O'Grady Psychology Associates

Psychotherapy, Marriage Counseling, Neuropsychological Assessment

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Waking up on the Grumpy Side of the Bed: Coping with difficult moods

Coping with depression and difficult emotions.“Yesterday all day a small gardenia was a great consolation.”

Thomas Merton

A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals

Some days are harder than others. It’s tempting to find something or someone to blame, even if it’s just the wrong side of the bed. Yesterday, I woke up grumpy, but instead of fault-finding, I announced to my family that I was grumpy and not to take anything that happens between us too personally.

My bad mood persisted through breakfast. In fact, I kind of enjoyed feeling grumpy. Especially because there was no apparent reason and I didn’t care to find one. I felt defiant.

I took my hike as I usually do, on this sunny morning. I begrudgingly admitted it was a stunning day. Yet my mood persisted—and became worse as a large group of hikers, some meet-up group or club, began to pass me on the narrow trail. As I walked in the opposite direction up the hill while they clomped down, one by one, they each said good morning, smiling as if the day was something really special. In my sour mood I thought, ”How many more are there? Don’t they realize that, as one person going against the tide of walkers, I would already have been greeted numerous times? And how many more good mornings and fake smiles do I have to return?”

Many, many more, it turned out, because the group numbered more than 80. And every single person smiled at me and said “Good morning,” or a variant of it. By about the 40th person, something happened without any volition on my part: I began to smile back with genuine happiness. At first, it was in amusement at my grumpy predicament of sharing a trail with 80 very happy hikers, but as the group moved past me, I felt a stirring of good will toward these cheerful strangers, who had unknowingly softened my mood.

Sometimes moods are like that: inexplicable and unpredictable. As a psychotherapist, I help people articulate their feelings. More expansive and more integrated awareness of emotions, achieved through therapy and mindfulness practice, helps people respond more healthily and flexibly in the moment and day by day. By doing so, we can change the quality of our lives.

It can feel as though we’re overpowered by emotions. We can become so absorbed in them that we become identified with what we feel and lose the ability to witness them. A simple misunderstanding with a friend can become an all-consuming and unbearable wound. In such cases, we risk getting stuck in a contracted state that can lead to depression or avoidance behaviors such as overeating, drinking, shopping, or sleeping, which provide a temporary illusion of feeling good. But as we know, those actions backfire, leading to more guilt and less overall effectiveness.

Noting and naming emotions, in contrast, gives us a path past denial or avoidance into acceptance, letting go, and even gratitude.

Sometimes our moods are not just difficult, but serious mood disorders, such as major depression. If feelings of sadness last longer than two weeks, and interfere with daily activities, it is important to get help from a psychotherapist to determine if psychotherapy and medication would benefit. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is often a good treatment for depression.

The solution is not to ignore our difficult moods, but to acknowledge them as they arise. In some situations we will be able to trace what we feel to a particular event that we can bring insight to. For other moods, like my waking up grumpy for no apparent reason, we accept them and watch what happens next, much as we do with the weather. Eighty happy hikers eventually made me smile and my bad mood passed as they passed by. That was essentially effortless, but it is often quite effortful to cope with hard emotions.

When we cultivate a disposition that witnesses and accepts passing experiences, we become more stable. In mindfulness meditation or contemplative prayer, we accept thoughts and feelings without judgment and with open and spacious awareness. Emotions arise and pass without interference. I acknowledged my grumpiness and warned my family not to mind me. In doing so, I took responsibility rather than looking for someone or something to blame. This allowed me not only to be open to my bad mood, but also to become open to the good mood that emerged later on.

Sometimes, of course, bad moods can arise for good reasons, not just something that inexplicably overtakes us. In his journal, Thomas Merton describes waking up with heart palpitations and shortness of breath, surely cause for concern. But instead of dwelling on his fear, he starts his page by recognizing the small gardenia as a consolation. He describes walking out into the woods and gazing at the tall straight oaks, closing his journal entry for that day with the lines:

“Sweet afternoon! Cool breezes and a clear sky! This day will not come again. The bulls lie under the tree in the corner of their field. Quiet afternoon! The blue hills, the daylilies in the wind. This day will not come again.”

That is more than acceptance; it’s real gratitude. It starts with accepting all our moods, the grumpy and the grateful. Without that, we can only approximate gratitude in a kind of pretending. With my softened mood, I continued on my way, grateful to the hikers, and happy to be spending my morning in the hills.

