I want to share with you all that I have recently pulled together over 30 of my favorite pieces of writing from my first 2 years of training to become a psychoanalyst, and created a Kindle e-book with them.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08X3TNH83
Many thanks for your support and kindness. It continues to inspire me to keep writing and creating. A longer, more comprehensive and even more personal volume is already underway!
With deepest Gratitude,
Vanessa
I bring this post to you at the time of the Winter Solstice, the time when we are closest to our unconscious, and therefore have the greatest potential to create deep shifts within our psyche-body in service of our evolution, both individually and collectively. Today I want to share with you thoughts that I have gathered that have to do with our health and healing. It also seems particularly appropriate due to so many people around the world being sick, and who are frightened as a result.
The single most important factor in someone’s healing is their belief that they can heal. I realize that many people do not heal physically even when they firmly believe they can. However, I strongly feel that the point stands. The very decision to heal is, in itself, healing on at least some level.
In our culture, we have given most of our healing power over to the doctors and the medical establishment. We are, indeed, conditioned from a young age to do so. Most people see the doctor as the one who knows more about their bodies than they do, and who has the authority to tell them what they need to do to heal, or even whether they can. They project absolute knowledge onto the doctor, as a kind of all-seeing guru. Some people dread going to the doctor for this reason too — fearing that they will be diagnosed with something that the doctor will tell them is incurable. And they believe her — that’s the problem. Immediately, without even realizing it, they give that authority over to the doctor without even questioning it. In other words, it happens unconsciously, as something that’s been “built in” in such a way as to assume the doctor’s certainty. Receiving a diagnosis, such as cancer, strikes so much fear into people’s hearts, that they regress and want someone else to take over their treatment. My sense is that that’s the real reason people deteriorate and even die — because they’ve given away their own sense of their bodies and their incredible healing potentials over to the doctor who has decreed that their condition is incurable.
This runs very deep, because it is part of our Western culture, where from the moment we are born — and even before — the doctor is determining whether we are healthy, and later on our parents bring in the doctor for our various sniffles and childhood illnesses. The trouble is not with bringing in someone who can be a healing presence, but with the implicit, unspoken, giving-over of authority to someone else to the exclusion of our own awareness and our own potential for healing. From a very young age, we are subtly (or not-so-subtly) taught to ignore the wisdom of our bodies and our own intuition, and to instead “do as the doctor says”.
Healing is possible in an instant. The skeptical mind will reject this statement, citing so many people who never heal, or who take years or even decades to heal. However, I’d like to point your attention to the 4-minute mile phenomenon. For years, it was believed that the human body could not run a mile in under 4 minutes. Then one person (Roger Bannister) decided to challenge this — which means that he rejected the assumption that was being made about the human body as a general rule. But here’s the most amazing thing: once he did it, it showed the rest of the world that this was, indeed, possible, and hordes of people have since repeated this feat. And so it is with healing — if one person can heal from cancer, or any other illness, they prove that it is not an impossibility the way Rodger Bannister showed others about running a mile in under 4 minutes. And that healing comes from a decision — whether it’s made consciously or unconsciously.
We all have times when we unconsciously know that we will heal, such as, when we have a cold or the flu. We know that, if we are in generally decent health, we will eventually recover, and we don’t fret about it too much. We might even enjoy a few days of being snuggled into the couch with some hot tea and comfy TV shows, even if we are physically uncomfortable. We simply expect that after a few days of symptoms, the body will once again go back to normal. (Colds and flus are, by the way, the body’s way of detoxing from an accumulation of toxins in the body, such as after consuming lots of processed foods, or being around environmental toxins such as those used in cleaning airplane cabins.)
However, given what we have been taught over decades of cultural messaging, when it comes to more serious illnesses, the decision to heal must happen consciously. Whether the person believes that it will be “a long road to recovery” or if they know that healing is possible more quickly than some statistical chart dictates, there is a conscious decision made. It looks differently depending on what kind of illness it is, and what the person chooses to do, but it is always a mobilizing energy. One might decide to see a practitioner of some branch of Traditional/Holistic medicine (such as a naturopath, functional medicine doctor, acupuncturist, herbalist, etc.), or perhaps treat themselves at home with herbs, supplements, and dietary adjustments. Some read the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza, and enter into a regular meditation practice focused on entering into a state of health. Whatever it is, it’s an energy that demonstrates their belief that healing is possible, an empowered state of being, rather than a victim stance.
This shift is not an easy one to make. I realize that what I wrote above can be a challenge to believe, especially if you are dealing with something very deep, such as cancer or autoimmune illness. The beliefs about our body and what is possible run so deep, that they can feel immovable. I can relate — and I am myself still at times plagued with doubt, which I have to crawl out of through painstaking moments of intense awareness. If you are intrigued by the above, I do recommend reading the works of the authors listed below to help you really internalize a new way of thinking about your health and your life. Healing IS possible. Even if the physical body is “too far gone” by some standards, healing is possible on at least the psycho-emotional-spiritual levels. That is why you are here. I invite you to bring in your Inner Healer and decide to heal.
Authors Worth Reading
Joe Dispenza
Bruce Lipton
Lynne McTaggart
Gregg Braden
Alberto Villoldo
*I am saddened that we live in a society where, I am legally obligated to defer to doctors (it’s one glaring example of the conditioning I described above), as if they hold all of your healing capacity. However, I am required to note that my statements are not intended to serve as medical advice or to substitute regular medical treatment.
