So, this is it. Today is my fortieth birthday. I’ve been telling people that I have a lot of “energy” about this event. I’m not in crisis—believe me, I checked!—but I have a lot of interest in the fact that the earth has circled the sun forty times since that Monday morning in rural Minnesota when my parents headed for the hospital. I know that the earth herself couldn’t care less how old I am, and that I am one among billions, but I confess I’ve been thinking about myself a lot lately. Who am I? How am I doing compared to my 30-year-old self? (Much better, generally speaking.) And what’s next?

One of the things I decided to do to mark this event was to follow my own advice and write a letter to my older self, specifically, my 50-year-old self. I wrote it in longhand, just to be certain that it won’t find its way into cyberspace. (Some things need to be between me and myself…or is it myselves?) But I can tell you it was a not-too-long message of greeting and reflection for the enjoyment of the person I will be ten years from now. I told him what I haven’t yet accomplished for us, what I am proud to have gotten done, and some of my hopes for him. And I shared with him my compassion for our 30-year-old self, who (as I noted above) was in much worse shape than I hope either of us will be.

This is more than a silly, self-obsessed thing to do. It really is a healthy way to get in touch with oneself. Who am I? Who was I? Who do I want to become? I often encourage clients to do this exercise if they’re feeling apprehensive or anxious about their future, or if they’re feeling regret about their past. Can you speak with wisdom and affection to your older self, and (this might be much harder) your younger self? Thinking of yourself this way—in the third person—can free you to live more comfortably in your own skin, as you, like our home planet, move into the future, year by year.

Oh, and I asked the 50-year-old me to write back and tell me everything!

My five-year-old self.

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One of my goals in the next year (or two) is to write an abecedary. An abecedary can take many forms, but for my purposes it would be a small book with 26 chapters. Each chapter would be an essay on concepts I use with clients in therapy, one for each letter of the alphabet. A is for attitude, perhaps: how does your attitude determine your mood, the quality of your relationship, etc.? L is for listening (I’m in favor of listening, and it’s more than you might think it is). You get the idea.

I don’t have all the chapters worked out, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have a good time with chapter three. C is for courage. I’ve written about this before. It takes courage to pursue the relationship you really want, to take your career in a new direction, to confront yourself—and then your partner—about a problem, or about your deepest wish. It certainly takes courage to draw close emotionally to someone who really matters to you, and who (by virtue of being human) is capable of harming or grieving you.

But I also want C to stand for curiosity. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the lack of curiosity has killed many relationships. If you have the foresight—and the humility—to try to look at the world through your partner’s eyes, you might be less upset by what’s going on with your partner, and feel more free to take action. I like to say that when a couple is shouting at the top of their lungs, they are expressing zero curiosity about the other. No wonder they’re at each other’s throats. I’ve noticed that in any of the hundreds of friendships, working relationships, and other relationships I’ve had over the years, my own curiosity has opened up a lot of opportunities for growth and intimacy.

And yet, I also want C to stand for creativity! I want to talk about the importance of play in relationships, and playfulness in your thinking and behaving throughout your life. Can you recognize your own absurdity and laugh at yourself? If not, I don’t like your chances for happiness. And the happiest couples I’ve worked with have been the ones who allow for delightful creativity, spontaneity, and playfulness in their relationship…even if there’s also been a lot of hurt feelings and hard times.

Lots of people assume that in Therapyland, C stands for communication. Maybe. But I think the three words above are more of a challenge for most people than communication skills. In any case, chapter three is going to be a snap!

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Lately I’ve been acquainting myself with an uncomfortable feeling: I’ve been going to workout classes at my health club and feeling incompetent.

Pathetic, even! The kickboxing class was challenging, invigorating…and mystifying. I’m a good verbal learner—I know how to read, write, and think my way through a problem—but I’m not a good visual learner. I can’t watch you do the kickboxing routine perfectly and quickly imitate your moves. Step aerobics: same thing. I kept at it—I stayed till the bitter end, dammit!—but I had to stay close to one particular move that I could do, and just keep doing it while the instructor taught to the top of the class. Spin class is much easier on the self-esteem, if not the body: I can’t humiliate myself too much when riding a stationary bike. Coming up: aquafit, so I’ll have a chance to look the fool and be half naked all at the same time!

Why am I doing this? Of course I want to get in shape, and there’s no better time for that than these long summer days, especially since I finished up a ton of work projects last month and have a lot more time. I always feel better when I’m at fighting weight, which is a very personal measurement, as I’m sure you know. We all tend to like a certain weight, a certain feeling, a certain look. I’m not far away from it, but I have to work at it.

