Elisa Monti is a voice-specialized experimental psychologist. She received her doctorate from The New School for Social Research. Her concentration is the relationship between psychological trauma and measures of voice. Her mission is to contribute to further understanding of the relationship between trauma and voice.
Elisa is a collaborator of the Helou Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh and is affiliated with New York Speech Pathology. Elisa is now completing Level III Montello Method for Performance Wellness Certification and is certified in Vocal Psychotherapy (trained by Dr. Diane Austin). Elisa is the founder of the Voice and Trauma Research and Connection Group.
Dr. Monti’s Career Path
Q: Tell me a little about where you are now in your career and the path you’ve taken to get here.
Thank you for a question that helps me look back and reflect on what my path has been. My purpose in life is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between psychological trauma and the voice. This “field” is not yet established and research still needs to go a long way. I have therefore founded voiceandtrauma.com, a platform for conversations among experts on this topic.
Currently, I call myself a researcher and a Performance Wellness therapist. The path to get here was certainly marked by educational steps, such as getting my PhD in experimental psychology and my certification in the Montello Method for Performance Wellness as well as my certification in Vocal Psychotherapy. I am passionate about research as it is the part that helps pose questions in a certain way and at least strive for some objectivity in my quest for answers about the links between traumatic experiences and voice.
My work as a Performance Wellness therapist helps me get closer to the inner world of individuals and it has been very humbling for me. My clients are generally creative individuals who deal with various kinds of emotional blocks, performance anxiety and trauma.
So, I would say that currently I am divided between research, client works, and connecting with others who share my same interest in the trauma-voice relationship.
What is Trauma?
Q: Trauma is a term thrown around a lot these days. How do you conceptualize trauma? What are the hallmarks? What are the common misconceptions you observe others having?
I think conceptualizations and terminology for trauma have been changing throughout the years. Trauma can be described as a particularly emotionally distressing event that happens to a person with potentially long-term effects on one’s wellbeing. Perhaps the most up-to-date conceptualization of trauma is that trauma is not necessarily the event itself, but trauma is how the nervous system responds to the event.
I think the hallmarks of trauma are several, but at the core is a change in one’s ability to deal with everyday situations in the same way that one used to before the trauma. Connecting with others may have become difficult, sounds may have become unbearable, falling asleep may be a challenge. One might see themselves and their world differently than they did before.
I believe that a big misconception is what “counts” as trauma and the frequency of trauma occurrence. If we think about childhood trauma specifically, survivors of abuse and neglect worldwide are at least 1 in 5, but if you ask individuals outside of the field to take a guess, they will probably tell you it’s 1 in 100 or something along those lines.
Also, I think people often focus on what they believe is “bad enough” to be considered trauma. Again, if one’s system reacts exhibiting post-traumatic reactivity, the person has suffered trauma. Importantly, on an ethical level, I think we cannot tell anyone that what they considered traumatizing is not.
Discovering the Connection Between Trauma and Voice
Q: How did you first become aware of the possible connection between trauma and the voice?
I initially became very fascinated with the connections between one’s past and the voice a very long time ago, when I was in musical theater school, specifically at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
I remember watching peers sing songs beautifully and flawlessly until they were in a particularly triggering situation, a personal rough patch or difficulties with specific professors around whom they felt insecure or vulnerable. Suddenly their voices were unable to do what they would normally do.
I remember being stunned by those instances, especially because no one seemed interested in discussing these potential connections. The “fix” was always technical, there was never an acknowledgment of the emotional mechanisms underlying elements in a voice changing suddenly.
How Trauma Affects the Voice
Q: How do you understand the connection between trauma and voice? What is the pathway through which trauma influences voice?
This is my favorite question as it is the question that my passion revolves around! The connection between trauma and voice is widely discussed, but not yet researched enough. There are probably several pathways that we still have to investigate.
One possible connection can exist in how trauma impacts physiology and therefore potentially the physiological systems of the vocal apparatus. The voice is incredibly complex, and because saying what we need to say comes so naturally, we often take this complexity for granted.
When we speak, several steps occur, beginning with respiration, then to phonation (vocal folds vibrating) to resonation (oral tract cavities change shape when we speak) to articulation (e.g. lips moving).
Also, the brain is involved in all of these mechanisms at various levels. One could argue that any of these elements could be physiologically indirectly influenced by trauma which can then impact the voice.
The investigative works needs to uncover all of these layers.
“Voice” as a Metaphor
Q: “Voice” is an interesting topic because it is a discrete, observable, physiological entity and it’s also used abstractly as a synonym for someone’s unique perspective. Voice is a literary term and a colloquial term referring to the distinctive way people express themselves. What are your thoughts on trauma and its potential to impact voice in the more abstract sense?
I love the numerous aspects of voice as well!
Generally, research approaches the voice in its acoustic, physiological or perceptual form.
I do certainly agree that the voice is a symbol of the “metaphorical” voice that we attribute to someone’s truth, perspective, self-expression. I think trauma can absolutely impact the voice in this more abstract sense, as sometimes trauma can make one feel afraid to say what they need to say, feel vulnerable in taking up space, or hesitant to be seen and heard.
Some scholars have actually argued that the abstract metaphorical meaning of voice is one of the pathways that can affect the actual voice. I think this is an interesting line of inquiry that can be further explored.
For example, there are case studies in speech language pathology discussing voice loss after the loss of loved one, or developing unexplained vocal tension when tension arises in a marriage. Also, cases have been reported of people who sound “strangled” when they are holding in guilt or an unbearable secret.
I personally find it very fascinating when people’s voices change when they talk about themselves as opposed to when they talk about someone else, such as suddenly sounding very high pitched and soft.
I think that the abstract, more metaphorical definition of “voice” and the actual voice often go hand in hand in mysterious ways that inform us about both.
Trauma and Voice: Now and the Future
Q: What are some of the most compelling findings on the link between trauma and the voice? Where do you see your research heading going forward?
I would say there are different findings, some have to do with vocal pathology and some have to do with “normal” voices.
There is a substantial body of literature on what we call ‘psychogenic voice disorders’ which are voices that become pathological as a result of psychological events – including trauma – in the absence of laryngeal pathology.
The links between trauma and non-pathological voices remain largely unexplored. An important article to know about is the paper that came out in 2019 by Marmar and colleagues about speech indices in the voices of veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder and without.
I have conducted a few preliminary studies myself where I have primarily explored the links between self-reported childhood trauma and interpersonal violence with acoustic measures of voice. Some are out there, and some are in the making.
Research is necessary to create a sense of direction that is currently lacking in the field.
Importantly, though not of empirical nature, the work by Dr. Diane Austin, the founder of Vocal Psychotherapy, needs to be kept in mind. Dr. Austin works a lot with the voice in trauma survivors and has written several case studies that can inspire both research and clinical work.
Supporting Dr. Monti’s Work
Q: How can people support you and/or your research?
The best way to support us is to visit our website voiceandtrauma.com and spread the word about our mission and our events!
Monti, E., D’Andrea W., Freed, S., Kidd, D., Feuer, S., Carroll, L., Castano E. Does Self-Reported Childhood Trauma Relate to Vocal Acoustic Measures? Preliminary Findings at Trauma Recall. J Nonverbal Behav (In Press).
My fortieth birthday was a tough one for me. Behind me was half my life. I found myself carrying a lot of heavy baggage. Worse still was what I had left behind me: a trail of missed opportunities and dead dreams.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of who I’ve become. But who among us is immune to existential crises and regrets? Not me, and probably not you either.
For me, turning 40 was a landmark event–bigger than any birthday I’d had prior. My perspective tipped–seemingly overnight–from “the future holds such promise” to “I’ve already decided what my life is and what it’s likely to be.”
Amidst this existential crisis I held the limp corpses of my abandoned dreams and demanded answers about how this came to be. How did I allow this to happen?
Baseball
When my dad introduced me to baseball at the age of four, I couldn’t get enough. I’d watch every televised game the Oakland A’s played, which fortunately was almost daily. My dad taught me how to play catch. I’d replay highlights in my head from the games my dad and I had watched together (from memory as this was long before Youtube).
I would imagine myself as Mark McGwire or Jose Canseco taking big swings, making contact and watching the ball sail over the fence for a home run. I’d pretend my bed was the outfield wall, and re-enact the catches I saw outfielders make, leaping over the wall to snatch a home run away from the opposing batter. I’d throw tennis balls against the outside wall of our home creating ground balls for me to field. I especially loved throwing them at an angle where I’d have to chase–even dive for them to prevent them from going into an imagined outfield for a base hit.
While I wouldn’t call my infatuation with baseball a habit, per se, my love for baseball was a daily preoccupation. My skills and feel for the game grew commensurately with my obsession and repeated engagement. I knew with certainty that I was going to be a professional baseball player when I grew up.
You’ve probably guessed that that dream never materialized. As I got older, I watched fewer games, fantasized less about the plays I’d make in the field, and realized I’d never be the hulking giant that Mark McGwire or Jose Canseco were.
But there was no single moment that my dream died. It got harder to practice real baseball skills without a large field and fellow ballplayers to practice with. My fantasy became a less compelling way of staying connected to the sport than real ball. And thus, my daily engagement faded. I never figured out a way to turn my passion into habit.
My dream didn’t explode in a fiery car crash. My dream died a slow death of starvation, over many years.
My existential sorrow exists because I never lost the love of playing baseball. I feel regret because I failed to integrate it into my daily life. What if I had turned baseball into a daily practice, meditation, or ritual? No matter how small, what if I had just kept it alive in my mind and body?
But I didn’t. That’s how my dream died. I have no doubt that you’ve had some dreams perish in a similar manner. Small moments of neglect, repeated day after day, withering slowly at first then drastically as days became months, then years.
You Are What You Do Every Day
The point I’m building up to is probably quite obvious now: I’m not a baseball player because I didn’t figure out how to engage with baseball every day (Note: “every day” is of course an exaggeration. Everyone gets sick, goes on vacation, has an off day, and/or simply breaks from routine at one time or another. By every day, I mean something like: “every typical day”).
It’s the same reason I’m not an astronaut, musician, mathematician, or monk. I never nurtured the constituent skills, knowledge, and practices of these other identities through deliberate, daily practice.
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones
Now I had a desire to be a baseball player, but no particular interest in acquiring these other identities. In that way, baseball player and these other identities are different. What makes them the same is daily regular neglect.
Let’s examine this from the reverse perspective. Do you have any negative identities? Are you overweight? Out of shape? Underachieving? Lost? Poor?
By the law of habit, you are habitually engaging in practices that bestow whichever of these unwanted identities you own.
The Popularity of Habit Content
Why have so many books been written–and more importantly, why have so many books on habit sold–in the last 5 years? Even more videos, listicles, and video summaries (this included) accompany the rise in published works on habit.
What sparked this trend?
It’s an interesting question worthy of its own discussion. A rise in ADHD culture where adult issues related to initiating and maintaining chosen behaviors abound? Or, perhaps the absence of structure once provided by 9-5 office jobs in the pre-covid era stripped us of much-needed self-governance muscle?
My pet theory: We are in the middle of a cultural epidemic of identity crisis.
As society increases in complexity and the economic gulf widens between the haves and have-nots, younger generations struggle to define themselves. Adolescents and young adults have traditionally found identity through traditional career paths. Work, when done right, provides opportunities for growth, skill development, and purpose.
For most young people, identifying, cultivating, and establishing a mature identity in today’s world will likely be the most difficult challenge they undertake. In fact, many don’t succeed, which results in a wasteland of failed launches, immature parents, financially underperforming “adults” in their 30’s and 40’s who never found their way in their 20’s.
Habit provides the antidote to this crisis. What you do every day declares to yourself and the world exactly who and what you are. Negotiating your role in the workforce, in relationships, and in your community becomes much easier once you stand tall on a foundation of robust, established, curated habits.
Whatever the reason for their proliferation, books on habit have clearly captured the imagination of the masses.
Habits Are the Building Blocks of a Consciously-Constructed You
As a trained psychotherapist, I encourage skepticism of any method that promises radical transformation. People naturally build personalities that are robust, resilient, and conservative against change. This means that the things you don’t like about yourself are every bit as resistant to change as the aspects of you that serve you.
Psychotherapy is a process of confronting the more stubborn, weed-like structures of the personality that don’t serve you. It’s a process of working with rooted resistance and clearing obstacles to growth. The unconscious mind, the wiser, more powerful, more circumspect aspect of mental life does the bulk of the work in terms of replacing old structures that are out of date and working poorly.
But, what about change we actively want? How do we consciously choose new skills and facets of identity? This, I believe, is where habit comes in.
The art and skill of creating new habits the way we deliberately, steadily, and consciously choose who we are in the process of becoming.
Let’s consider how habit can triumph over unconscious resistance and the mind’s bias towards conserving the old you.
The Magic of Habits
Habits can be small
To embrace habits is to embrace the master value of consistency. Small steps that turn into large distances with the passage of time and unyielding consistency.
