Tag Archives: self help

It Only Counts if the Judge Sees You Do It . . .

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  The good thing about horse shows is that when you’re showing your stuff in the ring, you don’t have to be good all the time.  You only have to be perfect when the judge is watching you. 

I’ve been thinking about how to set reasonable goals on this becoming more functional through taming the EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM.  Which took me to thinking about horse shows and treatment centers.  That’s a match, right?  (Ah, perhaps more of a match than you’d ever believe.)

Because when you’re in the ring atop your expensive steed–no matter how horribly your horse behaves, no matter what kind of deadly mood he’s in, no matter if he’s bucking like crazy the entire way around the ring–you must have an expression on your face showing what an absolutely lovely ride you’re having.  Your horse’s head can be between his knees and his heels over your head, and you gotta be smiling as if you’re having the best time ever!  Your expression is saying that WHAT’S HAPPENING SIMPLY ISN’T HAPPENING. 

In the treatment center we teach a similar skill, FAKE IT ‘TIL YOU MAKE IT.

Thus, what about making a goal, for now, of toning down our EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEMS  when the judge can see us?  When you’re in the ring, it’s okay to twist yourself into a pretzel and pull all kinds of obvious gimics to keep yourself aboard–when the judge is turned the other way.  So, here’s the deal.  We “fake it ’til we make it” and “smile like we are having the finest, comfortable ride” when we’re in public. Or pick one arena and make that your showring.  Home or work.   Or, maybe just with one other person you want to relieve of your easy to erupt anxiety.  (I know one…no two…no…)

Why put on a show?  Why not just “go with your feelings” all the time.  For starters, you will drive other people crazy or away.  More important, you’ll pass up the chance to gain a little management over that inner force. As “real” as emotions “feel” they’re just feelings and not in line with facts. People who are not ruled by their EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYTEMS have better relationships, work experiences, and better lives. 

What’s fun is that by pretending you’ve got it together you get it more together.    

  I haven’t forgotten the Mexico confession. Working up to it.

Avoidance Anxiety… Will You Calm Down so I can Calm Down

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  I’m an “unabler,” the fella on “Intervention” admitted.

Of course, he meant to say he was an enabler.  I like his version better.  He was describing the “unabler” as someone who gets rid of her anxiety by taking the other person “off the hook”–paying their bills when they are spending their money on drugs or cars and apartments they cannot afford…for starters.

Bored? http://Twitter.com/mysteryshrink

Enabling is just way we respond because we are “intolerant” of other people being anxious. We are “allergic” the other person being anxious.

Well, guess what? No matter how perfectly we try to arrange our lives and how carefully we try to arrange the lives of others…People we know and love get anxious.  Sinking into their EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEMS, they spray anxiety on us.  “I can’t do it!  It’s not my fault!  The teacher didn’t tell me!  I’m going to miss my plane and then I’m REALLY GOING TO FALL APART. No, it’s hopeless, there’s no way out of total disaster!” they insist.  And we are infected. We dive into our own endless pools of EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE.  We are stuck trying to get rid of OUR anxiety by ridding them of THEIR anxiety.

If you’re as porous as I am, if the “other” is someone I know, much less love, or care about–(Okay, could be the sacker a the grocery in a bad mood, but he’s really a hard worker)–if the person is someone close, all he has to do is open the morning paper with a “whack” and I’m in there… boom… trying to talk him into having a good day.  Just to help him, of course.

The many faces of the please CALM DOWN so I can CALM DOWN routine are too many to cover in one day, but here are a few favorites:

Minimization: “Oh, it’s not that bad.”

The Judge: “You      caused this to happen, you know.” 

Miss Lake Superior:  “You know what I WOULD DO…”

The Miss Lake Superior First Runner Up  whose response is so enlightening she (ah, yes, our Dr.L) is awarded the tiarra:  “I’m not listening to your whining. In the same situation I would not have: EVER MARRIED THAT GUY, GONE ON EVEN ONE DATE WITH THAT GUY, OR SPOKEN WITH A GUY who had a friend whose mother was a smoker or didn’t agree with me…if you had been lucky enough to BE ME,   you wouldn’t have these worries now, but here you are…so tough.”

