“We Have A Lot To Talk About”

From Ted

Last October Margie, my wife, and I sold our business that we had been managing since 1992.  I don’t say we owned it because if any of your have ever owned your own business you would know what I mean, when (with a smile) I say “we managed it, we didn’t own it”.  Truth be told, the business owned us.

We were excited with the prospect of being able to move into this next phase of our lives, whatever that might be.  Though we are both of ‘retirement age’ we knew that the typical meaning of that word, would not apply to us, and that our guess is that as long as we are able we will always be ‘doing’ something.  We love the work our business allowed us to do.  We love being with and helping people, because in the process of helping them we help ourselves.

So, even though we were expecting that there would be opportunities, we have been astonished at just how many have come our way.   We expected to travel more, and we have.  We expected to work together in wonderful places with wonderful people, and we have.  We expected to be able to spend more time with our families, and we have.  We expected to be able to spend more time with our friends, and we have.  We expected to have ‘work’ come our way, and we have. 

What we didn’t expect, was the sheer number and the magnitude of these opportunities.

As a result of all of this, one evening, Margie said to me “We have a lot to talk about”.  At that moment, rather than feel pressured, as the situation may have warranted, I felt this overwhelming sense of gratitude.  Gratitude for my relationship with her.  Gratitude that we still have a lot to talk about after 28 years of being together.  After 28 years, we still have a lot to talk about.  Talk about things with caring, honoring, respectful communication.  How cool is that? 

I thought of other couples I know who have nothing to say to each other.  I remembered other times in my life when the person I was closest to and I had ‘nothing to talk about’.  When I was younger, I would be sitting at a restaurant, watching a couple across the room, having a morning breakfast, sharing the same booth, but having no visible contact with each other.  Both preoccupied with their section of the Sunday paper.  I always felt sadness when I saw that.

On the other hand, I know of couples who talk a lot, but the ‘talking’ lacks mutual respect and honoring.  Their conversations are full of criticism, contempt, judgments, advice giving, justifications, accusations, and defensiveness.

We have worked really, really hard to be able, after all these years, “to have a lot to talk about”.   I am grateful. 

Mr. Stouffer

From Ted

I have a bleeding disorder known as hemophilia.  From time to time that causes me to have spontaneous episodes of internal bleeding (as well as those caused by traumatic experiences such as falls and the like).  My sophomore year in college I fell on my hip during basketball practice, which caused a “bleed”.  In those days treatment for the bleeding disorder consisted primarily of asking the client to be quiet and remain as immobile as possible until the bleeding stopped on its own.  This could take weeks, depending on the bleed site.  Emotionally I always felt significant shame when these bleeds would happen.  Thoughts like “I’m not like everyone else”.  “There won’t be a place for me if I go missing from the typical routine of campus life”, “No one will even notice I am missing”. And the biggest one, “Somehow I must have done something wrong to cause this to happen”.

 

Because of this particular bleed I missed weeks of classes.  For the better part of four weeks, I spent every day lying as quietly as I could in my dorm room.  Hoping and praying things would get better.

 

One evening, about two weeks into my healing, there was a knock on the door of my dorm room.  My roommate went to the door and it was one of my professors, a Mr. Stouffer.  My first thought was that he was checking up on me to see if I was indeed unable to attend his classes or just skipping them.  It soon became very clear to me that he genuinely was concerned about my well-being, and that the only reason he came was to see if there was anything he could do to help.  Even in the small college I went to, this was unheard of.  I was deeply touched.

 

A few years ago, I was introduced to the idea of human “Angels”.  Angels were identified to me as those people who appear in our lives at just the right time, offering just the right message, and then, like heralding angels, go off into the universe to do the same for others.  I think sometimes there are dark angels (who come into our lives at just the right moments to teach us how NOT to behave) as well as bright angels (who come into our lives to demonstrate how to behave.).

