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May 11, 2017 By Susan O'Grady 5 Comments

Anxiety Knows No Age Limits: Each moment is all we really ever have

We all get anxious from time to time. Even mild panic that’s morphed from mere anxiety is normal. Most often, though, anxiety will peak right before an event that makes us worry, such as an exam or dinner party—a kind of anticipatory anxiety—and then fade 10 minutes into the event. The ebb and flow of anxiety can be unpleasant but usually isn’t a major concern.

But the usual ebb and flow can worsen. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), normal anxiety becomes diagnosable as generalized anxiety disorder when:

  • Excessive anxiety and worry occurs more days than not, for at least six months, about several events or activities (for example, performance at school or work)
  • Controlling the worry is difficult
  • The anxiety/worry includes at least three out of six symptoms (in diagnosing children, just one of these symptoms is required): restlessness or feeling on edge; being easily fatigued; difficulty concentrating, or the mind going blank; irritability; muscle tension; sleep disturbance
  • These symptoms cause significant distress in functioning
  • The disturbance isn’t related to medication, drugs, or a medical condition
  • The disturbance isn’t explainable by another mental disorder

I recently saw an 88-year old woman who was referred by her internist for anxiety. Her primary symptoms were her mind going blank, trouble letting go of thoughts, and agoraphobia (the desire to avoid leaving her home). The usual culprits were ruled out: hyperthyroidism, a medication side effect, or, given the client’s advanced age, dementia.

Composedly, my client said her anxiety came from feeling pressured to do more, and a sense of failure for not being good enough. This surprised me; I had expected her to talk about a fear of approaching mortality.

It’s a psychologist’s job to ask the hard questions, the ones that seem most obvious—the ones most friends and family wouldn’t touch for fear of making the person feel worse. So, I gently inquired if some of her anxiety could be related to thoughts about aging and death. But my client was quite definite that that was not the case! Her physician had assured her she would live to be 94 years old. I did a quick calculation—math was never my strength as I still count in my head with little dots—and determined that would give her five more years. Wouldn’t such a short countdown to death be enough to bring about anxiety, I still wondered?

Another job of a psychologist is not to jump to conclusions or make assumptions. Using inquiry, we ask for further thoughts, feelings, and associations. Some of her anxiety, she acknowledged,  was longstanding, but a new worry was that she was no longer as interested in venturing from home. What was this about?  Was she worried about taking a fall, breaking a bone, and ending up in the hospital? Again, no, it wasn’t fear that losing her balance and falling would lead to death because she knew that it most likely would. Anyone who reaches the age of 88 has seen in their own peer group how a broken hip can spiral downwards to a skilled nursing facility, with all the loss of dignity that brings.

Perhaps the most important part of our job as a psychologist is to trust that our clients know what they’re talking about. That trust is huge because it eventually leads us to an understanding of what is going on inside, in the deeper places we can touch if given time and attention. It turned out that my client’s anxiety was about just what she’d said it was. She was feeling like she should be doing more, going out more, and accomplishing more. Until she retired 23 years ago, she had been very productive in her job as an accountant. She loved her work, and she loved her retirement. She hadn’t slowed down in retirement until recently. She couldn’t understand the desire to just stay home. It was unlike her, and she felt she should be keeping up the pace she was accustomed to.

We discussed her symptoms; a mind going blank can be due to anxiety, and also to what my neuropsychologist husband refers to as benign senescent forgetfulness. (He tells me I have a mild case of it—our brains shrink as we get older, it’s entirely normal.) I also recommended that she turn off CNN. I wasn’t being flippant: Non-stop watching the news these days is making a lot of us anxious. Being bombarded with daily images of worldwide pain and suffering pervades our senses and creates disturbances that go deep into our unconscious minds, harming emotional health.

What about not wanting to leave the house? She wasn’t worried about going outside, but rather, as we figured out together, she desired to retreat from the world, to reflect and take time to appreciate her many gifts: a life well lived, a 65-year marriage to a good man, and her overall sense was that she had had a good, if not perfect, life. It was time to turn inward a bit more and let herself off the hook. Over the next several weeks, we explored how she could do just that.

