Category: Counseling

The Nourishing Opposite

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Yogic psychology says there’s more. Encountering these stuck and painful knots is the path. This perspective teaches us that we aren’t stuck, we’re only identifying with less satisfying “things.” One remedy, Patanjali tells us, is to look for the opposite (II:33). I think of it as the Nourishing Opposite (Fay, 2010) not just any opposite, but something that will actually invite more nourishment into our experience. Pain, then, is a process of pointing out the way to remember and return ourselves to our true nature. In integrating opposites, holding these opposites simultaneously (Bryant, 2009; Miller, 2014), a third higher synthesis occurs (Patanjali 2.48), in which suffering is eased.

Fay, Deirdre. Attachment-Based Yoga & Meditation for Trauma Recovery: Simple, Safe, and Effective Practices for Therapy (pp. 16-17). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

The prescription to nourish the opposite when feeling stuck is the same process as identifying presenting issues and corresponding client goals. In seeking the opposite of what pains us, we seek joy. Treatment plans that include objectives, interventions and modalities chart the path of the nourishing opposite. Together we seek ease for the anxious, joy for the grieving, elevation for the depressed, reality for the delusional, focus for the inattentive. Therapy invites the nourishing opposite.

What pains you? What is this pain’s opposite? Can you invite the nourishing opposite?

As a therapist-intern, I find myself sometimes wobbly having absorbed client anxieties, fears, angers, sadness and confusion. Why am I angry? Is this anger even mine? Is this pain mine? Am I mirroring client feelings? Or maybe my feelings are responding, like a song?

I have been feeling irritable this weekend. What is the nourishing opposite? Feeling agreeable? How do I feel agreeable? Accept what is, accept that for now I’m feeling irritable, sensitive, overwhelmed, cranky without shame.

Writing helps me. Sharing with you nourishes me. I already feel a bit more relaxed, allowing myself to feel irritable and agreeable at the same time.

Now you try it. What feeling is bothering you? What is the opposite? How do you invite the nourishing opposite? How can you sit with the contradiction?

This takes practice, doesn’t it…

May we return to our own nature by listening to our discomfort (over and over again),

Hungryphil

Photography by Nate Dale – New Adventure Production

Nourish Hope

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Chronic anxiety is a crisis of hope. It is the fear of a failed future. Depression is a crisis of hope. It is the belief in a meaningless future. Delusion, addiction, obsession — these are all the mind’s desperate and compulsive attempts at generating hope one neurotic tic or obsessive craving at a time.

The avoidance of hopelessness — that is, the construction of hope — then becomes our mind’s primary project. All meaning, everything we understand about ourselves and the world, is constructed for the purpose of maintaining hope. Therefore, hope is the only thing any of us willingly dies for. Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves. Without it, we believe we are nothing.

Mark Manson from Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope

How can we nourish hope within when we have lost, been disappointed, hurt or rejected? This is what the same author suggests,

Don’t hope.

Don’t despair either.

In fact don’t deign to believe you know anything. It’s that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place.

Don’t hope for better. Just be better.

Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.

– Mark Manson from Everything is F*cked: A Book about Hope

Wishing the few of you reading this a holiday season being better,

Hungryphil

Metabolizing Sweet Joy

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Dear Readers,

I have a confession.

I’ve been converting joy into fear. My desire to help into a fear of hurting others. I haven’t been digesting life or metabolizing my nutrient-rich loving supports in spirit or in body despite this blog’s mission.

Mostly I’m guilty of being unaware of my own indigestion.

The literal and material story is that my A1C reports pre-diabetes, a blame that can easily be laid at the feet of my parents. How could I, mindful eater hungryphil, fail to notice my own decreasing ability to metabolize energy?

In fearing failure, I failed.

The spiritual story is that new to my practicum site of community mental health, I let my desire to help morph into a fear of paperwork- forms, checking the wrong box, not asking enough, asking too much, not converting subjective information into correct numerical value, writing the wrong words etc. etc. The stress turned my dream job into a haunting.