But I’m also doing it because I think it’s healthy to do things one isn’t good at. As a therapist, I have to be highly competent in my job: I’m working with human beings in vulnerable, complicated situations in their lives. I have to be tip top! But step class? That’s a perfect opportunity to get used to the feeling of incompetence. I say this not because it’s fun or virtuous to feel silly or make a fool of yourself, but because it teaches you that you will spend your life getting better at things, so it’s good to cultivate a healthy humility about it. I’m always learning, and there’s a time in the trajectory of learning when the learner feels incompetent.

Which brings me to the work I do with clients. I often wonder (sometimes aloud, sometimes not…depends!) whether certain clients are highly uncomfortable with feeling incompetent. None of us likes the feeling, but some of us are deeply uncomfortable with it. So when they discover their incompetence at, say, relationship skills, they get resistant, distant, frustrated, even furious. Their partner has to drag them to counseling, and they sit there, arms folded, fending off the feeling that they’re just not that good at all this relationshippy-talky stuff. So I invite them to, well, look at it the way you’d look at a step aerobics class. (Unless you happen to be excellent at that!) Embrace your incompetence. Realize you’ve got a lot to learn, and everyone has been in this position. Take a deep breath, and start asking questions—of me, of your partner, and (most importantly) of yourself. What do you want to know? What do you want to learn? It’ll be hard to find out until you accept the fact that you’re not too good at this. (Yet!)

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Are you thinking about getting some counseling? Good idea! And if so, I suggest you stop wondering whether you need it, and definitely stop asking the question, “Are things bad enough that I need to go to counseling?”

I work alongside a couple of massage therapists in my little office complex, and sometimes I envy them. I envy how their field is understood by most people: anyone can say, “Oh, I had a massage today, and then I got a haircut, and the sun’s out, so…a great day!” But rarely will you hear someone say, “I set up a counseling appointment to work on my emotional-regulation problems, and to finally face the fact that I’m not being very mature in my relationship.” No, most people won’t say that, even though it would be a remarkably mature thing to say!

So that’s why most people look at counseling as a last-ditch effort to pull their little airplane out of its fiery plunge, or see it as something you do if—unless you get some counseling—your life or relationship is about to collapse.

I started seeing a therapist myself in May 2006, which is one of the reasons why I had enough confidence to leave a great job here and start my own private practice. I knew that I needed someone to help me get a better handle on myself, my goals, and some of the ordinary neurotic software that was still running in my very normal human mind. I wasn’t about to lose my partner, or my job. I wasn’t becoming self-destructive, and certainly wasn’t within a thousand miles of feeling suicidal. But I knew I needed a hand. I still see her, and these days we work on who I am, what kind of relationship I want to keep cultivating with my partner, how my beliefs and attitudes affect how I run my business, and so on. There’s always something to explore.

And often enough I feel like I’ve just had a massage when I leave her office. Take it from me: you aren’t “psycho” if you’re seeking counseling. If you’re taking this step, you’re probably one of the most mature and courageous people you know.

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I risk hypocrisy by posting this, but I want to talk about the importance of rest and relaxation. I’ll admit up front that I’m a son of hardworking Midwestern parents, and I’ve taken their life lessons to heart. This means that I don’t really start relaxing on a vacation until perhaps the third or fourth day, and even then it’s hard to really let go of all the different concerns and issues that preoccupy me in my profession. But I keep working on this, and one way I do it is by meditating on the activities (or lack thereof) of other mammals.

Think about it: You don’t have to be a dog or cat companion to know that once the other (non-human) mammals on this planet have fed themselves, relieved their sexual needs, provided reasonable security, and found shelter, they just … lie around. If I surprise my dogs by coming home in the middle of the day, I find them snoozing. What is it about humans that we can’t just let it go on a regular basis?

I suggest that we post pictures around us that remind us of the restful wisdom of other mammals. This is one of the reasons I like to take pictures of my dogs at rest. It reminds me to get over myself and plan for weekly times of R&R. Ideally, we would all unplug at least one full day per week. If you’re feeling stressed and exhausted, stop for a moment and recognize that the non-human mammals around you, well, they think it’s odd that you’re not napping!