The poem below came through me as I arrived in a little cabin on a lake in Vermont a couple of days ago. I came here to meet with my shamanic/spiritual teacher, and was already beginning to experience a shift in my awareness, away from my regular life, yet quite different from a “vacation” space.
I used to write a lot of poetry, but had stopped for many years. However, when I found myself by that incredible lake, I found that poetry was the only thing that could possibly come close to articulating my experience in any kind of authentic way. If I had tried to journal about it, something would be irrevocably lost in translation.
Symmetry
As above, so below —
Still water and sky
Shape perfect symmetry.
The stuff of paintings
That seem too perfect
To be real.
Within moments
Tender shades of cream and apricot
Morph into detached, steely grays.
A chill as the sun sets
Evokes a sudden unease
A sudden shift in awareness.
The passage from romantic pinks
To a cool hearkening of nightfall
Touches some deeper inner disquiet
That’s been unseen for years
Hidden behind familiar scenery.
This unexpected crack
In my tourist-like admiration
Of a picturesque, postcard-worthy spot
Is an offering —
An opening for me
To see the real landscapes
As without so within.
I am not going to start yet another blog post with the pithy observation that our Western culture prioritizes thinking over feeling. Okay, well, I guess I did. That’s because this idea is so crucial, that it’s worth it to try to bring people’s attention to it, perhaps in a different way.
Believe it or not, I think about this blog daily, despite the fact that I have not published anything in months. This is due to many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that so few people now take the time to actually read and think deeply about anything on the internet. It’s become such a toxic mimic of engagement that I barely know how to insert anything of use here. But, ultimately, I have to hope that those who are interested will find something meaningful in it. I will attempt to aid this process by offering something new, some ways of thinking about and feeling into our experience that are rarely offered. I want you to walk away from this article with not just a new understanding, but a new experience that you can draw upon in the future.
Well, now I’ve set up quite a task for myself and feel a bit anxious. With this, I have just moved from the realm of thinking right into a feeling — a slight anxiety at how much I’ve promised you, my reader, a fear that I will not be able to deliver and will lose your attention or even invite criticism or judgment. Worse yet, I fear that I will have wasted precious minutes of your life that I cannot return to you This is relevant to one of the more salient points of this essay, which I won’t wait too long to share with you — it is that one cannot think and feel at the same time. If you are thinking, then you are not feeling, and if you are feeling, you are not thinking.
If you read the above carefully, notice your reaction to what I just proposed. Do you have a feeling about it?
Chances are, you have a kind of evaluative stance about it than any kind of feeling. It might be something like, “Yeah, I knew that”, or “That’s stupid, I can name a hundred instances when I was thinking and feeling at the same time”, or perhaps, “Hmm, okay, tell me your argument for it.” This is in part because we are in the realm of words as you are reading a bunch of text on a screen (ugh, screens! Yet, hopefully this current one is a little less “ugh”!). Having a feeling and noticing it, requires a subtlety in awareness that is not only culturally suppressed (massively so), but also difficult to do while reading (in the realm of thoughts). You might need to close your eyes and take a breath, while putting everything else out of your mind before you might become aware of a feeling.
I must offer empathy prior to continuing with my premise here, as I speak from direct experience. Even as someone who identifies as an “empath”, the pressure from my thinking mind usually drowns out at least 98% of my feelings, unless they are either quite intense, or I’ve consciously taken time to tune into them. My previous paragraph was meant to gently point out this very challenge and hopefully offer you a direct awareness of it right in this moment. We think more than we feel, or so it seems.
More often than not, what happens when you notice a feeling, particularly a strong one, is that you instantly switch to thinking about it. Where is it coming from, what is the important information related to it, how can I feel better, what has to happen, what’s unfair, whose fault is it, what do I need to do next, and what’s for lunch, anyway? That’s why it seems like we can think and feel at the same time. But if you pay careful attention, the moment you have a thought about the feeling, you are no longer feeling it. You may go back and forth between these — often this happens when the feeling is very strong and insists on being there — but they are still discrete states of being.
So, above, when I made that promise to offer you something different, to share something that would leave you with an experience that would have made reading this essay worth the time that I could never give back to you, I felt an instant, albeit slight, sense of fear and insecurity. If you go back and look at the 3rd paragraph, right after the word “anxious”, I switched into describing why I was feeling that way — and had therefore moved out of the realm of feeling back into thinking. If the feeling of anxiety was still there, it became muted, hidden from view because I got busy explaining it. Do not mistake talking about a feeling for the feeling itself. Feeling is pure experience. Words are only a mediocre approximation of that experience, should we try to name them (and I love words!) But again, since we are in the realm of words on a page, and I was attempting to convey something useful, I chose to switch over to ideas rather than staying with the feeling.
