Celebrating and Cultivating Our Better Angels

We have a lot to celebrate as we enter the New Year. The Iraq war is over for the United States; our troops have come home. I’m looking forward to a peaceful 2012.

Indeed, there’s now evidence that the world is getting more peaceful all the time. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has researched the past from 8000 BCE to the 1970’s and concludes that society has become less violent over the centuries. He’s written an 802-page book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, to prove his point. 

For starters, statistics released by the FBI show that violent crime in the United States has decreased by 13.4 percent over the last decade. To use a more visual example, today’s ads for gyms and exercise paraphernalia don’t “feature the use of fisticuffs,” as they did in the 1940’s “to restore manly honor.” Today, “bulging pectorals and rippling abdominals are shown in arty close-up for both sexes to admire. The advantage they promise is in beauty, not might.”

I skim the book; I don’t have to read every word to know I like it. His thesis of our evolving brains induces warm, fuzzy feelings of optimism in me.

Speaking of optimism, here’s a formula which elucidates one conundrum of our Human Condition and converts the Impossible to Possible, and even beyond to Joyous.

Negative Attachments, such as feeling like an outsider in society and/or within our own psyches, are best sublimated into artistic endeavors (activities like listening to music, writing poems, drawing and sketching, etc.). This will allow us to vent our negative feelings and externalize them in a healthy way.

If hostility and aggression are not acknowledged or sublimated, our dark or shadow side can create dissension and we have the tendency to externalize negativity on to others. In some cases this results in acts of violence.

(Extreme examples of this kind of projection include Hitler and other serial killers. Hitler’s own failure as a painter proves the importance of sublimating negative impulses through art. Because he failed to gain instantaneous fame through his painting, Hitler lashed out and externalized his anger by writing Mein Kampf.  His detachment from the positive within himself and humanity resulted in the devastating violence of the Holocaust  and WWII.)

 By contrast, we create Positive Attachments when we care and love ourselves – and when we care for others - as we do when we work toward positive thinking as mentioned in last week’s blog. (I cope with my shadow side/demons with exercise for the body and for the mind, I write a daily journal.)

Positive attachments increase optimism and energy. As we extend our care and love for people, places and things in our environment, we increase the possibilities of slouching toward and bringing about world peace. Amen.

Dear Reader: I welcome your comments. (jsimon145@gmail.com)

Energy: We Are What We Think

The genius Albert Einstein not only discovered the relationship of energy and matter in the physical realm, he also raised questions about the mind’s ventures into realms beyond the visible. I like to think he intuited the connection between mind and body. He certainly did not become derailed by negative thoughts and focused his abundant brain energy on problem solving.

 We know energy comes from calories in food and that calories from fruits, vegetables, lean protein, are better than those from fatty meats and rich pastries. But what about the energy from our thoughts?  I propose that Positive Thoughts are like good nutrition while negative thinking can harm us like junk food.

Paying attention to the quality of our thoughts is as vital as providing a well-balanced diet for our bodies.

Negative thinking discourages, leads to feelings of hopelessness, saps energy.  Negative thoughts clog our brain circuits similar to fatty foods blocking our coronary arteries.

Watching the news late at night, which abounds in negative happenings around the world, won’t lead to the highway of sweet dreams and can have a detrimental impact on the next day too.  Many of my patients don’t immediately recognize the connection between watching the 11 o’clock news, a poor night of sleep,  and their pessimistic mood the next morning.

If negative thinking is capable of pulling us down, positive thinking can lift our spirits and, quite often, enable us to successfully change our situation.

Many years ago, I suffered from depression and couldn’t budge my mind out of the doldrums to move forward in my life.  I discovered  the role of exercise:  putting my body in motion transferred  to my mind and I  let go of negative thoughts.

For me, exercise is as vital to my mind as to my body. When I don’t exercise, my thoughts dive into negative territory.

Studies show that daily exercise can be as effective as antidepressant medication!  (Medication may be necessary when a person is too depressed to motivate himself to go to the gym.)

I’ve noticed that dwelling on past failures saps my energy. When I forgive myself for mistakes, view them as learning experiences, part of the process of living, my energy  increases.

Negative and ambivalent feelings are part of the process of problem solving, but we need to be aware of them. The state of limbo (Should I? Shouldn’t I?) can lead to disequilibrium.  

A few years ago when I slipped on a patch of ice in the street, I realized I had been thinking negatively about my future just before I fell.  My mind was not focused on navigating the slippery surface.

Now I purposefully whistle a happy tune (the melody from the King and I) when I climb a ladder to change a light bulb. Positive thinking, like a protein drink, injects energy and the ballast of balance.

 Conclusion: We take good care of ourselves when we use energy to expand  awareness of how negative and positive thinking and feeling affects our bodies and minds.

