In this episode, Mr. Schue is out with the flu; in his absence, Blaine and Sam come up with an assignment for the glee club – to sing songs that are “guilty pleasures.”  “We all have some musical shame,” Blaine contends, as he works to sell the idea to others in the group, “You know, that secret love we dare not speak, but when it comes on the radio, we can’t help but turn up the volume and sing along!”  With “Wake Me Up before You Go-Go” playing in the background, then, I folded laundry on the coffee table, and found myself musing, once again, over the notion for a blog post that I had been entertaining for a while, but had not yet been able to bring myself to write.  I had a song that I wanted to use to illustrate an idea about the kind of relationships and conversations that make a difference for us when we’re feeling stuck, but wasn’t sure how to do so without admitting to a “guilty pleasure” of precisely the kind that Blaine had just defined in Glee.  Me, the guy who can’t get from my front door to the mailbox in icy winter weather without limbs-flailing incidents of losing my footing every two steps – that’s just how coordinated I am (The Wild and Precious Present, 2013) – has long loved grooving to the beat of electronic dance music.  One of my favorite songs in this genre is the 1999 debut single, “Blue,” from Europop, the first album by the Italian Eurodance group, Eiffel 65.

In “Blue,” we hear that an unnamed “little guy” — whom I will also call Blue — “lives in a blue world”; everything that he sees around him, all the time (“all day and all night”), is blue – his house (“blue … with a blue little window”), his car, the street, the trees.  Even his girlfriend and “the people … that walk around” are blue.  That Blue perceives, or interprets, the world as blue seems to explain his experience and the description of it as such – “everything is blue for him” (emphasis added), the narrator tell us.  In addition, this monochromatic view of the world seems related to how Blue sees/experiences himself, as “everything he sees is just blue, like him” (emphasis added).

While there is a sense of correlation, then, between Blue’s view or interpretation of the world, and how he sees or experiences himself, the narrator goes one step further, I think, as he contextualizes Blue’s plaint, and offers us a kind of cautionary tale in the process (“Yo, listen up, here’s a story … “).  He suggests that Blue’s current relationships, and the kinds of conversations they presently engender and support, do nothing to expand (and so, effectively, sustain) the “blue little window” through which Blue sees/interprets/experiences “his self” and “everybody around.”  After all, even with a girlfriend and others in his midst, Blue “ain’t got nobody to listen (to listen, to listen).”  The echo of the words “to listen” in this portion of the song creates just enough ambiguity — “to listen” almost becomes ”to listen to” – to suggest to me that Blue may not only need somebody “to listen” (to him, and to his story), but also somebody to whom he can listen (“listen to”), for his experience to be any different, any less hue-restricted and mood-restrictive.

How could having someone “to listen” and “to listen to” make a difference for Blue?  While various characters in the “Guilty Pleasures” episode of Glee voice the view that relief comes from opening up to others about what we have kept to ourselves (As Blaine says to Sam about being a fan of Barry Manilow, “Once you stop hiding it, you’ll feel so much better!”), I’m going to propose that change comes more specifically from the experience of a certain kind of relationship and conversation in our lives.  In this kind of relationship and conversation, we have someone “to listen” to us, and so, the chance to feel heard, to experience a sense of empathy and validation, and we have the opportunity “to listen to” how someone else processes our experience, to entertain other ways of seeing/interpreting, talking about, and responding to it that may be helpful to us.  The word “conversation” comes from the Latin, “turning about with,” a phrase that describes my own sense of what happens in certain kinds of relationships and conversations – a “turning about [of an experience] with [another]” that helps us see the experience differently, often in terms of other parts or dimensions, or – we could say – colors.  Some relationships and conversations help us see things in a polychromatic versus monochromatic fashion, and this shift in perspective and interpretation opens up a wider range of possible emotional and behavioral responses for us.  We feel less stuck!

In Glee, Blaine’s ultimate “guilty pleasure” – that one thing that Blaine is so ashamed of liking that he refuses to admit it for a long while – is not Wham! but his “bestie,” Sam.  Blaine feels so anxious about how Sam might respond to learning about his crush, so worried about freaking Sam out or jeopardizing their friendship, that he can’t bring himself to talk to Sam about what he’s feeling, despite invitation after invitation by Sam to do so.  When Blaine does allow himself to be vulnerable, he discovers that Sam is not weirded out at all by his feelings; Sam says that he is flattered by the attention, and would feel a bit put out, in fact, if Blaine did not like him!  In this conversation, Sam shares perspectives – that Blaine’s crush on him is no big deal, not a threat to their friendship, etc. – that Blaine was just not able to imagine before.  His own fear, his sense of shame, colored his perspective on his feelings in a limiting way.  Sam introduced Blaine to different meanings for those feelings.

The kind of relationship and conversation with Sam that made a difference for Blaine, that could make a difference for Blue and for us, when we’re feeling stuck (whether “blue,” or anxious), is not an experience that we can have only with others – we can also have it with ourselves.  How does the relationship that you have with yourself support you?  How do the conversations that you have with yourself in your own head limit or expand your sense of possibilities?

For more ideas about anxious thinking and responses to help us foster a greater sense of calm and confidence for ourselves, feel free to see other Thought Tonic posts by Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT, ELI-MP, at thoughttonic.com; you can follow Scott Burns Kahler and this blog via e-mail, Google+, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, or RSS feed. Thank you for reading!

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine. — Diana Wynne Jones

Schneider defines an interpretation as an opinion that we create to explain an experience that we have had (137). For an example, he refers back to the scenario that he used to illustrate assumptions, in which he has asked a woman on a date, and she has declined: he interprets her “no” as meaning that he does not dress well enough (138). Cue Sharp Dressed Man from ZZ Top’s 1983 album, Eliminator! If he decides to act on his interpretation, Schneider may spend money on a new wardrobe, which — if his own idea about why the woman has declined a date with him does not reflect the reasons that she herself might cite — could constitute “‘marching off in the wrong direction’” (138), and even set himself up for frustration when she still says “no” as he stands before her in a new (and expensive!) Armani suit. When we allow ourselves to believe that our interpretation is the only possible explanation for what we have experienced, we close ourselves off from other options that may be very helpful for us to consider. Personally, I think of every experience in our lives as generating the “enormous rainbow” of possible interpretations that the late British children’s fantasy writer, Diana Wynne Jones, associated with myth and folklore. I view interpretations as stories that we tell ourselves to help us make sense out of our experiences and the world around us; others may sometimes agree that these stories are “true,” but even this social construction of a certain “validity” does not make interpretations facts.

