Game of Life

A teacher of mine and of many, Stephen Gilligan, once said, “Over- thinking is holding your breath and clenching all of your muscles…”

Have you ever tried to do anything at all when you are holding your breath and clenching all of your muscles? How does worrying about the same thing over and over and over again with an emphasis on what may go wrong work for you throughout the night? How rested are you the next day?

Did you know that being tired is the most effective way to exacerbate anxiety? So what is a more realistic way of living your life?

a) Focusing on the negative, ‘what-iffing’ about what can go wrong, and being self-critical

b) Focusing on the positive, imagining all that can go right, and being self-supportive

Milton H. Erickson, M.D. believed that that your conscious/thinking mind “doesn’t do much of anything of that much significance.” The answers reside on the inside, in your subconscious/creative mind. Accessing the benevolent wisdom of your subconscious will enable you find answers, create solutions, and sleep deeply through the night.

Therapeutic Exercise: Absorbing Activity—1-3 Minute Power Zone

Plant a ‘solution seed’ in your subconscious mind regarding something in your life that you are working through, a problem at work, a relationship issue, etc.. Now, absorb yourself in something that you enjoy doing: Playing/ listening to music, working out, yoga, reading, cooking, powerwalking, ceramics, therapeutic channel surfing, anything that dips you down beneath the clatter and chatter of your conscious mind. Your subconscious mind will now activate and generate solutions, ideas, and new ways of experiencing the issue you are dealing with. After your activity, take five very slow, very deep breaths and enjoy staring at the inside of your eyelids for 1-3 minutes. Repeat the breathing a few times a day and before bed. Your solutions will unquestionably bloom.

If I were King of the World the phrase “WHAT-IF” would be stricken from all languages.  People would be banned from uttering these overwhelmingly poisonous words.  What-Iffing is a practice that is extraordinarily common in our society.

In my work What-If is identified as a primary symptom of anxiety.  What-If is a hit man for anxiety, a sadistic pied piper that leads people into a toxic waste dump of  symptomology.

What-If I fail…

What-If I lose my job…

What-If he leaves me….

What-Iffing is akin to dousing a fire with gasoline.

UTILIZE IT

A client I’m working with is a self -proclaimed “gold medalist” at What-Iffing.  She routinely loses sleep worrying about all that could go wrong in her life, having developed an expertize at What-Iffing regarding the social, emotional, and academic success of her teen age daughter.  She sat across from me at a recent session with a look of confusion after I asked her the following question:  “Sally, it occurred to me that with your immense capacity to worry and obsess about all things related to your daughter that you should consider teaching her how to worry, how to become a world class What-Iffer, so that she can learn how to focus on negative outcomes and experience emotional as well as physiological symptoms of anxiety….JUST LIKE YOU!   Perhaps she too can develop high blood pressure and insomnia.  This way you can really role model for her.”  As Sally sat dumbfounded, I continued, “ Or you could take some time right now and learn a most extraordinary therapeutic tool that I call ‘The Art of What-Willing.”

I went on to demonstrate to Sally how What-Willing is the therapeutic polarity of What-Iffing.  Any What-If can be utilized to transform her inner dialogue.  Instead of following the What-Iffs she began to talk to herself in the following manner, “Thank you Ms. What-If for reminding me, What-Will it be like when my daughter achieves her goals? ( It WILL be great)…Thank you Ms. What-If for triggering me to take 3 slow, deep breaths and to focus on all that’s good in my life…Thank you Ms. What-If for cueing me to envision my Best Self…”

Sally began to understand the tremendous value of imagining her future success and happiness as a realistic, meaningful way of living her life.  She learned to close her eyes, breathe deeply and experience her next best self.  As she let go of What-Iffing she began to let go and go with the empowering flow, the artistic glow of What-Willing….

See handout: The Art of What Willing

People with the Good Problem (good problemers) unwittingly hide behind the belief that they will be hurting the feelings of another person if they speak their mind in a real, genuine way or say no to a request to help. Clients with the good problem routinely say, “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I agreed to help……” What makes this such a toxic style of living is that typically the good problemer will disregard and disrespect her own plan, desire, and needs in order to accommodate the request of another.

It has nothing to with hurting the feelings of another person. It has everything to do with being extraordinarily unfamiliar and uncomfortable taking care of your emotional needs in a healthy, empowered manner. So there is an initially awkward shift that must take place, namely a transition to focusing internally on what you want and need to honor yourself and become more balanced and self-respectful from an unrelenting focus on what you think everyone else needs and wants.

The good problemer becomes healthier and happier when she lets go of allowing others to dictate her feelings and behavior and shifts into an internal focus where she proactively takes care of herself…FIRST. Remember, people WILL like and respect you more when you embrace this style of living.

