Working Through Conflict

It’s a sad fact that most of us are never taught explicitly how to deal with conflict and instead are only educated on the topic in ways that are implicit and wildly confusing. Stereotypically this education is received through observation of those closest to us. There are no exact words used to label or categorize the yelling and screaming, the little obscenities that get hurled across the room which no longer seem even half as funny as they used to. No words used to describe why your mother, father, sibling ran away or barricaded themselves behind a locked door, leaving you to wonder in silence about their forceful absence.

There is rarely an explanation for why these things happen, not during or after. They just do, apparently. At least to the mind of anyone witnessing these conflicts play out.

And bearing witness is typically how a person develops their template for dealing with conflict. Temperament and natural disposition play a role, but observation and learned application probably have a greater effect on an individual. I’ve learned that the differences between unhealthy styles of conflict resolution and their methods of application are artificial. Whether you barricade the door or bust through it is irrelevant. It produces the same result and essentially amounts to the same thing..

What Is Conflict?

Conflict is what occurs between individuals and groups whenever there is a recognized difference and sufficient emotional investment. Sports is an easy way to explain it because sports are one of the few and one of the most public forums where conflict can be acknowledged and accepted.

Conflicts exist between teams that are competing against one another, and it also exists between members of the same team who are often competing against each other for certain accolades. In both instances, what is at the core of these conflicts are perceived differences (my team vs your team, my desire for more playing time vs your desire for more playing time, etc.) tied to emotional investments.

Sports are designed to produce these conflicts but they are also designed to inevitably resolve them. Charles Barkely provided a good example of this. During his playing days he truly believed he was the best basketball player in the world. This belief was both the fuel and the byproduct of his success, as is the case with most professional athletes. In 1993, Charles Barkely found himself in disagreement about this with Michael Jordan, who believed in his own right that he was the best. Because their teams were competed against each other during the regular season and eventually for the NBA championship, they would have the opportunity to resolve the conflict. Not by hiding or over-reacting to it, not even through the use of words. The act of competition ensured their engagement, which is all that was needed to address it.

In his retelling of what happened, Barkley reports that as the competition began he told his daughter “Ain’t nobody in the world better than your dad at basketball.” But as it played out he went back to his daughter and said “Christina, I ain’t never said this before, I think there’s somebody better at basketball than me.” Obviously this was a humbling moment, but it also represented the resolution of that particular conflict that existed between Barkley and Jordan.

Consequences

When a person walks away from conflict and doesn’t see it through to the end, they forfeit the opportunity to influence how that conflict is resolved. They lose the ability to impact the narrative. If I’m at odds with someone and they choose not to engage with me, then to a certain extent, the truth about our issue, about them, and about me, becomes whatever I believe it to be. I might be cautious or careless about the assumptions I make and conclusions I come to. I might rely on the advice of friends to help me, but something is still missing. The inability to engage directly with the person I am in conflict with creates a psychological black box. The stories we use to cover up this void are frequently unhelpful in resolving our conflicts.

If someone is able to stay connected to the conflict and work through it, there is an opportunity to either advance or complete the business of the relationship, which in essence is what all conflicts are about, our relationships with others and with ourselves. Advancing the relationship implies learning something new about self and other and incorporating this new information into the framework of the relationship. This enlarges the relationship by increasing the capacities of the individuals involved in it, especially the capacity for understanding. Similarly, completing the business of the relationship implies acknowledging the limits of what it can provide and either accepting the relationship as it is or ending it, with full recognition of its limits, but also with less bitterness and frustration.

Either outcome is fine. What matters is the willingness to engage in the process that allows you to arrive at an outcome at all. This process can often lead to surprises. Relationships thought to be beyond repair are mended, and some that seem to be working just fine end abruptly. Conflict is an additive. While engaged in it, an individual is not only learning but also incorporating new things into themselves. This is how people become more patient, empathetic, and curious.

One of my favorite examples of this happening comes from Mad Men. In one particular episode you can feel the frustration bubbling between Don and Peggy which quickly boils over into a full-on shouting match. But, while they were both momentarily shaken, neither of them ran away in response to the other’s anger and aggression, and because of this they were able to continue working through the conflict and move forward in their relationship. Before the conflict they related to each other as boss and subordinate, but afterwards their relationship became more personal. Antagonism was replaced by understanding and even affection, which also led to them producing better work.

Our issues can be resolved, many of them to the point of improvement, if we can tolerate the temporary discomfort that comes with working through them.

*Video clips of the Mad Men episode are included below

Making Space for Unhappiness

Irvin Yalom tells a story about the writer Andre Malraux asking a parish priest what he had learned about mankind after taking confession for 50 years. “First of all,” the priest replied, “people are much more unhappy than one thinks…and then the fundamental fact is that there is no such thing as a grown up person.”

This brief little story is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is that one wonders if this is really what the priest said, or if it is only what Malraux heard. Words have a tendency to take on distinct shapes and different meanings when filtered through the lens of experience. In the case of Malraux, experience was anchored by the early divorce of his parents and the subsequent suicide of his father following the stock market crash of 1929. After that came the multifaceted devastation of The Great Depression and the second world war. All of this happened during Malraux’s early years and provided the context in which his life would be situated.

Whether the priest said this or not, Malraux did not have to look far or wide for the evidence of unhappiness in the multitude of lives scarred by overwhelming amounts of adversity. Proof was all around. It is possible Malraux, capable of being boisterous and shy, reserved and full of action, understood the priest to be answering a question about himself, which essentially he was. Questions about mankind tend to conceal something personal about the person who asks. Some questions double as a type of confession.

Regardless of his intent, the answers given are interesting from a psychological standpoint. To say that people are more unhappy than we think is different than making the obvious observation that people are unhappy. The wording of the response gets at something else, namely our tendency to hide our unhappiness from others. We are primarily driven to do this by two emotions, fear and guilt.

FEAR & THE ENTERTAINER

The popular entertainer represents many things in society, some positive and some negative. Because of their public status they are easily signified upon by others. This process of signifying is a part of the ongoing exchange that takes place between the entertainer and society. The primary goal of the entertainer is to provide their own stylized version of fun to the masses, but they can also represent other things besides having a good time. They can be symbols of hope, and they can be cautionary tales, which is the part that is most relevant to this discussion. When we talk about the disastrous effects of hiding your feelings it is usually in reference to some tragic event involving an entertainer or some other public figure. Losses like Robin Williams come to mind, but others losses have also occurred more recently. The public’s reaction to these events tends to be a microcosm of grief, ranging from anger, confusion, shock, and abject denial.

It begs the question of why and how it can be so late, and sometimes too late, when we discover the fact of someone’s painful unhappiness? Fear comes into play because of the natural tendency to compare, which all animals must do on some level in order to survive, but none with the toxic efficiency of human beings. Hasty judgments used to keep us safe and in some cases they still do, but measuring our social status against others and feeling the need to hide certain feelings out of embarrassment does not move the pendulum of our safety in any direction. Or at least it shouldn’t, but the truth is that realities, whether real or imagined, do sometimes produce terrible effects. To think of yourself as unhappy is an essential ingredient, maybe the only ingredient, needed to be unhappy, regardless of the context.

Fear might not be so consequential if people could talk more openly about their struggles and find common ground, since unhappiness rests on a negative view of difference. Having someone join in your unhappiness with their own, or simply show a willingness to bear witness to it has the effect of shrinking the difference, of chipping away at it.

Without this support, one’s mind can become like a hardened shell without any cracks or crevices where light can get inside. The only sensation becomes the unpleasant echo of your own self-defeating thoughts. In this mental state the cost of revealing ourselves is judged to be too high because of what happened last time, every other time, becomes the symbol for what will happen every time. Rather than risk hurt and rejection, our thoughts push us towards a self-imposed exile.

Terrible as that sounds, I have no doubt it is the mind's way of trying to help us survive, and it is impressive that beings who are fundamentally social can and do indeed survive in isolation for significant lengths of time. But the overconsumption of fear as a motivating factor and the overreliance on isolation as a coping strategy force you to pay a heavy price.

GUILT

Apart from being afraid, we are also embarrassed to acknowledge the fact of our unhappiness. Even though our thoughts and ideas about happiness are not much better than second-hand sketches handed down to us by people who themselves are unskilled in the art of happiness, we take them very seriously. We believe that being anything less than happy as we have lazily imagined it is to be a failure. Instead of realizing that happiness and unhappiness are informed by chance and circumstance we view them as being solely the product of our own decisions. Therefore, if I’m unhappy, I’ve done something wrong.

This idea is so popular because it aligns with the way many of us naturally perceive events in childhood. As children we tend to exaggerate the amount of influence and control we have so that when things go well we have the confidence of “knowing” we made it happen. Unfortunately we use the same type of thinking when things don’t go well, assuming it is because we made it happen. As adults we usually make this judgment based on the same criteria we used as children–does it make me feel good or does it make me feel bad. Pair this type of infantile thinking with our other tendency to compare and it becomes easy to be personally convicted about one’s lack of happiness and choose to hide out of a sense that you are doing something wrong.