There are no facts, only interpretations. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There are ways for us to challenge interpretive “energy blocks,” of course, and the approaches will likely sound familiar to anyone who is already familiar with cognitive-behavioral responses to anxious thinking, especially to those patterns that are often referred to as mind reading and personalization. The first step, I contend, is to recognize that we do not have to accept everything that we think as “true,” that our ideas about what we experience are not facts (whatever those are), but beliefs based on what we see through the lenses in the invisible eyeglasses that we wear. When we catch ourselves making an interpretation, then, we can ask ourselves, very simply, as Schneider suggests, “‘What’s another way to look at that?’” (140). Just posing this question to ourselves can defuse the power of our own particular perspective, and diminish what — borrowing from Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie — we can call “the danger of a single story”; we acknowledge that other (and potentially more helpful!) meanings are possible. We may even decide to go a step further, and ask another person, whether or not that person is involved, about his or her interpretation of an experience. Or, we can play around with challenging ourselves to argue what we would identify as the exact opposite of our first interpretation. There is a rainbow of possibilities!

I have proposed in previous posts, and will do so again in this one, that we actually give ourselves the chance to think more realistically, with greater balance (which helps foster calm and confidence!), when we challenge our often all-too-automatic anxious thinking. If, after exploring other possible meanings of an experience, we decide that we want to stick with our original interpretation, we can do so, and then shift into conscious consideration of how we want to respond. In the process of responding consciously to any interpretation we have, I suggest that we remember how long we have been looking through the particular set of lenses that supports this interpretation; initially, we may find ourselves still tending to perceive (or even look for) what we are used to seeing. In my own experience, interpretations can be at least as emotionally charged as the assumptions that we explored in the last post, and so also difficult for us to let go. Just imagine a history for Schneider, in his dating scenario, in which he grew up poor and was teased as a child for not having the popular clothes that so many of his peers were wearing! To help us loosen our grip on a “stubborn” interpretation, I suggest echoing the approach that Schneider recommends for responding to assumptions — validating our perspective as absolutely “normal” given what we have experienced previously, and how we have learned to think about those experiences (136). How else could we think — until we challenge ourselves to think differently?

“Experience the Rainbow!” — Skittles

Over the next couple of weeks, I invite you to notice when you are making interpretations, creating opinions to explain your experiences (I think of human beings as meaning-making creatures — we engage in this activity all the time!). Your boss may come into work and head straight to her office without saying “Good morning!” to you, shutting the door hard behind her. You think that she must be angry with you, though you don’t know why she would be; you steer clear of her for the rest of the morning, trying to figure out what you did to upset her, instead of talking to her about the assignment she gave you, and which you have finished — early! You may be feeling nervous about how a classmate is looking at you as you give a presentation, wondering what he is criticizing about you, or about what you’re doing, as he watches. Consider whether or not such interpretations of your experiences are helpful to you, whether they resonate with catabolic energy, that distracts and drains you, or anabolic energy, that supports you in moving in the direction that you want to go. What are other ways of looking at these experiences? Perhaps your boss has had a tough morning with a sick child, or is grouchy about spilling coffee on herself in the Starbucks drive-through (her mood may have nothing to do with you!). Maybe that classmate is thinking how nervous he is, imagining that you might be feeling similarly, and admiring how you are forging right along in your presentation. The key, I think, to challenging interpretations, is in a variation on the Skittles candy ad campaign — “Experience the Rainbow! Taste the Rainbow!” Your interpretation is only one possible color of meaning for the experience that you have had. Think the Rainbow!

For more ideas about anxious thinking and responses to help us foster a greater sense of calm and confidence for ourselves, feel free to see other Thought Tonic posts by Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT, ELI-MP, at thoughttonic.com; you can follow Scott Burns Kahler and this blog via e-mail, Google+, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, or RSS feed. Thank you for reading!

In a previous blog post, Through a Glass Darkly (2013), I proposed the notion that all of us go through our lives wearing pairs of invisible eyeglasses. The lenses in these glasses, which impact what we see, are made up of the thoughts and beliefs that we have come to hold about ourselves, other people, and the world. Some of the thoughts and beliefs, I submitted, are helpful to us — they have an anabolic or positive influence on our mood, energy, and actions, and so expand what is possible for us. Others can limit our view, and so our experiences of life — these thoughts and beliefs resonate with catabolic or negative energy that can have distracting, draining, and even destructive effects on our sense of ourselves; our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health; our work lives; and our relationships. In Energy Leadership: Transforming Your Workplace and Your Life from the Core (2008), Bruce D. Schneider identifies what I’m describing here — the thoughts and beliefs of dirty lenses — as four kinds of “energy blocks” that prevent us from making conscious choices in our lives and reaching our potential; he calls them limiting beliefs, assumptions, interpretations, and gremlins (with “gremlin” being another way to reference what we often call our inner critic) (129). In my last blog post, I explored limiting beliefs; today, I’m turning our attention to the next menace in the list — assumptions.

Schneider defines an assumption very specifically as “a belief that, because something [has] happened in the past, it’s going to happen again” (134). To provide an example, Schneider references a scenario in which he has asked someone on a date, and that person has declined; he believes (assumes) that because this one person has said “no” that anyone else he may ask will also turn down his invitation. As a result, he may either decide not to try again (since he already “knows” what will happen), or to allow his expectations of “rejection” to affect the energy with which he asks the next person, potentially setting himself up, then, for the very experience that he fears — a kind of self-sabotage. When we permit our assumptions to determine what we decide to do in our lives, we let a past experience control what is possible for us in our present and future. With this idea in mind, I have come to think of an assumption as a ghost or phantom of a past “negative” experience that we allow to haunt us, to intimidate us out of taking positive action in our lives.

