David Teachout's Blog, page 4

Stop Setting Goals, Start Living From Values

Starting from a deficit is always frustrating because after all the work done and resources used to get oneself to the surface, you often find yourself exhausted by the journey. Further, deficit thinking has us defining ourselves from the perspective of where we’re going, not where we’ve come from, it can feel that no movement has occurred at all! Unfortunately this mentality is exactly what we bring to ‘goal setting’ and it’s precisely why the spiral of shame and self-doubt is so often the end result. Thankfully we can give up goals by instead looking at achievement. The way to do this is to reframe our behavior within a consideration of Values.

Values are not Behavior

Values are not synonymous with, or at least not fully understood or fulfilled by, particular behaviors. This may at first sound obvious, but it’s not typically how we assess and judge ourselves and one another. When was the last time you chastised yourself for not going to the gym and instead binging a tv show? When was the last time you judged another as being dishonest based on a particular situation? For that matter, when was the last time you felt yourself unfairly judged when you went with being supportive rather than being honest? Or, how easy is it to think of a time when you gave up on supporting one Value, like Honesty, for the purpose of saving someone’s life, job or prevent being hurt?

All of these scenarios bring us to three conclusions:

Values never go awaySometimes in supporting one Value in a particular way, it may mean not supporting another in a way we’d otherwise doContext often drives what Value(s) we’re focused on

Consider the difficulty of judgment, both of others and ourselves. Often it happens where one family member will declare you don’t love them because you don’t treat them exactly the same way as another. The accusation is often met with stunned frustration because of course you love them, it’s simply that you interact differently due to the nature of the particular connection, the context in which a behavior occurred and what the other person’s interests may be. A more obvious example would be if one of your kids declared you didn’t love them because you don’t treat them the exact same way as your spouse. Clearly the claim is absurd, the very nature of the connection leads to different behavior. Importantly, the Value itself never went away.

Photo by Harrison Moore on Unsplash

Life is a constant juggling act of supporting what we care about, utilizing the behavior we’ve learned to associate with particular Values and doing so within contexts of which we often have no control over the particulars. Consider self-esteem or integrity, where ‘standing up for yourself’ is a common advice given. Yet, when faced with a hostile work environment or unhealthy personal relationship we won’t follow the advice, instead opting for another behavior. Where we often then shame ourselves, the reality is we did act to support a Value, but instead of Integrity, we acted on Financial Security, Safety, Peace, etc. What we’re concerned with here is not a judgment about long-term consequences, but a proper evaluation about why we do what we do in any given moment.

Those moments are context-driven. We are not likely going to be able to focus on Health when we’re incessantly surrounded by junk food and find it difficult to gain access to healthier alternatives. It’s little wonder in that context that Pleasure takes center-stage. We’re not likely to work on Self-Esteem/Image when coming out of an emotionally abusive family, surrounded by unsupportive community and/or lacking in skills that our specific society finds useful. I say “likely” here because there’s always personal stories of people seeing their way through adversity; this is about the general experience. In fact, behind every story of success despite adversity you’ll find that the person did the one thing we’re about to bring attention to: expanding perspective.

Daily Valued Living

Rather than goals, let’s consider what we’re already doing in our lives that is helpful and expand on that. Rather than getting caught up in a hyper-focus on one behavior, let’s consider how we’re always seeking to support what we care about.

Steps of Valued Living: (“Identifying Values” worksheet on Resources page)

Identify an area of your life you’d typically set a goal based on lack or self-denialWhat Value is associated with that area?Select 2-5 other Values that come to mind, or are associated with, that initial Value.What are healthy behaviors to support that Value?Consider how others are supporting those same Values and how you may bring such behavior completely or in part, to your own life.

Each step is about starting from your humanity, at the center of which is what you care about, and building upon what already exists. From that foundation you can increase your confidence in what is behaviorally possible by enlarging your competence in how you support what matters to you. Noticing what you’re already doing is exactly the opposite of getting lost in the contemplation of what you’re not. The latter is an ever-expanding sinkhole and we know where it sends us: nowhere.

