Your Zesty Self

How Reality Checking Can Save Your Life and Your Dreams

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:52:01 +0000

Introduction: My personal discovery of the need for reality checking

We've all heard the saying that when we assume, we make an ASS of U and ME. And when we feel like an ass we may feel shame, embarrassment and lowered self esteem. Then again, if when we're thinking someone else is an ass we can feel resentment, anger, disgust.

It may seem so obvious, but the truth is that at earlier points in my life, I didn't even know I was making any assumptions. I'll share with you about how I began to learn to reality check instead of "mind read."

When I was in my late twenties, I was living in a loft in the Mission District in San Francisco with my sculptor boyfriend. I had quit my job as gallery assistant director, agreed to let my two boys go on an extended visit with their father and his new wife, and had moved into the loft. All of this was to be able to build a sculpture concept I had in mind. My plan was to fabricate a ‘garden' of about twenty 8' high translucent plastic plants. I wanted the imagined viewers to have a dizzy, delighted sort of Alice-In-Wonderland feeling. But after all the changes I had made to be able to work full-force, I was not actually working at all.

So I was depressed and confused about my non-productivity: I had never been unable to produce before. I thought I was Ms. Productivity USA. I didn't know what was happening to me, but I knew I needed help to get back to my Producer Self. Since I ever-so-luckily come from a family that considers people who go into therapy as the cream-of-the-crop (Thank you, Mom), I went to a therapist.

The first lesson I learned about myself in therapy was that I was always trying to control myself. If I started to cry in session about missing my kids, I'd tilt my head back and widen my eyes in an attempt to keep the tears within the pockets of my eyelids. But if I couldn't control that, and a tear drooled over the edge, I would open up a Kleenex as far as I could and hide my face with it. I would also hold my breath in while simultaneously trying to push out. Whew! All this contortion to suppress any outward expression of sadness.

The next lesson I learned in therapy is how important it is to do "reality checking." The definition of 'reality check' from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary is: something that clarifies or serves as a reminder of reality, often by correcting a misconception. In fact some people consider reality checking a matter of "clarification."

From my current vantage point, it's hard to believe that at one time I didn't know there was such a thing as a reality check. When I first heard that phrase, I thought it meant someone was having hallucinations and needed to stop it. But, to validate myself, if you grow up in a family with the unspoken rules, "Do not think, do not feel, and certainly do not speak about your thoughts or feelings," you would not even conceive of sharing a feeling, thought, or belief about another person. Much less ask if it is really true.

As I explored my non-productivity and depression in therapy, I realized that I had made an assumption that, because my boyfriend was an artist, he would support my artistic ambitions. I had never asked him how he felt about my ambitions.

The Night of the Necklace changed that assumption. I love making unusual ornaments to wear to openings and other art functions. On The Night we are preparing to attend a museum opening. I happily put on my newly finished flashing silver Mylar necklace bedecked with silver vacuum-formed rat skulls and wispy fluttering feathers. (We artists dress outrageously so that the San Francisco Chronicle art reporters and photographers will want to shoot us.) As I put on my final makeup touches, I catch my boyfriend's angry eyes in the mirror. He asks me to take off the necklace. He says he does not want anything to detract from his getting attention. I am shocked. I comply - after all, his career is certainly more important than mine. (Yes, yes, it was many years ago.)

Now I am alerted. I begin to ask more questions about his desires. Lo and behold, I find that his vision of a perfect relationship is with someone who wants to cook and have more children with him, and not do any art work at all - ever. I soon leave my sculptor boyfriend and the loft. And my unproductiveness and depression leave me at the same time.

Never again would I not ask about what kind of a relationship another person wants before I actually enter one. I had learned the painful results of not doing a reality check.

Using the learnings of reality checking

I next experience the pleasurable results of reality checking. I've learned enough in my therapy to know that I need to learn respect for my feelings, and learning acting seems like a good way to learn that. I am now studying acting at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. A fellow classmate and friend, Abby, and I talk about getting an apartment near the company theatre.

A few weeks later, Abby and Sally (another actor friend) are visiting me. Abby mentions that she and Sally have looked at an apartment. Immediately, I assume that that means that Abby no longer wants to room with me. I am crushed. I want to keep quiet, pretend nothing is the matter. I also want to cry because I am so hurt at being left out and at the same time I want to make sure they don't know I am hurt. Being hurt means to me that I was admitting weakness. It means that I will be scorned by anyone who knows. Also, if I show my hurt they will feel guilty and I don't want them to feel bad.

With the painful lessons of past assumptions vibrating in me now, I breathe deeply, several times, and gather my courage to say something like, "Gee, does that mean that you no longer want to room with me?" I am (of course) looking at the floor, too scared to see the faces of derision I know will be there if I look up. "Oh, no", Alice blurts, "I was hoping that we could all room together so that the rent would be less." Luckily, I really like Sally and think it would be fun for the three of us to share a place. We end up spending two more fun and growth-filled years as we train.

Here's another example of how reality checking saves. Years later - okay, decades later - I am just starting to date a man I later married. He calls to ask if I have gotten an email he had sent: I hadn't. A few minutes later I get an email from him saying, "I don't know why you didn't get it. I resent it." Oh my God, I think. I wonder if he has an anger problem. I better check this out. (By this time, I had become a Gold Medal reality checker.) I very kindly ask, "What do you resent about my not getting your email?" He burst out laughing, "Re-sent. I meant I sent it to you again!"

Doing reality checks also has become terrifically important in my work as a psychotherapist. So many of our upsets with other people come from the tendency for us to think we know the meaning of what others say. But we are so often unable to see beyond the meaning that we ourselves have given to what they have said. So an excruciatingly important part of the making love through Deep Listening is practicing the reality check.

What reality checking looks like: "Did I get that right?"

The way reality checking appears is in saying an equivalent of "It seems to me that what you are saying is (fill in the blank - this is the mirroring part) and then, the reality check magic phrase: "Did I get that right?" Other examples of the reality check are: "Did I understand you?" or "Is this what you mean?" Then you wait for their answer.

Though you probably already know whether you got it 'right.' You can usually tell by the expression on their face. If you got it right they are pleased. If they are angry and/or hurt, you might notice their face softening. They often nod their head up and down as you are talking. If you didn't get it right (and there are so many reasons for this) you can tell that too. They usually get even more upset as they see how you are stating your misinterpretation of them, rather than what they meant. We humans so long to be understood, to be recognized for who we are. So having our feelings, or intentions, or our reasons misunderstood can be terribly painful.

Avoiding the waste of not reality checking our assumptions

The idea of - or the fact of - wasting our potential makes me very sad. And not using reality checking can contribute to a terrible throwing away of the love and joy that is available to us.

Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh in his book True Love: A Practice for Awaking the Heart provides an instructive story of the devastation that can occur when we omit reality checking. In the story, a man has to leave his pregnant wife to go to war. Two years later he returns home and tries to get his toddler son to call him Daddy. The little boy refuses saying, "You are not my Daddy. My Daddy is somebody else. He visits us every night and my mommy talks to him every night and very often she cries with him. And every time my mommy sits down, he sits down too. Every time she lies down, he lies down too." As he listens, the man's heart turns to stone; he starts staying out nights drinking and returning only in the wee hours.

