Denial & the Drain of the Everyday

There are many things in life one could rightly consider boring and inane, and all of these things, broadly speaking, can be categorized as doing the laundry. 

Exercise. Budgeting. Studying. Difficult conversations. Together they make up the minutiae of life, and people are loath to do them sometimes. Not because they are painful, but rather, because they are unpleasant, and it is upon discovering the many variations of displeasure that arise in day-to-day life, that denial steps in to serve a greater function. 

Denial is a psychological defense mechanism, the core function of which is not only to protect the mind from threats (pain), but also to preserve one’s relationship to pleasure, which if we had it our way, would be unceasing and constant. Human beings are incredibly attuned to good feelings and just as sensitive to any marker of their absence. 

The mind seems to have a way of guiding individuals away from inner turmoil and conflict. Away from the small tasks that compromise them by becoming a significant drain on their energy and time. This is what denial is really a defense against, not the simple act of folding clothes, but the greater threat it represents by encroaching on human finitude. 

What is Denial?

It is a refusal to accept facts which are as incontrovertible as they are inconvenient. It is not the surface reality that is difficult to tolerate, but the awareness of the underlying meaning of investing precious resources into things one does not really care about. 

Denial is mostly an unconscious process that people are not aware of, especially not in the moment it is employed. Freud called it the “ostrich policy” invoking the image of the animal sticking its head in the ground to avoid what threatens it. Which is what denial is tantamount to, sticking one’s head in the ground to avoid distressing reality. Doing so can be necessary and protective at times, but it can also hinder growth and development. 

How Denial Works 

Imagine a person who is at risk of losing someone close to them, such as an aging parent. They love this person and cannot imagine living in a world without them. The thought of it is simply too severe, and rather than allow oneself to be overwhelmed, the psyche kicks in and activates the defense of denial. 

Thoughts of one’s parent miraculously recovering or being saved by some miracle treatment occur, and if not that then by the sheer force of their will to survive, and if not that, then finally by some sort of divine intervention.  

In such scenarios these outcomes are unlikely if not impossible, but the psyche produces them in order to provide relief and protection from feelings of fear and authenticity. This response can be adaptive or maladaptive depending on the context. 

Common Types

Denial can manifest in different ways and should be judged accordingly based on how it is categorized. 

Simple denial is the most straightforward type, which is characterized by direct denial of reality. It is a simple refusal to believe what has happened, has really happened. 

A close companion of this simple denial is minimization, which involves a partial admission of the truth but stops short of full recognition by downplaying the significance of what has occurred. This partial admission of the truth makes minimization the most difficult type of denial to identify because it easily passes for honesty. 

The next type is not always thought of as a form of denial but it is one. It is projection, which occurs when you attribute unacceptable feelings or impulses to others. When one is criticized or held at fault for something they’ve done, rather than be accountable, they may accuse someone else of doing the exact thing they are guilty of. 

And of course there is avoidance, the type of denial that most people are familiar with. It involves the subtle unconscious choice to avoid all together anything and everything that could leave you feeling exposed. Avoidance stands in direct opposition to reality and truth. 

Denial in Everyday Life 

Despite occasionally producing a positive outcome, on the whole denial has a negative effect on multiple areas of life. People suffer personally, socially, physically, and spiritually when they live in denial. They turn a blind eye to the warning signs that trouble is on the horizon and do nothing to stop it. They miss out on some of the most meaningful and rewarding aspects of life. In this regard, denial ceases to be a form of protection and becomes a barricade between who someone is and who they could become. 

Working Through 

The question of how to work through denial is really the question of how one tolerates and eventually works through pain. 

Practicing self-compassion is necessary in order to do this. When someone makes a mistake or doesn’t live up to their standards, the temptation is to avoid the painful uncomfortable feelings that come with this reality. Self-compassion is an antidote to such avoidance. 

Writing is a practical way of employing it. Reflecting on what was done and getting all of one’s thoughts and feelings, whether good or bad, out on the page, can help to tolerate them. It allows for working through them. 

If the issue is that someone denies their feelings by unnecessarily courting conflict, the solution is to slow down and direct their skepticism towards the sudden urge they have to fight or argue. 

To push themselves to have open conversations instead, and in doing so, acknowledge how difficult it is to admit one’s wrongs, not only to others but also to themselves. Dealing with the difficult is how one becomes more courageous than they imagine they are. 

Final Thoughts 

Though ineffective, denial is not a flaw. It is a necessary defense at times. It is a natural part of psychic life. Not one that should be employed without discretion–there are times when the use of denial as a defense mechanism is what must in fact be denied.

It is important to be aware and take stock of where denial shows up in one’s life, and what thoughts and feelings lie just beyond it, which is how a person can locate, find, and face whatever it is that denial is protecting them from.

Why Success Has No Deadline

So many of people think that life is over if they don’t achieve their goals by a certain point in time. Usually, the date that is set is arbitrary and comes much too soon. People think that if they haven’t realized their dreams by 25 that they never will but that is a foolish and destructive way to think.