I know, you’re probably thinking like my doctor, this isn’t so deep hungryphil, “just stop eating carbs and sugar, all will be well.” Part of me agrees with you.

But.

Those of you familiar with the work of Louis Hay know that diabetes expresses a:

Longing for what might have been. A great need to control. Deep sorrow. No sweetness left.

In order to counteract this association she recommends that I need to remind myself that:

This moment is filled with joy. I now choose to experience the sweetness of today.

You Can Heal Your Life . Hay House. Kindle Edition.

Yes, I know this maybe voodoo and completely unrelated to the mechanics of genetics and biology. Again, agree.

But.

What if there is more: a spiritual dimension to all that challenges us whether physical or emotional?

This my own intervention plan for the next six months until I get tested again:

  1. Reduce Carbohydrate and Sugar intake following medical advice.
  2. Walk an hour a day. Expend energy reconnecting to my ground by focusing on each step.
  3. Educate myself on how to identify supportive and nutrient-rich good things in food and people. This also means accepting help and guidance from others, for example, trust my supervisor and peers at work. I’m also working with a nutrition coach to introduce me to food that can support me better. Interestingly the first lesson involved a form of “grounding.” Nutrient rich soil produces nutrient rich produce, therefore buy from farmers who nourish the soil. Simple, right? More on this later. Fascinating how our ground and earth matters: emotionally and digestively.
  4. Recognize fears present alongside positive emotions instead of replacing or rejecting.

May I metabolize sweetness into energetic joy. The last months I have let the joys of my life ferment in fear. I will celebrate learning new things instead of focusing on mistakes. I will celebrate my baby growing into higher learning instead of fearing her departure. I will celebrate my warm loving home and husband instead of fearing all that can interrupt.

I will celebrate you, dear readers, my willing community of ears and eyes, as part of my nourishing support.

This moment is filled with joy. I now choose to experience the sweetness of today.

May we all metabolize and accept joy with gratitude (and enjoy a warm glazed chocolate doughnut occasionally).

Hungryphil

Bittermelons and Brownies: A recipe to grow myself

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Everyday I find myself astonished and humbled by the infinite recipes for eating and living. My experience in architecture, philosophy, yoga and food has blended into a strange kaleidoscopic lens adjusting awareness, responsibility and joy in every interaction. I see cooking as transformative, as an event that helps me to take the other in, to consume, to enjoy and to cherish. My revised recipe for living now involves three considerations borrowing from yoga mindfulness and object oriented philosophy.

 (X)  Everything is a location in existence.

You, as a thing, are a dynamic location. You are a unique point in the stippled picture of the universe, never isolated, always responding. As is, everything else.

I borrow this from the practice of yoga that warns us against the misguided and egocentric belief that we are proudly autonomous or sadly disconnected.

X+  Everything is more than it appears.

You, as a thing, are more than your actions, emotions, body, race, religion, thought, features, likes, dislikes, you and everything you think you know is more than your assessment. You are hidden. As is, everything else.

Object oriented thinking and Graham Harman taught me to celebrate the darkness and depth of things. There is a philosophical generosity in accepting the unknown and resisting the drive for full disclosure.

 X + ( –X)  Everything is conditioned on what it is not.

Food is the visceral example of this. What is not you, sustains you. You are weird. As is, everything else.

Timothy Morton, the author of the Poetics of Spice (2006), Dark Ecology  (2016) and much more in between, talks about the “weird,” turning, twisting, looping non-linear causality and coexistence of things.

You, as a thing, are as a location in existence, more than what you seem and are conditioned by everything that is not you, and everything you encounter does the same.

Everything is a Point. Hidden. Weird.  Including, you. And, me.

Thing: {(X), X+, [X+(-X)]}

Keep reading. This is the master recipe I’ll be using in all food stories to come and to help me care about things I don’t understand. Let me tell you how to eat bittermelons and brownies, and a few things in between.