The young woman's suffering is so great that she throws herself in the river and drowns. When the husband hears of this he returns home. That night he lights the night time lamp. When his son sees the light, he excitedly points to the shadow of his father on the wall. "Mister, mister, it's my Daddy: he's come back." All along his wife had been crying to her husband in her imagination, "You must come back home soon." And when she would sit down, the shadow would sit. When she would sit down lie down, the shadow would lie down. The man's misperceptions were cleared up, but it was too late.

Conclusion

I agree with Thick Nhat Hanh as he remarks, "I do not want you to make the same mistake in your everyday life. We are subject to misperceptions every day, so we have to pay attention. . . . You must always check things out by going to the person in question."

I am dedicated to helping all people live life to the fullest. And we can't do that without reality checking.

Artist's Way Groups Website: www.DrJaneBolton.com

Raise Your Self Esteem by Getting Unglued from Your Stuck Feelings

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:33:30 +0000

You know those everyday hurts and pains. And you know how the tiny hurts and irritations can have a cumulative effect. Then one day you just erupt with the disappointments, hurts or irritations that you've been trying let pass, ignore or talk yourself out of. And then your self esteem plummets because of the childish, inappropriate way you acted.

For some examples of those tiny hurts, let's say you walk into a party and experience a group of friends turning their backs on you instead of smiling, or your mother screams she'll have a heart attack if you go out with that woman, or you find out that your mate has been viewing pornography every night after you go to bed. The hurt can be as seemingly small as smiling at someone and getting a cold glare back.

Any of these things will usually trigger an emotional reaction, however slight and brief. It's natural. If we could just feel the feelings they will just go on through our amazing, self righting body/minds and would re-center ourselves and move on to what was next.

But the truth is that most of us don't just stop at feeling the feelings. We make up stories about why "it" happened; or how inadequate, weak, or stupid we are to have the feelings we have; or how wrong "they" were to do whatever. In other words, our interpreting machine starts whizzing. And as we are nattering away, we know we are doing this and our self esteem is sinking.

Much of our self esteem (at least until we have trained ourselves for a radical self-acceptance) depends on what emotions we are feeling. Ideally we would open-heartedly accept however we feel. But, let's face it, when we feel loving, playful, generous, we feel good about ourselves. However, when we are caught by anxiety, sadness, jealousy or hurt, our self image can suffer. At those times, we don't measure up to how we would like to feel, how we would like to be seen, how we would like to imagine ourselves to be.

The problems we have with ourselves and with those emotional states come from getting stuck in the feelings, from identifying with the feelings. It is the experience of "I AM angry" rather than I am a beautiful being who "has anger" passing by. The real problem is our reactions to our feelings, and our judgments about ourselves for having those feelings. That keeps us stuck as we resist, and react ad nauseum.

I'd like to give you a way to experience your uncomfortable feelings but not get glued to or avoid them.

This method is called Conscious Witnessing. It is explained in great depth by Wayne Dyer in Your Sacred Self: Making the Decision to Be Free. This method is also something that therapists may use to assist people who are working through major trauma.

This split focus and detaching method requires that you observe painful moments from a detached, slightly dissociated place a couple of locations away from the experience.

For a visual metaphor of the placement of the vantage points, you can imagine yourself in a movie theatre in the projection room. And you are doing three things at once. 1 )You-as the Conscious Witness--are looking down into the theatre, and having your own response as you watch and 2) you notice your emotional reactions, thoughts, body sensations as you 3) see the painful incident played out on the screen.

I'll describe the process using an experience of a composite client. I'll later demonstrate how it can be used for more harmonious relationships.

One step removed: viewing a video or film of the incident with you in it

In the theater metaphor, you are not in your body, seeing the incident from your own eyes as you were when it first happened. You are viewing the incident on the screen as you sit in the theatre.

To practice, the first step is to pick an experience that is not horribly painful, but enough to register some emotional pain. Now play the video or screen scene forward as you non-judgmentally notice your responses.

To demonstrate the process, I'll use the following incident.

"I'm five years old, in the backyard with Mom, hanging up wet sheets. I touch her arm. She pulls back, starts to cry and runs away to a next door neighbor's back yard. I follow her; she weeps, falls to the ground and says she feels trapped being a mother. She rocks back and forth sobbing and singing, ‘If I had the wings of an Angel, over these prison walls I would fly.' I sit on the ground, at her feet, listening quietly."

Two steps removed: viewing yourself as you view yourself watching the scene

In the theater metaphor, you are seeing yourself from the projection booth as you watch the film, video, or incident. If you prefer to just visualize yourself viewing the scene from up and behind your head about three feet, that works too. Notice, without judgment, your thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations.

The example continues.

"First I/she was feeling love for Mom, which is why I/she reached out to touch her arm. So I am shocked when Mom pulls back. I'm hurt. And scared and confused and I know it's best if I make my face a mask and don't show my feelings. When she starts to cry, in the neighbor's yard, I have certain calm. I know that once she gets the pain out of her system, she'll feel better."

Notice how you feel about yourself as you watch yourself go through your experience.

"From this position I experience such tenderness for myself. My voice from there is "She" is so dear. . . She wants to help. . . There is love there . . . She doesn't realize it, but she is being given a gift an apprenticeship as a therapist. From down there, she thinks it hurts, like a ‘shot' but the incident is imbued with enormous healing powers. "

Using Your Conscious Witness View for Relational issues

I now turn to an example of how using the Conscious Witness position can help to get a different perspective on relational issues. This practice not only provides emotional relief, but can provide emotional freedom with which to imagine and carry out alternative responses.

Below is what happened with a woman as she experimented with using the Conscious Witness perspective.

The scene: she and her partner are lying in bed watching TV before sleeping. He makes a derogatory comment about the program. She quickly picks up her journal and begins writing energetically in it. He thinks she is offended by his comment and is writing nasty things about him. He sighs in pain and disgust, feeling criticized. She thinks he is taking her actions personally (she's actually inspired and writing a poem). She thinks, "There he goes. Again."

This client was feeling angry, lonely, sad, disgusted, and depressed about her relationship. She was thinking, "He's so not there-as usual. He never sees ME, only his ideas of how I'm disapproving."

As she lay on the bed, in pain, she saw that he had gone to sleep. She decided to try the Conscious Witness point of view of their exchange. As she replayed the scene from her conscious Witness point of view was an all too familiar relational pattern, played out countless times. She suddenly burst out laughing at the predictability and the "ridiculousness" of the pattern. She wrote in her journal, now, "This is hysterical!" Her feelings of annoyance at her partner vanished, and she went to sleep happy.

She is understandingly excited about continuing to use this practice to detach from her unwanted emotional intensities. She is also freed up from her distress enough to actually invent alternative ways of reacting to the pattern when it appears again.

I hope this Conscious Witness practice will bring you relief and restore your humor at our relational foibles.

7 More Reasons It's So Darn Hard To Earn The Empathy Gold Cup

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:17:37 +0000

The challenge of learning empathic skills

Are you are at a point that you can see the value of learning empathy skills and practicing them in your daily life? Great.

So here comes my plea for perserverance. Because even when someone has learned that empathy is the single most important relational gift to give and get (and, yes, that includes your relationship with your self), there are still some really hard things to master.

After all, if empathic skills were so easy to develop, more people would have done it already.