Acceptance of who we are, imperfect and flawed, allows us to live more fully each moment, for as is said in mindfulness practices, each moment is all we really ever have.

Filed Under: Couples & Marriage & Family, Depression & Anxiety, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Health Psychology, Mindfulness & Meditation, Relationships, Self-care, Stress, Uncategorized, Well-being & Growth

February 7, 2017 By Susan O'Grady 4 Comments

Working with Emotions: How mindfulness and awareness help

hiding from emotions is never a good strategy
Hiding from emotions is never a good strategy

Bringing the hidden to light is an important part of psychotherapy, sometimes achieved through focus on intellectual reflections. But in recent years, mindfulness-based therapies emphasize awareness of how feelings and physical sensations are related. It is enlightening to notice what happens in the body when we feel strong emotions.

As an example of how lack of mindfulness can hurt, I would sometimes react with anger at my husband when he disagreed or corrected me. But rather than seeing my point of view, he only experienced my anger as defensiveness, while I experienced him as overbearing. The result was that I felt worse.

This pattern continued until I learned to slow down my automatic reaction of anger, by becoming aware of the physical sensations that accompanied my feelings. This allowed me to become aware of the small, fleeting, and easily overlooked span of time between my internal commentary about his comment and my emotional reaction.

What was surprisingly helpful in doing this was to become aware of physical sensations; in mindfulness practices, we call this “mindfulness of the body.” Sleuthing out my emotions when corrected by my husband, I could actually feel my hackles go up. It was subtle but unmistakable.

Sensing our Hackles Before a Fight

When a dog’s hackles go up, the hair between their shoulder blades becomes erect as an automatic reaction to feeling threatened. As Adrienne Janet Farricell, a certified dog trainer explains, special muscles attached to hair follicles “are innervated by the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system and are therefore not under conscious control. The function allows the dog to appear larger, taller and therefore more intimidating than it is. This is a ‘fight or flight’ response triggered by adrenaline.”

Paying attention to my physical response after my husband criticized me, I began to sense that distinct feeling of my hackles going up. But what surprised me even more was what followed:  I felt myself contract, my shoulders dropping and my chest becoming slightly concave. I submitted instead of fighting, just as a dog lies submissively on the ground. In the animal world, cowering is a useful and self-protective signaling “I am not a threat to you, so you don’t need to attack me.“ But when we humans do that, we lose some of our power.

Paying attention to this small and subtle sequence of physical sensation help us notice the physical reactions that often precede the ultimate expression of strong emotion. Without being aware of how we succumb to our initial reactions we are unable to address the problem that’s making us react.

Making the automatic conscious is liberating on many levels. First, we gain some control over our automatic responses—something dogs cannot easily do. Second, greater physical and emotional awareness lets us link direct relationship to felt experiences. Being able to name an experience or find an image for it, as I did with the hackles example, opens our understanding, bringing meaning to what on the surface looks like plain old anger.

It is important to know that an angry outburst is not always a bad thing. Anger is a reaction that often stands in for other feelings that are less available to us. Let’s imagine a typical couple’s situation of the sort I see in my practice.  When Jill got angry at Sam, she didn’t always stop to feel what that anger signified. Their arguments escalated as they each get more flooded with emotions. But when Jill reflected on her anger, her felt-sense was of being small, childlike, and without a voice of her own. Childlike? Sure enough, just as she’d felt in her family growing up with three older brothers, she experienced Sam as being dismissive of her opinions and dominating her in a situation where she was powerless.

Sam, meanwhile, had no idea she was feeling this way, because all he saw was her childish, to him, outburst. He tagged Jill as being easily out of control, making him feel all the more self-righteous toward her, which further reinforced Jill—and Sam–feeling like Jill was the problem in the relationship. Sam was off the hook, and did not have to look at his role.