To be explicit, the size of any habit is not nearly as important as the commitment to repeating it. If your goal is to be physically fit, the habit could begin with one push-up per day, walk one block, walk up one flight of stairs, or simply go to the gym for five minutes (this could mean literally going to the gym–that is,not doing a single exercise).
“When you are designing a new habit, you are really designing for consistency. And for that result, you’ll find that simplicity is the key. Or as I like to teach my students: Simplicity changes behavior.”
― B.J. Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything
Remember that fitness, like many other aspects of self-care and self-governance are daily practices that will be relevant for the rest of your life. It’s amazing how much people tend to overestimate the importance of intensity when it comes to exercise among other habits, and underestimate consistency.
The best way to build consistency is to start small–tiny even. The catch is simply that you must do it every day, rain or shine. Intensity is not the virtue to seek when it comes to change. Consistency is.
Habits create a process orientation
Outcomes matter in life. There’s no getting around it. The trick of the mind you must learn to accept is that the best results come from making the process the outcome.
What does this mean? You’re much better off setting the goal of writing 200 crappy words per day than the goal of writing a New York Times best-seller.
“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Quantity begets quality, perfect is the enemy of the good, the journey is the destination, and a little is infinitely more than zero.
These truisms all point to the same conclusion: Just do it. Or as Seth Godin urges, merely do it.
When you focus on building a habit, you orient yourself to a much healthier game. How do I complete this essential task every day without breaking the chain? How many days of completed habits can I stack?
With this process mindset you cultivate agency, discipline, and professionalism. With a results orientation, you fritter away energy worrying about perception, simulating others’ responses, and worrying about challenges yet to arrive.
Focusing on what others will think, how critics will receive something, what results you’ll get, or how much revenue a product will generate are crippling mindsets.
You see, in life there is no finish line, except death. Life goes on after successes and failures alike. Having a process orientation means building something that works for you. That is invaluable no matter what outcomes you generate. Success? Great, start again. Failure? Disappointing, but the process goes on.
And even though the outcome is not the point (since it’s not under your control), your outcomes will almost certainly be better by focusing on building productive habits you can maintain over time.
Habits are Ballasts
At the core of every adult human is a fickle child. Our moods change, our impulses move from one object to another, and the shine of instant gratification perpetually allures.
If our conscious minds are like vessels, then the seas of the Id–the raw emotional force that seeks immediate expression–exerts pitches and tosses us about.
Everyone has moments, days, weeks, months and even years where our vessels capsize, leaving our will scrambling to stay afloat and climb back into the safety of its vessel.
Habits are like ballasts. Habits steady the ship and protect our conscious will from being overtaken by stormy seas.
The stronger and wiser our habits, the more stable and secure we feel. While we can never have perfect control, we feel at our strongest when we stability triumphs over unpredictability day-in, day-out.
Habits are efficient
Imagine a task, practice, or project you’ve struggled to tackle in recent months or years. Consider for a moment how many plans you’ve hatched in your mind to complete it. Have there been false starts? Bursts of effort punctuated by frustration plus extended periods of neglect? How much willpower went into those surges of effort? When you’re not making progress, is there anxiety? Stress? Inhibition? Overwhelm?
The internal experiences I mention are major drags on energy, productivity, and self esteem. Back-of-mind ruminations on neglected responsibilities kill our moods and dull the blades of our attention and drive.
Habits, when successfully implemented, offer an effective solution. Intuitively, making slow, gradual progress may not seem like the most “efficient” solution. After all, isn’t efficiency about getting more done in less time?
But the efficiency of habit comes from minimizing angst, worry, overwhelm, inertia, and dread. Do one small thing per day without stress or inhibition, and suddenly you’re making progress without guilt or stress.
“Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.”
― Charles Duhigg, The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business
Habits are energy efficient. Habits are the electric vehicles of self-governance. Habits get you from point A to point B slowly, but with negligible energy expense.
We all admire the manic Ferraris and Lamborghinis of personal productivity. 0 to 60 in 3 seconds, going fast, making others look like chumps, and looking sexy in the process.
These high-performance, high-speed people are as rare as they are admirable. They seem to get more done in a day than you do in a month (or more). Habits mean agreeing not to compare yourself to the F1 racers of productivity.
When you embrace habits, you compare yourself to the stuck, depressed, self-loathing version of yourself that can’t seem to make progress on a daunting task. Habits are efficient because they get you out of your chair and moving towards an important objective.
Habits affirm the self and build Identity
The self is a notion we have of who we are. An identity is what we convince the world we are. The self is an evolving entity. It changes, it develops, and grows. It contains features of our personality, strengths, weaknesses, interests, tastes, and aspirations.
In contrast, identity is what we earn in the world. It’s one thing to have a self-image of being funny, generous, and intelligent. But do others see you this way? Do others describe you as funny? Do they expect you to say smart things and give more than you receive? These are questions of identity.
“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
As social creatures, we are constantly creating a story of how we want to experience ourselves and how we want to be seen by others. Sometimes our actions align with how we think of ourselves and how others see us. Other times, our actions don’t align with what we think about ourselves or how others see us.
This creates tension, suffering, and anxiety.
Habits, when thoughtfully chosen and enacted consistently, are vehicles to create harmony between how we see ourselves, our actions, and how others perceive us. Our minds like it when our idea of ourselves as being smart matches our behaviors of reading every day and having engaging conversations with others. Habits make this alignment possible.
Habits build self-esteem
Habits are integral to all aspects of self. I just mentioned how habits affirm self-image. But let’s consider another aspect of self: Self-Esteem.
Self-esteem is a tricky concept to which to assign meaning. I’ll define it the following way for now. I reserve the right to change it later.
Self-efficacy is a belief in one’s own ability to solve problems.
Productivity/creativity is one’s generosity in solving important problems for oneself and others.
Self-concept is the notion that the world is essentially better off by one’s presence in it and/or contributions to it.
I’ve separated three elements of self-esteem, but you should observe that these are interrelated. It’s hard to believe in your inherent goodness if you aren’t able to give to others in a way that feels meaningful. Similarly, it’s hard to give meaningfully to yourself and others if you don’t believe you can solve important problems.
These aspects of self-esteem all work together to create an overall feeling about oneself.
This definition probably requires at least a caveat about boundaries, as many with low self-esteem end up solving too many problems for the wrong people. But that’s a topic for another day.
People begin to develop self-esteem at a young age through their participation in their family system, eventually translating positive feelings in the family to more complex systems over time. A child will try to replicate positive experiences at home (or compensate for negative experiences) by becoming successful academically and socially at school. After school, a similar process happens when you find a job and build close relationships.
Not everyone does this successfully, though. As an adult, one of the best ways to do this remedial work of (re)building self-esteem is to develop good habits.
Habits are the ideal product of taking big, abstract, global problems and making them into behavioral processes. You become more self-efficacious by solving problems every day. You become better at providing value to others by practicing ways of providing value to yourself and others in small ways daily. You build a stronger self-concept by offering value to deserving others day-in, day-out.
Habits build self-reliance
Here’s another aspect of self to explore in the context of habits: self-reliance. Self-reliance in casual parlance usually equates to not needing others. That’s not what I mean here.
In this context, I use self-reliance to mean trusting oneself. In other words, we can rely on ourselves to bridge the gap between where we are and what we desire in the long term. We can rely on ourselves to complete what we say we need to do to function in the world. And, we can rely on ourselves to take steps to bring our sense of self in alignment with our values.
“People model their change attempts after the external discipline they receive as children. They try to improve their lives by enslaving themselves to rigid and arbitrary goals, an outside-in approach. But for real change to occur, we need self-discipline, which can only come from a place of personal freedom and empowerment. We need to do the opposite of what we typically do.”
― Stephen Guise, Elastic Habits: Good Habits That Adapt to Your Day
The essence of self-reliance is trust. Can we trust that we will continue to move in the direction we aspire to go? If I want to be more fit and healthy, can I count on myself to go to the gym? To eat better?
As I’ve discussed, habits are not about getting it now. Habits don’t help us achieve instant gratification. Habits help us believe we can get what we want eventually. This means we need faith, belief, and trust.
Doing a small thing, day in and day out is how we achieve faith, belief, and trust. Once we believe in ourselves, then we really have something valuable.
Habits reduce overwhelm
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
While I don’t condone eating cute, large, sentient, endangered species, habits are at the heart of this truism.
Big, overwhelming tasks require the same kind of system that allows water to cut through rock. Slow, deliberate, unrelenting, repeated effort.
While most people recognize that the best way to fight overwhelm is to break a task down into smaller steps, it can be hard to do in practice. Breaking things down into smaller steps is cognitive and strategic. Habits are the behavioral version of this.
“We should be dreamy about aspirations but not about the behaviors that will get us there. Behaviors are grounded. Concrete. They are the handholds and footholds that get you up the rock face. Your path to the top is your own, and you choose your behaviors according to the particular rock you are climbing.”
― B.J. Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything
Action precedes motivation. Just start. Do something. Anything. Once you have broken inertia and have a bit of momentum, then being strategic–that is, making a list of small steps–will likely happen organically.
Again. Just start. Once you’ve started, strategy and “breaking it down” into bite-sized portions will follow naturally.
In steps it looks like this:
Just start with anything. Do something.
Once you feel hopeful, have momentum, and a hint of motivation, begin to think strategically. Break the task down into constituent habits. Make the habits so small you can’t possibly fail to complete them daily.
Repeat until the task is complete. Or, in the case of perpetual tasks, like fitness, repeat forever.
Revise as necessary. For example, change the habit to something more effective, easier, smaller, and/or easier to integrate into your daily routines.
Habits are effective
“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
In previous bullet points I’ve addressed how habits work. Ultimately, the only way to be convinced of the efficacy of deploying habits in your life is to try them out.
Until you’ve experienced the magic of habits in your own life, you’ll remain skeptical. This is true of any self-help advice you read.
“We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification. We find it difficult to enact or even accept incremental progress. Which is exactly what you need to cultivate meaningful long-term change.”
― B.J. Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything
Think of something you’ve struggled to start, change, complete, etc.
Apply the advice from this article.
Approach a solution from the perspective of habit formation.
James Clear’s 1998 best-selling book on habits is the place to start if you’re just getting started learning about habits. Clear writes in an extremely engaging manner, weaving relevant social science in with masterful storytelling.
What’s more, Clear offers extremely practical wisdom on how to begin implementing habits into the reader’s daily life.
“Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks.” -James Clear, Atomic Habits
BJ Fogg, the author of Tiny Habits, is a behavioral scientist at Stanford University who has written the authoritative technical manual for engineering small behavior changes that you can repeat indefinitely.
Fogg is an accomplished storyteller in his own right. I read the audiobook of Tiny Habits, which the author narrates himself. The significance of this can only be fully appreciated by hearing Fogg tell the backstory in his own voice.
Suffice it to say, that the habits Fogg extolls allowed him to accomplish the feat of narrating a full-length non-fiction work–an achievement he likely would never have been able to imagine himself doing in his younger years.
I credit Fogg for creating such a comprehensive, detailed user manual for the creation of tiny habits. The book is a testament to how even the simple act of creating a small habit is worth breaking down in a patient way so anyone can reap the benefits of habit formation.
This is a fairly long book that requires significant interest in the subject to read all the way through. It’s not boring, but it is thorough. I’d recommend starting with Clear’s book to see if you enjoy the topic enough to do a deeper dive.
“there are only three things we can do that will create lasting change: Have an epiphany, change our environment, or change our habits in tiny ways.” -BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits
Stephen Guise’s book on habit has probably garnered the least acclaim of any of these books, but I found it to make one of the more unique and powerful contributions to the popular literature on habits. He argues that elasticity–not rigidity–is the key to making habits last. And, making habits last is the key to making them effective.
Flexibility, Guise argues, is an underrated but essential aspect of strength. Think gymnasts instead of body builders.
Guise presents an elaborate system of how he manages habits in his own life. The author’s system of habits is a useful reference point, but also worth taking with a grain of salt. The best parts of the book are how he connects habit formation to the development of compassionate, self-discipline.
Elastic Habits is an incredibly empowering work of self-help. In a subtle manner, this book offers enough guidance to be immediately actionable while also emphasizing the importance of customizing habits to your life. And of course, customization means having habits that can be flexibly adapted to align with the demands of your day and general motivation levels.
My caveat with this recommendation is that I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the book so much if I had not read other books first. I was already sold on the importance of habits before reading this, making the concept of elasticity feel like an extremely surprising and delightful cheat code to an established relationship with habit-building.
“Discipline is what others do to us to keep our behavior in check. Self-discipline is how we form ourselves into the people we want to be.” -Stephen Guise, Elastic Habits
If you’re looking for tips, tricks, and practical strategies for integrating habits into your daily life, Charles Duhigg’s book is not the best option. The Power of Habit is a well-told series of stories that argues that habit lies at the heart of many human virtues and success stories.
Charles Duhigg’s classic book on habit is an engaging read with page-turning stories. My frustration with the book is that the term habit lacks conceptual clarity. Many phenomena that Duhigg describes don’t seem to fit with recognizable definitions of habit. That is, certain anecdotes have been incorporated into the narrative structure of the book in order to advance the argument that habits are indeed powerful.
