Category Archives: Skills & Tools

Healing Depression: How It Begins

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A young man met with his therapist for the first time and told him: ”I am depressed.”

To his surprise the therapist asked him if he considered his depression an enemy or a friend. “Of course it is an enemy. I hate it. I do everything to get away from it. Nothing works. That is why I am here, to get rid of it.”

The therapist understood his response, with much compassion. Then the therapist asked in a tone of curiosity: “What would it be like to treat your depression as a friend rather than as an enemy?”

The young man was now so confused. This question did not make any sense to him.

The two men talked for a while about the young man’s awareness that fed his depression. At session end the therapist said to the young man that he now understood how his depression was caused by years of quiet anger.

Leaving the session the young man shook his head saying to himself: ”Yea, it is so quiet I do not even see it.”

Getting into his car and turning on the radio he heard his favorite Simon and Garfunkel song, Sound of Silence, and he was singing along with them the words: “Hello Darkness, my old friend, I have come to talk with you again.” At that moment a heartfelt understanding took place about what the therapist was inviting him to do, that is, to talk with his depression as a friend. It wanted to speak and be heard. However, it had been repressed and buried for many years. A tear came down his cheek as he connected with that buried pain. He had begun to talk, to listen, to heal, forgive and move forward.

May you all find within yourselves the grace to slow down, be gentle, and listen kindly to your own experience. You deserve compassion, just as all living beings do. Being alive can be a tall order. Let us all take comfort in the truth that we are walking this path together.

Especially during these challenging times, it is important for us all to be gentle with ourselves and with eachother. If you or a loved one needs support please reach out to a therapist today. Our counselors are trained to provide teletherapy so that you can receive support from the safety and comfort of your own home.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

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We live in a time of 7 Habits, 3 steps to Health and Security, 8 Dates, the newest John/Julie Gottmann work; often a way of looking at a prescription or quick template of how to move from one place to another. In the mid 90s I was lucky enough to learn of the work of Stephen Covey, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” At that time, as a trainer with folks in the criminal justice system, I used the material to assist trainees and executive staff to organize challenges into realizable steps of action to move forward. Later on down the line, many practitioners and systems of learning echoed some of this wisdom. (See Daniel Goleman’s work, where they use the system of RULER: Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, Regulating.) In fact, I would say that one of the stand-out benefits of the 7 Habits model is that it is full of wisdom that is timeless, helpful in many different settings.

A summary of the 7 Habits follows. Habit One: Be Proactive; Habit Two: Begin With the End in Mind; Habit Three: Put First Things First. (These first 3 Habits capture a system of Self-Management.) Habit Four: Think Win-Win; Habit Five: Seek First to Understand, Then Be Understood; Habit Six: Synergize; Habit Seven: Sharpen the Saw. (The last 4 habits had to do with work/challenges in working with/managing others.) At the time of learning this material, and having the opportunity to train with Stephen Covey and others from his organization, I knew I was learning some things that were familiar, some that were timeless, and many things that would continue to serve my ongoing personal and professional development.

Within this work, there are several practical and usable tools, ways of thinking/acting. One such tool is the ‘Emotional Bank Account,’ or EBA. In 7 habit language it is a way of examining ways of being/practicing in our daily lives using the model of a bank account, including deposits and withdrawals. Deposits might include ‘seeking first to understand,’ in contrast to a withdrawal practice where one might unconsciously seek to be the first one to be understood in a disagreement. Deposits: keeping promises, kindnesses being courteous, clarifying expectations, being loyal to an absent party, offering apologies, or being open to feedback. Conversely, withdrawals would be along the lines of breaking promises, un-kindnesses, violating expectations, being disloyal, duplicitous, leading with pride, conceit, arrogance, or rejecting feedback.

I have used this tool personally as I examine my own self-management, deepening awareness of the movement of reactivity to choice (a daily and even moment to moment challenge!) I reset with actions to add to my own system of deposits, carefully managing reactivity that really springs from withdrawals. When I take my eye off the choices that are available, this is often a result of missing some strategies of self-care.

In work with couples, this has been an invaluable tool. When engaging in conversation, each member of the couple can state individual understandings of deposits and withdrawals. Facilitated conversation (seeking first to understand, then be understood) often follows. Sometimes an agreement is made to focus on one area, one concrete place of action that each can give attention to in order to enable the shift from what they don’t want to what they do want–or withdrawals to deposits.