So even if you are convinced about the effectiveness of practicing of empathy, learning empathy skills can be very difficult. Why is that?

1. Many people have the limiting belief that talking to others should just come naturally, without effort. These people will often groan when they see a list of steps to go through to foster mutual empathy. Often they will initially think something like, "Well, if we have to talk about how to talk to each other, what's the use? We're ruined already."

2. Many people experience difficulty slowing themselves down when they have been used to free wheeling though sometimes unprofitable verbal expressions.

Some people idealize what they call "spontaneity" so much, that they feel inauthentic when they have to actually think about how to speak and listen in order to maximize mutual understanding.

These people confuse spontaneity and authenticity with mindlessness and reactivity. They are often experiencing agitation and fear and the going so fast helps them think that they can just jump over those feelings.

If there was over control in one's childhood, a person can learn to develop patterns of rebellion, submission, or withdrawal to protect themselves from having to follow a structure for communicating.

3. The person who found that rebellion was the best strategy in their early circumstances will probably react with resentment and resistance: "Nobody can tell me how to talk!" "I'm not going to follow somebody else's rules for talking!" or "Rules, rules, rules. Who needs them?"

4. Others may feel as if they are submitting when they temporarily put their own biases aside to see another point of view. When a partner is angry they can feel that if they don't attack back that they are giving up on themselves-which they are sick of doing.

5. The person who uses withdrawal patterns may go through the motions of the structured exercise, but internally be uninvolved and unsoftened by the process. They may even be privately fantasizing revenge or other things.

6. To master the art and skill of empathy requires practice, sometimes a lot of practice. Heaven knows, I'm still learning after 17 years. People who expect themselves to learn things without an actual learning process of misunderstandings, confusions, and mistakes and corrections can initially have a hard time. People who identify themselves as perfectionists would be in this group.

7. For most people, it is frustrating making the inevitable mistakes in the learning process. Some people are not willing to experience frustration in the pursuit of a goal.

But in the end, It's worth every second spent learning empathy skills.

Dr. Bolton gives popular workshops on assertiveness topics and leads "The Artist's Way Plus" workshops. To learn more about her work, visit her websites at: www.DrJaneBolton.com and www.FreedomFromShame.com.

Stop Giving Me Empathy! It Makes Me Feel Bad

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:05:53 +0000

Barriers to receiving empathy

In a previous post I talked about the barriers to giving empathy, the lifeblood of self esteem and healthy connection. In this post I focus on three barriers to receiving empathy: 1) confusion about pity, sympathy, and empathy 2) desire to punish oneself for hurting another and 3) trying to avoid vulnerable tenderness when a need is met.

1. Confusion about empathy, sympathy, and pity

Most people do not want to feel less strong or capable than others. When feeling painful feelings such as distress, fear, sadness or shame, many people feel vulnerable, and at that time may see themselves as less powerful than usual and as less powerful than others.

In this temporarily less powerful state, another person's feeling responses to our feeling state can make us feel better or worse. Three common responses to another's pain and vulnerability are pity, sympathy, and empathy. And the greatest healer of these is empathy.

Pity is felt by one person who compares themselves with another and feels better off than the other-at least in the moment. So, pity can be a separating emotion. "Oh, you poor thing!" might be one way of expressing pity. Few people want to feel pitiful, or pathetic. Pity is often condescending and may include feelings of superiority, contempt (a mixture of disgust and anger) and rejection.

Many people who are not used to receiving empathy confuse receiving empathy (understanding) with receiving pity and therefore may feel belittled and insulted.

There is another important confusing factor with pity. That is that people may criticize themselves for having painful emotions. Then they think that others are looking down on them because they are looking down on themselves. This self contempt for one's own vulnerable states is a major cause of low self esteem.

Sympathy, on the other hand, is when one person feels the feelings of the sufferer as if he or she were the sufferer.

Sympathy is an automatic, involuntary response to another's emotional state. Babies are born with the ability to sympathize. Hospital nursery staffs know well the phenomenon in which one baby starts to cry and within moments all the babies are bawling.

In adulthood, if someone feels the sadness of another which then arouses their own unacceptable sadness, they may try to stop the sadness of the other so they won't have to feel the pain. This indicates not only lack of empathy for the self and other, but a lack of a healthy boundary as a separate, but relating, person.

Sympathy is thus shared suffering. Sympathy often seeks to console, while empathy seeks to understand. In sympathy, one's own past is brought in as in "I remember when ________(some past experience, i.e. "when MY father died") I was incapacitated for months!"

The person sympathizing may, over time, feel burdened or burned out. To look at the other side of the sympathy equation, the one being sympathized with may feel as if they are causing pain to the sympathizer, and feel guilty.

Empathy requires much more of an advanced integration of thought and feeling. In empathy, no past is spoken about. The only thing present is the other person's experience, feelings, and story. As Kelly Bryson says in Don't Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion For Self With Compassion For Others, "Relating to another's experience is about you. Empathizing is about them."

When one person understands the other's plight and at the same time maintains a healthy emotional distance, that's empathy. Active thinking is required to calm one's own possible emotional reactivity. The automatic impulse to judge and criticize must be put aside.

Empathy is concerned with a much higher order of human relationship and understanding: engaged detachment. In empathy, we "borrow" another's feelings to observe, feel, and understand them, but not to take them onto ourselves. By being a participant-observer, we come to understand how the other person feels. An empathetic observer enters into the equation to be with the other's experience, and then removes him/herself to think about and to verbalize.

Since the empathizer is not taking the other's feelings personally, the empathizer does not feel that they have "caused" the other's feelings and thus does not react with anger, shame or guilt.

2. The desire to punish oneself for hurting another

Finding fault with another is unproductive. But so is the self flagellation that may occur after one learns that their activities have triggered hurt in another.

Self blame is the refusal to give oneself empathy, and has painful consequences for both people.

In the process of self blame, connection with the one who was hurt is cut off. The focus goes to the self, instead of the injured party. The person who could be helped to restore their sense of wellbeing is hurt--yet again.

Let's say an adult child, in an attempt to find self respect by finally speaking up, tells her mother of ways she was hurt in her childhood by constant criticism. The mother may deny that hr daughter's view ever happened. Or, the mother may turn and blame the adult child, "But you kept breaking the house rules!" Yet again, the mother may give her good reasons that the criticisms were necessary: "My parents did the same with me, and I turned out all right, so I thought it would be good for you too."

But even more unproductive may be the mother's crumbling into guilt and shame, "I know I was a terrible mother; I never paid attention to anything but success. I feel terrible, I don't know how I can live with myself, I'm such a selfish person, I wish I were dead," etc. The conversation can get right back to focusing on the parent's pain. Once again this leaves the adult child's feelings and needs unseen, and unrecognized. In this case, what the adult child needs is to see the parent's pain, his real remorse about the fact that the adult child was hurt. Not that the parent is hurting about his own self.

When a caretaker cannot hear with empathy that they have hurt the child, it sets up a fundamental internal conflict for the child with devastating life consequences. The child must choose to lose either 1) a sense of a zesty self if it does not to share their painful feelings with the parent, or 2) a sense of safe connection with the parent if they do share their painful feelings.

