The Consequences of Not Standing Up for What you Believe In

There are many moments in life when the most difficult thing and the rightest are one and the same, and in those moments all too often, there is a temptation to stand down and not say anything. Past a certain point there are psychological consequences for not standing up for yourself, and far enough removed from speaking out on your own behalf, it becomes difficult if not impossible to ever resume the practice.

It is, unfortunately, perfectly normal to assume that children do not have voices to express their own thoughts and feelings, or at least they shouldn’t. Some children are clever enough to find ways to maneuver around these assumptions and find ways to be heard. Some are patient enough to wait it out until the day when they can establish more equitable relationships with their peers. And some are left with the lasting imprint of being silenced too long and too often. These are the people for whom speaking out remains difficult. Barring some kind of unexpected trauma, it is rare to find an adult who all of a sudden loses the will to speak. Such habits are are not easily changed because they are ingrained in childhood during important windows of development.

Moments of difficulty exist to help you find out who you really are and what you really believe in.

If you are unable to stand up for yourself, for whatever reason, you are unable to achieve full psychological maturity because important psychological tasks are left unattended to. These tasks include the formation of identity and learning how to skillfully navigate relationships with others. The first and sometimes most crucial element of someone defining what their identity is, is being able to define what it is not, and inevitably this requires making choices and sticking by them, despite opposition. It also requires an environment that is tolerant if not supportive of a person’s desire to question and push back against the established norms in a system. Without such tolerance, growth and development becomes much more difficult to accomplish. This is when a person is left to either choose to open rebellion against their environment or silence.

Without a clear sense of identity, a person is at risk of becoming enmeshed and being consumed by the fantasies of others. The way it happens is that other people begin to shape and mold such a person into whatever version of them fits their agenda, and this person feels powerless to stop it. In part because this shaping and molding is often done without malicious intent, and when a person’s identity is underdeveloped, they often cannot respond to identity threats unless they are overt and dramatic. It is the lack of worth communicated through a lack of self-protection that places an individual at risk of assuming a victim mentality, which is the only identity left open to the powerless person who experiences everything as happening to them.

Obviously, I believe it is better to stand up for yourself, and that doing so requires not only learning how to speak, but also learning how to tolerate and lean into discomfort. The point I will continue to make is that anxiety is a part of living and has to be leaned into at times. Part of the work of achieving psychological maturity is learning how to stay present, make choices, and protect yourself in the face of anxiety, instead of experiencing the world as happening to you, which leads to a feeling of powerlessness. There is always an element of nervousness in important matters, an anxiety that comes with speaking up when there is something to lose, but there is also something to gain from doing it anyway.

These moments of difficulty exist to help you find out who you really are and what you really believe in. They exist to help you find your chosen community, the ones you want to engage with precisely because you do feel like you have power and a voice when you’re in their presence.

Turbulent Times: Takeaways from Attending the AGPA Connect 2024 Conference

Things were good, but that wasn’t good enough. Over time I’ve learned that it’s not in my nature to be easily satisfied, a fact that is sometimes as irritating to me as it is to others. I accomplished most of what I had set out to do academically over the last few years. I received applause from the people I expected it to come from. None of it was surprising or particularly exciting, which was the problem. Everything had mostly gone as expected, and rather than feel good about this, more than anything else, I felt painfully bored. I was searching, or at least I wanted to be searching, but I had no idea where to begin, so I was restless and resigned to my circumstances. I felt completely unmoored. I wanted to be standing on the precipice of something different, but it was difficult to know which path would take me in the direction of the difference I was seeking and whether or not I even knew what that was.

Those were the circumstances I faced when I once again was presented with the opportunity to attend AGPA Connect, a conference hosted by the American Group Psychotherapy Association, that I had little interest in attending up until then. By now I had advanced enough in my career to also be swayed by a sense of duty and obligation to attend the conference, and there was also something more to it. The solution to my current predicament, I concluded, was to run towards my boredom, frustration, and career anxieties, and throw myself fully into them. It was counterintuitive to choose to move towards the sources of my discomfort, and that was different enough for me to be convinced that it was worth trying.

Arrival

I flew into Washington D.C late on a Saturday night, and immediately marked myself as a typical Southerner by my lack of preparedness for the change in climate. A year spent living in Pittsburgh had convinced me that my body would get used to it and a light jacket would be enough, but all my northern exposure did was make me foolishly indifferent towards the weather. Standing outside of the airport in cold and windy Washington D.C I quickly realized that I was not prepared for the effect the weather would have on me.

The people seemed nice enough. They were at least willing to humor my questions about where I could find a store to buy proper attire at midnight, but could not provide much in the way of help. Solving that problem would have to wait until later.

I decided I would be using public transportation throughout the week and the man who arrived to bring me to the place where I would be staying was chatty. He described himself as El Salvadorian because of his mother, and Costa Rican because of his father. He was a bad driver, who took multiple wrong turns and drove on the wrong side of the road, but I figured this was the norm for a major city so I said nothing. I rationalized that as far as introductions to a city things could have been worse.

Attending AGPA is like being transported out of time, or at least being transported to a place where time seems to move at a different pace and rhythm, one that is wholly defined by the AGPA calendar instead of any celestial cycle.

Before my flight even landed I was already watching, looking out for what the experience might have to offer. The culture of the South, and maybe every other place, is this odd mixture of familiarity that comforts and suffocates at the same time. I always forget, when I’ve stayed there too long, that not all aspects of culture travel well. Some parts get left behind, and make space for experiencing alternative views of life. Some parts get dragged along no matter how much you might like to leave them behind. Race falls into the latter category.

At some point my Uber driver decided he likes the black people in Washington D.C more than he likes the black people in other places because he gets along better with them. Through some unknown calculus he decided to confide in me, a black man from another place, about his discovery. The irony of the situation was not lost on me. I feigned a few lines of curiosity, as he told me that I should visit Baltimore to be among my people. I nodded as he told me about his wife who he wanted to take on a vacation to Pennsylvania, in part because it was too dangerous to travel back to her home in Colombia. I kept nodding, and when it was time to get out of the car, I thanked him, grabbed my bag, and went inside. It was the type of conversation that made me feel like I was right back at home.

Start of the Conference

Attending AGPA is like being transported out of time, or at least being transported to a place where time seems to move at a different pace and rhythm, one that is wholly defined by the AGPA calendar instead of any celestial cycle. It’s a phenomenon that is difficult to fully grasp, and while trying to wrap my head around it I was also tasked with thinking about a different question, what it means to be an ally.

A room full of new, unfamiliar, delighted faces, and myself, had to ponder this question. We discussed it while discussing ourselves, which is how a lot of learning is done at AGPA, through a mixture of curated topics that have off-ramps into the realm of the personal built into them. This worked for me because it allowed me to gradually open myself up without being pressured to do it all at once, and always gave me the option of taking my foot off the gas and slowing down if I wanted to.

Even though there are built-in stopgaps, most people tend to ignore them, and strong connections develop fast at AGPA. It’s appropriate that the word connect is included in the title of the conference because it’s greatly emphasized. People who attend the conference are chomping at the bit for it. Secretly I was too, and when asked what I wanted from the experience, I talked about looking for a home. A few years ago I thought I had it, but I was searching once more.

Pain and torture breed isolation and people are more likely to find strength and healing if they have a community to rely on. It is the group, and not the individual that survives, and it is within the context of the group that some individuals can begin to thrive.

Seated at dinner that night, in a sectioned off room full of the faces I had met that morning and afternoon was where I had my first inkling of it, when I gave my first real consideration to the idea that I might have found a home. There were plenty of accomplished people in the room with numerous accolades, but it was their warmth and their willingness to share their stories that most affected me.

After dinner a group of us splintered off and found ourselves in the lobby of the hotel bar, drinking, laughing, storytelling, connecting. A woman brought out a deck of tarot cards and each of us drew from the deck, reading the description of the cards we had chosen and its personal relevance to us. Tarot cards had no significant meaning to me until I was in a relationship with someone who liked to use them to predict the outcome of our romance. It might have mitigated her anxieties, but it worsened mine because I never knew what to expect. It was based on the message from the cards, so on some days our love was inevitable, and on others they provided perfect justification for the chaos and turmoil that existed between us.

Obviously my view of tarot cards was slanted towards the negative, and for that reason, this unexpected gathering was more than random entertainment. The entire experience with the cards and these people served as a medium that allowed me to re-do what had been a painful experience and incorporate something new into it. What used to be an unpleasant association became tinged with the sweetness of that evening spent sitting at the lobby bar.

Torture

Early on at the conference it occurred to me that an aspect of my identity that I don’t think much about is nationality. Despite the historically tenuous nature of my relationship to the term, I take for granted the fact that I am an American. Not much thought or consideration is given to this fact unless I am traveling abroad, or in this instance, still stateside but in a more multicultural environment, which Washington D.C certainly is in comparison to Louisiana.

This is one of the reasons I was interested in learning about therapeutic work with forced migrants, a topic I knew nothing about. I’m less ignorant now, slightly. I know about the millions of people from the hundreds of countries around the world who are violently branded with the term migrant. I know, in the most disconnected way possible, what they have had to survive, and now have a more clear vision of how I might help. Now I understand that as a therapist my own clarity of mind is crucial to helping others because ambiguity is more than just an uncomfortable state. It is also a tool used by torturers and oppressors who come from all walks of life. This is what I am tasked with trying to work against. My own inner clarity is crucial for supporting others as they find their own way out of this web of ambiguity and return to life feeling more empowered. This process can take place one person at a time through individual therapy, but it can be accelerated. Pain and torture breed isolation and people are more likely to find strength and healing if they have a community to rely on. It is the group, and not the individual that survives, and it is within the context of the group that some individuals can begin to thrive.

Full Participation

Which is not to say that being in a group is always desirable. It certainly isn’t easy. Everyone brings their own perspective to the experience. Everyone carries inside of them their own world, colored by the presence of others, yet still wholly unique to themselves. And when there is a confrontation between two worlds, the process of convergence can be difficult.

The beauty and terror of being in a group is that it allows you to excavate thoughts and feelings that you hardly knew were there. Through this process new discoveries are made about the self and others, and concepts that seem vague and coolly intellectual become more personal and understandable through a combination of experience and reflection.

I knew enough to know that AGPA would set the stage for this conflict through its Institutes, all day affairs in which I would become a part of a therapy group, not only as a silent observer, but as a full-fledged participant. As the theory goes, this was supposed to help me learn what it means to be a group therapist, and help me incorporate my learning more fully. Despite knowing this, I was still skeptical going into the institute, but that’s the point. New group members feel the same–they are skeptical about how joining a group will help them in any way. They, which is to say I, experience a mix of fear and curiosity about the whole thing, especially being seated amongst professional peers, which makes a person act with some trepidation. The smallest decisions, such as what chair to sit in, become crucially important, and everyone knows it because everyone is trained to notice these subtleties, and the feeling that there really is nowhere to hide is exacerbated. The paradox is that this is true and it isn’t. You can hide, but really you can’t, because even the act of hiding reveals something about you.

Microaggressions

In any social context the specter of microaggressions looms large. The question is to what extent are people prepared to talk about the presence of this phenomenon, and to what extent are they willing to address microaggressions when they occur.

