Tag: Fear

What is good about disappointment

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I frequently say to people I work with that one of the key things is how we deal with disappointment. It is a necessary skill,  because it is a frequent and inevitable occurance in an imperfect world. Each one of us has our own way of working with the  discomfort coming from disappointments in our plans or in other people. These ways are often based on how well our parents helped us deal with early shocks and disappointments, or whether they tried to shield us from the ups and downs of reality. Sometimes a parent can think that the best way to raise their child is to shower them with protection and insulate them from moments when they or the world are less than perfectly loving. However, the child has to learn to live in the real world, and the real world isn’t perfect. In other words, it is right –  and leads to the development of a healthy psyche – that the child is gently disappointed and comes to understand that it is not always possible to have people around them who understand and respond perfectly to their every wish. Even from an early age we have to learn to share, take our turn in games, postpone our own gratification and  acknowledge that other people have needs, moods and different agendas.

Rather than a parent having to being perfect  all the time, English Psychotherapist Winnicott said that they just had to be “good enough”.  This means that the parent provides enough support –  or “holding”  – to support the child without going to the extremes of  stifling it or of abandoning it.  The skill of the “good-enough parent” is to give the child a sense of loosening when faced with new situations rather than the shock and subsequent fear of being ‘dropped’. This allows the child develop resources, maintain a sense of control and  stops them from feeling that the world is unsafe all the time.

If this happens successfully,  the challanges of life do not frighten because the child builds up interior resources. It means that relationships does not threaten because, paradoxically, a smothering early closeness can trigger fears of engulfment in later life. And it means that the adult has a healthier structure for dealing with disappointment because as a child he or she has learned that life and people can not be perfect all the time. Often our disappointments do not arise so much from what actually happened, but more from how we compare what happened to our expectations, our inner patterns or our fixed version of reality. Disappointment show us that life –  like the good enough parent –  is not always available to us in the fixed way we want or whenever we demand it, but is still good despite that.

For this reason disappointments are good teachers. They allow us to see that there is more to us than our conscious thoughts and desires. They reveal how we can be attached to a specific version of how things should be, or of what life owes us. This does not mean they are easy because trying to avoid what disappoints is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. However, we grow more quickly if we are open to working with disappointments rather than avoiding them. Rather than being negative, they can become positive moments of growth,  leading us away from the suffering which is based on our lack of understanding of the deep reality of change.

Our culture has evolved into one that is pleasure-based and ego-identified, and that emphasizes immediate gratification. It also began to define success as your ability to control outcomes. Today, we teach our children that if you are an effective person, you can control your life. You can get and do what you want. If you do, you win in life. This modern image portrays “winners” as people who have it all together. You are not supposed to have internal conflicts, stress, or anxiety—that means you are incompetent. …… But this perspective flattens life. It denies the possibility of finding a deeper meaning to your experience. If you measure your self-worth and effectiveness according to these superficial cultural standards, then each time you suffer you are forced to interpret suffering as humiliation. Why would you choose to acknowledge suffering if it only stands for failure?

Phillip Moffitt, How Suffering got a Bad Name

If I let go will I float?

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Everything is meant to be let go of.

Meister Eckhard

Got some reminders today that changes of direction and endings are an inevitable part of our lives, touching our plans, our enthusiasms,  our things, our friendships. In fact, one of the core things we realize in meditation is that nothing is permanently satisfying or reliable. This challenges our need to be in control at all times, a need which is often driven by fear. The opposite of this need for control – of the future, our our plans, of others – is to trust, to let go. Deep down there is nothing to hang on to. Our mistake is that we look for certainty, for solid ground, when in actual fact, the deep reality which we come to accept is that nothing is really lasting or solid. Ironically, realizing that brings us the greatest freedom.

And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.

Rilke

When we feel that we want to run away

Karl Duffy1 Comment

All relationships demand that we trust the other person. However, due to our personal history, this can sometimes prove a challenge. Our brains are wired to remember the risks that come from encounters with others, such as those in our childhood. Therefore certain words or situations may trigger deep felt unconscious memories and the brain automatically applies an expectation of danger to them. Our stress and anxiety rises, and we feel trapped. Our instinct is to run away. This happens even though our strengths and resources are greatly different now than what they were when we were little.

Thus it can help if we increase our capacity to see these fears as they arise in order not to be influenced by our automatic reactions to them. A way if doing so is outlined here:

Anxiety, dread, worry and even panic are just mental states like any other. Recognize fear when it arises, observe the feeling of it in your body – watch it try and convince you that you should be alarmed – see it change and move on. Verbally describe to yourself what you are feeling, to increase frontal lobe regulation of the limbic system. Notice how the awareness which contains fear is itself never fearful.  Keep separating from the fear; settle back into  the vast space of awareness through which fear passes like a cloud.

Rick Hanson, Buddha’s Brain

Trusting in goodness

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In order to communicate very openly with the world, you need to develop fundamental trust. This kind of trust is not trusting“in”something, but simply trusting. It is very much like your breath. You do not consciously hold on to your breath, or trust in your breath, yet breathing is your very nature. In the same way, to be trusting is your very nature. To be trusting means you are fundamentally free from doubt about your goodness and about the goodness of others.

Dr. Jeremy Hayward

Don’t listen to yourself

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The trick is not how much pain you feel but how much joy you feel.

Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses not to love, excuses, excuses, excuses.

Erica Jong

The Wrong Trousers

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Sometimes we get little reminders that our way of seeing the world is not always completely objective. We see the world not as it actually is, but as we are.

I recently bought some clothes, thinking that they looked nice. Shortly afterwards I was informed that the colour did not suit me and that they were a strange choice. For a moment I took refuge in the fact that maybe I have better taste, that I have an interesting dress sense, and anyway I don’t have too much interest in criteria like colour. I had a certain notion of how these clothes were right. Normally when our judgment is questioned we need to rationalize and reduce some dissonance between our “good judgment” and others’ opinions. However, I soon admitted to myself that others are probably more objective and that I was more than likely wrong.

I know that in most things, I see through my own subjective filters, so it is likely the same for my dress sense. We think we see something as it is. But really it is we see it through our own conditioning and history, and often through the story which is dominant in our life at that moment. Indeed, most thinking is not pure thought, but is rather a self-focused emotional activity. A similar process applies to the words we use. Something may be said to us with the best of intentions but we hear it through the emotional place we are standing. Or similarly, a simple email or text message which we send can be understood completely differently by the person receiving it, because of where they are at, and as a result they move to an interpretation which was never intended.

Practice is essentially clarifying our vision. We learn to sit still, to befriend ourselves. We return to sit each day in order to see through our mental processes, with all their noise; and to increasingly enter into reality as-it-actually-is. We see that we can hardly take a breath without a thought or opinion or judgment going through our head. We see that we prefer to relate to life through our thoughts and frequently our fears. Our natural calm mind is often clouded by the limited self-image created by habitual, obsessive, neuronal patterns. Practice works on this, allowing us let go of the fears that drive our thoughts, getting closer to the moment as it is. We observe the mind in order to not get lost in it. We learn to relate simply with the thoughts, feelings and experiences that arise as we sit. Slowly we get to see the world more objectively. To see things as they are, not as I want them to be.