Responding (not reacting) to anxiety: a buffet of options

The good folks over at the Nurses Online Education Data Base let me know about an article they posted to their library, entitled "50 Quick and Easy Ways to Calm Anxiety" (click here). It's a nicely organized buffet of possibilities, though some of the 50 will be more quick, and some more easy, from time to time as you experience anxiety.

A warning: given that shame and anxiety often are holding hands (often out of sight), be mindful of your own experiences as you read through these possible responses, and catch yourself if any judgment comes up around all the things you "should" be doing (or not doing). These kind of lists can be great to read when you're in an anxiety storm, but can also tend to be more overwhelming. If perusing it reminds you of something you've forgotten, that might be helpful, go for it! If you're getting flooded by all the options, or you're berating yourself for not feeling everything as "Slow and Hard," then just set it aside and come back to it later.

So much about managing anxiety has to do with acceptance of the reality of where you're at, exactly what anxiety does not do. So if such a list is an aid, great! If not, no problem. Be very pragmatic and do whatever works.

The Complexity of Depression: FSU's study on the media and "chemical imbalance"

There's an interesting study that was published in February, coming out of Florida State University, a review of the media's presentation of depression as a result of a "chemical imbalance." Below is the full article (from psychcentral.com.) I'm quoting it here not to endorse the statistics or conclusions that the researchers come to, but more as food for thought, particularly about what seems to me the simple reality that depression is most often a complex, systemic condition which can't be reduced to just one cause.

In my experience, depression is several pieces of rope, tied up together such that tugging just one tends to tighten the others. Addressing the biochemical is very important, whether through SSRIs or food or amino acid therapy, but it's just one thread, and doesn't in and of itself totally stabilize chronic depression. And in my experience, it certainly does not pull up the roots of the depression, which is more like crab grass than something with a single tap root.

So, for your perusal, here is the article in full:

New studies are questioning the theoretical underpinnings that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance. Some of the writings blame the media for publishing news articles as fact, rather than theory.

Jeffrey Lacasse, an Florida State University doctoral candidate and visiting lecturer in the College of Social Work, and Jonathan Leo, a neuroanatomy professor at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, found that reporters who included statements in news articles about depression being caused by a chemical imbalance, or a lack of serotonin in the brain, were unable to provide scientific evidence to support those
statements.

In the study, the authors spent about a year in late 2006 and 2007 monitoring the daily news for articles that included statements about chemical imbalances and contacting the authors to request evidence that supported their statements.

Several reporters, psychiatrists and a drug company responded to the researchers’ requests, but they did not provide documentation that supported the chemical imbalance theory. Their findings were published in the journal Society.

“The media’s presentation of the theory as fact is troublesome because it misrepresents the current status of the theory,” says Jeffrey Lacasse, an FSU doctoral candidate and visiting lecturer in the College of Social Work.

“For instance, there are few scientists who will rise to its defense, and some prominent psychiatrists publicly acknowledge that the serotonin hypothesis is more metaphor than fact. As the current study documents, when asked for evidence, reporters were unable to cite peer-reviewed primary articles in support of the theory.”

Moreover, the researchers said, several of the responses received from reporters seem to suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory’s scientific status. The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” which almost all psychiatrists use to diagnose and treat their patients, clearly states that the cause of depression and anxiety is unknown, according to Lacasse and Leo.

The Society article builds on the pair’s 2005 study, which focused on pharmaceutical advertisements that claim depression is caused by an imbalance of serotonin — an imbalance the drug companies say can be corrected by a class of antidepressants called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs).

”The chemical imbalance theory, which was formulated in the 1960s, was based on the observation that mood could be artificially altered with drugs, rather than direct observation of any chemical imbalances,” Leo said. “Since then there has been no direct evidence to confirm the theory and a significant number of findings cast doubt on the theory.”

The researchers said the popularity of the theory is in large part based on the presumed efficacy of the SSRIs, but they say that several large studies now cast doubt on this efficacy.

A review of a full set of trial data published in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine last month concluded that much of the perceived efficacy of several of the most common SSRIs was due to the placebo effect.

Other studies indicate that for every 10 people who take an SSRI, only one to two people are truly receiving benefit from the medication, according to Lacasse and Leo.

Still, the National Center for Health Statistics found that antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs in the United States, with doctors writing more than 31 million prescriptions in 2005.

Both Lacasse and Leo emphasized the importance of patients being given factual information so they can make informed decisions about medications and the role of other potentially useful interventions, such as psychotherapy, exercise or self-help strategies.

“Patients might make different choices about the use of medications and possibly use alternative approaches to their distress if they were fully informed,” Lacasse said.

“We believe the media can play a positive role by ensuring that their mental health reporting is congruent with scientific literature.”

