In my own life I have always felt stories and metaphors with morals have been powerful in helping me really get a message on a deeper level. This is no secret, that’s why Chicken Soup for the Soul and Aesop’s Fables have been so enduringly popular.  There is something about them that seem to hit us on an emotional level where their messages really stick. When I was starting out as a Psychologist I set up times with leading therapists to glean their wisdom to support me in really getting started on the right foot. I asked one therapist the question, “In your time as a therapist, what has been one of the greatest things you’ve learned?” He looked up and began to think. After a few moments, he looked back in my eyes and said, “While people may come in to see me once a week or so, the real therapy happens in their daily lives. I could spend an entire session with a couple trying to explain and enact the therapeutic concept of remaining present, empathic, and compassionate to the other even during difficult times and while this may support them in the moment, the message may or may not stick with them throughout the week where the real therapy occurs. But, if I ask ‘Can you keep your heart open in hell’, this may really stay with them and they are more likely to be able to grab it when difficulty arises. If they use it during difficult times that is when change really happens.  

“Can you keep your heart open in hell” to me, says, in those moments when we are wrought by our habits that keep us stuck in perpetual avoidance of what’s uncomfortable or foreign, can we stay with that discomfort and open up to ourselves or another with a  sense of compassion and love. What difference would this make? Yes, what difference would it make if we were able to put ourselves in another shoes a bit more often instead of reacting with defensiveness or attacks? What difference would it make if we were able to sit with …

There is a new tradition starting today on the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog. Every Monday I’m going to cite a quote or a poem that is related to mindfulness and psychotherapy in some way and then explore it a bit and how it is relevant to our lives. For me, quotes and poetry can often sink me into a state of greater understanding.

Here is today’s quote that Christy Matta, MA reminded us of in her comment from the blog post 10 Quotes for a Mindful Day

 ”You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

In everyday life we are guaranteed to have things rise and fall all the time. At one point someone we know is having a baby and close to the same time someone is passing away. Someone is getting married, while another couple is getting a divorce. During a certain phase of life this may seem like the worst time that will ever be and two months later something wonderful happens.

Everyone has ups and downs, sometimes seemingly more extreme than others. To make this more specific to mental health issues. If someone is struggling with Panic Disorder, the panic attacks have an initial lift of the wave, peak, and then eventually come down. Cravings and urges for addictive behaviors follow the same course as well as compulsions for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Those struggling with bipolar disorder certainly understand the rise and fall of these waves.

The distress comes up as waves of sensations coming and going. Our work is to learn how to surf them so that we come to acknowledge the wave when it is there, become present to it, and now have the choice to get on the board and ride it out with a greater sense of ease and grace.

The late Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and it’s all Small Stuff, had a chapter that I always appreciate that was titled “Be Grateful for the Good Times and Graceful during the more Difficult Times.” In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran speaks about how all …

Throughout the course of writing the blog Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, we have interacted around topics on mindfulness and forgiveness, grieving, meditation, medication, depression, stress, anxiety, self esteem, anger, and many more.

Here are the top 10 blogs for Mindfulness and Psychotherapy:

1. Refusing to Forgive: 9 Steps to Break Free
2. Feeling Grief Means Being Alive: 7 Tips to Help 
3. What Everybody Should Know About the Dangers of Meditation 
4. Depression: Medicate, Meditate or both? 
5. How Do We Forgive Ourselves? 
6. Trying to Fix Your Depression? You May Be Adding to It Instead 
7. Stress got you down? Try this tip to balance throughout the day 
8. Calming Your Distressed Mind 
9. 7 Ways to Mindfully Boost Self-Esteem 
10. When You Can’t Forgive: Hope is Not Lost

In following this blog, are there any topics that you haven’t seen covered that you would like?

As always, please share your thoughts, questions, and stories below. Your interaction here provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

This blog is a response to a question around self-forgiveness that arose out of an earlier blog Refusing to Forgive: 9 Steps to Break Free. It is clear from the responses of this blog how much pain we all have that is associated with our own actions and the actions of others. I started this blog with the intention of answering all the questions that came up and soon realized that that would not do them justice. Instead, I will do a series of blogs on forgiveness that addresses these questions. These were excellent questions and are all worth exploring. Some of them overlap so as this series progresses, I will do the best I can to synthesize them.

