Teens and Texting: A Recipe For Disaster

Michelle Carter is a teenager who was part of a deadly texting relationship, one that ended in the suicide of her then boyfriend, Conrad Roy.  Michelle Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, wanton and reckless conduct, for encouraging Conrad to kill himself, bullying him via text to follow through with his suicidal thoughts, and not doing anything to stop him when she knew he was dying.  Last week she received a sentence of 15 months.  She was 17 at the time of the crime,

Source: Unsplash

he was 18. This tragic case has gotten me thinking a lot about teens and texting and what’s really happening to our children when they conduct online relationships. 

Michelle and Conrad called each other boyfriend and girlfriend despite the fact that they had only met in person a few times over their more than two-year relationship. They communicated almost exclusively through text messages, over a thousand of them in just the last week of the boy’s life.  Conrad was depressed and had tried to kill himself once before he met Michelle Carter.  Michelle, while socially popular, had also struggled with depression and had a history of cutting and anorexia. 

In the beginning of their relationship, and at other times throughout it, Michelle encouraged Conrad to get help for his depression and was supportive of his hopes and dreams for moving forward in his life.  But as time went by, Michelle became more callous, and chillingly aggressive in convincing him to commit suicide.  She even went so far as to tell him that she would look like a fool, after all this effort, if he didn’t kill himself.  She said, “You always say you’re going to do it but you never do” And when Conrad was scared and got out of truck once it had started filling with carbon monoxide, saying that he didn’t want to die, Michelle told him to get back in and do it.  When he worried that his suicide would cause suffering to his family, Michelle Carter told him that his family would get over him after a couple weeks, and that she would take care of them. 

So how does something this terrible happen, and why?   How does a good kid like Michelle Carter become someone capable of such emotional violence?  And does technology have anything to do with why this tragedy happened?  Is there something about the texting relationship that causes this kind of behavior and dysfunction?  It is critical that we consider such questions now as our teenagers’ relationships have become, for the most part, text-based; kids are communicating less and less in person and more through their devices, experiencing one another via abbreviated, isolated and often terse words on a small screen, without any of the necessary components and triggers for empathy and emotional connection. 

When Michelle Carter met Conrad Roy she seemed to care about him and expressed kindness and concern. But over time and text, she grew colder, less empathic, and more involved in what his suicide would mean for her, how it would get her what she wanted, namely, attention.  Towards the end, as she convinced her boyfriend over text to take his own life, Michelle requested that Conrad tag her in a last post before he died, to memorialize her as his greatest love.  So too, immediately after his death, she began posting on Facebook about her profound loss and suffering.  What we notice is that Conrad, for Michelle, had ceased to be a person in his own right, and rather, had become just an object for her, something that could provide or deprive her of her needs.  Over time, she seemed to stop caring about him or seeing him as a person truly suffering.  She stopped caring about what was in his or his family’s best interest.  Interacting solely with her screen, as opposed to a real-life human being, Michelle Carter seemed only able to feel what would benefit her. 

The texting relationship is missing three profoundly important relational elements, and the essential ingredients of connection and empathy.  Specifically, the sight of someone’s face, the sound of someone’s voice and the language of someone’s body.  Without these three elements, it’s extremely difficult to develop or maintain a sense of empathy for another person.  Texting relationships, if they are not supplemented with real time together, face to face, eventually, can and do lose a sense of empathy and even reality.  The texting teenager shifts from being in relationship with another person to being in a relationship with just themselves.  Without visual and auditory cues, the relationship is with their own words and the screen on which they appear. Teenagers are narcissistic by nature, it's normal;  they need more cues - not less - to resist turning every experience into something about themselves. Teenagers need to see, hear, and experience another person in order to remember that the words coming across their screen indeed belong to someone else real, separate from themselves, with real feelings.  

Furthermore, the texting relationship adds rocket fuel to a teenage mind.  Texting makes it possible to record and manifest every thought that appears, and so, whatever is present in the adolescent mind will be ignited and strengthened.  Because of the possibility that texting creates, teens pay extra attention to their thoughts and are encouraged to listen to and formulate their every idea.  In the past, perhaps ninety eight percent of a teenager’s thoughts might have simply passed through her mind without much attention, without even being remembered, but now such thoughts are celebrated and exacerbated in the process of turning them into texts, formulating the unformulated, and thus feeding the wild teenage mind. 

In addition, texting gives the teenager an un-interrupted audience for her every thought; it offers immediate feedback and attention. Teens today crave attention at a level that’s unprecedented.  It is paradoxical really; on the one hand, teens behave as if their every thought is fascinating and worth recording, and yet, they don’t seem to be able to maintain a sense of self-worth unless continually validated, attended to, and reflected through likes, followers, and constant online attention.  Texting makes it possible for teens to receive that attention 24/7, which is in part why it’s so addictive for the adolescent mind.    

