Your Therapist Is Human, Too

A lot of people think that therapists are immune to the normal issues and pitfalls and twisted little patterns that go along with being human.

They think we know better, that we can do better, and that we can do it all easily and without struggle. They think that that's a key criteria for having this job.

The truth is, even though we spent years getting Masters degrees and completing (literally) thousands of hours of supervised field experience, and even though we learned tons of treatment modalities and communication skills and practical work-arounds for all kinds of psychological challenges, we're still human.

We still have personal flaws and blind spots and we still get tripped up in life. We struggle with exercising consistently and being courteous drivers and behaving like adults at our parents' Thanksgiving dinner table. Just like anyone.

The good news is that it's OK. Therapy is all about you, and our ability to see into your blind spots, to reflect you back to you, to place your issues in a context vis-a-vis what's "normal," and to use all the experience and expert knowledge we're steeped in... this all works. It helps. It really does.

And being human - being flawed and fallible - is also helpful. In fact, it's key. If we are the nearly blind leading the nearly blind, we wouldn't be much use if we couldn't relate to near-blindness.

And so the field of psychology continues to exist. Because believe me, if its efficacy was reliant on your therapist's perfectness, it wouldn't.

That said.

Poet David Whyte has observed that it is inexplicably calming and healing just to be in the presence of a person who is fully themselves - whole, aligned, integrated, authentic. We know it instinctively when we encounter it. We can feel it. They don't even need to say anything; just being with them helps us feel better, helps us feel more whole. David himself is like that, for me. And last week, I had the privilege of spending a half-hour with a Native American medicine man. It's unmistakable, and so satisfying.

I believe this is the experience some people are hoping (or expecting) to have when they walk in a therapist's office. Unfortunately, that level of authenticity isn't so common yet. It's certainly something to which I aspire, as many of my colleagues do. It would make the work much less work, for everyone in the room. But it isn't something available through training & experience alone. Being fully oneself is a whole different learning curve.

In the meantime, we do the work and the work gets done. But those misperceptions people have of us can be tough.

I love being a therapist, but I don't like revealing the fact in social situations. There's a sound people make, a kind of sing-song, "oh-OH-oh," that follows the admission. They seem to think I can read their minds, or see some secret inner brokenness that they themselves don't want to know about, or that I'm otherwise "onto" them. Because they feel like an impostor.

News flash: Most of us feel like an impostor in some (or even most) areas of life. It just means you're normal.

I can't read their minds or anything, so when I'm out in the world, just trying to be myself and get to know someone, or - god forbid - flirt with someone, them knowing I'm a therapist sometimes gets in the way.

So, sometimes I soften it. I'll say I'm a counselor, rather than a therapist. Or, I'll say I'm a marriage counselor. This seems least threatening, generally. But it also makes people curious.

"Oh. So, are you married?" they ask.

Then, when I say no, "Divorced?"

I am divorced, and that causes eyebrows to rise.

(Now who feels like an impostor.)

It's a quandary most therapists face, sooner or later - the client (or potential client) who thinks that we can't help them because we aren't the model of what they hope to become. We're too young, or too single, or too childless.

Or, they think we can't help because we're too different from them. We've got our acts together - we dress well and work for ourselves in this lovely office, in this lovely part of town - so how can we understand where they're coming from?

The answer is that we can, usually, and if we can't, we usually know enough to say so and ask good enough questions to meet them halfway. But it's an impossible situation. Just the act of reassuring someone that we can understand is usually further evidence that we don't understand. I'm not entirely sure why, but that's how it goes.

Our personal histories certainly inform our work. How can they not? We are well-trained, however, to detect whether they're getting in the way of seeing your issues clearly, and we're legally and ethically required to get over it, and if we can't, to refer you on to someone else.

Back to those raised eyebrows. Even though I feel a pang when someone infers that a divorcee cannot be an effective marriage counselor, I know it to be untrue.

Doubting a marriage counselor's skill or professionalism because they're divorced is like doubting a pilot's skill because his plane crashed after the co-pilot set a bomb in the fuselage and parachuted to safety.

Any experience that makes us more human makes us better therapists. Marriage, divorce, never-married... parenthood, childlessness... togetherness, loneliness, grief... there's no experience that means we can't help.

So give your therapist a break. Despite being only human, we still do a fine job.