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First, sorry for the long blog silence: I was a trainer at a week-long conference, then on vacation. At the conference—which was about organizational development—we talked a lot about three possible reasons why change doesn’t happen in organizations: dissatisfaction isn’t high enough, the people don’t have a strong enough vision, or there isn’t enough awareness of the first steps they need to make for change to happen.

Naturally, I thought about this in my work with clients (and, as it happens, in my own personal goal-setting). Here’s how you can apply it to yourself and your relationship:

1. Is change not happening because you’re not dissatisfied enough? As much as you might be upset about the state of your relationship, your health, or your career, you might also feel comfortable with the overall state of things, and therefore unwilling to change. An obvious example of this is the frustration people suffer around weight loss: it’s hard to not eat the French fries because as much as you want to look and feel better, you’re not so dissatisfied with how you look and feel that you’re willing to push the plate away from you.

2. Do you lack a strong vision of the future you want? I got some good advice when I started my private practice a few years ago: I was told to envision my ideal client, the person (or persons) with whom I most want to work. I’m not everyone’s therapist, and not everyone is my client, so to design my business successfully, I had to clarify my vision.

3. Are you having trouble identifying first steps for change? Maybe you’re frustrated in your career, but you’re stuck because you’ve never been in this particular situation before, and you can’t figure out what to do today and tomorrow to change it. You feel the dull drag of your daily tasks, or the pressure of a difficult boss, and you sit at your desk, thinking, “Now what?”

If any of these three situations is a problem for you, then it’s going to be hard to overcome your natural (and even healthy) resistance to change. In counseling, I’ve worked with clients on all three problems, depending on the situation. (Often enough, the typical person—myself included—is working on at least two of them.) Which one is bogging you down?

And if you want some background on the organizational-development theory behind all this, here it is!

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Like a lot of people I know, I don’t keep a regular journal. I used to pretend I was the journaling type—after all, I’m a therapist. Aren’t we supposed to be the kind of people who keep long and profound journals?? So I’d buy a journal in the new year, find it collecting dust months later, and feel frustrated. Now I’ve just accepted it: I don’t keep a journal. But I do do product-cloud journaling from time to time.

Product clouds look like this. They’re simply a list of things or products, organized in the rough shape of a cloud. The font size of each object in the cloud depends on the popularity or importance of the object. A product cloud of 2008 presidential candidates, for example, would have ‘Obama’ and ‘McCain’ in large font sizes (Obama would be somewhat larger than McCain), and ‘Kucinich’ much smaller. ‘Clinton’ would be nearly as large as McCain. You get the idea. And for a non-journaling person like me, this is a great way to get things off my mind and onto paper.

Normally, if I can just get all the things on my mind disgorged onto a notepad, I can think, feel, and act with clarity. I don’t need to reflect at length on my life, or my career, or my relationships. I just need to clear out all the little things going on in my head. Here’s an example of a cloud I wrote this morning (click on the image for a larger view):

You can see, then, that laundry just needs to happen tonight, and that I’ll be doing something about my checkbook and paperwork today, even if I don’t make it to the grocery store. After doing this cloud, I felt a lot more organized, and the “sluggish Monday feeling” was almost gone. (Almost. It’s still a little early in the day.)

Oh, and here’s one more rule about this journaling technique: you are free to do it whenever you like. You don’t have to do it daily, or at all. If the spirit moves you, give it a try. I say this because a lot of my clients are like I used to be: they think they’re “supposed to” do these kinds of self-help things, and the “supposed-to” obligation short-circuits the whole thing, making it just another task, another product in the cloud. Give it a try if you like, or…don’t! Either way, I wish you a non-sluggish Monday.

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Long ago—nearly half my lifetime ago!—I had two cats. I was working as an administrative assistant at the time, in Minneapolis, and every other week or so, I would take time over lunch to go to the high-end pet store around the corner from my office. I’d purchase expensive organic cat food, and then head back up the street for my own lunch. And where did I often go for lunch? McDonald’s.

Huh???

I remember noticing this at the time and laughing at myself: why was I feeding my cats better than I fed myself? Why was their health more important than my own? And now that I have dogs, I am noticing some of the same patterns, even if the choices I make are slightly different. If I have that third glass of wine and feel less-than-stellar the next morning, I notice that my dogs feel just fine and are enjoying the morning walk. If I overeat, or overwork, or let myself get caught up in the daily stress of being a human, I’ll come home and see that my dogs had been napping contentedly all day.