Dear Reader: I welcome your comments. (jsimon145@gmail.com)

Giving and Gratitude

 Giving extends beyond material gifts. 

Helping a blind person across the street or catching a stranger’s attention to tell her she dropped her glove is a way of giving.

When we give a gift which meets the recipients’ needs, their delight lifts our spirits. The acts of giving and receiving nurture, sustain and enrich everyone.

Sometimes we don’t have the choice but have to give (at Christmas time, to the building superintendent, out of obligation). This kind of giving doesn’t nurture the heart and soul and may cause resentment. We’d do well to alter our lives to include as few of these situations as possible; however, this kind of obligated giving is often necessary. In many human societies, the act of mutually exchanging money, goods, etc. may contribute to social cohesion.

Gift giving has an extensive history, stretching back to before recorded time, when it was common for ancient cultures to give each other food or animal pelts to signify an event like a wedding. During the early days of the Roman Republic, citizens exchanged evergreen branches and sweet cakes on the Winter Solstice to symbolize a wish for prosperity in the coming year. In the Christian religion, the story of the three wise men who brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the baby Jesus has set the example for people to bestow presents on each other.

Though originally not a traditional part of the Jewish celebration of Chanukkah, the practice of gift giving has been added to prevent children from envying the presents their Christian friends receive.

According to Judaic principles and practice, anonymous giving is the highest form of contributing. The giver doesn’t ask for recognition or appreciation.

My own life has been marked by a complex relationship with giving and receiving. In my early 30s, I suffered from depression. My psychoanalyst, Dr. Van Bark, helped me unearth feelings of deprivation I’d kept buried since childhood.  I was raised by an intelligent single parent mother, overwhelmed with raising five children, who didn’t have the time or luxury to respond to my complex emotional needs.

I envied my colleagues who seemed to have more supportive parents and I envied them for having intact families. Envy fed my feelings of deprivation. To feel abundance required therapy and time for me to acknowledge what my parents gave and couldn’t give.

My emotions registered what I’d missed - the subtleties of understanding and empathy. Feelings of deprivation interfered with an appreciation of the gifts I’d received: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education.

A person in the throes of a manic episode may not have a realistic sense of what he can afford to give. If he depletes himself of basic necessities, money to pay rent and buy food, he’ll need charity himself. In the long run, this kind of imbalance doesn’t help anyone.

In Charles Dickens’s classic story A Christmas Carol, Scrooge hates Christmas because he can’t give. Rich in material goods, he’s impoverished emotionally because he was traumatized by a difficult childhood. He’s transformed by nightmares of the terrible fate awaiting him in the future (the royal road to the unconscious once again) that will come to pass if he doesn’t change. Ultimately the nightmares have an effect on Scrooge, who awakens and becomes a generous man.

I will never forget a very sad patient who couldn’t reveal her entire story because she said it was too tragic. She insisted she was searching for a KEY to help her resolve her distress.

I tried to assure her that the issue is not a key, but the step by step process of therapy which leads to understanding. My explanation failed to impress her and she left therapy. By the time she returned for a follow-up session a few years later, I’d discovered the Key of Gratitude.

 “You know, you were right. There is a key. The key of gratitude opens many doors,” I said, thrilled to share my discovery with her.

   

Her lips turned up in a slow smile, as if to say she knew it all along.  “I’m so glad to hear you say that!” she said. Serenity, like the scent of a lovely perfume, wafted through the room.

I wondered if she was another human angel blessing my life, arriving at a moment to complete a cycle, resonating through the invisible layers of  connectedness among us.

Conclusion: As bleak as matters may be, finding something for which we are grateful opens doors to abundance.

Real giving comes from the heart, from a feeling of abundance and gratitude. In these situations the giver is also the recipient. 

Dear Reader: I welcome your comments. (jsimon145@gmail.com)

Routing Out Royal Roads of Gold

In my last blog I referred to the shadow side of ourselves, the complex web of thoughts and feelings we keep hidden from our conscious life. As Francis Bacon is alleged to have said, “We are the last to know ourselves.


Not everyone has time and money to invest in years of psychotherapy/psychoanalysis to discover the hidden self(ves). Even so, we don’t need to despair. If we allow ourselves time, space, honesty and courage, dreams, daydreams and meditation are tools within our grasp.


We try to keep our contradictory feelings out of awareness because we assume we’re crazy to have them. But often they make good sense.


When I was ten years old I began to write a journal because I both loved and hated my newborn brother. Where to put these feelings except on paper?  To my surprise, owning my feelings relieved me. I don’t think I understood the whys until recently. (I loved my brother because he was adorable and I could indulge my maternal feelings and help take care of him. And I hated him because he diluted the attention I received from my overwhelmed mother.)  To experience mutually contradictory  emotions makes sense!