By promoting to ourselves the daily ways we support our Values, we remind ourselves that we are constantly in service to them. By expanding what is possible through noticing how others support our shared Values we build a greater repertoire of behavioral tools to work through the struggles that inevitably come up. Isn’t that what we’re all ultimately interested in anyway?

Main photo by Evan Leith on Unsplash

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Change Is As Fundamental as Gravity

The pursuit of change is as varied as New Year’s Resolutions and almost always focused on what we consciously are doing. Looking at change as a foundational law of life can help us on our journeys of discovery and see others more clearly.

From Our Evolving Minds: Change in Context

Essentially Darwin, and evolutionary theory after him, saw organisms as being in the world, where change is a complex interplay between the internal world (what later would be understood as genes) of the organism and the external world within and through which they exist. This begins the discussion not at the level of the individual, where debates of experience and nativism, nature and nurture, play out, but at the level of relationship, of the interaction of organism and environment. To focus on one or the other is to ignore that the fundamental unit of reality is relational interaction.

Allowing for change helps us see others and ourselves as constantly in flux, and while we may still rightly disagree with particular behaviors, we can still see one another as having the potential to do something new.

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Putting Consequences in their Place

Working with clients going through difficult times, many questions come up concerning fairness, justice, and responsibility. The world, it becomes painfully obvious, doesn’t respond to our thoughts the way we’d like. Our pictures/stories of ‘what should be’ rarely match ‘what is.’ Despite this, we continue to struggle on, moving from moment to moment with a sometimes grim, sometimes emotionally poignant, determination. Faced with the struggle, there is a completely understandable question in response: When will this end?!

I want to turn for a moment to the ABCs. Before you start going down that familiar song from childhood, we’ll be looking at:

A – AntecedentB – BehaviorC – Consequence

Now, don’t go running for the hills just yet. This is simply a way of looking at our behavior, a framing of the world and our interaction with it. Prior to action is a factor/item (an ‘antecedent’) which has a causal relationship with the behavior, followed by a consequence(s) or result. This is just a more formal way of declaring what our parents used to warn us about concerning ‘there will be consequences!’ What they often left out in their warnings, and frankly what we often oversimplify as adults, are the influences/antecedents leading to particular behavior.

Getting Caught in Consequence

The reason for this formality is to help us see where we get stuck. The influences/antecedents is where we can find freedom, but we as a species are pretty terrible at determining what those are on a day-to-day basis. Seriously. We are. But more on that in a bit.

Where we get stuck is in the perception of consequence. When you stub a toe walking around barefoot, do you focus on the walking or are you wincing, hopping and holding on to the hurt foot? When you’ve lost a job, had a fight with a friend or see a relationship ending, do you focus on all the decisions that came before it or are you caught up in the emotional cacophony of the loss?

Further, even after the initial pain is worked through, consider how the consequence is still front and center in how you view the world. From the item on the floor that ‘shouldn’t have been there’ to ‘that person/group is horrible’ and ‘I always make horrible decisions,’ the thoughts/assessments are vibrantly colored by the shadowy influence of obsessing over consequence.

Before getting sucked into morose reflection, the focus on consequence makes a great deal of sense. Our brain/body system comes from eons of evolutionary development and biological cost/benefit appraisal. Expending energy on anything other than consequence would be a privilege. Think about it. If you’re focused on brute survival, the consequences of one’s behavior should definitely be front and center in consciousness. When faced with getting eaten, freezing to death or not having enough food, these are consequences that will direct, understandably, the attention of anyone.

Revealing the Influencers

We’re not going to remove our tendency to obsess over consequences and we should definitely not ignore consequences either. However, if we want to change our future behavior, reduce negative consequences and expand how we work through situations, then we need to focus on more than consequences. Here come the influencers.

Biology

The one area of our lives we have the most control over is often the one area we rarely consider in effecting our decision-making: our biology/physiology.

How well and how much have you been sleeping?

