self-awareness

Emotional Intelligence, Self-Development, self-perception

I’m going to step outside the usual heavy-thinking kinds of posts I normally write to offer a brief glimpse into the entirely-human world of Therapists As Human Beings. (I know most of you cognitively understand that we’re humans, but it’s surprising, in a no-not-really-kinda-way, how often clients in particular expect us to have our shit together in particular ways. Since it’s not often that folks who deal with us professionally get the chance to peek behind the curtain and recognize the foibles that make us just like everyone else, if you’re someone who doesn’t WANT to know that your therapist is human, might I recommend you click THIS LINK instead.)

So, disclosure: I turned 50 in May. I am part of the generation that didn’t grow up with a lot of childhood conveniences we take for granted in this day and age. Sometimes when in our middle aged wisdom and experience we encounter something that a schoolkid takes for granted, we can feel somewhat crushed that we’re not managing the experience as well as someone a tiny fraction of our age.

In preparation for a camping event over the Labour Day weekend, I bought a case of juice boxes at Costco. I have almost never used juice boxes, but a case of small square servings of fruit-sugared liquids is an excellent thing to take camping when you normally run into liquids/convenience issues on primitive sites. In the course of loading out, the case never made it into the vehicle and was, perforce, awaiting my return. Ergo, I’ve been drinking my way through the case of juice boxes for the last week.

And lemme tell you, nothing levels an adult ego like realizing that your “brain the size of a planet” and five decades of developing hand-eye coordination and grad-school-honed intellect and three decades worth of professional problem solving… it’s all for naught when for a week straight your Facebook posts read, “Days Since Last Juice Box Incident: 0”. Even after being scolded and schooled by a seven year old this past weekend on “Juice Box Best Practices”, I have still managed at least once a day to forget how these lethal little liquid grenades work, somehow. Much of this week’s laundry is comprised of Fruit Punch Fatalities.

So what’s going on here?

It’s both everything and nothing, really. From a mindfulness perspective, it’s the observation that I am apparently not in my best moment when it comes to maybe 60% of my juice box encounters; when you don’t pay attention to corporeal, mechanical details, it’s easy to grasp a thing that doesn’t do well when grasped. It’s a humbling reminder of vulnerability and openness to our own internal narratives around who we are and what we believe we *SHOULD* be capable of. It’s easy to feel humiliation when admitting we can’t do something a child can do in their sleep (those of you trying to teach senior parents to program a PVR, use a computer, or manage a smartphone, have almost certainly seen that humiliation in action in your parents, for example). We don’t as a species generally like admitting our failures and weaknesses, and for certain professions, those human weaknesses when exposed feel like nails in the coffins of our professional presentations to our clientele.

I’m of the (potentially contentious) opinion that embracing humility, on the other hand, is a way of maintaining balance within our sense of authentic presence. Most of us understand there is a difference between humilation and humility, but don’t always have a clear understanding of the difference:

Definition of humiliate:
humiliated; humiliating
transitive verb
:to reduce (someone) to a lower position in one’s own eyes or others’ eyes :to make (someone) ashamed or embarrassed :mortify

Humiliation is a terribly painful and destructive emotional state. It ranks very high among the things that people are afraid of. It is an overwhelming experience of shame and being degraded, usually in the eyes of others. Sometimes a person can be intentionally humiliated by another, in a sadistic attack that is intended to strip away all dignity and self-esteem. —
Michael Jolkovski

Definition of humility:
noun
:freedom from pride or arrogance :the quality or state of being humble

Humility, on the other hand, is a relief. When individuals are able to gracefully accept that there are limits to their power and importance, and to not collapse into despair, shame, or impotent rage, this is a developmental accomplishment. It marks the move from fantasy to reality, from omnipotence to competence. It is a gift at every stage of life ? when a 2-year-old can accept that they are not actually in charge of everything, or when an aged person accepts that they need to a depend on others in a way they haven?t before. There?s a key element of being at peace. Contrary to humiliation, humility gives a person their dignity and equilibrium back. —
Michael Jolkovski

There is a great deal of ego wrapped up in our adult concepts of who we should be, how we should function, what we should be able to do. To have our ego confronted with persistent failures on simple challenges — if a seven year old can wield the juice box so effortlessly, why am *I* awash in apple juice accidents?? — is almost guaranteed to feel like we are lesser, touching on that degradation mentioned under “humiliation”; our incompetence is being judged by others, we feel, and judged harshly. It feels like hot burning shame; “I’m 50 friggin’ years old, I drive a car and work and pay taxes, WHY CAN I NOT OPEN A DAMNED JUICE BOX WITHOUT CATASTROPHIC FAILURE???”

(That may or may not be an actual quote.)

There is a choice we can make when we are awash in the struggle around what we feel we SHOULD be able to manage, and what we actually experience. We’re going to feel what we feel, and if it’s the hot wash of shame and humiliation that hits us first, then so be it. But when that tide recedes, we can choose how to respond to the experience: we can judge ourselves as we imagine others are judging us, and stay bogged down in the peach punch-stained hell of our own humiliation and misery, or… we can sit with a seven year old Subject Matter Expert who probably handles more juice boxes in a month than I will handle in the course of my lifetime, and be open to what this child can teach us. In my case, I was amazed that this child had significantly more patience with me than I had been having for myself. He showed me how to carefully lift the top corners of the juice box and how to hold it so that I had some firmity of grip without grasping the weaker sides and inadvertently squeezing. He showed me twice, once on my juice box, and again on one of his own.

For myself, I could choose to be embarrassed by the necessity of this educational curve ball, or I could hold myself open to the teachings in spite of feeling more than a little ashamed at its necessity. As the definitions above suggest, one of the chiefest tenets of humility is the relief in accepting that one HAS limitations, of letting go of the ego-wrapped expectations and SHOULDS bolstering my flawed self-definition. It’s okay to be embarrassed. But we can choose, to some extent, whether that embarrassment parlays into shame and humiliation, or into humility and vulnerable authenticity.

Being able to own and embrace my own failings is, for many therapists, the largest resource pool from which our working compassion for others comes from. Sometimes we forget that we’re also flawed, and I can guarantee every one of us has flaws we actively WORK TO FORGET, because hey, no-one ever ENJOYS confronting or exposing our secret shames. But sometimes sharing them allows for a bonding experience, an opportunity to let in others who have similar flaws and weaknesses. Sometimes we can exploit our own vulnerabilities for comedic value (this is my own usual modus operandi; Virginia Satir would likely say this is my irreverent/irrelevant stance coming into play, and she’s probably not wrong; I’m okay with allowing many of my flaws to be seen, but I will spin-doctor the hell out of the presentation to increase the chances of my audience joining me in that witnessing in gentler, more tolerable ways.) Being able to separate out humiliation from humility allows us more of an opportunity for reflection; humiliation and shame are reactive default stances that close us down without much recourse for active decision-making. Humility leaves us open and relaxed in our understanding of limitations, and hopefully open to opportunities to learn from those with something to teach us, regardless of our expectations. “See the world through a child’s eyes” is a cliche because it’s true; they see and experience things so much more differently than we do that it’s good to be reminded sometimes they can teach or re-teach us so much.

So I’m going home to do more laundry, and contemplate the remaining juice boxes as a lesson in humility. They are a good reminder, in their own inauspicious, ticking-time-bomb kind of way, that what we expect of ourselves can sometimes be subverted by the simplest of things, and we can either flagellate ourselves mercilessly with shame and humiliation for failing those expectations, or we can be open to the lessons they can teach us with embarrassment rather than shame, and humility rather than humiliation.

(BTW, the Peach Punch is my favourite. Because you needed to know that.)

Life Transitions, Relationships

I had started the year with the self-directed research project of studying male depression and toxic masculinity, a seemingly-increasingly-timely subject for our times, between what we witnessed with the rise of a shifting attitude towards rape culture and gendered power dynamics (that may have started within the gaming community to some extent, but has spilled the river banks, as it were, into more mainstream conversations), the political circus south of the border and all of the gendered power struggles that surfaced there, and now we see systemic hatred and “Us versus Them”-isms reaching levels of violence we haven’t seen in a generation and a half as entire groups of people start to find their voices and push back against systemic intolerances both subtle and overt.

This plays out on the microcosmic scale in the therapy office with clients coming in to give voice to their own experiences, often for the first times in their lives. Recently I have been privileged to sit with a number of people who have been struggling to get out from under patterns of behaviour that, over the course of a lifetime, have led to what a friend of mine refers to as “complicity in their own subjugation”. Some of these clients are men, and it’s been refreshing to see them recognize their own patterns, relating them to traditional masculinity binds they been resisting (consciously or unconsciously) most of their lives, and struggling to *be* better partners.

