Fair Fighting Rules

I am often asked, “What is fair in the fights my husband and I have?”

Let’s face it, every invention of man must carry some rules to help define it. Think of the operating manuals you get with the coffee maker or the new 60-inch Samsung flat screen, your new lawn edger, or even the iPhone X. Every organization, every sport, every endeavor we care to be a part of seems to have its own set of rules. They define the boundaries of what is fair and unfair, expected and not expected, and render operations as somewhat more predictable.

In short, rules provide safety and structure. They ensure, or at least make it somewhat possible, for all participants to know what the hell is going on, to strategize, and to (ahem) resolve disagreements.

This applies to marriages as much as it applies to football or basketball or to how you would probably not use your iPhone to edge your lawn (although that cannot be too far off in the future!). Resolving conflict in marriages is hard work, complex, and sorely in need of an owner’s manual (they do exist, by the way – just check Amazon). Without rules, such resolution is fleeting and sure to be short-lived if achieved at all.

As the great therapist Nathan Cobb has said …

… conflict does not have to be unsafe, unpredictable and without purpose. When spouses are committed to following a set of rules, conflict can be an opportunity for couples to grow their “cooperation muscles.” Handling conflict constructively can even help couples develop greater closeness through achieving mutual understanding, learning to cooperate, taking each other’s perspective, and resolving problems together.

This post will outline ten rules for fair fighting. I would encourage you to print them out and put them up on the refrigerator. And then, refer to them every time conflict looms like a thundercloud.

  1. No degrading language. Degradation occurs when we engage in name-calling, in insults, put-downs, and even swearing. When you are name-calling, you are eliciting in your partner the “fight or flight response.” It is a call to arms, a call to do whatever they need to do to protect themselves. Moreover, it is a function of attacking the sinner rather than the sin; of degrading the person rather than their behavior. It can and often does leave scar tissue.
  2.  No blaming. Think about it: blaming is a distraction and distances you from resolution. It is yet another invitation for your partner to engage in defensive talk and will surely escalate, rather than deescalate, the argument. It may feel good for a moment, but it too leaves scar tissue. It may even touch deep-seated fears that the other person may have about themselves. It is a close cousin to judgment, another of the results of putting the blame on someone else. Instead, I would invite you to stay focused on the relationship and to endeavor to keep it intact at all costs, and to find solutions rather than culprits.
  3.  No yelling. If you are a teacher, then you know that yelling at your students is counterproductive. They stop listening and then start reacting. The conversation, such as it was, is shut down. And, again, it may touch some deep-seated pain associated with raised voices. The bottom line is the message: if it cannot be delivered without yelling, then it is probably not the right message. Make a concerted effort to lower your voice. We know from research and just plain old common sense, that a lowered voice invites listeners into the conversation rather than shutting them out. And if you cannot lower your voice, then it’s clear that ‘now’ is the not the right time to be discussing the matter.
  4. No use of force. The threat of physical force, and the use of physical force itself, is at all times unacceptable. Period. Full stop. It accomplishes nothing except to render the relationship then, and into the foreseeable future, as an unsafe space. Even punching a hole in the stucco, or kicking the cat, will send that message. Each of us, especially in marriage, have a right to safety, to a home free of physical abuse. As with raised voices, I would suggest you remove yourself and go somewhere to cool down. You can have a fair fight without force. If you feel as if you cannot, then call and schedule a session with me.
  5. No talk of divorce or dissolution. Now we are into the manipulation that so many of us fear. We are talking here of “conditional love,” of the idea that it is “my way or the highway.” A threat such as that elicits in our partners deep-seated fears of abandonment and suggests a certain immaturity on the part of the other. It erodes trust. And it sorta sends the message that the problem is big, huge, and irresolvable. It isn’t.
  6. Talk about YOUR needs and wants, not your partner’s. As my couples clients will attest, one of the first questions I ask them when they present for couples therapy is: “Whose behavior can you control?” The answer is never anything but, “my own.” Instructing your partner on what THEY should want or need is patronizing, controlling, presumptuous and, frankly, immature. THEY get to decide what they want and need. Moreover, it is the epitome of wasted energy in a relationship to spend time analyzing your partner. In the alternative, spend the energy identifying your own wants, your unmet needs, and on constructing the approach to the matter (whatever it may be). YOU are the expert in YOUR world and no one else’s.
  7. Stay in the present, always. Resist the temptation to go back in time. At base, it is discouraging to be reminded of past transgression, especially when we have worked hard to resolve them, to make amends for them, and to grow from them. Besides, you cannot change the past! You can only change your behavior and contribute to a better today and tomorrow. Moreover, if you are forever dredging the past, the chances are that the past conflict was never satisfactorily resolved. Get therapy. And remember to discuss issues as they happen rather than allowing them to fester.
  8. Take turns speaking. One of my teachers from elementary school would calm an unruly class by reminding everyone that she had a “talking stick” and wasn’t afraid to use it. Her rule was simple: one speaker at a time. And, in a marriage, that means one listener at a time. Think of how frustrating it is to you to have someone forever interrupting you or talking on top of you. Remember that feeling and apply it to fair marital fights. Oh, and don’t go using your “listening time” to compose your come-back, your rebuttal. REALLY LISTEN.
  9. No stonewalling. This means being present in the moment, being committed to a resolution, and earnestly remaining committed to NOT kicking the can down the road. “Not now, honey,” is not a good refrain. There is no better time than now.
  10. And finally, if you need to, take a time-out. Think here of football and the battle that rages on the gridiron. Things are getting fired up, the teams are really engaged and hammering away, and then … the coach calls a time-out. WTF? Well, he (or she) may be seeing something you are not. He may be seeing too much passion and not enough discipline. By slowing things down, the coach is saying, “OK, we need to refocus. We need to keep a larger picture in mind. “If you find yourself violating any of the rules above, then it is time for a time-out. Pure and simple. You have lost sight of the goal. You have lost perspective. How long? Well, 30 minutes is good. It takes at least that long to return the body’s metabolism from “fight” to normal. It takes at least that long to lose the urge to react rather than respond. Thirty minutes, an hour, two hours, but never more than 24 hours. And, yes, it is dangerous to go to bed mad.

In conclusion, remember this: many partners grew up in households, in so-called families-of-origin, where yelling, blaming, name-calling and finger wagging was the norm. The fact is – no one “wins” such arguments. Not then, not now.

Or as my grandma used to say, “don’t fight like a pig in the mud. Everyone gets dirty and the pig loves it.”

 

Posted in Counseling Concepts, General Musings | 2 Comments

Generative Artificial Intelligence

 

Robot PNG

My robot thinks for me, therefore I am?

Artificial Intelligence Scares Me

So, now we’re into artificial intelligence everywhere. People in my world are quite proud of themselves when they tell me that no longer ask Google (or Bing) for information but instead turn to one of the AI engines: Grok, Complexity, Gemini, et. al.

And it worries me.

Scares me, in fact.

Here’s why…

I think there’s a dream that goes along with the advent of such technology and that dream is of reduced work and increased leisure time. Soon, we will have robots from Tesla that will wander through our homes doing menial tasks, like “hey, robot man, make me a perfect cup of coffee and then bring it to me.”

We won’t even have to say “please.”

Fair enough. Who am I stand athwart of such progress?

Nevertheless, I think it’s a pipe dream wrapped inside of a nightmare.

Hear me out.

Man needs work. It defines who he is. Work is the yin to the yang of leisure time. Without work, leisure means nothing.

And I don’t think we handle the leisure time we have now! Just look at how people descend into drugs and alcohol.

AI is more properly understood as “generative” artificial intelligence (GAI). “Generative” in the sense that it will generate less for us to do.

There will be a hollowing out of people. A loss of identity, purpose, and importance. A feeling of worthlessness will be the result for those who incorporate GAI into their everyday life.

The majority of what the technology gurus are pitching to us now involves the “rosy future” of being relieved of your job, and of your agency as human being. Freewill itself may be in danger.

The gurus of AI encourage such a capitulation of the most basic decisions: what to write in an email, where to eat dinner, where to vacation, what bedtime story your daughter asked you to “make up,” what to wear, to make coffee, etc.

There is nothing in their pitch that suggests you will be a better person with this tech, be you a husband, girlfriend, writer, athlete, etc.

Their pitches are always focused on GAI doing all the basic things that essentially make you what you are.

This is to say nothing of the criminal reduction in learning that will follow. Learning not only enriches our lives but is essential for a person’s confidence. If we don’t have to learn – which is to say, if we don’t have to do anything – we will lose our humanity.

If you notice, the gurus are also trying to insist they are doing something spiritual, that GAI is a kind of “god.” Always there for you, giving you wisdom, giving you companionship, giving you “love.” In essence, a kind of fake god, an “antichrist.”

If you think people are depressed, anxious, or feeling a loss of purpose now, it’s nothing compared with how they’ll feel after they start letting GAI live their lives.

I see it now. Students who rely on AI to write their paper, for instance. They cannot be proud of what they’ve done. They just turn it in and go on to the next vapid response to an assignment.

I am worried.

Posted in Addiction, Anxiety, Depression, General Musings, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Generative Artificial Intelligence

Safe Talk on Campus – the End of Speech and The Deification of Playdoh

A couple of weeks ago, I told my hard-working students that I would be available to them over the coming weekend, “except for Sunday around 11-12 when I will be at Mass.”  Word got back to me that I should refrain from such statements as they might be construed as an endorsement, by virtue of my “position of power,” of religion. Worse, it would be construed as an endorsement of a particular sect, one which has been averse to the “interests of certain populations within our university.”  By that, of course, they mean Catholicism’s continuing struggles with its avowed pro-life position (not pro-choice, whatever that is), or its struggles with homosexuality (putting aside for the moment that my Church has never, to my knowledge, barred anyone from entering).  I was also casually reminded that my standing as mental health professional within what has become an incredibly close-minded and unabashedly liberal professional organization (The American Counseling Association), could be at risk should I persist. Read that as I did – a threat to either fall in line or suffer the consequences.

My dear readers, you will know by now what my response was; namely, that I will never lie to my students, that I will be as transparent as decorum and tact permit, and that the practice of religion remains a basic freedom. I therefore rejected the request that I “refrain.” I am not made of Playdoh™ -never have been and never will be. What you see is what you get, and I hope that my students know that.

To wit, if I am on a golf course, I will tell them that. If I am grocery shopping, they will know that too. And if I am at Mass, and thereby unavailable to their texted pleas for help on a particular assignment, I will tell them that as well. I am Catholic and that’s that.

Which brings me to this wonderful piece by Bill Deresiewicz in The American Scholar on newsstands this month. The notion of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, has reached an absurdity that even Allen Bloom’s, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), would never have predicted (and Dr. Bloom predicted a veritable laundry list of political correct nonsense).

All I can do is sigh. Mr. Deresiewicz’s rather long article follows and is his work, not mine, and his alone.