 

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The Elusive Muse: Reclaiming creativity and focus

NorthernLights
Photo by Marcelo Quinan, Unsplash

For three months, I’ve resisted writing. I sat at my desk or the kitchen table—my favorite place to write—to compose an essay, but distraction beckoned me at every turn. The muse, that slippery, elusive impulse to create words from experiences and observations, had gone missing. Each week I’d tell myself that I’d write over the weekend, and Sunday night would come with nothing to show.

Wonderful ideas came at moments in my psychotherapy work, or on a hike, or in conversations with friends. I had flashes of insight, but writing them down was the tricky part. I used apps like Evernote and Pocket to collect interesting, pertinent articles to reference. I’d write a few lines and a title, but not finish the post. In fact, my Mac desktop became so cluttered with ideas and open pages that I was overwhelmed with all the fragments of potential posts staring back at me, giving me a glimpse into the world of attention deficit disorder (ADD). The mindscape becomes so cluttered with snippets of thoughts and ideas that nothing sticks for long, and nothing gets finished.

When Ancient Greeks needed inspiration, they’d call upon the muses. The one I’ve been needing is Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry and eloquence. Socrates said that when a muse takes hold of us, we’re compelled to create.

It would be great if invoking the muse were all there was to it. But the muse alone is not enough. Focus and perseverance provide the steam, the energy that gets things going. As Victor Hugo said, “Persistence is necessary to accomplish most anything of value.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) offers a good example of persistence. He painted his garden at Giverny, France, with its beautiful water lilies, some 250 times over the last 30 years of his life. Some water-lily paintings were enormous murals, some were smaller canvases. “Know that I am absorbed by work,” he wrote in a 1908 letter, when he was 68. “These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It is beyond my power as an old man, and yet I want to arrive at rendering what I feel. I have destroyed some. . . . Some I recommence . . . and I hope that after so many efforts, something will come out” (quoted in Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self by Steven Z. Levine, p. 206).

Despite being displeased with his work, feeling that it failed to capture his intentions, and despite the cataracts that plagued him until a 1923 operation, Monet persisted. And he succeeded in creating some of the world’s most famous and best-loved art: his water-lily paintings hang in museums all over the world.

Monet found his work absorbing to the point of obsession even when he had to destroy canvases. Many people, though, find it hard to persist in tasks that are unrewarding.

In my three months of a writing slump, I did not persist. I gave up when the writing didn’t come easily. Sitting at the computer to write, I gave in to mind-numbing web browsing.

I had distractions besides the internet. Of course, I work nearly full-time as a psychologist, and have home and family obligations. The holidays took over a big portion of my attention, updating my software entailed much time-consuming tinkering, and my 24-year-old daughter told me she was leaving to work on an mhealth project in Darfur, Sudan, to help the 90,000 displaced people living in refugee camps. I learned a lot in the last month about that region’s history and its genocides. Letting young adults make their own choices is the right thing to do…but still, I kept searching for recent news from Sudan, and that was a big distraction from my own writing.

At one point, my friend Sarah told me, “Susan, I think you need to get back to your blogging—besides, we all miss your posts.” In Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (WaterBrook Press, 2001), Madeleine L’Engle quotes an unknown writer on the subject of discipline: “If I leave my work for a day, it leaves me for three,” going on to cite Arthur Rubinstein: ”If I don’t practice the piano for one day I know it. If I don’t practice it for two days my family knows it. If I don’t practice it for three days, my public knows it” (p. 196). By that formula, I will need a lot of catching up to do. But fortunately, I love to write, and I sense that the muse is not lost. She may have been taking a break, but she is near.

I have learned a few things over these last few months about how to make space for the muse to re-enter. Some ways to refocus:

  1. Tidy your computer’s home screen. Close all windows except the document you are working on; turn notifications off. Open a browser window only if it relates to your project. You can also try an app that blocks distractions.
  2. If you have a noisy environment, try headphones and/or closing the door to minimize distractions.
  3. Keep a regular schedule. As William Faulkner said, “I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.” Return to that schedule after vacations, holidays, or sickness.
  4. If you’re having trouble finding sustained time to write, try working in “chunks.” Break up your writing task into manageable pieces that you can accomplish in half an hour or 45 minutes. Then, knowing you have (say) half an hour before starting dinner, you can work on a half-hour chunk.
  5. Be mindful of self-care—get good sleep, eat well, exercise, and make time to relax.
  6. Don’t call your mother unless you’ve finished your writing task for the day.
  7. Cultivate will power and self-control.
  8. Write even when you don’t feel inspired.

