mindfulness

Crazy is Contagious

Ron Johnson communication, emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, political, relationships, Self-Awareness

I heard the statement, “crazy is contagious” from a colleague of mine when I told him about an experience I had recently had with a patient. It got me thinking. “Crazy” is not by any means a part of my vocabulary, nor are other typical terms when we think of the challenges that people have like, “issues,” “problems,” and even “diagnoses.” If you have followed me in my blogging, you have noticed that I do the very best I can to avoid diagnosing someone and finding the diagnosis of much benefit. People use the terms depressed, nervous, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and PTSD way too easily and very often without much knowledge of these conditions. There are, for instance very few people, who suffer from a true bipolar disorder, perhaps one in 1000, maybe less. Bipolar disorder, by the way, is a delusional disorder when someone truly experiences such a severe depression as to truly not want to live for one more day, and that followed by times when the person feels like s/he could fly off a building successfully with arms as wings. I was bemused by a person reported that her husband was “very bipolar.” She actually meant that he swung from happy to sad. But this is not bipolar disorder. Nor is being sad depression, being worried anxiety, being distracted ADHD, or having bad memories PTSD. PTSD and the like are all real disorders, but they are not as common as people think. Enough of my grandstanding on the theme that psychiatric terms are used excessively. Let me get to the point.

The point is this: some kind of “crazy” is contagious. This means that if you around a person who feels delusional, speaks her delusions with firm conviction, and is fully convinced of these delusions, you will absorb some of the “crazy” thinking. This happened to me the other day with a patient who, indeed, espoused a series of delusional-like statements. This was a young man, a man of good integrity as well as high intelligence, but someone who has been suffering from some time with a significant amount of anxiety. I have written about anxiety before noting that it is clearly the most difficult phenomenon to overcome because it is caused by the brain (not the mind, mind you) believes that there is lethal danger just around the corner and keeps you in a state of perpetual hypervigilance in preparation for the danger that the brain believes to exist. I will not restate what I have previously written about this mind-brain interaction except to say that you mind knows everything but your brain knows only safety and pleasure, or lack thereof. You brain doesn’t know that when you are “worried” about passing an exam tomorrow that this is, actually tomorrow, because the brain (not the mind) does not have a sense of time. For the brain everything is in the present. So when your mind thinks about the danger of failing an exam, you brain goes into action to protect you. Unfortunately, you brain does not distinguish some future danger from a present danger. Furthermore, you brain does not distinguish serious danger from minor danger. Hence, anxiety is very difficult to conquer. It is only conquered by sadness. But that is another discussion unless you want to read our books. So, let me tell you about how I “caught” the delusion I heard the other day.

Delusions

I must alter the words and circumstances to protect my patient’s identify but the phenomenon is the same: delusion spoken. Jack (I’ll call him Jack) suggested there was a conspiracy operating in Washington having to do with a certain political figure. He expressed how he had concluded that there was some immediate danger to him, to his family, and to America at large due to this individual and his colleagues. At first, he told me that an important senator had been “kidnapped” and another one “arrested” for unknown offenses and by unknown individuals. He told me more and more about what he was quite certain was about to happen in America and advised me that I should prepare myself for some kind of political, cultural, or military storm that was about to happen. When I first heard about the “arrest” of a senator, I was quite distressed because I had not heard about it, but then as Jack continued his story and beliefs in what I should call a conspiracy theory, I became increasingly concerned that I was listening to a person who was either truly delusional or “feeling” delusional for some reason. Jack finalized his statements of concern with a suggestion that there was a true danger of the water in Madison being contaminated with some kind of mind-altering drug. I was advised to keep from drinking tap water.

Now, I know that the water is not contaminated in Madison and I most certainly know that there is no conspiracy to take over the world, but after listening to this long story of conspiracy, I was affected emotionally, and then I was affected cognitively. I actually thought that maybe…just maybe…the water had somehow been contaminated. I knew better, but I found myself actually thinking this “crazy” notion. Why would I do that? I know better. Part of the reason I actually considered that there might be some truth in these stories was because I value Jack, namely his intelligence and his integrity. This is an important factor when you consider what you hear, from whom you hear it, and the content of what you hear. But this is not enough. You have to attend to how you feel because “crazy is contagious.”