I have a hunch that my resiliency and good fortune in life has a lot to do with the “Angels” that came into my lives.  From time to time, I have had the chance to go back and thank some of those angels for heeding the call to show up and I would invite you to consider doing the same.

So, “Mr. Stouffer, wherever you are, thank you”. 

What Gets Fed

From Ted

This crossed my desk recently and I thought it would be a good idea to pass it on to our readers.  I know I needed to hear this type of thing again.  I would like to give credit to the author, but none was mentioned.

The story goes:

An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandson about life.  One day he said to him: “I want you to know that a fight is going on inside of me.  It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.”

“One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.  The other represents joy, peace, love hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth compassion and faith”.

The grandson said, “Grandfather, how terrible.”

Grandfather paused for a moment and then continued.  “I tell you this because I want you to understand that this same fight is going on inside you and every other person too.”

The grandson quickly asked “Grandfather, which one will win?”

Grandfather replied, “The one you feed”.

Resolving Unfinished Business

From Brad

     I settled into my seat as the professor began the lecture. As soon as he started talking, I started feeling uncomfortable. I shifted in my seat. With each word he spoke, I found myself feeling more and more nauseous. It felt like the walls were closing in on me. I began to sweat and feel dizzy. I wanted him to talk about something else. Within minutes I stood up and left the classroom. I went to the bathroom. I felt sick to my stomach. I took a few deep breaths and splashed water on my face. I realized that if I ever wanted to be an effective psychologist, I would have to do something about how I felt. My professor was talking about how to help clients who are suffering with unresolved grief issues. Unexpectedly, I had been flooded by memories of something I hadn’t thought about in years. During the lecture, I flashed back to when I was 11 years old, and the moment I got the news that my older brother had died unexpectedly. It came as a total shock, and to cope I shut down and avoided thinking about it as best I could. While I had been a client in therapy for several years prior to the class, my brother’s death had never come up for me as an issue I needed to explore. However, in that moment, I realized that I had “unfinished business” surrounding his death and its impact on my life. I realized that if I wanted to move forward, both in my personal life and as a future psychologist, the unfinished business I had around his death would need to be resolved.

     “Unfinished business” is the phrase therapists use to describe the emotions and memories surrounding past experiences that a person has avoided or repressed. The feelings around the event are not fully processed at the time, often because they are too overwhelming or traumatic. Since they are unresolved, they linger in the background of a person’s heart and mind. When not appropriately expressed, the sadness, grief, fear, anger, anxiety, mistrust, or terror associated with these events are carried into our present lives where they interfere with our ability to be emotionally present in our current lives. Unfinished business limits our ability to connect with ourselves and others. Research has shown that unfinished business is associated with anxiety, depression, and interpersonal problems.

     Children instinctively know how to deal with difficult feelings. However, they are often taught by parents and society to not cry or be angry. As such, when difficult thoughts or feelings come up, many of us are trained to push them aside or avoid thinking about them. In fact, human beings are experts at finding ways to avoid uncomfortable feelings or dial down their intensity-- often resorting to things like alcohol abuse, smoking, compulsive eating, compulsive spending, to keep the volume down. However, these avoidance techniques only end up adding to our problems. While our ability to distance ourselves from painful feelings helps us survive in traumatic or overwhelming times, this same numbness can limit our ability to feel joy, love, peace and serenity when we are no longer in danger.

 

     But who wants to dredge up the past, especially the painful parts? Shouldn’t we just let bygones be bygones? Ironically, while we have a tendency to avoid unfinished business, the effects on our life persist until we face the issue and deal with the unexpressed feelings. There are many avenues for allowing these feelings to be addressed- including journaling, therapy, support groups, pastoral counseling, or a talk with a close friend. When we access these old memories, we are able to supplement them with new information and insights, and thus change the hold they have on our lives.

