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Simple Energy Work Exercise

Practicing Mindfulness keeps your awareness of yourself and your immediate surroundings keen. Meditating on your breath, as Zen practitioners and others do, will increase your ability to focus your mind and your ability to make self awareness a habit.

Using The Observing Ego is a similar function although as you get more skilled, it can go deeper.  You can get adept  at knowing  about what your emotions are at any given time, by learning to read your own body energy.

Both of these functions encourage us to have a part of our awareness be located in the body where emotions reside and can be known: if you feel into a sensation in your body and keep your focus “smack dab” in the center of that sensation you will soon be able to identify what emotion that sensation represents. You can test your conclusion by making a simple statement and feeling what the energy does. For example – perhaps you notice a tightness  in your  throat and a heaviness in your solar plexus ( the area that is located just below your sternum).  You say to yourself or out loud “I’m sad about my job” and if nothing changes in your body energy you try “I’m sad about my dog”. When you say  the right thing, your energy will drop down and that is the affirmation that what you said is true.

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The “Not Good Enough” Therapist

I have answered a number of questions on Quora; many from people asking specifically for my response.  A large percentage of them speak of  variations on the same theme. They are either blaming or at least doubting themselves about their discomfort with their  therapist or the  lack of success of the treatment.  In each situation, I saw reasons to believe the therapist was either inadequate or downright unscrupulous and unethical.

This is such a set up:  People go to therapy  because they feel uncertain about themselves  or their life in some way, and that in itself makes the them vulnerable and not confident in their ability to critique the therapist. Plus, everyone really wants the therapist to be wonderful and help, even to be a really trustworthy parent figure.  Unscrupulous therapists can turn this to their own advantage in a myriad of ways: from seeing the client longer than needed to make more money, having sex with their client, to using the client to be  their friend. Poor therapy can be very harmful or at a minimum waste the client’s time and money, and it may turn them off to therapy altogether.

Some people automatically give the therapist credence just because they have an office and are in business. Please don’t! Question the therapist and trust your intuition as much as possible. You are not supposed to trust this professional just because they have a degree. The therapist has to earn the client’s trust and you can let that take as long as it takes. It some situations, that trust isn’t fully felt until the end of a long bout of therapy. And that’s just fine.

If you are uncertain if your therapist is useful  to you, it’s fine to bring this up and evaluate the therapist’s response. It can also be helpful to ask another therapist about your situation.  The ‘second opinion’ therapist may want you to try and work the  out your dissatisfaction  with your current therapist – considering the possibility of negative transference – but if you have given that your best shot, it’s really OK to find someone who works well with you. If you repeatedly have the same dissatisfaction, then it may indeed be negative transference and you need to pick your best choice  of a competent therapist and hang in for the long haul.

I have other blog entries and short articles about How to Choose The Right Therapist, what you should get from a good therapist and how to decide if and when you should leave as well, as well  as blogs about transference. Check them out if it would be helpful to you. You  can also write and ask me for my opinion.

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Traditional and Transpersonal Psychotherapy

I often have clients ask me “What is Transpersonal Therapy?” and I respond “It’s therapy that goes beyond the personal level – to the spiritual level.”  This article, written about me and published in Natural Awakenings Magazine, offers a nice explanation about the ways I offer Transpersonal Therapy to enhance traditional talk therapy. A link to the article is here.

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Fear of Change

Sometimes clients tell me that they are afraid to change, even if the change they are talking about is something they have wanted for a long time, it’s still frightening to do.  I often say things like  “you don’t have to change until you are ready,” and then I tell this story:

Snakes live in the forest. They spend all day traveling over rough, uneven ground. They go over fallen branches with hard bark, sticks, rocky areas, sharp pebbles and all sorts of terrain.

Every spring the snake sheds her skin. The old skin loosens as she travels over the rough ground. The baby new skin beneath it has to get strong enough to handle the terrain before the old skin finally peels off.

It’s never the therapists job to pull the skin off a snake.

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Couples: What You Can Expect from your Partner, and What you Have to Get from Yourself.

I see a lot of couples in my practice and have found there are many myths people believe about what you can have if only you had the perfect partner. Many have a lot of disatisfaction with their partner because he or she is not providing what they think a partner/ spouse should provide.  I’ll list a few of these myths to clarify what I’m speaking about.

1.You can’t demand intimacy from your partener, doing so will likely  create more distance and less intimacy.  You can  talk about how close or safe your partner  feels with you, and that could be productive. You can think about why your partner doesn’t feel open with you, what you might be doing that pushes your partner to back away from you.  It is also possible that your partner’s resistance to being sexual or emotionally close isn’t about you, it’s more about what they brought into the relationship from their past: their baggage. You could be very useful to them in changing their hesitancy about intimacy, or maybe a therapist could help. But demanding is useless and feels bad all around.

2 .Your partner can’t make you happy, you have to do that for yourself.  What your partner can do is keep you exquisite  company while you figure all that out for yourself. A good therapist can also help.

