benrussack-blog

[benrussack-blog]

So why, exactly, do I need therapy?

“There are two types of people: those who need therapy and those who can benefit from it.”

Topping out at six foot five, the old man stared down at me from his tall chair with the gravity of a king from some ancient world. In 1989, at the age of fifteen, I became the patient of Seymour Radin MCFF, a Jungian analyst from Petaluma, California. As a man who had come of age during the Great Depression, Seymour had more than a few good stories, as well as good ideas, to pass down to me. Over two decades later, I still went to see him once a week.

“Can you expand on that, please?” I asked, knowing full well that he would not.

Throughout my adult years, I have spent an inordinate amount of time breaking the encryption of Seymour’s aphorisms. Only two types, really? If so, which type am I? The more I deconstructed the old man’s sentiments, the more I believe really no one should go: A person who needs therapy but clearly isn’t benefitting from it, has no business remaining in treatment. Furthermore, those who benefit but don’t actually need it have little cause to even bother going in the first place. Sadly, when further pressed, Seymour did little else but wait stoically with ancient, folded hands as I talked my way (stammered, really) through my own exasperated thoughts. Nevertheless, from this confounding chunk of so-called wisdom I now extrapolate the following:

The benefits of therapy, or perhaps the needs therapy serves are multifaceted. On a basic, day-to-day level, therapy opens us up to new ways of thinking and feeling about life’s challenges, ultimately assisting us to make better choices in the moment. That is, we learn to ask ourselves better questions, such as, “Should I go with my anger, which I know is a big issue of mine, and lay into my sister for failing to mind her own business, or should I express my dissatisfaction with her behavior honestly and authentically and without using hurtful language?” Normally, an individual holding on to a lot of anger would not even consider the second option. The same applies for someone managing difficulties such as depression, anxiety, or a lack of adequate communication skills. This is where therapy can help. Therapy can help us make the better choice.

Another way to improve our ability to make better choices is to figure out what we actually want. Towards this end, I often challenge patients to imagine the life they desire and work with them to remove the perceived barriers between themselves and what they want, or at least a realistic version of what they want. That means learning to replace “I want to sing like Selena Gomez” with a more realistic goals such as “I want to one day sing competently before a large and appreciative audience.” Fortunately, the barriers around us are largely self-created and, with a bit of focus and insight, they may be broken down or at the very least hopped over.

Again, do we need to make better choices, or are better choices available only to those who are simply able to benefit from them? Seymour once said to me, “I would stand on my head if I thought it would make you feel better.” That one, at least, made some sense: While therapy can’t solve all of your problems, as your therapist, I sure wish it could. Also I related to this statement on a personal level. Like Seymour, and as a therapist myself, I simply want to help people any way I can.

On a more internal and decidedly less measurable level, therapy is also about growth. This may be exasperating to hear, but just stay with me, even if this kind of talk isn’t your jam.

On its face, growth is a non-quantifiable process. Consider, for example, the difference between a child falling down and scraping his knee and an adult doing the same: The injury may be identical, but the manner in which the pain is handled is entirely different. That is, as we grow, we tend to be less affected when things do not go our way. Edward Edinger, a Jungian philosopher, described growth as an “Expansion of Personality.” Think as a childh, whose world one day may have briefly fallen apart as you sailed over a pair of handlebars and painted the curb with your knee. That child was still you, but a different you. A lesser version of you. Another way to think of growth is the experience of an increase in consciousness. Though Edinger also said that consciousness is impossible to define, we usually know an increase—or decrease—in consciousness when we see it. Usually such a shift happens incrementally, slowly and nearly invisibly, over many years. But sometimes it comes all at once, usually in a cathartic, painful fashion.

Here is yet another Seymourism:

“If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t true.”

Ouch.

This brings us to the next obvious question: How do I grow? Well, picking up the phone and getting yourself into therapy might be one way to go about doing that. There you may experience growth by vocalizing events or feelings you have never spoken of before. Think of how physical therapy works. During recovery from a significant injury, often a part of the body has atrophied or is failing to heal due to lack of use—that is, due to lack of blood and energy reaching that space. Once it does so, the body’s natural healing processes will finally be able to tend to the injury. The same applies to the mind. A childhood trauma, which is probably far more serious than a bicycle accident, may too atrophy aspects of our psyche. As an adult, it is as though certain memories and feelings are blocked up, penned in, unable to be released or processed. For example, I once knew a woman who refused, under any circumstances, to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. This phobia was understandable, as she had been nearly killed several years prior during a head-on collision on the same bridge. It was as though the psychic wound left by the accident never fully healed—or never healed at all. The memories were too painful to relive and therefore remained unchanged, fragmented and stuck within her. In theory, talk therapy might be one way for her to process the accident and shepherd those horrific memories towards the light, thereby allowing the natural healing processes of her heart and soul to do their work.