The Good Problem consists of three characteristics:

1. Only good people can contract it.
2. It is based on an irrational belief that you must take care of everyone else FIRST, be approved of and liked by any and all people, and rarely, if ever, take care of your own emotional, physical, and soulful needs FIRST.
3. It is REALLY good because it can be rapidly fixable.

Do you have trouble saying no when asked to help someone?   Do you accept invitations because you don’t want to hurt another person’s feelings or perhaps  because you want that person to like you?  How are you with receiving compliments or gifts?  Do you readily accept the compliment/gift or is there always a qualifier, like, “Oh this sweater, I really need to update my wardrobe…” or “You shouldn’t have spent this much money on me, why did you do that?”  I can remember ( I am a recovered Good Problemer) an example, one of seemingly countless episodes of living via the toxicity of the Good Problem, when no matter what I would stop what I was doing and talk to a coworker of mine who would come by my office in the counseling agency  and start a conversation.  Regardless of the charts I needed to complete, the phone calls I had to make…I would sit there, and listen with a seething, hidden resentment while simultaneously  looking  down at the phone and the unfinished charts, desperately hoping he would read my mind and understand I had work to do.

Do you feel you are being a Good person when you disregard your own needs to cater to what you interpret to be the needs of others?  Have you convinced yourself that you are actually being nice and respectful when you do and say what you believe others want to hear?  Do you not allow others to help you when preparing dinner and/or cleaning up?  Do you incessantly ask your guests if everything is cooked just right?  Do you get up and down from the table throughout the meal to check on who knows what?   Do you always say, “It’s up to you…” when asked what you want to do?   Have you noticed an undercurrent of resentment toward the people you are always ‘helping?’

THE PARADOX OF THE GOOD PROBLEM

I learned, thankfully, a long time ago that I was unwittingly hiding behind the extraordinarily confused belief that I was actually being nice and helpful to others when I disregarded my own feelings, opinions, and needs.   Regarding my office colleague who preferred talking about sports to doing his own administrative work… I was always frustrated that he would stop every day to talk.  It got to the point that I was really resentful.  He, in turn, eventually discontinued his daily chats.  He began to feel my frustration, I emitted it into the air, a toxic, disingenuous energy that finally drove him away.  Had I candidly said to him, “Bill, I can’t talk right now because I have to finish my charting and make some calls,” I would have communicated a REALNESS and an HONESTY that Bill would have readily accepted and understood.  Bill would have liked and respected me more for my ability to be REAL with him.  This candid style of communication emits a healthy, REAL energy that people are drawn to.

This is the paradox of the Good Problem:  People like and respect you more when you are REAL with them.  This is why the Good Problem can be rapidly fixable!  Real time experimentation will prove it to you.  Begin by being honest with yourself.  Prioritize what you need to do and want to do.  When you take care of yourself FIRST you are not being selfish, you are being healthy and self-respectful.  A second aspect of the Good Problem paradox is when you take care of yourself first, then, AND ONLY THEN, can you really be genuinely available and helpful to others.  So embrace your ability to say no when asked to go out to dinner; accept all compliments, speak your mind candidly and respectfully; let friends and family help you clean up; announce how great the meal is while everyone is eating…people will be comfortable with the REAL energy you bring to the relationship, the interaction.

People who have recovered from the Good Problem find it hilarious that the one thing they never, ever wanted to do they actually did routinely.  A Good Problemer  would never dream of insulting someone.  So it is quite shocking to learn that social psychologists have absolutely determined that when people do not accept compliments or gifts graciously with a smile and a “thank you” that the person giving the compliment feels insulted.  The studies detail that the overwhelming majority of people who are giving the compliments are doing so genuinely.  Thus, the Good Problemer is unintentionally not only insulting the compliment giver, but is also making a judgment that the giver is being disingenuous.

Finally, once you embark on field experimentation that is REAL and honest, you will really begin to feel so GOOD…………

Do you believe that other people are judging you? Many clients report to me that they experience heightened anxiety in social situations, at the gym, walking down the street, making a presentation at work, or going out on a date, to name just a few examples. Their ironclad assumption is that other people are negatively analyzing, critiquing, and judging their behavior, appearance, and overall presentation to the world.

Daily Energy Allotment

We begin each day with a finite amount of energy. This energy is utilized to propel us through our responsibilities and activities. It is an extremely valuable commodity that allows us to concentrate on what matters to each of us as unique individuals. As our energy flows through our mind/body connection we are able to absorb ourselves into our work, parenting, relationships, dreams, problems, vacation planning, what we are going to have for dinner, as well as everything and anything that is meaningful in our life experience. It does not occur to the overwhelming majority of people to drain any of their precious energy allotment for the purpose of engaging in a mean-spirited breakdown of how some else looks, acts, or behaves.

