Bears & Taxes

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AI-generated image of A. “Grizz” Lee Baer, CPA (credit: DALL-E)

“The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.”

— Margaret Atwood, from MaddAddam

“…but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”

— Benjamin Franklin, from a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, translated from the original French

Avoidance gets a bad rap in our culture. We use “avoidant” and its cognates as pejoratives, indicating weakness, sloth, or cowardice. “Get in there!” or “Suck it up!” we say as a way of bullying each other – or ourselves – into doing something we don’t want to. We say about others things like, “he’ll never face up to x” or “she couldn’t handle y” as evidence of failure or lack. Explicitly calling someone avoidant is a deep insult. The thing is, avoidance isn’t an inherently bad thing.

For example, we (humans) have spent, as of this writing, roughly the last two and a half years avoiding each other for very good reason: tiny beasties living in our mucus have been killing us and the best way to keep them from continuing to do so is to keep ourselves apart. That’s smart. Similarly, I’ve been avoiding bears all my life and it’s worked very well for me so far. Same thing with toadstools, angry men with knives, and very large meteors. So, avoidance per se clearly isn’t a problem; there must be more to it.

What is avoidance, if we boil it down? One way of thinking of it is as motion away. I see a bear and, unless it’s in a zoo or otherwise clearly unable to reach me, I’m going to move in a direction to put more distance between it and myself. Toadstools, leave’em be, and run away from angry men with knives. Very large meteors might be more tricky to avoid, but with enough warning, maybe we can.

As avoidance is demonized in our culture, approach is lionized. Confronting and overcoming something dangerous or aversive is considered an inherent good. Harry Potter and his lion-mascotted Gryffindor mates are shown to be leaders because of their bravery. The man staring down the tanks rolling into Tiananmen square faced an overwhelming force, which then balked, and thus he became an icon of heroism (despite the fact that, to this day, his fate remains chillingly unknown). Farragut’s “Damn the torpedoes!” allegedly shouted as a command that his fleet run through a naval minefield is still quoted after more than 150 years in encouragement to take high-risk, high-reward actions.

Yet fantasies like Harry Potter, incomplete stories like Tank Man’s, and cherry-picked histories like Farragut’s don’t account for the realities of approach strategies. Unquestionably, facing challenges is an indispensable skill, but our glorification of the white-knuckle, teeth-gritting, hunker-down-and-get-through-it approach often leads us to outcomes like perseverant failure, exhaustion, burnout, and even retraumatization. These are especially common, in my experience, among people whose careers arise from their passions, such as artists or folks in prosocial fields like diversity, equity, and inclusion or health care, just to give a few examples.

Balance is a central concept in much of my work with patients, in this case balance between approaching and avoidance. Neither one is inherently good or bad, but instead they are two different strategies that each have pros and cons. As I said above, avoiding bears seems to be a pretty good strategy; they can be very dangerous and avoiding them has had, for me anyway, no meaningful consequences. But useful as avoidance can be in some scenarios, in others, it doesn’t work well at all: if I avoid calculating and paying my taxes, that would very likely lead in the long run to my incurring significant financial costs and/or jail time, so it’s actually more dangerous not to do them, even though the task may feel aversive. When it comes to taxes, an approach strategy makes sense.

Some folks I work with need help with improving their approach skills – socializing, getting important work done – and so cheering them on with Gryffindor references or playful shouts of “damn the torpedoes!” might be helpful. But some of my patients are looking to bolster their avoidance skills – saying no to others’ inappropriate demands, letting go of perceived obligations – in which case stories of standing one’s ground or even wise retreat are more pragmatic. Neither approaching nor avoidance is always the most effective response; optimal mental health means having facility with each strategy and to be able to discern when to apply which.

The Conscripted Shaman

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On a recent visit to the Shidoni Foundry and Gallery in Tesuque, NM, I ran across a bronze sculpture entitled “Spirit of the Medicine Man” by Gib Singleton. It depicted a person wearing the horns and skin of a bison, clinging tenaciously to the back of a horse careering missile-like across an imagined prairie. I felt, as a psychologist, that I could relate deeply to the experience that the artist portrayed: the sometimes wild surrender a therapist makes to their patient’s experience, riding fleeing emotions with no certainty where they will lead, yet profoundly trusting that it will be a place we need to go.

