"Real courage is risking something that you have to keep on living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's cliches."
Tom Robbins
I include both of these stories to demonstrate how closely our own issues can overlap with the people that come into therapy. I know that I am effective sometimes because I have stumbled into a lot of the same dark rooms as my clients and fallen down a lot of the same stairs.
This idea in psychology was explored by Carl Jung who said that it “was only the wounded healer who can heal.” Essentially what he was saying was that the therapist has been hurt in a lot of the same ways as the people he sees, but has hopefully learned to recognize and identify these hurts, and draw on memories of how he personally coped with this hurt to assist his clients. This is particularly relevant to me in considering the idea of substitute people, and I wanted to share some personal reflections about this.
My guess is I am not a typical substitute person, and I’m not really sure there is such a thing. The common traits seem to be more about feeling that you are just not quite anyone’s first choice, and personally I know exploring my childhood holds some clues as to how this happens.
As the second oldest in a family of four kids very close in age, the problem was not really with attention. My parents divorced at a very young age, and, although my mother was seriously overworked, she always had enough time for me, maybe even more than my share. The next logical thing you might go to is sibling rivalry. Often a second-born kid becomes rebellious, as the role of the responsible one has been taken by the eldest. Ok, this one was definitely true in my family. My sister was a high achiever and I definitely kind of went the other way. Still, I wouldn’t frame the relationship in terms of jealousy, so this doesn’t really seem to be a great explanation either.
One thing that did affect me personally was growing up kind of poor. Seeing other kids with nicer things was kind of hard, and I think a part of me always thought I was missing out on something. Hard to describe exactly, but really it is a kind of feeling that something is going on just out of your grasp that is a lot more hip than what you’re doing. I’ve felt like that my whole life, and heard similar sentiments from a number of different people I’ve seen in therapy.
It was funny because even when I went on vacation I often thought I might be missing something. I would anticipate and anticipate, and when I got there it wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be.
Over time, when you feel second best for long enough, you begin to make choices that confirm your ideas about yourself, and wake up one day with a second rate life. This is an exceedingly difficult pattern to break out of, and for me it truly took reinventing myself by moving to another place.
So when I was about 21 or so I hit the road, working in a number of our National Parks, I found that for summer at least I was far from a substitute person, and for a time truly felt the beam of a very imaginary spotlight as I met new people from all over the country. Dating was easy in these days, as we were all young, free, and adventurous. I went out with some beautiful women during these years of my life, and seemed to be on my way to a happy and prosperous life with any number of them.
But eventually the summer would end and I would have to return to my life, which was always in disarray. I would return home and all of the old substitute patterns would begin to creep in again. Somehow familiar surrounding always brought back those old feelings of being second best.
So I hit the road over and over again. Somehow a change of place was always a remedy for these feelings, and each time I landed in a new place I found I was able to reinvent myself. In many ways these were the best years of my life, as I met thousand of people, had a number of wonderful relationships, and got to see a big chunk of the world.
Eventually I moved to Chicago to become a comedian, where strangely, I met a number of people who had found a wonderful way to deal with being substitute people, by learning to laugh about it. I became one of these people too. These were hedonistic years for me, and I fell into the very familiar pattern of joking about myself in the evening, while suffering the consequences of feeling second best during the day. Eventually I truly had to hold my life up to a microscope when my comic idol and extreme substitute personality Chris Farley overdosed on drugs just a few short blocks from my house.
So I had my dark night of the soul. I realized that continuing on the path I was on would likely result in an early demise, and I wasn’t quite ready to check out just yet. I started to study Psychology. First I got a Bachelor’s degree, than a Master’s degree and then another Master’s degree. There, I had done it. I had so many degrees I couldn’t possibly feel second best anymore, right?
Wrong…
The crucial moment for me was actually getting into counseling. That is where I first came to realize that changes in your external world have very little to do with the day to day operation of your internal machinery. No, small, internal changes were what occurred as I continued with therapy, and one day I just woke up and realized I felt differently. The best way I can describe it was an ability to laugh with myself rather than at myself. Gradually I learned that virtually everyone, from the hottest celebrity, to the prom queen, to the richest industrialists, feels like a substitute person at one time or another. This was reinforced for me again and again in my work as a therapist. I found that if you looked behind the lives that seemed like they were using a bit too much effort to exude superiority, there was usually a case of crippling self-loathing and insecurity.