The Diet of Experience: The ongoing choosing of what we need

Sandy was flailing in the whirlpool of her anxiety. She could spot what her mind was saying--"We have to do something to stop this anxiety, but we don't have the power. But we have to do something! But..."--but couldn't find enough ground to pull herself out. In a familiar desperation, she saw herself reaching out for anything to hang onto, wanting to lose herself in television or food. "Miserable," she thought, "Absolutely miserable."

This "no exit" quality of anxiety is so part and parcel of what keeps it in place: our danger warnings go off because of some internal or external experience, our thoughts add to the anxiety, we can't find an immediate cure, which makes us feel even more endangered, our bodies signal more danger, our minds react, and...so on. This is the stuckness, the circular quality of this particular wild mood.

One way of coping is what Sandy found herself lunging for, the strategies she had learned help "muffle" the experience of anxiety. Overeating suppresses the physical sensations, like putting your finger on a vibrating string, and creates a thin sense of control ("Well, at least I can control what I'm eating"). Disappearing into TV does a similar thing with the mind, supplanting distracting thoughts and images for the anxious ones, and allowing you to push the buttons on the remote control to shift your thoughts. To some degree anyway, and that's certainly an important degree because both TV and food point to your ability to actually choose different physical and mental states. And when you are really upset, having these ways of calming or distracting can be very helpful.

The unhelpful part comes from those times when we reach after these coping devices from a place of desperation, not from a place of choice.

For instance, Sandy used a lot of coffee to manage her anxiety, without fully realizing what its purpose was. When we explored what it might be like to diminish her intake, she noticed a lot of fear arising. She was afraid that she would fall apart in her day-to-day life if she changed how much coffee she drank. But, in realizing the purpose of coffee, she was able to start experimenting with dosage and when during the day she drank it, even abstaining at times. Ultimately, she was able use coffee strategically for those days when the anxiety was too strong to manage with her other skills, or when she needed to get worldly stuff accomplished and couldn't dedicate the time to meditating or investigating the details of the anxiety.

Anxiety has much to do, at the level of thought, with feeling out of control, and Sandy's learning was that she could both get the suppressant effects of coffee as needed, but also could feel more in control of the process, of when she chose, rather than letting the choice be habitual and maybe even a misreading of what she really needs.

Because within anxiety is a message about something lacking, either as a "psychic nutrient" or as a desire. Often within her anxiety was a feeling of wanting to feel more competent (not just, notice, feeling incompetent, but having an active desire), and when she stumbled on an activity that made her feel that, her anxiety reduced or dissipated.

So our work focused for a time on making a practice of asking herself, "What do I need in this moment?" and then really listening (here is a recent article on one way to do this). Often the first response would be a knee-jerk, "Doesn't matter because I don't have the power to change anything!" But we worked to recognize this voice of disempowerment, and to listen past it to the intuitive place in her that could give her a real answer. Her's was often, "It would help if I felt more effective," which the TV and overeating actually never satisfied, often making her feel more incompetent.

We are always faced with a choice when our moods become wild, but without being able to contact the wise place within us, we don't act self-destructively so much as on poor information. So she had to learn to tolerate that space between "We can't!" and the wisdom that would eventually arise, and then to act on that wisdom to help herself get what her system was lacking.

I say "system" intentionally, because what was so important was to shift from the sense of personal endangerment that fueled the anxiety, to a more neutral stance of examining her need and then, as if designing her own diet, added the missing nutrients and noticing the results. The control that is arrived at is an authentic one based in awareness or listening, and direct response, not in an image of control (like frantically pushing buttons on the remote control) that we can feel is unstable and not really that all effective.

What Sandy learned was that even within the storm of anxiety, there was a place of calm from which she could assess her need, and that over time, in practicing responding to her own wisdom about her needs, she could actually shift her mood. In learning not to struggle against anxiety, but to move with it like boating through rapids, she could actually diminish the mood and build up a grounded faith in her ability to get out of the whirlpool of anxiety. The voice of helplessness and powerlessness came to sound a bit tinny when it arrived, because she remembered more and more often past times of finding what she genuinely needed.

And finally, at a deeper level, she began to trust that she actually could provide what she, in moments, lacked, and that life apparently was not a desert, but rather a buffet table on which she could find the experiences that she actually needed.

The Body Unconstrained: The signatures of the wild moods

Since everything, as the wonderful Vipassana teacher S.N.Goenka says, that happens in the mind also happens in the body, anxiety and depression show up as "signatures" of sensations. When the wild moods are happening in the mind, they're also signing their names on the body.

Now, this is a very important point, because, again as taught by Goenka (and the Buddha), what we are essentially reacting to is not actually the outside world of forms and colors and so forth, but to how they make us feel. Or rather, "make us feel," because it's literally the sensations in the body that are the experiences that we react to.

