Blog - Page 4 of 7 - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

October 4, 2021March 27, 2023

Primary and Secondary Emotions

Our emotions, when they are heightened, can feel like a freight train, plowing through and interrupting everything in their tracks.
Often this is because, like cars on a freight train, emotions and thoughts are pouring in rapid fire one after another with no end in sight.
An example: you feel angry for a moment, but then, perhaps you feel guilty for feeling angry (or expressing it). Perhaps that can lead to frustration that you feel guilty. So on and so forth.
Some of us have a hard time identifying what our feelings are, or labeling them into categories like “anger”, “guilt”, or “frustration”. Instead we just feel revved up or activated or (at the other end of the spectrum) numb or flat.
In the DBT world Marsha Linehan describes primary and secondary emotions to help us begin to make sense of our inner world. Primary emotions are responses to our external world (like events around you or the actions of others). Secondary emotions are responses to our internal world (i.e. emotions in response to our emotions or thoughts).
For most of us, secondary emotions are the ones that cause the most upheaval and distress.
That’s because we can have many secondary emotions and they often come in quickly and more powerfully than the primary emotion that preceded it.
Secondary emotions often have a judgment built into them (i.e. I noticed I’m angry, but I feel like I shouldn’t be angry, so now I feel ashamed about my anger).
This can leave us in a trap where our emotions are loud, overwhelming, hard to distinguish from one another, and subsequently hard to resolve – even if we’re really trying. Instead we can feel out of control spinning and cycling, often in ways that interfere with our ability to be present in our lives.

For us to manage our emotional world we need to know what we are feeling and how to take care of ourselves in response to that feeling. An essential skill to help us regulate (balance) our emotional world is learning how to feel and process through emotions in a way resolves them.

There are many tools for managing your emotions, but one way to help you through them is to learn how to identify them. Once we’ve identified them, we often feel better because our internal world feels organized and less chaotic by our awareness of what’s happening within it. This is similar to strategic problem solving, usually the first step in a problem solving strategy is identifying what the issue is so you can address what needs resolution. The concept of Primary and Secondary emotions from Dialectical Behavior Therapy gives us a helpful starting point to do this in our emotional world.

Primary emotions are reactions to events in your external environment (being angry at someone for criticizing, feeling happy that a loved one is coming to visit etc). Secondary emotions are are reactions to your internal world (i.e. your thoughts and feelings). For example: feeling guilty when you feel angry or feeling pride in your ability to be happy for someone else.

Secondary emotions tend to cause the most distress for a few reasons:

1. They can be set off in a long overwhelming string (which I call emotional chaining), with numerous thoughts and feelings coming from and leading to one another.

2. They can dilute, overwhelm, and drown out the primary emotion making it difficult to identify and resolve whatever set that off. This overpowering often leaves us confused, potentially upset with ourselves, and overwhelmed.

3. If we have judged ourselves for experiencing our primary emotion (i.e. I got angry, but feel like I shouldn’t have gotten angry), we will both be stuck with our feeling and our belief that we shouldn’t have it; a complete trap to effective resolution of what’s happening.

To increase your ability to manage your emotions, start working to identify “primary” and “secondary” emotions. Look out for the three traps listed above and see notes for more resources.

Notes:

This post references material from Marsha Linehan’s emotion regulation module in her Dialectical Behavior Therapy treatment manual, specifically pages 86 and 89 of the manual. Full Citation: Linehan, M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford Press.
If you struggle with secondary emotion trap number 1 (emotional chaining) and number 2 (secondary emotions overwhelming primary emotions) you want to work to help slow down your internal world so it doesn’t move quite as rapid fire. Working on staying in the present hugely helps here. There will be additional posts to come on this, but see this post on meditation for something you can start today.
If you struggle with secondary emotion trap number 3, (judgments), see these prior posts for help with tools and concepts to decrease the power of judgments; and this series on identifying, understanding, and challenging judgments.
Knowing how to manage emotions is a complex skill, sometimes we need to let ourselves ride them out, sometimes we need to pull away from them, sometimes we need to actively manage them. There will be many more posts to come on this topic but these previous posts on controlling our attention and knowing which types of coping skills to use when have helpful content.
Today’s post assumes you buy in that all feelings are worth having. Perhaps you don’t. This post covers some of the many reasons we want to keep both our positive and our negative emotions around.
Sometimes our emotions are too big or feel too far away for us to tolerate feeling through them. This happens when we are outside our window of tolerance. If this is the case you want to work towards grounding to help turn the dial down on the intensity (or the numbness) before working on feeling through.
This is similar, but not to be confused with behavioral chaining, a DBT technique in which you look back at each moment that lead up to a particular behavior to identify the feeling or experience that started the behavior.