By William Deresiewicz, March 6, 2017

Let us eschew the familiar examples: the disinvited speakers, the Title IX tribunals, the safe zones stocked with Play-Doh, the crusades against banh mi. The flesh-eating bacterium of political correctness, which feeds preferentially on brain tissue, and which has become endemic on elite college campuses, reveals its true virulence not in the sorts of high-profile outbreaks that reach the national consciousness, but in the myriad of ordinary cases—the everyday business-as-usual at institutions around the country—that are rarely even talked about.

A clarification, before I continue (since deliberate misconstrual is itself a tactic of the phenomenon in question). By political correctness, I do not mean the term as it has come to be employed on the right—that is, the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets. I mean its older, intramural denotation: the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas.

I recently spent a semester at Scripps, a selective women’s college in Southern California. I had one student, from a Chinese-American family, who informed me that the first thing she learned when she got to college was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her non-feminist views about marriage. I had another student, a self-described “strong feminist,” who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might say something that you’re not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”

I also heard that the director of the writing center, a specialist in disability studies, was informing people that they couldn’t use expressions like “that’s a crazy idea” because they stigmatize the mentally ill. I heard a young woman tell me that she had been criticized by a fellow student for wearing moccasins—an act, she was informed, of cultural appropriation. I heard an adjunct instructor describe how a routine pedagogical conflict over something he had said in class had turned, when the student in question claimed to have felt “triggered,” into, in his words, a bureaucratic “dumpster fire.” He was careful now, he added, to avoid saying anything, or teaching anything, that might conceivably lead to trouble.

I listened to students—young women, again, who considered themselves strong feminists—talk about how they were afraid to speak freely among their peers, and how despite its notoriety as a platform for cyberbullying, they were grateful for YikYak, the social media app, because it allowed them to say anonymously what they couldn’t say in their own name. Above all, I heard my students tell me that while they generally identified with the sentiments and norms that travel under the name of political correctness, they thought that it had simply gone too far—way too far. Everybody felt oppressed, as they put it, by the “PC police”—everybody, that is, except for those whom everybody else regarded as members of the PC police.

I heard all this, and a good bit more, while teaching one class, for 12 students, during one semester, at one college. And I have no reason to believe that circumstances are substantially different at other elite private institutions, and plenty of reasons not to believe it: from conversations with individuals at many schools, from my broader experience in higher education, from what I’ve read not only in the mainstream media but also in the higher education press. The situation is undoubtedly better at some places than others, undoubtedly worse at the liberal arts colleges as a whole than at the universities as a whole, but broadly similar across the board.

So, this is how I’ve come to understand the situation: Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

I should mention that when I was speaking about these issues last fall with a group of students at Whitman College, a selective school in Washington State, that idea, that elite private colleges are religious institutions, is the one that resonated with them most. I should also mention that I received an email recently from a student who had transferred from Oral Roberts, the evangelical Christian university in Tulsa, to Columbia, my alma mater. The latter, he found to his surprise, is also a religious school, only there, he said, the faith is the religion of success. The religion of success is not the same as political correctness, but as I will presently explain, the two go hand in hand.

What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern. The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

Dogma, and the enforcement of dogma, makes for ideological consensus. Students seldom disagree with one another anymore in class, I’ve been told about school after school. The reason, at least at Whitman, said one of the students I talked to there, is mainly that they really don’t have any disagreements. Another added that when they take up an issue in class, it isn’t, let’s talk about issue X, but rather, let’s talk about why such-and-such position is the correct one to have on issue X. When my student wrote about her churchgoing friend, she said that she couldn’t understand why anyone would feel uncomfortable being out as a religious person at a place as diverse as Scripps. But of course, Scripps and its ilk are only diverse in terms of identity. In terms of ideology, they are all but homogeneous. You don’t have “different voices” on campus, as these institutions like to boast; you have different bodies, speaking with the same voice.

That, by the way, is why liberal students (and liberals in general) are so bad at defending their own positions. They never have to, so they never learn to. That is also why it tends to be so easy for conservatives to goad them into incoherent anger. Nothing makes you more enraged than an argument you cannot answer. But the reason to listen to people who disagree with you is not so you can learn to refute them. The reason is that you may be wrong. In fact, you are wrong: about some things and probably about a lot of things. There is zero percent chance that any one of us is 100 percent correct. That, in turn, is why freedom of expression includes the right to hear as well as speak, and why disinviting campus speakers abridges the speech rights of students as well as of the speakers themselves.

Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color—two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base. As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics. Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). If you want to find the counterculture on today’s elite college campuses, you need to look for the conservative students.

Which brings us to another thing that comes with dogma: heresy. Heresy means those beliefs that undermine the orthodox consensus, so it must be eradicated: by education, by reeducation—if necessary, by censorship. It makes a perfect, dreary sense that there are speech codes, or the desire for speech codes, at selective private colleges. The irony is that conservatives don’t actually care if progressives disapprove of them, with the result that political correctness generally amounts to internecine warfare on the left: radical feminists excoriating other radical feminists for saying “vagina” instead of “front hole,” students denouncing the director of Boys Don’t Cry as a transphobic “cis white bitch” (as recently happened at Reed College), and so forth.

But the most effective form of censorship, of course, is self-censorship—which, in the intimate environment of a residential college, young adults are very quick to learn. One of the students at Whitman mentioned that he’s careful, when questioning consensus beliefs, to phrase his opinion in terms of “Explain to me why I’m wrong.” Other students— at Bard College, at the Claremont Colleges—have explained that any challenge to the hegemony of identity politics will get you branded as a racist (as in, “Don’t talk to that guy, he’s a racist”). Campus protesters, their frequent rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, are not the ones being silenced: they are, after all, not being silent. They are in the middle of the quad, speaking their minds. The ones being silenced are the ones like my students at Scripps, like the students at Whitman, like many students, no doubt, at many places, who are keeping their mouths shut. “The religion of humanity,” as David Bromwich recently wrote, “may turn out to be as dangerous as all the other religions.”

The assumption on selective campuses is not only that we are in full possession of the truth, but that we are in full possession of virtue. We don’t just know the good with perfect wisdom, we embody it with perfect innocence. But regimes of virtue tend to eat their children. Think of Salem. They tend to turn upon themselves, since everybody wants to be the holiest. Think of the French Revolution. The ante is forever being upped. The PC commissariat reminds me of the NRA. Everyone is terrified of challenging the NRA (everyone in a position to stop it, at least), so it gets whatever it demands. But then, because it can, it thinks up new demands. Guns in playgrounds, guns in bars.

So it is with political correctness. There is always something new, as my students understood, that you aren’t supposed to say. And worst of all, you often don’t find out about it until after you have said it. The term political correctness, which originated in the 1970s as a form of self-mockery among progressive college students, was a deliberately ironic invocation of Stalinism. By now we’ve lost the irony but kept the Stalinism—and it was a feature of Stalinism that you could be convicted for an act that was not a crime at the time you committed it. So, you were always already guilty, or could be made to be guilty, and therefore were always controllable.

You were also always under surveillance by a cadre of what Jane Austen called, in a very different context, “voluntary spies,” and what my students called the PC police. Regimes of virtue produce informants (which really does wonders for social cohesion). They also produce authorities, often self-appointed authorities, like the writing director at Scripps who decreed that you aren’t supposed to use the word crazy. Whenever I hear that you aren’t supposed to say something, I want to know, where did this supposed descend from? Who decided, and who gave them the right to decide? And whenever I hear that a given group of students demands this or says that, I want to ask, whom exactly are we talking about: all of them, or just a few of them? Did the group choose its leaders, or did the leaders choose themselves?

Let me be clear. I recognize that both the culture of political correctness and the recent forms of campus agitation are responding to enormous, intractable national problems. There is systemic racism and individual bigotry in the United States, and colleges are not immune from either. There is systemic sexism and sexual assault in society at large, and campuses are no exception. The call for safe spaces and trigger warnings, the desire to eliminate micro-aggressions, the demand for the removal of offensive symbols and the suppression of offensive language: however foolish some of these might be as policy prescriptions (especially the first two), however absurd as they work themselves out on the ground, all originate in deeply legitimate concerns.

But so much of political correctness is not about justice or creating a safe environment; it is about power. And so much of what is taking place at colleges today reflects the way that relations of power have been reconfigured in contemporary higher education. Campus activists are taking advantage of the fact (and I suspect that a lot of them understand this intuitively, if not explicitly) that students have a lot more power than they used to. The change is the result not only of the rise of the customer-service mentality in academia, but also of the proletarianization of the faculty. Students have risen; instructors have fallen. Where once administrations worked in alliance with the faculty, were indeed largely composed of faculty, now they work against the faculty in alliance with students, a separate managerial stratum more interested in the satisfaction of its customers than the well-being of its employees.

In the inevitable power struggle between students and teachers, the former have gained the whip hand. The large majority of instructors today are adjuncts working term to term for a few thousand dollars a course, or contract employees with no long-term job security, or untenured professors whose careers can still be derailed. With the expansion of Title IX in 2011—the law is now being used, among other things, to police classroom content—even tenured faculty are sitting with a sword above their heads. Thanks not only to the shift to contingent employment but also to the chronic oversupply of PhDs (the academic reserve army, to adapt a phrase from Marx), academic labor is cheap and academic workers are vulnerable and frightened. In a conflict between a student and a faculty member, almost nothing is at stake for the student beyond the possibility of receiving a low grade (which, in the current environment, means something like a B+). But the teacher could be fired. That is why so many faculty members, like that adjunct instructor at Scripps, are teaching with their tails between their legs. They, too, are being silenced. Whether they know it or not, student activists (and students in general) are exploiting the insecurity of an increasingly immiserated workforce. So much for social justice.

The power of political correctness is wielded not only against the faculty, however, but also against other groups within the student body, ones who don’t belong to the ideologically privileged demographics or espouse the approved points of view: conservative students; religious students, particularly Christians; students who identify as Zionists, a category that includes a lot of Jewish students; “athletes,” meaning white male athletes; white students from red states; heterosexual cisgendered white men from anywhere at all, who represent, depending on the school, between a fifth and a third of all students. (I say this, by the way, as an atheist, a democratic socialist, a native northeasterner, a person who believes that colleges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvious by now, a card-carrying member of the liberal elite.) I haven’t heard too many people talk about creating safe spaces for Christians, or preventing micro-aggressions against conservatives, or banning hate speech against athletes, or disinviting socialists.

What I have heard, frequently, for as long as I have been involved in academia, are open expressions of contempt or prejudice or hostility against those suspect groups or members of those groups. If you are a white man, you are routinely regarded as guilty until proven innocent, the worst possible construction is put upon your words, and anything you say on a sensitive issue is received with suspicion at best. I attended a workshop on micro-aggressions at the University of Missouri last year. The problem with micro-aggressions, the leader said, is that they “create a space of hostility,” that they say, “you don’t belong; you are different in a way that’s not okay.” Those formulations precisely describe the environment that the groups I just enumerated often encounter at elite private colleges, except that unlike the typical micro-aggression, the offense is not inadvertent. It is quite deliberate. Racism may indeed be a system, but bigotry and prejudice are personal attitudes, and they are freely distributed (“cis white bitch”) across the political spectrum.