Importantly, in addition, when empathy to oneself is cut off, more pain for the self and less empathy for the other is the result. The longer one is judging themselves, refusing self empathy, the longer it will take to develop true understanding of the other person. If we want to make a change in our behavior, understanding and accepting one's self comes first. Punishing never helps in the long run--punishing either the other or the self.

3. When a need is met, a vulnerable tenderness may show up

Sometimes, people may ward off another's empathy for the mere fact that it is needed so much that if empathy is received, it may trigger even more vulnerability. For example, in my clinical practice, I often find that when a client's unrecognized need is met, there are tears. Tears of gratitude, of relief, and also of sadness at the former deprivation. Last week, in a difficult call to a client's teacher, while the client was in the room with me, I defended the validity of my client's point of view. After the call, my client sobbed, "No one has ever stuck up for me like that. Thank you."

Another example: decades ago, before most people had stopped smoking, a cigarette-smoking woman in her 20's, had recently broken up with her boyfriend and was lonely and depressed. In an initial interview she rummaged in her purse for her lighter. As she dug and dug but couldn't find her lighter, I asked, "Would you like a light?" She burst into tears at this kindness, which she felt that she had not experienced for so long.

When we are without information, experience and perspective about empathy it can be difficult to give and receive this "single most important skill in intimate relationships" (Love & Stosny). And the truth is that even when we realize the importance of empathy and decide to learn the skills, it can still be challenging. I will write about the hurdles to be jumped in a future post.

The main point I want to make about empathy is that even though it is sometimes difficult to give, to get, and to learn, it is worth the effort.

Raise Self Esteem with the Lifeblood of Empathy

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:43:04 +0000

"Shared sorrow is half sorrow, shared joy is double joy." -Unknown

"The most dangerous enemy of mental health is isolation. Our needs for connection are hard-wired." Susan Johnson, PhD

Sometimes we forget the importance of the mutual empathy that friendships offer for our wellbeing and self esteem. This morning's Los Angeles Times Health Section reminds us of the power of connection and "empathy's [good] effect" on healing colds.

I offer the next few posts about empathy; what it is and is not, why it is important, and what keeps us from giving and receiving empathy.

The opposite of empathy

"How could you do that to me!?" I heard that phrase, I mean really heard it, when I called my mother to tell her that I had decided to get a divorce from my doctor husband of 10 years. By that time I had experienced enough therapy with empathy to know that her response was ever so self-centered. There was no concern for what I was going through, or for how it would impact my children, or even for my later-to-be ex-husband.

I had known in my guts, thought not yet in my head, that any distress that her offspring had would be experienced by her as a betrayal--as treason, even. I knew not to expect any compassion.

That was then. Now, remembering the exchange is very funny to me; it's so outrageously unempathic. Now I can have compassion for the emotionally fragile woman, who had always longed to become an MD herself and who felt she needed academic status to feel worthwhile. Now I know in my veins the immeasurable difference it makes to receive and give empathy, and to do without it. And now I have a passion to make a difference to people who are deprived of empathy, people who still have to live with the daily disconnect and lasting loneliness.

The problem is, many people may have had little experience with being given empathy and don't know the difference.

Why is empathy so important?

I call empathy lifeblood, because it gives us vitality. After all, a basic everyday, all day human need is to be seen, heard and recognized for who we are. Not for how someone would like us to be. Not for how someone is trying to get us to be. But for who we are inside: Our feelings, thoughts, desires, and dreams.

Receiving and giving empathy meets that indestructible human need for recognition. Empathy is so appreciated by Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly, that he dubs it one of the Ten Heroic Virtues. He writes: "We need to feel connected to each other. We need to feel we belong, are worthy of metaphorically being reached for, of being held." Keen goes on to say that empathy is not simply receptive. "[Empathic] Listening is the art by which we reach across the space between us. Passive attention does not work."

We were born hardwired to feel our emotions. All of our feelings are survival mechanisms. When we pay attention to our feelings, and think about them, we can use them to help us understand what we need from moment to moment. With the knowledge of what we need, we can take action to meet those needs. Now the empathy boost: When another person makes an attempt to guess or can sense and express what we feel, it can be like an energy transfusion. It gives us a burst of hope and optimism and energy. That renewed energy brings us closer to being able to act upon what we need. That way we can meet our human obligation of taking good emotional care of our selves.

Pat Love & Steven Stosny, authors of How to Improve Your Marriage without Talking about It, say, "Developing the ability to experience the world through your partner's eyes, while holding on to your perspective, may be the single most important skill in intimate relationships."

"I have come to believe that empathy, more than any other human faculty, is the key to loving relationships and the antidote to the loneliness, fear, anxiety, and despair that affect the lives of so many people, " writes Arthur Ciaramicoli in The Power of Empathy.

I've spent decades learning about the power of empathy to heal and support blossoming of the self and relationships. And I have come to believe that love is the commitment to be willing to see any and everything from the other person's point of view. To me, then, commitment to conscious empathy is real love.

What is empathy?

Webster defines empathy as: n.(1904) The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or the present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated directly.

Another definition: the ability to accurately understand and sensitively respond to the experience of another living being.

Examples of empathy

Imagine a toddler trying to walk over to a puppy, lose his balance and plop to the floor. His first response is a surprised look. An empathic mother might respond lightly: "Uh oh!" showing she understands that he made a surprise blooper- from his point of view. He didn't achieve the continuous walk he had intended. If she runs to him, shrieking, "Oh my God, you poor thing!" she is showing her own anxious point of view.

A more complex empathy might be with a teenage daughter who is pleading for an expensive prom dress, which the parents are unwilling to buy. Saying, "You want to feel special and look extra-beautiful on this very special night. And you want to fit in with what your friends are wearing" would be empathic. It shows that you understand her point of view. "Who do you think you are," or, "Money doesn't grow on trees," are not empathic responses. There's nothing about her point of view in either statement.

Or, to use a dating example, a woman, I'll call her Judy, tells her live-in boyfriend that she is going to see the movie Lars and the Real Girl with her friend Sally that night. He heard her speak two weeks ago of getting free tickets to that movie from a movie survey company. When she comes in later than expected, her boyfriend is withdrawn. He tells her, "I remember that you got free tickets and went to that movie a couple of weeks ago. Judy empathically responds, "Since you thought I had already seen Lars and the Real Girl, I can imagine you thought I might be lying when I said I was going to see it with Sally. I can imagine it made you feel distrustful."

Spontaneous empathy

Empathy can sometimes seem to appear spontaneously. More often, there needs to be a deliberate effort to experience and express it.

Here's an example of the spontaneous version. Once as an old boyfriend and I were breaking up, he stood at my open front door as he was making his final exit, shouting, "And you can go to Hell!" As I told a girlfriend about that goodbye scene, she said, "How could you take being treated like that?" But I wasn't hurt by his uncharacteristic explosiveness. I had seen into his usually sweet blue eyes, I saw the pain there. I was not insulted or afraid. I understood.

Willed empathy

Empathy is usually, however, a controlled, intentional activity needing a thoughtful, active and intelligent exploration. The focus is on what lies under the surface of another human being.

Empathy requires balance between over-heatedness and frigidness. We must integrate feelings and thoughts in order to not get over-aroused by our emotions. In an intense encounter, it requires that we slow down so that thoughts can catch up with our feelings.