One of the reasons that mindfulness has gained such traction is that most of us know we are only half awake. We use only a small part of our mental and physical resources. As William James wrote, being cut off from our creative resources leads to feeling as if a “sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch or clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding.” On Vital Reserves: The Energies of Men (The Perfect Library, 1833).

James observed, that in a single successful effort of will, such as saying ”no” to mindless temptation, we gain vitality and reanimate our energy for days and weeks, giving us a new range of power. Giving in to habitual avoidance behaviors, only provides temporary escape, and ultimately leads to fatigue and inertia. It is not what we do that causes fatigue, but what we don’t do.

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Facebook’s False Face: Comparing our insides to other people’s outsides

Social media often contributes to feeling left out, leading to depression and social comparison.

Guidelines for Kindness When Posting

We seldom deliberately present a bad face on social media. Selfie stick in hand, we depict ourselves smiling before an elaborate, expensive meal, in front of a landmark in an exotic land, or simply celebrating with friends (which all can see, including those not fortunate enough to be present in those moments).  Accumulating ubiquitous likes and thumbs-up is gratifying in the way that cotton candy is: briefly sweet,  but fading quickly as the posts scroll by. Posts may have sad news; they may be angry, ranting, or commented on by haters, but in constructing a public version of ourselves, we promote something: a lifestyle, an idea, or an image.

First generation Face bookers–the early adopters—now in their twenties, have mostly abandoned it for Twitter and Instagram where they look for news in their areas of interest.  Their parents, on the other hand, who may have started a Facebook page as a means to snoop on their kids, (and friends of their kids)—are more active than ever, but for themselves now, posting about their kid’s achievements. That’s understandable. The need to know that others care about us is normal.  Seeking attention in the right way, at the right time, is healthy: An actor needs interaction with her audience; a poet wants to hear audible sighs when reading their work. In conversation, we seek reciprocity. I speak while someone listens, then I listen attentively in turn. I can tell you now, having published a blog, that I want to know that people read my posts, and it is the best when someone comments.

 No one wants to be a Debbie Downer to their friends, and no one wants to read the sad, drab, boring parts of life. So what’s wrong with shaping a good-looking, successful persona for social media? One answer: it’s depressing. The theory of social comparison suggests that we evaluate and define ourselves in relation to others, and Facebook is no exception. But if we’re always comparing our lives, which we know to be full of difficulty (unrealized dreams, illness, money problems, strained relationships, etc.) to the carefully curated, only-the-highlights lives of others, it’s easy to feel envious and depressed at how you don’t measure up.

More than that, when we’re obsessing over social media, we’re not paying attention to our own present moment. Instead, we take a mini-time travel to a future moment, imagining other people witnessing our experience, or become lost in memories, wishes, and comparisons. We become exhibitionists and voyeurs, which detaches us from other people rather than bringing us closer together.

Chao-pien was a Chinese official of the Sung dynasty and lay disciple to a Zen master. He summarized a spiritual experience in a four-line poem:

 

Devoid of thought, I sat quietly by the desk in my official room,

With my fountain-mind undisturbed, as serene as water;

A sudden crash of thunder, the mind doors burst open,

And lo, there sits the old man in all his homeliness.

                                 T. Suzuki (Essays in Zen Buddhism, Second Series (1953; reprint, London: Rider, 1970)

 

Thomas Merton unpacks this metaphor in his book The Inner Experience:

Suddenly there is a clap of thunder and the “doors” of the inner consciousness fly open. The clap of thunder is just startling enough to create a sudden awareness, a self-realization in which the false, exterior self is caught in all its naked nothingness and immediately dispelled as an illusion. Not only does it vanish, but it is seen never to have been there at all—a pure fiction, a mere shadow of passionate attachment and of self-deception. Instead, the real self stands revealed in all his reality.

A serene mind, devoid of the constant stream of media, allows us to see ourselves as we are: homely and human. The irony for those of us hoping to portray perfection is that it takes seeing our homeliness—our unpolished, unedited life—to begin glimpsing our wholeness.

When we don’t see our homeliness because we are busily posting all the good stuff, we evade the difficult yet real feelings we have, and we evade real emotional contact with ourselves and others. Our rejected, unacknowledged feelings go underground—and will pop up again as symptoms of unease. In this way, social media becomes a defense mechanism, like denial or projection.

