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But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.
But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.
What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick.
We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it.
“Welcome to Holland.” Written by Emily Perl Kingsley, the parent of a child with Down syndrome, it’s about the experience of having your life’s expectations turned upside down: When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The
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We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them.
“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”
the late psychotherapist John Weakland famously said, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.” I
In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.
Most of us come to therapy feeling trapped—imprisoned by our thoughts, behaviors, marriages, jobs, fears, or past. Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for—I’m unlovable, I’m lovable—often we choose the one that makes us feel bad. Why do we keep our radios tuned to the same static-ridden stations (the everyone’s-life-is-better-than-mine station, the I-can’t-trust-people station, the nothing-works-out-for-me station) instead of moving the dial up or down? Change the station.
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There is a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.
We marry our unfinished business.
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: “Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.” Fromm
The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things—leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator—they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.
The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness. Death, of course, is an instinctive fear that we often repress but that tends to increase as we get older. What we fear isn’t just dying in the literal sense but in the sense of being extinguished, the loss of our very identities, of our younger and more vibrant selves. How do we defend against this fear? Sometimes we refuse to grow up. Sometimes we self-sabotage. And sometimes we flat-out deny our impending deaths. But as Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and
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I think about how it’s the not knowing that torments all of us. Not knowing why your boyfriend left. Not knowing what’s wrong with your body. Not knowing if you could have saved your son. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we’ll never know why.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
People with cherophobia are like Teflon pans in terms of pleasure—it doesn’t stick (though pain cakes on them as if to an ungreased surface). It’s common for people with traumatic histories to expect disaster just around the corner. Instead of leaning into the goodness that comes their way, they become hypervigilant, always waiting for something to go wrong.
The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others.
The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?
think of something else Wendell once said: “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.”