Illusions from Childhood & Making New Rules

Last week, I talked a little about illusions. Life is pretty chaotic and we need to impose order to stay sane, so we come up with plausible explanations that help our world make sense. Made-up organizing principles. Illusions. We fall under the spell of illusions all the time without knowing it, and it’s often OK, but sometimes it’s not.

This week is about illusions we were indoctrinated into as children. These can be especially hard to break because they’ve never been articulated. There aren’t words for them – just a vague sense of knowing that this is “how things are.” It’s really tough to argue with a fallacy of logic if it’s wordless. You’ve got nothing to address. It’s like trying to have a fistfight with a ghost.

The good news is that articulating these illusions – these old rules – is half the battle in breaking their spell.

The bad news is that one of the rules says not to articulate the rules.

So, the first step is to give yourself permission to articulate the rules. Repeat after me. “It’s OK to talk about fight club.”

Seriously, though… This illusion masks the others: “No one can speak the rules.” Speaking the rules could lead to questioning the rules, and we can't have that. As kids, we were naive enough to fall for this. But we're grown-up now. The ruse is up. Let's question the rules!

So, what were they? What were the unspoken but unmistakable rules of your childhood? Here are some examples, to inspire your memory:

• The younger kids aren’t allowed to be smarter or more successful than the oldest.
• No kid is allowed to be smarter or more successful than the parents.
• House rules only really apply to girls (or boys, or stepchildren).
• No one should do anything to wake up Dad before 9 on weekends.
• Only boys (or girls, or parents) are allowed to get angry.
• Anything appearing (or made to appear) to be about survival (food/money/work) is more important than any family member.
• People with (or without) money are different, and we don't really associate with them.

What are yours? What weren’t you allowed to do? What are the kinds of things about which you’d say “we don’t do that” or “we aren’t like that”? What rules applied to what household members? What rules had no explanation?

Articulate them. You have permission. Then bring your experienced, sense-making, grown-up mind into the picture to stand next to your younger self, surveying the past, and let it ask why.

Why wasn’t anyone allowed to open that cabinet? Why was this sibling allowed to get away with stuff that you couldn’t? Why didn’t anyone ever talk about these extended family members? Why could Mom wear make-up and perfume but the girls couldn’t, even when they were 17 or 18?

In other words, go through each one and ask, boldly and loudly (at least in your own head), "WTF?" or “Says WHO?!”

If you don't relate to this, if your house rules were spoken clearly, made sense and applied equally to everyone, and the authorities' reactions to any given behavior or situation were predictable, sensible and appropriate, wow. Seriously? Good for you. You're not normal.

The rest of us have a list, some short, some long, of strange, random and perhaps inexplicable illusions we took on as kids.

Next, consider each rule and listen inside to detect whether you’re still trying to follow it, as an adult out in the world, completely separate from that past environment. What part of you is still trying to be a good son/daughter/sibling? What part of you is still trying to make life easier for someone by “being good”? And then ask if you need to follow it anymore, or if it needs modification, or if it needs to be crossed off the list, once and for all.

Alternatively, what part of you insists on breaking the rules as often as possible, just like you did (or wanted to) as a teenager? Cross that rule off the list, too. Free yourself from continuing to break it to prove a mute point.

Now make a list of new rules – rules for your house. Rules like:

• No one is allowed to demean or ridicule anyone else.
• Everyone is allowed and encouraged to be successful.
• Everyone gets to have a say in house decisions.
• No sarcasm allowed.
• Rules are for everybody, and everybody can keep or break rules with equal consequences.

If that sounds ludicrous for any reason, maybe that step isn’t necessary for you. For some of us, it’s a revolution of empowerment to make our own rules and hang them on the fridge for a while, until we’ve integrated them and don’t need reminders anymore.

In any case, questioning the inner authority that has been keeping you beholden to outdated rules and illusions is an unquestionably winning proposition.

Illusions & Spells & the Warriors Who Break Them

It's one of the precepts of particle physics that matter is neither created nor destroyed - it just changes form. Solid becomes liquid, liquid becomes gas, gas becomes... solid again? Something. I don't know. I'm not a physicist.

But for the realm of psychology, I can offer a parallel theory: illusions are neither created nor destroyed - they just change into slightly more twisted illusions, or they're passed down to the most gullible child, or they pop up somewhere in the Midwest after a particularly ill-conceived episode of Oprah. (It happens, rarely, but it does.)

