"On Healing" May 2003

Posted on Mon, May. 19, 2003
Face issues with compassion - and learn
By Dan Gottlieb

My last column addressed the issue of anxiety management in this anxious world. One recommendation was to identify your demons and learn to tolerate them. A woman wrote me and said that although she is clear she has many emotions that interfere with her life, she was having difficulty understanding how to face her demons and let go.

"When I was a child, my parents screamed constantly and put each other, as well as the kids, down," she wrote. "Eventually, my mother walked out on the family, and my father, who considered me his favorite child, confided all of his problems and yearnings (including his yearnings for love with a woman) to me. He had no clear boundaries with sexuality - I had a lot of icky feelings listening to sex as a constant discussion and jokes with sexual innuendo. Now that I am married, I find I have problems with passion with my husband and a constant feeling of pressure to do better than my parents and avoid having my children repeat my experience - so if he yells at the kids, I hear the demons or if he sends me a sexual e-mail, I recoil. I read your column with great interest and curiosity about facing the demons and letting them go, but I didn't walk away knowing how."

Dear reader: The task is not to let go of your demons, but to face them with courage and compassion. Yes, compassion. If you can sit with your demons without trying to banish them from your experience, you can learn some interesting things about yourself.

The human mind is creative, intelligent and resilient. The reason you have difficulty identifying your demons is because your mind is so smart and healthy. It is afraid it will be overwhelmed by the emotions your demons carry. That's why when you begin to touch on these powerful emotions you feel icky or recoil. These emotions, distasteful as they may be, protect you from even greater pain.

So when I ask you to identify your demons, the closest you can get is to identify some of the feelings associated with them. But the demons I referred to are not thoughts, visions or recollections. They are experiences that you feel, or actually experience, in the moment. Experiences that your mind reflexively pushes away. You are doing what most of us do. When the emotions begin, you recoil from the experience that your mind knows will be difficult.

The process of learning to tolerate these emotions, ultimately learning to tolerate the experiences that are a part of you, can be a painful one. So when you first feel the anxiety or ickiness, you are in the right neighborhood. But this is the beginning. Instead of running away, think about what would happen if you just sat there for a while. Sure, the distasteful emotions would increase. In the process, you might feel frightened, angry, sexually aroused, or ashamed. And what do you think would happen if you sat even longer with the feelings?

Keep in mind that this process can be difficult, and sometimes should be done with a therapist or guide. It should be someone who understands the process and can help provide both structure and safety. It also should be someone who can understand and tolerate emotions rather than simply try to fix them.

I try to meditate almost daily. The other day, when I sat down for my 45-minute session with myself, I just didn't want to. I had so much to do and felt that I would relax better if I got busy with what was on my list rather than sit. Nevertheless, I sat.

At first, I felt terribly frustrated and irritable. Then, as my mind got busy with what seemed like 1,000 thoughts, I wanted to open my eyes and write down notes as I was afraid I would forget some of these important thoughts. My frustration increased. I hoped that the 45 minutes were almost done. Despite my commitment not to, I looked at my watch. Only 10 minutes had elapsed! My frustration turned to futility, which turned to helplessness, which turned to hopelessness. As I sat through these powerful and distressing feelings, the hopelessness turned to a profound sense of aloneness. My eyes welled up with tears and my breathing became more rapid as I sat - alone. After several minutes experiencing this profound pain, I was aware of the distress diminishing. Soon, instead of sitting in agony, I was just sitting.

The experience was not pleasant, nor was it relaxing or insightful. It was simply spending some time with a part of my mind that rarely gets attention.

Understand that this journey is an act of compassion for yourself. And if you can feel compassion for parts of yourself that have been disavowed, then you can truly feel compassion for others.

Posted on Mon, May 5, 2003
Easing the everyday stresses that fester
By Dan Gottlieb

Everybody seems to be worried about anxiety. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that although our risk has been greatly diminished over the years, anxiety has actually increased for reasons ranging from greater access to research information to nonstop media coverage of disasters. Newsweek recently devoted its lead article to the psychology and biology of anxiety.

Clearly, we have anxiety about our anxiety. And we have had it for a long time. In this space three years ago, I reported that the majority of visits to doctors' offices were stress-related. Since then, the economy has turned sour and we've endured 9/11 and Iraq. These national crises undoubtedly can have a negative impact on those with existing anxiety disorders, and many people experience stressful symptoms in stressful times.

But these stressors do not explain what many perceive as a pervasive sense of unease that our society has had for many years. I am more concerned about another kind of anxiety - the kind we often cannot feel and sometimes are not even aware we have. The anxiety we turn our backs on can have the most destructive impact.

This is what I call everyday anxiety. Sometimes we are aware of some discomfort, and act quickly to make ourselves feel better. Sometimes we just act without being aware of why. This anxiety causes us to reach for the refrigerator, snap at our loved ones, drive aggressively, or stay awake at night. More often than not, it is this anxiety that causes us to pressure our children and ourselves to achieve, work too hard, be prejudiced, use drugs or alcohol, or buy guns. Despite the fact that we are not fully aware of this anxiety, it lives inside of us.

My wife and I were in our 20s when she was diagnosed with cancer. We had two babies and were both pretty frightened. Despite her diagnosis, she continued to smoke and eat poorly. So with what I thought was a motive of love and concern, I nagged.

I nagged her about smoking, about exercise, about diet. I was relentless, and in the process, simply added to what was already great stress. I thought it was about love. But it was about anxiety. More specifically, what controlled my behavior was anxiety that I could not face or manage.

It's easy to say the fear was about losing a wife and partner. But the enemy was my anxiety.

I have always believed much of life is about anxiety management. Think about it: The need to act quickly and effectively, the need to change someone, the fear of silence, the great fear of doing nothing are all about anxiety management. And all nagging is about our own anxiety that we cannot tolerate.

I understand that there are plenty of "things" out there to make us nervous. But if we were no longer afraid of our own anxiety, those "things" would certainly look different.

So how do we regain control over our lives?

First, nothing changes until you recognize that you are anxious.

Second, understand that most anxiety is neither a symptom that needs to be cured - with medication or psychotherapy or exercise - nor a sign of weakness that should be hidden; hiding it, in fact, inevitably makes anxiety worse. Anxiety is just an emotion.

Third, try to understand the ultimate fears, the real demons. Are they your child's failure, your parent's death, or your own illness, death or abandonment? Whatever your nightmare is, you probably have been carrying it inside for many years. And most of us devote a great deal of energy to staying one step ahead of these fears. And we're probably unsuccessful, thus causing more anxiety.

I encourage you to think about your worst nightmare and try to face it. Most people, when they look at their demons, try to find a way to annihilate them, or use logic to make them go away. That usually fails.

If we are able to face our demons long enough to make eye contact with them, we inevitably discover they are not half as scary as we previously thought. Our demons are smart: When we try to beat them down, they get stronger. When we try to run away, they get stronger. When we try to outsmart them, they get stronger. But if we just notice them, accept them and find them interesting, there is no more energy to keep them going. Ultimately, the great fears are simply parts of our own minds that need attention.

There is an ancient parable that tells me that we've had this wisdom for years:

There was once a man who was frightened of his shadow and could not stand the look of his footprints. So he walked quickly in life, yet both followed. He began to run, and still they followed. Eventually he ran so fast that he died. In truth, all he had to do to put his demons to rest was to get out of the sunlight and sit down.

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