Often I work with clients on the concept of Radical Acceptance. One problem with this is that it sounds clinical and hard: “Radical Acceptance”…what’s that? So I’ll use my basement as an example of how you can use Radical Acceptance to feel better and live better:

Right now, my basement has several issues: a cluttered tool counter, unfolded linens, unorganized boxes of personal papers, water-damaged junk, and a weird smell coming from behind a chest of drawers. Today, Monday, is my day off. If I chose, I could worry about my basement and make a plan to tackle it. When I start planning by worrying, though, it often goes like this: I make a big list and plan to do hours of work, then get about a half-hour’s work done and somehow get distracted. And then, at the end of my day off, I feel frustrated with myself and can’t stop thinking about my basement.

So I’m approaching it this way, using Radical Acceptance: right now, today, as it is, my basement is perfect. The linens aren’t supposed to be folded right now. The smell isn’t so bad, and I don’t have to hang out in that area too much anyway. The personal papers are in boxes, and their condition is ideal–for today. If I feel like it, I might go down there and straighten something up. And if I do, then my basement will once again be perfect–for that moment, for that time of the day.

Radical Acceptance is about surrendering completely to the situation you’re in right now. Most of the time it has to do with really upsetting situations, such as: you’re racing to the ER with a bad cut on your hand, the pain is throbbing, and you run into traffic. There’s nothing you can do. Radical Acceptance means surrendering to the situation, taking deep breaths, soothing yourself, and allowing yourself to experience the situation without getting frantic and upset about it.

There are other examples. You might be coping with a terrible loss, a death of someone close to you or a traumatic event in your life. Radical Acceptance is a way for you to go forward with that loss, not denying it, but also not frantically resisting it and fighting it.

My basement is a much less dramatic example, but it’s the same principle: do I need to clean the basement today? No. And if I don’t, will it still be a great day? Yes. Right now, right at this moment, my basement is perfect. My day off is perfect.

Enjoy your perfect day!

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In the first few years of my career I worked primarily with teenagers and kids. I still see a few clients from these age groups, but not as many as I saw when I worked for mental-health agencies. Weekly–sometimes daily–I would hear someone say that my clients needed “anger management.” This is one of those phrases from Therapy Land that has found its way into popular culture: almost everyone knows what “anger management” is, and almost everyone thinks it’s a good thing, even if they wouldn’t be caught dead taking an anger management class.

At the risk of offending many good professionals in my field, I say: think twice before taking one of these classes. (Often enough, if you’re taking one, you’re being forced to, so you don’t have the luxury of thinking twice. But keep reading!) Whether you’re being forced to take anger management or you’re just angry a lot and someone in your life has said, “Wow, you need anger management!” it’s important to remember a few things about anger:

1) Anger, like all emotions, is neither bad nor good. It has no moral value. It is a psychophysiological response by your mind and body to circumstances around you. I like the definition of anger (included in the work of Marsha Linehan) that says anger is simply the emotion you feel when something is in your way. That’s it.

2) Anger is often useful. It can tell you a lot about your situation, yourself, other people, and what your options are. It’s hard to see how, say, road rage is useful. But even if you’re experiencing road rage, the emotion might be telling you that you are too stressed out, that you need to take a minute–or a few minutes, or an hour, or a day–to work through something, or simply take a break.

3) There are no “angry people.” There are people who get angry quite often, and people who nurse grudges or hatreds for years at a time, but again, anger is an emotional response, not a personality trait. Senator Jim Webb might disagree. He’s a champion of the Scots-Irish culture, a culture that embraces anger in a particular way, and for particular cultural reasons. But even in a culture like that, where anger is a powerful cultural phenomenon, an individual person is capable of not being angry.

4) Like many emotions, anger is not designed to be chronic. If you are nursing a grudge for long lengths of time, you should know that you’re probably doing more harm to yourself than the person who originally hurt you. This is why I agree with the idea behind anger management, if not the specific methods or intended outcomes of anger management.

5) Finally, my case against anger management. (And I would love to be proven wrong about this!) Over the years I’ve seen that many of my clients find anger management either ineffective or counter-productive. It’s usually ineffective, particularly with teenage boys. They go to anger management classes, but they don’t seem to come out with much at the end. It becomes another irritant for them, and another thing their parents are expected to enforce, which (ask any parent) is the last thing they need. The counter-productive outcome occurs when anger management classes teach people not how to understand and make use of their anger, with the goal of resolving it, but rather how to squelch their anger or find some way to define it as wrong, bad, or useless.