The topic was introduced early on in the group, and the right things were said about microaggressions often being unintentional, but there was something about the discussion that left me unsettled. It was difficult to say at first, but it became clearer over time that there is something about the way microaggressions are discussed as a universal phenomenon that is unsettling to me because it ignores the complex ways in which this process plays out. Microaggressions may be unintentional products of the unconscious, but the unconscious functions differently from person to person, and this functioning is often greatly affected by privilege and power. In addition to this, conscious awareness also plays an important role in microaggressions that cannot be ignored.

The types of microaggressions perceived to be available to a person are a function of identity. It is difficult for me to recall ever having enacted a microaggression against a white man because of the psychological effects of a legacy of racism that makes it clear what boundaries should not be crossed. But it feels much more probable that in my life I have microaggressed against women, even if I can’t recall specific incidents, because of a different power differential that exists in these relationships. All of these thoughts came to me because I was in the group. It is impossible to predict when and if I would have become aware of them in any other way, which I think is the point. The beauty and terror of being in a group is that it allows you to excavate thoughts and feelings that you hardly knew were there. Through this process new discoveries are made about the self and others, and concepts that seem vague and coolly intellectual become more personal and understandable through a combination of experience and reflection.

Desire

My sideways glances kept directing themselves towards a woman with piercing eyes who was seated across from me and my attraction made me realize how much this room was like so many other rooms I had been in. I realized the prevalence of desire, not just at a hotel with thousands of people closely residing next to one another, but everywhere else too, almost all of the time. I bring desire into almost every room I walk into, and it was in Washington D.C that I noticed that it was constantly by my side. At presentations, panel discussions, and dinners. Walking alongside strangers, and waiting for rides. The feeling of desire was ubiquitous, and in this environment, more easily acknowledged.

Years ago I sat through a lecture on the mate selection process, and listened as the professor named desire as a poor barometer by which to judge someone’s viability as a long-term romantic partner. He encouraged the use of other standards when trying to find a mate, and I couldn’t really disagree with his larger point about the limits of desire, a point which ironically is made valid because of the limitless nature of desire. But I couldn’t totally discard desire as a useful tool for relationship building either. The rush of excitement that we experience when we find someone who we desire is often enough motivation to draw us into an interaction with them. This does not always lead to romance, because feelings are not always mutual and even if they are desire is rarely strong enough to triumph over incompatibility, but this is not the only option and sometimes, desire is the starting point of what may become an intimate relationship of real importance. The lesson one learns over time is how to be careful with desire, not to completely disregard it.

Therapy groups illuminate these hidden fears and desires by forging a crucible in which these dynamics can arise without being immediately discharged or casted aside as is the case in normal life. It is inevitable that you will find within the group, whatever exists outside of it. This is a familiar axiom in the world of psychotherapy, the understanding that people bring their experience with them and recreate it in the therapy situation, or at least act in ways that allow the experience to resurface in this context.

The struggle that every therapist must contend with and resolve is where the line between the personal and the professional lies, and whether or not the line actually exists at all. Professional organizations and licensing boards try to help in this area, but they can’t really decide.

What became evident to me is that this process may also work in reverse. The experiences we have in groups sometimes resurface even after leaving the group, and we become more skilled at recognizing when this is happening. In all likelihood this is because the group is both reflective and experiential–as individuals interact with others in the group they get to receive live and in the moment feedback about how the impact they are having. They also have the opportunity to offer the same feedback to others. This process of slowing down to observe in real time these multiple effects has the impact of accelerating learning.

My own observation is that the learning that began for me in my training group continued beyond the eight hours we spent together. The identified themes of fear and desire were just as present as I moved onto dinner and other activities that awaited me that night, but even more so than before. There was a strange congruence that stayed with me throughout the night, and my sense is that this harmony was somehow informed by my experience in the group.

The Personal and the Professional

The struggle that every therapist must contend with and resolve is where the line between the personal and the professional lies, and whether or not the line actually exists at all. Professional organizations and licensing boards try to help in this area, but they can’t really decide. Attending a professional training where you also are asked to participate in group therapy makes it clear how blurry are the lines between the personal and the professional.

On the second day my group insisted on making the distinction even messier than it already was in my mind. They had spotted my deception, the easy way I’m capable of hiding by giving the least required information about myself, and using it as a launching pad to ask other people questions, pivoting the conversation away from myself. They had noticed it, and would no longer abide by it. They wanted more from me. They wanted me to be more vulnerable, to join in with them, at which point the group started to feel less like professional development, like an intellectual exercise, and more like a referendum on my chosen way of being with these people. I bristled at the request, but it no longer made sense to try to hide. I tried to bring myself in, and initially I stumbled because it was difficult to figure out what parts of myself to show. Maybe I was unsure of what parts of myself were allowed.

The group waited as I wrestled for quite a while, trying to identify what I wanted. Eventually I found the thing I wished for, and being far off from the realm of the professional by this point, offered my wish to the group and waited to see what would happen.

When you risk vulnerability and your leader does not respond as you want them to, you are left with only two options–blame yourself or suffer an inevitable loss of faith.

There was a silent pause, then a request for more clarity, and finally a feeling of stuck-ness as the group reached an impasse. To me it felt like a defeat. I thought I had expressed my wish in the clearest way possible and yet I was left facing the coldness of miscommunication. And after surrendering my previous position, I was left with nowhere to hide. Nothing came of the request for clarity, and no common ground was found. In hindsight, I was also to blame for the miscommunication. I spoke clearly, but shared a wish that was completely outside the realm of normal expectations in professional training, which is exactly the conundrum that underlies this situation. I was operating completely from the personal side and moving further and further away from the professional side of things. I was moving towards the anger and frustration I was accustomed to finding mixed in with my disappointment.

The Role of the Leader

I have a certain level of respect for any therapist willing to take on the task of leading a group, especially a group that is formed impromptu with minimal input from themselves on the group’s formation. Especially a group with me because I don’t consider myself to be a good group member, meaning early on I am resistant to being led and maintain a healthy amount of skepticism towards the leader. The respect that I mentioned usually isn’t shown until after the group is over and I’m at least somewhat assured that the group leader is capable of earning it if I needed them to. It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is with me in groups. In this context, I expect just as much from others as I would from myself.

I expect that when someone takes a risk in a group, the leader is able to support them and help them complete the motion so to speak. If someone attempts to build a bridge, even a flimsy one, the leader has to help the group connect to the person's efforts and complete the bridge, and if the group cannot do this then the group leader has to model how it’s done by doing it themselves. When this happens, the group is able to progress towards its intended purpose, but when this opportunity is missed, the group becomes disjointed, and without intervention, withers and dies. People take up residence with each other by forming sub-groups with one or two others whom they think might be able to provide some protection from the outcome.

Feeling anger and frustration, I wasn’t sure what to do, but it no longer felt like I could look towards the leader for direction. When you risk vulnerability and your leader does not respond as you want them to, you are left with only two options–blame yourself or suffer an inevitable loss of faith. I was well beyond the point of taking on blame for others, and not so fervent in my faith to begin with that the other decision would come at a terrible cost. So I watched and observed the group wrestle with the question of what we were doing while silently personalizing it and turning it into a singular issue, thinking only of what I wanted to do. What did I want from this experience? This was not new to me, having to figure out for myself what to do because I could not rely on the adults in the room. I was experiencing the group as I had experienced some of the earliest groups I had been a part of in my life. I suspect the same was true for everyone else in the group, and it may have even been true for the leader too.

Years ago I was at an open mic event for poets and I watched a man perform a poem in which he uttered the phrase “repetition is the father of learning,” riffing on the original phrase to share his painful experience with his father. I recall it now as I think about the repetitive nature of group therapy, the way that themes from one’s life surface again and again throughout the group experience. Repetition can be a means to experiencing great pleasure and also great pain, but it is the latter that produces the most impactful kind of learning.

Large Group

I was beginning to get my bearings. I wasn’t as wide-eyed about the experience of the conference, and I was starting to solidify in my mind how I wanted to show up in the space I was in. I had begun to learn the routes in and out of the hotel, recognize the now familiar faces of some of the workers as I stood in the morning breakfast line, and had a sense of the people I wanted to be around. I was networking, a term I’m realizing I dislike, but still had the goal of building community and broadening alliances, finding more people I felt protective of and felt protected by in return.

All of this was crystallized during the large group, which, as I understand it, is an experience meant to allow for the observation of broader social dynamics within a confined space. It is a microcosm of societal dynamics, and with this being the case and society being what it is, the large group is also wildly confusing and at times blisteringly painful. I’m used to therapy groups of six to twelve people, so sitting in a room with hundreds of people who were all trying to participate in group therapy felt like I was spying, like I was watching something I wasn’t really supposed to be a part of. It felt like I was privy to a conversation that was not meant for me.

But, maybe that’s part of what you’re supposed to get from the large group. You get to be privy to the conversations that you intuitively know must be taking place all the time–how could they not with things being as difficult as they are at times for certain groups in this country. You know that some segment of the population must feel indifferent or hostile towards you, and some other segment must be busy fetishizing you, but it is still strange to become a witness to it. Especially when the confirmation comes from a room of your professional peers.

You don’t get fully settled, even after you get past the initial strangeness of it, because there is this tension in the room that at times borders on becoming explosive. I shouldn’t have been surprised. People suffer and struggle to make sense of why this is so, and when it seems impossible to cut through their suffering with logic, violence becomes optional. This tension always exists and there is a need for people who are willing to give of themselves and guide others towards a different path that allows them to deal with their pain and hurt. There was plenty of it in the room after the anger subsided, along with a deep feeling of sadness, but there was something else present too, in between the lines of sadness wrapping itself around everyone in the room, which to me felt like a renewed sense of belonging. If people could tolerate their suffering long enough they could notice how it connected them to every other person, and allow them to leave the room still hopeful.

Being a therapist sometimes means that you get too comfortable living in the world you have created.

That final feeling must have carried over because the last large group was still combative, but less so compared to the others. People were still angry, but their anger didn’t seem to be genuine. It was the anger that is used to cover up true emotions. There were beautiful moments of connection in the last group. Moments of unity, moments of solidarity, and moments of transformation. The group got closer and closer to connecting, and then anger, which was really fear, would get in the way. Everyone was wrestling with this in their own way. The path was not necessarily open, but it was there, and the group had begun to turn towards it. Given how the group started, the willingness to even entertain the thought might be considered a sign of progress.

One Last Chance

By the end of the week I was ready to go. Ready for the Southern warmth that I knew was waiting for me. I had planned for an early morning flight that would allow me to get back with plenty of time left in the day, and meant that I would be waking up in the middle of the night to leave from the hotel. This presented logistical issues for me which I decided to resolve by sitting in the hotel lobby and staying awake all night until it was time for me to leave. I underestimated the discomfort of doing things this way, and the temptation to lay down on the floor and close my eyes if only for a few minutes, having reached a state of mental exhaustion days before. Neither option was appealing to me but I was accepting of my circumstances and would manage to suffer through one uncomfortable night at a hotel.

I had spent the early part of the night with two friends from home who were also attending the conference and we had said our goodbyes so that they could go back to their room and rest. After we parted ways I sat in the hallway thinking about everything I had experienced throughout the conference, trying to keep myself awake and alert. I was wondering about the next few hours with a tired sense of dread, when my phone started to buzz. Instead of responding to the text I called my friends and listened as they invited me to take one of their beds so that I could have a few hours of sleep before leaving early in the morning. Initially I wanted to decline the offer because my instinct is to refuse help unless I really need it and the standard I’ve set for what qualifies as a need is not met often. But, because of the experiences I had at AGPA throughout the week I paused and thought about it. I thought about the ways I had been tested and pushed to learn not only how to give but also receive, and how this was a necessary challenge for me to overcome in pursuit of goals that were both professional and personal.

