Please follow & like us
Blog
3/24/20
Love In The Time Of COVID-19
Here we are, all together in our apartness from each other. What a bizarre reality and time this is.
How are you holding up? What are you doing for self-care?
I posted some ideas on Instagram (@wolcottcounseling) earlier tonight. What would you add? How are you adjusting to this new reality? What’s new, and what remains the same?
Me: I’m working from home, in a private and secure corner of my house –removed from the rest of my family while I’m seeing clients (on my computer screen that is). My husband’s working from home too, in another part of our house, with headphones on, helping folks at the University operate in this new reality. It’s the golden era of distance learning! (I get to observe him working a bit, but not vice-versa.) And my two teens are on a strange and long spring break.
I miss being with my clients. I miss my office. I can’t wait until we can be together again.
But I’m SO grateful for the technology we do have to stay connected!
After I posted on Instagram, I wanted to share more with you. To share what I’m really leaning into, what specifically makes me feel better.
So I’m starting a new weekly thing here: sharing what gives me perspective and comfort in this strange new world.
Starting next week, I’ll be posting about a poem on Monday, a podcast epidsode on Wednesday, and a book on Friday. (And I’ll continue doing that until this pandemic is over).
My thinking about the timing works like this:
Poetry: to center and deepen thinking, to set the tone for the week.
Podcast: to hear conversation and other voices mid-week, as we round the corner on what for some of us is a very loooong and sometimes isolating week.
Book: to invite spending time with longer thoughts as we go into the weekend when we have more time.
But I have three right now I can’t wait to share, so this week, you get it all at once!
POEM
Pandemic
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love—
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.
–Lynn Ungar 3/11/20
PODCAST
Brene Brown has a brand new podcast called Unlocking Us. And it’s amazing. It launched on March 20. Here’s the link: https://brenebrown.com/unlockingus/
Listen to her first episode, FFTs.
FFTs stands for Effing First Time.
Which is where we all are right now.
I mean, none of us have lived during a worldwide pandemic, so it’s our FFT for that.
Give a listen, and see if it doesn’t help you feel a little better about life as we navigate completely new waters.
BOOK
I’m currently reading The Overstory by Richard Powers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year. It’s a sweeping, gorgeously detailed account of American life through time for multiple generations of different American families.
That is to say, immigrants (for we are all immigrants).
And trees. It’s also about trees.
Reading it, I feel wonder and gratitude about the resilience of all of our ancestors who struggled and put down roots — and sometimes thrived, and sometimes were decimated, but left enough DNA behind that you, and I and everyone we know is here on this earth at this time.
And alongside the stories of generations and generations of families, the trees leave DNA, too. And witness. And grow. And suffer. And survive. And provide cover. And comfort. And sometimes die. And are imbued with meaning for, and connected to people, and landscapes, stories and history.
Today, when finished my last session, I went outside and lay down in the hammock and just looked at and listened to the trees, the sky, the birds, all the noises around me that I rarely listen to so carefully. I thought: I’ve lived in our house for a decade, yet can’t identify half the trees around me. I’ll be working on changing that as I focus on the little space of life I get to call home, with loving attention, these next several weeks (months?).
I invite you to read The Overstory along with me, and consider the parallels we’re living now: a time fraught with FFTs, with newness, with no map, little history to draw on, no clear assumptions about the future. How do the stories of these families make you think about your own life? What are you creating? What will you leave behind?
What in the natural world accompanies you, silently witnesses you ,and gives you comfort?
And how can we treat this strange and uninvited pause in our lives as a sabbath?
See you next week with another poem, another podcast recommendation, and another book invitation. Until then, physically distance but don’t socially distance! Wash your hands, practice good emotional self-care, and be well. I miss you.
2/14/20
Learning How To Love
Everywhere you look this month — reminders of love, relationships, connection!
Love is amazing. And it’s important. But Valentines’ Day – with its focus on flowers, chocolates and fancy dinners – tells us nothing about how to have more of this incredible life force in our lives. For a lot of us, Valentine’s Day just inspires compare-and-despair. And no wonder. We spend more time teaching people to drive a car than teaching them how to have a good love relationship!
That’s backwards. We need to know more about how to connect.
Think about how little you’ve been taught about love. When did anyone teach you the skills needed to be happy in love? My guess: close to never.
But there are great tools and information out there. And I invite you to spend the rest of this month with me learning about usable, actionable tools that you can implement in your life now. I’ll share some here, but to get all the content, follow along with @wolcottcounseling, and sign up for my newsletter!
You’ve probably heard “You can’t really love someone until you love yourself.” I disagree. Yes, loving yourself is very important — and it’s a lifelong journey for most of us. Definitely work on self love! But take heart — you can love, and receive love, as you’re making that lifelong journey.
You want love, connection, closeness and companionship. Intimacy, fun, life-witnessing, and compassion. We all do. Yet many of us were never taught how to develop our skills to discern and make good choices in love, and we’ve never been taught how to show up with skill and sensitivity for the most important part of our life — choice in, and our connection to a loving partner.
So where do we start?
I love the work of Dr. John Gottman, relationship researcher who studies divorce prediction and marital stability. Along with Dr. Julie Gottman, his research partner and wife, the Gottman Institute says we have the power to be “relationship masters” or “relationship disasters” depending on the skills we practice in our relationships — with ourselves and with our romantic partners.
There are 4 behaviors (and their antidotes) that the Gottmans have identified, over decades of longitudinal research, and they call these the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for Relationships.
The 4 Horsemen are:
1. Criticism
2. Defensiveness
3. Contempt
4. Stonewalling
And the 4 antidotes to these apocalyptic horsemen are:
1. A soft startup
2. Taking responsibility and ownership
3. A culture of appreciation
4. Physiological self-soothing
The 4 horsemen are so common and so easy to engage in. I don’t need to explain Criticism and Defensiveness…I think everyone knows what those are and feel like — and unfortunately, due to our brain’s negativity bias, we’re really, really good at them. Blaming, criticizing and defensiveness are easy — and frankly, kind of fun sometimes — to engage in. But the Gottmans warn that they’re far more corrosive in relationships than we realize, so if we want to have a good relationship, we must become expert at the antidotes…and that takes practice. But with practice, you can become skilled.
Contempt may look like eye rolling, sneering, derisive laugher, sarcasm and needling. Contempt is acid for a relationship. The antidote is developing a language and culture of real appreciation — knowing your partner better — her or his stories, vulnerabilities, likes/dislikes, and so on. Practicing remembering good times together, celebrating small and big things. Having meaningful rituals. This works against the negativity bias we all so easily fall into, and cushions the irritations of life that we tend to take out on those closest to us.
