In this month’s Tool, I describe something that can helpful in negotiating shame, that force in everyone’s psyche that points at us with a deep disapproval. It blocks desire and hopes, and the actions connected to them, and can be a heroic project to shift. This tool isn’t meant to take away shame, but to perhaps provide a wedge to make a bit more space between it and you.
August’s Tool-of-the-Month is a kind of exploratory/diagnostic one, not so much intended to change something about your experience. But it’s pretty cool, because what it does is help us realize (in our own embodied experience) that there is a difference between reacting to someone’s, or some part of ourselves’, demand, and taking it as a request. We generally have no idea how much of our power and self-control we give away routinely, until we start to see this connection—between request and response—is not fixed.
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.
The article in this month’s newsletter extends some thoughts from last year, (link) about the necessity of approaching depression as a training process. Here I am expanding the idea to the underlying idea, namely, that life itself can be looked at as a training, a kind of coach whose injunctions and regimen is embedded in the nature of the challenge itself. Rather than life simply giving inflictions that we have to fight, or submit to, the idea here is that actually life is giving us training opportunities. Whether we see them, or are willing to go through the hard work to get the good results, is something that is essentially up to us. But having a lens such as “life’s training opportunities” can help open us up to the possibility.
The “Tool of the Month” for April is a simple test for a complex problem: is the belief that we hold as ours, actually ours, or is it being held because we either inherited it, or had to believe it for safety reasons? The answer is a very important one, because if a belief is congruent with who we actually are, if it truly is our belief, then it doesn’t cause friction. But if it is incongruent, then the friction between our self and our received belief cause stress, at some level, even though initially we may not be aware of that stress. So the Desert Island Test is a little thought experiment to help discriminate which belief belongs to whom.
Here’s an article that is an extrapolation of what I wrote about philosophy back in December, an attempt to explain some of the deeper ways in which the mind constructs depression…without telling you. It uses the image of an old power plant control room to talk about the “Wall of Knobs”, the settings of the body-mind that define our experience, and our potential for experience.
As I said in that article, although this can seem a bit academic compared with what on the surface seems more practical—what I address in the Tools of the Month—having a better understanding of how the mind works to build depression is essential to actually both managing, and ultimately deconstructing it. Depression is not simple, despite what the popular presentation of it is, and having an appropriately complex understanding will give the possibility of having a robustly balanced life.
The tool-of-the-month for this month is a simple one that is often not easy to execute on. The way depression works is primarily to pull the levers and knobs of the imagination, to convince you that the world, well, just is grey and bleak. But, the solution to depression is often described by the 180 degree opposite from what it’s doing: if it’s imagining greyness for you, then you can imagine color for yourself.
So, this is a description of the process of imagining out from where you are, in concentric circles of the world around you, in order to remind (“re-mind”) yourself that there is a world of possibility and potential out there, and that depression was just forgetting it for you.
Happy New Year! I hope it is starting off well for you all, and as usual, that you’re getting enough support to deal effectively with all the inevitable, and from the therapeutic perspective, necessary challenges.
In the current tool-of-the-month, I propose a practice of approaching “self-care” as “future-self care,” of practicing making choices based on our future self being a dependent who is subject to our present choices, but has no agency in actually making those choices. It creates an interesting ethical framework for our choices, without getting so entangled in the questions of society ethics and demands, that can help clarify what the actual consequences of our actions are on our self, or rather, on our selves.