I hasten to add, that while I labor to lift the realm of feelings and their immense importance into our conscious awareness here, feeling is not better than thinking. They are equals, they give birth to each other, and they are parts of a whole. One way I see them is that feeling is the Yin aspect — pure experience, the realm of the body. Thinking is the Yang — the activity of moving something forward by the addition of a label, a direction, a question, or a defense. I am merely stating that our culture has been heavily weighted toward thinking and most of us have a tremendous difficulty staying with any feeling for too long before we bury it with words, symbols, metaphors, explanations, and all kinds of other burdens. I just did it myself after feeling that bit of anxiety! I told myself a number of stories about the need to move this post along, the need to appear “professional”, since I knew that if I sat with the anxiety, I might never have published this piece at all. So in that instance, thoughts helped me move forward, for dwelling in it would have been unproductive for my current purpose. The key here is that I felt it at all. Had I not, this post would have come from a defensive, performative place instead of an authentic unfolding of what I wanted to convey. For, I can never give these minutes and hours back to myself, either.
I leave you to ponder the premise that one cannot think and feel at the same time. This is not intended to be didactic or prescriptive, but an invitation to explore your inner world. Whether I’ve offered you something new or not (though I do hope I have), my sincere wish is for you to recognize, at the deepest level, that whether you are thinking or feeling, each moment of your experience is the most precious asset you have. Then again, I remember in my early days of therapy saying to my analyst, “I theel…” and the two of us bursting into laughter.
_____
I would like to offer thanks to Feedspot for featuring Loving Psychoanalysis as one of the top 10 psychoanalytic blogs on the internet. Please feel free to check out the others as well!
Like any other morning, the other day I sat down to meditate with one of Dr. Joe Dispenza’s guided meditation tracks*. I have been studying his work for nearly a year and find it to be a tremendous method to rework deeply-entrenched emotional patterns in an experiential way. In this post I’d like to share with you a bit of my experience, as well as some insights into how to use this kind of meditation in order to truly grow.
With my eye mask on and headphones in, I found my spot on the couch where I always meditate. The session the day before didn’t seem to go very deeply, and I was hoping this one would go further. (That self-judgment is so insidious!) It was my day off, so maybe not having anything scheduled later on would make for a more relaxed state and hopefully allow me to go deeper than the day before.
“NOW,” says Dr. Dispenza at the beginning of one of his many meditations. “Can you REST your awareness on the SPACE… between… your… eyes…”
That’s not too difficult to do, so I’m off to a great start. The next few instructions take me to a relaxed but present state. “This is going well,” I implicitly say to myself. I’m doing it “right”. (More self-evaluation — so challenging to let go of!) But, the meditation continues… Trance-like music fills my awareness for a while as I settle in.
“And NOW…” — some time later, Dr. Dispenza’s next directive suddenly jolts me. I’d gone into a sleepy state and now bobbed my head awake. Damn. Gotta get more “with it”, I gotta focus more. Shoot, what am I supposed to be focusing on now? I didn’t even realize that I hadn’t actually heard what the next point of focus should be.
The next chunk of instructions have me going between being able to stay focused and nodding off, each time mentally berating myself for it. Why can’t I get it together? Why can’t I really show up for myself? (Judgy, judge judge!!)
I remind myself that Dr. Joe has said himself that getting sleepy is not a bad thing when you’re meditating — it’s a sign that you’re able to get relaxed and that your brainwaves are actually slowing down. So now, every time my head bobs, I use the jolt to refocus as best I can — and this is an opportunity to use the process positively rather than judging myself in a familiar, but self-sabotaging way. It’s an opportunity to practice a different way of perceiving my efforts. It’s not about failing or doing it wrong — it’s about earnestly showing up, in as many moments as possible. If I were to judge each moment I realized I’d nodded off, I’d waste my meditation time judging myself (or likely check out altogether!)
The second part of the guided process involves focusing on an emotional state you are wanting to rework and change. This doesn’t mean what you’re feeling that moment — instead, you’re asked to choose an entrenched way of being in the world that actually inhibits your self-expression in your life. For example, people who have an illness often choose to rework their belief that it is incurable, and use the meditation to see and feel themselves being completely healthy. Others choose to rework feeling sorry for themselves as their way of being in the world (i.e. being stuck in victim mentality), or their sense of themselves as worthless or abandoned, and so on. Yet others might use it to zoom in on unproductive emotional reactivity or anger.
As you follow the meditation, Dr. Dispenza asks you to recognize the ways in which you embody those limiting beliefs about yourself, and then to envision a different version of yourself.
Psychoanalytically speaking, the method of this practice is two-fold:
This is where the meditation can really get surprisingly challenging — because we are so used to those familiar feelings. It’s easy to see yourself as the suffering self. But envisioning and experiencing a different version of yourself tends to be more difficult than it sounds. The familiar ways of thinking and feeling show up with a vengeance, right then and there in the moment.
As I emerged from that meditation practice, I caught myself wanting to scrap it, wanting to say that I failed at it “because it didn’t go very deep” and therefore I had not accomplished anything with it. But thenI realized that although I was no longer expressly meditating in that moment, I could apply the same method of awareness to my familiar way of thinking about myself. That moment of becoming aware of my self-judgment was one more opportunity to rework my familiar ways of thinking and being.
I immediately reminded myself that my earnest intention and effort really matters. Despite not “going deep” or achieving some thought-free inner state, I still tracked and reworked many moments where I was reverting to suffering and self-judgment, the places that I am so used to that they show up unbidden, and tend to slip by my awareness over and over. For example, during the practice, I would go into an emotional state of “I suck at this” or “See? I knew it wouldn’t go well again today”, or even “Well, this whole session is a wash” — and for a moment, I would actually believe each of those thoughts.