So what is a parent to do?  How can we keep our teens from becoming the next Michelle Carter or Conrad Roy?  Many people judge parents who are unaware of what’s happening in their teen’s online life. But in truth, even the best parents can be duped when it comes to their teen’s texting relationships.  Undoubtedly, teenagers need to individuate, to keep secrets and have private spaces that their parents can’t access.  But before technology was central to a teenager’s life, parents could, to a certain extent, control their child’s access to secrets spaces.  For one thing, the private encounters had to happen outside the house, outside a parent’s earshot and view, and also in between activities like school, sports and the like.  Now, because teens are communicating with peers around the clock, outside the earshot and sight of their parents, the secrets and private encounters exist everywhere and all the time.  As a result, our teenagers’ private lives are impossible to control and difficult to know about, even by the most well-intentioned and loving parent. 

In this new world of nonstop texting teens, parents need to be extra vigilant, to pay serious and focused attention to what their kids are saying, doing, and feeling, and the silences between the words.  If your teen is becoming more withdrawn, angry, sullen, distracted, or is spending more time on her phone, more time out of sight, it’s critically important to inquire into what’s happening in her online life. And don’t just talk to your teen, talk to the parents of her friends as well, about what they are seeing and hearing.  It takes a village to raise a child, and now that their social life goes on outside our reach, we need that village more than ever.  As a parent these days we need to be relentless in discovering our children's virtual universe, and specifically, the relationships they are playing out on their screens.  We must keep open, or if need be, force open the lines of communication with our teens.  Simply trusting and turning the other way, in this new virtually relational world, is no longer an option.    

WCBS Health and Welness with Pat Farnack and Nancy Colier

Nancy Colier is a Manhattan psychotherapist, life coach, and author of "The Power of Off." She talks about how use of our devices has really affected our entire world, and not always for the better.

Why We Hold Grudges and How to Let Them Go

• Karen, 65, is very angry at her ex-boyfriend. It seems he asked her best friend out on a date, a few days after breaking up with Karen. He was her boyfriend in high school. 
• Paul, 45, can’t forgive his sister, because, as he sees it, she treated him like he didn’t matter when they were children.
• Shelly talks of her resentment toward her mother, whom she is convinced loved her brother more than her. While her relationship with her mother eventually changed, and offered Shelly a feeling of being loved enough, the bitterness about not being her mother’s favorite remains stuck.

These people are not isolated examples or peculiar in any way. Many people hold grudges, deep ones, that can last a lifetime. Many are unable to let go of the anger they feel towards those who “wronged” them in the past, even though they may have a strong desire and put in a concerted effort to do so.

Often we hold onto our grudges unwillingly, while wishing we could drop them and live freshly in the present, without the injustices of the past occupying so much psychic space. 

Why do we hold grudges when they are in fact quite painful to maintain, and often seem to work against what we really want? Why do we keep wounds open and active, living in past experiences of pain which prevent new experiences from being able to happen? What keeps us stuck when we want to move on and let go? Most important, how can we let go? 

To begin with, grudges come with an identity. With our grudge intact, we know who we are—a person who was “wronged.”  As much as we don’t like it, there also exists a kind of rightness and strength in this identity. We have something that defines us—our anger and victimhood—which gives us a sense of solidness and purpose. We have definition and a grievance that carries weight. To let go of our grudge, we have to be willing to let go of our identity as the “wronged” one, and whatever strength, solidity, or possible sympathy and understanding we receive through that “wronged” identity. We have to be willing to drop the “I” who was mistreated and step into a new version of ourselves, one we don’t know yet, that allows the present moment to determine who we are, not past injustice.

But what are we really trying to get at, get to, or just get by holding onto a grudge and strengthening our identity as the one who was “wronged”? In truth, our grudge, and the identity that accompanies it, is an attempt to get the comfort and compassion we didn’t get in the past, the empathy for what happened to us at the hands of this “other,” the experience that our suffering matters  As a somebody who was victimized, we are announcing that we are deserving of extra kindness and special treatment. Our indignation and anger is a cry to be cared about and treated differently—because of what we have endured.

The problem with grudges, besides the fact that they are a drag to carry around (like a bag of sedimentized toxic waste that keeps us stuck in anger) is that they don’t serve the purpose that they are there to serve. They don’t make us feel better or heal our hurt. At the end of the day, we end up as proud owners of our grudges but still without the experience of comfort that we ultimately crave, that we have craved since the original wounding. We turn our grudge into an object and hold it out at arm’s length—proof of what we have suffered, a badge of honor, a way to remind others and ourselves of our pain and deserving-ness. But in fact our grudge is disconnected from our own heart; while born out of our pain, it becomes a construction of the mind, a story of what happened to us. Our grudge morphs into a boulder that blocks the light of kindness from reaching our heart, and thus is an obstacle to true healing. Sadly, in its effort to garner us empathy, our grudge ends up depriving us of the very empathy that we need to release it.