A quick experiment to test this: imagine you are driving and someone pulls in front of you. In instance one, you feel a surge of adrenaline and an acidic quality in your gut...and you flip the person off. In instance two, though, for whatever reason, you feel a surge of wellbeing in your body, calm, open, grounded...and you smile at the person. Same scene, but very different responses. And if it's possible to have these two different reactions, if everyone does not react exactly the same to the same event, then it's not really the event that's being reacted to but how one makes sense of it internally. And that sense is made both in terms of thoughts and sensations.

So with that, take a second to think about how the wild moods sign themselves on your body. Glurky stomach? Acid stomach? Headache? Flushing heat in the chest? But it may actually take some concentrated focusing to see what the body is doing when depressed or anxious, because we can get so used to experiencing these signatures as depression and anxiety that we are not really aware of them as distinct and repeating physical sensations.

So why is this important, to become aware of these sensations? Because when we are able to be aware of the sensations as physical events, then there is the opportunity to break the cycling whirlpool of mood, where negative thought causes unpleasant sensation, which generates another negative thought, reinforcing another negative sensation, and around and around, deeper and deeper.

To be able to meet a negative sensation with acceptance is actually to break this chain of mood, because the positive thought (the acceptance, "no problem," "this is ok," etc.) is reflected as a neutral or positive sensation on the body. And then the whirlpool slows and eventually stops.

This is about changing your habitual aversion to your embodied experience, which is actually easier said than done, because over time, we come to identify with certain sensations and disidentify with others. The ones we don't like often come to be seen as foreign, as something being done to us, almost as invaders. And what do we naturally do when feeling invaded? Defend. And if we can't effectively defend, if we feel exposed to such assault, there is a real tendency to either collapse or become hypervigilent. I.e, to become depressed or anxious. (The point here is not that we can't identify with unpleasant sensations, but that the really problematic situation with moods are those sensations that feel like an attack on our integrity.)

So shifting your acceptance of the "bad sensations," is actually to shift the boundaries of your self. They no longer are foreign, but rather are seen as no different essentially than any positive or desirable sensation. They are all you. Which can be disorienting if you've lived a long life of defending against certain bodily states that have been identified with the wild moods, and labeled as "not self."

But the payoff is huge: the reclaiming at the bodily level of aspects of our experience, our selves, which have been cast out because of their association to things we have thought we can't accept. It is an amazing flash when, observing the signature of depression or anxiety, we realize that we are trying to eject certain sensations...and that the rejection is totally unnecessary. That's when a major lasso is gotten around the neck of one of those wild moods.

The Magic Well: Letting the universe answer the questions (for a change)

(This was printed in my newsletter, but I liked it quite a bit, so thought I'd print it here as well.)

Have you noticed asking questions of yourself, like, "Am I good enough," or, "Is this all useless," and then wondering why the answers are so elusive?

A colleague who traveled in Asia for a while once told me this story:

I was in Thailand, in the North where there was a lot of fogged in days, at least up in the mountains. My mood was really getting affected after a while. I was bummed out much of the day, and noticed myself walking around the forest thinking, 'Why can't I shake this malaise?' The question repeated over and over, and I'd struggle with it like a Zen koan, and just feel worse that I was apparently too stupid to figure out the answer.

Then one day, walking back from a dismal hike, coming through the gate of the village I was living in, I asked the question again, but for some reason it seemed to actually come out as a question. The difference was like, 'Hmm, I wonder what's keeping this in place?' Which may sound similar, but there was a part of me that came online, a rational, data-driven place that, when it showed up, backlit what had been going on. That I'd been actually saying, 'I'm miserable,' but in the cloak of a question. When the cloak dropped off, the answers came quickly and without a lot of struggle. Like, 'Oh, duh, it's been foggy and I always get low when there's not enough sunlight. And I'm eating poorly and am far from home. Oh!' And then the solutions came quickly and with that clarity I could actually take action. But it required getting clear what was a question, and what was me saying, 'Ow!'"

So, what's this about? Basically, perseveration and rumination are two of the forces that drive and support anxiety and depression. Like my colleague's question, they often take the form of asking questions that aren't really questions at all. These are sentences that do, indeed, seem to end with a question mark, and yet are not actually taken up as real questions, meaning, as inquiry which goes through a process towards either being answered, or being tossed out as illegitimate questions. That's how real questioning happened. The problem my colleague illustrated is when we think we're in that process, but are actually asking questions that in actuality are statements of feeling combined with a fear-based desire to find a little control.