So I again try and return to the idea of humor in therapy, because that was my personal path to wellness, although I also recognize there may be others. I constantly see people who struggle with inferiority, and in one way or another it seeps into every aspect of their lives. Shared absurdity, that’s become my mantra. I mean what the hell are we really doing here anyway? I remember watching a video called “The power of ten” a few years back that kept zooming away from the earth by a power of ten. Looking at our tiny speck of dust fade into the distance, I suddenly realized not going to some dance seemed a little less important, and it is a lesson I try and remember. We all have an idea about what it is we are doing here, but all we really know for sure is that we are on this tiny blue speck of stardust together. For better or for worse we’re stuck here together, and personally I think there’s got to be something better than trying to make each other feel bad about what we don’t have. When we can learn to laugh about our shared experience it truly does become a shared experience, and sometimes that makes it pretty bearable.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
David
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?
Marianne Williamson
David was a prisoner. That was the way he described himself anyway. A neatly-dressed Black man in his 30’s, he was new to therapy and was admittedly a little uncomfortable about the process. He described himself as a prisoner of his own weight, and how it had kept him from being happy for as long as he could remember.
Again a client of mine had hit on a sensitive subject. I had also felt like this from time to time, and could definitely empathize with David’s struggles. The funny thing was he was no more than 15 pounds overweight, and in his well-tailored suit it was hard to tell he was overweight at all.
But I knew that wasn’t my job to tell him that, although that was certainly my first instinct. When I first became a therapist this was a mistake I made often, correcting people’s opinion about themselves and in many ways being a cheerleader.
My training however taught me that this can actually be counter-productive. What someone is looking for is confirmation of their experience. The desire to be understood is one of the strongest wishes we have. That’s not to say that you don’t help people examine their own self-sabotaging ways of talking to themselves, but our first job is always to try and understand a person’s worldview. If you correct someone to fast, or deny some aspect of a person’s experience, you have missed on an empathic level, and this is something I always try to keep in mind.
So David told me about his life as a prisoner. He described being overweight for most of his life, and how he was always the “fat kid” growing up for as long as he could remember. Through High School he described having a lot of female friends, but very few romantic partnerships. This pattern continued on through college, and now into his professional life as well.
Although I am single, and often find the dating world a hazy and confusing mystery, I did think there were ways I could be of service to David. I knew that if he could begin to feel understood, that over time he may develop more confidence which would then seep into other areas of his life. I know how this works because I have been in therapy myself. It was an extremely important piece of my own development as a therapist, and I often left the sessions feeling a lot more confident when I was on the other side of the proverbial couch.
I told David about my ideas on substitute people, and he was immediately taken with the idea. He described being the guy who girls would take to the dance when no one else had asked them out, and how we was always kind of a second tier kind of guy when it came to dating. He described how now as an adult he had experienced so much of this kind of thing that he had in a sense given up on the dating world, as he knew that people were simply not that interested in him.
One of the first steps in therapy is to actually examine the evidence of what people are saying and see if it holds up to scrutiny. I asked David to think about a college educated, well-dressed, polite and kind man, who had a good job and was financially responsible. I then asked him if I described that man to his female friends, how many of them would feel like that kind of man was extremely difficult, if not impossible to find.
He agreed this hypothetical man sounded great, and his female friends often did complain to him that there were no good men around. Still, although he was able to give this imaginary version of David the benefit of the doubt, he could not extend the same courtesy to himself. This is unfortunately a very common trait in people that struggle with depression, and it takes a lot of hard work and time to begin to undo the roots of this self-defeating way of approaching the world.
Something occurred to me with David however, and at about 6 weeks into therapy I decided to take a chance. Although we talked a lot about his childhood, his self-defeating ways of talking to himself, and engaged in a lot of the standard therapeutic conversations, he kept coming back to being a prisoner of his weight.
So, with a very deep breath, I asked him, as gently as I could, if it was possible that he was overweight because he wanted to be overweight. This is a dangerous kind of question for a therapist to ask, as it can be perceived as blaming the victim. On the other hand a large part of your goal is also to promote personal responsibility, and it was in this vein that I decided to ask the question.