So-called "negative" emotions like fear, anger, shame and guilt make high metabolic demands on our bodies. When there is such high physiological arousal, our focus narrows. This narrowing of perspective has helped us for millions of years to survive in an emergency by eliminating anything that would distract us from being able to fight or get away.

The problem at this stage of our human evolution is that functioning from our old brain allows us to go into "prove them wrong and myself right" position (fight)or "I'll just get out as fast as I can, or withdraw internally" (flight). Our widened perspective of the whole picture vanishes. And we can get "blinded' by our emotions and say and do things which only escalate the conflict.

Barriers to giving empathy

1. Impatience at having our needs for empathy temporarily unmet

One of the most difficult times to be empathic is when someone is misunderstanding us and not thinking well of us. We can feel a desperate need to explain why we did what ever we did, i.e., "I was just trying to help you." We may feel an urgency to at least prove they are wrong about their opinion about us: "I didn't mean it that way!" Alternatively, we may want to prevent them from feeling pain, as in, "But I love you, how could you think I would do that."

But to really build the safe haven of relationships, we first need to connect before correcting their interpretation of our behavior. We connect by speaking of where they are emotionally before giving our point of view. Let's say you are an office supply salesman at a party with your new wife. A woman finds out what you do and starts telling you about a new recycled paper her company uses for their business cards.

At home, after the party, your wife is distressed at what she thinks is your flirting. The empathic path would have you saying something like, "Oh, so it seemed as if I was flirting with her when I leaned over and took her card. I can understand that. I wonder if you were afraid I was going to call her and ask her for a date." With empathy, you correct her understanding second. Only after verbalizing her viewpoint, you explain that the woman was telling you about a new recycled paper and that she was showing you her business card which was made of it. That's the hard part-waiting to share your point of view, allowing yourself to be misunderstood for a while.

2. Desire to punish "bad" others

Unfortunately many of us were raised with the idea that the most important, even the first thing to do when there is conflict, is to determine who is right and who is wrong, or who is innocent and who is guilty, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. (Does the playground blurt, "You started it!" sound familiar?)

When one person "punishes" another by attack, or by withdrawal of either the self or of love, nothing helpful ever happens. A dramatic example is when one partner has an affair. The "bad"/punished one may stop an outward activity, but internally the resentment at feeling coerced and the fear of being treated without caring lingers on and on and on.

The person who "wins" by punishing and therefore stopping the other's behavior never really feels safe either. He/she knows the new behavior didn't come from a real owning of the different behavior. Understanding what unmet needs or false beliefs underlay the affair needs to happen for real change to occur.

3. Fear of rewarding or encouraging "bad" behavior

When I was growing up, there was much interest in "conditioning" good behavior. There was a belief that if one responded with warmth to another's pain, it only made the person express more pain to get more sympathy. "If I try to understand him, he'll keep coming home late!" is the belief.

I remember getting sick just once when I still lived in my parents' house. I was fourteen, too sick to go downstairs to eat, sitting propped up against some pillows, waiting for my unwanted lunch to be brought upstairs by my mother. I saw her walk across the room towards me with a tray in her hands. As she leaned down to place the tray on my lap, she rammed the tray into my stomach. I cried out in shock, "Why did you do that?" She scowled back," I don't want to condition you to be sick by rewarding you!"

The belief is that if someone is treated kindly when they do something that doesn't please us, they will just do the 'bad' thing more. The desire is to control the behavior of the other. Many people have rigid rules about how other people should act and they think that the others are 'bad' if they do not act according to their own rules.

I have heard parents say "Ignore him. He just wants attention." To me this is similar to saying, "Don't feed him. He is just hungry." I've even heard hospital personnel say, "She's just trying to manipulate us by threatening suicide, so I'll just say, 'go ahead and jump!'"

We can see here some of the barriers to our giving empathy. My next post will cover some of the barriers to receiving empathy.

Is Anger Good or Bad For Self Esteem?

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:46:41 +0000

"Pushing, Shouting, Shoving in Tampa Town Hall" and "Town Hall Free-For-Alls: Screaming and Chaos" cry TV headlines as healthcare reform is debated. We see enraged and truly terrified people screaming in turbulent gatherings.

Sadly, the raging behavior does not help the people doing it get closer to having their needs met. The problem is not that they are feeling angry, but that they are not using their anger to clarify for themselves specifically what their needs are, and plan how they could more effectively act to have their needs met.

I work with many conflict avoidant people, so problems I see with anger are often related to a difficulty or unwillingness to experience anger. And it seems that there is much helpful material written about how to stop destructive actions, but there is much less written to support people who avoid anger. So this post outlines some of the ways people lose self esteem and zest by various anger avoiding methods.

The problem: self contempt and rejection for feeling states

The anger avoidant person believes that they are a bad person for merely having the feelings of anger, irritation, disappointment, frustration. But it's not just anger that people reject themselves for feeling. Any of the other emotional states can trigger people to have a secondary shame reaction.

A major cause of people's contempt towards themselves is related to their perceived inability to regulate their emotions. Two aspects of self esteem, feeling competent to manage your self and feeling loveable, converge in the area of how we talk to ourselves about our feelings.

Examples of self rejecting ways people talk to themselves about their feelings

Here are some of the self contemptuous, shaming ways that people respond to their own emotional states.

"What's the matter with me?" says the distressed person, holding back tears.

"Who would want to be around me," I'm such a downer, wails the sad person.

"They just ridicule me, and leave the room when I'm anxious," frets the anxious.

"I'm way too needy to be around people," says the lonely one.

"I disgust myself, so I know I'll disgust them too," cringes the shamed person.

"I don't deserve them in my life," says the abusively angry person.

Four zest killing, self esteem lowering responses to our own anger

Here I talk about one use of anger to avoid other feelings, and three ways people avoid anger. All of these strategies lower self esteem, and all of these strategies can be changed to more beneficial methods.

1. Aggression

One person may easily be aware of feeling angry, but unaware of the other feelings, and the needs that are fueling the anger. That person may bully, aggressively hurting others. Later, they may feel guilt and shame about their actions, and their self esteem is lowered. On a deep level we all need to feel compassion for others and when we act counter to that need, it comes back to bite our own self esteem.

2. Suppression

Another person may feel the anger, try to suppress it, or minimize it and therefore not benefit from the information it is giving about their unfulfilled core values or needs that are discounted. If someone has a belief that they should accept everything, they may not set appropriate boundaries. With lack of self protective boundaries they in essence hang out a "walk on me" sign. The usual scene with suppressing anger is that the internal pressure builds up until the self-suppressing can no longer hold and emotional eruption follows. Then the person feels remorse, shame and self esteem plummets.

3. Turning against the self

Yet another person may turn their anger against themselves and shame themselves. The condition for this dynamic is that something in the environment disappoints the person, and then the person finds fault shames themselves. This helps them still feel connected to the disappointing other. After all, is the inner experience, the other person didn't do anything wrong, oneself self was defective.

An example of someone who grew out of responding to her own anger this way is Annie (discussed in previous posts). She initially came to me feeling great shame and agitation. She had been seeing a therapist who routinely came to session 10-15 minutes late. Sometimes he would even leave a session for ten minutes to make coffee for himself.

She felt grateful to him for seeing her early in the morning before work, so she did not feel entitled to have her anger. As she continued to accept his behavior and accuse herself of being needy, her self esteem kept dropping. "I was just getting worse and worse," she remembers.