The path to freedom from a grudge is not so much through forgiveness of the "other" (although this can be helpful), but rather through loving our own self. To bring our own loving presence to the suffering that crystallized into the grudge, the pain that was caused by this “other,” is what ultimately heals the suffering and allows the grudge to melt. If it feels like too much to go directly into the pain of a grudge, we can move toward it with the help of someone we trust, or bring a loving presence to our wound, but from a safe place inside. The idea is not to re-traumatize ourselves by diving into the original pain but rather to attend to it with the compassion that we didn’t receive, that our grudge is screaming for, and bring it directly into the center of the storm. Our heart contains both our pain and the elixir for our pain. 

To let go of a grudge we need to move the focus off of the one who “wronged” us, off of the story of our suffering, and into the felt experience of what we actually lived. When we move our attention inside, into our heart, our pain shifts from being a “something” that happened to us, another part of our narrative, to a sensation that we know intimately, a felt sense that we are one with from the inside.

In re-focusing our attention, we find the soothing kindness and compassion that the grudge itself desires. In addition, we take responsibility for caring about our own suffering, and for knowing that our suffering matters, which can never be achieved through our grudge, no matter how fiercely we believe in it. We can then let go of the identity of the one who was “wronged,” because it no longer serves us and because our own presence is now righting that wrong. Without the need for our grudge, it often simply drops away without our knowing how. What becomes clear is that we are where we need to be, in our own heart’s company.   

If you're interested in this topic and want to read related Psychology Today blogs:

• "How to Live in the Real World (Minus One Troubling Word)"
• "Are You Feeding On Your Pain... Past Its Expiration Date?"
• "How to Heal Defensiveness In Close Relationships"
• "Stop 'Shoulding' Yourself to Death"
• "Letting Go of Toxic People"
• "When Old Friends Stop Being Good Friends"
• ""And" Not "But": The Secret to Healthy Relationships" 

Copyright 2015 Nancy Colier

What We Want Most From Relationships (But Rarely Get)

Most couples come to see me to learn better communication skills—or at least that’s what they say in the first session. What gets described as communication problems, however, are in fact usually listening problems.

The truth is, we’re not very good listeners; we don’t know (and are not taught) how to listen to each other, at least not in a manner that truly nourishes us on a deep and spiritual level, and makes us feel heard, understood, or loved. We know how to listen from the head, but not from the heart. 

And yet being deeply listened to is the experience that human beings most crave and need. 

If there is one ingredient that determines whether or not a relationship will be successful, that ingredient is listening—the degree to which each partner feels listened to and truly known. Couples that can listen to each other in a satisfying way usually succeed, while those that can’t usually fail. Ultimately, we can only feel loved to the degree that we feel listened to.

I recently had a session with "Jon" and "Joan" (not their real names). Joan began by saying that she felt her experience could never be “just heard” by Jon—listened to and absorbed, without any interpretation, solution, judgment, defense or attack. She described how Jon was unable to hold a space for or really be with what she was living—without doing something with it or to it. Jon responded that holding a space for her feelings was not something that should be expected of him. Her request was unreasonable in his eyes, because a husband should not have to sit by silently and listen to what his wife is not receiving in the relationship—not without speaking up for himself, expressing his opinion, and providing some explanation. He then told his wife that what she really wanted (whether she knew it or not) was to control the relationship, the interaction—and him, as she "always did." Joan, without responding to his interpretation, repeated the same yearning—to be listened to with simple openness and non-judgment. Jon responded to this second attempt by telling Joan that her experience was false, that he did in fact listen to and hear her, even if she couldn’t feel it, and that she should examine why she couldn’t feel his kindness and interest. Joan then repeated her longing one more time, almost verbatim. This time Jon’s response was to express how totally alone he feels in the relationship, and how Joan has no interest in hearing what is truly important to him. 

From there, we began the work, in learning how to listen.

What happened between Joan and Jon is not gender specific nor is it specific to romantic relationships. What this couple demonstrated is a human problem: We constantly reject each other’s experience. It’s what we are taught to do. Listening to Joan that day, I felt as if I were watching an airplane desperately trying to find a place to land. Rejected by all control towers, her experience was to be left floating, unheard, unloved, with nowhere to touch down, nowhere to be welcomed home, no place to just be.

We all live this suffering daily, left with our own orphaned experience to nurture and land for ourselves. Yesterday I finished a particularly challenging and heartbreaking session in my office. Coming home, carrying a deep well of unprocessed feelings about what I had just lived, I entered my home to find my babysitter in a tiff. Before I had put my keys down, she was unloading her anger on me because my daughter would not eat her pasta. And just like that, my experience, what I was holding so profoundly in that moment, had to be put away to attend to the situation at hand. Life is always doing this to us, asking us to move from one experience to another without the processing, the landing, or the care and attention that we really crave—and need.