There are several ways for us to challenge any assumption that we make. These ways may sound very familiar to those who are already acquainted with cognitive-behavioral responses to kinds of anxious thinking like catastrophizing and probability overestimation. The first step, I suggest, is to remind ourselves that we do not have to believe everything that we think, that our beliefs are not facts, though we often proceed, of course, as if they do reflect a natural order of things (when we say to ourselves, for example, “That’s just how it is!”). When catching ourselves in the midst of making an assumption, then, we can ask ourselves, very simply, “‘Just because that happened in the past, why must it happen again?’” (136). In posing this question, we open space for ourselves to examine the evidence for the assumption that we have made, and to find evidence that contradicts it, that reminds us that other outcomes are possible. We actually give ourselves the chance to think more realistically, I contend, in being less unconsciously dominated by our anxious thinking (see also Thanks, Not Angst, 2012). If, after we have examined the evidence, we decide that our assumption still has merit, we can then shift into strategies of response that echo those that are useful for countering catastrophic thinking. We can ask ourselves, “So what if that happens?” and “How would I like to respond to that, if it does occur?” In the process of responding consciously to an assumption, whatever tactic we take, we may want to keep in mind that we have been seeing through the particular set of lenses that supports this assumption for a long time, and we may still initially tend to see (or even look for) what we are used to seeing. Schneider notes that because assumptions are based primarily on personal experiences, they are “internalized” and more “emotional” than limiting beliefs; as a result, they can be difficult for us to release (136). He suggests that validating our own perspective as absolutely “normal,” given what we have experienced and how we have learned to think about what we have experienced so far in our lives, can help us loosen our grip on the belief that is holding us back (136).

Over the next couple of weeks, I invite you to examine the lenses in your own invisible eyeglasses of perception for the “phantom menace” of assumptions. Look for thoughts and beliefs related to what has happened in the past that you expect to happen again, that restrict rather than expand your sense of what is possible for you and in your life as a result. These thoughts and beliefs will be ones that contribute to moods and behaviors that resonate with catabolic or negative energy, which breaks you down, instead of anabolic or positive energy, which builds you up. Once you notice an assumption, question it, ask yourself what thoughts and beliefs would be more helpful to you, and decide how you want to “clean your lenses” so that your invisible eyeglasses of perception work for you rather than against you. These glasses can support you in taking positive action with a sense of calm and confidence — in whatever direction you want to go.

Bon Voyage!

“The Force will be with you, always.” — Obi-Wan to Luke, Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)

For more ideas about anxious thinking and responses to help us foster a greater sense of calm and confidence for ourselves, feel free to see other Thought Tonic posts by Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT, ELI-MP, at thoughttonic.com; you can follow Scott Burns Kahler and this blog via e-mail, Google+, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, or RSS feed. So many possibilities! Thank you for reading.

In my last blog post, I introduced the notion that all of us go through our lives wearing pairs of invisible eyeglasses.  The lenses in these glasses, which impact what we see, are made up of the thoughts and beliefs that we have come to hold about ourselves, other people, and the world.  Some of these thoughts are helpful to us (in that they have an anabolic, or positive, influence on our mood, energy, and actions — what is possible for us); others dim our view, and so our experiences of life (the energetic consequences are negative, or catabolic — distracting and draining — with destructive effects on our sense of self, health, work life, and relationships).  In Energy Leadership: Transforming Your Workplace and Your Life from the Core (2008), Bruce D. Schneider identifies examples of what I’m describing here — the thoughts and beliefs of dirty lenses — as four kinds of “energy blocks” (129): limiting beliefs, interpretations, assumptions, and gremlins (with “gremlin” being another way to reference what we often call our inner critic).  In my blog post today, I’d like to explore the first of these blocks — limiting beliefs.

Schneider defines limiting beliefs as ideas that we have about our situations, surroundings, other people, or the world that restrict our sense of what is possible.  Most often, we have come to accept these ideas as true because they are communicated to us as true by some source that we have invested with “authority” — someone we know, the media, or a book we once read, for instance.  As an example of a limiting belief, Schneider references the idea that before 1954, running a mile in under four minutes was considered “impossible” for a human being, and even “dangerous” to attempt (129).  On May 6, 1954, at a meet in Oxford, England, a 25-year-old junior doctor named Roger Bannister ran his way into the record and history books with a time of three minutes and 59.4 seconds.  Schneider contends that such an achievement required Bannister’s rejection of a prevailing and limiting belief of his era, and the creation of a new belief for himself — that running a mile in under four minutes was possible.  While I do not know enough to claim that a sub-four-minute mile was considered impossible and dangerous at the time, it does seem to me that Bannister would have had to believe that breaking the four-minute mile was possible for him (no limiting belief there!); otherwise, would he have even tried?

From my own perspective, another example of a limiting belief that may resonate with many of us who identify ourselves as anxious is the idea that our anxiety is a curse or a wound, something “bad,” a way in which we’re broken (and so “bad” ourselves, perhaps).  As a limiting belief, this idea is more complicated because it is often not simply based on something that we have been told, but on our own personal experiences of emotional and physical pain; moreover, our “gremlin” or inner critic frequently gets involved.  Previously, I have suggested that as valid as the view of anxiety as a curse or a wound may be, given what those of us who experience anxiety can go through, it is not helpful to us (The Gift of Anxiety, 2012).  This particular way of seeing sets up a relationship between us and our anxiety that is dominated by feelings of antipathy, resentment, and fear.  In this kind of relationship, we tend to polarize with our anxiety, identifying it as an enemy and taking up a defensive position against it; as we do so, we generate an even greater amount of tension for ourselves (catabolic energy!), and not the increased sense of calm and confidence that we desire.  Personally, I wonder how our experiences of anxiety might be different if we were able to see anxiety not as a curse or a wound, but as a blessing, a source of healing — a gift.  While I acknowledge that this idea may strike some as sounding ridiculous, at least initially, I get very excited thinking about what a different kind of relationship between us and anxiety this energetically anabolic perspective makes possible, and with this different relationship, what becomes possible for us.

