Bullied

“Bullying is killing our kids. Being different is killing our kids and the kids who are bullying are dying inside. We have to save our kids whether they are bullied or they are bullying. They are all in pain.”

Cat Cora

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

Kahlil Gibran

I must admit, I usually enjoy writing these little essays. I find myself jotting down little notes from time to time, and, over the course of a couple of weeks, they just kind of come together into a collection of (mostly) integrated ideas. It’s a fun process and something I usually look forward to.

Not this time though. No this time I felt compelled to talk about something that has in many ways been a huge issue in my life as a kid, then a teenager, and now as a child psychologist. This issue is bullying.

I've been on all sides of the bullying continuum. As a kid I was teased for my appearance, mocked relentlessly and humiliated. Later, as a teenager, I dished out plenty of the same. I teased just about anyone in my path, and this went on for a while. Maybe this was a way of dealing with my own experiences. One thing I know to be unequivocally true, is that this kind of stuff leaves scars. I've got plenty of my own, and am sure I've created a few myself. As much as I enjoy working with kids, I've often thought that it was my penance in this life to try and guide kids through their own troubled times as a way of making peace with my own past.

An image that will always haunt me came from one of my first experiences as a counselor in my early days as a psychology student. I had an assignment at a school at the end of the summer and it was hot. Not just warm, but summer in Chicago hot. A skinny kid came in wearing a baggy sweatshirt, and I made a sarcastic remark about him being overdressed. He managed a little smile, sat down, and we talked for a while. He talked to me about his parents, his neighborhood, and then finally what it was like to be gay in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood. I was very touched by his story, and told him to please come back again.

As he got up to leave, he took a long look at me, and then slowly rolled up his sleeves. There were knife marks across and all up and down his arms. Not little ones either, but long and ugly scars from years of cutting himself.

“This is why I wear long sleeve shirts in the summer” he said quietly.

It was a statement that I've never forgotten.

I never saw this particular kid again, as my assignment ended shortly afterwards, and he never showed up for his next appointment. I've always wondered what happened to him, and I find myself hoping that he somehow hung on. Still, his scars ran deep, and there were a lot of them.

Unfortunately those weren't the last scars that I've seen, but it was the last time I ever made a sarcastic comment about a kid wearing long sleeves. It reminded me of a lesson that I often forget. Words matter. Sometimes they matter so much that they make vulnerable and scared children run knives across their arms, sometimes fatally. It’s all a little terrifying actually. You want to tell these kids that this stuff is not going to last forever. That one day they will be out of High School and free from small minds and mean people.

But you really can’t promise that.

What you can do is listen and try and understand. You can give them a place where they can talk about the isolation and the confusion and the humiliation. And some of them will survive and become the “massive characters” that Kahlil Gibran discusses in the above quotation. Many of the world’s great success stories start in this very manner. But some of them wont. Some of them will spend the rest of their lives thinking that they aren't welcome in a world that has been so hard on them.

What we can also do is advocate for those who have yet to realize the power of their own voices. Personally I've come to see this as my duty and responsibility. Bullying has become one of the most serious epidemics of our generation, and it’s killing our kids, both literally and figuratively. If you are in a position to influence a child in your life, please take the time to talk to them about this.

A life may depend on it.

Navigating your emotions

“If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart.”

Pema Chödrön

Ever have one of those moments when your emotions get away from you? If you’re like me it probably happens at least once a day. I’m a psychologist. I should know better, but I promise you it happens to the best of us. I've nearly lost my mind in Chicago traffic when I’m running a little late for work. Sometimes even on the way to teach an anger management class. Ahh the hypocrisy.

 One of the better books I’ve ever read on the subject of managing emotions is called ‘Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman, who calls it “emotional highjacking” when feelings such as anger take over the brain of an otherwise (reasonably) rationale person. The emotion in this case overrides the thinking, reasoning part of the brain, and, for a short while, the emotion takes over instead. Ever wonder how a normally calm person can sometimes turn in to a completely different person when they are triggered in a certain way? Or wondered why people just seem to “snap” in certain stressful situations? Emotional highjacking explains a lot of this.

All of this has to do with the way our brains respond to fear. When we experience fear, our fight or flight response summons us to the present moment and makes sure we are paying attention. It’s the brain’s way of saying, “This is real, this is actually happening, and you have to address this NOW.” All of this happens in a matter of seconds. The problem is that our brains can play tricks on us sometimes. Often times we go on high alert when a thoughtful moment of reflection would have sufficed instead. I see this all the time while doing marriage counseling. A comment is made that sets off a person’s alarm system, a threat is perceived, and a person goes on the attack. Their partner attacks back, and within seconds everyone is at defcon five.

All of this can start with a comment as seemingly innocent as “does this dress make me look fat?”

One explanation for this is that these kinds of threats can be a blow to our entire sense of self. If a marriage is a huge part of someone’s identity, and a comment is perceived in a way that is threatening to the marriage, it also can pull the rug out on a person’s entire sense of self, which can lead to confusion, fear, and often even rage.

All of this is interesting to consider in relation to the “iceberg” theory of personality. What we see above the surface of the water may be substantial, but still, 75% of the iceberg is beneath the water. An example used in Goleman’s book was two kids in the backseat of a car driving along with their parents in the front. The Beatles song “Help” is playing on the radio. All of a sudden there is a fight in the front seat, and dad reaches over and smacks mom. The kids are terrified in the back seat, and duck their heads and hope that the fight stops as soon as possible.