While we are conditioned to present our experience to others with a “What should I do about this?” as a way to include the other person (and hence earn their ear), most of the time we don’t really want to know what they think we should do about an issue, how to fix it, what’s wrong with us, why we shouldn’t feel what we feel, or anything else. We have probably already been inundated with countless well-intentioned and wise suggestions, from others and ourselves, on what we should do about our experience, and why we are having it. We already know all this. The problem, really, is that what we are asking for is not what we actually want, but rather what we have been conditioned to believe we are allowed to ask for. We don’t really long for anything to be done with or about our experience. Really, we just want our experience to be heard, listened to, understood, and cared about. We want someone to know how it is for us in this moment, in this life, and to keep us company in our experience—exactly as it is. What we want is for our experience to get to just be, without having to change into something else. 

The hardest thing in the world (or one of them anyway) is to listen to someone we care about (and even someone we don’t) talk about an experience that sounds painful—and not step in to help, offer suggestions, or try to fix it. The second-hardest (not necessarily in this order) is to listen to someone describe a problem that they (or we) believe we are responsible for—and not defend ourselves. And rounding out this trio is to listen to someone describe a problem for which we believe they are to blame and have created, and not try to convince them of their responsibility. 

Counterintuitive though it may feel, simply (but not easily) offering our compassionate presence to another human being—being willing to truly understand what the other is living, and selfless enough to get out of the way of their unfolding process—we are actually offering the greatest gift we can—and the experience that we all really crave. While we may believe that we are not giving enough, we are actually giving the very thing the other person wants, but is not allowed to say they want. By seemingly doing nothing (but truly listening), we are allowing the other to discover what they need to discover, creating and holding the space in which their problem can uncover its own solution (which is rarely anything we could have come up with). Experience teaches us to trust the profoundly transformative and healing power of being with—holding a space for another person’s experience. By being willing and courageous enough to do nothing with and to another’s experience, we are actually doing the most profound thing of all.

Are You an Enabler?

I am an aware person--and--I was an enabler.

My path to becoming an enabler started out as most do, as someone trying to help, and thinking that I could. A dear friend who is also a relative came to me in trouble, having lost her job, about to lose her health insurance and unable to pay rent. An intelligent, honest and kind woman, she was not afraid of hard work and had always demonstrated a strong moral character. She desperately wanted to work and was trying diligently to find employment. When she first asked me for financial help, a short- term loan, it was a no-brainer. She’d never had trouble paying her bills, and there was no reason to think that she wouldn’t get herself out of this recent financial pickle. And so, without much thought, I wrote her a check…

Eight years later, she was still in that pickle only that pickle had morphed itself into a malignant sub-machine gun. For eight years she came to me for money on an increasingly frequent basis, with increasingly dire potential consequences, and with an increasing sense of entitlement. For the most part she paid me back although sometimes not for a long time, and sometimes after I had already loaned her more on top of what she already owed me.

Complicating the matter, she wasn’t just a relative and friend, she was also deeply involved in my children’s lives; she loved my children…and was also someone I loved, and still love. I didn’t want her to suffer as she was suffering or be tormented by the relentless fear and desperation she felt.

Also, I was in a position where I had a good job and some money in the bank; she had neither. I could help, which in my mind meant that I should help. She was in pain and also family after all.

Year after year she continued to ask me for money. But no matter how much I “helped,” her financial situation got worse. She was also growing more despondent and angry, more aggressive in her behavior towards me. She spent money that she didn’t have, assuming that I would cover her. Despite many frank and difficult conversations, nothing changed. Finally, despite great ambivalence, I told her that I could not continue to play this role in her life. I didn’t want us to resent each other. Difficult as it was, I laid down an official “no more” declaration.

Although I sounded clear outwardly, inside I was anything but. I felt terrible about the decision to stop “helping,” selfish, un-loving, and incapable of deep compassion. In light of my longtime Buddhist practice, I felt like a spiritual fraud.

She was on her knees, begging literally, and also threatening terrible things, if I didn’t rescue her. She looked like an animal with its leg in a trap, helpless and terrified, and enraged—at me. Looking at her face, white with terror, furious with desperation and humiliation, still I held my ground. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but some part of me knew I had to do it.

The result was that she acted out her threats and I believe, punished me for attempting to stop the cycle.  She stopped taking care of her life, on every front, and ended up homeless (except if I would have her) and ill, without health care, and without any community. I spoke with relatives and former friends, but no one was willing/able to help her.

As I experienced it, she was now my third child, my charge. In truth, I still loved her, and wanted her to find her way back to independence, to enjoy her life. Nonetheless, I also knew that I had been bullied into saving her, despite my decision to stop, but it would not happen again.