 

     Addressing my unfinished business with my brother did not change the reality of his passing, but it did significantly change my experience of his death. Prior to talking about it in therapy, I had no idea that I carried feelings of guilt and anger, as well as unexpressed sadness. By facing this very difficult experience I had tried to forget, and by fully experiencing the emotions I had about the event, I was able to release pent-up tears and express unacknowledged anger. Almost instantly, it felt like a great weight had been lifted from both my heart and mind. I was able to look at the experience in an entirely different light, allowing me to challenge some of the distorted lessons I learned about myself and life itself by my 11-year-old mind.

     While I will never be able to get my brother back, the intensity of the pain has diminished. By resolving my unfinished business around his death, I was able to get a part of me back that I thought had died with him. As a result, I believe I experience life more fully and with greater appreciation than I may have otherwise. While we can never change the past, resolving our unfinished business can improve our moods, lighten the load on our hearts and minds, improve our relationships, give us new understandings, and enhance our appreciation for the basic and fundamental aspects of life.

Managing Difficult Feelings

From Ted

One of my clients recently asked me to share with them ideas on how to manage their anger.  My theory is that denying or holding on to a feeling like anger simply makes it stronger.  Feelings like anger (and all the others) have their origin with some kind of a physical sensation.  A recent study was able to document that a sensation always precedes a person’s awareness of a feeling.

A tightness in the gut, heaviness in the chest, a tingling in the arms, a pain in the neck, and so on.  Those sensations are messages from our bodies, telling us that something is going on that needs our attention.  My experience is that most of us are not very tuned into those messages, mostly missing them all together.  The body will not be denied, however, and such unacknowledged initial messages grow in intensity and finally register in our awareness as a “feeling”, usually a pretty big one, and quite often a difficult one, such as anger, fear, depression, etc.

I encourage clients to participate in activities and exercises designed to help them become more aware of the initial sensations, so as to make choices earlier in the process.  By doing so, one has many more choices than if they wait until the sensation becomes a full fledged feeling.

So back to the client’s question?  How to explain this rather dense concept?

Being a person of metaphors (you may remember the old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”, you may not be as familiar with “A metaphor is worth a thousand pictures”), I remembered that when typing on my Blackberry the way to capitalize a letter (make it go from ‘a’ to ‘A’ for example) is to simply hold down on the key an extra long time.  ‘So the way to keep an ‘a’ (a pain in the gut) from becoming an ‘A (anger at another person) is to pay attention to the ‘a’ when it first shows up. Much easier said than done for the average person, myself included.

Redemption

From Ted

A friend called me from London and asked if I would consider presenting at a conference she was helping organize, called “Be the Change”.  She knew of our work and our book, “The Financial Wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge” that uses Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” to explain our perspective of how to help people change their destructive financial behaviors.

After quite an extended and engaging conversation, she asked if it would be possible to make my points during the presentation without mentioning the name of Scrooge, our book, or the Christmas Carol metaphor.

Somewhat taken aback, I thought, “Here I will be in London, the home of Charles Dickens, the source of much of his work, and they don’t want me to mention him at all? What’s that all about?”

So, I asked why.  She said “The people who will be attending are very informed, caring, evolved, involved people”, and finished that statement with an adamant “We are not Scrooges!!!”

My response was, “I know you, and if the people who will be attending the conference are anything like you, you are all in fact, very much Scrooge like.”

 

After a very long silence, she responded with a measured coldness that I had not encountered before, “What do you mean?” 

I said “You are very much like Scrooge, the Scrooge at the end of the story.” 

Another long silence and she said “I never thought of Scrooge that way.”

I went on to say that I saw the story of Scrooge as one of redemption and one that gave great hope for all of us no matter how old we were and how fixed we were in our ways.

Her initial reaction to the story of Scrooge is actually very common.  For some reason, very few people consider Scrooge to be an enviable man, yet by the end of the story he has become as good a person as can be imagined.

The moral of this story for me?  Redemption.  I ask for people to judge me on how I am today, rather than judge me for how I might have been in the past; in other words asking them to give me the gift of redemption.  I too am frequently challenged to give that gift to others who have hurt or betrayed me.