So if you feel you have an anger problem, by all means take steps to address it. You could even sign up for an anger management course! But look at the materials–or talk to the course leader. Find out if they help you understand and deal with your anger, with respect for the fact that it is a useful and normal human emotion.

Finally, if you’ve struggled with anger and learned something about yourself, or about emotions, or relationships, please comment on this blog. I’d love to hear (and share) your story with other normal humans who sometimes get angry.

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Today is June 6, and currently the temperature in Seattle is 47 degrees. Yes, that’s 47 degrees Fahrenheit! All this February weather has gotten me thinking about Seasonal Affect Disorder, which is real, in case you want to know. I’m originally from Minnesota, so in all honesty I’m not profoundly affected by the weather. I’ve seen worse! But it takes its toll. Especially when it feels like this pattern is a part of Global Weirding. It’s a little scary to take the dogs out in early June and bundle up like it’s still the middle of winter.

So…here’s something else that can cheer us all up. (Or at least me.) Like pretty much everybody else, I’ve been watching political events unfold this week with almost obsessive interest. I’ve been checking and re-checking my favorite political blogs–my favorite? that’s easy…go here–and following every breaking news story about Obama clinching the nomination, Clinton bowing out, and everything in between.

As I’ve been watching this historic election, I’ve felt more and more optimistic, more and more hopeful, about the direction our country is taking. And I’ve even dared to look forward to seeing clients in November. Why? Because I remember seeing clients in November 2004, and it was a hard, hard time back then. It’s no secret that I live and work in the indigo-blue city of Seattle, so the 2004 election returns were not good news for most of my clients. And for some of them, they were seriously depressing. (For a few, they were dangerously depressing!) I was really concerned, both personally and professionally, about how things were going on a national scale.

I mention all of this primarily because–as I said–I’m feeling optimistic and hopeful about current events, despite all the terrifying problems like cyclones, earthquakes, political upheaval, terrorism, global “weirding,” and so on. I’m optimistic and hopeful because I really think our nation is about to turn the page on rhetoric and policies that haven’t helped us face these problems.

But I also mention it because I’m trained as a “systems” therapist, meaning I do not see individual mood problems (for instance) simply as an individual’s problem. When someone tells me she’s dangerously depressed by election returns, I take her word for it. I don’t assume she’s just clinically depressed. I don’t assume she just has something “wrong with her brain.” I know better. Big events have big effects on individual people.

So if you have the misfortune of living and working in 47-degree weather today, take a moment to check out your favorite political blog. Things are looking up!

(Knock on wood!)

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Well–I think I need to revisit an old post on “empathy, sympathy, and compassion.”

Recently I heard from commenter “ianstrever,” who said this in response to my blog post: “You got this completely wrong. The latin roots explain the difference. Empathy contains the root of ‘em’ or ‘in.’ Thus, to empathize with someone means to be ‘in’ the same situation; to feel what they feel. Sympathy contains the root ’sym/syn’ or ‘like.’ Therefore, the sympathetic person has been in a situation that is like the one someone else is experiencing, but it is not exactly the same thing.”

Not being one who wants to get stuff like this wrong, I consulted dictionary.com, and here’s what I found (bold-face emphasis added by me):

empathy–noun. 1. The intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. 2. The imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

sympathy–noun. 1. Harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another. [...] 3. The fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble, fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration. [...] 7. Psychology. A relationship between persons in which the condition of one induces a parallel or reciprocal condition in another.

First, let’s set aside the argument about Latin roots–I’m more interested in how the words are understood and used by American English-speaking people today, even if our usage departs from the original meaning of the words.

It’s not a perfect fit, but I think these definitions support my original post: empathy is the act of understanding another person’s feelings or experiences or perspectives–”I get that you’re upset. It makes sense to me.” But one doesn’t have to share the feelings or experiences or perspectives. As it says in the definition above, empathy is the intellectual identification with another person. (And yet, the definition also says an empathic person could be having a “vicarious experiencing of” the other person’s feelings, so the waters are still a bit muddy!)

And as for sympathy, my original definition understood sympathy as sharing the feelings of another, not simply having an intellectual understanding of the feelings. “You’re upset,” a sympathetic person would say, “and I am too!” This is borne out in the definition above: “harmony of or agreement in feeling,” “the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another,” “a parallel or reciprocal condition in another.”