COMING TO TERMS

Maybe you have done something wrong. That is sometimes the case and in those instances guilt does serve an important function in helping us to correct our behavior. Guilt is not always an unearned emotion, but it is frequently a fabricated one. The benefit of being skeptical towards the feeling of guilt and occasionally bypassing it is that it allows you to be honest about what’s really going on, share it, and possibly experience relief for having done so.

It likely requires both personal and social changes to make being unhappy more acceptable and less of something deemed unacceptable and necessary to hide. Social pressure to perform, (especially online) seems to be at an all time high, so only the latter seems viable. A personal commitment to time spent in solitude and reflection balanced by the fostering of a few close relationships based on truth and honesty might be the best way not to get swept up in the tide.

Unpleasant as it may be, the reality is that human beings aren’t really designed to be happy. No more than we are designed to be angry or sad, brainiacs, or olympic athletes. We don’t come prepackaged. There are entire industries built on the singular hope that people will refuse to acknowledge that fact.

GROWING UP

The second half of the priest's answer is that there is no such thing as a grown-up person. A statement that essentially reduces comparison to a useless act. Compare yourself to what? To who? We are too biologically and psychologically complex to be stable in the full sense of the word. We are always moving. To compare is to judge yourself against something that isn’t there or won’t be in the next moment. Anyone who pretends otherwise, who pretends as if they have themselves all figured out, should be met with skepticism. The best that anyone can do is articulate their own experience through whatever method they like as long as it is arrived at through careful contemplation.

Going back to the title, this means that everyone at times is a patient in need of help from another, and everyone is also at times a guide helping point the way towards healing for someone else. Both labels are social constructs that should be held onto loosely. The fact that certain people are more likely to become patients than others is often because of reasons that have nothing to do with illness or wellness. The patient label is usually applied to whoever is most willing to speak up about their need for help at a given moment in time. The label can also be applied to the person for whom other people, for whatever reason, are willing to speak on behalf of. In either case the label is not necessarily for the person with the greatest need.

That priest really was speaking about all of us when he answered this question, himself included. Ultimately, there is no such thing as a grown up person because we are all still growing. Rather than being an excuse for perpetual immaturity, it is an opportunity for continuous self-exploration. The latter choice is how a person might one day find themselves outside of the unhappy rank and file the priest was talking about.

How Love Improves Mental Health

Describing Love

In his brief but profound classic, The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm said “love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence” [1]. This utterance is among the many other poetic phrases in this book, which Fromm wrote in 1956, but is just as relevant today. We are paying more and more attention to the internal psychological dimensions of well-being and beginning to more fully appreciate the aspects of living that are non-material, but equally important. With this comes a growing recognition that love is more than just pretty words and romantic gestures. It is a necessary force for the healing of the psychic wounds of the past.

Even with a growing awareness of the impact of love, there are many who still might wonder how it can really benefit them, or wonder, justifiably, what love really is. Love, and this definition is by no means original, is a state of being characterized by active engagement with oneself or another [2]. Fromm believed that discipline, concentration, patience, and supreme concern were the qualities most necessary to learning about love, which he considered an art just like any other (cite Fromm). The physical and emotional benefits we experience in this state are the byproducts of these qualities. They are what happens when we decide to love.

Physical & Emotional Benefits

Through love there is an amplification of everything inside of us, the physical and the emotional. The heart becomes healthier, the body’s natural immunity is boosted, as well as its tolerance for pain. And the levels of the stress hormone cortisol are scaled back [3].

The hormones oxytocin and dopamine are released in larger quantities when we experience love and make these changes possible. Underneath the process by which this occurs is the simple fact is love makes us better and it makes us stronger. It is a safety net that provides all manner of protection against the challenges of life, and we can hardly face life without it. This is why the need for love is so great in children, but even as adults we still require it. Intimacy, like food, water, and shelter is a basic human need [4]. (Traupmann & Hatfield). Healing then, especially in the case of psychic and emotional difficulties, is a group endeavor, and is never complete in isolation. These difficulties that arise in the context of relationships and must also be healed in the context of relationships.

The wounds we reference are broadly characterized as various mental illnesses–depression, anxiety, mood disturbances, etc. These states of being are the antithesis of love. They take root in its absence. The solutions to the problems they cause can be found in part, through the cultivation of love. In order to do this, one must be willing to learn and practice love. To become more conscious of it and more capable of applying it to everyday life.

Barriers to Love

At this point it is fair to consider why, if the benefits of love are so obvious and considerable, why aren’t more people interested in learning and practicing it?

First, I do not think the issue is a lack of interest. Love may be a universal experience, but not as we experience it. No animal is or ever was as interested in love as human beings. Our art, our fears and our passions, our beginnings and endings, testify to the fact that we are concerned with love to the point of obsession. Instead, the barrier to love is a lack of awareness of what it truly means and a lack of effort in applying its meaning.

Most people believe in the idea that love just happens. It is something you simply fall into, and the feeling of passionate love supports this notion with its effortless quality, but the effortlessness of love is short-lived. The sense that every moment of your life has converged at the point where you are standing face to face with your loved one occurs alongside a surge of biology and the release of hormones (oxytocin & dopamine) that is otherwise rarely experienced. It is easy to get swept up in the feeling of new love and to wish for its continuation, but eventually the effects of this surge fade, and at that point, this passion can only be maintained if it is renewed through conscious effort.

None of this is particularly appealing for the person who misunderstands the meaning of love. It is difficult to accept even if you do. There is something gratifying about relinquishing responsibility and giving yourself up to an experience that feels bigger than you, but the greater pleasure is had when you embrace love as a serious discipline that requires study [5]. The attainment of love, and good mental health, is not an event, but a process. The more serious you are about practicing daily the skills that make you more capable of giving and receiving love, the more likely you are to reap their benefits.

References

1. Fromm, E. (2088). The art of loving. Continuum Pub.

2. Carnahan, J. (2020, February 11). Love heals: The powerful effects of love ( and how to create more of it). Dr. Jill Carnahan, MD. https://www.jillcarnahan.com/2020/02/11/love-heals/

3. Jenkins, P. (2023, November 20). Why love matters: The power of emotional connections in our lives. Brilliantio. https://brilliantio.com/why-love-matters/

4. Traupmann, J., & Hatfield, E. (1981). Love and its effect on mental and physical health. Aging: Stability and change in the family, 253-274.

5. Hooks, B. (2022). All about love: New visions. William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Truth, Lies, & Consequences

There are many unintended consequences to not telling the truth. One of the most obvious being the damage that is done to relationships. Once a person has been found out, once it is known that they have a tendency to lie, it becomes difficult to regain trust in them. And it becomes difficult to do the work required to maintain a relationship with them, without the base level of security provided by openness and honesty. Telling the truth is a necessity, not only to love others, but to love yourself. 

What does it mean to be in touch with the truth? It simply means seeing things as they really are. Without illusion and without the deception that often stems from preconceived notions. Despite its simple meaning, it is difficult to overcome our biases and preferences for how we think things should be. Oftentimes these biases are reflections of our hopes and wishes, and if we lose them, the only thing waiting for us, we think, is disappointment. Disappointment and pain. 

The worst thing about lying is the fact that it renders love an impossibility.

But, uncomfortable as it may be, choosing to tell the truth is still the only way we can fully relate to another human being. Embracing the truth means actually having the freedom to make choices with more honesty and sincerity. It also makes love a legitimate possibility. Love for another and love for oneself. The worst thing about lying is the fact that it renders love an impossibility.

At some point I came to the realization that it is impossible to lie to someone else without first lying to yourself. To present an obvious falsehood as if it were a truth is to actually deal in two kinds of deception. The damage this does to other people is what’s most talked about, but the damage you do to yourself is just as consequential. After relationships end, for one reason or another, you are left only with yourself. You are forced to deal with you, and you have no hope of doing this with compassion or with success, if you are unable to deal in truth. 

Anxiety is not a bad thing. It arises when we are on the verge of doing something new and challenging. Telling the truth can be both.

How does an individual know whether or not they are doing well in this regard? One way is to measure and compare your feelings and notice how often you feel anxious as opposed to guilty. Anxiety is not always a bad thing. It arises when we are on the verge of doing something new or challenging. Telling the truth can be both. An honest life is a challenging life because it involves standing up for what you believe in and not always going along with the crowd. 

In a way this makes it easy to know when you fall out of line with telling the truth because feelings of anxiety will be replaced by something else. Oftentimes the replacement is guilt, either because of what you have done to someone else through dealing with them dishonestly, or because of what you have done to yourself by doing the same. Guilt, however you experience it, is often a signpost of inauthenticity, another word for lying. When you notice it, pause and examine the way you are dealing with people. You’ll probably recognize shortcomings that need to be corrected. 

No one is born knowing how to lie, which means no one is born knowing how to tell the truth.