Most people are barely even aware of who they are at 25, much less what they want, and many people will enter into their 30’s still with only a vague notion as they try to figure it out. One should not let the narratives they see and hear on social media trick them into believing that this is not the case. In fact, some of the greatest achievements of mankind have been accomplished by late bloomers. People who were well past the point in life when they were supposed to be successful according to society’s standards.

Popular examples are people like Ford and Edison, both of whom did not achieve success until after 40 and represent the quintessential rags to riches story. 

Some of my favorites in this category are people like Toni Morrison, Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley, and Charles Bukowski. Lesser-known figures to be sure, but all of them possessed the same strength of will that told them to keep going, defy the odds, and define success on their own terms. 

No one has it all figured out, and they don’t have to succumb to the notion that they are supposed to. They’re not. No one arrives at a point where everything is forever perfectly aligned. Maybe a person experiences it from time to time, but only for a moment, and one soon finds out that life is mostly about just having the courage to try, regardless of whether one succeeds or not, and more than that, they soon find out that the greatest achievement is in having the willingness to, if necessary, start all over again. 

The Only Way Out is Through

Life is difficult and trouble is inevitable. While the desire to avoid trouble is understandable, it is ultimately unrealistic. 

The only remedy to trouble is perseverance, not avoidance, which tends to have the opposite effect. It solves problems in the short term, but multiples them in the long-term. 

Dwelling on problems doesn’t work either because it increases their impact and their ability to harm someone. Most problems people encounter in life come and go quickly, but dwelling on their problems allows them to take up residence in their minds and affect them for much longer than they would if a person could simply let them pass along.

The power a person has is in their ability to choose the attitude they take towards their troubles.  

Start Small. Speak Truly.

It’s not easy to find your own voice, but it’s worth the effort, and it’s better than the alternative. Most people use someone else’s voice when they speak without even noticing it. They have adopted someone else’s beliefs and values and keep on repeating them and using them to solve issues that arise, even when there are better options. Which creates another problem. When you don’t take the time to find your own voice you become stagnant mentally and emotionally. 

It seems like the longer you wait to find your voice the harder it is to find it at all. The more work you have to do to wade through the thoughts and opinions that are not your own. Thoreau talked about the men who lived lives of quiet desperation. There are many ways to live a meaningful life, but a common theme among all of them is choosing not to resign themselves to this quiet desperation.  

Finding your own voice is an act of rebellion. Sometimes it is a battle, but it isn’t always drama-filled and world-shattering. Breaking out, rebelling, can happen through small daily actions that might not be noticeable to anyone else, but they still have an impact and you know they matter.  

The Fall Comes First

The journey towards mental health often starts in reverse. What I mean is that people usually start to elevate and rise towards mental health only after they have fallen, after they have experienced a descent that has taken them so far down, they are not sure if they will be able to get up again. 

Falling is a common part of life. We do it all the time as children, but with enough perseverance, most of us master the art of walking. The same process applies to the art of living. Most people learn how to get along well enough, eventually. The Fall takes place after you think you’ve got life figured out, and the reason it’s so difficult to overcome is because all the knowledge and information you’ve used to get through life becomes insufficient. 

Most of us feel like failures at this point. The confusion and inadequacy that come with the fall are enough to break some of us, at least temporarily. But it is in that very moment, when you are sitting in your brokenness that you are able to begin your journey to being healthy again. It’s impossible to ascend without falling. In the end it’s even possible to be thankful for our struggles. Sometimes we need them to learn how to heal and overcome difficulties.

From Court to Couch: What the Luka Dončić Trade Teaches Us About Group Dynamics

As a preface to what I’m writing about now and hopefully in the future, I’ll briefly speak about the origins of my love for basketball. My earliest and most vivid memories of the sport are watching the 2001 NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers. Without really understanding anything about basketball, I was still entranced by the competitiveness and aerial acrobatics that were being put on display. That was the start of me harboring dreams of becoming a professional athlete. Dreams which did not come to fruition, but birthed in me a love for the sport, and sport in general, ever since then. 

I’m a therapist, not a professional athlete, and I cannot help but to blend these two facts of my experience, to examine sports through the psychological lens of my profession and perhaps share the combination of these two things through my writing. 

A transaction took place between two sports teams last week that by most accounts is viewed as the biggest trade in the history of the NBA, if not the history of professional sports. The Dallas Mavericks traded their start player, Luka Dončić, to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for one of their star players, Anthony Davis. 

Other details were involved but that was the headline, and rightfully so. Decisions involving someone who is considered to be one of the best in the world at their sport do tend to reverberate across multiple channels. The media coverage has been extensive and warranted, and rather than rehash what has already been said, or focus on individuals alone. I want to examine what happened from a group context in order to highlight the other characters involved and understand the situation from a different perspective. 

Why Was Luka Doncic Traded?

The decision to invite a new person into a group or to kick someone out of a group is not made on impulse alone. There may not be an abundance of forethought, but there is at least some consideration given to this decision before it is made. The feeling of wanting to make a change is present in the group before it is ever given verbal expression. It is a process in and of itself for a group to accept and acknowledge the presence of hostile feelings towards one of its members and the possible implications of allowing those feelings to surface in the group. Typically the group allows (or elects) one person in the group to take on the task of being the first person to verbalize their feelings. It is only after this that the rest of the group members can openly respond to the hostile feelings which have been present. 

