Category: family therapy

We Need an Emotional Revolution

How we deal with these difficult emotional experiences becomes critical to the way we move through our lives, adding to life’s satisfactions or burdening us with chronic distress.

Oh, 2020. The problems that we all face during this terrible, remarkable year continue.

It’s completely normal for us all to be dealing with very strong emotions; mounting isolation, anger, frustrations and fear can overrun even our favorite coping skills. How we deal with these difficult emotional experiences becomes critical to the way we move through our lives, adding to life’s satisfactions or burdening us with chronic distress.

It seems to me that learning to manage ourselves is the work of a lifetime and our earliest teachers are parents, siblings, grandparents and other close relationships who model how to deal with life’s challenges.

As we move toward the expanding social network of school and neighborhood, we inevitably take one of two emotional directions: we either gain the skills of self-management of distress tolerance and cognitive emotional understanding (sometimes chronically soothing our pain with less-helpful substances like alcohol) or, we seek relief by pushing our pain onto others. That displacement looks like blame, denial, verbal or physical intimidation, bullying, or violence.

No doubt you’ve noticed as I have a recent cultural shift toward externalizing fear and frustration that fuels the rhetoric of division, cynicism, judgment and hate. Whether it is the dangerous rise in hate groups, shootings and public violence against others or the distrust and bitterness of partisan politics in governing, none of us have been spared the real results of people who don’t deal well with frustration and pain.

This cultural and personal failure to manage our struggles has dangerous, real life consequences. Minimizing public health science has meant we have continuing, dangerous exposure to pandemic. Not acknowledging our national bias toward white, European history and our legacy of slavery means people of color are still judged as less worthy, less human and experience bias and bigotry every day. Not being willing to look at the mythology of capitalism and the American Dream means the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer — the poorest ending up homeless on our streets, in our neighborhood parks and our prisons.

Social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Coddling of the American Mind) study moral reasoning and ethical leadership. They research and study the way we behave together. They have helped me better understand just what has been stoking our country’s increasing violent speech and actions in recent years. And it is no one person or political party’s fault.

One of the most shocking findings of their research is the way social media has impacted our shift toward emotional acting out and political extremism. Social media platforms are designed to keep us spending time on the site as a way to generate income (in the way of paid advertising) for the media companies.

How have sites like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and Pinterest been engineering our attention? By creating easy ways to form interest groups and ways for us to react to one another with comments, like buttons, emojis and post sharing, all rapid emotional reactions that tend to fuel more responses.

The recent Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, describes this strategy with candid interviews with the engineers who designed these sites. For the last 10 years, millions of us have spent untold hours reading, reacting and sharing information online, and now bad actors, including foreign governments, are exploiting these sites to stoke anger, despair and distrust during this bitter election and pandemic.

So, what can you do about it? Take a look at how you communicate. How do you manage your interactions in real life as well as online? If there is ever a time in our lives when we all need to hold ourselves accountable for our emotions, for the way we think, comment and react to other people and their ideas, it is now.

Assess how you show up in public spaces. You are in charge of your emotional responses, in person and virtually. Bring your best self to your Facebook page, your news article comments, the internet memes you share.

It’s time for an emotional revolution. One that values honestly, humility, toleration and facts. We can turn our national mood around, but it will take every one of us to grow up and manage hard emotions better.

Originally written for “Spiritual Reflections,” a weekly column appearing in the Savage Pacer newspaper.

ANOTHER death by police

On this past Memorial Day, May 25, 2020, George Floyd was thrown to the ground during an arrest on Chicago Ave, Minneapolis, two dozen miles from my home. He had gone into Cup Foods on the corner to buy some things, using what the store clerk believed was a counterfeit $20 bill. Did George even know it was a bogus bill? We can’t know because instead of conversation, the lead officer on that team of 4 police officers subdued him with his knee on his neck for nearly 9 minutes.

Passers by shouted, screamed, and begged the officers to get off his neck as George cried out “I can’t breathe” and called for his mother. A 17 year old on her way back home down the street had the presence of mind and the courage to video the entire scene. And then the strength to put that video onto the internet and it flew around the world.

