I'm dancing as fast as I can

Make Them Stop, make them stop!!!
Celine’ Journey to the end of the night

I’m dancing as fast as I can
Barbara Jordan

Sonia was a 45-year old woman who had a couple of tapes that wouldn’t stop playing in her head. That’s what she came in discussing anyway, and she wanted to know if I could hypnotize her and make these tapes stop playing.

From my initial impressions of Sonia, I knew immediately that this was going to be a fascinating case. I have always found that these “tapes”, these little songs and phrases that get stuck in our heads, often provide amazing insight into a person’s inner world. I have had many such tapes playing I my own head, and thinking about where they came from and what message my subconscious was trying to convey to me has always provided me with amazingly instructive information.

To back up for a second, Sonia was a college professor at a local community college who described feeling a “half step behind” her life at all times. She was divorced, had 2 kids, and had arrived at this period having accomplished a lot of what she had set out to do. Yet she was harried and she was frazzled and she couldn’t quite get caught up on all of her various projects and obligations.

In these cases, the therapeutic prescription might be to help Sonia organize her life a little better. Journaling, short-term goal setting, some work on the issue of time-management and mindful living, these were all things that I knew could be of use to Sonia, but I also knew there was more. The difficulty with Sonia is the she wanted a quick fix, and discussed how she really didn’t have time to do more than 10 sessions with me at this time in her life.

So I had to find out about the tapes, and the relevance they may have to the things that were holding her back from living the life she wanted. She was a professor of sociology, a close cousin of psychology, and I hoped that I could help her reach a deeper level of understanding by appealing to her knowledge about people and their inherent need to find belonging.

So we talked about the tapes. The first one, at the beginning of this story, comes from Celine, a French writer known for his book Journey to the end of the night. In this book, a young boy becomes filled with a sense of dread after watching and reflecting on the frenetic pace of the city in which he lived. He had an urge to scream, “Make them stop” at the top of his lungs. It was literally a desire to stop time and make everyone slow down and pay attention to how fast life was passing them by. It was a short little passage in this book, but one that had gotten stuck in Sonia’s head and that she couldn’t seem to shake.

So we talked about what it was she wanted to make stop, and this question released a floodgate of emotion in Sonia that she hadn’t expected. She wanted her kids to stop getting older so fast, she wanted the wrinkles on her face to stop getting deeper and deeper each day, she wanted birthdays to stop reappearing on her calendar so fast, students to stop coming in and out of her life so quickly, and most of all she missed the things that she never gotten to experience in her rapidly fleeting youth.

Here at last was the key. It wasn’t just that she missed her own life, it was that she also felt a kind of longing for all of the things she never got to do. This is a particularly painful kind of nostalgia, as we wistfully miss an imaginary life that we are sure everyone else has experienced but us. This can create a dangerous kind of personal isolation, as we have assigned superior memories to people that we don’t even know to be true. In comparison our own lives look incomplete.

I wanted to know more. What about the other portion of the tape in Sonia’s head? In this case it was a single phrase “I’m dancing as fast as I can,” which was a book from the 70s later made into a movie, about a career woman struggling with an addiction to Valium and her deteriorating mental health.

So now I had two extremely powerful insights to work with regarding the state of Sonia’s inner world. She was in deep pain about getting older, missing a life that never was, while all the time fearing she was going a little crazy in the process. These were powerful pieces of a puzzle that weren’t in her immediate awareness, and weren’t at all visible to the people in her life, who simply viewed her as a successful professor and an amazing woman.

So we began a deep and comprehensive dialogue about what it was that made her feel like this, and the root of it all came back to unfinished business from her childhood. She had been the child of a divorce, felt a tremendous amount of shame from this, and became in effect the “smart’ girl who always had her nose in a book. Meanwhile she missed out on several rites of passage growing up, and had an amazing amount of regret that she never went to her High School prom. Now, with kids who were getting to this age, she was also divorced, and seeing them go through some of the same things she had stirred up some long forgotten feelings of inferiority.

So we began a discussion about this. These long forgotten feelings had somehow surfaced just to the level of her preconscious mind, and sent a message “make them stop, make them stop.” It was kind of fascinating actually, and as we began to explore this issue, Sonia was able to add a number of her own insights as we continued. What was perhaps the most interesting thing, was this woman, who had not been able to find belonging as a child, chose to dedicate her life to the sociology and in particular the study of group behavior. It was a fascinating compensation that had for the most part served her well. She was very well liked by her students, respected by her peers, and was doing very well financially and professionally.

But as is the case with many things we don’t deal with from our pasts, feelings of inferiority from childhood had arisen to cause Sonia a significant amount of distress. The “I’m dancing as fast as I can” tape seemed to indicate a fear that she was slowly losing her own sanity, which Sonia eventually confirmed. Another part of this particular phrase was that she was, quite, literally, intimated by the word “dance.” Seeing her sons navigate the minefields of dances and proms was very anxiety provoking for her, but there was also something in her own life that was provoking this anxiety.