Chasing Rainbows

From Ted

We were in Kauai, Hawaii recently to among, other things, attend our son’s wedding.  As we traveled around the island, it happened to be one of those days where it seemed like every 20 minutes another beautiful unexpected rainbow would appear.  Once we actually saw a double rainbow.  As I thought about how beautiful they were and how fortunate that I was present to be able to witness them, I stumbled upon the realization that rainbows are always present.  Whether I see them or not is determined by where I am. 

Then I thought more globally about my life.  There are probably always rainbows in my life, even in the stormy times, if I am in the correct position to recognize them.  That seemed to be an important reminder of just how important perspective is to the quality of my life’s experience.

Having It All

From Ted

I met a wonderful lady a few years ago who said she wanted to work with me.  After discussing the details, I asked what she was looking for.  She said, “Though I have all of the money anyone could ever imagine, it is all so meaningless, I have no friends and my children hate me.”  In the years since we have been working together, she continues to get little pieces of what she had been seeking in terms of quality connections to her family and friends.

I was reminded of this conversation during a recent visit to Corsica.  We were working with a couple there.  Their hillside home looks out over a spectacular 210 degree view of the Mediterranean and sland of Corsica.  There are million dollar views and then there are priceless views.  This was one of those priceless ones.  As we were talking late in the afternoon one day, the wife said “It is hard to believe that we have so much.  Look at this view, look at the house we get to live in, and yet we are so very unhappy, to the point where I feel sad when I see this, instead of happy”.

What these precious folks have taught me is that fame, wealth, gorgeous homes and views can never give me what matters most, quality relationships with my friends, and family.  I am grateful for that lesson, without having to pay the huge price others have had to pay to find these truths.  I am also reminded that lessons such as these are available if I pay attention. 

Thriving Through the Holidays

From Ted

The holiday season is billed as the season that is supposed to contain the greatest joy and this raises people’s expectations for this time of year.  In reality, research suggests that this season may be one of the most stressful and depressive for many people.  The season’s holiday stories in books, on TV and in movies typically end on a happy note.  At the end of the story everyone ends up understood, smiling, loving and miraculously united in mind, body and spirit.

Hope springs eternal in many of us that maybe this will be our year.  Despite our experience, we believe that our history can be ignored.  We think that we can just will things to be different.  When once again, it does not happen this way, we feel the emptiness even more acutely and painfully.  On the other hand, if we don’t even have the fantasy that the holiday season can be joyful, we are painfully reminded of that and feel depressed because signs of the season are everywhere we look, denting our denial of how things really are.  This is especially true for families where there is a history of emotional distance and/or painful interactions.  So, what are we to do?  Here are some suggestions to help you thrive through the holiday season:

1.  When going to visit family members, set boundaries in terms of how much time you will spend during any one visit.  “I will be coming at 10:00AM and leaving at 2:00PM” is how I used to announce my intentions to my relatives.  They would say “Oh, I wish you could stay longer”, and I would simply say “I do too”.  There is no need for you to talk about why.  With some families, it is pure fantasy to believe that they might understand, let alone agree with you or take that opportunity to change who they are and how they behave.   Additionally, don’t stay at their house.  Spend the money on a motel.  The monetary cost of a motel is probably easier to bear than the emotional cost of staying in their homes (and may be cheaper than a couple of visits to your therapist to try and get over the trauma).  If you are worried about what they will think and say about you, you are probably (like I was for a long time) under some significant illusion about what they already think and say about you. 

2.  Find some way to be with and help people. During the holidays I spent after my kid’s mom and I split, I was a single dad.  The holiday season was filled with more sadness, grief and loss, than joy.  One of the things that my children and I would do was make a big pot of my special spaghetti sauce, put it into quart jars, wrap them and deliver them to all of our special friends.  We would just show up on their doorstep, wish them a happy holiday and take off to the next home.  Sort of the spaghetti sauce Santa and his helpers.  So instead of noticing only the emptiness of our holiday together we witnessed the looks of surprise and laughter that our actions created.  Who knows if they ever ate the stuff?  Others have volunteered at homeless shelters, helping serve a holiday meal.  Research has recently confirmed that chemicals released in our brain as we are ‘doing good for others’ are anti-depressant in nature.