Crazy is contagious

There are a lot of things that are contagious. These days, of course, we are all thinking of how Covid is contagious. We hear this all the time with suggestions of social distancing, masking, and all the rest. Then we also hear that social distancing and masking is not enough from some people and that it is harmful from other people. It is hard to know what to believe, but what most people do is trust their feelings: wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, social distance or don’t social distance, have parties or don’t have parties. Watching out for a viral contagion is difficult but you can find your way and do your best. Not so with emotional contagion and intellectual contagion.

Conspiratorial ideas, whether truly delusional or not, create a strong emotion. Witness the recent events in the Capital where people truly believed that it was possible to storm the Capital building and somehow change the course of democracy as it has operated for 250 years. These were not crazy people. They were, in my estimation, “true believers,” namely people who believe so heartily in President Trump, that they could take his words, his suggestion, and then broaden it into action. It is debatable whether Trump really wanted the crows to invade the Capital as it happened, something like the French revolution when outraged Frenchmen stormed to gates of the aristocracy. I doubt that these people were delusional although it is possible that some of them might have been. What happened, at least in my mind, was that there was a crowd effect, largely driven by powerful emotion and belief. The same crowd effect occurred during some Black Lives Matter marches when a few people, obviously overcome with emotion, did physical damage to property, and in some circumstances damage to people. Crazy, if we call it that, is contagious because it is profoundly emotional, which then filters into one’s cognition to justify the emotionally-based delusion. There is actually a formal diagnosis, rarely used, but quite real, called “shared psychotic experience.” I have encountered it only a couple times in my career.

It is not only “crazy” that is contagious. All things are contagious. Specifically, both depression and anxiety are contagious. This means that if you are around someone who suffers from depression or anxiety, you will most certainly feel the symptoms of these disorders. We therapists need to be quite aware of the contagion effect as we deal with people who might, indeed, be profoundly depressed or anxious. But this awareness is not limited to therapists. I suggest you be aware of the people around you who are, for instance, depressed, anxious, moody, or even delusional because too much exposure to such things will rub off on you.

Interestingly, you can also “catch” good feeling, like hope, faith, trust, love, and joy. Note how you feel when you are around someone who has one or more of these feelings in their nature or their presentation. Sadly, there are not many people who feel these things with our current deluge of politically motivated statements from all quarters. It behooves us to find people who feel good about life if we are to feel good about life. This can be a challenge especially if you are in some difficult situation, or your family or friend is in some difficult situation, because you would normally want to talk about the situation. Indeed, you need to talk but not with joining in with delusional, depressing, or anxiety-driven conversation, nor with conversation with false hope and simple answers. It is no small task.

Avoid the crazy

You can deal with delusional thoughts by noting how you feel emotionally. You will feel afraid. If you are around depression, you will feel depressed, and when you’re around anxiety, you will feel anxious. Not so bad to feel these things for a few moments, maybe minutes, but not more. Note when you start to absorb the “crazy” and quickly find a way out of the conversation. This may not always be easy. I needed to stay with my patient for a half hour as he talked to me about his delusions. I am not even sure that he really believes these conspiracy theories. Perhaps, he just absorbed them from a good friend. It doesn’t matter where he came to believe such things, nor does it matter how deeply he believes them. It doesn’t even matter whether some of what he says is actually true. What matters is that crazy incites crazy. Likewise, depression incites depression, anxiety incites anxiety, anger incites anger, and so on. You don’t need someone else’s crazy. You have enough of your own. You need to keep your distance.

Keeping you distance means trusting your feelings, namely when you begin to feel things that are not good for you, like anger or fear. If you are with someone and hearing their stories but begin to feel such things, you need to first be aware of your feelings, realize that you have “caught” someone else’s feeling, and then get away as soon as you can. This might take some socially delicate maneuver, but you need not feel what someone else feels if it is bad for you.