It seemed that once a year her college had a major party for the faculty to drink wine, dress up, and generally rub elbows outside of the school environment. For years Sonia had avoided these things, but this year was a little different. An attractive economics professor had hinted around at taking her to the party, and had mentioned dancing to her a few times as well. The tape in her head got much louder when he was around, and she even found that repeating “I’m dancing as fast as I can” helped quell her anxiety in these situations.

So we broke this down. In her life, quite literally, she was working very hard to simply maintain her home, and her career, with very little time for anything else. She was doing the best she could, sacrificing for her kids, but still dreamed about a life filled with love, adventure, and romance. Yet this was just a fantasy at this point in her life, and now a man had come along and hinted that this life that she had never had could be a reality. It was a recipe for distress, but yet, just out of her immediate awareness. As we continued to talk, Sonia was able to laugh heartily at her own life, and by our 4th month together had made real progress in putting to rest some of her long-forgotten feelings of inferiority.

I’m pleased to report that this story has a happy ending. Finally, and improbably, Sonia got to have her prom experience at the faculty party, where she and her new boyfriend tripped the light fantastic on the dance floor and were the hits of the party. I even saw them as a couple recently, where we all talked about the pressure of balancing dating, raising kinds, work, etc.

“By the way,” he said at the end of the session, “I have this song, I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll, playing in my head, do you think you can help me with this?”

But he already had his answer.

Chris Farley

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

In one of my previous books, The Tragic Clowns, I wrote about one of my favorite comedians, Chris Farley. Some my find it odd that a person so well known and famous could be a substitute person, but in Chris’ case this pattern was actually quite pervasive. It’s an important point, as many of us make the assumption that the rich and famous have lives that are free from everyday feelings of doubt and insecurity. We assign qualities to others based on actions we see in movies and television. One of my clients was amazed for instance that a man like Owen Wilson could attempt suicide. My research into the inner worlds of several comedians, including Chris Farley’s, led me to believe that a substitute pattern is often at the very core of what drives many of our most well known comedians.

In Chris’ case this started at a very young age, as problems with his weight made him in immediate target of abuse from the other children. His weight clearly created for Chris a self image where he was separate and different than the other kids. In many cases a child will do anything to be like the other kids, but in Chris’ case he took the exact opposite strategy. Realizing that the other kids found his weight to be a source of amusement, Chris decided to make jokes about it before the other kids got the chance. He in fact got so good at it, that his act made him the star in virtually every environment he was ever subjected to.

But the validation, admiration, and even adoration Chris received for making fun of his weight caused a split inside of him that made him terribly uncomfortable in his own skin. We want belonging, all of us, and Chris had found belonging with the richest and most famous people in the world, but the price tag for this sense of belonging was one that cost him his life.

How does this happen? As is the case with many substitute people, he turned to drugs and alcohol to ease the pain that he felt from being forever just outside the circle of the other human beings. The difficulty in confronting this pattern is that to really be able to find this sense of belonging, we first have to make peace with ourselves, and this is something Chris never came close to doing. Literally sitting alone with himself was something that was uncomfortable for Chris, and he often turned to drugs and alcohol to create a temporary cease fire in the war that was going on inside him.

Chris’ inner turmoil brings to mind a quote from Alfred Adler, “The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.” So although Chris was able to combat his inferiority by compensating with a wonderfully entertaining self-deprecating sense of humor, it was clear that this emotional agitation was a powerful and destructive force in his tragic, abbreviated life.

What lesson can we as substitute people take from Chris’ life, after all his case seems to be an unusual and extreme example of this pattern. Having researched and written a couple of books on the nature of humor and how it may be used for both healthy and unhealthy adaptation, I think it is an important question. This pattern of attacking one’s self before others have a chance to is prevalent in many people with the substitute pattern, and is especially common with people who are overweight and often struggling with this problem very publicly.

Kurt Vonnegut said, “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” Although this is a sentiment I certainly agree with, it is also important to note that laughter can be turned excessively against the self, as was the case with Chris Farley. Somewhere along the laughter continuum we have to find the ability to laugh at our shared absurdity as human beings while also balancing our need to take care of ourselves.

A great deal of taking care of ourselves begins with our inner dialogue. Those little things we say audible only in our own heads that judge, criticize, and compare have a tremendous influence on the choices we eventually make, as these thoughts become feelings that then become actions. Over time prolonged negative judgments we make about ourselves take a huge toll, and not only do we begin to believe our self-fulfilling prophecies, we convince others to believe them as well. My guess is we all know someone who seems like they should be in a different station on life, rather it be with a partner who appreciates them or a career that challenges them, who has simply been unable to grasp that those are things they deserve. Perhaps you have been one of these people. I have been as well.

One quote that was of tremendous value to me in confronting this pattern comes from Marianne Williamson, whose books have been an inspiration to many who have struggled to overcome substitute feelings. She says, “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? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Very powerful words that might hold tremendous meaning in the struggle to overcome feelings of inferiority. But if we reflect thoughtfully enough, and think about our tendency to judge and compare, and make a thorough and honest assessment of how the way we talk to ourselves contributes to these feelings, it is my believe that we can begin to find our light.