September 20, 2021March 27, 2023

The “Rules” in Therapy

There’s a lot of popular notions about what therapy’s “supposed” to look like, but often when a client starts to have reactions to or about their therapist it goes unspoken between them
When any of us are in treatment we bring with it our expectation of how we’re “supposed” to be in relationships. Those expectations are formed by our prior relationships, prior therapies, and our culture.
Those expectations can leave us feeling like there are implicit “rules” between client and therapist. Can I ask about ____? I didn’t like what my therapist said, is it ok to tell them? I’m feeling like we’re stuck in treatment, is it ok to talk about it?
If you start withholding, or keeping something from your therapist, it can actually interfere with the speed and effectiveness of the treatment; now there are whole sections of your internal world that are off limits.
Sometimes we don’t bring things up because we feel like we’re not supposed to, the therapy is helpful enough, we are afraid we’ll hurt the therapist’s feelings, or perhaps we assume “they’re the professional, they know what they’re doing, right?”.
Even if the therapist DOES know what they’re doing, that doesn’t mean how they are working with you feels right at any given point in time. When it doesn’t feel right that can leave the client feeling less safe. Without safety and trust we can start to withhold more and more.
For some of us, the “rules” we intuit in therapy are closely tied to social “rules” we feel in life. Rules that are sometimes so strong we don’t question them, and rules that effect how much we ask or expect of others, and how much we take on for ourselves.
In therapy, and in all relationships, we can get stuck in that space between “how we feel we’re supposed to be” and what we actually need.
Therapy is a GREAT place to have that first experience of exploring and challenging that “supposed to” by working to unearth and talk through those expectations and how they effect you. The opening path to that is talking to your therapist about your expectations or concerns of your work together.

It’s not uncommon, in my personal life, for a friend or acquaintance to ask me about “the rules” of therapy. Am I allowed to ask about my therapist? What if I’m bothered by something my therapist does, is it ok for me to give them feedback?

The answer to these types of questions is somewhat nuanced, because each individual therapist will hold different boundaries for their practice – but – the overwhelming answer is – YES – bring what you are thinking about or concerned about to your therapist.

“But I don’t want to hurt her feelings”, “I don’t want to seem like I’m prying” or “It just seems like this is how he is”, are common responses I hear. So yes, on the one hand you want to be considerate of your therapist’s person-hood, but on the other hand, it is your therapist’s job to help you understand what you are experiencing with them in the context of what brings you to treatment. Feedback, questions, or concerns you have for your therapist can become barriers to you being comfortable in the room, and therapy works best when you feel at ease, and able to be open, vulnerable, and honest.

Additionally, (and here’s where it gets interesting) what you are experiencing with your therapist may be a microcosm of what you experience in other relationships. A skilled therapist will be able to help you think about how your feedback applies to both your relationship with them, as well as other relationships in your life and the themes you are discussing in treatment. A skilled therapist will also be able to help you process through how it felt to give feedback and your experience in life outside of therapy speaking up in ways that both get you what you need and take care of your relationships.

If you ask a question about your therapist you may or may not get a direct answer, but you should learn something about yourself in the process. When it’s working well therapy is a collaborative process, which means the therapist will do his or her best to intuit what you need and what will be helpful, but they won’t always get it right. So, take a risk, and talk to your therapist about what you’re not talking to them about.

Notes:

1. . My post on Cyclical Psychodynamics covers more on how we can inadvertently and unknowingly participate in creating dynamics in our relationship with others that don’t work for us.
2. Often times when we have “rules” hard wired into us about “how we’re supposed to be in relationships” we find we have a hard time balancing our needs and the needs of our relationships. Sometimes when we’re trying out new ways of being with others we quite literally feel like we don’t know how to say what we want to say in a way that feels honest, open, and kind. See this post on how to find the balance between yourself, your goals, and your relationships.
3. This is a multi-part series that will aim to help you get the most out of your treatment. See the first part in this series “Tips for selecting a therapist”.