Bur that’s not the end of the story.

These kids grow up, get older, but still, every time they hear the song “Help” they are overwhelmed by a scared and uneasy feeling. All of this happens just out of their immediate awareness, but the feeling comes over them and their well-being is at least temporarily disrupted. This is how emotional triggers can work, and by the time we reach adulthood, we may have accumulated thousands of them.

This is an important concept to understand, because it also provides an explanation as to why we often tend to make the same mistakes over and over again. Freud called this the “repetition compulsion” after observing people doing something a second time, even after it caused them pain the first time. His best guess was that we continue to put ourselves in situations like this again because we want a different outcome this time around.

It rarely ever happens that way.

Ever wonder why a person who just got out of an abusive relationship tends to pick a guy just like that again and again? Why a man with a nagging and impossible to please mother would marry a woman with almost exactly the same personality? Or perhaps a woman with a cold and distant father keeps choosing men that can’t meet her emotional needs?

The repetition compulsion explains a lot of this, as our emotional wiring keeps steering us in a direction that leads to more pain. It’s somewhat like a pilot with a bad navigational system, who is trying desperately to get to Florida, but keeps winding up in New York instead. Until we can better understand our emotional tendencies and reactions, we repeat mistakes over and over, without always understanding why. And truthfully this can go on for a lifetime.

So how DO we break this cycle and begin to better understand our own navigational system? The answer I believe lies in training ourselves to focus our attention specifically to the present moment. To understand when we are susceptible to these emotional “hijacks” and to bring ourselves back to the present moment, which is the only thing we have any real control over. As Victor Frankl puts it in his wonderful book Man’s Search for Meaning, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

In pursuit of helping others find more of these moments in their lives, I would like to recommend a couple of things. First, acquaint yourself with the idea of mindfulness meditation, and perhaps start with the book Full Catastrophe Living by John Kabat-Zinn which may be the best book written on the subject. Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence is also a fantastic read, and one that personally helped me a great deal. Sometimes now, (not all the time) when someone cuts me off in traffic, I remember what is happening, take a deep breath, and laugh at my own reaction. I’m still a work in progress. All of us are. But as long as we are drawing breath, we can get better at making choices that empower us to be personally responsible for our lives.

That’s the best we can do..

3 A.M.

It's 3 A.M. I must be lonely

When she says baby
Well I can't help but be scared of it all sometimes            

Matchbox 20

In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race--never quite sane in the night.
- Mark Twain   

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense-

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For as long as I can remember, I have woken up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I will go a few weeks sleeping soundly through the night, but always, at some point, my 3 A.M. wake-up call returns. Being up at this hour evokes all kinds of things in a person, including fear, loneliness, solitude, and occasionally even serenity and a sense of hope.

Although it has often felt like I was alone in the world at 3 A.M., I know I’m not the only one. I've talked to dozens of people in counseling who have reported their own experiences at this hour, and their stories always make me think about what it is about 3 A.M. that seems to stir people.

There is some research that suggests that we were never really meant to sleep in 8-hour blocks. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2105490/The-myth-hour-sleep-How-scientists-increasingly-agree-rest-better-you.html Apparently it was perfectly common for our ancestors to wake during the night, be up for an hour or two, and then go back to bed. So, some of what we think of as “insomnia” may actually be a part of our inherited adaptation to sleep.

At one point, I thought insomnia was about existential crisis. Those moments all of us have from time to time where we think about what it is we are doing here. Who am I? Where am I’m going? These are the kinds of things that come into your head at 3 in the morning. Life can feel a little rudderless when you’re awake with your own thoughts at that hour, and those questions can be a little harder to answer when no one else is around.

I also think 3 AM. has a lot to do with anxiety, which is a future-oriented fear about business that is yet to be transacted. We worry about money and our jobs and our health, and just about anything else that has been rattling around in our heads throughout the day. These things bubble to the surface at 3 A.M., sometimes even interrupting our sleep. It can feel like a cruel trick at times, as we are not in any kind of position to solve these problems at that hour. So we worry. And think. And run the same tape deck of thoughts over and over. Sometimes we even count the occasional sheep in between the ruminations. Who among us hasn't made some kind of “sleep bargain?” “If I fall asleep now, I’ll still get 5 hours." 

That never works..

An Indian man who specialized in meditation once told me that “the body takes sleep as it needs it.” It was little comfort at the time, but in retrospect I think he had a point. Although I've certainly experienced grogginess, fatigue, and poor concentration after a night of interrupted sleep, I have found that eventually the body always succumbs when it’s had enough.. In the past I've slept for what seemed like days after hitting one of these walls.

The real question seems to be, what can we do to quiet our minds down at 3 A.M. and what steps do we need to take to “finish each day and be done with it” as Mr. Emerson recommends? I believe the antidote to restless sleep lies somewhere in answering this question.

In the meantime there are several techniques we can use that can help us power down our minds in these situations. One of my personal favorites comes from Andrew Weil, who quite literally wrote the book on breathing. The second exercise here, http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART00521/three-breathing-exercises.html the “4, 7, 8” technique is the best one I know to elicit the relaxation response that helps people sleep. A commitment to doing this exercise a couple of times a day will do wonders for your ability to feel more relaxed. I guarantee it.