To some degree, of course, this is inevitable: it’s the humans in my house who have to earn the money, pay the bills, do the laundry (I haven’t figured out how to train the dogs on that one, alas), and so on. But I have a lot of control over my life…a lot more than I sometimes assume. Sometimes that third glass of wine was a good choice, and worth the morning-after feeling. But other times I need to be conscious of my need for a good night’s sleep, something that my dogs enjoy every night of the year.

This self-care test is simple, and it suggests immediate solutions. If your dog is living better than you, there are steps you can take today to improve your daily routines. (And if you don’t have a dog, don’t you think you should get one?)

Hoku and Stella, living their happy lives.

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I was talking with my sister last week about my recent post about ‘lesser selves’ and how we can ‘bind’ them to achieve the goals that our best selves really want. She sent me this link to an excerpt of a book by Geneen Roth (on Oprah’s website), and though the book in its very title is directed toward women, many of the ideas resonate deeply with me, and apply to men.

I have a history of dieting, emotional eating, and being preoccupied with food. I’ve never been a heavy guy, but I know what it’s like to be on the upper end of my ‘zone,’ if you want to call it that. It’s hard not to have preoccupations like this, given how many anxious and conflicted attitudes about food (and addictive substances, and so on) run through our culture like a river in spring. But it’s healthy to step out of that river and, bottom line, be gentle with yourself. Self-abusive diets never work, and in some sense they shouldn’t: why should self-abuse yield positive results?

After my conversation with my sister, I reflected on the way I currently approach food and drink, and their relationship to both my body and my emotional life. Here’s my simple little set of rules. I offer them not as a template for you to follow–you are free to do as you like, and my way isn’t necessarily your way. But it might get you thinking about the underlying assumptions you have about food, or alcohol, or any of the other objects and activities that enrich life, but also make it challenging. So…here’s how I see it:

1. Eat and drink whatever food and beverages you like. Enjoy life.
2. Don’t eat anxiety, stress, anger, or sadness. Notice those emotions and work with them. Don’t eat them.
3. Appreciate your health, and your body. Notice your good feelings. Look with kindness upon your body, exactly as it is today.

Too simple? I don’t think so. First off, #1 and #2 really work well together. I promise you I won’t eat too many potato chips if I’m not eating stress. If I’m working through my stress, breathing, and generally following a good pattern of self-care, I’ll have a few potato chips, but a few will be enough. And #3, though it sounds simple, is oh so hard for so many of us. It requires a little more explanation.

A few years ago, when I was a therapist at Group Health, I was in a training session on cognitive-behavioral therapy. Our great trainer, Sandra Coffman, told us about a meditation class she was taking. Everyone was seated on the floor, meditating, breathing and taking in all the silence and loveliness of the meditation exercise. And then the instructor said, “Now, let us all notice our non-headaches.”

<pause>

What was that?

He wanted the class to begin noticing the wonderful, healthy experiences they were having in that moment–having, but not being conscious of. They were all enjoying non-headaches, but they weren’t focusing on that. #3 in my little plan is a lot like this. There is a tremendous amount of power in consciousness: “I don’t want to become like my mother,” you might be thinking. Well, you’re conscious of it, so chances are you won’t. “I am noticing that my body is healthy, and beautiful,” you tell yourself. Well, you’re conscious of it, so chances are your body will become even more healthy and beautiful.

But don’t take my word for it. Take some time to be in silence, to breathe, and to ask yourself your own questions about how you can approach your goals, and your life.

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Every once in a while I notice themes cropping up in my work with several clients. Lately one of those themes has been the ordinary and lovable absurdity of human beings. So often we suffer and struggle because we fail to laugh at ourselves, and miss out on the opportunity to look at ourselves with a humorous awareness of our own absurdity.

One of my favorite films is the wicked (in all the good ways) Dogma, a film that spoofs the Catholic church and organized religion in general. In one scene, a human is talking to an angel, and she’s commenting on how ridiculous the angel’s concerns are. The angel (played by Alan Rickman) responds, “There’s nothing funnier than the ridiculous faces you people make mid-coitus.” It’s one of my favorite comments on human sexuality, and supports my belief that if you can laugh (kindly) at your sexual self, you will be much more likely to enjoy great sex.

Most of my clients come to counseling with problems that are dead serious. It’s a big mistake to just minimize those problems and laugh them away. At the same time, it’s also healthy to be aware of your own silliness, your own fallibility, your own absurdity. To illustrate, I’ll present a photo of a creature (in my care) who has no problem looking ridiculous!

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