Duhigg is, after all, a journalist and not a social scientist. As a writer and storyteller, he does well. Ultimately, I do believe his thesis about habits–I’m just not sure the examples he chose truly count as strong evidence in support of that thesis.
At the end of the day, the success of Duhigg’s book speaks for itself. It’s sold tons of copies and is extremely well-reviewed. It’s worth a read, but if you ask me, the first three on the list would all be better places to start.
“As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.”
― Charles Duhigg, The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life nd Business
Wrapping Up
Human beings are conservative. Even when our experiences are painful, we repeat them because we know we can survive them. We choose the devil we know.
But change is possible. Psychotherapy accomplishes change through collaborative work with a skilled therapist. Together with an effective therapist, you can systematically break down old templates that would otherwise repeat on autopilot. New behaviors emerge gradually out of new perspectives of yourself and the world around you.
But many people don’t want to rely on the incremental progress of therapy. In fact, many don’t even trust that the work they do with a therapist is accomplishing anything. Trusting your unconscious to create innovative solutions to longstanding problems can be a leap of faith that’s too far for many people.
So what then? How can change happen through the conscious mind (i.e., force of will) alone?
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
That’s where habits come in.
I’ve made the case in this piece that habits offer a sneaky way of making change palatable to a recalcitrant mind.
Most efforts to change, especially the big efforts born of fleeting inspiration, fail miserably. The desired change is too great. The effort is too unsustainable. The expectation is too great.
In the end, big efforts to change end in inoculation against future campaigns for change. Failed efforts destroy hope.
Habits, when applied skillfully and thoughtfully, offer a more successful path. Start small. Detach from expectations. Focus on consistency and process.
Over time, imperceptibly, you will become different. You can change the fabric of self, of identity. You are what you do every day. So, do what you want to be–no matter how small the actions are at first.
I love a good paradox. In clinical practice, a session seldom goes by where I do not seize the opportunity to share a relevant one with a patient.
Perhaps it’s their inherent rhetorical force in paradox. Maybe the power of paradox comes from their historical and cultural tradition.
Eastern philosophy is full of paradoxes. You can find paradox in the Tao Te Ching. Paradoxes are abundant in Zen koans–riddle-like stories that provoke enlightening insights. Paradox flows through the study martial arts. Derivative guru characters in pop culture, like Yoda, often speak in paradox.
The more ancient the tradition, it seems, the more riddled the culture is with paradoxical sayings (this is not a verified claim, but would be an interesting study!).
Whatever the reason, I’m sold on using paradoxes as a tried-and-true delivery mechanism life-changing wisdom.
What is a paradox?
“A statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true.”
The two aspects of paradox I’ll highlight are the following:
First, paradoxes are counterintuitive at best, nonsensical at worst. In the language of Merriam-Webster, a statement of paradox is “seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense.” This feature of a paradox is not only interesting, but potentially useful. If something seems illogical, nonsensical, and/or counterintuitive, then the odds are that people don’t think that way. Paradox helps people think in new, helpful ways–ways that aren’t merely common sense.
Second, a paradox contains truth. As the definition
The way I’ll discuss paradoxes here is quite similar to the concept of “dialectics”. The term dialectic has become quite popular in psychology thanks to Marsha Linehan.
I’ll use the terms “dialectic” and “paradox” interchangeably here. I apologize in advance to philosophy scholars, who will surely find this both inaccurate and offensive. But for conceptual clarity, I’ll differentiate between the two before I begin to use the terms interchangeably.
A paradox is a statement that appears wrong or nonsensical but is (or could be) in fact true.
A dialectic is a conversation–or dialogue–between two opposing points of view. A dialectic involves suspension of judgment, treating both sides as valid. Why do this? The longer one is able to hold two views in conversation, the sharper and more advanced understanding one finds on a topic.
Those may seem quite different. But conceptually they share important elements. Most importantly, paradox and dialectic share the features of holding two opposing/contradictory elements in tension, suspending judgment (not jumping to conclusions), maintaining an ethic of uncertainty, and seeking a higher–or perhaps more practicable–version of the truth.
Why are they so useful to therapists?
Clinicians use paradoxes and dialectics to no end because the challenges of life tend not to fall into neat and tidy bins. Our brain seeks order, winces at uncertainty, rejects nuance, and defaults to unequivocal assertions. Therapists know two things about this tendency:
That we do in fact have such a tendency; we assume something is right or wrong, black and white, good or bad. I.e., “It’s your fault or my fault, and I know damn well it’s not my fault.”
The synthesis is usually more accurate and easier to integrate into healthy relationships. That is, “We’re both right, and both wrong;” “Your point of view is valid, as is mine.”
Clinicians don’t have the secrets to life and are every bit as frustrated by the uncertainty and ambiguity of common life problems. Even though EVERYONE struggles living with shades of gray, trained professionals, the uncertainties of life are an integral part of personal and professional practice.
A good therapist welcomes the challenge of aspiring to live an integrated life, reconciling opposites and holding two competing ideas or emotions in tension. To the skilled clinician, that aspirational values helps her help you.
Paradox 1: It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility
From a young age, parents, teachers, and authority figures make an effort to punish offenders as well as extract apologies and reparations from them.
Your brother hits you and steals your snack? Mom swoops in and forces Big Bro to return the snack and give you an apology.
The bully at school pulls your hair? Ms. Teacher doles out a detention and Bully’s mom makes him apologize.
Criminal robs a bank? The police arrest him, Prosecutor prosecutes, and Criminal serves time and does many hours of community service.
It’s satisfying when something approximating justice materializes. But what about the rapist? The murderer? The boss who subtly undermines you over the course of years? He costs you countless promotions and dollars earned. What about the husband who cheats on you, abuses you, and separates you from friends and family?
The damage from these tragic examples cannot be undone. No one can return a loss of dignity, bodily integrity and autonomy violently stolen. No one can restore a lost loved one, time and effort stolen, or trust broken.
Bad things happen to good people every day. Illusions of fairness may be a useful ideal for an evolved society. Yet, blind faith in social structures and systems to preserve fairness for all is naive fantasy.
To quote an extremely smart and successful guy I know: “Fair is the first two weeks of October.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with seeking justice when feasible. (I.e., Is a conviction likely? How expensive will it be in time, money, and effort? Is this the kind of person who apologizes? Owns his mistakes?)
When justice is possible, pursue it.
BUT…!
No matter what, assume responsibility.
Grief, pain, and righteous indignation can be quagmires. Feel them. Own them. Take responsibility for them.
Many who espouse this idea of radical ownership and responsibility will say: “Don’t be a victim” or “That’s a victim mentality.”
I would add that victims do exist. Many people are victimized by ill-meaning perpetrators.
It’s not wrong to be a victim. Yet, it’s unhealthy to spend your life claiming victim entitlements.
Paradox 2: You probably don’t have free will but you’re better off believing you do
When you boil down human behavior into its biochemical elements, everything you do amounts to neurochemical interactions that either cross critical thresholds, or not. Choices you’ve made in the past, traumas, rational bases for your behavior are already baked into your biology.
That spontaneous thought you just had? It’s an emergent property of your meat hardware. Every decision you make, thought you have, impulse you inhibit, feeling you have can be reduced to the complex interaction of your existing biology with the randomness and chaos of your environment.
Yet, we need to reconcile this fact with the observation that people who have agency are the most accomplished and most actualized people on the planet. Try finding an accomplished person that doesn’t believe they have been a passive automaton in their achievements.
The wise and the humble will recognize the role of luck, timing, and circumstance. Still, nothing gets done without ownership, responsibility, and personal agency.
While free will may be an illusion, the brains with a belief in free will hardwired in, navigate the world better.
That makes believing in the power of choice one very useful illusion.
Paradox 3: Life is probably meaningless, which is cool
Let me preface this by saying I make no claim to have the secrets of the universe. I know I don’t know the meaning of life, whether or not there is one all knowing God or thousands of deities roaming the earth in disguise.
I know I don’t know, and I’m reasonably confident that you (and anyone else) doesn’t know either.
To me, the simplest explanation is that life is meaningless. Random. A curiosity. A phenomenon.
You might come to a different conclusion, and that’s fine.
However, from a psychological perspective, the fact that the meaning of life is not clearly and explicitly revealed to us turns life into a projective test–one really long Rorschach test.
Or, if you prefer artistic imagery, it turns life into a blank canvas.
We create our own meaning. Perhaps you could even say that nihilists create their own lack of meaning. That can feel empty, lonely, and depressing. It can also feel liberating, exciting, and fun.
Healthy people tend to consider their lives to be meaningful and important. Healthy people also tend not to feel burdened by the stakes of life. Things are important yet also a gift to be enjoyed. Importance doesn’t have to mean feeling weighte down by existential responsibility.
You get to make your own. You can emulate the happy people you know, or design your own narrative that excites you.
Just know that the story of nihilistic despair is also a story you are also telling. Rational though it may be, it’s still the meaning you’ve made.
Bonus Paradox: The rule of opposites
While I’ve highlighted three paradoxes of wellbeing, the truth is paradoxes and dialectics are everywhere in life. In fact, nearly every virtue you’d like to cultivate, the opposite of what you desire is an essential part of achieving what you seek. Ancient philosophies have long extolled the virtue of integrating opposites. Especially in eastern philosophies, adherents believe that balance, health, and harmony come through finding the unity in opposites.
The well-known yin-yang symbol captures the unity of opposites. Note how the contrasting colors dance with one another and even contain a kernal off its counterpart (“dualistic-monism”). Notice how the black “yin” contains within it a unit of white “yang.” In the other swirl the reverse is true: the white swirl of yang also has an black eye of yin.
Consider the following list of paradoxes:
To change, accept.
To be loved, means learning to be disliked.
To master, surrender.
To be free, be disciplined.
To succeed, learn to fail.
To feel intimacy, set boundaries.
To be strong, be flexible.
To get results, focus on the process.
To be rich, embrace frugal, minimalistic practices.
Summary
In this article I’ve provided an explanation of paradoxes, why clinicians use them, and what their value could be in a clinical context.
I’ve also provided (at least) four paradoxes I have found to have strong associations with optimal mental health. Many more exist, of course. I’d love to read others in the comments.
What, if any paradoxes have you found to be true? What virtues are you attempting to integrate into your life? How could your quest for new virtues be aided by integrating its opposite into your life?
Compassion comes to people naturally. Even in the nursery, infants experience empathic distress–when one baby cries, ALL babies start to cry.
Problems experiencing and expressing compassion tend to arise the more involved we get in the complexities of social give and take. Compassion becomes especially tricky in a couple of different scenarios:
First, I might have trouble feeling compassion for others if I feel like I am sacrificing more than you are. Or, perhaps I feel like you’re getting more back than I am if we sacrifice the same amount. Worse still, I might see that you sacrifice less than me and get more back.
Politicians, financiers, billionaires are all easy targets for antagonism because many people agree they don’t deserve our compassion. Why? Because we believe they often make more than us, pay less taxes, and/or work less.
The second reason compassion can be tricky is if I don’t see you as belonging to the same group. Nationalist and racial examples abound here. A less emotionally charged example would be the world of professional sports. If I’m a Yankee fan, I might have a hard time feeling compassion for a player on the Red Sox. Why? Because I don’t believe I’m a member of that tribe. My emotional energy does not contribute to the Red Sox community and I also don’t get anything back from them. They might as well be from a different planet!
How To Be More Compassionate
Let’s get right into how to allow give more emotional energy to the feelings and needs to others. The tips that follow are more about mindset than specific actions. Remember, compassion comes naturally. And while the tips I present here may be simple, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are always easy to apply.
Tip 1: Take Heart
The first tip I would give anyone seeking to feel more compassion for others is to remember that it comes to you naturally. You don’t lack empathy or compassion, you simply have learned ways of being in the world that make giving others’ pain its due recognition difficult or impossible.
Narcissists and psychopaths, famous for their inability to feel empathy and compassion, arrive at their tortured states due to chronic states of profound lack–whether that be kindness, nurturance, care, decency, emotional validation, or some other emotional necessity.
But unless you are an extreme case, finding compassion is just a matter of returning to your natural state of being. So, first take heart that if you’re reading this and want to improve how empathic you are, you’re probably not a psychopath.
Tip 2: Tend to yourself first
My second tip is a paradoxical one: take care of yourself first. Compassion and empathy are difficult when we feel stretched too thin. Maybe your bills are overwhelming, your family demands too much, you have too little time, or perhaps feel like no one cares what you are thinking and feeling. Under these circumstances, it’s extremely difficult to truly attend to and empathize with someone else’s emotional needs.
Taking time and space to feel your own feelings and work on setting appropriate boundaries might give you a bit more emotional fuel to go on a compassionate journey with someone else.
Tip 3: Check your envy
A third tip for how to enhance compassion is to check your own envy. Envy is pervasive and pernicious in our current culture. Social media notoriously stokes envy, magnifying our own sense of lack and encourages us to even enjoy others’ misfortune (celebrity gossip makes a killing off of our envy).