I was originally drawing on the work of David Burns when I wrote the post on empathy, sympathy, and compassion. I believe his understanding of empathy is consistent with my definition–it’s the act of understanding another person, if not sharing the other person’s feelings or perspective. As I said above, these definitions from dictionary.com don’t fully clarify things…the definition of empathy allows for at least a little bit of what I’d call sympathy, and the definition of sympathy allows for a little bit of compassion! But I’ll stand by my original post and continue using these three words like this:

1. Empathy: I get you.
2: Sympathy: I get you, and I share your feeling.
3: Compassion: I get you, and I want to help you.

And thanks to “ianstrever,” who challenged me to check my work and clarify my thoughts. S/he probably still disagrees with me, but it’s always good to think these things through!

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Have you noticed? Winter seems to be holding on. Each morning, the temperature can’t seem to make its way above 40 or 41 degrees. My relatives and friends in Minnesota would scoff at this, especially this year—their winter has been brutal. But even in temperate Seattle, it’s hard to feel great about the weather when you can still feel winter’s grip, no matter how much it has weakened.

I’m not one to suffer Seasonal Affect Disorder, or at least I can say that even if winter drives me a little crazy, it doesn’t render me severely depressed, sad, and despondent. But it can drag the best of us down. I’ve even talked to a few native Seattle residents who have said that March can sometimes be too much for them.

Here’s my solution: if you see the sun, drop everything and get out there. My office window faces east, so when I see clients in the late morning I find it a lot harder to concentrate with the sun streaming in. (I manage to do it, but still!) So between sessions I dash out and take in the growing light.

Another trick: pay close attention to the evening light. I noticed last night that there was still quite a bit of light in the sky at 7:45 p.m. Remember: in late December the light is gone around 4:30!

Finally, if you’re really having trouble believing that spring is on its way, take a few extra moments to look down and notice what’s happening to the landscape. Today I was driving to an appointment in the Rainier valley, and as usual I was running late. After the appointment ended I drove back the same way, but this time I noticed something astonishing: on every block, along every planting strip, hundreds of daffodils were shining in the spring sun. There they were, spreading out on both sides of the street, like a bright yellow wave of color opening up in front of me. How did I miss them when I was coming from the other direction? Was I really that late? Was my appointment really that important?

Just a few seconds is all it takes to stop and notice the breathtaking beauty of the early days of spring. Yes, it’s still chilly. But there are flowers everywhere, the moon is waxing, and the sun was shining for hours today. Did you notice? Will you promise yourself to take a look tomorrow?

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Recently a client asked me, “What’s the difference between guilt and shame?” It’s a good question, if only because so many of us experience both of these emotions. Here’s my take on it.

Guilt is the emotion we feel when we have done something we regret, something that we think (or know) was not a good thing to do. Guilt is about things we do that we aren’t proud of.

Shame is different. Shame is the emotion we feel when we think there is something about ourselves that is fundamentally bad or wrong. Shame is about things about ourselves that we aren’t proud of.

Sometimes we feel guilt that is really over the top—excessive, even obsessive guilt. Maybe we are involved in an accident, and someone else is hurt or killed, and we feel what’s called “survivor’s guilt”. That’s an example of unjustified guilt, or guilt that isn’t really about a conscious choice we made. It’s guilt run amok.

Shame (I think) is humility run amok. It’s taking humility so far that it becomes its opposite. Here’s what I mean: a person with healthy humility often feels very good about herself. Unlike shame, healthy humility is not self-deprecating or self-denying. Healthy humility is simply an outward orientation, a way of living that is other-directed. But shame is self-directed, and self-destructive. Unlike guilt, I think shame is a useless emotion. It’s a way to shut yourself down, to withdraw from relationships, to step back from your life.

Shame leads us to forget that each human person has intrinsic value, and no matter how much sorrow (and guilt!) we feel about the choices we’ve made, we are not fundamentally broken.

Bottom line: guilt—most of the time—takes us somewhere. Shame—not so much! Both have a way of getting into our lives. Counseling helps you sort all this out, look at yourself with compassion, and respond to these difficult emotions in a healthy way.

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I sometimes wonder if the one thing I deal with in my work and in my own life—the one dragon I keep slaying, and helping other people slay—is fear. I’m not a big-theory-to-describe-anything kind of person, but consider some of the evidence:

—An individual comes to counseling because he’s feeling lonesome, unloved, even unloveable. “I don’t know,” he might say, “maybe I’m depressed.” But as he talks about the difficulty of being on his own and ‘unlucky in love,’ he starts seeing how scared he is—scared to approach others, much less ask them out. Or scared to face his own demons, the thoughts and beliefs that keep him stuck, and maybe keep him single. Our work together helps him do the things that scare him, and find the love and intimacy he longs for.