In Chris’ case he reflected a tremendous amount of this light, but ultimately he couldn’t see himself the way the rest of the world experienced him on a daily basis. My guess is that many of us fit into this pattern as well. All of us have gifts to offer, every one of us. Fear seems to be the central thing that prevents us from sharing these gifts, and we have to stare this fear down if we are going to truly have a chance to share the lives we were born to lead. My hope is that by sharing Chris’ story I have shown that all of us, from the wealthiest celebrity to the loneliest recluses, have at times felt like they didn’t belong with the rest of the parade. By talking about and accepting that a part of this is a natural human tendency, we can perhaps diminish its power and begin to reconnect with each other.

A Requiem for Eleanor Rigby

Elanor Rigby
Picks up the rich in the church
Where her wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window
Wearing the face
That she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

John Lennon & Paul McCartney


Perhaps more than any case I’ve ever had, Sarah made me truly examine what it is I hoped to accomplish by being a therapist, and what this title really means. I met her during a period of my life when I had just come out a difficult relationship, and was in one of those interpersonal vortexes where I just couldn’t seem to connect with another person. This became particularly clear to me on a drive back to Chicago on a long, rainy night, where there was not another car in site for miles. I turned on the radio and heard,

“Never gonna fall in love again
I don't wanna start with someone new
Cause I couldn't bear to see it end
Just like me and you
No I never wanna feel the pain
Of rememberin' how it used to be
Never gonna fall in love again
Just like you and me”


It was a song by a man named Erik Carmen that I remembered from my youth. It was one of those songs that had the double bonus of being both grating as well as terribly depressing. I pulled over to the side of the road and looked into the mirror. I needed to gather myself for a minute. How had I gotten here, on the side of the road next to an Indiana wheat field with rain pounding down and not another person in site. Where had I gone wrong?

I eventually came out of this funk and made it back to Chicago, determined to commit myself to my work as a therapist, where I could focus on other people, something that had always been a wonderful recipe for alleviating my own feelings of loneliness.


An interesting thing that happens when you work as a therapist is that whatever your own personal issues are at the time, you can almost guarantee that one of your clients will have a problem that will pull these feelings out of you even more. This is the strange, synchronistic, dance of energy that takes place between two people in a therapeutic relationship. This dynamic was especially apparent in my work with Sarah, a 35 year-old woman who had found our office in the phone book and innocently scheduled an appointment with me on the Monday following the ride home I just described.


Sarah showed up to her appointment dressed very nicely and laughing and joking in a way that made me wonder what exactly I could help her with. We spent the whole first session engaging in this good-natured repartee, and when she left I couldn’t help but think I had just been on a first date rather than a therapy session.


Careful here, I thought to myself, this woman clearly has some of the exact issues that you do in your life, and this could be a tricky road to walk down. I thought about this a bit when I got home. One technique that is often pretty effective in therapy is to ask a person what advice they would give someone close to them if they described a similar issue that the person has presented. They are often able to come up with effective and creative solutions to this problem, which they are inexplicably unable to apply to themselves. This then can create a kind of cognitive dissonance, where a person becomes uncomfortable with their own illogical thinking, and slowly begin to incorporate changes into their lives.


From a psychological standpoint, I wanted to keep in mind Jung’s idea that “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” My own hope for transformation was secondary in this case, as it was my first priority to see Sarah through her difficulties, and help her feel understood and perhaps even reach a new understanding about how she could create more intimate interpersonal relationships.


Sarah came in complaining about exactly that. She was, in her own words, “too picky” about the men she dated, and would often look for the slightest abnormality in a man and then use it as an excuse to cut her ties with them. For ten years she had been going on like this, and now, as she got into her mid-thirties, she had come to believe that she would never find a husband and be a mother, which had created significant feelings of sadness and loss.


All of this took weeks to get to however, as she masked this sadness by making jokes, laughing at herself, and generally changing the subject whenever the conversation would get uncomfortable or hit too close to home. It was a difficult dance, as these were all of my own compensatory patterns, and I had personally used all of them to change the subject when someone asked me about my own single lifestyle.


But this was my job, and, despite any personal shortcomings, I knew I could not allow her to continue to distract me from the issue she had come in seeking help for. I learned to stop laughing at all of her jokes and playing along with the witty banter, as it was a trap we had fallen into too often. I acknowledged that had we met under different circumstances, I would love to sit and talk with her like this, but she had come in with a problem, and that kind of conversation wasn’t helping us solve the problem.


So over time we began to talk more seriously. She attributed many of her problems with intimacy back to her parent’s divorce when she was 16, which had “blindsided” her and made her distrust the outward appearances of happy couples. Her parent’s relationship had seemed perfect to her, and when they hadn’t made it she had begun to question who could. It wasn’t an altogether uncommon response to divorce, and in particular a divorce that occurred at the age of 16, which is an important time in a woman’s life to begin to make sense of dating, relationships, and romance. Our parents are our templates for these relationships, and when their relationship dissolves, it is natural to wonder how one should proceed when their own model has been destroyed.