There are several ways for us to challenge our limiting beliefs, whether the beliefs concern how we think about anxiety or anything else in our lives.  These ways may sound very familiar to those of us who are already acquainted with various cognitive-behavioral responses to anxious thinking. First of all, we recognize that we do not have to believe everything we think, that our beliefs are not facts, though we often proceed, of course, as if they do reflect a natural order of things (when we say to ourselves, for example, “That’s just how things are!”).  If we inventory and evaluate the influence that a particular belief has had on our life (look at the cost, and ask ourselves, “Is that all right with me?”), and decide that we want to change what we have been experiencing, we can begin by choosing an alternate belief for ourselves, a way of seeing that helps us rather than hurts us.  We can then examine the evidence for the limiting belief (question the proof of its “truth,” in other words), and ask ourselves questions like, “How true do I believe this idea is … really?” and “Where did this limiting belief come from for me?”  (Schneider, 134).  In answering the first question, we may realize that our ”buy-in” to the belief is not as complete as it had seemed; in answering the second, we allow ourselves the opportunity to create a context for the belief, which may help us conceive that we need not see it as fact, but simply as something that we have come to accept as true (and so, as something that we can decide to reject).  We can also explore supporting evidence for the alternate idea that we have developed.  In the midst of all of these responses, it may be helpful for us to keep in mind that we have been seeing through this particular set of lenses for a long time, and we may still initially tend to see (or even look for) what we are used to seeing.  Change takes time.  Or is that just another limiting belief … if it’s not helping us?

Over the next couple of weeks, I invite you to examine the lenses in your own invisible eyeglasses of perception for limiting beliefs.  Look for thoughts and ideas that restrict rather than expand your sense of what is possible, that contribute to moods and behaviors that resonate with catabolic energy, which breaks you down, instead of anabolic energy, which builds you up.  There are times that all of us could use an extra ”someone in our corner” who wants us to be able to see all the possibilities for thought, feeling, and action that are available to us, so that we can pick which among these will help us move in the direction that we want to go.  I would like, in some small measure, to help you in this way; perhaps, one day, you will pass the help along to someone else!

How is the way that you are seeing things influencing what is possible for you?  What are alternate thoughts and beliefs that would be more helpful than some of the ones that you are currently using?  How can you ”clean your lenses” so that your invisible eyeglasses of perception work for you rather than against you?

Here’s to your increased calm and confidence!

For more ideas about anxious thinking and responses to help us foster a greater sense of calm and confidence, feel free to see other Thought Tonic posts by Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT, ELI-MP at thoughttonic.com; you can follow Scott Burns Kahler, and this blog, via e-mail, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feed.  Thank you for reading!

I was in my freshman or sophomore year of college — it is all just a blur, now — when I got my first pair of eyeglasses.  I had been sitting in a large, lecture-style class when I noticed that I could not make out the words that the professor was writing on the chalkboard in the front of the room.  My peers were not having the same difficulty.  I tried sitting in a number of different seats, hoping that a change in lighting or in my distance from the front of the room would help, but nothing made much of a difference.  The course was one in music history and appreciation, and for a couple of weeks, I was playing my own game of musical chairs!   When it was clear that moving around the room, developing a French-Stewart squint, wasn’t helping me decipher the writing on the chalkboard, off I went to see an optometrist.

Because I knew that both of my parents had gotten glasses as children, I was not surprised by the idea that it might finally be “my time”; truthfully, however, I had been hoping that I had escaped any genetic predisposition to need corrective eyewear, and had even managed to pride myself on getting through my childhood and teenage-years without the slightest indication of trouble with my vision (as if I had something to do with it!).  As much as getting glasses was a blow to my pride, though, wearing them was a greater blow to my vanity; I did not see myself as one of those people so easily able to pull off the look that we would later call ”geeky chic.”  Worst of all, perhaps, was that I had not yet matured out of exceptionally oily adolescent skin, and I was always navigating the world, then,  through lenses that were covered with smudges.

Given my own experience with eyeglasses, I have often found the image of eyeglasses helpful in explaining the idea that, as human beings, each of us views our world through a specific set of lenses.  These lenses are comprised of thoughts and beliefs that we have developed over time out of our individual experiences, and in the context of constructing meanings of those experiences in our conversations and relationships with other people.  I think of everyone as wearing a pair of invisible eyeglasses (glasses of perception) all of the time.  Some of the lenses in these invisible glasses (such as the lenses I had in college, covered with smudges) limit our vision, restrict what we’re able to see, and so reduce the range of ways in which we’re able to show up in our lives; other lenses (think of those that are clean and clear) augment or otherwise expand our vision, help us to see more of what is possible, and support our focus on whatever we decide matters most to us in our lives — by opening up options of conscious emotional and behavioral response to situations that we encounter.  Please understand that I am not proposing the notion that we can have direct, unmediated (godlike?) access to the “reality” of things (which could be one interpretation of having glasses of perception with crystal clear lenses), or even that we judge the “dirty” set of lenses as “bad” and the “clean” set as “good.”  I am suggesting that the clear or unsmudged set of lenses (having thoughts and beliefs that help us rather than hold us back) offers us increased opportunities to perceive a wider range of possibilities for feeling and responding in any given circumstance, and so the freedom to pick which feelings and behavior we think will work best, or how we want to show up as we move in the direction that we want to go.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are seated in a crowded cafe and think that you may see a friend at a table across the room.  You are wearing a pair of eyeglasses with smudged lenses (or regular sunglasses with smudged lenses, perhaps, if you do not wear prescription eyewear).  You can’t see very clearly with dirty lenses, and feel less certain, less confident, as a result.  You mutter under your breath, a bit perplexed and disgruntled, “Now, is that Susie over there?”  You respond tentatively, even anxiously — finally deciding that because you can’t really tell if that woman is Susie or not, you are not going to approach her, call out, or wave (the cafe is pretty casual!).