For example, "If a guy loves me, he'll know what I want/need" is an illusion. "Other people have more extra money than I do," is usually an illusion. "People who look different are different," "People who look the same are the same," "Politicians tell the truth," "Politicians lie"... they're all illusions.

Illusions are part of the human condition. Since we aren't omniscient, we don't usually know why things happen, but not knowing isn't tolerable. Seriously. If any of us were really, truly, deeply in touch with how unknowable everything is and how extraordinarily chaotic our plane of existence is, we'd fall off the edge of sanity, never to be heard from again.

So, we have to make stuff up, invent possible reasons things happen, plausible mechanisms and theoretical metaphysical laws that help us feel that our world makes sense. Organizing principles. Made-up organizing principles. Illusions.

It's OK. Illusions are way better than insanity. And most of them are just fine. They're our friends. If thinking you need to work hard to be successful inspires you to work hard and makes you successful doing something you love, and you're happy, then... rock on. No harm, no foul.

And besides, who are we to say? We humans are very accomplished at creating self-fulfilling prophecies, so how can we ever say the illusions aren't "true" or "real"? We can't. So we might as well roll with it.

Except, in some cases, when they go unchallenged and unchecked, illusions can become like spells - perception-twisting, judgment-blocking magic spells that we have no idea have been cast on us. Spells are illusions that have grown cancerous. They become very serious, and we take them very seriously, and we become very upset if people or circumstances don't line up in support of the spells we're under. This, is not helpful. This, sucks.

Luckily, our world has an elite force of professionals who break spells for a living - warriors fighting the cancers, freeing us from the bonds of overly serious made-up rules. No, I'm not talking about therapists, though we do our part. And I'm not talking about investigative journalists, though their hearts are in the right place.

I'm talking about comedians.

Humor is the great spell-breaker of our world. When we are under a spell, toiling in narrow-mindedness, taking ourselves and our burdens way too seriously, believing whatever made-up organizing principle we chose in an easier moment, nothing snaps us out of it quicker or more gently than a comedy routine, pointing out the absurdities and cracking us up.

And if you don't have a Chris Rock or Louis CK or Demetri Martin handy, tap into your inner comedian and make fun of yourself. Just be nice about it. Don't let your inner critic masquerade as an inner comedian and roast you in mean-spirited ways. This is nice funny. Be nice funny. Your inner comedian is on your side.

Romance Is Emotional Fast Food

Once upon a time, in high school, I was befriended by a new girl who lived in a big, modern house. Her single mother had married a wealthy older man, so my friend had already enjoyed a couple years of getting everything she wanted, including great clothes, a car and a horse – things she had no prayer of having before the marriage. I was envious, of course. I still had no prayer of having those things, and never would.

I remember seeing, taped up in her locker one day, a quote cut out of a magazine that said, paraphrased, “Wanting is often far more satisfying than having.” I was disgusted. It smacked of ingratitude and flew in the face of my certainty that money would buy me happiness, even if she was failing to buy it.

I knew the quote was untrue, but I was wrong about why. It took me a long while to figure it out, and it has to do with the fallacy of romance.

Romance is one of our culture’s favorite dynamics. Romance is the experience of longing for something while also feeling the possibility - nay, the promise - of fulfillment.

Actual fulfillment is not really part of romance. Actual fulfillment, when it arrives, is only satisfying for a brief shining moment before returns start diminishing. Once actual fulfillment arrives, romance fades fast.

This is true with objects. The longing experienced upon seeing that gadget or those shoes in the store window is delicious, but as we all know, it does not necessarily predict satisfaction later. Sometimes, you get it home and wonder what you were thinking. My high school friend, I now believe, was validating this experience by clipping that quote and hanging it in her locker.

And, it’s true with relationships. People wonder why romance doesn’t stay alive in marriages. Simple: it’s pretty tough to long for someone you wake up with every day. They can be awesome and you can love them, clearly, but romance? Not so much.

Television writers have become very skilled at holding characters, precariously wobbling, at the fulcrum point of longing and fulfillment. It’s delicate. If the circumstances keeping the characters apart are too discouraging, the promise of fulfillment wanes, and we lose interest. And if they get together and the union is too secure or satisfying, the longing wanes, and we lose interest. But being on the verge – we love that!

It’s emotional fast food. Just as sure as that Big Mac or Whopper is chemically engineered to taste good but also leave a deeper need unsatisfied so you'll come back for more... so it is with romance. Romance does not nourish us emotionally. But it's delicious!