Over time our therapeutic relationship deepened, and we were in uncharted waters for me in terms of therapeutic intimacy. A companion to me while I thought about Sarah’s case was Irv Yalom’s book The Gift of Therapy, where he made the point over and over again that it was “the relationship that heals” in therapy. I knew that if she could continue to disclose the deepest and most vulnerable parts of herself in the sessions, that it was likely she could learn to develop this same kind of trust outside of the therapeutic office.


So on we went. Her talking all the time about the doubts she felt about herself and whether she would be any good to someone in a relationship given the insecurities she worked so hard to cover up. She made a number of important insights throughout our work together, and as the weeks turned into months, I was pleased at the progress we had made, and patted myself on the back about how neutral I had been able to stay as a therapist, despite struggling with a number of the same problems that Sarah had.

But I was in for a rude awakening. One Saturday about 6 months into our work together, I was out with some friends at an Irish bar, listening to music and having a beer with at least some notion of improving my own social situation. I felt a buzzing in my pocket and looked down. It was Sarah. What was she doing calling me now? I wondered if she had dialed me by mistake, or sat on her phone, or if there was some other such explanation, but when I listened to her message I knew this wasn’t the case.


She had called me sobbing and sounded very desperate, and I knew that I immediately had to snap back into therapist mode for a moment, despite the fact that it was a Saturday night and I was on my own time. I called her back and she explained that she was feeling suicidal and didn’t know if she could make it through the night. I asked her if she had a plan or the means to commit suicide, and she said she did not, but that she was also very desperate and wondered if it was possible if I could come out and talk to her.

This proved to be a serious test of my clinical judgment. I had had a couple of drinks, and knew that driving was not an option. I could call 911, but that didn’t seem to be a great solution either. She seemed to just need to talk to me at this moment, and I began the long and arduous trip on Chicago’s public transportation to go and see her.

When I got there it was midnight and she was sitting in her car. I unlocked the door and we went inside. Her eyes were red from crying and when we got to my office she let it all out.

“I needed you to know.. That for months I have been lying to you.. I have come in here, pretended to be Ok, and that I was making progress. But I’m not” I never told you about Elanor Rigby. You know the song? The song about the woman who dies alone? It has been in my head for months, and it just keeps getting louder. Tonight it got so loud I couldn’t get it to stop. And you know what the funny part is? The only thing that makes it quiet down is coming here. Coming to talk to you. So I guess I wanted to say fuck you.. Fuck you for making me care so much about you and not being available to me. That’s what I wanted to say to you.”

I took a deep breath and thought very carefully about what I was going to say next. Should I tell her about the songs that played in MY head? Tell her about my own dark night of the soul next to an Indiana farm? We were at a very important crossroads here and I wanted to show her how much she meant to me without making it appear like a romantic overture. What I did say is this;

“I care very much about you Sarah. The things you describe are things I have felt myself. A number of times. I became a therapist because I hate to see people in pain. I will give you everything I have as therapist to help you figure out how to get past your own loneliness. That’s how I think we get through pain, by giving what we have to give to others. From what I know you are an amazing, exceptional woman with an incredible amount of this to give to the rest of the world. Maybe we can keep trying to figure this out together.”

She took this all in with a kind of wonder, and slowly but surely stopped crying and began to think. I wasn’t quite sure if I was being tested in that moment, but what I did know is that for that moment at least, the crisis had been averted. We talked a little more and I hopped back onto the train on another rainy Chicago night to go back home. The soundtrack in my own head was playing “Eleanor Rigby”, but I knew it wouldn’t last forever. I had found a way to deal with my own loneliness, and this night had proved to me that I had made the right choice in becoming a therapist.

So Sarah and I continued our sessions, but after that night there seemed to be a whole new level of honesty between us that allowed for some real progress as we worked on the things that Sarah felt were holding her back. The idea of giving love to get love intrigued her, and, to my great surprise and pleasure, one day she marched into my office and told me how she had decided to become a therapist. That was over a year ago now, and I am happy to report that Sarah has now been in grad school for a year, and has also begun dating again.

I include this story because no other therapy case has truly made me think to this extent about why it is I am a therapist, and what it really means to create a healing relationship with someone in this context. When I began my work with Sarah I often felt like an impostor, as the insecurities, doubts, and failures she had experienced were no different than my own. One of my favorite Psychologists, Rudolph Dreikurs, talked about having “the courage to be imperfect” and in this case I found this courage, despite my own substitute feelings that threatened to undermine my confidence and render me ineffective as a therapist. It was a tremendous learning experience, and I have no doubt Sarah will “pay it forward" when it comes to passing on this lesson.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.
Shel Silverstein

I came home from this Christmas experience thinking about how I could use what I had learned in my work as a therapist. Part of being a good therapist is continually taking stock of your own life, and how your own state of mind impacts the people who trust you to counsel them about their lives. I thought about how my life had changed since I had officially become a therapist, and how I had lost touch with some of my old friends as I was surrounded with a new group of people. I had been feeling very “grown up” as I made this transition to a new life, and thought that this would also be a gateway to a new state of mind free from the substitute pattern. Then following story explains how I made sense of dealing with this transition, and lessons I learned about the choices I made about how I was going to spend the rest of the time that I had been given.