A dear friend of mine, a mathematician, familiar and comfortable dealing with the world of numbers, didn’t understand my writing compulsion until recently when she wrote down her thoughts and identified feelings she hadn’t been able to voice in a conversation.
“Now I see why you are always writing,” she said. 


Her sudden insight is what is known as an “aha” experience.


The concept of the “life-altering moment” (or “aha experience”) has become a popular and well-recognized state of mind, due in large part to Oprah Winfrey’s emphasis of the notion on her TV program. Originally known as the ‘eureka’ experience, the definition is based on the insight of Archimedes  (287-212 BC).  When he was taking a bath, he realized the amount of water he displaced related to his weight. He could apply the same phenomenon (of water displacement) to determine if the king’s crown was pure gold.  In his state of excitement, he leapt from the bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, Sicily yelling “Eureka, Eureka!” (“I found it; I found it.”)

Committing ourselves to daily or almost daily practice to rout out  ‘the royal road to the unconscious’  (as Freud referred to dreams) is not easy. Our minds construct endless arguments of resistance to defeat our constructive goals. Voices of judges censor, condemn, criticize.  Each of us harbors within our minds an enemy as cunning and clever as the Trojan horse.


We’re afraid to discover our opposing thoughts and feelings because we may realize we have to change. And change is very frightening.


 “I think I’m accustomed to my misery, “ a woman once told me after she’d spent a few years thinking about possible ways to improve her situation.


And that’s okay too. To choose to remain in a situation may be the best solution. What is important is that we recognize the possibility of choice.

Conclusion: To allow ourselves to become aware of our contradictory thoughts can be calming and diminish stress, even if we don’t act on them to change our lives. Acceptance is key.

Dear Reader: I welcome your comments. (jsimon145@gmail.com)

Acknowledging the 'Impossible', renders it 'Possible'.

This blog follows the last one in which I discuss some aspects of the human condition which render it impossible.

You may rightfully ask: what purpose does it serve to reveal the impossible, which seems like exposing a bare backside? (We know it’s there, but hide it under wraps.)

Because to acknowledge the impossible, paradoxically renders it possible. The awareness that we’re all racked by conflict lessens the pain; we’re less likely to flagellate ourselves with self-hate (which serves no purpose and saps our energy).

The Psyche as Battlefield

Our Father of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), proposed that our psyches are governed by the warring forces of Libido  (life force or energy), and Thanatos (the destructive, Death drive).

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875- 1961) viewed our behavior as an embodiment of the battle between the anima  (feminine) and the animus (masculine) sides of the psyche. He identified our shadow side as the hidden or repressed parts of the mind, roughly equivalent to the Freudian unconscious. Jung wrote, “Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

Both theorists agree that creativity lies in the buried portion (unconscious or shadow) of the mind. Their methods changed our view of the human psyche, showing that much of who we are and how we behave lies beyond our conscious control. They agreed that the goal is to elucidate, to render the unconscious conscious, and to become aware of the “shadow side” through free association and talk therapy.

(Dare I say all methods of psychotherapy aim to increase self-awareness of body, mind and feelings?)

In the recent film A Dangerous Method, the story develops as Carl Jung applies Freud’s method of talk therapy in his treatment of Sabina Spielrein, an eighteen-year-old woman who suffers from hysteria. Through speaking, through verbal (and ultimately physical) acknowledgment of Spielrein’s anxieties and neuroses, Jung eventually manages to cure his patient, endowing her with the tools to lead a mentally healthy existence. A remarkably accurate portrait of Jung and Freud, who figure prominently in the film, A Dangerous Method makes a great case for the importance – indeed, the necessity – of talk therapy.

I suggest that something in the Zeitgeist, the sentiment of our times, asks us to take another look at this period (the early 1900s) just before the outbreak of World War I. A society that had long been forced to separate rational science and unpredictable emotion was learning, through psychology and talk therapy in particular, to cope with and express its feelings in an entirely new way. In speaking frankly about one’s fears, dreams, attractions one could grasp the previously intangible and begin to reevaluate one’s lifestyle. The impossible could become possible.

Today talk therapy is as relevant as ever to reveal the hidden aspects of ourselves and explain our mysterious behavior.

Jung said,  “If you imagine a person brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a thick shadow. Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.”

With awareness comes acceptance of the various, often conflicting, aspects of ourselves which results in relief , greater comfort in our existence,  and even  beyond, to  moments of bemusement, pleasure and joy.

The goal is to own and integrate the positive and negative forces within our human psyches, to heal our broken selves and express our creativity, and work together to heal  our broken world.

Dear Reader: I welcome your comments. (jsimon145@gmail.com)