Say the Odd Thought

They say some things are better left unsaid. If you're in church, court or a board meeting, this is probably true. But not in the therapy session. It's all fair game here, no matter how odd it may seem.

This is one of the best ways therapy is different from other types of relationships. Censoring your words is not necessary - in fact, I'd recommend you don't.

Sometimes these odd thoughts give us great information. You're talking about a co-worker and suddenly your sister's face pops into your head. Whenever you think of your hometown you get a lump in your throat. You just had a fantasy about yelling at your therapist. Whenever someone mentions the ocean chills run down your spine. You've been zoned out for the past couple minutes and didn't hear a word the therapist said. In the rest of the world, these thoughts, feelings and impulses would be kept quiet. But in therapy, fair game.

These odd thoughts can help us understand deeper parts of you - parts of your self few people see. If I had to summarize the function of therapy to one single element, it would be deeper understanding of ones self. Not just the stuff on the surface, the deeper material too. Some odd thoughts have deep meaning, even deeper than you might be aware of. Kind of like dreams.

You've heard of the concept of the "Freudian Slip"? That's when the deeper thought sneaks out past our censors and into our speech. Like telling a love interest you like their sex, when you meant to say socks. This odd thought thing is similar, only you're discussing all the slips you thought about but managed not to say.

It's a little risky sharing these thoughts you normally keep to yourself. But soon you'll see how helpful it is. Give it a shot.

Intimacy Starts With "I"

A little something for couples (written to men, but applies to everyone):


The most vital, passionate, intimate relationships are experienced by two people who know who they are as individuals and who have a deep desire to share their self with their partner. Intimacy is not about being dependent on one another or completely independent. It involves true interdependence: two people coming together to support and love each other deeply while still maintaining their own identity.

Think back to the beginning of your relationship, when you first got serious. You couldn’t keep your hands off each other. It didn’t matter if you were in the car, in the movie theater, or in her parents’ living room. You were thinking about being with her, and she was thinking about being with you. School, work, friends, sleep—nothing else mattered.

Let’s explore the circumstances for a moment. You had your life, and she had hers. You had your own place; so did she. You had different friends. You had a deep, rich history that was brand new to her, and she had her own interesting past. You talked about all sorts of things, agreeing on some, disagreeing on others. You were different people with different lives, and that’s part of what made your courtship tantalizing. You were crazy about each other. Her stories fascinated you, and you were eager to tell her yours. The two of you looked forward to all the incredible things you were going to experience together, especially sex. You were free to be yourself, and she was mesmerizing.

As your relationship progressed toward marriage, the two of you drew closer to one another and you shared more and more of your lives together. You may have found that you were willing to spend less time with your own friends, and she was too. Instead of “I,” “me,” and “mine,” the language of the relationship changed to “we,” “us,” and “ours.” Because of your love and desire to make each other happy, you occasionally put your own needs and wants on hold to accommodate her. These personal sacrifices are some of the most loving acts we do for one another.


Over time, however, this accommodation can have its downside. Surrendering your own wants is not always best for the relationship. For example, it may not be a big deal for you to agree to spend your vacation with your mother-in-law this year, but spending every summer with her for the next forty years may cause some problems. As a couple, you face numerous situations that require each of you to state your honest opinion rather than to acquiesce. Issues such as where you’ll live and how many children you’ll have require both of you to express your opinions. When you develop a habit of accommodating rather than stating your feelings, resentments build and the passion can start to fade.

Accommodation and diminished passion are normal in marriage, and many couples accept these patterns as facts of life. But you want more than normal or average. Passion comes from taking the risk to be emotionally vulnerable in your relationship. Therefore I invite you to be open and honest with each other, to be who you really are, to rekindle the flames of your romance. When you hold back, you are cheating yourself of the joyful, passionate intimacy that keeps love alive and makes sparks fly in the bedroom. This active, alive, intimate, and honest connection is called a vital marriage and is possible only when a couple is willing to face their fears of vulnerability.

Transference

You were bitten by a dog as a kid, and dogs still frighten you. The lady working at the deli reminds you of your third grade teacher. The guy next to you on the plane looks like your college buddy Stan, so you start telling him the kind of obscene jokes Stan would love. But he's not amused.

This tendency to relate and equate past relationships with current ones is normal. In order to make sense of new information we look to a related template already on file and examine similarities and differences. For example, based on your experience with your wise, gentle and physically limited grandmother, you would tend to treat all elderly women in a manner similar to her initially. You might see one at the corner, and with arm extended and a big smile you offer to help her across the street, only to find she's neither physically limited nor gentle. Whoops.

Part of the work of therapy is exploring this very issue. We all transfer our templates from prior relationships onto new ones - and from the first phone call you begin transference with your therapist. The structure of therapy encourages it.