The vivid starkness of D. T. Suzuki ‘s excerpt speaks to what we must eventually encounter when we sit alone without our devices. We see the door burst open to our humanness, in all its homeliness and ordinariness. We are fine as we are, warts and all.

Over the years I have seen clients who obsessively look at social media; some create a complete alter ego. This keeps them from true and honest relationships, even with themselves. For tips on putting down the smartphone, try this link.

Consider the following these guidelines for kindness when posting.

  1. Be considerate of others when posting photos of exclusive activities, amazing holidays, or expensive vacations—especially ones your friends can’t afford, weren’t invited to, or couldn’t attend.
  2. Don’t overshare—no one wants to see your every activity, meal, and outfit.
  3. Check your privilege. Make sure you are not being insensitive in your posting.
  4. Be genuine; avoid arrogance.
  5. Make posts that are about other people and issues, not just yourself.
  6. Try taking a break from posting.
  7. People want to see your artwork, your successes, and accomplishments, but don’t upload every single thing.

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Implacable Grandeur: Mindfulness and Change

Learning to appreciate what you have.

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.                 Albert Camus

Much of the human experience is determined by chance—factors completely outside our control.

My father, who died of prostate cancer at the age of fifty-six, had two copies of the BRCA2 gene, one healthy and one defective. The defective BRCA2 gene greatly increases the chances of developing hereditary breast, ovarian, or prostate cancer (HBOC). My brother and I each had a 50/50 chance of getting that mutated gene. As it turns out, my brother got the broken gene, and I got the healthy one.  I was lucky; I don’t have to face that increased cancer risk, and neither do my two daughters. But my brother is now fighting HBOC prostate cancer.

Surgery and treatments will hopefully keep the cancer from spreading beyond where it has already taken up residence in his body. My brother and I talked for a long time after we got the genetic news. I felt something akin to survivor guilt—why did I escape hereditary cancer while my brother was saddled with it?

Like many siblings, we had been competitive in our younger years; I worried that he would feel envy, but in fact, he congratulated me. My brother was genuinely happy for me. For anyone in that position, being able to feel glad for another in the face of your own difficult outcome takes maturity, wisdom, and a generous spirit.

Finding out that I do not carry the genetic alteration BRCA2 was a great relief. I’d had such an outpouring of kind thoughts from so many people while waiting for the results that I almost feel guilty for not having the mutation. I had this crazy thought that those who expressed love and support would think “Why was she such a drama queen bothering us with this when she only had a 50% chance?”

Some might wonder why I chose to be so transparent, especially when psychotherapists normally aren’t self-disclosing. On further reflection, I believe that transparency facilitates integration. That means that you’re working toward a more unified sense of self, rather than compartmentalizing or walling off different facets of your personality.

I use my own personal experiences, as well as the insights from my work, as a foundation for growth and self-discovery leading to greater authenticity. As we get older, we learn that being authentic feels better. I’m glad that despite my self-doubt, I opened up about that threat. By doing so, and by being present to either outcome, I learned a lot.

What I learned is the stuff of aphorisms, platitudes, teaching stories, parables, and fairy tales from all faith traditions: How to appreciate your life before you see it vanish, how to find meaning in daily challenges, and beauty in the smallest things. My wish now is to savor my sense of gratitude and good fortune and relish my current good health.

I was lucky. But the truth is, no one gets to a certain point and then lives happily ever after. Most of life is a matter of contending with problems, hardships, and unexpected turn of events. Periods of placid security are the exception rather than the rule.

Life is change. It’s our nature to want to hold onto things, always grasping to make things safe and predictable. But the wisdom of the Buddha teaches us that we will never succeed: Because life is constant change, attachment causes suffering. The only way to achieve true peace is through accepting that life is dynamic, not static. As Epictetus wrote, “It is not events that disturb the minds of men, but the view they take of them.”

But this doesn’t require superhuman serenity. I believe that we all have an instinct for wholeness at the core of our being. One way of looking at this yearning is as an archetypal urge of the Self, an archaic memory that may have been present in the lives and generations before us.

Growing with difficulties and changes.The Next Blade of Grass

“As a caterpillar, having come to the end of one blade of grass, draws itself together and reaches out for the next, so the Self, having come to the end of one life and dispelled all ignorance, gathers in his faculties and reaches out from the old body to a new.”  [IV.4.3] (Easwaran, Eknath. The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press, iBooks, 2007.)