Being a therapist sometimes means that you get too comfortable living in the world you have created. You invite your clients in and though they are able to influence it, for the most part you get to maintain control. Group therapy is about something else. It is about co-creating that world with other people, and one quality that I am sure is necessary to be a good group therapist, is the eventual willingness to give up control and let yourself be a part of the process. With gratitude I accepted the offer from my friends, and made my way to their room, still reflecting on all the beautiful shades of humanity I had encountered in myself and others throughout the week.

What is Existential Anti-Consumerism

Being rooted in philosophy rather than pathology, the existential approach requires a more broad view of human issues, one that goes beyond personalizing problems. In a clinical setting I might start by trying to understand an individual's world, but the goal is always to expand further beyond the individual’s thoughts and feelings and help them connect to a larger whole. If the task is to help them make sense of their experience, it is necessary to capture as many of the elements that make up that experience as possible. For this, you have to illuminate the map of existence, which enlarges a person’s experience. Of course you must be capable of expanding yourself in order to do this–the benefit and challenge of existentialism is that it does not tolerate dogma and does not allow you to rest on your laurels.

It is no small thing to have someone validate your feelings, but it is a feeling beyond relief to realize your experience, however troublesome, is not yours alone. As Baldwin would say, it is not your private property, or maybe it is, but it also belongs to the world.

Taking full ownership of one’s life matters in this tradition, the accumulation of experience, the expression of authenticity, both of which supersede the hoarding of material objects.

The existential approach challenges you to reconsider what you really own, and more broadly, if ownership is really that desirable. Taking full ownership of one’s life matters in this tradition, the accumulation of experience, the expression of authenticity, both of which supersede the hoarding of material objects. It is not anti-consumption, and it is not an ascetic philosophy, but it is anti-consumerism.

Consumption is an activity that amounts to an experience. Mindfulness about one’s choices in this domain is aligned with the overall goals of existentialism, one of which is the discovery of meaning that is capable of supporting one’s life and providing some degree of happiness.

How Loving Yourself Transforms Your Ability to Love Others

For even the hope of healthy and long-lasting relationships to exist, you must first learn how to love yourself. Statements about needing to love yourself before you can love someone else are commonplace, and I agree with the sentiment behind these statements, but the understanding and the practical application of self-love is much less common than the many cliched references to it.

Loving oneself implies having a relationship in which you express patience and understanding towards yourself. You exercise discipline and practice taking responsibility in your personal life. You spend time in reflection, and work to maintain awareness of your thoughts and feelings, your wants and needs, nurturing them, without necessarily indulging them at every opportunity. This is roughly what it is to love yourself. Most of the time loving yourself is not glamorous. It is the consistent habit of doing so over an extended period of time that adds up to a significant achievement. Which is the case in any relationship.

The inevitable tension in any relationship is that two people become one, and at the same time, remain two. Self-love is the source that eases this tension and makes it possible to carry the stress of it without becoming overwhelmed.

Loving others requires exercising the same qualities and behaviors but directing them outward. The question is why is it necessary to develop this love for yourself first before developing it for others? It’s necessary because without self-love, relationships between people are prone to become unequal and unhealthy. Relationships are actually incredibly fragile and more often than not would be avoided if people really considered the cost of attempting to merge one life with another in any kind of significant way. In order for this process of merging to be successful, both parties must be able to maintain an equal level of independence. They must be able to maintain equal freedom of thought, feeling, and expression. The inevitable tension in any relationship is that two people become one, and at the same time, remain two. Self-love is the source that eases this tension and makes it possible to carry the stress of it without becoming overwhelmed. Self-love is a protective force that simultaneously works for the good of the individual and the couple, or the group.

Without self-love you are at risk of becoming enmeshed, depending on another person to provide your mental and emotional stability through their own presence. This creates added pressure because individuals are no longer taking care of themselves and have lost their independence. They also forfeit their freedom or rob another person of their own. If I depend on you wholly for my well-being, I am admitting that I am no longer interested in the freedom (and responsibility) of providing for myself. I am also saying to another person that you cannot think, act, and be however you choose because I need you to take care of me. This level of dependence makes love impossible.

Self-love is a practice that occurs alongside establishing relationships with others. It is about maintaining a healthy regard for yourself alongside the emotional investments you make into others.

The only alternative to enmeshment is avoidance, which is difficult to identify because it is easy for people practicing avoidance to be mistakenly identified as loving themselves or working on themselves, when they are not. Self-love does not imply isolation, nor does it imply always putting oneself first. The misperception is that you need to go off into the wilderness for some unknown amount of time and learn to love yourself before you can come back to the tribe, but this is not the way self-love works. Self-love is a practice that occurs alongside establishing relationships with others. It is about maintaining a healthy regard for yourself alongside the emotional investments you make into others.

What self-love does imply, if anything, is that there is always at least one condition for loving others, and that unconditional love is rare and difficult to find. To say that you have to love yourself before you can love others, or even amend that statement to having to love yourself alongside loving others, is to place a condition on love. I think it would be healthier if we realized that there are almost no relationships without conditions, and were more careful about the pursuit of unconditional love. It’s an entertaining fantasy, but for the most part an impractical reality. For unconditional love to be realized, it would not only have to exist without conditions, but it would have to be given in perpetuity, without the option of it ever being taken away, no matter what a person says or does. This kind of carte blanche arrangement is similar to the unhealthy dynamic that exists in an enmeshed relationship. The more I think about it the more I get the sense that it is a sign of loving someone well to place conditions upon them, assuming those conditions follow loving principles.

Self-love is also an important psychological development, a shift from thinking of oneself as wholly reliant on others for love to realizing one’s own potential to be a source of love.

Love is a learned skill and most of the information we receive says that we should practice this skill with and for others. It is much less common to receive the message that one should make themselves the focus of a loving practice. This contributes to the tendency to first seek love from others before seeking it from ourselves, and to give love to others in hopes of receiving love from them, instead of receiving love from ourselves. Most people have a general awareness, even without full acknowledgement, of their limited capacities and their need for others in order to be successful. This way of thinking, that others are needed to accomplish most things, probably layers on top of the way we think about love and makes it natural for us to rely on others for love in any and all forms. In that sense, self-love is also an important psychological development, a shift from thinking of oneself as wholly reliant on others for love to realizing one’s own potential to be a source of love. To recognize that you are not only a recipient of love, but a creator and a co-conspirator of it.

From Creation to Consciousness: Takeaways from Poor Things

I suspect that most men find themselves in an unenviable position when trying to say anything intelligible or wise about the lives of women. After watching Poor Things, the latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone, I feel no less confident in expressing that sentiment.

Poor Things is an interesting viewing experience. It’s a story that transports you to the past while simultaneously making you more aware of the present and making you ponder, sometimes solemnly, what the future will be like. It’s easy and tempting to say the film deals with issues that exist between women and men, but really it disabuses the audience of this notion. There really are no issues between women and men in the world of Poor Things. There are men with issues who, for lack of awareness, raise hell and wreak havoc on the lives of women.

The film quickly establishes the setting as one where women are objectified and lack the agency of their male counterparts. In the beginning, the main character Bella is treated less like a person than she is a psychological mirror for the men in the film who project their own thoughts and feelings onto her. For most of these men the content of their projections never rises above the level of their base desire. Bella’s cognitive shortcomings are easily overlooked by them because they are only concerned with her physical features. Their entire view of her is informed by and filtered through the lens of her beauty. A larger point is being made about male-female relations, which are often entered into and kept alive solely by the power of attraction, which moves people in the direction of what they would like to do without forcing them to consider whether or not they should do it.

Known Unknowns

There is an interesting relationship that exists between the characters and truth. They have an ambivalence about it, a selective amnesia that is used to blot out and hide certain parts of themselves and their reality. At one point the character Godwin, speaking about his father says “They pushed the boundaries of what’s known and they paid the price. That’s the only way to live.” This statement essentially summarizes his life philosophy and his view of how people should live, and yet, in several moments throughout the film he shies away from it. He fails to live up to his ideals and when he is confronted by those ideals through Bella who personifies them, he struggles to accept their presence in her.

It’s commonplace for the relationship between a parent and a child to develop like this. Parents somehow think they can instill certain ideas and values in a child without eventually being challenged to live up to them. Bella goes along with this contradiction early on because she has the mind of a child and cannot for one second fathom how Godwin could ever act without her best interest in mind. But as she continues to develop, she challenges him more and forces him to reveal what is hidden behind his paternalism. Godwin has his own desire for control, which he satisfies in part by instilling a sense of fear inside Bella. Watching this manipulation play out, it’s impossible not to think of other people like him, who twist and contort their own minds until they are able to believe that a human being is somehow something less than that. Godwin accomplished this by labeling Bella as an experiment, but all he really accomplishes is the recapitulation of his own experience with his father who also deemed scientific progress to be the most important thing.

Unfinished Business

The film goes through the trouble of hinting at Godwin’s past relationship with his father multiple times to show that he is still anchored to it and his inability to be honest about that makes it difficult for him to be honest about anything else. His stated goal is scientific progress but really, his existence has become a matter of running from the past and everything else about his life converges on that fact. So much so that he lies to Bella instead of telling her the truth about her backstory and lies to himself about his reasons for doing so. He denies the fact that his relationship with Bella is about more than his morbid scientific curiosity, and eventually he admits that his bond with Bella satisfies what he suspects is a parental urge in him.

What’s interesting is that in order for Godwin to wrestle with his own experience of family he had to recreate it, except this time he served as a stand-in for his father. He had to become him in order to make sense of him and the things he did. The crux of the issue is that Godwin, for various reasons, wants to control his environment and Bella, for reasons of her own, wants to be free. She tells him “You love me too tight.” Which is exactly what it feels like when you are trying to separate from someone you love so that you can find your own identity.

Discovering the Self

Separation is never an easy task. Alexis Carrel said that “Man cannot remake himself without suffering for he is both the marble and the sculptor,” which is why redefining yourself and your relationships is nearly always done in dramatic fashion. For Bella, the force that compelled her to seek separation was pleasure. The discovery of which represented a seminal moment in her growth and development. To her mind she’s found the secret of life, and she not only wants to indulge it but share it with others, and she’s disappointed when she’s reprimanded by the lady of the house for doing so. From Godwin she receives nothing but silence, and her response was typical and no different than that of any young adolescent mind faced with this situation. She ran off with the first person willing to indulge her interest.

This escape marked the next and most exciting phase of her adventuring and for a brief period of time she was able to experience pleasure without consequence or consideration, but this was short-lived. What she came to find after the initial thrill of her escape was that golden, gilded, ornate cages are still tools of bondage, no matter how pretty and exciting. A different type of confinement is all her companion has to offer.

She indulges, but after a period of time Bella begins to realize there are limits to what pleasure and even freedom can provide to an individual. Her seeking and adventuring made her blind to the reality of others and their suffering, the realization of which mortifies her. She is overwhelmed momentarily but then she is energized by her feelings, and able to find another side of life worth exploring. The pleasures of the flesh subside and are replaced by the pleasures of the mind. She’s fascinated by ideas and starts to wonder about the world and her place in it.