We’ll go with these few for now, minimizing, judging, claiming we’d do better in the same situation.  Guilt Alert: Remember, if you are reading this, you are probably a person who’s not much of a problem for others and most importantly, you have a capacity to look at YOUR OWN BEHAVIOR. So, pat yourself on the back for having that kind of guts as you catch yourself doing back-flips to calm someone else down because you too, are a little pourous.  THE REALLY GOOD NEWS: When we breathe, “Cool air in, Warm air out,” in place of the above routines, we reduce our stress. Along with not being quite such a pain to other people.    

 . . . ah, Mexico.

The Eye of the Beholder: The Lawn Mower Fueling Incident

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“Which is more important? The world that is made up of facts, or the WORLD AS YOU SEE IT?”

On an afternoon in August, I was mowing the lawn when I ran out of gas.  Whew.  As if perspiration wasn’t already blinding me.  I located the full gas can and returned to the mower in the middle of the back yard.  I opened the gasoline hatch and rotated the handle off the can. 

Great. The gas can had an opening about four inches in diameter and flat on the top of the vessel and the hatch in the mower was less than an inch across.  How was I supposed to do this?  The heat was killing me.  My EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM was launching me into idiot ramblings such as, ”Why am I the one out here in this heat?  I do everything around here! I’m not even supposed to be out in the heat. Who left the mower half empty anyway? My whole life has been just like this.  Me getting stuck with all the hideous jobs.”  And . . . for leading role in Playing Victim, the nominees are . . .

Okay. So fine.  I could make this work.  (Motto as a child:  If at first you don’t succeed, force it.)

I’m not helpless, right?  I go into the house and search for a funnel for twenty minutes. Right. We didn’t have a hammer.  What made me think I could find something as specific as a funnel? “Why am I the one always stuck without the right tools?  I could use the urn from the coffee machine . . . no, that sounds risky as far as future coffee.  I collect several manilla folders from my home office and head out, patting myself on my sweaty back because I am such a genius. 

Back at the mower, I make a funnel out of one folder and pour.  It collapses.  Fine. My hands are shaking like crazy.  I’m blind. A bit dizzy. Yet, clever girl that I am, I persevere.  I made a tiered, graduated funnel using six manilla folders.  And it works!  I stand over the mower wondering exactly what the chances are that a breeze could set the mower, gasoline folders, and me up in a mushroom of flames.  Particularly since I can’t control my body movements my knees being shot and all.  My mood?  Victim has racheted up to snivelling and just wait until . . .

I turn to return the cap to the gasoline can.  Which is when I notice that the “cap” for the tank, which I had unscrewed and set aside, is actually an excellent, pliable funnel.

This is my world, and welcome to it.

Tomorrow: How Much Does Your PERCEPTION determine your life?

The Wrestler: Praise Can Be Dangerous

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 If you were famous enough to have YOUR OWN ACTION FIGURE would you have Self Confidence and Self Esteem?  More to nail on the Psychobabble Wall of Things that Aren’t True:  If you get enough Praise . . . you will have SELF CONFIDENCE  and SELF ESTEEM. 

But wait!  Praise is a good thing, right? After all, praise makes us FEEL good. We’ve even told parents and teachers that praise (social reinforcement) is the way to get kids to accomplish tasks. We’ve told husbands and wives that praising their spouses can MAKE THEM FEEL LOVED.  Can’t get too much praise, can’t give too much praise . . . right? 

Maybe.  But, What is, “Do these pants make me look fat?”  but one more attempt to suck approval out of another person and duck responsibility for ourselves? (By the way, you regular readers know and have taken the pledge to never, ever, ask anyone that question, or any similar question. You guys remember that any part of your body or personality that you complain about grows to enormous proportions in the eyes of the other.) 

The problem is, if you buy that enough love and praise results in Self Confidence and Self Esteem, it follows then that, if you DO NOT FEEL loaded up with these feathery showstoppers, self-confidence and self-esteem, you must have–somewhere along the line–missed out on sufficient praise.  Now, I wish the worst part of this misguided notion is that we will overblame others (See “What’s Love Got to Do With It?)  . . . but that’s not the worst part.  The most damaging result of this belief is believing –   “I don’t have self confidence and self esteem because I did not get the love and praise I needed AND I did not get the love and praise I needed to be a person with self confidence and self esteem BECAUSE I’M NOT DESERVING OF LOVE and PRAISE”.  And that’s just not right. The whole chase approval, get praise routine is a dead end.  The movie The Wrestler speaks to this issue with clarity, pain, and beauty.   