On the other hand, I feel the term trauma to be somewhat limiting, as it may pathologize the patient. For while exposing buried and traumatized parts of ourselves is essential for deep change, I am less interested in how you were traumatized and more so in how you were Shaped.

Allow me to explain:

Shaping refers to any childhood, teen and early adulthood environmental pressures or events, traumatic and otherwise, that Shaped your personality. Your Shape is akin to a hillside tree whose trunk and branches reach out in strange angles due to the steep gradient and strong winds. Like yourself, and so many of us, though the tree may appear different or odd, it is perfectly functional. A Bonsai figures into this analogy as well: A fully mature, entirely healthy entity appears to us in miniature due to a lack of available earth in which to spread its roots.

My job as your therapist is to discern your Shape.

When we discover our Shape, we can know our Work.

When we know our Work then we can Grow.

Imagine a household which eschewed and repressed all discussion and expression of feeling, a household where crying was a form of weakness and anger a capital crime. A child reared in such an environment may be Shaped into someone with an oversized focus on intellect. Think of a Spock or the Trekian android, Commander Data. Think of a man who tries to solve every problem instead of addressing how his partner actually feels. Work with such a patient may involve simply helping him get out of his own head and accessing his feelings, his body, or his intuition. The Work of this patient is to explore, access and utilize the realms that thought does not touch. It is my belief that such a practice will initiate Growth.

Here is another example: A friend of mine is currently undergoing a long and protracted divorce. A self-described feeling type, this person leads with her emotions. Her decision tree is less influenced by cold reasoning and more so by her mood or inner temperature. As the divorce dragged on, visions of repairing the marriage kept cropping up for her. Every time her soon-to-be ex showed the remotest bit of decency, she would attempt to reconcile to give him another chance. Every time, of course, his old habits would swiftly resurface: belittling, dismissing, ignoring. (A real catch, no?) His intermittent kindness reminded her how much she actually loved him. In those moments, her thought process would go something like this: “Today I love my husband, therefore we should be together.” In this instance, my friend’s executive functioning—that is, the driving seat of our decision-making process—was being guided by her emotional world. Feeling was the rule.

I recommended my friend write herself a letter about what she should do and not do the next time one of these moments cropped up. In the letter, she could also describe in detail her husband’s true character, this shadow of a man who occasionally threw her his scraps of kindness. I asked her to write from her more grounded, thinking self to her less grounded, feeling Self, a Self that was clearly suffering from feelings of abandonment and hurt due to the steadily crumbling marriage. Postmarked from the realm of thought and addressed to the land of emotion, this measure of Work would hopefully allow my friend to access her thinking function during times of emotional turmoil.

(Note: I do not mean to imply that feeling is any worse or better than thought. Rather, in a well-balanced personality, the two work in concert to arrive at optimal solutions.)

So what happens when we discover our Work and begin to Grow? What changes, exactly? Here is a straightforward but woefully incomplete list: make better choices; attract healthier, kinder people; learn to better and deeply appreciate and experience our lives on a day-to-day level; increase our vulnerability; increase our capacity for intimacy; acquire a broader, stronger community; learn to ask for help; increase our productivity and therefore income; increase our well-being; gain a wholly unquantifiable sense of inner growth and increased consciousness; feel a sense that you have taken the red pill.

Let me bring all of this to a personal level: as a child, and well into my teens and twenties, I was deeply socially maladaptive and grossly overweight. As one may well imagine, such a platform proved to be the source of considerable strife in my adult life. Dating, friendships, income, self-image—nearly everything was affected. By age twenty-eight, I lacked self-confidence, had formed very few friendships and had had even fewer girlfriends. I feared conflict and in both public and private arenas I felt constantly unsafe and physically vulnerable. How I came to be this way, how I grew into this Shape, is not germane to this discussion. Needless to say, my Shape stood out in stark relief: to anyone with eyes, my pathology was obvious.

Then one day, some time after my twenty-ninth birthday, a friend (a real friend, the kind who cared enough not to listen to my BS) dragged me to an introductory class in Brazilian jujitsu. The next day, I quit my gym and never looked back. This extremely intense, full-contact grappling art afforded me several opportunities, all of which were connected to my Work. First of all, daily controlled conflict built my self-confidence. In addition, the high-contact sport allowed me to blow off a considerable amount of repressed anger, which I am sure was stunting my emotional and psychological development. Jujitsu also whipped me into the best physical shape of my life. Lastly, and probably most importantly, I benefited from the tight brotherhood that forms amongst Brazilian jujitsu players.