Down & Out & Happy

The film is Kafkaesque in the sense that instead of helping Bella to rise up from her sunken state, she has to go even further down to find her way out. What’s interesting and important and difficult for us to understand about the character of Bella is that she embraces her descent with a sense of amusement. For her, difficulties shouldn’t be avoided because they are also opportunities. She views difficulties as the fertile ground on which she can further explore the possibilities of her existence. With this attitude, even time spent in a brothel is informative. Her time there allows her to continue to learn and receive an education that is more empirical, one based on the lived experience of others and her own. She is made to see that sadness and dysfunction make us whole beings, and wanting to be happy all the time is a childish state. Acceptance of suffering, and not avoidance of it, is what leads to the overcoming of it.

Going Back Home

With this understanding, Bella returns home to find out the truth about her origins. She confronts Godwin and in doing so is able to achieve something better than the separation she originally intended. She becomes an individual in her own right, capable of honoring the story she is living and creating about herself, while preserving the parts of her relationship with Godwin that are still important. Her example may be what makes it possible for Godwin to do the same. He is finally able to renounce and break the fantasy bond that he has with his father, and by doing so, is able to be present in his relationship with Bella. He can experience his world with wonder and curiosity instead of trying to control every aspect of it.

For Bella, it wasn’t until she resolved the issues with her father that she was able to establish a mature loving relationship with someone else. One that encompassed union and desire while preserving her freedom and individuality. What I appreciate about the film is that it doesn’t simplify Bella’s bliss. This new loving relationship isn’t an end, but a precursor to her greatest confrontation with the past. The order of these events speaks to the psychological truth that love does heal, but often not until it has brought us face to face with our demons.

Bella achieves her victory over the past, and most importantly she does so with integrity. She remains curious and hopeful throughout the film. At the end of her journey, having arrived at the place that she is in, she is able to say “I am never happier than when I’m here.” She has made important discoveries along the way about what really brings her happiness, meaning, and purpose.

How to Turn Tension into Opportunities for Growth

It’s a sad fact that most of us are never taught explicitly how to deal with conflict and instead are only educated on the topic in ways that are implicit and wildly confusing. Stereotypically this education is received through observation of those closest to us. There are no exact words used to label or categorize the yelling and screaming, the little obscenities that get hurled across the room which no longer seem even half as funny as they used to. No words used to describe why your mother, father, sibling ran away or barricaded themselves behind a locked door, leaving you to wonder in silence about their forceful absence.

There is rarely an explanation for why these things happen, not during or after. They just do, apparently. At least to the mind of anyone witnessing these conflicts play out.

And bearing witness is typically how a person develops their template for dealing with conflict. Temperament and natural disposition play a role, but observation and learned application probably have a greater effect on an individual. I’ve learned that the differences between unhealthy styles of conflict resolution and their methods of application are artificial. Whether you barricade the door or bust through it is irrelevant. It produces the same result and essentially amounts to the same thing..

What Is Conflict?

Conflict is what occurs between individuals and groups whenever there is a recognized difference and sufficient emotional investment. Sports is an easy way to explain it because sports are one of the few and one of the most public forums where conflict can be acknowledged and accepted.

Conflicts exist between teams that are competing against one another, and it also exists between members of the same team who are often competing against each other for certain accolades. In both instances, what is at the core of these conflicts are perceived differences (my team vs your team, my desire for more playing time vs your desire for more playing time, etc.) tied to emotional investments.

Sports are designed to produce these conflicts but they are also designed to inevitably resolve them. Charles Barkely provided a good example of this. During his playing days he truly believed he was the best basketball player in the world. This belief was both the fuel and the byproduct of his success, as is the case with most professional athletes. In 1993, Charles Barkely found himself in disagreement about this with Michael Jordan, who believed in his own right that he was the best. Because their teams were competed against each other during the regular season and eventually for the NBA championship, they would have the opportunity to resolve the conflict. Not by hiding or over-reacting to it, not even through the use of words. The act of competition ensured their engagement, which is all that was needed to address it.

In his retelling of what happened, Barkley reports that as the competition began he told his daughter “Ain’t nobody in the world better than your dad at basketball.” But as it played out he went back to his daughter and said “Christina, I ain’t never said this before, I think there’s somebody better at basketball than me.” Obviously this was a humbling moment, but it also represented the resolution of that particular conflict that existed between Barkley and Jordan.

Consequences

When a person walks away from conflict and doesn’t see it through to the end, they forfeit the opportunity to influence how that conflict is resolved. They lose the ability to impact the narrative. If I’m at odds with someone and they choose not to engage with me, then to a certain extent, the truth about our issue, about them, and about me, becomes whatever I believe it to be. I might be cautious or careless about the assumptions I make and conclusions I come to. I might rely on the advice of friends to help me, but something is still missing. The inability to engage directly with the person I am in conflict with creates a psychological black box. The stories we use to cover up this void are frequently unhelpful in resolving our conflicts.

If someone is able to stay connected to the conflict and work through it, there is an opportunity to either advance or complete the business of the relationship, which in essence is what all conflicts are about, our relationships with others and with ourselves. Advancing the relationship implies learning something new about the self and the other and incorporating this new information into the framework of the relationship. This enlarges the relationship by increasing the inner capacities of both people involved in it, especially the capacity for understanding. Similarly, completing the relationship implies acknowledging the limits of what it can provide and either accepting the relationship as it is or ending it, with full recognition of its limits, and with less bitterness and frustration overall.

Either outcome is fine. What matters is the willingness to engage in the process that allows you to arrive at any outcome at all. This process can often lead to surprises. Relationships thought to be beyond repair can be mended, and relationships that seem to be working just fine can end abruptly. Conflict is an additive. When engaging in it, an individual is not only learning but also incorporating new things into themselves. This is how people become more patient, empathetic, and curious.

One of my favorite examples of this happening comes from Mad Men. In one particular episode you can feel the frustration bubbling between Don and Peggy which quickly boils over into a full-on shouting match. But, while they were both momentarily shaken, neither of them ran away in response to the other’s anger and aggression, and because of this they were able to continue working through the conflict and move forward in their relationship. Before the conflict they related to each other as boss and subordinate, but afterwards their relationship became more personal. Antagonism was replaced by understanding and even affection, which also led to them producing better work.

Our issues can be resolved, many of them to the point of improvement, if we can tolerate the temporary discomfort that comes with working through them.

*Video clips of the Mad Men episode are included below

Does Being Unhappy Play a Role in Having a Fulfilling Life?

Irvin Yalom tells a story about the writer Andre Malraux asking a parish priest what he had learned about mankind after taking confession for 50 years. “First of all,” the priest replied, “people are much more unhappy than one thinks…and then the fundamental fact is that there is no such thing as a grown up person.”

This brief little story is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is that one wonders if this is really what the priest said, or if it is only what Malraux heard. Words have a tendency to take on distinct shapes and different meanings when filtered through the lens of experience. In the case of Malraux, experience was anchored by the early divorce of his parents and the subsequent suicide of his father following the stock market crash of 1929. After that came the multifaceted devastation of The Great Depression and the second world war. All of this happened during Malraux’s early years and provided the context in which his life would be situated.

Whether the priest said this or not, Malraux did not have to look far or wide for the evidence of unhappiness in the multitude of lives scarred by overwhelming amounts of adversity. Proof was all around. It is possible Malraux, capable of being boisterous and shy, reserved and full of action, understood the priest to be answering a question about himself, which essentially he was. Questions about mankind tend to conceal something personal about the person who asks. Some questions double as a type of confession.

Regardless of his intent, the answers given are interesting from a psychological standpoint. To say that people are more unhappy than we think is different than making the obvious observation that people are unhappy. The wording of the response gets at something else, namely our tendency to hide our unhappiness from others. We are primarily driven to do this by two emotions, fear and guilt.

FEAR & THE ENTERTAINER

The popular entertainer represents many things in society, some positive and some negative. Because of their public status they are easily signified upon by others. This process of signifying is a part of the ongoing exchange that takes place between the entertainer and society. The primary goal of the entertainer is to provide their own stylized version of fun to the masses, but they can also represent other things besides having a good time. They can be symbols of hope, and they can be cautionary tales, which is the part that is most relevant to this discussion. When we talk about the disastrous effects of hiding your feelings it is usually in reference to some tragic event involving an entertainer or some other public figure. Losses like Robin Williams come to mind, but others losses have also occurred more recently. The public’s reaction to these events tends to be a microcosm of grief, ranging from anger, confusion, shock, and abject denial.

It begs the question of why and how it can be so late, and sometimes too late, when we discover the fact of someone’s painful unhappiness? Fear comes into play because of the natural tendency to compare, which all animals must do on some level in order to survive, but none with the toxic efficiency of human beings. Hasty judgments used to keep us safe and in some cases they still do, but measuring our social status against others and feeling the need to hide certain feelings out of embarrassment does not move the pendulum of our safety in any direction. Or at least it shouldn’t, but the truth is that realities, whether real or imagined, do sometimes produce terrible effects. To think of yourself as unhappy is an essential ingredient, maybe the only ingredient, needed to be unhappy, regardless of the context.

Fear might not be so consequential if people could talk more openly about their struggles and find common ground, since unhappiness rests on a negative view of difference. Having someone join in your unhappiness with their own, or simply show a willingness to bear witness to it has the effect of shrinking the difference, of chipping away at it.

Without this support, one’s mind can become like a hardened shell without any cracks or crevices where light can get inside. The only sensation becomes the unpleasant echo of your own self-defeating thoughts. In this mental state the cost of revealing ourselves is judged to be too high because of what happened last time, every other time, becomes the symbol for what will happen every time. Rather than risk hurt and rejection, our thoughts push us towards a self-imposed exile.

Terrible as that sounds, I have no doubt it is the mind's way of trying to help us survive, and it is impressive that beings who are fundamentally social can and do indeed survive in isolation for significant lengths of time. But the overconsumption of fear as a motivating factor and the overreliance on isolation as a coping strategy force you to pay a heavy price.

GUILT

Apart from being afraid, we are also embarrassed to acknowledge the fact of our unhappiness. Even though our thoughts and ideas about happiness are not much better than second-hand sketches handed down to us by people who themselves are unskilled in the art of happiness, we take them very seriously. We believe that being anything less than happy as we have lazily imagined it is to be a failure. Instead of realizing that happiness and unhappiness are informed by chance and circumstance we view them as being solely the product of our own decisions. Therefore, if I’m unhappy, I’ve done something wrong.

This idea is so popular because it aligns with the way many of us naturally perceive events in childhood. As children we tend to exaggerate the amount of influence and control we have so that when things go well we have the confidence of “knowing” we made it happen. Unfortunately we use the same type of thinking when things don’t go well, assuming it is because we made it happen. As adults we usually make this judgment based on the same criteria we used as children–does it make me feel good or does it make me feel bad. Pair this type of infantile thinking with our other tendency to compare and it becomes easy to be personally convicted about one’s lack of happiness and choose to hide out of a sense that you are doing something wrong.

COMING TO TERMS

Maybe you have done something wrong. That is sometimes the case and in those instances guilt does serve an important function in helping us to correct our behavior. Guilt is not always an unearned emotion, but it is frequently a fabricated one. The benefit of being skeptical towards the feeling of guilt and occasionally bypassing it is that it allows you to be honest about what’s really going on, share it, and possibly experience relief for having done so.