Warning:  Plot information to follow.  If you haven’t seen The Wrestler and you want to be surprised, stop now. Also, you probably want to avoid the movie if a lot of nudity, a lot, is going to bother you. 

The Wrestler, Randy the Ram (Mickey Rourke), reaches physical maturity to discover he doesn’t know how to participate in adult relationships.  At about the same time he starts spending hours at the gym and learns what body-building enhancing drugs can do for him.  Wha-la!  The Ram is getting noticed.  Being admired.  He even has his own Randy the Ram action toy on the market.

Tomorrow:  Is having an action toy in your image the same as being a real person?

  
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

Confidence, Ssmonfidence

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 Yep.  Nail another of the reliable psychobabble topics to the wall.  Just rip it out of your head and ram a spike through it.

We’re supposed to have this SELF-CONFIDENCE  BEFORE we accomplish tasks, projects, and relationships.  Fine.  So Just where are we supposed to get S-C? 

We can’t buy it, obviously, since people with lots of stuff are missing S-C as often as the rest of us bargain hunters.  Okay, so your parents, right?  Your parents, if they loved you, were SUPPOSED to GIVE you Self-Confidence.  So that worked, right?

Well, no.  So, phooey there.  Every parent I’ve ever worked with loved their children and most desperately wanted to GIVE their children S-C.  Their love didn’t do it, and given that little confession, I guess you get it that a psychololgist can’t GIVE it to you, either. 

Things are looking pretty desperate.  But wait!  We can marry someone who loves us enough to GIVE us Self-Confidence.  Right.  Talk about a way to wear out a relationship.  And your kids?  Even if they do everything right and the family is doing great. . . Nope, they can’t GIVE it to you. Even when they try very hard.

So what now?  Oh, yeah.  We already nailed that S-C business to the psychobabble-I’m-not-going-to-look-for-Stuff-That-Doesn’t-Really-Exist-WALL.

This Self Confidence business has held us back long enough.  Part of the effort toward a life based more on facts, and less on wild emotions, toward a life with more solid successes that come from steady progress (no eat-cookies and lose weight, send in your old gold and go to Tahiti,  or borrow more money to save yourself money funny business) . . .

Means facing the REALITY that to accomplish anything, we have to take the first step, SELF-CONFIDENCE or NO SELF-CONFIDENCE.  The only thing that matters is that first step.  Then the one after and the one after.  Knowing we will fail sometimes.  That if we aren’t knocked around a bit, our goals are way to low. 

As for where having 14 babies while unemployed and single comes from? . . . Now there’s a woman taking LIFE RULED by the EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM TO A NEW LEVEL.

Anxiety: The “Women in Therapy” Incident

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 Okay.  Some more on FUSION . . . sticking yourself to someone else’s anxiety.  Making THEIR anxiety about YOU. 

We lose power over ourselves when we cannot operate separately . . . when our “mood” is determined by the “mood” of another person. When our sense of doing okay is dependant on another person (usually a spouse or a child) doing okay . . . we are going to try very hard to keep the other person calm so that we can be calm.  Though, of course, we deny such a motivation.  We say we are twisting into a pretzel to keep them calm . . . because we are just TRYING TO HELP THEM. 

  Operating to keep everyone around you calm is very tiring. 

The “Women in Therapy” Incident:  At last, this example is a time when I actually managed to stay separate, calm, in charge, and barely ruffled.  At least I did in “Women in Therapy, Part 1.”

  Part One.  My husband had an important deposition on this particular afternoon.  I was out at the stable schooling my horse in a jumper ring away from the barn.  The stable phone at the ring chimed several times, but as it was always for the kids that rode and dismounting to pick it up was a real hassle, I paid no attention.  When I finished riding and returned to the main barn the phone continued to ring and, as I was right by it and not on a horse, I answered it.  It was my husband–ballistic.  His car wouldn’t start and he’d been trying to reach me. (We lived near the stable.) I rescued him as quickly as possible. Still he filled the twenty minutes to downtown in a rain of fury . . . of course returning to the faithful topic of the time and money I spent on the horses. 

Here’s the thing.  My big moment of emotional steadiness.  I did not get angry or even particularly anxious. I knew he wasn’t really upset by me. I knew  he was okay with the horses.  He was anxious about the trial to come and providing the best deposition he could for his client.  What he said, for once, didn’t set off defensiveness. I took in my book and read in the lobby during his deposition.  On the way home he apologized as I knew he would.  And I said I was okay, I knew he knew I would never have intentionally left him out to dry.