Even with rigorous self-examination, it is not easy to recognize when we are being dishonest. Sometimes feedback from others is needed in order to gain clarity. The problem is that the type of feedback we seek is usually biased towards whatever it is we really want to do. Seeking this type of feedback is unhelpful, but you can hack your tendency to do so by asking yourself who are the qualified people that you are least likely to talk to about an issue? Those are the people most likely to put you in touch with the truth, and the people whose advice you should be seeking out.  

No one is born knowing how to lie, which means no one is born knowing how to tell the truth either. Both are skills one develops. You have to choose which of them you want to invest your time and energy into learning. 

Communicating Effectively & Working Through Difficult Emotions

There are very few things that one does that consistently offer up in combination so many moments of doubt and uncertainty as parenting does. Children used to be hands, and now their mouths is what they say, and I can say that the calloused hands of my grandmothers and grandfathers testify to this fact; I asked one of them about what it was like growing up and she told me, without a hint of sadness, that she was promoted to the fourth grade, but had to quit school in order to go to work as a dishwasher to help the family. These were simply the choices that one made and all I will ever know about them, and all my children will ever know about them, are the secondhand accounts passed down by people, fewer and fewer of whom have actually been there. 

Maybe children are only mouths now, which I would like to believe is a positive development rather than the pejorative it is meant to be, though comfort, ease, and progress rarely fit together nicely. What I do believe is true about children, then and now, is that the wishes that spring forth from their mouths are too quickly and too often silenced. 

But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is not specifically about children but an issue with communication in general. It’s just that the inevitable breakdown of communication is most clearly seen in the relationship between adults and children, but really the issue is ubiquitous. 

We are fearful of things we do not understand and do not want to know because they threaten our identity.

Language is difficult because it functions by way of impressions and constantly shifting meanings. It is an inexact articulation of one’s feelings that makes great demands of us. It is a system of symbols meant to be reordered and re-used for many purposes from moment to moment. Sometimes this all occurs in the same moment–people have these scripts in their head that co-mingle without coexisting, hence the conflict, which seems to evoke one of two reactions–fear or anger. We are fearful of things we do not understand and do not want to know because they threaten our identity. Very often anger serves as a rallying cry in defense of the identity we so badly want to preserve. We think we are angry when we don’t get what we want, but it’s more than that. Anger is connected to our identity, much of which we can recognize by answering the question, what do we want? It seems like wanting is the most basic element of a person’s identity. You’re born, and you’re given a name, a place to stay, and parents to provide for you, which compromises an identity, or a role maybe, but it’s not your identity, and your feelings aren’t either. Your identity doesn’t come in until you make decisions about what it is you want in life.

The unwillingness to tolerate anger is what clears the way for harm to be done in relationships, not the presence of it.

Therefore, to deny one’s wants is to deny one’s identity, and one of the many things that children seem to know better than adults, is the rage that accompanies this refusal of one’s right to exist. For anyone to be shocked by the anger of a child’s response to this, says a lot about how out of touch we can be with the reality of others. The unwillingness to tolerate anger is what clears the way for harm to be done in relationships, not the presence of it. Which is how you arrive at a place where you offer one-sided ultimatums as solutions, where you secure hollow victories that lead to bitterness and resentment instead of communication and understanding. It is better to extend a hand to embrace than a boot to lick, but people don’t even realize it as they’re doing it.

Yesterday I watched my daughter become more and more angry as she struggled and failed to find a shirt she wanted to wear. Her style is ever-changing and sometimes nothing she chooses can satisfy her current sensibilities. I watched her rummage through her drawers in vain and when I offered to help her she turned to me and screamed “No!”

She was feeling angry, and most importantly, beneath her anger, she was feeling painfully insecure. In her mind, my offer to help must have felt like someone shining a light on her insecurity, so she lashed out in order to protect herself. Why would she let anyone see her in such a vulnerable state?

Okay, I can follow that, and I can understand that she couldn’t find the words to say and how getting into her bed and throwing the blankets over her head seemed like the best thing for her at that moment, but I still had a decision to make for myself. In that moment I had to decide how I would communicate, if I would meet her anger and frustration with my own. If I would demand that she respect me, which has nothing to do with actually being respected and everything to do with being feared. If I would ignore the feelings of my four year old just so I could feel a little more comfortable myself. 

I sat quietly next to her and waited for what couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, though discomfort does turn any amount of time into an eternity. But after a few seconds had passed in silence, she poked her head out from underneath the blankets, looked me square in the eyes, and started talking to me. She talked about how she was feeling angry, and how she was learning in school that she should take deep breaths to calm down when she feels angry. 

“Have you tried it?” I asked.

“This is my first time trying.” Then she took a deep breath and another after that. Then we took one together, and she was quickly able to calm down. 

The rest of the evening was easy. There was laughter and there was bickering over little things, and none of it came at the cost of hurting anyone else’s feelings.

In Search of a Friend

I believe, without discrediting the profession entirely, that some of the benefits derived from psychotherapy could just as well be provided by close friends and family members. Psychotherapy is a relatively young field, but even still, there is evidence that the most important factor in whether or not it actually works is the relationship between the therapist and the client. And if establishing a good relationship is the main way people benefit from psychotherapy, it stands to reason that they could potentially experience some of these same benefits if they established similar kinds of relationships outside of therapy. In fact they should be encouraged to do so by the therapist. What matters most in the final calculation, is the dynamics that are created between two people, not, in totality, who the two people are. 

Freud told a story that helps to illustrate this point. He was working with a patient who was suffering from mental distress, loss of sleep, and a lack of appetite. He and the other physicians involved in her care had failed in their attempts to improve her condition which was only worsening. Until one day, a friend of the patient actually came and abducted her from the hospital and brought the patient home with her to care for her there. How she accomplished this is either unknown or unstated, but a year later Freud once again became involved in the care of this patient and was surprised to discover her in a much better condition than the one she was in when he last saw her.

What is more likely is that it was the care she received from her friend that made the crucial difference. 

Freud credited himself for the change in her condition, attributing it to the lasting effects of his treatment, but this is unlikely because the little that was said about the treatment, spoke only to how ineffective it had been in helping this woman. What is more likely is that it was the care she received from her friend that made the crucial difference. 

And it is safe to assume that this friend of the patient must have cared a great deal about her if she was willing to abduct her from a hospital. To this friend, it must have felt more like a rescue mission, and a serious responsibility to nurse her friend back to health. Her steady presence and consistent care is what allowed this woman to heal and start to become whole again. 

Most of us have our stories like this. Stories of being in a low place in life and needing the love and support of someone else to carry us through. Sometimes that someone else is a therapist or a doctor, but as the story illustrates, it does not have to be. We can all provide this type of care for each other, and it is important that we do so because not everyone has access to professionals and even those who do might not have access to them in their time of need. And in those times, what we need, in reality, is a friend who will barge in and save us. 

Therapists are skillful and curious learners, which eventually, we hope, will allow us to help someone in need.

The thing that therapists are trained to do well is listen. We listen to what is said and what is not said. We look at the actions of clients and understand that this is a form of communication that must be listened to as well. Through listening we form opinions and make interpretations, and as we get to know our clients better over time, we can make quicker, more accurate judgments about what is happening to them, or at least we should. The necessity of all this listening really implies that therapists are not experts on our clients’ lives, because we have not lived them. Therapists are skillful and curious learners, which eventually, we hope, will allow us to help someone in need.  

And yet, it is possible for the friends and family that we keep closest to us to also learn and possess this intense curiosity about others. Friends and family may be even more capable of quickly becoming experts on our client’s lives because they have bore witness to them and have lived in close proximity to them for much longer than we have as therapists. It seems unwise for their testimony to be neglected.

They Cloned Tyrone Review

Tupac is alive, Michael Jackson ain’t dead, and Toni Morrison might just as well be sitting at a coffee shop nodding, I told you to everyone that passes by. Her presence certainly seems to loom large over They Cloned Tyrone, where you very quickly learn that almost no proclamation is unworthy of consideration, if only for an infinitesimal amount of time.

She, Morrison, articulated the searing effect the white gaze has on black life, giving voice to something that for centuries was a constant, but was so potent and lethal that it was unspeakable. Here it is, recaptured in the film’s opening image of an advertisement with a white man grinning obscenely, overlooking a group of black people having this very debate (about Tupac and Michael Jackson). It sets the stage for the inevitable clash between history and perception, ready to play out in the fictional neighborhood called The Glen.

With art, oftentimes one must at least wonder, if not ask who is the audience, or to put it another way, who did the artist have in mind when they made this? It is assumed, pejoratively, that black movies are made for black audiences and that there is no category called white movies. Movies like Oppenheimer are less impressive to me for the technical feats they accomplish than their ability to craft a historical narrative about post World War II America and what follows that is somehow completely devoid of black people.  But alas, it is a movie, made for the movie going audience. Black movies must exist for the supplication of some other category of people.