Feeling what someone else feels, whether joyful or sad, is not always a bad thing. It can be very good to feel sad with someone who has had a loss or feel truly joyful with someone when they tell you about their success in life. My concern is not to keep your social distance from any and all emotion but to be aware of the emotion that people bring to you because all emotion is contagious. Emotion is wonderful, and there are rare times when it is valuable to be afraid and to be angry. Rare times. There are more times when it is valuable to be joyful or sad because these emotions have to do with love, not defense

Patience

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

I am not, by nature, a very patient person, which means that I tend to jump before I think and talk before I think. However, this lack of “thinking” is not the real essence of patience. Patience is much about feeling. If you have followed our recent blogs, specifically over the past year, you have noted that we have put a central emphasis on this whole matter of feeling, noting importantly that feeling is very foundational to who we are as humans and even more central in our relationships. Feelings, however, are impossible to define and very hard to describe. Yet feelings affect all that we do, whether work, play, thinking, planning, executing our plans, or just hanging out. I invite you to note your feelings and how they affect what you think, say, and do. Importantly, feelings are not the same as emotion, as we describe in our recent book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel.  Rather, emotion is a subset of feelings. specifically, I “feel” something in my inner core which first has a physical/body effect, then an emotional effect, and then a thought, which can then be reflected in what I say or do. We all have this same process: physical, emotional, cognitive, and active, but depending on our psychological natures, we tend to express our feelings in one of these genres. I will leave this discussion and focus on the emotional part of “feelings” as I attempt to describe this important “feeling” of patience.

It’s all Greek to me

Deb and I had the privilege (and chore) of attending seminary where we learned Greek, which was the original language in which the New Testament was written (The Jewish Scriptures, often called the Old Testament, was mostly written in Hebrew). So, to really study biblical statements, one needs to have at least a rudimentary understanding of Greek, which by the way is quite easy to learn once you learn the Greek alphabet, which by the starts with the letters alpha and beta. In my study of the New Testament I ran across many significant differences in words that when translated into English, sometimes lost their original meaning. For instance, there is a passage in the New Testament book of Galatians where the Apostle Paul says that we need to be careful not to have too much pride, but 3 verses later says that we need to have pride. A quick study of the passage, however, reveals, that the author actually uses two different Greek words that are both translated “pride,” but are, in fact quite different. The first “pride” word means thinking you are better than someone else, whereas the second “pride” word means thinking you are better than you were in the past. So Paul is not saying that you shouldn’t have personal pride, or confidence, but rather that we should avoid comparing ourselves to others, as the anonymous author of Desiderata says, “…and don’t compare yourself to others or you will become vain or bitter.” Enough of pride. Now on to patience. There are two words translated patience, and they are profoundly different: makrothumia and hupomeno.

Makrothumia

You can actually pick out what at least part of this words means, namely the “makro” part. Makro in Greek means “much” or “many”. What does thumia mean? It means passion, or it could be translated as purpose, desire, or even lust. The most dramatic use of the word makrothumia occurs in a very well-known biblical passage in another Pauline book First Corinthians, namely the beginning of chapter 13 where Paul says, “Love is patient and kind (and a few other things). This “patience” word is makrothumia. In fact, in the Authorized Version of the Bible, usually called the King James, the translators translated makrothumia as “long suffering,” which is actually closer to the meaning of makrothumia than what we think of when we talk of patience. So what?

So, if you follow me, to be patient, at least in the biblical view of patience, is to suffer. Wait a minute, isn’t patience a kind of peace of mind, careful thinking, and just waiting your turn. Nothing of the kind. Patience, at least in I Corinthians 13 is quite the opposite. It has nothing to do with peace of mind and waiting “patiently.” Makrothumia is wanting something very much and suffering in the wanting, in the not having, and in the unknown factor of when you will get what you want, or if you will ever get what you want. So, forget about being patient if you think patience is just thinking and sitting on a rock. It is nothing of the kind. Patience, real patience is truly passionate. It is often filled with love, potential loss of love, and feeling quite upset that you don’t have what you love.