September 18, 2021March 27, 2023

The Power of Validation

When we validate another’s emotion, we validate them; we communicate that their perspective is valuable and important and as such they are valuable and important to us
The experience of repeatedly having your emotions validated helps bolster self-esteem and self-worth. It teaches us to trust ourselves; that others trust us; and that we are knowable, relatable, and understandable.
Validation is affirming someone’s perspective or reaction as understandable and legitimate. You can accept someone’s reaction, empathize with it, and still not agree with it.
It’s important that we learn how to validate others while maintaining our limits, and honoring our perspective. We can validate someone’s emotions and perspective and still challenge them and hold our boundaries.
Validation involves a degree of acceptance; acceptance of a perspective, and acceptance that feelings and reactions are what they are, whether you like them, think they’re justified, or not.
When we ourselves don’t share the perspective of a person, when we’re confused by what they’re feeling, or it feels irrational to us we are more likely to invalidate.
When we invalidate, we deny someone’s experience and teach them not to trust themselves or their intuition. Invalidation communicates that what they feel, or how they understand something is wrong.
Maybe sometimes you feel someone’s reaction is wrong. Remember: A reaction can be disproportionate to a situation, and still a valid reaction, given the cumulative experience of one’s life. At any time we are reacting to more than just the moment we are in.
Repeated invalidation can cause someone to question their capacity to hold a valid perspective on the world, can heighten anxiety and depression, and can have devastating impacts on someone’s sense of worth.
We can further this troublesome cycle by invalidating our feelings and our perspective, which can leave us alienated from our emotional world and constantly looking for external validation and approval.

Validation is a powerful and important part of parenting, being in a relationship, and working with others. When we validate, we communicate to someone, “I understand you, and I understand your feelings in the context of your experiences”. Validating does not have to mean that we agree with or share the feelings (or perspective) being communicated, but it does mean that we treat their take on a situation as reasonable in the context of their current and prior experiences.

Sometimes, in our efforts to cope or help another cope with an overwhelming situation we can accidentally invalidate by trying to reassure another (and ourselves). Saying “you’re ok” and “It’s not that bad” are examples of how we can accidentally invalidate by expressing our desire for someone (or ourselves) not to struggle. Other times, we can overtly invalidate; we deny the expressed experience of another person for the experience we believe they “should” be having, or the experience we want them to be having.

For many of us, if we ourselves wouldn’t have the reaction a person is having it becomes tough for us to validate their perspective or emotions. This can be made easier by working to trust that feelings arise for a reason, and that at any given point in time all people are responding to both the situation they are in, and the situations that preceded it (that inform how they understand what is happening). If we can accept all emotions as valid, we can still work to challenge perspectives without alienating (and invalidating) another or ourselves.

Many of us think invalidation is necessary when we don’t agree or need to hold a boundary. We can validate AND challenge. Our emotions can be a valid response to our current read on a situation, AND we can validate someone’s emotional experience while offering a different perspective. This is often a FAR more useful way of getting through to someone, and it allows us to support someone’s sense of self while sharing a different perspective.

See notes for further information on how to accept other’s perspectives, and for examples of how to validate while challenging and holding boundaries.

Notes:

Read more about how our difficulties facing the pain of something can lead us to react in ways that try and keep our sense of safety intact, but can alienate others and reduce connection.
Invalidating the facts as someone sees and understands them, especially facts about the difference between what they experience and what is told to them about what is happening is called gaslighting. It causes you to undermine your ability to trust yourself, your reality, and your ability to perceive reality in manner consistent with what is happening in the external world.
It can be helpful to think of our knowledge of why someone reacts the way they do like an iceberg – consider that what you think of as “too much” or “too big” is based only on what you know of a situation. Try and trust that there is probably much more beneath the surface of a “big reaction” that you don’t know about. This can be true of both others reactions and our own. A reaction can still be disproportionate to a situation, and a valid reaction, given the cumulative experience of one’s life.
Do you find you often question the validity of someone else’s reactions? Or you often find yourself feeling like others around you are over’-reacting? See this post to help you think through it.
I mention in the post we are all, in some ways, responding to both the present situation and past situations that inform how we perceive the current one. Sometimes how heavily the past “weighs in” can be disproportionate. Learn more about this here.
If you find that you are often effected heavily by the past informing your current reactions grounding and mindfulness can help you reduce that tendency and stay more in the present.
Ways to validate while holding a boundary, “I hear you, and I know. You’re really upset by this and I get it. We’re still not going to change our plans”; “You are really angry, this is not what you wanted to be happening right now. If it were up to you this isn’t what we would be doing, but this is what I’ve decided and I know you don’t like it”.
Ways to validate while challenging someone (and remember that your tone matters), “it sounds like you’re not comfortable with this situation. I get that, if I weren’t comfortable with something I wouldn’t want to proceed either. Though, in all honesty I don’t share your perspective. I see it this way ___”; “Wow. Ok, so it sounds like you feel really strongly that _____ is a problem. When I think about that same situation I see it really differently”
If you struggle with chronic low self-esteem or low self-worth, consider your prior experiences with emotional validation, there may be a history of invalidation. that has effected your ability to trust yourself.
If you’re a parent and you’re struggling to validate your children Big Little Feelings offers online courses on this, as does Dr. Becky at Good Inside.

September 18, 2021March 27, 2023

The Myth of Exposure Therapy

Many of us wrongly believe that “exposure therapy” is repeatedly putting ourselves in a feared situation in the hopes it will decrease our anxiety in that situation.
I.e. “If I get on the plane enough times my fear of flying will go away”.
While low-level anxiety often dissipates with repeated exposure, higher level anxiety is made worse or stays the same with this tactic.
That’s because what makes exposure therapy effective is that the therapist exposes someone to a feared situation AND helps them have a different set of internal responses
It is that repeated experience of being in a situation and having a DIFFERENT internal experience that can shift our relationship with the situation.
An exposure therapist would NOT advocate for white knuckling your way through
Exposure therapy isn’t the only way to deal with fears of this nature, but the key for any and every individual to be aware of is that exposure therapy is not simply putting yourself in the situation time and time again and “pushing” through it.
If you want to work on a feared situation I’d encourage you to work to increase your awareness of where that line is between “high” and “low” anxiety situations
In low-anxiety situations – sure – expose yourself. You may just need to get the hang of it.
You can address high anxiety situations in a variety of ways including formal exposure therapy, standard therapy, working to build insight into what’s under the anxiety in an effort to help it dissipate, and increasing your mindfulness and grounding skills (info on those two in the comments).

I can’t tell you how many times a client has walked into my office talking about a struggle in a particular situation; a fear of flying, anxiety with public speaking, difficulties with crowds. Often, they tell me about how they have “white-knuckled” their way through this situation time and again in an attempt at “exposure therapy”. More often than not, they find it doesn’t work.

This is when I tell them that’s not how exposure therapy works. When a therapist is helping a client with an exposure the therapist is both EXPOSING the client to the situation they struggle with AND helping them have a DIFFERENT internal experience while doing so. It is that repeated experience of being in the situation and having a DIFFERENT internal experience that can shift our relationship with the situation.

For most of us, if we knew how to have a different internal experience while in the situation we would have done that long ago. What may feel intuitive to us in those moments (and perhaps not in our control) is to have the reaction we’ve always had.

Getting on the plane 35 times in an effort to expose yourself to a feared situation in the hopes it will neutralize (or numb) you to it can work with situations where you feel anxiety in a low intensity manner (i.e. think about performance anxiety where we are jittery the first few times, but with repeated experience we get more and more comfortable). With higher intensity anxiety you may actually be reinforcing (i.e. strengthening or making worse) the anxious response by exposing yourself to it without having built up coping strategies or skills for how to manage your internal world while you are exposed to the situation.

What I can do with my clients, and what you can do too, is work know ourselves well enough to know where that line is between the “low(er)” anxiety situations and the “high(er)” anxiety situations. When our anxiety is lower we often just need to stick with it and get the hang of it. You should notice yourself feeling less and less anxious over time. When anxiety is higher, the anxiety doesn’t change or get worse with repeated exposure. That’s a cue not to keep going without a different set of internal responses.