My mom was a teacher when I was little, and so books were a part of my life for as long as I can remember. The poem at the beginning of this vignette was my favorite poem growing up, and when I was a kid I used to literally search and search for the place where the sidewalk ends.

I never found it growing up, but I did have to analyze my 20 favorite poems when I was first in college, and I chose this as one of them. To me it was about trying to find that childlike sense of wonder in your heart, even as the responsibilities of life begin to creep in as you get older. And I had gotten older, and life didn’t seem as simple as it did when I was a kid. Shortly after that I just kind of forgot about the poem altogether.

Life takes funny turns sometimes though, and cut to many years later I was living in Chicago and had improbably become an avid bike rider. On one particular evening I had found a trail that seemed like it was leading to a beautiful view of the city. I had gone careening down the path, and then, looking up, saw nothing but Lake Michigan and the Chicago Skyline behind it. I slammed on my brakes and nearly went into the water, getting pretty scratched up in the process. And then, strangely, this poem popped back into my head again. This was it!! This was, quite literally, the place where the sidewalk ends.

As I dusted myself off I began to laugh. I was in such a hurry that I had almost died, but here before me lay an incredible gift. I had found it, finally after years of forgetting about it, and I vowed to give this moment its due. I visit this spot a couple of times a week now, usually right around dusk as the sun sets on Chicago and the lights of the city begin to shine.

I think about a lot of things in these moments. Usually it begins with taking a kind of inventory. What are you doing? I often think to myself. Are you a therapist? A writer? A comedian? An imposter? A Buffoon? Some strange hybrid of all of these things? Usually though a quiet kind of calm comes over me, and I sit and enjoy the city from a distance. I think of all of the things I’ve done here, all the adventures, all the people, and I begin to settle down. When I’m particularly stressed I take out a copy of this poem and read it, and think about those last couple of lines, and usually I find my answer to whatever particular worry is on my mind.

The answer is right there. See the world like a child sees the world, and suddenly everything doesn’t seem so bad. That’s how I want to live my life. How I do live my life most of the time. Sometimes the undertow of various pressures threatens to drag me under with it, and in these moments I have to remember to stay true to myself. I will not be a grownup because someone tells me to be. It hasn’t worked for me, and really I’m not sure it works for anybody.

Oscar Wilde said “The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. The body is born young and grows old. That is the tragedy of life. That describes it so well for me. Sometimes I look in the mirror and wonder how the hell this happened. I feel younger than I have ever felt, but clearly that’s not what everyone sees. It has really been my experience that one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to judge anyone simply on their chronological age, as this is just not a good barometer of the size of a person’s spirit. Some of the oldest people I know are 25 or so, and some of the youngest are in their 70’s. Age is a dangerous fixation we have in our culture and it is one that never fails to irritate me.

So for me, as I get ready to enter a new phase of my life, I try to remember that really it doesn’t matter what I am. My only real goal is to continue to emphasize how I’m going to choose to live, and I will hope it will always be with the eyes of a child. It took me many years to find the place where the sidewalk ends, and it is a lesson I am not ready to relinquish so easily.

The Mythical Joneses

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself.
- Mary Schmich

There is an interesting history behind the idea of keeping up with the Joneses here in America. As the industrial revolution progressed, and people began moving from farms into cities, everyone began living a lot closer together. With this newfound closeness also came a little more nosiness. Now people were more and more interested in what their neighbors did with their money, and soon this arrangement increased competition.

World War 2 changed a lot however, as the able-bodied men went off to war, and the women went to work doing their jobs. Perhaps more than any other time in our history, the people in America embraced cooperation, and banded together to fight the war at home while the soldiers did battle overseas. I remember reading a very poignant essay on similar occurrences in England, where people reported feelings of euphoria despite the war raging around them. Social psychologists attributed these feelings to the breakdown of the social classes, and how being freed from these restraints seemed to dramatically increase feelings of happiness despite the horrific nature of the war itself

A strange thing happened after the war ended however, as Americans in particular were now more prosperous then ever. The advertising industry seized on this newfound sense of prosperity, and began convincing people to buy things they didn’t need, often pairing products with famous celebrities to accentuate the point. With the proliferation of new media came more and more advertisements. Suddenly all of our newfound motion picture heroes were being paired with things to buy. It was effective.

And so the die was cast. America crossed the Rubicon in the 40’s and 50’s and we haven’t been back since. The early seeds of equating our value with what we owed were planted during these years, and it is a pattern that had become even more deeply entrenched in the decades since World War 2.