Pausing Before Reacting

As this example shows, our reactions and feelings may mean more than we consciously know. In some traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism, mindfulness translates as “to remember.” This process of witnessing our emotions and our physical sensations requires remembering to push the pause button before our automatic reactions take hold. In a disagreement between couples, this may mean agreeing to a time-out, or the pause may be as subtle as one breath—a period between two sentences. Pausing gives us the space to be aware without becoming stuck in automatic reactions, attacking back, or inwardly growing smaller and losing the essence of our feelings, which are usually quite valid.

This pause also gives us time to consolidate our understanding of our self. Jill recognized an old memory: that of being discounted, unheard, or dismissed. She also understood that when anger dominates, the more important issues get lost.

Being Alert to Underlying Emotions

Of course, staying calm while having hard conversations can be challenging. It helps to recognize the early and subtle signs that you are becoming flooded. Once flooded, meaningful conversations come to a grinding halt or turn into a yelling match. Be alert for automatic reactions. Remembering to pause before automatically reacting allows us to tune into the deeper, less conscious feeling: what emotions and what physical sensations are triggered?

At this point, we have a choice. We can either use our awareness to ask directly for a bit of time to get back in emotional balance before continuing. Or, we can use the pause to go deeper into what may be coming up from within. This doesn’t have to be a lengthy process; with practice, that pause can take mere seconds for insight to come.

And in that pause, when we bring awareness to physical sensations like raised hackles or a churning gut, we can use these as signals to look more deeply into our role in what is getting triggered. Too often our automatic response is to assume fault lies outside us, not within. As Cassius says, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

While taking responsibility for what is arising in us, we also need to be aware of its impact on others. When we do this, hackles go down and the back and shoulders lengthen, bringing real power, liberating the Self to be more fully alive and present. Our defense mechanism was only masquerading as power, and that briefly.

What is Your Role?

Taking responsibility does not result in guilty self-recrimination but liberation and power. Once we take ownership of our contribution to conflict, we can more readily bring insight and thus control over our automatic reactions. It may reveal qualities within us that are active and useful in opening us up to be freer, more whole in ways we‘ve barely glimpsed.

Being aware of our default defense mechanisms can help us deal more effectively with difficulty. While many defenses help us cope—psychologists call this defense in service of the ego—they can backfire and hurt us. Because defenses are unconscious, it’s difficult to be aware when they emerge. The best clue that our defenses are lurking is when we react with strong emotions or behaviors, such as rage or sharp criticism.

Some of the most common defenses are projection and denial. They are related in that both mechanisms protect a person’s sense of self by attributing to another (projection) or rejecting (denial) their own unacceptable impulses or feelings, which are made unconscious. Let’s see how that worked with Amie and Jon, who were locked in a cycle of blame when they came to counseling. Amie saw Jon as extremely self-centered, and Jon felt Amie was too emotional, always criticizing him and trying to control him; meanwhile, each felt innocent of playing a role in this cycle.

With therapy, both Jon and Amie could see how they projected unacknowledged parts of themselves onto the other. Amie never gave herself permission to ask for time to be with her friends or to play. She then criticized Jon for taking time for himself instead of spending time with the family. Further examination revealed that Amie’s mother was a martyr and never let anyone in the family forget it. Amie grew up feeling that taking time for herself was selfish. She denied feelings of wanting to take time for herself and projected her anxiety about selfishness onto Jon. Meanwhile, Jon disowned his own anger by projecting it all onto Amie.

This dynamic created misunderstanding and distance. Once both Amie and Jon saw their role, they not only reduced conflict but had more access to dormant passions. Replacing anger with understanding brought new ways of relating. Sex reentered the marriage, along with play and a deeper acceptance of each other.

When your hackles go up–whenever you have a strong emotional reaction–you have an opportunity to learn something new. By pausing and paying close attention to your bodily sensations and your thoughts, you can discover something unexpected, something that ultimately empowers you.

Filed Under: Couples & Marriage & Family, Depression & Anxiety, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Mindfulness & Meditation, Psychotherapy, Relationships, Stress, Uncategorized, Well-being & Growth Tagged With: Conflict in Marriage, Couples, Couples Communication, Dealing with Conflict in Marriage, Flooding, Mindfulness, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

January 24, 2017 By Susan O'Grady 10 Comments

How to Be Sad

Psychotherapy for depression helps people accept that we can't force happiness.There’s a plethora of information about happiness.