Notes:

How much anxiety we feel in a certain situation can vary based on a variety of factors. I.e. one day a situation might be “low intensity” and the next day the same situation might be “high intensity”. The key here is to work to pay attention to knowing your own anxious cues and responding to what they tell you.
I am not a specialist in exposure therapy, and in fact when I have clients in need of this type of treatment I will send them to a specialist for a series of sessions to work with someone in the situation they are struggling with to come up with strategies specific to their situation and their needs. This is often short-term work and it can be done alongside a longer therapy.
One tactic you can try if you want to try building that different set of internal responses is strengthening your grounding based skills (those help combat anxiety by keeping you in the present) and mindfulness skills (those both keep you in the present and help you increase your ability to control your attention. Both Mindfulness and Grounding will help you “tame” your anxiety in those moments, though there are many more skills and techniques that an exposure specialist could work with you on (sometimes in as little as 4-6 sessions) if you’re really stuck with something.

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.

July 26, 2021March 27, 2023

The Ripple Effects of Change / Introduction to Systems Theory

One of the most unexpected parts of working towards personal growth is that our relationships change
This is because when we grow we often change habits, patterns, capacities, and expectations.
Because of this, when we change ourselves we may no longer be the same in our relationships.
Sometimes our growth means we connect differently, which means some relationships can feel like they lose the glue that once held them together.
Sometimes others struggle with our changes, because they’ve come to depend on us to be a certain way; some way that serves a need for them – a need we may no longer be able to fill while being our authentic selves.
When we change and start taking on a new role (or no longer take on a familiar role) it can throw off the sense of balance that others have come to depend on when everyone participates in familiar and predictable ways.
Many relationships can grow and evolve together, but some cannot. When we “grow out of people” this is often what it means; not that we are better than them, but that our new way of being is no longer compatible with the needs of each party.
Sometimes our growth helps us see other’s behaviors or words through a different lens, causing us to see the relationship differently, and potentially participate in it differently (or not at all) moving forward.
To take care of your health and wellbeing you may need to change how you participate, and, others may be effected by how that changes the larger dynamic.
So, if you’re making changes in your life, be aware, a lot more than just you may change.

When we change, grow, and evolve there are often unexpected ripple effects in our relationships. Just as there are “growing pains” with physical growth, we can experience growing pains with emotional, relational, and psychological growth.

Our personal growth usually involves concrete changes in how we live our lives. We can set new or remove old boundaries, we may shift how we spend our time or where our limits are. When we grow we may find we talk about different topics with friends or family or look to others for different kinds of support. We may also find that we connect with others in ways that are different from how we used to connect. We may bring new availability to others, or, we may not be available in ways that we were before.

When we change in the ways I’ve described, it means we are different in our relationships with others. Often our growth happens in personal or private moments outside the observation (or awareness) of friends of family. This means as we change we may surprise people, or people may not know what to to expect of us and may look for us to continue participating in the relationship in the way we have in the past.

Our change can challenge some of our relationships; if we are not longer able to fill a predicable role within our relationships others around us may feel confused, lost, angry, or unable to connect. We too can experience loss as relationships that once felt predictable change.

All of this is natural, healthy, and normal when we grow. If you are working on making changes, expect for this to effect the relationships around you. Work to be consistent with the changes you need to make, and expect others may not “get it” at first. Be patient (and consistent) with others and yourself during this adjustment period. Some will struggle with your adjustments, and others will adapt with time.

Notes:

A common example of this (and one used as an example in my graduate school class on family treatment) is the TV family “The Simpsons”. Marge holds the responsibility for keeping the family organized and running while Homer earns money, and doesn’t do much more to attend to the emotional or relational needs of the family. Homer has come to depend on Marge to do the parenting, and Marge has come to depend on Homer to earn the money. Imagine how “thrown off” the family would be if one day Homer became a much more involved parent. A burden would be lifted off of Marge – but – Marge also may feel lost, untrusting, and unsure what to do with herself as her entire identity is formulated around caring for her family and cleaning up after Homer’s (literal and figurative) messes. More in this article from the Baltimore Sun .
What I am describing here is an extension of what (in the therapist world) we call “systems theory”. In short, this theory describes all of us as being components of larger systems (family systems, work systems, cultural systems, etc). These systems can reinforce behavior, roles, and dynamics within us as individuals and within our relationships. So, when you change one part of a system, the rest of the system needs to adapt too. If you see a therapist describe themselves as a “systems therapist” it means they operate with this framework in mind.
This dynamic is often common is families where one person is identified as “unwell” (physically, emotionally, developmentally – etc). A number of members of a family may get used to thinking of themselves in caretaking roles, and they may rely on the unwell member to be less able or capable. If the “unwell” person becomes more independent and capable over time other member of the family may struggle with how to relate to them, and how to relate to each other as roles change and shift. Identities and a sense of purpose can be lost, and sometimes families can come to depend on a dynamic of having an “unwell” member to keep a sense of balance intact. This “unwell” member can also be called “the identified patient” in therapist lingo, which means the person the family, organization, or system has come to rely on to hold the position of being unwell.
If you find you have a hard time “catching up” when those around you have made changes I’d encourage you to work on mindfulness – taking in each moment as its own unique and individual experience with a person. We can simultaneously hold awareness of how someone “used to be” while paying attention to current actions and behaviors to allow room for their growth. We may need to spend time processing through losses or gains we experience when those around us grow. This introduction to meditation may be a helpful starting point.
Sometimes even “positive” changes can be met with resistance or pushback from those around you, or perhaps you are finding yourself struggling with someone else’s “positive” changes. That may be because their are secondary gains in place for the person who has not made the change, but who is effected by it.

July 20, 2021March 27, 2023

Foundations of Meditation

A step-by-step guide to the Foundational Meditation for Mental Health
- 1. Make sure you are comfortable enough to not move for the duration of the exercise
- 2. Pick a “Focal Point” using one of your five sense. I recommend starting with touch and waiting to use sight until you are more advanced.
  - Ideas:
    - Try pressing your finger tips together or
    - Put a beverage in your mouth and don’t swallow it
- 3. Set a timer for 30 seconds.
- 4. Close your eyes and work to notice “what comes up”. (I.e. what thoughts enter your mind, what sensations you feel in your body, and what emotional feelings you notice internally). Once you notice something return to the focal point you’ve selected.
- 5. You stop when the timer stops.
- Do this once a day for a month. After a month you can gradually increase to up to two minutes (or longer), though I have found 30 seconds a day can be enough for someone to see significant gains.
- The only time we’d want you breaking the meditation is if you are in danger (i.e. a fire alarm goes off etc), otherwise, it is your job to notice whatever urges arise without acting on them, including urges to move your body, end the meditation, think through something – etc.
- You will drift away many times; this is the whole point of the exercise. You are working on increasing your ability to notice when you drift away and come back to your chosen focal point
- This is not meant to be relaxing, it is a very active process of observing your mind body. What you are doing with this exercise is strengthening your ability to have an internal experience that you don’t react to
- It’s ok if you get irritated, want to stop, find yourself feeling tempted to move, wonder if you’re doing it “right”. These are all just thoughts, feelings, senses, and urges and it is your job to notice them without acting on them.

Regardless of whether or not you have a meditation practice already, I always encourage my clients to start with this foundational exercise. When we meditate in this way we strengthen our ability to cope by working on being present with our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. We are noticing them, but not letting them dictate our actions or behavior.

When I introduce this skill to my clients I introduce it to empower someone to strengthen their ability to improve their concentration and to be less controlled by their emotional states. I also use it to help them increase their ability to control their attention, which makes them less susceptible to triggers.

The goal is to work on being present with what comes up, to notice it, and then to let it go and be present for the next “thing” (be it a thought, sensation, or feeling).

Many of my clients get stuck in one of two places, so be on the lookout for these traps:

They start “Chaining”, meaning they have a thought and then they react to that thought with another thought, or maybe a feeling, and so on and so forth so the meditation exercise becomes more like a stream of consciousness. This is normally how our minds work, so it will probably start to happen during the exercise. It’s ok, you’re going to get better at catching that and then redirecting yourself. Instead work towards noticing a thought, and then letting it float away while waiting for the next one.
The other common trap is: “Blocking”. This is when you try and “clear your mind” so that you have quiet or stillness. While that can be a great centering or relaxation exercise, it is not the type of meditative exercise we are trying to work towards. We want thoughts, feelings, and sensations to float into awareness so you can strengthen your ability to notice them and then re-direct your attention.