So we’ve come to measure our personal value on how well we fit in. That is the essence of the idea of belonging. and in America belonging is often measured by the quantity of a person’s possessions, and also how many of these possessions are also owned and appreciated by our neighbors. It’s a vicious circular game without a clear beginning, middle, and end.

In a nutshell then, advertisers have seized on one of the most basic and primal human needs, which is the need to feel a sense of belonging. This is problematic in many ways, and has caused a gulf in our society that often is demoralizing to a person’s self-esteem, when they have neither the means nor the opportunity to purchase the things required for membership.

So what is the solution? In working with a number of families over the years I have discovered that parents are often in a seemingly no-win situation. They try to instill in their children the idea that they are not defined by their possessions, but meanwhile the pressure to have what the other kids have is a powerful force instilled in children from a very early age. To often the guilt a parent feels with the idea that they are contributing to their kid being different makes them give in and play the game.

Somewhere along the way, if we are to get out of this trap, we have to wander off this path onto the road less traveled. This is a difficult fork in the road, as most of us are socialized in a million different ways to associate success with the acquisition of possessions. In a fascinating article entitled “Why the self is empty” Phillip Cushman makes the argument that we fill up our empty selves by buying things. Who among us has not relieved some temporary bit of suffering by purchasing something we didn’t really need? My guess is almost all of us. This is a pattern that helps us avoid dealing with legitimate suffering, which Cushman argues is an important piece of individual growth.

In making this deviation from consumerism, we often have a dark night of the soul. When we for a minute shed our materialistic coping methods we are left looking into a strange abyss, and this is where we have an opportunity for self-exploration. In many cases we have to unlearn a lifetime of programming that has led us to measure our happiness against our friends and neighbors. Ultimately this is a rope we have to let go of to truly journey down the road of self-exploration.

I include this essay in this book because through my work with people of every socio-economic class, I have noticed that a great deal of what makes someone feel like a substitute person originates with deeply conditioned ideas about how we compare to the people around us. Virtually everyone has felt they were missing something everyone else seemed to be getting, but for substitute people this is a feeling that can rest on their shoulders for a lifetime.

This can be a difficult moment in therapy, as we are taught that finding belonging is an important piece of feeling socially interested in others. As we individuate we must balance this need to belong while also weighing what this belonging may cost us. Perhaps before we can come back to others we have to truly spend some time alone with ourselves and emerge from this alienation with a more secure sense of self. We often mistake being alone with loneliness, and combat this loneliness by buying things to make us feel closer to the imaginary herd.

I would like to close this essay by sharing a story that happened to me last Christmas, while I was barricaded for two solid days in the Seattle airport due to extreme weather conditions. I hadn’t been home for Christmas in years, and this was the year I decided to break the streak. I avoided coming home in part because Christmas stirred up a number of my own substitute feelings, and, like I suspect happens in many households over the holidays, I dreaded playing the “let’s compare our lives” game with friends, family, and everyone else.

But this year things were going well, I was a therapist, had written books, and was scheduled to appear on Television later that month to talk about one of my books. A part of me wanted to go home again as a successful guy with good things to say about my life. I put on a nice suit and flew out of a freezing cold Chicago evening into what I hoped were greener pastures.

But I was wrong.

It so happened Seattle was having one of their worst snowstorms in a century. As I got off my plane, I heard the announcement that all the planes that night had been grounded for the evening. We were told to return to the lobby and check back in with the counter to figure out when our next flights would be leaving.

What I saw when I exited the terminal was a sea of humanity unlike any I had ever seen. There before me were thousands of people lying all over the place of every shape, size, age, race, and creed. I was demoralized. I looked at the line and it went on for hundreds of yards, snaking around over and over again. I reluctantly lugged my very large bag to the end of the line. I was in that line for nearly 24 hours, which, taken at face value, would appear to be one of the most torturous things a traveler could ever experience. It wasn’t. What occurred next was one of the most interesting sociological developments that I have ever had the pleasure of observing.

I sized up the people next to me in line. A family of hillbillies with plastic bags. A couple of dorks that looked like insurance salesmen. A lady that looked like she had just got out of a Honky Tonk after drinking for 3 straight days. Jesus. This was going to be the longest day of my life.

No one spoke for the first hour as we all began to get a sense of what we were in for. Finally I broke the ice and made a small joke, and everyone seemed eager to do a little venting. I busted out a bottle of wine I was bringing home for Christmas, thinking that somehow we needed it more now. Someone else produced some snacks, and soon we had a regular little party going on.

And all those judgments that went through my head? They were wrong. These people seemed to be incredibly nice and I had clearly misjudged them. What had happened here? How and why had a bunch of strangers decided to become some fast friends? What was the psychology behind this?

As I pondered these questions I came to the conclusion that most of it had to do with the fact that in this time, in this place, none of us were any more important than the other. We were all simply wayward travelers stranded together in the middle of a snowstorm, and for those 24 hours all hints of difference in social class had been dissolved. It was one of the greatest 24 hours I ever spent actually, as I truly got to know dozens of people in line as we continued to laugh and tell stories about our shared predicament. It never came up that I was a therapist, to them I was simply, “suit guy”, who was every bit as stranded as they were. I don’t think I’ve ever continuously laughed more than I did that day, and as we finally got to the front of the line, a kind of melancholy seemed to settle over our entire group.

