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)