Stonewalling looks like crossed arms, turning away, or even leaving the room. It happens when someone feels so flooded with negative emotion, they have to block it any way they can. Gottman makes people wear pulse oximeters in couple’s counseling and as soon as anyone’s heart rate gets elevated, they stop the therapy and do muscle relaxation, breathing, and whatever else is necessary to soothe and bring folks back into connection with themselves. Learning to notice when you get flooded with negative emotion (signs like shallow breathing, muscle tension, elevated heart rate) is a key antidote to stonewalling.
I also love Dr. Mira Kirshenbaum’s work on relationships. Dr. Kirshenbaum is the author of When Good People Have Affairs. I wrote a blog post back in 2013 about the “Essential 5” elements to a good relationship. The 5 essential elements are:
Easy Connections
Fun
Safety
Mutual Respect
Physical Chemistry
Definitely read my blog post on why these 5 matter. But I’ll say here that what I like about her take is that we really do have to have ALL five. If you dismiss or minimize even one, Kirshenbaum says, the relationship won’t last…in fact, it’s at high risk for infidelity. The one I hear clients often minimize –when the other 4 are present — is physical chemistry. In fact, people tend to congratulate themselves on not prioritizing this, because they feel that caring about attraction means they’re “superficial.” It’s not superficial. It’s actually essential to the health and well-being of your relationship.
Books by Kirshenbaum and by the Gottmans are a great place to start to improve your understanding of relationships and start practicing some of those antidotes and mindsets. In particular, the Gottman Institute has amazing resources including The Marriage Minute, the Relationship Checkup and more.
Keep an eye out for posts about learning to know yourself better (and become a more skilled partner — a “relationship master” in the verbiage of John Gottman) on @wolcottcounseling Instagram. I’ll be talking about the amazing Authentic Happiness site at University of Pennsylvania, the Love Language tool, the Myers Briggs assessment, and more. My goal is to provide you with as much content as I can about how to love –and understand love–better.
Wishing you all the love —
Lisa
11/30/19
November: Harvest Your Gratitude
We’ve spent the month talking about gratitude — specifically the science of gratitude and various practices to promote gratitude.
Most of the conversation has been happening on Instagram, so hop on over to @wolcottcounseling for a deeper dive into the science and practice of gratitude.
I have one more gratitude practice on this last day of November: A Gratitude Harvest!
A gratitude harvest is appropriate for Thanksgiving week, don’t you think?
What is a “gratitude harvest”?
A Gratitude Harvest is a look back at the year you’ve had…..a look back to gather together what you feel positive, hopeful and grateful for.
You don’t have to exempt yourself if you’ve had a dreadful year. You can still do this. Stay with me.
Your first thoughts are not expertise. They’re not the final word. They’re not even that accurate. This is because your brain is biased toward negativity (because we inherited brains that flow in a negative current more easily than positive). More specifically, the brain’s amygdala (emotional center) uses more than two-thirds of its neurons to look for bad news. When it finds it it encodes it in memory instantly — so our memory banks are full of negative memories. By contrast, positive experiences must be held in the brain for more than twelve seconds in order to be stored in memory!
The take home is: Your brain’s initial assessment of the year is not what we’re after. It can’t be blindly trusted.
We’re going deeper and wider than that. So when your brain answers with “this was a shitty year” — just say “Ok, Boomer” and keep moving.
Look back on your year.
Do you have all your fingers and toes? Grateful.
Do you have a bed to sleep in? Grateful.
Do you have enough food to eat? Grateful.
Do you have clean, running water in your home? Grateful.
Do you have a choice of clothing to wear? Grateful.
Can you move your body? Grateful.
Do you have a friend you trust? Grateful.
Did you learn about yourself this year? Grateful.
Do you feel a connection to something bigger than yourself? Grateful.
Did you help anyone this year? Grateful.
Are you free from major diseases? Grateful.
Do you connect with any kind of community? Grateful.
Is there something in your life you love? A cat, a dog, a person? Grateful.
Do you have meaningful work? Or an idea of what you’d like to do with your one precious life? Grateful.
Have you been able to see the stars and the moon this year? Lie in the sand at the beach? Swim in the ocean? Taste good food? Hug a friend? Read and be inspired? Take a hot shower? See a sunrise? Hike in a forest? Visit a new place? Travel, even? Laugh with someone? Watch a child? See a movie or show that moved you, or made you laugh? Grow or buy food from a local source? Cook a meal? Celebrate an accomplishment? What else?
So take a few moments as this year winds down to gather together your gratitude. Be specific and granular and expansive and wide. Gather it all together. You can do this on paper, in Notes on your phone, or in an art project like a “gratitude bomb” (see my post on IG @wolcottcounseling for an example). Harvest your gratitude, and enjoy the fruits of your labor this year.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on gratitude…please click on the title to open comments and leave your thoughts below!
10/9/19
WHAT WE’RE REALLY TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ‘DOMESTIC VIOLENCE’
As you may know, October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
Did you know 1 in 4 women will experience relationship violence in their lifetime? One in four! (Why aren’t we talking about this more? I’m out to change that.)
But first:
What are we actually talking about when we talk about violent relationships?
I have an issue with the term “Domestic Violence.”
The word “Domestic” makes many of us think of a married, hetero-normative couple. (We even have a name for the kind of undershirt worn by the husband — a “wife beater.”) Yet most domestic violence episodes happen between partners who do not, or no longer, live together. (See Evan Stark, Coercive Control, How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, Oxford Press, 2007)
The word “Violence” focuses our minds, pocketbooks, and legal resources on physical aggression: assault, battery, beating, strangling, use of weapons, and sometimes murder (or murder/suicide). This kind of violence is actually a small part of relationship abuse. It’s the extreme outcome of power and control dynamics. It’s the tip of the iceberg. Most of the iceberg, as we know, is out of sight.
The physical violence part of “domestic violence” is only a fraction of what we’re really talking about when we talk about domestic violence.
So what makes up the bulk of relationship abuse? What lays the groundwork for the physical violence? Coercive Control.
Coercive control is a pattern of intimidation, isolation and control. It is the systematic human rights abuse of taking away a person’s freedom. Coercive control relies heavily on enforced gender norms. It is a form of mental torment, intimidation and physical limitation that is often so effective that physical violence becomes unnecessary. Researchers sometimes call this kind of abuse “intimate terrorism” and “entrapment.”
