August 2021 - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

August 31, 2021March 27, 2023

Deconstructing “We create our own reality”

“You create your own reality.” Often meant to be empowering, for many it can feel hugely invalidating
A constructive way to consider this concept is accepting that our expectations (which are informed by our prior experiences) often lead us to behave in ways that increase the likelihood that what we expect will be what we experience
This can keep us locked in a cycle where what we expect (even if it’s not what we want) is likely to be what we experience again and again.
Paul Wachtel’s “Cyclical Psychodynamic Model” explains how this can happen. In short, the past teaches us what to expect, we engage with the present based on those expectations, and how we engage effects others and influences the outcomes we experience.
Broken down further: our expectations of how a situation will go influences how direct, open, vulnerable, friendly, trusting, and collaborative we are with any given person or at any given time.
Others then responds to the presence (or absence) of those dynamics in a way that often leads to the outcome we expected.
An example: imagine you expect someone to be dismissive of your perspective. You may approach them with tentativeness and apprehension trying not “ask too much” or irritate them. This may make it more difficult for you to be clear, direct, and open about the topic at hand.
As a result of how you approached the topic, they may not understand you (leaving you feeling dismissed and unheard), or become irritated by their confusion / your vagueness (confirming your sense that they wouldn’t want to hear it).
In this way, we can all inadvertently participate in shaping the outcomes of any given situation or dynamic based on the intersection of how our past experience informs our expectations and current behavior.
More on this (including further examples and what to do about it) in today’s post and notes.

Chances are you’ve heard some version of the phrase “we create our own reality”. For many, this statement is confusing and invalidating, especially for those who have experienced trauma, systemic failures, or an inadequate developmental landscape. Paul Wachtel, a leading scholar in the world of psychotherapy, explains how we all participate in “creating our own reality”.

Per Wachtel, we learn from our relationships and experiences what we can expect from others and how others tend to perceive us. Based on what’s happened in our past, we come to expect certain behaviors, dynamics, and outcomes from people / situations. We carry those expectations with us into new relationships / situations and those expectations influence how we behave and interact. Our behavior and way of being with others then influences how others are with us, often in a way that continues to provide the experiences or dynamics we expected.

We can get locked in cycles where perhaps we don’t want an outcome, but expect it, and participate in our interactions in a way that makes it more likely the outcome will come to reality. The trouble is, many of us are often acting on expectations that are so hard wired we may not be aware just how powerful they are in influencing our behavior and relationships.
For us to constructively participate in “creating” our own reality in line with the life we want to lead we need to accept our prior experiences and expectations tend to lead us to behave in ways that increase the likelihood that what we expect will be what we experience. If we want to change our lives and start having different experiences we may need to work to override our “automatic” and “intuitive” ways of being.

If you find yourself experiencing the same dynamic or patterns with others, start with yourself. You may need to work to identify how you think others see you, what you expect of others, your sense of what others expect of you, and how all of that informs how you are in your interactions. Therapy, a mindfulness practice (which increases our ability for objectivity), reflective work, and feedback from trusted others can help us uncover these dynamics and work towards changing them.

Notes:

The theory I’ve outlined is from Paul Wachtel’s book, “Relational Theory and the practice of Psychotherapy”, specifically chapter six’s discussion of the Cyclical Psychodynamic Model. Full Citation: Wachtel, P. L. (2008). Relational theory and the practice of psychotherapy. Guilford Press.
Wachtel (pages 104-105) provides an example of two children to help us further understand how this dynamic can occur. He asks us to imagine one child who is friendly, outgoing, and open. This child will likely evoke friendliness in others and learn from those interactions that others are eager to interact with him. Another child is more shy, withdrawn, and hesitant to approach others. He will not be as likely to experience as much engagement as the first child, because he is not initiating as much or as openly friendly. The example of the children goes further, to explain how even the same situation can be participated in very differently, and in ways that continue to reinforce whatever the child’s natural tendencies are. He encourages us to consider how each child might interact with someone who is grumpy. For the child who is more prone to friendliness and openness that expectation that people are largely friendly and interested may help her engage with that person in a way that eventually does lead to a positive social interaction (like a smile). For the child who is more weary to interact he may be more likely to take someone’s grumpiness as a sign to back away, further reinforcing his beliefs about how interested others are in him.
This perspective *does not* hold that we have complete control over outcomes in our life. This is more about the subtle ways in which our expectations inform our behavior, and that influences those around us. So no, this does not mean it’s your fault that some situations have turned out the way they have, but it may mean it’s worth considering how you participated, especially if you find yourself in a pattern that keeps repeating.
A thought provoking quote from the book to help you reflect on how this happens, “In a host of ways, many of them not easy to identify or notice, each of us repeatedly induces others to behave in ways that are likely to maintain the pattern between us”. (page 105)
Wachtel wrote portions of this chapter for therapists, to help them accept that we do a disservice to our clients if we ONLY help them identify and process through how the past effected them. He explains we also need to help our clients see how the past continues to inform the present, and how our behavior and the behavior of those around us are an interplay. Without addressing all aspects of this, and helping to build insight into both how and why the pattern developed and how it currently plays out we leave our clients struggles insufficiently addressed.
If you are doing the work of changing cyclical patterns in your life, this means you are also changing how you are in relationships. It’s important to know that others have gotten used to your cyclical patterns too, and that they may need some time to catch up and adjust. See this post for further discussion.
I further outline how we use our past to learn and make connections that effect our present day in this post.