This is what I and others have called a shamanic model of psychotherapy. It’s a metaphor referring to a spiritual healing process in which the healer, vessel-like, takes into themselves the patient’s harmful “demon” and renders it innocuous or, as in the above sculpture, rides its wildness and ultimately tames it, before returning it to the owner, now healed through this rebalancing. Psychotherapy, of course, is founded in secular rather than spiritual traditions and knowledge, but the metaphor is apt, as it, like shamanism, is an emotionally demanding process that, even as it is richly satisfying, can be existentially depleting. One reason why it works, though, is that both the patient and the therapist are volunteers: again like shamanism, each participant chooses the vulnerability and risk entailed in the process, the patient letting another see their darkest self and the therapist chancing failure and the emotional pain entailed in empathy. Through their mutual and agentic investment, the healer and the being healed can change the course of unwellness and create a new, more healthful state. The process is, at its heart, innately generous.

However, there is also a dark version of this dynamic: scapegoating. In it, a suffering person relies on another to process their pain, but it is not voluntary; the sufferer strives to relocate their suffering outside themselves by persistently blaming another for it, sometimes leading this blamed other to believe that the pain is actually theirs. This can happen when the original sufferer is unable to recognize or accept the pain as their own, to understand its origin within themselves, and so they cast about looking elsewhere and assign the cause to whatever external candidate which appears to them as plausible.

In families, this can look like a parent persistently blaming a child for the parent’s suffering — “My life was great until you came along” or, more subtly, “I’m so disappointed in you” — and, in some households, the entire family comes to see one person as the source of all dysfunction. This can go so far that, when a child grows up in a narrative in which they are blamed for the family’s problems, they can come to believe it and, often, take on such a role — consciously or unconsciously — and so behave in disruptive ways.

This dynamic is similar to that of the shaman in that the scapegoat becomes the vessel for the family’s demons; it’s also very different, however, in that no one in the system is volunteering. The blaming members falsely believe they are victims of the scapegoat and the scapegoat, perhaps more reasonably, sees themselves as victim of the blamers. Yet, the scapegoat has been conscripted into the role of bearing blame for all the family’s pain and “wrongness” and has been given no skill for dealing with the burden, let alone for recognizing the dynamic as such or helping the blamers to accept and process their own suffering. This conscripted shaman ends up being continually pummeled and inevitably overwhelmed by the emotional labor offloaded onto them by others who, usually through their own naivete and trauma, are blind to the injury they do.

The dynamic of scapegoating is tragic; scapegoats are abused and can end up struggling with the freight of others’ pain throughout their lives, while blamers rob themselves of the very agency they hope to gain by offloading their pain. Some people do not survive scapegoating, as the strategies to relieve themselves of others’ pain can have life-threatening costs: addictive behaviors or other behavioral and mental health issues — which have the exacerbating effect of providing blamers with further “evidence” that the scapegoat really is the problem — which can be incapacitating and even lead to death, indirectly or by suicide.

The good news about this is that folks who experience scapegoating tend to come to psychotherapy with strengths that they didn’t know they had, arising, paradoxically, from those same experiences of abuse: higher self-awareness, greater empathy, and richer understanding of interpersonal dynamics. Treatment that focuses on interrupting and breaking up the old narrative of being the problem can help the patient to recognize and take ownership of those strengths. In turn, it can become easier to set boundaries and distinguish when it’s okay to be vulnerable and when it’s more risky.

Working with folks who have been or are being scapegoated is one of the most meaningful aspects of my practice. It is a privilege for me to watch these former conscripts come into themselves, to recognize their strengths, and begin to feel the freedom to express themselves with confidence, choosing paths that can lead away from others’ burdens and toward deeply satisfying lives.

On Burnout

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When patients tell me they feel constantly drained, unable to keep up their motivation and focus, and that they repeatedly start the week or even the day with less energy than they ended the previous one with, I sometimes will explore with them the possibility that they are heading toward or suffering from what I think of as burnout.*

What is burnout?  In my clinical practice, I define burnout as “having more going out than coming in.”  More what?  Colloquially, maybe we’d say emotional energy, but to be more precise, let’s call it self-regulation resources.  Every time you do a thing you don’t want to do or stop yourself doing a thing you want to do, that’s self-regulation.  We regulate ourselves in subtle (being polite to strangers) and not so subtle (declining your favorite dessert) ways all the time and it requires expending neurological resources, which we feel subjectively as effort.