The silence was broken by a young Goth-looking girl who was traveling with her mother. From talking to her I found out her parents were divorced and that she was going home to see her grandparents for the first time in many years. She was about 13, and talked to me about how she didn’t fit in very well at school, and also about her sense of relief about having a few weeks away from the kids who teased her.

“I have a question”, she asked. “What’s going to happen when we all have to go back home?”

It was a brilliant question that ran much deeper in my mind than the obvious answer regarding exchanging emails and phone numbers. We had become our own little Breakfast Club here in this airport, and as we got to the end of the line, it was clear she was feeling particularly sad that life was simply going to return to normal when we parted company. How had we created this belonging, and why was it so fleeting? Why did it take a 12 inch snowstorm in Seattle for this little girl to feel a true sense of belonging for perhaps the first time in her entire life?

These were questions I couldn’t totally answer, but now nearly a year later it is still a question I ask myself nearly every day. Why do we maintain our distance from people through social status when it seems to make everyone so unhappy? How do we unshackle ourselves from these conventions? In thinking about this question, I did in fact get everyone’s contact information, and have kept in touch with them faithfully ever since. On the night of my big TV appearance I emailed my teen-aged friend and told her I wanted to say hello, and asked her how I looked on the big screen. Although we all said goodbye that evening, we have kept this feeling alive with a little extra work. It is a lesson that will stay with me forever.

Thomas

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.
Edwin Arlington Robinson

For a long time I thought it was money that was at the root of the substitute pattern, as it was something from my own background that often made me feel left out. Working as a therapist however, has convinced me that money has very little to do with feeling true belonging with others, and in some cases it can even be a terrible hindrance.

I remember reading this poem about Richard Cory when I first started college, and being a little confused by it. Richard seemed like he had a lot going for him. What I hadn’t considered was how much Richard felt left out of what was going on around him, and this feeling of being left out is often at the root of the substitute pattern.

Which brings me to case of Thomas, a well-dressed man in his 40’s, who came into my office a year or so ago wanting to talk about how he could stop yelling at his kids so much. Thomas was a wealthy man who worked in the financial industry in Chicago, and had reached his 40’s having accomplished all of the things he had envisioned foe himself. He had a beautiful wife, two great kids, and had made his first million already. He had a big house, nice cars, and the country club membership to go along with it.

But he was miserable.

I remember reading a book years ago by Joseph Heller called “Something Happened”. The book described a man much like Thomas, who thought that if he just painted the numbers like he was supposed to, happiness would follow shortly afterwards.

But something happened.

And so it was with Thomas, he described feeling this internal pressure all of the time, yet he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. So we began a dialogue about this, and I asked him to describe what his life would look like if I could wave a magic wand and take him to the life that he imagined for himself.

His answer surprised me. Most people, when asked this question will orient their answer to the present or the future, but in this case Thomas went back to the past. He recalled,

“I remember back when I was about 10 watching the Irish boys from my neighborhood play football in the park. I wasn’t allowed to play with them, so I would sometimes just sneak down and watch from a distance. I would study how they teased each other, how they laughed, the jokes they told, and I would go home and practice talking like they talked. I always thought they were having some kind of wonderful fun that I would never know about, and that thought has stayed with me for as long as I can remember. I guess then, to answer your question, I would go back and be able to fit in perfectly with that group of boys.”

The honesty and depth of his recollection moved me a great deal, and I could clearly see that Thomas had struggled his whole life to find a sense of belonging in this world. Somehow he had glimpsed the nature of belonging as a child, but was always the outsider looking in from a distance.

And now Thomas again lived high upon a hill looking down at the working-class people of his town. It was in a sense a perfect metaphor for the course his life had taken, and as therapy progressed we talked a lot about how this reinforced a pattern he had been stuck in his entire life.

So as we continued to have this discussion, Thomas made an important revelation. What if he was yelling at his kids because he saw them repeating the same pattern that he himself had fallen victim to? What if he was resentful of them, trying to live vicariously through them, and trying to reinvent a youth through them that he never had access to?

Thomas made all of these associations himself, which once again reinforced the idea for me that people are almost always their own best clinicians. What they often lack is encouragement to pursue these ideas. There is perhaps nothing more disheartening than to come to some kind of deeply insightful personal revelation, only to find that when you try to share this revelation, people don’t understand. The difference with a therapist is, if they are any good at their job, they will give you every ounce of their concentration to try and understand these insights.

In any case working with Thomas on these associations had really started to make him rethink the way he was parenting his children. He eventually came to the conclusion that he couldn’t make his wish come true, not exactly, but what he could do was provide his children with choices that would increase their sense of belonging.