But those tiny moments when I could catch myself right there and consciously choose a different perspective (which leads to a different feeling) really count. They count for a lot. That’s because while some part of me wanted to “scrap” the whole thing as a way of sabotaging even the future moments I had remaining, I kept reminding myself that it’s not just the whole practice that day — but each moment of meditation is its own opportunity. I don’t say this as a pithy, new-agey way of trying to encourage you to “never give up”. I fully believe that these are the micro-moments in which change actually happens. Each of them adds to and builds on the previous one. My old, familiar self wanted to sabotage the whole of that day’s practice, even before it was done, because then I would be off the hook and my internal status quo would get to go unchallenged for one more day. I could tell myself that I’ll try again tomorrow as a way of avoiding myself today.
We tend to think — and expect — that it’s the big, profound moments of meditation that have the “real” impact. For some people they do happen, and certainly do have an impact. But even for them, in actuality it’s these micro-events in which you are creating a new way of being and literally restructuring your biology.
Every time you catch yourself at reverting back to your self-sabotaging ways, you make that pattern a little more conscious. And then, every time you consciously choose a different way of being for that moment, you actually create those new neural pathways that lead to a new personality.
The familiar, self-pitying or self-denigrating ways of thinking and being shaped your personality from years of “practicing” them implicitly, first as a young child and then by default as an adult. The real gift of Dr. Dispenza’s work is that you can apply this method to make these old, unconscious programs conscious. And then, in a very similar way, the consciously-chosen, new ways of being which you practice in meditation can eventually become a new way of being in the world, as well.
*Note: I am in no way affiliated with Dr. Joe Dispenza. I am a student of his work because I find it useful and am sharing the above as a personal experience and hope that it helps others to make use of either his meditations or any other form of meditation.
Some useful links:
One of Dr. Joe Dispenza’s meditations (similar to what I’ve described here)
This year I have been deeply studying the work of several people whose ideas and findings are extremely important to the world of healing and personal growth, although they are not in the world of psychotherapy. Three of these people — all of whom are scientists, researchers, and speakers — are Dr. Joe Dispenza, Gregg Braden, and Lynne McTaggart, all of whom have written multiple books. I couldn’t possibly do them justice in a single blog post, but I wanted to express my gratitude for their work as it shapes my understanding of both my own experience and my work with clients. I find their work to be immensely important, and plan to eventually incorporate it into psychoanalytic work.
Before I get on to my topic, I invite you, right in this moment, to take a slow breath and notice your body in your seat. Then, place your hand on your heart and check in with yourself. Just doing this one small action, which should take you no more than 30 seconds, you have now given your body some attention and a little reset. Perhaps you were even able to hear from your body something it needs in this moment — a sip of water, a shift of your muscles, an unfolding of your shoulders. You have just made a bit of space for the unknown and likely just interrupted a pattern of unawareness. That has given your body an experience of moving into the present moment, and your brain has registered a data point of a different way of being. As you read the rest of my blog, you will begin to see why this is so important and so much more impactful than it seems.
In this blog post, I want to focus on and expand a point that Dr. Joe Dispenza emphatically makes in his workshops and books — and that is, making space for the unknown. He makes the point that more often than not, we function on a kind of auto-pilot, mostly based on our past experience. We have the same routines and the same thoughts and feelings day in and day out. Most people can map out their entire day, down to the minute details of the order of their routine (cell phone, bathroom, coffee, shower, breakfast, etc.) And if one does the same things day in and day out, it follows that they are also likely thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings day after day. This makes life predictable and familiar, but also leaves little or no room for anything new to happen.
We want to be able to predict our day and to avoid pain or difficulty, if at all possible, or to at least minimize them. There are many reasons we automatically avoid and guard against the unknown. The unknown is potentially scary, evolutionarily speaking, so we seek out the known and predictable, since it’s helped us survive until this point. Also, when we start out as children, the unknown is adventure and fun! — but more often than not it gets taught (or “whooped” for some) out of us by frightened adults who want to prepare us for the knocks of the “real world”. Before we know it, we form a belief system where we associate the unknown with pain, and come to expect — and are even unconsciously looking for — things to go wrong. So, we learn the safe, familiar routines and hold on to the safe, familiar thoughts (even when they are painful!) On an unconscious level, we live in fear of those “knocks”, rarely embracing joy even when it does show up. Most people I’ve talked to about this say that as soon as things are good, they are cautiously looking around, waiting for “the other shoe to drop”. The joy, spontaneity, and sense of adventure are all but snuffed out by the time we enter adulthood.
So, when in the course of our everyday lives we are struggling and hoping (or even praying) for something to change, if there is no room in our lives for anything new to show up, change has no place to enter our lives, except through a crisis of some kind. So another thing we tend to associate the unknown with is crisis or something challenging happening to us, something being out of our comfortable control.
What Dr. Dispenza points out, however, is that making space for the unknown on a regular basis is the only way for our lives to actually change for the better — both on a personal and on a collective level (which are, of course, inextricably connected). More often than not, when the unknown shows up in our lives, it is our own Self coming to us with information, some aspect of ourselves we’ve neglected even though it is desperate for attention. Or, it might be some important ideas we don’t make time for, or some signal from our body, or it might be even a psychic or spiritual message. In fact, the more I listen to Dr. Dispenza’s material, the more I see how exciting and magical the unknown can potentially be. We often perceive it to be “negative” because it’s not something we expected, and perhaps it even interrupts the flow of our lives. But how often do cancer patients say that cancer was the best thing that could have happened to them, because it finally woke them up to how they were mistreating or neglecting themselves?