When it comes to love and partnership, romance is the early, immature stage of the relationship. When a relationship matures, the romance goes. This is not a bad thing, unless we have other expectations. Which we normal people often do, because we're immersed in a culture that tells us to.

Current American culture is dependent on immaturity.

Having what you want when you want it is an appropriate and natural drive – if you’re a toddler. Operating from this principle as adults is what makes capitalism wildly, explosively successful at achieving its goal of growth and affluence, and so most of our consumer-centered industries (manufacturing, advertising, etc.) are geared to encourage and reward toddler-age thinking & behaving in grown-ups. After all, you have to long for something if the market is to fulfill it.

So, we get to be immature, the market (or our date for Friday night) meets & fulfills our longing, and everyone gets rich (or laid). What's the problem?

Other than the obvious lack of depth, there is a deeply troubling emotional by-product to all this: We've developed an affection for emptiness.

Emptiness is a necessary condition for romance. You can only long for something if some part of you feels an absence. And since we love romance, emptiness becomes our comfort zone – our dearly held comfort zone. Even as we complain about our emptiness and long for relief, we subconsciously resist change. The romantic in us needs the emptiness to survive.

Toddlers, by going through that particular stage of emotional development, learn to delay gratification and to cooperate with the outer world. They mature. They realize that the longing & fulfillment cycle is only a first step in engaging fully with the world and with others. (At least, we hope they do.)

The point of romance, evolutionarily, is to get past it. To let it lead us to create deeper, richer relationships that, while not based on longing, are still fulfilling - more fulfilling, profoundly and sweetly fulfilling, in the long run. The point is to leave romance behind.

But we haven’t. We can’t. We’re stuck in our comfort zone of emptiness, relishing anticipation of the next romantic adventure. For the most part, I think we know we're stuck – it’s just really tough to break out when we live in a world where billboards and commercials and the living examples around us every day poke and prod at our feelings of emptiness.

If you don’t relate to this, if you were raised in a different culture or have otherwise escaped the insidious broken-promise cycle of American consumerism, and your expectations of gadgets, shoes and people are never unrealistic or disappointing, congratulations. Good for you. You’re not normal.

The rest of us are faced with a challenge: to stop being seduced by romance and to let go of emptiness as a necessary condition for fulfillment.

How will you do this? You, as an individual, get to problem-solve it for yourself. A therapist (or friend, or random stranger) may be able to help with thinking outside the box, but the act of figuring it out for yourself, uniquely, taking into account who you are and what you want, is part of the maturing process and therefore part of the escape route.

Ten years ago, a boyfriend of mine made an anti-romantic statement that I sharply resented and still find pretty cynical, but it has stuck with me, and it helps keep my inner romantic in check.

He said that Shakespeare knew the real nature of romance: all his comedies end with a marriage, and all his tragedies start with one.

I haven’t actually checked, but I know it’s true with many of the major plays, and in any case, it’s a potent reminder that romance is an illusion, and has limits, and that stories that start with “once upon a time” don’t end with “happily ever after.”

So thanks. Ya bastard.

Finding Meaning in Life

One of my primary purposes as a therapist is to help people find meaning in their lives, one by one. Everyone is different and we’re all inspired and motivated by different things.

I recently met someone out in the world who said, “If you aren’t parenting – if you aren’t showing the world to the next generation, sharing the world with the next generation – well, then… what are you doing here?”

He wasn’t imposing this standard on me or anyone else; it was more personal, a conclusion he’s come to based on where he believes his life’s meaning will lie – in having children and nurturing them as they grow. (It also demonstrated clearly that he has not found fulfillment elsewhere in life, something he freely admitted.)

For some who’ve chosen to become parents, an easy, instant answer to the question of what gives their life meaning is napping in the next room, or off at school, or playing in the yard with the less refined neighbor kids. But not all parents share that clarity.

That’s OK, by the way. We’re not supposed to admit it or talk about it, but parenting is not the ultimate fulfillment for all parents. There’s nothing wrong with you or your relationship with your kids if you feel this way.

So, for those of us who don’t have easy answers, finding meaning beyond parenting is a worthy pursuit. I’ll call it a life’s calling – not to be confused with work or what we do to survive. It’s a fulfilling pursuit, whether vocation-related or not. It can be work, but it can also be play. It can be both. Doing it makes living feel extra worthwhile.