It likely requires both personal and social changes to make being unhappy more acceptable and less of something deemed unacceptable and necessary to hide. Social pressure to perform, (especially online) seems to be at an all time high, so only the latter seems viable. A personal commitment to time spent in solitude and reflection balanced by the fostering of a few close relationships based on truth and honesty might be the best way not to get swept up in the tide.

Unpleasant as it may be, the reality is that human beings aren’t really designed to be happy. No more than we are designed to be angry or sad, brainiacs, or olympic athletes. We don’t come prepackaged. There are entire industries built on the singular hope that people will refuse to acknowledge that fact.

GROWING UP

The second half of the priest's answer is that there is no such thing as a grown-up person. A statement that essentially reduces comparison to a useless act. Compare yourself to what? To who? We are too biologically and psychologically complex to be stable in the full sense of the word. We are always moving. To compare is to judge yourself against something that isn’t there or won’t be in the next moment. Anyone who pretends otherwise, who pretends as if they have themselves all figured out, should be met with skepticism. The best that anyone can do is articulate their own experience through whatever method they like as long as it is arrived at through careful contemplation.

Going back to the title, this means that everyone at times is a patient in need of help from another, and everyone is also at times a guide helping point the way towards healing for someone else. Both labels are social constructs that should be held onto loosely. The fact that certain people are more likely to become patients than others is often because of reasons that have nothing to do with illness or wellness. The patient label is usually applied to whoever is most willing to speak up about their need for help at a given moment in time. The label can also be applied to the person for whom other people, for whatever reason, are willing to speak on behalf of. In either case the label is not necessarily for the person with the greatest need.

That priest really was speaking about all of us when he answered this question, himself included. Ultimately, there is no such thing as a grown up person because we are all still growing. Rather than being an excuse for perpetual immaturity, it is an opportunity for continuous self-exploration. The latter choice is how a person might one day find themselves outside of the unhappy rank and file the priest was talking about.

How Love Improves Mental Health

Describing Love

In his brief but profound classic, The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm said “love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence” [1]. This utterance is among the many other poetic phrases in this book, which Fromm wrote in 1956, but is just as relevant today. We are paying more and more attention to the internal psychological dimensions of well-being and beginning to more fully appreciate the aspects of living that are non-material, but equally important. With this comes a growing recognition that love is more than just pretty words and romantic gestures. It is a necessary force for the healing of the psychic wounds of the past.

Even with a growing awareness of the impact of love, there are many who still might wonder how it can really benefit them, or wonder, justifiably, what love really is. Love, and this definition is by no means original, is a state of being characterized by active engagement with oneself or another [2]. Fromm believed that discipline, concentration, patience, and supreme concern were the qualities most necessary to learning about love, which he considered an art just like any other (cite Fromm). The physical and emotional benefits we experience in this state are the byproducts of these qualities. They are what happens when we decide to love.

Physical & Emotional Benefits

Through love there is an amplification of everything inside of us, the physical and the emotional. The heart becomes healthier, the body’s natural immunity is boosted, as well as its tolerance for pain. And the levels of the stress hormone cortisol are scaled back [3].

The hormones oxytocin and dopamine are released in larger quantities when we experience love and make these changes possible. Underneath the process by which this occurs is the simple fact is love makes us better and it makes us stronger. It is a safety net that provides all manner of protection against the challenges of life, and we can hardly face life without it. This is why the need for love is so great in children, but even as adults we still require it. Intimacy, like food, water, and shelter is a basic human need [4]. (Traupmann & Hatfield). Healing then, especially in the case of psychic and emotional difficulties, is a group endeavor, and is never complete in isolation. These difficulties that arise in the context of relationships and must also be healed in the context of relationships.

The wounds we reference are broadly characterized as various mental illnesses–depression, anxiety, mood disturbances, etc. These states of being are the antithesis of love. They take root in its absence. The solutions to the problems they cause can be found in part, through the cultivation of love. In order to do this, one must be willing to learn and practice love. To become more conscious of it and more capable of applying it to everyday life.

Barriers to Love

At this point it is fair to consider why, if the benefits of love are so obvious and considerable, why aren’t more people interested in learning and practicing it?

First, I do not think the issue is a lack of interest. Love may be a universal experience, but not as we experience it. No animal is or ever was as interested in love as human beings. Our art, our fears and our passions, our beginnings and endings, testify to the fact that we are concerned with love to the point of obsession. Instead, the barrier to love is a lack of awareness of what it truly means and a lack of effort in applying its meaning.

Most people believe in the idea that love just happens. It is something you simply fall into, and the feeling of passionate love supports this notion with its effortless quality, but the effortlessness of love is short-lived. The sense that every moment of your life has converged at the point where you are standing face to face with your loved one occurs alongside a surge of biology and the release of hormones (oxytocin & dopamine) that is otherwise rarely experienced. It is easy to get swept up in the feeling of new love and to wish for its continuation, but eventually the effects of this surge fade, and at that point, this passion can only be maintained if it is renewed through conscious effort.

None of this is particularly appealing for the person who misunderstands the meaning of love. It is difficult to accept even if you do. There is something gratifying about relinquishing responsibility and giving yourself up to an experience that feels bigger than you, but the greater pleasure is had when you embrace love as a serious discipline that requires study [5]. The attainment of love, and good mental health, is not an event, but a process. The more serious you are about practicing daily the skills that make you more capable of giving and receiving love, the more likely you are to reap their benefits.

References

1. Fromm, E. (2088). The art of loving. Continuum Pub.

2. Carnahan, J. (2020, February 11). Love heals: The powerful effects of love ( and how to create more of it). Dr. Jill Carnahan, MD. https://www.jillcarnahan.com/2020/02/11/love-heals/

3. Jenkins, P. (2023, November 20). Why love matters: The power of emotional connections in our lives. Brilliantio. https://brilliantio.com/why-love-matters/

4. Traupmann, J., & Hatfield, E. (1981). Love and its effect on mental and physical health. Aging: Stability and change in the family, 253-274.

5. Hooks, B. (2022). All about love: New visions. William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Truth, Lies, & Consequences

There are many unintended consequences to not telling the truth. One of the most obvious being the damage that is done to relationships. Once a person has been found out, once it is known that they have a tendency to lie, it becomes difficult to regain trust in them. And it becomes difficult to do the work required to maintain a relationship with them, without the base level of security provided by openness and honesty. Telling the truth is a necessity, not only to love others, but to love yourself. 

What does it mean to be in touch with the truth? It simply means seeing things as they really are. Without illusion and without the deception that often stems from preconceived notions. Despite its simple meaning, it is difficult to overcome our biases and preferences for how we think things should be. Oftentimes these biases are reflections of our hopes and wishes, and if we lose them, the only thing waiting for us, we think, is disappointment. Disappointment and pain. 

The worst thing about lying is the fact that it renders love an impossibility.

But, uncomfortable as it may be, choosing to tell the truth is still the only way we can fully relate to another human being. Embracing the truth means actually having the freedom to make choices with more honesty and sincerity. It also makes love a legitimate possibility. Love for another and love for oneself. The worst thing about lying is the fact that it renders love an impossibility.

At some point I came to the realization that it is impossible to lie to someone else without first lying to yourself. To present an obvious falsehood as if it were a truth is to actually deal in two kinds of deception. The damage this does to other people is what’s most talked about, but the damage you do to yourself is just as consequential. After relationships end, for one reason or another, you are left only with yourself. You are forced to deal with you, and you have no hope of doing this with compassion or with success, if you are unable to deal in truth. 

Anxiety is not a bad thing. It arises when we are on the verge of doing something new and challenging. Telling the truth can be both.

How does an individual know whether or not they are doing well in this regard? One way is to measure and compare your feelings and notice how often you feel anxious as opposed to guilty. Anxiety is not always a bad thing. It arises when we are on the verge of doing something new or challenging. Telling the truth can be both. An honest life is a challenging life because it involves standing up for what you believe in and not always going along with the crowd. 

In a way this makes it easy to know when you fall out of line with telling the truth because feelings of anxiety will be replaced by something else. Oftentimes the replacement is guilt, either because of what you have done to someone else through dealing with them dishonestly, or because of what you have done to yourself by doing the same. Guilt, however you experience it, is often a signpost of inauthenticity, another word for lying. When you notice it, pause and examine the way you are dealing with people. You’ll probably recognize shortcomings that need to be corrected. 

No one is born knowing how to lie, which means no one is born knowing how to tell the truth.

Even with rigorous self-examination, it is not easy to recognize when we are being dishonest. Sometimes feedback from others is needed in order to gain clarity. The problem is that the type of feedback we seek is usually biased towards whatever it is we really want to do. Seeking this type of feedback is unhelpful, but you can hack your tendency to do so by asking yourself who are the qualified people that you are least likely to talk to about an issue? Those are the people most likely to put you in touch with the truth, and the people whose advice you should be seeking out.  

No one is born knowing how to lie, which means no one is born knowing how to tell the truth either. Both are skills one develops. You have to choose which of them you want to invest your time and energy into learning. 

How to Communicate with Kids for Better Understanding

There are very few things that one does that consistently offer up in combination so many moments of doubt and uncertainty as parenting does. Children used to be hands, and now their mouths is what they say, and I can say that the calloused hands of my grandmothers and grandfathers testify to this fact; I asked one of them about what it was like growing up and she told me, without a hint of sadness, that she was promoted to the fourth grade, but had to quit school in order to go to work as a dishwasher to help the family. These were simply the choices that one made and all I will ever know about them, and all my children will ever know about them, are the secondhand accounts passed down by people, fewer and fewer of whom have actually been there. 

Maybe children are only mouths now, which I would like to believe is a positive development rather than the pejorative it is meant to be, though comfort, ease, and progress rarely fit together nicely. What I do believe is true about children, then and now, is that the wishes that spring forth from their mouths are too quickly and too often silenced. 

But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is not specifically about children but an issue with communication in general. It’s just that the inevitable breakdown of communication is most clearly seen in the relationship between adults and children, but really the issue is ubiquitous. 

We are fearful of things we do not understand and do not want to know because they threaten our identity.

Language is difficult because it functions by way of impressions and constantly shifting meanings. It is an inexact articulation of one’s feelings that makes great demands of us. It is a system of symbols meant to be reordered and re-used for many purposes from moment to moment. Sometimes this all occurs in the same moment–people have these scripts in their head that co-mingle without coexisting, hence the conflict, which seems to evoke one of two reactions–fear or anger. We are fearful of things we do not understand and do not want to know because they threaten our identity. Very often anger serves as a rallying cry in defense of the identity we so badly want to preserve. We think we are angry when we don’t get what we want, but it’s more than that. Anger is connected to our identity, much of which we can recognize by answering the question, what do we want? It seems like wanting is the most basic element of a person’s identity. You’re born, and you’re given a name, a place to stay, and parents to provide for you, which compromises an identity, or a role maybe, but it’s not your identity, and your feelings aren’t either. Your identity doesn’t come in until you make decisions about what it is you want in life.

The unwillingness to tolerate anger is what clears the way for harm to be done in relationships, not the presence of it.

Therefore, to deny one’s wants is to deny one’s identity, and one of the many things that children seem to know better than adults, is the rage that accompanies this refusal of one’s right to exist. For anyone to be shocked by the anger of a child’s response to this, says a lot about how out of touch we can be with the reality of others. The unwillingness to tolerate anger is what clears the way for harm to be done in relationships, not the presence of it. Which is how you arrive at a place where you offer one-sided ultimatums as solutions, where you secure hollow victories that lead to bitterness and resentment instead of communication and understanding. It is better to extend a hand to embrace than a boot to lick, but people don’t even realize it as they’re doing it.