One model/metaphor I use when talking about self-regulation is a hydroelectric dam.  You’ve got a big reservoir of water some of which flows through conduits to drive turbines, which in turn generates electricity for a town.  The reservoir behind the dam gets refilled more or less steadily from a river, so water comes in and energy goes out in a sustainable cycle.  However, if the electrical demands of the city increase or the inflow from the river decreases such that the level of the reservoir starts going down over time, that water->energy conversion can’t be sustained.  If that dynamic continues too long, eventually, there won’t be enough water behind the dam to power the turbines and there won’t be any electricity for the town.

Self-regulation works in a similar way.  Every day, our bodies produce neurotransmitters and hormones that allow us to think and feel and make decisions and take actions — that’s the river.  Those molecules then get used as we think, feel, decide, and act — that’s the water spinning the turbines — and the consequences of those thoughts, feelings, etc. manifest in our lives — that’s the town.†  Normally, there are plenty of these neurochemicals for the stuff we need to do on a daily basis, however, when the demand on us goes up or our body’s ability to make them is impaired, we run a deficit.  Like the hydroelectric dam, we can do that for a while because most of the time we have a good surplus, but if that deficit runs on long enough, our body starts sending us notices and even alarms in the form of fatigue, confusion, irritability, insomnia, and other distress symptoms.  If we don’t address the deficit, we eventually burnout — no more water behind the dam — becoming so depleted that we can’t hardly act at all and are forced to rest and recuperate, often resulting in a chaotic fallout of undesirable consequences.

I like this model because it conveys a critical point:  we are physical beings with limitations.  Yes, I believe in free will (a central component of the existentialist aspects of my orientation), but will, as in “force of will,” only gets you so far.  Just like a car can go a lot of places but run out of gas, a person has choice but can run out of self-regulation resource, no matter how willful they are.

What does this mean practically?  We avoid burnout by first recognizing it as a thing, acknowledging that we have to “feed the machine” in order for us to accomplish what we’re up to.  Second, by identifying the limits of our particular machine, we can account for them; if I want to fly to the moon, I’m going to have a much better chance of figuring out how to get there if I know that simply flapping my arms won’t work.

From here, we can start to take an inventory of credits and debits and get a sense of how to steward our self-regulation reservoir.  In terms of credits — think water coming into the reservoir — basic things like sleeping and eating habits are always worth looking at.  Also consider what you’re doing for fun — are you getting down time, both active (e.g., hobbies, sports, projects, socializing) and passive (restful behaviors like reading, watching TV, cuddling with a loved one)?  What raises the shoreline on your lake?  I think it’s important to start with what’s coming in, as we can often find small things that add up to make a big difference without even worrying about what’s going out.

That said, debits are important, too; ultimately, this model is about making sure that what’s going out covered by what’s coming in.  Once you’ve got your resources optimized, if you still find yourself at a deficit, take a look at the demands on you, what the town is expecting the turbines to power.  In the cases I’m talking about here, some of the demands — like the big project at work or the newborn that just joined your family — can’t be cut back without unacceptable consequences.  Instead, look to reduce other debits:  maybe the house doesn’t get cleaned as often as you like or that friend you were helping out has to wait a bit, things that have lower stakes that you can drop temporarily to husband your energy for the Big Demand.

There are also less obvious, but possibly more potent debits to look out for.  For example, simply resisting our circumstances costs us.  Take that big project at work:  I know I’m going to participate in it (my boss told me I will and I’m choosing to do what she says so I can keep my job), but doing so and then complaining about it only means I’m expending energy that’s counter to what’s actually happening.  I may genuinely not like the project, but that’s different from actively resisting it by complaining, wishing things were different, avoiding the tasks, etc.  In our metaphor it’s like maybe the guy who’s pushing for housing development in the town is also dumping concrete in the dam’s power ducts.  This kind of resistance is something that we all do and it can be overt, subtle, and even unconscious, but it expends effort, which drains our limited resources.

How does one avoid debits like this?  The short answer is a kind of mindful acceptance.  I’m not suggesting we roll over and resign ourselves to an unworkable happenstance, but rather to practice choosing what’s happening instead of being a victim of it.  It’s about one’s orientation to one’s situation.  It’s developing a habit of recognizing and taking ownership of what one is doing; if we make it our choice — “I was voluntold for this project, but I’m choosing it because I want to keep my job” — it helps us to let go of fighting what we’re doing anyway.  Examining one’s own behavior and attitude to identify and let go of this dynamic wherever it might show up can save precious resources and slow or stave off burnout.