The Mavericks seem to have made their first acknowledgement of their hostile feelings towards Dončić sometime in January. They did so in the form of a hypothetical question, a soft lob thrown in the direction of the Los Angeles Lakers. Well, would you trade for Luka Dončić? As is the case in groups, strong sentiments are initially shared in a manner that hides the depth of feelings behind them. Hypotheticals often hide the reality of strong desires. 

Reasons for the trade have been discussed ad nauseam. Dončić drank and ate too much and worked out too little. He was temperamental and by their estimation, too expensive. I’m not particularly interested in any of that. My interest is in examining the privileged position Dončić had within the Mavericks organization (their figurative group), how he came to occupy it, and the reasons his position changed so drastically. 

On the face of it the answer is simple. Dončić is a phenom and the culture of the NBA is that players of his caliber are empowered almost immediately. Because they are exceptional, organizations quickly become beholden to them. Every NBA team is a group with established norms and ways of functioning. 

Drafting a player is tantamount to inviting a new person into the group. In most cases the new member must quickly adjust to the rules of the group, but in the case of Dončić, who was so unique, he did not have to make the same adjustment. When someone who enters the group is viewed this way, the group responds by changing to fit the needs of the individual. There is an immediate shift in power within the group. 

This shift represents the renegotiation of a new agreement amongst the members of the group. Under these circumstances the new agreement is essentially this: the group will give up its individual and collective power in exchange for the benefits the individual can provide. In sports, teams give up control to star players because they believe their individual performance will result in organizational success. Such is the case with the Mavericks, who believed Dončić was the key to future success.  

Or at least they did. The first domino to fall, which led to this sequence of events, was the Mavericks losing their belief in Dončić. Ironically it was their success, not their failure, that led to this conclusion. 

The Mavericks have been criticized for trading away a player who led them to the NBA finals just last season. This is taken as proof of Dončić’s ability to eventually lead a team to a championship. But the Mavericks view it as proof positive of the exact opposite. Their loss to the Celtics in the NBA finals did two things. It showed the Mavericks they were good enough to get to the Finals but nowhere near good enough to win a championship. Secondly, it removed the spectre of hope from the Mavericks. Not completely, but resoundingly enough to cause some people to lose faith in Dončić, the person who had been given so much power within the group. 

The Underlying Power Dynamics

General managers of sports teams at times function like group therapists. They are responsible for looking after the safety and well-being  of the group members and ensuring the group is functioning well as a whole. Managers do not act alone and operate within the structure created by ownership, whose presence also impacts the group even if they are not explicitly a part of it. My view is that Nico Harrison, the Mavericks general manager, acted freely in deciding to trade Dončić, but his actions were not free from outside influence. 

Harrison, as is typical of people in his position, was chosen by the group to carry out their wishes. A lot of time has been spent trying to understand exactly whose wishes Harrison was carrying out, but this hard to know because there appears to have been factions or subgroups within the Mavericks organization. These subgroups exist within the Mavericks organization and the larger group that is the NBA and can be identified by the way they responded to the trade. These groups can be divided into players, management, and ownership. Each groups response reveals something about their competing agendas, all of which impact the group dynamics.  

The player’s response has mostly been a negative one. They were shocked by what occurred, protesting the unfairness of it, pondered what it meant for them, and quickly came to the conclusion that it meant no player was safe.  

Groups will sometimes elect one of their members to play the role of scapegoat, to take the blame for the group’s lack of progress. As the pressure builds, the scapegoat is eventually expelled from the group. Their may be a momentary feeling of relief now that the problem is gone, but relief is followed by fear and panic. 

This happens because on a deeper level members are aware that the problems of the group are always about more than one individual, and will persist even after the individual is gone. They know that if someone like Dončić can be scapegoated and unceremoniously traded, the same could also happen to them. The group trembles at this realization, and the part they played in bringing it about.  

The common response from players is to think about the personal impact trades have on them. Management, acting as de facto group leaders, must respond by trying to help the group adjust to this change and restore group cohesion. Harrison has done this by trying to instill hope and outlining a positive vision of the future of his group, His belief is that the group will function better now and is better positioned to accomplish their ultimate goal, winning a championship.

This is the appropriate response, but it is not always easy to restore group cohesion but doing so can be a challenge. For the Mavericks, they have had to contend with raucous and emotionally charged reaction from their fans, one they likely did not fully anticipate. This highlights another important aspect of group dynamics. While not directly involved, fans, like family and friends of group members, can exert a large amount of influence on group dynamics. Especially when they are activated by something going on within the group. 

Ownership could take a supportive stance which could bring clarity or help the group move their discomfort towards acceptance. It seemed like Mavericks ownership would have rather not done that given their initial silence in the aftermath of the announcement. A silence that was broken via an interview that was published over the weekend, and almost certainly was motivated by the fact that fans staging protest in front of the American Airlines Arena where the Mavericks play. They seem to prefer to stay in the background, but this choice along with others they make may be the most significant because they lead to a repetition of the same group dynamics that led the Mavericks to this moment in time. 