On the other side of that equation are the women, trying to find their voices in a world that has left both men and women increasingly unsure of the roles they’re “supposed” to play once we start to strip out some of the traditionally-gendered underpinnings and expectations… but without replacing them with clear new guidelines. Terry Real, in “How Can I Get Through to you: Closing the Intimacy Gap between Men and Women”, writes:

Since Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking research, the idea that girls approaching adolescence “lose their voice,” that they learn to back away from conflict and swallow the truth, has become virtually a cultural axiom. But it takes factoring male development back into the analysis, understanding the patriarchal cultural influences on both sexes, before it occurs to us to ask the next critical question: When girls are inducted into womanhood, what is it exactly that they have to say that must be silenced? What is the truth that women carry that cannot be spoken? The answer is simple and chilling. Girls, women–and also young boys–all share this in common: none may speak the truth about men.

[…] What is the open secret that everyone around the man sees but from which he himself must be protected? It is the dance of contempt itself,
the dynamics of patriarchy as they play out, unacknowledged, inside the man’s skin.

–pg. 90-91

Real goes on to describe what I am seeing time and time again play out with my own clients as they struggle to establish some sense of autonomous self and rediscover their own voices, bubbling up through the mud of years or decades of complicit unhappiness.

Pia [Mellody] observed that there wasn’t one form of childhood abuse, but rather two. What Pia called “disempowering abuse” is the one we can all readily identify. It is made of of transactions that shame a child, hurt him, physically or psychologically, make him feel unwanted, helpless, unworthy. What Pia has called “false empowerment,” by contrast, is comprised of transactions that pump up a child’s grandiosity, or at the least, that do not actively hold it in check. Pia’s genius was in understanding that falsely empowering a child is also a form of abuse. Failure to supply appropriate guidance and limits does a grave disservice to a child, and represents a serious breach in parental responsibility. The combination of these two kinds of abuse lie at the core of the conspiracy about men.

–pg. 93

Anna and Mirriam* are two clients I have met recently, both women in their late 60s or early 70s, who are on the brink of leaving their respective marriages. Their stories are remarkably similar, and in them I hear not only echoes of my mother’s experience, but residual resonances with my own process of trying to sort out who I was/am supposed to be in relationship with men. Both women have been married for 40ish years, raised families, sacrificed many of their own dreams to raise children and support their husbands’ careers over their own aspirations. Like my mother, they’re of a generation that was taught rigid, gendered expectations about the roles we play. Both Anna and Mirriam are meeting with me because they are deeply, profoundly unhappy in their marriages. They both feel like they’ve “tried everything” over the years to get their husbands to change, or to try to find their own space within the limited confines of those gendered roles. As one might expect, the reality of retirement as it throws married couples back into each other’s space on a 24/7 basis after years of a careful balance between one sphere of control being external to “home”, and the other being the home and family sphere itself, is excruciating.

These women, and probably millions like them across the world where such gender-biased roles still have influence, feel desperate to be seen and heard as something other than an adjunct, an accessory, to their partners’ worlds. Men, who often define themselves more by what they DO than who they ARE, struggle with the transition to retirement because it takes away the bulk of their life’s worth of “doing”, and therefore also threatens their self-definition. Unsurprisingly, many women in this age range are likewise struggling as newly-retired husbands attempt to exert the control they are used to having outside the home, in a sphere that for probably decades has NOT been their principle domain. The resulting power struggle drives a wedge between partners, or widens a gulf already dug by decades of silent tolerance for a thousand tiny but unresolved hurts, and eventually, someone (usually the woman) winds up in therapy, or the lawyer’s office… or both. To understand who this pervasive silence saps the love and intimacy out of a marriage, we turn to Terry Real again:

Repudiating the inner vulnerability that is made up of equal parts of humanity and trauma, boys learn to punish in others what they dare not risk showing themselves. It is this unacknowledged superimposition of grandiosity on shame, this burying of hurt boy inside hurting man, the sweet vulnerable self wrapped in the armor of denial, walled off behind business, work, drink, or rage, the hidden “feminine” inside the bluff “masculine”, that is the truth about men that dare not be uttered. And why must it remain unspoken? Because women and children fear triggering either extreme grandiosity or shame in the men they depend on. They fear that the very act of naming these states, of unmasking their effects, will escalate them. And their fears are far from groundless. And yet, while speaking may trigger explosion, the destructive power of silence works like a slow-moving poison, infecting not just the women who still themselves, but the sons and daughters who watch as well, passing on to the next generation…burdens no youngster should be asked to carry.

–pg. 95

Women like my clients are maintaining silence because all attempts in the past to introduce themselves as equal partners to be seen and heard, or to request, require, demand, beg for emotional connection and intimacy with their partners, have been met with various forms of rejection, abuse, or violence. Over the years, their cries have muted to whispers and silence, and then one day, when they’ve felt they’ve had enough, they begin to look for a door marked exit. The strong ones deliver ultimatums to often-stunned partners who claim to have not seen any indications there was anything wrong, admissions that will often send wives desperate for connection into intense emotional spirals.

“I’ve been shouting myself hoarse for forty years,” said Mirriam, “and he pats me on the hand and tells me I’m over-reacting to nothing, that it’s all in my head.”

“He looks through me like I’m not even there,” Anna whispers through her tears. Even with me, she has trouble holding her voice at a normal conversational tone, and seems surprised when I voice anger on her behalf, though grateful that *someone* can.

Grandiosity pushed to extremes ends in homicide, shame in suicide. Both states are potentially lethal. This double-edged threat stops the truth in a woman’s mouth. Afraid of being hurt, afraid of hurting someone she loves, she backs down. Caretaking is, after all, her mandate, her primary training since birth. … The problem for women (or anyone inhabiting the caretaking side of the dynamic) is that while their empathic connection to the disowned “feminine”, the vulnerable, in the other is exaggerated, the connection to their own vulnerability, to self-care, is attenuated. In this way, many women, caring more deeply for the little boy in the man than the man does himself, find themselves bathed in sympathy for that hidden boy even while being psychologically, and sometimes physically, harmed by the man.

–pg. 99

Having women partners call them out for bad behaviours in relationship threatens many men’s self-identity and brings either a rage or shame response, so women, especially those who might have already encountered those kinds of response patterns in family or early relationship experiences, learn to be hyper-vigilant to such moods. They caretake situations to avoid rocking the boat and, along the way, suppress their own needs in the name of maintaining not just family “harmony” and in no small measure, their own personal safety. It’s no small wonder then that forty years into marriage, the box at the back of the closet into which they’ve been stuffing their own dreams, desires, wants, needs, finally starts to overflow like a boiling pot. One of the first things I do with sitting in witness with these clients is normalize the process by which we become silent, and in recognizing the normalization, begin to explore how they feel on a general level about the pattern of silencing they’ve experienced. It’s often much easier to begin such exploration at a general, cultural level before a client feels safe owning such experiences, such intensity of feeling, for themselves. It’s hugely common for women clients to be unable or unwilling to recognize or own their own anger, for example. They will use disarming or diminutizing language to express something cognitively, and in that we discern the stories they’ve been telling themselves, the unconscious scripts they’ve been following, for YEARS. And we know they’re cognitive layers trying to distance or disconnect from the actual feeling, because probably 4 times out of 5, at this point a client will completely dissolve somehow into an intense emotional reaction that is largely at odds with the cognitive overlay.

It’s a very difficult process to admit that one has a voice, let alone (re-)learn to use it. For many of these clients, these women, who have been suppressing for decades, the ship on which any hope of repair rests has sailed. That’s not to say things cannot change for the better, but the lion’s share of the effort involves training frightened women to take emotional risks in the face of a partner who is potentially unraveling in their own way as life transitions change everything they knew, and if the partner isn’t dealing with that internal turmoil effectively themselves, a client suddenly introducing new, unexpected boundaries where previously none existed and demanding respectful adherence and (gasp!) CONSENT where previously none has been necessary, is more likely going to make things worse before anything gets better. We cannot force truculent partners to change, especially if we look at them through the lens of gendered baggage trapping us all to some extent in the roles we play and better understand what’s potentially happening on the inside of their heads while we’re beating against the barricades on the outside.

I have never not been honest with a client facing this kind of effort: we cannot predict how the change process will go, and we cannot guarantee the partner will be as willing to engage the change process as you are… if at all. Some women will understandably find the process of departure a simpler and more palatable choice; some will stay and fight for their marriages and, more importantly, their spaces and voices within them. And it’s important to recognize, from a therapeutic position, that these role-based issues are not strictly limited to an older generation, though some of the entitlement-based expectations are more entrenched; my younger client couples are finding an easier time exploring and expressing a more equally-distributed power base, and women in general are finding more of their own voices. But even with my 20-somethings, I see residual cultural baggage around women being able to ask for what they want and need, cropping up to stunt some of their intimate interactions. We’re not out of the woods yet, especially as younger men are currently being trapped between legacy cultural traditions surrounding “masculinity” and a more feminist approach to equality and egalitarianism that’s leaving them without a clear way forward into self-esteem and self-identity — a chaotic state they then carry forward into their relationships in troubling ways.