I would also recommend a couple of thought-stopping techniques. One of these involves imagining your thoughts as being part of a river and letting them flow away as they come into your mind. Another bit of imagery that helped me was to imagine my thoughts as pop-up adds that come up when you’re on your computer. Just because they come into your awareness, you don’t have to click on every one. It’s okay to simply let them go.

These are techniques that are useful as short-term interventions, but still, I think the question of insomnia also has a philosophical component. How do we finish each day and be done with it? Some of this involves a bit of self-forgiveness. Sure we did and said some things we may have regretted, but so has everyone else. Often we extend all kinds of understanding and forgiveness to our friends when they stumble a little, but we are unwilling to extend the same courtesy to ourselves. What’s done is done. You can take responsibility for changing it, accept it, or let it go. Those are your healthy options. Ruminating on things is a waste of precious time and energy.

We can also wake up each morning and do the things we say we are going to do. Write them down, make a list on your Ipad, tie a string around your finger if you have to, but do everything in your power to accomplish a few things that make you feel like you are moving towards the person you want to be. It has been my experience that unfinished business is a big piece of what keeps us awake at night, and reaching small goals throughout the day is a wonderful antidote. Research bears this out.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am writing this article at 3 A.M. Often when I have an idea rattling around in my head, it stays there until I do something about it. Not all thoughts should be ignored, and sometimes the ones that come back are trying to tell us something. In my case I woke up and started typing. Perhaps I will learn something from a fellow 3 A.M. person, and maybe I’ll even help someone get a little sleep. In any case,

It’s done..

In search of the Golden Valley

From the movie Shadowlands

Joy: Is it someplace real?

CS Lewis- I think so. It's called the Golden Valley, I believe.. Somewhere in Herefordshire. –

Joy: Somewhere special?

C.S. Lewis- In a way. It was on our nursery wall when I was a child. I didn't know it was a real place then. I thought it was a view of heaven. Or, the promised land. I used to think that one day I'd come around a bend in the road...or over the brow of a hill, and there it would be.

C.S Lewis-Shadowlands

“Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

Thích Nhất Hạnh

I’ve always been fascinated by C.S Lewis. At different incarnations in his life he was an atheist, a philosopher, an intellectual, a born-again Christian, and a children’s book author. I love the idea that one man could be so full of constant contradiction and evolution. It’s something I can definitely relate to.

The above scene from the movie Shadowlands about his life always stuck with me. I’ve had a few “sacred” places in my life like his beloved Golden Valley. The top of a mountain in Ireland, the bottom of the Grand Canyon, alone on a lonely and solemn September night, and a lovely valley in the Orosi region of Costa Rica, pictured here.

 

Today was the first time I’ve ever returned to a sacred place in my life, and it was something I’ve always wondered about. Would the place have the same meaning to me if I was to one day return, or was there something specific about the way I was feeling back then? Would it still have its magic if I returned? 

So I sought to answer that question today, and walking through the hills in the Orori Valley, I had the oddest feeling of simultaneously being in two places at the same time, as the memories and my current incarnation began to intertwine. One burgeoning area in my field is called “Ecological” psychology, which explores the effects certain kinds of places have on our lives. It’s a fascinating idea that these places can act so powerfully on our mental state, and, having experienced it on such a personal level, I wanted to explore the mystery a little deeper.

So I ventured into the mountains of Costa Rica in search of this feeling, wondering as I did if these are the kinds of things we can force, or if we just need to let them happen organically. I took in the beauty of the rolling green hills, and as I walked a feeling of calm and serenity came over me as I became totally invested in the moment. In this time, in this place, all of the regrets of the past and the worries about the future dissipated, as I simply appreciated how fortunate I was to be in this beautiful place.

As I continued to walk, I stumbled across a little village up in the mountains and decided I would forgo my experiment for the moment and take a little rest. The first thing I noticed was how small and run down the homes were, and for a moment I felt a little saddened. I took a seat in the town square and watched families and friends gather together to talk and laugh. I watched four generations of families kick a soccer ball around in a little field. I sat and just took in their lives, and eventually I came to understand something that was different than what it was I came for.
.

Costa Rica was recently named as the happiest country on earth in a survey called the "Happy Planet Index." This index takes into account a variety of factors such as longevity, health care, pollution, etc. As I sat on my little bench watching these people in this little town, I began to get a sense of why this place earned the ranking that it did.

 What I observed was that on this summer Sunday afternoon, everyone was totally in the moment, enjoying their friends and their families, and simply taking a little time to be completely in the here and now. It’s a quality that is very elusive in the hustle and bustle of American life. Everyone seems to be somewhere else. If you don’t believe me, watch a group of people out at a bar or a restaurant the next time you’re out and about. Half the people will probably have a phone in their hand, texting or calling someone else as opposed to being in the moment with the people they are supposed to be out with. It’s a troubling trend in American life that I myself am also completely guilty of.

So as I watched these people I realized that, although I had gone off in search of some kind of transcendent experience in nature, I had found a different kind of life lesson about staying in the moment. Sometimes it seems like life is always about getting more. Get the newest phone, move to a bigger house, get the newest gadget and by all means stay on it at all times to justify the purchase. It’s an exercise that I believe leads to a great deal of anxiety. 