You want to be patient? No, you don’t. You want what you want, and you want it now. Sound familiar? Nothing wrong with wanting, nothing at all because wanting is love-based. I love something and I want it, or I don’t want to lose it. Join the crowd. This wanting, craving, desiring, and passion doesn’t mean you yell and scream (unless you are acting like a 4-year old who is learning that she can’t have most of what she wants because she wants too much and is just out of the first couple years of life where she got pretty much all she wants). Patience is suffering; it is painful; it can be awful. And it ends. How it ends is not necessarily up to you, but patience ends calmly, but most importantly, you can be patient for a very long time, even years. not so with hupameno.

Hupameno

This Greek word, usually translated “patience” probably should be translated “endurance” or even “surviving.” Note that hupomeno is much different form makrothumia. The word hupameno is comprised of two other Greek words that make understanding of the word much clearer. Hupo means under, while meno means something like standing. So the visual picture of hupameno is standing under something, like a weight. Consider the picture of your standing under some kind of weight, like a big huge sack of bricks, or worse yet, something that is so heavy that you will most certainly be able to stand under the weight for very long. This is the essence of hupameno: you can’t stand it forever. Rather, when you are exercising this kind of patience, you are surviving, perhaps for some good reason or unforeseen reason, but you most certainly are not looking forward to anything other than getting out from under this weight.

This kind of patience, or endurance, calls for stamina to survive under the weight of something that is very heavy or even dangerous. The heaviness or dangerousness of this weight could, indeed, be physical, but it is more than likely personal or interpersonal. Personal weights could be as simple as working hard for an exam that is coming up, dealing with an intolerable boss at work, or waiting for some kind of danger to pass. Interpersonal weights could be as serious as a divorce action that is being brought against you against your will, or some kind of intolerable marriage that you must survive for some good reason. You might need to survive a time when you are living on little or nothing because you can’t afford it, together with all the bill collectors calling you daily. You might need to endure the cold in your house because you can’t afford to turn on the furnace or perhaps because you don’t have a furnace. You might need to sit before some kind of panel of individuals who judge you unfairly where it is unwise for you to say anything in your defense. All of these examples, and many more that might have happened in your life are weighty, or even dangerous. An important ingredient of this hupomeno kind of patience/endurance is that there may be no visible end to the suffering that you need to endure, which only makes this kind of patience all the more difficult. It’s not always easy to see the value of makrothumia kind of patience, but it nearly impossible to see the value of hupomeno kind of patience. In fact, both have profit

The profit of patience

Get the picture of these very different kinds of patience? One kind of patience is love-based and looking forward to having something that you want, and perhaps need, and this is a time that is very passionate. We can patiently wait until the date of a wedding, graduation, or the teenagers finally going to college. This is waiting for something to happen that is worth the wait. It is much harder to patiently wait for something to end that has no intrinsic value. It is valuable for kids to wait until Christmas to open presents as it is good for kids to learn to wait for dinner, for school to end, or for a vacation. The profit in waiting for something good to occur builds character and allows you to muse about what you love and what you can love. At this very moment I am waiting to see my daughter, Jenny, who we will be seeing tomorrow (if the snow lets up). This kind of patience only endears me to Jenny and broadens my love for her. In fact, all makrothumia kinds of patience are good for you, if not easy to wait for. The more important the goal of waiting, which usually means the deeper the love we have for something, the greater is the value, the profit of patient waiting. Recall, however, that makrothumia kind of patience can be very difficult, even the cause of suffering.

Hupomeno-like patience, endurance does not have such a lofty goal. Endurance is difficult and weighty, and perhaps it is just surviving until the wait is over. This kind of patience is surviving, not thriving. Yet there is profit in hupomeno patience. It teaches you the occasional necessity of survival for its own sake. I had a tooth extracted a few weeks ago, not something that I looked forward to, and not something that I could really profit from except that my infected tooth might now be tone. For the most part I endured the experience because it was necessary. I can now look back at this experience and see that I could do it again if necessary, which might very well be given that old men tend to lose their teeth. If you ever played high school football, you might remember the August football practices in 100 degree heat that you needed to endure. Not pleasant, but there is profit in some things. While football practice or losing a tooth might have some visible profit in the end, there are times when you simply need to endure something that has no profit but to stay alive. There is an important element of psychological literature suggesting that some kinds of endurance of awful things can built self-confidence in the face of adversity. Perhaps you survived poverty, an authoritarian boss, or even an abusive parent, and as a result you have a certain resilience to adversity in general.

