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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Taking Responsibility for our Future Selves

We’re going to start here by pinching a concept from the field of economics, being, “Cost externalizing”.  This is a term that describes how a business maximizes its profits by off-loading indirect costs and forcing negative effects to a third party. For example, when a chemical plant pours its industrial waste into the river next door, it is externalizing the costs of proper disposal of the toxins to the citizenry in general, who both have to pay for the medical effects, and eventually for the cleanup when the state agencies have to get involved.

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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Questions about Depression: Webinar interview with Psyched in SF

Here is the link to my webinar interview and q&a (approx. 40min) with Psyched in SF’s Traci Ruble.  We cover the following questions, which were sent in by the readers of this great blog:

  1. Have you noticed a kind of depression that is related to “eco-depression” or the environment?
  2. How do you relate to a depressed friend or family member that is both helpful and unhelpful?
  3. How can I, as a 15-year depression sufferer, take care of myself?
  4. How can I distinguish if what I am feeling is sadness or depression?
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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

What Emotions are Trying to Tell Us

(Audio version, click here, or here to download.)

While emotions are not at all simple experiences (as Dan Siegel makes clear in his book, “The Developing Mind”), there is a class of emotion which are universal, cross-cultural, and definable in ways that most of us will quickly understand. These are called the “categorical emotions”, and are generally listed as: anger, sadness, fear, disgust, contempt, joy (happiness), and surprise. (Varying theorists would make this list slightly differently, but we’ll go with this one.)

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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Void vs. Emptiness

There is a critical distinction between the experiences of Void and that of Emptiness that it behooves us who experience anxiety and depression to know about.

“Void” here refers to “the presence of absence.” It is experienced as a closed, retracted, painful state, like touching into a pocket of acid. It is the equivalent of a abscess in the body. It’s not empty space. It’s full of toxins and dead material, but is trapped in a bubble. When we experience Void, we are experiencing a place in our psyche where what was, or should be, in that space has collapsed or been destroyed. It is without positive energy, uncreative, pulling in the way an acid eats at its surroundings.

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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Slowing Down

The Idea:

So this article is going to be a very simple and direct reminder of something we all, across the board, forget to do. Which is to slow down.

Now, that’s often put out as a general injunction, as a “way of living,” or as a way of encouraging mindfulness and reflectivity and calm. Fair enough.

But I want say “slow down” as a literal injunction: don’t move your body as fast. Consciously retard movement. Not internally, not speech, but with your big muscle groups and gross motor actions. I.e., physically, slow down.

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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Teachers, Conscious and Unconscious

A Story:

There is a story in the Buddhist world, of an old monk who lived in the Buddha’s community at the time of the Buddha’s death. As the story is told by the Vipassana teacher S.N. Goenka, after Buddha passed away, this monk was openly happy, saying, “Now that the old man’s not around, we won’t have to stick to all his rules.” (The monastic order had a lot of rules.) This was overheard by one of the senior, enlightened monks, who realized that unless the Buddha’s teachings were recorded and remembered, the order would break down and the usefulness of Buddhism lost. So he helped initiate a convocation of the most senior monks, to remember and record (in memory) the teachings. And this senior monk was so grateful to the old monk.

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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

What is Shame?

The researcher Brene Brown, who got a dose of youtube attention (link) last year from her TED conference talks, has this great definition of shame: “Shame is the fear of disconnection.” She talks about how shame is the emotion/state that is pervasive throughout our lives, but which is rarely talked about. Even in the psychotherapeutic community, it is much more common to talk about something relatively rare like suicide then something like shame, which is so common and impactful. And yet, without an understanding of shame, and a practiced ability to spot it as an experience, we are invisibly swayed and sculpted by its logic and rules. But-and it’s a big but-that becoming intimate with shame qua shame is a bit like getting to know the sun by staring at it intently. The burning makes it very difficult to hold a steady gaze.

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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

De-Pressurizing the Holidays

The spiritual teacher Saniel Bonder once stated something that applies well to psychotherapy in general, and anxiety and depression specifically:  our lives are a continuous process of equalizing pressure, with that which is being “equalized” being the pressure between you and the world around you. Why do we do this?  Simply because the state of being overly-pressurized is painful, and we deeply want less pain.

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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

 The Past that Pretends to be the Present 

This month I want to give a quick overview of the difference between “implicit” and “explicit” memory, which is really a critical one both for dealing with depression and anxiety, and, well, just for the challenge of being human.  I hav  e found that it can help us make sense of what otherwise is baffling in our experience, those moments of, “Why am I doing this?”

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 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

The “Wobble” of Progress

Given the linear mind of our mainstream rational American culture, it seems to take many of us some time to come to terms with the “wobble of progress,” which is the way in which our own growth and development moves forward in…wobbles. There’s a natural wave form to unfolding as a human being that isn’t explained by the progressivist idea that growth and success is a simple step-by-step process, like walking down a straight road. Rather, human growth (and the healing and uprooting of depression and anxiety) looks more like the switchbacks up the side of a mountain. The path is a straight line; you can trace the trail from bottom to top. But when you’re on it, it often feels like anything but a straight path.

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