These, then, are questions without answers, because they are not actual inquiry. And this is the dilemma, that when we forget what we're actually doing (stating a feeling and desire vs. practicing inquiry) is not questioning, then when we don't come up with an answer, it's taken as a sign of danger. Then we try "asking" again, trying to find a way to feel safety and control, and with no solid answer coming, we zip around the track yet again. And depending on the question, it's naturally going to be either depressing or anxiety provoking to not come up with an answer or solution.

There are a few ways out of this loop, and I'll offer an exercise below for one way, emphasizing acceptance and openness. I'm calling it the Magic Well, as it's a visualization involving...can you guess?

Closing your eyes, imagine you are in a safe, protected field of grass. It's sunny, mild, a pretty nice place to be. (Change the place if you need to, so long as the felt-sense is one of comfort and safety/peacefulness.)

Now, you see an old fashion well there a little bit in front of you. It has stones around the edge (you won't fall in). This is a magic well, but you have to read the plaque on the side to understand what kind of magic.

So, what you need to do is think of a question you want answered, and imagine it as having form, and resting in your upturned palms. Whatever feels like it's natural form, pretty or not so pretty, it's all fine.

Now, with your question formed, you walk up to the well and read the plaque: "This is a magic well, magic because it will answer your question. However, it answers on it's own schedule. Your job is to ask, and then step back with an open patience. It's job is to answer."

The well is deep, and you step forward and tip the question gently off your hands to drop down into the darkness. Now you step back and practice the patience of waiting, knowing that eventually, and appropriately, the answer will return to you.

Good work!

For some people, this exercise feels like a relief; for other, letting go of the question, giving it over to the universe, or a deeper part of ourselves (however one thinks about where it goes) causes anxiety. Any reaction is fine. This is an exercise in asking a question differently, and implicitly in developing trust that the answer is known already, in oneself, in the ether, in the mind of God, and that openness will provide the information better than insistence.

Notice that, in the example of my colleague, his shift in questioning led to a more active problem solving stance. But it started with an openness of questioning, a real curiosity or wondering. The Magic Well is asking with a big openness, allowing something larger to do the answering.

So experiment with what approach seems to work with which question (radical openness, problem solving, etc.), but keep in mind that the starting point is opening to getting a real answer, and that you don't initially know what it will be, but trusting (more and more!) that it will be OK.

Cues: Which to pay attention to

When I first arrived in San Francisco from a much smaller town, the stimuli of just driving around the city was near overwhelming. Cars, bikes, scooters, pedestrians, pedestrians with dogs, dog walkers with packs of dogs, stop lights, honking horns, roads built for carriages, blinking signs, beautiful buildings, stunning views--my mind was hyperventilating with what to pay attention too.

Life, we can agree, offers us a tremendous amount of data. If we were to pay attention to all of it, equally, we'd be lost in a ocean of signals and stimulation. The brain automatically filters this data, whether it comes from within or without, according to our patterning, some hard wired (like the frequencies of light that the cells of the eye register) and some come from our particular history. For instance, there's that phenomena where, when you buy a new car, you suddenly see that same model all over.

Internally, the same automatic decisions are being made, in terms of what the mind gives preference and space to when scanning all the internal data. The whole body, the whole conglomerate of trillions and trillions of cells, is constantly communicating with itself, between cells, between brain cells, between organs, between the mind and the body. Electrical, chemical, mechanical, hydraulic--huge amounts of signaling goes on. So what does the mind pay attention to?

You can see how there is a tremendous amount of filtering that goes on out of our conscious awareness, as there has to be. Thankfully, we don't have to choose moment by moment whether to think about signaling the white blood cells to take on that cold, or choose how to regulate our internal temperature.

Yet there are very important, especially to sufferers of the wild moods, choices to be made in terms of where to place our attention, choices that determine in large part what mood gets brought to fore, or sent to the back of our minds.

For instance, when you are exercising, what is the relevant information to pay attention to? And how do you know? When you hear the thought, "Stop, this is too painful!" where is it actually coming from? When you feel the tension in your calves, running on the treadmill, is that a sign of impending cramp, or a good healthy work out?

Or, when you are feeling anxiety, and your heart speeds up, is that an imminent heart attack? Are you nearing your death? Is it a signal that your body is revving up to deal with a potential danger? What does it mean?

Noam Chomsky, the linguist and political writer, has said that people are essentially rational, but that they are fed poor data. While one could argue with the basic premise, what seems true is that with "bad data" we do get "bad results." In Buddhist terms, we are misperceiving, misinterpreting reality, producing ignorance, and therefore suffering. Chomsky has focused on the bad information coming from mass media and how that affects public discourse and opinion, which is a legitimate area to critique. But for the wild moods, the more salient place to look is how we are telling ourselves bad narratives, selecting ourselves the distorted information, and then believing the resulting story.