While Annie initially could not tolerate her own anger at her previous therapist, she learned to recognize and use her anger. She learned to recognize his lies as his integrity issue, not her unimportance. She learned to recognize she needed to go into business for herself, and not expect him to acknowledge her.

4. Non-recognition of anger

The fourth response to our own anger that I want to talk about here is that of not even recognizing that we are feeling anger.

Why is non recognition of our own anger a problem? What you can't recognize, you can't regulate. As John Gray's book title asserts, "What You Can Feel, You Can Heal." In fact, in my very first therapist training, I learned that an important function of therapy is to "give people a language for their feelings so that they don't need to act them out."

Before we can recognize that we are feeling angry, we have to have learned to name the feeling and recognize how it feels inside ourselves. Ideally we are taught to name our feelings as a young child. But as I have found in my practice, people often do not recognize their own anger. This often happens in families with rigid, authoritarian family rules. The children in these families are often taught that they should not show anger towards their parents with their faces, words, tones of voice, or actions.

Josie's Journey

Josie (a fictional composite) grew up in a family in which the parents based their self esteem on how obedient the children were. No dissent was allowed. Josie often heard her parents criticize her older sister: "Get that look off your face, Missy." She heard threats: "You don't like it? Well, then, Miss High and Mighty, I'll drive you to the prison in just 20 minutes. Then you'll appreciate what you had." Not only the threatening words and tones, but also the scornful looks, taught Josie to want to avoid and to not even recognize her anger.

But it was not only the fear of receiving contempt that made Josie unable to recognize and use her anger. It was also that she had never been taught to recognize her own anger. She was never told, for example, "Yes, Honey, you are angry right now because you need to have your rights to your own property respected, not have your backpack stolen. Let's look at what can you do to get it back." So with no words to name her experience, she could not recognize it, think about it, and use it. When someone has not had their experience named and explained, the experience can remain unconscious. (Contemporary psychoanalysts would say this unrecognized experience is the territory of the unvalidated unconscious.)

How Josie came to recognize her anger

By the time I met Josie, she was 45. This story shows the work she did before she met me. Her previous therapy work had taught her to recognize her anger (though she still had trouble from time to time). Being able to recognize and use her anger made her able to work so successfully with me to improve her marriage.

She was 25 at the time the following events unfolded. Josie's husband had just told her that one of his secretaries had walked into his private office, told him she was in love with him, leaned over his desk, kissed him and said that she wanted to have an affair with him.

Josie turned white as her husband was telling her this. She felt strangely disconnected, and had tears dripping from her eyes, without experiencing anything she could verbalize. Later that day, Josie thought about suicide, and thought that if she woke up in the middle of the night still feeling so much pain, that she would take enough pills to kill herself. Fortunately, she did not wake up in the middle of the night, and also fortunately, she had a session with her therapist early the next morning. Her therapist responded to her story, "You don't seem angry with him. I wonder why. I am angry with him." Josie puzzled, "But he didn't do anything wrong. He told her he loved me and wouldn't have an affair."

Later that day, she lay in bed on her back and was going over the session in her mind. As she remembered her therapist's remark about his being angry, she suddenly felt heat in her pelvic area and felt it rise up through her trunk, "like a steam roller going right up my front."

She was excited. She realized that she was experiencing anger consciously for the first time. Her anger had moved from being unconscious to being conscious through the validation by her therapist. The irony was that as soon as she felt and recognized her anger at her husband, she liked him better. She also liked herself a lot better. Her mood picked up. She was able to move from a tearful, somnambulant state to a productive state.

Josie moved up a step in being able to regulate her self esteem by recognizing her anger. Recognition, being aware of and able to name our feeling states, is the first step to an ability to regulate our emotions. Giving up a felt belief that anger itself is bad and that we are bad if we feel anger lifts self esteem to start with. And then gaining the power to use our anger positively makes us feel competent in that raises our good feelings about ourselves.

These two stories of Annie and Josie examples show that anger avoidant strategies can be worked through to a zestier self and self esteem.

The solution: recognizing that feelings have survival value and learning how to regulate them

After all, we were born hard-wired with abilities to experience and express feelings. Every feeling is important as a signal to ourselves, giving us useful information.

Feeling states are also communications to others. Think of a hungry newborn whose cries of distress get louder and louder with frustration and outrage. If no one feeds them, they may get worked up to a red-faced, whole-bodied, clenched-up thrashing.

So my conclusion is that anger is good. It's the judgments and meanings we make of our feelings and what we do with them that can be a problem for our self esteem.

Your Most Powerful Self-Esteem Lifter is You

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:01:38 +0000

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." —Eleanor Roosevelt

"You're not the boss of me!" asserts the three-year-old, rebelling against parental limit setting. When it comes to regulating our self esteem, we should all be so three-years-old, refusing to give that power away.

All of us are subject to transitory ups and downs in our self esteem--the ongoing evaluations of ourselves. Our fluctuating self views are constantly modified by feedback about how and what we are feeling, thinking, and doing. That feedback comes both from outside the self, and from the inside. Positive internal feedback leads to high self-esteem; negative, to low self-esteem.

Types of feedback and how they affect self esteem

Suppose someone makes a false criticism of you. For example: "Yuck, your green hair is really disgusting," when your hair is really brown. Would you think less of yourself? Not so much. More likely, you'd either laugh at the absurdity, or think they were a bit daft (or colorblind) at the least. Why wouldn't it lower your self esteem? Because you have to agree with a criticism in order for it to deflate your self esteem. The comment about your hair is an example of noncredible negative external feedback.

On the other hand, let's say someone compliments you. Let's suppose someone said, "You look so well rested." Ordinarily you may like this, but if you had spent the morning bemoaning the bags under your eyes and didn't sleep until 3 am, would your self esteem be raised up? No, you would probably just dismiss their opinion, internally at least. This would be an example of noncredible positive external feedback.

Categories of feedback are either positive or negative, either internal or external, and either credible or noncredible.

And the most powerful combination of these qualities for raising self esteem is credible, positive internal feedback.

So that you can see more clearly why your internal feedback to yourself has more effect on raising your self esteem than outside feedback, let's look at more examples.

Credible negative external feedback example. An admired boss scowls, "The document was supposed to be delivered by Monday, and it didn't get here until Tuesday." While, you probably wouldn't like to hear about the missed deadline, it wouldn't lower your self esteem as much as if you said to yourself, "I am always late. I'm sabotaging myself-again. I'm such a loser."

Credible positive external feedback example. Your niece says, "It meant a lot to me to have you at my graduation." You would probably feel pleased to hear her say this.

Credible positive internal feedback example. Using the example of your niece, above, suppose that internally you say to yourself, "I really did manage to organize my schedule so that I could be there for her. It took a lot, but I did it!" Notice which has the more powerful effect on your view of yourself.

In the example above, clearly, the internal feedback has a greater impact on your self esteem. Your own opinion has the most powerful effect on your zestiness and self esteem. So your self esteem boils down to what feedback you give yourself--what you say to yourself about yourself.

It also follows that how you talk to yourself depends upon the meanings you make about yourself according to what you think, what you feel, and what you do.

In the next post, I'll write about one of the biggest self esteem smashers-the way you talk to yourself (internal negative feedback) about your emotional states. That feedback is so often noncredible, because it was formed from messages passed on to you through the limitations of your early caretakers.