I am perfectly aware that men, whites, heterosexuals, and cisgendered* people remain the dominant groups in society as a whole. But equality is not revenge. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are incomparably more powerful, and more entrenched, than their “reverse” counterparts, but that doesn’t make the latter anything less than reprehensible, especially when practiced against college students: individuals, in other words, who are scarcely more than adolescents, and who deserve the benefit of the doubt.

I was talking about trigger warnings with the writing director at Scripps. I told her that the only student I’d taught who was so uncomfortable with course material that he had to leave the room was a young Christian man (another Asian American, as it turns out), who excused himself before a class discussion of the sexually explicit lesbian novelist Jeanette Winterson. I was naïve enough to think that the director would be sympathetic to the student’s situation. Instead, she snorted with contempt. (For the record, I myself was none too happy with his move. But then, I don’t believe in trigger warnings in the first place.) Progressive faculty and students at selective private colleges will often say that they want to dismantle the hierarchies of power that persist in society at large. Their actions often suggest that in fact they would like to invert them. All groups are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Political correctness creates a mindset of us versus them. “Them” is white men, or straight cisgendered white men—a.k.a. “the patriarchy.” (The phrase “dead white men,” so beloved on the left, would have little force if its last two words were not already felt to constitute a pejorative.) “Us” is everybody else, the coalition of virtue (virtuous, of course, by virtue of an accident of birth). Which means that political correctness not only treats “them” as a monolith—erasing the differences among white people, like those between Jews and Mormons or English and Irish, thus effacing the specificity of their historical and sometimes also their present experiences—it effaces the specificity of everyone’s experience.

Political correctness expects us to plot our experience on the grid of identity, to interpret it in terms of our location at the intersection of a limited number of recognized categories. You are a lesbian Latina, therefore you must feel X. You are a white trans man, therefore you must think Y. But identity should not precede experience; it should proceed from it. And experience is much more granular, and composed of a vastly larger number of variables, than is dreamt of in the PC philosophy. I myself am a youngest child; I was raised in the suburbs; I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family—but more to the point, my consciousness and way of being in the world have been shaped by an infinite series of experiential particulars, a large proportion of which are not reducible to any category.

That, by the way, is one of the reasons to read literature, and to place it at the center of a college education: because it captures the complexity of lived experience, and of enacted identity, in a way that the categories of a politicized social science can never hope to match.

There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize—that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. And the exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group.

We don’t acknowledge class, so there are few affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous.

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

But it isn’t simply the admissions process. The culture of political correctness, the religion of the fancy private colleges, provides the affluent white and Asian students who make up the preponderant majority of their student bodies, and the affluent white and Asian professionals who make up the preponderant majority of their tenured faculty and managerial staffs, with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege. It enables them to tell themselves that they are children of the light—part of the solution to our social ills, not an integral component of the problem. It may speak about dismantling the elite, but its real purpose is to flatter it.

And here we come to the connection between the religion of success and the religion of political correctness. Political correctness is a fig leaf for the competitive individualism of meritocratic neoliberalism, with its worship of success above all. It provides a moral cover beneath which undergraduates can prosecute their careerist projects undisturbed. Student existence may be understood as largely separated into two non-communicating realms: campus social life (including the classroom understood as a collective space), where the enforcement of political correctness is designed to create an emotionally unthreatening environment; and the individual pursuit of personal advancement, the real business going forward. The moral commitments of the first (which are often transient in any case) are safely isolated from the second.

What falls between the two is nothing less than the core purpose of a liberal education: inquiry into the fundamental human questions, undertaken through rational discourse. Rational discourse, meaning rational argument: not the us-talk of PC consensus, which isn’t argument, or the them-talk of vituperation (as practiced ubiquitously on social media), which isn’t rational. But inquiry into the fundamental human questions—in the words of Tolstoy, “What shall we do and how shall we live?”—threatens both of the current campus creeds: political correctness, by calling its certainties into question; the religion of success, by calling its values into question. Such inquiry raises the possibility that there are different ways to think and different things to live for.

Political correctness and rational discourse are incompatible ideals. Forget “civility,” the quality that college deans and presidents inevitably put forth as that which needs to “balance” free expression. The call for civility is nothing more than a management tool for nervous bureaucrats, a way of splitting every difference and puréeing them into a pablum of deanly mush. Free expression is an absolute; to balance it is to destroy it.

Fortunately, we already have a tried-and-tested rule for free expression, one specifically designed to foster rational discourse. It’s called the First Amendment, and First Amendment jurisprudence doesn’t recognize “offensive” speech or even hate speech as categories subject to legitimate restriction. For one thing, hate is not illegal, and neither is giving offense. For another, what’s hate to me may not be hate to you; what’s offensive to you may be my deeply held belief. The concepts are relative and subjective. When I gave a version of this essay as a talk at Bard, the first comment from the panel of student respondents came from a young Palestinian woman who argued that “conservative narratives” like Zionism should be censored, because “they require the otherization, if not the dehumanization, of another group of people.” It didn’t seem to have occurred to her that many Zionists would say the same about what they regard as the Palestinian position. Once you start to ban offensive speech, there is no logical place to stop—or rather, where you stop will be determined by the relative positions of competing groups within the community.

In other words, again, by power. To take the most conspicuous issue around which questions of free expression are being disputed on campus, the disinvitation of outside speakers always reflects the power of one group over another. When a speaker is invited to campus, it means that some set of people within the institution—some department, center, committee, or student organization—wants to hear what they have to say. When they are disinvited, shouted down, or otherwise prevented from speaking, it means another set has proved to be more powerful.

When the latter are accused of opposing free speech, they invariably respond, “How can we be opposed to free speech? We are exercising it right now!” But everyone is in favor of their own free speech (including, for instance, Vladimir Putin). The test of your commitment to free speech as a general principle is whether you are willing to tolerate the speech of others, especially those with whom you most disagree. If you are using your speech to try to silence speech, you are not in favor of free speech. You are only in favor of yourself.

I see no reason that the First Amendment shouldn’t be the guiding principle at private colleges and universities (at least the ones that profess to be secular), just as it is, perforce, at public institutions. But public schools are very different places from private ones. Their student bodies, for the most part, are far more diverse, economically and in every other way, which means these institutions do not have to deal with a large bolus of affluent, sheltered white and Asian kids who don’t know how to talk to black and brown people and need to be “educated” into “awareness” by the presence of African-American and Latino students (who are, in turn, expected to “represent” their communities). When different kinds of people grow up together, rather than being introduced to one another under artificial conditions in young adulthood, they learn to talk and play and study together honestly and unselfconsciously—which means, for adolescents, often frankly and roughly—without feeling that they have to tiptoe around sensitivities that are frequently created by the situation itself. (In today’s idiom, they can be real with one another. The one thing students at elite private colleges very rarely are is “real.”) It’s true that neighborhoods and public schools are much more segregated than they were a generation ago, but students at public colleges and universities are still considerably less likely to come from affluent white/Asian bubbles than are those at wealthy private ones.

True diversity means true disagreement. Political correctness exists at public institutions, but it doesn’t dominate them. A friend of mine who went to Columbia and Yale now teaches at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. “When you meet someone at Hunter,” she told me, “You can’t assume they see the world the same way you do.” That’s about as pithy an expression of the problem at selective private colleges as I can imagine. When you meet someone at Columbia or Yale or Scripps or Whitman or any of scores of other institutions, you absolutely can assume they see the world the same way you do. And anyone who threatens to disrupt that cozy situation must be disinvited, reeducated, or silenced. It’s no surprise that the large majority of high-profile PC absurdities take place at elite private schools like Emory or Oberlin or Northwestern.

That same safe assumption, about the points of view of everyone around you, does not pervade selective private campuses alone, of course. It is equally the case among the liberal elite: at the Manhattan dinner party, the Silicon Valley startup, the Seattle coffee shop, the Brookline PTA. (That it is also the case in other realms of society, non-liberal and/or non-elite, is true. It is also no excuse, especially not for people who consider themselves so enlightened.) This is not an accident. Selective private colleges are the training grounds of the liberal elite, and the training in question involves not only formal education for professional success, but also initiation into the folkways of the tribe.

Which means that fancy private colleges have a mission that public institutions do not. People arrive at public schools from a wide range of social locations, and they return to a range that is nearly as wide. The institutional mission is to get them through and into the job market, not to turn them into any particular kind of person. But selective private colleges (which also tend to be a lot smaller than public schools) are in the business of creating a community and, beyond that, a class. “However much diversity Yale’s freshman classes may have,” as one of my students once put it, “its senior classes have far less.”

And this, I believe, is one of the sources of the new revolt among students of color at elite private colleges and universities. The expectation at those institutions has always been that the newcomers whom they deign to admit to the ranks of the blessed, be they Jews in the 1950s or African Americans today, will assimilate to the ways of the blessed. That they will become, as people say, “more white.” That bargain, as uncomfortable as it has always been, was more readily accepted in the past. For various reasons, it seems that it no longer is. Students of color are telling the whites who surround them, “No, we aren’t like you, and what’s more, we don’t want to be like you.” As very different as their outlook is from that of the white working class, their rejection of the liberal elite is not entirely dissimilar.

Selective private colleges need to decide what kind of places they want to be. Do they want to be socialization machines for the upper-middle class, ideological enforcers of progressive dogma? Or do they want to be educational institutions in the only sense that really matters: places of free, frank, and fearless inquiry? When we talk about political correctness and its many florid manifestations, so much in the news of late, we are talking not only about racial injustice and other forms of systemic oppression, or about the coddling of privileged youth, though both are certainly at play. We are also talking, or rather not talking, about the pathologies of the American class system. And those are also what we need to deal with.


* cisgendered: denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.

 

Posted in General Musings | Comments Off on Safe Talk on Campus – the End of Speech and The Deification of Playdoh

The Struggle with Porn is Really a Struggle with Responsibility

[This is for my clients struggling with pornography]

In this very short post, as a follow up to what I’ve written recently about the attachment to porn that some 90% of men have (and likely suffer from), I want to remind my clients that I will speak of porn as an escape from responsibility.

Indeed, as they undoubtedly know deep within their conscience, these men feel guilt and shame not because they consume porn but because they know that they are eschewing responsibility.

How utterly convenient is it that one can surf to a porn site and avoid having to interact with a real person?

There is good news: Those feelings of guilt are nature’s reminder that we have a moral sense. It need not be a burden.

Quoting here from The Sociopath Next Door (by Dr. Martha Stout):

No, the best part of possessing a moral sense is the deep and beautiful gift that comes to us inside, and only inside, the wrappings of conscience. The ability to love comes bundled up in conscience, just as our spirits are bundled up in our bodies. Conscience is the embodiment of love, imbued into our very biology. It lives in the part of the brain that reacts emotionally, and in their favor, when the ones we love need our attention, our help, or even our sacrifice. We have already seen that when someone’s mind is not equipped to love, he can have no genuine conscience either, since conscience is an intervening sense of responsibility based in our emotional attachments to others.