I must comment on the obvious: things are not so clear as to suggest there is no overlap between makrothumia and hupomeno kinds of patience. There are occasions where they combine in some areas of life or even co-exist. I find myself experiencing mostly hupomeno patience during the wait until the presidential election and installation is finally over. It has been a challenge, something that I have endured for the most part, but I think this wait has also been good for me as I have had to challenge the useless anxiety and worry about the final outcome.

One final thought regarding this murky distinction between these two kinds of patience. What I call makrothumia patience is always good for you. This means that it is always good to wait for something that is good. There is a danger, however, of engaging in patience when you should engage in action. You can wait all day for the guy to call you, but maybe you should call him. He just might have lost your number. You can wait for someone to knock on your door and offer you a lucrative job, but maybe you need to go to work at the Kwik Trip until you can find that perfect job. On the other hand, hupomeno is not always good for you and not always necessary. There are times, places, and people who are truly dangerous. You might need to back out of such things for your survival. It might be good for some people to like on a plank of nails, but it might not be good for you.

Take care, be patient as much as possible and as much as necessary. Endure what needs to be endured and in so-doing develop self-confidence and resilience. You need to know “when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.” Or as AA suggests, “change what you can change, accept what you cannot change, and develop the wisdom to know the difference.”

And, Happy New Year!!

Dealing Effectively with Challenges: The Four A’s

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

 

We can effectively meet the challenges of the day, of the year, or of one’s life. Likewise, there are four ineffective ways of facing the challenges of life, which are

  • Avoidance
  • Anxiety
  • Anger
  • Accommodation

 

I will briefly describe each of these ways that people frequently deal with the challenges they face in their daily lives and then offer another alternative to facing such things. Before I engage in this process, allow me to remind you of what I previously called “the war” that is occurring in America and all of the rest of the world.

The challenges of “The War”

We are all in the midst of the “war” as I called it in a previous blog, namely the biological, political, and cultural challenges that together have made life quite difficult. My life certainly is a whole lot better than it is for most people, but I have found it “challenging” to deal with:

  • Finding a balance of reason and necessity with Covid, i.e. mask-wearing, social distancing, and the strong differences of opinion about such things
  • Hearing a daily report of a dear cousin who was functionally dying in a hospital in Minneapolis where she lives. Indeed, she was in the ICU for 38 days along with her husband, and then for a period of time, also her son. Her daughter-in-law also contracted Covid. The “dying” has put her five children in a difficult place for sure, although there was a joyful end to this saga, if we can use this term, when Sue and her husband died within minutes of each other “holding hands as they went to heaven” given that the hospital graciously put then in the same room as they faded.
  • So, Deb and I took another Covid test with the results of my being negative (again, having taken a test a month ago), but Deb being “positive.” It seems likely that I got Covid, gave it to her, and then got better, now being negative. (We both have now tested “negative” twice since this initial positive test for Deb.
  • The many challenges of the people I see hourly in my office, all of whom are suffering from severe emotional distress now being complicated by “the war.” This requires me to give my best knowing that my best is often insufficient.
  • Staying vigilant with my own physical and emotional health without paranoia or distress

Challenges that I meet

You can see that these challenges are not so severe nor life-threatening or terribly distressing compared to many other people whom I see in my office who suffer:

  • Spouse unpredictably asking for a divorce (one after 7 years and one after 30 years)
  • Man who has never grown up, now feeling like a 3-year old in a 38-year old body
  • Man, while a person of fine character, intelligence, and deep faith suffering from a severe depression that won’t seem to abate (despite my best efforts…and his)
  • Child who lives in a truly dysfunctional (not a word that I cherish, but there is no better word) family composed, again, of parents who are bright and good people. How do I help a 14-year old find her way in life when she, seemingly, is the most adult-like in the family of four?
  • The many people who come to me for neuropsychological evaluations seeking some kind of “answer” to their life’s dilemmas, often looking for a “diagnosis” that will make sense of why life does not make sense to them.