Guiding self-awareness

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Can self-awareness be taught? Yes and no. I prefer the idea that self-awareness can be guided, safe guarded. As someone guiding efforts of increased self-awareness and self-actualization, I see my role as holding space and sometimes modeling, similar to teaching a yoga class. The sequence I call out is not the experience. Parallel to every call to move into a pose is a reminder to stay within one’s own body and breath. Therapy and counseling is no different. Leading someone to an emotional or physical point that hurts, stretches, aches requires careful awareness in order to avoid additional pain and injury. There is a balance between guiding one to their edge and protecting their choice to grow, move, change, ache, beyond hurt.

Therapists are always weighing the balance between forming a trusting alliance and getting to the real work so the patient doesn’t have to continue suffering. From the outset, we move both slowly and quickly, slowing the content down, speeding up the relationship, planting seeds strategically along the way. As in nature, if you plant the seeds too early, they won’t sprout. If you plant too late, they might make progress, but you’ve missed the most fertile ground. If you plant at just the right time, though, they’ll soak up the nutrients and grow. Our work is an intricate dance between support and confrontation.

Gottlieb, Lori. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed . HMH Books. Kindle Edition.

This dance requires emotional muscle memory and compassion that comes from having attempted personal variations on the same dance of confronting life’s challenges. There is personal investment for both therapist/social worker and client. It is a much deeper conversation beyond assessment and diagnosis that demands full participation by both. The creation of meaning demands this attention and presence. I cannot be present in your life, if I am not present in my own. Therapist and patient, Lori Gottlieb describes this struggle to move beyond the easy and removed task of giving advice towards self-actualization as a person and as a therapist.

… in the sense that therapy is a profession you learn by doing—not just the work of being a therapist, but also the work of being a patient. It’s a dual apprenticeship, which is why there’s a saying that therapists can take their patients only as far as they’ve gone in their own inner lives. (There’s much debate about this idea—like my colleagues, I’ve seen patients reach heights I can only aspire to. But still, it’s no surprise that as I heal inside, I’m also becoming more adept at healing others.)

Gottlieb, Lori. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed . HMH Books. Kindle Edition.

Healing must be collective. Learning how to balance self-aware ease in myself as a precondition to guide others is a formidable task. Deep breaths and try again.

May we heal from life together,

Hungryphil

Catch a glimpse of yourself in the space around you
Photography by Nate Dale – New Adventure Production

Anticipating Restriction

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Anticipating the lean back
Photography by Nate Dale – New Adventure Production

You know the feeling when you wait for the person in front of you on an airplane to lean back and restrict you even further in to the the tight small seat?

You know that feeling, right? Wishing and hoping they won’t but at the same time realizing that they are perfectly right do so. Should I lean back too? Let the seat backs cascade down the aisle? This anticipation of discomfort to come is not the best feeling. (For a fuller account of airplane discomfort you can read, Inflight Therapy: For those traveling far and within on amazon kindle.)

For now the question is simple, how do you brace for impact, for being leaned into, for constriction, for discomfort?

As Thanksgiving travel and associated anxiety approaches in a few months, what are your strategies for coping? Music, breathing exercises, reading, meditating? Anticipating and thinking of coping skills ahead of time can reduce our anxiety response. Accepting and addressing the discomfort to come helps ironically ease it. Just recognizing discomfort without a related alleviation attempt, I imagine would increase anxiety. So, it might be worth taking the time to think ahead to this moment and find your empowered coping strategy. Resist the lean, at least emotionally 🙂

Wishing you ease,

Hungryphil

Take your emotional temperature

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Just like a fever indicates a medical concern, anxiety indicates an emotional concern. What is your anxiety telling you?