Two years later, back on her feet at least minimally, having never paid me back the large amount of money she now owed me, she asked again. “Just to cover her for a short time” was how she put it, as if it were a small and casual affair, with no history. The tone of the request was perhaps even more shocking than the request itself. But this time when I said “no” I was certain I would not waver. What followed however, I could never have imagined.

This friend and relative, whom I thought I had been (lovingly) taking care of for years, ferociously attacked me verbally and emotionally. She abused me with her words and anger, accused me of wanting to destroy her, of being a terrible and sadistic person, the antithesis of family. And, she blamed me, fiercely, for the impending consequences she would suffer as a result of my not fixing her life. As she saw it, I was not only to blame for what would happen to her but actually intended for her destruction. I had abandoned her, and my abandonment was the cause of the horrible pain she was enduring. Finally, she assured me that I would go down with her when she fell, that she would make sure of it.

It was nearly impossible to process—violent rage and hatred from a person that I believed I had been “helping” for nearly a decade, someone that I loved and that I believed loved me!

She continued to bully me emotionally for months, to make me know and feel her suffering. She made life extraordinarily stressful not just for me, but also for my children. Her fury was terrifying and seemingly bottomless. Occasionally, between rages, she would approach me with kindness, express deep gratitude for all that I had done for her, and acknowledge my generosity. Still, no matter her approach, wrath and hatred or gratitude and responsibility, I painstakingly continued to say “no.”

I had become an enabler. Realizing this truth was like waking up from a terrible dream. With my role named, I was suddenly able to change. What was it that allowed me to know myself as an enabler, finally, after years of co-creating this disastrous situation—all with the best of intentions?

When Is It Time to Stop Fixing Ourselves?

Are you a self-help junkie? Even if you don’t have a stack of books on your bedside table with the newest ways to fix yourself, you still might be.  And it wouldn’t be your fault if you were.  We are conditioned from a very young age to believe that we need to become better, new and improved versions of ourselves, even if at first we don’t know exactly how or why.  But soon enough we have filled in the why-s with our shortcomings and failures and self-help provides the how-to-s in its unending methods for self-correction.  Armed with our story of deficiencies firmly in place and a surplus of paths towards improvement, we set off on our life mission, namely, becoming someone else.  And, we are proud of and celebrated for our mission. Growing and evolving, becoming a better person, it all sounds so virtuous.  Who would turn down such an opportunity?  

And yet, growing and evolving are too often code words for what is really "getting fixed" or correcting our basic unworthiness.  From the time we are young, we are infiltrated with the belief that the basic problem underlying all other problems is, put simply, us.  We are what’s wrong.  As adults, we search the globe for the right teacher; we attend seminars, buy books, hire coaches, consult shamans, and everything else under the sun, all in an effort to make ourselves into something good enough or maybe just enough.

But good enough for what or whom?  Did you ever wonder?

If we boil it down, we keep fixing ourselves in the hopes that we can, finally, just be as  we actually are.  Once we're fixed, enough, worthy--whether that means more compassionate, more disciplined, more grateful, more peaceful, more attentive, more informed, more important, more even-tempered, more spiritual, or whatever shape our more-s have formed into, then and only then we'll be entitled to feel what we feel, think what we think, experience what we experience, in essence, be who we are.

The fear that fuels our self-betterment mission is the belief that we are, at our core, not what we should be, faulty, broken, lacking, nothing, unworthy, undeserving, unlovable, or some other version of not okay.  To give ourselves permission to be who we are, give up the mission for a better version of ourselves would be tantamount to accepting our defectiveness and giving up all hope of fruition.  And that, of course, would be unwise, naive, lazy, a cop out, and despairing. To suggest that we stop striving to be better than who we are is not just counter-intuitive, but frightening and dangerous. Such a suggestion incites fear, scorn, anger, confusion, amusement, and an assumption of ignorance.

Self-help, while useful in certain ways, strengthens our core belief--that we are inherently defective.  Self-help starts with our defectiveness as its basic assumption, and then graciously offers to provide us with an unending stream of strategies by which to fix our defective core, which, once fixed, will award us the right to be who we are. The problem is that the strategies keep us stuck in the cycle of fixing--and more importantly, in the belief that we are broken. If you notice, we never do become that person who is allowed to feel what we feel, and experience what we experience.  We never do get permission to just be who and as we are. 

This is where spirituality enters, and offers something radically different than self-help. 

Most people think that spirituality and self-help are the same thing; they’re not.  In fact, they are fundamentally different.  We have tried to turned spirituality into self-help, another method for correcting ourselves, but to do so is to misunderstand and eradicate the most profound (and beneficial) teaching that spirituality offers.