If, on the other hand, you are wearing a pair of glasses with clean lenses, you will likely feel less anxious in this same situation, saying to yourself, “Hey, that’s my friend, Susie, across the room there!”  You will move with greater confidence, deciding to get up from your own table to pay her a visit, perhaps, or to call out to her — waving, and smiling widely — “‘Hey, Susie!  Over here!’”

Now, most of us, I venture, prefer the vision of clear, confident energy in the second of these two responses (we can call this energy “anabolic” since we so often experience variations of it as “building us up”); however, if we have gotten accustomed over the course of time to looking through dirty lenses in our invisible glasses, we might not even realize how profoundly these lenses — the often unconscious thoughts and beliefs that we have come to hold about ourselves, those people around us, others, and the world — are dimming our view, and so our experience of our life, with a very different energy (i.e., “catabolic” — contracting, and draining since it “breaks us down”)!  In Energy Leadership: Transforming Your Workplace and Your Life from the Core (2008), Bruce D. Schneider talks about examples of what I’m describing here — the thoughts and beliefs of dirty lenses — as falling into four main categories: limiting beliefs, interpretations, assumptions, and “gremlins” (with “gremlin” being one way to reference what we also often call our inner critic).

Sometimes, as happens in the story that Schneider tells, it helps to examine our lenses with the support of someone who wants us to be able to see all the possibilities for thought, feeling, and action that are available to us, so that we can pick which among these will help us move in the direction that we want to go — with a sense of calm and confidence.  In the weeks that follow, I’ll be addressing each of these four obstacles to our experience of anabolic energy one at a time as topics for this blog.  I’ll be offering further definitions and examples, explaining the ways in which I find these ideas relating to the kinds of anxious thinking identified in cognitive-behavioral approaches to therapy, and exploring ideas for how we can respond when we notice ourselves feeling out-of-focus, have the sense that the vision we want for ourselves is blurred — not on account of myopia or astigmatism — but because of smudges of unhelpful thoughts and beliefs on the lenses of our perceptions.

To your calm and confidence!

For more ideas about anxious thinking and responses to help us foster a greater sense of calm and confidence, feel free to see other Thought Tonic posts at thoughttonic.com; you can follow this blog, by Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT, via e-mail, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feed.

Filed under: Help with Anxious Thinking Tagged: Anabolic energy, Assumptions, Behavior, Bruce D. Schneider, Catabolic energy, Energy Leadership, Feeling, Gremlins, Interpretations, Limiting beliefs, Perception, Thought ]]> http://thoughttonic.com/2013/01/29/through-a-glass-darkly/feed/ 2 Man Cleaning Glasses sbkahler http://thoughttonic.com/2013/01/15/the-wild-and-precious-present/ http://thoughttonic.com/2013/01/15/the-wild-and-precious-present/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:47:13 +0000 Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT, ELI-MP http://thoughttonic.com/?p=966 ]]> I’m currently participating in a writing group that meets on a monthly basis. Between each of our meetings, one of the facilitators sends out a topic on which all of us in the group are invited to reflect and write for our next session together. Today, as my post for this blog, I would like to share the inspiration for the group’s most recent topic — an excerpt from a poem by Mary Oliver — and what came to my mind related to anxiety as I thought about it.

Here in Indianapolis, Indiana, we have had snow and ice on the ground in the neighborhood where I live since the day after Christmas (as I write these words, it is January 8). Now, don’t get me wrong — I don’t mind snow, at least initially. I don’t even mind ice — well, for a few days, anyway. After almost two weeks, though, as beautiful as I may find the snow and ice at first, I am past ready for the stuff to melt. Then, I’m okay if it starts all over again — really. I just want a break! Actually, to be absolutely honest, I want an opportunity to walk to the mailbox at the end of the work day without ice skating in my slick-soled dress shoes — to not have a break (of an arm or a leg, that is!). If I were on a reality TV show during any given winter, I would be the cast member (in)famous for wacky arms-waving, yelling-out-loud (and cursing under my breath!) incidents of nearly losing my footing every time I walked out the front door. Yeah, I’m that guy. I’m sure sometimes that my real-life neighbors get together, snickering behind the curtains of the window with the best vantage point, just to watch.

Given this winter context, the topic for the writing group — a couple of lines from a poem called “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver (House of Light, 1990) — strikes me as especially ironic, and welcome. After so many days of snow and ice on the ground, I’m ready for a bit of summer — however I can get it! In the poem, the narrator contemplates creation, the company of a grasshopper that eats sugar out of her hand, and she enjoys herself — just being — in fields of grass on a summer day. The lines that the group facilitator asks us to reflect on for our writing this month come from the very end of the poem, when the narrator turns to the audience with a question. In my own head, I hear the question as the narrator’s response to an imagined reprimand for spending the day in what some people would surely interpret as an indolent, even self-indulgent fashion:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

What comes up for me when I read these last lines of Oliver’s poem is what I heard the narrator just describe doing with her own “wild and precious” life during a summer day that she spends in fields of grass — attending to the moment, attending to her experience in the moment. I hear the narrator’s question, then, as a call to live in the present — a practice that, in my own experience, is so often a challenge when I am feeling anxious. Anxiety has a knack for pulling me out of the present moment, whatever may be happening, whether I’m judging the experience that I’m having as a positive or negative one, and setting my mind racing along the lines of “What if … ” and “Then what … ?” If I’m in the middle of an unpleasant experience, the anxiety does not help — I feel only more miserable, in fact. If I’m in the middle of a pleasant experience, the anxiety cheats me out of enjoying it. Either way, anxiety gets me worrying about things that may never happen, at the expense of being present to whatever is happening in the here-and-now, and being able to make conscious choices about how I want to think and feel about those things, and how I want to respond behaviorally. What is it that I plan to do with my one “wild and precious” life? My own answer to Oliver’s narrator is that I plan to be as present as I can manage to be. Like everyone else with a similar goal (I know that you’re out there!), I am always learning how to do so.