The skill with meditation is not in preventing your mind from wandering, it is in noticing when it wanders and then bringing it back to your chosen focal point.

You should find, after a month, you are less “reactive” and more able to notice your thoughts and feelings without having the urgency to respond to them.

Notes:

The focal point can be anything that uses one of your five sense. I personally find touch is the most accessible, but here are examples from all five senses. The key with any of these is to use it as an anchor, something you return to in-between the internal thoughts, feelings, and sensations you notice throughout the exercise.
1. Taste: Put a candy in your mouth and notice the taste of it. Resist the temptation to move it around / crunch on it.
2. Sound: Just listen to the sounds around you – this works best if you’re not in a completely quiet space, though if it is “quiet” you may find there were more sounds than you had been aware of when you quietly listen.
3. Sight: Watch trees in the wind, watch snow or rain fall.
4. Smell: Sit over a coffee or tea, spray a perfume or cologne.
With step one, I encourage you to sit in a way in which you are comfortable, BUT as you get more and more advanced you might want to try sitting in a way this is slightly uncomfortable. This will give you an opportunity to work on sitting with your physical discomfort and tolerating the sensation of it.
There will be a second post to come covering how to move away from having a focal point. As you get more and more advanced your focal point can get less specific, but phase one meditation is about working on noticing the drift and re-centering back to the established focal point. Eventually just “you” can be your focal point.
If “nothing” happens (i.e. you try this exercise every day for a week and you just have a blank mind) you can try scanning around your body to see what you notice or prompting yourself with questions about what’s happening in different areas of your body).
If this is highly activating (which it might be if you struggle with anxiety, intense feelings, or you have a history of trauma) start with grounding and try decreasing the time to 15 or 20 seconds. Once you get really good at grounding you are likely to feel safer and more able to tolerate the exercise.
Want to learn more about who may benefit from meditation? The post “Why Meditation” covers more details on how meditation can increase our ability to cope. The post “Controlling our Attention” covers how meditation can increase out ability to accept what we cannot control. Meditation can help us increase our ability to release our emotions, as covered in the post “Emotions are Brief“.
I was trained on this in graduate school, and I remember we would start off every class with a two minute exercise. Inevitably someone would arrive late and shuffle around the room, drop a bag, pull out a chair, etc. I remember feeling and thinking “ugh! They’ve disrupted the peace! It’s interfering with the exercise”. Initially, I was not able to step back and recognize that my irritation at being “interrupted” and my thoughts about that were actually just another thought and feeling to notice. The exercise can’t be interrupted, because the whole purpose of it is to notice what comes up (internally or externally), and then come back to your chosen focal point. That noticing can include noticing your own irritability, like in my case, as well as noticing your own experience of distraction. The better we get at noticing and returning our attention to our chosen focal point in the exercise, the better we get with this skill in our day to day lives.
Over time, this exercise will teach you to be more mindful of your internal world and less reactive to it, which means (eventually) you may not need to do it on an ongoing basis. Instead, may find you are more and more used to being connected with your internal world, and this awareness without reactivity will happen more organically and naturally throughout your day.
You may notice there is a focus on “not reacting” or “acting” in this exercise. That’s because we are working to introduce intention to when you act on internal experiences. The goal in life is, of course, to act and respond as is indicated for any given situation, and meditation of this nature helps introduce a pause so that you can increase your ability to notice your internal experiences before reacting to them. In life you won’t always just sit and notice, but that’s exactly what we do when we meditate – we strengthen our ability to resist the urge to act. There will, in life, be times where acting intuitively / quickly makes sense (think about emergency situations), so we are not eliminating the ability or need (at times) for a quick reaction – but we are working to introduce intentionality so we can be more in control of when we act quickly.
Chelsea Handler’s book, “Life will be the death of me” covers how meditation fundamentally changed her life.
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Wherever you go there you are” is an excellent instructional book on meditation.