What kind of food are you typically eating? Full meals or snacks? High in sugar? For that matter, what’s your caffeine intake and how close to sleep time are you taking it?

Focused exercise? Not just wandering around but an actual exercise routine.

Meditation practice? Even 10 minutes a day is a huge help. Meditation isn’t about adding yet another activity, it’s about slowing down and seeing how the cacophony of our every-day lives is not the same thing as our image of who we are.

Relationships

Relationships are not just about intimate partnerships. They include family, co-workers, and even the strangers we run into at the store or on the street.

Do you feel seen by those you feel closest too?

Are you concerned about the future of an important connection?

How difficult do you find it to talk with your boss?

Relationships are the medium through which we express ourselves. As such they have an enormous influence on the decisions we make.

Environment

Environment is about both the socio-cultural expectations/rules we live under and the physical structures we live within and interact with.

Is your personal space cluttered and disorganized or dirty?

Do you feel too cold or too hot at your place of work so you’re constantly having to make adjustments?

Do you live around green spaces and/or how often do you step away from buildings and into nature?

Are family members bringing up expectations you either don’t personally care about or are things you feel shame/doubt about?

Freedom through Awareness

The questions above are not exhaustive and quite often there isn’t a right or wrong answer to them. They’re about expanding your awareness of what is effecting you, because they are and you don’t have a choice about it. You can no more stop being influenced by biology, relationships and environment than you can stop the tides of the ocean being controlled by the moon.

Freedom is not in removing yourself from influence but by becoming more aware of them. This allows for the exploration of potential responses rather than being trapped into “what I’ve always done” or “feeling overwhelmed” or “I don’t know what came over me.”

We can’t remove ourselves from consequence, but we can help shift what consequences we will experience.

Main photo by Ian Chen on Unsplash

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You Are Not the Sum of Your Parts

When I was a kid there was a toy I loved, a kaleidoscope of sorts, where you looked in one end and by turning the other end, sifted grains of multi-colored sand to make different patterns. You couldn’t add any new grains, you couldn’t change the colors. The only thing you could do was change the speed with which you turned the one end. We have a tendency, as human beings, to attempt isolating one or another grain or color and believe by doing so we become capable of seeing the entire image. In fact, not just the entire image, but every potential image.

When was the last time you felt shame? Doubt? Self-criticism? Do you remember what it was about? Now, do you remember what it wasn’t about? That last question may be rather jarring. Let’s put it another way: what are you not thinking about right now? Hmm…. yeah, likely even more confusing. Let’s try something different. Pick an object, any object, around you and stare at it. Now, without looking away, describe what’s behind you. Obviously there are shortcomings to this as you may be in a familiar place, but I hope the point is made. There is an entire reality living, breathing, existing outside of your momentary perception, both in sight and in mind. So why the isolating focus on any one thing?

To have our focus be easily swayed would have really put a damper on our survival potential as a species. Were we the proverbial dog gallivanting after every ‘squirrel,’ we’d have walked off a cliff, got eaten by an animal or missed out on catching our food. In other words, we’d have died. To survive we needed the capacity to focus, which came with the tangential skill of ignoring everything else. So next time someone points out that you were ignoring them, just blame your biology. I’m kidding. Really.

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A Perspective Reminder

Let’s come back to the shame and criticism piece. Or, if you’d like, the self-congratulatory and joyful piece. It really doesn’t matter, because you can participate in the focus/ignore process with any of the above and more. Within ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), this is called fusion, which I’ve written about here. The difficulty with fusion is that the whole of who you are and the surrounding extent of reality gets removed from consideration. And that contributes to a whole host of problems.

Depression? Focus on self-doubt and criticism and ignore the vast majority of time you’ve lived without failure. Anxiety? Focus on what has or could go wrong, ignore the vast majority of events that were either neutral or went correctly. Relationship difficulty? Focus on what she/he did wrong, ignore the majority of behavior that was loving or neutral (as a strong caveat, this is not about when abuse is occurring and if such is happening, absolutely should you remember that and use the reminder to get help).

