New Beginnings

Center for Conscious Living has begun its second iteration. We are now located in Oregon, seeing clients in Bend and Redmond. It has taken longer than expected to get licensed in Oregon, and while it seemed excessive, I do not at all begrudge the many hours spent reviewing ethics!

It is always good to review, and reviewing the Ethical Standards for Psychologists has given me time to review how I practice and how I want to perceive my clients. These standards cover the very basics such as, never, ever enter into personal relationships with clients, maintain high standards for privacy and confidentiality, and, most important of all, FIRST DO NO HARM, a principle that is taught to every treating professional.

In Defense of Pain

What?! Defend pain? Whatever for?

Because pain is an all-important indicator that something is wrong--that you should look to your body's needs, stop doing something that hurts, pay attention.  Ever since the advent of the "Excedrin headache", we have expected to be able to instantly get rid of pain.  We have developed a zero tolerance attitude.  Instead of learning from our pain, we tend to search and destroy--find a pill that will make it go away:  "I do not have time for this headache, I have to work, take care of the kids, run that marathon......"

What this attitude does is cause us to neglect the real cause of the pain, whether it be overwork, dehydration, or a brain tumor or sprained ankle.  We want the pain gone, but we do not have the patience to slow down and find the real source of the pain.  Sometimes this works fine--sometimes that trip to the doctor provides some advice and gets you a medication that works, and the pain never returns.   Your sprained ankle heals, you rehydrate and feel wonderful.  As long as you remember to follow that advice, which includes resting the ankle and hydrating regularly--actually making a long-term, but fairly easy change, you will remain fine. Other times, you end up neglecting the real source of the pain, and it just keeps coming back.  Those are the times we need to look at more closely.

So you get tension headaches every week or so, or have a pain in your side that never quite goes away, or worse, you have a chronic condition such as fibromyalgia, CRPS (RSD), migraine.  The doctor gives you a lot of medication and it dulls the pain, but you never feel quite right.

Let's start with that tension headache.   Tension, right?   What do you do in addition to taking medication?  Do you look for the source of the tension?  No, because you know it--whether it is the boss, the kids' school, your impending promotion, the mortgage, or all of those, you know what it is, and it feels unchangeable.   Not quite.  What you can change is how you perceive and handle those life stresses,   and how you deal with the repercussions in your body.   You can learn to manage stress differently AND treat your body better.   Perhaps you get a therapist to teach you Rational-Emotive Therapy and start doing massage or Feldenkrais® treatments.   Or perhaps you learn meditation and start yoga classes.  Making those two types of changes in combination, you can get many stress-based pain conditions to remit completely. 
In the case of a more serious chronic condition, the cure is similar, but less simple.  The precursors may be a lifetime of stress or a history of trauma.  Then you got hurt in a car accident, and your body just seemed to betray you.  Everything hurts, and nothing helps.  These conditions require a more detailed approach to restoring comfort--a look at your history to heal the inner pain as well as a thorough examination of how you embody and maintain the pain.  Deeply experienced stress and trauma change the body, the brain, and YOU.  But even these very deep, longstanding  changes are repairable with therapy for the mind and the body. 

Remember that your mind and body are a totality rather than two separate entities.  Thus to completely cure any pain, we need to look at our lifestyle, our habits, and our history.  Pain is a signal to stop and listen to the body.   Pay attention to your body, take care of its deepest needs, and it will rarely betray you.

How Worry is like a Hamster Wheel........

Sometimes you just have to worry, right? Wrong! Worrying about something that might go wrong, is going wrong, or has already gone wrong is not going to change things, right? Right. So all the energy you expend worrying is not being spent productively on problem-solving. What it is doing is using energy and preventing you from focusing on the real problem. If your daughter is out too late, worrying about her is not going to get her home safely. If your boss is on a tear, and you fear for you job, worrying about his erratic behavior is not going to save your job. If a tornado is bearing down on your neighborhood, worrying is not going to save it.

Worry is a distraction--we take up mental space worrying, and we feel occupied, so we are less focused on hunting for that elusive solution or doing something else productive. But the worry itself is exactly like running in a hamster wheel--you are moving, you are active, but you are still in the same place. You might expend some calories, but you will not get any closer to solving the problem.

Worry is a uniquely human activity. And as with other activities in which humans engage, we tend to defend this one. After all, if it were not important, it would not worry me, right? I ought to worry about my daughter/job/house, right? The truth is that it is not the worry that is going to help you resolve the issue. Worry represents thinking things you have already thought rather than arriving at new ideas. Worry stresses your system, causes you to lose sleep, and generally moves you away from creativity into a rut. The issue at hand may indeed be serious, but worrying is not the answer.

Take that daughter--she is late, and you are rightly concerned that something has gone awry. You can actively search for her if you have some leads; you can call the authorities if it has been a seriously long wait and she is not answering her phone, or, if it is really the usual Saturday night teenager misbehaving, you can get some sleep and let her worry all night over the consequence her well-rested parents will impose. The point is that the actual process of worrying is not what gets her safe nor you closer to a resolution.

Your job is on the line; you have a moody boss, and today is one of those days. Recognize this for what it is and get to work--the hours you spend worrying that you are next for his wrath will not help you to avoid it. In fact, there is some chance that your worry makes you flustered and ineffectual that day and indeed puts you right in the spotlight you had hoped to avoid. Yes, your job is important. The point is not that it is no cause for concern if your boss is unpredictable, just that the actual process of worrying is not what is going to resolve the issue.