A lot of deficit running can be remedied through these tools.  However, we can occasionally find ourselves in a position where we’ve maximized our input and the output can’t be cut down to a manageable level.  In those cases, the math becomes very simple and, at some point, we’re going to run out of water for the turbines.  Our common response to this awareness is to continue charging ahead and hope that our resources hold out long enough to finish the project.  In my experience, more often than not, they don’t and when that happens, our burnout results in unnecessarily messy losses.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  If we see the crash coming and are honest with ourselves that we’re going to drop some balls, we can be mindful and planful about which balls we drop and the consequences of doing so, thus limiting the cost to ourselves and to others.  For example, when I worked in a community mental health clinic, there was a period during which the demand on psychologists was unsustainably high.  I tried to keep up with it, but couldn’t and ended up getting sick a lot.  Each time I did and called out, the admin staff would have to scramble to reach my patients to let them know that I was out and then those patients who were planning to get help that day unexpectedly did not get it.  On top of that, the time off I was taking was being spent recovering from whatever nasty bug my overtaxed system had failed to protect me from, which was hardly a repleting way to spend that time and I ended up feeling even more exhausted when I returned to the clinic.  After a few months of this, I decided to adopt a new strategy:  I scheduled one extra day off per month.  I would do this well ahead of time, so my patients knew I was going to be away and we could find alternative times to meet and it didn’t burden the already busy admin staff.  On my days off, I was able to do things that replenished me, so when I came back to the office I was actually refreshed and ready for my heavy caseload.  I was still losing days at work, but being intentional about it meant it was more sustainable.

So:  if you have more going out than coming in, first look to see how you can get more coming in, then consider what demands you can reduce and how you might be resisting your situation (doing it but acting the victim of it).  If that doesn’t get you to a balance, you may have some tough decisions to make:  choosing which balls you’re going to drop.  The best way to avoid burnout it to see it coming; once you have, you can account for it.

Mindful self-awareness is the key.  Pay attention to your needs and make sure you’re getting them met in appropriate ways.  Not only will you be less distressed, but your loved ones will appreciate it.

——————————————-

*This is not a technical term, nor is it a diagnosis.  I’ve met psychologists who eschew the word and I consider their arguments against it, especially that it’s not scientifically precise, as fair.  I use it here and in my practice, though, to refer to a particular dynamic that can get set up in our lives and I find that it’s a practical and effective name for it.  Additionally, I talk about burnout using the language of self-regulation resource and ego depletion theory.  This essay isn’t about the technical aspects of ego depletion nor is it a place to debate the strengths and weaknesses of the theory; rather, I use some of the ideas and terms as practical vocabulary for approaching a common subjective phenomenon and how, operationally, an individual might cope with it.

†This is oversimplifying quite a bit, but stick with me; the model works.

Embrace the Suboptimal

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As of this posting, I’m 11 days into self-quarantine and almost all of my patients are under similar self-imposed restrictions.  Telepsychology has enabled us to continue the good work we are doing together, which is great, but it’s not really the same as being in a room together.  Still, it’s much preferable to not being able to do therapy at all.

Many of the conversations I’ve had with folks recently have followed this theme of being somehow restricted in the things we depend on to keep our batteries charged.  “I need to spend time with friends, with family, with my significant other(s)” or “Not being able to get out of the house is getting me down” or “My work is important to me.”  Social distancing and self-quarantining means we can’t do the thing that humans are built to do:  be with each other.  Humans eat together, work together, make love together, argue together, play together.  (Even those of us with a more introverted bent are not entirely isolated; we just emphasize different aspects of relationship.)  There’s no part of our lives that specifically not being with other people doesn’t affect.  So, what do you do?

I think the first thing is to remember that our situation is, by definition, not optimal.  Taking care of our individual and collective selves in a time of pandemic means things are not good.  Even so, we still have a kind of knee-jerk expectation that a given way of coping needs to provide us with our usual quality of life or it’s not worth doing.  It’s like, for example, if a video chat with your bestie is only 80% as fabulous as actually hanging out with them, we focus on the loss of that 20% of the je ne sais quoi you have together and because that’s lost, the rest is just not worth it.  Suboptimal won’t cut it; it’s either the best or bust.