Many countries (but not the United States court system — yet) recognize that coercive control is the biggest relationship abuse problem, and their laws reflect it. So if our legal system here in the US primarily recognizes and punishes only the episodes of physical battering, yet the bulk of abuse doesn’t include battering — what are we missing here?
We’re missing verbal and emotional abuse, intimidation, stalking, monitoring, financial abuse, isolation, manipulation, harassment, slut shaming, and gender shaming and other forms of bullying designed to maintain the upper hand. We’re missing gaslighting. We’re missing a lot of what makes relationships toxic and dangerous. We’re missing what always, always precedes the violence.
Let’s take a look at how coercive control works and what it accomplishes. Coercive control is the means by which men control and dominate women in their personal lives. Coercive control has replaced publicly sanctioned male dominance with private oppression.
This looks like isolating you from your friends and family: deleting your contacts, encouraging you to spend all your time together, disparaging your friends/family/roommates/relatives. It looks like economic abuse: monitoring or curtailing your access to money, making you use all your money. It uses technology: demanding passwords, texting or calling incessantly, tracking your whereabouts through home systems, GPS or spyware. It looks like threats: threatening to commit suicide if you leave, threatening to publish texts or photographs that would embarrass or harm you, threatening to leave, forcing you to participate in illegal activities. It looks like using gender privilege: enforcing rigid gender norms, treating you like an inferior, making all the ‘big’ decisions. It looks like minimizing, blaming and denying: blaming you for the abuse (I wouldn’t have done X if you hadn’t done Y), denying and minimizing abuse (I never hit you…yelling is not abuse). It looks like emotional abuse: yelling, sarcasm, withholding kindness, putting you down, instilling guilt.
What does coercive control accomplish? Coercive control tears down self esteem. Coercive control gaslights, until reality is warped. Coercive control entraps women in an ever-shrinking radius — physically and socially — but even more damaging, in their own imaginations. And because our legal system and our vocabulary focuses on physical violence, battery and similar crimes, it misses the biggest aspect of abuse: coercive control.
How many times have you heard (or yourself said) a variation of the following:
“But he’s never hit me. If he hit me, I’d leave!”
You know the story of the frog in a pot of water, slowly heating up? So slowly, it never jumps out of the pot, because by the time the water was boiling it was too late?
Let’s help each other see and name abuse as it’s happening. Let’s see it, name it, and support each other in leaving before it’s too late.
Until we can identify and see — really see — coercive control, we’ll continue to have 1 in 4 women experience violent abuse by a partner in their lifetime. And the longer we focus on just the violence part, the farther away we are from solutions that will actually impact the issue of domestic, dating, and intimate partner abuse.
How about we change that 1 in 4 statistic in our generation?
As always, please share your thoughts by clicking on the headline of this post and commenting in the comments section.
3/1/19
It’s Eating Disorders Awareness Week!
Eating disorders affect more than 30 million people in the United States; millions more have disordered eating or related issues. From emotional eating, to body image issues, to orthorexia (a fixation on “clean” eating), to diagnosed Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder, or ARFID (Avoidant-Restrictive Food Intake Disorder), we are a nation with a very problematic relationship to food, self-love, appetite, emotional and physical nourishment and self-esteem.
Why is it such a problem? One thought is our society’s persistent bias toward thinness, and methods to achieve thinness, are so accepted. Scroll through any social media or pick up any publication and you will likely see “ideal” and often photoshopped bodies represented alongside diets, fasts, and other behaviors that promote disordered eating.
Why do we have such perfectionism aimed at our bodies? The answer is complicated, but I believe it has much to do with finding a place to enact control — to counteract shame when we feel a loss of control — both personally and on a societal level. Perfectionism and shame go together.
Women account for over two-thirds of eating disorders; men are affected in large numbers as well, and those numbers are growing. It starts early and moves through the life cycle — 42% of 1st through 4th grade girls want to be thinner. ARFID is thought to affect 3% to 5% of all children. Approximately 10% of all college age women have a diagnosable eating disorder. And 13% of women over the age of 50 engage in eating disordered behavior. Concurrently, nearly 30% of people with binge and purge behaviors also engage in cutting or other self-harm behaviors.
Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental health disorder, yet only 1 in 10 seek out treatment. Every 60 seconds, an individual dies as a direct result of an eating disorder.
There is help for eating disorders.
• Educate yourself. The National Eating Disorders Association, or NEDA, has a wealth of information, here.
• Screen Yourself. Here’s a screening tool to determine if you have an eating disorder. (T/W – many screening tools do require you to put in your height and weight to assist in assessing).
• Check yourself. Develop a critical eye toward what our culture is selling you. Remind yourself that media is in large part designed to sell products, and a following or readership with low self esteem is highly motivated to buy diet related products.
• Become Shame Aware. Much of disordered eating is rooted in shame and it’s twin, perfectionism. Watch this TED talk by Brené Brown which speaks to shame, perfectionism and vulnerability. Also, I highly recommend her books, especially The Gifts Of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, and Rising Strong. You can find a mental health specialist trained in her methodology (I’m one of them!) here.
• Read books on eating disorders. I recommend Geneen Roth’s books, especially Feeding The Hungry Heart, When Food Is Love, and Women Food and God. Another great book is Life Without Ed by Jenni Schaffer and Thom Rutledge. For families and friends, I recommend Surviving An Eating Disorder by Siegel, Brisman and Weinshel.
• 12-Step, Overeaters Anonymous. Contrary to the name, OA is not just for people concerned with overeating; it’s also for anorexia, bulimia, food addiction, or any type of eating problem. 12-step programs are a great tool and wonderful companion to therapy.
• Nutritional Counseling with a nutritionist or other medically trained person who is educated, aware, and sensitive to the psychological aspects of eating disorders and disordered eating. Not all helpers are! Ask for recommendations, ask for what you need, and trust your gut. That goes for mental health and wellness counselors as well:
• Counseling/Therapy with a therapist skilled in and sensitive to dynamics around body shame, body image, control, disordered eating, and eating disorders. Again, ask for recommendations for someone skilled, interview more than one therapist, and trust your gut. One powerful modality for working with an eating disorder is Internal Family Systems work. You can find an IFS-trained therapist here.
If you are currently struggling with disordered eating, please don’t delay in getting help. If you feel you are in a crisis, please reach out to one of these hotlines in this link (not just for bulimia, despite the words in the link). If you don’t want to talk, you can use the text crisis line, which is here and here: Text CONNECT to 741741.
