Is Mental Health a Matter of Alignment?

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

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

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

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

How to Overcome Normality

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

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

Overcoming Normality

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

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

Dealing with challenges 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Become Yourself: Living Authentically

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

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

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

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

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

Meaning & Truth

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

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

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

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

Depth for Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Self-Medication Doesn’t Work

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

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

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

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

What is the Difference Between Psychological & Psychiatric Theory?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding Panic Attacks & What to do About Them

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

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

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

1. Deep breathing exercises

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

3. Holding yourself while repeating calming mantras 

How Depression & Anxiety are Related

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why We Recreate Our Old Relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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.