This might seem like a strong statement.  “Of course a video chat with my bestie is still worth doing,” you might say.  But notice how many of our decisions seem to line up with that sense of all-or-nothing.  “I can’t go visit grandma, so I end up just not talking to her.”  “My gym is closed, so I’m not exercising.”  And the like.  It’s easy to do and we often don’t notice it.

Humans have a negative cognitive bias that leads us to focus on the downside of things (this is adaptive:  it’s more useful to remember that place where your cousin got eaten by a bear than that place where the dogwood blooms) and one place that that can show up is this automatic, often unconscious, intolerance of the suboptimal.  The problem is that, in this case, that bias robs us of getting at least some of what we need, even if it’s not all of what we need.

In a situation like a global pandemic, getting as much of what we need as possible is extra important, especially because we’re unlikely at a given moment to be able to get all of what we need.  So, embrace the suboptimal.  If the best you’re going to get is a videochat with your bestie, take it.  If you can’t go visit your loved ones, call them.  If your favorite park is closed, walk around your backyard or your block or your apartment roof or your living room.  If your guitar is in the shop, listen to your favorite music (or sing!).  None of this will be enough, but it will be more than you’d get otherwise.  And, if you take advantage of enough of the opportunities for the suboptimal, they might add up to something close to what you would normally get.

Our ability to care for ourselves affects our ability to care for others and, right now, we all need as much care as we can get.  So, do your part to take care of yourself, because your wellness affects us all.

Art Is About Now

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A principal reason I advocate for art and support artists in my work as a psychologist is because art is about quality of life — and that means on personal, communal, and societal levels.  Art improves quality of life now.

Think about it:  when does art happen?  It’s like the old thought experiment, “a tree falls in the forest…”  If there’s no one there to hear it, the concussion of the tree hitting the ground produces pressure waves in the air and the ground, but sound per se is an artifact of animal auditory perception (there’s no such thing as sound — pitch, timbre — outside of a brain that’s processing vibrations).  Similarly, if there’s a mural on a building, it’s just a wall reflecting different wavelengths of light compared to other walls unless there is someone to experience it, only then do color, shape, and pattern arise.  Art happens in our perception of it — in our minds — and therefore requires an experiencer.  One consequence of that is that art happens when it is experienced.  Art happens now.

This applies if you’re looking at a petroglyph that was scratched on a rock before civilization was dreamt of or at a dance concert where the band is improvising on the spot:  your experience of a thing is an indispensable component of art and your experience can only ever be now.

This is how psychotherapy works, too.  A description of what happens in session is likely to be pretty boring:  one person talks, another person talks, back and forth, maybe there’s some laughing, maybe some crying.  (By the way, this is why good psychotherapy makes lousy TV and vice versa.)  But the power of psychotherapy for both the patient and the psychologist comes in the exploration, in the moment.  We experience meaning, context, identity, relationship, in the same way we experience art:  by engaging with it in the now.

A society, a community, an individual with more art in their life is more satisfied, more flexible, more resourceful (explicating that assertion is outside the scope of this post, but I can do so another time).  The more art that is being made in a place, the more art objects that are standing about, waiting to be experienced, the better the quality of life of those in that place.  A mural of a colorful, abstracted bird goes up on the side of a building; a bust of Frank Zappa lurks among trees in a library square; a busker shouts his heart out while strumming a guitar that maybe has been loved a bit too long; a local museum opens an exhibition of selections from the Dutch masters.  All this is now; all this matters because it is now and now is when quality of life happens.

The Pain of Killer Taste

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“Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me — is that, all of us who do creative work, like, you know we get into it, and we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap that, for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, okay?  It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.  You know what I mean?  A lot of people never get past that phase, a lot of people at that point, they quit.  And the thing I would just like to say to you, with all my heart, is that most everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as what they wanted it to be; they knew it fell short.  It didn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.  And the thing to know is everybody goes through that. And if you go through it, you’re going through it right now, you’re just getting out of that phase, you gotta know, it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you could do is:  do a lot of work.  Do a huge volume of work.  Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month, you know you’re gonna finish one story.  It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually gonna catch up and close that gap, and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while, it’s normal to take a while, and you’ve just have to fight your way through that, okay?”