The Judging Paradox

So who is judging who? I was working with a client recently, a bright young professional woman, who has been convinced since childhood that everyone she encountered was judging her harshly. She was preparing for an important marketing presentation and was obsessively fearing how the audience would think she was incompetent, unattractive, and in her words, “a complete loser.” I took the opportunity to share with her that as she gave her presentation the man in the first row would be thinking about his son’s little league game; the woman next to him would be wondering if her husband remembered to pick up kitty litter; the man in the second row would be worrying about paying his mortgage; the woman across the aisle was having an affair; the man next to her was lost in a daydream about his upcoming trip to Cancun………And unless she started doing back flips and speaking in German people wouldn’t have any desire to judge her. I went on to emphasize that she just wasn’t that important to the audience, she wasn’t any more than a blip on the radar screen of their work day. She certainly didn’t qualify as someone who they would feel the need to negatively critique. So I posed the question, “So who is judging who?” For the remainder of the session we processed that she was unwittingly and unintentionally JUDGING the people that she irrationally believed were judging her. I explained that most people are actually good, thoroughly unconcerned with cruel and petty criticisms. She was thus, in essence, making a judgment that people were judging her! I pleasantly inquired if she routinely engaged in a negative, mean-spirited analysis of people she encountered throughout her journey in life. She began to understand and integrate that it was simply her anxiety attempting to keep her down. She embraced that she was a member in good standing with the human race, and the same rules for everyone else applied to her. Her homework, which she readily accepted with a laugh, was to “Stop being so judgmental!”

90% of all communication is everything but the content of the words. People are always communicating, in fact, people can not NOT communicate. How many different ways can you say hello to someone? Remember how you ran into the guy who you had a falling out with years ago or when you bumped into to your friends ex-husband who you despised. How were these ‘hellos’ different from meeting your best friend from college for happy hour or from how you greeted your beloved son when he returned home from California for the holidays?

I was recently working with a couple who had significant communication difficulties. The woman became upset when her husband said to me, “See how angry she gets, she is always so defensive…” The wife, on cue, said, “I never said I was angry…and I’M NOT DEFENSIVE!” Now I was afforded the opportunity to gently suggest to her that no, perhaps she did not SAY she was angry or defensive, but that, indeed, she was absolutely communicating her frustration, anger, and defensiveness.

So the content of our words accounts for just about 10% of what we are communicating. How we say the words, the intonation, the facial expression, the body language constitutes the genuine intent of the communication. So if I were King of the World texting would be banished to Siberia and people would begin the process of reconnecting with the respectful art of communication.

Do you consider yourself, or do others label you as a control freak?   Many clients over the years have announced to me that they are major control freaks.  They consider their micromanaging of relationships, responsibilities, and of even fun to be something of an unbreakable habit.  Others explain that, “everyone thinks I have to be in control all the time…but if I don’t take care of things, who will?”  It has been my strong experience that the aforementioned people believe that they are actually IN CONTROL when they worry, obsess, what-if, and incessantly question themselves and everyone they interact with on a daily basis.

The Ultimate Form of Control

One of my favorite therapeutic inquiries is when I have the opportunity to ask the self-diagnosed control freak the following question:  “In your opinion what is the ultimate form of control?”  Most people understand that their controlling ways have created anxiety in themselves and difficulties in a myriad of relationships, thus they typically respond to the question with an acknowledgement, in their own unique way, that their pattern of attempting to control life doesn’t seem to be working  so well.  So, typically, they manifest a look of curiosity while simultaneously bracing themselves as they await the answer to this most intriguing of questions. And the correct answer is……..

The Ultimate Form of Control is LETTING GO

The person is now informed that he/she is not a control freak, but actually an Out of Control Freak (OCF).  This is always done in an upbeat, fun manner that stimulates further discussion.  The classic response from the OCF is something along the lines of, “Well, I can’t just ignore things…do you expect me to blow off my responsibilities…to not care anymore? “  To which I gladly explain that the letting go has to do with the symptomology that develops with an overly controlling style of living, namely the anxiety that creates fear, worry, overthinking  and physiological problems like insomnia, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, and dermatological issues, to name just a few.

Letting go really involves getting out of your own way.  Letting go of what-iffing,  obsessive worrying,  and incessant focusing on what can go wrong in all aspects of life.  Letting go of negative, fear based thinking and creating positive expectations of success for yourself and the people you care about, those you live with, love with, work with.  I’ve had the frequent experience of asking the connected, well meaning, yet overly controlling mother, “Do you love your son enough to allow him to fail the math test?”  This caring mother is unwittingly denying her son the crucial life experience of learning from his failure.   She is not giving him the gifts of responsibility and self-respect that can be cultivated from the healthy communication and meaningful consequences that are positively triggered from the failed test.