It has already begun to happen. After the trade a narrative quickly began to emerge about Kyrie Irving now being the leader of the team (group). Over the weekend, after Anthony Davis made his impressive Mavericks debut there was a coalescing around the idea of him being the potential leader of the Mavericks. Another uniquely talented player whose presence once again entices the group into placing their hopes and wishes and power inside of him.

The storm within the Mavericks organization reached its climax with the trade of Luka Dončić and that storm will inevitably come to an end. A new group is forming. They are establishing their own norms and formulating their own agreements, and despite an overall structure that mostly remains the same as it was previously, their is hope that this particular group will take them to new heights. 

We shall see. 

Why the Family is the First School of Love

Since there are not, and in my mind, it is hard to fathom that there ever will be, a multitude of schools that exist primarily for the purpose of cultivating the skills necessary for loving and fostering healthy relationships, one must be resigned to the fact that the family, by default functions as the primary school of love. This being the case, there are as many schools as there are families, most with some overlap in terms of the similarities and differences and very few that can be counted as being the same.  It is within the confines of the family that love is defined. The family is where the meaning of love is given a structure and a shape.

This meaning-making is carried out in both verbal and non-verbal ways. The memory of childhood is imperfect and prone to alteration as time passes, but certain moments are indelible and leave lifetime impressions on the mind and the heart, and oftentimes these moments deal with the particular topic of love. What it is and what it isn’t. Looking back, I surely thought love was the feeling I got when my mother took care of me when I was sick, or on days when I wasn’t sick, the feeling I got when my father let me play hooky and stay home from school. Those moments are easy to recollect because of the positive association I have with them. Naturally my world was defined by emotion, and all my value judgments were subject to the approval of my feelings. It takes a long time to realize that love is more like the nights your mother worked overtime at the hospital, the club, the restaurant, the office, wherever, to make sure you had school clothes that fit, and possibly a new pair of shoes to go with them.

Most families are too busy trying to survive and advance, and ironically, trying to love, both individually and collectively, to pay much attention to the actual business of modeling what love is and what it isn’t. When one is accosted on all sides by the trivial and serious, the personal and the political, it is difficult to mind what is happening within the four walls of one’s home, and yet this is the task that is always important, until it becomes urgent. 

This difficulty leads to confusion about love and acceptance of some faulty assumptions. The most common of these is the assumption that love is only ever about feeling good. This assumption is understandable on the part of a child who is more than anything else concerned about holding onto whatever good feeling they can find. For some children, the unbearable conditions they are forced to endure, in which they still manage to conjure up some amount of pleasure testifies to that fact. 

But at some point, you have to realize that love is not always about feeling good and may in fact have very little to do with happiness, at least not the way we usually think of that word. Love produces a happiness that comes from giving rather than receiving. A fulfillment that comes from nurturing someone or something else rather than satisfying one’s own desires. This kind of love is difficult to understand and difficult to practice, and one comes into it gradually. 

It is the responsibility of the family to help its members grow into this understanding. To gently disabuse its members of the faulty belief that love is synonymous with feeling good. What you find is that unhealthy families are ones where the adults themselves are just as preoccupied with feeling good as everyone else. This wish makes them incapable of guiding other family members towards a healthy definition of love. No one is able to receive the kind of nurturance that leads to growth and maturity and instead everyone within the family becomes locked in a battle to preserve their own pleasure. This is in essence a form of neglect that ensures long-term dysfunction due to the fact that everyone is stuck at the level of a child when it comes to understanding love, viewing it only through the prism of reward and punishment. 

How Vague Goals Produce Vague Results

It is impossible to find success if you don’t start out with a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve. Sometimes people don’t know what they want and choose to adopt the wishes and desires of other people because it is easier than deciding for themselves. 

But just as bad is when a person doesn’t clarify what they want. Most people say they want to be happy, but happiness is a vague and subjective term that means something different to everyone. Even if you simplify happiness and say it consists of the basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter, etc., there is still a lot of difference amongst people in terms of what and how much of each they think they need to be happy. 

Having a specific goal in mind that you can measure and track your progress towards gives you a daily routine to follow. It gives structure and order to your existence because you know what you are working towards. It also tells you when the journey is over, which is just as important. One of the qualities that successful people share that is not talked about enough is their ability to recognize when it is time for something to end. When it is time to change directions and embark on a new journey, a moment that usually comes well before the majority of people realize it. They keep the end in mind even when they start, because they realize that a decision not to plan for change, for the time when something is over and done with, is a decision to court stagnancy and complacency. It’s deciding, in essence, to fail. 

The end goal in therapy might involve helping a person resolve whatever issues initially brought them to therapy, or being able to accomplish the goals outlined in a plan of care. Most people come to therapy with a combination of the two, some things they want less of in their lives, and other things they want more of. Therapy is such a dynamic process that inevitably new issues will surface throughout sessions and new goals will be formulated beyond the initial ones. This can make it difficult to determine when therapy has come to an end. There’s a fine line between needing to continue helping someone with new problems as they organically arise, and looking for problems to avoid having to say goodbye. The latter could be considered a form of self-sabotage. 