Dr. Dispenza passionately urges his students to make space for the unknown in their daily lives through meditation — through sitting down, and focusing on Space in your body and outside it (and a number of other techniques). Focusing on the space your body occupies, and the space around your body, takes you out of the realm of thinking about your life and into the realm of direct experience. He also cites scores of meticulous scientific research (some of which he’s done himself), pointing toward the tremendous impact of “teaching your body emotionally”, bringing up one’s own powerful feelings of gratitude and love, and using your powerful imagination to envision and feel the kind of You that you want to be. This acts as an antidote to the cyclic ruminations of your everyday thoughts, and your body begins to learn and neurologically wire those emotions into your neural circuitry with repetition.
When I’ve sat down this way — even with Dispenza’s guided meditation audios — I suddenly found facing myself in a way I didn’t expect. Hey, that’s the unknown in action, from the first moment! I’ve initially found myself restless, anxious, and sometimes frustrated. As any meditation teacher will tell you, making room for yourself every day is what creates change — it’s not having that perfect meditation posture in white cotton robes, with the perfectly balanced breath and an impossibly straight spine. Often it’s a sweaty, uphill battle. But, as I’ve discovered, that’s not as masochistic as it might sound. It’s a path toward befriending your body and getting to know your energy. I’ve had meditations where I cried in frustration, and others where I experienced exhilaration at feeling my energy field reaching out to fill the entire room.
I do not believe that meditation is the only way to make space for the unknown, although I’ve found that it’s one of the most potent. Journaling/writing is another powerful way, if you are able to stay open to the present moment and allow your conscious awareness to unfold (rather than only writing down thoughts you’ve already had). Making art of any kind — with the same premise of spontaneous expression — is a very rich ground in which the unknown can emerge. And another powerful way, is, psychoanalytic sessions. On both sides of the couch, a therapy session is like a mutual meditation, where both people are attending to the present and are (hopefully) open to something new arising at any moment.
Any practice(s) you create where you consciously make regular time for something to unfold that’s different from your daily tasks and habitual thoughts can create that space and opportunity for positive change. And that’s not just something that sounds good to say — doing this allows you to regularly break up the habitual, cyclic patterns of thinking and feeling, which overtime literally causes those old circuits to prune apart in your brain. Every time you drift in meditation and think about the next thing on your To Do list (or about lunch), and then bring yourself back to the focus on space, you interrupt an ingrained pattern and encourage/strengthen a different one. Or, if you’re writing, when you bring yourself back from checking your texts or looking up a product on the internet — same thing. In an analytic session, bringing yourself back from a tangent, speaking up when something isn’t going in the direction you need, or allowing yourself to explore an uncomfortable topic (and so many other examples!!) allows you to have that same effect in your body, brain, and entire energy field.
It is difficult to convey how powerful this truly is in just a few paragraphs. I think it’s clear that I’m not talking about any kind of magic, “think yourself happy” thing — but a pathway toward deep change on so many levels, facilitated by consciously stepping out of the familiar. I highly recommend the books of the authors I listed — the links at the beginning of the post take you to their respective books for you to explore. All three authors also have multiple fascinating talks on YouTube.
How can you make more space for the unknown in your life?
At this moment, take a breath and see if you can relax your jaw. (I just noticed I was holding my breath too.) Grab some tea, and go easy.
At a time like this one all my clients are going through the same thing I’m going through — a pandemic engulfing the world and devastating entire countries. Everyone is going through it in their own unique way, but we are also in it together. With every hour, the news gets more dire and yet so many things still remain uncertain.
Uncertainty is immensely difficult for all of us to live with, even the regular everyday uncertainty that we each must bear. But uncertainty on a global level, about pretty much every single aspect of our lives that we had come to take for granted — that’s Hard with a capital H. Even — and pardon me for the utterly obvious joke — being able to count on toilet paper is no longer a given. (And I actually was anxious about it for a while!) We know the world is not going to look the same ever again, but we don’t know what that means — and I think we feel similarly freaked out by this.
So, we take to the internet and social media to try to relieve our momentary anxiety. It has been so helpful for myself personally — everyone is posting about the same thing, and the immediacy of the posts helps me feel connected. I’m sure this is why so many people take to it now as well. That, and so many being grounded at home.
I’ve been amazed to see so many articles and links to all the cool free stuff being offered online — courses, museum tours, concerts, and even operas. Every time I see a post like that, my heart warms up a little, feeling the generosity of companies and organizations everywhere. There is indeed so much goodness, and so much knowledge and beauty at our fingertips, there for the taking. However, I also realized that this grateful feeling came with a kind of asterisk — which is why I decided to write this post.