Therapists typically maintain a stance of objective neutrality. This means they usually don't share a whole lot of information about their personal lives or their privately held thoughts, feelings or judgments about the material you bring up. This varies from therapist to therapist, of course, and different psychological theories do this to a greater or lesser degree. But generally speaking, the therapist is a blank canvas. They do this because what you transfer onto them says something very important about you.

John (a fake client) has been in therapy three months and comes into his session looking agitated and suspicious. I ask him how he is and he answers with "oh, wouldn't you like to know?!" It turns out John was laid off from his job, and he's assuming I will be angry with him. He entered the session preparing himself for the lecture I would give him about his failure to accept responsibility. By further exploring this, we find that he experienced his dad as critical and unempathic, and assumed I would respond the same way. In fact, I felt sadness and compassion when I heard his news, and I shared this with him. By pointing out this inaccurate assumption, John was able to understand why he tends to withdraw whenever he gets bad news: he expects other people to criticize him like his father used to, even though this has rarely proven true. He transferred his father's response onto me.

It seems we start with a limited number of templates at our disposal, the most powerful ones coming from our early caregivers. We tend to assume most new people will respond in ways similar to these original templates, even when there is evidence to the contrary. Some of the most important work in therapy is examining these old molds to see how they've shaped our relationships and our development. Challenging, difficult growth comes when we try to develop new templates.

Not all dogs bite. Not every old woman wants our help. Not everyone responds like John's dad. Therapy and the therapeutic relationship is one of the best places to check our assumptions. We might be playing according to rules that no longer apply.

No, it isn't.

The therapist's chair provides a unique perspective on culture. Our primary task is trying to understand the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of our clients. Over time we start to see patterns, both on an individual and societal level. We see trends, styles, popular sentiment, even lexicon change gradually, one unrelated individual at a time.

Here's a phrase I've heard a lot recently, from all types of people: it is what it is (iiwii for short). The phrase seems harmless enough, but I actually think it can be a bad sign, psychologically. It's a defense mechanism.

We hear it all the time, particularly from athletes on losing teams. As spoken by the coach of the UCLA football team who lost to a horrible Notre Dame squad. USC loses to the Oregon Ducks, same statement. USA Today even named it the 2004 Sports Cliche of the Year. There are t-shirts, blogs, tattoos, even a support group utilizing this phrase. Here's a discussion describing how iiwii has replaced "it's all good" in common parlance. The urban dictionary tries to define it, but none of the definitions quite capture what I see in my office.

The problem is, iiwii is a deceptive statement. The words and tone imply acceptance of the current state of affairs, but the underlying sentiment is frustration and helplessness. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite familiar with irony, cynicism and satire. But that's not what this is. This is a defense mechanism. Not only that, it's the Ebola virus of defense mechanisms: denial.

Let's say I have a client, a man who has been in a miserable marriage for 20 years. Every perceptive muscle I have tells me he feels angry, sad and very stuck. But I ask him how he feels and he drops the iiwii bomb: "I don't know," he says "my marriage is what it is, and that's that." Here is my translation: This situation makes me very upset, but I'm powerless to change it, so I'm trying to push away my feelings and begrudgingly accept my helplessness. I don't want to talk about it anymore. We both know he has strong feelings about it, but iiwii won't let us get there. That's what a defense mechanism is: any mechanism that protects (defends) us from unwanted thoughts, feelings, or drives.

I'm not trying to be grammar police, or take away freedom of speech. I actually don't mind the phrase when used appropriately. I'm just calling out iiwii for what it often is: denial. Normal, healthy emotional processing includes 1) injury 2) feeling the emotion 3) expressing the emotion, then finally 4) acceptance. What I'm seeing is people wanting to leapfrog steps 2 and 3 in order to avoid the pain and get to the acceptance. They hope that shortcut won't hurt as bad.

But you know what? Bypassing the emotion doesn't work. It has to be expressed sometime. Talk to someone who took antidepressants following the death of a loved one. Prozac doesn't eliminate the grief, it just postpones it. Emotions like grief and anger are natural, necessary phases we must experience in order to move on. In order to achieve real acceptance. And what happens when we don't deal with the underlying emotions? Most of mankind's health and relational problems. I'm afraid that's the harsh reality.

How to Forgive

After years of discussing hurt and forgiveness, some things have come into focus. There are four elements necessary for healthy forgiveness:

1. Express the Emotion - Whatever the crime/injustice/violation/slight, the forgiver needs to fully express how it made him feel. Anger, sadness and fear are common responses. By the way, it is ideal if the victim is able to express her emotions to her perpetrator, but not essential.