The challenges that people face may include personal (like depression), interpersonal (like deteriorating marriages), vocational (being unemployed, underemployed, or mal-employed), financial, or medical. And there are the challenges of meeting one’s daily needs, perhaps caring for an old house, looking for a new house, or getting the TV, Internet, or cable fixed. There is no end to the kind of challenges people meet, usually daily, sometimes multiple times a day. I meet people every day of my working day who functionally say, “I wish I weren’t alive” in various forms, like, “I wish the Lord would just take me home;” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “I don’t see the point of living,” or perhaps just, “I have no interest in anything.” When people have challenges, however difficult they are, they often turn to one of the following:

Avoidance

This is something like, “If I just ignore it, it will go away,” or perhaps, “If I ignore the problem, I won’t feel the burden of facing it.” Avoidance, like all malfunctional ways of dealing with difficulties is learned early in childhood and then reinforced throughout adolescence and into adulthood. People learn to avoid. Indeed, some challenges actually need to be avoided, if by avoiding we mean understanding the challenge but knowing that the challenge has to be endured for a bit. More often, however, avoidance lasts for days or years, which only makes doing something increasingly impossible.

Anxiety

Deb and I wrote about anxiety extensively in our Good Grief book noting, “Anxiety is delusional.” Let me explain. When I worry about something, I set up a dynamic between my mind, which thinks and feels, and my brain, which does neither of these things. Anxiety, and its cognates of worry, fretting, and nervousness, is delusional because it does absolutely nothing for the future. There is never any need for any kind of anxiety. For that matter, there is almost never any need for any kind of fear. When the brain “hears” your concern about some potential danger in the future, the brain immediately goes into preventive mode by raising your level of awareness, which we call hypervigilance. The brain thinks “the lion is coming over the hill and you need to be aware of the potential lion threat. The brain does this because the brain doesn’t have a sense of future. Any kind of “worry” that you might have translates into the brain’s belief about the lion coming. As you certainly know, “the war” has created massive amounts of anxiety, which is only aggravated by politicians who stir up unnecessary hypervigilance by outlandish claims or threats. By the way, anxiety tends to be a young woman’s tendency, and an older man’s tendency.

Anger

Anger is also delusional. As anxiety is delusional because it is a function that seemingly can change the future, anger is delusional because you think you can change the past. Of course, you can’t change the past, but the brain doesn’t know that the past exists any more than it knows about the future. The brain churns up anger because, again, the brain thinks (figuratively) that “the lion is coming over the hill” so you need to get prepared to fight. The brain doesn’t know that you are angry at something that happened to you, something that someone did to you, or something that you did to yourself. Anger is common for young men and for older women.

Accommodation

Accommodations are those things that we do that make us feel better. Nothing wrong with feeling better, but when we accommodate to a challenge, we tend to avoid facing the challenge head on. Accommodations are all potentially addictive. Addictions, again, are a brain function, not so much a mind action. The brain has two operations (I spoke of this in a blog some time ago): pleasure and safety. So when you are not happy in some way, perhaps thinking of something that is happening, has happen, or might happen, your brain acts like this thing is happening in the present. Then the brain sort of “remembers” something that makes you feel good, and “tells” you to go to this thing. (I wrote a blog on the “go to” tendencies we all have.) These tendencies are not bad in themselves, but the brain doesn’t know the damage some kind of excess can do to one’s body, social life, or emotional life. We identify accommodations (or addictions) as chemical or behavioral. Chemical additions are primarily eating, alcohol, or drugs, while behavioral addictions include gambling, sexual activity, buying, hoarding, working, and playing. Note that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these accommodations, and in fact, we have to do some of these things, like eating and buying. Some activity (chemical or behavioral) as a relieving or enhancing activity, becomes a habit, and then may move into being more of an accommodation.

So what can be done to avoid the tendencies towards avoidance, anxiety, anger, and accommodation? There are four other “A’s” that might work: Awareness, Acceptance, Adaptation, and Adjustment.