A tornado is reported in your area. Batten down the hatches and find the safest place to wait it out. Worrying and fretting will not keep you safe without action. Alternatively, it is tornado weather and you sit frantically by the radio listening to the reports--you lose a day of productivity, and nothing comes of it. Better to have a preparation plan for this season and know how to implement it, then have your ducks in a row come the actual threat.

The thing about worry is that we do it all the time. We worry about our kids. We worry about our jobs, our houses, our health, the economy, our weight, and whatever else we can find to fret over. This is a bad habit. It wastes resources, stresses our immune system, and achieves nothing. Humans get attached to the thoughts that run around in our brains. We hear that subliminal chatter and assume it is meaningful and important. In reality, our minds tend to run in the same ruts they always run in, and this limits creative problem solving. The problem is that we become so accustomed to the chatter in our heads, we never question its validity.

Time to get off the hamster wheel. Learn new habits of thought and reduce your stress instantly. Yes, it sounds easy, and with practice, it is. And the new habits you learn will help you for a lifetime.

The Powerlessness of Getting Angry

"He makes me sooo mad."
"That really pisses me off."
"I can't stand it when you do that."

We often think of anger as a powerful emotion--anger makes us red in the face, we feel a surge of power, our voices get loud. What we fail to notice is that the perception of power is vastly different from the experience of power. When you are angry, you are not in control. You are powerless over what you feel, and often feel powerless over your reactions. This is not power, but its opposite, powerlessness, loss of control, and weakness. When you are not in control of your reaction to a situation, you are indeed weak. The presentation of anger may serve to decoy the person or situation about which you are angry, it presents a loud and blustery front, but it takes away your power to regain control of the most important variable: yourself.

Ah, but since it appears that people, things, and situations MAKE us angry, how do we avoid becoming angry and thus maintain control? By following the famous ABCs of Rational Emotive Therapy. A is an Activating event--it is what we complain about that has "made" us angry--a fact of experience. C is the Consequence we create--behavior(s) and/or emotion(s). Which leaves B out of its place between A and C. B is the Belief or set of beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, that is the true cause of C. Generally the beliefs that cause anger are irrational.

To illustrate: a man tromps your toes quite hard in a crowded elevator. Your initial reaction of pain is a normal, automatic one. The next reaction (emotional C), anger, and possibly the shout (behavioral C) "hey, look where you are going", is mediated by your beliefs that "he should be more careful", "he should look where he is going", "he should have waited for the next car", etc. Then you notice the white-tipped cane--the man is blind. Your anger is replaced by compassion, perhaps a lingering annoyance that no one in front helped him enter safely, a touch of shame for being angry at a blind man, etc. Thus the anger was NOT caused by your toes having been stepped on, but by the thoughts generated by your related beliefs. The anger, thus created, can be eliminated once the belief system is altered either by new knowledge ("he is blind"), or by a conscious choice as in this next example:

Your daughter is very late getting home one Saturday evening. You are frustrated that she is missing her curfew once again. You are getting angry, and thinking about how you will discipline her when she finally shows up. You feel yourself coming to a boil, and the words "grounded for life" and "never go out with those people again" bounce around in your brain. Eventually, you realize that losing sleep, pacing the floor, and planning the expected late-night ambush will do little to solve the problem of her frequent tardiness, but will result in her becoming correspondingly angry at you and creating a stalemate on the issue of improved behavior. You create a plan to deal with her in the morning, and head off to bed, your anger having turned to disappointment, and your self-control reasserted. You even manage to get some sleep, which your worried daughter, having created her own defensive, angry stance, ("where is the expected, unreasonable parental ambush?") is not able to achieve.

Success--you have managed your irrational thoughts ("that girl must respect the house rules", "I can't stand having a child who disobeys", "what a bad daughter I have"). By changing your thoughts into calmer ones ("it is a shame she has made another poor choice", "I need a plan to help her understand that if she is living here, there are rules she must follow", "children test the patience of parents; I remember that from when I was her age, but it will make for a happier household if she learns to cooperate".), you regained control over your emotions and behaviors. Changing your thoughts from demands and name-calling into preferences and facts helped you to calm yourself and create a plan. You put yourself back in control of both you and the situation.

Getting from anger to calm is a process. It begins, in the language of RET, with D, a Dispute: "Is it really true that she must respect the rules, or is that just my unreasonable demand of a teenager?", "It is not true that I cannot stand her behavior", "She can be unruly, but she is not all bad"). Following your dispute, you arrive at a new approach, the reasonable beliefs that will allow you to sleep, as in the example above. E is that Effective new belief or philosophy. And F is your new behavior and emotions: getting a night of good sleep and dealing calmly with the teen in the morning ("Honey, we need to talk about your curfew"). You win and so does she. Having a calm parent helps her to remain open to learning and improving.

Whenever you find yourself thinking "(he/she/that)makes me sooo mad", you have given away your personal power. To maintain power and control, change your thoughts so that you can be understandably upset, disappointed, concerned, confused, etc., without losing control over your reactions and thus, the situation. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, can help you learn to prevent anger and maintain control. Empower yourself!