Please click on the title of this blog post above to open the comments, and let me know what other information you need. Do you have a book recommendation or website you‘ve found helpful? Please share, or make a comment! I look forward to continuing the conversation and learning with our Wolcott Counseling & Wellness community. If you haven’t done so yet, sign up for our newsletter too, to get the latest updates, resources and notice for upcoming workshops. Thanks!
11/22/18
How To Do Gratitude
It’s Thanksgiving week, which got me thinking about things I’m thankful for, which got me thinking about gratitude.
How many times have you heard that practicing gratitude is the secret to a happy life? If you’re like me, your social media pages are flooded this week with gratitude memes.
But why is it important, and more importantly, how do you actually make gratitude a practice?
When I wake up super early, like today, I don’t feel grateful; I feel annoyed. My brain starts in on my long list of things to do. I lament I didn’t get enough sleep; now I’m going into the day tired. The “what ifs” start, which is my particular brand of anxiety. What if I get a sleep deprivation headache? And then I can’t be really present to my family who is visiting? And then I get behind on all I need to do to pull off a Thanksgiving party for 16 people? And I get stressed out and short with my family? And my attitude ruins Thanksgiving? (“What ifs” are usually extreme).
I’ve been on this “what if” train so often, I recognize it quickly. And that’s when I start my habit of practicing gratitude.
Because gratitude throws a monkey wrench in the anxiety gears.
I start small — with what is right around me. I feel grateful for the feel of cotton percale sheets against my skin. “Thank you for clean sheets.” This makes me think of my pajamas and the fact that unlike much of the world, I have a special kind of clothes just for sleeping — even more than one of these kinds of clothes — so I can wear clean, special sleeping clothes to bed every night. “Thank you for pajamas.” This makes me think of my bed, so I say to myself, “thank you for my bed.” I momentarily think about needing to buy a new bed because this one isn’t the greatest for my back. I start to feel annoyed about aging, but catch myself and “thank you for my healthy body.”
It starts raining, but I’m safe and dry, so I say “thank you for the roof over my head.” I think of my house and how grateful I am, after renting for years in San Francisco, that we were able to buy our house here in Florida. “Thank you for my home.” I think of the rooms in my house; my children sleeping in their rooms. This makes me think of being a parent. There are a million and one ways to be irritated as a parent, but I catch myself as I start to get on that train and say “Thank you for my healthy, beautiful children.”
The path of gratitude meanders; I follow it.
Internally, symbolically, I bow with thanks for each small thing I notice that I can be grateful for.
I think of this as akin to the beautiful quote from the Talmud, “Every blade of grass has an Angel whispering to it, ‘Grow, grow.’” I dial into the minute, the small, the granular of life. Thank you.
But sometimes my gratitude practice has to view life from a great distance. Something so shitty is going on that the only way for me to handle it is to zoom out and force myself to look at the big picture. I pull away from my life to a birds eye view…or sometimes, a satellite view. And like Mr. Rogers says, to “Look for the helpers.”
I began practicing gratitude in my 20s, during one of these times. I was fortunate to come across a book called Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach. The book was everywhere — bookstores, best seller lists, on Oprah. It has an essay and a quote for every day of the year. Early on in the book, Breathnach lays out several principles for the journey that the book invites the reader on, and one of them is a gratitude practice.
She writes, for the January 14th entry, “There are several tools that I’m going to suggest you use as you begin your inner exploration. While all of them will help you become happier and more content and will nurture your creativity, this first tool could change the quality of your life beyond belief: it’s what I call a daily gratitude journal. [E]ach night before I go to bed, I write down five things that I can be grateful for.”
For whatever reason, probably because I needed a life raft at this time in my life, I decided to follow this advice and for the next year, I wrote down things for which I was grateful for every day.
It was a massive struggle, to be honest, to do this on some days. I didn’t grow up with models for practicing gratitude. There was more than one day that year when I wrote down, 3 times, “I’m thankful this day is over. I’m thankful this day is over. I’m thankful this day is over.” and called it a day.
And that’s fine to do. Because in doing any kind of reflection on gratitude, you’re training your brain to shift from its unfortunate inheritance (what neuroscientists call the “negativity bias”) to something beyond our primitive, reptilian brain — creating new, neural pathways that recognize what’s going well, right, or good.
Over time, my attitude — and my life — improved greatly. But having a wonderful life comes with its own issues.
The brilliant vulnerability researcher Brené Brown talks about using gratitude in times of “foreboding joy.” Foreboding joy is that feeling you have when you think “Hey, my relationships are going well, work is good, I’m healthy…oh no, the other shoe is going to drop!” That feeling that things are going too well, so of course, the s@#t is about to hit the fan. (Aren’t human brains special?)
The second you feel that, no matter how inauthentic it feels, start reciting “I’m grateful for ___.” It can be basic, like “I’m grateful for sunshine. I’m grateful for coffee.” List everything out loud and see how it shifts you out of fear and allows you to stay in the vulnerable emotion of joy.
I so highly recommend you try a gratitude practice. It tames anxiety, short-circuits fear, shifts what feels hopeless and locked, and brings you into the present. Over time, it becomes a habit, and it literally changes the way you see the world. The world just isn’t the same place when you search for — and name — your gratitude.
Melody Beattie, author of books on codependency, says it best:
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
In summary:
- Go small. Notice the littlest things to be grateful for. List them. Write them. Create those new neural pathways and watch your life transform.
- Go big when you need to. Take a bird’s eye, or satellite, view. Look at the big picture. Consider how you’ll feel in a month, in a year, in a decade, on your deathbed looking back at your life. List the big ticket items you’re grateful for — health, kind people, friends, shelter, food, water, safety.
- Recognize and respond to “foreboding joy” with gratitude. Allow yourself to stay in the present, and not rehearse tragedy. Lean into the vulnerability that is joy.
I wish you all the best with your gratitude practices — tell me how you do it in the comments below! (Click on the blog title to link to comments).
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
1/20/17
The Talk (About Sexual Harassment and Assault)
The summer I was 13, I was sexually assaulted in a hotel lobby. My little sister sat in the booth across from me as we colored. The hotel clerk, who’d chatted my family up the day before, came over to our table and asked if he could show us how to draw something. He slid into the booth beside me. A minute later he ran his hand up the inside of my bare thigh.