Okay.  That was Part One.  You did notice the halo and the little blue birdies fluttering about?   Cue up “Whistle While You Work.”

Tomorrow, Part Two.  It’s not nearly as lovely. 

 

It’s really hard to change the way we habitually deal with anxiety.  So celebrate your little victories and do not water the times when your EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM takes charge and you waste time, can’t sleep, make a fool of yourself, irritate someone you love, procrastinate, get into too big a hurry and make a mess… and others. 

Think of the emotional field of people, job, traffic, weather, friends, etc. as the GARDEN IN WHICH YOU LIVE.  And, while we’re MAKING UP THE WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE (since we humans can’t help it.) Your garden has rows and rows and rows of blooming possibilities. Some rows were planted for you (family) and some you planted yourself.

A garden is a CHANGING ORGANIC ELEMENT.  We tend to the of the SELF as stagnant.  Fixed.  Maybe even broken and stuck that way.  A good part of our SELF GARDEN we keep hidden from others, some from ourselves.  The good news?

A garden CHANGES ALL THE TIME.  Some change is out of our control–weather–so we’re not going to waste energy trying to change what is beyond our power, right?  If you’re short, you’re short. If you’re young you’re young and if you’re not young, you’re not–no matter how many Extenz drinks you buy (Yep, you only pay shipping and handling, of course. But have you really ever thought how much it might cost to receive a soft drink through the mail? And that doesn’t count how much it costs for them to “handle” your drink–another one of those “let’s just make up a figure” expenses.) 

Or creams or surgeries or, God forbid, have you even seen that full-body spandex thing info-mercial? It’s a garment that, somehow, the women in the ad are able to get into and the “before” and “after” shots are prit-tee impressive. I will mention that the photos are all of women standing.  Attempt to sit down or breathe and all bets are off.

Where is Yoda when I need him?  Manana.

Losing It… Losing One’s Self

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 The woman who lost 100 pounds on burgers is an example of someone who could listen to her THINKING self amidst the crowds telling her what she should do. 

Well, doc, you say, when do we get to HOW to engage the THINKING GUIDANCE SYSTEM?

Now.  A start.  Your THINKING GUIDANCE SYSTEM is in gear when YOUR BEST THINKING is your point of reference for decisions.  Remember, only your TGS considers options in a thoughtful way, your EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM , has only one goal (no matter what rubberly rationalization you’re using) and that one thing is —-

    do whatever you have to do to rid yourself of anxiety.   

An easy place to start the task of recognizing when we are slipping from our thinking point of reference to an emotionally driven position, is to talk about FUSION.  FUSION …is when your actions and “feelings” are determined, not by your own thinking point of reference, but determined by “catching” the anxiety of another. 

Examples:

A woman on a plane is reading a novel.  The man next to her asks what she’s reading. She shows him the title and says she really likes the author.  The man sneers and replies staring out the window, “Yeah, I guess if you can’t read more complex works-you have to stay with books like that.”  (Do you feel it?)

 While in graduate school I went on a cruise with a friend who was doing a seminar for “Adult Children of Alcoholics” (a fad diagnosis that has, gladly, passed). I was able to pay minimal cost as an additional person in the seminar leader’s cabin. The first day I attended an introductory group session in which emotional overdrive and ”group-think” were in high gear.   Group-think happens in low functioning gatherings in which each participant is encouraged to become “one” with the group by confessing similar experiences. Refusal to become “one” with the group is labelled as insanity or denial. When it was my time to “join” I thought back really hard to uncover how my life had been affected by addiction.  Then I had it.   I actually said that I was affected by addiction when my mother was ill and taking cortisone to stay alive. (Which didn’t work all that long. She died at barely 42.) 

The point?  Before I felt the suck of the group anxiety, I’d NEVER thought of my mother’s desperate efforts to deal with her fatal illness as CAUSING ME to GO THROUGH the wretched helplessness and personal trauma–of an adult survivor from a drug-distorted home.  Never.  But for those shining few minutes… I’d given up mom… and REALITY… to be part of the group.

The really scary part was that I didn’t realize until after the meeting what had transpired.  How I’d lost (given up) my point of reference.  What if I hadn’t realized what happened?  What if the warm affirmation of the group had propelled me into a life living out a new label?

Just saying.  Later.  More fusion.