David was very offended at first, and got angry which is what I expected. We spent that hour in a kind of uncomfortable silence as I tried to explain what I meant by this, but it was clear his emotions had become aroused, and it was therefore very difficult to continue the conversation. Still, I thought it was important. I provide him with this quote from Marianne Williamson at the beginning of this story to think about when he returned the next week, and asked him to please think about it until I saw him again.
It was a tense week waiting for that next session, but when David did return it was with a smile on his face. He reported he had been up half the night thinking about what I had said, and how that quote had in fact summed up his feelings, which is what I had hoped for. Personally he thought he was capable of a lot of great things, and described how he spent hours daydreaming and visualizing the life that he thought he was capable of living. But he was also afraid, and he wondered aloud if maintaining the little extra weight he carried was his way of keeping himself safe from having to risk rejection if he did chose to follow his dreams.
This blew me away, and reminded me that people are often much more insightful about themselves than we often give them credit for. It has been my experience that really people often have the answers to their own questions if we just give them time and space to explore these questions. David knew on an intellectual level that he could lose 15 pounds easily enough, he was an athlete in High School and had been thinking of joining a gym for years. What he had done however is make a connection between a surface level symptom (being overweight) and a deep-seated fear he had of living the life he was capable of living.
What happens next after such a revelation is reached is always interesting to observe. Some will tell you that insight in therapy is essentially useless, as it simply reveals the problem without providing any tools to change the problem. Regardless of the particular debate, it is always important to take action. A therapist can provide all of the insight in the world, but ultimately it is the client who has to do the heavy lifting.
So in David’s case we set some goals. Along with joining a gym and losing the weight, he had an idea for a small business he wanted to start, so we also set some goals around that. He became a man on a mission, working out and researching, and generally finding a whole new gear in his life that he never knew he had. It was wonderful to observe, and within a month David had his business up and running and was doing well.
Obviously not every case in therapy goes this well, but I wanted to think seriously about what had happened. Somehow having someone actually become interested in his life had made David interested in his life again, and he had tapped into some kind of long dormant desire he had about the kind of life he wanted to live. Somehow as he got older he had moved farther and farther away from this life force, and became content to simply exist on this planet, in his case literally as a “prisoner” in his own body.
I have seen David for over a year now, and yes, he has begun dating again over the period with a lot of mixed results. He told me one of the women he had dated thought he was too “cocky”, and this was really kind of amusing considering where we had started out just a few months before. Over the course of this year we talked a lot about how this “substitute” pattern happened in the first place, and I think it is an important question that I very much wanted to figure out.
P.S. I joined a gym yesterday myself. Physician heal thyself is I think the proper expression.
Marianne Williamson
David was a prisoner. That was the way he described himself anyway. A neatly-dressed Black man in his 30’s, he was new to therapy and was admittedly a little uncomfortable about the process. He described himself as a prisoner of his own weight, and how it had kept him from being happy for as long as he could remember.
Again a client of mine had hit on a sensitive subject. I had also felt like this from time to time, and could definitely empathize with David’s struggles. The funny thing was he was no more than 15 pounds overweight, and in his well-tailored suit it was hard to tell he was overweight at all.
But I knew that wasn’t my job to tell him that, although that was certainly my first instinct. When I first became a therapist this was a mistake I made often, correcting people’s opinion about themselves and in many ways being a cheerleader.
My training however taught me that this can actually be counter-productive. What someone is looking for is confirmation of their experience. The desire to be understood is one of the strongest wishes we have. That’s not to say that you don’t help people examine their own self-sabotaging ways of talking to themselves, but our first job is always to try and understand a person’s worldview. If you correct someone to fast, or deny some aspect of a person’s experience, you have missed on an empathic level, and this is something I always try to keep in mind.
So David told me about his life as a prisoner. He described being overweight for most of his life, and how he was always the “fat kid” growing up for as long as he could remember. Through High School he described having a lot of female friends, but very few romantic partnerships. This pattern continued on through college, and now into his professional life as well.