Which begs the question, how do we make more accurate stories of our outer and inner data? I think the answer really boils down to: breathe, and be curious. With the panic attack example, it's being mindful of the experience, the data--racing heart, temple throbbing, fear--in a curious, interested way. "Hmm, what is this?" is the essential attitude. Inquisitiveness and curiosity. With this mindset, the "real," or more accurate, less filtered version of reality comes to the fore, because we are not, as it were, forcing the light through any number of prisms.

If I'm running on the treadmill and the thought comes that I have to stop, I can question it: "Is that true?" And then see what comes with that openness. Which requires a certain stability, in terms of focus and emotions, but that all can be developed with work and attention.

Which is not to say any of this is easy, because there are reasons why we've learned to filter for certain information (usually "negative data"). Yet we can learn to be more objective in interpreting our own data, our own signals, from heart, mind, body, and spirit. We learn to allow in the data and sitting with it to allow the order and meaning already there to emerge, without forcing a judgment out of fear.

Goal setting: a method to clarify the process

One of the really common experiences in anxiety and depression is overwhelm. At worst, it can mean that looking at the dishes in the sink triggers a cascade of fear or exhaustion which throws you onto your most basic of coping skills, usually fleeing the task through avoidance.

Now, tackling anxiety and depression requires a multi-pronged approach, from developing spiritual connections, to basic skill building, and with goal setting we're on the latter part of this spectrum, although even here it's not a black or white issue. (Hope can facilitate planning, and having a clear plan can engender hope.)

But here, I'm going to take the "clarifying the process" approach, and present some thoughts about goal setting and execution which might be helpful. I'm trying here to make the steps distinct, because we can get into trouble when we think goal setting is just one process with one method. Kind of like thinking that any work on a car, because it's a car, uses the same tool. Try fixing the electrical system with a wrench...

First step: Vision

Here's where you are letting your heart and mind fly with desire. Really. This is not the time, at the beginning of the goal setting process, to focus on the "hows" of the process. Vision is about identifying where it is you really, in your heart of heart, want to go, and getting into the nuts and bolts will very easily chase the vision away.

For instance, it's common to struggle with the question, "What am I going to do with my life?" We often, at different phases of our lives, seem to run out of path and kind of stand in an open field looking for direction. To grab at a goal, the next step, is actually to overlook the identification of vision. You could say, "My goal is to make a million dollars in the next year," which is a fine goal, but if you haven't tied it to a vision, you may down the road find that it's not at all what you want your life to look like.

Here is where you take some time to sit down in the field and mull over possibilities, quieting yourself so you can check these options against what your heart wants. You treat the "What am I going to do with my life?" as a real, objective question, not as a way of stating despair. (If you're feeling despair, it's much better to just acknowledge it as despair and sit with that. Trying to ask a question which is actually a feeling, that's just confusing.)

From asking a question in this way, it kind of rouses your mind to actually engage the question. "Oh, my vision of my life is living in the country, married, with animals and owning a bookstore." That's what might pop out of a vision meditation. Whatever feels true and right to you will be a credible vision--i.e., don't second guess yourself too much.

Notice that this statement of vision doesn't say anything about how or where or how long. It's a desire, but it will orient the steps down the line. And what it requires to clarify is actually openness and dreaminess, drawing on the right side of the brain, as it were, to give the left side (linear, logical) some direction.

(A coda with vision: sometimes your focus is much more narrow, in which case vision tends to be less global. For instance, with the dishes in the sink, although the goal is to clean the dishes, there is actually a vision. It might be to live in a house that is clean and inviting, and then keeping up with the dishes is actually a goal of that vision. But to get them done, it's often not necessary to spend a lot of time with this vision phase, though acknowledging the underlying desire can be helpful in motivation.)

Step 2: Goals

So having set a vision, you then have to establish some goals, or it's going to remain in the dreamy parts of your brain. Here's where our amazing human inheritance of cognitive reasoning and problem solving comes in. Let's hear it for the frontal cortex!

For the vision above, what could be the goals? Since there are "multiple areas of satisfaction," there need to be multiple goals. And the process of arriving at these goals is the thinking about what you want in terms of the vision. So, with marriage, it might be, "To find a suitable partner within the next year, who is interested in marriage." In a way, it's a mini vision, but more concrete: in the next year you'll find a partner, not in some nebulous future.

But you also have to assess the reasonableness of the goal, to some degree. If your goal is, "I'll find a husband/wife within a week," that's not likely to happen. You're stating what you want, within likely parameters. This is the assessment part of coming up with goals: is it doable, all things considered?

In the same way, you'd come up with goals for: moving to the country, buying a house, founding/buying a bookstore. The questions are, "What is the framework of action to realize my vision?"