We can turn this psychological equation around. The other truth is that should a person have no conscience, he could never truly love. When an imperative sense of responsibility is subtracted from love, all that is left is a thin, tertiary thing—a will to possess, which is not love at all.

Think about it.

[UPDATE on January 12. 2025: Pornography is not an addiction, and I am done with the assertions that it is. Why? Because there is no withdrawal once you decided to stop with it.]

Posted in General Musings, Pornography | Comments Off on The Struggle with Porn is Really a Struggle with Responsibility

Ah, the Childless Life

Saw this today and thought it an interesting response to the whole of “childless life” being somehow better than having kids and rolling the dice. Or, having an “oops” baby and then valuing that child.

Disclosure: My wife and I are childless. Our daughter died of a Fentanyl overdose in 2022, but while we had her, we enjoyed the process of at least trying to bring along the next generation.

Anyway, having children or adopting, is to my mind a requirement of adulthood. Yes, some cannot have children, and I am sad for them. And some choose not to for what I think are valid reasons, like an itinerate professional life, or a decision to be additive to the American project in other ways (via, say, teaching). Barring those things, and as I tell my students – please, for the love of God, have babies and lots of them! We will need them, and darn soon. Read on …


To that end, let’s talk about Decision Theory. The decision that might resonate is this:

If there were two envelopes, and one had $100 while the other had $200, how much would you pay for a random shot?

I’ll give you a moment to think about it.

 

 

 

 

Some might say, “less than $100,” because either way you win. Of course, the seller has to be willing to lose money, which he would not.

That said, a reasonable answer might be in the $140-$149.99 range, giving you a positive expected value in return for taking on some risk. I’ll not talk about the formula here – just take my word for it.

That seems reasonable.

OK, now suppose you open the envelope and see that it contains $100. How much would I have to pay to buy it back from you?

Obviously, you would accept no less than $100. Why give away money? By the way, this was the same position taken by the Seller initially.

So, we’ve established reasonable terms for valuing an uncertain event and for valuing it after the uncertainty is removed.

Now let’s talk about the decision to have a child. A couple is deciding whether to have a first child. When weighing their options, they weigh the child against the chance to use the money and time they would spend on parenthood to go on two extra vacations a year.

They decide to remain childless and take the vacations. (See the above image that contrasts parenthood against lying on a beach.)

Assume for the moment that Dictator Trump has banned all abortion (this is called “Contrary to Fact Reasoning,” by the way, because Trump would have no such power and, besides, he has said he is opposed to a Congressional attempt to do so).

Anyway, assume further that the couple’s birth control fails, and they have an “oops” baby boy. Later, perhaps years later, their son gets sick and needs an operation to save him. The operation costs the couple’s entire net worth, which they pay without question. After all, the only other option is to take him home and kill him, thus saving money and pain.

I think the above story is plausible and reflects how people actually think about their decision to have kids and their medical decisions for their existing kids. But note the inconsistency. Before having a child, they valued a potential child less than two annual vacations. After having him they valued him more than their entire net worth.

In practice, people value potential children much (much!) less than the average value they place on an existing child. Nobody places their living, breathing children on the same level as a vacation, but many people think about potential children that way.

If there isn’t a whole literature in philosophy trying to resolve this inconsistency, there should be.

We are headed to the great de-population. The Black Plague will pale in comparison. We won’t be around for what comes after, but I hope and pray it’s another Renaissance (as came after the Plague).

Posted in General Musings, People in general, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Ah, the Childless Life

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.”

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.”

– John Greenleaf Whittier

 

 

 

 

What does that mean?

This quote is about regret and sadness. It is about what might have been, if only action had been taken. It comes from the poem “Maud Muller,” which is about a young and beautiful girl who meets a wealthy judge from the local town. Both are attracted to the other, but neither says anything. They each go on with their lives, wondering what might have been.

A longer section of the poem ends like this (lines 101-106):

Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,

For rich repiner and household drudge!

God pity them both! and pity us all,

Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

This is, unfortunately, something that nearly all of us will have in common, if not already, eventually.

How many times has someone you wanted to meet slipped away while you were busy trying to find the best words to use when introducing yourself? Or how many times did a business opportunity slip away because we thought we knew better or were rather full of ourselves. It has certainly happened to me.

And that’s just the topic of the quote. What other areas in your life have the words “it might have been” hanging over the memory of something you did or failed to do?

Yes, there is a price to pay for trying and failing. But I believe the price of not trying is often much higher.

Why is living without regret important?

How much of your life do you want to dedicate to the re-living of unpleasant memories? How much time do you want to invest in things you cannot change? How much emotional pain are you willing to put yourself through in order to re-live these past situations and second guess yourself?

Personally, I have tried (often in vain) to spend enough time reviewing a situation to learn something from it, and then I try to put in a box labeled “lessons learned.” I may go back to it if I come across a similar situation later in life, but I try not to rummage through the box. Ever. That’s a massive time suck and an emotional drain.

I owned a home in Reno. It had a very small mortgage. I paid $250,000 for it. I could have kept it and turned it into a rental, but I was afraid of the market. So, I sold it for (you guessed it) $250,000. Not even two years later, it was worth over $500,000. Think I haven’t ruminated over that stupid decision? Of course I did.

How much nicer would life be if you could set your past regrets aside, and move forward with your life, taking action when opportunities come your way? That’s what I try to do (again, often in vain).

I believe it’s worth a try, wouldn’t you agree?

Where can I apply this in my life?

From my experience, there seem to be two major components to living with few regrets (I can’t imagine living with absolutely none, can you?).

The first step is to take prompt action. The second is to accept the outcome of your action (or inaction) and move on with your life.

The first, to me, is key. If you don’t take prompt action, the opportunity often slips away. And the crucial part of being ready to take action is to be prepared. Preparation and confidence can also be bolstered by practice and by learning from your mistakes.

Where in your life do you most often have regrets of not having taken action? Be careful about 20/20 hindsight. Don’t say something about playing lottery numbers or stocks based on knowledge you couldn’t possibly have had in advance.

But do you have regrets frequently when you meet people? That’s my biggest source of regret.

What about your agonizing afterwards? Do you berate yourself or are you full of self-recrimination?

What is your attitude towards yourself? Do you say, “I should learn something from that,” or do you call yourself names, list all your faults and otherwise run yourself down?

In the long run, which path leads you forward, and which leaves you so afraid that you freeze up when an opportunity presents itself? If you’re like me or most people I know, the latter is the more frequent response. But that’s not the best way to move forward, is it?

Forgive yourself and Move On (I only wish I could)

So how do we focus more on what we can learn, rather than calling ourselves names? The first thing I try to do is to take the emotion down a notch or two. I find that my periods of pity and self-flagellation tend to be when I am most emotional or the most fatigued. Once I tone that down, I can be a little more reasonable.

And that’s when I can start being logical and analytical about what happened or failed to happen. I ask myself “At what point did I mess up?” How could I have pulled things together and better prepared myself for the opportunity? What should I have said, what should I have done?

When I was 16 my dad and I bought a 1966 Ford Mustang from, of all people, Melissa Gilbert’s dad. Remember her? She played on a TV show called Little House on the Prairie. I paid something like $1,600 for it. And proceeded to “cherry it up,” spending another $4,000 to make it the best damn Mustang in the world. I loved that car. But then when I graduated college and got my first professional job, I decided I was worth more than a 15-year-old car and proceeded to sell it for about $3,000. Today? That car is worth upwards of $45,000. Such a dunce. Woulda, coulda, shoulda … I shoulda kept it. Stupid me.

Look, the point isn’t to beat myself up for being such a dunce, but to learn something from the experience. That way, it isn’t a failure, it isn’t a complete loss or a complete waste of time. It isn’t as good a teacher as actually having tried something, but at least I’m a step closer next time, right?

So, what will you do the next time opportunity knocks? Will you freeze and wonder what might have been, or will you take a shot? Even if you mangle it badly, it’s better than nothing, right? You’ve got a real data point, not just a guess.

You’ll learn more from a failure than from guessing what might have been. Take your failures and educate those coming up behind you.

Posted in Counseling Concepts, Depression, General Musings, Positive Mental Attitude | Comments Off on For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.”

Therapeutic Journaling

I have kept journals over the years. At times, I called them My Management Journal, then later, My Daily Record of Events. My inspiration was no less than good old Benjamin Franklin who maintained what he called his Virtues: Daily Record and Journal. Suffice to say that journaling has been a big part of my life since I first started my careers (first in business as a manager, then later as a mental health professional).

I first used them to record both hits and misses as a businessperson, with the objective of learning (mostly from my mistakes and bad decisions). Later I would use them to write out my goals and plans to achieve them. I’ve evolved to using journaling as an avenue to become more self-aware.

By this process, progress in life takes on a certain kind of animation and allows you to “look back” on where you’ve been. You can discern trends and themes, both of which can help you to adjust course going forward. This helps lock in the necessary identity shifts for long-term change and it acts to navigate the eventual obstacles that pop up.

That’s why today I want to share an evidence-based journaling practice that’s been shown to improve life along several dimensions, including lung function in asthma patients, immune responsiveness, pain alleviation, and sleep improvement.

The great thing about it is that it’s zero cost. An even better aspect is that it could change your life.

Therapeutic Journaling is what I recommend to my life coaching clients. Years ago, it was recommended to me and was beyond useful in helping me to make it through the chaos we call like. Created by renowned scientist Dr. James Pennebaker, therapeutic journaling involves these steps:

  • You pick an emotionally triggering event in your life. This could be positive or negative, so be sure to give equal weight to both.
  • Then sit down and write down every thought about that event for 15-20 minutes. Use a pen or type this on digital. The key is to not stop to think. Just keep writing.
  • Write for yourself. No one will see this.
  • Do this for either 4 days straight or once a week for 4 weeks. The results will be the same.
  • If an event is still too upsetting to write about then don’t write about it until your emotions have died down. In the meantime, pick another event to write about.
  • After you’re done with this process look at what you’ve written.

When traumatic events occur, we are often not able to process what happened and the event can become stuck in our memory. This type of journaling works because emotional expression is good for our health and can enhance our immune system. By expressing our thoughts on paper, we can move forward by letting go of the feelings involved.

Recently, the University of Wisconsin (another “UW” but not the one I am affiliated with, that one being the University of Wyoming) published an article on the process, which I am happy to share with you now.

What Is Therapeutic Journaling?

Therapeutic journaling is the process of writing down our thoughts and feelings about our personal experiences. This kind of private reflection allows us to sort through events that have occurred and problems that we may be struggling with. It allows us to come to a deeper understanding about ourselves, with a different perspective on these difficulties.