My literature search on this subject yielded over 13,000 scholarly research articles and over one thousand books. Advice about how to be happy floods the internet daily with simplistic listicles and click-bait articles that make it all seem so easy.

But their advice, like telling a sad person to think about all the reasons they shouldn’t be sad, or a depressed person to just get up and exercise, doesn’t work. Thinking about the good things in life can sometimes ameliorate sad feelings, but usually, trying to grasp at happiness when in the grip of a depressed mood leads to failure. And while the research on exercise’s positive effect on depression is robust and persuasive, depressed people lack the drive to work out: that’s what depression means.

These suggestions, though well-meant, amount to telling depressed persons to snap out of it—or it’s their fault. This shames the sufferer, making things worse. And the resulting family strife doesn’t help. Well-intentioned spouses and parents who believe that snapping out of it actually is within a depressed person’s power will eventually succumb to exasperation and resignation.

A recent New York Times article gives suggestions for eliminating negative thinking, and paraphrases  Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence: ” it might be helpful to ask yourself if you are accomplishing anything by dwelling on your negative thoughts.”

Depressed people have negative thoughts. Understandable. When we’re depressed, we’re likely to feel hopeless, inadequate, and a failure. While practicing controlled breathing and mindfulness even with your eyes open, as the article suggests, will help, how do we get to the point of making these actions regular parts of daily life? When sadness overwhelms, it is often impossible to follow well-meaning suggestions with regularity. Like New Years’ resolutions, these techniques fade quickly.

When Sadness is Normal

Sometimes sadness is normal. Experiencing a range of feelings in reaction to painful life events is understandable; these life stressors would make most of us depressed. When psychologists see a client for a first appointment, we assess mood, its duration, and the severity of distress. Is the client’s symptoms within normal limits given the precipitant for entering therapy, e.g., a marital crisis, job loss, or death of a family member? We would say a client’s feelings are “within normal limits” when they come to therapy with sadness after losing a loved one.

In my own practice, a former client returned to treatment recently because his wife had just died. He spoke of his inability to shake the feelings of loss and sadness. It had only been four weeks, and he asked me if it is normal to feel depressed, and the question that inevitably follows: how long it will last? It’s okay to feel sad—but to someone grieving, the feelings can be so intense that time stands still. Four weeks can feel like four years.

It’s hard to feel deep emotional distress, of course. Indeed, because suffering is part of the human condition, we’ve devised a vast repertoire of ways to avoid experiencing our painful emotions and worrisome thoughts, including self-medicating by substance use, distraction by Facebook and other media outlets, and much more. Americans account for two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants, which also happen to be the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States. These drugs can play a vital role in helping many people cope with chronic depression, but all too often these medications are over prescribed or prescribed without looking at inner sources of depression.

When Positive Thinking and Life Coaching Make it Worse

Or, life coaches with little training in mood disorders are prescribing positive thinking the way many physicians prescribe mood stabilizers, but even positive thinking strategies are ways to avoid painful feelings. I have seen the disastrous results of life coaches who work remotely from home, charging enormous amounts of money to people desperate for help. Sadly, these coaches have not laid eyes on the people they propose to help. They are unable to see the dangerous weight loss or weight gain or pick up the nuanced suicidal non-verbal communications.

One client I saw judged himself to be a failure after his six-month life-coaching sessions because he was unable to feel better or do the things the coach was suggesting. When I saw him after his failed coaching experience, he was in a deep depression, his sadness palpable. I asked if he was suicidal and he admitted that he was—something his coach had never asked about. Alerting his partner and suggesting hospitalization was imperative. Alarmingly, he had already seen three different psychiatrists and obtained antidepressants from each, and not one of them had inquired about suicidality.