For that reason, I judge therapy to be over when a person is living the life they want to live, paradoxes and all. This means they have resolved or gotten control of most if not all of the problems they initially came to therapy for, and they have accomplished their personal goals. Having this end in mind at the very beginning helps to guide the therapeutic process.  

Is Mental Health a Matter of Alignment?

A mentor taught me a simple definition of mental health. They taught me that mental health is when your head, heart, and mouth are in a straight line. The work that we all must do in life, the work that the existential therapist is particularly concerned with, is trying to help people create this kind of alignment in their lives. 

Many of our problems stem from being out of alignment. Our heads (thoughts) reflect one reality while our hearts (emotions) or our mouths (words and actions) reflect another. This misalignment creates internal turmoil and confusion. It makes it difficult to consistently show up as one’s best self and to act with integrity. And integrity is a necessary part of mental health–it is both a product of good mental health as well as a contributor to it. 

We use our values to measure whether or not we are living with integrity and to guide us towards alignment, but it is difficult to stay there because of our tendency to focus on things that do not matter and things that we have no control over. The frequency with which these two categories are synonymous with one another is not a coincidence. 

When mental health begins to worsen, one of the first things to do is examine if somewhere, somehow our lives have gotten out of alignment. 

How to Overcome Normality

At every stage of life there is a pressure to fit in with the crowd. People feel this pressure whether they are children, teenagers, adults, or elderly. This pressure is internal as well as external because most people want to be liked and have a desire to belong. This desire leads people to adopt the thoughts and behaviors of others, typically whatever group is seen as the majority. When this occurs, it is an adjustment to the norm, and while normality does have some benefits such as a sense of belonging, increased popularity, and less potential for being persecuted by others, it can also feel stifling. Normality can limit personal growth, which is why it is important for a person to think critically about the norms they are following and at times choose to break free from them.

It is true that people learn about themselves through their relationships with others, but they also need time alone to aid in their growth as well. Spending time in solitude, away from others, allows the individual to clarify what they really think and feel. It allows them to figure out what makes them unique and different from others. These unique qualities, whatever they may be, are often the foundation from which a person is best able to express their creativity. Recognizing what makes a person different also serves as an opportunity to practice self-acceptance. Rather than negatively comparing oneself to others or thinking about the ways they don’t measure up, through compassion a person can come to cherish the qualities they have that others may not possess, even though it is a difficult task. Most of the stories of successful individuals are stories about people who were willing to break away from the norm in order to do what they really wanted to do. 

Overcoming Normality

Normality is overcome by setting personal goals that align with the true self and the things one genuinely values. Only then can a person take action to move closer towards those goals, which might feel scary at first, but as they keep going, they start to build more confidence in their ability to take risks and step outside of their comfort zone.

I referenced success stories of people who have done this, and it’s important to also state that their success is not purely individual. People who embark on the journey to become themselves often find that they are met by others all along the path. They are surrounded by like-minded individuals who can provide support that is not based on them being alike, but is based on them being the most authentic version of themselves.

Dealing with challenges 

It is not easy to give up the benefits of fully embracing normality. The challenges of doing so have already been outlined–loss of a sense of belonging and popularity, as well as likely persecution from others who don’t understand.

The way for a person to deal with these challenges is to commit to values-based living, making choices that are based on the values they hold most important rather than making them on the basis of what is easy or convenient. This helps a person to become more resilient and to overcome their fears and doubts. Support will come from a group of like-minded individuals, but until it does one must provide their own support and validation and protect their own well-being. Overcoming these challenges is worth it in the long run because in doing so a person truly understands what it means to be fulfilled and happy within themselves. 

The Beauty in Brokenness: How Despair Can Illuminate the Path to Healing

What exactly is despair? A state of mind entered into not on account of a person’s own will and volition, and not one that they feel pulled into by a strength greater than their own. Despair is more akin to the person who slumps down defeated after a long struggle. It comes to them when they feel they are at the limit of their capacities, when it feels as if they have reached the final step on the staircase of existence and there is nothing new for them to strive for or experience. 

Thankfully, despair, while being quite convincing in this regard, is nothing more than an illusion. Not in the sense that a person doesn’t actually experience the dark and heavy thoughts and feelings that accompany it. Those are as real as it gets. What is not real is the conclusions that are drawn from this experience. Despair is not a final stop or an end to happiness. Despair is a crucible in which everyone, once there, has the opportunity to reach down even further within themselves and discover new strength that they did not know they had. And with the discovery of new strength comes the discovery of new possibilities.  

Much of what people discover and attain in the way of progress can only be gained through difficult circumstances. Anyone capable of examining their own life can agree with this sentiment. The path towards being whoever and whatever it is one wants to be contains both difficult and easy moments, but it is the difficult moments that are most impactful and remembered most vividly.