Envy can be hard to deal with, but I like to encourage people to see it as desire in disguise. Perhaps someone else’s good fortune can lead you to setting a goal for yourself. Envy is only a problem when it makes you want to tear others down. What if it could help you lift yourself up? If it can, then envy can lead you to compassion by becoming curious about another person’s struggle to reach the goal you would like to reach yourself.
Tip 4: Find your strongest bond
One final tip for enhancing compassion is to find your highest common denominator. I say the highest common denominator because of course we are all human. But humanity alone doesn’t always feel like a strong enough connection. Try to find a higher level of commonality.
What if you knew more about another person’s struggles or inner world? What if you learned that the person you struggle to feel compassion for also has a critical mother or a domineering father? Perhaps both you and the individual you can’t seem to feel empathy for both have a child with the same learning difficulty, medical issue, or style of acting out?
The more you can relate the other person’s life to your own and see them as an avatar for yourself, the more you learn about yourself.
This benefits us too, not just others. I see in my practice all the time people learn about their biggest pain points and darkest emotions by having some profound and unexpected fit of compassion for someone they see suffer on the news. Connecting with yourself and connecting with others go hand in hand.
Wrapping Up
Being impacted by others sometimes feels impossible, or at least, overwhelming. But being impacted by others is really a passive process, not an active one. The tips I’ve provided here are more about removing barriers–that is active processes–that get in the way of us experiencing our natural reactions to others.
Be easy with yourself and you’ll be much more receptive to the needs of others. Again, simple but not always easy.
How does someone know if they are in psychosis? As it turns out, this is precisely the correct question to ask. There is a simple and interesting answer to this question. But first, let’s begin with how NAMI (National Alliance On Mental Illness), an authority on mental illness, defines psychosis:
“Most people think of psychosis as a break with reality. In a way it is. Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person’s thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what isn’t. These disruptions are often experienced as seeing, hearing and believing things that aren’t real or having strange, persistent thoughts, behaviors and emotions. While everyone’s experience is different, most people say psychosis is frightening and confusing.”
Many people associate psychosis with its dramatic symptoms of hallucinations and bizarre beliefs. Disorganized thinking is another unmistakable sign of psychosis.
These are not wrong associations. However, the defining feature of psychosis is a lack of insight. In other words, a true psychosis is one where the person experiencing hallucinations or delusions believes these experiences to be real.
In the passage above, I emphasized the portion of NAMI’s definition wherein they capture that it is the believing of the hallucinations or delusions. The conviction and inflexibility around that belief is what distinguishes non-pathological disturbances in thinking from psychosis.
In fact, to get right down to it, delusions are the heart of psychosis. When hallucinations occur, they are only psychotic to the extent that the person experiencing them believes that they are real voices. What makes hallucinations psychotic is the inability to recognize that the voices the hallucinator hears are imagined. In other words, psychotic hallucinations are also delusions.
A psychotic person may have a vague sensation that something is “off” or that things are taking a dark turn when psychosis sets in. However, the defining feature of psychosis is that the experiencer does not know s/he is psychotic. The clinical phrasing of this is that the psychotic person “lacks insight.”
I’ll share one caveat to the way I’ve defined psychosis as delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking with a lack of insight. A mentor of mine, David Shapiro, used to talk about the “double-bookkeeping” of psychosis. The term double-bookkeeping refers to the way a person can both know and not know something at the same time. The example Shapiro used to illustrate this point is the psychotic person on a psychiatric ward who has the unshakeable belief that he is Jesus, yet also stands in line to take his medication.
Consider a similar example:
A psychotic person shows up to the psychiatric ER. He is convinced that a chip has been implanted in his head by aliens. The patient becomes upset that the primary concern of the chip is not taken seriously by clinicians.
But why show up to a psychiatric ER? Why not seek out a brain surgeon?
This vague, dissociated, “knowing” that something is wrong is not sufficient to be meaningful insight into the condition. However, a faint awareness of the psychiatric nature of psychosis is somewhere on the mental books.
In their book Assessing Psychosis, the bible for understanding clinical presentations of psychosis, Khadivi and Kleiger describe how psychotic thinking really comes to the surface when a clinician probes the contradictions like the one above. Asking a patient to explain why he came to the psych ER when a surgeon would be required allows for a clinician to see the psychotic process in action.
One last implication of defining psychosis as a lack of insight, is that someone can experience hallucinations without being psychotic. Everyone has isolated experiences of delusions and hallucinations in their life. Though for most of us, these experiences are subtle, infrequent and safely contained.
I recently came across a study that established interconnections between trauma, the self-conscious emotions (i.e., guilt and shame), and hypersexuality. The tendency towards hypersexuality appears especially strong among male trauma survivors. A summary of the findings from the study can be found here.
The study’s findings stirred up a few interesting questions in me. First, what is it about experiences of trauma that evoke guilt and shame–emotions that make us question the stability of our social bonds and membership? Second, what is an easy way to tell that certain expressions of sexuality may be unhealthy responses to trauma? And third, why would hypersexuality be a common way of coping with the guilt and shame associated with trauma?
Why Guilt and Shame
The fact that guilt and shame are so closely linked to trauma is a bit of a head scratcher at first glance. For one, traumatic experiences are so varied. Each “type” of traumatic experience has its own emotional nuances so it seems a bit odd that guilt and shame would be so consistently linked to traumatic experiences. After all, aside from feelings of danger, what does experience in combat have in common with being sexually assaulted?
Certain kinds of trauma, like sexual-assault, can be easily linked to experiences of shame. Survivors of sexual assault have natural feelings of healthy sexuality forced into contact with hostility, victimization, predatory behavior, and social stigma. Many victims feel a sense of guilt as well because they wonder if their actions, clothing, kindness, and trusting mentality could have made them a target.
Another reason to feel puzzled by guilt and shame resulting from trauma is how guilty and ashamed the victim feels but not the perpetrator. In cases where a traumatic event is interpersonal in nature, meaning one person victimizes another, shouldn’t it be the perpetrator who carries around feelings of guilt and shame? While we have ways of explaining this phenomenon, where the victim feels what the perpetrator should be feeling, it’s not the most intuitive consequence.
Any student of psychoanalytic theory could explain this phenomenon as projective identification. Projective identification occurs where the force of someone’s projection is so strong (and strongly disavowed) that it induces a corresponding experience in the recipient.
Setting complex, esoteric theoretical concepts aside, it could suffice to explain the guilt and shame that follow trauma as catastrophic failures of culture. Each of us sets aside powerful impulses and longings in order to reap the functional benefits of society and the reassurances of culture. Culture is a group narrative of who a group of people is, what they aspire to, and why life is worth living for them.
Traumatic events often expose the fiction in cultural narratives to their victims. The consequence is the traumatized feel alienated from others and unprotected by the stories others believe. Take the soldier who fights overseas, sees its atrocities, and returns to a populace ignorant of the realities of war. Civilians comfort themselves with stories of fighting for freedom and justice, but soldiers know first hand of the discrepancy between the story and reality.
The abused altar boy also knows this fiction. Religious fellowship and the soothing words of scripture don’t feel the same after being victimized by a leader in the community. Not only does religion stop feeling good, but the traumatic event separates the victim from others who believe it to be the answer to profound existential anxieties.
Shame and guilt arise whenever we feel disconnected from the culture of which we are a part. We begin to wonder if we are the problem–either we have done something wrong or are just inherently wrong.
There’s more to be said specifically about why shame in particular is so inherently connected with trauma. I’ll elaborate more on the link between shame in trauma in a later section.
Why Hypersexuality?
First of all, what even is the difference between natural sexuality and hypersexuality? The short answer is compulsivity. Hypersexuality is not really a matter of having an “overactive” sex drive. It’s much more about needing to have sex to feel okay. Or to use a food analogy, the difference between healthy sexuality and hypersexuality is much like the difference between having healthy eating habits and binge-eating. Overeating tends not to be about having a big appetite as much as it is about wanting the good feelings of eating to replace the bad feelings of idle moments.
Sex is healthy when partners find an overlap in naturally oscillating states of sexual desire. When desire and the compulsive need to find relief from negative emotional states get confused, sex starts to become unhealthy hypersexuality. Returning to the food analogy, healthy sex is like eating a wholesome, well-balanced meal several times a day. Hypersexuality is like going to the supermarket, picking up chips, cookies, candy and doughnuts then going to a private place to binge on them.
Hypersexuality is often associated with manic and hypomanic states where action replaces introspection. Sex, like food, is an especially powerful action to drown out introspection because of the potent physiological changes that occur naturally during sex.
In other words, people look to regulate painful emotions by seeking stimulating environments like clubs, casinos, shopping trips, vacations, spontaneous sexual encounters, etc. instead of recognizing one’s emotional state and finding a healthy, non-destructive way of coping with it. Manic and hypomanic defenses are common in trauma in addition to dissociation as a way of avoiding oneself.
What does hypersexuality have to do with trauma and PTSD?
As we’ve established, the so-called self-conscious emotions of guilt and shame often accompany trauma. Shame is especially pernicious. Shame tends to occur whenever the trauma has forced sufferers into the primitive defense of dissociation. Dissociation occurs when a psychological experience is so unbearable that the moment-to-moment flow of conscious experience separates from the experience of being in one’s own body. Put more simply, the trauma victim has an out-of-body experience to numb the psychic and physiological pain of the trauma.
Once dissociation occurs, it often becomes a dominant defense mechanism. The nature of post-traumatic symptoms is that the sufferer is constantly vigilant of the trauma repeating. Thus, any hint of danger leads to the recurrence of dissociation.
The emotion of shame is a residue of trauma and becomes like a moat that separates mind from body. Those who experience trauma feel a sense of shame or disgust at being in one’s own skin. Addictive and compulsive behaviors are tools trauma victims use in order to tolerate shame and have embodied experiences.
Compulsive sexuality is a logical coping strategy to deal with trauma, dissociation, and shame. Sex is a highly stimulating–even intoxicating–experience that makes being in one’s own skin pleasurable. Men especially may be hypersexual due to the association men learn between having sex and social acceptance. Shame is an extremely uncomfortable feeling associated with being a social outcast. Being received sexually, for many men, feels like the antidote to the dark feelings of shameful, social exclusion.
Healing from Trauma
Healing from post-traumatic symptoms like hypersexuality requires that the sufferer practice tolerating overwhelming emotions and working to restore healthy dialogue between mind and body. Psychotherapy provides a useful context to begin confronting difficult emotions associated with trauma. A skilled psychotherapist with whom the patient has a strong relationship can help to untangle the emotional knots left by trauma, encourage slow and steady exposure to painful residues of trauma, and raise awareness around a patient’s tendency to dissociate.
Mindfulness and yoga are especially helpful adjuncts to psychotherapy. Yoga especially has been celebrated as a way for people to synchronize physical and emotional experiences that have been dissociated through trauma. Muscular tension, defensive body postures, and chronic states of autonomic arousal can all be directly addressed through a modest yet consistent yoga practice.
People who have suffered from trauma can have negative experiences with mindfulness and yoga when it’s done outside of a psychotherapeutic treatment. Trauma survivors need to go slow, have expectations managed, and receive psychoeducation around preventing re-traumatization. In short, it’s important to have the proper support if your aim is to address symptoms of trauma through yoga or meditation / mindfulness practices.
In short, the psychological experiences of trauma are essential to address through a conventional strategy of psychotherapy with a skilled practitioner. The embodied experiences of trauma are also incredibly important to address as well, which is what makes yoga and meditation such helpful adjuncts. The mind-body impact of trauma is something famed trauma researcher and psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk discusses at length. For a review of his acclaimed book, The Body Keeps the Score, continue reading here.
We live in an interconnected world–a world where the 24-hour news cycle and social media confronts us with the most extreme ends of human experience. One hour, we might be watching the Kardashians vacation or unwind in their multimillion-dollar mansion. The next hour (or perhaps even the same hour!) we could be scrolling through instagram seeing haunting images of oppression, invasion, illness, destruction, and other powerful stories of the most profound levels of human suffering.
Whether we find ourselves more engaged with those we envy or those we pity, our voyeurism is sure to leave us in a darker place than where we started.
It’s true that we would be better off if we simply disengaged. Stop doomscrolling. Stop engaging with trolls. Stop watching the news. Stop immersing yourself in the lives of the rich, beautiful, and overindulged.
But that advice might be skirting a very rational question: how can we be happy when others are suffering through no fault of their own?
The first question: do you really want to not suffer?
Sometimes it’s more comfortable to suffer. Asking yourself if you truly want to be happy is a necessary first step.
If you’re asking yourself: “how can I be happy when so many are suffering?” the first question to address is “why are you asking?” In other words, I often hear this question as a rhetorical question. The question might be more of an assertion of the following argument:
“I’m totally justified in being unhappy and depressed and am tired of other people suggesting I should feel otherwise.”
Now, if you really want to be happy, then read on. However, if you’re looking for reasons to feel anger, righteous indignation, sadness, nihilistic despair, and depressive realism, there are innumerable media outlets and social media accounts to provide the gratification you seek.