But we do have tools now, and language, for sorting through the years of silence and suppression. Getting clients into therapy where these experiences can be validated is the hard part for the client; sitting with them while they confront the choice of staying the same and coping, or leaving and starting over at any age is often the hard part for the therapist. But it is a great privilege to be the space, the safety, and sometimes the first voice allowing and encouraging these clients, these women especially (but the men as well who are also struggling to give voice to what they themselves have been burying for most of their lives), to speak up. In many ways, these clients are the ones who best illustrate how it’s less about the “therapeutic interventions” we professionals bring to the exchange, and entirely about making space for the relationship to be pre-eminent instead. So many of these clients have never felt, or forgotten what it feels like, to be seen and heard for themselves in all their beauty… and all their pain.

And thus, the work begins.

* — Names are changed to protect client confidentiality.

Emotional Intelligence, Life Transitions, Self-Development

This morning I’m thinking about the term “midlife crisis”, both in terms of the ambiguity of the term “midlife”, and, well, I guess, the nature of “crisis”. Since Tuesday mornings often roll around before I’ve actually figured out what the weekly blog topic is going to be, my “creative process”, such as it is, involves sitting down in my independent downtown favourite coffee shop and staring out the big front windows while I reflect on any developing themes from the past or previous weeks while pretending I can absorb scandalous amounts of coffee through osmosis. On a whim, I googled the term “midlife crisis”, in part because of a couple of lingering experiences this past week, in part because, hey, *I’m* fifty and my own life has been something of a challenge for the past five years, many of my friends are sliding slowly into (or through, or just edging out of) this age range, and because it’s Tuesday and I need to write about SOMETHING.

Imagine my surprise when a hefty percentage of the search results come back with variations on the theme of the “myth of midlife crisis”. “Myth??” I thought to myself. “I don’t freaking think so.” [Character point: Our Humble Narrator may be a little tightly-wound and emotionally reactive before she’s had coffee.]

Less surprisingly, it starts to make a kind of sense when I come back to consider the readings from the perspective of last week’s post: it’s all in the definitions of the words we use. For one thing, “midlife” is a VERY broadly-defined age range; while it has settled through common social usage to be “in one’s 40s”, different studies of social mental health and happiness have encompassed participants from their late 20s to their mid-70s:

“More than a quarter said they had experienced a midlife crisis, a term they were free to define for themselves. The average age of crisis was 46. Some said their crisis was because they realized time was slipping away from them. Others blamed it on a divorce. Others said it was prompted by losing a job.

?Most boiled down to ?something happened that made me re-evalute my life,? ? Wethington says. ?That?s a pretty minimal definition.? She considers herself in the camp of sociologists who believe the midlife crisis is a myth.”

— as reported here.

Sooooo… okay. I’m definitely in the camp that believes, as much from a professional perspective as a personal one, that something(s) happens one day that makes us re-evaluate our lives. For me it was a separation/divorce coupled with struggling through a protracted career transition; for many, it’s the onset of “empty nest syndrome”, or the challenge of confronting own mortality through dealing with aging or dying parents. The definition of “crisis” itself is open to some debate; sometimes it’s the difference between a swift, singular stroke (death, sudden relationship endings, job loss) versus the “death by a thousand cuts” of slow, progressive unhappiness and dissatisfaction that one day simply hits a breaking point. This past week I had two new clients in this latter category that underlined the idea that a singular crisis event and a crisis point are not exactly the same things, but can provoke the same kind of provocative, potentially catastrophic, drive to change SOMETHING.

Why change?

“Erik Erikson was a developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst who among other things coined the phrases ?identity crisis? and ?generativity.? Erikson described generativity as, “a concern for establishing and guiding the next generation.” Between the ages of 40 to 65, Erikson theorized that we all face the existential question, ?Can I make my life count?? and the psychosocial crisis of ?generativity vs. stagnation.” “

— as reported here.

The kinds of change that we have culturally connected to this notion of the “midlife crisis” encompass a number of different plausible needs: the knee-jerk reaction to getting old, or to not being where our cultural narratives told us we SHOULD be by our mid-40s; the knee-jerk reactions to discovering we did everything we were told we SHOULD do, so why don’t we feel happy? The reaction to having invested 18-22 years in raising children to be independent people, without having invested the same work into our partnered relationships and, in the echoing stillness of that now-empty nest, wondering “Why don’t we ever talk to each other? What do we still have in common? WHO IS THIS STRANGER IN MY BED??” The reaction to struggling to find personal fulfillment through the external validation of work or volunteer or extended family involvements, and confronting dissatisfaction with one or more of those facets suddenly failing us, or the slow recognition that they have NEVER fulfilled us…

The list of agents provocateurs goes on, but the gist is, essentially something points out to us that we’re not where we thought we coulda/shoulda/woulda been by now when we followed the script like we were expected to. The two clients I saw last week who started this train of thought for me were both women in a slightly-later-than-midlife state who were finally dealing with similar issues as they and their partners cruised roughly into retirement–another life state-change that often provokes major adjustments and realizations for many. So we recognize, possibly for the first time, that we’re not happy with where we’re at, and for many who make it into therapy at this stage, it’s the first time they may have given themselves permission to ADMIT aloud that they are not happy. But because our culture is still very much geared toward a capitalist-heavy “pursuit of happiness” mindset in which individual happiness is, paradoxically, both the be all and end all of our existence and yet the thing we are most expected to sacrifice in pursuit of being a Good Partner, Good Family, Good Employee, yadda yadda yadda… we thrash around trying to find a reasonable path out of the conundrum of trying to recognize our own happiness and contentment and peace of mind as distinct from the weight of internalized cultural baggage. This moment of awakening, especially when it provokes a path of awakening change, is what Chogyam Trungpa refers to as “recovering the sanity we are born with”.

Many things happen with clients who are coming to a therapist at this point in their lives. Often, we have to start in the short term with shoring them up in the face of a precipitating crisis event–death, divorce, departures, dissastisfaction. Then we begin the deeper work of making some kind of meaning of the events and their responses, perhaps deconstructing some of their internalized, potentially-inherited narratives and values that have been shaken by these events. This part is like doing a structural assessment on a building after an earthquake: we need to figure out what part of the foundation is still solid, and what parts of the remaining structure need to be replaced with something better-designed to handle what’s happening, or what’s to come. This work is often a split between narrative therapy, and reconstructuring self-identity through deliberate work around identifying and articulating individual needs and wants. We’ll often do some ongoing work around rebuilding self-esteem, especially in situations where the crisis (as a singular event or ongoing progression) has eroded the client’s confidence in Self or personal agency. And above all, we normalize that many of these crises, regardless of when in the life cycle they happen, are GOING TO BE traumatic for many people. Catastrophic adjustments are the ones we never see coming and generally don’t prepare for, assuming we knew HOW to prepare effectively in the first place.

There definitely is a sense of life transitions for many of us, right around now; regardless of how or why we awaken to this sense, and how well we process the sense of urgency that drives that from “awareness” to “crisis” on a seeming-moment’s notice, most of us will face some kind of critical thrashing experience that brings an opportunity to assess and evaluate ourselves. We’re not always going to be receptive to the goad, nor graceful in how we weather the adjustments to come. But there are resources to get us through these changes that can be more helpful than the cliched responses popularized in mass media. Not all of us can afford red sports cars or traipsing off to Thailand to discover ourselves, but there are always ways to connect with support and resources to help steer us through the worst of the thrashing. Self-peace is a worthy goal when we find effective ways of weathering the storms, even if we need a helping hand to get through them.

Attachments, Emotional Intelligence, Relationships, self-perception

The more I work with adult clients raised in environments where parental or caretaker love was NOT present, or was inconsistent at best, the more I come to recognize a stance in many of my clients in which they have learned to substitute “being needed” for authentic love. Substituting need for love can manifest in many different ways, but often embodies a significant portion of care-taking for others as a core practice, as if to say, “If I can prove my value to you through taking care of you, you’ll just love me, right?”

What happens instead, however, is a slippery slope of enablement and reinforcing potential entitlements. How this plays out in a lot of relational dynamics (at least insofar as we therapists see it in the counselling office) looks like this:

A caretaker personality is often hyper-attentive, or hyper-vigilant, to the moods of a partner. At the earliest signs of partner distress, the care-taker is *right in there*, sometimes asking explicitly, “What can I do for you? How can I help you? What do you need from me?” More commonly, however, the care-taker often guesses or tries to anticipate what needs are going unaddressed, to take care of them BEFORE the distressed partner can increase distress (either internally at themselves or outwardly at the care-taker or other vulnerable others). While this care-taking practice seems a noble gesture, the problems it introduces are manifold.