— Ira Glass*, writer and creator of This American Life

I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with creatives who find themselves paralyzed by this dynamic, caught between their vision and their efforts; Ira Glass, in the above quote, articulates this phenomenon brilliantly.  It’s a brutal experience to look at something you’ve just created and hear that voice say, “what a piece of crap.”  You are both the hangman and the hanged, the righteousness of your condemnation as painful as being condemned.  

Most psychotherapies include work that focuses on or at least addresses the disempowering things we say to ourselves, calling ourselves stupid, ugly, worthless, etc., — technically, negative self-talk — and it is an important task in psychotherapy to explore how to deconstruct, respond to, or let go of that internal dialog.  Most negative self-talk develops from disempowering things others have said to or about us, or negative self-talk we’ve heard significant others direct toward themselves, especially when we were very small and learning about ourselves and our world.  Those messages get inculcated into our psyche and, eventually, we lose our conscious awareness that they originally came from outside of us:  they become “just the way I am.”  

But the kind of negative self-talk that Glass is talking about is subtly and importantly different from this:  while it feels — and can be — self-directed, a critical component of it is the voice of your artistic sense, your creative intuition.  Have you ever seen or heard the early works of your artistic heroes?  How many of them actually appeal to your creative sense?  Even our best untrained works are not going to be hung in MoMA or recorded on Nonesuch; they are the product of a developing talent, not a mature one.  The discomfort, even shock, of seeing how far short one’s work falls from one’s vision can manifest as a peculiar kind of harsh self-talk that, far from being a dysfunction, is evidence of a strength, even if it’s painful.  

That said, this strength, this voice of your creative intuition can be hard to distinguish from the more dysfunctional variety of negative self-talk and can even be co-opted by it.  In my work with creative folks, we often spend time exploring this difference and developing ways of supporting your artistic sense and expanding the conduit to it, while dismantling negative self-talk.  As you learn to identify your old, negative narratives and develop skills to cope with them, you are freed up to listen to the creative guide that defines your vision as an artist.  Further, as the clarity of this vision resolves and you feel more acutely the distance between it and its manifestation, we can work together to help you push through that discomfort to produce efforts that ever more closely resemble your ideal.  

 

 

*I found several indirect citations for this quote, but the original YouTube video from which it was apparently transcribed appears no longer to be available.  My sources:

• Originally brought to my attention on http://llllllll.co/t/unsafe-music/6138 January 17, 2017.
• This transcription from a more recent video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka1lEll_v2w November 4, 2016.
• Earliest reference found in a blog post at http://www.mcwade.com/DesignTalk/2011/04/nobody-tells-this-to-beginners/ April 26, 2011.
• For a different visual interpretation, see https://vimeo.com/24715531, also 2011 but no date.

Failure Is the Best Option

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“If you look at the past, at the greatest composers of all time, what we know of Beethoven, what we know of Mozart, what we know of those people is an edited version of their catalogs. A lot of really bad music was written by a lot of great people and time has taken care of those things and they become sort of oddities that kind of fall off the general likes. So, what we get when we think of those big names are the things that did work. So, it’s kind of funny that contemporary composers [tend not] to think of failing, to think of creating something that doesn’t quite work, as something positive, because history has transformed the past view of what being a composer is into something that doesn’t exist at all, into these super machines that just create beauty that just works from the get go. And it’s so not true. I allow myself a lot of room for failure. I think that failure is a great thing. Failure sometimes teaches you much, much more than something that just works from the beginning.”

— Marcos Balter, composer, as interviewed by Nadia Sirota in Meet the Composer 10/30/2014 episode, “Failure Is an Option”

Many of us spend a lot of time and energy worrying about and trying to prevent failure. Relationships, creative projects, parenting, academics, careers — we tend to believe that failure at something means we have lost something. It’s like when something doesn’t turn out the way we intended or hoped, it means we can’t ever have that thing, that outcome is forever closed to us. Further, we tend to make it mean something bad about who we are as a human being: failure is a dark mark on us that we must avoid at all costs or hide shamefully away.

What if we have this backwards? What if failure is actually our best opportunity to get closer to our goals? You’ve probably heard plenty of self-help gurus say this, or gotten a pep talk that sounds like it, but have you ever seriously considered what it means, specifically for yourself and your life?

We can talk a lot about what failure is, chase down and deconstruct its sources in expectation, identity, and locus of control — and these can be interesting and enlightening discussions — but here I want to cut through all that. The above quote offers a glimpse into a paradigm shift, an entirely different relationship to failure, one that is mutually exclusive to the held understanding of ourselves and the world.

