I give thanks today for my clients. Of course I’m thankful for all the good things you bring into my office, into my life: your courage, your creativity, your good humor. I love all of that! But I also give thanks for the challenges you bring to me, even the frustrations. One client once apologized for being “so hard, so difficult.” As if it was wrong for him to bring his problems to his counselor! No, I am thankful for the problems, the anger, the tears, the worries, the regrets. So often these hard things take us closer to the heart of things: our truest selves, our deepest longings, and a life lived more beautifully, more fully. So, thank you. Thank you for choosing to work with me.

One of my favorite writers, Susan Palo Cherwien, wrote about thanksgiving. Here is her take on gratitude, and I offer you this poem with all good wishes for a happy Thanksgiving.

God is praised in gratitude.
This is Meister Eckhart’s one most excellent
and needful prayer:
Thank you.
It feeds the well of our joy.
Gratitude
Thanksgiving
In all things I have learned to give thanks.
Corrie ten Boom learned to thank God for fleas;
St. Paul, for the thorn in his flesh.
In all things
the best and most needful prayer:
Thank you.

—from Crossings, by Susan Palo Cherwien

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The other two motivators Bill O’Hanlon describes are dissed and pissed.

Dissed: this is when something terrible happens to you, or you suffer a difficult loss, and the emotional wound you suffer becomes a motivator. My favorite example is the story of Elizabeth and John Edwards (I posted about this a few weeks ago.) After their 16 year old son died in a car accident, they created the Wade Edwards Learning Lab in his memory at the high school he had attended. They used their wound to make a difference in the world. The tragedy they suffered became a powerful motivator.

Pissed: this is when you are so mad about something that you just can’t help but get involved and try to change it. One of the examples Bill O’Hanlon talks about is the filmmaker Michael Moore. Moore once told an interviewer that his big, unattractive face does not exactly belong on the big screen. But Moore makes his movies anyway because he is so furious about the problems he sees in the world. Another example is Martin Luther King, Jr., who saw the injustice of racism in this country and launched a movement to fight it.

Were you dissed? Are you pissed? These can be great motivators!

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Bill O’Hanlon’s Four Motivators. He believes there are four things that motivate people to take action in their lives, whether they’re taking action to improve a relationship, a career, or anything else in their lives that they want to change or fix.

The four motivators are (in Bill O’Hanlon’s phrasing): blissed, blessed, dissed, and pissed!

I’ll describe the first two here, and the second two in another posting.

Blissed: this means that when you’re doing something new in your life, or taking action, or volunteering, or taking a career risk, you’re doing it because you’re “blissed out” while you do it. If someone loves to be an actor, say, they’ll audition for acting jobs and work hard at it because they just feel great while they’re doing it. They’re “following their bliss,” as the bumper sticker says.

Blessed: this is when people take action in their life out of deep gratitude for some blessing they’ve received. Someone might say, “I was so inspired by my favorite teacher in high school that I decided to go into teaching myself.” Or they say, “I have so much in my life, so many gifts, such abundance, that I just have to give back, and that’s why I volunteer so much of my time.”

So here are the questions: what blisses you out? And who or what has been a blessing for you? Think about your answers to these questions. This might help you figure out what will motivate you to make changes in the here-and-now of your life.

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Why does it have to hurt? This is an ancient question for human beings. “It” is anything that changes us, forces us to grow, forces us to grow up. Relationships. Loss. Change. Connecting with another person. Separating from another person. Connecting with yourself. So many of the people I work with are asking this question. They don’t always ask me… most of the time they’re asking themselves, or the Universe, or God. And there never seems to be a good answer!

Staying with someone and working through your problems – this is painful, but it helps you gain new strength as a person.

Staying with yourself and working through your problems – not self-medicating or avoiding them, and not distracting yourself with endless activities, but paying attention to yourself with silence, stillness, journaling, exercise, and breathing… people usually avoid this because it can be painful and stressful to get closer to yourself. You might want more from yourself, or your life, or others… and that might mean more loss, more change. Ouch!

I walk this path myself, and in my work I walk alongside others who are sometimes doing it for the first time. The poet Rumi can help us, I think. Here’s one of his writings, entitled “Sky-Circles”–

The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn that?

They fall, and falling,
they are given wings.