Let me paint a picture of the Growth I have experienced due to fifteen years of hard training and focus on my Work: Today I am one hundred pounds thinner; I am part of a vast community of truly fabulous men and women; I feel safe, confident and centered in just about any situation. After fifteen years, I can finally hold my head up and smile. I would call that progress. And am I saying that jujitsu is the answer to everyone’s prayers? Well, no (but really yes and hell yes), but let me add that during this fifteen-year stint I partook in a host of other activities related to my Work: I attended therapy, started dating and went back to school for an advanced degree in Counseling Psychology. I mean, who knows, maybe the jujitsu didn’t do a damn thing and my self-improvement came from digesting all those god-awful textbooks. Regardless, whether it is simply talking it through with a professional, analyzing our dreams or swimming the Strait of Gibraltar, like countless streams filling a vast reservoir, our growth may come to us from a thousand directions.

In the years before his passing, I would spend hours with Seymour on his vast, serene ranch. I can’t stop picturing his hands, stiff and crooked from his street fighting days during the Depression, and how he stared at me with a mixture of determination and compassion from beneath a set of white, overgrown eyebrows.

So folks, need or benefit?

Even now, I still can’t say which camp I belong to, and I have stayed awake nights wondering if there is truly a difference. Perhaps that’s what he meant, that there are no differences, that therapy is for everyone, that there is really only one type of person, and only one way this goes:

Shape. Work. Growth.

That’s everything I know.

Now give me a call.

[benrussack-blog]

Kidnapped by Cupid, How Romantic Love Takes Over Our Lives

The last thing you actually heard was a scratchy, excited message in your voicemail about a great first date, followed a few days later by a text in all caps and smothered in exclamation points.  After a week, there were only rumors of a third and forth date. And then, silence.

You called. You texted. You accessed social networks. But to no avail.

Your friend has fallen victim to romantic love, swept up by that proverbial white horse into an even more proverbial sunset. You want answers, no doubt, and demand to know why your friend will not be returned. You would also like to know what it is, exactly, about romantic love that would possesses anyone to abandon their closest companions and focus so blindly, so hopelessly and so completely onto one person.

Well, let’s get into it.

The first thing you need to know is that your friend has constructed the perfect psychological mate. Wrought over a lifetime this flawless manikin shimmers with an ethereal, otherworldly translucence. If your friend is male, this visage is likely female, a woman who fits all of his specifications—weight, shape, height, hair and eye color. Better yet, she knows exactly when to leave the room, bring him a beer or allow him time to cry on her shoulder.  She may even follow the NHL and participate, under no duress, in fantasy football. If your friend is female, her Adonis may resemble the Hollywood flavor of the month, but more importantly he listens, is receptive to her feelings, freely and easily expresses his own and remains continuously, fully and breathtakingly emotionally available.

So how does this apply to your friend’s situation? In a word: projection. Like looking through a lens, the glass manikin stands between us and our enamored, distorting their image. To complicate matters, there are aspects of our effigy of which we may not be aware—nearly invisible fabric festooned from its stiff, outstretched arms and tilted neck. This man may want a woman who moves and speaks like his mother. Here is a woman who unconsciously scores her potential mate by comparing his hands to her father’s.  I do not mean to suggest the presence of a Freudian love affair, rather that since childhood each of us unconsciously compile criteria for what we believe is beautiful, masculine or feminine based on the models which are closest at hand. Conversely, say a woman had a terrible relationship with her father—perhaps she avoids men who even remotely resemble him. Even glasses and a mis-placed mole could be a deal breaker. And just to bewilder and truly upset you, she may actually find abusive men attractive. In fact, both men and women may unconsciously replicate an abusive past in order to re-experience and resolve childhood trauma. This can manifest in a number of ways. For example, a child abused by both parents may, as an adult, feel unsafe or simply unable to carryout intimate relationships. This person may seek out partners who are perhaps married, geographically distant, emotionally unavailable, or “just someone to sleep with”.

On a brighter note, sometimes we project onto our new partner qualities we love most about ourselves. Is this love of your life (the one you met five minutes ago) gorgeous, wise and brilliant? Loving, reliable and receptive? Has anyone ever said anything like that about you? Just as we may find ourselves inexplicably incensed with those who harbor and exhibit our own negative traits, so too do we occasionally become enamored when the opposite occurs. Just as we have a difficult time owning our negative traits, we may have just a hard a time owning the positive.