August 23, 2021March 27, 2023

No One Creates All the Problems in Their Life…

If something affects you, bothers you, or creates problems for you, it’s yours to participate in fixing, even if you didn’t create it or it’s not “your” fault.
Some of us are given the tremendous advantage of having the majority of our physical, social, emotional, and financial needs met from an early age. Most of us are not.
When we don’t have those needs met it can effect our ability to trust, connect, hold boundaries, be vulnerable with others, and be in touch with our inner world in a productive way.
Regardless, the accountability and responsibility lies within each of us to do what is in our power to move towards creating the life we want to have.
For many of us that can mean “cleaning up” after early formative experiences you didn’t have control over, but that have shaped you into being a person who has developed dynamics or patterns that create problems in your life moving forward.
Those dynamics and patterns become our responsibility to manage and deal with as we go through our lives, even if they were formed because of experiences we didn’t create
Many of us can get stuck in the in-between of “it affected me” but “I didn’t cause it”, leaving us in a passive or helpless place wishing for someone else to “clean up”, “deal with”, or tolerate some dynamic within us.
While, there is validity in the feelings of fear, anger, loss, and sadness that are tied to how unfair a situation may be, those feelings are your responsibility to work through so they don’t interfere with your ability to move towards creating the life you want to lead
No one creates all of the problems in their life; regardless each of us is responsible for dealing with them anyways.
With this mindset we can be the victim of something, but not a casualty of it

According to Dialectal Behavior Therapy we are ultimately the ones responsible for participating in our lives in a way that brings us meaning, joy, and satisfaction. Our ability to connect, relate, trust, share, hold boundaries, be vulnerable, and be productively connected to our thoughts and feelings is hugely shaped by our early relationships, relationships we have at a time when we don’t get to choose who we are around. For some of us, those relationships and that environment provide a ripe and fertile ground for healthy and safe development. Most of us, however, hit some “snags” along the way and struggle on some level with the dynamics just listed.

Those “snags” are our responsibility, even if we didn’t participate in creating them. For example, your difficulty with vulnerability becomes your responsibility, even if you were the victim of earlier experiences that made being vulnerable inaccessible.

DBT encourages each of us to hold our end goals, values, and priorities in mind, and to do what we need to – and can do (there will be limits here) to get ourselves in the life we want to lead. This does not mean “what happens” in your life is your sole responsibility. There are far too many external forces at play for that to be possible. What it does mean is the roadblocks you hit are yours to work through, regardless of how they got there.

For some of us we run into a thought traps around a fairness or a “who caused it” mindset. We can come to believe because a “mess” or “problem” in our life wasn’t created or initiated by us it isn’t our responsibility to participate in dealing with. We can get so focused on “who created it” or “how it got there” that we become distracted, helpless, and more focused on what is outside of our control (the choices someone else made) than what could be within our control (how we cope, manage, or can grow as a result of an experience).

There is validity in the unfairness or the bitterness felt around cleaning up a problem you didn’t create. Own, accept, process and work through those feelings rather than let them stop you from focusing on your growth and your goals.

Notes:

This perspective would most certainly acknowledge that some of us have more work to do than others because of factors totally outside of our control. That’s unfair. But it’s reality, and for us to be able to have the life we want its our work to do.
This does not mean there is no point to working to make the world and our society / culture a more fair place. What it does mean is that we don’t want the unfairness of something to create passivity in us that stops us in our tracks and strips us from working towards what is meaningful and important to us as individuals. What this principle says is that it may be unfair, but you are ultimately the one that suffers if you let that stop you or hold you back.
This perspective would also not say that “if we are unhappy it is our fault”, however it would say if we are unhappy we want to be on the lookout for ways in which we may also be struggling with passivity or helplessness in certain areas that may be interfering with our ability to improve our circumstances. For some, a lot more energy is focused on “who started it”. While is helpless to bring insight and awareness into how something developed, if we stop there we are at a stalemate of helplessness.
I can appreciate some may be reading this and thinking about it through the lens of community or systemic factors that have a huge impact on wellbeing (think gangs, gun violence, etc). This principle is much more about helping an individual challenge patterns of helplessness or passivity that may be keeping them stuck than it is about how to effect change on a much larger system (like a community). It is worth noting that the systems we are in have a huge impact on our wellbeing, happiness, and health and the more privilege we have the more able we are to minimize the impact of those systemic forces. If you read the post thinking more about larger systemic forces I’d encourage you to go back and re-read it through the lens of the individual.
Unsure why you’d want to be in touch with your inner world? See this post on Emotional Blocking, and this post on how our emotions are like traffic signals.
Helplessness and passivity are often NATURAL and HEALTHY reactions to environments where we don’t have control. If you struggle with these dynamics know that you may be applying a tactic that used to work in one life scenario in a way that no longer serves you. See Your Brain as An Association Machine for more information on how this can happen.
Elements of this post may be confusing for someone that identifies as “co-dependent”, given the lack of clear boundaries I am describing. If this is you, think about this through the lens of how you can “fix” by focusing on what is within your internal world or scope of control rather than how you can “fix” by working to change another person.