Another example from my practice is that of a woman who saw a life coach because she hated her job. They talked about the need to follow her bliss and sever ties with her employer. She took this advice, quit her job, and when her unemployment ended, she was unable to find another job. Despondent, she came to therapy to help sort out her feelings about her life and to find a way to understand why she was unhappy at her former job. She needed to understand her role in how she was sabotaging herself. She took the long road to what ultimately brought her fullness and acceptance of life and work.

Accepting Suffering as Unavoidable

Suffering can’t be avoided. (In Buddhism, it’s the first Noble Truth.) But allowing ourselves to express sadness and to accept deep pain will eventually allow these feelings to dissipate; blocking emotions only deepens problems. Also, giving ourselves time to settle into feeling allows us to recognize that they ebb and flow. Through this, we can accept that while old age and death are inevitable, and feeling sad is part of living, suffering is impermanent. By being able to sit with emotions and not get caught up in either rumination or anxious fretting, we develop a steadiness of mind. Meditation works by settling our turbulent thoughts and emotions so that we can titrate them into tolerable moments.

What works

When sadness becomes major depression, positive thinking (and related approaches, such as life coaching) are like putting a Band-Aid on a gushing wound. Facing our pain, learning to bear our suffering, and then doing the deep inner work of understanding our role in our troubles is a way out. It is often slow and filled with obstacles. Here are some steps in the process:

  1. Become aware of subtle emotions as you experience them. By becoming aware of emotions as you feel them, rather than pushing them away, you will be better able to use them to employ coping strategies.

 

  1. When emotions become intense, know that feelings don’t stay that way forever. All emotions are transient. Practices such as regular meditation help us not just to become aware of feeling but also not to indulge them.

 

  1. Remember that subtle change is hard to see. A broken bone mends slowly; in the early stages, healing is hardly noticeable on an X-ray.

 

  1. Look deeply at ourselves and the role we play in our mood. Doing so opens what is within, leading to understanding and insight.

 

  1. Take into account what precipitates depression. Learning to tolerate understandable sadness and some depression helps normalize what we are experiencing. All emotions have a role to play in living well; we must accept and not disown our most difficult feelings.

Filed Under: Depression & Anxiety, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Mindfulness & Meditation, Psychotherapy, Self-care, Uncategorized, Well-being & Growth Tagged With: coaching, Depression, Meditation, Mindfulnees-Based Cognitive Therapy, psychotherapy, sadness

September 19, 2016 By Susan O'Grady 1 Comment

How to Keep Your Marriage Healthy While Coping with Chronic Illness

Relationships and chronic pain.

Most marriages will be confronted with challenges. How we cope, make meaning from, and find benefit in challenges affects our overall satisfaction in our marriage. One of these biggest challenges marriages face is health

In Sickness and In Health Till Death do us part

We take our marriage vows in innocence and with deeply felt sincerity. That’s probably a very good thing, because the reality of coping with a chronic, debilitating illness such as a stroke, Parkinson’s disease (PD), or dementia, makes many question or regret their vows to stay together in sickness and in health.

When our love is new, we don’t vow to love honor and cherish until. And usually, we don’t intend to leave when our partner becomes ill—but we may feel like it at times.

When One Partner Becomes a Caregiver

In the United States, spouses are first in line to take on caregiving responsibilities (Pinquart and Sorensen, 2011.) We are living longer than ever before, so the likelihood that one partner will become a caregiver is high. Studies have shown that the caregiver burden when a spouse has a chronic illness negatively affects the non-ill partner both physically and mentally: more depression, more financial and physical strain, and lower levels of well-being.

Take PD, for example. PD is a chronic debilitating illness characterized by complex motor and non-motor symptoms. When PD is first diagnosed and during much of the illness, the non-PD partner provides most of the informal caregiving. Roles and division of labor often shift, with the caregiving spouse taking over such tasks as scheduling and driving to medical appointments, assuming the banking and paying bills, and so forth. Chores increasingly fall on one partner, making it difficult to find time for the non-PD partner to practice their own self-care or see friends.

Research on marital satisfaction and quality of life shows that social support is a key factor in coping with illness, yet sadly, couples often become more isolated, withdrawing due to an increase in interpersonal distress, shame, or apathy. The need to cut back on work-life or retire abruptly brings another set of challenges, such as loss of work identity, fading ties with coworkers, more dependence on family, and decreased income.