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For those of you out there who like advice columns, I recommend Emily Yoffe. She’s the advice columnist for Slate.com, and her column is called “Dear Prudence.” In today’s column she consulted with Janis Abrahms Spring, a therapist and author I’ve recommended in a previous blog entry. I think Emily has a good take on most issues, and though her style is sometimes bracing, she usually gives people good ideas about how to resolve their problems. Check it out!

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Someone asked me this a couple days ago. Well, yes and no. First, the no part: I see people who are grieving, people who have career problems, and people who just need someone to help them through a rough time in their life. I mainly work with people on relationship problems, but people are complex, so that means my work is complex.

But I also think that in a lot of situations, relationships are really what most people are working on, even if it seems like they have a career problem, or a financial problem, or some other issue. Most people spend a majority of their waking life at work, and that means they’re interacting with people, and that means relationships. And more often than not, when someone is going through a rough time, there’s a friendship or relationship or family situation that they’re dealing with, and when we focus on those relationships, we make a lot of progress.

Think about all the people in your life… family, friends, co-workers, spouse or partner (or your wish to find a spouse or partner)… in our work together, I can pretty much guarantee that we’ll be doing some “relationship counseling”!

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People talk about intimacy, but they don’t always have the same definition of the word. So I thought I’d offer my definition and explain what I mean, because intimacy is one of the biggest issues I deal with in my work.

Intimacy (as I see it) is this: drawing closer and closer to another person without disintegrating, without falling apart. I can’t be intimate with a volcano. I can get pretty close: I can climb it, maybe walk around the edge of the crater. But if I jump in, I disintegrate. The volcano consumes me. But two people can be more intimate. If you are “standing on your own two feet” emotionally, you can get closer and closer to another person and withstand the intensity of the closeness.

An example of someone not handling intimacy well, of someone “disintegrating” when they’re emotionally close to another person, is this: you start to worry about what the other person thinks of you, or you find yourself getting defensive, or even a little panicked, because the closeness is so intense. Or you’re so freaked out about being intimate (emotionally intimate) that you hold yourself back. The other person thinks you’re cold and distant, that you don’t care. But the truth is you’re scared. You’re having a hard time calming yourself down because being close to another person is so unsettling.

So, how does it work? How do we get better at intimacy? By practicing it. By drawing closer and closer to someone, and not stepping back, or not doing the other things we do to get out of the hot spot (such as getting defensive, or giving in to anxiety, or just freaking out the way we used to do!). Being in a relationship with another person, sticking with it, noticing how the closeness pushes us to grow…this is the way intimacy makes us better, stronger, and healthier.

Intimacy can be painful. But look what happens to people, the better they get at it! It’s worth it. Your life–your self–is bigger and stronger than you know.

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…be sure you vote! Today is Election Day, and even though it’s not an “election year,” there are many issues and problems to vote on.

Why would a therapist put this on a blog that’s about counseling? If you’re wondering that, it’s because I think about voting the same way I think about other ways in which we “show up” in our lives. Sometimes people will protest something they think is unjust by not participating in it: they want us to boycott the Olympics in Beijing to protest Chinese violations of human rights… or on a very small scale, a person will withdraw from a community or a relationship because they’re angry and they want to prove a point. I think this is a mistake. If you don’t show up, you disenfranchise yourself. You no longer have a voice.

So even if you’re mad, disillusioned, cynical, or just plain tired, show up today and vote. And show up elsewhere in your life, no matter how frustrating it might be. The people around you need to hear your voice!

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Some traditions call this the Day of the Dead. In my tradition, it’s All Souls’ Day, a day to remember all who have died. Some say that on this day the space separating the living and the dead is thinner. Whatever a person thinks about life and death, this is a good day and a good time of year to reflect, and remember. In the northern hemisphere, all the world seems to be dying–leaves falling, wind picking up, clouds rolling in. A time to think about death, loss, absence.

Maybe it sounds depressing. But it is healthy to have a day or two like this on your calendar. And it’s not just about the death of persons we love. It’s also a good day to think about other “deaths” we’ve suffered–the loss of a relationship, or a way of living and being. The loss of a career, or a home. Even the loss of a worldview, or the loss of innocence.

We don’t do this to be morbid, or to have a “pity party.” When we honestly remember and acknowledge who and what has passed from our midst, then we see our present lives in a richer light. Today is a day to be grateful for those who once walked through life with us, and to recall the grief and sadness that follow in their absence. Today can be a day of silence and strength.

Or just a day of silence.

Happy All Souls’ Day.

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