George died under that restraint while the officer looked unmoved and even amused by the outcry the bystanders were creating around him. He knelt there while George died with his hand in his pants pocket, as if this was just a walk in the park. He has been charged with 2nd degree murder, and his fellow officers arrested and charged with aiding and abetting murder and other lesser crimes. The investigation and trial preparations continue by our state Attorney General.

George was a black man in a city and state that has always prided itself on being Nice and Progressive and Diverse. At least, for the white citizens of Minnesota. I am among those white citizens who, until now, may have known things were occasionally hard for our fellow citizens of color, but had little personal experience with the way police treat BIPOC people as if they are criminals and dangers to our way of life.

As our city and state exploded in peaceful protests and bitter and violent burning and looting, the world erupted in shock, shame, and revolt. Wave after wave of pent up despair caught the energies of many who filled the streets, airwaves and internet with stories, anger and hope for a finally awoken white populace to SEE the white skin supremacy that undergirds nearly everything and every institution in America.

People have been shaken and thrust into a new image of our state and country. White people are racing to catch up to the witness of black and brown persons who have lived this fear and racism all their lives. Not every white citizen, of course. But many, many more who have stood passively alongside before and who are now engaging, reading, marching, talking, writing, giving, and listening to try to understand and change.

I have been and remain committed to better understanding the white supremacy of our culture and how it has shaped me, my decisions and assumptions, and future vision of the world. May millions of us use the brutal lynching of George Floyd on a corner of Minneapolis one holiday evening during a pandemic and the presidency of Donald Trump to listen, to repent, and to work to change the world.

May George be the very last in the innumerable line of lynchings of black Americans. May his name be the last on the list of black men and women killed by our peace officers. May this nation pull itself toward equity and peace. And may all our leaders, including our highest office, once again reflect justice for all.

#lynching #GeorgeFloyd #blacklivesmatter #vote2020

UPDATE: COVID-19

Therapy is best done face to face as we communicate with one another with our bodies, emotions, faces as well our words and our silences. But in these unusual times of pandemic control, I will be adjusting my client contact according to CDC and State Health Department recommendations.

I am now offering telephone OR Telemedicine (HIPPA compliant video conferencing) to all new and current clients. Please call me directly at 612-735-2229 or email me at: lynne (at) inspiringchange (dot) us to get started.

In-office sessions have resumed. I ask that all in-office clients reschedule sessions to telephone or video conferencing if they have any active symptoms.

We continue to learn, experience and suffer together. May this worldwide experience bring hope in the midst of despair, and empathy over suspicion, healing in the face of disease, despair and death.

Why Do I Keep Asking you to Journal?

Daily I am asking my clients to take therapy skills with them into daily life – the foremost being the ability to think about our thinking. It builds the critical self reflection muscle that is a key to overcoming the distorted thinking of chronic anxiety, depression, chronic pain and problems with body, self and relationship image and assessment.

Here’s helpful list of what handwriting can do for you and your brain, focused on students and learning, applicable to what we are working on when we do psychotherapy.

https://ivypanda.com/blog/handwriting-good-for-your-studying/

Does Birth Order Matter?

For generations, family members have noted the differences that naturally arise in children raised in the same family. How is it that John, the first born and only boy, seems to have such different personality characteristics than his younger brother, raised in the same house by the same parents just two years apart? Good question!


Theories of personality abound. You may be familiar with some of the more popular models, often used in work or educational settings. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), based on the four major personality styles described by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is a favorite. The Enneagram, a model developed in religious communities and often used in spiritual direction, and other forms of personal discovery, is another. These are models that seek to describe common types of personalities. Other models, such as the Big Five theory, attempt to describe personalities using the idea of common traits shared by human beings across the world, such as extraversion or neuroticism.


Whichever way makes more sense to you to describe human beings, by types or common traits, we have a collective curiosity about how people become who they are, and how much we can or should adapt ourselves to others and our environment.


How did I get to be the way I am? When my clients ask me this question, I answer this way: our personality is constituted like a recipe, with three primary ingredients. The first main ingredient is our individual nature. We are born with a particular style of personality, inherited from our parents and our larger family system. It’s part of our genetic code, and forms the basis of who we become. Our general sense of the world, our innate optimism or pessimism, our sense of humor; this basic personality is another thing we have inherited.