My Illness or Your Illness: Attending to the relationship

Chronic illness needs to be seen not only as an individual challenge but as a relationship challenge as well. Anger at the unfairness of life when newly diagnosed is entirely normal, for example, especially if the implications of the disease process are fully understood. Wanting to blame someone is understandable, but with an illness such as PD, it’s important to ascribe the difficulties to the disease, not the person.

Studies have looked at how dyadic coping—a process by which a couple works together to cope with the stressors that one or both face—might be one way of improving health and in turn, the quality of the marriage. Couples who see the illness as a relationship issue rather than an individual issue will be more satisfied with their relationship than couples that don’t.

Coping together: We-ness in marriage

One clue to how couples see the relationship is their pronouns. These seemingly innocuous parts of our everyday speech give us an important window into the inner workings of relationship. If one member of a couple comes into my office and is talking at his/her partner, using pronouns such as I, me, my, you, your, this shows a greater sense of independence and distance in relationship. Using words like we, us, our, implies a shared identification between spouses, more intimacy, and more emotional investment in their relationship.

Self and Partner Soothing

We-ness is also associated with more positive and fewer negative feelings, and with lower autonomic nervous system arousal—the fight or flight response. When one partner is anxious or distressed, we can calm them down by using we-ness words. This produces a soothing or emotion-regulating effect on the other spouse. I have seen this many times in my office when counseling couples. For example, when Joyce was becoming agitated about how she would cope with Al’s PD, Al reached over and gently stroked her arm, saying ”We’ll deal with this together.” This had an immediate impact on Joyce’s anxiety.

That simple act can make a big difference. We refer to these as emotion-regulating behaviors. Couples can help each other cope with anger, frustration, and fear and minimize the damage to the marriage. In couples therapy, we help partners understand the importance of self-soothing during difficult times and the value of providing that to their partner when needed.

 Benefit Finding: Glorifying the struggle

 When couples come to therapy, I assess their strengths and the areas that need work. Asking such questions as “Looking back over the years, what moments stand out as really hard times in your marriage? Why do you think you stayed together? How did you get through these difficult times?” Or, “How would you say your marriage is different from when you first got married?” With such questions, I am looking for growth as a couple and for a sense of how they cope. Are they a team? Or do they point fingers and accuse their partner of messing things up?

By developing a shared narrative, and finding meaning in how we strengthen our bond (or we-ness), we can improve our marriage and how we cope with problems. Couples who view their struggles as hard, but worth it, demonstrate hopefulness and togetherness. Yet when one partner feels out of control of the events that they face, they may slip into passive endurance, believing there is nothing they can do about a problem. They struggle to survive instead of growing closer through the challenges. These marriages are less likely to be happy and more likely to end in divorce.

But for couples that find meaning and growth in difficult times, they “glorify the struggle” and will have a better chance of staying together through hard times. Hope and commitment toward growth as a couple are elevated over disillusionment and negative perspective. I don’t want to be dismissive of the real, hard problems such couples face or expect them to have a Pollyanna, rose-colored-glasses approach. We can acknowledge the pain and suffering we face, but at the same time, try to find something in our experience that helps us learn something new, to grow from it.

By viewing the inevitable problems that arise in marriage as “our problems” rather than blaming our partner, we strengthen our bond. Moreover, when we work as a team rather than in parallel, we are less likely to complain criticize, or be defensive. This has a valuable outcome: we naturally reduce each other’s tension or physiological arousal. When we are relaxed when confronted with problems or conflicts, we are more likely to find ways to manage them—in sickness and in health.