To learn more about Dr. Bolton's work, visit her websites at: www.DrJaneBolton.com and www.FreedomFromShame.com.

Build Self Esteem and Zest with Intention and Imagination

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:47:57 +0000

"Prison bars imagined are no less solid steel." R. Crowell. "Imagination is more important than knowledge." A. Einstein. "When imagination and will work together, all things are possible." C. Fillmore.

Imagination is one of the six functions of our minds (along with logic, reason, will, memory, perception, intuition). Our ability to use our imagination for our benefit plays a major part in our experience of power, self esteem and joy. In fact, one definition of the word "empowerment" is the ability to assign advantageous meanings to life's events. Facts are facts. But the meanings of the facts we make up, imagine, and interpret all the time. We can't help ourselves--our minds are made to create meanings.

Probably everybody knows by now that there are two million bits of information pouring into our senses every second. Our nervous systems, however, are not set up to handle all that that information.

One of our protections against data overwhelm is the way our belief systems filter out information. Belief systems help us by making it likely that we will automatically and quickly make meanings-a short cut. For example, if we believe that dancing is evil, we will automatically assume a dance teacher is suspect. Our automatic meaning-making can imprison us by diminishing our self esteem, limiting our possibilities and causing relational rifts.

Common examples of disempowering meanings

Below are three typical unexamined meanings that leach our self esteem and zest.

The prison of low self esteem: "I'm a failure."
So often I hear people in their 30's calling themselves a failure because they believe they should have been married with children by now. "I'm 35, and I'm behind all my friends. I'll never find someone right for me."

The prison of distrust: "He doesn't care about my needs, only about his."
"The phone was ringing; I was throwing up in the bathroom when our realtor called. My husband answered and was relaying questions about when the realtor could bring someone over to look at the house. He didn't care that I was sick!" (He was actually trying to please her by having the house sold as soon as possible, which is what she told him she wanted.)

The prison of unearned guilt: "I find other women attractive to look at, so I shouldn't be with my girlfriend." "When I look at a beautiful woman I wonder what it would be like to have sex with her. I must not love my girlfriend. I'm really not being fair to her. I'd better break up."

How to change your meaning, and change your zest

When you take a stressful, painful or frightening situation and work at assigning supportive meanings to it, you can increase your empowerment and zest.

An example of how to change a meaning and change your zest is what Joey (a fictionalized composite) did to help himself. Several months ago Joey's wife who was in a hotel bar with her business associates and had been drinking too much. She had not eaten all day and needed help getting to her hotel room. A male business associate walked her there and attempted to kiss her. She told Joey what happened, and that it didn't go any further. Despite the fact that he knows her to be rigorously honest he began to suspect her story and was obsessed with imagining painful scenarios. His wife, too, suffered greatly, from observing him in such pain. Joey and his wife began daily fights.

5 Steps to making a meaning change

Using Joey as an example, I show several steps to making a change of meaning.

1. First ask yourself: Are you aware of your present attitude towards it?
Joey certainly knew he was irate and terribly hurt. He imagined that much more had happened than what she had told him.

2. Determine whether you are willing to change your attitude about it.
Joey actually desperately wanted to believe that his relationship was not tainted, even ruined. He was very willing to change his painful imaginings.

3. If you are willing to change your point of view, list 10 positive things that have happened or could happen as a result of the situation. Notice any resistance you may have to doing this. Write down your resistant thoughts.

In this case, Joey was way ahead of me. He actually announced that he wanted to stop imagining all the things he'd like to do to punish her or to attack the man.

Joey's list of 10 positive things began with, "After seeing the pain involved here in feeling betrayed, I could never cheat on her-or anyone." He quickly added, "She has been so hurt by the pain that I've felt, that I'm sure she won't ever do anything like that. Her pain feels like a sort of an insurance policy against this ever happening again." He continued, I've also learned anger management methods that will help me keep my cool with my kids and help me in my work." As Joey began to focus on the positive results of his originally painful situation, he started returning to his zest point.

4. Chose an intention that supports a form of creative visualization about what's possible.
The deliberate imagining of desired scenes is an important step, and makes this process more than mere "positive thinking."

Joey chose the intention, "We will be even closer than before. We can re-connect and commit to making our relationship a priority."

He began using his imagination to create possibilities. "I 'm picturing reconnecting as we get ready to go to sleep. We've gotten into the habit of falling asleep while watching TV, instead of connecting. I'll restart our old habit of taking turns reading to each other while we snuggle. And I can initiate our good night kiss, which we both love, but have let slip away." His energy visibly builds as he plans what he can do, now that he has shifted his attitude.

This kind of deliberate work of imagination usually needs to be recreated several times a day, when the automatic scary pictures and thoughts rear their heads.

5. Take the actions that support your intention.
Joey's smile when he returned the next week broadcast his success with this exercise. He was smiling a similar smile a couple of months later announcing, "My wife and I are pregnant!"

The choice is ours. We can be trapped or free to invent. An anonymous writer rings true, "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to chose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness."

Visit DrJaneBolton.com and her personal blog, Freedom From Shame .

Zest Builders & Breakers: The Power of Choice

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:28:50 +0000

I've been rereading Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl's inspiring story of how he used conscious meaning making to survive through his grueling experience at Auschwitz. Frankl says, "We are never left with nothing when we realize we always have the freedom to choose how to respond to the situation." Of course how we respond to a situation is based upon the meanings we make of it.

Achieving and maintaining a zesty approach to life includes being able to distance from our experiences enough to notice what interpretations or meanings we apply to things, people, and events. When we can detach from our experience and observe, we can see whether we are assigning a meaning that is supportive to us or one that is unsupportive. And we can change the meaning if we realize our meaning is unsupportive.

I'm going to tell two stories about meaning making. The first story shows the heartbreaking consequences of being unaware of the interpretations we make of events. The second story shows a life change when a boy made a new meaning of a past traumatic event. At the end of the post I offer some experiential exercises to help build your meaning making observation power.

Celebration Aborted: A cautionary tale about making unsupportive interpretations

A well-known story told by Thich Nhat Hanh shows a tragic consequence of assigning a disadvantageous meaning. In the story, a Husband had to leave his pregnant Wife to go to war. Two years later, he came back, and the Wife hurried out to get some food to make a special meal. While she was gone, he tried to get his Son to call him daddy. But because his Son had never known him before, the boy refused to call him daddy. He said, "Mister, you're not my daddy. My daddy talks to my mommy at night, and my mommy cries to him. And when she sits down, he sits down. And when she lies down, he lies down too."

The Husband's heart hardened as he listened to the story. He was so distressed that he started going out drinking every night and staying out to the wee hours of the morning. The Wife became so distressed that she threw herself in the river and drowned. When the man heard about his wife's drowning, he went home to take of the boy.

The first night he was home, he was going to read the boy a good night story. He put a light by the side of the bed. All of a sudden the little boy jumped up and down. "Mister, Mister, Mister!" he squealed, pointing to a shadow of the Husband on the wall. "That's my Daddy! My mother would talk to him at night, and when she sat down, he would sit down too. When she lay down, he would lay down too."