The second main ingredient of our personality is formed by the way we are cared for by our parents; it’s the nurture part of the recipe. Was our mother well nourished, healthy, and ready to become pregnant? Were our parents free from addiction, major illness or injury? Was our birth relatively normal? Were we welcomed into the world with joy and cared for with love? The way our parents meet our vulnerability, suffering and growing sense of self makes up the great majority of our personality relationship style.


If our parents or primary caregivers have enough sense of self that they can sacrifice and respond to our needs consistently, we learn to trust that others will meet our needs, and that others are trustworthy. We offer ourselves to them, and get care and love in return. In the research done on this concept of emotional attachment, about half of us get just what we need to feel secure. The rest of us learn some combination of security, anxiety and withdrawal to cope with inconsistent parenting.


The third part of our personality is made up of all the unique, individual experience we have in life and what we do with it. It’s the fall you took in second grade from school jungle gym, the trip to the hospital, and the cast that you had to wear through the summer. How did that fall affect you? How did it shape the way you think, feel and respond to the world? What happens, and how you chose to respond, makes up a large part of your personality.


What about birth order? I think it fits in this third “what happens to us” category of personality development. While research is still battling it out whether first born children actually are more independent than their second born siblings, therapists and other social scientists have found a common pattern in family position that seems to fit many families, at least in Western cultures. In general, first born and only children are commonly more self determined and disciplined, having been born into an adult system and most closely associated to adults, even as infants. The second born child is less connected to the adults in the family, and if followed by a third child, may feel a bit lost in their parents’ strong relationship to the first born and emotional focus on the baby of the family. The farther away from the parent system, the more independent and even rebellious that child may become. (Sulloway, 1997) Additionally, the more older siblings a child has, the more accustomed they often become to letting other people lead, and can more easily go “with the flow” than those born first.


Family therapists differ in the amount of importance they place in this theory of birth order, but most will inquire about how a client’s family is constituted, and where in the family their client “fits.” Why it matters at all is that it may help people better understand some of their unconscious preferences for friendships, marriage partners, relationship styles, and even how they may connect to or discipline their own children. It’s all just part of our individual personality recipes.

Sulloway, F. J. (1997) Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. New York: Vintage.

(Originally written for GoodTherapy.org profile/topic expert page)

Do You Have Enough Friends?

            Do you have all the friends you need? Chances are that you are among the majority of American adults who recognize that they are struggling with fewer close friendships than they want. As emotional beings, all of us are biologically designed to connect to others in and outside our families of origin. While we may be surrounded by others at work, or sporting events, in our neighborhoods or churches, few of us feel that we have a core group of steady, supportive, mutually caring same gender friendships. We are friend hungry. And we don’t know how to fix it.

            This emotional scarcity can come on quite slowly. While we are progressing through school, the constant shifts from playgrounds to classrooms to new schools provide us with an ever-replenishing sea of faces from whom we may find sympathetic chums. But just as quickly as those people move into our lives, they can move out, as new environments and opportunities sweep our time and attention elsewhere. Our friends and we may marry. And right before our eyes, our emotional circle becomes instantly smaller and more fixed.

            It becomes harder and harder to stay in regular, meaningful touch with people. Phone calls help but don’t completely replace in-person conversation. Getting together can take enormous scheduling and financial efforts not everyone is able to sustain. When was the last time you hand-wrote a distant friend a letter? Many of us have tried to find less isolation in the connections we make on social media. They soothe us with easy digital connections to people across the globe. But unless those relationships are mutual and sustained, they won’t fill the emotional gap that face-to-face time with people provides.

            This scarcity of friendships seems to hit American men even harder than it does women. We have a culture that still assumes men need to be independent, stoic and in competition with one another. Generations of this gender ethic have led to families that raise boys to dismiss healthy emotional dependency and under-value one another, even within the same family. This places men in emotionally vulnerable positions, overly dependent upon their romantic partners for support. Women shoulder this by becoming the emotional centers of their families and becoming adept at managing everyone’s interpersonal relationships. It leaves men empty and women exhausted. While many of us reject these old models, they still shape the way we live. What are we to do?

            I don’t think we should give up on being and having good friends. The emotional cost of loneliness is a true mental health crisis for many, and there are no quick and lasting solutions. Over a lifetime, we need many real friends with whom we can share common interests, new experiences, shared struggles and spontaneous laughter.