In Thomas’ case most of the restrictions he placed on himself and his family came from the voice inside of his head. Looking a little further, this voice had its roots in the way he was raised by his parents. His mother was judgmental and condescending while he was growing up, and she literally had become a part of an imaginary audience that Thomas always felt accountable to. There is actually an entire school of psychology based on this idea called Object Relations, and these visions we have of our parents that influence our present day lives is one of its most important tenets.

In any case we started talking about how he could identify and answer this voice in his head, and as he became more mindful of this voice, he even began to develop a sense of humor about it.

As we continued to talk, he began to blossom into a very funny person,. He described how he and his kids had begun to do more things together, including playing football and basketball and a number of other things they had never done together before. It was very nice to hear. Often times parents who did not gratify their own desires in childhood literally make their children instruments of their own ego, but this wasn’t the case with Thomas at all. Most people describe wanting to give their children the things they never had, referring to material things, but in his case he was able to give them a sense of playfulness. He was in essence letting them be children, and in doing this became a child himself again, and this made Thomas one of the most fun people I’ve ever worked with.

This is a potential gift we have when we become parents. If we are mindful enough we can learn from the mistakes of our own childhoods and try and make sure patterns don’t get handed down for generations. In the case of Thomas he was able to reinvent himself by thinking of how important of a job being a parent was. When he came into my office he wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong, but knew that something had to change. His parental instincts had led him to therapy, where with just a little listening and encouragement, he was able to make important changes in both he and his children’s lives.

For a friend who has died

"Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often that not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them-we can love completely without complete understanding."
A River Runs Through It

Got word from my sister today that her best friend, who was also a friend of mine, had died. She had just turned 40. When you hear news like this a million questions go through your mind. How did it happen? What happened? Was it an accident? Suicide? We want some explanation as to how this happens because it doesn’t make sense to us. Young people aren’t supposed to die, and when they do, we also for a second consider our own mortality.

So in talking with my sister I learned that her friend had essentially drank herself to death. She had been drinking secretly for years, and finally her organs had shut down and her heart had eventually stopped.

This was devastating news for my sister in more ways than one. Losing your best friend at such a young age is awful enough, but losing them to something that could have been prevented hurts even worse. You wonder, what could I have done? Did I miss a sign? A cry for help? You think constantly of all of the things you might have said or done to help, but it’s simply just too late.

Which leads me to the quote at the beginning of this entry. Why is it that we are so often unable to lend assistance to the people closest to us who seem to be in so much pain? Does our fear of intrusion prevent us from asking the right questions? Should we be able to intuit people’s internal pain and find these things?

Ultimately I think the answer is no to all of these things. Often a great deal of guilt comes along when someone close to us self-destructs, but ultimately we are all responsible for our own lives. I think so much of our external problems start with some internal disruption going on inside our troubled hearts and minds. Many of us can fake our way through a day, and yes I speak from a great deal of experience on this. But ultimately we have to resolve these inner conflicts if we want to live the life we know we’re capable of.

So I think a lot about my friend who died today. The stories in this book have all been success stories so far, but it would be unrealistic to suggest that everyone gets over feeling second best in their lives. Some of us need to escape this feeling, and drift towards addictive behavior. We need a respite from these feelings, and often something like alcohol or overeating provides some temporary relief.

The problem with this solution is that the thing that provides relief is also what keeps the door locked on our self-awareness. Addictive behavior also leads to self-loathing, which then further reinforces the original feelings of inferiority. This is a vicious cycle that becomes deeply habituated and very difficult to extract yourself from.

So I think about my friend and how she must have felt as she continued to drink massive amounts of liquor even as her body was failing. She was one of the funniest, sweetest, women I’ve ever met, but somehow what was going on in her internal world was just too difficult to face. Sometimes this looks like boredom, but I also think it can be deeply rooted in the substitute pattern. Our idle time is painful in part because we haven’t found a sufficient level of challenge in our lives to induce creative solutions. We have in a sense “settled’ for a life that is less than we were capable of, and this is very difficult to face. So we fashion an escape. For some it can be wandering the world, while others find they can find the same journey is available in a bottle of Vodka in the comfort of their own living rooms.

So perhaps there are levels of inferiority that vary widely from person to person. That has been my experience as a therapist. The psychologist Alfred Adler said ‘The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.” This also seems relevant to a discussion of addiction, as the emotional agitation in some cases becomes too difficult to bear for even short periods of time.

So in my overwhelming sadness for my friend, I think about what could have possibly happened to alter her life course. My wish was she could have gotten into some kind of therapy, and at least begun a dialogue about what her inner world was like. Hopefully she may have found a gentle and supportive therapist to work with her on this. I know therapy works because I have personally experienced it. All of us, every one of, at times feels very alone in this world, and therapy can be one place where you have someone unequivocally and totally devoted to you. In a sense this is more intimate than a marriage, a parental relationship, perhaps even the relationship between a person and their clergy. If you feel like my friend did, or if aspects of her story seem familiar to you, please think about making that call. Sometimes even a glimmer of hope is enough of a catalyst to begin the process of change, and any good therapist will help you in your journey to find and develop this sense of hope.