Tag: Psychology

Roots in the past 3: The wound of the heart

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues show up most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in and through our relationships with our early caretakers.  The core psychological wound, so prevalent in the modern world,  forms out of not feeling loved or intrinsically lovable as we are. Inadequate love or attunement is shocking and traumatic for a child’s developing and highly sensitive nervous system. It damages our capacity to value ourselves, which is also the basis for valuing others.  I call this the “relational wound“ or “wound of the heart.”

There is a whole body of study and research showing how close bonding and loving attunement — what is known as “secure attachment”— have powerful impacts on every aspect of human development. Secure attachment has a tremendous effect on many dimensions of our health, wellbeing, and capacity to function effectively in the world: how our brains form, how well our endocrine and immune systems function, how we handle emotions, how subject we are to depression, how our nervous system functions and handles stress, and how we relate to others.

John Welwood

When you think you are not “good enough”

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The goalposts for what counts as “good enough”  always seem to be out of reach. No matter how well we do, someone else always seems to be doing it better. The result of this line of thinking is sobering: Millions of people who need to take pharmaceuticals every day just to cope with daily life. Insecurity, anxiety, and depression are incredibly common in our society, and much of this is due to self-judgment, to beating ourselves up when we feel we aren’t winning in the game of life.

So what’s the answer? To stop judging and evaluating ourselves altogether. To stop trying to label ourselves as “good” or “bad” and simply accept ourselves with an open heart. To treat ourselves with the same kindness, caring, and compassion we would show to a good friend — or even a stranger,  for that matter. Self-compassion provides an island of calm, a refuge from the stormy seas of endless positive and negative self-judgment, so that we can finally stop asking, “Am I as good as they are? Am I good enough?” By tapping into our inner wellsprings of kindness, acknowledging the shared nature of our imperfect human condition, we can start to feel more secure, accepted, and alive.

It does take work to break the self-criticizing habits of a lifetime, but at the end of the day, you are only being asked to relax, allow life to be as it is, and open your heart to yourself. It’s easier than you might think, and it could change your life.

Kristan Neff, Why Self-Compassion trumps Self-Esteem

Creating ourselves

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We are always in a perpetual state of being created and creating ourselves. We will never be the same, and we have never been quite the way we are right in this moment. This emergence of being as we flow from state to state is characterized by an underlying sense that there is an incredible amount of freedom and cohesion within the system in a given moment. As a person’s states of mind emerge in ways determined by the systems own constraints and by the external constraints of interpersonal connections with others, the self is perpetually being created

Dan Siegel, The Developing Mind; How Relationships and the Brain interact to Shape who we are

Preparing for the end of the world

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Well,  the much-hyped end of the world on Saturday did not quite happen. No earthquake, no rapture, no rising up  of the perfect, no revealing of the wicked.  As the predicted time passed across the world, the tendency was to reduce the whole  event to the delusions of a small fringe group.  However, the roots of the idea reveals a psychology that is found not only in those evangelical Christians who believed in Saturday’s date so fervently.  As one Christian commentator said before the event, this type of forecasting tells us little about God but tells us a lot about those who make the predictions.

For one thing, it reveals a way of dealing with the unsatisfactory nature of this world by looking for something or someone to come “fix” things and transcend this world. There are a lot of uncertainties in the world today, stemming from economic uncertainties, the difficulties between nations,  religions and cultures,  and from natural disasters.  And there are always uncertainties in our personal lives. Things change. People close to us get ill or move away.  This can make us feel very insecure and one tendency is to look to something outside, or someone stronger than us, to steady us on this uncertain ground. It is always tempting to seek for some lasting security and we do so frequently, trying to hold onto some aspects of our life or someone who has come into our life.  However, the foundations of mindfulness are quite different. They are based on seeing that change and ambiguity are simply the nature of things in this world, on realizing that life lacks the very things that we feel we need most, such as permanence, security, and certainty.  Our everyday practice is to increasingly feel this personally and move towards relaxing in the uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect us. This means that when we come up against the anxious nature of this world, or even its disasters, or when we encounter change and setbacks in our lives, it does not mean that something is wrong with us.  Understanding this allows us relax with ourselves as we are, without always thinking that there is something lacking in us, or missing in the world.

The second implicit idea in this picture of the end of the world is what it says about us and how we need to be in order to “qualify” for this moment. It sees the direction we need to be going in as having “perfection” as its goal.  Now as I said in yesterday’s post, healthy striving and moving forward toward our full potential  is a good thing. However, this spiritual notion of “perfection” can give rise to some dangers. One is that it can build upon an unhealthy perfectionism and unrelenting standards which is frequently linked to shame and the need to earn approval.  This “tyranny of the should” as Karen Horney called it,  gives rise to a deep sense of never being “good enough”, leading many people push themselves and better themselves because of a fear of being judged or disappointing others. Having the notion of “perfection” as the way to define ourselves can give rise to a compulsive running away from ourselves. It also, ironically, can mean that we become slow to do anything, fearing  the mistakes we may make and possibility of failure.