Yesterday I watched my daughter become more and more angry as she struggled and failed to find a shirt she wanted to wear. Her style is ever-changing and sometimes nothing she chooses can satisfy her current sensibilities. I watched her rummage through her drawers in vain and when I offered to help her she turned to me and screamed “No!”

She was feeling angry, and most importantly, beneath her anger, she was feeling painfully insecure. In her mind, my offer to help must have felt like someone shining a light on her insecurity, so she lashed out in order to protect herself. Why would she let anyone see her in such a vulnerable state?

Okay, I can follow that, and I can understand that she couldn’t find the words to say and how getting into her bed and throwing the blankets over her head seemed like the best thing for her at that moment, but I still had a decision to make for myself. In that moment I had to decide how I would communicate, if I would meet her anger and frustration with my own. If I would demand that she respect me, which has nothing to do with actually being respected and everything to do with being feared. If I would ignore the feelings of my four year old just so I could feel a little more comfortable myself. 

I sat quietly next to her and waited for what couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, though discomfort does turn any amount of time into an eternity. But after a few seconds had passed in silence, she poked her head out from underneath the blankets, looked me square in the eyes, and started talking to me. She talked about how she was feeling angry, and how she was learning in school that she should take deep breaths to calm down when she feels angry. 

“Have you tried it?” I asked.

“This is my first time trying.” Then she took a deep breath and another after that. Then we took one together, and she was quickly able to calm down. 

The rest of the evening was easy. There was laughter and there was bickering over little things, and none of it came at the cost of hurting anyone else’s feelings.

In Search of a Friend

I believe, without discrediting the profession entirely, that some of the benefits derived from psychotherapy could just as well be provided by close friends and family members. Psychotherapy is a relatively young field, but even still, there is evidence that the most important factor in whether or not it actually works is the relationship between the therapist and the client. And if establishing a good relationship is the main way people benefit from psychotherapy, it stands to reason that they could potentially experience some of these same benefits if they established similar kinds of relationships outside of therapy. In fact they should be encouraged to do so by the therapist. What matters most in the final calculation, is the dynamics that are created between two people, not, in totality, who the two people are. 

Freud told a story that helps to illustrate this point. He was working with a patient who was suffering from mental distress, loss of sleep, and a lack of appetite. He and the other physicians involved in her care had failed in their attempts to improve her condition which was only worsening. Until one day, a friend of the patient actually came and abducted her from the hospital and brought the patient home with her to care for her there. How she accomplished this is either unknown or unstated, but a year later Freud once again became involved in the care of this patient and was surprised to discover her in a much better condition than the one she was in when he last saw her.

What is more likely is that it was the care she received from her friend that made the crucial difference. 

Freud credited himself for the change in her condition, attributing it to the lasting effects of his treatment, but this is unlikely because the little that was said about the treatment, spoke only to how ineffective it had been in helping this woman. What is more likely is that it was the care she received from her friend that made the crucial difference. 

And it is safe to assume that this friend of the patient must have cared a great deal about her if she was willing to abduct her from a hospital. To this friend, it must have felt more like a rescue mission, and a serious responsibility to nurse her friend back to health. Her steady presence and consistent care is what allowed this woman to heal and start to become whole again. 

Most of us have our stories like this. Stories of being in a low place in life and needing the love and support of someone else to carry us through. Sometimes that someone else is a therapist or a doctor, but as the story illustrates, it does not have to be. We can all provide this type of care for each other, and it is important that we do so because not everyone has access to professionals and even those who do might not have access to them in their time of need. And in those times, what we need, in reality, is a friend who will barge in and save us. 

Therapists are skillful and curious learners, which eventually, we hope, will allow us to help someone in need.

The thing that therapists are trained to do well is listen. We listen to what is said and what is not said. We look at the actions of clients and understand that this is a form of communication that must be listened to as well. Through listening we form opinions and make interpretations, and as we get to know our clients better over time, we can make quicker, more accurate judgments about what is happening to them, or at least we should. The necessity of all this listening really implies that therapists are not experts on our clients’ lives, because we have not lived them. Therapists are skillful and curious learners, which eventually, we hope, will allow us to help someone in need.  

And yet, it is possible for the friends and family that we keep closest to us to also learn and possess this intense curiosity about others. Friends and family may be even more capable of quickly becoming experts on our client’s lives because they have bore witness to them and have lived in close proximity to them for much longer than we have as therapists. It seems unwise for their testimony to be neglected.

Identity, Control, and Rebellion: Takeaways from They Cloned Tyrone

Tupac is alive, Michael Jackson ain’t dead, and Toni Morrison might just as well be sitting at a coffee shop nodding, I told you to everyone that passes by. Her presence certainly seems to loom large over They Cloned Tyrone, where you very quickly learn that almost no proclamation is unworthy of consideration, if only for an infinitesimal amount of time.

She, Morrison, articulated the searing effect the white gaze has on black life, giving voice to something that for centuries was a constant, but was so potent and lethal that it was unspeakable. Here it is, recaptured in the film’s opening image of an advertisement with a white man grinning obscenely, overlooking a group of black people having this very debate (about Tupac and Michael Jackson). It sets the stage for the inevitable clash between history and perception, ready to play out in the fictional neighborhood called The Glen.

With art, oftentimes one must at least wonder, if not ask who is the audience, or to put it another way, who did the artist have in mind when they made this? It is assumed, pejoratively, that black movies are made for black audiences and that there is no category called white movies. Movies like Oppenheimer are less impressive to me for the technical feats they accomplish than their ability to craft a historical narrative about post World War II America and what follows that is somehow completely devoid of black people.  But alas, it is a movie, made for the movie going audience. Black movies must exist for the supplication of some other category of people.

This particular film (Tyrone) offers commentary on the issue of whether or not things naturally are the way they are, or if they were made to be that way, and swallows up the entire category of living with its questioning. It drops you into the lives of its characters and instead of asking you to wonder why they are like this, which is less of an honest question than it is a silent judgement, it forces you to consider who really stands to benefit from these people’s lives being this way?

Some people never recover from the loss of innocence.

Everyone has their own unique response to the question as the answers are revealed. Fontaine (John Boyega), Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), and Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) cycle between moments of doubt, denial, and defiance towards their encroaching reality as they take stock of how complex the machinery of what is happening to them really is.

What it means to have a self, and whether that self is a creation, or the by-product of circumstances is another central theme. Does it even matter, is what the film seems to be asking, because in the end, the self may only be a set of ideas, yours, or mine, made to fit together and promulgated through the body. The trailer and title make it known that clones play a part in the film, in the literal and metaphorical sense. Fontaine discovers he has been cloned, but even before this physical manifestation is shown, the ideas that he embodies appear to be nothing more than the repackaged ideas of someone else, which seems to be true for most of the people surviving in The Glen.

In this way, trauma becomes a common occurrence, and writ large, the private theater of the mind becomes a communal hive. Characters wrestle with what has happened to them and the burden of their nearly forgotten possibilities. Whether one becomes a hero, or a villain seems to hinge on the manner in which they resolve these issues.

Some people never recover from the loss of innocence. One death in particular crystallizes this, but regardless, most characters seem to have had to give birth to an identity much too soon and are thus forced to cling fiercely to it given their vulnerability. Parents are conspicuously absent, and everyone must become their own mother or father much too soon with far too little guidance. Perhaps this is part of the message—parents are, after all, are one step closer to being elders, who function as the collective memory of a community. Memory is a form of safekeeping, without which any group of people is rendered unable to remember the brilliance and tragedy of their history, and thus makes themselves vulnerable to the most wicked ignorance. This is personified by a character whose life is a reminder of what happens when your entire history, past and future, is overshadowed by your worst experience.

The women in the film are the ones who display the courage and intelligence to fight back and injure the cycle that is harming so many, and perhaps break it entirely. They seem to never lose sight of who exactly this is for, and thankfully the film spares them from the fate of being cast as nothing more than accessories to the salvation of men. Yo-Yo dares to dream despite conditions that threaten to suffocate her very existence.

The story is entertaining and even heroic in some moments and fails only if neat and clean resolution is what one seeks, which is certainly forgivable, and fitting given the nature of what it deals with. A quest to discover one’s identity, in this instance, benefits from the inclusion of clones and science fiction but would be no less perplexing without them.

Having an Ethic of Love

Love was, is, and will always be a radical act, and its history one of radicalism, of daring to go further than one has gone before, despite great and violent opposition. This being the case because love requires something which very few people seem willing or able to do. Namely, to let go of the need for power and control.

A need that is so great because it is energized by an intense desire to quell one’s inner anxieties in order to live and exist comfortably, a pursuit, at its most extreme, in which it becomes painfully easy to objectify other people and view them as obstacles to the attainment of one’s goals, rather than as individuals with their own right to exist. Every act of evil committed surely has this quality of loveless objectification attached to it.

An ethic of love is at home within the existential tradition because of this tradition’s belief in the freedom to formulate one’s own values and beliefs in route to living fully. If you are trying to develop your own system of caring instead of staying wedded to the one you inherited, adopting an ethic of love is a good place to start. The values that belay this ethic include honesty, openness, and a commitment to giving your all in the endeavors that you choose. Doing so allows you to re-examine every area of your life and ask yourself if the qualities you seek to embody are present in how you live, in the places and ways that you choose to work, and in the way you relate to other people. Each sphere of your life, from the private to the public, can be considered.

The position that love and freedom are radical ideas maintains its status in large part because of the failure by the majority to realize that freedom has always existed on the other side of safety. And safety is the price that everyone pays for it.

Having integrity is required for practicing an ethic of love and you do this by deciding for yourself what is right and acting in accordance with this decision. This does not automatically negate the impact and value of already established traditions, but it does mean you actively choose to carry on or reject these traditions. Through actively choosing, traditions become your own in a way that they weren’t before. Or you may discover that your faith was misplaced and strike out on your own to discover a new path. Either way, more wisdom, meaning, and freedom await on this path once you find it.

It is unlikely that you will be joined by many on this path, and it is important to have a strong set of values to rely on. You must be willing to stand up for what you believe in, even if no one else agrees with you. It is an act of courageous defiance to stand against the cynicism and absurdity of the world, to accept that to live is to sometimes struggle, and fully embrace life anyway.

The position that love and freedom are radical ideas maintains its status in large part because of the failure by the majority to realize that freedom has always existed on the other side of safety. And safety is the price that everyone pays for it. It is often the case that those who would maintain the status quo for themselves are opposed to freedom for others, and one must work to never find themselves aligned with such forces.

This work, and all the stress and anxiety that it engenders is not to be avoided. Neither is it meant to be overcome. It is the path you perpetually travel as you ascend daily.

The Emotional Toll of Mixed Messages: How Conflicting Parental Signals Affect Mental Health

While walking through the grocery store, I saw something I’ve often seen, that struck me differently this time. A young boy, probably no more than four years of age, was being chauffeured around by the people I presume were his parents, when the man who was likely his father, given his appearance, shoved him as he walked past him further down the aisle. He might have been playing around, but the kid didn’t take it that way. He was upset and to the best of his limited abilities gathered whatever strength he could find and used it to verbally snap back at his father in a small act of dissent. Whatever he said must have registered as a challenge because the father quickly closed the gap between them and dug his hand into the chest of the child, overshadowing his growing frustration. All of this took place in front of me within the span of a few seconds, but it was enough time for an important message to be sent.