Therapeutic journaling differs from more traditional diary writing, which involves recording the details of daily events. In contrast, therapeutic journaling is an internal process of using the written word to express the full range of emotions, reactions and perceptions we have related to difficult, upsetting, or traumatic life events. Along the way, this can mean writing ourselves to better emotional and physical health and a greater sense of well-being.

Therapeutic journaling can be done by keeping a regular journal to write about events that bring up anger, grief, anxiety, or joy that occur in daily life. It can also be used more therapeutically to deal with specific upsetting, stressful, or traumatic life events.

An expressive writing protocol developed by Dr. James Pennebaker is the most widely used and researched method utilized in clinical practice. This writing protocol has been linked to improvements in both physical and psychological health. It has been used in non-clinical and clinical populations.

The expressive writing protocol consists of asking someone to write about a stressful, traumatic or emotional experience for three to five sessions, over four consecutive days, for 15-20 minutes per session. Research has found it to be useful as a stand-alone tool or as an adjunct to traditional psychotherapies.

How It Works

Emotional expression has been found to be good for our health. It enhances our immune system functioning. When upsetting or traumatic events occur, we often are not able to fully process what happened, and the event and the emotions around what occurred become stuck in our memory. The simple act of expressing thoughts and feelings on paper about challenging and upsetting events can allow us to move forward by expressing and letting go of the feelings involved.

Expressive writing also provides an opportunity to construct a meaningful personal narrative about what happened. It brings clarity and enables us to place our experience into the context of our larger place in the world.

Over the past 25 years, a growing body of research has demonstrated the beneficial effects that writing about traumatic or stressful events has on physical and emotional health. Dr. Pennebaker, one of the first researchers in this area, found that writing about emotionally difficult events or feelings for just 20 minutes at a time over four consecutive days was associated with both short-term increases in physiological arousal and long-term decreases in integrative health problems, such as immune system functioning.

One study, a meta-analysis of 13 studies of written emotional expression with healthy participants, found specific benefits in objective or self-reported physical health, psychological well-being, physiological functioning, and general functioning outcomes.

In another meta-analysis of nine studies on written emotional disclosure on clinical populations and found significant benefit for health outcomes in medically ill populations but did not find any psychological health outcomes in psychiatric populations.

Expressive writing has been found to produce significant benefits for individuals with a variety of medical conditions including:

  • Lung functioning in asthma
  • Disease severity in rheumatoid arthritis
  • Pain and physical health in cancer
  • Immune response in HIV infection
  • Hospitalizations for cystic fibrosis
  • Pain intensity in women with chronic pelvic pain
  • Sleep-onset latency in poor sleepers.
  • Post-operative course

In addition, it can be helpful for assistance with specific life circumstances, including:

  • Relationship break-ups
  • Death of a loved one
  • Unemployment
  • Natural disaster
  • General stressful events (aka, life in general)

In 2012, researchers conducted a meta-analysis investigating the efficacy of expressive writing for treatment of posttraumatic stress conditions (e.g. acute stress disorder and PTSD) and comorbid depressive symptoms. It resulted in significant and substantial short-term reductions in posttraumatic stress and depressive symptoms. There was no difference in efficacy between writing therapy and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. The effects of written emotional expression are substantial and similar in magnitude to the effects of other psychological interventions, many of which can be time consuming and expensive. Expressive writing can therefore be considered an evidence-based treatment for posttraumatic stress and constitutes a useful treatment alternative for patients who do not respond to other evidence-based therapies. It may be especially useful for reaching trauma survivors in need of evidence-based mental health care who live in remote areas.

Therapeutic journaling can also be a way to reach people who are unwilling or unable to engage in psychotherapy.

Therapeutic Journaling Instructions

This writing exercise is useful for dealing with emotional upheavals or traumas. It is a four-day writing program that has proven effective for improving mental and physical health. It is best to do your writing in a meaningful place, time, and atmosphere, so think about finding a location where you will be undisturbed by others, your phone, e-mail, etc.

It is important to think about what your writing topic will be. You might pick an emotionally upsetting event that is bothering you. If you have faced a massive trauma, it is best not to write about it for several weeks afterwards, as it may be too difficult to deal with some of the emotions that arise around what happened.

Trust where your writing takes you. You might start writing about a traumatic experience and then find yourself writing about something entirely different.

For the next four days, please write about an emotionally upsetting or traumatic event that has had a strong impact on you. During your writing, you are encouraged to explore your deepest emotions and thoughts about this difficult life experience. As you write about this topic, you might tie it to your relationships with others. You may relate it to your past, present, or future, or you may connect it with who you may have been, who you would like to be, or who you are now.

You may write about the same general issues or experiences on all days of writing, or you may choose to write about different topics each day.

Keep in mind these few simple guidelines recommended by Pennebaker:

  • Writing topic. You can write about the same event all four days or different events each day. What you choose to write about should be something that is extremely personal and important for you.
  • Length and frequency. Write for 15-20 minutes each day for four consecutive days if you can. It is a bit more effective than writing four days over the course of several weeks.
  • Write continuously. Once you begin writing, write continuously without stopping. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. If you run out of things to say, simply repeat what you have already written. Keep writing about the topic until the time is up.
  • Write only for yourself. You are writing for yourself and no one else. After you complete the expressive writing exercise, you may want to destroy or hide what you have written. Remember this writing can be for your eyes only.
  • What to avoid. If you feel that you cannot write about a particular event because it would be too upsetting, then don’t write about it. Just write about events or situations that you can handle now.
  • What to expect. It is common for people to feel somewhat saddened or depressed after writing, especially on the first day or two. Know that this is completely normal, if this happens to you. Typically, the feeling usually lasts just a few minutes or a few hours. It is a good idea to plan some time to yourself after your writing session to reflect on the issues you have been writing about and support yourself in any emotions that come up.
  • Considerations. Writing about the same topic day after day for too many days is not helpful. If, after several sessions, you feel you are not making progress, then you might need to stop and contact a health care practitioner.
  • When to discontinue the journaling exercise. Writing exercises aren’t for everyone. If the writing exercise evokes strong feelings that you cannot cope with, stop immediately and do something soothing for yourself. Experiencing symptoms of hypervigilance, stress or distress are signals to discontinue this journaling exercise immediately. Take care of yourself by doing something like practice diaphragmatic breathing, reach out to a friend or loved one, or go for a walk to center and calm yourself. If you experience lingering negative feelings, you might benefit some additional help. It is recommended to seek the professional advice of a psychologist, counselor, or physician to discuss these feelings and experiences.

References

Baikie, K., Wilhelm, K. (2005). Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 11(5)

Batten, S., Follette, V., Hall, M., & Palm, K. (2003). Physical and psychological effects of written disclosure among sexual abuse survivors. Behavior Therapy 33(1)

Frisina, P., Borod, J., & Lepore, S. (2004). A meta-analysis of the effects of written emotional disclosure on the health outcomes of clinical populations. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 92(9)

Kovac, S., Range, L. (2000). Writing projects: lessening undergraduates’ unique suicidal bereavement. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 30(1)

Lepore, S., Greenberg, M. (2002). Mending broken hearts: effects of expressive writing on mood, cognitive processing, social adjustment and health following a relationship breakup. Psychology & Health 17(5)

Niles, A., Haltom, K., Mulvenna, C., Lieberman, M., & Stanton, A. (2014). Randomized controlled trial of expressive writing for psychological and physical health: the moderating role of emotional expressivity. anxiety, stress, and coping. doi:10.1080/10615806.2013.802308

Pennebaker, J. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science 8(3)

Pennebaker, J. (2004). From Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma & Emotional Upheaval. New Harbinger Publications; Distributed in Canada by Raincoats Books.

Richards, J., Beal, W., Seagal, J., & Pennebaker, J. (2000). Effects of disclosure of traumatic events on illness behavior among psychiatric prison inmates. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 109(1)

Schoutrop, M., Lange, A., Hanewald, G., Davidovich, U., & Salomon, H. (2002). Structured writing and processing major stressful events: a controlled trial. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 71(3)

Smyth, J. (1998) Written emotional expression: effect sizes, outcome types, and moderating variables. Journal of Consultative Clinical Psychology 66(1)

Smyth, J., Hockemeyer, J., Anderson, C. (2002). Structured writing about a natural disaster buffers the effect of intrusive thoughts on negative affect and physical symptoms. The Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies.

Spera, S., Buhrfeind, E., Pennebaker, J. (1994). Expressive writing and coping with job loss. Academy of Management Journal 37(3)

van Emmerik, A., Reijntjes, A., & Kamphuis, J. (2013). Writing therapy for posttraumatic stress: a meta-analysis. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 82(2)

Posted in Anxiety, Blogging, Business, Counseling Concepts, Depression, Positive Mental Attitude | Comments Off on Therapeutic Journaling

Fix the Problem

Often, we find ourselves in a mess. We’ve had a bad breakup, lost a job, been reprimanded by a boss, received a poor grade on an assignment, or … whatever. As I work in my practice as a life coach (and more recently, as an Academic Coach), I am increasingly drawn to a very directive approach which stresses active problem solving.

Let me explain.

Years ago, in a movie starring Michael Douglas entitled Disclosure, there was a mystery character who communicated with Douglas’ character via email only. Side Note: The movie was remarkably prescient: It is easily 30 years old (maybe older), yet it foresaw the ubiquity of email, the development of AR goggles like those being introduced by Meta and Apple, and the terrible things that can happen to people when they forget their morals.

Anyway, that character, whom we never see, keeps telling Douglas’s character (who was in trouble with some terrible people in his company) to “fix the problem.” He wondered, “who the hell is this and precisely what problem do they think I need to fix??”

He was frustrated. He would go around trying to understand the forces allied against him and to fix what he ‘thought’ was the “problem.” Yet at the end of each attempt, he would get an email from this mystery person that said, simply, “you came closer but failed. Fix the problem!”

Long story short – ultimately, he discovered the problem and fixed it.

Years ago, a guy named Maslow studied what motivated people in clearly terrible circumstances to try and better their lots in life. He wanted to understand, for example, why people in clearly terrible circumstances – say, abject poverty – were nonetheless happy with their lives. Conversely, he wanted to understand why people in fantastically great circumstances were equally UNHAPPY with their lives. Why the difference?

Ultimately, while Maslow didn’t “solve” the problem, he nonetheless began to understand human nature a lot more. He arrived what we now call the Theory of Motivation. That theory is usually shown as a pyramid or “hierarchy” of needs:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turns out, people who have …

  • their most basic needs met (the so-called Physiological needs); and,
  • their everyday security needs met; and,
  • who love someone and are loved by someone (the Love/Belonging rung of the ladder); and,
  • who actually like themselves and are liked by others (Esteemed) …

… are able to arrive at what he called ‘self-actualization.’

I call that last rung of the ladder, “contentment.”

As I encounter people in my practice who are forever unhappy with their lives I try to understand where on the hierarchy things have gone awry. Often, the problem begins on the bottom.