Think of it this way: Imagine you’re in an unfamiliar room. It’s completely dark and you don’t know where the furniture is or where you are in the room. You know there’s a light in here somewhere, but you don’t know where or what it is; it could be a lamp, it would be a wall switch, you don’t know any of that, only that it’s here somewhere. How do you get the lights on?  There is only way to go about it: carefully start to feel about the room testing things. Nope, that’s a chair… that’s a couch… (bump) ouch! okay, that’s a coffee table… that’s a sideboard… oh, wait, here’s a lamp, but there’s no switch… that must mean there’s a wall switch somewhere… etc., etc., until you finally get the light turned on.

Fumbling about might require some patience and might entail a barked shin or two, but you wouldn’t think of the fumbling as a failure, would you? Instead, it’s more like simply what’s necessary to meet the goal (to get the lights on). Yet, technically, each thing you touch is a test to see if it will produce light and, again technically, each test that doesn’t get the lights on is a failure.

But this is different, you might say. “When we start with effectively limitless options and more or less complete ignorance about the situation, obviously, we have no choice but to make arbitrary tests of whatever is at hand; it only stands to reason that most of that won’t work, simply because we don’t know what does work. I’m worried about those times when I should know, but I fail anyway.” Ah, there’s the rub: what you “should” know.

This is the difference with the sense in which Maestro Balter and others like him hold failure: there is no expectation that one “should” be able to predict or produce a given outcome. In Balter’s example, he might guess at it, he might think, “Gee, this seems like this might work,” but he’s not assuming his guess is right — he takes as a starting point that his guesses are unlikely to be right even most of the time, let alone all the time.

So, every time our guesses or attempts don’t go the way we thought or hoped they would, rather than getting in the way of our goal, those experiences help us: at minimum, they eliminate dead-ends; at best they point directly the way, like the discovery that a table lamp has no switch tells you to look for a wall switch. Sometimes through what we think of as failure, we are led to discover something new, an entirely novel path that never occurred to us as a possibility. Far from being the obstacle to our goal, failure is a guide, a bridge, a muse even, that helps us to it.

In my work with patients, I approach experiences that don’t go quite as planned as opportunities for insight; we practice learning to see how all our experiences can get us closer to our goals, not just the ones that turn out the way we imagined.

Say the Hard Thing

Note:  If you're looking for general information on my psychotherapy 
practice, click here.  If you want to learn about my specialized work with 
creative people, click here. 

“Let us speak thereof, ye wisest ones, even though it be bad. To be silent is worse; all suppressed truths become poisonous.
And let everything break up which can break up by our truths! Many a house is still to be built.”
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, A Book for All and None

“Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it’ll always get you the right ones.”
— John Lennon (attribution unconfirmed)

Let’s say I have something really important to tell a friend or my partner. The problem is, though, that it’s scary to say, scary because I’m afraid this significant other will be hurt, or worse, they might care about me less. They might even leave me.

But this thing I have to say is really important. It’s about something that’s true for me. Maybe it’s something my friend does that hurts me; maybe it’s something about me that’s true but I’m ashamed of, or that others have said is a bad thing. I really want to tell my significant other, but it’s a very scary thing to say.

Why would anyone say such a thing? Sure, it’s uncomfortable keeping it to myself, but people keep secrets all the time. What purpose could it serve to risk losing a friend by saying something he doesn’t like? The answer comes when we can look at all the costs and benefits, not just the potential loss of a relationship.

Whatever this thing is, this truth, it’s very present. It’s hard to keep to myself; whenever I’m with this person, it’s on my mind; it colors my experience of being with him; it feels wrong to keep it to myself, like I’m lying to him. No matter how I push that feeling away, it is always there, like a rumble in my belly, a mosquito whining in one ear, like an uncomfortable chair I’ve been sitting in too long. This is a cost, and not a small one; it takes effort to push the feeling away, to stay focused on my friend, to enjoy his company. And the more important the thing, the more effort it takes to keep it to myself. So, it actually takes me away from him: keeping a secret keeps me from really being with my friend.