True spirituality is not about fixing ourselves spiritually or becoming spiritually better.  Rather, spirituality is about freedom from the belief of our unworthiness, and ultimately, it is about acceptance.  Spirituality, practiced in its truest form, is about meeting who we really are, and allowing ourselves to experience life as we actually experience it.  In this way, it is more of an undoing than a doing. 

In truth, we need to take the risk that it is to lean back into who we actually are and to do that before we even know that who we are will be enough, or even that there will be anything there to catch us.  We need to relinquish our self-improvement plans before we believe that we have the right to stop improving.  The whole thing, true spirituality, requires a kind of faith, not a faith in a system, story or methodology, but a faith that trusts or a wisdom that knows that we can’t think our way into what we truly want, can’t ultimately make happen what we really need.  No matter what path we practice,there comes a point where we have to let go of the reins; we have to give up the quest to be good enough.  

What happens when we stop trying to change ourselves into something better is nothing like what we imagine.  We envision stepping off the self-help train and landing smack inside someone incomplete and unsatisfactory.  And yet in truth, the simple (but not easy) act of inviting ourselves into our own life, has the effect of placing us at the center of something so beautiful and extraordinary. Giving ourselves permission to be as we are miraculously creates a kind of love for ourselves, not so much for our individual characteristics, but for our being.  And not just for our being, but for the truth, whatever that is.  It is as if whatever we find inside ourselves, whether we wish it were here or not, it is okay and we are okay. Ultimately, we shift from trying to become lovable to being love itself.  And amazingly, from this place, the not-enough person we thought we were has simply vanished, or more likely, never was.

Try it out for a moment—this moment.  Just let yourself be.  Give yourself permission to have the experience you are having, whatever it is, with no story about whether it is right or wrong, good or bad.  Feel how you actually are.  It’s that direct and that simple.  No judgments allowed.  It won’t make sense... it takes a leap... so leap.

How to Deepen Your Relationship With Yourself

We all want to be happy which, at the simplest level, means that we want our life to be filled with experiences that we like and enjoy. There is nothing more inborn to the human being than the desire to want what is happening to indeed be happening. In service to this basic drive, we do everything we can to create lives that contain experiences that we want. The drive to create a life we like is a most healthy drive.

When we get what we want in our lives, there isn’t much that needs to be said or done. We might want to learn how to more fully enjoy the desired experiences or be more present or grateful, but such changes are fun and relatively stress-free. We are working with life’s good stuff, trying to figure out how to feel the good a little more intensely, or make the good stuff into great stuff.

But the question that every human being at some point in their lives needs to answer is not what to do with the experiences that they want, but rather what to do with the experiences that they don’t want.  No matter how hard we try to create a life that contains only what we want, life always includes the full menu. The fact that our life contains undesirable aspects simply means that we are human.

The question is not whether we can prevent unwanted experiences, we can’t, but rather how to live and relate to the experiences that we consider unwanted or painful. Can we live those experiences, in a new way such that they are not so painful, scary and derailing?

We have been conditioned to view unwanted experiences as personal failings. We believe that there is always something that we could have done differently to make that experience not happen, and if we could have done that thing, we would be a better person with a better life. But what if you were to choose to relate to your unwanted experiences as nothing out of the ordinary, simply a normal part of every human life? Could you throw out all ideas of the unwanted as representing some personal failure or success? What if the undesired aspects of life could just be what they are and not about your personal worthiness? What if you were to choose to relate to difficult experiences as opportunities to embrace yourself in compassion instead of assaulting yourself with blame?

In addition, we relate to unwanted experiences as dangerous to our wellbeing.  We believe that if we allow ourselves to accept or look into such experiences more deeply, we will be harmed. In truth, we have a choice as to what kind of relationship we want to conduct with our unwanted experiences, and ourselves when we are inside them. We can choose to turn towards the unwanted experiences, and get curious about the ways that our mind and body respond when in contact with the unwanted. As counterintuitive as it is to our conditioning, we can welcome unwanted experiences (when they have chosen to arrive despite our wishes) as fertile ground for discovery and enlightenment, a chance to get to know ourselves more deeply and truthfully, to honestly meet who we are. Could you get interested in whatever experience is arising in your awareness right now, to welcome the comfortable and the uncomfortable as equal opportunities for self-awareness and discovery?   Could you decide to turn your attention to the thoughts, feelings and sensations that are happening inside you even if they are not what you normally consider pleasurable?

We have a lot more choice than we believe in how we live our individual experiences. While we are conditioned to believe that negative experiences must be experienced negatively and positive ones, positively, we can shift this belief with a different attitude towards the purpose and meaning of experiences and what, ultimately, they are here to offer us. 