3.  Find out about and attend gatherings where others are experiencing the same feelings.  Many, many folks have a less than classic holiday season.  You are not alone; you don’t have to do it alone.  You will find people who love you just because you show up.  This is especially helpful if you have no family or you are in the midst of frantic family events. 

4.  If you are gathering as a family and there is a glint of hope that you might be able to come to some agreements, talk early about what you would like to do, see happen, etc.  Margie and I will be with our family for an extended period of time during this holiday season.  What we are planning on doing, when we all get together, is sit down in one room, in a circle, and one by one, share (make a list of) of EVERYTHING that each of us wants to do, and who we would like to do it with.  We then divide the days into thirds, and plot it out.  That avoids the “Unexpressed Expectations = Premeditated Resentments/Depression experience. 

5.  See it as a learning experience.  As some armchair philosophers propose, every experience we have can teach us something.  A painful or less than perfect situation is known in some quarters as an AFGO.  Another Freaking Growth Opportunity.  (Well, they don’t actually use the word Freaking, but you get the idea).  Stay open to what you are learning, how you are feeling and you will eventually begin to better shape your future holiday (and daily) experiences.

I wish for you many blessings this holiday season.

Staying On Course

From Ted

On my most recent trip back from London I was reminded of something that a commercial pilot friend once told me. We were talking about the auto-pilot function on airplanes he flew.  He told me the device had the capability of not only flying the airplane but also landing it.  He went on to say that even with the auto-pilot function engaged a plane is off-course about 99% of the time (which is better than humans can manage).  “How does that work?,” I asked.

My friend went on to explain that aircrafts tend to wander up and down and side to side constantly.  The auto-pilot notes those changes and makes continuous adjustments for those deviations.  As such, the plane is only directly on course for just a fraction of the time.

For many years I worked in public education.  Over the course of 17 years, the high school I worked in had gone through 14 principals.  As a long-timer, when our next principal was introduced I had more than a bit of skepticism.  Our school had a reputation for killing the careers of administrators.  We, as a faculty, were supposedly unruly and unmanageable.  To top it off this newest administrator had the same last name as a luncheon meat!  The only question I had in my mind was when, not if, he would disappear. I doubted he would be able to last the school year.  Unbelievably, I started noticing things changing.  Things I never thought possible began happening.  People who I thought would never toe anyone’s line began doing so, gladly.  I watched mystified as he was able to change the climate of the entire school with his leadership.  One day I asked him for his secret.  He said “I see my job as just trying to keep everyone headed in the general direction of west”.

 

I once owned a power boat, or rather it owned me.  The popular saying at the time was “a boat is a hole in the water, surrounded by wood, into which you pour your money.”  This was a big boat, bigger than anything that I had ever driven before.  As I learned to maneuver the boat I learned some lessons.  One of the things I learned was that if you just hold the wheel steady, even though the bow (or front end of the boat) wanders to the left and right, the boat will ultimately go in the direction the wheel is set.  There is no reason to “chase” the bow by turning the wheel; the boat will straighten out if the wheel is just held steady.

These three stories illustrate some important points that I try to remember, especially during stressful times.  1) Seldom will I be perfectly “on target,” and even if I am it will only be for a relatively brief moment in time.  2) If I get a compass heading or pick a spot on the horizon (a goal), keep the target in my line of sight, keep moving in that direction, and trust the process, I will arrive at my desired destination, even if at times it seems I am way off course.  3) It is important for me to keep a steady hand and not chase after those things that might lead me away from my goal.  Perhaps most importantly, I have to remind myself that I don’t ever have to make the journey alone.