My purpose here is to take the question at face value. How do you escape the doom and gloom of the world and move into feelings of wellbeing, agency, and healthy engagement with life?
Why would anyone want to choose unhappiness over happiness?
It comes as a surprise to many people who begin therapy that it’s possible to choose suffering over happiness. Why would anyone do such a thing?
People have their reasons. And of course, no one does so entirely consciously or voluntarily. Below I’ve listed a few (but certainly not all) of the reasons why people make an unconscious decision to feel anxious, depressed, and pessimistic about their fate, the world, and the future.
Chronic guilt
It’s hard to find the right balance between self-sacrifice and self-importance. Many people sacrifice too much, making happiness seem like selfishness and excess.
Every human who lives in a society has to sacrifice some of his own longings, desires, and instincts to exist harmoniously within collectives. This begins with family, but eventually becomes school, religious communities, until eventually broader, more abstract demands of the country and culture. Guilt is the emotion we learn to feel when we transgress or get more than our fair share. It’s helpful for societies to teach its members to feel guilty when one of its members has acted out of step with cherished values and agreements about what’s just.
The problem is that things can never be “fair.” Following the rules does not prevent someone for being envied, resented, and judged.
Parents envy their children for their youth, their energy, their future, their entitlement to doting care, and generally for having things that they themselves did not have when they were children. Peers, colleagues, and community members later envy others for being better looking, having more money, more talent, future prospects, etc.
This is to say, someone can do everything “right”, break no rules, and still feel guilty based on the perception that s/he has gotten more than s/he deserves. Many people learn to keep themselves small in order to satiate the unchecked envy of those around them–be it parents, friends, or respected community members.
What’s the natural consequence of this? The cycle continues. The individual who has agreed to feel guilty for talents and special characteristics begins to expect others to make greater sacrifices and envies those that take more than what’s “fair.”
This is a recipe for judgment, self-righteousness, and suffering.
Getting to be right
People often get so focused on proving their opinions to be true that they lose all perspective on what’s really important
One of the wonderful aspects of negative outcomes is that it’s easy to predict them. The downside of being able to predict these outcomes is that you have to live with them. But for many, that’s a trade off they are willing to make.
One term for this is depressive realism and it’s actually a real phenomenon. Make a dark prediction about the future and you’re likely to be right. This is especially true in your own life.
Have you ever made statements to yourself or others that sound like the ones below?
“I’ll never get that job.”
“There’s no way I can get an A in that class.”
“People like me never get accepted into that program.”
“No one ever listens to my ideas.”
These are the kinds of statements that are deals with the devil. There’s a good chance you’ll be right, but it’s certain you’ll suffer if you are. You’ll be right because you try less hard (or not at all), appear less confident, torpedo your own efforts, self-sabotage, etc.
But being right is comforting and, we believe, protects us from being too vulnerable and too sad.
Validation of pain:
It can be extremely difficult to let go of feelings and intuitions that harm us until we are assured that these emotional nudges have some validity.
One paradox of being social creatures and dealing with painful emotions is that in order to move through something, we have to be able to recognize what it is and where it came from. Much has been written about the developmental disasters that occur when young children are deprived of this emotional validation.
It’s often quicker in the demanding role of parent to talk children out of their feelings than to do the necessary emotional education of helping children to understand why they feel sad, hurt, angry, and upset. The short-sightedness of this strategy ultimately backfires, understandable though it may be.
As human beings, we’ve established that it’s imperative sometimes we need to sacrifice our individual needs for the collective. Before we can accomplish this, it’s important that we are able to fully understand the tradeoffs we are making. In other words, you need to appreciate where your emotions are coming from, the problem your emotions are signaling, and why ignoring certain problems could be dangerous before moving on and accepting your fate.
It’s always a delicate balance between the individual needs and the collective good. We cannot simply ignore the former for the sake of the latter.
In a related point, the question of how to feel okay in a world in crisis could be seen as a question that reverses the order of causality. In other words, are you depressed because the world is in crisis, or are you finding all of the pain in the world because you want (and, perhaps need) to validate your pain?
If it’s validation you crave, then there are other ways to do this. Successfully moving through depressive bouts means finding the emotions underlying it–usually a cocktail of guilt, shame, sadness, and anger, and validating these feelings without relying on the doom and gloom of the 24-hour news cycle to emotionally harmonize with you.
Underdeveloped Identity
It takes a lot of hard work and persistence to figure out where you belong and add value in the world, but we can’t truly be happy until we figure it out.
Building a mature, healthy identity is one of the hardest things human being have to do–especially in the complex world we live in now. The task involves having a well-developed sense of who you are as an individual, recognizing the things that others value about you, then cultivating skills around your unique qualities, talents and gifts.
In hunter-gatherer times, finding a role within a much simpler system with fewer human resources was an easy task. Now, not so much. Finance, law, technology, the arts, academia, marketing, medicine, engineering, etc. are all abstractions so far away from the day-to-day skills that our ancestors used to survive. It takes years to figure out what might be a match between our internal and external world in terms of filling an economic niche.
And, some people never find such a match.
When a person struggles to find a sense of belonging, one must ask the following question:
“Is the problem with me or is the problem in the world?”
You may recognize that this is a false dilemma. The answer to the question could simply be that there is no problem with either. Just keep looking for your place and your people.
But, it’s tempting when the frustration level is high, to find problems with the world. Fault finding with the world around us is flawed strategy, but a strategy nonetheless, to the problem of becoming a valued member of the social world.
The Narcissism of Happiness
Pure logic may tell you that you’re not important on a cosmic scale, but believing you matter is essential to being happy.
And now for a provocative and controversial point. Nevertheless, I believe it to be true. The controversial premise is the following:
Happiness requires that the individual embrace a healthy amount of narcissism.
The noble sufferer is not incorrect in that there is great unfairness in the amount of ease, comfort, luxury, wealth, love, kindness, equality, respect, etc. that gets distributed by chance throughout the masses. Some people just have it easier and better than others–and not just trivial differences.
Some children cry because they didn’t get the exact pony they desired. Other children cry because their parents were killed in front of their eyes in cold blood and for incomprehensibly silly reasons.
This is to say, the madness of the world is truly something to fret about. The pain and suffering “out there” is truly a problem and is not something that can be easily dismissed or trivialized using rational arguments.
But to make my point, let’s zoom out a bit more. Let’s be even more rational. Of what significance is human suffering? Of what significance is your life, my life, or anyone else’s?
Is the universe not infinitely vast? Are our lives not infinitely short when you consider the age of the universe? How can one reasonably argue that anything actually matters when we extend our frame of reference to the cosmic level? Aren’t we all, as Yalom describes, mere parentheses in eternity?
The point I’m making is a rather simple one. The state of mind required to lead a happy life full of subjective meaning and wellbeing is a totally separate state of mind than aiming to be purely rational and fully empathic.
Put in reverse, to feel happy and to lead a life that feels like it’s worth living, you must immerse yourself in your own story. Your life must be like an enthralling film in which you are the protagonist. You must find your own quest. You must deny many known realities of the world, such as the profound levels of suffering on a global scale, and you must deny the profound indifference to our existence from the universe.
The most accurate term for this is healthy narcissism. You are not selfish and empathetic to the characters in your orbit. You may also find people to care about on a global scale–causes to champion and charities to support. But you must accept your own limitations and your own selfishness in order to be a happy individual–and perhaps even a force for good in the world.
After all, depressed, miserable people crippled by their own depression tend not to be the ones who leave the world a better place than how they found it.
What does it mean to be “happy”, anyway?
Happiness doesn’t necessarily mean always being joyful. But being open to the full range of human experience is a good start to finding positive feelings about your life.
Happiness is not an easy state to capture, because it’s assumed that even the happiest people struggle, have problems, have high and low points, and are just as vulnerable to the indignities of the human condition as everyone else.
So, given that it’s impossible to be blissful and smiling every moment of the day, let’s unpack some of the elements of what it means to lead a happy life–or at the very least, a life worth living.
Identity = Authenticity + Value + Belonging
Every culture, society, country, community, etc. has problems. Some more than others. Criticizing these entities can lead to meaningful change. But I believe it’s important to separate the project of changing society for the better from the task of finding your place in a society. The latter is an essential problem to solve in order to find a sense of wellbeing in life.
No matter what you feel about your cultural context, there’s no getting around the importance of being somebody within that culture, feeling like you contribute something important, and feeling a sense of camaraderie.
It doesn’t really matter who or what you become, only that you feel like you are adding value to the world and that you belong.
Being somebody
It used to be that if you didn’t become a doctor or a lawyer, you weren’t a real success. Over time, beliefs have changed about what it means to be successful. Throughout the world, people do a better job of celebrating talent, skill, and meaningful contributions.
You don’t have to be a lawyer, a doctor, or even have a traditional job. Being a good father, a skilled drycleaner, or skilled bartender all have the potential to offer the rewards of being someone who adds value to your community.
Finding fit
Offering value to the world is only enjoyable and sustainable when we find an overlap between the needs of our community and our unique gifts. This takes a lot of careful consideration or a lot of trial and error–perhaps both. While it’s beyond the scope of this piece to offer tips and strategies for finding your place in the world, some useful questions to consider are the following:
What do I like thinking about?
Where does my attention want to go?
What kind of discomfort is easiest for me to tolerate?
What are the attributes and talents that I feel most confident about?
What causes or problems are most important to me?
Serving others
Many people get rich and successful but don’t become happy until they focus on serving others.
The happiest people on earth are the ones that serve others. You could argue that the happiness precedes the serving, but I think this is a bit of an academic point. Whenever possible, I suggest following the example of the people who have what you want–in this case, a sense of wellbeing derived from making important contributions to the lives of others.
Who, how, where, and why you serve others is a very personal choice (see point above about “finding fit”). It may not be easy to find the best way for you to serve others, but it’s probably worth the effort.
Not only does serving others contribute to feelings of wellbeing, but it also helps to counteract any of the guilt one feels about feeling good in a suffering world. We often hear the sound advice: “put your own oxygen mask on first.” Well, what if it’s possible to take care of yourself at the same time you help others? Serving others in a way that truly fulfills you might just be the way.
Belonging
Belonging is better than fitting in. We belong when we feel comfort, ease, and connection with others.
It’s essential for everyone to feel like they are a part of a group of like-minded people. Finding people with shared values and beliefs about the world doesn’t have to be a toxic in-group culture that’s rejecting of others. It simply means that there are people in the world that accept you just for being you. Your people allow you to feel comfortable being yourself and don’t make you work hard to be accepted.
Brene Brown, author of Dare to Lead and other popular books, makes the distinction between fitting in and belonging. Fitting in is an active process where you alter your behavior, censor yourself, and put forth effort to be a part of a larger group. Belonging, in contrast, feels easy and natural (but probably does not mean putting forth zero effort).
Fitting in is not inherently bad. Just make sure you have a place of belonging, too.
Freud’s Formula: Love & Work
If we can figure out how to show up in love and work, then we have figured out most challenging parts of life.
Freud’s terse answer to what makes for a good life was “love and work.” The simplicity is powerful and I think important on multiple levels. On the surface, finding a sense of satisfaction in relationships and in your professional life are undoubtedly important because the average person spends most of the day working and then coming home to catch up with a partner/family.
But there is more to it than just that. One could make valid criticisms that many cultures overvalue professional achievement and some of the happiest people lead lives of contented solitude. So let’s abstract a bit and see what can be distilled from Freud’s definition to make them less concrete and misunderstood.
Engagement
When Freud spoke of love and work, one of the key features he highlighted about having success in these areas was a lack of inhibitions. A lack of inhibitions is perhaps a slightly convoluted way of saying that one is engaged. In other words, you don’t hold any of yourself back.
As social creatures, humans are not merely content to only receive the things we need. It’s vital we feel that we are giving of ourselves as well. Full engagement with work and love means that we are giving of ourselves in an uninhibited way to the things that matter to us. It could be in the areas of love and work, but perhaps it could be something else.
Flow
Flow might be redundant here because flow is a natural state of wellbeing that comes from being fully engaged. Flow is the state of being “in the zone”, where attention is fully focused on the task at hand, things feel effortless despite facing a formidable challenge, and time seems to pass quickly. The concept of flow, coined by Mahaly Csíkszentmihályi, is described in more detail in many other places.
What’s important about flow is that it’s a state of pleasure and wellbeing that is not hedonistic or overly indulgent. It comes from putting in effort and thus is not marred by the hangovers that come from pure pleasure seeking. It’s also a state of mind that is the opposite of being overwhelmed by the world’s problems. To be in flow is to have agency, to be empowered. Being in flow means feeling capable, but challenged. In a flow state your focus is narrow, specific, and directed towards a manageable task.
Ruminating about the desperate state of the world is the antithesis of flow and it should not surprise us that the consequences of despairing about the world produce negative consequences. Since flow creates positive mental states, better to find it more often.