July 15, 2021March 27, 2023

You Married Your Parent?

When we are drawn to relationships that parallel our relationships with our parents we are often drawn to how we FELT in the relationship and our experience of the relationship.
This can include the role we take on in relation to the other person, what we expect of them and how they’ll react, and our sense of how we’re supposed to be around them.
Your experience of a relationship is likely to be unique to you, which means it may not be similar to experiences other people (including your siblings) had of your parent.
An example: For the parent that had a temper, think about your experience of that, perhaps it’s something like ‘I had to walk on eggshells around her, and I felt like I had to keep her protected from something that might make her too angry. I was often scared or nervous when something might upset her’.
While your spouse may or may not have a temper, you can explore whether or not there is an experiential parallel in how direct you feel you can be with your partner, or if you feel like it’s your job to keep your partner “in a happy zone” because it’s hard for you to trust they’ll be able to productively manage upsetting information independently. You can also consider how similarly you feel when you anticipate they’ll be upset
We end up in parallel relationships often because we are drawn to that familiar feeling, role, dynamic, or experience.
When we build insight and understanding into what our relationship was like for us we can make decisions (in an active way) about whether that served us (or not) and whether that’s an experience we want in our relationship(s) moving forward (or not).
So when we question, “am I dating my parent”, we want to be on the lookout for both traits between your partner and your parent as well as your experience of each relationship.
You can end up “marrying your parent” by marrying someone who makes you feel the same way or take on the same role in the relationship even if they have very different personality traits.
See post for more information and sample questions to ask yourself to help you build this understanding.

For most of us, when we consider whether or not we’re dating or married to “our parent” (as the expression goes) we think about this concept in terms of interests or personality traits. For example: my mother was organized and so is my spouse; my father was a runner and so is my partner; my parent had a temper and so does my wife.

Many of us know we are drawn to what’s familiar, and so yes, we can be drawn to familiar personality characteristics. When I’m thinking about whether or not someone may be replicating an earlier relationship pattern in a current relationship I’m also on the lookout for “experiential” parallels, something I find far fewer people have heard of or considered.
By experiential, I am referring to YOUR experience in the relationship. We’re looking at how our personality interacts with the personality of another person for a unique relational dynamic between us.

For many of us it can be hard to get descriptive in a concrete way about our experience of our parents as the relationship becomes our standard for “normal” far before we have the capacity for words or for memory.

A helpful way to explore this idea is to focus on your experience in the early relationship and your experience in your current relationship and see what parallels arise. Ask yourself questions about your experience, and it’s ok if your responses surprise you.

Samples:

How understood, alone, connected, or important did I feel?

When a problem arose did I feel safe in discussing it? Afraid? Like it was my job to figure it out alone? Maybe it wasn’t my job at all?

How was accountability handled? Who took responsibility for problems or accidents?

When a change needed to be made did I feel like it was my job to adapt, did I expect them to adapt? Did we all work towards making changes?

When something needed to be figured out was I included? Ignored?

These prompts will help you connect with how you felt, the role you took on, what you expect of others, and what the relationship was like for you. We can then use that information to help us change patterns that may not serve us moving forward, and work towards keeping dynamics that did work well for us and our relationship.

Notes:

If you’re having a difficult time getting descriptive about the relationship (i.e. going beyond “the relationship was good” or “the relationship was bad”) read more about how to find and use descriptive language in ways that help us move beyond words like “good” or “bad”.
Still having a tough time identifying your experience? When you try and explore it let go of how you think you “should” feel and allow yourself to be present with whatever comes up, even if it feels surprising or uncomfortable.
This post also relates to a prior post where I cover how our early experiences shape our understanding of what to expect of ourselves and those around us.
An example of relational experiences that occur with specific personality traits: For the parent who got a lot done, ‘I always knew I could rely on her to take care of things, but I also always felt like she was so busy, or distracted, or not really present with me and so I got used to feeling like she wasn’t totally plugged in to me’. Whether or not your partner “gets a lot done” in the way your parent did, if we were having you pay attention to your experience of the relationship we’d want you to be reflecting on how important you feel when you’re together, and exploring how much you feel like your partner offers you their full attention when you’re together, and how available to you they are.