            One of the most helpful resources I have found that helps to describe how we make good, close friendships is the 2016 book, “Frientimacy” by Shasta Nelson. Nelson has created an online community around friendships, speaks around the country to groups and corporations about her research, and was a featured speaker at TEDx in 2017. What she has to teach us about the qualities of good friendships is inspiring to me as a relationship therapist and someone who wants to be and have close friendships throughout my entire lifespan.

            The core qualities we must cultivate within ourselves and our key intimate relationships are Positivity, Consistency and Vulnerability. In other words, our key friendships should feel good, be mutually maintained, and let us be our real selves. These are high standards, and they take time, good boundaries and mutual intention to develop. Not every friendship can or will experience all three qualities. There are all kinds of people in our lives who may be able to sustain one aspect, like positivity, but can’t meet other aspects like consistency or real-life sharing. Or we may be more interested in someone as a friend than they are in us, and the relationship never grows. I’ll point you to Nelson’s book for more details about these key aspects, but you get the point. Real friendships take work and commitment to one another. When they work, they make us feel fully human.

            No matter who we are, we need good friendships. Perhaps the last good friend you had was someone you knew years ago but with whom you have fallen out of touch. What did that friendship teach you about how to recreate that small, essential, positive human community of two close friends? Perhaps it’s time to discover more about how you can be a friend and welcome new friendship in return.

(Written for/published 5/28/2019 The Savage Pacer)

Changing as We Age

         There is something about life transitions that makes them more difficult the older we become. I have noticed this with my clients as well as myself, and I’m certain that it’s not a simple function of declining vitality or just a well-earned preference for our own habits. What is it about life change in later life that seems to be so challenging?

         Human development is a long process of accumulated experience. It seems to take most of us about two decades to become independent of our caregivers, and during those twenty years we experience innumerable changes in our bodies, our environments, our relationships and our knowledge of the world. New people, new shoes, new ideas. Repeat.  Whether we are moving from one classroom to another, or one neighborhood, state or country to another, our younger selves are constantly integrating change into our understanding of our self and the world.

         I recall being an excited 21-year-old in the late summer of 1979, just weeks past college graduation, packing a dozen cardboard boxes full of records, books, clothes and personal items, weighing them and dropping them off for shipping. And then, accompanied only by my hard-sided sky-blue Samsonite suitcases and my guitar, getting on a series of planes beginning in Burlington, Vermont and landing in St. Paul to begin my new life as a Lutheran seminarian and would-be pastor, never to live in New England again.

         Such full-scale moves are the norm for many young adults; new jobs, new relationships, joining the Peace Corp, moving alone to a new city for graduate school. What makes such dislocation possible is the fewer and transitory ties that young adults have made so far in their lives. Change is the standard young lives have known, and it is only by living into later changes of career, marriage, parenthood, childcare, student loans, chronic health issues, mortgages and aging parents do those transitions grind to a slow march.

         I have watched this middle life deceleration of change out my living room window. Of the 6 middle-class homes surrounding me, 4 of them, including our own, have had the same owners for over 20 years. I used to think that remarkable. Now I understand what creates that stability because I have sought just that stability for myself. Moving is such an enormous disruptor when over the years you have made a house your home, when you value your children’s school district or your church, when you rely on key friends and health care professionals you know, when you live in a region with enough economic diversity you may be able to change careers in place, as I did. If those core resources have been established, one thinks long and hard before taking a geographic leap to begin putting that all in place again.

         But the changes within and around you may catch you off guard. If you are lucky, your children grow and succeed and leave your home for one of their own. The work you sacrificed for changes or you change, or you age out and now it’s done. Your parents, blessed with long lives, die and you are suddenly the oldest generation of your family. Your body, which you’ve trusted to go and grow suddenly stalls and reveals new pain, problems and limitations. How did all this suddenly happen, you wonder, and of course the answer is that it was all happening while you were busy looking down, raising children, earning a living, trying to stay focused enough to create a full-grown life. And before you know it, you’re on the other side of trying. You’ve suddenly arrived, only to have to figure out the next transition into older adulthood.

