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.

Slumped on my sofa, he seems surrounded by enemies.

He tells me what his girlfriend’s doing to him, and what his ex-wife did,  And how he was abused by his last boss.  And by his father and mother before that.

I believe everything he tells me.

But the more he talks the weaker he sounds.  It’s like he’s shrinking before my eyes.

Which illustrates the risk in blaming.

Blaming is an explanation.  It explains pain and problems by pointing to someone or something outside us and beyond our control.  Not my fault, blaming says.  I didn’t cause this.

Which may be true, and is often comforting in the moment.

But in the long run it‘s a dangerous way to see things.

Why?

Because you can’t solve a problem that’s not yours to solve.

When we blame we give away responsibility.  When we give away responsibility, we also give away the solution to problems.  We give away power, which I define as the ability to take care of ourselves

And powerless people solve nothing.

Somebody once compared blaming to swallowing poison and waiting for the other guy to die.

Feeling stuck?  Need to fix something in your life or relationship?

Move past blame.

Take more responsibility.

We’re driving together, my wife and I.  I crack the window for fresh air.  Ten seconds later she touches her shoulder, as if to ward off a chill.  I close the window.

I turn up the radio for a Bach cello passage.  Her sigh is barely audible.  I turn down the music.

We’re married 38 years.  I know her moves, she knows mine.  (For example, I have a special cough that reminds her I hate Frazier reruns.)

We share a secret language.

Pretty normal.  All couples find such ways to communicate with — and yes, control — each other.

We signal feelings, preferences and reactions to our partner, and our partner adjusts accordingly.  Secret-language messages fly back and forth between us all day long.  Couples together a while speak it automatically, even unconsciously,

It’s mostly harmless, even helpful.  Saves time, energy, strengthens our bond.

But some people depend on secret communication because they don’t know how to express themselves in an unsecret way.

Most couples I see for marriage counseling lack this ability.  Usually they grew up in families unable to model healthy emotional communication.  They’ve no clue how to talk about feelings.  Secret language – what therapists call acting-out — is the only one they speak.

They also tend to expect others to intuit their meaning.  If you really loved me, they rationalize, you’d know how I feel.

But that’s silly.  My wife and I love each other.  We still can’t read each other’s minds.

Back in the car I notice a tinge of resentment.  That Bach I turned down is Yo-Yo Ma playing the deep, gorgeous prelude to the First Cello Suite.

“I’m turning this up,” I say.  “It’s short.  Okay?”

“Sure,” my wife says.

Most relationships are ruined not by what we express, but by what we hold back.

Like any addiction, addiction to control is a bitch to recover from.

Hard enough to imagine surviving without doing the stuff we’ve always believed was absolutely necessary.

It’s even harder when we have no models to guide us.  How do you practice healthy alternatives to controlling if you’re not even sure how they look?

To help with that, we’re introducing a new feature: The Practice Corner.  It will be an occasional series of true (but cleverly disguised) stories told by readers working actively to free themselves from compulsive controlling.

Below is the first.

The Corner will be divided into three sections: Tales of Surrender, Tales of Responsibility, and Tales of Intimacy.  (If you’re not sure what those words mean, here’s a brief explanation.)

We hope you find these stories helpful.  Feel free to respond, if you like.  I’m sure their authors would appreciate that.

And we’d love to have you contribute your own.

Because nobody recovers alone.

Love,

~ Steve & Bert

* * *

Carry permit

I’m sitting in a faculty meeting and the chairperson turns to me and I know what’s coming.  Last week she asked me to do extra work I really really don’t want to do.  Being me, I told her I’d think about it.  Now she says “So can you take on that project we spoke about?”  “No, I decided against it,” I say.  She blinks.  Then she turns to the person beside me and asks them to do the same project.  I’m amazed at how easy that was.  I look across the table to a friend with whom I’d shared your recent post Gun, the one about the power of being able to say No.  I raise the tip of my index finger to my lips and blow imaginary smoke away from an imaginary muzzle.  My friend grins, then presses her lips together to keep from giggling.  Thanks for the carry permit, Steve.

~ Shared by A.P.

My favorite part of The Addams Family (ABC, 1964-66) was the character named Thing.

A disembodied hand that lived in a box, Thing scrambled across tabletops like a spider and occasionally performed small favors for members of the family.

“Thank you, Thing,” Morticia Addams would coo.

In recent years I’ve grown my own version of Thing.

Mine’s not a hand, but a voice in my head.

There have always been voices in my head, as I’m sure there are in yours.  One’s the voice Gestaltists call Topdog, always ready to prod, judge or criticize.  Another’s the voice of Underdog, who whines (It’s too hard), makes excuses (I try my best) and promises (I’ll do it tomorrow).

For decades these guys were constant companions, engaged in endless Should vs Can’t battles that Fritz Perls called “the self-torture game.”

So the topdog and underdog strive for control.  Like every parent and child, they strive with each other for control.  The person is fragmented into controller and controlled.  This inner conflict, the struggle between the topdog and the underdog, is never complete….  There is no end to the self-torture, to the self-nagging, self-castigating.  It hides under the mask of “self-improvement.”  It never works.  (Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, 1969).

Thing’s voice is different.

Thing’s voice is soothing.

Thing forgives my mistakes, limitations, even my sins.

Thing reassures, encourages, and reframes problems in ways that let me be gentle with myself.

Thing gives me permission to listen to feelings and give myself what I need.