Those people have not attended to the most basic of needs and for whatever reason are unwilling or unable to “fix the problem.” In other words, everything above the bottom rung is immaterial if we are forever fighting ourselves or others for the most basic needs in life.

They may have friends in life, yes. They may have a safe place to live, and they may even kinda like themselves. But …

… they are forever pulled back down because they haven’t attended to the basics of life.

In many cases the “fix” is simple. Take for example, not having reliable transportation to get to the job that provides the money for the house they live in or the food they eat. Perhaps they get fired for perpetual tardiness or absence.

Or, by way of another example, they don’t get enough sleep because they are worried about, well, having reliable transportation to get to work and thereby avoiding getting fired.

Maybe they haven’t attended to the basic disciplines in life, like self-care and routine dental appointments. Or maybe they refuse to alter their diets to lose weight and to be more agile in their work.

You can see where this goes.

I try and take my clients to that bottom rung and ask, “what problem at a most basic level are you refusing to fix?”

Back to the movie, Disclosure. To quote that anonymous emailer, I say to my clients, “Fix the problem.”

Once we have attended to our most basic needs, we are able to move solidly up the pyramid.

If you are forever swimming upstream in matters of, say, love and belonging, then the “fix” is simple: Try fishing from a different rock. Perhaps you keep attracting the same kind of love interest who ultimately dumps you. Yet, you go back to the same rock, drop the same bait, and then catch the same damn type of fish. Change the rock you’re fishing from; Fix the problem.

If you’ve been fired because of recurring lateness or absences due to not having reliable transportation yet continue to believe that your car will start again in the morning (when it won’t), then it is time to … fix the problem. Get a different, more reliable car.

How about this: You keep getting poor grades on tests, yet you persist in cramming the night before. Here’s a thought: Fix the problem. Start studying the first day of the semester and do not let up. Problem fixed.


Maybe I am getting cranky in my old age, but I gotta say … it is increasingly easy for me to be very direct in my approach.

I will often say, “Enough already! Fix the problem! You’re an adult, dammit. Fix the problem and propel yourself forward!”

Posted in General Musings | Comments Off on Fix the Problem

Your Relationship Just Ended – Now What?

 

 

 

 

 

In my work as a therapist and as a Life Coach (more the latter), I work with clients suffering through unsatisfying or deteriorating (or broken) relationships. My own belief is that much of the tumult we experience in life is only tumultuous because of problems at home. There’s an old adage that holds: Solve the problems at home, create a strong and loving union there, and you can handle almost anything the universe throws your way.

The ending of a love relationship is a devastating experience. The life you once shared is turned upside down. Breaking your life apart means separating all that you had (or “thought” you had) together. The loss of identity as a couple, feelings of failure, anxiety, and despair over the loss of the commitment and security the relationship provided rush to the forefront.

Our most intimate relationships inform us about ourselves and often shape who we are and who we are to become. Loss can be felt on so many levels: physically—the loss of the person you love; emotionally—the loss of the commitment to and reliance on the attachment to this person; and psychologically—the loss of self-esteem and well-being as you are returned to living life by and for yourself. And then there’s the loss of all the hopes and dreams for your future together.

When a love relationship ends, we are suddenly alone, often feeling as if an essential part of ourselves has been cut off. But, when we can face what lies ahead and to work through this devastating loss, we can draw upon inner resources to help facilitate the process of loss, separation, and adaptation to a new way of being.

What do you do when your love leaves your life? How do you start the difficult work of beginning over again and moving forward into an uncertain future?

  1. What is, is.

You made a sound decision. You thought about it for months if not years. Therefore, accept what happens as it unfolds. The ending of an intimate relationship can be chaotic. There are no rules for how to separate, for how to feel at any given moment. It’s mostly ad-lib. Suspend any expectation of what “should” happen and how you’re “supposed” to feel because it may change moment to moment. Allow yourself to grieve. The process of grieving is not linear but rather a cyclic one. Grief will come in waves. Even with progress, you may find yourself back at square one. That’s normal for grief. The goal is to find your way to your own life, back to yourself.

  1. Feel your feelings.

You will experience many different emotions—grief, hurt, sadness, resentment, anger, despair, and fear. Let them wash over you. Let them drench you. After all, someone you once loved and depended upon, and may even still do and want to, disappointed you. The ending of your relationship may feel like a death. It may take a very long time to understand everything that happened, to process all the emotions, and to move on in the best possible way.

  1. Keep moving forward.

The idea is to move through and beyond your loss and to come out whole on the other side. Your life has meaning beyond your relationship. Once you’ve worked through the experience of loss you will be capable and ready to rejoin life with a new sense of future.

It’s essential to keep going with the routine of your daily life. That will give you a sense of structure and ground you in your environment and immediate life. Remember that things may not make sense to you; that everything you knew in the relationship will feel different than it was.

  1. Don’t take radical action.

The desire to rapidly move away from the drama-trauma of your loss may not be that unusual. The thought may be that if something you were so sure of failed, that life didn’t turn out the way you had thought it would and counted on, then why not try something new and different. But that will just fill the hole of your longing. Make changes slowly, deliberately, and after much thought about the outcome and consequences. No big life changes should be undertaken until most of the dust has settled and emotions have been dealt with. The time to begin to move forward, to act, is after the fog has lifted and you can see things more clearly.

  1. You come first.

If you learn nothing else, the most important thing is … you. That must always be your No. 1 priority. Most of us tend to want to accommodate and please the one we love. Often, that’s at our own expense. Many people bend over backward for their loved one, often neglecting their own needs and desires, and sometimes even totally losing sight of who they are and what they need. The strength of a really good relationship lies in the equal collaboration of both partners.

I have always spoken of how good relationships should resemble the letter “A” with both partners leaning into each other in equal measure. Accommodation is fine, provided it comes in equal measure. You don’t lose “you” just because you are in a relationship. And the other person doesn’t lose themselves either. You bring the complete “you” to a relationship and should expect the same of the other person. In other words, you complete you.

  1. Take care of yourself.

This may not be what you feel like doing. The ending of a relationship may find you feeling totally rejected, dejected, and unloved. Don’t neglect your health and appearance. You may wonder why you need to bother caring for yourself, but you do. It’s essential to message yourself whether you believe it or not, that you are a worthwhile person, that you are deserving of respect, that you are lovable and loved. And that starts with loving yourself.

Don’t allow yourself to slide into unhealthy coping mechanisms. Don’t self-medicate with alcohol, drugs, food, or anything else for that matter, which will only distract and numb you. This behavior disrupts the grieving process, may spiral out of control, may delay the healing process, and may prevent you from moving forward in your life. Far better to feel the feelings, regardless of how painful they are, and work through them.

  1. Learn from your experience.

It’s often difficult, even painful to examine our behavior and our responsibility, but ultimately, it’s this introspection and insight gained that makes us more honest to and for ourselves. Did you and your loved one just simply grow apart? What part did you play in making the relationship what it was? Were you realistic about what you expected from the relationship? What would you do differently in retrospect? What will you do differently in the future?

Often when we choose a partner/lover, it is not always for the right reasons. There are often issues and problems we don’t want to see. Love sometimes blinds us to what is really there. There are many reasons for wanting to be in a relationship with a particular person. Sometimes it’s about dependency, or feeling complete with another, or because we believe there can be no one else. These are simply not good enough reasons. Ultimately, it’s about mutual respect, caring, support, empathy, and shared values and goals. Each of us comes to the relationship as a whole person that wants to share a life with another whole person.

Think “A.”

 

Posted in Anxiety, Counseling Concepts, People (in general), Positive Mental Attitude | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Your Relationship Just Ended – Now What?

Organize a Mastermind Group: Surrounding Ourselves with Life-Givers, not Life-Suckers

MastermindsThis is adapted from Living for Monday, a neat little blog should you ever have occasion to want to, well, live for Mondays. Plus, it was taken from my learnings as a TEC Chair in South Australia, for which I owe both Jerry Kleeman and Adrian Geering a huge debt of gratitude.

 

Here we go:

Often, among the first questions that I will ask a coaching client is this: “What is it that holds you back from creating purpose and fulfillment in your life?” If the answer is not forthcoming, I will often table the issue, with the client’s permission and vow to come back to it again and again in future sessions.  Among the more immediate responses are the ones you’d expect: I need more money. More time. The right ideas. The most common answer I get is this: I guess I don’t have enough of the right people in my life.

The Eagle and Child pub is similar to many other pubs in Oxford. Located near the University of Oxford, it is the quintessential English pub, precisely as you might expect it:  Dimly lit, smelling of old beer (but in a good way, with beer served beer at room temperature; the English don’t drink it any other way).  Naturally, they have fish and chips along with other pub food.  By all accounts, it’s just another common place (a ye’old public place, as it were) in one of the greatest college towns in the world. Except for one thing:

You see, in the 1930s and 1940s, a very special group used space in The Eagle and Child to challenge and support one another while offering criticism on their best work. And in the beginning of their time together, in the middle, and at the end, they managed as well to have a jolly good time together.  You’ve heard of these guys: J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and several others. They had formed a group called The Inklings, who used the pub as one of several locations for their “mastermind meetings.” Whether directly or indirectly, this group pushed each member to create their best possible work. They pushed one another to reach their full potential and hone their writing to make it the best in the world.

300px-Eagle_and_Child_(interior)

The interior of The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford

While the 1930s may seem like a lifetime ago (two lifetimes, to be exact) and the members of The Inklings may seem larger than life (they were), this group formed the perfect case-study for why so many of my clients (and friends) identify “finding the right people” as the single greatest factor holding them back from purpose and fulfillment.

Surround Yourself with Remarkable People

When Cindy and I were first engaged, we attended something called “Engagement Encounter,” a three-day retreat hosted by the Catholic Church. During the course of that weekend, we learned about how to keep our marriage away from life-suckers, those people determined to bring us down, and to surround our marriage with life-givers. It was one of the most profound lessons of my life. We have tried to observe it ever since.

Deep down, we all want to be pushed. We want to be challenged to put our best work into the world. We want to be understood, supported, listened to, encouraged, called out, and loved by people that care about us. We want life-givers in our lives. At base, we want to be the average of five incredible people whom we constantly surround ourselves with. We want these things, and yet so many of us lack the right people in our lives to make it happen.

The problem is that our early relationships are largely a function of location. We go to high school with the people who live in our neighborhood. We go to college with the people admissions officers decide are qualified to be in our class. We commence our careers based on incomplete information (I sure did) and a general lack of direction upon graduating from college. And one day we wake up realizing that the people we spend the most time with are not necessarily the ones that we want to be influenced by.

That’s a scary realization. Life cannot be that chancy, can it?  For a period of time, we wander around lost in thought trying to understand the alternatives. Eventually, we reach a decision point. We will ask ourselves: Do I settle into a life of complacency and empty dreaming? Or do I do something about my dreams and find the people who will help me reach them?

What Exactly is a Mastermind Group?

A mastermind group is a collection of 4-8 creative individuals who meet on a regular basis to help one another reach their fullest potential.