Step 3: Planning

Here the left brain is getting even more play, because it's here where you look at the goals and create definable, time-limited steps to realize that goal. And these plans need to be carefully assessed for real-world applicability, that the plan actually is likely to realize the goal, that there is enough energy (in whatever form) for the goal, etc.

So, for the goal of marriage within a year, the question is: "What do I have to do to actually find a partner within a year?" If the plan becomes, "One date each month," that's both too vague--where are you meeting people and how--and not reasonable in terms of meeting the goal. A more likely plan is, "Sign up for several online dating services, put the word out to friends, and go on at least one date a week." There are definable steps, a timeline, and a way to measure progress (dates/week).

Usually, at the planning stage, you notice there are steps, which even above you can see: you have to join the dating service, and get word out to friends, before you can actually start dating. Once that first step is done, then you actually go on the dates at least weekly.

Which brings us to the final step:

Step 4: Execution

This is where the rubber meets the road. You've got the broad map, you've got the specific targets, you know which car and how long the trip is likely to take, and now it's time to go!

For the marriage plan, this means actually signing up for the service, and contacting friends. And it's a different set of dynamics at work in doing than in planning. The plan is not the action, as the map is not the territory. Whereas you may have a beautiful, clear, and true plan, if it's not executed, then it's just a pretty map.

So at this step, the issues of motivation and energy come really to the fore. Often, you will get a surge of these through the process of planning, because seeing something as organized and doable is a boost to your confidence and faith. But you may still run into typical fears or hesitations, and this is where you organize the supports to help you move into action.

If you're worried about your desirability as a mate, you might take up psychotherapy to help with the fear, or you may say that for every date you muster the courage to go on, you get to treat yourself to, well, something motivating for you.

The execution stage is about actually putting the plan in action, which may be clear after the other stages, or may require work on "execution" issues (there's a little mini-goal setting exercise here, too), but once the vision, goals, and plan is set in place, it's often much easier to move forward.

To sum up

It's important to see goal setting as a chain of linked, but distinct, stages. If it seems, and feels, like just one mass of activity, then, especially if you're prone to anxiety or depression, it's likely to lead to overwhelm.

Each stage requires a different approach, and even a different part of your brain coming online. The dream fuels the car, but unless there are an engine and tubes to carry the dream to that engine, it's never going to have any traction in the real world. So, to confuse any one stage for another is to risk never getting that car built and moving.

Good luck with your car building, whether it's a little Matchbox or a deluxe sportster, so long as it's truly what you want.

In Praise of Irrelevance

I wrote a while back about "The Intolerables" (link), those places in our selves where we say, "Hell or high water, this has to change!" Now, there is much to be said about setting our boundaries firmly and clearly, and to responding directly to what we deem is unjust. And there is much to be said in favor of a strong will.

However, often in declaring our Intolerables, we are attempting to solve problems that may, ultimately, be unsolvable, or at least in the way we think they have to be solved.

For instance, say a man's Intolerable is that they will never clean up after their wife. Never, in no circumstance, ever, for any reason. It's caused many fights, this principled position (she'd called it "rigidly and stubborn"), but he will not budge. It's "intolerable" for him to imagine playing the role of "maid" to his wife, and her protestations only make him more entrenched.

Now, what problem is he trying to solve? Let's say in his family, he was the second oldest of nine kids, and while the eldest got to be the star athlete, he was made to be the supervisor of his siblings. At some point he rebelled, and has been rebelling ever since against that role.

The problem he's attacking is the feeling of being mistreated and overwhelmed with responsibility or work that he believes should not be his, and yet is being put upon him. When this feeling arises--his wife is running late and needs him to take care of the dishes--he starts to become flooded with memories and feelings (rage, impotence, grief) that were exactly what he was experiencing as a child but had no way to express. So he's developed his Intolerable as a way of suppressing the re-experiencing of all that pain. "I'm not going to do your dishes" is his way of saying, "You won't make me feel like I used to feel, because now I have some control."

Which is totally understandable, and if we look, we can make a list of our own Intolerables. It's a universal tendency in humans.

And...it doesn't work. The emotions we're keeping at bay with our rigid stance don't actually resolve by being suppressed. And when we keep holding others responsible for being the cause of our suffering, we have to maintain a defensive, hardened stance to "hold them off." In other words, at a subtle or not so subtle level, we are constantly feeling attacked.

So what does work is, through examining this triad--of past, present, and environment/relationships--we come to see that in terms of solving the "problem," other people and their actions or inactions, well, they're simply not relevant.

This is actually the experience that arises when an Intolerable is very near to resolution. What was a problem to be heroically solved is not actually "solved," but rather the problem itself is dissolved. The man realizes that his wife's messiness is utterly irrelevant to whether he has to defend against his feelings, and that the control he's trying to get through refusing his wife's demands actually shatters on his own barricades.