While all this may sound easy or simple, the execution, consistent attention to, or commitment to a new way of being is the daily, lived challenge. This is often the work of therapy: to look at where actions or practices are missing the mark, and having conversations to repair or build something new. I often cite Recovery wisdom of, ‘how does one eat an elephant?’ ‘One piece/chunk at a time.’ Individual shifts, modifications–sprinkled with tons of patience and good humor–begin the sacred and meaningful work, step by step, piece by piece, of ‘creating that which is new.’

Making a Living

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In the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney plays a man whose job consists of firing people. Corporations contract with him to deliver the bad news to their casualties. And he has mastered his art, describing his work to an upstart apprentice in spiritual terms: something akin to ferrying the souls of the newly unemployed to a place where they can begin to face the reality of their situation.

In one termination interview, he brings a desperate man to the discovery that the loss of his job means that he can pursue the culinary career he had long ago sacrificed in the name of safety and dependability. “Your children don’t respect you for paying the bills. What they respect is people who follow their dreams.” This man’s change of heart happens in about three minutes onscreen. Not so realistic, maybe. And yet the essential experience, given enough time, is believable enough.

Losing a job can be devastating, especially in a down economy. A few are laid off one day and find new jobs the next, but others–perhaps you–become unemployed for months and months. You might feel crushed, disconnected. More than your income has collapsed; so too, in some cases, has your identity. The employment crisis of “What am I to do?” becomes a spiritual crisis of “Who am I?” Loss of your job can expose an even greater void.

The loss of your job has meaning for you. That meaning can be influenced by your stage of life, whether it falls in your early, confidence-building years; or it occurs in your productive and often driven middle phase, or it coincides with your mid-life self-assessment; or it lands late in your career, when you are questioning your ability or desire to keep pace with changing circumstances. And in the end, the meaning you discover is, of course, highly individual.

Understanding the meaning of this transition is part necessity and part opportunity. In ordinary circumstances, people tend to count on the requirements of the day to guide them–through the day, the week, from week to week, and so on. But this is different. Without a job, a person might need a compass, a way of understanding what is ultimately important, because the field is so desolate, the usual landmarks gone.

Many a man who has been living to work vows that, next time, he will work to live. Many a woman who has allowed the job to define success realigns her work with her own most deeply held values. “What am I to do?” is both an employment question and a spiritual one. And the compass you consult to guide your response is critical.

Under the pressure of finding work, you might consider it a luxury to spend time clarifying the compass by which you establish your direction in life. Fair enough. It is not a requirement for everyone faced with unemployment. But should you find the loss debilitating or should the workless phase prove protracted through no choice of your own, a deep consideration of your compass, your guiding values and objectives, can be the most healing and productive step you can take.

10 Tips for Parenting Your Adult Children

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When I lived and worked in one of Arizona’s retirement cities and was doing group therapy with older adults, one question that came up in group discussions again and again was: “How can I have a better relationship with my grown children and grandchildren?”

Some people just wanted to know how to get their grandchildren to say “thank you” for birthday gifts. Others were struggling with how to say “no” to their adult children who “were still on the payroll,” expecting money that their parents were not in a position to give. Others were in conflict with adult children who objected to their entering into a second marriage. Others were estranged from their adult children. All of them were trapped in old, painful family patterns.

Now, back in Seattle where I work with adults of all ages, the question remains a compelling one. Some of what I learned in my Arizona experience and in my own family relationships is shared in these “10 Tips for Parenting Your Grown Children.”

  1. Continue to have a life. Keeping your own interests and activities alive is healthy for you and makes you more interesting to others.
  2. Be true to yourself. Pay attention to your feelings, your intuition and your beliefs, using this information to help you make good decisions.
  3. Choose when to talk and when to listen. Improve your sense of timing. Recognize that you can do only your half of the relationship.
  4. Recall your own relationship with your parents and in-laws. Let yourself be guided by what you learned about what worked and what didn’t.
  5. Expect everyone to treat you with respect. All the time. Be respectful of everyone else. All the time.
  6. Understand that you need not address everything. Some things that need to be said may not need to be said by you.
  7. Be willing to do nothing when that appears to be the best option. Often when nothing seems to be happening, something quite important is.
  8. Accept that you are, forever, the parent. At some level, your children are reassured by your willingness to hold on to that role. Gently.
  9. Take responsibility for managing your own feelings. When you’re angry, fearful or despairing, find ways to work through it.
  10. Keep putting kindness and understanding into your relationships. Accept realities, set reasonable limits and choose how you want to behave.