Another danger lies in the suggestion is that the goal is to become “perfect” rather than to becoming “whole”. However, we are not called to move toward some kind of flawlessness or faultlessness but rather towards completion or wholeness.  As Jung rightly pointed out, this means that we hold onto all aspects of our self, including the “shadow” parts  which have their roots in the unconscious: The realization of the self … leads to a fundamental conflict, to a real suspension between opposites…, and to an approximate state of wholeness that lacks perfection. … The individual may strive after perfection … but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.  In some sense we are always “on the way” rather than ever getting it fully together.

The final danger is in the way that any type of “leaning towards” pulls us out of this moment and how it actually is. Our focus is not on any future, “better” moment, but on this one, even if it is not as we would want it.  The best way to prepare for the future – or the “end of the world” if you like – is to care for this moment and then the next moment. There are enough distractions in the world today, including these spiritual ones, pulling us away from noticing where our life is,  now.

Meanwhile, here we are, missing the fullness of the present moment, which is where the soul resides.  It’s not like you have to go someplace else to get it.  So the challenge here is, Can we live this moment fully?  When you ask a group of people to spend five minutes watching their own breaths moving in and out of their bodies, just as an experiment,  they discover that their minds are like bubbling vats, and it’s not so easy to stay on the breath.  The mind has a life of its own.  It carries you away.  Over a lifetime, you may wind up in the situation where you are never actually where you find yourself.  You’re always someplace else, lost, in your head, and therefore in a kind of dysfunctional or nonoptimal state.  Why dysfunctional?  Because the only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets.  You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment. The past is gone, and I don’t know what’s coming in the future.  It’s obvious that if I want my life to be whole, to resonate with feeling and integrity and value and health, there’s only one way I can influence the future:  by owning the present. 

Jon Kabat Zinn

Stop wearing other people’s faces

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

While  giving a talk at an All Day Retreat on Saturday I came across a familiar concern. When encouraging participants to be “at home” in the moment and widen this to being at ease in their lives as they actually are, one person  wondered whether  this meant we will never improve. It is true that some people may use acceptance as an excuse for passivity or to mask an already existent depression. However, for most people the practice is to go against the deeply-conditioned habit of judging oneself and trying to “fix” one’s life – normally in response to the  internalized early demands of parents or from the exigencies of  today’s continually comparing society  –  and see if they can relax in their history and their personality as it is. Practically,  this means noticing the way the mind likes to compare our life as it is with better lives and how it finds it hard to believe that where it is at this moment is enough. In this poem, May Sexton seems to try this. She decides, finally,  to become herself and stop wearing the faces which others demand of her. She has the courage to stand still and be in her life as it is.

Now I become myself. It’s taken Time, many years and places;

I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces,

Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning,

“Hurry, you will be dead before—”

(What? Before you reach the morning? Or the end of the poem is clear?

Or love safe in the walled city?)

Now to stand still, to be here, Feel my own weight and density!

The black shadow on the paper Is my hand; the shadow of a word

As thought shapes the shaper Falls heavy on the page, is heard.

All fuses now, falls into place From wish to action, word to silence,

My work, my love, my time, my face Gathered into one intense

Gesture of growing like a plant. As slowly as the ripening fruit

Fertile, detached, and always spent, Falls but does not exhaust the root,

So all the poem is, can give, Grows in me to become the song,

Made so and rooted by love.

Now there is time and Time is young.

O, in this single hour I live All of myself and do not move.

I, the pursued, who madly ran, Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

Running away from parts of ourselves

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

If there are whole parts of yourself that you are always running from, that you even feel justified in running from, then you’re going to run from anything that brings you into contact with your feelings of insecurity. Have you noticed how often these parts of ourselves get touched? The closer you get to a situation or a person, the more these feelings arise. Often when you’re in a relationship it starts off great, but when it gets intimate and begins to bring out your neurosis, you just want to get out of there.

So I’m here to tell you that the path to peace is right there, when you want to get away. You can cruise through life not letting anything touch you, but if you really want to live fully, if you want to enter into life, enter into genuine relationships with other people, with animals, with the world situation, you’re definitely going to have the experience of feeling provoked, of getting hooked. You’re not just going to feel bliss. The message is that when those feelings emerge, this is not a failure. This is the chance to cultivate unconditional friendliness toward your perfect and imperfect self.

Pema Chodron