Can’t recall what I was hoping for.  I just remember it didn’t happen, and how disappointed I felt.  And what my friend said about it.

“Expectations,” he told me, “are killers.”

What is an expectation, anyway?

It’s a demand we make on reality.  “Reality must be this way,” we tell ourselves, “or I’ll be unhappy.”

Which explains why we’re unhappy much of the time.

Human beings expect a level of control over life that we simply can’t have.  We want to control realities both external (people, places and things) and internal (our own thoughts, feelings and behavior).  Moment to moment we carry a picture in our minds of how we want things to be, and we constantly compare that picture to how things really are.

In other words,  we spend our lives looking for reasons to be disappointed.

And finding them.

Even when we’re not disappointed, we tend to skim over these moments of satisfaction and move on to the next expectation.

We do this millions of times over the course of a lifetime.  Like hamsters trying to outrun the hamster wheel.

Expectations also explain why, secretly, most of us feel inadequate.  We’re failures in our own minds, because we’re constantly trying to do the impossible – bend reality to our will.

And the problem with fighting reality is that reality always wins.

“I wonder,” Mark Twain wrote, “if God created man because he was disappointed with the monkey.”

She’s always cheerful.

He’s always joking.

She’s always calm, cool and collected.

He’s always detached and philosophical.

Always is a problem in therapy.

It usually indicates what I call an emotional scab.

Physical scabbing you know.  It’s where a wound crusts over.  Those scabs may itch a bit, but generally you leave them alone, because they signify healing going on under the surface

Psychological scabs are different.  Those you may need to pick at.

People scab over emotionally when they’ve been hurt or traumatized.  In an attempt to protect themselves, they conceal their wound beneath a false front like the ones described above.

This sort of scabbing is useful to a point.  Who wants to go around bleeding in public?

But past that point one may need to pick at this sort of scab in order to complete the healing.  Because feelings need to be identified and expressed before they heal.  Anger, grief, anxiety and disappointment all need – and deserve — respectul attention. It’s not enough just to pretend they’re all gone.

So if you come to my office, and you’re always one thing or another…

Don’t be surprised if I start to pick at your scab.

A coward is someone who uses fear as an excuse to not do the right thing.

Awful character flaw, cowardice.

Then again:

Know anyone who’s never been cowardly?

For fear is the bane of human existence.  And to be ruled by it is just human nature.

I’ve certainly had my cowardly moments.

You too, I bet.

We’re all cowards at one time or another.

So I respectfully suggest that we

(a) forgive ourselves,

(b) suspend judgment of each other,

and

(c) retire the word coward.

“You shall love your crooked neighbor,” wrote W.H. Auden, “with your crooked heart.”

prophylaxis (n): the prevention of disease

“I’m reading about raising an emotionally intelligent child,” she tells me.

“Oh?  What are you learning?”

“How important it is to validate feelings.”

I smile.  “I’ve been telling you that for months.”

“I know.  But this is in a book.”

I laugh.

I’m happy.  She’s finally getting it.

Question:

Why is it so hard for most of us to see feelings as friendly?

Because we’re trained to see them as not.

We socialized to see them as a threat to peace, order, politeness, respect, discipline and self-control.

To distrust them, judge them, fear them, avoid them, and try to prevent them in ourselves and others.

Forgive my language, but this is all terribly fucked up.

Because a free flow of feelings is the single most important component of psychological and emotional health.

Also the best way to prevent mental illness, addictions, abuse, bad comunication and unhealthy relationships.

Also the single most important emotional lesson any parent can learn and/or teach.

So I really don’t care where this parent’s finally getting it.

I’m just grateful she is.

Imagine a climber on the side of a mountain.

She gets tired, sits down to rest.  She looks up at the top of the mountain, where’s she’s been heading.  Then down at the bottom, where she started.  Both seem so far away.

Fuck it, she thinks.  And proceeds to make camp.

Camping’s easier than climbing, so she settles in.

The camp becomes permanent.  The camp becomes home.

Occasionally I find myself working with clients like this.  I call them resigned codependents.

They begin therapy, then get discouraged.  Decide the work is too hard.  Decide they can’t do any better.  Or that they don’t deserve any better.  (All essentially the same decision.)

Look.  Codependency’s an addiction.  Freeing yourself from any addiction is a hard climb.  It’s difficult and painful and scary to try giving up something that’s always felt absolutely essential.