The pandemic — along with the unbearable uncertainty of what may come — has kicked up most of our nervous systems into survival mode even if your immediate survival is not at stake at this moment. Stress chemicals are squirted into your body, and you are constantly working to mitigate anxiety. That’s where social media can be so useful, despite its other flaws. But not everyone is able to simply shift their routines and treat their self-quarantines (or mandated ones, for that matter) as a “break” or an opportunity to learn from this new experience. Even when you are not stuck at home with children or don’t have an abusive situation you can’t escape from, even when you can order your groceries online and aren’t worried about paying your rent, what is happening in the world is stressful and it affects your body and your life. And in a state like this, watching a museum tour or taking in a free opera, might not be possible. When you are stressed, you might be in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response (or a dizzying blend of all of the above) — and it might not be immediately obvious even to yourself. The effects can be so subtle.
So yes, for many people, this experience can be an incredible learning opportunity, a chance to be mindful, to learn to appreciate the little things, a chance to recognize and withdraw unnecessary attachments (like, do I really need that book I probably won’t get to read for 3 years?), a chance to reconnect, and an opportunity to practice kindness and connection. But for so many, that’s too much — too heavy a burden.
Many people with various traumas (whether big or microscopic-and-cumulative) are going to be too amped up right now, to take in free courses or virtual tours online. When one’s nervous system is amped up like this, relaxation and learning are not possible and cause them to feel more stressed. Many people need more comfort and support now, even if it means watching familiar shows on loop.
So if you’re up for a free online course, a gallery tour or a new movie, by all means — revel in those delicious offerings. But if you are feeling that “asterisk” I have encountered, if you can’t “make the most of” a global pandemic, you have full permission (and please give it to yourself!!) to hold onto what’s always worked for you. Your defenses (i.e. coping mechanisms) are okay to use. (Of course, if they lead you to also hurt yourself, please be kind to you, kinder than ever!)
Social media has always been skewed toward bite-sized, easy advice, positive quotes, attempts to inspire, and jokes/memes. Balancing this out can be hard if it’s all you’re seeing, even when you already know that not all of it is going to be useful. I personally find the humor very healing, but I also have moments when I feel sick to my stomach and reach for easy comforts that have worked before. That’s just fine.
So, my own, bite-sized advice is this:
– Be really, really kind to yourself. If all you can do is put one foot in front of the other, you are doing enough.
– Find ways to create a state of relaxation in your body whenever possible.
If you can take deep, intentional breaths throughout the day, amazing. There are also wonderful guided meditations that can be lovely for this purpose. This doesn’t need to be a time to “learn to meditate”. This is simply to give your body a break, and a chance for the stress chemicals to get filtered out.
This is enough. You are doing enough.
I have compiled a list of resources that can be helpful to help your body relax and release the stress. I am sharing things I’ve used myself and have found helpful (but feel free to explore the myriad others available!):
GUIDED RELAXATION
Guided Body Scan Meditation for Mind & Body Healing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7xGF8F28zo
Mindfulness Meditation in 20 Minutes
https://youtu.be/64ZU2UCQdmQ
SLEEP
Sleep Hypnosis for Calming An Overactive Mind (guided)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuzJffTliSc
Sleep Hypnosis for Floating Relaxation | Calm Your Mind for Deep Sleep
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CydzZTME9wM
Hypnosis for Life Healing Sleep (guided)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLgwD7qczJQ&t=4295s
Lucid Dreaming Music (instrumental)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk07QtKXDdE&list=FLqUVWkEtOMOocCxhI1zCAdQ&index=17&t=0s
Sleep Talk Down Guided Meditation (Guided)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69o0P7s8GHE
Lucid Dreaming Hypnosis (guided)
https://youtu.be/d5EbEoIDaDY
Sleep Hypnosis for Anxiety Reduction & Reversal (guided)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvOgpzRJxJg&t=56s
GOOD NIGHT Deep REM Cell Rejuventing Sleep Guided
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KzrrgIpHa8
RELAXING, SOOTHING, and HEALING MUSIC
Meditation Music – Increase Creativity
https://youtu.be/mPwn8I3rD7g
Beautiful music (instrumental)
https://youtu.be/CQUGUDc-fZQ
Chakra Healing ~ Spa Music w/ Binaural Beats (instrumental)
https://youtu.be/ARoih8HTPGw
DISSOLVE TOXINS, CLEANSE INFECTIONS | Full Body Cell Level Detox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK2hS40pr-g
Rain & Thunder Relaxation ~ 2 Hours High Quality Ambient Sounds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Xu6mkacg8
“It’s actually a good thing you’re feeling depressed”, I find myself saying to clients more and more lately. Of course, I don’t mean this comment literally, this is not an expression of some sadistic joy at another’s suffering — and I must immediately expand upon what I do mean by it. This is what this post will be about — something I truly believe about depression and something that seems to go against the grain of much of the social media’s portrayal of it. There is much being said and done for helping people speak up about depression, to be more open about it rather than hiding it as some terrible personal failing. This is a much-needed, welcome turn of events.
However, the thinking still seems to revolve around seeing depression as an intruder, an unwelcome guest that must be eradicated. Yes, coping with the day-to-day experience is something that one needs to figure out when the weight of depression won’t let her or him get out of bed, or go to work, when the fatigue and the self-loathing seem to take over the entire awareness of the person’s existence. But to me, the goal of this coping is not to find a way to slay the monster, to “beat it”, and to return to life as normal. Coping skills are important for the sake of being able to function, but actually addressing depression means something else entirely. Whether or not medication needs to be involved (and medication can indeed be crucial), depression has a message coming from deep within the individual, that needs to be truly heard and heeded in order to truly work it through.