Try shifting your perspective for a day. You can always abandon the practice. Nothing will be lost. Imagine getting interested in whatever is arising inside you, whatever is happening in response to your present experience.  Choose to investigate your own experience, even when it is uncomfortable, and relate to it as an intimate doorway into your own mind and consciousness. You can opt to view all experience as just this. When all experiences are opportunities to deepen your relationship with your own being, to know your self, you can stop being so afraid of and rejecting of the experiences that you don’t want.

We will never stop trying to create experiences that we want. It is who we are as human beings. Until we are enlightened we will always prefer and wish for experiences that we like over those that we don’t. But when experiences do arrive at our doorstep (as they always will) that we have not invited, that we would never choose to bring into our house, it is best to find a way to relate to them without fear, and turn them into houseguests if we can. All experiences, welcomed, are opportunities to see and know the truth of ourselves more clearly. With this attitude, we can relate to our whole life, the sweet and the bitter, as enlightening, not necessarily wanted, but enlightening nonetheless, and in that light, meaningful.

How to Overcome the Fear of Feelings

I recently attended a panel discussion on the topic of happiness. Early on in the dialogue, one of the panelists addressed what he considered the mistaken way that most people think about happiness, namely, as a state that is free from pain or difficulty. He explained that we need to view happiness as a state in which all feelings are present and welcome, not just positive emotions. He went on to say that it is important to be able to sit with our feelings and feel what is actually happening inside us, even if it is hard stuff. While not new or revelatory, this is a profoundly true and important teaching, and one that I have also spent a lot of time writing about. What was revelatory however, was the follow-up question from the American journalist/moderator.

Upon hearing his suggestion that we “sit” with our real feelings, the journalist immediately jumped in to ask the following: How realistic was it for most people to be able to "just sit around” and feel their feelings? Was this not an issue of class in that the higher socioeconomic classes could spend their time contemplating their sadness while the rest of us regular folks had to get to work? How possible was it, really, for the average person, to be with or in their sadness, “sitting still” when things needed to get done? After all, didn’t we all need to get out the door and earn a living? 

The word “sit” had lit this moderator on fire, and in her response, morphed into “sitting still” and “just sitting around.” She was, seemingly, quite angered by the audacity of this author to suggest that we could feel our sad feelings in addition to our happy ones. As strange as it was to hear where the moderator went with his suggestion, her reaction is in fact common. In this culture we are afraid of feelings that are not happy, and conditioned to believe that feeling anything other than pleasure will prevent us from being able to go to work, live a normal life, or take care of ourselves. Allowing difficult feelings to be present will not only prevent us from basic functioning but will also endanger any positive feelings that might exist.  Happiness is an all or nothing condition. The underlying belief is that feeling our feelings as they really are will lead us to be fixated on our navel (the much maligned body-part associated with sad feelings), crying and eating chips on a dirty couch. A real life, one that includes going to work, buying groceries and being normal, and a state in which we feel our real feelings are two entirely separate things—and cannot coexist. We hold the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) belief that anyone who has the luxury of feeling their feelings must be independently wealthy and able to devote their entire life to their own struggles. And, if we are not already self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and unemployed, the privilege to experience painful feelings will lead us to become this way.

This journalist’s line of questioning clearly exposed the degree of fear and helplessness that we experience when in the face of challenging emotions. Given that difficult feelings are a part of everyone’s life, it has always amazed me that courses on learning how to be with and soothe such feelings is not required curriculum in every formal education. It is a real life skill that everyone needs. The idea that we could actually feel difficult feelings and still be strong and content is not only not taught, but instead we are encouraged to believe the opposite, that if we do allow ourselves to feel what’s inside us, our dark feelings will overwhelm and swallow us, never go away, and take us out of commission for life. And so we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to stay away from the harder feelings, fending them off, papering them over, keeping ourselves from feeling anything that we believe could disable us.

In truth, feeling our true feelings is not contradictory to living a functioning life. Quite the opposite. The more we allow our true experience to be felt, the more energy and attention we have to devote to our functioning life. We are no longer using up our energy and focus trying to push away the feelings that we don’t want and are afraid to feel. In addition, when we actually feel a feeling, we discover that no matter how strong or hard the feeling is, it has a natural life span and can only remain with intensity for a short time, far shorter than we have been led to believe. Feelings, when felt, actually pass through awareness and then ease, on their own. They may return but they will pass again, in contrast with the thoughts that we generate about the negative feelings, which continue unceasingly. Furthermore, feeling our feelings takes no effort, other than the slight effort that it is to give ourselves permission to feel them. And yet, even with no effort expended, the simple act of allowing what we feel, what is already there to be felt, has a profoundly satisfying and relaxing effect. When we stop having to fend off what we are not supposed to or allowed to feel, running from our truth, we can then relax into the embrace of our own company, and settle into our own real life.

