Category: Psychology

Hidden

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It is a joy to be hidden
but a disaster not to be found.

D.W. Winnicott

Feeling Safe

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Many of us look outside ourselves for affirmation and some sense of worth, often turning to our careers or possessions to give us value. We can do the same in relationships, often expecting others to fill gaps we perceive in our self, which we can find hard to accept fully. This can be a well-established pattern by the time we reach adulthood. It can take the shape of us feeling we need to earn acceptance, or taking care of others at the expense of of own emotional needs. Freud wrote about a repetition complex, which is our need to seek out people who re-enact earlier emotional experiences, rather than necessarily people who allow us be loved just for our own sake.

It is only when we feel safe that we begin to relax with ourselves, as we are, and we can drop these early roles, or the ongoing commentary on how we are doing. Often this happens when we find ourselves with someone who accepts us or listens with real empathy. We find that we do not have to work to deserve love, we do not have to perform, but that we are lovable, deep down, before anything we do. A necessary prerequisite for growth is unconditional acceptance. Receiving such acceptance is like a gentle touch with a feather, warm and caring. It allows us reverse some of the patterns we have established and heals our inner self. It creates a safe haven from the storms of life.

The body and the mind

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Increasingly research is showing how the mind plays a significant part in how our body feels. This is of interest to us who are working with stress. It also helps us understand how mediatation, simply sitting and observing the mind, can be an effective way of working with difficult emotions and events.

For example, research has shown that the body responds to abstract thoughts as if they were real. Work done at the University of Aberdeen found that when participants were asked to recall the past or imagine the future, their bodies acted out the metaphors contained in the words. So when asked to remember, they leaned slightly backward; when imagining the future, their bodies moved forwards. Though these shifts amounted to just a few millimeters, the results were consistent enough for researchers to conclude that they could ‘take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.’

Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam observes: “How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body. We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.” This is consistent with the way stress manifests itself in the body as headaches or heart conditions. It can also be seen when we have had a difficult encounter and we go around with a knot in the stomach. It supports the approach of Mindfulness meditation in its focus on the mind as a part of a whole body response to life’s stresses.

See more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02angier.html/

Spring: Undoing and letting go

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All though our lives, we experience loss, in little and big ways. Some we acknowledge explicitly and grieve for. Others we may not have had the time or space to grieve for and they can come up later on in life, and attach themselves onto some other loss. There can also be the gradual loss of our hopes and dreams, or the plans we have invested in our work, or the direction of our lives.

Robert Neimeyer, who has written extensively in this area, says that when we go through a significant loss we have an undoing of our individual and collective life histories. It affects our world, and changes our sense of self. If it is a significant loss, such as the death of one who meant much to us, or the loss of a partner or even a move from work or familiar suroundings, we can feel uprooted and homesick. He says that what is needed at such times is having people to turn to who care for us, as we “tell and retell our story”. We need someone who can listen.

Why is this? Because as humans we like to give our lives meaning by underpinning them with a coherent and consistent story. Thus when we experience these losses we need to reorganize our sense of sense and our sense of meaning in life. We reach a limit where we are invited to tell our story again, but in a new way. The losses of life can make us hard and fearful of life or can make us more open, more caring for others.

The Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa talks about a soft spot, a raw spot, a wounded spot on the body or in the heart. A spot that is painful and sore. A spot that may emerge in the face of a loss. We hate such spots so we try to prevent them. And if we can’t prevent them we try to cover them up, so we won’t absentmindedly rub them or pour hot or cold water on them. A sore spot is no fun. Yet it is valuable. Trungpa Rinpoche calls the sore spot embryonic compassion, potential compassion. Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can wake us up to love, and to loving action.

Norman Fischer, Love, Loss and Anxious Times

Comparing

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The reason we practice is not seen on the meditation cushion, but in the rest of our life. We practice so that we can better accept the present moment, where our life actually is, rather than always imposing conditions: it must be this way or that way, or we can’t be happy. These conditions can lead us to look elsewhere for happiness, and not realize that the all we need is already in our lives right now.

As we sit we notice that the mind has a lot of different ways to avoid just being in the present moment. One of them is to compare. It compares this sitting moment – “boring” to other moments we could be having – “much more interesting, much more productive”. And this habit of comparing extends to our life in general. We compare our present self to a better self, or our lives to others’ lives, or to the ideal portrayal of lives which we find in society or which our insecurities about ourselves have generated. We find that a lot of our anxieties arise because we are trying to match up to what we think our life “should” be like, or what others portray as being happy. We are continualy presented with a model of success in career and in relationships which seems so desirable. Often other people seem to have gotten it all together and have all the answers, when we find ourselves feeling frantic, or worried or uncertain inside. Thus we fall into the trap of comparing “our insides to other peoples’ outsides” and we find that we come up lacking.

Comparing can lead us to feeling divided and unhappy, pulled in different directions. It manifests itself as a restlessness and unease because it does not allow us rest in what is here, now. This restlessness comes from the fundamental cognitive dissonance or tension that arises when we are caught between wanting two different things. The dissonance caused by such contradictions creates a tension in the mind, which can range from minor irritation to deep anguish as long as it continues.

As humans we try to reduce our anxiety by stabilizing our life and looking for certainty as much as possible. We also do not like holding opposite ideas. Thus we try to convince ourselves that we are consistent and coherent. We need to reduce dissonance in order to maintain our positive self-image and feel good about what we are doing One way to do this is to deny one direction completely. However, such strategies do not tend to work and our deep sense of anxiety remains.

Mindfulness helps us because it allows us see the different ways we try to escape from our life as it actually is. It allows us relax by teaching us that happiness is to be found in how we are, not how our comparing thoughts tell us how we should be. We see them as thoughts, and like all thoughts they increasingly lose their solidity, become more transparent and we do not need to follow them

Types of insecurity in relationships

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In our early years we lay down a pattern for later relationships. We construct our inner psyche out of the materials that are at our disposal in those first experiences. If some of those experiences are less than optimal, and the person’s early life is lacking in adequate consistent responses, the person’s relating style in later years can reflect that. From my work I am always interested to see how adults have taken into their own inner selves characteristics of their caregivers – which may have been exaggerated or inadequate – and then defend these defective structures as their own self.

For example, a parent can use the child for its own emotional needs by holding on to the child to compensate for lacks in the relationship with the partner. This can produce in the child – and later in the adult – a reduced capacity for real relationships. We might see this as a need to contol in relationships, in an attempt to gain back the security of that first closeness. On the other hand, a parent who is inconsistent in their affection can give rise to an insecurity in the child who draws conlusions about future relationships based on what they see in the parent.

Dan Siegel, in his book The Developing Brain writes about the desired “attunement” between the caregiver and child, which allows the child to “feel felt.” This attuned state shapes the young brain. It builds neuronal patterns that underpin the child’s resilience and grounds the ability to connect in meaningful relationships later in life.

However, all is not lost. What science is discovering recently is that the brain can be re-shaped later in life. So, even if we grew up with an insecure attachment pattern, we can grow in our security later in life, reducing our need for control or withdrawal. In other words, we can retrain the brain, which shapes our emotional security or felt sense in relationships. One way to do this is through sitting meditation which seems to work on the same part of the brain that is shaped in those early months. We rest in silence and that calms gradually the anxious messages remembered deep in our unconscious.