First, it removes responsibility for practicing emotional self awareness and self-regulation from the distressed party; they never learn how to manage themselves or their own needs. Secondly, it creates undue stress on the care-taker, not only because they’ve taken on emotional labour that, truthfully, isn’t theirs to manage, but also because it generally encourages care-takers to compartmentalize or bury their OWN needs, anxieties, or distresses without effectively addressing them. Third, it reinforces the codependent fusion by reinforcing the notion that neither can effectively exist without the other, since a care-taker by definitions must have others to care for in order to feel validated, and they believe the Other cannot exist without them to manage every little detail for them (something those Others may often be too willing to accept if it means less work for them to handle on some front or other).

It may be true that very few of us *LIKE* seeing our partners in distress, but there’s a massive difference between being ready to assist, or simply bearing witness, and moving in to “fix” things for another. When I was a teenager taking swimming lessons up to and including training as a lifeguard, the VERY FIRST lesson they teach us about rescuing drowning swimmers is that it’s a REALLY BAD IDEA to get close enough to the drowning swimmer to make contact. The swimmer in their panic will grab on to the rescue attempt and completely overwhelm the rescuer… and they both drown. So lifeguards are trained to use a “reverse and ready” position that lets them push a flotation device to the swimmer and instruct them to grab and hang on until they are calm enough to be assisted back to safety. This analogy is one of the most powerful ones I can give to care-takers who insist on swimming in after distressed partners, then wonder why they always feel so overwhelmed by their efforts, almost to the point of drowning themselves.

This state of emotional enmeshment, where care-takers deflect or defer their own anxiety by hyper-attentively managing others’ distress is something Murray Bowen identified in (family) systems as “fusion”:

?Fusion or lack of differentiation is where individual choices are set aside in service of achieving harmony in the system? (Brown, 1999)

Fusion is where ?people form intense relationships with others and their actions depend largely on the condition of the relationships at any given time?Decisions depend on what others think and whether the decision will disturb the fusion of the existing relationships.? (Papero, 2000)

Care-takers come by this fusion through their early training; they learn that they cannot be emotional safe, acknowledged and validated for any reason other than a service they can provide. Parentified children, for example, or displaced children, often internalize early on a strong sense that they are valuable for what they DO, rather than simply for being lovable and worthwhile people in their own right. (The displacement may happen within the family system for a variety of reasons, such as parental preference for a first-born or male child over a female child; or one child is perceived as a “problem” child while other children might be left to manage on their own or manage the family while the parents cope with the “problem”; children may also feel ostracized in a variety of ways by their care-takers for not conforming to or complying with both explicit and implicit systemic values.) They learn to fear what happens if they do NOT provide the service they believe is expected of them. Seeing loved ones in emotional distress may trigger intense surges in their own anxiety; perhaps their own early care-takers tended to act out with violence in distress, so any emotional distress in the adult client is intolerable, for fear of such violences returning. Or the adult client may simply not recognize the value of anything other than performing service; if they themselves have no memorable experience of being loved for themselves, they may be unable to distinguish a difference between “being needed” and “being loved”, and the idea of not being needed to take care of someone threatens their very self-definition and sense of self-worth.

It’s a tricky thing to suss out what’s happening with clients who fall into the category of “substituting need for love”, because the patterns are hard to verify in the light of things like Gary Chapman’s Love Languages identifying “acts of service” as a bone fide love language. Where we start to see the substitution becoming problematic is when the underlying attachments themselves become a struggle to manage; care-takers doing this kind of substitution often have anxious attachments in which any failure of the partner to validate the care-takers efforts become a source of significant distress in the care-taker themselves. There is no healthy sense of differentiation between the care-taker and the target when the smallest bump in this “transference of care” can send one or both parties into distress. It’s too easy for the receiving partner to simply become complacent with being cared for, especially if it means they never have to learn to self-manage their own distress when someone else is always there to take care of things for them. And it certainly seems a common social pattern for individuals to gravitate into relationships with complimentary, familiar care-taking patterns. The patterns in and of themselves may not be problematic, but they bring with them a weighty potential for invisible expectations and unspoken needs around reflecting validation. Care-takers will sometimes chase target recipients even if the relationship as a whole is one they recognize on some level as unhealthy for them; that’s certainly a Big Red Flag in the therapy room that we’re dealing with someone who is potentially chasing validation for being needed, and a historical or Family of Origin snapshot will tell us in very short order whether or not the client recognizes the experience of being loved, or if they respond more to being needed.

To be clear, in healthy intimate relationships, there is generally a balance of love and need, and sometimes there is less need than love. When need overshadows love, however, or subsumes it completely, we stand at high risk for having less stable, less satisfactory relationships overall. In therapy we might find that care-takers who only (or predominantly) identify with meeting needs more than recognizing love as their primary avenue of attachment are insecure not only in their relationships, but in themselves. We see a lot of co-morbid symptoms tied to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and profound exhaustion, with a potential raft of physical/health issues that often come along for the ride with ANY of these mental health challenges. Unraveling this convoluted self-identity can be a lengthy process; there are no “silver bullet solutions” when countering a lifetime’s worth of programming around a person’s sense of intrinsic sense of worth. We start with the basics of Human Worth, and look at how those lessons may have been twisted early on, reinforced by a lifetime’s worth of relationship practices, and how the errant substitution of need for love is probably sabotaging self and self-in-relationship in the client’s current situations. We can unravel understandings and begin the work of creating a new sense of self, but as with all things, it takes time and patience, and a willingness to self-love that can sometimes be every bit as challenging as loving others

But the work is worthwhile, however difficult. We are all worthy of love, not just because of what we DO for others, but simply because as people we have a value all our own. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of that fact, and taught (as we maybe weren’t in early life) to see that in and for ourselves.

Emotional Intelligence, Self-Development, Uncategorized

Sometimes when people approach the process of ?trying to get their lives in order?, either as a choice for general improvement or in the aftermath of some kind of major upheaval, they may find themselves flummoxed at the scope of change, and unable to pinpoint a place to start. When clients come into my office for help with this kind of reconstruction work, we often start with the Needs and Wants work discussed in previous posts, so that we know what kinds of needs the client is seeking to address, going forward from this moment in their lives. After we know what port they’re trying to make for, we create a roadmap, something that gives them a framework to approach changing important aspects of their lives by adjusting how they express and boundary the needs and wants attached to those aspect. A roadmap identifies specific goals the individual wants to meet, and a reasonable, realistic plan for attaining them as best they can.

When creating a personal roadmap, these kinds of general goals are a second or third step in the process. They help define things we feel are needful, but they don’t address the very important question, “why?” Why are these kinds of changes necessary? What are they intended to move a person towards? What needs are they intended to meet?

The purpose of a roadmap, generally speaking, is to help define and prioritize meeting an individual’s needs and wants. By defining a high-level need in one’s life, then defining all the intermediary needs that make up that culminating purpose,?then?defining all the goals the individual feels they need to achieve to meet those needs, a person creates a customized list of short-term checklist goals that are congruent both with the larger needs, and the overall purpose. Employing the map analogy to full effect, it’s like charting a high-level, low-detail map of the globe, then zooming in until, at the most detailed level, you have a street map of your own neighbourhood. Each level of the roadmap is designed to refine the goals at that particular level, the needs that goal meets, and/or the actions or changes required to address the needs that meet the goals.

Many people struggle to communicate their own needs, for two main reasons:

  1. They don’t know their own needs, and
  2. They don’t trust that communicating them will get them met.

A roadmap is a tool for?better understanding your own needs. It may be that your needs are not being met because you’re unclear or inconsistent in their presentation, or you frequently downplay their priority when presenting them to others. This exercise is going to be most difficult for people who lack a willingness to be honestly introspective, or who have difficulty finding their own voice in relationships, but if you’re willing to tough it out, you’ll have the start of a improved, more consistent understanding of yourself, and that?can?help ease communicating this material to people around you.

Grab pencil and paper; I’ll wait.

For the purpose of this exercise, we’ll start with a familiar, reasonably common goal. For most people (at least in our own culture) the overall goal in life is?to be happy. If this is true for you, pick up your pencils and write that in the middle at the top of your paper:?“I want to be more consistently happy”. If happiness?isn’t?the be-all and end-all of your life’s purpose, write a more appropriate mission statement – where “appropriate” means “applicable to yourself, personally” – and leave me a comment to tell me what you chose, because I’ll be curious to see how the process works out for other goals. For the purpose of documenting the exercise (and partly because I’ll be using myself as an example), I’m going to continue with increasing happiness?as this particular roadmap’s destination point. As the highest?priority, ?everything else on your roadmap should be pointing at this goal, and giving you something to which you can align your decision processes.