2. Rebuild Security - In order to forgive, the forgiver needs to feel a reasonable amount of assurance that the violation won't recur. Let's say you step on my toe. In order for me to rebuild security, I'm going to need some verbal commitment from you that you'll try not to step on my toe again, or I need to decide to keep my feet away from yours, etc. Some mechanism needs to be in place to let me know I'm safe again.

3. Understand - The forgiver needs to develop some framework to understand why the violation happened in the first place. Why was my toe stepped on? We're on a crowded train? You're a clumsy dancer? You hate me? Oh, you're drunk, I understand. The brain will search for this reason and can't stop (or forgive) until it has one.

4. Let Go - This is making a conscious decision to drop the grudge and resentment. It's the hardest step for most people. Holding a grudge is a powerful thing - you can get someone to suck up to you for years by lording his misbehavior over him. Letting go means stepping down from the nobility of victimhood, becoming an equal again, and promising not to point back to her infraction every time you're losing an argument. Letting go is not forgetting - most of us can't choose what we remember. It's choosing to return to a place of equal power.

Research shows forgiveness greatly benefits the physical health of the forgiver. Seems that holding a grudge is bad for you.

Feelings 101

It's typical for therapists to ask about feelings. It's also typical for clients to dislike being asked. The truth is, many problems can't be resolved with a shift in thoughts and behaviors alone. Most of the time in order to grow we have to work through feelings.

While it's hip to talk about feelings in our Oprah society, we're not all good at it. A common trick is share a thought masquerading as a feeling. Starting a sentence with "I feel...." doesn't mean you're experiencing or communicating your feelings. I see people do this all the time. Take this couple:

Spouse 1: "I feel that you broke the garbage disposal."

Spouse 2: "I feel like you didn't look at it closely because you don't care."

Spouse 1: "Well, I'm just telling you how I feel."

Not feelings. In fact, any time "I feel..." is followed by "that" or "you" or "like", we're not talking about emotions. Most of the time, those are thoughts, beliefs, or judgements. No, you don't feel that NASA should pursue a mission to Mars. You believe it. It's your opinion. It's a thought, not a feeling.

Feelings can be broken down to some combination or degree of sad, mad, glad or afraid (some experts might also throw in shock, love and/or envy). That's it. Degrees of sad might range from bummed out to devastated, while anger might range from annoyed to enraged. Sometimes feelings combine, creating frustration (sad + mad), bittersweet (sad + glad), etc.

And what makes these feelings, rather than thoughts? Feelings can be felt, actually physically experienced. It might take a little practice, but a simple way to get in touch with real feelings is to become aware of the physical sensations you have in your body. When people experience emotion, their body tends to feel a certain way, unique for everyone. When people are sad they may feel a weight in the chest and shoulders. People feeling angry might report an expansive, explosive sensation in their chest and arms. Fear tends to be a weight in the stomach. Joy is often a light, energized feeling throughout the body. But again, it can be different for anybody.

How Do You Feel?

As I said last month, two questions help jump-start any stalled therapy session. I've convinced you to talk about what you want. Now, I embrace the cliche and ask you to talk about your feelings.

Why? Getting in touch with emotion helps inform decision making, resolve issues from the past, and increase self-awareness.

When we make important decisions, we use both our brain and our gut. Think about your decision to take a job, move into a new place, enter a relationship with someone - you probably used both logic and emotion to make those decisions. The absence of either could cause problems.

By the way, in our world logic tends to be valued more highly than emotion, making people reluctant to admit that emotion plays an important role in decision making. Rather than just admit that feelings were a factor in a decision, we tend to go overboard with rationalization ("sure, it's nice that it's a convertible, but I chose it because it gets 3 more MPG!").

Sometimes people are so overwhelmed by emotion that they can't deal with it all at once. The tragedy of abuse, loss, rejection, abandonment, or other forms of pain can just be too much. So they feel what they can at the time and store away the rest for later. Some would call this "sweeping it under the rug," others would term this repression. As much as we might like, these unexpressed emotions don't just go away - they stay within our psyche and body until we let them out. I know, it's starting to sound a little new-agey, but there is truth here. People can hold on to unexpressed emotion for years, decades, even the rest of their lives. Problem is, the body wasn't meant to hold on to that kind of pain for too long - it can start to break down. Still, many people choose the slow burn of repression over the sharp pain of letting emotion out.

Part of your identity lies in how you emotionally respond to the world around you. Your feelings determine facets of your personality, your relationship style, your opinions, and how you view yourself. When clients tell me they don't really know who they are or what they want, I direct them toward their feelings. Along with your thoughts and experiences, your feelings determine your deepest sense of self.

Research has shown that men and women experience emotion equally, but women tend to express while men repress. No big shocker there. In the next blog I'll give a quick lesson in getting in touch with emotion.