Imagine for a moment, a person named Johnnie who has complained for months about her dislike of doing hard things, and really that word doesn’t describe it–hatred is the most appropriate word to capture her feelings. Week after week she complains about her life and the things she would rather not face, using every method of avoidance she can conjure up in her mind. And the harder she tries to avoid; the more difficult things become for her until eventually there is nothing else she can do to avoid the challenges in her life. As dogged as she has been, she is finally all out of tricks, and with this ending comes the beginning of her own personal encounter with despair. 

Despair is not the final stop or the end of happiness. Despair is a crucible in which everyone, once there, has the opportunity to reach down even further within themselves and discover new strength that they did not know they had.

She has been sick–sad, blue, depressed, ill, any and all of those things, but none of them, no matter how terrible, has been enough to make her give up trying to push away her problems. It is only in realizing that one is surrounded and without any more exits that they have the opportunity to be brought into a new psychological state. The transition is difficult. It is a type of pain that has not been experienced before. It is blunt and direct, and aching.

Despite all this discomfort, the therapist must insist that someone like Johnnie turn her attention towards the things she desperately does not want to look at, and the must do so without being abrasive and damaging. They must accept the fact that the best they may be able to manage is to get someone to look at the details of their life for a few minutes at a time, and sometimes even less than that. They must be persistent in their encouragement that a person keep coming back to their situation and try to see it with clarity. 

The wish for life to be easy is difficult to give up, and it is equally difficult to be in the position of having to push someone to relinquish it, but it is necessary. The best form of help one person can provide to another is getting them to realize the fact that life is never really easy for anybody, and the only thing left for a person to do once they know this is to embrace the struggle and take the hard road. It’s no easy feat because treading an unfamiliar path inevitably means embarking on a journey without a map in search of somewhere you’ve never been with nothing but the hope within to carry you forward. But, if someone can make the difficult start and keep moving through the treacherous middle, they find that eventually the journey does become less difficult and even though they don’t know exactly where they’re going or what they’re doing, they start to trust that they’ll know when they get there. 

…life is never really easy for anybody. And, the only thing left to do once you know this is to embrace the struggle and take the hard road.

Despair can unlock new depths of experience within. I called it a crucible, but it’s just as appropriate to compare it to being locked inside of a mental gymnasium where strengthening your mind is the only way to break free. Anyone who continually expects ease and comfort in life will be perpetually disappointed. They’ll sit on the floor lamenting life’s unfairness while wasting away. This is the falsehood that a misunderstanding of despair leads to, and this is why it is important to realize that even in despair, and in a certain sense, only through despair can a person transform their life.

The person who undergoes this transformation does so by choosing to become stronger, not by waiting for the burdens of their life to become easier.

How to Become Yourself: Living Authentically

In order to become yourself you must first get in touch with the self that already is. Before you fully grasp the concept of a self, it is already formed, already having things added to it and taken away from it by virtue of experience, the impacts of which we are not fully conscious of in the moment. Becoming yourself requires taking psychological ownership over those core characteristics that define who you are. Characteristics which may or may not be amenable to change, so that ownership becomes something more closely related to guardianship, and the development of a self that is consistent becomes about protecting those core parts from negative influences. 

There are many who think that changing your physical appearance is the quickest way to demonstrate that you have become yourself. This is the personality ethic approach that Stephen Covey wrote about, defined by taking of shortcuts and making superficial changes in hopes of appearing different, but without doing the inner work on yourself these attempts fail because they are not authentic. 

Even if I do have success with this strategy, if I am constantly changing for others, for their approval or appeasement, or whatever else I’m angling to get, the core self gets lost in this process, and the only way to get back in touch with it is to find wrestle with that question of who I am. The answer to which can only be found by understanding why I feel the need to keep making changes in the first place. That’s the core of the issue, the behavior most often carried out, which by default comes to define my existence. That’s the making of the inauthentic self. 

Exactly how the self is made is still mysterious and ultimately might not matter–there are things we have to accept as inevitable and outside of our control, and how I got to be who I am might be one of them. It might be that the assumption of responsibility is more important than the act of creation. After that moment of discovery, when you get the first inkling of how significant the phrase I am really is, then you have to intentionally decide about how you will develop the self. If you don’t, it still develops on its own, but it does so in the shadows, trapped behind whatever part in life you feel you must play. Which leaves you weak, fragile, and insecure, like everything else that is forced to live without light. 

The goal is not to become disagreeable, but you should certainly want to nourish the self you are creating to the point of it becoming tough, immutable, and essential. 

Meaning & Truth

It’s okay to feel lost sometimes in life, to feel as if you don’t know what you’re doing. Feeling lost from time to time is something everyone goes through, and it may be closer to the truth to say that people go through life feeling this way most of the time. Life is complex, and when things feel overly simple, as juxtaposed to things being simple as they can be, one should start to wonder whether or not they’re missing out. Simplicity isn’t a bad thing, but neither is complexity. It can mean that a person is more engaged in life, that they are living and striving instead of merely existing.  