This particular film (Tyrone) offers commentary on the issue of whether or not things naturally are the way they are, or if they were made to be that way, and swallows up the entire category of living with its questioning. It drops you into the lives of its characters and instead of asking you to wonder why they are like this, which is less of an honest question than it is a silent judgement, it forces you to consider who really stands to benefit from these people’s lives being this way?

Some people never recover from the loss of innocence.

Everyone has their own unique response to the question as the answers are revealed. Fontaine (John Boyega), Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), and Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) cycle between moments of doubt, denial, and defiance towards their encroaching reality as they take stock of how complex the machinery of what is happening to them really is.

What it means to have a self, and whether that self is a creation, or the by-product of circumstances is another central theme. Does it even matter, is what the film seems to be asking, because in the end, the self may only be a set of ideas, yours, or mine, made to fit together and promulgated through the body. The trailer and title make it known that clones play a part in the film, in the literal and metaphorical sense. Fontaine discovers he has been cloned, but even before this physical manifestation is shown, the ideas that he embodies appear to be nothing more than the repackaged ideas of someone else, which seems to be true for most of the people surviving in The Glen.

In this way, trauma becomes a common occurrence, and writ large, the private theater of the mind becomes a communal hive. Characters wrestle with what has happened to them and the burden of their nearly forgotten possibilities. Whether one becomes a hero, or a villain seems to hinge on the manner in which they resolve these issues.

Some people never recover from the loss of innocence. One death in particular crystallizes this, but regardless, most characters seem to have had to give birth to an identity much too soon and are thus forced to cling fiercely to it given their vulnerability. Parents are conspicuously absent, and everyone must become their own mother or father much too soon with far too little guidance. Perhaps this is part of the message—parents are, after all, are one step closer to being elders, who function as the collective memory of a community. Memory is a form of safekeeping, without which any group of people is rendered unable to remember the brilliance and tragedy of their history, and thus makes themselves vulnerable to the most wicked ignorance. This is personified by a character whose life is a reminder of what happens when your entire history, past and future, is overshadowed by your worst experience.

The women in the film are the ones who display the courage and intelligence to fight back and injure the cycle that is harming so many, and perhaps break it entirely. They seem to never lose sight of who exactly this is for, and thankfully the film spares them from the fate of being cast as nothing more than accessories to the salvation of men. Yo-Yo dares to dream despite conditions that threaten to suffocate her very existence.

The story is entertaining and even heroic in some moments and fails only if neat and clean resolution is what one seeks, which is certainly forgivable, and fitting given the nature of what it deals with. A quest to discover one’s identity, in this instance, benefits from the inclusion of clones and science fiction but would be no less perplexing without them.

Having an Ethic of Love

Love was, is, and will always be a radical act, and its history one of radicalism, of daring to go further than one has gone before, despite great and violent opposition. This being the case because love requires something which very few people seem willing or able to do. Namely, to let go of the need for power and control.

A need that is so great because it is energized by an intense desire to quell one’s inner anxieties in order to live and exist comfortably, a pursuit, at its most extreme, in which it becomes painfully easy to objectify other people and view them as obstacles to the attainment of one’s goals, rather than as individuals with their own right to exist. Every act of evil committed surely has this quality of loveless objectification attached to it.

An ethic of love is at home within the existential tradition because of this tradition’s belief in the freedom to formulate one’s own values and beliefs in route to living fully. If you are trying to develop your own system of caring instead of staying wedded to the one you inherited, adopting an ethic of love is a good place to start. The values that belay this ethic include honesty, openness, and a commitment to giving your all in the endeavors that you choose. Doing so allows you to re-examine every area of your life and ask yourself if the qualities you seek to embody are present in how you live, in the places and ways that you choose to work, and in the way you relate to other people. Each sphere of your life, from the private to the public, can be considered.

The position that love and freedom are radical ideas maintains its status in large part because of the failure by the majority to realize that freedom has always existed on the other side of safety. And safety is the price that everyone pays for it.

Having integrity is required for practicing an ethic of love and you do this by deciding for yourself what is right and acting in accordance with this decision. This does not automatically negate the impact and value of already established traditions, but it does mean you actively choose to carry on or reject these traditions. Through actively choosing, traditions become your own in a way that they weren’t before. Or you may discover that your faith was misplaced and strike out on your own to discover a new path. Either way, more wisdom, meaning, and freedom await on this path once you find it.

It is unlikely that you will be joined by many on this path, and it is important to have a strong set of values to rely on. You must be willing to stand up for what you believe in, even if no one else agrees with you. It is an act of courageous defiance to stand against the cynicism and absurdity of the world, to accept that to live is to sometimes struggle, and fully embrace life anyway.

The position that love and freedom are radical ideas maintains its status in large part because of the failure by the majority to realize that freedom has always existed on the other side of safety. And safety is the price that everyone pays for it. It is often the case that those who would maintain the status quo for themselves are opposed to freedom for others, and one must work to never find themselves aligned with such forces.

This work, and all the stress and anxiety that it engenders is not to be avoided. Neither is it meant to be overcome. It is the path you perpetually travel as you ascend daily.

On Parenting and the Negative Effect of Mixed Messages

While walking through the grocery store, I saw something I’ve often seen, that struck me differently this time. A young boy, probably no more than four years of age, was being chauffeured around by the people I presume were his parents, when the man who was likely his father, given his appearance, shoved him as he walked past him further down the aisle. He might have been playing around, but the kid didn’t take it that way. He was upset and to the best of his limited abilities gathered whatever strength he could find and used it to verbally snap back at his father in a small act of dissent. Whatever he said must have registered as a challenge because the father quickly closed the gap between them and dug his hand into the chest of the child, overshadowing his growing frustration. All of this took place in front of me within the span of a few seconds, but it was enough time for an important message to be sent.

This type of messaging creates more problems than it solves. Young children like this boy are constantly learning through their environment, especially through their family. Mostly through what family members do to each other and how they ascribe meaning to those behaviors. Messages that simultaneously communicate it is okay for an adult to hit a child unprovoked, that it is not okay for a child to respond in anger, but it is okay for the adult to retaliate, are mixed up and confusing. Not for the adult who sees no issue with such a self-serving arrangement, but for the child who is forced to make sense of it on their own. An unenviable task for a child, to mentally corral a storm visited upon them by the person tasked with loving them.

Mixed messages can be hidden under the guise of positivity. Some children eventually grow to feel tormented by the message that positive feelings are the only acceptable ones.

Maybe this man is nothing himself but an amalgamation of mixed messages that he received, handed down to him by the adults in his life. It’s impossible to know, but what I suspect will happen over time, from knowledge and intuition, is something like this. The child will eventually internalize these messages if they receive them frequently enough and learn that he must submit to and appease others in order to survive and endure relationships. At least until he is strong enough to imitate them, which will be his form of open rebellion against those who have caused him pain.

Whichever way it plays out, the amount of emotion a child suppresses to handle this situation is immense and this early and persistent lack of expression leads to emotional difficulties. Later, other people will be subjected to these difficulties and will be forced to reckon with them out of their own sense of love and duty. This sets the stage for a sinking pit of reoccurring pain. It gives credence to the generational curses that people speak about, and the idea that trauma is sometimes transmitted through the family, whose rules and behaviors give traumatic experiences their structure and shape. And it is difficult to disentangle, undo, and replace the influence of decades of lessons learned in such harsh ways.

Mixed messages can be hidden under the guise of positivity. Some children eventually grow to feel tormented by the message that positive feelings are the only acceptable ones. They are praised for being sweet, kind, strong, and pretty, or some variation of these things, and taught that this is a standard of behavior they must always reach. Frequently they are punished for falling short of these things, either receiving criticism for being unlike this idealistic image or abandonment by being ignored until they can behave better. They are left to deal with their emotions on their own, like the boy in the grocery store.

The message to them is clear. I love you because you are good. I love you when you are pleasing, which pleases me. I love you for me. A child who associates love with good feelings only is no better equipped for life than a child who associates love with pain. They will seek out the familiarity of this mental programming in their future experiences and find themselves equally frustrated and unsure of what to do.

Clients Who Lose Control for the Sake of Care

A client walked into my office for an appointment. They seemed fine at first, but it quickly became apparent that something was wrong as they sat down on the couch across from me and began to twiddle their thumbs and shuffle their legs uncomfortably. This went on long enough and eventually I asked if they were nervous.

“No” they replied. “Well, maybe a little…I did do cocaine.”

“…When?” I asked, somewhat surprised, mostly because it was only a few minutes past 10 o’clock in the morning.

“Right before I came here.”

I looked at the client, carefully considering what they had said to me, letting it settle in my mind. What did it mean for this person to sit before me, young, impulsive, painfully naïve, and share this information? To opt for truth when they easily could have lied. There was a look of disappointment and expectation on their face as they waited for me to say something.

“Do you want me to be upset with you?” I wasn’t sure if this was the right question, but I knew that any sort of declarative statement would be of no use. Not until I could understand this person more fully, and with my question I started in on that task.