 But not here. Here in this little valley my gadgets didn’t work, I had nobody to text, and I just had the pleasure of watching people enjoy their lives as they existed. Although their houses weren’t large and their clothes weren’t new, and none of them had the newest ipad, they were happy, and it made me happy to sit and watch for a while.

Eventually I returned to my little hotel and looked at the pile of gadgets I had sitting there, and wondered if I shouldn’t just leave them all behind. They were the tools I used in my life back home, but for a moment they seemed like heavy baggage that perhaps I didn’t need as much as I thought I did. I am a Psychologist, and my job is to be with people in the present moment as I bear witness to the various struggles in their lives.

I don’t need four different Apple products to do this..

Eventually I went home with everything that I came with, but also with a new approach to living in the moment that I had always understood on an intellectual level, but no so much on an emotional one. I wanted to find and bottle what those people in that little mountain village had, but knew that all of this started by taming the distractions in my own mind.

And in the end, I think I also helped answer my own question about why certain places in nature are so sacred to us. Although the places themselves certainly have a kind of power, ultimately I believe it is the state of mind we are in when we observe them that helps contribute so much to their influence over us. As John Milton said hundreds of years ago, “The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven.” I vowed to keep that in mind as I touched down on US soil again.


For now, I am grateful for the time I have been given today. 

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone..

Such a long long time to be gone

                                                                                                                                            

Such a long long time to be gone
and a short time to be there
Grateful Dead- Box of Rain

   All the people we used to know
   They're an illusion to me now
   Some are mathematicians
   Some are carpenter's wives
   Don't know how it all got started
   I don't what they're doing with their lives

   Bob Dylan- Tangled up in blue

   How do we reconcile the past with the present, 
   when we don’t feel comfortable in either one?

   October Road

Every summer I get this odd kind of feeling. There’s something so fleeting about it, and sometimes in the middle of a summer day, I start thinking about all the places I’ve been. Sometimes I even sit and time travel for a moment as I watch the sun go down. I think about being 18 and sitting by the river in my hometown, wondering if I was ever going to get a chance to leave. I think about being on top of a mountain in Yellowstone Park, or drinking beer in a crazy Montana bar, and I go back for a short while to those places. 

And then the moment passes. I take measure of where I am, and wonder what happened to all of the people I used to know and have such good times with. You get so close to people and make such amazing friendships, and then one day you look up again and find yourself in a completely different incarnation. Seasons change and people come and go, and we are often left wondering what happened. 

Modern technology has helped a little bit. We can use Facebook or something similar to catch up with people or to take a glimpse of the lives they are living now, but sometimes this doesn’t really scratch the itch. Many memories get frozen in amber, and we have a hard time reconciling how the people we used to know don’t seem to be the same anymore. We want them to stay the way WE remembered them, and when the way they are now conflicts with the way we see them, a strange loop of perception can occur, where we are left wondering if maybe all of our experiences were just some kind of a dream.   

                                                                                                    

In thinking about this issue, I thought about an exercise I sometimes give people in counseling, where they are instructed to write their own obituaries. Although it sounds a little morbid, it sometimes helps people clarify what it is they want to accomplish during their short stays here on planet earth. How would you like to be remembered, and what would you want people to say about you? “Bob spent his later years mostly eating Doritos and playing Xbox 360, he died in his beloved sweatpants he had worn for 27 straight days.” Probably not. Probably you would want the people you had shared significant experiences with to remember you and say something about the good times you had together. 

Which makes me wonder why we don’t just go ahead and do these things while we are still drawing breath. Stephen Levine posed the question, “If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say?  And why are you waiting?” Why DO we wait to do these things, and where does this apprehension come from? I think we get trapped in our comfort zones at times, and settle into a kind of complacency where we just kind of survive on auto-pilot rather than think too much about it.

 I recently read an article called “The top five regrets of the dying” which was written by a nurse who had spent a lot of time with people at the end of their lives. Two of the five items involved courage, which I think informs so much of our happiness, but it was another item that really caught my eye. The item was “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” In explaining this item, she writes, “"Often they would not truly realize the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."

Powerful stuff, which I think speaks to the point I’m trying to make about stepping out of our comfort zones and picking up the phone. I know for me personally I have vowed to do a little more than examine the pangs of nostalgia I feel and take a little more action. So what are YOU waiting for? Pick up the phone and call an old friend you haven’t talked to in a while. Make peace with someone you are having a silly and stupid argument with. Make plans to visit a place that has special memories for you. Pick up that guitar that is gathering dust in the closet and give it another shot.

Such a long long time to be gone, and a short time to be here..

Bang the Drum Slowly

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. 

~Victor Frankl

But I tried didn’t I? At least I did that.

~Randall P. McMurphy- One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The Pacific Northwestern salmon beats itself bloody on its quest to travel hundreds of miles upstream against the current, with a single purpose, sex of course, but also... life

~Drew Baylor ~Elizabethtown

When I was a young man in my early teens, I became interested in a movie called “Bang the Drum Slowly.” It was a baseball movie, where Robert DeNiro plays a young catcher dying of a terminal illness, who has one last season in the majors before his illness takes him. Something about the movie and this phrase captured my imagination, and sometimes during particular moments that I thought life was moving too fast, I would repeat this phrase to myself. Bang the Drum Slowly. Slow down a little life, and let me enjoy the moment. I’ll get older soon enough.