Although I am single, and often find the dating world a hazy and confusing mystery, I did think there were ways I could be of service to David. I knew that if he could begin to feel understood, that over time he may develop more confidence which would then seep into other areas of his life. I know how this works because I have been in therapy myself. It was an extremely important piece of my own development as a therapist, and I often left the sessions feeling a lot more confident when I was on the other side of the proverbial couch.
I told David about my ideas on substitute people, and he was immediately taken with the idea. He described being the guy who girls would take to the dance when no one else had asked them out, and how we was always kind of a second tier kind of guy when it came to dating. He described how now as an adult he had experienced so much of this kind of thing that he had in a sense given up on the dating world, as he knew that people were simply not that interested in him.
One of the first steps in therapy is to actually examine the evidence of what people are saying and see if it holds up to scrutiny. I asked David to think about a college educated, well-dressed, polite and kind man, who had a good job and was financially responsible. I then asked him if I described that man to his female friends, how many of them would feel like that kind of man was extremely difficult, if not impossible to find.
He agreed this hypothetical man sounded great, and his female friends often did complain to him that there were no good men around. Still, although he was able to give this imaginary version of David the benefit of the doubt, he could not extend the same courtesy to himself. This is unfortunately a very common trait in people that struggle with depression, and it takes a lot of hard work and time to begin to undo the roots of this self-defeating way of approaching the world.
Something occurred to me with David however, and at about 6 weeks into therapy I decided to take a chance. Although we talked a lot about his childhood, his self-defeating ways of talking to himself, and engaged in a lot of the standard therapeutic conversations, he kept coming back to being a prisoner of his weight.
So, with a very deep breath, I asked him, as gently as I could, if it was possible that he was overweight because he wanted to be overweight. This is a dangerous kind of question for a therapist to ask, as it can be perceived as blaming the victim. On the other hand a large part of your goal is also to promote personal responsibility, and it was in this vein that I decided to ask the question.
David was very offended at first, and got angry which is what I expected. We spent that hour in a kind of uncomfortable silence as I tried to explain what I meant by this, but it was clear his emotions had become aroused, and it was therefore very difficult to continue the conversation. Still, I thought it was important. I provide him with this quote from Marianne Williamson at the beginning of this story to think about when he returned the next week, and asked him to please think about it until I saw him again.
It was a tense week waiting for that next session, but when David did return it was with a smile on his face. He reported he had been up half the night thinking about what I had said, and how that quote had in fact summed up his feelings, which is what I had hoped for. Personally he thought he was capable of a lot of great things, and described how he spent hours daydreaming and visualizing the life that he thought he was capable of living. But he was also afraid, and he wondered aloud if maintaining the little extra weight he carried was his way of keeping himself safe from having to risk rejection if he did chose to follow his dreams.
This blew me away, and reminded me that people are often much more insightful about themselves than we often give them credit for. It has been my experience that really people often have the answers to their own questions if we just give them time and space to explore these questions. David knew on an intellectual level that he could lose 15 pounds easily enough, he was an athlete in High School and had been thinking of joining a gym for years. What he had done however is make a connection between a surface level symptom (being overweight) and a deep-seated fear he had of living the life he was capable of living.
What happens next after such a revelation is reached is always interesting to observe. Some will tell you that insight in therapy is essentially useless, as it simply reveals the problem without providing any tools to change the problem. Regardless of the particular debate, it is always important to take action. A therapist can provide all of the insight in the world, but ultimately it is the client who has to do the heavy lifting.
So in David’s case we set some goals. Along with joining a gym and losing the weight, he had an idea for a small business he wanted to start, so we also set some goals around that. He became a man on a mission, working out and researching, and generally finding a whole new gear in his life that he never knew he had. It was wonderful to observe, and within a month David had his business up and running and was doing well.
Obviously not every case in therapy goes this well, but I wanted to think seriously about what had happened. Somehow having someone actually become interested in his life had made David interested in his life again, and he had tapped into some kind of long dormant desire he had about the kind of life he wanted to live. Somehow as he got older he had moved farther and farther away from this life force, and became content to simply exist on this planet, in his case literally as a “prisoner” in his own body.
I have seen David for over a year now, and yes, he has begun dating again over the period with a lot of mixed results. He told me one of the women he had dated thought he was too “cocky”, and this was really kind of amusing considering where we had started out just a few months before. Over the course of this year we talked a lot about how this “substitute” pattern happened in the first place, and I think it is an important question that I very much wanted to figure out.