This wasn’t the only time I was sexually assaulted. But it’s the one I told my 12 year daughter about. When she gets older, I’ll tell her more.
I told her this part of my past when I had The Talk with her about sexual assault.
The phrase “The Talk” usually refers to the one that many black and brown parents have with their sons, teaching them to be polite, to keep their hands on the steering wheel, to minimize risk of getting killed by the police. It’s The Talk that addresses the frailty of the African American male body, so disturbingly and beautifully described by Ta-Nehisi Coates here.
We need to have The Talk with our daughters too. About sexual assault and harassment. This became abundantly clear to me during the 2016 presidential race.
The Access Hollywood recordings ignited a powderkeg of outrage, shame and humiliation far too many women have lived with in silence for far too long. Including mine. Between ages 10 and 23, I was sexually assaulted, groped, and harassed several times physically; verbally more times than I could ever count. The harassment continued later in life. And I’m not alone.
Why talk with my young daughter now? Because the majority of American sexual assault victims are young. While 1 in 6 American women has been the victim of attempted (2.8%) or completed (14.8%) rape in her lifetime, the age group with the highest rate of sexual assault is age 12-24, and 66% of those victims are age 12-17. One in 6 girls (and 1 in 9 boys) will be sexually assaulted before age 18. The US Department of Justice states approximately 1.8 million adolescents have been the victim of sexual assault. And 82% of all juvenile victims are female. Underreporting is widespread; these numbers are likely much higher.
How can we parents send them out into the world as if sexual assault is not going to happen?
The toxic statements we heard on the Access Hollywood recordings this fall enraged me, and re-ignited feelings of powerlessness and fear. But the outpouring of truth from women around the world empowered me. And that’s when I knew that simply crossing my fingers and hoping my daughter won’t have the same experiences I’ve had was not an option.
Every day, I see the walking wounded in my therapy office.
I know what to do as a therapist. I help people heal. But how does a mom talk with her daughter about this?
I had to find a way, even if it wasn’t perfect. I wanted to at least protect her from the shame and isolation that so many girls and women experience. I wanted to plant the seeds of healing. Above all, I wanted to protect her emotional self.
And it went better than expected. Ever since, I’ve thought what a huge difference it can make if parents everywhere began this conversation with their girls.
So how did I do it? See below.
1. Begin with an “in” — the news.
Sexual harassment and sexual assault became part of our national conversation last fall. Take advantage of this.
“Honey, tell me what you’ve been hearing about the things Donald Trump said about women. What have you heard?”
Yes, she heard about the Access Hollywood recording, even if she didn’t know the exact wording. She thought Trump was “dumb” and “mean.” “He thinks he is better than all girls,” she said. “He doesn’t treat people nice. I feel sorry for those women he hurt.”
My heart sunk, because I know what she doesn’t yet know. “Those women” may well be her, in the next decade.
I wanted to gently help her make the connection between what she’s hearing and her own life.
2. Be specific and personal about sexual assault.
We started by discussing unwanted touch. I told her I hope it never happens, and it should never happen…but it does happen to many girls and women, and it may happen to her. And I talked about my own life, the summer I was 13, in that hotel lobby.
Other assaults impacted me more than this (as bad as it was). But for now, this one allowed me the emotional equilibrium to have The Talk.
I told her about her aunt, who was at an outdoor high school party when a boy she knew peripherally from her high school class, out of nowhere, shoved his hand down the front of her pants, touching her private parts. She was walking to her car, with others nearby, and felt totally safe until that moment. (As a side note, I never heard this story until I told my sister I was writing this article.)
My girl was really paying attention now.
I told her that my friends and my clients share stories of assault in places they didn’t expect — at a city park in broad daylight, in a train station, at a music concert when they were with their friends, by a family friend on a camping trip, or at a sleepover. It can, and does, happen anywhere.
3. Ask questions, listen, and assess.
When I asked my daughter what she would do if something like this happened to her, she said “I would punch them and get away from them fast!”
(Oh baby girl, I thought. We have to talk about what usually happens. Freezing is the most common response.)
But first I said that I loved her response and that she had every right to defend herself. “Would I get in trouble if I hurt them?” she asked. No, I answered, you absolutely can defend yourself. I told her about the self defense class I took in my late 20s, DC Impact, and told her I’d like her to take a self defense class (like this one) too.
Assess her capacity to handle the conversation. During The Talk, I frequently stopped and checked in with her to see how she was feeling and what she was taking in. For as long as she seemed calm and attentive, we proceeded.
4. Educate her and reassure her.
I didn’t quote statistics, because I didn’t want to alarm her. I just laid the groundwork for awareness and shame protection.
“It happens to lots of people,” I said. “It can happen in public, and it can happen in private. In the daytime or in the nighttime. It can be a stranger, but a lot of the time, it’s someone you know and may not expect.” (In fact, 71% of perpetrators are known to the victim.)
“Most women I know have had some kind of experience like this,” I said. “But many men are good and kind and respectful and would never ever hurt girls or women.” We talked about all the men and boys she knows who respect and empower women and girls. We talked about how they demonstrate love and respect, kindness and support.
Right now, she’s entirely sure she knows who to trust. Her confidence, and general high self esteem, give me confidence she’ll avoid sexual assault. And I hope this talk will give her the awareness and presence to make her a less likely target.
But if she is a victim someday, I want to lay the groundwork now to help her avoid the shame and isolation that follows.
5. Talk about common reactions, guilt and shame.
I went back to her confident statement that she would punch an aggressor and run away. As a therapist who works with shame and trauma, I know this is unlikely to happen.
“I love that you’d protect yourself, honey. And I want you to whenever you can. But I want you to know that a lot of the time, when people get SURPRISE ATTACKS on their body, they freeze. They feel like all the power drains out of them. Their mind does one thing, and their body does another. Sometimes they can’t even remember what exactly happened. Then they get mad themselves for not reacting differently.”
My daughter nodded, taking this in. I told her I have clients who feel ashamed, and never before told anyone they’d been assaulted. That almost all the time, they feel guilty, and they are mad at themselves for being paralyzed, for not doing or saying the right thing — the thing that would have made it not happen, or the thing that would have made it better.
It’s normal to freeze, I told her. “Your brain and your body don’t work together, in part because you can’t believe it’s happening. So if that ever happens to you, I want you to remember: it’s not your fault if you freeze, and I don’t want you to feel guilty about it.” In this way, I hope to preemptively disable the landmines that get buried in sexual assault, described so brilliantly by the writer Craig Childs here.