Can We Help Each Other Change?

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Couples who are coming into counseling to deal with anger in their relationship often wonder:  Is this really going to help?   Will the therapist be able to help my partner see things differently?  Will this be worth the time and effort?

To me, it seems to be a question of hope.  Is there hope?  Yes, there is.  Hope does not disappoint (Romans 5:5) but the answers to our questions might be disappointing. We can’t change our loved ones and they can’t change us. The hope lies in learning that we can help each other change by changing ourselves.

For example, asking ourselves questions like this: What was I doing right before the temper flare?  Was I pushing buttons?  Was I criticizing or yelling?  Was I stonewalling?   Realizing that tempers are not lost in a “vacuum,” we look for the extenuating circumstances.

When we start to look at the big picture and at our part in the big picture, we begin to understand what we can do to help our loved one solve what we’ve been thinking of as “their” problem.  It begins to become an “our” problem.

Taking this position of helping each other change is one sure way to make therapy worth the time and effort. If we can recognize the triggers that lead to our partner’s losing their temper, we can learn ways of coping that will be more effective.  An equally important piece of the puzzle is learning their buttons, choosing not to push them, and letting the other person walk away when they need to.  When we learn more effective ways of communicating, we’ll be more successful  when we sit down and try to solve a problem.

If we think that we’re just an innocent bystander and the conflict is all about our partner, we might want to spend some time asking God to show us our blind spots. Or we could even ask our partner what they think we contribute to their temper flare ups. When we are able to control our anxiety and consider another person’s point of view, we can learn something  important about our relationship journey.  Controlling our anxiety and agreeing to hear constructive criticism isn’t easy but it can be done, especially when our partner is willing to offer their thoughts in a kind and gentle way.

John Gottman, in his work at the University of Washington, says that if you can allow your partner to influence you and if your partner can gently share their opinions, you’re well on your way to a healthy relationship. And a healthy relationship can tackle many mountains, including the anger mountain–when you’re doing it together.

“Survival Kit for Stepparents”

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  1. Give up the belief that there’s only one RIGHT way to do things. Be willing to consider new possibilities and other ways of looking at the world.
  2. Try to stay in the present moment, rather than letting yourself slip back into the past or drift into the future. Focus on things you have some control over.
  3. Accept an appropriate amount of responsibility for maintaining a comfortable and safe emotional “climate” in your home, but don’t get stuck in managing every detail. 
  4. Recognize that everyone gets to feel the way they feel, but make and enforce rules that ensure that people act in ways that are fair and respectful.
  5. Develop stepparent/stepchild roles gradually and thoughtfully, with the original parent primarily in charge of his/her children, while people are getting used to the changes.
  6.  Accept that parents and their original children will always have a special bond, and that this isn’t necessarily a threat to the newly developing family.
  7.  Resist overburdening particular days or events (birthdays, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, graduations, etc.). Instead, focus on creating good long-term feelings and memories.
  8.  Arrange to have some time alone as a couple EVERY DAY– time to share information, plan and, most important, pay attention to your relationship.
  9.  Insist on some individual time EACH DAY for taking care of yourself.  Adults who are responsible for meeting the needs of their children and others on a daily basis can’t run on empty.
  10.  When things look as if they’re getting out of hand, take a deep breath and try to remember which people in the family are the grown-ups and which ones are the kids. Then try hard to behave like a grown-up – and expect the other grown-ups to do so as well.

“Hold Me Tight Can Be Good For Couples”