Anxiety indicates that a conflict is ensuing, and so long as there is conflict a positive solution is within the realm of possibility. In this respect anxiety has been likened to the prognostic value of fever: it is a sign of struggle within the personality and an indication, speaking in psychopathological terms, that serious disintegration has not yet occurred (Yaskin).

May Ph.D., Rollo. The Meaning Of Anxiety . Hauraki Publishing. Kindle Edition.

As a sign of struggle normal anxiety focuses us on the present conflict by exposing the emotional temperature. Anxiety surrounding an exam, public speaking, presentation, meeting new people etc. simply points to caring. This is important to me, anxiety reminds us. It need to overwhelm the event in a negative, fearful and blinding light. Just as a fever tells us to rest, cover and care, a rise in anxiety does the same. Of course, in a hospital a fever is treated differently, and with alarm. This medical and emotional history maybe the difference between neurotic anxiety and normal anxiety.

To be sure, neurotic anxiety is the result of unfortunate learning in the respect that the individual was forced to deal with threatening situations at a period—usually in early childhood—when he was incapable of coping directly or constructively with such experiences. In this respect, neurotic anxiety is the result of the failure to cope with the previous anxiety situations in one’s experiences. But normal anxiety is not the result of unfortunate learning; it arises rather from a realistic appraisal of one’s situation of danger. To the extent that a person can succeed in constructively meeting the normal day-to-day anxiety experiences as they arise, he avoids the repression and retrenchment which make for later neurotic anxiety.

May Ph.D., Rollo. The Meaning Of Anxiety . Hauraki Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In order to confront anxiety, we need to recognize the rise in our emotional temperature. This is why mindfulness can help ease anxiety. We practice looking inward and measuring the emotional temperature of the moment. How can we avoid repression and retrenchment unless we recognize that we are simply appraising an experience? How can I succeed in constructively meeting day-to-day anxiety unless I mindfully engage it? Self-aware ease requires courage to confront discomfort and most importantly consistent practice.

What experiences raise your emotional temperature? How do you treat it?

Wishing you meaningful anxiety,

Hungryphil

Rest, retreat, remove anxiety?
Photography by Nate Dale – New Adventure Production

Existential Love

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A few blog posts ago I talked about whose fault is loneliness. Feeling lonely often corresponds to feeling unloved. I’d like to consider the dynamics of loneliness and love a bit longer. How do you relate love and loneliness in your life?

The following quote from Irvin Yalom might help clarify what we search for in others, and loneliness as those needs, unfulfilled.

Growth-motivated and deficiency-motivated individuals have different types of interpersonal relations. The growth-motivated person is less dependent, less beholden to others, less needful of others’ praise and affection, less anxious for honors, prestige, and rewards. He or she does not require continual interpersonal need gratification and, in fact, may at times feel hampered by others and prefer periods of privacy. Consequently the growth-motivated individual does not relate to others as sources of supply but is able to view them as complex, unique, whole beings. The deficiency-motivated individual, on the other hand, relates to others from the point of view of usefulness. Those aspects of the other that are not related to the perceiver’s needs are either overlooked altogether or regarded as an irritant or a threat.

Irvin D. Yalom. Existential Psychotherapy (Kindle Locations 5185-5189). Kindle Edition.

It is ironic that independent and growth motivated individuals who are able to sustain themselves on their own make the most supportive partners. You are my partner because I admire and respect your existence, independent of me. I don’t need you to fulfill me, rather, I will work to support and witness your existence. I love you in that I offer my attention and energy in service of your existence. This attitude isn’t self-sacrificing per se. It simply resists self-aggrandizing. Your needs are as important as my needs. Reciprocity takes effort. That is the work of love. Many simply concede to lives of loneliness, maybe because the work of love seems out of reach and overwhelming. To honestly answer, why am I lonely? what am I searching for? what do I need? takes courage. Can I accept and receive the answer without judgment? Unless I take responsibility for my own attitudes about love and loneliness, I cannot mature.