Unfortunately, the finding part isn’t always easy, and there are some particular psychological smokescreens in the way – competing influences. They work on each of us, subconsciously pulling us in different directions, making it confusing and difficult to hone in on a life’s calling.

For example, socially speaking, we’re being pulled in one direction by our common value system. Our culture values material success, stability and a degree of conformity, so we feel the pressure to participate in this. Grandness is held in high esteem; if you’re going to be a writer, writing a bestseller is assumed to be the point. Our culture believes in identity: decide who you are and be it, 100%, whatever it is (which, by the way, is absurdly limiting, because our identities evolve constantly). Even rebels need to conform to the acceptable ways of rebelling, joining a stable rebellious subculture in order to remain functional in society.

Then, we’re pulled in another direction based on whether we’re male or female. There are expectations of men that differ from expectations of women, and qualities and choices that will define what kind of man or woman you are. And those expectations differ depending on whether you’re at work, at home, at the supermarket or visiting the White House. (Don’t get me started on the subconscious gender-role voodoo that brides & grooms have to deal with.)

Now, on top of all this, factor in the values of your particular family, the values you were programmed with from infancy, which pull you in other directions. Even if you don’t agree with them, they’re still in there, pulling.

For instance, does your family embrace passive, submissive women or strong, outspoken women? Ambitious, forceful men or humble, quiet men? Does your family value higher education, or find it optional or unnecessary? Does your family believe in marriage? In public service? In competition? In working hard? Or hardly working?

These are only a few of the smokescreens blowing around you all the time, pulling you in all different directions and making it tough to tune into your deeper self and figure out what you, individually and uniquely, really find meaningful.

If you don’t relate to this, if you’ve found your life’s calling and you can feel every aspect of who you are lining up behind it, and you feel enthusiastic and energized on a regular basis, that’s fantastic. Totally awesome. You are to be admired and envied, and good for you. You’re not normal.

For the rest of us… two tasks along the path are identifying a life’s calling and then following it.

Identifying it is complicated, not just because of the smokescreens, but also because for many people, it’s a moving target. We may find a life’s calling and devote ourselves to it, enjoying years of peace and joy interspersed with life’s usual hassles, only to find ten years later that it’s shape-shifted and we need to start again.

This is not uncommon, so if it’s happened to you, it’s OK. You didn’t misidentify it, and you didn’t make a mistake by following it back then. It changed on you. That may feel unfair or cruel (particularly if it’s a vocation), and you may be pretty upset about it. Yeah, OK, take some time with that. When you’re done, take a breath and start again.

For others, identification is the easy part – task #2 is the sticking point: giving yourself permission to focus your energy in that direction. I mean, how can you go back to school, or pick up an instrument, or learn a whole new subculture worth of stuff at the ripe old age of [insert meaningless number here].

Here’s how. Just decide to, regardless of the other things in your life that will need to accommodate. Instead of waiting for all those other things to line up & make it easy, just move forward, and the other things will adapt. They’ll have to.

There can also be a fear in starting out because of the moving-target nature of the thing. What happens if you put in lots of time, energy and money and then it changes? Then you’d be stuck with a garage full of gear, or a career path, or a commitment to volunteer for the rest of the year that you wouldn’t want anymore.

Yeah, that might sting, but what else are you doing? You can easily live your whole life withholding, but it really isn’t worth it. Until you follow the path you know about, a new one won’t present, so you aren’t avoiding or shortcutting anything. You’re just waiting out the clock.

If you’re having trouble identifying a meaningful life’s calling, one parameter to consider is which feels more important to you: the future or the present.

If you feel inspired and motivated by the idea of creating something valuable that stays and serves well beyond your lifetime – an invention, a restored old house, an up-leveled standard or model for your industry – then suspend gratification and focus your energy on big, long-term goals. Don’t care what anyone else thinks, or what the smokescreens say. You’re in it for the long haul.

If, on the other hand, you feel less interested in perpetuity and more inspired & motivated by how life can be better in the now, for yourself and others, then it makes more sense to focus on the ephemeral, the temporary, the playful. Focus on what’s now and what’s next, and don’t worry about thinking too far ahead, no matter what the smokescreen says.

Even if your preference lands somewhere in between, one will feel stronger than the other, and getting a sense of this can help you cut through the smokescreens of all those social and familial influences and turn up the volume on what you find meaningful.