Letting go allows you to remain extremely responsible, detailed oriented, and professional in your style of living.   You are choosing to trust yourself and others, to be your very best self, to let and go with the flow…to flow with the inner glow of letting go.

Guilt = What do I resent? Expression>Ingestion of Feelings. (G=RSMT X EXP>IOF).

Whenever you are feeling guilty ask yourself the following question, “What do I resent?” Guilt is typically experienced when the actual emotion you are feeling is being denied or stuffed back down inside. People pleasers, or those who suffer with the Good Problem (See Good Problem Blog), are virtuosos at feeling guilty.

Do you have a friend or family member who ONLY talks about themselves and NEVER genuinely inquires how you are doing? How about a son or daughter who constantly demands rides, the newest shoes, the latest technologically advanced wireless devices while simultaneously achieving the bare minimum at school and doing next to nothing at home? Have you ever been asked out on a date and said yes ONLY because you sought to avoid the inevitable pangs of guilt if you dared to decline?

These are but a few of the scenarios that call for a healthy expression of REAL emotion. If you were to utilize the above formula with the aforementioned examples, the real emotion would surely emerge. This genuine feeling is overwhelmingly some form of resentment, ranging from rage to anger to annoyance, and can certainly be another emotion, such as sadness. I conceptualize this process, for example, as the resentment being triggered when your friend, yet again, talks on laboriously for 30 minutes and never once asks how you are doing. As the resentment makes it way up through your core and prepares to manifest itself as the expression of a healthy emotion, (This can be done by respectfully ending the conversation and explaining in that moment or perhaps sometime later your reasons for discontinuing the friendship), the guilt intercepts this process of empowering expression and forcefully stuffs the resentment back down to your core. This ingestion of the real emotion insidiously creates a toxic guilt response.

WHEN THE RESENTMENT IS NOT EXPRESSED, ITS INGESTION CREATES GUILT

People pleasers (aka as Good Problemers) are masterful at blaming themselves. They unwittingly transform healthy expression of feeling into self-sabotaging guilt. Guilt has become a dysfunctional friend that specializes in the internalization of feelings. People who habitually internalize their emotions are now extraordinarily prone to heightened anxiety and depression.

So try the guilt formula on for size, experience how genuinely it fits. Pay attention to and honor the real emotion that is attempting to get out, to be healthfully expressed. You deserve it.

Milton Hyland Erickson, (5 December 1901– 25 March 1980) was an American psychiatrist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy. He was the founder of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis.  He is well known for his approach to the unconscious mind and his creative and solution-based therapy.

Anxiety creates many symptoms, both psychological and physiological.  High blood pressure, irritable bowl syndrome, insomnia, obsessive worrying, and irrational thinking are but a few of the problems created and produced by anxiety.   I have found in my work with clients that there are three symptoms in particular which anxiety loves to unleash.  Anxiety is unquestionably the big boss, the Godfather (Don Corleone) who orders his three most lethal hit men to attack.  (SEE BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF ANXIETY HANDOUT) Please click on Handout.

These three marauders are Self-Criticism, Why, and What-If.  Self-criticism (Luca Brasi) reigns at the top of the triangle, leading both Why and What-If into battle. I always tell clients at some point during the first session how they will know that the therapy has been successful.  I explain that once they begin to UTILIZE their symptoms as positive triggers, as powerful reminders to TAP IN to their therapeutic tools, the symptoms of the Bermuda Triangle no longer stand a chance.  Not yet knowing how to access their tools, clients typically shoot me a look of disbelief that also communicates curiosity and hopefulness.

So how do you UTILIZE symptoms?  Whenever stricken with a bout of self-criticism you can say,” Thank you Ms. Self-Criticism for reminding me to support myself…or Thank you Ms. S.C. for triggering me to talk to myself like I would my best friend Lindsey”…or, depending on your mood,” Bleep You Ms. S.C. for reminding me to take five deep breaths and imagine how my Best Self is compassionate and self- supportive.

Self-Criticism is trying to fight with you.  It is a symptom that lives in the conscious mind (SEE HYPNOTHERAPY) and works for anxiety.  Your Best Self, which thrives in your subconscious mind, is infinitely more powerful than any symptom.  Your best self is an expert at utilizing symptoms and transforming them into solutions, into powerfully calming energy.  Your best self knows that there is no fight if you thank the symptom for reminding you that you really do not want to fight.  Imagine someone trying to argue with you and you realize, “Wow, what a reminder that I want to chill out.”

Symptoms can remind you to visualize loved ones, to breathe deeply, to really let go.  Symptoms are relentless, yet when they are utilized as positive triggers to unleash your tools, they quickly dissolve.

The therapeutic trance, or zone, that clients are guided into allows the subconscious mind to create a seamless integration and application of this utilization principle.  The conscious mind, where the symptoms live, has great difficulty accessing the inner tools discussed throughout.