I think that’s a great definition in that it allows for the flexibility to fit most people’s needs.

To get a mastermind group together, you’ll have to find 3-7 other people who will be as committed and dependable as you. They’ll need to be creative, which simply means they’re dedicated to achieving their dreams (and yours) through creative problem solving, goal setting, and accountability. Finally, everyone in the group needs to be willing to meet on a regular basis.

This sounds simple enough, but there’s much more to it than just a common definition. In fact, “mastermind” as a term was defined and popularized as long ago as 1937, when Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich was originally published. So, if the concept has been proven to help millionaires make their fortunes and it’s been around for several decades, why aren’t we all in a group yet?

The answer? Because it takes real work.

How to Form Your Own Group

Step One: Know What You Want (and need)

Answer three questions to begin with:

Who are you? Or, said another way, What aren’t you?

What do you want? Seriously, now, what do you really want?

When you’ve done this in the past, what did it feel like? I’ll bet it felt good.

The answers to those questions form the base of what you’ll want to capture in your group: mission and values, passion, strengths, vision, and mindset. By answering these questions before you get started with a mastermind group, you guarantee yourself that you’ll seek out the right people.

Who are you? There are four essential aspects of who you are that you’ll need to consider:

  • Purpose: Do you have a Mission Statement as a human being? If not, write one. Here’s mine:

    “On a mission to make it through – what, I don’t really know, but I would like to have done so having made a difference in the life of a child (my child), having been the best husband to my Cindy that I know how to be, having been a minimal burden to my society and additive to the American project; to have been a good neighbor; to love my Lord and His Word; to believe that although I have not always lived my life in such upstanding fashion,  at least I know of my transgressions and have said sorry whenever possible; to develop and maintain a solid, well-defined sense of right and wrong; to have been a mentor and a leader to the greatest number possible; to have made peace with the world; and, to have tried, thought probably not nearly enough, to check my anger.”

    As an aside, many great thinkers believe you should also have a list of core values, things over which you would never, ever compromise.  I have a list like that too, and it is critical that it be reviewed in conjunction with the mission statement as often as possible:

    * Asset Management, maintenance and enhancement: I take pride in ownership; things are better for having been under my care;
    * Physical accomplishment: I value, not nearly enough, physical exercise for itself; the value of movement.
    * The love of my wife and of my little girl: Because they have a need to love, and because I have a need to be loved.
    * Order, Quiet and Time Alone: I prefer stasis.
    * Weather and God’s Earth: I value seasons for what they offer as change. They affect the treadmills of life.
    * Leadership and service to others: Mean what you say and live an exemplary life. Be authentic.
    * Taking responsibility and Not Rolling Over: I do not shrink from responsibility for my actions; and I expect the same from others.
    * My life with Cindy: It has given my new wings. I can and do sleep like a baby most nights and can conceive of a future!
    * Ancaro Imparo: I love to learn and want to continue learning in the classic sense, for the rest of my life. Why ever else would I have gotten a doctorate at 59?
    * Civil Disobedience: I run red arrows, I never wait around like sheeple, and I question authority.

    Those are mine. You should come up with your own.

  • Passion: What are your interests? Which of your interests inspire you enough to become the best in the world? On what projects, topics, or interests do you spend most of your time?
  • Strengths: What are your innate talents and tendencies that you were born with? How do you do your best work? What are examples of situations in the past when you were at your best and how can you replicate those situations in the future?

Get to the bottom of each of these questions on some level before you try to setup a mastermind group. Without this information, it will be hard to know what type of people are most likely to align with who you are to help you reach your goals.

What do you want? Again, like knowing who you are, there are four essential levels on which you can consider what you want:

  • Vision: Your vision encompasses the complete picture of what you want your life to look like. It includes how you want family, friends, and colleagues to think about you when you reach the end of your life. Most importantly, it includes the aspects of what you consider to be a fulfilling, impactful life.
  • Long term goals: Your long term goals paint a picture of your next 10-25 years. How will you know you are on the path to a life of fulfillment and impact over that time-frame?
  • Short term goals: Over the next year, what do you need to accomplish or maintain in order to remain on track to reach your long term goals and life vision?
  • Key Performance Indicators: What daily, weekly, and monthly practices or habits will allow you to reach your short term goals?

Establishing a full breakdown of what you want (and, definitely, what you DON’T want) will help establish how your mastermind group can help you. Without a clear vision, it may be difficult to effectively use your group to your advantage.

 

Step Two: Seek Out People with Similar Goals and Experience Levels

thYou need to locate “your people” – aka, the people who will form the core of your mastermind group. This is partly an exercise in trial and error, as some people are likely to come and go from any group. However, the more intentional you can be at the beginning, the more likely you are to form a core group that stays together for many years, just like The Inklings, who met regularly for nearly 20 years!

 

 

You’re looking for people who have three key characteristics:

  • They seem to have answered the three questions.
  • They have similar goals to yours.
  • They have a similar experience level as you.

How can you find the people who will make up a great mastermind group? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  • Attend “networking events” in your area. Have as many conversations as possible and take notes on the ones that are most interesting and engaging.
  • Attend conferences that have messaging and story lines that appeal to you.
  • Ask your mentors, family, friends, and close contacts for recommendations of people that meet the three key characteristics from above.
  • Search for blogs that seem to contain similar messaging, goals, and mindset as you.

Once you think you’ve found the right people, you’ll want to have conversations with each one of them over Skype or in person to see if they’ll actually be a good fit.

Step Three: Create Structure

Once you have a solid group of 3-7 other individuals, take some time to create a proposed structure. There are many formats that can work for these meetings, so you’ll have to try different things out, keep what you like, discard what you don’t. Based on experience, here are a couple of ideas for meeting structure that might work:

  • Have regular meetings, preferably every week or every other week.
  • Hold the meetings at one consistent time that works for each person in the group.
  • Expect each person to attend unless they tell the group ahead of time.
  • Meeting in person is best, by video chat is second best.
  • Set specific goals at the end of each meeting and write them down on a shareable document.
  • Give each person the opportunity to update the group on their progress as compared to their goals at the beginning of the meeting.
  • th (1)Use a talking stick – no one, and I mean NO ONE, gets to talk over another.
  • Each week, focus intently (20-30 minutes) on one person’s specific challenges or goals by offering feedback, advice, and criticism to help them create even better ideas or solutions.
  • Respecting a time limit usually means that more gets done, but if the group is crushing it on a particular problem by building creative solutions, then don’t stop the flow.
  • Coming prepared makes for a more productive meeting—send out reading or materials for which you want feedback ahead of time.

Remember to build the group collaboratively – everyone will take ownership if they feel as if they’ve been heard (which is one of my problems with my country these days – I feel like I no longer get heard on anything).

Step Four: Always have Compelling Conversations

Create compelling conversation during your mastermind meetings.

  • The Inklings had a really interesting practice: They would write pieces of literature or non-fiction and then read them aloud at the group meetings. The criticism and feedback in return was raw, and sometimes harsh, but always useful.
  • Craft annual plans at the beginning of each year (or every 12 months), ask for feedback, and check in every quarter or half year on progress. By stating your biggest goals for the year out loud, they immediately become more rule. By being held accountable for those goals, they become much more likely to be reached.
  • Create bucket lists or impossible lists that you read out loud to the group. This will allow the group to get to know each other better. It will also allow your peers to push you towards your real dreams rather than allowing you to settle for second-tier wishful thinking because you’re scared of failure.
  • Undertake common readings (books, periodicals, or blogs). You can take this in many different directions. You could spend the first 15 minutes of each meeting in a book club type format. You could pick one periodical or blog article per person per meeting and discuss them for the first 15 minutes.
  • Discuss real life case studies. Identify specific examples of excellent, inspiring performance within your industry or area of interest.
  • Conduct 30 minute “workshops.” If you get the right people for your group, each one will have a set of experiences and knowledge from which you will learn. Once per quarter, someone in the group should give a 30-minute workshop or walk through of a process or skill that has helped them reach their goals.
  • Get together in person once per year. Getting together in person changes everything, especially the dynamics of the relationships within your Group. Working relationships turn into friendships, and the creative ideas that come from the meeting are even more impactful than over video chat.

These are just a few ideas around forming your mastermind group.

Get Started

Right now, take the time to answer the questions I set forth above and then look up conferences, networking events, or specific people you believe might be great for building your mastermind group. You are in control of both of these actions, so schedule a work period on your calendar to make it happen. There is nothing holding you back. Whether you’re a young professional just kicking off your career, a new business owner, or a seasoned second-career veteran like me, everyone can benefit from surrounding yourself with incredible people.

 

Posted in Blogging, Business, General Musings | Comments Off on Organize a Mastermind Group: Surrounding Ourselves with Life-Givers, not Life-Suckers

Assertiveness – a Primer

One of the downsides to being an Introvert was, for me, an inability to assert myself. I stumbled for words, which only reinforced the idea that I couldn’t do it. Or I wasn’t confident enough in my position or convicted of my idea. I suffered from Imposter Syndrome and felt that I didn’t belong in a conversation or that my position wasn’t somehow earned.

I could go on.

The problem back then (many, many years ago) was that I didn’t understand assertiveness. What I did understand was the exact opposite – speak only when spoken to.

Not good. Not good at all.

I endeavored to learn what it took. Here are my principal findings …

The key aim of assertiveness is to take responsibility for your choices and wellbeing. Another aim is to improve your connection with others, rather than alienating you from them. Assertiveness is an alternative to violating other people’s rights (using aggression), violating your own rights (using passivity) or allowing your rights to be violated but then finding covert ways to communicate your dissatisfaction (passive-aggression).

Here’s an example:

You find yourself doing the dishes yet again. You are silently seething in the kitchen. You wash those damn dishes like they’ve never been washed before. You begin clanging the pots and pans. You barely dry them. You throw the dish towel back onto its rack.

How about this?

Because you’re so damnably conscientious, you cannot stand to see a job not being done, even though it’s someone else’s job! You do it anyway because, well, you’re so damnably conscientious. You find yourself seething at the other employee who is being paid to do what you are doing!

Or this …

You provide repeated emotional support and advice to a friend who desperately needs professional help but refuses to seek it. Moreover, they don’t take your advice and perhaps do the opposite. You wonder, “why the hell do I bother?”

Or this …

You cannot bring yourself to talk to your boss or someone you perceive to be in a position of authority because you don’t think what you have to say is worth their time. You retreat. You hide. And the opportunity is lost, and you hate yourself for it.

Or even this …

You find yourself funding an adult child’s lifestyle, while they make little or no attempt to sort out their own financial issues. They’ve moved back into the basement, rent-free, because they cannot seem to hold a job, or perhaps because they enjoy spending money on things like concerts and alcohol. You seethe.

Here’s the thing: Even the most confident, assertive people encounter these scenarios. Left unchecked, these situations make endless demands of our time, money, and empathy. They even go so far as to limit your personal and professional growth.

Your friends or loved ones will often say, “You just need to be more assertive!” Or “Why can’t you just say no?”