This is why I titled this post “Depression’s Call”. It is not meant to minimize the immense suffering that depression often entails. And, it is not meant to minimize the importance of finding ways to take care of oneself, through small daily actions, therapy, and possibly medication. But depression has within it a deep call. It is a message, being delivered from the psyche and the body, that something needs attention. In my experience both personally and as an analyst, this “something” is not conscious. Depression becomes a kind of symbol, a symptom that points to something unconscious that needs to be addressed and brought to light. More often than not, it’s an entire constellation of issues, reaching back to childhood, or possibly to a trauma or a loss years ago. When not fully dealt with (or, as the case often is, when never seeing the light of day at all), it sits within our psyches and bodies underneath the surface, and colors the world around us.
It takes a great deal of energy to contain our inner experience. When growing up, one’s experience is not held, mirrored, and validated, the child internalizes all kinds of messages that then become part of her or his “template” for how people and the world are seen. For a typical and not seemingly traumatic example, when, say a father says to his daughter to “stop moping” when she is upset about her friend moving away, she learns that her feelings are too much for others to handle, that she is overwhelming to others, that she needs to shut off her natural response in order to take care of important others in her life. As children, our parents are our whole world, so we will form a template that doesn’t take into account the idiosyncrasies or personality issues of our individual parents — the template becomes wholesale. And so, to continue with this little girl who has been told to stop moping ( likely over and over and over in many other instances), her template will contain this complex message that her feelings are bad, wrong, overwhelming to others, and a nuisance to be gotten rid of. She will unconsciously begin to do as she is told, in order to maintain the connection to important others in her life. This takes immense amounts of energy to live this way, even though this energy is expended unconsciously.
Enter depression. The now-adult little girl’s psyche and body are exhausted from this labor of suppressing her true feelings. By now she may not even know she’s doing it, and how long she has been doing it, or why. All she knows is that she is depressed. And this is why I see depression as an important messenger.
Heeding depression’s call means looking deeper, beyond one’s current circumstances, and beyond finding ways to feel better as soon as possible. She may not feel better right away in a literal sense, but when finding that thread of discovering the ways in which her psyche has been working so hard to maintain the kind of self that’s been required of her, she may feel a sense of relief, a direction to follow, a way through. Suffering is torture, it can be near-unbearable for some. Suffering needs compassion, support, mirroring, and humanness, a “True Other” (Winnicott’s beautiful term referring to the presence of someone who truly sees and resonates with the person, relating to them in an authentic way that feels like exactly what they needed in a given moment.) But depression also needs more. It calls us to go deeper, to look beyond the immediate, to go deeper, and, essentially, to transform.
Seen in this light, depression’s call is a gift — hence that strange statement at the beginning of this post that I have said to clients. The fact that one recognizes she is depressed is an inordinate potential. So many walk through life without being aware of being depressed — getting through the day, binge-watching TV shows, even going out and seemingly having fun, while the psyche suffers under the pressure of those childhood templates. But when one becomes aware of depression, it can become a catalyst for discovering these templates, for challenging one’s patterns, perceptions of oneself and the world, and for truly embodying one’s True Self. The journey is not easy, and my goal here is not to deify depression — my hope is to share the deeper, urgent call that it represents and the potential it holds.
I have recently attended the first level of training for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, or AEDP. The experience transformed me profoundly, and its tendrils will continue to flesh out into my work going forward. During the 5-day experience, I struggled with integrating the model into my psychoanalytic understanding of doing therapeutic work — which makes sense, given how deeply psychoanalysis has impacted me as both analysand and analyst. Psychoanalysis is the deepest kind of psychotherapy I know, and yet I was looking to go further, particularly in the area of technique and presence with clients.
One of the things I struggled with as an analyst was how heady the work can be. One can have all kinds of deep, intense, and even necessary insights about oneself, but experiencing them directly is not a given, and there was very little training on how to help clients have that more direct experience — both within themselves and with the analyst. As someone who is both very intellectual and very deep-feeling, I longed for more training and language for bringing the experiential dimension into the room with my clients. That’s why I was so thrilled by the description of AEDP — not as something to displace psychoanalysis, but as something that could enrich it.
There is so much I gleaned from this approach that I could write about, but I am choosing just one element, something that perhaps hits right into the core of AEDP’s healing intention, which is “undoing aloneness”. One of the simplest, yet most profound interventions of the model (and there are many, many others) was the phrase that became the title of this post: “Can you feel me here with you?” Since AEDP is an attachment-based model, it strives to focus on and flesh out the experience of attachment within the therapeutic relationship itself. Clients will bring all kinds of issues to work on — which manifest out of unconsciously-running internal pathways established long ago. In psychoanalytic work, the goal is to bring those pathways into conscious awareness (and I’m very much condensing this here!). While doing this work with clients (pre-AEDP), I have watched them gradually becoming aware of ways they unconsciously enact their lives over and over, and these patterns slowly beginning to change as a result of that awareness.