And sure enough I did. I had all kinds of dreams as a kid that didn’t exactly materialize, but some other ones came to fruition instead. So here I sit, a psychologist, not quite old, but not exactly a young man either, trying my best to help other people realize their own dreams, or at least make the kind of changes in their lives to find some kind of happiness.

I was reminded of all of this, because this week one of my patients passed away when her heart simply didn’t work anymore. It was my first death since I’ve been a psychologist, and it hit me pretty hard. This is a letter I got from her a couple of months before she died.

I share this on these pages, because in many ways I was incredibly proud of this woman, and her willingness to make changes in her life, even as it was coming to an end. She could have simply thrown in the towel and kept on doing what she was doing, but instead she chose to try and change a few things in her life and take responsibility for her own happiness. It’s something so few of us are truly willing to do, although if you ask people they will usually tell you otherwise. What we really often want is someone else to change. In reality however, the only way we change the temperature of our own happiness in any kind of lasting way, is to make some internal changes in ourselves. The people and places can and do change, but in the confines of our inner worlds, the song remains the same. Confronting and changing these inner workings is difficult work, and in this case, a very brave woman was able to do this. Right at the end of her life, sure, but still, much like McMurphy in Cuckoos’s Nest, she tried goddamnit. At least she did that.

The saddest part of the story was that she had so little time left after she decided to make these changes in her life, and I couldn’t help but wonder why the drum couldn’t have beat a little more slowly for her. So much of life seems to work like this. We thrash and we struggle and we flail, and in the end we find we held the keys to our own prisons the whole time. This woman found this out at the end of her life, and, although I wished for her to have more time to enjoy herself,  maybe I missed the whole point.  Maybe the happiness she found at the end of her life was the culmination of a lot of suffering that eventually crystallized into wisdom. Although it would be nice to think we can have one without the other, I’m not completely sure that’s how it works. In any case, she found her peace at the end, and, in dying, left me with my own new lessons to contemplate. Am I taking responsibility for my own happiness, or have I grown complacent and cynical? Am I actually walking the walk, or am I just saying the words? These are questions we should ask ourselves again and again, and personally I’m starting today. Thank you for this one last lesson my friend.

Memories and Gratitude

“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles

      Memorial Day weekend has always been a favorite of mine. Having slugged though another long Chicago winter, it marks the beginning of summer and all of the good times that come along with that. After 3 days of basking in this summer fun, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the holiday has a more serious purpose and more important meaning.

     For many, the day is a reminder to step back and acknowledge all of the service people who gave their lives fighting for their country. It reminds us that a price was paid for us to live the way we do, and that this price involved a lot of other people actually losing their lives in pursuit of this freedom. Courageous people paved the way for us, and the lives of convenience we enjoy today involved a lot of sacrifice. It’s an important idea to remember, and perhaps this idea can also serve to rekindle our sense of gratitude in an age where many of us have grown a tad entitled to the lives we live today.

     Beyond the military aspect of the holiday, I think this day also offers a wonderful chance to think about where we came from. Although they may not have been the kinds of choices that cost them their lives, our own mothers and fathers made tremendous sacrifices to give us a better life, and as children we rarely stop to acknowledge this. As the quote above attests to, it is only later in life, “when the skin sags and the heart weakens” that we begin to fully realize how our own lives are also part of a much larger story. Many of our grandparents and great-grandparents came to this country from somewhere else, and faced down tremendous fears to start a new legacy for their families, and we are the ones currently reaping the benefits of their acts of courage so many years ago. To me it’s a powerful thought, and one that makes me a lot less inclined to complain about the wide array of “first world problems” that seem to seep into my life on a daily basis. My biggest problem is losing my remote control, but somewhere in history it was a matter of literally finding food, clothing, and shelter. Kind of puts things in perspective.

     In my own life I think about my own mother working multiple jobs so her kids could one day have a life better than her own, and I am grateful. I didn’t say it a single time growing up, but now, as a doctor who has all kinds of options in my life, I realize someone else paid a price for me. It’s humbling and I am grateful. I suspect we can all think about a similar choice our parents made at one point, and I hope in these moments we can continue to choose gratitude. Parenting is like being a participant in a relay race, where you take the baton as far as you can go, based on the best information you have at the time. You hope your kids will run faster and run further, and one day their kids will run even further than that. Like I say, we’re part of a larger story.

     All of these thoughts come to mind today, because I do believe we have entered an age of entitlement, and sometimes it makes me a little sad. I know I am personally almost constantly taking things for granted, and in these moments, I try and think about where I came from and where I’m going, and what the original authors of my story would think about my whining and complaining. In these moments I often end up laughing at my own sense of self-importance, and remind myself to keep on moving the baton. Remember the sacrifices and be grateful. A simple mantra, but one I think we all could stand to repeat once in a while.