In summary, our ideal mate is an amalgam of human made of memories, ideals, traumas, hopes and dreams–all manufactured from the material deep within our own individual psyches. Which begs the question: When we are in love, who are we really in love with? When you look into your lover’s eyes, whose eyes are you really looking into? Picture your friend on a date. She is in a café, sitting across from her newly beloved. Two people transfixed, each with a mirror, gazing into their own reflection.

Finally, one day, usually around three months later, your phone rings.

She is contrite, possibly tearful. “We’re taking a break. I’m sorry I’ve been such a terrible friend. I don’t know what I was thinking.” You don’t need to ask what happened. Maybe they had their first fight, or moved into that comfortable, familiar stage of the relationship. Whatever the case, the projection has begun to crack and splinter. Have you been here before? You awake one day to a human being laying beside you wrapped in 90% of the covers, a human you must listen to and compromise with (how to share a blanket for instance), who may also be experiencing their own sense of loss and deep disappoint as you fail to live up to an impossible standard. For a projection’s ephemeral nature is the source of its great paradox—for once you have found the one, you have found no one.

In his book “We, Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love” Robert Johnson, the great Jungian philosopher and psychotherapist, likened the sparkling quality of romance to a religious experience. In addition, he discusses how many religions converge on the point that the deepest experience of God, the universe, the great mystery, or whatever label you wish to lay upon it, exists ultimately within ourselves. Johnson feels that romantic love operates as a modern gateway to this deeper experience, or a road sign indicating the direction towards our true Self. He maintains that part of the reason we become so swept up in projection is that we are missing this aspect in our lives and are left craving an intense experience of the numinous and of the Self.

So is the secret…church? Hell no. What Johnson is advocating for is a deeper, more fearless excavation of who we are as humans. So long as we are unable to access the greatness and mystery that is ourselves, we will continue to project all this material onto our partner. Just think of what romantic love requires your significant other to hold—a life time of your own material, your hopes, dreams, unmet expectations as well as unearthed and unresolved traumas.  If we do not learn to lighten the load we place upon our significant other we will be continually disappointed with our intimate relationships.

So what do we do once the projection has lifted and our experience of the numinous has evaporated?  Relationships have the potential to move into a deeper form of love—real caring, quiet. Johnson states

Love is the power within us that affirms and values another human being as he or she is….Therefore, when I say that “I love,” it is not I who love, but, in reality, Love who acts through me. Love is not so much something I do as something that I am. Love is not a doing but a state of being— a relatedness, a connectedness to another mortal, an identification with her or him that simply flows within me and through me, independent of my intentions or my efforts.  (We, Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love 2013)

I will not attempt to improve on that statement. Though I will add that there is no need to reignite the “spark” in the relationship, when what we truly want are embers, buried deep within the ash and charcoal. Why not a red hot, steady heat? For what better thing is there in life but the simple joy of waking up next to someone you love and who loves you back?

Nine months later, you listen patiently as your friend complains and hems and haws, those three months of deafening silence replaced now by appeals for advice, hand-holding and “just someone to talk to” over a beer, coffee, lunch, or anything else that will take up an afternoon away from their a-little-less-than-before-significant-other. You hang up the phone. You scheduled a coffee date, but you know that your friend doesn’t need your help now any more than she did in the beginning. She needs to dedicate the time, do the work and face some serious self-excavation.

Still, projection has served a purpose for your friend. Have you ever “gone too fast” and ruined something that seemed to have great potential? It is as though the projection needs time to build up—like a kind of ethereal charge. And as the two of you dance your dance, leave secret notes, take just enough time to return each other’s phone calls and allow the mystery to propagate, the more your own desires, dreams and imaginings can wash over your new partner and thicken the excitement. Projection is the psychic glue that keeps two people together long enough to decide whether or not there is something real to salvage once the winds of reality have set in and the fairy dust has cleared. So if I had to bring religion or spirituality into this, I would say that during the first glowing phase of a relationship, it is God or the great mystery that takes care of us. After that, we are on our own.