3.You can’t expect your partner to be a twin,  to be someone  who believes the same things you do and therefore makes you feel sure of yourself.  That’s another one of those things you have to do for yourself. ‘

People who are fully grownup have the best relationships. Those grownups have have taken it upon themselves to find meaning in their lives, to like themselves, to come to terms with their families of origin, all these tasks and more that are the work of growing up.  You can find meaning in sharing your life with another, but you still have to do the work of your own life to be a good partner and have a good relationship.  Try looking into this instead of  wanting your partner to complete you as a person. I think you will be happier with the results.

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Ready to remember?

Many clients who are in therapy for childhood abuse get impatient to know what happened to them. However, everyone needs  to be  prepared to confront trauma, especially their own trauma.  When readiness exists, if any  trauma happened, you will remember it at a time when your external environment and  inner environment are able to support you sufficiently. This way remembering what happened (that was destructive to you in the past), now can help you to heal.

The inner environment is your relationship with yourself.  You need to be able to line up your resources to be PRO- you.  So what are PRO-You resources? Here’s an  example:  your intelligence assists you in understanding that you were not at all responsible for the abuse happening.  That would be PRO-you.  An  ANTI- you resource  would be your  brain coming up with ways to put yourself down.

The outer environment has to do with different things for different people, but usually it includes (1) having the right guide to help you through this difficult healing journey,  (2) being  in a supportive relationship  or out of a bad one, (3) having the time and attention to devote to yourself:  A single mom with  two young kids and no health insurance who is putting herself through a master’s degree program is probably not at the best  time in her life to start incest therapy, right?

Developing your inner environment often takes time, and people have said to me in frustration “Why doesn’t all this just come up and show itself to me on a g#&** video screen! Don’t you guys have drugs to make people remember?”  In fact, the therapy that goes on before information comes to the surface is just as much ‘incest therapy’ as what happens after. Most likely that time is spent repairing your self respect and instilling healthy self love.

I believe therapists in out-patient mental health clinics  should not use techniques  to pry a memory out, or use the therapy hour to work at unearthing it.  Forcing something to come to your awareness before you are truly ready can be overwhelming and destructive. Thank goodness most people have enough defences to prevent this from happening.

Get yourself a therapist who has been  over this terrain with many women and men.  Going this journey takes a special kind of courage and you deserve an experienced guide. The human heart, once broken, can heal itself again.  Therapists are  here to help people take back their lives and live in a different world that, often, they didn’t know was possible.

My best to you.

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Communicating with the Child Within: Part 1

One way to do inner work is to have an ongoing conversation with your child self. It’s tricky to really do it correctly, though.  You can’t decide what you want the child to say, you have to “let it happen”.  If you do, you will find remarkable insight into your own unconscious, because it is from the unconscious part of your mind that your imaginary child self will speak to you.

So how do you “let it happen”? Some people can do this easily (and some people are probably best off doing their inner work another way, because it is virtually impossible for them to allow their mind to flow as is needed here – which is fine since there are other ways to do internal work).  But when you can let it happen – it is comparable to a day dream that is progressing on it’s own, without an agenda, and can be very useful.

So here’s an example of “letting it happen”. In a fantasy, go to your childhood home and look for your young self in your old bedroom. When you open the door, look around, is there anyone there? Is it a younger you? About how old is this part of you? (Here’s where you don’t decide – you look to and see.)

One person I know looked everywhere and couldn’t find her child – the room was empty. (That was a perfect message from her inner child – she had no relationship to herself in this emotional way). Eventually the person found the child hiding under the bed – backed away and facing the wall. By the time she had eventually gently coached the child away from the wall – she had learned a great deal about how frightened she was of her abusive family, even at a very young age.

Another example is a person finding a young teenager self in the backyard by her old swing set. She tried extending to the young girl self, only to have the teenage self blow up at her, furious, “If you don’t stop pushing me and making me work all the time, I’ll go kill myself. Then you’ll be sorry! You never let me have a any fun. All you care about is money!” The adult in this situation did over work and rarely gave herself  down time, no less time for fun. The adult was running from emotional self, and her internal pain with over work and busyness. The wisdom she needed came from her teenage self.

The goal of this kind of work is to get in close touch with your feelings and if possible, re-parent yourself. I have said to men clients “You be the good father  that your inner little boy never had, and if you get into places where you don’t know what to do or say, you can always check with Grandma. (That’s me, therapist and Grandma.)

Hurtful self talk is revealed here – as the adult may not know what is nurturing and supportive, if they rarely got caring or supportive words from their real parents. “Grandma” can intervene and teach the adult how to be a good parent.   Learning how to be a good parent to yourself can lead to positive self talk. You can practice it intentionally during these sessions with your inner child self, and kinder, more useful self talk will start to happen naturally.