Somehow we forgot to dance

Somehow we forgot to Dance

Our lives are better left to chance

 I could have missed the pain

But I'd have had to miss the dance

Tony Arata

If you watch youtube videos long enough, eventually you find a gem. This is one of those videos. Music and life. It’s a great metaphor really. All of are involved in some kind of Opera. Some are comedies, some are tragedies, and most are somewhere in between. By the time the fat lady finally sings, most of us have seen plenty of both.

I particularly like what he says at the end. It was a musical and we forgot to dance. I think that is true of so many of us. We somehow get trapped between jumping through hoops and living up to other’s expectations of us, and all of a sudden the record is over. Oliver Wendell Holmes said it like this, “Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.”

Why is that? Are we all conditioned to continually try and unlock the next accomplishment? Having seen a number of teenagers in counseling over the years, I’ve certainly had a front row seat in witnessing this dynamic. Get on the honor roll, study for the SAT, get into college, and on and on. Smell the roses later, but for right now finish your essays.. 

The problem with this idea, is that much like Mr. Watts points out, it doesn’t end with college. Most of us will spend the rest of our lives chasing the next milestone we feel we are “supposed” to accomplish. A lot of this is about what our family and friends think about us. There’s a whole lot of research about this actually. It’s called “Social comparison theory” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory, and it explains a lot about how we compare ourselves to other people as a basis for our own happiness. When we have what someone above us has, then we can finally be happy. Meanwhile we continue to spin on the hamster wheel, in constant pursuit of targets that never seem to stay still. 

In reflecting on this idea, consider the words of Fr. Alfred D'Souza, “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” These words ring pretty true to me. As we stress about the future and lament the things from our pasts, our time in the present is melting away like one of Salvador Dali’s clocks. Many of us learn this lesson too late.

So how do we extract ourselves from this trap and learn to dance to the music? It’s really kind of a tough question. Regardless of the things we tell ourselves, none of us live in a bubble, and for better or for worse, our lives are intertwined in the same big ball of tangled knots with everyone else. Although we often admire the outlaws and the icons, we are much more comfortable when we are all playing by the same rules. It gives us a sense of order.

In my own life, I’ve come to find that to remember it is a dance, I need to remind myself to laugh. All the time. To laugh even when I really don’t feel like laughing.. To me a sense of humor is indicative of a constant choice to reframe perspective. To keep the music playing regardless of our personal little dramas that constantly threaten to scratch the record. Perspective is a difficult thing, and in my experience something that takes sustained vigilance to achieve. Our minds like to slip back into the tragedies. This is a choice, and one that we can change anytime we gather the strength to accept personal responsibility for our own happiness. Ultimately all we have is our perspective, and by accessing our humor I truly believe we can learn to dance. 

Kids, Dreams, and Encouragement

I said, that's life
And as funny as it may seem,
some people get their kicks, stompin' on a dream.
David Lee Roth – That’s Life

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”
 Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven 

Children crave encouragement like plants crave water.
Rudolph Dreikurs 


Because I spend a lot of time working with kids, I’ve picked up on a few things. Over the years, my video game skills have gotten pretty adequate. I can name a few rappers beyond MC Hammer, and I can intelligently discuss the merits of the various Spongebob characters if I was truly pressed. Does any of this actually make me cool? Probably not. Still, I think it’s important to try and meet kids where their worlds exist right now. Getting them to adapt to us is an exercise in futility.

 Beyond toys or movies or games, I have also come to understand that what kids really want, is for someone to be truly interested in their lives. Kids really do crave encouragement like plants crave water, although we as parents, teachers, and counselors may sometimes miss this. All of us that have interacted with kids at any level have at one time or another felt uncool, it’s just the nature of the beast. Sometime this stings a little, as our pride always takes a little hit when we realize that the same kids that used to look up to us, now see us as a little less than hip. We’re supposed to be the bigger person in these scenarios. It doesn’t always work like this..

 Despite these occasional hits to our own pride, I truly believe that we can never forget that kids need our encouragement more than anything, regardless of how tough or disinterested they may sometimes appear. I’ve spent plenty of time working with the future version of these kids. There really is nothing sadder than someone who fails to realize their potential because they never got the encouragement that they needed, but in some way, this is a part of all of our stories. It’s been my experience that sometimes four little words such as “I’m proud of you” can make all of the difference in the world to a person who needs to hear it. This doesn’t end in childhood either.

Perhaps even more startling, is that there are plenty of people in this world, who not only fail to give this encouragement, but actively seek to snuff out the light in other people. The song says it well, “As funny as it may seem, some people get their kicks, stomping on a dream.” Perhaps this is what happens to a number of people who failed to receive encouragement in their own lives. Hurt lingers, resentment builds, and they work to pull others down in the same way that they were. It’s a sad cycle that takes active and mindful excavation of our own pasts to consistently stand up against.

So for all of us who interact with children, as counselors, teachers, and especially parents, we have to realize that we are in fact leaving imprints on these little people that we interact with, and learn to put aside our own disappointments and remember what it is these children need from us. And perhaps, beyond the children, it’s not too late for the grown-ups in our lives to also rekindle their own dreams with a little bit of much needed encouragement. Many of us are still these same kids now in larger sizes. But we still have our dreams. Every single one of us. And without the idea of these dreams, an important part of us begins to die. So take the time to tell a kid you’re proud of them. They want to hear it very badly, and these little words can shape a child’s future in ways far beyond our comprehension.

Scar Tissue

I don't want to die without a few scars.