The answer to those questions is often obvious, but if so, why do we find it so difficult to put assertiveness into practice?

Our society is peppered with messages about “putting yourself out there” and “asking for what you want” in a just-do-it kind of way.

I struggled with those messages. I was loath to get in someone’s way. I wasn’t worth their time. I was taught (as I said above), “don’t speak unless spoken to.”

And so, I found myself not asking for what I wanted, let alone attaining it.  In turn, these ideas actually increased in me an already-abundant sense of shame, frustration, and self-blame when things don’t go the way we’d hoped.

Alright, so what are the barriers? Often, we …

  • Fear that we will come across as ‘aggressive.’
  • Fear that we will hurt the other person’s feelings.
  • Fear another person’s anger or disapproval.
  • Avoid a sense of guilt for placing our needs first.
  • Feel discomfort with asking others to see our preferences as important.
  • Fear appearing to be selfish.
  • Fear being rejected or disliked.
  • Suffer insecurity in our ability to make good decisions.
  • Develop the perception that assertiveness is personality trait rather than a skill we learn (“But I’m just not an assertive person!”)

The problem with such beliefs is that they wear down our self-esteem and over time negatively affect our happiness, sense of agency, and even our physical health. Moreover, these beliefs result in a vicious cycle. When we repeatedly compromise our needs, we hold ourselves back from practicing and improving our assertiveness skills. This in turn means we don’t experience the positive impact of assertiveness and healthier boundaries.

Sometimes the source of our difficulty with assertiveness goes back even further. We can internalize messages from an early age about how to express our needs and whether this is seen as appropriate.

Then there’s the case of people who have experienced abuse or neglect in childhood and may have internalized the belief from very early on that their feelings, wishes and right to personal boundaries are not important.

Could this apply to you? If you have had the experience of your wishes not being prioritized or respected, it is possible that you have rarely known anything different. Perhaps you feel a lack of control over your own life – a sense of being carried along by a tidal wave of events rather than steering the ship yourself. Psychologists refer to this as “an overwrought internal locus of control,” which means you are acted upon by the world, as opposed to acting on the world.

As such, you may more often find yourself reacting to events in your life rather than creating them. People may praise your ability to be highly empathic and generous, yet somehow you always end up giving more than you receive. And deep down, you can’t help but notice the difference (and inwardly resent it).

Side Note: Those with “an overwrought locus of external control” are often seen as a pain the ass. These are people who think they can control anything and everything. Internal versus External, the goal is to be somewhere in the middle.

Struggling with setting healthy boundaries can also indicate low self-esteem or a sense of unworthiness. Deep down, you may not really believe you have the right to ask for what you want. Your needs may not seem as legitimate or important as other people’s. You find it far easier to ask other people what they need and spend much of your precious time and energy trying to get it for them. The problem is that you keep adjusting your own desires and needs in order to meet someone else’s.

There are a range of reasons why we have difficulty being assertive. Sometimes even starting to become aware of our unhelpful beliefs can begin a process of change. Below are some common beliefs that hold people back from acting assertively:

  • I shouldn’t say how I’m really feeling or thinking because I don’t want to burden others with my problems.
  • I wouldn’t want to make a scene or draw attention to myself.
  • If I assert myself, I will upset the other person and ruin our relationship.
  • If someone says “no” to my request, it’s because they don’t like me.
  • I shouldn’t have to say what I need or how I feel: people close to me should already know.
  • It sounds uncaring, rude, and selfish to say what you want.
  • I have no right to change my mind (plus it’ll be really annoying for everyone else).
  • I’m not sure what I want, so I’ll see what the others prefer and then I’ll decide.
  • I’m not good at being assertive. If I try to speak for myself, I’ll just sound like an idiot – why bother trying?
  • Cool girls wouldn’t make a fuss about this, I should just ‘go with the flow.’
  • People should keep their feelings to themselves.
  • If I express that I am feeling anxious or overwhelmed, people will think I am weak.
  • If I accept compliments from someone it will mean that I am arrogant.

If those apply to you, then consider for a moment this quote from Marianne Williamson:

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small does not serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

Assertive communication can actually be an act of caring and compassion that benefits other people and yourself, particularly when it is practiced with kindness and courtesy. Honest dialogue can clear up expectations in relationship and allow both parties to solve conflict together. Of course, some people may respond poorly regardless of how respectfully you communicate. However, it is important to stay connected to your inherent right to respect your own time, needs and emotions.

Practicing assertive communication can also drastically improve our mental health and reduce our anxiety about a problem. Think of how exhausting it feels to hold on to disappointment or frustration, without feeling like you can change the situation.  Constantly pretending you’re ‘cool with it’ when you’re actually hurting. However uncomfortable it might feel at the time, assertive communication may eventually help you feel more connected to others in the long-term.

There is a famous Hebrew saying, “If I am not for myself, then who is for me?” If I do not advocate for myself, or communicate my needs, I run the risk of burning out, setting unrealistic expectations and bad precedents, feeling resentful and avoiding others. Sometimes even behaving in those passive-aggressive ways cited above.

Air stewardess performing safety demonstration on aeroplane

When we care for our needs, we give others the right to care for themselves as well. It gives them permission to say, “I care about you and want to support you, but I can’t give to you when I’m low on my own energy sources.”

Consider this example: when the cabin pressure drops during a flight, you’re instructed to apply your own oxygen masks before helping others. If you were to leave your oxygen mask until last, you would lose consciousness fairly quickly and be of no help whatsoever to anyone else. Similarly, when we continuously put other’s needs before our own, emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue are a guaranteed conclusion.

Articulating our own boundaries and needs in respectful, kind ways are not only possible, but effective in maintaining our health and good relationships.

Toward an understanding of Assertiveness …

  • It is my responsibility to articulate and prioritize my needs. Everyone has this responsibility for themselves, otherwise we cannot maintain healthy boundaries between where I start, and you end.  If I don’t prioritize my needs, I risk neglecting those needs. This could place pressure on someone else to ‘mindread’ what I want, make decisions for me, or to ‘save me.’ This can be self-defeating because it reinforces the notion that I do not have the agency to make good choices for myself. Everyone has agency, otherwise known as “personal power.”
  • When you say “no” you are refusing a request, not rejecting a person. Express yourself firmly and respectfully. And try not to drag it out. Part of declining an offer respectfully is giving the other person enough time to process your refusal and find another alternative. Think of people who start dating someone they feel ambivalent about in order to avoid hurting their feelings with a breakup. Not good. We might term this as “ruinous empathy.”
  • It is simply not realistic to say ‘yes’ to every request (think of an employee who takes on every single project and more, whilst feeling increasingly run-down and burned-out). When we say “no” to one thing we are actually saying “yes” to something else.
  • Similarly, saying ‘yes’ to one activity means saying ‘no’ to something else that might enrich our lives or preserve our mental health, such as alone time and that extra hour of sleep. We always have a choice, and we are constantly making choices. It’s completely reasonable to weigh up the pros and cons of committing to requests of your time and energy.
  • People who have difficulty with assertiveness. They usually overestimate the difficulty that the other person will have in accepting the refusal. For example, we are not trusting that they can cope with hearing “no.” Expressing our feelings openly actually liberates the other person to express their feelings (see the Williamson quote above). By saying “no” to somebody, it allows them to say “no” to our requests. As strange as this sounds, this allows both parties to set reasonable, healthy boundaries and take responsibility for maintaining them.
  • Being assertive does not mean that you always get what you want. Being assertive is about expressing yourself in a way that respects both your needs and the needs of others. Sometimes this means you may or may not get what you want; many times, you must find a mutually satisfactory compromise.
  • Context is everything. We do not have to be assertive in every situation. You may find that being assertive in certain situations is not the most helpful way to behave at the time (for example, if someone is extremely aggressive in the face of direct feedback). However, understanding how to be assertive provides you with the choice of when to be assertive and how to enact healthy boundaries.

If you’re someone who struggles with assertiveness, you too may become overwhelmed by guilt and anxiety, even when you desperately need to achieve a goal. You may struggle to balance so-called “socially appropriate behavior” with your own priorities.

Many people struggle to asking for what they want out of a fear that they will appear to be self-centered, domineering or a bully. Most of the time, the opposite is truer. People who struggle with assertiveness and resort to passivity are often highly sensitive and empathic people. They might be the ‘helpers’ or ‘counsellors’ amongst friends or families. They may even feel a deep sense of pride and purpose in their desire to help and give to others.

Contrasted with the pride and fulfilment some people feel at being able to meet others’ needs, reflecting on their own priorities might feel uncomfortable and even embarrassing. There are many reasons for this: They may hold deep-seated beliefs that their needs are not as legitimate or important as other people’s. They feel so afraid of potential rejection or being seen as ‘selfish’ that they often aren’t really in touch with what they want at all; those things that allow them to feel energized, fulfilled, or nurtured. Or, for that matter, the kinds of personal choices and healthy boundaries that sustain their own mental health.

Avoiding assertiveness can seriously compromise our mental health.

In more extreme cases, people who struggle with assertiveness often describe a sense of giving selflessly and endlessly to their bosses, partners, friends, children, without ever feeling a sense of fulfillment or satisfaction in their relationships. Instead, they feel like they are constantly being taken advantage of in a manner beyond their control. They perform favors and submit to another’s preferences out of a sense of obligation. There seems to be no way out.’ They might tell themselves, “I just have to! It’s the right thing to do.” At times they secretly seethe, wondering why they never get the same generosity in return.

Eventually, people may find themselves becoming the Silent Accountant, keeping a hidden score card that tracks the giving and receiving across close relationships. This can spiral into a passive-aggressive habit that builds on resentment and frustration, without really changing a thing. The problem lies in not being able to speak up or act, even when the accounts have reached a serious level of imbalance.

Many people avoid assertiveness because they confuse assertiveness with selfishness. The word selfish pushes all of our guilt buttons, yet our definition of it is often misguided.

  • Selfishness is putting your needs above everyone else’s, not caring about the impact on others. It means trying to make sure that you have an advantage over everyone else while ignoring, excluding, or belittling their needs. Those who behave selfishly struggle to consider or understand other people’s experience, their wants and needs. They may believe that their own needs and interests are more important than others’.
  • The key aim of selfishness is often connected to dominating or minimizing someone else’s needs. The person behaving selfishly may not really care about being alienated from others.
  • Assertiveness, on the other hand, is about taking responsibility for your own needs and meeting them in reasonable and self-fulfilling ways. You do not hold malice towards others, and you’re not trying to disadvantage or punish someone else. While you state your needs, you are still aiming to be empathic, genuine, and kind.

You’re willing to consider other points of view whilst staying connected to your priorities. Your openness also helps people know exactly where they stand with you. This can improve your relationships because you are open with others about what you need from them in order to feel valued and heard.

Posted in Anxiety, Assertiveness, Counseling Concepts, General Musings, Positive Mental Attitude, Victimhood | Comments Off on Assertiveness – a Primer