It may be generous to Freud to assume that he was aware of flow when extolling the benefits of love and work. However, I do believe that Freud was quite informed by the joyful flow states he achieved from writing and doing his clinical work when he highlighted love and work as essential to wellbeing. I’ll own the speculation, though.
Fullness of feeling
If Freud taught us anything about life, it’s that it’s important to feel your feelings. A good life can’t be one without pain or hardship, since everyone faces an abundance of both. However, we can make our peace with the fact that life is full of ups and downs.
The more courage we can summon to experience our feelings, the more likely we are to find what matters to us in both love and work. The more emotionally attuned we are, the deeper the connections we can make to others and the more passionate we can be in the offering of ourselves to others–be that in work or any other kind of service.
When despairing about the world, it’s important to distinguish between feeling sad and angry versus a defensive shutting down. In other words, it’s possible to cry and even rage at some of the world’s problems without getting stuck there. Feel your feelings, but move on to feeling intensely about more local concerns. Immerse yourself in challenges and problems that can be solved.
Again, we return to the importance Freud placed on being free from inhibitions. To be successful in these areas means being passionate about who you love and what you do. Success in love and work entails feeling your feelings.
Becoming your own parent = Treating yourself like you matter
Providing ourselves with the best, most customized care is an art that takes a lifetime to master.
It’s a cliche to talk about “self-care” in today’s world. While I think it’s a cliche for good reason–namely because it’s imperative to a strong sense of wellbeing–I believe that we need to be a bit clearer about what’s meant by self-care.
Self-care connotes equal parts wholesomeness and pleasure most places I see it discussed, which I think is mostly right. Other times, it is presented as a prescription for the chronically busy, the folks who work too hard and forget to take breaks. This latter perspective I find a bit problematic.
Self-care is a mindset that all adults need to bring to their life. Self-care certainly includes nice, wholesome things we do for ourselves that also give us pleasure. Although, I don’t believe small acts of kindness to oneself is a comprehensive definition of self-care.
To me, self-care is an empowered state of mind that one can only achieve after mourning the loss of caregivers whose responsibility was to meet your every need in life. Every grown up struggles, to one extent or another, with the fact that we no longer have parents to tend to our every need and responsibility. We see this struggle when people complain about the parenting they did receive, complain about the deficiencies of friends and romantic partners, grievances about the government, and again when we look at the state of the world and how poorly cared for it often is.
Caring for oneself is an ongoing and iterative process because each of us has unique minds, bodies, and souls. What’s more, these change as we change. Self-care means accepting that we must become our own parents, and do a better job of it than our actual parents. It means letting your actual parents off the hook and using that energy to focus on identifying and meeting your own needs.
There are an endless number of questions we need to answer in order to be competent at this. I’ll provide a tiny fraction here to give a sense of what I mean by self care:
What do I like to eat?
How do I get proper nutrition?
How do I ensure that my nutritional needs fits within my budget?
How do I earn enough money?
How do I find work or income streams that fit with my skills, talents, and preferences?
How do I take care of my body?
What kind of exercise do I enjoy?
How do I keep myself from being lonely?
How do I motivate myself when I’m feeling unmotivated?
What traits do I look for in friends and romantic partners?
Do I want to have a family?
Where do I get help if I can’t do something on my own?
Etc., etc.
The problem of how to optimally take care of yourself is one that directly relates back to the original question: how do we feel happy when the world is so damaged?
Well, we accept responsibility for taking care of ourselves. Of course, this is harder for some than others. We don’t all have equal opportunities, and many of us have great disadvantages, if not disabilities.
But, you play the hand you’re dealt.
Looking at the wretched state of the world and giving up is cursing the dealer for your hand or the bad card selection of others. I believe it’s a distraction from the game, and, perhaps an avoidance of playing the game altogether.
The game may not always be fun, but what’s the alternative?
Turning it around
Changing your life can be incredibly simple, but seldom is easy.
Changing your life can feel like turning around a massive ship. It takes a long time, looks more like a big arc than a hairpin turn, and begins with a commitment to stop going in the wrong direction. It’s extremely helpful to have a guide, like a therapist, psychiatrist, or other expert who can become a trusted facilitator of the metamorphosis.
It’s important to be transparent here that people have transformed their lives in all kinds of ways. That means two things. First, people do change their lives and so it’s possible to do. And second, the way that works for you is likely to be quite personal. That being said, I’ll share some principles that I’ve found to be extremely helpful in stimulating powerful change.
Sadness & Grief: Proof you’ve stopped going in the wrong direction:
Sadness and grief are underrated emotions. Anger can be intoxicating in the way it makes us feel powerful and helps us to overcome obstacles. Fear can save our life. Envy can help us know what we want. Guilt has the potential to help us repair relationships. But what is sadness for?
It may seem like retreating, leaning into our sadness, falling apart, and indulging in the pain of the moment has very few practical benefits. I now believe that this couldn’t be any further from the truth. Sadness serves many functions, but the way I’ve come to understand it is that it allows us to truly learn our lesson.
If you often feel like you’re reliving the same painful problem over and over again, it may be a sign that you have not truly moved on from an earlier experience that caused you pain. You should think of the compulsion to repeat as a sign that you are trying to change the ending to an old, long-finished story.
If you can’t allow yourself to enjoy life because others are suffering, it probably means that the suffering of the world mirrors your own suffering. Finding that pain and feeling the sadness associated with it is an essential step to moving on and growing up.
Feel your pain, shed your tears, and go through the grief. It’s truly the best way to stop going in the wrong direction, repeating old patterns, and staying stuck in the same old self-defeating patterns.
Cultivate Habits: “mighty oaks from little acorns grow”
Real change is slow. Most of the actions people take to address an ongoing problem is a reaction of frustration and self-hatred. As soon as the acute pain or desperation is gone, people tend to fall right back into the patterns they are used to.
Almost everyone has some type of demon with whom they are in a quasi-abusive relationship. The demons of work, sleep, exercise, food, romance, etc. find a way of ingratiating themselves into the lives of most modern people.
While the most important, lasting changes often happen slowly, this does not mean that change has to be complicated or even hard. There is an entire body of literature on habit creation that can be extremely useful. Change usually begins with setting the intention to integrate one teeny tiny constructive action into your daily life.
Overweight? Eat one serving of green vegetables a day. Need exercise? Do one push-up or walk one loop around the block a day. Need a job? Send one networking email every day.
These actions need to be so small and easy that you can’t possibly fail. Change is not just about burning the calories or getting the interview. Change is about building trust with yourself. It’s about creating systems that will last. It’s about keeping the weight off, not just losing it.
In short, change is about identity.
You need to become someone new. You need to prove to yourself that you’re the kind of person who shows up the way you want every single day.
Find desire (and if not desire, envy):
It never fails to amaze me how many people live by the credo: “If I don’t get my hopes up, I can’t be disappointed.” This philosophy veers into dark depressive realism very quickly. It’s a very smooth transition into the philosophies of “I’m not disappointed because I knew I wasn’t going to work out” and “what’s the point of trying, the odds are slim that things will work out.”
Rationalizations like these can be seductive. It’s true that having a “realistic” mentality to uncertainty braces us against life’s low points. The catch is that our rationality diminishes excitement, joy, pleasure, and vitality. Sure desire can be scary and vulnerable, but it’s also incredibly pleasurable.
When you live your life “in your head”, cut off from the juicy emotions of life, you’ve created a sterile existence for yourself. Many people make this Faustian bargain of becoming too smart to enjoy life. Nihilism is not far away once you’ve sold your soul to the devil.
Finding ways to reconnect with desire and risking disappointment is a good way out of this trap. Many people are drawn into the popular world of “manifesting” and “law of attraction” because the practice of turning thoughts into things feels good. Connecting with desire and dreaming of a better life are quite healthy.
For many, it’s not easy to tap back into what they want. Hyper-rationality has taken hold of their psyche to the point of not feeling much of anything. If this is true for you, try thinking about the people in life who seem to have everything. Who are you most envious of? What do they have that you want?
This is one path back into the risky but exciting world of desire.
People make the world go ‘round:
If you’re down about the world and can’t get past the egregious acts of cruelty and sensitivity you see around you, the odds are you are either isolated from others or the people you do see feel similarly to you. Social ties are an essential part of feeling connections, meaning, hopefulness, and engagement.
If you aren’t seeing people you care about, it’s important to find some that feel like good influences. If you are seeing people who are just as discouraged as you about the state of the world, it’s important to bring in some fresh perspectives.
We are much more influenced by the people close to us than we are those who are far away. This is sometimes absurd, as reflected in certain versions of the well-known trolley problem.
The original trolley problem is the following:
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two (and only two) options:
1. Do nothing, in which case the trolley will kill the five people on the main track.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?
— Philippa Foot, the Oxford Review, 1967
In the original formulation, there is no mention of physical proximity, but consider the following variation on the trolley problem:
As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?
— Philippa Foot, the Oxford Review, 1967
The rational choice is to sacrifice one for many. But at an emotional level, it feels wrong. How can you take another’s life while looking them in the eyes and feeling their fear and sense of betrayal?
The tragedy and absurdity of this can be seen when we discuss topics like war and the practice of bombing cities in far away lands. The bombing victims are like the people standing on in the path of a runaway trolley some distance off. We can’t see their faces or register their emotions as we decide their fate.
The power of this bias is so powerful that academic Roger Fisher came up with the following idea about how to prevent a nuclear war:
My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.
When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.”
— Roger Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1981
The point of these examples is not to criticize human nature or to stir up more feelings about the absurdity of life. The point of discussing these quirks of humanity is to suggest ways of using these biases to your advantage.
The people close to us have a big impact on our thoughts, feelings, and worldview. It’s become cliche to say, but I believe there is truth that you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time around. If you want to be happier, if you want a more positive outlook, and if you want to feel better about the state of the world and its future, surround yourself with people who embody the outlooks you want to cultivate.
Wrap Up:
Happiness is a personal journey that involves sitting with some of life’s hardest questions.
I’ve done my best in the post above to address the very valid question of: how do we find happiness in a world where so many suffer? Understanding the motivation for asking the question is the first challenge to finding a meaningful answer. If we want to outgrow the question, we need to first understand what our intentions are in the asking.
I’ve argued that it’s important to be selfish. I’ve assumed a pragmatic attitude towards selfishness, where I take no position on whether or not it’s moral to be selfish, but rather focus on the importance of being selfish in order to live a life worth living.
In the latter portion of this post, I’ve been overly ambitious in trying to define what makes a happy life and even given suggestions about how unhappy people might go about transforming their lives into more fulfilling ones.
I welcome comments, questions and elaborations that would help other readers of this post to get more answers than I can provide in such brief answers to some of life’s biggest questions.
As a personality disorder, BPD is a set of symptoms and experiences that is woven into the fabric of what it feels like to be you. Meaning, it’s hard to imagine another way of being. It may feel impossible to be different–and ironically–it may not even feel desirable to be different.
Consider the following anecdote from David Foster Wallace’s celebrated commencement address:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
-David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Address
Traits of BPD can be so intertwined with one’s sense of self that they are invisible–like water to a fish.
This story captures some of what is tricky about personality disorders. The term for psychological experiences–even negative ones–being inseparable from one’s sense of self is called “egosyntonic.” This is to say, aspects of personality, even ones that comprise BPD, are like water to a fish. Personality is everywhere, yet it’s also invisible. Many professionals miss BPD for the same reasons.
Having BPD is like being one of the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous anecdote above with one major difference—in BPD the water is a source of emotional pain and discomfort. Before the fish can do anything about the emotional pain and discomfort. She must first begin to develop a concept of water.
In BPD, water means the dynamics of personality. A good therapist, partner, meditation practice, journaling practice, etc. can all be helpful in helping BPD sufferers discover the nature of “water.”
Personality dynamics is a complex subject beyond the scope of this piece, but I’ll try to shed a bit of light on what I mean by that term. The dynamics of character is the way your personality fits together in stable and orderly ways. It answers the questions of:
What motivates you?
What do you most long for?
What most hurts you and disappoints you?
How have emotional currents been blocked, thwarted, shaped, or created by your developmental context?
In other words, how do the BPD sufferer’s thoughts, feelings, and actions make sense based on how she was born and in what situation she grew up?
Therapists and psychiatrists tend to focus on the acute symptoms, like depression or the anxiety, but miss the big picture. In BPD and other personality disorders, the conditions that generate acute symptoms and continue to be active in the background even after intense affect storms pass.
This is why the problem of BPD can only be addressed by working at the level of personality dynamics.
What Makes Change So Hard After Diagnosing the Problem?
We’ve begun to explore why it’s easy to miss the problem of BPD altogether. But the reason BPD is easy to miss is related to why it’s difficult to treat.
Is borderline personality disorder curable? When trying to “cure” any mental illness or emotional disorder, the pain of that disorder is typically what provides the motivation for change. But what if losing your pain meant feeling like losing yourself entirely? While ersonality pathology is distressing, but changing our personality feels like abandoning the self–an experience especially painful for sufferers of BPD.
Changing from BPD means grappling chronically with the aforementioned question: what good is feeling better if I don’t even feel like myself anymore?