Chuck Palahniuk 

Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on.

Henry Rollins


Had a truly enlightening conversation with a man last night who had just lost a friend of his in a motorcycle accident. He told me about how his friend had been an alcoholic for most of his life, but had been clean for five years when he died. He was killed by a drunk driver, a fact that left this man both angry and confused about God and fate and the futility of making plans, when the world seemed to him to be a series of unpredictable accidents. He was difficult to console, and while talking to him, it occurred to me that a scar was being formed that would take a long time to heal. Even as a (very off-duty) therapist, I doubted that there was much I could say to him that would help this scar heal any faster. These things take time.

And I’ve got plenty of my own scars as well. Memories come back sometimes that remind me of painful experiences, and in these moments, I think about what these things have meant to my own story. Sometimes these memories are powerful, and I wonder if I would be better off if they could be completely eradicated from my mind. The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. They are actually quite close to developing a pill for this now. Seriously..

Ultimately however, I think I’ll take a pass on this pill, even if they do finally get it right. I’ve come to understand that these experiences have shaped me in ways, both good and bad, that inform my decisions in all kinds of powerful ways, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has this to say on the subject, “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

I think there is a tremendous amount of wisdom in these words. Although I don’t claim to be one of these “beautiful people” I do know that I became a therapist for several of the reasons that she mentions. When you’ve overcome pain in your own life, you feel a kind of calling to at least try to help others who are in some of the same emotional places. This is often exceedingly difficult, as human change is much more complex than simply sharing a story with someone. It takes patience, resilience, and most of all, simply time, and many kinds of pain can be especially resistant to change. We can become quite comfortable with the devils that we know, and yes I know this from a great deal of personal experience.

When change does happen, it occurs to me that it is akin to scar tissue that is hardening, and pain is slowly being transformed into something stronger, and in these moments a kind of wisdom is also being created. Perspective develops that allows us to see our painful experiences as part of a larger and more complex storyline. This is how we grow.

So in my own life I know that I will continue to share my own past experiences with others, while also thinking about the baggage I haven’t quite made peace with just yet. It reminds me to be patient with others, and perhaps more importantly, be patient with myself. To fully engage with this life in love and fate and moving in the direction of our dreams, is to make ourselves vulnerable to pain again and again and again. Sometimes we’re gonna get hurt. There’s just no way around it. But as we get older and wiser, we perhaps come to see that Mr. Rollins is right in the quote at the beginning of this essay, Scar tissue IS stronger than regular tissue, and we need to realize that we have survived these kinds of things before, and we will again. Any kind of life worth living is going to have some pain in it. It’s what we do after that matters.

With this in mind, I attended a wake today as a guest of the man at the beginning of the story. Not as a therapist, or really even a friend, but rather as someone who has lost some friends, felt that pain, and lived to tell the tale. I thought I was there to help him, but in the end, listening to the speeches, music, and stories, I learned at least as much as I taught.

Inspiration comes in all kinds of places..

Bill Murray, Endless Loops, & The Groundhog.

Groundhog Day. Such an odd and silly little holiday when you think about it, and one that is now synonymous with the movie starring Bill Murray, where he gets stuck repeating one endless day. When the movie came out it was considered a modest hit, but over the years something changed, and people started to look at it as perhaps a kind of masterpiece. Buddhists celebrate the film as a metaphor for many of their teachings. Prominent Catholics commented on the movie as being representative of the concept of purgatory. Beyond the commentary from these lofty places, nearly every one you speak to can relate to this movie in one way or another.

Why is that? Perhaps because at its core, the movie gives us a glimpse of someone who is truly and completely stuck, which, from my experiences as a therapist, I would guess is almost a universal feeling. Who among us hasn’t felt like we were repeating some version of the same day over and over again? A funny example of this comes in the movie “Kingpin” where Woody Harrelson’s character asks an old man drinking wine, “How is life?”

“Taking Forever” is his response.

An odd footnote to this movie is that former best buddies and collaborators Bill Murray and Harold Ramis had a parting of the ways after the movie was done filming. Murray thought the movie should have been more philosophical in nature, and Ramis thought it should be a comedy. It might seem like a small thing for two such brilliant friends to be fighting about. It wasn’t to them. They didn’t speak again for twelve years.

To me their argument speaks to the very premise of feeling stuck in this life, right to its very core. Fr. Alfred D’Souza weighs in on the side of life as the philosophical tragedy, saying, “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin, real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life."

A powerful argument to be sure. Life often feels like never-ending unfinished business, where new fires begin to burn even as the old ones begin to smolder out. Perhaps Father Alfred was right. John Lennon seemed to think so as well, reminding us that “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

On the other hand..

Maybe this is really just a comedy after all. It is kind of silly to think that our own self-importance means a whole lot considering how short our little stay here is. Most of us believe this in at least some way. About other people. Our own problems we don’t find so funny. Mel Brooks said it pretty eloquently, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

So what does all of this have to do with Groundhog Day? Perhaps the answer lies in how Murray finally breaks free from the endless loop, as it slowly dawns on him that he is never going to escape. He surrenders to his fate, while also oddly becoming a wonderful source of inspiration to his fellow captives. By directing his energy away from himself and more towards others, he begins to feel a kind of emotional freedom, despite the fact that he feels like he will be stuck forever in the same day. Why would he do this? If there is no accountability, shouldn’t we just make ourselves happy and take whatever it is we want from life? People seem to voice this opinion often, and Murray in the movie also first takes this approach. It doesn’t seem to work for him. Or for most lottery winners. They’re usually broke again in a few years.