But camping on a mountain is no picnic either.  Expect bad weather year round.  Expect storms of anxiety, depression, hopelessness.  Count on life feeling permanently insecure and imbalanced.

If you find yourself here, don’t give up.

Break camp.

Read a book.  Got to a meeting.  Find a climbing buddy.

Or hire a Sherpa to help you get moving again.  There are plenty out there who can help.  Some know the mountain well, and are pretty good at coaching folks to higher elevations.

Just don’t give up.

You get one lifetime.

A mountainside is no place to spend it.

There are two sorts of victims.

The first sort is people to whom something bad has happened.

Shooting victims.  Abuse victims.  Flu victims.  Victims of the IRS.

The second sort is people who become defined by the bad things that happened to them.

Psychological victims, the second sort, live in a kind of waking nightmare.  The bad thing that happened to them doesn’t feel like it’s over and done with.  They carry it around with them in their bodies and their  minds.

It reshapes them, the way the artist’s wire reshapes a bonsai tree.  It colors everything; their view of themselves, other people, life itself.

The goal of therapy with the second sort of victim is to transform them into the first sort.

To stop bad experiences from defining a person

No, therapy can’t erase the past.

But it can help someone escape the past and move into the present.

I had three separate sessions with three members of the same extended family.  Two were cousins, and the third was one cousin’s spouse.

Each session felt remarkably like the other two.

I could barely get a word in edgewise in any of them.  All three clients were anxious and talked fast, as if expecting to get cut off.  All three had trouble focusing on questions — instead they pinballed from topic to topic to topic.  And all seemed determined to get me to see things as they see them, and a bit annoyed when I did not.

Which reminded me of pinkeye.

You know, conjunctivitis.  That eye disease you catch from towels.

I found myself thinking how, like pinkeye, habits and symptoms are contagious in families.  How hard it is not to end up thinking and feeling and reacting like each other.

Particularly where control is concerned.

Think about it.  Think how hard it is to not feel pulled into copying your family members when they

~ withhold or disguise what they’re feeling,

~ act out feelings instead of using words,

~ obsess or catastrophize about problems,

~ criticize or pass judgment,

~ blame others,

~ worry about how others see them or the family, or

~ focus on externals (people, places, things) instead of their own perceptions and prejudices.

All are controlling behaviors we can catch from each other.  As are symptoms like anxiety, depression, addiction, anger, impatience and abuse.

We’re mostly unconscious of this, though.  We tend to miss even obvious connections between our emotional habits and the family relationships that shaped us.

Because like conjunctivitis, family dynamics distort our vision.

It can be impossible to see clearly through pink eyes.

Occasionally a therapist is forced to fire a client.

It’s called therapeutic discharge.   Had to do it myself not long ago. Always sad.

But sometimes there’s no avoiding it.  This particular man’s therapy was going nowhere.

He was stuck at the first stage of learning.

There are four stages:

1. Unconscious incompetence

2. Conscious incompetence

3. Conscious competence

4. Unconscious competence.

Unconscious incompetence is where you don’t know what you don’t know.  Imagine a four-year old watching Daddy drive.  “I can do that,” he says, and sits at the wheel and yanks it back and forth.  “Look, I’m driving.”  He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.  He’s unconsciously incompetent.

Conscious incompetence is where you know what you don’t know.  Flash forward twelve years: the kid’s sixteen, starting Driver Ed.  “Parallel park over there,” the instructor says, and the kid panics.  He knows what he doesn’t know.  He’s consciously incompetent.

Conscious competence is where you know what you know.  Now eighteen, the kid’s passed his road test.  He drives proudly down the street, knowing he can park if he has to.  He knows what he knows.  He’s consciously competent.

Unconscious competence, the last stage, is where you don’t know what you know.  Now the kid’s forty, a driver for decades.  While driving he plays music, eats fast food, makes phone calls or daydreams.  Driving’s so familiar he forgets that he’s doing it.  He’s doesn’t know what he knows.  He’s unconsciously competent.

Acknowledging ignorance always is the first step towards ending it.

But some people can’t or won’t take that first step.  They stay stuck in that first stage of learning.  So they learn nothing, and their therapies go nowhere.

Often, though, the real problem isn’t what they don’t know.

It’s that, deep down, they really don’t want to.