Step outside the typical mental health therapy categories for a moment. Ever considered yourself incapable because of who you are, your gender, your family, or some other part of yourself?

Notice that as you focus on a trait, characteristic, event or identity, the ‘self’ or who you are gets more and more hidden. This doesn’t mean we get rid of these things, it does mean we consider more carefully what we’re doing when we think this way. It takes practice. That practice begins with the simple acknowledgment: “I am more than any single thought, feeling or behavior.”

As soon as shame, self-doubt and criticism occur, we can learn to reflect on what is being hidden by those labels. Here are three skills to work on:

Asking yourself: What am I not noticing? The question may seem counter-intuitive, but that jarring feeling may get you outside of the rut you find yourself in.Change focus: bring your attention to physical sensation, like the feel of your clothes against your skin; or to an object in your immediate experience, noting as many characteristics as you can; or if you’re stuck in a memory, deliberately and imaginatively place yourself as an observer instead of a participant.Shift perspective: pursue a different story, like the old choose your own adventure novels; imagine how someone from a different socio-cultural background would think; or deliberately change the thought/feeling by singing it or mimicking it as the voice of your favorite actor or fictional character.

Who you are is more than the sum of your parts, it’s perspective too. What we considered life-ending as children, we can usually laugh at now. Our thoughts about love and hate have gone through many evolutions as our lives have unfolded. Our smiles have gotten deeper. Our concerns have gotten broader. What we consider important has changed. This is all for the good, because the world is a lot bigger than any one of us and that means there’s always room to grow.

Featured photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash

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Reminding Yourself of the Ground

How much of your life has happened without your conscious awareness? Sure, there’s the approximately 8 hours a day of sleep, which, doing the math, is 2920 hours, translated to 121 days or 4 months. Yup, 4 months out of the year is spent sleeping. Now let’s expand on that and consider the number of times you’ve ‘snapped to attention’ and realized you’d been daydreaming and, amusingly, can’t remember what was so much more important. This can be embarrassing when in a conversation with someone else and potentially quite dangerous when driving, with a full third of accidents occurring within one mile of home and often by running into parked cars.

Stepping away from the dangerous and into the mundane, have you ever considered yourself to be on ‘autopilot’? For that matter, think back over the last week, how much can you fully remember and how much is hazy recall? Understand that this is completely normal. If we were to attempt actively paying attention to every single bit of data, internal and external, we’d be overrun and go through a system crash. It’d be like watching Netflix and having a crystal clear image, only to have your internet provider throttle your speed and everything goes grainy or stops altogether.

While we certainly don’t want to get ourselves into a shutdown experience, even the minutest increase in awareness can help us live healthier mental lives. In fact, doing so doesn’t even have to be all the time, it can simply be focused around relationships, work, physical health and so on. What area of your life would you like to understand better? Doing so requires a greater awareness.

We like to be right and that leads us to double-down on our stories of ‘what is.’ To challenge them requires two things: 1) increased awareness and 2) actively doing so from a space of positive exploration. Now, I don’t mean ‘positive’ in the sense of happy, joyful and smiling. ‘Positive’ here means active engagement or deliberate movement, or in other words, adding to what you’re doing, rather than subtracting or avoiding. Sometimes doing so is not at all joyful and may even initially result in feelings of hurt or discontent. Thankfully, increasing awareness does not require any particular feeling attached to it.

The world in and around us doesn’t stop influencing our decisions and ideas of who we are simply because we don’t actively notice parts of it.


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Feet on the Ground

So where to start? Regardless of what area in your life you’d like more awareness about, starting anywhere will have spillover. With that in mind: how are your feet? Seriously, how are they? What are they doing right now? How do they feel? Do you really only notice them when they are in pain?

Our feet carry us everywhere, but while in use, we rarely pay them much attention. In fact, while walking, to pay special attention to your feet will result in slowing down. That this results in not getting to a destination as quickly is likely why we’re good with ignoring them so long as they’re functioning. So it is with a great many parts of our lives.