When I feel anxious, I’m aware that I have begun to focus my thinking on fears and doubts. I get caught up in my head this way, with side effects that I notice in my body: an upset stomach, palpitating heart, sweating, and restlessness. When I feel anxious, I am plagued by restlessness of my mind as well, in the form of poor concentration — on everything except what I’m feeling anxious about! What helps me when I’m feeling anxious is to bring myself back into the present moment; I am often able to do this by getting out of my head, centering and grounding myself in the sensory experiences of my body. I may take a few slow, deep breaths, concentrating on my experience of those breaths (the sensation of air filling my lungs, my abdomen expanding, and then the reverse) instead of the anxious thoughts that are spinning in my head. I may take a few sips of cold water, noticing the temperature of the water in my mouth, against my tongue, and down my throat as I swallow. At this point, I may then remind myself of what is going well in my life, a few reasons for feeling grateful, giving thanks, in the present. If I have more time, I may decide to take a walk (if there is not snow and ice on the ground!) or go to the gym, listen to music that comforts and soothes me, or meditate. I may use the idea of “Worry Time,” postponing my worry until a certain period later in the day; when that time comes, then, I usually find myself bored by my anxiety before my allotted “Worry Time” is over.

Now, if your experiences of anxiety are anything like mine, they may feel a bit like losing your footing on the ice — out of control, scary, potentially embarrassing if someone is around to see, tending to induce anxiety about having another such experience in the future (which means, then, a sense of anxiety about anxiety … ack!). Clearly, being able to be present to the moment in the midst of such experiences can be a challenge. As corny as this may sound, I often say to myself, “Wow! I’m feeling really anxious right now! How do I want to handle this experience of anxiety in a way that is going to feel helpful to me?” I remind myself that what I’m going through is only temporary, and won’t kill me. Though I would much rather be experiencing myself as “idle and blessed” in fields of grass on a summer day than seized with a sense of anxiety, whatever the context, I do my best to practice the kind of radical attention to the “wild and precious” present moment of life that I find exemplified by the narrator in Oliver’s poem. I think of the present as “wild” because, even with all of my anxious “What if … ?” and “Then what … ?” thinking, I know that I can’t actually control the outcome of events with that thinking (though anxiety constantly tries to convince me otherwise!). I think of the present as “precious” because, when I’m able to make conscious decisions in the moment about how I’m thinking about things, feeling, and how I want to respond behaviorally, the benefits to increasing my sense of calm and confidence are invaluable.

Here’s to your own increasing sense of calm and confidence!

For more ideas about anxious thinking and responses to help us foster a greater sense of calm and confidence, feel free to see other Thought Tonic posts at thoughttonic.com; you can follow this blog, by Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT, via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feed.

As we begin 2013, many of us will be thinking about where we want to go this year — figuratively, at least, in terms of what we want to be different for ourselves, in our lives. If we aren’t happy with our weight, for example, we may be planning a new gym routine, or to change our eating habits. If we are tired of losing track of when bills are due, or where we have left our keys, we may be considering ways in which we can improve our organization at home. So often, whatever it is that we want to be different in the new year, we frame a related resolution in terms of something that we “need” or “have” to do. We think, “I need to lose 10 pounds — no more excuses!” or “I’m so sick of not being able to find anything — I just have to get organized!” And why wouldn’t we have these kinds of pressured thoughts, given the sense of anxious urgency that we sometimes experience to make these changes in our lives? Unfortunately, as helpful as such thoughts would seem to be in motivating us to take action, and supporting us to maintain what we start, I don’t know that they work very well for many of us; in fact, I would argue that these kinds of thoughts — “I need to …” and “I have to …” — can actually get in our way of creating the differences that we want for ourselves, in our lives. Just as we can talk about some cars as “lemons,” we can talk about certain thoughts as “lemons,” too; they end up being more trouble than they are worth, and sooner or later we realize that they just aren’t able to take us where we want to go.

What makes these kinds of thoughts “lemons”? What’s wrong with saying to ourselves, “I need to …” or “I have to …”? Let me clarify. From my perspective, the issue is not one of right or wrong, but what works best or most often for us, and what does not. In my own experience, when I am thinking in terms of “I need to …” or “I have to …” I notice an internal grimace, an energetic “sour face,” so to speak (think about the expression on someone’s face when that person tastes the tartness of a lemon). For me, “I need to …” and “I have to …” create a sense of motivational “drag” rather than enthusiasm or excitement. I even start to feel a bit anxious about what it is that I have resolved to do. “I really need to get to the gym today!” “I just have to finish this blog post by Sunday evening!” I have come to associate the tense response that I experience with the idea that these thoughts come from a fearful or an already anxious frame of mind. “I really need to get to the gym today because if I don’t, I’m never going to lose this extra weight!” “I just have to finish this blog post by Sunday evening; it will be awful if I don’t get it published on Monday morning like I told myself I would!” Do you hear the anxious all-or-nothing thinking in “I’m never going to lose this extra weight!” and the catastrophic thinking in “it will be awful [if I don't finish this blog post by Sunday evening] …”? How about the possibility of selective attention and memory in the second of these examples if I told you that one time, I had trouble getting a post done by Sunday evening, but was able to work on it on Monday, and just published it Monday evening, then, instead of Monday morning? The world did not end.