This type of messaging creates more problems than it solves. Young children like this boy are constantly learning through their environment, especially through their family. Mostly through what family members do to each other and how they ascribe meaning to those behaviors. Messages that simultaneously communicate it is okay for an adult to hit a child unprovoked, that it is not okay for a child to respond in anger, but it is okay for the adult to retaliate, are mixed up and confusing. Not for the adult who sees no issue with such a self-serving arrangement, but for the child who is forced to make sense of it on their own. An unenviable task for a child, to mentally corral a storm visited upon them by the person tasked with loving them.

Mixed messages can be hidden under the guise of positivity. Some children eventually grow to feel tormented by the message that positive feelings are the only acceptable ones.

Maybe this man is nothing himself but an amalgamation of mixed messages that he received, handed down to him by the adults in his life. It’s impossible to know, but what I suspect will happen over time, from knowledge and intuition, is something like this. The child will eventually internalize these messages if they receive them frequently enough and learn that he must submit to and appease others in order to survive and endure relationships. At least until he is strong enough to imitate them, which will be his form of open rebellion against those who have caused him pain.

Whichever way it plays out, the amount of emotion a child suppresses to handle this situation is immense and this early and persistent lack of expression leads to emotional difficulties. Later, other people will be subjected to these difficulties and will be forced to reckon with them out of their own sense of love and duty. This sets the stage for a sinking pit of reoccurring pain. It gives credence to the generational curses that people speak about, and the idea that trauma is sometimes transmitted through the family, whose rules and behaviors give traumatic experiences their structure and shape. And it is difficult to disentangle, undo, and replace the influence of decades of lessons learned in such harsh ways.

Mixed messages can be hidden under the guise of positivity. Some children eventually grow to feel tormented by the message that positive feelings are the only acceptable ones. They are praised for being sweet, kind, strong, and pretty, or some variation of these things, and taught that this is a standard of behavior they must always reach. Frequently they are punished for falling short of these things, either receiving criticism for being unlike this idealistic image or abandonment by being ignored until they can behave better. They are left to deal with their emotions on their own, like the boy in the grocery store.

The message to them is clear. I love you because you are good. I love you when you are pleasing, which pleases me. I love you for me. A child who associates love with good feelings only is no better equipped for life than a child who associates love with pain. They will seek out the familiarity of this mental programming in their future experiences and find themselves equally frustrated and unsure of what to do.

Losing Control to Be Seen: What are the Unspoken Dynamics of Acting Out in Therapy

A client walked into my office for an appointment. They seemed fine at first, but it quickly became apparent that something was wrong as they sat down on the couch across from me and began to twiddle their thumbs and shuffle their legs uncomfortably. This went on long enough and eventually I asked if they were nervous.

“No” they replied. “Well, maybe a little…I did do cocaine.”

“…When?” I asked, somewhat surprised, mostly because it was only a few minutes past 10 o’clock in the morning.

“Right before I came here.”

I looked at the client, carefully considering what they had said to me, letting it settle in my mind. What did it mean for this person to sit before me, young, impulsive, painfully naïve, and share this information? To opt for truth when they easily could have lied. There was a look of disappointment and expectation on their face as they waited for me to say something.

“Do you want me to be upset with you?” I wasn’t sure if this was the right question, but I knew that any sort of declarative statement would be of no use. Not until I could understand this person more fully, and with my question I started in on that task.

Nothing is done for the sake of nothing, and human agency is goal directed even when the goal is unclear, as is the case in many instances. It is easy to judge someone who shows up to an appointment high on cocaine as being out of control. Maybe they are, but there are also certain benefits to “being out of control” which must be considered. Losing control, by which I mean acting in ways that are risky and potentially harmful to oneself or others is a proven way to elicit care from others.

Imagine a person whose experience teaches them that their wants and needs are not important, or even worse, receives the message that they are not entitled to have any wants or needs because of their status. This message crystallizes around their existence, and it is often the case that the only time an exception is made is when they are ill or in trouble. On these rare occasions, rather than being dismissed, the person is showered with attention, and this attention, no matter how positive or negative, caring or chastising, is still an improvement on being from being the recipient of emotional indifference.

At some point such a person makes a discovery, which is that when they are out of control, people are more likely to take care of them. The person sitting before me, who had been passed over many times in life, was such a person. Branded as a troublemaker already, they explicitly rejected this label, but implicitly accepted it and used it to get attention and care from others. They could have cancelled the appointment or just not shown up at all, but they didn’t, and their confession of drug use doubled as a confession of desire, that there was something they wanted from me. Chiefly, positive attention in the form of caring concern, but I suspect that if I had become angry at their confession this would have been an acceptable substitute. Anything but nothing.

The problems inherent in this strategy are obvious. As previously stated, it is risky, and there is the chance that a person goes too far in their bid for attention and commits a mistake they cannot easily recover from. This strategy of losing control to make people take care of you is also a form of manipulation, and once caught, the person is even less likely to receive the care they initially wanted. At that point either the jig is up, or the person becomes more desperate in their manipulation, resorting to more dangerous versions of losing control to get their needs met.

These regressions may involve harming oneself or others, risky drug use, indiscriminate sexual activity, and episodes of uncontrolled rage. The ways to lose control are numerous.

What other options are available? The person most likely to entertain this strategy struggles with recognizing and acknowledging their wants and needs so they must learn how to begin doing this. They must experience what it is like to be encouraged to share their experience with another and have it validated instead of dismissed. And they must learn that the stakes do not have to be so high for them to feel entitled to receiving care from others.

When they no longer must lose control, they are free to try other things. They can talk about how they feel and what they want and make requests of others. They can learn how to meet their own needs, through exercise, a warm bath, enjoying a favorite meal, and many other things. Or they can give up some of their wants and needs, which may be the greatest sign of an individual’s growth and maturity. When a person consistently gets at least some of their needs met, they are not desperate for limited opportunities to do so.

The client didn’t want me to be upset with them, as it turns out. Truthfully, they didn’t know what they wanted, or why they did what they did. Only that they were struggling and wanted help from somebody. An outcome they would have to learn could be achieved without clumsy concoctions that I would not choose for them, but am thankful that they chose to share with me.  

How to go From Autopilot to Authorship: Taking Ownership of Your Journey

To be responsible, as Jean-Paul Sartre defines it, is to be “the uncontested author of an event or thing.” Authorship is a stand-in for the word creator, of which an author is one kind, and for whom the task is to fashion from the materials of their imagination a work that is complete and new. This imagination being the main tool applied, there can be no doubt that the author is the source from which the story originates. It is clear that several people are involved in the making and publishing of a book, from editor’s, proofreaders, cover designers, type setters and more. Each of these serves an important role in the process, but their roles are created in reaction to the author and defined in relation to the author’s original efforts.  

Applying his notion of responsibility in a psychotherapeutic setting has benefits and risks. Doing so moves me towards a more internal locus of control when discussing issues and sets up an expectation that the client will shift to a similar orientation. And when more emphasis is placed on what a client can control and change, less time is wasted on issues that can be affected by neither the client or myself.

Of particular interest is the fact that the client is now allowed to approach the issue of suffering differently. To say that someone is responsible for their suffering runs the risk of being insensitive, but to say a client’s suffering is theirs, and that they alone are responsible for what they do with it moves them out of a helpless role and into a more active one. Challenging and often unfair, accepting responsibility for one’s suffering is still the best option for someone who intends to do something about it. A significant amount of suffering self-induced and unwarranted. It is a kind of suffering psychologically born in the aftermath of what has already occurred and added unto one’s burdens through the stories people tell themselves about what their suffering means.

When you focus on your role in events you understand that almost nothing in your life is the way it has always been or the way it must always be. This is true of life generally, and expands your possibilities once you realize it.

Admittedly, an emphasis on responsibility is most comforting to people who highly value individualism, partially because it ignores the reality of interdependence. In societies that are increasingly more complex, where accomplishing most tasks involves help from others, cordoning oneself off might be possible, but it would not be desirable. We need other people to survive and to flourish. We need other people to achieve our full potential. As the African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

There is the risk of veering too far on the side of responsibility assumption. This attitude becomes unhelpful when you begin to assume responsibility for things that you are not actually responsible for, which allows others to potentially take advantage of this and use you. For example, if a client complains about mistreatment from their family, and I am too quick to focus on the client’s role in the situation, I give the impression that the client’s concerns are illegitimate. It is possible for a client to remain the author of their feelings while also being shown respect and compassion for the difficult conditions under which their feelings arise. Conditions which they of course, are not the uncontested author of. Responsibility should not be heaped on an individual without considering the constant pressure that other people exert on them.

Most clients, at the time we first meet, are limited in their ability to assume responsibility for their lives. As it is in life, so it is in therapy. They must be encouraged to increase this capacity, and a large portion of success in therapy and in life is attributable to ones willingness to do this. One must always come back to their role in events, no matter how large or miniscule, no matter how many times they stray from it, because it is the only perspective from which change takes place.  

Blonde as Becoming: Frank Ocean and the Time It Takes to Be

On July 10, 2012 Frank Ocean released what would go on to become his critically acclaimed album Channel Orange, subsequently changing his life with its massive success.  Excitement about the release of the album was buffered not only by the content, but by the fact that just days before, Ocean released a letter to the public in which he openly talked about his first love being a man.  Both the letter and the album were revelatory, and emblematic of Frank Ocean’s style of art, as well as the way he chose to communicate his art.

Frank Ocean’s current predicament is interesting because it highlights the relationship between the artist and their fans.  It is a mutually agreed upon relationship in which the artist consents to make and share their art with fans in exchange for what the artist seeks, whether it be fame, fortune, or something else.

A figure as seemingly unique as Frank Ocean is still not immune to the pressures of fame.  Indeed, his uniqueness may very well render him more susceptible to the trappings of fame, as society loves to ensnare rarities of all kinds, and observe them on societies terms before moving on to something else.  So it comes as no surprise that three years later, many fans and individuals in the music industry seem ready to do just that—they seem ready to quit Frank Ocean after embracing him initially.  Months of delayed promises of a new album, with little indication as to when it will arrive will do that to a fan base.

The relationship between Frank Ocean and his fans resembles other relationships in the sense that the qualities that initially attract us— Ocean’s uniqueness and commitment to doing things his own way—begin to repel us as the love bloom fades.  Most if not all of that bloom has worn off after three years of waiting.  Clearly Frank Ocean is working on his own time, and this is an absolute necessity for any artist deeply engaged in their craft.  Rushing the work would produce unsatisfactory results for both Ocean and his fans.  It would be a disappointment for Ocean because he will not have remained true to himself, and what becomes of an artist no longer capable of truth? They are no longer capable of art.

Frank Ocean’s current predicament is interesting because it highlights the relationship between the artist and their fans.  It is a mutually agreed upon relationship in which the artist consents to make and share their art with fans in exchange for what the artist seeks, whether it be fame, fortune, or something else.  Not every relationship is the same, and as a brief comparison, the singer Adele, under somewhat similar circumstances, has not been subjected to the same sort of questioning and heckling by her fans.  Adele’s last album was released in 2011, and until October of 2015 she had not released any new music, apart from a song written and performed for a James Bond film in 2012.  She had not performed live in three years.  Rather than derision, her choices were respected and when she did release new music, it was treated like a godsend.  Why has the same amount of patience and respect for privacy not been afforded to Frank Ocean?