         No one as of yet has handed me a life map. We each end up sketching out our own with just enough foresight to help us imagine what comes next. And that may be the greatest and necessary emotional skill of later life: imagination. The ability to mentally image our next steps with greater wisdom and hard-earned courage than we could have possibly hoped for at 21 or even 41. Because it takes that kind of skill to discern how to live in an aging body, how to let go of old resentments, what of everything we have accumulated to keep and what to let go. If we’re lucky, there is so much left to learn.

(Originally published in the Savage Pacer Online 4/15/19 and in print 4/20/19)

The Huge Problem of Binary Thinking

There is so much the small child’s brain is figuring out about the world it’s no wonder human memories don’t begin to form until our third or fourth year. And even then, they are impressionistic: a beloved face, the flash of a dog running across a lawn, the yellow wallpaper over a grandparent’s shoulder as he lifted us out of a crib. So much experience and so few ways to describe it to ourselves.  One of the very first ways our brain organizes the world is to divide known things in two: night, day; up, down; yes, no; cold, hot; mother, father. This binary division is one of the first ways we know how the world is.

By the time we are ready for kindergarten, we can expand those mental and linguistic maps. We know there are more than two temperatures of things, the day is divided by clocks into hours, and we have a box of crayons which contains a dozen or more different colors. But this automatic binary thinking seems to really stick when it comes to sorting people. Small children believe the world to be clearly sorted into good and bad people, boys and girls, rich and poor, young and old, black and white. A critical problem in our country at the moment is that many adults refuse to grow beyond these mental labels. And spend enormous energies reinforcing these labels when they are shamelessly simplistic or just plain wrong.

I’ve been lamenting the way we compartmentalize one another this way as we approach the midterm election this November 6th. Nothing is as distorted and illustrative of this binary division than the current crop of negative campaign ads. While officially a multi-party political system, our politics have evolved into a binary choice: the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Dividing our political visions into two teams has created an Us vs. Them strategy that currently draws no one to middle ground.

Push, pull, left, right. Yes, our politics have been in this tug of war for generations. But the new pervasiveness of personal technology, the internet, and social media have allowed white racial anxiety to reemerge from the far shadows into a frighteningly broad cultural attitude, fanning the anonymous rage of some into flame. Just this week over a dozen mail bombs were sent to Democratic leaders, and neo-Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric spurred one gunman to slaughter 11 Jewish worshippers at prayer in Pennsylvania.

Some of us were once naïve enough to believe that the election of Barack Obama marked permanent social change in America. The 2016 campaigns demonstrate that racial fear is still at the heart of majority America. With no political experience and a self-professed history of exploiting women, with a campaign promise to build a giant wall on our southern border and reverse trade agreements with China, Trump won his party’s nomination and then the national election. His current policies attempt to upend sexual minority rights, stall climate change efforts and reverse laws that protect women’s reproductive decisions. Every one of these choices repeatedly divides us, each speech he gives shamelessly promotes himself, all the while Russian efforts to sow political unease in America by planting false political stories in social media, shared instantly by millions across Facebook, succeed. Putin must be thrilled.

Us/them, either/or binary thinking never could sustain a complex democracy. The answers to our personal and social challenges are too complex. I urge you to become part of the solution, and vigorously resist the racial bias we have all grown up with; to question political rhetoric, even from your own party of choice; and to recognize that the words we use to think, describe and talk with one another can have life and death consequences in the real world. Leadership at every level of government matters. Vote.

 

(First published 10/31/18 in Savage Pacer “Spiritual Reflections” column)

https://tinyurl.com/yam6flnq

 

Gender Control & Body Shame: The Purity Movement

Nothing makes me sadder than the way a part of the Christian family, the conservative evangelical community, has shamed women for their gender, leadership and sexuality. In the 1990’s, a bizarre, controlling movement spread in churches to have young women be told that sexual purity was their responsibility alone;  that young men were so weak that they couldn’t control their sex drive. Girls were trained to pledge their “purity” until marriage at the cost of their integrity and sense of self. Girls were indoctrinated to such a degree that their sexual expression was wrapped in shame, guilt and fear to traumatic degree.

I hope that any woman for whom this story is a personal one will seek care with a good, skilled mental health therapist who has religious training and deep background. I work with such women.

Want to learn more about the way women have been shamed and controlled by this movement? Listen to this recent Fresh Air broadcast in which Teri Gross interviews the author of the new book, “Pure.” https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/09/18/649070416?showDate=2018-09-18