P.S. I joined a gym yesterday myself. Physician heal thyself is I think the proper expression.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Anna
"Run your fingers through my soul. For once, just once, feel exactly what I feel, believe what I believe, perceive as I perceive, look, experience, examine, and for once; just once, understand."
Ever known a beautiful woman who had no idea she was beautiful? If so you know a woman like Anna. When she walked into my office for the first time she was biting her nails and shuffling her feet back and forth, but clearly behind the nervous façade there was a truly beautiful woman. Still, as a therapist it wasn’t my job to worry about what she looked like, and I asked her to sit down so we could se what it is she wanted to accomplish.
She immediately told me that she didn’t think this was going to work. I felt like I was on a first date, and she had rejected me after just one look. Wow, my own substitute feelings were getting activated here, and I reminded myself to calm down and remain in therapist mode.
Eventually we did settle into a comfortable conversation, and she told me she had to constantly fight feelings of inadequacy. She felt she was ugly, overweight, not smart enough, and that people were constantly looking at her and judging her.
This is not an uncommon sort of therapy problem, and my training immediately started filling in pieces of her background. Probably an overbearing, perfectionistic mother in this story, who had stripped away at her daughter’s self-esteem for most of her life. Most likely she constantly talked to herself in a negative matter, and thoughts became feelings which then affected her behavior as well as her perception of the world around her. Boom, I has solved the case, I was the therapist of the year….
But I was wrong.
Her description of her childhood was pretty normal. She was an only child of parents who had doted on her a bit, but what she described was far from a standard overbearing childhood. Her parents were a bit older, and she had always wanted brothers and sisters growing up, but really what she described was far from what I expected.
No what she described was a kind of longing. She described walking past people’s houses at Christmastime and feeling a kind of penetrating sadness about something she thought she was missing out on. It was sad, sweet, and very touching.
So I could immediately go to the idea that perhaps being an only child filled Anna with a kind of pervasive loneliness that cast a long shadow over her entire life. This was partially correct, and Anna did have a kind of private internal world that was very difficult to penetrate. This is not uncommon with only children, as the lack of siblings often makes them turn inward, as they miss out on a lot of the socialization that comes from kicking, screaming, and laughing with brothers and sisters who are fighting for the same space.
But this wasn’t the whole story either.
I told Anna about the substitute theory and she immediately felt like it described her perfectly. She knew on some level that she was a perfectly attractive person, but emotionally she just never quite felt like she belonged. The idea of belonging is so powerful in psychotherapy, and finding out how someone belongs in the world is often one of the most important pieces of the therapeutic puzzle.
But substitute people often belong only partially. All the facts of their lives usually look just fine. They went to prom, weren’t picked last for the team, and fit in just fine with nearly everyone. This was true with Anna as well, everything she described about her life seemed remarkably normal.
So we kept coming back to how she felt about herself. One would have thought just from her sheer beauty she would have been reinforced over and over again in her life, but that wasn’t her experience at all. I walked a fine line with her in therapy. I could tell her she was beautiful, but really, if that didn’t match with her experience, than that’s a poor therapeutic intervention. No it was more important for me to try and feel how she felt and perhaps help her find her way towards her best self. And in the meantime,
Do it for myself as well…..
So as time passed we talked a lot about this feeling. I told her a little about my own personal journey, but was also careful not to make the sessions about me, although I was I’m sure learning as much from her as she was from me. Maybe more. We explored this topic together, and I asked me to teach me about her inner world, which she agreed to do with great relish. Somehow teaching someone who understood was very empowering to her, and she walked me through some of the earliest memories of her life right up to the present day.
They key to our relationship was that after many months of talking, she began to feel understood, which is not only a goal of therapy, but an important consideration in any human interaction. Eventually, through telling me her story, something slowly started to change. There was more of a strut in her step, and even the way she walked across a room seemed to be different. She had found her confidence by talking about how unconfident she was, and paradoxically left therapy a much more self-assured woman.