Thing is the voice of a parent I never had.  I began hearing it only later in life.  Partly it’s the voice of my own therapist, who years ago taught me to stop self-torturing.  Partly it echoes my wife and children, who love me as I am.  And partly it’s the voice I myself use with clients when trying to teach them self-care and self-compassion.

Thing’s good company.  I wish we’d had more years together.

I wonder who’d I be now if we had.

But hell.  Better late than never.

Thank you, Thing.

redux (adj): brought back

Her husband is alcoholic.  This is her second marriage.  Her first husband was alcoholic too.

 As was dad.

 “I always swore I’d never marry someone like my father,” she says.  “Then I do it twice.  What am I, stupid?  Self-destructive?”

 “Neither,” I say.  “You’re still trying to get dad to stop drinking.”

 She looks at me as if I just spoke Klingon.

 “Kids with a problem parent often grow up to find partners that remind them of the parent.  It’s why kids from alcoholic families marry alcoholics, kids from abusive families marry abusers, and so on.”

 “We’re all stupid?” she frowns.

 “No.  You’re all trying to heal the old wound.

 “First you recreate the scene of the crime by finding someone like dad.  Then you try to fix him.  If you can fix him it’s almost as good as fixing your father.  At least that’s the unconscious logic.  It’s called repetition compulsion.”

“Does it ever work?”

I shake my head.  “Not in my experience.”

“How can I stop?” she asks.

“Well, you become conscious of your unconscious motive.  That’s what we’re doing now.”

She nods.

 “Then you grieve the old wound – let yourself feel and express what you couldn’t as a kid.  The helplessness, anxiety, sadness, anger.”

 Her eyes fill.

 “I know.  Not fun.  But essential to putting the past behind you.”

 “Then you start making choices based on your current situation instead of the old nightmare.  For example, you accept that your husband’s drinking – like dad’s – is a problem only he can solve.  You stop trying to control it.  I’ll help with that.”

 “Sounds like lots of work,” she says.

 “Sure,” I say.  “Recovery’s never a walk in the park.

 “Just better than repeating the nightmare.”

 “I’m scared I’m going crazy,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

“I can’t stop thinking about killing someone.”

She describes a string of homicidal fantasies and nightmares involving the violent demise of her older sister, who abused her when they were kids.

“How do they make you feel?” I ask.

“Like an awful person,” she says.  “And scared I’m losing it.”

“You’re not losing it,” I say. “You’re finding it.”

“Finding what?”

“Your anger.”

I remind her how depressed she was when she began therapy.  “You were internalizing all that anger, turning it against yourself.  Now it’s pointed in the right direction.  That’s growth.”

“Oh.”  She looks relieved.  “So what should I do now?”

“What you’re doing.  Externalize.  Express it here, talk about it to others.”

”Others?  I couldn’t.  I’d be too ashamed.”

So I tell her this story:

A man came into therapy obsessed with Hitler and the Nazis.  Read about them, dreamt about them, couldn’t stop, didn’t know why.  Turned out he’d been abused by his alcoholic father.  I suggested he was obsessed with Nazis because that’s what Dad seemed like to him.  “It’s called displacement,” I said.  “A way of redirecting your anger.”  “That actually makes sense,” he said.  Then I suggested he tell his Al-Anon group about our conversation.  He did, with much fear and trembling.  And looked up to find a circle of twenty people all nodding at him.

Anger’s no sin, no sign of insanity.  It’s just a natural response to being hurt.  A sort of emotional leftover  or sewage.

Our problems come not from feeling anger, but from not knowing how to flush it out of our system.

Or as Buddha said, we’re not punished for our anger, we’re punished by it.

Magic word, No.

As in No thanks, I don’t want to. 

Or No, that’s not good for me.

Solves many problems.

Saves endless energy.

Deflects tons of discomfort and pain.

True, not always easy to say.

Especially if you’ve been denied that right in the past.

Especially if nobody taught you that it is a right.

But that’s what it is.   Everyone has the right to say No.

It’s also a necessity.  Sort of like carrying a gun in a rough part of town.

You don’t have to wave it around or point it at people.  But it’s nice to have on your hip when push comes to shove.

And let’s face it.

There are places and people in your life you shouldn’t visit unarmed.

So group (see Harbor) ends.  And one member follows me back to my office.

“How do I stop controlling?” she asks.

“Wrong question,” I say.  “You can’t stop all controlling.  Better to ask, ‘How do I stop controlling compulsively?’”

Compulsive controlling is the addictive sort, driven by anxiety and ignorance.  Control addicts are chronically scared but know no other way to feel safe or happy.  They’ve never learned alternatives to controlling.

What alternatives?

Surrender, responsibility and intimacy.

~ Surrender is the ability to stop controlling what can’t (or shouldn’t) be controlled.  It means being able to do nothing and trust that things will work out anyway.  Other words for surrender are detachment, acceptance and faith.  A life without surrender is a tense, white-knuckled life.

~ Responsibility means the ability to respond – to answer a situation or need appropriately.  Often the key to  such answers lies in our ability to listen to ourselves, especially to the body and the messages it sends us.  Most of us are trained to ignore such messages.  But a person who takes care of himself is being responsible.  One who buries feelings or sacrifices himself for others is not.

~ Intimacy is the ability to be yourself with another person and allow them to do the same with you.  It’s the most challenging alternative because it combines the first two.  Intimacy requires that I stop trying to control you and also risk being myself.  Not easy.  But worth the work.  Because intimate relationships are as good as human relationships get.

None of these alternatives is easy, when you come down to it.

But all are worth the work.

Because to the extent we remain ignorant of or unwilling to practice them, we stay hopelessly addicted to control.