May’s Tool-of-the-Month centers on the short question, “What is the most creative thing I can do?”, which is not easy to actually ask. Or if it’s easy to ask, it’s hard to act on. So, here are some brief thoughts about that question, and since experimentation is a big part of creativity, give the question a shot and see what happens.
When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!”–(John 2:15)
I was sitting with a client who was describing being at a party full of close friends, people she’s known for years and is comfortable with, when she, out of the blue, began feeling anxious. There was nothing that happened in the interactions; the same sharing of recent events was going on as before the burst of anxiety. She was baffled at what was triggering the anxiety, and kept looking to the happenings around her and couldn’t find what was activating her. Which, of course, led her to feel more anxious. (Anxiety signals a danger, and marshals the “locate danger” circuitry, and when that danger can’t be found, prompts or reinforces the anxiety.)
Someone recently asked me what the magic pill of psychotherapy was, and at first I scratched my head and shrugged, starting into, “Well, there really isn’t…” and then stopped. “You know what, there actually is a magic pill: surrender.” We then went on to talk about that, what that means, but I realize I left one important thing out:
Surrender happens in waves.
As I’ve been preparing for the next series of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression (MBCT) classes (see below), my thoughts have gone to the subject of “taking action” within the context of a class which stresses heavily acceptance and non-resistance of the experience of depression. It’s an important issues, especially for a therapist like myself who stresses the aspect of mindfulness as a general principle of effective therapy (not the sole cause, maybe not even the most important, but pretty useful at least…).
“Burned all my notebooks, what good are
Notebooks? They won’t help me survive.”
“Life During Wartime”-Talking Heads
I think it would be fair to say that there’s a lot of stress in the air (or on our doorsteps) these days, and I don’t believe we can understate the often under-, or not-so-underground effect it’s having on us. The Talking Heads succinctly put it in their song: not a time to reflect, ’cause you gotta just survive.
Regardless of who you were rooting, or working, for in the recent presidential election, one has to see it as a pretty remarkable event. The first African-American president, the first race so influenced by “green politics,” and the first one I’ve seen in a while to not just talk about hope, but to actually stimulate it in what seems to be a wide swath of the electorate.
The success of, and problem with, control
We humans are wired up to want control. In a large way, we got to the top of the food chain by finding ways to control our surroundings and each other. We developed tools, which allowed us to control many things, including food supplies, housing, mobility. We developed social systems, which allowed control over how we relate to each other, opening up possibilities to grow and develop that are squashed if everyone is out for just themselves. We developed science, allowing vast opportunities to control the material world, as well as insights into how to control our selves (psychology, sociology, neurology, etc.).
So with the primaries over, and the campaign for President revving up, here are some suggestions about using this inescapable event to your benefit. The Wild Moods, depression and anxiety, have multiple factors that influence them, and though our recent bias is towards “brain chemistry imbalance,” the storms of culture cannot be taken lightly.
The other day, another milestone for my beautiful nephew Benjamin: just passing his first birthday, he toddled from one parent to the other, getting a little push/support off the starting line, and a quick catch at the finish. This is after some months of his wheeling around on the house, holding onto walls and couches and chairs, and knees and the edge of prone parents, and finally his walky cart. And that after some months of more and more skillful crawling, as supervised by his folks. It’s a bit like watching some kind of magical box, that once the “go” button is pushed, it opens and unfolds, pauses, then unfolds with another amazing form.
It’s funny, though, what we take for granted in infants and children, and then learn to studiously deny to ourselves.
As adults, the general notion is that we’re not supposed to lean on things. And that’s often the message we got at some point in our childhood or adolescence: don’t depend on anything or anyone, because if you do there’s something wrong with you. If you’re male, then it means you are weak, feminine, and in possible danger. If you’re a woman, then you’re histrionic, clingy, and weak. (There’s certainly a cultural gender bias here, in terms of dependency, with woman be encouraged to be more relational, nurturing, connected. But having to lean on someone or something for support, that’s got a pale cast to it regardless of gender.)
This is one of the misgivings I hear most often with folks new to psychotherapy: “I don’t want to have to be dependant on you or on therapy.” What I say in response is, “My work is not to encourage weakness; my work is helping you learn to recognize when to be skillful dependence.”
So what do I mean by “skillful dependence”? Skillful dependence is what Benjamin was unselfconsciously and without apology displaying in his run-up to the Big Walk. Namely, he recognized his need for support, and took it. He didn’t debate his need; he simply saw it, and went about getting it so that he could learn what he needed to learn. That’s the natural relationship to need.
But what happens with unskillful dependence is that by leaning on crutches–be they people or habits or addictions–we avoid building the muscles that we naturally have available to us, for building, and effectively “outsource” parts of ourselves. That is, we have the capacity, and refuse (for whatever reasons) to grow it as it naturally wants to be grown.
The other unskillful dependence, is what is known in psychology as “counter-phobic”: we are scared of the feelings/experience of dependence (of recognizing that we don’t or aren’t all we need), and so decide that we’re never, ever, under any circumstances going to be dependent. Here one leans towards the caricature of American individualism, the Texas of the soul, the classic American male.
But what happens here is that although strength is actually built, and things often get done, the achievements are made possible by a rigid and patterned building of the psychic muscles. The strength is one of resistance and stubbornness, which, if the only strength available, is actually quite brittle at its core. And the consequence of that strength being overcome is of a profound collapse, because what’s underneath that hard shell is unformed, unable to tolerate stress without coming apart.
Also, the other consequence of not being vulnerable to one’s own need, is that part of you knows how secretly, truly vulnerable you are to serious hurt, by virtue of that very rigid strength that has been cultivated. So this makes it even harder to grow because your very survival at some level is taken to be the result of the armor that is worn. And if it’s worn for a long time, one even starts confusing the armor with one’s self…and then it can be terrifying if not inconceivable that there’s actually something softer and subtler underneath. It’s very hard to remove the armor then.
So, then, skillful dependence is what happens when we can tolerate the reality that we actually need each other. Learning doesn’t really happen unless we can realize this and allow ourselves to be children (in relation to what’s to be learned), which means that we need support and help. To push that away is to short circuit the learning process. Or for emotions and relationships, it stunts the maturation process. In order to grow, we simply need support. And at some point, when we are strong enough to stand on our own, to continue with the same kind of support is actually to stunt the next stage of growth (imagine what would happen if that supportive structure holding up the space shuttle never let go when the rockets fired).
What is created when one allows the world to support us, allows ourselves to be contacted and held in our need, is not at all the feared dependency. It’s actually an incredible resiliency, that of the proverbial reed in the river, bending with the currents quiet and torrential. We become skilled in knowing how much of what we actually need to keep growing and developing, and we become unafraid of showing what’s actually true for us, that we do need support and we do need each other.
