselves to ideas (stream of consciousness), and gain the value our thoughts provide us.

Growth mindsets allow us to learn as we go, to adapt and evolve our schemas, stereotypes and belief systems toward the person we are meant to be. When we look more deeply to discover subconscious beliefs, we realize the limitations we have applied to ourselves.

While schemas, stereotypes and beliefs help us move through life, they also have the potential to limit how and what we think.

Fixed mindsets, cognitive dissonance, double binds, imbalances between will and acceptance and unhelpful ways to align our expectations are thought patterns that distract and impede our ability to flow intuitively through life.

All of the ways that we can go wrong in our inner life can be overcome, especially if we understand the foundation of our liberation is our understanding of our own value. We might have learned to believe that our performance, our appearance, our behavior or our need to be right are what matter most. In fact, when we accept our humanness, the essence of who we are, learning as we go, with a birthright that recognizes the miraculous within each of us, we discover what it means to become empowered to be our whole true self. We are life wanting to be lived and our task is to get out of our own way.

To “Begin Within” is pragmatic advice.

Self-awareness and self-knowledge can shape our choices and influence

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This triad…emotion, body and thought are three parts of a whole. We have the potential to see their inter-relatedness and to integrate them into a stable and cohesive self. It increases our ability to live from the inside out, empowered to align our choices with our values and ideals.

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who we are. Like learning to play an instrument or athletic skills or another language, it takes time and practice.

Listening to, tending to and caring for the inner life of the only person we can really know is not only beneficial to being ourselves, it is what will allow humanity to discover what we are meant to be. As co creators we shape the course and direction humanity takes. War and conflict or compassion and kindness represent the range of what is possible. When we know enough to live in line with what we value most, we increase the potential for all humans to benefit from what we offer one another. Part two addresses the ways in which we relate to one another, the ways we understand what influences ourselves and others. From the platform of our self-worth we seek a fair balance for ourselves and others when we are empowered. From under-valued ideas about our worth we compensate, being disempowered or using power to control others and the world we are in. With assertiveness and boundaries we can navigate relationships in ways that are fair and want no more nor no less for ourselves than we want for others.

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Space left for illustration of the Empowered Being

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index of concept maps 01 17 the basics: emotions, body & thought 1 7 - F i g 0 1 : The Triangle of Balance: Emotion, Thought & Body

02 19 emotion 2 1 - f i g 0 2 : Emotions: Their Purpose and Level of Intensity 2 4 - f i g 0 3 : Risks & Consequences of Rage 2 8 - F i g 0 4 : Emotional Intensity Scale 5 7 - F i g 0 5 : Emotion-Based Filters that Affect Our Life Energy 6 3 - F i g 0 6 : Repression, Restraint & Regulation

04 73 thought 8 1 - f i g 0 8 : Fixed v/s Growth Mindset 8 5 - f i g 0 9 : The Limits of Will... Finding Acceptance x x - f i g 1 0 : Managing Expectations

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7 4 - f i g 0 7 : Our Mind, Degrees of Will Power

designed by rocio guerrero november 2020