The belief that we stay strong by ignoring our difficult emotions is false. Thinking that we must ignore how we really feel in order to make a living, be productive, get off the couch, or just plain take care of ourselves, leaves us in a state of constant fear. Every life contains happy feelings and sad ones too; such is the human condition. If we are afraid of our sadness and don’t believe we can manage or live a life with it, then our life contains a constant presence that is a threat to our basic wellbeing. As a result, we are in a state of perpetual weakness.

We are at our strongest, most high functioning and confident when we have the ability to experience whatever is passing through our feeling sky, without having to run from it, pretend it’s not there or force it away. We are most warrior-like when we learn to co-habitate with the full range of feelings, contradictory as they often are. We find our deepest confidence when we know (from lived experience) that feelings come and go and we can survive them, and will become a little bit stronger with each passage. We discover our most profound caretaker, inside ourselves, when we stop defending a single-pointed happiness, which always excludes another part of our story. We are at our most content and healthy when we give ourselves the blessing that it is to relax into what we actually feel, and live in our truth. Allowing ourselves to sit with our feelings, the ones we like and the ones we don’t, does not only not conflict with taking care of ourselves and conducting a real life—it is, in truth, our best means for taking care of ourselves and the very essence of a real life.

How to Look Out for Yourself

There are times in life when things fall apart, when we lose something deeply important, something that made us feel connected, grounded or safe. Sometimes a lot of things fall apart at the same time. There are times in life, for everyone, when it feels like all our safety nets get cut, and we are stripped of everything that we considered our foundation.

A friend of mine recently went through a divorce. The end of her marriage came, as many do, with great misunderstanding and pain. The worst part was that she felt like her best friend, her ex-husband, had turned into someone she didn't know, and who seemed to hate her, which created great sorrow and feelings of helplessness. She was now a 50-something single woman with the sense that nothing in life could be counted on. If this rupture could happen when her intentions had been so good, with someone whom she had loved so deeply, and been so honest with, then the world was surely an unsafe place. There was no ground to be found, nothing to root her to a sense of safety. She felt entirely untethered, terrified, as if she were floating in a space capsule that had lost touch with its earthly command center. 

She had no idea how to move forward.

What my friend did next is what so many of us do when we are in a situation of profound suffering: She switched into action mode. She started making plans to meet the next man, to get back into life. She joined “meetup” groups, registered with dating sites, called everyone she knew to find out who they knew that she might like. She purchased subscriptions to magazines that listed social activities in her city, signed up for new classes, and got "out there" in every way. No “next” stone was left unturned.

How my friend reacted to her sadness and fear is very normal, very human. When we dive into fierce action as a response to suffering, we are really just tying to make the bad feelings go away, and thus to take care of ourselves. We want to feel better, so we set out to figure out how to make that happen. We feel powerless, so we empower ourselves with action steps. In fact, there is nothing wrong with—and a lot right—with doing things to make ourselves feel better when we are suffering.

And yet, my friend's very normal action approach misses one crucial ingredient: It does not allow our actual feelings (and thus our self) to be included in our experience. As we feverishly set out to change our feelings, what is left out of the process is feeling what we are actually feeling.

When we experience great loss or emotional trauma, we usually don’t know what to do, or how to make it better—what the path to better will look like and how it will come about. In addition to allowing ourselves to feel the sadness, helplessness, and fear that loss brings, it is also profoundly important to allow ourselves to feel what it is like to not have an answer, and not know how we are going to make the situation change and remedy our pain. We can remind ourselves that the situation and the feelings will change, as everything always does, but that right now, in this moment, we can give ourselves permission to not know what to do.

For we Type A's, and even Type B's and C's, allowing the feeling of not knowing how to help ourselves can be very hard and scary. And yet, permission to not know is a profound gift to ourselves and an act of deep self-caring. Sometimes, this alone can ease the suffering and take care of our pain, without doing anything else whatsoever.

Suffering, as awful as it feels to walk through, is our teacher. But it can only teach us if we allow it to be felt. Sadness, fear, not knowing—all the difficult emotions, when experienced, change who we are, which ironically is what we are trying to accomplish when we run around frantically trying to fix our painful feelings. When we allow our real feelings to be here, as they are, we offer ourselves a warm embrace and the kindness of our own compassionate presence. We agree to be with ourselves, keep ourselves company in what we are truly living.

While it is contrary to how we are conditioned in this culture to respond to suffering, the simple act of letting ourselves feel how we feel is the act that is indeed most helpful in both healing and generating change. Allowing ourselves to be sad soothes sadness. Allowing ourselves to be afraid calms our fear. Allowing ourselves to not know how to fix our pain soothes the anxiety of having to fix it. Allowing ourselves to be who we are, as we are, allows us to feel deeply self-loved, welcome in our own life, and not alone.

When we allow ourselves to feel how we feel, we find the company of our own presence, which will always ease our suffering.