Nothing is done for the sake of nothing, and human agency is goal directed even when the goal is unclear, as is the case in many instances. It is easy to judge someone who shows up to an appointment high on cocaine as being out of control. Maybe they are, but there are also certain benefits to “being out of control” which must be considered. Losing control, by which I mean acting in ways that are risky and potentially harmful to oneself or others is a proven way to elicit care from others.

Imagine a person whose experience teaches them that their wants and needs are not important, or even worse, receives the message that they are not entitled to have any wants or needs because of their status. This message crystallizes around their existence, and it is often the case that the only time an exception is made is when they are ill or in trouble. On these rare occasions, rather than being dismissed, the person is showered with attention, and this attention, no matter how positive or negative, caring or chastising, is still an improvement on being from being the recipient of emotional indifference.

At some point such a person makes a discovery, which is that when they are out of control, people are more likely to take care of them. The person sitting before me, who had been passed over many times in life, was such a person. Branded as a troublemaker already, they explicitly rejected this label, but implicitly accepted it and used it to get attention and care from others. They could have cancelled the appointment or just not shown up at all, but they didn’t, and their confession of drug use doubled as a confession of desire, that there was something they wanted from me. Chiefly, positive attention in the form of caring concern, but I suspect that if I had become angry at their confession this would have been an acceptable substitute. Anything but nothing.

The problems inherent in this strategy are obvious. As previously stated, it is risky, and there is the chance that a person goes too far in their bid for attention and commits a mistake they cannot easily recover from. This strategy of losing control to make people take care of you is also a form of manipulation, and once caught, the person is even less likely to receive the care they initially wanted. At that point either the jig is up, or the person becomes more desperate in their manipulation, resorting to more dangerous versions of losing control to get their needs met.

These regressions may involve harming oneself or others, risky drug use, indiscriminate sexual activity, and episodes of uncontrolled rage. The ways to lose control are numerous.

What other options are available? The person most likely to entertain this strategy struggles with recognizing and acknowledging their wants and needs so they must learn how to begin doing this. They must experience what it is like to be encouraged to share their experience with another and have it validated instead of dismissed. And they must learn that the stakes do not have to be so high for them to feel entitled to receiving care from others.

When they no longer must lose control, they are free to try other things. They can talk about how they feel and what they want and make requests of others. They can learn how to meet their own needs, through exercise, a warm bath, enjoying a favorite meal, and many other things. Or they can give up some of their wants and needs, which may be the greatest sign of an individual’s growth and maturity. When a person consistently gets at least some of their needs met, they are not desperate for limited opportunities to do so.

The client didn’t want me to be upset with them, as it turns out. Truthfully, they didn’t know what they wanted, or why they did what they did. Only that they were struggling and wanted help from somebody. An outcome they would have to learn could be achieved without clumsy concoctions that I would not choose for them, but am thankful that they chose to share with me.  

On Becoming the Author of Your Life

To be responsible, as Jean-Paul Sartre defines it, is to be “the uncontested author of an event or thing.” Authorship is a stand-in for the word creator, of which an author is one kind, and for whom the task is to fashion from the materials of their imagination a work that is complete and new. This imagination being the main tool applied, there can be no doubt that the author is the source from which the story originates. It is clear that several people are involved in the making and publishing of a book, from editor’s, proofreaders, cover designers, type setters and more. Each of these serves an important role in the process, but their roles are created in reaction to the author and defined in relation to the author’s original efforts.  

Applying his notion of responsibility in a psychotherapeutic setting has benefits and risks. Doing so moves me towards a more internal locus of control when discussing issues and sets up an expectation that the client will shift to a similar orientation. And when more emphasis is placed on what a client can control and change, less time is wasted on issues that can be affected by neither the client or myself.

Of particular interest is the fact that the client is now allowed to approach the issue of suffering differently. To say that someone is responsible for their suffering runs the risk of being insensitive, but to say a client’s suffering is theirs, and that they alone are responsible for what they do with it moves them out of a helpless role and into a more active one. Challenging and often unfair, accepting responsibility for one’s suffering is still the best option for someone who intends to do something about it. A significant amount of suffering self-induced and unwarranted. It is a kind of suffering psychologically born in the aftermath of what has already occurred and added unto one’s burdens through the stories people tell themselves about what their suffering means.

When you focus on your role in events you understand that almost nothing in your life is the way it has always been or the way it must always be. This is true of life generally, and expands your possibilities once you realize it.

Admittedly, an emphasis on responsibility is most comforting to people who highly value individualism, partially because it ignores the reality of interdependence. In societies that are increasingly more complex, where accomplishing most tasks involves help from others, cordoning oneself off might be possible, but it would not be desirable. We need other people to survive and to flourish. We need other people to achieve our full potential. As the African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

There is the risk of veering too far on the side of responsibility assumption. This attitude becomes unhelpful when you begin to assume responsibility for things that you are not actually responsible for, which allows others to potentially take advantage of this and use you. For example, if a client complains about mistreatment from their family, and I am too quick to focus on the client’s role in the situation, I give the impression that the client’s concerns are illegitimate. It is possible for a client to remain the author of their feelings while also being shown respect and compassion for the difficult conditions under which their feelings arise. Conditions which they of course, are not the uncontested author of. Responsibility should not be heaped on an individual without considering the constant pressure that other people exert on them.

Most clients, at the time we first meet, are limited in their ability to assume responsibility for their lives. As it is in life, so it is in therapy. They must be encouraged to increase this capacity, and a large portion of success in therapy and in life is attributable to ones willingness to do this. One must always come back to their role in events, no matter how large or miniscule, no matter how many times they stray from it, because it is the only perspective from which change takes place.  

The Case for Frank Ocean

*Previously written and reposted here.

On July 10, 2012 Frank Ocean released what would go on to become his critically acclaimed album Channel Orange, subsequently changing his life with its massive success.  Excitement about the release of the album was buffered not only by the content, but by the fact that just days before, Ocean released a letter to the public in which he openly talked about his first love being a man.  Both the letter and the album were revelatory, and emblematic of Frank Ocean’s style of art, as well as the way he chose to communicate his art.

Frank Ocean’s current predicament is interesting because it highlights the relationship between the artist and their fans.  It is a mutually agreed upon relationship in which the artist consents to make and share their art with fans in exchange for what the artist seeks, whether it be fame, fortune, or something else.

A figure as seemingly unique as Frank Ocean is still not immune to the pressures of fame.  Indeed, his uniqueness may very well render him more susceptible to the trappings of fame, as society loves to ensnare rarities of all kinds, and observe them on societies terms before moving on to something else.  So it comes as no surprise that three years later, many fans and individuals in the music industry seem ready to do just that—they seem ready to quit Frank Ocean after embracing him initially.  Months of delayed promises of a new album, with little indication as to when it will arrive will do that to a fan base.

The relationship between Frank Ocean and his fans resembles other relationships in the sense that the qualities that initially attract us— Ocean’s uniqueness and commitment to doing things his own way—begin to repel us as the love bloom fades.  Most if not all of that bloom has worn off after three years of waiting.  Clearly Frank Ocean is working on his own time, and this is an absolute necessity for any artist deeply engaged in their craft.  Rushing the work would produce unsatisfactory results for both Ocean and his fans.  It would be a disappointment for Ocean because he will not have remained true to himself, and what becomes of an artist no longer capable of truth? They are no longer capable of art.

Frank Ocean’s current predicament is interesting because it highlights the relationship between the artist and their fans.  It is a mutually agreed upon relationship in which the artist consents to make and share their art with fans in exchange for what the artist seeks, whether it be fame, fortune, or something else.  Not every relationship is the same, and as a brief comparison, the singer Adele, under somewhat similar circumstances, has not been subjected to the same sort of questioning and heckling by her fans.  Adele’s last album was released in 2011, and until October of 2015 she had not released any new music, apart from a song written and performed for a James Bond film in 2012.  She had not performed live in three years.  Rather than derision, her choices were respected and when she did release new music, it was treated like a godsend.  Why has the same amount of patience and respect for privacy not been afforded to Frank Ocean?

The extent to which Frank Ocean’s reputation has changed for the worse, and whether he even cares what others think of him are all unknown at this point.  From his previous actions one can surmise that Ocean is more concerned with his creative process than his fame.  This is not to say that he does not care about fame at all, and he may even care a great deal about it.  What I am saying is that Frank Ocean’s relationship to his art and the process by which he creates that art seem to be paramount, while his relationship to his fans is peripheral.  At best, all we can do is guess about what motivations currently guide Frank Ocean, and not fully understanding the intricacies that underlie Ocean’s art because the most we have access to are his albums as finished products, which are not always equal to the sum of their parts.  But we should know about the artist as an identity, one that history tells us exists independently of fans who wait patiently or not.  Frank Ocean will release his album when he is ready to, and not a day sooner, regardless of those who complain—perhaps he will be better off for doing so.