While you may pick up on some failures in logic in this question, doesn’t it feel intuitively true? Would you want to take an elixir that made all of your problems disappear if you no longer felt like yourself? Most unconsciously choose not to, because it feels like a rejection or an abandonment of self–the exact scenario that people with BPD are trying desperately to avoid.
What is BPD, Actually?
When the trauma of chronic emotional invalidation occurs in development, the personality cannot mature properly.
Most people know BPD as the laundry list of symptoms that you can find outlined in one of the volumes of DSM or ICD series. A selection of these symptoms may very well describe what you or a loved one seems to go through, but it may leave you wanting more of an explanation of what is at the core of all of those unwelcome experiences.
I’ll define BPD here the following way.
Borderline Personality Disorder is emotional immaturity and frozen state of developmental delay brought about by a chronic state of emotional trauma in the emotional environment of the developing person. The “frozen” aspect of BPD has to do with emotional immaturity and maladaptive defenses being baked into the personality structure. The emotional traumas that cause the ossification of immature defenses are often described as emotional invalidation. Sufferers of BPD are also believed to be more profoundly impacted by repeating instances of emotional invalidation or trauma due to having a more reactive and receptive temperament–a set of traits that can be adaptive when matched with the appropriate environment.
I’ve defined BPD this way because it also explains why I, and many others, are quite sanguine about the prognosis for most cases of BPD. Framing BPD as developmental delay implies that recovery from BPD requires intervention with remedial skills training and copious amounts of emotional validation means. I believe this is in fact the case.
The intense pain and secondary gain associated with having some of the benefits of being immature often make recovery from BPD challenging. However, the temperamental proclivity that many sufferers of BPD have also makes BPD patients capable of not only making remarkable progress in treatment, but also reaching surpristing levels of thriving and success
In my experience, the potential that many patients have would surprise families, loved ones, and clinicians close to the patient–and perhaps most of all, the patient herself. The right care matters, though. A poor fit or an unskilled therapist along with enough self-destructive behavior unchecked by appropriate care can lead to truly awful outcomes, too.
Is borderline personality disorder curable?
Trauma repeats without intervention. If nothing changes, then nothing changes.
It would be irresponsible to suggest that organic growth can occur and alleviate some of the acute pain of BPD if a sufferer of BPD finds good friends, a job in which she succeeds, and/or a romantic relationship wherein she finds support, validation, and excellent communication.
However, positive life choices and experiences alone tend not to resolve BPD. Some intervention is usually required. The reason for this is both simple and complex. BPD is a disorder born of relational trauma. People tend to repeat familiar patterns of relational trauma such that BPD sufferers tend to recreate the same kinds of relationships and life circumstances that brought about the suffering to begin with.
Theoretically this is a challenge to explain and yet many theories attempt to provide sound reasons for why humans tend to repeat patterns that seem so undesirable. Whether repetition compulsion, masochistic acting out/retaliations, or retraumatization is your preferred term, many have observed that we tend to seek out what we know–regardless of whether that known outcome is one that’s good for us.
Some attribute this to comfort. Others attribute this to trying to solve a painful problem by providing oneself another opportunity. Perhaps it’s an attack on a parental figure’s narcissism by destroying the self–a narcissistic extension of the parent.
While organic recovery is technically possible, it usually requires painful cycles of repeating negative patterns with the help of someone who has diagnosed the disorder and is actively working with the sufferer of BPD to resolve trauma and imagine new possibilities in love and life.
Why is borderline personality disorder curable?
Sufferers of BPD long for intimacy and connection. This healthy drive can be leveraged for good outcomes.
The reason that there is always hope when it comes to a pure BPD diagnosis is the core longing for intimacy and connection at the center of the experience. Anyone who has truly experienced BPD, either in themselves or in relation to a loved one, knows how important relationships are to sufferers of BPD.
One could argue that the defining feature of borderline personality disorder is the desperate and frantic efforts sufferers of BPD make to prevent and/or undo abandonment. This stems from a robust and healthy desire to have deep, meaningful, and mutually satisfying relationships.
Of course, the expression of this longing is not always healthy. Sufferers of BPD often manipulate and control, assert emotional needs in destructive ways, and choose the wrong partners and situations to assert these deep longings, but the origin of these desires comes from a healthy, human place.
No matter how disturbed some of the acting out can appear to outsiders, a desire for connection is a positive prognostic feature. While borderline personality disorder is deeply painful for its sufferers and those in its orbit, relational longings and a need to be understood is what separates BPD from more hopeless forms of pathology like malignant narcissism, paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder.
No matter how dramatic and dire things get in the life of a borderline patient, as long as there is a longing for connection, there is hope. After all, it’s the potential to develop a relationship with a concerned other, a therapist most often, that will determine whether these needs can be channeled in healthy ways that will decide if the pathology will soften or become more pronounced.
When and how is borderline personality disorder curable?
BPD can be more and less severe. Incurable? Only without seeking and finding the proper help.
Like any condition, the more severe it is, the harder it is to cure. I have not seen a pure case of borderline personality disorder that could not be greatly improved through a commitment to the proper course of treatment.
BPD, like any kind of human experience, exists on a continuum. Some people merely exhibit and experience BPD-like traits, while others struggle to get through a single day without a crisis of cutting, panic, or other kinds of extreme expressions of profound suffering.
For certain individuals who are either more sensitive or were raised in more invalidating environments, the severity of borderline personality disorder can be more extreme. It’s one of the challenges of running groups with individuals who have BPD, as each member often has her own motivation to convince others that her trauma is worth validating, creating a macabre competition of who suffered more.
Things like trauma, pain, and emotional invalidation are hard to quantify. Sometimes people suffer the most gruesome and horrifying traumatic experiences and make it through with manageable symptoms. Others come from wealthy backgrounds, seem to have it all on the surface, and can’t seem to do anything healthy, mature, or forward-looking in their lives.
With BPD, I’ve noticed that sometimes the pure gruesomeness of some experiences can provide with it a kind of validation. Whereas, having apparent wealth and privilege can often make symptoms worse because the individual feels pain but “has no good reason” to be upset about their life.
When answering the question, ‘is borderline personality disorder curable?’ it’s sufficient to say, not all “cases” of BPD are identical. And, just as BPD can get much better over time, it can also get worse through engaging in activities that make everything worse–retraumatizing relationships, substance abuse, suicide attempts, etc. Recovery is always possible, but wherever you are, time is of the essence and finding the right help matters.
It’s never hopeless. Be suspicious of the motives of anyone who tells you it is.
I’ll end this post with a dialectic or paradox, which is often equal parts soothing and confounding to the human psyche–especially the mind of the borderline personality sufferer:
It’s never too late to get the help you need, AND, it’s essential that you start as soon as possible.
How can I figure out if I’m depressed or just lazy?
What is depression?
There are many ways to define depression. The DSM and ICD take descriptive approaches, outlining a set of symptom criteria that coincide with depressive episodes. Psychodynamic therapists formulations explain it in theoretical terms, summarized simply as “anger turned inward.” Behaviorists posited that depression results from a lack of reinforcement, whether positive or negative, in one’s environment. And patriarch of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, created depression in a laboratory using dogs by applying behavioral principles. He called named is lab-induced depression “learned helplessness.”
I’ll do my best here to make my own definition combining the merits of all three definitions.
Let’s start with the core components. They are:
Depression is an emotional and physiological state.
Depression emotionally feels like resignation, giving up, hopelessness and despair.
On top of the experience of giving up, depression also registers emotionally as guilt over not being good enough and/or having failed to live up to what’s expected of him/her. Guilt results from self-consciousness, self-critique, and what many simplify as “anger turned inwards.”
Physiologically, depression is a shutting down, or conservation of energy triggered by an inability to solve an emotional, developmental, or adaptational problem. This means a lack of energy, changes in appetite, sleep, and productivity.
Depressions occur around major life transitions or events. Losses of loved ones, relationship problems, problems finding success, confronting past traumas, etc.
While these component parts paint the picture, allow me to summarize the following way:
When we are depressed, it’s not that we are overwhelmed with intense emotion. In many cases, depression is an aversive experience of numbness. Depression is the nuclear option of the organism. All of the emotion, all of the energy, all of the hope that the individual has for gaining traction, making an impact on the environment and/or progressing in life seems to be received by the world with indifference. When our efforts and psychological energy appear to make no difference on our life outcomes (lack of reinforcement), our bodies and minds shut down. We refer to this as depression.
What is laziness?
The first thing to appreciate about laziness is that it is a pejorative word with moralistic undertones. That is to say, we use the word casually to describe a tendency to choose inactivity rather than proactivity or industriousness.
Laziness implies a deficiency in character or temperament, but it should not be mistaken as a psychological explanation. I’ll repeat that:
Laziness is not a psychological explanation of behavior.
Laziness could mean a number of things. A lack of interest or engagement with your life. Dissociation from painful emotions or experiences. It could be a sign of developmental traumas or delays. It could simply mean you are in fact depressed!
Many more reasons for “laziness” can and do exist. But, it may be unhelpful to ask in a binary way, am I lazy OR depressed. Since, you can quite easily be lazy because you’re depressed.
Speculation on the origins of laziness as a concept
I suspect laziness is a construct that arose out of the need to guilt or shame members who tended to be social loafers. At a macro scale, it’s important for most societies and cultures to celebrate the producers and make an example of the loafers.
It’s useful on a large scale to extol the virtue of industriousness. However, at the individual level, shaming the non-contributors can be dangerous. If you recognize yourself as one of the underachievers or underperformers, it’s not enough to see yourself as “bad” or “failing” if you wish to feel differently.
Self-critique mostly does not lead to motivation. In fact it more often leads to depression. Perhaps you don’t know what your talents are. Perhaps you don’t know where you are best suited to contribute. Perhaps you need to learn some remedial skills–either emotional or practical–before you can access your abilities.
Here is a series of questions I’d encourage anyone who is curious about whether they should dismiss themselves as lazy.
When and how do you experience yourself as lazy?
Do you always experience yourself as lazy or only on certain days, times of the day, periods of your life, during certain activities and/or in specific contexts?
Are there areas of your life where you are excited, animated, engaged, and eager to do active work?
Have there been periods in your history when you’ve experienced yourself as a hard worker?
What how do you feel when you believe yourself to be lazy?
Is the label “lazy” something you use in your internal monologue in a futile attempt to motivate yourself?
Do you think of yourself as a good person overall?
After reflecting on these questions, look at your answers and consider the following.
Is your laziness context dependent?
Is your laziness domain specific?
Are your strengths being wasted?
Are your deficiencies being magnified?
Did something happen that changed how you see yourself?
Are your expectations unreasonable about how much time for comfort and leisure you’re entitled to?
Is laziness just one of many ways you think of yourself as deficient?
While I can’t assign a score and interpretation rubric, these questions should help you clarify whether you’re in a depressive funk or you may need to challenge yourself a bit further. In general, depression is episodic. You will have other times in your life where you’ve felt engaged and productive. It’s important not to rule out that you could be depressed at the level of personality–otherwise known as dysthymia or persistent depressive disorder. Chronic depression can go on a lifetime and some people never realize there is another possible way to go through life.
Many times, a change of job, change of context, change of relationship, or a move into therapy can do wonders. Your laziness could very well be a poor fit between you and your environment.
And certainly, if you feel generally like you are a worthless, deficient person who is lazy among many other bad things, then you are probably depressed.
Laziness as a personality trait
While it’s beyond the scope of this response to explain and critique widely-used personality inventories, instruments like the NEO-PI, do in fact have a scale related to laziness. The trait is industriousness, and one can be high or low in industriousness. Low levels of industriousness are the equivalent of someone who is high on the laziness trait.
Here’s the thing about traits. First of all, traits are merely descriptors. In other words, they are not explanations. It’s true that traits tend to be stable over time–that is the trait tends to be present to roughly the same degree when it is measured at multiple points in time.
But this shouldn’t really surprise us. Many of the ways we think about ourselves don’t change all that much–especially if many of the circumstances of our lives have not changed or we have not had the opportunity to systematically evaluate/re-evaluate who we are–especially in the context of psychotherapy.
One could argue that traits are stable over time because they are rooted in biology expressed through temperament. However, I think there are good reasons to doubt pure biological explanations of personality. My reasons for doubting this have much to do with anecdotal experiences I’ve had observing in patients the complex interaction between natural tendencies and life experiences. It would be hard to do what I do and not see everywhere how people, inclusive of their personalities, are shaped by culture, people, places, and experiences.
Secondly, traits are self-reported. The foundation of trait measures like the NEO-PI are questionnaires with simple rating scales. Don’t get me wrong, this does not mean they should be dismissed. Instruments like the NEO-PI are very useful ways of aggregating attitudes we hold about ourselves and can often summarize views we hold about ourselves in both compelling and shocking ways.
Again, it’s far too complicated to discuss here, but self-report has numerous shortcomings and biases that should limit how far we infer from findings based on this method of data collection. Projective tests, like the TAT and Rorschach test, can be quite useful supplements, but of course, have their own problems.