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  1. Get two copies of the book so that each of you has your own personal copy and, if you want to make notes of your responses and ideas in it, you can.
  2. Approach your reading together with “a teachable spirit.”  As you consider your relationship, agree that you’ll refrain from staying too much in your head or repeating old, unhelpful patterns of thought. Be willing to go to your heart.
  3. Take your time.  Read the book aloud to each other, one brief section (about 3-5 pages) of a chapter each day. As one of you reads aloud, the other can follow along in his or her own copy of the book so that the ideas are coming in both through your ears and your eyes. Given the busy lives most couples have, it’s realistic to allow three or four months in which to read the book in this manner.  Agree that you will stay together, reading at the same pace.
  4. When you’ve read the day’s section, talk to each other about what things caught your attention and why these are meaningful to you.  Consider the questions the author raised.
  5. Let yourselves fully enter into the stories of the couples in the book. Try reading them as if you were in a play, speaking the lines to each other. It can be surprising and empowering to hear yourself and your partner saying words that, in your own relationship, tend to lead to a meltdown. You’ll find that using a ‘script’ can increase your ‘awareness capacity’ — the ability to observe your own negative patterns of communication in real time. When you can see the patterns, you can change them – transforming problematic interaction into communication that is grounded in mutual respect and creates greater closeness. You can move from “stand-off” to “stand together.”

(For a similar and specifically Christian book, see Safe Haven Marriage by Sharon Hart-Morris and Archibald Hart.)  More information about Susan Johnson’s book is available at:
http://holdmetight.net/video.php; http://holdmetight.net/audio_interviews.php.

Johnson, S. (2008) Hold Me Tight. Lebanon, IN: Hachette Book Group/Little, Brown and Company.

Parenting Teens and Social Media

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It is important for parents to establish an open dialogue about the appropriate and safe use of social media, texting and cell phones. Parents need to be aware of the negatives of social media, including cyberbullying and sexting, which pose a significant threat to teens online.  As a parent, you can help your teens be smart about what they put online.  Be aware also of the positive side of social media.  Many teens say that it helps them feel more confident and is important in their relationships with friends.  Additionally, some teens use social media for social good (Wallace, 2013).

  • Parents have a responsibility to set guidelines for when, where, and how much technology is appropriate for their teens. These can include:
  • Writing a contract defining how your teen can use social media.  Outlining consequences.
  • Using parental controls and filters on computers to screen inappropriate content.
  • ·Cautioning teens to not accept friend requests from people they don’t know.
  • Knowing your teens’ passwords.
  • Limiting computer use to common spaces in the home.
  • Keeping the conversation open with your teens.

Social media and technology change rapidly so parents need to be smart. Talk to your teen about their computer and social media habits.  Expect and encourage your teen to talk to you when they have a concern.  Remind your teen that you love them and you want to understand them.  To learn more, go to: safetynet.app.org, stopcyberbullying.org, enough.org, safekids.org, and commonsensemedia.org (Carroll, & Kirkpatrick, 2011).

Sources:
Carroll, J.A. & Kirkpatrick, R.L. (2011). Impact of social media on adolescent behavioral health.  Oakland, CA: California Adolescent Health Collaborative.  Retrieved July 31, 2014, from:  http://www.phi.org/uploads/application/files/g9g6xbfghdxoe3yytmc1rfvvm8lt1ly9sr3j369pstkojdly15.pdf.

Davidson, L. (2013).  Moms, you oughta know:  11 social media apps teens are using now.  Retrieved July 31, 2014 from:  http://www.today.com/parents/moms-you-oughta-know-11-social-media-apps-teens-are-6C10833314

Felsenthal Stewart, R. (2014).  Social Media: What parents must know.  Retrieved July 31, 2014 from: http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/social-media-and-tweens-teens.

Pew Research Internet Project.  (2012).  Teens Fact Sheet.  Retrieved July 31, 2014 from:  http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/teens-fact-sheet/

Wallace, K. (2013).  The upside of selfies: Social media isn’t all bad for kids.  Retrieved July 31, 2014 from:  http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/21/living/social-media-positives-teens-parents/

Geltman, J.  (2014).  A Survival Guide to Parenting Teens.  New York, NY: AMACOM.

Levkoff, L., & Wider, J.  (2014).  got teens?  The Doctor Moms’ Guide to Sexuality, Social Media, and Other Adolescent Realities.  Berkeley CA: Seal Press.

Forgiving: A Path for Healing

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Forgiveness is not a popular concept in this culture where perfection is over-valued. Our self-esteem is too often measured by how perfect and admired we feel we are. When we find ourselves on either side of the equation — having hurt someone or having been hurt, we face the human reality of our not being perfect. It is hard to accept that there is no possibility of going through life without making mistakes. Yet, it is through acknowledging our mistakes and our vulnerability that we grow deeper in our relationships.