The Hateful Eight Review

*Previously written and reposted here.

Watching the The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, I found myself arrested by the force with which the story was told.  Hateful Eight centers on the relationships between eight people, known for and connected by their prior reputations more than anything else.  On its surface, the film is about bounty hunter John Ruth’s mission to complete another successful hunt, but the actual meaning of the film is more complex.

The specter of race looms large in it, and Tarantino addresses the issue by setting the film only a few years after the events of the American Civil War.  The ghost of that war hovers over and haunts the characters in the film, and apparently still haunt us today—a recent mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina testifies to the fact.  Making a movie set in the late 1800’s both timely and appropriate.  Samuel L. Jackson plays Major Marquis Warren, a decorated army veteran who is now himself a renowned bounty hunter.  He is black, and the other characters are indignant over having to deal with his presence. To my mind, Warren represents the coming of a new negro, a phrase later taken up during the Harlem Renaissance which symbolized the kind of black person who outspoken in their refusal to accept the indignities of American society.

The encounter that plays out frightful and electrifying, but first there is a series of half-hearted attempts from the other characters to restrain their hostility towards Warren, mostly owed to his reputation as a man highly capable of killing. Tarantino writes Warren as a character whose intellectual prowess is subtly displayed, skillfully employed, and certainly surpasses his physical skills.  This quality is established early on and reinforced throughout the film, not by making Warren appear superhuman, but by highlighting the other character’s failure to recognize him as human at all.

As could be expected from this director given his past proclivity, The Hateful Eight is littered with the N-word.  Though it used often, the word feels less out of place in this film than it does in other films like Django Unchained or Pulp Fiction.  The historical setting makes the harsh dialogue plausible, and the acting performances mostly make the use of the word believable.  Not excusable, then or now, but believable that the N-word would be used by white men as a sort of power grab, to put Major Warren back in his place, and reassure themselves of their own.  In similar fashion, the B-word is frequently directed at Daisy, the only prominent female character in the film, which seemed too illicit less powerful reactions from the audience. Why is this so?  Why do we cringe at the on-screen use of the N-word but not the B-word, similarly used to dismiss and dehumanize?

Beyond race and gender, The Hateful Eight is a commentary on the overall idea of identity.

Who exactly is Daisy and what does she mean to this film?  Of the prominent characters, her story is the most underdeveloped.  She is branded as a ruthless criminal, but we do not know to what extent this is true, and in a film where the relativity of truth is an important theme, this lack of explanation cannot be overlooked.  Daisy seems to serve as a vessel for the other characters to act out their own pent-up anger towards women.  Some of the characters consider her a devil, while others think her life is worth saving, and each character's belief about her fate doubles as a window into their definition of justice.  Is it cold and dispassionate, or is it emotionally tinged?

These ideas about justice are also seen through the ways the characters interact with each other.  John Ruth is the easy choice for an example of dispassionate justice, but even he falls short of this ideal.  They all do, which may be the point—these American made figures cannot possibly live up to their own moral codes, and when it is a choice between them and the other, such codes are easily abandoned.

Beyond race and gender, The Hateful Eight is a commentary on the overall idea of identity.  Flashbacks, and well-crafted dialogues highlight the fluidity of identity, and how quickly it can shift.  The characters' behaviors, and perceptions of each other, as well as the viewer’s perception of them, changes at a dizzying pace.  This pace does not set a new standard for Tarantino films, but in the past, the frenetic pace left some viewers confused, and others dissatisfied, and it is better executed in The Hateful Eight.  By confining most of the film to a single room, Tarantino creates a world that is less open and sprawling, while maintaining his style as a filmmaker.  The result is a film that operates well on multiple levels, at once being easy enough to follow, and at the same time complex and layered. 

Will the audience understand the message?  Will they understand that Tarantino is critiquing race relations in America on multiple levels?  I fear that the humorous moments laced throughout the film will provide people with enough justification to gloss over the more serious aspects of the work. Especially people who still today harbor the same hateful attitudes as the film’s titular characters. More than anything, with The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino deftly shrinks down a significant piece of the American experiment and places it into one room, serving as a metaphorical melting pot.  He captures all the madness that is produced as result of this experiment called America, and the taste of redemption we get when this experiment functions as intended, however short and fleeting those moments may be.

Why You Don’t Want Your Ex to Date Anyone Else

Even in a long gone by now golden age of men who were dandies that proudly laid out their affections as well as their fleeces, and women who moved with gilded elegance, the idea that we meet the one and fall in love has been a pervasive myth.  It does sometimes happen to be the case, that the first love is an enduring one.  But for most people their endurance is tested in terms of how much disappointment, and consequently, how much pain they can bear throughout the course of several romantic relationships.  It is not unusual that some romantic relationships end, and there are good reasons that we should want them to.  What is unusual is that even when a relationship does end, and even when we no longer love a person, we sometimes refuse to accept the idea that our former beloved will go on to care for and eventually love someone else. 

It feels good to be thought of and remembered by the ones we love, but it feels better to be remembered by the ones we don’t.

We harbor the wish that our exes continue to see us in a certain light.  We want them to think of their time with us as a unique and singular experience that irrevocably changed them for the better.  It is oddly gratifying to know that they are forlorn without us, but this wish only reveals something about our own state of mind.  When a relationship ends, even one whose demise we welcome, both people enter a state of loneliness.  In this painful space of separateness, we find ourselves yearning for our former foundation.  Yes, there was rot, and it was filled with cracks, but it still provided something.  When we diverge from the path of coupledom, we find ourselves not knowing what comes next.  The feeling of being lost is what we are trying to avoid when we cling to our exes in one form or another. 

We maintain a connection to an ex by trying to transform the romantic relationship into a friendship.  An effort that usually fails because we have not given ourselves enough time and space to make sense of what happened and sort ourselves out.  But in another sense, it “works” because sorting out and sense-making is the last thing a person wants to do when they are reeling from the pain of a breakup.

And even when we choose to expel a former lover from our life, we still want that person to think well of us.  We want to feel special in their eyes even when they long ago lost the ability to spark the same reaction in ours.  It feels good to be thought of and remembered by the ones we love, but it feels better to be remembered by the ones we don’t.  It makes us feel especially unique and powerful.  That I could reject a person and they could still hold me in the highest regard and still want me.

It makes sense that people are dismayed when they find out their ex has a new romantic interest.  They’re moving on, and if an ex is moving on then maybe we aren’t so important after all.  Maybe we never were.  Those kinds of thoughts are felt more than they are formulated, and they produce an aching sensation.  Of course, we can’t avoid them forever, neither by turning towards the past we had with our ex or leaping into the arms of someone else without taking time for self-reflection.  You can acknowledge the pain of having your ego bruised, by the mere thought of your ex caring for someone else as much as they once cared about you and accept that in all likelihood that is exactly what will happen.  Their role in your story is finished for now, or forever, and all that any of us can do about it is get back to the relationship we are always in, which is with ourselves, and slowly start to rebuild.   

Psychotherapists Are Artists

When approached and practiced in certain ways, psychotherapy can be elevated to the level of an art form.  The fact that psychotherapy is still (and necessarily so) a private affair that is hidden from public consumption makes it more difficult to qualify or quantify its status as a form of art.  But for the many who practice it and the few who get to observe it, there are differences between straightforward practitioners and artists in the trade. 

Consider this—art is a realm of subjectivity, where often times consensus is king and the majority rules.  The paintings of a Da Vinci and Picasso, or the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright still leave some cold.  As do the writings of Baldwin, Morrison, or Rowling.  But to a sizeable amount of people, their works represent titanic triumphs of human creativity.  Whatever this sizeable number is, it represents mass approval, which is so often necessary for the triumph of art over obscurity, but of course a number is not all that art is.  And this mass effect I speak of has lent its weight not only to the crafts of painting, architecture, or literature, but also to psychology, the study of the human mind.

To be clear, mass approval is not enough.  The popularity of a thing does not mean that it is worthy of adulation.  Art stirs something deep inside of us and brings it to the surface.  Art disturbs, and is confrontational at times, but it also seeks pathways to deeper connection with oneself and with the world.  The beauty of art lies in the way it makes us feel something that is deeply personal and at the same time relatable to all of humanity.  How the artist achieves this effect differs based on their tools and the talents they possess, but the desired effect is always the same.  To wake others up to themselves and get them to feel deeply. 

It takes courage and a certain audacity to practice art

The psychotherapist does not use the brush of the painter, the instrument of the musician, or the charts, graphs, and measuring tools of the scientist.  They use themselves—their presence, consisting of their body, heart, mind, and spirit, which allows them to forge an alliance with those they work with in hopes of bringing forth something new.  The artist plays at God as they attempt to corral creation, and in a sense the psychotherapist does the same. The best are very intentional about their ambition.