Although I would like to take credit for this wonderful therapeutic accomplishment, it was actually me who was in a sense getting therapy from her. I had watched her transformation, and contributed when I could by empathizing and listening and trying to understand. When therapy works best this is what it is, a process of watching someone find their way back to themselves. It was incredibly powerful, and a perfect example of how really listening is often the best tool a therapist really has.
Ever known a beautiful woman who had no idea she was beautiful? If so you know a woman like Anna. When she walked into my office for the first time she was biting her nails and shuffling her feet back and forth, but clearly behind the nervous façade there was a truly beautiful woman. Still, as a therapist it wasn’t my job to worry about what she looked like, and I asked her to sit down so we could se what it is she wanted to accomplish.
She immediately told me that she didn’t think this was going to work. I felt like I was on a first date, and she had rejected me after just one look. Wow, my own substitute feelings were getting activated here, and I reminded myself to calm down and remain in therapist mode.
Eventually we did settle into a comfortable conversation, and she told me she had to constantly fight feelings of inadequacy. She felt she was ugly, overweight, not smart enough, and that people were constantly looking at her and judging her.
This is not an uncommon sort of therapy problem, and my training immediately started filling in pieces of her background. Probably an overbearing, perfectionistic mother in this story, who had stripped away at her daughter’s self-esteem for most of her life. Most likely she constantly talked to herself in a negative matter, and thoughts became feelings which then affected her behavior as well as her perception of the world around her. Boom, I has solved the case, I was the therapist of the year….
But I was wrong.
Her description of her childhood was pretty normal. She was an only child of parents who had doted on her a bit, but what she described was far from a standard overbearing childhood. Her parents were a bit older, and she had always wanted brothers and sisters growing up, but really what she described was far from what I expected.
No what she described was a kind of longing. She described walking past people’s houses at Christmastime and feeling a kind of penetrating sadness about something she thought she was missing out on. It was sad, sweet, and very touching.
So I could immediately go to the idea that perhaps being an only child filled Anna with a kind of pervasive loneliness that cast a long shadow over her entire life. This was partially correct, and Anna did have a kind of private internal world that was very difficult to penetrate. This is not uncommon with only children, as the lack of siblings often makes them turn inward, as they miss out on a lot of the socialization that comes from kicking, screaming, and laughing with brothers and sisters who are fighting for the same space.
But this wasn’t the whole story either.
I told Anna about the substitute theory and she immediately felt like it described her perfectly. She knew on some level that she was a perfectly attractive person, but emotionally she just never quite felt like she belonged. The idea of belonging is so powerful in psychotherapy, and finding out how someone belongs in the world is often one of the most important pieces of the therapeutic puzzle.
But substitute people often belong only partially. All the facts of their lives usually look just fine. They went to prom, weren’t picked last for the team, and fit in just fine with nearly everyone. This was true with Anna as well, everything she described about her life seemed remarkably normal.
So we kept coming back to how she felt about herself. One would have thought just from her sheer beauty she would have been reinforced over and over again in her life, but that wasn’t her experience at all. I walked a fine line with her in therapy. I could tell her she was beautiful, but really, if that didn’t match with her experience, than that’s a poor therapeutic intervention. No it was more important for me to try and feel how she felt and perhaps help her find her way towards her best self. And in the meantime,
Do it for myself as well…..
So as time passed we talked a lot about this feeling. I told her a little about my own personal journey, but was also careful not to make the sessions about me, although I was I’m sure learning as much from her as she was from me. Maybe more. We explored this topic together, and I asked me to teach me about her inner world, which she agreed to do with great relish. Somehow teaching someone who understood was very empowering to her, and she walked me through some of the earliest memories of her life right up to the present day.
They key to our relationship was that after many months of talking, she began to feel understood, which is not only a goal of therapy, but an important consideration in any human interaction. Eventually, through telling me her story, something slowly started to change. There was more of a strut in her step, and even the way she walked across a room seemed to be different. She had found her confidence by talking about how unconfident she was, and paradoxically left therapy a much more self-assured woman.
Although I would like to take credit for this wonderful therapeutic accomplishment, it was actually me who was in a sense getting therapy from her. I had watched her transformation, and contributed when I could by empathizing and listening and trying to understand. When therapy works best this is what it is, a process of watching someone find their way back to themselves. It was incredibly powerful, and a perfect example of how really listening is often the best tool a therapist really has.
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