Part of the challenge is for a person to find out what is true for them. This is made more difficult by the fact that it is easy to find an abundance of people who will tell you what you should believe and what you should do. It takes discipline and restraint to practice discernment and not passively absorb all the information floating around. If a person does that, the truth will soften until it is devoid of any form and definition. It won’t be black and white, or even gray, but as clear as liquid and only capable of producing the image of whatever belief is most convenient to them at a given moment in time. Through this flimsy definition of the truth, a person might garner favor, but it’s not how you create the meaning and purpose that is necessary to guide you through the difficult times in life, when public opinion is not on your side. The search for meaning and truth is a collective endeavor that everyone engages in, but the truth that is discovered, no matter how similar it appears on the surface in comparison to others, belongs only to the individual. In order to find it, a person has to make their own meaning, test their own theories about living, and learn for themselves the strength or weakness of their views. 

It can’t be given. It can’t be arrived at secondhand. You can talk to other people, listen to them, watch movies, and read books. They can show you what it looks like to be searching, and what it feels like to discover truth in the most unpredictable ways, but they can’t give it to you. They can reveal the places where it makes sense to look, including the places within yourself, but they can’t go there. The space between people exists for this reason. So that each person can and inevitabley has to look for themselves in order to find truth. The differences between people serve to bring into sharper relief individual values, and these differences, instead of being negative, are opportunities to discover something new about the world and what it means to live in it. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean any of this is easy or pleasant. Searching for truth isn’t a Saturday in the park, and it isn’t supposed to be, but it also isn’t as bad as people make it out to be, not always. It’s important to stay curious and allow oneself to be surprised by whatever it is that resonates within, even if it shocks you. Moreso, it’s important to keep going, keep searching, keep doing whatever it is one needs to do in order to join the chorus of people living with meaning and purpose.  

Depth for Truth

Depth is a defense mechanism. One that is an off shoot of intellectualization, one that is meant to ward off and keep at bay any sign of mental and emotional discomfort. 

It makes perfect sense to my mind, to keep asking questions when you don’t like the answer that you’re getting. We all do this, but I’ll use children as an example. A child wants something and someone comes along and says no, you can’t do that, you can’t go there, you can’t have this. At this point anyone, but especially a child, gets full of indignation. 

Why can’t I go? Why can’t I have this or that? 

Because you can’t, or, worse than that, Because I said so. That’s the usual response, which speaks to the fact that some things are too complicated to explain, but mostly is about the self-righteous indignation adults have about children having the nerve to even ask them to reveal their motives. It won’t happen, and children are experienced and observant enough to know that, which makes their questioning disingenuous, but not ineffective. Questions serve multiple purposes. They can illuminate the path towards truth, or they can be the means through which we contest reality. 

Again, everyone does this, uses questions in this way. Most of us, when faced with difficult realities, ones that we cannot evade or attack, tend to question the validity of them. I don’t begrudge the fact. Reality is certainly a difficult predicament that takes time to adjust oneself to, more time than some of us will ever have, but fortunately the task doesn’t always require that much of us.

It is a mistake to assume that you must plume the depths of your heart and mind to find the truth because the truth is often visible right there on the surface, in plain view. Many times in life it either is or it isn’t. Trying to be profound and come up with complicated explanations for why things aren’t going your way is a method of trying to soften the inevitable blows of life. It might be useful, but it’s not particularly effective if one’s goal is learn how to tolerate difficult situations in life. Self-awareness is not necessarily about sinking into the depths, endlessly asking yourself why you feel the way you do, and having more to find might in the end only provide excitement without further clarity. Sometimes it takes courage to stay on the surface and take things as they are, to go forward instead of going down, moving towards one’s challenges instead of away from them. You make progress not only by learning how to look for and find the truth, but also by increasing your capacity to tolerate it.

When Self-Medication Doesn’t Work

By work I mean make problems go away or resolve them. Self-medication, especially through the use of drugs, is rooted in impatience, and an urgent desire to make things better. Usually with the intent to do so as quickly as possible and with the least amount of effort. There is a type of logic to this thinking that is understandable when you consider the fact that people exert a tremendous amount of effort to bear their pain and hide their suffering from others.

It makes sense to look for easy solutions in such circumstances and expecting anyone in this position to double down on the work of eating well, sleeping enough, exercising regularly, and maintaining social connections is asking a lot. And yet, this is exactly what is required, what should be asked, and what should be promoted. All of these are called forms of self-care, but they are also forms of self-medication because engaging in these activities affects you in all of the same ways, altering your mood, emotions, brain chemistry, your life.

Discomfort is a side-effect of change, and what most people mean when they say they dislike change, is that they dislike being uncomfortable. When people are reasonably sure that change will lead to more pleasure and comfort they embrace it openly. The issue with adaptive methods of creating change is that the positive results are usually not immediate and must build up over time, and time, along with patience, are luxuries not often given by those who are suffering. Improving the diet, starting the exercise routine, taking the medications daily, attending the therapy sessions weekly. They all yield positive benefits, after the initial challenge of starting. Substance abuse, on the other hand, provides immediate relief without posing any initial challenges, which makes it an enticing choice, until one considers the painful side-effects that come after and last much longer than any ill effects that come from making other types of changes.