So what’s the alternative? For me, what works better — and feels better, frankly — is to think in terms of “I want to …” or “I can …” (desire and opportunity) rather than “I need to …” or “I have to …” (desperation and obligation). Now, I can almost hear the objections that I have made to this notion in the past, which are perhaps yours as well: “But I really do need to lose this extra weight because …” For some of us, the reasons for thinking in terms of “need” in this situation may range from controlling diabetes to keeping up with young children to fitting into our pants (“New clothes cost money, and we’re saving for a trip to Florida. Oh, no … what will I look like in a bathing suit?”). However, there is also a “want” that goes along with each of these scenarios that we can apply to our resolution to get to the gym. “I want to get to the gym because I want to keep up with my kids. Plus, it will feel so good to have gone to the gym, to be able to say that I went, that I did it!” For many of us, “I want to keep up with my kids!” will create a very different feeling than “I really need to get to the gym because if I don’t, I’m never going to lose this extra weight!” We can talk about this different feeling as having a different kind of energy — anabolic, versus catabolic (terms that Bruce D. Schneider, author of Energy Leadership: Transforming Your Workplace and Your Life from the Core (2008), has borrowed from the vocabulary of biology and physiology in relation to the processes of metabolism). Anabolic energy builds us up, supports us, while catabolic energy drains us, tears us down, and fuels our experiences of anxiety. While the sense of pressure that we get from catabolic energy can have short-term benefits — think of a cheetah on the plains of Africa that bursts into high-speed to catch its prey — this kind of energy ends up wearing us and others out if we keep it up for too long (even the cheetah can’t keep up these extreme speeds indefinitely!). For many of us, the catabolic energy of “I have to …” and “I need to …” thoughts just can’t take us as far as (so, ultimately, where) we want to go, and can actually get in our way, then, of creating the positive, sustained experiences of what we want to be different for ourselves, in our lives.

Whenever this time of year rolls around, and I find myself reflecting on what I want to be different for myself, in my life, in the coming new year, I think back to the car that I bought several years ago, and how — for a time, in the context of getting back and forth to work, around town to run errands, etc. — it served me well. When I began to have problems with the car on a regular basis, I had the opportunity to re-evaluate its value to me, and determined that it was adding to my sense of stress and anxiety; I could no longer count on it to take me where I wanted to go. The same has been true for me of “I have to …” and “I need to …” thoughts, and the same may be true for you as well. These thoughts are not special to the end of any given year, of course, but tend to surface in our practice of making New Year’s resolutions. As we begin 2013, I want to think more often in terms of “I want to …” and “I can …” so that I can experience the anabolic energy that will help me reach my other goals. I want to improve my organization at home so that I can spend less time trying to find my keys, or worrying about which bills have yet to be paid, and more time working on my blog!

Where do you want to go?

Best wishes for a wonderful 2013!

For more ideas about anxious thinking and responses to help us foster a greater sense of calm and confidence, feel free to see other Thought Tonic posts at thoughttonic.com; you can follow this blog, by Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT, via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feed.

What made this blanket such a special gift is not how I felt about it initially — obviously. What made it so special is how I learned to appreciate it in the years that followed — when I moved away to college, for example, and first lived on my own. During my junior and senior years of college, I lived in an off-campus apartment that had a single source of heat — a very small electric wall-unit in one of the corners of the living room. On winter nights, I would have been freezing in my futon bed without that wonderful wool blanket to keep me toasty warm! I still think of that blanket, which became so worn from my use over time that I finally let it go. I remember how painful my experiences of that blanket were at first (due to my feelings of confusion and disappointment over getting it as a Christmas gift), and how I learned to value it, even treasure it, as my years with it progressed.

Those among us who struggle with experiences of anxiety know all too well how intensely painful these can be, and how easily the pain can begin to blanket over our sense of anything positive in our lives. As if the emotional anguish of anxiety weren’t enough, it often comes with physical pain — in the form of muscle tension, upset stomachs, and headaches, just to name a few examples. The emotional and physical distress combine to take a toll on our confidence, then, convincing us that something must be wrong with us, and that withdrawing or giving up are the only options that make sense for us, or are even the only options that are possible. With such feelings of limitation and compromised self-esteem, we frequently experience increased emotional pain — a sense of hopelessness and loneliness, even what we could call depression. No wonder those of us who struggle with experiences of anxiety tend to see anxiety as a curse, a way in which we’re broken, a wound that doesn’t heal. Who wouldn’t feel this way, given what we go through?

As valid as this view is — and I want to make clear that it is completely valid, given our profoundly and repeatedly painful experiences of anxiety — it seems to me to have the very unfortunate effect of perpetuating the very affliction from which we seek relief. Seeing anxiety as a curse or a wound sets up a relationship between us and anxiety that is dominated by our sense of antipathy, resentment, and fear. In this kind of relationship, we tend to polarize with our anxiety, identifying it as our enemy and taking up a defensive position against it; as we do so, we often generate an even higher degree of tension for ourselves, and not the increased sense of calm and confidence that we desire. Personally, I wonder how our experiences might be different if we were able to see our anxiety in another light, not as a curse or a wound, but as a blessing or a source of healing, as odd as those ideas may sound. What if, in keeping with the holiday season, we were able to see our anxiety as a gift? What kind of relationship with anxiety would be possible for us if we were able to adopt this perspective? What might the benefits be?

For me, the key to seeing anxiety differently — as a gift, for instance — lies in exploring those ways in which I can say that I am thankful for my experiences of it. Sure, on the one hand, the very idea of being thankful for anxiety sounds absurd — even offensive, perhaps — given all the pain that we associate with feeling anxious; however, the frame of mind in which such an idea is absurd or offensive is the same frame of mind that is dominated by anxious, fearful, tense, and defensive thinking. I am not intimating that we consider experiences of anxiety pleasant — I have already mentioned the myriad ways in which they are profoundly painful, in fact; what I am suggesting is that these very unpleasant, painful experiences call our attention to certain habits of thinking, associated feelings, and ways of responding in behavior that are not helpful to us — that limit, constrain, even debilitate us.

Anxiety, then, provides a doorway to healing, a prompt to us to examine our thoughts about ourselves, others, and our experiences, and to evaluate how well these thoughts are working for us. If we don’t like the way that our thoughts are working for us, if we determine that they are exacerbating our anguish (like seeing anxiety as a curse or as a wound!) — rather than helping us to feel more calm and confident — we can decide to exchange them for thoughts that support us in having the different experiences that we want. The curse, the wound of anxiety, becomes a source of healing, a gift for growth.