“Infantile love follows the principle ‘I love because I am loved.’ Mature love follows the principle: ‘I am loved because I love.’ Immature love says, ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says, ‘I need you because I love you.’ Fromm’s point that love is an active, not a passive, process has extraordinary ordinary importance for the clinician. Patients complain of loneliness, of being unloved and unlovable, but the productive work is always to be done in the opposite realm: their inability to love. Love is a positive act, not a passive affect; it is giving, not receiving-a “standing in” not a “falling for.”

Irvin D. Yalom. Existential Psychotherapy (Kindle Locations 5213-5217). Kindle Edition.

Do you feel immature, mature, in-between in love?

May you be deeply engaged in the work of love,

Hungryphil

Are you enjoying your privacy or are you lonely?
Photography by Nate Dale – New Adventure Production

Self-Aware Ease

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It is not surprising that I’m drawn to Existentialist Psychotherapy in the lineage of Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Vicktor Frankl practicing the philosophies of Kierkagaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Husserl and others. The basic premise as Irvin Yalom explains below is the humble defense of the ancient belief that self-awareness leads to a meaningful fulfilling life even if the process of self-discovery is painful:

Wisdom does not lead to madness, nor denial to sanity: the confrontation with the givens of existence is painful but ultimately healing. Good therapeutic work is always coupled with reality testing and the search for personal enlightenment; the therapist who decides that certain aspects of reality and truth are to be eschewed is on treacherous ground.

Irvin D. Yalom. Existential Psychotherapy (Kindle Locations 190-192). Kindle Edition.

In working and volunteering at different contexts such as hospice, domestic violence shelter, food pantries, community health, grief and loss counseling, my role and mission is simple: To invite self-aware ease in myself and in others with me. Sometimes that means asking gentle guiding questions, sometimes breathing, sometimes guiding meditations, sometimes just sitting in silence and making space for self-inquiry.

Self-inquiry is painful, as Plato describes in the Republic, the released prisoner is blinded and stumbling, heading out of the cave. The turning towards truth or meaning is daunting and frightening. The journey inward can only be sustained by moments of ease. Self-awareness rests on self-care. This is the balance I’m trying to learn and practice. Each person sitting with me teaches me a different version.

The existential position emphasizes a different kind of basic conflict: neither a conflict with suppressed instinctual strivings nor one with internalized significant adults, but instead a conflict that flows from the individual’s confrontation with the givens of existence. And I mean by “givens” of existence certain ultimate concerns, certain intrinsic properties ties that are a part, and an inescapable part, of the human being’s existence in the world.

Irvin D. Yalom. Existential Psychotherapy (Kindle Locations 107-109). Kindle Edition.

I hope to practice the humility of the Existentialist perspective: I can never know your experience, your suffering, your confrontation with life, however, I can guide you to map your internal valleys and mountains, joys and sorrows, to know yourself . I am able to do so because I walk with self-aware ease despite the sufferings of my own life. This of course leads to concerns of therapeutic transference. That exploration will have to wait for another post.

Whether you are a counselor, therapist, teacher, creative, what is your mission? Why is it your mission? How do you confront the givens of existence: death, isolation, freedom or meaninglessness?

Bring self-aware ease. Seems so simple, yet it is a life’s work. Mine.

Wishing you self-aware ease,

Hungryphil

Photography by Nate Dale – New Adventure Productions

Food Poem – Death Again by Jim Harrison

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Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death.
Indeed it’s our most unique act along with birth.
We must think of it as cooking breakfast,
it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl
or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin
after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,
slide into the fire. Of course it’s a little hard
to accept your last kiss, your last drink,
your last meal about which the condemned
can be quite particular as if there could be
a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers
sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid
lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon
call, and staring into the still, opaque water.
We’ll know as children again all that we are
destined to know, that the water is cold
and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.

Jim Harrison, “Death Again” from Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems. from the Writer’s Almanac Podcast, August 14th, 2019