Control, he comes to realize, is about allowing his feelings to happen and learning to understand where they came from, and how they keep playing out and shaping his present life. When he sees that even these feelings are irrelevant to what choices he makes in his own life, then he's truly free of the Intolerable. The past happened, but that doesn't necessarily determine the future, if one's aware.

This recognition of irrelevance, though, as an experience, is not at all depressing or tragic. It's not particularly felt as a liberating relief. It's more of a simple thought (at it's clearest), an insight without the fireworks. "Oh, it doesn't actually matter. What I thought was the point...isn't." And then you go on, free to make choices rather than having your choice already made by your Intolerable.

Moosehead gifts: The ways we divide the Self

Here are some thoughts about the "moose head gifts" that life brings us...frequently. You know, the experiences that come along, that seem to fit into our lives about as well as that stuffed moose head that our uncle once gave us. Getting fired unexpectedly. Car wrecks. Losses. Physical illness. All the things that we not only don't want, but believe, deep down, that we cannot survive if they happen.

These are the gifts, though, that when really we sit down and thoroughly unwrap them, what we find inside are forgotten parts of ourselves.

I've picked up an early book by the philosopher Ken Wilber, called No Boundary, which is a discussion of the different ways in which we as humans construct, or divide, our sense of self. Starting from the relative diffuseness of a newborn's consciousness, we go about the process of defining our self, inscribing what's within the definition of self, and what's experienced as foreign and "other." Wilber's divisions are:

Persona level: an individual's persona is self, and their unwanted mental bits (shadow) are "other"
Ego level: the ego is self, and the body is seen as "other"
Total organism: the body-mind is self, and the environment is "other"
Unity Consciousness: all experience/phenomena is seen as self, and therefore there's no "other"

Far from being esoteric, these splits are the stuff of our day-to-day lives. Look for those areas where you perpetually do battle or experience conflict, and that will mark the border of self and other. These splits are especially perceptible in our relationships, where to a large degree we partner up with those parts of ourselves which we haven't (yet) been able to recognize as ours.

The way in which we arrange the particular fences that define the property lines of our Self comes in large part from the way the world, especially our parents/caregivers, mirror back to us the acceptable vs. the unacceptable parts of the self. For instance, if parents are natural and laid back about an infant's various fluids, then that child is not taking in the message that there's something undesirable about the natural body. He or she will grow up (barring other factors) with a sense that body functions are just natural, no big deal in the scheme of things (the original scheme of things being their parents). There's more of a willingness to see body as self, rather than if the opposite messages were given, one tends to distance from identifying with body because in a subtle or not-so-subtle way, body was shown to be dangerous--the danger being that it scared the parents who the infant is totally dependent on for food and emotional nurturing, causing the emotional connection to waver or break.

The same is true for the other splits: messages about the dangerousness/desirability of parts of the psyche (say, anger or love), the environment (other cultures/people, the messy natural world), or spiritual realms (our deeper unities with the world and others).

But the upshot is that where there are these splits, as understandable and worthy of empathy are their origins, there is suffering. Why? Because we are cutting ourselves off from our own selves, constantly ostracizing ourselves from the full community that at some level we know we belong to. Apropos to my last post, we are repeatedly dis-membering our Self.

There's no blame or shame in this though, because it's simply what humans do. And one can say that the developmental path of growth is a path of remembering that what's on the other side of the fence is not just something we're related to, but what we really are.

So the "moosehead gifts" of life, if we are truly, at essence, an un-bounded oneness, are really just parts of ourselves that we've learned to disown. The experiences we don't want--whether the irritation of our partner's messiness, or the pain of losing a parent, or the fear of experiences of unbounded spaciousness--show us those places where we are divided. The "bad mate," the "depriving world," the "horrid emptiness," they're all parts or experiences of ourselves which we've learned to spurn and resist.

This is why intimate relationships are such wonderful, painful places of learning. The annoying habits of our partners are actually the lost bits of ourselves; they bring us gifts of their "noxious" bits, but if we actually open them, what we find is that they are offering us parts of ourselves. The unkemptness of our partner, that we reject and abhor, is actually carrying a deeper feeling of, say, flow, or non-pressure on our environment. We may choose not to adopt the form of that ease--I, for instance, simply work better when the tool bench is organized--but the opportunity is there to find the ease in ourselves which has been lost or disowned.

What I've seen in the act of reclaiming part of self, healing these splits, is not an experience of heroic triumph, but rather of familiar affection and recognition. For instance, when talking about his first deep-water scuba dive, my friend described it as, given how much fear he'd had, "oddly familiar." He said, "There were all the usual elements, just with a lot of water. And the critters were just doing what all critters do." He recognized the elements of the ocean as the same constituent elements of himself.