Contrary to what her Husband thought, the Wife had been crying in her imagination to her Husband, "Please come home. I can't stand missing you so much." The Husband believed that his interpretation was a fact. Had he been better able to see that he was assigning to the boy's story the meaning that she was unfaithful, he could have asked her to give him the truth. Then he might have been celebrating his homecoming instead of a coping with horror.

Celebration Found: A corrective tale about changing unsupportive interpretations

The second story, a dramatic and beautiful real life story I heard yesterday. It's about how changing the meaning of a life event can change an experience, and even a whole life.

A thirteen year old boy asked for help from a psycho-spiritual practitioner. The boy had been terrified and trembling every day for the past two years. His quivering fear state had started when his father had gotten something lodged in his throat and couldn't breathe. The boy had managed to dislodge the item and, within moments, the father was fine. The incident left the boy, however, with the belief (interpretation, meaning) that his parents were going to die. This led to his accompanying constant terror and trembling.

The practitioner talked the boy back to the moment in the episode when it was clear that the father was okay. The practitioner coached the boy to realize and focus on the fact that his father was alive. And that it was because of him! As the boy refocused on these new meanings he moved to a state of celebration and gratitude. His two years of anguish and trembling vanished. His zest returned--and it has stayed.

Clearly, recognizing and changing our automatically assigned meanings is in order if the interpretations do not add to our zestiness. The exercises below help develop the ability to recognize our meaning making process.

Exercises to build recognition of our unconscious automatic meaning making

The first step, as usual, is to become aware that you are assigning meanings. These three exercises can help you increase your power through observation of your interpretations.

In each of the following meaning making experiments, read the bolded sentence. Then look slowly around and apply the idea in the sentence to what you see. Apply it to anything your eyes have lighted upon. Just glance easily and fairly quickly around, selecting objects indiscriminately. For best results, make notes about your discoveries.

1. Nothing I see [in this room, on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything in itself.

"This table does not mean anything." "This chair does not mean anything." Continue naming objects, first near and then further away, adding: "does not mean anything in itself." Make sure nothing you see is intentionally avoided.

2. I have given everything I see [in this room, on this street, from this window, in this place] all the meaning it has for me.

The exercises for this sentence are the same as the first one. Begin with the things that are near to you, and apply the idea to whatever your glance rests upon. Then increase the range outward. Apply this idea as you look around you, on both sides, and behind you.

3. With this exercise, you apply the idea on a more abstract level. This practice period begins with spending about a minute noticing the thoughts that are crossing your mind.

These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see [in this room, on this street, from this window, in this place.]

Apply the idea to your thoughts. Say to yourself, "This thought about________(fill in the blank with your thought) does not mean anything. It is like the things I see [in this room, on this street, from this window, in this place.]"

May your days be zestier as you notice the interpretations you make and change the ones that don't support you.

Visit www.DrJaneBolton.com and www.FreedomFromShame blog with videos.

Should Everyone Play By Your Rules?

Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T., C.C. — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:33:57 +0000

Did you ever try to get a squirrel to eat an acorn with a knife and fork? Probably not. You haven't tried to enforce an unenforceable rule of behavior on the squirrel. So you probably haven't gone around feeling resentful toward squirrels with bad table manners. Why? Because no one can enforce impeccable table manners on a squirrel.

With people, it is often more difficult to tell the difference between what we have the power to influence and what we don't. And, if we are not clear about the limitations of our power, we expect the impossible from ourselves. The result is exasperation, helplessness and resentment. All of which drain our zest.

A common source of personal power leakage is in trying to enforce our standards, and our rules, on other people. We may, consciously or unconsciously, expect others to live by our own rules and standards.

An example of trying to enforce an unenforceable rule is when we expect a chronically late person to be on time when meeting us. Another example is expecting a messy person to straighten up their office for our visits. In each case, the other person chooses how to live their life and we have no or very little ability to make them follow our rules for timeliness or cleanliness.

We have several choices when we are constantly distressed by another's actions or inactions. One of the choices is, of course, to have no further interaction with the other. Another, is to communicate calmly and clearly your distress and to ask for a behavior change. When all else has failed, and you don't want to leave the relationship or keep harping on your request, adjusting your expectations is necessary.

Common unenforceable rules include the following: People have to tell me the truth. They have to be fair to me. My parents have to stop criticizing me. Other people shouldn't judge me. Life has to be easy. My partner has to give me an anniversary card. She has to care for me the way I want to be cared for.

Annie * discovers of one of her power leaks and gains her freedom.

A client told me this story. She was employed by an art gallery owner; one of her duties was to prepare copies of artist's paintings. "I had worked all weekend on the woman's painting--on my own time--not getting paid extra. When she came to pick up the painting, my boss actually sat there and told her that HE had stayed up late last night and gotten up at 5:00 am to finish it for her. And he had not made one brush stroke on that painting! I had to inhibit my mouth from dropping wide open right in front of the woman. He told her that right in front of me.

"It was a moment of such clarity for me. I realized that he's just going to do what he does. He just is not going to do things the way I've wanted him to. But in a flash I was freed. I just let go and felt such relief! I saw that that is just the way he is. I can't get him to be the way I want. Wow."

How to Challenge Your Unenforceable Rules for Others

Here are 7 steps to follow to improve your power leakage.

1. Acknowledge that you are upset and name what you are feeling: possibly hurt, angry, depressed, hopeless, and alienated. Annie used to get anxious when her boss ignored her needs. Then she would feel shame as if there must be something lacking in her for her boss to treat her that way. She later learned that she was angry--a feeling she previously did not allow herself to feel.

2. Recognize that your upset is partly because you are trying to enforce an unenforceable rule. Annie realized that, "He just is not going to do things the way I've wanted him to. "

3. Realize that you, more than the other person, are the one with the distress about the problem. Annie remarked, "He was going to take credit for what I had done. Again."

4. Articulate the unenforceable rule that is at the core of your upset. To find the rule, ask yourself, "What experience am I demanding to be different?" Annie understood that she was expecting him to behave the way she would.

5. Commit to consciously change your demands demanding and shift to thinking about what it is that you want or need. One way to find that want or need is to say to yourself, "I wish___", or "I hope__" or "It would be nice if___." In Annie's case, her first wish was to cut down on her hours of unpaid overtime work. Her longer term goal, she expressed as, "This is confirming that I need to go into business for myself. I guess I always knew, but was too scared to admit it."

6. Focus on finding your positive intention behind the demand or grievance. To help yourself find the positive intention, ask yourself the following questions.

• "How would my life be better if my desires were met?" Time and energy for her own painting, and more time with her husband were what Annie wanted.

• "What were my reasons for being in this situation in the first place?" Annie realized that she had previously felt that she needed her boss's view of her as an artist. She hadn't had enough confidence in herself.

• "What is my goal, expressed in positive terms?" "Going out on my own is what I have always wanted to do, but was too scared to do before," was Annie's happy conclusion.

7. Now work towards accomplishing your goal. The day after Annie made her realization, she contacted a web designer to start her own website. She's progressing beautifully.

Just ending a power leak by going for what you want and need and not trying to enforce your rules on others can increase your Zest Factor enormously.

* Names and other identifying information are changed to protect client confidentiality

To learn more about assertiveness skills, click: http://www.dr-jane-bolton.com/assertiveness.html. For self esteem skills, click http://www.dr-jane-bolton.com/self-esteem.html