Filed Under: Couples & Marriage & Family, Depression & Anxiety, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Health Psychology, Relationships, Well-being & Growth Tagged With: Chronic Illness, glorifying the struggle, Parkinson's Disease, Spousal caregiving, We-ness

August 2, 2016 By Susan O'Grady 4 Comments

Suffering, Compassion, and a Skate Ramp

 

Last summer my neighbor’s son built a huge skate ramp right next to our property line. (We’re on different streets, so I’d never met him or his family.) First sawing, then drills, and eventually it was finished. I was glad for the wild Toyon bushes that grew high along a chain-link fence, blocking the view—but they didn’t block the noise. In use, a wooden skate ramp has a distinctive mechanical rhythmic sound. It’s similar to the poinging back-and-forth of a tennis match, but is contiguous and unvarying, except for sudden yelps from the kid or his friends.

My work as a psychotherapist is focused and can be intense. Quiet time in my garden is where I replenish by slipping into reverie and stillness. I love the silence, punctuated only by bird song and breeze-tossed tree branches. But now all I could hear, from morning to dusk, was the skate ramp. I tried to counter my disgruntlement by reminding myself ”At least it’s not a meth lab, and I could be glad he’s getting healthy outdoor exercise instead of playing violent video games and watching TV all day.” But in truth, my first thought when occasionally I heard a thud followed by silence was ”Yes! A broken ankle.” I did also think ”Oh no, he could be seriously hurt.” But then the skating would start up again, shattering my peace and sending me back inside, grumbling to myself.

It’s true that in many ways, mine was a problem of privilege. I was just irritated by a noisy nuisance, while some people are living in refugee camps or dodging bullets in their own neighborhoods. Many people have no quiet, private, beautiful place whose silence can be invaded. But most everyone can relate to feeling dominated by difficult or negative emotions like helplessness and anger.

Finding Another View: Opening a window

This summer, though, something happened to help me accept the noisy interruption of my peace. When a Monterey pine succumbed to bark beetles, the tree guys removed some of the Toyon bushes, opening the way to roll giant slices of the dead tree to the driveway. For the first time, I had a window to view of the skate ramp. The opening allowed me to see a shadow dance, the blur of back-and-forth movement, that accompanied the rhythmic skating sound. Actually seeing the annoying kid had the interesting effect of making me less annoyed. Suddenly he was a person, a kid in a baseball hat having fun, not just a maddening, repetitive sound.

I felt compassion; I wasn’t trying to feel compassion, talking myself into it, as I had before. Catching glimpses of the kid trullunking on his skate ramp allowed me to view it differently. I can now sit in my backyard and know that the neighbor kid is doing what he enjoys. I can occupy that space literally alongside him. It becomes background sound, along with the birdsong and an occasional leaf blower. And it also nice to notice when it stops.

How does my experience relate to suffering and compassion? Because it’s only when we can see the humanity of others and acknowledge our own uncomfortable thoughts that we can transform them. When I couldn’t see what annoyed me, all I could do was feel passive and irritated. Once the view was clear, I saw the source of my feelings and could accept it. A kid having fun. On a skate ramp in his backyard, which happens to abut my backyard. We all have hedges that obscure our view and block compassionate response.

In psychotherapy, and in mindfulness-based therapies, we learn to see that our emotional suffering and problems in life are not only caused by external circumstances but by the way we react to them. When our minds are dominated by difficult or negative emotions, we feel out of control. We employ defense mechanisms like withdrawal, projection, and demonizing the other. In contrast, meditation and practicing mindfulness is helpful because we cultivate the capacity to watch what is arising in our mind.

We sit with feelings and thoughts, noting but not getting caught up in them as we refocus on breathing and sitting. Witnessing our thoughts and feelings and allowing them to move on, rather than reacting unreflectively, gives us more emotional control, more choices about how to respond with our better, less overwhelmed selves. Meditation provides a window to compassion, something like the window through the hedges. We may begin to see that things are not so bad.

W.H. Auden’s poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” contrasts the idealistic hopes of lovers with the quelling voice of Time, which recommends looking in the mirror—accepting things as they are—and the healing that comes from putting aside illusion:

‘O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.’

With my crooked heart, I do.

Filed Under: Depression & Anxiety, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Mindfulness & Meditation, Psychotherapy, Well-being & Growth Tagged With: Acceptance, compassion, coping, suffering

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Dr. Susan J. O’Grady is a Certified Gottman Couples Therapist

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