I thought it was appropriate to start this series with us. So, how do we forgive ourselves?

So many things happen in our lives that we blame ourselves for. We may blame ourselves for shouting at our kids or not protecting our siblings from abusive parents when we were young, or hating ourselves for having an affair. One of the first things to do is understand that you are not the first person who has made this mistake; it has likely been made thousands if not millions of times before you by other people. I am not condoning the action, but simply letting you know that you are not alone and that many people have made this mistake in the face of common human challenges. One of the common things we do as humans is taking things personally to a fault. When we come to understand that no one is immune from being unskillful, we can begin to take it a little less personally. This helps us in the process of forgiveness.

Another thing to remind yourself of is that this act you may have committed is now in the past, it is not present, and you are not currently doing it. Notice when the mind trap of blaming yourself for past events arises, see if you can acknowledge its presence and the remind yourself that you did …

In a recent PC blog by Erika Krull explores a personal journey with the act of crying and how she has come to a more accepting place with it. She writes about her past:

I also spent some years crying in private shame from depression that no one really understood or knew about. Perhaps because of that, I’m both more easily triggered and more ready to be open about it.

Many of us have grown up with the messages that crying is shameful and others have had so many tears in connection with depression that the simple act of a tear making its way through the duct triggers fear of depression’s return. We now know that thoughts, feelings and emotions are inextricably tied together and the event of one can trigger another. So when we cry or feel sad, the past negative depressive thoughts (e.g., I am worthless, hopeless, unlovable) come screaming back even if the crying has nothing to do with them.

Erika writes about the potential that these tears could have other meanings:

Some of these are tears leftover from grieving a death, some of these are tears of joy for passing on traditions, and some of these are tears of nostalgia for happy experiences that shaped my life.

However, as a result of these strong associations of tears with depression, shame, or other negative moods, many people don’t allow them to release and just hold them back. In a recent interview in Therese Borchard’s blog, Beyond Blue, I explore how to cultivate the ability to cry in a healthy way.

Our culture has a lot of judgment about crying and many of us learn from a very young age, especially men, not to cry and just to “stuff it.” It’s unfortunate and I think this is changing little by little. Depending on a person’s situation, I support going to a therapist who can act as a guide to discussing some of the wounding that may have occurred earlier in life. There will be a lot of fear covering up the tears as they may seem foreign and be riddled with judgment from earlier years.

That voice that says “crying …

Continue reading… »

Throughout our lives we’ve been interpreting and making meaning out of all kinds of events. Every even by itself is just an event, but the way we see it, the importance we give it, how it weaves into the fabric of our cells makes all the difference. This meaning that we make then goes on to affect how we interpret other things, it informs the choices that we make and the behaviors that we conduct.

For example, if I were to get pulled over by the police for speeding I might think “the world is out to get me” or “I need to slow down.” I may miss the possibility that this may have saved me from an upcoming accident. Some people say life is like a blank canvas, go ahead and paint your masterpiece. The problem with that statement is that life is not like a blank canvas because we bring all of our past experiences, woundings, traumas, and triumphs with us to the seat. If you were abused as a child that is going to have an effect on how you view and interpret relationships and the world. If you are a veteran who has just come back from war and saw some of your friends wounded or killed, that is going to affect how you make meaning of many different things in life. Many different forms of therapy ask us to shift the way we seeing things, have a different outlook on life. It’s not so easy.

However, it’s also important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, says that people can survive any experience if they learn to make a more positive meaning out of it. He says, “even the worst circumstance can be transformed by our minds.”  We do walk around the world shaped by our experiences and the meaning we give to events can have a dramatic effect on how we feel emotionally and physically.

So the practice is to become aware of the meaning we are giving events and think of our initial interpretation as one slice of a pie and then asking …