Creating a Personal Mission Statement

When you look at that statement,?“I want to be more consistently happy”, what does that mean to you? When you consider?happiness?in the in the big picture?of your life overall, what contributes to your happiness? For many, if not most, of us, the answer to this question will amount to something that feels like a personal mission?statement, such as “I want to improve the quality of my life such that I am secure, comfortable; my needs are met and I have some degree of luxury”. If this assessment doesn’t fit for you, insert your own mission statement, one that encompasses your highest-priority need(s). Yes, these statements may seem banal and obvious at this stage of the game, but you’d be amazed at how many people have *never* thought to make these intentions for their lives explicit – and not clarifying the overall intent makes it difficult in both the long and short term, to do the evaluative assessments in situ that tell them whether or not they are behaving congruently, moving towards their priority need(s). Remember the Seneca quote from last week: “When you don’t know what port you’re making for, no wind is the right wind.”

Applying the Needs Framework

Now look at that mission statement and ask yourself, what needs must you meet in yourself to achieve your definition happiness, your priority need as you have defined it? These are the overall?life needs?or goals that you will strive to attain over the term of your life, the larger motivators that will help you shape decisions that make you happy, or move you towards your priority need. List everything that comes to mind on a second line under?“I want to be more consistently happy”, in a column of its own.

For myself, this second line contains the following column headers:

  1. Good Physical Health
  2. Good Mental Health
  3. Financial Stability
  4. Strong & Healthy Relationships
  5. Comfortable Home

You can re-arrange the items on this line according to priority, if they are not all valued equally in your personal roadmap. For my roadmap, I?value all five of my entries on this line equally. If any *one* of these items slides sufficiently off-kilter, it will pull all the rest of the items on this line out of balance?fairly quickly.

Next, draw lines on your paper to form columns for each of these secondary-level needs. In this stage of the exercise, I?want to document the?core personal needs, the emotionally-invested requirements you have for each of the categories of life needs defined in the column headings. For some of you, this section may be the most difficult, because it requires you to look inside and become aware of, and give name to, some fairly intimate needs. In many cases, you may not know what some or all of these needs are, and that’s okay?- a roadmap is a lifelong project-in-progress; you can come back and fill in the blanks (or adjust previous content) later as you become more aware of your own?core needs.

Breaking Down the Emotional Needs

The importance of this exercise comes from knowing what sub-level, emotional needs are likely to skew your attempts to meet your high-level life needs. If you find you are consistently not achieving some degree of success with the need identified in the column heading (such as “Financial Stability”), look at the emotional needs you’ve connected with that life need. For example, my map has “Meaningful Work” tied to “Financial Stability”, because when I don’t have work I find meaningful, my own unhappiness jeopardizes my willingness to stay in unsatisfying jobs, which has incredible impact on my financial stability.?Honestly assess whether your emotional requirements are being fulfilled. If what you’ve written on paper here doesn’t feel like it’s?the issue, perhaps there’s another emotional need you haven’t yet identified but are responding to as it goes unmet below surface-level consciousness. Or perhaps one of the needs in another category is sliding, and pulling everything else with it (as when pervasive job dissatisfaction starts to manifest as conflict or struggles in relationships). Knowing the emotional needs as well as the life goals becomes an excellent diagnostic tool when you become frustrated at a perceived lack of progress in any one area, because you can come back to your roadmap for reference to see where an identified, prioritized need is sliding.

Being aware of your emotional needs, and how they map to your life goals and global need, also makes the whole deal a hell of a lot easier to communicate clearly, and with relevant priority, to those people with whom you share your life.

For myself, mapping emotional needs for my life goals looks like this:

  1. Good physical health: I?need to feel attractive (in my own eyes, at least), and physically capable, strong enough to be (by and large) physically independent.
  2. Good mental health: I?need to feel like I’m doing more than coping from one day to the next, that I’m actively resolving, or at least working on, my own issues.
  3. Financial stability: I?need to feel like I’m responsibly managing my resources so that I?can both cover my basic expenses, and allow for a reasonable degree of discretionary luxury, and am planning adequately for future/retirement necessities.
  4. Strong & healthy relationships: I?need to feel like a respected and respectful equal; I?need to feel desired and desirable; I?need to feel I?am trusted enough to have some degree of decision-making autonomy; I?need to communicate effectively, and be communicated with likewise; I?need to be able to continue with intimate (invested/emotionally engaged), non-primary relationships, both sexual and non-sexual in nature.
  5. Comfortable home: I?need to feel secure in my home; I?need to feel it is a place of peace and comfort. I?*want* to be surrounded by items of beauty and quality; I *want* to be able to have at least adequate space for all my myriad hobbies.

The Action Plan

Now we come to the portion of the exercise with which people have the least amount of difficulty producing, if a harder time maintaining. In this stage, you’re going to list what you’re doing, not doing, and planning to do, to address the emotional needs that drive the life needs that direct you towards your priority need. (Are you seeing how this all starts to hang together now?)

You may have to go to a second sheet of paper somewhere around here; I?often do.

Keeping your *emotional needs* firmly at the forefront of your mind, look at everything you have written in each column, and under that information, I?want you to outline the definitive actions you are doing to meet those needs. Try to word things in the positive if you can; it helps clarify forward focus?when we?define plans by what we’re doing rather than what we’re NOT doing. For example, instead of saying “stop eating junk food”, say instead, “eat more balanced meals, more healthy snacks”. Working in the positive gives you actual goals to move towards; working in the negative declines only a small number of possible options for your actions, which leaves you with unclear goals and a harder time measuring congruency in meeting or moving towards your stated global and personal needs. Think positive!

Next, list the things you aren’t doing but WILL do to help meet that need. These are going to be the larger milestones on your roadmap, goals that may take some work to manage, but real, achievable things you can reach either immediately or with some degree of short- or long-term directed planning.

My milestones-in-progress:

  1. Good Physical Health: a. rebuild spinal integrity as much as possible; b. rebuild general fitness level (aquafit/swimming, cycling); c. moderate food intake to reasonable portion sizes; d. reduce the carbs-content of that intake (not necessarily to Atkins-level, but down); e. eat more home-cooked meals and less fast food & junk.
  2. Good Mental Health: a. continue my own therapy; b. address/resolve known outstanding fears of feeling undervalued or minimized in my intimate relationships; c. continue to practice and evaluate and refine my risk assessment processes.
  3. Financial Stability: a. redo the monthly budgets and see how much money I actually?have?when all the bills and standard personal and professional expenses are paid each month; b. move investment portfolio to a better-managed, higher-yield program; c. determine whether I?can safely increase monthly contributions to that portfolio base, or increase loan payments; d. create list of high-want items, and look at short- and long-term budget options for planned purchasing.
  4. Strong & Healthy Relationships: a. clarify relationship structures?and expectations tied to those structures; b. re-evaluate and clarify any changes to the?Relationship Framework & Needs; c. apply improved tools and techniques as developed via counselling, evaluate and tweak as needed; d. continue to evaluate and improve communications (especially where prioritized needs and wants are concerned); e. invest more time in discovering the things we enjoy doing together
  5. Comfortable Home: a. improve chore and general maintenance schedule; b. ask for more help when necessary; c. check the budget to see if hiring even occasional professional help is possible; d. rearrange space to make sure prioritized activities have priority access.

Evaluating Obstacle Risk

Now we’re getting to the closing sections of the roadmap.

You have now defined, or at least begun sketching in, your needs: global, life, personal. You’ve developed some milestones that set you on the path of meeting those identified needs, achievable goals that are not out of your reach (even if they may take some planning and effort to attain). But any pragmatic planning requires a degree of Risk Evaluation: you have to know what hurdles stand between you and your milestones, what dependencies you must factor in (either things you have to do in a specific order, or factors that may be beyond your control), and your contingency plan for managing your way over those hurdles. You’ll need to know which hurdles can be surpassed in the short term or with relatively minimal effort, and which ones require mini-roadmaps of their own to circumvent.

You can make separate lists of these as needed. I’m not going to go into too much detail here, because this is the stage where it becomes easy to become bogged down in the details, or dismayed by the hurdles. The purpose of this part of the roadmap is awareness, not obsession. You’re not documenting the known hurdles in order to throw them up as excuses to step off the roadmap and slide into despondency – to do so defeats the work and purpose of the roadmap exercise itself. This part of the roadmap simply lists the known challenges, like a topographical map might list mountains (take *THIS* pass through them), or rivers (detour to *THIS* shallow ford), or simply, “Here Be Dragons, avoid at all costs”.

And here we come to what should for all of us be the battle cry for this work: “Don’t let the fact that the work is hard become your excuse for not doing the work”.

I?suspect most people won’t be able to pull a detailed roadmap together in one sitting, certainly not without some degree of mental stressing. It took me several sittings to write?this post, with several revisions over the years since it first appeared, and now multiple attempts to prep it for this release?and the roadmap concept is one I’ve been actively working with now for *years*. I’ve had to go back rooting through some of the more introspective relationship-building posts I’ve written over the years to find places where I’ve already done some of the work, or explained some of the concepts. Trying to distill the process proved to be a hard exercise in and of itself, but?it has proven to be a useful tool for myself and my clients over the years as we try to shape a frame of reference for their self-development.