The Ants and the Grasshopper
The ants in the grasshopper is a classic fable from the famous collection, Aesop’s Fables
I’ve discussed laziness as a morally freighted word. Where better to observe how the virtues of hard work and the moral failure of laziness get taught than in a fable–a kind of story told with the aim of teaching a moral?
The story goes as follows:
“THE ANTS were spending a fine winter’s day drying grain collected in the summertime. A Grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed by and earnestly begged for a little food. The Ants inquired of him, “Why did you not treasure up food during the summer?” He replied, “I had not leisure enough. I passed the days in singing.” They then said in derision: “If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter.”
What I love about this fable is the agricultural theme and how values of work and productivity correspond with the need to store food for the winter. The harsher the winter, the greater the need to be like the ants and not the grasshopper. One inference that we could make is that stereotypes of cultures closer to the equator as “lazy” may follow from the need to be more disciplined and forward thinking when winter looms around the corner. It’s interesting to note that depression and suicide tend to be much more frequent in cultures with longer, darker, harsher winters. Could it be the absence of light that leads to physiologically induced depressions? Sure. Could it also be that cultures that have adapted to harsh winters are more demanding and less forgiving of individual needs? Yes.
As it is with most either/or formulations, the answer is probably both. But I would give more weight to the latter. Hard work and self-sacrifice applied on a societal scale lead to great civilizations. But individual wellbeing can get crushed in the process.
In the developed world, where centuries of self-sacrifice have led to material abundance, musicians like the grasshopper can compose and play year-round. And, these days the world needs both musicians and farmers alike. We celebrate musicians who “work hard” and produce many fine songs and compositions.
In this way, I find it easier to think of laziness vs hardworking as being a function of adaptation. Find a place in the world where being a grasshopper who dances and sings for fun can be celebrated as doing valuable work. Psychotherapy exists because larger, more complex societies demand hard work and self-sacrifice. The individual can still find his or her place, but it’s not easy. In fact, it may be the hardest thing a person has to do.
In my practice, I never accept self-deprecating confessions of “I’m just lazy.” Why not? Because every “lazy” adult was once a child. Spend enough time around young children–the closest reference point we have to our most natural state of being– and seldom will the adjective “lazy” come to mind as a descriptor. No child is lazy when it comes to play. Children either feel safe and free to play, or they feel frightened and inhibited in play. All work is built on play.
The proof that people are not inherently lazy is in the natural exuberance of all children
Everyone has the energy and capacity to contribute. However, not everyone is suited to contribute in the same way. If you find your skills, your unique attributes, and your enthusiasm never emerge in your day-to-day life, you may become resigned and demoralized.
Mindsplain Book Review: The 5 Love Languages.The Secret to Love that Lasts
What’s “The 5 Love Languages” About?
Relationship expert Dr. Gary Chapman tackles one of the most common issues relationships face today-how to make love last. Chapman offers readers a remedy, which he discovered from years of experience in working with couples. With clear examples and uplifting storytelling, Dr. Chapman reveals the various ways we express and receive love, known as love languages. Countless amounts of couples have experienced richer levels of intimacy from learning their love languages-and this book will help you get started in understanding yours.
Key Takeaways from The 5 Love Languages
There are five unique love languages – quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.
Love languages represent the way we receive love. Chapman concludes that once you identify and learn how to express your partner’s primary love language, you’ve discovered the key to a long-lasting, loving relationship.
The way that you understand love isn’t always the same as your partner’s. It’s rare for relationships to share the same love language, the goal is to identify them and learn how to express them in a way you both understand.
Awareness is one thing-action is another. Just because your partner knows your love language doesn’t mean things will automatically change. It takes a conscious effort and time to do the things that make your partner feel most loved.
Your love language can change on occasion. The key is to communicate with your partner and put it into practice.
Anyone can learn to speak any of the five love languages. Most of us grew up knowing only one or two of them, while the others must be learned. Speaking your partner’s love language takes a small amount of effort and intention.
There are a few ways to discover your love language, which include: observing how you or your partner express love most often, paying attention to complaints, and noticing requests. Chapman also developed a quiz that you can take here.
The 5 Love Languages: Overall Rating-4/5
The Caduceus is the staff carried by the Greek god, Hermes. This symbol contains a staff spiraled by two snakes and often topped with a set of wings.
The Caduceus represents Hermes and all domains associated with him. Some of the most well-known associations with Hermes are trades, occupations, commerce, negotiation, printing, writing, and eloquence.
However, the characteristics of the Caduceus invoked here are its power to awaken the sleeping, put the conscious to sleep, ease the pain of death, and revive the dead.
The 5 Love Languages is as useful as it is insightful. In short, practically anyone in a relationship could benefit from reading this book. Whether you’re a young newlywed wanting to start your marriage on the right foot, or you’ve been married for 40 years and feel your connection is fading.
On the other hand, it’s essential to note that working on relationships is important but won’t always “save” them. Yes, improving communication is helpful, but those involved in an emotionally abusive or manipulative relationship should proceed with caution. This book tends to minimize the damage that can be caused in these situations by reaching out with love languages. Sacrificing yourself to save a toxic relationship is a serious risk that’s often dismissed throughout the book.
Overall, the knowledge Chapman presents is valuable. If communication and understanding aren’t the primary concerns in your romantic relationship, you’ll benefit from learning how you can use love languages with other people you care about.
Book APA Reference
Chapman, G. D. (1995). The five love languages: How to express heartfelt commitment to your mate. Chicago: Northfield Pub.
There is no doubt that human society is living in times of profound crisis. Both Black Lives Matter and Climate Change protests have been taking place throughout the world. As a result, the radical ecopsychologist, Andy Fisher argues that we need to not only find a way of re-entering into a relationship with life but also of exploring those ways that capitalism, colonialism, and industry is failing the earth so that we can create helpful change. It is only by exploring how social and ecological injustices have created harm to both human and non-human communities that we can work towards liberation for all beings.
How does a liberation ecopsychology model view our current world?
Liberation psychology explores how the past has shaped the present, taking into account how this impacts all of life. Social injustice shapes our current world. Derrida shares the need to be reflexive about our liberal democratic society in his work Spectres of Marx. Explaining that repressed aspects of our history remain with us, shaping the present, he points out that this has lead to high levels of violence against women and children, racism, famine, starvation, and genocide, along with the destruction of animal life. When specters of the past unfold into the present they have the power to disrupt the future.
However, reality is not fixed, static, or ‘out there,’ separate from us. James Hillman (1996) explains that we ‘live in psyche’ or soul. All that is around us has life and meaning. There is no single truth or static reality. Instead, we are changing, evolving, and constantly creating. Living consciously brings the possibility of shaping a different world.
Robbins argues the importance of cultural therapeutics, bringing unconscious but unresolved aspects of society into awareness and dialogue as a way of creating healing for all members of our more than human world. Andy Fisher shares that by working with our hearts, with our love for the earth, and not just with our fears, we might work towards change.
The role of liberation ecopsychology in the environmental crisis
Although the environmental crisis has only recently become a deep concern for western humanity, ecopsychologists argue that all people have a genuine need for the wonder and reverence of life. It is the divided self, created by modernity, which has left us isolated from each other and the world around us.
Voices that add to liberation ecopsychology
Ecosocialism
In exploring what it means to be a person in society, ecosocialism emphasizes the role of the economy and capitalism in particular, in shaping the world we live in. Capitalist society has to devalue life to continue exploiting both land and people to thrive. Also, globalization and imperialism are seen to play a role in the destruction of nature.
Andrea Smith explains that colonial-capitalism created destruction because it saw no value in simply being. Instead, it only saw value in both land and people when they were put to work and able to produce. This lead to large-scale monoculture farming and mining. Only those people who had their work recognized were given value within this system.
Andy Fisher focuses on the shame manufactured by capitalist society, pointing out that capitalism can only survive if it keeps people striving for new achievements. Capitalism keeps people searching for happiness in goods and products. Once people have attained new products, they soon become outdated and there is a need for new ones. These goods or products keep people unaware of how unhappy they are as well as the exploitative practices used to produce them.
Naomi Klein explores the role big business and marketing efforts play in creating both human exploitation and environmental destruction. She shares that the need for clean air and water is a need all beings share. She points out that while both social justice and environmental activists have called for change, capitalism has gone out onto the streets. By creating products that seem to affirm identity or offer cleaner energy sources, capitalism maintains its destructive position in the world. Klein exposed the exploitative practices within the global fashion industry, which she explains abuses both garment workers and the environment to produce trendy items which are quickly disposed of.
Ecofeminism
While many ecopsychologists explore the disconnection between people and earth, ecofeminism takes this further, exploring the role of hegemonic masculinity in environmental destruction. Ecofeminism explores social hierarchies and the implications these have for both people and earth. Ecofeminism calls for social hierarchies to be broken down to create collaboration. There are many different thoughts within the ecofeminist movement, and many diverse voices add new dimensions of insight. The ecofeminist movement has been critiqued because it is said to hold very rigid beliefs about women. However, by exploring how social structures devalue both women and ecology, they provide important political insights into ecopsychology.
Decolonized voices
Decolonized voices within the ecopsychology movement focus on the impacts colonialism have had upon indigenous cultures. From introducing anthropocentrism to land losses, decolonized perspectives look at how the residues of colonialism continue to create social and ecological injustices within the present.
David Abram explains the very negative impact that development has had upon Aboriginal communities in Australia, pointing out that this community used songlines to access food and water as well as travel the terrain. By changing the shape of the land, development is driving aboriginal communities out of their minds. He challenges colonialist definitions of development and asks for us to recognize the value earth has to indigenous communities. He also shares the importance of ‘coming to our senses’ and recognizing the value of the more than human world.
Gloria Anzaldua shares that colonialism brought huge land losses for Mexican people. Not only were people forced off their land, but colonialism denied the soulfulness of earth. Anzaldua explains that while she can sense her ancestors in the movements of the wind, and can feel the life force within all of nature, colonialism sees nature to be made up of objects. She challenges the anthropocentrism of colonialist belief systems.
Linda Tuhawai Smith explains that while many colonialist beliefs may hold romantic perspectives about nature, there is no real understanding of how indigenous populations gave meaning to space. Intimate knowledge of nature meant survival for indigenous communities. Stories have also been told about place. These stories include indigenous names. When colonialism gives new names to place, indigenous children lose the stories told by their ancestors.
Leeann Simpson challenges the superficial relationship that capitalist society has to land. She explains that land is seen to be a resource within a capitalist-colonial system. While people may search for solutions to climate change because this would be beneficial to human societies, this misses a deep and spiritual relationship to the land needed for true healing to take place. She argues that a return to land-based knowledge is an important step in deconstructing colonialist structures and working towards embracing indigenous knowledge systems.
Robin Wall Kimmerer uses storytelling to speak about reestablishing a relationship to land, the wisdom of indigenous knowledge, and the social injustices faced by Native American communities. She shares the importance of giving back to the land. She also shares the destruction of both human and more than human communities by colonialist practices. She calls for a movement that would revalue both native science and the earth. Instead of speaking of sustainability as ‘reducing harm’ she stresses the importance of building a deep and spiritual relationship with the land.
How can we embrace the liberation movement within ecopsychology?
Re-connecting with the natural world can inspire us and provoke our deep imagination, helping us to see the dignity and integrity of the world around us (Sacks & Zumdick, 2013). And when we are aware of this, Abram (1996) explains that we become aware of the magic, the majesty, and the miracle of what it means to be alive and to live with others different from us. As we begin to think and question the world around us, we can, as Carl Anthony suggests, work towards a multi-cultural self that can give value to all beings. The ecopsychology movement has sometimes been criticized for not paying enough attention to the struggles of marginalized groups of people. Andy Fisher, therefore, points out the importance of developing a political literacy that enables a movement towards social and ecological transformation.
References
Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perceptions and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage.
Anthony, C., & Soule, R. (1998). A multicultural approach to ecopsychology. The Humanistic Psychologist, 26, 155–162.
Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco:
Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book Company.
Birkeland, J. (1993). Ecofeminism: Linking theory and practice. Ecofeminism: Women, animals, nature, 13-59.
Derrida, J. (1999). Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (Vol. 33). Verso.
Fisher, A. (2013). Radical ecopsychology: psychology in the service of life. Suny Press.
Fisher, A. (2013). Ecopsychology at the crossroads: Contesting the nature of a field. Ecopsychology, 5(3), 167-176.
Gaard, G. (1993). Ecofeminism. International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 1-10.
Hillman, J. (1996). In Search: Psychology and religion. Spring Publications.
Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything. London: Allen Lane.
Robbins, B. D. (2005). New organs of perception: Goethean science as a cultural therapeutics. Janus Head, 8(1), 113-126.
Simpson, L, B. (2002). Indigenous Environmental Education for Cultural Survival. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 7(1).
Simpson, L, B. (2014). Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society. 3 (2): 1 – 25.
Smith, A. (2014). Humanity Through Work. In Borderlands 13(1): 1-17.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonising Methodologies: Research and indigenous people. London: University of Otago Press.
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