You know when you've bridged this gap of otherness because you drop into peace and relaxation. The guards on the walls of your self recognize their fellows, and with a "Traveler, well met!" open the gates and either look over other chasms for danger, or at the end of the journey, see that there's really no danger for them to defend against.

(Resources: Wilber's Integral Institute website)

Re-Membering: "Resource Tapping" in action

Let's start from the idea that every individual has the capacity for all the mood states, from bleak depression and runaway anxiety, to elation and joy, and that the differences among people in terms of mood is not their capacity but their "habits." If it were a question of capacity, then presumably people suffering from, say, chronic depression, would never have felt anything but depression, and would never have any reprieves, any light days or happy moments. So if that's true, then what we've got is a problem of remembering.

Laurel Parnell, a psychologist and specialist in EMDR (a treatment for trauma which I'll write about later), has written a book called Tapping In, about the use of what she calls "resource tapping." Resource tapping uses the central discovery of EMDR, that when the brain is stimulated bi-laterally (by either moving the eyes back and forth, or tapping sequentially on each side of the body, or use of audio pulses), and traumatic memory is held in the mind, then there is a discharge or release of the trauma. It's a rather odd discovery that was made in the late 80's, and the scientists have not quite figured it out theoretically, but it does work and the research data shows that it is effective in relieving the symptoms of trauma.

However, Parnell's book is about how, when positive thoughts are held in the mind, and then bi-lateral stimulation is applied, those thoughts become more seated, like gently tapping on a peg to seat it in its hole. The thought (usually as an image) is brought to mind to evoke a desired feeling (say, safety), and when that desired sense is felt in the body, the tapping is applied.

As an example, I was working with a woman who felt frightened a lot. I asked her to think of a person or animal who, when brought to mind, carried a sense of protection and caring for her. She thought about it, and after a little bit, the image of a lizard came to mind. She'd been very connected to lizards as a child, living on a farm and on the edge of a large forest, where these animals had given her solace in a fairly lonely upbringing. She called the lizard forth, and she tapped on her knees, "tapping it in," allowing the associated sense of safety to strengthen.

She wasn't at all sure anything had happened when she left the session, though the lizard image had been consoling in the moment. But the next time we met, she told me that she'd been walking down a street near her house, and a car had almost run her down in a crosswalk. Whereas typically she would have shot into a panic and stayed there for some time, what she noticed was that immediately the image of the lizard sprang to mind, and in her imagination began stroking her hair like a mother with her child. She saw that her system began calming down right away, and she did not carry the fright beyond the incident itself. What could have been a low-grade trauma (an overwhelm of her nervous system) was simply a jet of adrenalin.

As you can see, she did not try consciously to soothe herself, but that the work we did created an association between feeling frightened and the soothing image such that when the emotion arose, the soothing also happened. Through this image--which actually is arbitrary, and the content is only important in that a particular individual's system associates the image with the desired feeling/state--an equilibrium was reestablished and trauma avoided.

What's happening is that resources that are already there in an individual are being accessed and connected with other parts of the mind/brain. My client had the capacity for self-soothing, but just wasn't remembering how or when to do it. Her's wasn't a resource problem, it was a remembering problem.

My preference, though, is for the term re-membering a bit better, as it seems to me a little more evocative and accurate. Our psyche's inevitably become dis-membered throughout our lives, often most strongly in our childhoods (via belief systems or trauma), and its natural resources go dormant, relatively unused or unaccessed. With depression, say, states of peace and self-acceptance don't disintegrate or die, they simply become disassociated from the individual. The depressed person, in a deep way, forgets that they have this capacity to experience, well, un-depression, and it requires effort and practice to remember the capacities exist, and then to re-member the psyche so that these resources become more readily available to day-to-day life.

The wonderful thing, though, is that with most people, their forgotten resources are just in the penumbra of consciousness, and can often be quickly called in. I've seen people cycling in fear or anxiety find images that, whoosh!, connect them to a state of safety so quickly it initially surprised me. Depression sometimes is a bit more difficult; the resources are there, but instead of being in the next room, they might be downstairs in the kitchen. However, they exist, and with other supports (medication, nutrition, exercise, more social contact) they become easily available as well.

The other wonderful thing about this resource work is that the resources that a person finds are unequivocally theirs. My client's lizard image came from within her own brain, and the soothing that ensued also came from own brain and neurological system. So if that's where it arose (and not from some outside intervention, divine or medical), and she's presumably always walking around with her own brain, then the resource is potentially always available.

Then it's just a matter of remembering.

(Resources: Dr. Parnell's website; Tapping In on Amazon; EMDR's main website)