When we ask question in session like, “What kind of person do you *WANT* to be?”, we have to know as much about the needs their answer is trying to address as we do about the obstacles they perceive getting in their way. Then we figure out what we need to do about the goals of meeting those needs and working around the obstacles. This roadmap is a good way of allowing people a means of thinking about those questions, then measuring their own progress along the route they’ve plotted.

Emotional Intelligence, Self-Development, Uncategorized

I know I promised last week that we’d get to roadmaps this week, but it occurs to me we may need to delve first into how to develop a framework understanding of our own needs and wants. In the course of my own early counselling sessions as a client, I framed in what I consider to be my five cornerstone principles of a good relationship (be it a friendship, a professional relationship, an intimate, emotionally-invested partnership, etc.). These principles represent a framework on which I later hung the needs and wants I identified as important to my ability and willingness to engage in relationships. This particular structure has subsequently become an intrinsic piece of the work I do with my own clients engaging in self-discovery. Most clients come into therapy looking to change or improve some aspect of themselves, and especially with couples I often hear statements like, ?We want to improve our communications, and our intimacy.?

That’s all well and good, say I, but what do these words actually mean? What do they look like when they are being adequately addressed? What does it look like when they’re not? So we start with what I think of as big umbrella words, words that cover a lot of terrain and (frequently, as we discover) mean different things to different people. When we start with the big words, we can begin to drill down into expectations and values attached to those umbrella words, and often find a host of more detailed needs and wants lurking in the shade underneath. Sometimes it takes a therapist to figure out how to extract the name of the need from the broader discussion around these frameworks, but often we can get to them on our own by breaking down the umbrella-level lexicon with two particular questions: What’s important about [principle] to you? What need(s) do those important factors meet for you?

Note: Bear in mind, what I identified as foundational for myself may not look the same for everyone; for example, someone coming out of very different life experiences may identify ?Safety? as a cornerstone principle. For some, the ambiguous term ?intimacy? might be at the top of their list, if they feel they need those needs met first and foremost before committing to emotional engagement and investment. My personal list below also makes the implicit assumption that basic needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, employment, income, etc., are already being addressed and met. In the case where any of these baseline safety needs are NOT being met, we often must address those first; if you know your Maslow hierarchy of needs, you’ll know that an individual cannot proceed to self-actualization work (which is largely what I write about) while their basic existence is uncertain or threatened.

Most of the list below falls under the Maslow category of Love/Belonging or Actualization.

My five principles are: communication, consideration, responsibility, availability, and collaboration.?Using this 5-point structure, I am now going to attempt the death-defying feat of mapping these five cornerstone principles to a host of specific relationship needs. As this remains an organic work-in-progress for myself, some of these principles and needs remain general, and deliberately so; I also didn’t want to get distracted by the trap of trying to define my needs as they might pertain to *specific* relationships.

Principle: Communication

Needs: create time and space to talk and listen; create a shared lexicon of important terms; be willing to inform each other when needs/wants/expectations/plans/etc change, and stay present to create a solution (see Availability); question for clarity and understanding when one of us doesn’t understand something;?don’t make assumptions or draw conclusion in the absence of information/answers from the other party–if the only reason you don’t know something for sure is because *you* failed to ask the questions, the responsibility for those possibly erroneous conclusions is all yours.

Principle: Consideration

Needs: treat me as you want me to treat you (compassion); take those wants/needs/expectations of mine that you are aware of into consideration before making or acting on a decision that affects me or us, and let me know when your decided outcome runs contrary to what you know of my stance; be respectful of how you represent me to other people (whether I’m present or not); be supportive when I’m stressing; don’t deliberately risk the physical or emotional health and stability of the relationship (this is a catch-all for many things, best translated as, “Think many times before you introduce anything with a potentially negative influence or impact to our relationship”; tell me respectfully and in a timely manner if I’m being inconsiderate of you and your needs/wants/etc.; understand (and help me understand) that we are two distinct entities with two distinct purposes, two distinct perspectives, two distinct drives, two distinct methods of interacting with our respective worlds; help find a means of making those differences work for us, rather than drive us apart.

Principle: Responsibility

Needs: be willing to recognize, understand, and accept ownership for your actions, and the consequences thereof; don’t expect me to solve all your problems for you (trust that while I’m here to help, I am not your personal Quixotic hero, nor do I expect you to be mine); drive the process for resolving any issues you bring up that require such action (I don’t read minds, so if you have a need or expectation that isn’t met, it’s your responsibility to make that known to me, not mine to guess) – WHO HAS THE NEED, DRIVES THE SOLUTION; help me avoid known patterns like passive-aggressive ?blamestorming? and skittering away from tense topics, and be cool when I call your patterns to attention in return; don’t assume that because I’ve asked for your input, that I’m expecting you to solve all my problems for me: DON’T OWN MY SHIT, DON’T EXPECT ME TO OWN YOURS.

[A recurring lessons originally phrased by a good friend as, “Don’t be complicit in your own subjugation”, also falls into this area of responsibility and owning your own actions, but as it wasn’t really something I could tie to a specific relationship *need*, per se, I didn’t initially include it. Maybe for future blog fodder, I might ponder a list of ?lessons learned? that have been important steps on the path to that fifth Maslow tier of self-actualization– but not today.]

Principle: Availabilty

Needs: stay present when we’re talking about serious stuff, or, if you can’t stay present, tell me that you can’t (and preferably why), and let me know when you *will* be available; make time for me in your life, in your social circles and activities (let me discover and decide for myself which ones I’ll join you in, and which I won’t); make time for a physical relationship (sex, snuggles, touches, showers, play, whatever); provide timely information about your schedule so we can make joint or solo plans accordingly; be honest about your interest in any plans that come up (if you think you’re going to hate it, we can almost always find ways around requiring your attendance)

Principle: Collaboration

Needs: jointly establish mutual/shared goals and plans for achieving those goals; communicate interest and desire for collaborative projects (generally and specifically), along with identified degree of prioritization; be honest about your interest in collaborations, and communicate any influencing factors you are aware of that will impact joint efforts; if I explicitly ask for help with a challenge, work with me to determine what kind of help I’m asking for, and determining what kind of solution/resolution process I’m seeing help with; be willing to bounce ideas around together without assuming there’s any pressure on you personally to come up with the Ultimate Right Answer To Fix Everything.

Intrepid readers may note, “Intimacy” is not listed here as one of my foundational principles. For myself, I find intimacy is a reasonably natural by-product of these needs being met effectively within relationship. Intimacy is a willingness to be vulnerable, and vulnerability is something that develops in an environment where people feel safe and respected. If meeting these needs results in my feeling securely attached, then increased vulnerability and intimacy are the result, rather than needing to be a core principle themselves. If intimacy is NOT present in my relationships, however, you can be sure I’ll take that as a barometric measurement that one or more core needs are not being adequately addressed.

This list doesn’t even begin to cover my wants, because for many of us, “wants” are things that can change on an almost hourly basis some days. I have learned a few very important lessons about wants, though: first, if there’s something I want, I stand a better chance of getting it if I *ask* for it directly, rather than hint about it or approach the topic obliquely – or worse, say nothing and just assume people will figure me out. Just because something is a high-priority want in my mind, doesn’t mean that want will be clear and prioritized for anyone outside my own head. If it’s important, ask explicitly.

Second, it’s OK to take risks with wants. Wants are (almost) never going to be deal-breakers in a relationship, because if they are, then chances are *very* high you’re dealing with a mislabeled or misunderstood need. Therefore, ask for everything – you never know what you *can* have, until you ask for it. By the same token, however ? and I cannot stress how critical this understanding will be ? don’t *expect* that just because you’ve asked for something that you’re now entitled to have what you’ve asked for, because sooner or later, someone’s going to say No. In the vein of not counting chickens before hatching, don’t get emotionally invested in your wants until you’ve got the *thing* in your hands (metaphorically or literally), because again, sooner or later you won’t get what you want. And if you’re even moderately invested in getting that want met, it’s going to feel like a crushing defeat. Anticipate, sure – but don’t expect. There’s a whole other topic around wants & needs and outcome attachment, but I’m now getting several weeks worth of blog topics ahead of myself.

Next week we’ll finally get to looking at how to work all of this into an actual roadmap, I promise (assuming I don’t remember any other process steps between here and there…)

Emotional Intelligence, Self-Development

Something that comes up a LOT with both my individual and couple clients tends to be a sometimes-surprising lack of self-awareness around our own needs and wants. I suspect this tendency to not know, or not admit, to what we need and want comes from a couple of different places, starting with cultural messaging around how “wanting things” = “being selfish”, and reinforced by a million small disappointments throughout life that inevitably instill in us a message that there’s no point in wanting what we want because “we’re only going to be disappointed anyway”, either by not achieving what we want, or by achieving it and finding out it’s not what we thought it would be (see an earlier post on achieving our dreams). I used to think that women are doubly-hampered in that many of us are culturally-conditioned on the basis of gender to be silent, or to be nurturers putting other people’s needs ahead of our own. I don’t think it’s so obviously-gender-biased a phenomenon any more, however. I see an increasing number of men in my office who are, for many similar reasons, also adopting the kind of care-giver roles that have kept them so reactively bound to meeting a partner’s needs that these men haven’t had any more time to observe and develop their own needs than many women have.