Failure to thoroughly consider this reality is what sets off the intolerable cycle where the remedy is also the source of pain, which can only be alleviated, one thinks, by getting more and more of the remedy. The record of the chaos this cycle produces is well-established: in reality the only way to experience genuine relief is by accepting that the journey towards healing will be undertaken with a certain level of discomfort. Accepting that working on oneself in all the aforementioned ways is worth the effort of pushing past one’s current capacities, and maintaining, if only for a little bit, the hope that things will get better.

What is the Difference Between Psychological & Psychiatric Theory?

The simplest explanation is that psychological and psychiatric theories represent two different beliefs about the root cause of mental suffering. 

Psychological approaches are often more relational. Mental disturbances are seen as the result of powerful emotions that influence us without our conscious awareness, that are not soley about what is happening within the individual. Even in the early case studies of Freud he frequently views the emotional disturbances of his patients as being caused by unpleasant relational experiences. Either that or they stemmed from the pain of being blocked from acting on certain emotions and consummating them through experience. Unrequited love is the most common example. 

From this perspective, treating mental illness is a matter of uncovering these hidden thoughts and feelings and helping people to metabolize them. There are hundreds of competing theories about the cause of these disturbances, but the basic procedure is the same. Excavate hidden thoughts and feelings in order to free people from the effects of them. Ironically, Freud is the father of this psychological technique, the talking cure, even though he was a physician trained to treat neurological disease.

Psychiatric theories, which were not developed by Freud, who was not a psychiatrist, takes a very different approach to treating mental illness. Mental illness is a result of faulty wiring in the brain. The chemistry of the brain is out of whack and fixing it is contingent upon finding the right combination of medications to help re-balance these chemicals. Much about the workings of the brain remain unknown, but neuroscience could possibly answer some of our questions, leading to more effective treatments. 

The implications of accepting either of these viewpoints are significant because it is frequently the case that accepting one point of view coincides with the denigration or outright dismissal of the other. 

A holistic approach is required, one that recognizes that some aspects of mental health are best improved upon with talk therapy, and some are more amenable to medication. Maintaining the sense that one’s preferred approach is right is less important than finding the most efficient route to alleviating suffering.

Understanding Panic Attacks & What to do About Them

Panic attacks are the bodily manifestations of anxiety magnified. When anxiety levels get too high, when the mental and emotional stress become unbearable, and it literally feels like you will die, you are experiencing a panic attack. 

Severe anxiety can make routine things feel terrifying, and panic attacks can be understood as the body’s response to this terror. Panic is the signal that tells the body to shut down and try to save itself. 

Because panic attacks play out in the body, the best way to stop them is to work with the body. Three ways to engage the body and help it to calm down are: 

1. Deep breathing exercises

2. Finding a peaceful spot to rest in where you feel grounded 

3. Holding yourself while repeating calming mantras 

How Depression & Anxiety are Related

Both depression and anxiety are responses to loss, real or imagined. The depressed person is preoccupied with what was and the anxious person is preoccupied with what could be. 

Depression and anxiety describe dynamic states of mind and these conditions frequently interact with each other and overlap. To think of a future and constantly worry about what could go wrong is to live with anxiety. But when the potential threat of future loss is replaced by the inevitability of loss, anxiety becomes depression. When the mind goes back and forth between these two states, anxiety and depression brush up against one another, doubly tormenting the psyche.

Why I Like M. Scott Peck's Definition of Love

I like it because he defines love as an action and not a feeling. Then he goes one step further and says that love is an act of service, meant to nurture yours or another’s spiritual growth. 

True love, according to Peck, is about helping someone to become the best version of themselves, regardless of whether or not it aligns with your personal desires. This also implies that you yourself are someone who deserves love and occasionally should find yourself making choices that allow you to live your best life, despite what others think about those decisions. 

Instead of being effortless, true love is effortful and when one realizes this, they realize what love is really about. Choosing to act with care, respect, concern, and commitment, even if you don’t always feel like it.

Why We Recreate Our Old Relationships

Meaning is always contextual and contingent upon our relationship to our environment. Therefore, our first attempt at making meaning occurs within the family. We do this reflexively, unconsciously, unintentionally, but we still do it. 

Every family represents the Garden of Eden for the children that are born into them. It is the place that one must be expelled from necessarily, and the place that one always longs to return to. The meaning of home is deeply embedded in individuals. It is like the spine of a book or a picture frame. People can tell stories and create artwork, but only within the framework that is initially provided by these early experiences.

That is why the dynamics of romantic relationships often resemble the dynamics contained within relationships with early caregivers. The similarity comes out of a desire to keep alive the connection to the past. This connection is more powerful because it is formed at a time when an individual is wholly dependent on others physically and emotionally. Any meaning that is made under those circumstances becomes associated with one’s very survival.

Which is why we want to return to the metaphorical garden, even when there is nothing growing inside. Even when the garden is on fire. It is still the only home we have ever known, and it is more familiar, and still more safe than the uncertainty that awaits outside of it. 

Existence precedes essence, but so does meaning. Therefore one’s essence is to a certain degree influenced by these primary relationships.