Then we talked about what she would do. Her list: tell a friend, call me or her dad, talk to someone she trusts. I told her I will always be here for her and help her, no matter what. I said that because even though she knows I love her and will always be there, I wanted her to know that it would still be true if she were a victim of assault, and it would still be true even if she felt ashamed.
6. Model your strongest moral position; lay groundwork to heal trauma.
The rest of the world has strong messages, but you as her parent have the strongest and loudest voice of all. Use it.
Some things may seem self-evident but need to be said, loud and clear, to your child.
“No matter what,” I said to her, “No one has the right to touch your body without your permission. Ever. Ever. And if they do, I want you to know that it is wrong, it is illegal, it is a crime, and it is not your fault.”
I told her that even though she’s nodding now, it’s possible that if it happens to her, she might not react the way she expects to, and that’s normal. “If it happens to you, you might freeze. You might feel like it’s your fault. I’m telling you now, it’s not your fault. You might feel ashamed. But it’s the other person who should be ashamed, not you.”
I told her if it happens to her, I hope she would tell someone right away, and get help. I told her I would like to be one of the people she tells. I told her I would understand what she’s going through, and that I would help her.
7. Model your strength and healing.
If you’ve been in therapy, share it. If you’ve done sexual harassment training, share what you learned. If you’ve taken a self defense class, talk about it. A former boss of mine once hired an expert on sexual harassment response who met separately with the women and men. In our session, she modeled specific ways to respond to street harassment, something that was really life changing for me.
My daughter loved hearing my stories of calling out harassers on the streets of Washington DC when I lived there. (“Making kissing noises at me as I walk down the street is sexual harassment. I don’t like it; no woman likes it. Stop harassing women!”) Just knowing one smartass or assertive comeback is a great tool to have in your pocket; I’ve felt safer and more empowered ever since. I want that for my daughter; I want that for all girls.
She loved hearing about DC Impact, the full-impact, “model mugging” course I took. I told her about RADkids, and she’s all fired up to take it now. Classes like this take advantage of adrenalin-fueled learning, with realistic fight scenarios and fully padded martial arts instructors. Developed by a woman black belt who couldn’t believe she was raped even though she had mad martial arts skills, it utilizes situational learning, patterning responses into your muscle memory, like riding a bike. These classes are physically and emotionally empowering. And if you’ve been the victim of assault, they are particularly helpful in making you feel strong again.
8. Remind her of her rights (and share your anger).
Our daughters have the right to be blissfully unaware of sexual assault, but this right is not yet fully realized in our society. I told her it makes me so mad that we even have to talk about this. That it’s not fair. I told her I love her very much, and that part of me wishes I could be with her all the time to protect her, but another part of me knows she has every right to be carefree, without her mom hovering over her as she’s developing into a young adult. I want her to be independent and silly and have fun and feel free. And I want her to be smart (although it pisses me off to no end that I have to add that in.) We talked about the balance of fun and carefulness.
I hope you, too, will have The Talk with your daughter. If you’re like me, coming to terms with the idea that more than likely, your daughter will suffer assault, unwanted touch, and/or harassment in her young lifetime, please have The Talk with her. If you want to protect her, have The Talk with her. If you want to safeguard her mental health and protect her from the predictable shame, the silencing, and all the somatic symptoms that accompany carrying a horrible secret, please, have The Talk with her.
The Talk may or may not protect my daughter’s body. But I’m confident that it has already protected her psyche.
I’m more hopeful for my daughter and our girls now then I ever could have been for myself. Social media allows us to witness for each other on a massive scale. Serial abusers — despite being famous, wealthy, and intimidating — no longer can hide behind the shame and silence of individual victims. When we talk, we connect, naming behaviors and empowering survivors. Predatory contempt doesn’t have to scare us in the same way anymore. As awareness grows and shame decreases, our tolerance for sexual abuse plummets. The personal does, indeed, become political.
1/17/17
Meet Cindy!
Please welcome Cindy Martin, the new part-time Administrative Assistant at Wolcott Psychotherapy Associates. When you call or email for an appointment, Cindy is the skillful and kind person who will contact you. She abides by HIPAA standards and will honor and protect your confidentiality. Cindy helps run my business smoothly by screening my calls and emails, contacting clients, scheduling appointments and alerting me to any issues or questions you may have. Inquiries are typically answered within 48 hours. We’re thrilled to have you Cindy!
7/14/14
Anxiety and Six Easy Ways To Interrupt the Stress Response
Do you feel stressed out? Anxious?
Is it hard for you to relax? Do you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep? Feel panicky sometimes? Heart racing? Hard to take a deep breath? Does all this make it hard for you to function the way you’d like to?
The number one complaint I hear from clients entering my office for the first time is anxiety.
No doubt, we live in a thoroughly stressed out world. And as a result, many of us are anxious.
And anxiety feels awful. But luckily, it’s one of the easiest to treat mental health concerns!
All it takes is a little education, and some willingness to make some simple changes…changes that seem so small they’re easy ignore.
Anxiety doesn’t come out of nowhere. And yes, there are several possible contributing factors – genetics, family modeling, specific traumatic events, over-stimulation.
But the main reason you have anxiety is uninterrupted STRESS.
Now, stress is a normal part of life. Can’t live without it. Our “flight or flight” response has evolved us into a sophisticated, competent species. We get a lot done. And for the most part, we stay safe doing it.
Feeling stressed is appropriate for new and/or periodic/infrequent experiences. For stressful events, like an exam, or a first date. For avoiding a car accident. For pulling ourselves or a loved one out of danger.
Physiologically, our breathing gets shallow, the blood vessels in our extremities narrow, and our arteries dilate, allowing more blood to the brain. Cortisol, the stress hormone, surges through our body along with adrenalin. We’re ready for action.
We’re supposed to feel that surge of anxiety, allow it to propel us over the hump, the obstacle, or the scary experience…and then the stress is supposed to drop back down to our baseline. Fairly relaxed, open, unworried.
In other words, we’re meant to use stress…not let stress use us.
When the stress ends, if we’re intentional about our body’s need to recover, breathing returns to normal (full, deep belly breaths, not shallow upper chest breaths). Cortisol and adrenalin drop back down. Blood vessels resume their normal functioning.
Our bodies can and do recover from stress.
Unless.
Unless we get swept into the “doing, not being” current. Unless we’re over- scheduled and under-rested. Unless we are relentlessly hard on ourselves. Unless we’ve forgotten how to relax.