So maybe it is really as simple as the movie makes it seem. If we all have felt stuck in our lives, and we’re all here together, then it stands to reason that we could at least help each other carry the weight of these feelings. Self-absorption as a response to feeling stuck often feels like the right way to go, when in fact it’s like spinning our tires deeper into the quicksand. When we chose to give instead of get, we often get back much more than we ever could have expected. And what we get back is not simply quid-pro-quo, but instead something much more powerful, which is freedom from the little prisons of self-obsession we build in our own minds.

And really, that’s the only kind of freedom that matters.

Walkin' in Memphis

Walkin’ in Memphis

Just pulling out of Memphis Tenessee. Had a wonderful weekend full of adventure. I got up on stage with BB King’s house band and played (flailed at) the trombone,. I stood at the very spot where James Earl Ray gunned down Martin Luther King.  I held the microphone where Johnny Cash recorded his first song. I sat and mediated at the spot where Elvis played “Unchained Melody” a couple of hours before he died. I’m not ashamed to say I cried when I stood at his grave, thinking 42 was too young for him to leave this mortal coil.

Travel is good for the soul. I’ve always known that, but sometimes in the hustle and bustle of life, I forget it. There is something about being in a strange place that challenges you to snap out of your comfort zone and start again with new people in new places. It helps you grow. I’m sure of it.

So on a whim I went to Memphis. I picked this place after reading a story about Marc Cohn, who wrote the seminal hit "‘Walkin’ in Memphis" back in 91’. Much like I did, he decided to visit this city to see Graceland and find out a little more about the King. While he was there, he had what he described as a “spiritual awakening.” Here is the story,

“Cohn wrote this song after traveling to Memphis to check out Graceland, which is Elvis Presley's mansion and a kitschy tourist destination. He made sure to see an Al Green sermon when he was there, but it was a trip out of Memphis along Highway 61 where the meaty part of his journey took place. In the desolate Delta, he saw a sign that said "Hollywood," which turned out to be the Hollywood Cafe, which is a small diner/music joint in Tunica County, Mississippi. This is where Cohn smelled the catfish and encountered a black woman in her 70’s named Murial who was at the piano. After watching Murial play a variety of spirituals and Hoagy Carmichael songs for about 90 minutes, he spoke with her when she took a break.

Cohn's mother died when he was just 2 years old, and he lost his father at age 12. He spent a lot of time reconciling his childhood, which often comes out in his songs. Speaking with Murial, he got maybe the best therapy of his life. Cohn described this conversation in his 1992 interview with Q magazine, saying: "She was real curious, she seemed to have some kind of intuition about me, and I ended up telling her about my family, my parents, how I was a musician looking for a record deal, the whole thing. Then, it must have been about two in the morning, she asks me up to sing with her and we do about an hour, me and this lady I'd never met before, playing a song I hardly knew so she's yelling the words at me. Then at the end, as the applause is rising up, she leans over and whispers in my ear, “You've got to let go of your mother, child, she didn't mean to die, she's where she's got to be and you're where you have to be, child, it's time to move on."

I was so touched to read that. I think in many ways we are all trying to reconcile things from our past, and the more we resist it, the more it comes back. Stephen King said it like this, “So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little. “

So I found myself in Memphis, trying to reconnect with a piece of my own past. Once upon a time I was a young kid at loose in this city. I was practically broke, in love for the first time, and dazzled and a little amazed to be in a new place. I remember at the time reading a story about a young Bruce Springsteen jumping the fence at Graceland because he wanted to show Elvis a song he had written. It always resonated with me. I aspired to be that bold.

As I walked the streets of Memphis all these years later, I heard the song “always something there to remind me” playing in my head. I remember being young and wistful, and I miss those times. But for better or for worse, I have gotten older, and in this and all other incarnations, I play the hand that is dealt. Perhaps Oscar Wilde said it best, “the soul is born old but grows young, that is the comedy of life. And the body is young but grows old. That is the tragedy of life.”

So aside from all the comedies and tragedies of my own life, I had a bit of my own spiritual awakening while I was walking the streets of Memphis. And it wasn’t because I learned something new or came to a different kind of understanding. Instead, I remembered something and someone I once was, and I realized I am still very much that same person. I came to understand that age, at it’s core, is really nothing more than a concept we conceive in our own minds We place limitations on ourselves based on what we “should” be doing, but ultimately the only person we have to account for is ourselves. Of course we try and improve ourselves along the way, but in the meantime, to find any kind of happiness, we have to find a kind of self-acceptance.

So that’s what I found in Memphis. A kind of understanding that in many ways I still am that young, brazen and hopeful young man I once was, while also being a little older and wiser as well. All of the stops on the timeline have their purpose, and shape us in ways we don’t always fully comprehend. The truth is that a life lived well is one we can come back to over and over again. To create these memories we just have to find our courage to try something new and do something different. This is why travel is so therapeutic. So farewell for now Memphis. I shall return.. Thanks for the memories..