Unless there’s some kind of difficulty, we go about our lives without much awareness. Unfortunately there are little things that can creep up on us and do us and our relationships harm if we’re not paying attention. Further, the world in and around us doesn’t stop influencing our decisions and ideas of who we are simply because we don’t actively notice parts of it. Taking even a small step, like deliberately noticing how you are stepping/moving, to expand awareness to a part of your life you aren’t generally aware of can lay the ground for new decisions and behaviors.

The more you see, the more there is to work with. The more you see, the greater potential there is to step away from the habits keeping you from moving forward.

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A Broader Awareness Can Lead to Uncertainty

Consistency, in practice and in thought, guides the creation of our stories and narratives. Selecting from the potentially overwhelming data of the world, our stories support what we believe and ignore or actively dismiss that which doesn’t. “New” information is not something we simply become aware of, but is all around us, happening every moment. This can be as banal and inconsequential as not paying attention to every shift in clouds above us, to the potentially disastrous of not seeing oncoming cars in traffic. 

The ability, through story or perspective, to maintain an internal sense of right-ness and consistency is not always in our best interests.

Gilovich found that when gamblers were right, they tended to offer bolstering comments about just how right they were—“I knew it would happen,” or words to that effect. But when they were wrong, they tended to minimize their error by offering “undoing” comments about how the game should have turned out differently. In these cases the gamblers would often blame the outcome on a fluke event, like a fumble in the fourth quarter. To them, a loss wasn’t really a loss; it was a near win. In either case, the effect of the bolstering and undoing comments was largely the same: foresight became better in hindsight. (Halinan)

Halinan, Joseph T. “Why We Make Mistakes”

Beyond ignorance or dismissal, we have here a rewrite of the past in a way that is falsely self-positive. Related to this is how we judge behavior we consider ‘wrong’; when the mistake is personal we often point to external circumstance, but when the mistake is someone else’s we direct our vision to the person’s internal failings. 

Deeper is the Ocean

An intervention strategy within ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is referred to as “Dropping Anchor.” The idea is to take an experience of fusion (an unhealthy preoccupation with a thought/emotion) and mindfully reflect on it while expanding one’s awareness of the physical reality around and within yourself.

The purpose is not to avoid the feeling/thought or even to necessarily change the feeling/thought, but to defuse, broadening awareness to how much more is going on beyond the preoccupation. We are so very much more than any single thought, emotion, or even behavior. Acceptance is about dwelling in this larger reality, not necessarily being ok with any particular thought, emotion or behavior.

Fusion is an inevitable result of the ignorance/dismissal/rewrite processes described above. Selecting pieces of experience to create a self-serving Narrative requires putting oneself contrary to the rest of reality pinging on your mind. The world doesn’t go away simply because we don’t want to see it. The continual avoidance requires a constant doubling-down on one or more pieces of the Narrative, building mental walls that become increasingly isolating.

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

Importantly here, the personal gain accomplished is not necessarily about feeling better, but having the world make sense. We will put ourselves through a great deal of pain and suffering to avoid having to doubt the way we think of the world and ourselves. That we do this to ourselves is because the alternative, doubt and uncertainty, is considered, sometimes rightly, to be a generator of anxiety and thus greater pain and suffering. Better the devil you know, as the saying goes.

Here is where the Dropping Anchor exercise can run afoul. An anchor, to continue the metaphor, only works well when there’s a ground/bottom to settle on and catch you. In the midst of the ocean, an anchor may not be all that helpful and perhaps even cause further problems as it selects something that won’t keep you stable. 

Dropping Anchor can be highly effective both therapeutically and as a technique within a broader meditative practice. Doing so in a healthy manner means remembering why fusion is both inevitable and often perceived as being helpful. Broadening one’s awareness can bring a level of self-reflective skepticism that can be disconcerting, especially if one’s sense of self or an Identity is tied strongly to the fused content.

Healthy, defused living means slipping into that deeper ocean of human potential, but there’s a reason why the lack of waves in a lake is associated so strongly with calm and peace. Exploring the former means acknowledging why the latter is so enticing.