Like the caterpillar, we draw ourselves together when one phase of life ends and stretch to reach for our next landing place—a new way of being in life, despite the inevitable changes that chance throws in our path.

We all possess that ability to draw ourselves together, collecting what we have learned from our experiences (a difficult situation, an insight during mediation, inner work in psychotherapy) and stretching out for the next blade of grass, the next place of sustenance. In this way, we grow, progressing slowly and deliberately from one place to the next.

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Accepting Life’s Turbulence: Fasten Your Seatbelt

Life brings ups and downs and finding a way through the stormy turbulence takes courage and grace.
Thunder Cloud from 37,000 ft

This dramatic cumulonimbus was captured at 37,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Pilots know to avoid going near these thunderclouds, charting a course around them for the comfort of passengers and safety of the aircraft. Even coming close will cause turbulence—the jet trembles and shakes, often violently.

Pilots rate turbulence as mild, medium, or severe. Thankfully, excellent communication between pilots means that patches of bumpy air can be predicted well ahead of time and avoided by changing elevation or course. But sometimes turbulence is unavoidable. In that situation, fearful flyers grip armrests, pop benzodiazepines, and turn up the volume on their headsets. Eventually the air smooths out, and everyone releases their breath…and their grips.

Staying Steady During Turbulent Times

Jet travel is a great metaphor for life. Sometimes the bumpy moments are so extreme that there’s nothing you can do but sit with it and hope you don’t have to pee. But sitting with the rocky ups and downs of life isn’t always easy.

When a pilot acquaintance asked me how to survive the turbulence of his current marriage problems, I asked him what he tells his passengers to do when the flight encounters a rough patch.

He said, “I tell them to fasten their seat belts.” We have all heard the familiar words, “The captain has turned on the seat belt sign. Please return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts.” Now, I confess I sometimes use this moment to zip down the now suddenly empty aisle to use the lavatory (but only in mild turbulence.)  But basically, in bad weather you need to stay seated and wait it out.

I enjoy flying, but that wasn’t always true. I was a fearful flyer for about six years. I wasn’t phobic, I didn’t avoid flying or have panic attacks, but I was alert to every squeal of the engine, movement of the wing flaps, or ring of a cabin bell,. During euphemistically described moments of “bumpy air,” I would glance up at the flight attendants’ faces to see if they were showing signs of concern.

I wasn’t afraid of heights or of being in an enclosed space—my fear was simply of crashing. Kaput, end of life, and the imagined 60 seconds of sheer terror I expected to feel going headlong into death.

We have no control over death. Once I came to terms with accepting that I could die in a plane crash, I became less afraid. It wasn’t that I was convinced by statistics showing how rare such deaths are; fearful flyers are rarely comforted by the statistics. Acceptance, in contrast, goes a long way in dealing with the bumps we encounter in life.

I found out this week that I have a 50/50 chance of having the genetic mutation associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC). My family on both sides has had lots of cancer. But through advanced genetic testing, I now know that my family members have the BRCA2 mutation going back three generations. As I await the results of my blood test, I am again reminded of our lack of control. For me, it’s the toss of a coin: I either have it or I don’t. If I do, I have an 85% chance of developing breast cancer and lower risk of other cancers (ovarian, pancreatic, melanoma, and stomach). I am not comforted by those odds.

Flying has infinitely better odds. But after a week of emotional turbulence, I will meet my fate with HBOC with as much grace as I can muster. It hasn’t been an easy week, to be sure, veering between certainty of bad results and certainty of escape. So while I wait and hope that I end up on the happier side of the 50-50 split, I will fasten my seatbelt and try to steer as safe a course through the thunderstorm as I can, with all the support I’ve gathered over the years: family, friendship, work that I love, and resources (such as FORCE). Coping skills, like seat belts, keep us safe. While we generally don’t enjoy restraints, a seatbelt helps to contain our emotions so they are less likely to overwhelm.

I am reminded, once again, of a lesson taught by Thich Nhat Hanh: “When we have a toothache, we know that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing.” (Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, 1992, p. 38). Finding comfort in the face of difficulty is possible—by riding out the painful moments and trusting that the next moment contains a potential fullness, some simple pleasure waiting to be noticed. So when the seatbelt sign is again turned off,  you are free to move about the cabin. Add take a deep breath.