When I think about this idea — the gift of anxiety — I think back to the wool blanket that my grandparents gave me for Christmas when I was just a teenager, and how, eventually, I grew to feel so thankful for it. At first, of course, I felt only confused, disappointed, and frustrated — even a bit hurt and upset, to be honest. I hadn’t asked for the blanket. I didn’t want the blanket. I even hated the way the blanket felt. Who would ever be glad to have such a thing? The very notion seemed preposterous to me. Now, as I reflect on my experience, I know that I couldn’t have reacted any other way, given how I was thinking about the blanket at the time. In the years that followed, as I learned to see ways in which the blanket was helpful to me, I began to think differently about the blanket itself, and my relationship to it changed, eased, became much less dominated by tension and aggravation. Finally, I stopped thinking about the blanket as the heavy, scratchy burden on my bed that I had received instead of a new bike or basketball for Christmas; instead, I thought about how the blanket served me well in ways that I had not expected, but came to value very much — in the course of time.

Happy Holidays!

For more ideas about anxious thinking and responses to help us foster a greater sense of calm and confidence, feel free to see other Thought Tonic posts at thoughttonic.com; you can follow this blog, by Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT, via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feed.

If you have ever gone to therapy for a sense of anxiety, or have done any research on your own for ideas about how to reduce anxiety, you have likely heard or run across the idea of scheduling “Worry Time.” In its simplest form, “Worry Time” is a specific amount of time (say, 30 minutes) at a certain time each day (10:00pm, for example) that we set aside for allowing ourselves to focus on our worry, and nothing else; we can think about this time as an appointment with Worry. When we start to feel anxious at other times during the day, we acknowledge the feeling, validate the experience for ourselves, but we postpone our worry until our next designated “Worry Time.”

“Worry Time” is a paradoxical prescription of the very problem that constitutes our complaint; as such, it sounds like a ridiculously counter-intuitive response to many of us. Right now, in fact, you might be saying to yourself, “What? Schedule time to worry? I want to STOP my worrying!” Trying to stop our anxious thoughts “cold turkey” in any given moment is a response often referred to as “thought stopping.” To get a sense of how attempts at “thought stopping” often actually backfire on us, I’m wondering if you might be willing to try a little experiment …

If you are willing, take a few moments to watch the music video of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” below. Once you are finished with the video, spend a few more moments thinking about all that you saw and heard – everything from the aspects of setting and choreography that caught your attention to the lyrics and details of dancers’ wardrobes (ah, yes, parachute pants … I wonder whatever happened to those!). Now, once you have thought about the video for a few minutes, I want you to stop thinking about it. Don’t think about the music video at all for the next five minutes!

How did you do?

If you are like most of us, you struggled with stopping your thoughts “cold turkey,” and found that trying to stop your thoughts just kept you focused on them. Whether our thoughts are about “U Can’t Touch This!” or our worries, we tend to be more able to postpone our focus on them for the time being than to stop them completely. Essentially, when we have scheduled “Worry Time” for ourselves, and find ourselves worrying at other times during the day, we are able to say to ourselves, “Stop … (wait until) Worry Time!” We avoid the trap of “thought stopping.”

When the time that we have scheduled for “Worry Time” arrives, then – 10:00pm, in my example from the featured image for this post – we follow-through, and allow ourselves the opportunity to focus on our worry. Whatever else we may be doing, we say to ourselves, “Stop … (now it is) Worry Time!” Think of MC Hammer’s line, “Stop … Hammer time!” The frequent result of engaging in “Worry Time” is finding that a focus on worry for the whole time we have allotted — 30 minutes, for instance — is more difficult than we expected. We can actually find ourselves getting bored with our worry! We might even start thinking about what we would rather be doing with our “Worry Time” and eventually, intentionally choosing to do these other things! What we learn in the process is that anxiety has less control over us than we had been telling ourselves. With practice, over time, we discover that we are more frequently able to say to anxiety, in the words of MC Hammer, “You can’t touch this!”

Here’s to your increasing calm and confidence!

For more ideas about anxious thinking, and responses that help us foster a greater sense of calm and confidence in our lives, feel free to see other Thought Tonic posts at thoughttonic.com; you can follow this blog via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter. If you would like further information about the idea of “Worry Time” in particular, feel free to contact me, Scott Burns Kahler, MA, LMFT. Thank you for reading!

I have decided to use this blog as the front page for a new WordPress Website for my counseling and coaching practices.  As a result, my blog will get a new name — and a brand new look!  You will also notice new pages attached to this blog — pages about the services that I offer, and pages with new information and links to new resources that will complement my posts.

The new name that I have chosen is a response to an evolution in my thinking since I set up the blog and began to publish posts — a growing understanding, I hope I can say, about what draws readers to the blog, and what they find most helpful about it.  I want this blog to have benefit for people!  Originally, I called my blog, “Social Anxiety, Shyness, and Performance Fears,” in a very straightforward reference to some the categories of experience with which I often work in my counseling and coaching practices.  As I have been writing posts, I have found myself enjoying a focus on the kinds of thinking that we can talk about as fueling all sorts of anxious experiences, including those associated with social situations, and exploring ways in which we can respond to such thinking in order to foster different experiences for ourselves.  The idea came to me that what I would like to offer through this blog, and what readers seem to be looking for when they come to it, could be called “thought tonic.”  When I say “tonic,” I refer to something that invigorates, strengthens, restores — or otherwise promotes and supports — our sense of well-being.  What I hope to provide in this blog are thoughts that help us calm our nerves and soothe our self-doubts, thoughts that help us increase our feelings of well-being in terms of emotional balance, self-confidence, and more.  With these notions in mind, I have decided to give my blog the new name of “Thought Tonic.”

I hope that you will enjoy the changes — in function, name, and look — that I will be making to this blog over the next several days.  I also hope that, over the coming weeks and months, you will continue to enjoy the same kind and quality of content that brought you to the blog in the first place.  Please feel free to leave a comment (or to contact me through the custom form that will be coming soon); I welcome your suggestions for content, as well as your ideas about what other features could make this Website a helpful resource for you.  I would love to hear from you!

Thank you for reading!

Sincerely,

Scott