References:

Hallinan, Joseph T.. Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average (p. 68). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

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Life as A Learning Process

Ask yourself “What do I believe?” and the result will likely be a cascade of memories highlighting actions, thoughts and experiences fitting a particular set of Virtues, or Values-in-action. The whole of this cascade will provide the basis for a rather nice structure or Narrative that you can offer to yourself or another to express who you believe yourself to be. This process also has a rather powerful effect of providing a sense of continuity and rightness about your life.

What it is not is a means of selecting what is True and Correct as if from a bin of differentiated facts.

Puzzles

Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.

Aeon

Ever put together a puzzle? If so, have you tried doing so with the image-side turned down so you only have the bland cardboard cutouts to work with? The latter is a lot harder and typically only done by those who’s desire to self-challenge is a lot higher than my own. But why is it harder? The shape of the pieces is the same and isn’t a puzzle simply about fitting them together? Alas, no, it isn’t, or at least the process isn’t that simple. Shapes matter, but so does the image we’re creating as a whole. Without consciously being aware, we have a pre-established guide of the larger image funneling the shapes to connect.

This whole-part strategy is a mechanism for weaving together disparate pieces of information. However, it’s just that, a mechanism or strategy, it doesn’t create something out of nothing, it has to work with what is given externally. Thankfully life is a whole lot bigger than any one of our perceptions, so we can create new stories quite often and even ones that are different than those of another despite having been in the same place and time. 

Ever expressed a memory of childhood to a sibling and had them dispute it? Had a moment of confusion when declaring one’s view of an event only to have a spouse, friend or colleague direct attention to a different view of that same event or a piece from it that wasn’t seen? Welcome to the puzzle-making that is experience. 

Images

How does this fit with the initial “Who am I?” question. Glad you ask. We generally only talk about “life experience” once we’ve gathered a certain amount of it. As a consequence we don’t appreciate what went into creating it, taking our perception as gospel or simply the “correct” view. Not much in life feels better than being right and we go out of our way to keep that feeling alive and well. 

But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.

Aeon

The above list of terms and quote has to do with a common metaphor used for describing human cognition: a computer. While we as human beings are inevitably going to use metaphors in helping us understand ourselves, like any other content of thought we can get too caught up in it, losing the trees for the forest. Further, if we don’t question the assumptions of our metaphor we can run ourselves directly into difficulty that otherwise could have been avoided.

Rather than looking at our minds as retrieval devices, consider instead a painter. We have the canvas of our biology, social structure, and relationships working with the paints of our senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms. Information here is not like data in a machine, a part of reality to be retrieved from within it. Rather, what we consider information/facts are the resulting images pieced together through learning processes within our own personal history. 

This is not a call for a post-fact society. Nor are we getting into the swamp of declaring every opinion is the equal of any other. Such is more concerned with the functions of our learning and it’s application within different areas of life. We’re here simply considering the basic process of how we develop a worldview. And at that level, it is little wonder we love the feeling of rightness and continuity. Where we get into the weeds/swamp of difficulty is mistaking the end result of our thinking strategy with the strategy itself and declaring our personal perspective equivalent to the whole of reality itself. Talk about ego!

Canvas

Where this leads us is to consider ourselves and our beliefs about the world differently. Rather than our beliefs being reflections of the world itself, they are attempts at piecing together the varieties of information our body/mind parses from within the world. Even we ourselves can be seen as paintings on a canvas, so long as we never forget there is still paint to be used and space to be painted upon. 

When we stop and rest upon a single thought/idea and think we have no more room to move, the result is fusion, stagnation and anxiety as we attempt to keep reality molded to only one form. Further, such fusion makes us incapable of seeing how those around us, including our loved ones, are moving along the same process we are. When they see differently, when they express themselves in alternative fashion, they are not being contrary to a singular correct reality, but instead are working within it, just from a different vantage point. 