And apparently, a lot of us have forgotten. Stress that’s supposed to be intermittent becomes chronic.
In our busy and over-stimulating world, anxiety surges, and then before it can come down to baseline, it surges again. The stress level gets high and stays high, and then climbs ever higher with each new stressor. We don’t come down to baseline. We live in a chronic state of stress. We’re so used to it, we hardly notice.
But when we experience this kind of chronic stress, we never come down from our state of hyper-arousal. And over time, guess what happens? Chronic stress turns into an anxiety disorder.
That’s right: anxiety comes from, in large part, the fact that we don’t let our bodies recover from the natural spikes of stress that we experience in daily life.
Fast forward a little, and that’s when we end up with something off the following menu of anxiety disorders:
- Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
- Panic Disorder
- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
- Social Phobia (or Social Anxiety Disorder)
I want to share Six ways to interrupt your stress response.
Put these in your back pocket, print out the list, or keep it on your phone for reference. (Because when you are having a moment of intense anxiety, that’s the same moment you won’t be able to remember any of these tips).
1) Breathe. This is the quickest route to interrupt the stress response and head off an anxiety attack. Sit down, close your eyes, put your hand on your belly, and take a deep enough breath that you feel your belly rise and fall. Focus on getting air into the bottom part of your lungs, not just the top third where most of us like to breathe. Count to 4, in and to 4, out.
I advise my clients to start and end the day this way: 3 (or more) deep breaths before you get out of bed in the morning, and 3 (or more) before you go to sleep. And then build from there, doing it during the day, in your car at a red light or when sitting in a meeting. Get your body back in touch with the way we’re supposed to breathe.
2) Alternate tensing/relaxing muscle groups. Sit comfortably, and then raise your legs straight out in front of you, flexing your feet and tensing your leg muscles. Hold for a few seconds, then drop your feet back to the ground. Do a couple times. Take a deep breath in-between. Do the same with your arms, flexing your hands. Then your shoulders: shrug them up to your ears and drop down. Notice the warmth you feel as your blood rushes back into your extremities. That’s good, oxygenated blood, helping get rid of the stress hormones and bring you back into balance.
3) Have a micro-meditation session. One of the misnomers about meditation is that it has to be a significant amount of time. Not so! Just sit, close your eyes, and do a quick body scan. You’ll probably notice your jaw is tight. Move it around and maybe yawn. Let your tongue float in the middle of your mouth. Now take some deep belly breaths. Don’t try to control your thoughts or achieve a blank mind. Just notice them, along with the noise in the room or outside, and anything else your senses pick up. Just notice, and breathe. Voila! You just meditated. Even 1 or 2 minutes will lower your stress level and interrupt the climb up to anxiety.
4) Stretch. Stand up, open your arms, raise them above your head, bend over and reach for your toes. If you have a foam roller, lay down on it with your spine along the length of the roller. Open your arms and move them, really expanding your chest. Roll back and forth and break up some of the tension in your back. This also helps blood flow, oxygen, and the relaxation response
5) 30-second hug. Study after study shows that physical contact lowers our stress hormones. After just 20 seconds, your body begins to release oxytocin, a powerful hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain and increases the bond we feel with others. Make a concerted effort to get and give more hugs in your life. Connection is a great antidote to stress. And that leads to…
6) Connect with others. Isolation increases stress. Connection, with people we like and who like us, mitigates stress. I love the quote by Anne Lamott: “My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.” Connecting with others gets us out of our unhealthy thought patterns, makes us laugh, makes us feel like we’re not “terminally unique” and reminds us not to take ourselves so seriously. All good for interrupting the stress response that leads to anxiety.
So there you go: 6 easy ways to interrupt your stress response and get you on the road to anxiety disorder prevention.
I’d love to hear: What are your favorite ways to de-stress? Click on the title of this post to open up the comments below.
3/2/14
How to Spot — and Handle — a Sociopath
Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahlmer. Danny Rolling. Jim Jones. David Koresh. Charles Manson. Hannibal Lecter. Aileen Wuornos. Norman Bates. Names you probably think of — real and fiction — when you hear the word “sociopath”.
But did you know that we cross paths with sociopaths on a regular basis — and often don’t even know it?
All serial killers are sociopaths. But not all sociopaths are serial killers.
In fact, many researchers believe that 1 in 25 Americans fit the criteria for sociopathy. One in 25! Think of all the people you have met in your life. Average one in 25. That’s 4% of the population, or about 12 million Americans. Hard to believe, right?
Well, maybe not.
Sociopaths wreak havoc in people’s lives in quiet ways, too. In fact, that’s how most sociopaths work.
Have you ever known someone who left you feeling confused, devastated, or chilled – maybe all at once? Maybe it was a romantic partner you think back on and describe as evil. Maybe it was a boss whom you describe as psycho. Or that domineering neighbor.
The vast majority of sociopaths don’t kill. But they make people miserable. And they tend to get away with an awful lot.
Wouldn’t it be nice to recognize a sociopath before they do their damage?
And, once recognized, wouldn’t it be great to know how to deal with one?
Sociopathy is surprisingly difficult to see.
In her book The Sociopath Next Door, clinical psychologist and former Harvard faculty member Martha Stout, PhD, gives us a great roadmap for conceptualizing, understanding, and avoiding sociopaths.
First, shift your Hollywood version of the sociopath or psychopath (the terms are interchangeable) – a cold-blooded serial killer – to the actual definition of a sociopath.
Sociopathic characteristics include powerful charisma, charm, spontaneity, chronic manipulation, intensity, and risk taking.
Sociopaths are good at making you doubt yourself. Making you do things you wouldn’t normally do. Making you do things for them. Making you feel crazy.
Sociopaths like to win, they like to dominate.
But the defining characteristic of a sociopath is a person who has no conscience.
What does this mean? No empathy. An inability – not a choice, but an inability – to care or even think about the feelings of anyone else. An ability to move through life with complete disregard for their actions: no remorse, no capacity for shame, and no guilt.
Sociopaths can, because they are unhindered by guilt, manipulate their way to the top. It could be Wall Street. It could be the local school board. It could be the homeowner’s association. It could be government. It could be their relationship with you. It could be any role. Which top depends on the sociopath’s particular ambition, desire, talent and smarts.
And one of the most difficult things about dealing with a sociopath is when you see it….but others around you don’t.
Many sociopaths live their lives relatively undetected – except, perhaps, by those closest to them… and only then, sometimes, to those who have learned to identify a sociopath.