Source:

https://benjaminrussack.com/kidnapped-by-cupid-how-romantic-love-takes-over-our-lives/

[benrussack-blog]

How to Throw Down: The Benefits of a Happy Fighting Marriage

“May you have a happy fighting marriage.”  The old man grinned and drummed his fingers against the armrest. I stared with a mixture of rage and confusion at this therapist who had just doomed me to a life of conflict. And just because he is ninety-four years old and can still ride a horse doesn’t mean he has all the answers. Ok, perhaps a great majority of answers but not all of them. Still, here are a few of his points, as filtered through my comparatively youthful vernacular:

Fighting draws battle lines. Every relationship needs healthy boundaries. “No dear, it is not ok to have dinner with your ex-girlfriend.” There are nice ways to communicate this, but if the message isn’t getting through to your partner, turning up the volume is not a crime.  That fifth  put-down in front of your mother after you asked him nicely to stop? Really? Let him have it.

Fighting helps work out the knots. Let’s say the two of you get into a huge blow out over money, or sex, or children (or all three, god help you) and finally, at 2AM, resolve the problem. The two of you can now sleep a little better knowing that this issue, at least for now, has been put to bed. With one less difference to mitigate, greater closeness and intimacy is achieved.

Fighting is a form of intimacy. To put it simply, suddenly you are in each other’s faces: you are loud, you are close, it is heated. Sounds like sex to me.

Fighting is a tool for demonstrating love. We pick fights in order to experience the love and reunification of making up afterward. This is not, of course, to be conflated with any form of physical, emotional or psychological abuse.

Fighting builds the relationship.  Think of a volcanic eruption–you have seen the videos of the lava flows as they roll popping and spitting into the ocean. That’s the fight. New information is bubbling out of each person: unmet expectations, old baggage, childhood trauma, etc. In a real sense, new ground is being created. When you are done fighting, and the lava has cooled, your “island” has grown.  In short, there is more relationship there than when you started.

“But aren’t there more productive ways to fight?” I asked, “I mean, despite the benefits, if you’re tearing each up all the time, it’s bound to do some lasting damage.”

The old man nodded, very slowly. Straight out of a Tolkien novel, my therapist is 6’4’’ and incredibly hairy. He claims he is going to live to 125.  I know this not to be a hope but a choice. The old man does as he pleases.

Listen to your partner: Every so often paraphrase what he or she is saying, or as may be the case, yelling. Say, “So what I hear you saying is…” Follow this with, “Did I get all that? Did I leave anything out?” Sometimes your significant other just wants to be heard. Letting him or her know this can both diffuse a fight and move the conversation in a more productive direction.

Avoid name calling. Just don’t do it. That’s dirty fighting. I don’t think this one requires an in-depth explanation.

Don’t throw things. For one thing, they often break, or break the thing they hit–especially if that thing happens to be someone you love, or the head of someone you love.

Avoid You–statements. While this may sound trite, this advice has been hammered into me by the old man, over a dozen extremely thick text books, and virtually every clinic in which I have been reluctantly inclined to seek extremely meager employment. But even under extreme duress, I eventually saw the light. Here are a few You-statements:

You always yell at me.

You were late for dinner.

You started this fight.

Let’s say I happen to get into a disagreement with my therapist. Instead of finger pointing, I bring the issue around to how I feel in the moment, to what I am processing/experiencing:

I feel hurt and enraged when you tell me I am being arrogant

When you sit there saying nothing I want to scream in your face.

When you are an asshole, I want to throw this ash tray at your head.

That last item is an example of a common mistake, since it pointed the finger by implying that my therapist was, in my educated opinion, acting like an asshole. Back to the previous example, one can also shift You to We, i.e. “You started this fight”  changes to  “When we fight”. Here, two very different statements contain basically the same factual information.

Ritual. Plan out a set activity in the event a serious meltdown cannot be avoided. The old man had such a plan whenever he fought with his wife. And because he didn’t look enough like a tree already, would go sit by this large oak on his property and write down everything he wanted to say. She would do the same (under a different tree, presumably). This ritual helped mitigate an escalating situation while allowing each party time to think objectively about what they wanted to say.  In other words, ritual brought order to chaos.

Ritual Also brings consciousness to the fight in the sense of “we are in this fight, this is getting out of hand, and we need to do something productive about it and this is what we are going to do”.  Consciousness, the old man maintains, is the great elixir of all our problems. In fact, all the points outlined here tie in to an increased level of consciousness—from drawing battle lines in the sand to examining childhood trauma—all concern bringing forth ideas, attitudes or states of mind that would otherwise remain below the surface.

“So did all of your fights have a good outcome?”

The old man says nothing, ignoring my ridiculous question. He stares at me with eyes set at least three inches into his skull, silently expressing his final point: Know when to give in and simply admit that the other person is right.

Source:

https://benjaminrussack.com/how-to-throw-down-the-benefits-of-a-happy-fighting-marriage/