At times the psychotherapists will fail: there will be clients who do not change or become better, and some who may become worse.  To fail in the endeavor to create and bring forth something new in a person can be more devastating than errant brush strokes and misplaced musical notes.  This is because a person expresses consciousness rather than simply being a product of consciousness.  To work with another, knowing their potential and their limitations, and journey through the maze of their life with them takes courage and trust.  Trust, in another and in oneself, is the bedrock on which creation takes place.  Without it there is no sense of direction, no willingness to take risks, and no progress which can be made.

It takes courage and a certain audacity to practice art, because it requires a willingness to exist separate and apart from others.  A distance that is necessary when one does not simply want to talk, but feels they truly have something to say.  Whether or not the feeling is justified is a bargain which must be struck between the individual and society.  Some psychotherapists have much to say about nothing.  They regurgitate empty platitudes or vomit up their own insecurities, inappropriately praising themselves or judging others without having earned a right to do either.  They move at a frenetic pace while accomplishing little of substance; they retreat into data and evidence whenever they are confused or unsure, signaling that they do not know how to practice the art of psychotherapy, but only how to follow the manual they were taught.

The client who comes before the psychotherapist may for the first time in their lives, as a result of their dissatisfaction, be open minded enough to have a real encounter with themselves.  The approach of the typical psychotherapist is management and symptom reduction—to be able to give a pat on the back to the client as they walk out the door and assure them that they are okay without ever asking them to be better.  The artist who practices psychotherapy seeks other things—connection, engagement, growth, and transformation in ways that are organic and unique to the individual they are working with at the time.  Only art can do this.  At its core the musician has there 12 notes to achieve this, the writer has there 26 letters, and the psychotherapist has their self. More than any theoretical background, use of the self is needed, a self that accepts life with its tensions and challenges, and helps others do the same.  

What Is the Purpose of Psychotherapy?

To tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder for us.

— Sigmund Freud

Because I am a psychotherapist I am always listening. I listen to the stories people tell me; stories that double as half-truths they simultaneously tell themselves. Stories that I tell myself just as often. Listening comes with the territory, and part of what makes someone a good therapist is the ability to do so. To an outside observer it might not look like much is going on between a client and a therapist.  Just two people having a conversation, but beyond initial appearances, a complicated exchange is playing out between the client and the therapist.

It is only through facing the things in life that are most difficult and confusing for us that we make sense of them.

In a therapeutic dialogue both client and therapist are constantly testing one another, and constantly testing themselves. The client wants to know if someone like myself, a professional helper is really up to the task. A fair question to ask because I don’t always know if I am, and more than that, I’m not always sure of the client’s commitment either. There is enough uncertainty and trepidation to make someone ask, what is the purpose of all this psychological probing and is there an end goal to be reached once it’s all done?

It’s certainly a fact that people test one another, in therapy and in life, to find out whether or not it is safe enough, physically and psychologically, for them to be honest about who they truly are. and few situations engender this more than the unfamiliarity of finding oneself for the first time sitting on in a therapist’s office with the expectation that you simply open your mouth and start to share your thoughts and feelings with someone you just met. In order for anyone to do this, the therapist has to quickly convince the client of their skill and capability. Without this initial convincing, there is no reason for the client to be there, and their presence will certainly be short-lived. With it, the client feels safe enough for the work to begin.

What the client gains is a place to retreat from life when they need to. A place where they can get enough distance from the world to start learning about it—if you live long enough you know that it is difficult to be curious when you are being assailed on all sides by challenges, at which point surviving life’s harsh realities becomes the main goal, the only goal, and the lens through which all other choices are filtered.  I am there, one hour at a time, to pull the client out of their world, and more importantly, to pull out the parts of the client’s world that they struggle with the most.  To push the client to confront the parts of life they are most confounded by.

It is only through facing the things in life that are most difficult and confusing for us that we make sense of them.  A process that must be repeated numerous times throughout our lives because new challenges require new answers from us regarding how they will be met. In the end, there simply is no cure for life.

Because I am a psychotherapist I act, for some length of time, as a secular guide on the client’s journey, helping them learn how to confront their deepest anxieties and overcome their most stressful life events.  Helping clients to become more skilled in the art of living is my purpose, and in carrying it out, clients themselves begin to develop their own, one that is not based on unearned confidence, but is carefully arrived at, with the proper motivation to pursue it.

On George Floyd & the Trial

Today marks the beginning of what will likely become another notorious case in American history; the trial of Derek Chauvin, the man accused of murdering George Floyd.  The jury selection will begin tomorrow and from there the trial will proceed towards its unsavory end, on display for the entire country to see.  The outcome of the trial will serve as a litmus test as to whether the events of the last year, and years before that, have altered the mind of the American republic enough to deliver a more just decision now.  It will carry with it the weight of the question, what is the American attitude towards those who wield power dangerously?

A society that produces encounters where innocent citizens can be murdered for no good reason and families can be left without any earthly retribution is a society that must rethink itself.

Incredulous at it seems, a question that inevitably will be asked is whether or not Chauvin caused the death of Floyd.  Conviction for the charge of second-degree murder which Chauvin faces hinges on the answer to this question.  There will be now, as there were then, voices that proclaim Chauvin’s innocence and those that contest it, hence the need for a fair and judicious legal process.  However, if one looks at and considers the thresholds that must be met for conviction, it is clear that Chauvin blasted through them.  Second-degree murder entails causing someone’s death while committing third-degree assault, which is defined as the reckless infliction of the fear of serious bodily injury, or recklessly causing a fear of injury through the use of a deadly weapon.  Recordings of the incident made it so that the use of imagination was not required to conjure up the sights and sounds of Floyd on the ground trapped underneath the force of Chauvin.  The fear of Floyd was plainly visible. 

Chauvin was negligent by any definition of the word, whether judged by the typical standard applied to an everyday citizen of this country, or the greater standard applied to those in positions of power and privilege, as was the case for Officer Chauvin.  It seems that this principle, that those with greater power and freedom must willingly resign themselves to greater responsibility, works in reverse in many instances in America.  Instead those with the most power operate with reckless impunity, housed inside of a psychological funhouse where every image they see is a powerful distortion of themselves and others which they unquestionably believe.  The least of us suffer for these illusions. 

The crimes committed without consequence by Chauvin and the like, whose chief concern should be upholding the law, range from the mundane to the murderous.  One thinks of Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who murdered Philando Castile in 2016, who was acquitted of any and all charges and received a buyout from his police department.  Or Timothy Loehmann, the officer who murdered twelve year old Tamir Rice in 2014, and was also acquitted of any and all charges.  I do not know Yanez or Loehmann, just as I do not know Castile or Rice, but a society that produces encounters where innocent citizens can be murdered for no good reason and families can be left without any earthly retribution is a society that must rethink itself.  It must reconsider its entire way of doing business and ask what exactly is its chief business—is it the perpetuation of the free market,  the importation of democracy, or some other lofty ideal?  Perhaps it should settle for the protection of its citizenry.

The second question to be answered is whether or not Chauvin’s actions were reasonable.  Again, looking honestly at that term we can only answer negatively.  Reasonable implies fairness, sensibility, moderation, and nothing of the like was contained in the actions of Chauvin.  The acts of kneeling on a man's neck for nine minutes while ignoring his pleas for relief, his crying out for his mother, and even the sensation of his body giving up on itself as he went limp do not function within the realm of reason.  These are the actions one reads about in books outlining the barbarism of past days and witnesses in films of the Tarantino type, with violence at times so hyperbolic it becomes a caricature of itself.

George Floyd may have had drugs in his system at the time of his death, and this is being trotted out as an actual cause of death instead of the actions of Chauvin, and being used to defame Floyd.  But what is the likelihood that Floyd, even in an intoxicated state would have rapidly declined and spontaneously succumbed to his condition without the intervention of Chauvin?  The assertion seems ludicrous, as does the assertion that the officer was so fearful of the threat that Floyd posed that he had no other choice but to react the way he did.  I am aware of several pieces of anecdotal evidence of black people behaving drunkenly and belligerently and living to tell the tale.  I am unaware of any anecdotes about white people behaving in the same way and not living through it, and that is what troubles the conscience.

Questions that should be raised and debated, especially in the medical field and other related fields, is how do we treat the chemically intoxicated in this country?  How should we treat them?  Should a person’s being sufficiently intoxicated, or even insufferably intoxicated essentially become a license to do grave bodily harm to them, or even a license to kill?  There exists in my mind an easy answer to the question, which is no, intoxication should not be met with excessive force, but how to clarify what that means and how to not merely teach, but actually infuse that ethos into our way of thinking is not something I can pretend to know for now.   

In the meantime, consider the kinds of things the thousands who organized and protested over the last year will want to know—such as why it seems an accepted norm in this country for police officers to violate citizens' constitutional right to life and get away with it?  There are laws in this country that are sacred when one considers the fact that the ink with which they were written is doused with the blood of countless martyrs to the cause of freedom and liberty.  No one should be able to trample on those rights easily. 