A very powerful conversation with one’s inner child can occur after a relationship has been formed through several sessions of work. At this point the adult can ask the child to leave the hurtful, often abusive home “and come and live with me.” It is often very touching how gratefully and enthusiastically the child responds to this offer.  Some people make elaborate rooms for the little child in their imagination,  others prefer to simply visit the child in their new, safe environment and re-parent  him or her.

Some of my clients have picked up on this approach and done a wonderful job of learning much about their family of origin and what needed to be learned and unlearned in order to have a satisfying life as an adult.

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Stuck Grief : Why is it you are looking into therapy?

A man I work with came up with this phrase, “stuck grief.”   He was referring to himself and why he was having trouble with near psychotic thinking. The “crazy” thoughts were preferable to recognizing what they symbolized: another extremely painful  memory of abuse from his father. He was saying, very articulately, what was going on inside himself: stuck, or unexpressed (and surely unresolved) grief.

I realized that stuck grief was the basis for what goes on in therapy sessions including all of our histories and especially forgotten, denied  or ignored incidents and realities. People avoid what brings pain, and until they have dealt with the pain and resolved it, they tend to continue what ever emotional habits maintain their avoidance  Even very high functioning adults, maintain unhealthy behaviors  because they are not willing to face the truth of their childhoods. Sometimes it is  loss of the relationship with their families that they fear, or having to confront the imperfection of their parents.  Ultimately It turns out to be an avoidance of growing up.

If someone has something that needs grieving, and they avoid the recognition and therefore the grieving, I call that stuck grief. It is  accompanied by some behaviors that aren’t healthy for the person, their children, their spouse, their customers, business associates, someone.  They often use an addiction  to keep the pain out of their awareness, like  drug or alcohol use, over working, lots of sex. It can become confusing to tell the difference between what you need with what is best for your children, and a  handing down of all kinds of human distress.

Stuck grief buried within a person can become the basis for just about anything that might bring someone into therapy.  This is why doing therapy takes courage, and a different kind of courage than many people are familiar with.   So, if you are looking for more than a bandaid, if you really want to understand yourself and make significant change, pick your therapist, your guide, carefully.

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When People Choose The Wrong Partner

This is my own personal opinion, borne out by many clients I have encountered.  I haven’t heard it from other therapists, and it certainly is not the usual explanation given in my profession. But it is my opinion:

When we are small children, we all need love, and we need it consistently. We need love that is intelligently given, so that, for example, as children we are  given age appropriate challenges that we can master – thus building or self esteem.  We also need to be loved just for existing, for being our parent’s pride and joy because we lie in our beds at night breathing.

Most people don’t get the kind of love they need. Many have parents completely unable to love them. When we grow up we still need that love we didn’t get. The longing to be loved  doesn’t go away just because it is time to move out of the house.

So we wind up picking someone as a partner who has enough of the attributes of the parent (or combination of parents) that they “feel” like the parent  we most still want to be loved by. In essence, we are picking a psychological stand-in for that parent. And then we work really hard to get that person to love us. But – because we are so good at picking stand-ins, we have picked someone who can’t love us either.  Often, because it really is the parent this partner represents to the child in us, this hurtful partner is hard to leave.

Many battered women fall into this category, and the sad thing is that if their parent was abusive they may have repressed any memory of the abuse ( for self – protection) and still pick people capable of abusing them.  When they hear this possible explanation, they can’t apply it because (1) they  have forgotten the abuse, and/or  (2) their denial of their parent’s cruelty keep them from acknowledging it. People want to believe they had good parents, otherwise their view of their childhood and their parents falls apart, leaving them with what feels like”nothing” to hang on to, to be their base.  They “lose” their parent.

This makes it hard for them to do successful therapy and strengthen themselves enough to leave an abusing partner, or one that simply is not well suited to them. I have found, however, if the therapist will  address whatever the person needs right now in therapy, then this in itself strengthens them to the point where they able to remember, work through whatever childhood issues they need to and make sense of their lives and their previous choices.  Best of all they are now free to choose a partner who can love them, as they deserve.

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Fall Depression – Seasonal Affective Disorder

We are moving into winter, and daylight  savings time has come and gone. If you are sensitive to light, you may well  be having less energy, have a low mood, trouble with mental acuity, and many  other symptoms of depression. If you realize that this is true for you every  fall and winter, you most likely have Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. Although some people find they feel worse in the summer and need to wear sun glasses, most of us effected by light changes and shorter days  experience it more in fall and winter.  Some of the symptoms that are easily noticed in our selves are craving carbohydrates and not wanting to be social.

The good news is that this is all pretty easy to fix: use a light box. Figure out a routine in your daily life so that you can be in front of a light box for whatever period of time you need. You can be working at a desk or walking on a treadmill; there are different sizes of light boxes that suit all these activities. There are even light box visors that allow you to move around doing whatever you like while you get your light.

Your medical doctor or a psychotherapist can put you in touch with reputable companies that sell light boxes.  Learn how they work and get started. Most people get results in 1 to 3 days. Good Luck!