This kind of cultural messaging is something we internalize from an early age, starting from the first time we as toddlers throw a tempter-tantrum in the toy aisle and get told we can’t have what we want. Maybe we grow up in financially-constrained environments where we can’t have what we want for economic reasons. The lucky and privileged ones grow up in environments where they learn they can have what they want without potentially asking for it at all. Many of us get into relationships as young (or even older) adults in which we attempt to attune to what our partners want so quickly that we put our own self-identifying desires on hold to be everything (or even just something) to our partners, risking a situation in which we create a pattern of back-burnering our own needs for so long that we forget we even have them. A long-time friend of mine refered to this many years ago as “becoming complicit in our own subjugation” — complictly enabling someone else’s needs to take such priority over our own for so long that we create a significant disturbance in the Force when one day those needs begin to reassert themselves.

For the purposes of perhaps gross-oversimplification, I define needs and wants as different things based on our abilities to flex where and how these needs are met, especially in relationship, and even *whether* these needs are addressed in specific relationships. In my lexicon, needs are generally the deal-breaker, gotta-have-them requirements one identifies as crucial foundations for secure attachment, for feeling content over the longer terms, for feeling like there is room to flourish and grow. Some of these may be tied to a basic Maslovian structure of needs, and some of them may be refinements of concepts like social belonging, esteem, or self-actualization. Wants, then, are those “nice to have” elements on which we are likely to be more willing to alter our expectations, or even voluntarily sacrifice them outright. (Note: Needs and wants are inherently different from values we hold, but for many people are intrinsically tied to those internal values. We’ll explore that idea in more depth in a futre post as well.)

There are two recurring issues I see time and again in the counselling office:
(1) people don’t know how to identify their own wants and needs at all, or
(2) people can’t tell the difference between needs and wants because they have allowed their needs to have as much of a transient nature and permeable boundaries as their wants have.

It’s a remarkably telling moment when I ask someone, “What exactly are your *needs* in this relationship?”, and receive back a blank stare. It’s common that people can tell me what they DON’T want to have happening (usually the exact set of factors that drive them to seek therapy in the first place). While defining by negative space is a good place to start, it doesn’t tell us much about what they know in a more positive way what needs they are driving toward. A Roman philosopher, Seneca the Younger, wrote, “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” Most of us can tell when our needs are not being met, and if we’re happy in a situation, we simply assume that our needs for that situation ARE being met. But ask someone to identify WHAT needs are being met, and we’re most commonly met with silence. When we don’t know what needs we’re trying to meet in relationship, how do we know for sure when those needs are adequately met? Equally important, if we don’t know what needs we require to have met in relationship, how do we explicitly negotiate those needs with our partners such that our partners can explicitly consent to be part of the need-meeting process, or adequately negotiate what they *can* be available for??

(The topic of consent in relationships is a whole other ball of fish I’ll be writing about in a near-future blog post; stay tuned.)

At the very least, defining by negative space gives us a place to start by providing quick and convenient opposites we can use as a basis for explorations. If I know I don’t want sarcasm and mockery from a partner (for example), what would the opposite of that look like in my worldview, and do I want that instead? Or do I want something *like* that, but different? How would I describe or label that adjacent idea?

Sometimes it’s easier to step away from the framework of known don’t-wants (it can be difficult to convince people to let go of their anger over finally acknowledging their disappointments and frustrations) and challenge people to think in blue-sky terms about what they DO want. I like to refer to this process as “reinventing Self 2.0”. It’s largely predicated on one deceptively-simple question: “What kind of person do you CHOOSE to be?”, because when people can articulate the kind of person they wish they could be, they are often unconsciously speaking to their own internal needs; this gives us a very strong place to start a discussion about what gets in the way of meeting those needs, and how do we tackle those obstructions both real and perceived? It also sneakily inserts the concept of agency, based in the power of self-directed choice, into the lexicon of someone who may have a history of subsuming their own relational needs, resulting in an additional layer of disempowerment or disenfranchisement within their relationships.

Next week, I’ll offer some suggestions on how to build a “road map” to provide some direction when refining our self-knowledge about needs and wants, both in terms of building a lexicon and in terms of uncovering obstacles. Until then, consider the question of “WHAT KIND OF PERSON DO YOU choose to be?”, as a way of opening the internal exploration around identifying the kinds of needs that being that sort of person would meet for you.

Self-Development, self-perception

Personal disclosure time: I’ll be 50 on my next birthday in a few weeks. Given the massive upheavals in my own personal and professional lives as I crossed that invisible threshold into “middle age”, I’ve felt fairly attuned to the cultural narratives we have around the “mid-life crisis” and the weighty expectations for “achieving dreams”, for better and for worse. I may not have acquired the jaunty red sports car as part of my transition, but when I replaced my beloved but aging Elantra last fall, I admit I *did* go out of my way to ensure my next vehicle was red. I’m still waiting for the equally-sporty blonde to show up in my life, though.

I had a realization this past week, along the lines of achieving dreams, that I have finally achieved the dream I set for myself ten years ago when I set out on the path to become a full-time, self-supporting therapist “eventually”. In doing so, I also confronted the fact that, having now achieved my dreams (dreams I didn’t even know I really had a decade ago), I was suddenly facing a gap where the driving ambition of my life has firmly resided for the last decade. It was like popping the hood on my shiny new(ish) car and finding the entire engine block had disappeared overnight. Lemme tell you, when one is talking about the subject of “the dreams that drive us”, it’s actually a terrifying thing to recognize you’ve hit the achievement milestone and the rest of your future ahead lies under a thick and obscure fog that spells out, “So now what??”

Something I was reading recently really drove home the power these Dreams can have on us. David Wexler (2004), quoting earlier research from Levinson (1978), writes,

Levinson’s research (1978) identifies a crucial aspect of […] adult development called the Dream. If you […] have lived through young adulthood with a vision of how your life should be, then you have been guided by the Dream. This stage of adult life is dominated by a push toward productivity.

This sense of purpose, while very challenging and often difficult to fulfill, is very organizing. You are guided by clear goals and themes. The obstacles are tangible, the achievements (for the most part) measurable.

The increasing awareness of your ticking clock at midlife, however, often causes the values that governed this Dream stage to lose their hold over the order of things. Two types of disorientation and disillusionment can occur.

[…] The first type of crisis strikes when you wake up one day and realize that the Dream is not going to happen. You face the often sobering realization that what you see is what you get. […] You may fear that there is nothing to look forward to except for a slow deterioration and narrowed possibilities.

[…]The second type of crisis affects you if you have achieved your dream–but suddenly find it meaningless. It does not fulfill you: “So what? Now I am successful. I don’t feel any happier.” (pgs. 76-77)

My own recent epiphany was closer to the second option than the first, not so much because the achievement had lost meaning (don’t get me wrong, I love the work that I do, and expect to keep finding the meaning in it until I’m too old to keep doing the work) as because I am definitely at that “So what now?” stage. I also came face to face with recognizing that achieving Dreams of this magnitude are also a profound privilege; not everyone gets to reach these kinds of pinnacle in spite of all their efforts, and there are a lot of bitter and disappointed people in the world who judge themselves harshly for that perception of failure. Admittedly, I often look at my choice to toss my IT career out the window in favour of grad school and a slow career change path as the start of my actual mid-life crisis. I had hit the wall in a hard way in my job of the time, and realized it was never going to go anywhere, and that even changing jobs and companies was simply going to be a case of “same shit, different basket”… and I was done with that basket (or so I thought, but that’s another story entirely). So I *get* both sides of the “ticking clock” that Wexler describes above.

These kinds of discussions are starting to come up in my client work more directly now, or maybe this is just the attunement I spoke of earlier. Sometimes it’s a client (or a client’s spouse) talking about a midlife affair; often it’s a midlife recognition of dissatisfaction and a sense of stagnation. Often it’s a question that preoccupies people to the point of distress: “I did everything my family/culture/society at large expected of me as an adult, what am I not happy? Why do I feel so restless??” The restlessness becomes a kind of emotional agitation much of the time, manifesting as depression as the disillusionment takes hold, or sometimes coming out as a kind of generalized anger at the world (or partners/families) as a sense of failure or profound disappointment turns outward rather than reflectively inward.