What AEDP has offered me is the attachment piece that psychoanalysis does not explicitly bring into the therapeutic technique (although it is certainly aware of it in terms of human development and within the therapeutic relationship). At least in my own understanding of it, psychoanalytic theory in general tends to attempt to avoid “wish gratification” — and the idea of a “corrective emotional experience” has been very controversial in this field as well. So, it was a great surprise to me to discover that AEDP works to explicitly bring the therapist into the relationship as a warm, holding other, and that this is reflected upon by both parties.
And when I say “explicitly”, I mean with phrases such as the title of this post — “Can you feel me here with you?” What I realized throughout the course of the training (and continue to realize afterward) was just how difficult it is for people to receive caring, attention, and support. We may say that it’s all we ever want, but the reality is that actually taking it in is a very different story. AEDP is the only model I’ve encountered that explicitly addresses this phenomenon. Asking this question (or others along the same lines) turns out to be an incredibly emotionally intimate and challenging experience — most people do not expect for someone to be this present.
Explicitly sharing with the client that the therapist is right there — in whatever form — usually makes her/him/them squirm. It’s suddenly very real and very hard to accept. Even if the person can say that yes, they can feel the therapist’s presence, they’re likely struggling to fully trust that presence. And therein lies the work, which can be done experientially in the immediacy of that squirmy feeling, rather than reflecting on it at an intellectual distance.
I will share my own experience of this phenomenon that I had at this training. We were practicing the AEDP techniques with one another, and had an assistant teacher nearby to help guide the therapist. When it was my turn to be the therapist, I felt vulnerable being watched (i.e. fearful of being judged!) by the assistant, so the exercise took a lot of courage for me to do. A few exchanges into my practice session, the teacher put her hand on my shoulder, and whispered in my ear something that I could say to the “patient” at that moment.
I squirmed. Yes, there was the struggle of being watched and being told what to do — that’s never comfortable for me (and can be a bit stilted, interrupting the immediacy of the encounter). But upon reflection, I realized that the real reason for my struggle was that the teacher cared about me. She cared enough to want to help me learn, to hold space for my process, and to offer me immediate tools rather than just watch me struggle and then tell me what I could have done better/differently. It turned out that my habitual fear of being judged was actually a “comfy” go-to as a way of avoiding an even deeper experience, that of being supported and cared about.
It continues to be a paradox — both for myself and my clients — how often this is the deeper struggle, how hard it is to really receive “the good stuff”, as the AEDP’s founder, Diana Fosha, says. When one grows up adapting to and subtly taking care of the feelings of the very important figures in her or his life (usually the parents), the deeply-ingrained lesson held in the psyche-body is often that one cannot truly trust the world enough to be able to relax and just receive. And if there is also trauma where one’s vulnerability was taken advantage of, this lesson is reinforced even further. The person learns that being loved and cared for is not a given, and does not come freely. It can feel like it’s never real, or that it must be earned, or a multitude of other feelings around it. Therein lies the work of analysis.
I am so deeply grateful that AEDP has honed in on this paradox and offers tools to explore it and shift it for people. There is so much more to this model that I found immediately useful and deeply applicable to psychoanalytic work — which I look forward to sharing here in future posts, as well as living out in my life and work. For more information about the model, use this link: https://aedpinstitute.org/about-aedp/
It was the second day of a 3-day conference, and I returned to my hotel room in the evening, feeling the kind of deep fullness one has when attending a rich experience that infuses new life into your very soul.
As I turned my doorknob to close the door, glad to be in the silence of my room (as an introvert, I really need that silence and space to process and recharge), I had the thought that I’m returning to my room a changed person from when I left it that morning. Of course, the intensity of a conference (or workshop, retreat, etc.) is easily conducive to that sense of growth, the almost visceral awareness of time having sped up as one drinks deeply from the well of experience. It’s exciting, and a little overwhelming (or very overwhelming, as the case may be). One can soak it up almost *because* it’s condensed into a short amount of time.
The point of this blog is not to try to think about how to hold onto these deep, profound experiences of insight, change, and growth, how to carry them into everyday life. But that moment when I closed my hotel door, feeling the deep internal shifts, I also realized that whether I return from a rich conference, a day of seeing clients, a vacation, or a grocery store trip, I am never the same as when I left. It looks pithy when written down like this — haven’t we seen enough Facebook posts about embracing the moment??
But I sensed a powerful truth to that thought on a deep level beyond words. One never steps into the same river twice. Writing this blog post from a bumpy airplane flight on my way back home, like almost everyone on it with me, I’m more aware than usual that our days are all numbered. This truth is avoided with the most intense vehemence by most because of the enormity of grief we do not want to face, but there is massive freedom that comes with a deep acceptance of it. When my 70-year-old grandma would say to my mother and I, “So when I’m gone, I want you to have the…[coffee table, brooch, painting, etc.]”, my mother would always wave her off with a “Mom!! Stop that.” But what freedom it might have been for my grandma to know that, having just a few years left on this planet, she can choose to leave gifts to her family in her wake. It is a paradox, but what freedom might each one of us experience if we were to fully acknowledge the finiteness of our lives.
Much has been written on this subject that I cannot hope to reference or survey here. My purpose here is to share a single enlightened moment of turning my doorknob during a conference weekend, and to convey perhaps a droplet of feeling that you might take with you wherever you go next.
A few exceptional authors on this subject do come to mind:
“Staring at the Sun” by Irvin Yalom
“The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker
Many books by Stephen and Ondrea Levine
Loving Psychoanalysis 