When we ask someone for forgiveness, we become vulnerable. When we acknowledge that we’ve hurt somebody, even without intending to, we are accepting that we are not perfect. It is a risk to do so, because we know we could feel humiliated, rejected or we could lose that person’s love and respect.

The fear of not being loved can prevent us from acknowledging the pain we have caused someone else, but not taking responsibility for that person’s pain does not means it doesn’t exist. When we don’t take that responsibility, we risk damaging or losing the relationship altogether. For example, your spouse’s pain will continue to be there whether you acknowledge your part in it or not. He or she can doubt your love and wonder if their feelings matter to you. While your spouse might try to forgive your hurtful behavior in order to keep peace, resentments could build. I invite you to reflect on these questions:
Remember a time when you hurt somebody. What did you tell yourself about that? What did you do?
Remember a time when you were hurt by somebody close to you. What were your feelings and what did you do?

Humans are emotional beings. When we avoid or hide our emotions, it drains and restricts our capacity to feel a variety of emotions. For example, if I’m filled with anger, it becomes difficult to experience happiness. When we hold on to resentment, we decrease our emotional flexibility. But we can choose to free ourselves by asking for forgiveness or by forgiving those who have hurt us. Forgiveness doesn’t happen quickly. It is a healing process. These are the steps in that process:

  • Recognize you are hurt and recall the details of the event.
  • Explore the feelings under the anger (fear, hurt of being abandoned, unloved, etc.).
  • Ask yourself what the hurt meant to you (i.e. what did I tell myself?).
  • Ask yourself, “What do I need now?” Is what you need attainable?
  • Choose to let go of your anger and move toward forgiveness.
  • Ask God to help you through this process. He wants us to be free.
  • Let Him intercede and invite him to heal you.

In the Shadow of Gun Violence

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I was drawing the Giza Plateau, shading the pyramids to convey centuries of desert erosion while trying to keep my extra ebony pencils from rolling off the uneven art table I was sitting at with three other students. It was only second period, intro to line drawing. The class was quiet, students poring over their sketch pads, the soft steps of our instructor traced between the tables as he glanced over our projects. I looked up when I heard the classroom’s television turn on and saw one of the administrators of my small, private high school flipping through channels. She stopped on the local news and took a step back, keeping her back to the class and her eyes locked on the screen. Everyone was watching now; a parking lot full of ambulances, cop cars, crying teenagers. It was breaking news from Littleton, about thirty miles away from my school in Boulder, and the anchor was saying “possibly twenty dead,” “national tragedy,” and “school shooting.” That was April 20th, 1999 and the first time I had ever heard of Columbine High School.

An emergency assembly was called and it was debated whether or not my school’s one hundred students should be sent home or kept on the grounds for our safety. Parents were called, students lined up at the campus’s single pay phone trying to contact family and friends possibly affected by what was happening. Grief counselors were called in the following day and talked to us about what had happened and comforted us as best they could. Our lives had been disrupted, disturbed. I was fortunate in that no one I knew was hurt in that attack, but the doors suddenly felt thin, the walls flimsy, the glass brittle. I felt vulnerable in places that had previously felt safe.

America has a sad history of school related gun violence that goes back to the 1850’s, but Columbine was the worst up to that point and changed everything. It has left an indelible mark upon our country and is still synonymous with feelings of tragedy and anger even fifteen years later. Eventually, my fear subsided and going to class felt like the routine it once had. Eight years after Columbine I was sitting in a lecture hall at a community college in Seattle when the campus alert system engaged and alerted us to a shooting occurring at Virginia Tech, with twice the number of fatalities of Columbine. Then again three years later, as a student at UW, it was a shooting at nearby SPU. I went home those nights with that same sense of vulnerability I had experienced as a teenager, but my relationship to it had changed. I allowed myself to feel it, but I did not allow it to control me.

Gun violence has cast a shadow over nearly my entire educational career and has become a tragic reality for the 48 million children enrolled in our school system. Even our universities are now affected, but frankly, I’m more worried about my low-sleep/high-sugar lifestyle than I am about encountering gun violence. If there is a single message I would convey to a student, regardless of age or institution, it would be, “be aware, be careful, but do not let fear govern your life.” So much of our anxieties revolve around circumstances outside of our control and are not helped one bit by heaping our worries upon them. Life is precious and is better spent studying the things that interest you, pursuing your dreams, and achieving your goals – things that fear will not allow.