I’m quite sure that’s not what really happened, but here’s the story:

For me and my neighbors, trash pick-up day is Friday.

I live in a little town, where there’s no municipal sanitation crew. Everybody hires one of several local mom-and-pop companies to pick up their trash.

The guys who collect our garbage are a father and son team with a small garbage truck (a modified pick-up truck). The men grab each can and swing it up and dump the contents into the truck by hand. They do that ALL DAY. I get tired just watching them.

[I'm devoting my Sunday blog posts to the topic of Learning Through Experience. This will very often mean Learning From Mistakes, and talking about mistakes and errors in general, including my own. It will also include the reflecting upon and valuing of all sorts of experiences.]

When I think “psychoanalysis,” my mind conjures a Woody-Allenesque caricature of a “neurotic” patient spending decades of his life lying on his analyst’s couch, endlessly rehashing every real or imagined detail of his childhood, in a fruitless internal quest for The Answer to his psychological distress.

 I’m going to try devoting my Sunday blog posts to the topic of Learning Through Experience. This will very often mean Learning From Mistakes, and talking about mistakes and errors in general, including my own. 

I must be a really odd person, because every month, as I pay my credit card bills, I don’t, actually, feel too bad.

In fact, I mostly feel pleased and satisfied.

Everyone in the mental health community is applauding Marsha Lineham for her brave revelation that she, herself, used to have BPD, and that she created her Dialectical Behavior Therapy in large part as an answer to her own needs.

Radical Acceptance is an important component of DBT. It means accepting oneself and accepting all of one’s emotions, even the powerful, painful, terrifying ones.

It’s not the same as being helpless and resigned to one’s negative feelings. Radical Acceptance says that Step One is facing emotions, experiencing them, seeing them clearly and thereby gaining perspective.

Nat writes:

…if someone hurts you in a way that you would never hurt anyone else, how you do stop yourself from mentally adding ‘but I would never do what they did’?

Forgiveness is a thing you do for yourself, because you ideally wish for your internal landscape to be as free and open and unencumbered as possible.

Every hurt or grudge you hold onto is like putting a wall around a patch of your own internal emotional terrain. You gain security but you sacrifice emotional acreage. You become less open, less generous, less available, less free. Your world becomes smaller.

Here comes an example of why learning and science are my life’s passions.

Because wait long enough, and some amazingly smart and dedicated researcher might come up with a break-through that changes your life.

Maybe it’s medical. Maybe technological.

Or, as the field of neuroscience advances, the light bulb that clicks on is more and more often psychological.

OK, soooo…..

Why do relationships fail?

One of my biggest Aha! moments in life so far, was when I learned about the need for emotional processing.

I used to believe that my feelings were directly linked to The Truth, both internal and external. That my emotions were like a litmus test on Reality. That all I needed to do was tune in to my feelings, and the Answers would emerge.

Well, no, that’s not how it actually works:

We went to The Whitney Museum of American Art this afternoon; we dutifully stood in line and bought our tickets, which had little yellow peel-off proof-of-paid-admission squares on the bottom. A guard at the exhibit entrance had the job of reminding everybody, over and over and over, to wear your stickers.

Along with taking in the Edward Hopper exhibit (future blog fodder), I appreciated the creative ways in which several people had complied with the order to wear your sticker!

Instead of sticking the little yellow tag on his lapel, one guy had his on his upper arm, like a military decoration. Another guy had reached back and slapped his onto his left shoulder blade.

And then there was the woman wearing hers in the middle of her forehead.

Look, they were all saying I’m wearing my sticker!…my way!

Today, I (a tutor, age 51) spent some time hanging out and chatting with Matt (my son, age 25, also a tutor) and Eva (age 16, one of our home school students).

I was listening to the two of them as they complained about the myriad of overwhelming life choices they faced, and their general level of bewilderment. (ex: How on earth am I supposed to know what I want to be when I grow up? There are so many different kinds of careers and I don’t even know what most of them are, or what the work would be like!)

Here’s what I wound up thinking about:

People attend my workshops (entitled Understanding the People You Love) with this main question: How can I make my relationship better?

They want a simple answer.

And then the answer I give them is TOO simple!

But here it is: Be thankful for your loved one, and say so…over and over and over…