Chauvin’s case will test the resolve of the American legal system’s beliefs.  I am not at all interested in the question of whether or not the American legal system has the power to punish—it is clear that it does.  I am interested in whether or not this system will continue to err on the side of protecting those, who through their own actions, do not warrant the level of protection they receive. This question is not purely rhetorical or theoretical; it is an urgent issue, and the answer must be worked out to perfection.  Another instance of acquittal on all charges would be a disaster, proving once again the presence of a body politic that is chiefly concerned with the preservation of power for the few who wield it at the expense of the many who do not. 

What Are the Givens of Existence in Existential Therapy?

The architects of Existentialism did not succumb to the idea of human beings existing as the center point of the universe, with dominion above and beyond all else.  Nor did they conceive of humans as being in a state of perpetual progress that was preordained and inevitable.  Man is neither a being made in the image of God, with its implied superiority in comparison to all others nor is man destined for greatness in any field.  Humankind is in all likelihood the result of an evolutionary process that if not completely random, is certainly a dispassionate one that curries no favor for any one particular group.

Rather than take a medical perspective, one can consider the issue from a philosophical perspective, which is what Existentialism aims to do.  Life is a series of ongoing exchanges of meaning and profundity with human beings serving as the transmitters of these messages, but amidst the rabble there exists certain limitations.  Humankind as it is constituted in the past, present, or future is never an inevitability, but certain conditions of life are constituted as such and exist outside of time.  Irvin Yalom has dealt with and written about And then some a morning these conditions, calling them the givens of existence; I will restate and reappraise them here. 

These givens of existence are matters of ultimate concern for human beings and in many ways affect how we choose to live our lives.  Freedom is the first given, and I speak about it in terms that extend beyond an individual’s ability to act out their wishes.  Freedom refers to a lack of solidity in all of the structures that human beings create and are thrown into.  Lack of structure points to a world without external laws or moral codes to govern our behavior and dictate to us how we should think, feel, and behave.  Every system is constructed, and consequently is untenable in the final calculation.  The very laws that govern the universe have been revealed to be open to clarification and re-interpretation as the scientific process continues on. 

Image via Ava Sol

Recognizing the groundlessness of existence turns out to be a dizzying experience rather than one that brings relief.  To understand that there are no external rules that govern life and that the rules one follows are arbitrary is to acknowledge that one is free to choose whether or not to continue to follow those rules.  The consequences of either choice fall squarely on the shoulders of each man or woman and cannot be handed over to fate or social forces, however large a shadow they cast.  Stress and anxiety often accompany this realization, and maladaptive behaviors can arise in an attempt to cope.

One also deals with isolation as a given of existence, not in the sense of being lonely without the company of others or having to endure punishments such as exile or solitary confinement.  Existential isolation cuts to the core of what it means to be isolated; no matter how close we get to others there is still a final unbridgeable gap that we can never close.  No matter how badly we want to know and understand someone, and despite all the energy and effort we may devote to this endeavor, we can never get at the heart of another human being.  Worse than that, we cannot fully understand ourselves, and if we fail at this then we cannot help but fail at the task of understanding the other.  We seek merger with someone or something greater than ourselves as a means of achieving wholeness, but we shrink from this same merger out of fear of being overwhelmed and obliterated by the other.  Successfully relating to others is a process of continuously finding healthy ways to balance this tension.

Though life is a process of becoming it is also a process of unbecoming and death is the biggest step in the latter process.  Death is something that every individual must contend with and as such is an obvious given of existence.  Every single person who lives will one day cease to be in a physical sense and eventually in a psychological sense as well.  The difficulty is not the end result, but in knowing what one would rather not know, and having to find a way to live with a force that is indifferent to us, that for centuries we have imbued with layer upon layer of meaning.

Each of these givens of existence build upon and inform the final given which is meaninglessness.  Because there are no external structures that exist outside of time or human invention and because humans are capable of and free to constitute the world in numerous ways, there can be no inherent meaning which applies to everyone in the same way.  Tension lies in the fact that human beings are creatures obsessed with making meaning out of their experiences.  We derive meanings where there are none and create them if we have to and this is a task we take up repeatedly throughout our lives as a way of making sense of things so that we can live effectively. 

It is important to approach these givens of existence carefully, absorbing and understanding them slowly, little by little until one is strong enough to bear the burden of these conditions.  They are each in their own right difficult to comprehend, and doing so can lead to radical shifts in the way one engages with life.  But understanding one’s terrain is much more useful than having no real grasp of the lay of the land. 

Why I Am an Existential Therapist

Life, it seems to me, lends itself to certain possibilities.  Possibilities which themselves take on an air of inevitability - that perceptive persistent state in which choice and free will are at first subsumed and at last obliterated.  I was born and just as quickly as I began to bloom I also began to be pruned and peppered for ends neither freely chosen nor wholly my own, if at all, barreling towards them until I would finally reach some unsatisfying conclusion. 

Existentialism, a philosophy dealing with freedom, authenticity, meaning, and even the inevitability of death, the ultimate human concerns.

Having arrived, and realizing how little of my life was of my own choosing, I started to examine the whole affair in order to understand where I was, and if necessary to uproot myself.  Some things have been said about what it feels like, this unshackling, this untethering, but very little about how frightening and arduous a task it is to really do it; to really choose for yourself.  At times you wonder if you've gone crazy, a word I am less and less convinced describes anything substantial, least of all what one is actually going through.  But if empty words are the cost of breaking with some old way of life that is ordered but agonizingly dull and predictable, then so be it.

I’m told I was born without a heartbeat or a pulse, by way of unforeseen complications during my mother’s pregnancy.  That the first thing to wrap itself around me was not a warm blanket given by some nurse or orderly reeling from a night of dealing with birth and death and all of the excrements of life, and it was not the weary arms of my mother.  Death covered me, prematurely yes, but it covered me all the same.  I assume I lay quiet and breathless as seconds stretched into the ether, serving out a death sentence that at best would be reduced to a charge of brain damage and a lifetime of silent “if onlys.”  I’d be incredulous if I had not seen faded pictures of the whole ordeal pressed into the yellowed pages of my family’s photo albums, themselves remnants of the past.

Somehow, I survived all of that, and the irreversible damage that was predicted never did set in.  Eventually my lungs filled with the sweetness of air as I began to breathe, my heart started to beat, the cascading wires attached to my body were removed, and I was not plucked away too soon.  This story has always stayed with me. 

My interest in existentialism paired with my choice to become a clinical social worker led me to existential psychotherapy

As a child I wondered if I was special for surviving: I wanted to believe it, though I truly did nothing to accomplish the feat.  My body wanted to live so it did; the rest is a mystery to me.  Perhaps others knew it better and could explain it best back then, but all of those faces and most of those memories are lost now.  More meaningful than the mystery or the facts involved was how the experience affected me, by which I mean it provided me with an early sense of my situation, which gradually grew into an awareness of the situation for us all.  I was alive, but this did not have to be the case; it was not a guarantee, or a promise, or the fulfillment of some far off prophecy; it was the outcome of incalculable events, more innumerable than I could begin to understand.  

Awareness being no guarantor of anything, least of all progress or change; I was not well equipped to deal with the conditions of my life that at times practically begged to be faced, and I was not well equipped precisely because no language that is given and not freely chosen can contain within it the power a man or woman needs to work out life’s problems in their own way.  So I began, earnestly, to find my way through the use of philosophy and the deep introspection that accompanies it, and ultimately through existentialism, a philosophy dealing with freedom, authenticity, meaning, and even the inevitability of death, the ultimate human concerns.  It did not ask me to shrink in the face of my responsibilities or to abdicate them to some force outside myself, but to accept them as my own, and more strangely than that, to accept myself as my own and value myself accordingly.  It readied me for the challenge of trying to find answers to the questions about life that have perplexed humans for as long as our ancestors have walked under the warmth of African suns.  It allowed me to meet, on neutral terms, the pervasive loneliness that ached inside of me and was reflected back in the eyes of the men and women in my community.  It heightened my senses, and at the risk of romanticizing, brought to life, for the first time in a long time, a necessary intensity, an urgency to live while I can.  It opened me up to the world and all the beauty and terror that lie therein.

My interest in existentialism paired with my choice to become a clinical social worker led me to existential psychotherapy - a dynamic method of therapy that was created out of the core principles of existential philosophy and fashioned to meet the needs of clients suffering with mental disorders.  It provided a framework that aligned with me personally and professionally and connected me to a lived tradition that includes clinicians, writers, philosophers, activists, artists, and more.

I choose to work existentially because those same aches and pains that have plagued me have plagued us all.  Because for the deeper problems of life there is no manualized method or simple solution that will banish from our sight for forever and ever, the pain and confusion and awe of living.  We each must contend with our fair share of struggle and strife as we try to meet life on its own terms, and try we must, since the only way out is through (I’ve yet to find another).  If somehow, in trying, I can sit with others compassionately, and bear witness to the fineness and the folly of the journey each human must undertake, then perhaps some growth and healing can be had for us all.