And what kind of relationship do I want with this person, anyway? How important is he to me? Most of us want to have friends and lovers who trust us and whom we trust. We want someone to confide in, to be ourselves with — some one to know and to be known by. How do we develop relationships like this? By letting others in. We take risks to be intimate; that’s what intimacy is, to open ourselves up emotionally and let others see those parts of us that we hide from the rest of the world. It’s risky because this opening up by definition makes us vulnerable — open to ridicule, to deceit, or disapproval — but we still do it because we want the intimacy. We are inherently creatures of relationships: intimacy is what humans do. So, in order to have the intimacy that we’re built for, we say what’s true for us. When others hear our truth, they get to decide if they’re okay with it; if they’re not, they tend to take themselves away.

That, of course, is the scary part: the risk of losing someone who has been okay with us so far. But if the goal is to be fully ourselves with another — intimacy — then being fully-ourselves-except-for-these-one-or-two-things isn’t quite so satisfying. Still, that fear of loss can be overwhelming and we often find ourselves in the bind of holding back that last piece of ourselves from an otherwise deeply trusted friend.

So, what’s the solution? Say the hard thing. Say it. Say it because the risk demonstrates how much your friend means to you: “This thing I have to share with you is important enough to me to risk losing you and you’re important enough to me that I want you to know it.” Say it because you want a partner who really is okay with all of you. Say it because it gives you the chance to discover that you really can survive even if the person is not okay with all of you. Say it because when they tell you they are okay with this important thing, you know you have a deep and rich relationship.

In my personal and clinical experience, artists have a leg up on this:  they’ve spent their lives exploring what’s true for them and learning to express it.  Writing music or poetry, building or carving a sculpture, choreographing a dance — whatever — doing it your individual way rather than the way others say it should be, artists, by definition, say the hard thing.  And, in doing so, they are known and others are drawn to them.

In my clinical experience, relationships in which both partners are willing to say the hard thing — and are willing to hear them — are the strongest and most loving and satisfying. The more practice we have in speaking our truth, the more practice our friends and partners have in hearing them, the more both of us feel trusting and trusted, mutually known.

And that’s really the whole point, isn’t it?

Living Art / Arting Life

Note:  If you're looking for general information on my psychotherapy 
practice, click here.  If you want to learn about my specialized work with 
creative people, click here. 

The most visible creators I know of are those artists whose medium is life itself. The ones who express the inexpressible — without brush, hammer, clay or guitar. They neither paint nor sculpt — their medium is being. Whatever their presence touches has increased life. They see and don’t have to draw. They are the artists of being alive.

— Donna J. Stone

In my psychotherapy practice, I often draw from a body of work variously referred to as mindfulness-based, acceptance-based, or values-based therapy. These approaches emphasize developing nonjudgmental awareness of oneself and one’s environment; a part of having a more accepting awareness of oneself is discovering a clearer sense of what’s important, one’s values.

Ideally, values guide our actions and research suggests that when they do, our sense of satisfaction with ourselves and with life tends to increase. But things aren’t always that easy: as we manage our daily lives, we are faced constantly with decisions to make, from the mundane to the potentially life-changing. These choice points are often emotionally charged — whether or not it makes sense to us that they should be — and we can find ourselves caught up in knee-jerk, emotional reactions, resulting in outcomes that are decidedly not consistent with our values.

Further, sometimes our values are not that obvious. Ever had someone say, “Just be yourself” and then think “What does THAT mean?” Or, maybe you’ve had the experience of feeling that there was some “right” response to a situation you’re faced with, but you just can’t seem to think of it. We can see how being able to tap into our values would be helpful, but we’re not clear enough on what they are for them to be of use.

It’s been my experience that creative people have a ready-made, direct line to their values, but often aren’t aware of it. When you’re deciding whether something you’re creating is “right” — the right phrasing, the right look, the right sensibility — you’re tapping into the place your values live. Creatives know how to pause and feel what’s “right” — skills at the heart of mindful practices — but often feel those abilities are limited to their specialized creative niche. In fact, they are not. In my work with people, we practice following that creative conduit and learn how to open it up in other domains, like money, family, and work, to guide values-based decisions in those areas. As we bring this critical component of art to life, life starts to make more sense — and to feel more creative.

One of the things I find perhaps most exciting about this insight is how many people already have that kind of access to their values; it’s just a matter of learning to recognize it. Whether you’re making a full-time living off of your creative powers or you’re a very part-time hobbyist whose fan base is indistinguishable from family and friends, it’s likely we can mine your creative practices and identify the deep vein of your values to help enrich your life. To my way of thinking, this is part of what it means to be an “artist of being alive.”