Sometimes we can achieve a Dream as a plateau and find there are a whole raft of new Dreams that we can now set from there; and sometimes we hit the plateau and it’s all we can do to lie there gasping for breath before we can even roll over and notice there’s more to see from here. Sometimes we hit a plateau and see nothing but fog. And sometimes those plateaus never happen. The paths forward all seem to involve the same piece of work: reorientation, and (if necessary) redefinition. Wexler refers to the need to “regain vitality” (pg. 77) as a critical response to this state of Dream recognition (fulfilled or unfulfilled), and the need most people will have to both look inward at the initial signs of distress, and making smart choices about what we do in response to identifying a state of even mild distress. Midlife affairs are a common response to seeking revitalization, for example, but often involve a lack of awareness about the internal distress, and certainly point to making choices that might be incongruent with previously-stated personal values. This is a great example of learning to differentiate between the feelings we have, and the actions we CHOOSE to engage in reaction or response to them.

I don’t yet know what the path off my own current plateau looks like, so I empathize completely with my fellow human beings stuck in the same place. Right now I’m still lying on the rocks trying to catch my breath. I’m aware there’s a vista to appreciate now that I’m here, but I’m also aware I can’t stay here forever; I’ve never been much of one for choosing stagnation. I just need some time to figure out next steps so that I can make smart choices, and as I figure that process, I’m trusting that it will help clarify how to have similar conversations with people around me on their own plateaus.

Book Recommendations, Emotional Intelligence, Uncategorized

Returning to reading David Wexler recently, I am reminded of one of the biggest takeaways from a previous reading of his book, Men in Therapy (I’m currently reading the layman companion book, When Good Men Behave Badly). In both books, Wexler discusses the relationship pattern in which people in general, and men in particular, set up relationships as mechanisms for reflecting back at them the values they most want to see and be seen in themselves. These mirroring requirements create a subtle and problematic kind of dependency, often reducing the autonomous, individuated human being who is the partner to little more than a reflective surface. The problems surface when the Partner has the audacity to develop their own wants and needs, to offer comments or criticisms about their mates that suggest dissatisfaction, or to become busy, distracted, unavailable or unreliable as sources of emotional validation and support.

When the dependent partner starts to perceive that the reflective surface is out of alignment or broken, it impacts their security in both their self-imaging and in their relationships. And what do we do when something is out of alignment? We attempt to push it back INTO alignment. Wexler writes in detail on how men especially give the power of validating them into the hands of women partners, often without either of them realizing what is happening and without the woman’s consent to shoulder this responsibility. We all look to our partners for emotional support and validation, yes; this is human relational nature. But we don’t all act out our insecurity when the support or validation is disrupted.

Because our cultural has stunted men’s emotional development in many ways, men are often left with very few ways of expressing hurt, fear, or shame. They do well enough to a point with frustration and disappointment, but in intimate partnerships where they feel especially vulnerable, fear or shame often paired with disrupted validation processes means they misdirect those base-level feelings into more commonly-acceptable and familiar anger, and lash out. Sometimes anger becomes cold silence, but in all cases where this distorted mirror process is occurring, it’s all intended to punish the mirror for misalignment. Lacking direct engagement with each other, couples get into cycles where the disappointment of not getting core needs met turns to emotional reactivity (acting out) that can drive partners to increase distance, which in turn only increases the sense of distortion. It’s another form of what Harriet Lerner calls the distancer-pursuer dynamic, when one partner misbehaves (lashing out, withdrawing, or both) and the other partner’s task in relationship is to somehow “bring them back” to centre; in short, “You change, so *I* feel better!”

There are a lot of reasons why these kinds of imbalanced attachments form; why men in particular crave a kind of emotional vulnerability they don’t feel safe pursuing outside these rare intimate contexts, and why women raised contextually to be placators and nurturers for their own safety allow themselves to be saddled with the unspoken expectations for holding up men’s self-images. Mismatches in Love Languages, for example, can be an enormous source if this kind of distortion. Unravelling all of this in counselling requires looking at where these unarticulated expectations have become burdensome, both in the sense of men being unable (or untrained) to hold their own sense of self-worth without relying exclusively on external reflective sources, and in the sense of women adopting and accepting this degree of emotional labour as the “cost of being in relationship”, as a female friend recently put it. People can be taught how to build their own internal reflections; questions I frequently use with my clients (of all gender identities and relational roles) include these:

  • What story are you telling yourself about what happened?
  • At the end of the day, what kind of person will you wish you had been in this situation?
  • In situations like [X], what would the person you wish you could be have done?
  • What do you see in yourself that looks like that kind of person?
  • What can you do to be a little more like that kind of person?
  • Where you choose to [negative, acting-out behaviour], what do you wish you had done instead?
  • What do you think you might need to make that choice differently in future?

These aren’t cure-alls by along shot, but this kind of questioning is intended to do two things: (1) get the client to practice looking inward to their own perceptions and values, and (2) trust that they can perceive and integrate those values in ways that teach them to trust their own validation senses rather than relying on, or pushing aggressively for, externally-reflected validation. Wexler provides MANY exercises in his books for how to explore those internal distortions, and conversations that shape more effective interactions between partners trying to work past the “bad behaviours” resulting from deep insecurities.

Emotional Intelligence, self-perception

With any new job comes new learning curves, new responsibilities, new personalities, new deadlines. Many people, when taking on new roles that push the boundaries of what they think they know about their own abilities, often have an anxious time settling in and while some people can face the challenges with a fearless, Can-Do attitude, many more of us get wrapped up in varying degrees of performance anxiety, and fear that those who hired us are going to discover we’re not as good as our resumes make us look, that we’re clearly imposters who don’t know what we’re doing, and that we’ll prove ourselves to be flawed and incompetent.

If you think therapists never fall prey to this kind of anxiety, let me tell you:

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha… no.

We all have good days and bad days, but the early days of anything involving a learning curve are tough. Trying to prepare and manage our integration into new environments, new teams, new expectations can lead us into doubting the speed with which we learn (speed that is compromised by stress and fatigue, two factors that also tend to tag along on new job situations), and our ability to translate that learning into demonstrable performance. I faced this same fear many times during hiring/onboarding cycles in high-tech, both as a permanent hire and for years as a contractor; now as a therapist I sometimes face this several times a day whenever I sit down with new clients on intake.

In the new group practice at Bliss Counselling, I’m bring some particular niche-lifestyle savviness to the fold, which on one hand is great for both the community I represent and for the increased resources we’ll develop within the clinical team. On the other hand, however, I’m being tagged internally as a “specialist” or “expert”, and nothing will send Imposter Syndrome singing top-volume arias in one’s head like being tagged an “expert” in something and being asked to speak somewhat knowledgeably about that topic. Another colleague of mine and I are preparing to do a talk to the soon-to-be graduates of the therapy program from whence we ourselves came; a nice little bit of “giving back to the community” that spawned us, to provide some street-level business perspective that the program itself does not. And I’m finding that, too, is sending my internal Chorus Of Demons into overdrive, questioning what I think I know and challenging my belief that I have any right at all to claim to speak knowledgeably on these topics.

I’m sure many of you know EXACTLY how this feels. We know what we know… right up to the point where we have been asked to share what we know with others. At that point, blending quietly into a small, innocuous clump of dust bunnies seems HIGHLY preferable to sharing information like an informed and knowledgeable resource. We get flushed out by our own insecurities, and while I sometimes amuse myself by debating openly with my internal hecklers, for some this becomes an outright debilitating problem.

When I recently commented to friends that I had been tagged to provide some “expert” information on my community support and was unquietly losing my sh*t over the request, one friend offered the sagest suggestion I have ever heard, after also pointing out to me that I was losing my sh*t over nothing more than talking about something I’ve been part of for thirty years. She said to me, “If you’re not the expert in the room, imagine someone who is; doesn’t have to be a real person you know, but imagine you’re sitting next to a Real Live Expert on this subject. Watch the Expert. What do you imagine The Expert might say, or what they might do. Then *you* do that thing.”

It’s kind of a “fake it till you make it approach”, but when I thought about that idea, I felt myself calm down. There’s still a little bit of Imposter Syndrome lurking around the edges of “pretending to be something I don’t comfortably believe myself to be”, and “what if they find out I’m only *pretending* to be The Expert?”, but at the end of the day, I remind myself (sometimes more persistently than I should admit professionally) that this is all *STILL ME*. *I* did this thing, and The Expert in the room, both the externalized imaginings and the internalized delivery system, are all me. It seems like a lot of cognitive work to go through, but it’s the same work I do with clients to offer externalized perspectives on skills as well as fears. Sometimes we can’t see what’s inside ourselves, but if we can imagine setting it next to ourselves, outside ourselves where we CAN see it, sometimes we gain a better grasp of how it works, how it influences and moves us, and how we can interact with it differently.

These “externalizing conversations” and projections often allow us to move beyond thought distortions tied to a belief in some kind of innate flaw?”I’m a failure”, “I don’t know anything”, “I’m an impostor”?and into a different way of interacting with the anxieties: “I don’t know how much I know about this topic, but here’s what I can tell you about what I do know, and I know how to connect with resources that know what I don’t”… which is exactly what An Expert would do, too!