August 2, 2021March 27, 2023

Building Mastery

There are concrete steps you can take to improve your self esteem, confidence, and sense of worth / value.
To feel good about ourselves we need to be doing something routinely that we feel proud of.
For us to feel proud of something it needs to be hard enough that it is a challenge, but not too hard that it’s overwhelming.
If it’s too easy we won’t really feel proud of it, and if it’s too difficult we’ll feel overwhelmed or defeated.
A common area of struggle in this arena is that many of us don’t actually hold realistic expectations for what’s “too difficult”.
This is one of the reasons many new years resolutions fall apart – many of us don’t accurately assess where that sweet spot is between “a challenge” and “unrealistically challenging”.
To be successful at setting and achieving realistic goals many of us have to wrestle with our “shoulds”.
We can feel like “I should already be____”, so when we set a goal we are inadvertently trying to make up for lost time.
This often backfires. When we try a challenge and it’s too far out of reach it actually DECREASES self-esteem, and can leave us feeling lazy, out of control, inadequate and generally unmotivated.
Accept where you are now, pick a goal to work towards that it just beyond that, and gradually work to get to the final milestone.

Marsha Linehan outlines in her Dialectical Behavior Therapy Treatment Manual exactly how to increase your sense of self esteem and confidence, and it’s through a process she calls “Building Mastery”.

Taking on appropriately challenging activities, goals, and tasks is a tool we can use to help us boost our sense of worth, confidence, and self esteem. If you’d like to try building #mastery you want to pick a #goal to work towards that feels challenging, but is realistic with how you live your life. For that sense of mastery and #accomplishment to be built the goal needs to be just out of current reach, but still accessible with effort.

If you find you are often someone who doesn’t meet the goals you set for yourself, your ambition might be blinding you from what is realistic and sustainable in your life. For many of us, we set goals that require we make changes that are too far out of reach, we then can’t meet the goal, and wind up feeling defeated, lazy, and incapable. This puts us at risk of giving up, and over time, this can erode at our sense of worth, ambition, and ability.

If you find yourself in a position where you set goals and routinely don’t meet them it’s not a signal that you are failure, you “can’t do it”, or that there is no hope – it’s often a signal that you have selected a goal too challenging for where you are at this juncture in your life. And yes, something can be too challenging even if you think it “should” be simple.

When you find yourself at the crossroads of wanting to make a change, wanting to learn a new skill, or wanting to boost your self esteem remember the key concepts behind building mastery, which includes setting an appropriately challenging goal and building on it over time. If you cannot achieve it, find a way to make the goal a little less challenging. Maybe it’s too much to exercise 5 times a week, but maybe 4 times or 3 times is more accessible (at first). You can always keep setting end goals that are a challenge beyond what you’ve mastered, but the key is doing so in a way that maximizes sweet spot between not enough of a challenge and too much of one.

Notes:

1 . It’s not uncommon for people to hold beliefs like, “exercising is good for me, so I should be able to do it regularly” or “I want to be a person who________’s every day, so I’m going to start that now”. The challenge is, we start with the end goal in mind, feel overwhelmed by how much it actually requires of us, and often give up and feel defeated. We come to believe “I’m not a person who can _____, because I tried and it didn’t work”. And yes, we did try, but we didn’t try in a way that was within that window of “challenging enough”. Instead, we may have unknowingly picked a goal that was too challenging without recognizing it in that way because we believed it “should” be within our reach. Unfortunately, this approach actually diminishes our sense of self-esteem because we are unable to stick with a goal we set. Read here for more on how “shoulds” can show up in disguise and throw us off track.

2. For more information on how to set realistic goals for yourself, and how to make gradual changes see this post.

3. Been trying to make a change for ages and it just won’t stick? In addition to exploring the reasonableness of your goals, it may also be time to consider “Secondary Gains”.

4. Do you have a hard time letting go of the “shoulds”? This is not uncommon. Really. It holds many of us back. This post may help.