The extent to which Frank Ocean’s reputation has changed for the worse, and whether he even cares what others think of him are all unknown at this point.  From his previous actions one can surmise that Ocean is more concerned with his creative process than his fame.  This is not to say that he does not care about fame at all, and he may even care a great deal about it.  What I am saying is that Frank Ocean’s relationship to his art and the process by which he creates that art seem to be paramount, while his relationship to his fans is peripheral.  At best, all we can do is guess about what motivations currently guide Frank Ocean, and not fully understanding the intricacies that underlie Ocean’s art because the most we have access to are his albums as finished products, which are not always equal to the sum of their parts.  But we should know about the artist as an identity, one that history tells us exists independently of fans who wait patiently or not.  Frank Ocean will release his album when he is ready to, and not a day sooner, regardless of those who complain—perhaps he will be better off for doing so.

Eight Shades of Hate: Takeaways from The Hateful Eight

Watching the The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, I found myself arrested by the force with which the story was told.  Hateful Eight centers on the relationships between eight people, known for and connected by their prior reputations more than anything else.  On its surface, the film is about bounty hunter John Ruth’s mission to complete another successful hunt, but the actual meaning of the film is more complex.

The specter of race looms large in it, and Tarantino addresses the issue by setting the film only a few years after the events of the American Civil War.  The ghost of that war hovers over and haunts the characters in the film, and apparently still haunt us today—a recent mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina testifies to the fact.  Making a movie set in the late 1800’s both timely and appropriate.  Samuel L. Jackson plays Major Marquis Warren, a decorated army veteran who is now himself a renowned bounty hunter.  He is black, and the other characters are indignant over having to deal with his presence. To my mind, Warren represents the coming of a new negro, a phrase later taken up during the Harlem Renaissance which symbolized the kind of black person who outspoken in their refusal to accept the indignities of American society.

The encounter that plays out frightful and electrifying, but first there is a series of half-hearted attempts from the other characters to restrain their hostility towards Warren, mostly owed to his reputation as a man highly capable of killing. Tarantino writes Warren as a character whose intellectual prowess is subtly displayed, skillfully employed, and certainly surpasses his physical skills.  This quality is established early on and reinforced throughout the film, not by making Warren appear superhuman, but by highlighting the other character’s failure to recognize him as human at all.

As could be expected from this director given his past proclivity, The Hateful Eight is littered with the N-word.  Though it used often, the word feels less out of place in this film than it does in other films like Django Unchained or Pulp Fiction.  The historical setting makes the harsh dialogue plausible, and the acting performances mostly make the use of the word believable.  Not excusable, then or now, but believable that the N-word would be used by white men as a sort of power grab, to put Major Warren back in his place, and reassure themselves of their own.  In similar fashion, the B-word is frequently directed at Daisy, the only prominent female character in the film, which seemed too illicit less powerful reactions from the audience. Why is this so?  Why do we cringe at the on-screen use of the N-word but not the B-word, similarly used to dismiss and dehumanize?

Beyond race and gender, The Hateful Eight is a commentary on the overall idea of identity.

Who exactly is Daisy and what does she mean to this film?  Of the prominent characters, her story is the most underdeveloped.  She is branded as a ruthless criminal, but we do not know to what extent this is true, and in a film where the relativity of truth is an important theme, this lack of explanation cannot be overlooked.  Daisy seems to serve as a vessel for the other characters to act out their own pent-up anger towards women.  Some of the characters consider her a devil, while others think her life is worth saving, and each character's belief about her fate doubles as a window into their definition of justice.  Is it cold and dispassionate, or is it emotionally tinged?

These ideas about justice are also seen through the ways the characters interact with each other.  John Ruth is the easy choice for an example of dispassionate justice, but even he falls short of this ideal.  They all do, which may be the point—these American made figures cannot possibly live up to their own moral codes, and when it is a choice between them and the other, such codes are easily abandoned.

Beyond race and gender, The Hateful Eight is a commentary on the overall idea of identity.  Flashbacks, and well-crafted dialogues highlight the fluidity of identity, and how quickly it can shift.  The characters' behaviors, and perceptions of each other, as well as the viewer’s perception of them, changes at a dizzying pace.  This pace does not set a new standard for Tarantino films, but in the past, the frenetic pace left some viewers confused, and others dissatisfied, and it is better executed in The Hateful Eight.  By confining most of the film to a single room, Tarantino creates a world that is less open and sprawling, while maintaining his style as a filmmaker.  The result is a film that operates well on multiple levels, at once being easy enough to follow, and at the same time complex and layered. 

Will the audience understand the message?  Will they understand that Tarantino is critiquing race relations in America on multiple levels?  I fear that the humorous moments laced throughout the film will provide people with enough justification to gloss over the more serious aspects of the work. Especially people who still today harbor the same hateful attitudes as the film’s titular characters. More than anything, with The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino deftly shrinks down a significant piece of the American experiment and places it into one room, serving as a metaphorical melting pot.  He captures all the madness that is produced as result of this experiment called America, and the taste of redemption we get when this experiment functions as intended, however short and fleeting those moments may be.

Why You Don’t Want Your Ex to Date Anyone Else

Even in a long gone by now golden age of men who were dandies that proudly laid out their affections as well as their fleeces, and women who moved with gilded elegance, the idea that we meet the one and fall in love has been a pervasive myth.  It does sometimes happen to be the case, that the first love is an enduring one.  But for most people their endurance is tested in terms of how much disappointment, and consequently, how much pain they can bear throughout the course of several romantic relationships.  It is not unusual that some romantic relationships end, and there are good reasons that we should want them to.  What is unusual is that even when a relationship does end, and even when we no longer love a person, we sometimes refuse to accept the idea that our former beloved will go on to care for and eventually love someone else. 

It feels good to be thought of and remembered by the ones we love, but it feels better to be remembered by the ones we don’t.

We harbor the wish that our exes continue to see us in a certain light.  We want them to think of their time with us as a unique and singular experience that irrevocably changed them for the better.  It is oddly gratifying to know that they are forlorn without us, but this wish only reveals something about our own state of mind.  When a relationship ends, even one whose demise we welcome, both people enter a state of loneliness.  In this painful space of separateness, we find ourselves yearning for our former foundation.  Yes, there was rot, and it was filled with cracks, but it still provided something.  When we diverge from the path of coupledom, we find ourselves not knowing what comes next.  The feeling of being lost is what we are trying to avoid when we cling to our exes in one form or another. 

We maintain a connection to an ex by trying to transform the romantic relationship into a friendship.  An effort that usually fails because we have not given ourselves enough time and space to make sense of what happened and sort ourselves out.  But in another sense, it “works” because sorting out and sense-making is the last thing a person wants to do when they are reeling from the pain of a breakup.

And even when we choose to expel a former lover from our life, we still want that person to think well of us.  We want to feel special in their eyes even when they long ago lost the ability to spark the same reaction in ours.  It feels good to be thought of and remembered by the ones we love, but it feels better to be remembered by the ones we don’t.  It makes us feel especially unique and powerful.  That I could reject a person and they could still hold me in the highest regard and still want me.

It makes sense that people are dismayed when they find out their ex has a new romantic interest.  They’re moving on, and if an ex is moving on then maybe we aren’t so important after all.  Maybe we never were.  Those kinds of thoughts are felt more than they are formulated, and they produce an aching sensation.  Of course, we can’t avoid them forever, neither by turning towards the past we had with our ex or leaping into the arms of someone else without taking time for self-reflection.  You can acknowledge the pain of having your ego bruised, by the mere thought of your ex caring for someone else as much as they once cared about you and accept that in all likelihood that is exactly what will happen.  Their role in your story is finished for now, or forever, and all that any of us can do about it is get back to the relationship we are always in, which is with ourselves, and slowly start to rebuild.   

Can Psychotherapists be Seen as Artists?

When approached and practiced in certain ways, psychotherapy can be elevated to the level of an art form.  The fact that psychotherapy is still (and necessarily so) a private affair that is hidden from public consumption makes it more difficult to qualify or quantify its status as a form of art.  But for the many who practice it and the few who get to observe it, there are differences between straightforward practitioners and artists in the trade. 

Consider this—art is a realm of subjectivity, where often times consensus is king and the majority rules.  The paintings of a Da Vinci and Picasso, or the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright still leave some cold.  As do the writings of Baldwin, Morrison, or Rowling.  But to a sizeable amount of people, their works represent titanic triumphs of human creativity.  Whatever this sizeable number is, it represents mass approval, which is so often necessary for the triumph of art over obscurity, but of course a number is not all that art is.  And this mass effect I speak of has lent its weight not only to the crafts of painting, architecture, or literature, but also to psychology, the study of the human mind.

To be clear, mass approval is not enough.  The popularity of a thing does not mean that it is worthy of adulation.  Art stirs something deep inside of us and brings it to the surface.  Art disturbs, and is confrontational at times, but it also seeks pathways to deeper connection with oneself and with the world.  The beauty of art lies in the way it makes us feel something that is deeply personal and at the same time relatable to all of humanity.  How the artist achieves this effect differs based on their tools and the talents they possess, but the desired effect is always the same.  To wake others up to themselves and get them to feel deeply. 

It takes courage and a certain audacity to practice art

The psychotherapist does not use the brush of the painter, the instrument of the musician, or the charts, graphs, and measuring tools of the scientist.  They use themselves—their presence, consisting of their body, heart, mind, and spirit, which allows them to forge an alliance with those they work with in hopes of bringing forth something new.  The artist plays at God as they attempt to corral creation, and in a sense the psychotherapist does the same. The best are very intentional about their ambition.

At times the psychotherapists will fail: there will be clients who do not change or become better, and some who may become worse.  To fail in the endeavor to create and bring forth something new in a person can be more devastating than errant brush strokes and misplaced musical notes.  This is because a person expresses consciousness rather than simply being a product of consciousness.  To work with another, knowing their potential and their limitations, and journey through the maze of their life with them takes courage and trust.  Trust, in another and in oneself, is the bedrock on which creation takes place.  Without it there is no sense of direction, no willingness to take risks, and no progress which can be made.

It takes courage and a certain audacity to practice art, because it requires a willingness to exist separate and apart from others.  A distance that is necessary when one does not simply want to talk, but feels they truly have something to say.  Whether or not the feeling is justified is a bargain which must be struck between the individual and society.  Some psychotherapists have much to say about nothing.  They regurgitate empty platitudes or vomit up their own insecurities, inappropriately praising themselves or judging others without having earned a right to do either.  They move at a frenetic pace while accomplishing little of substance; they retreat into data and evidence whenever they are confused or unsure, signaling that they do not know how to practice the art of psychotherapy, but only how to follow the manual they were taught.

The client who comes before the psychotherapist may for the first time in their lives, as a result of their dissatisfaction, be open minded enough to have a real encounter with themselves.  The approach of the typical psychotherapist is management and symptom reduction—to be able to give a pat on the back to the client as they walk out the door and assure them that they are okay without ever asking them to be better.  The artist who practices psychotherapy seeks other things—connection, engagement, growth, and transformation in ways that are organic and unique to the individual they are working with at the time.  Only art can do this.  At its core the musician has there 12 notes to achieve this, the writer has there 26 letters, and the psychotherapist has their self. More than any theoretical background, use of the self is needed, a self that accepts life with its tensions and challenges, and helps others do the same.