Sociopaths use many tools. They are described as charming, with an almost animal-like charisma. They have magnetism, an affinity for danger, spontaneity. They inspire a feeling of familiarity: “I just felt like I’d known her forever!” They establish intimacy quickly. They use “we” statements. They use seduction. They create distractions with social/professional roles: animal lover, humanitarian, benefactor. They engage in gaslighting – making you doubt your perceptions of reality.
Sociopaths are expert in identifying an easy mark – they can pick out the most trusting, decent person in the room. They use their victim’s goodness and capacity to trust against them. Crocodile tears are a favorite method. They are masterful at evoking pity and have incredible acting skills. In fact, sociopaths have an especially strong fondness for evoking pity.
Pity is carte blanche. Good people will let pathetic individuals get away with, sometimes literally, murder.
And when we pity, we are emotionally defenseless, emotionally vulnerable.
All sociopaths are violent – some emotionally, and some physically as well. For help in protecting yourself from violence in general – including sociopathic violence, I strongly recommend Gavin de Becker’s book, The Gift of Fear. This book discusses the predictability of violence – great for avoiding sociopaths. In particular, I like his Pre-Incident Indicators (PINs), which reads like a menu of sociopathic characteristics:
- Forced teaming. This is when a person implies he has something in common with you, claiming you have a shared predicament when that’s not really true.
- Speaking in “we” terms, i.e. “We don’t need to talk outside…Let’s go in.”
- Charm and Niceness. This is being polite and friendly to a chosen victim in order to manipulate him or her, or to disarm their mistrust.
- Too many details. If a person is lying they will add excessive details to make themselves sound more credible to their chosen victim.
- Typecasting. An insult is used to get a chosen victim who would otherwise ignore one to engage in conversation to counteract the insult. For example: “Oh, I bet you’re too stuck up to talk to a guy like me.” The tendency is for the chosen victim to want to prove the insult untrue.
- Loan Sharking. Giving unsolicited help to the chosen victim and anticipating they’ll feel obliged to extend some reciprocal openness in return.
- The Unsolicited Promise. A promise to do (or not do) something when no such promise is asked for; this usually means that such a promise will be broken. For example: an unsolicited, “I promise I’ll leave you alone after this,” usually means the chosen victim will not be left alone. Similarly, an unsolicited “I promise I won’t hurt you” usually means the person intends to hurt their chosen victim.
- Discounting the Word “No”. Refusing to accept rejection. “No thanks, I don’t need help,” the victim says. “Nonsense—it’s no trouble, we’re almost here!” says the sociopath.
So now you have a lead on how to recognize a sociopath, and hopefully red flags will rise when you encounter one.
But what if you’ve now realized you have a sociopath in your life – right now – and want to know how to handle them?
Stout lists “Thirteen Rules For Dealing With Sociopaths In Everyday Life.” I love this list and found it enlightening. Following is a paraphrase of what is written in her book.
1) Accept that some people have no conscience. And they don’t look like a serial killer. They look like us.
2) Always listen to your gut and prioritize what it tells you. “In a contest between your instincts and what is implied by the role a person has taken on – educator, doctor, leader, animal lover, policeman, humanist, parent – go with your instincts,” Stout urges.
3) Practice the “Rule of Threes”. Three strikes = out. One lie, one promise broken, one neglected responsibility – it could be a misunderstanding. Two: could be a serious mistake. Three: you are now dealing with a liar, and deceit lies at the heart of a person with no conscience. Cut your losses immediately.
4) Question authority. Heed your own anxieties and instincts. Especially around those who claim that by dominating others they are helping a greater good.
5) Suspect flattery. Know the difference between compliments and flattery. Compliments usually feel good. Flattery feels like too much. Know that sociopaths use flattery to manipulate.
6) Re-define your definition of respect. Discern between fear and respect. Sometimes the more we fear someone, the more we defer to them and offer them respect. Just because someone causes you to fear does not mean they are worthy of your respect. Separate the two.
7) Do not participate in intrigue – don’t play the game you’re being invited to play. Don’t compete with, or try to outsmart, or psychoanalyze, or even banter with a sociopath. Your #1 goal is to protect yourself.
8) Avoid. The best way to protect yourself is to avoid all contact. Minimize or eliminate the sociopath from your life. Although sociopaths are great actors, and can feign hurt feelings, know that they have no feelings to hurt – they are manipulating you.
9) Question your tendency to pity too easily. Evoking pity is a classic sociopathic tool. If you find yourself pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, chances are close to 100% that you are dealing with a sociopath. Related to this: challenge your need to be polite in all situations. Sociopaths take full advantage of our social reflexes. Remember: “No.” is a complete sentence.
10) Do not try to redeem the unredeemable. Second (and third and fourth) chances are for those who have a conscience. You can’t control someone else’s behavior. Although another favorite sociopathic trick is to defer blame and make other’s take responsibility for their behavior, “You owe me,” is another favorite phrase of the sociopath, know that you are not at fault. Again, learn how to cut your losses quickly.
11) No cover-ups. Never agree, for any reason, to help conceal the true character of a sociopath. “’Please don’t tell,’ is the trademark plea of thieves, child abusers – and sociopaths,” writes Stout. Do not listen to this self-serving request. Others deserve to be warned more than the sociopath deserves to be protected.
12) Defend your psyche. Don’t let someone without a conscience try to convince you that people aren’t good. Know that most of us do, thankfully, posses a conscience, and can love.
13) Live well. It is the best revenge.
Disturbing, isn’t it, to think about one in 25 of us having no conscience. One in 25 people being someone we need to avoid. Disturbing to think about the ease with which a sociopath creates a swath of destruction…and that they get away with it….and all you can do, usually, is steer clear.
But here’s another item I’d add to the list, something I’ve been known to say in my sessions with clients: 14) Time Wounds All Heels. (That’s not a typo. Eventually, karma catches up with bad folks). Sociopaths come to a bad end. For a thorough discussion on this, read Stout’s book. In a nutshell, because of the unrelenting boredom they feel, sociopaths create drama, take massive risks – even, sometimes, kill. It makes sense if you think about it – without human connection, what else is there? Because of their risk taking, it’s common for sociopaths to eventually be murdered, die of an overdose, or in an accident.
I write this not in the spirit of schadenfreude, but rather in celebration of our ability, the majority of us, to live lives full of depth, meaning, relationship, and love.
I’m curious to hear: what sociopaths have you encountered in your lives?
*click on title to open comments below