Awareness

Grand therapist, Fritz Perls, once said, “Awareness is curative.” We don’t think awareness is curative for two reasons, the first being that we don’t seek to “cure” people from what ails them, but help them mature emotionally, intellectually, ethically, and practically. Secondly, we think that awareness is the first step, but not sufficient for achieving personal maturity.

Awareness is quite simply and quite basically being aware of what one feels. Our “feeling book” makes this point foundationally, namely that people need to know what the feel before they do anything else, noting that “feelings” are so profound, so spiritual, so deep within our souls that we can’t define them. It is first necessary to be aware of the challenge you are facing, but it is then much more important to know your emotional reaction to the challenge, and in doing so avoid the tendencies to go to anxiety or anger. However, being aware is not enough.  We must accept.

Acceptance

This might be the hardest thing to do emotionally because it is always hard to accept “feelings” that may seem wrong, silly, irrational, or unnecessary. To accept the existence of a challenge is not to like it, not to approve of it. You don’t approve of someone firing you from your job, but you can accept it as a fact. Equally importantly, one needs to accept how one feels, which is not to agree with these feelings, much less the feeling words we speak. Acceptance of one’s feelings is not approval, quoting from another wise therapist (Dick Olney), but rather seeing what is. The difficulty with acceptance is to start with the physical feeling that is always first in feeling awareness, allow this feeling to migrate into emotions (the second process of experiencing feelings, thinking clearly (once the emotions have past), and then taking action. Most people have trouble with the words that are attached to feelings, which are always approximate and sometimes quite outrageous. To accept is to be, not to agree with, not to speak, not to think, and most truly not to act. It is only when people have been able to accept what they feel that they can move on to adaptation.

Adaptation

Adaptation is a Jungian term that I learned from yet another grand therapist (colleague, Boris Matthews). To adapt is to find a way to see what is and find a way to adapt to it. We have had to adapt to Covid most recently, which has been a challenge. I find it even harder to adapt to the political wrangling that have been going on over this past six months. To adapt is essentially to be sad, first, and then allow the sadness to run its course so that one can find a way to move beyond awareness and acceptance to a place where one is not bothered, much less stressed, by whatever challenge is in one’s life. To adapt to losing the use of his entire lower body, like a friend of mine has had to do, is not to like it, not to change it, but to be sad so that he can find a way to have a life ahead. Failure to adapt to challenges is usually where some kind of accommodation and addiction occurs, which are always ways to avoid being aware, accepting, and adapting to some tragedy or situation that you don’t like. However important adaptation is in life, it is not enough because you have to do something. You have to adjust your life in some way.

Adjustment

When I am with my friend who has lost the use of most of his body, if often think of the many people who have lost some or most of the use of their bodies and yet have found ways to have meaningful lives. He has not yet found a way to adapt to the lack of the use of most of his body, particularly challenging because he is a tradesman by profession. Most people, however, don’t have to adjust to such profound losses or other such terrible losses like the 12 people I know who have lost children. The challenging situations that most people meet are very often simpler, like finding a way to deal with the slow driver in front of you on the beltline, the misstatement you made or was made to you, the mistake you made or someone made with you. Adjustment to such challenges requires that you something, which is particularly hard when it is much easier to accommodate in some way. Some people “just do something,” which is often premature, but not truly an adjustment, while other people avoid doing anything at all because doing something seems so hard and so imperfect. Doers do things in a hurry to avoid the loss while dreamers avoiding doing to avoid potential loss.

Summary

Adjustments can be made in the following situations:

  • Loss, whether of person, place, or product:
  • Challenge by an external source, say spouse, friend, or employer
  • Mistake or misstep you have taken
  • Personal unhappiness with one’s life
  • Unhappiness with one’s social or intimate life
  • The current political assaults that we hear every day
  • The deaths and dangers of Covid that we hear every day
  • The seemingly overwhelming task of getting things done
  • The lack of anything to do that is meaningful

Adjustments to these and others is always the same: Awareness (of feelings), Acceptance (of feelings), Adaptation (to something that requires change), and Adjustment (by changing something)