—A couple comes to counseling because they’re screaming at each other and don’t know how to stop. Turns out they’re both afraid, maybe even terrified: afraid to tell the truth to each other, or say what’s really bothering them. Afraid to be honest with each other about their own contribution to the problem (”If I tell him I know I’m a part of the problem, I’m afraid he’ll just walk all over me!” one of them might say). Our work together helps the couple talk honestly, listen carefully, and—scary as it is—ask each other for what they really want.

—An adolescent comes to counseling because, well, usually because some adult who’s able to make life hard for him told him he had to! But he comes, and it sounds like the topic is behavior problems, truancy, impulsive (and maybe illegal) behaviors, unsafe sex, you know the story. But it’s not a cliche to say that this is a really scared kid, scared and maybe even panicked, trying to make some sense of his life, gain some sense of control. Our work together helps him breathe, learn how to calm himself down, and learn how to navigate his complicated life.

Right now, if you’re thinking about getting some counseling, you might feel (in no particular order) angry, upset, enraged, sad, confused, or just plain exhausted. You’re probably a pretty resilient person—after all, just thinking about getting counseling takes a little grit, to say nothing of coming in! You may be highly accomplished in your life, or feel pretty secure in general. But it’s highly possible that there’s something going on right now that frightens you. The area of your life that brought you to my site, whether it’s a relationship problem, career angst, grief, or something else entirely—if you reflect on your feelings about it, I’ll guess that fear is in there somewhere.

I help people notice their fears, understand them, and respond to them in new and life-changing ways.

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A good friend of mine introduced me to a poem by David Ray called “Thanks, Robert Frost.” I share it with you because so many clients of mine (and friends, too—and myself!) often have regrets about the past. We get angry at our past selves, frustrated that we didn’t do this, didn’t accomplish that, didn’t say or think or do the right thing.

The Buddha said that to practice compassion, one must first be compassionate toward one’s self. A major part of being compassionate toward yourself is forgiving yourself for the mistakes, shortcomings, and failures that clutter your past. I don’t think it’s right to call it “letting go of the past,” because the past is always with us, always shaping us. I think instead that it’s making sense of the past, and making peace with the past. It sounds funny to use the future tense when talking about the past, but I’ll do it anyway: the past will be all right. It’ll be all right. Here’s the poem:

Thanks, Robert Frost
by David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.

… Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

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I blogged yesterday on the glass-half-empty worldview, and—strange but true—several people, without reading my blog or knowing I wrote it, used the half-empty glass to describe their situation! So I thought I’d say more about it.

Here’s an example of how the half-empty/half-full glass doesn’t help someone deal with a problem: imagine you hate your job. (Some of you might not have any trouble imagining that!) Your boss drives you crazy, or you don’t fit in with your co-workers, or your work is underwhelming (or overwhelming)…these are just a few of the reasons why someone would be unhappy at work. The last thing you need is a counselor telling you to be chipper about your situation!

If “there is no glass,” that means you can look at your job problem from lots of different angles. Your boss is driving you crazy? We can talk about how this situation can be an opportunity for you to develop better personal boundaries, or better strategies you can use when working with difficult people. Or we can talk about how you deal with authority, how you handle someone who has more control or power than you. Your job duties are beneath your abilities? We can look at this as a sign that you’re ready to do some career development work, or even think about switching careers. Or we can talk about how you can re-invest in your current work in a new or creative way. You don’t fit in with your co-workers? We can discuss friendships in your life, or the concept of friendship itself, and how you can find ways to get closer to these people in your daily life, and get to know them better.

This is just one example of how counseling can take you in lots of different directions. If you feel “chipper” about something in your life, great! But counseling is about more than that—more than just adopting a positive attitude. It’s about your own growth and development. It’s about how you can make real changes in your life, and find deeper satisfaction in your career and relationships.

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When people say, “The glass is half empty,” you know what they mean. They’re adopting a negative view of their situation. Most people assume that counselors are in the business of convincing people that the glass is half full. Not me. I think my job is to invite people to imagine that there is no glass.

Huh?

What I mean is that it’s easy for people to look at a problem or issue in two opposing ways, and to assume that there really are only two ways to look at it. Problem is, it’s all too easy to see the downside when we’re talking about relationships, workplace challenges, even the weather! (By the way - did you get out in the sun today??) Another problem with the simplistic, half-empty/half-full views is that positive views often seem sappy or shallow, like painting a clown smile on your face.

In our work together, I’ll help you explore perspectives and approaches to your problem that you’ve never thought of. I’ll help you see yourself and your relationships in ways you might never have imagined before. Our work will always be more complex (and exciting!) than that half-filled glass of water.

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