Right and wrong still matter, but judging such doesn’t have to be the first and only means of interacting with another and ourselves. The vast majority of human behavior is an honest attempt at dealing with and working within a reality that we only see partly and yet are commonly fooled into believing we see a whole lot more of. When we consider that we ourselves, not just those we disagree with, are operating in this same learning process, we may find there’s a lot more space to move, understand and grow than we initially thought.

 

 

Reference:

Aeon. “Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer – Robert Epstein | Aeon Essays.” Aeon. 18 May 2016. Web. 14 Feb. 2018.

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Healing from Trauma

Question from Quora: 

Can one heal from PTSD without using medications? I hear PTSD doesn’t just apply to war veterans. It could be affecting anyone and we wouldn’t know it ourselves unless someone brought it to our attention.

Answer:

Absolutely you can move forward in life into personal growth, greater expression in experiences and healthy relationships. If that isn’t healing, I don’t know what is. And none of these things require medication, no matter what label has been applied to a set of maladaptive behavior. 

PTSD is not, as you correctly point out, solely happening within our women and men in military service. Any traumatic event has the potential of generating behavior classified as PTSD. Importantly, this trauma nor the later behavior says anything about your worth as a human being. Nor does this say anything about your level of “strength.” Who you are is not limited to any label, whether such is a healthy one you’ve chosen for yourself or one given to you through diagnosis.

Medications can help but they are not required for living healthy lives. Further, sometimes they may be helpful for a short time and then later removed. Also, like the label, whether you use them or not says nothing about who you are or the “strength” of your character.

Moving through PTSD involves looking at your resources, particularly your relationships, both with others and yourself.

Identify Support

Are you accepted for who you are and engaged with by others and yourself in ways that allow for personal exploration, challenge and growth? Are you comfortable with identifying what you Value and finding new ways to express your support for them? Do you have a community that encourages new experiences, lets you explore interests in new ways and includes people who share these interests?

The reason these previous questions and determining support systems is so important is that PTSD, like other issues related to anxiety/trauma, often results in isolation and removal from self-exploration. In the, totally understandable, desire to avoid feeling the anxiety, terror and discomfort, we build walls that eventually block us into a smaller and smaller space. The horrible irony is that ultimately this process results in us having only the terror itself as our companion.

Thankfully the world and each one of us, is bigger and filled with possibility, no matter how debilitating and limiting a label leads us to initially believe.

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An Issue of Interruption

There are few issues related to dialogue more annoying, more prone to misinterpretation, than interruptions. You’re happily sharing the latest and greatest from your mental repertoire, only to have it suddenly sidelined by a variable completely outside your control. It’s like that moment when walking down a city street, minding your own business, when an invisible crack in the concrete trips you up. Heart-racing, arms akimbo, head whipping around to see who saw, any shred of the thinking you were just engaged in shattered.

Art of the Conversation

Interruptions are a great way of showing what dialogue is largely about. Contrary to a common notion of it being an exchange of ideas, dialogue is far more concerned with the desire to be heard. If dialogue was really concerned with an exchange of ideas for the purpose of growing our knowledge-base, we’d be in a fight to see who could stay silent the longest. On the contrary, the struggle in dialogue is usually about who can say what more often, in the most witty, ear-catching way, particularly if it leads to the other person repeating what they just heard. This brings to mind the old advice we all got from our wise grandparents, that if God wanted us to talk more She’d have given us two mouths instead of two ears. Unfortunately, it’s more the case that we have two ears precisely because we want to make sure we hear ourselves talk.

We don’t share our opinions or behave the way we do without a bone-deep belief in the rightness of our actions. Having others acknowledge our words and actions, even at the cost of another person’s equanimity, is a small price to pay, in our eyes, for continued confirmation.

In short, the experience of being right is imperative for our survival, gratifying for our ego, and, overall, one of life’s cheapest and keenest satisfactions.

Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (pp. 4-5). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The Power of Being Heard

Interruptions serve another purpose as well: acknowledgment. They’re a tacit, and sometimes not so much, attempt by the person doing the interrupting that they consider themselves and what they have to say as at least as important as whatever the other person is doing. I hazard to guess that interruptions occur far more regularly from bosses to their subordinates and, in the case of children interrupting their parents, is about asserting their importance. The vast number of stories about bosses getting in the way of work and children getting in the way of parental social situations seems to bear this out, albeit anecdotally.

Some, reading the above, may believe that what is truly going on there is about power. However, acknowledgment doesn’t necessarily have to be about power, or at least not at its most basic level. Power requires a certain social structure to be played out. Instead, the focus here is more generally a concern of existential angst, or, in other words: the need to be seen. 

We really, really, need to belong. It’s why there’s never a waking moment when we aren’t considering, at some mental level, who we are in relation to something, someone or some group.  And at the heart of that need is a concern with our continued existence. This is why banishing or ostracism has been such a powerful tool for punishment and social control. We crave the continued acknowledgment of our social ties because being alone or cut off is a yawning abyss. 

Seen in this light, interruption is a great indicator of one’s anxiety, connected to whatever relationship is currently being attended to. Rather than seeing it as some great social affront or pointing to a lack of care for the other, the broader concern for connection, being seen and knowing one belongs, can be acknowledged. Not every interruption points to a narcissistic pathology, sometimes, if not often, it’s simply about being human.

Featured photo by Asa Rodger on Unsplash

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Feelings Are Always Waiting

What to do when feelings persist after the form of relationship they’re associated with has ended? Our feelings are not very tidy when it comes to staying within the bounds of what makes us comfortable. Often we may feel elation when it is considered more proper to feel chagrin. At other times we will feel sad when socially it’s expected we should be happy. When it comes to matters of the heart, it is indeed those pesky feelings which seemingly lie to us and set us down paths of confusion.

Let’s start with assuming love still exists after the ending of a relationship. Such an experience doesn’t require any particular behavior on your part. It’s a feeling, an assessment by you about the person, selecting particular parts of them and the history you had. Unless the time was an unmitigated disaster in which every moment was epically painful, there were then periods that were good and provided the means for there to be love.

Those times are what your mind is drawing on and from those memories, there is likely going to be feelings of loss. This is completely normal. Again though, this doesn’t require any particular behavior from you. Accept the feelings as part of being human, of acknowledging there were good times and you miss those. Call it love, call it whatever you want, but none of this requires anything out of you.

From: Return Of The Ex and Hope For Rebirth

“The loss is often so large, so ridiculously painful, not because the other person wasn’t worth it (though let’s face it, there really isn’t anybody worthy of invoking the feeling of soul-spasming pain felt by romantic loss) but because in a very real sense the world created by the connection was torn away. This isn’t poetic license, this touches upon attachment and how our minds work, giving us a bit of insight into why even after all the tears and sorrow there’s a part of us that leaps for joy at the possibility the ex may return.”

This is why labeling our emotions as ‘positive’ and ‘negative,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ is so unhelpful, it’s an attempt at making the nuanced, the complex, into a simple subtraction problem. Surely, so the thinking goes, without x-person in my life, we can subtract any associated y-emotions. Life doesn’t work that way however. Just as the initial attraction and shared experience drew on individual histories, social context and future desires, so then any emotional experience that comes after will draw on the same. That there will overlap to some degree allows for our internal stories to have coherence, but it also provides the space to make connections we don’t have to hold onto.

Our thoughts/emotions are not the sum total of who we are. Nor do they guide all of our behavior, not in any one-to-one sense. Spend a moment considering just how many thoughts/feelings you have that you don’t act upon or don’t do so in a particular way. You’ll quickly see that your life is far larger than any simple causal relationship between thought/feeling and action.

Relationships change/end for any number of reasons, from the obvious to the subtle, from the clear to the obscure. Very rarely is it because there was absolutely nothing good going on. Welcome to humanity, where the breadth of our relationship potential is as wide as there are people to connect with. Embrace the feelings, during and after, just know that what you do with them is up to you and the story you have about them is only partly about the person your attention is currently on.

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