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We live in a world filled with turmoil and contradictions. Some of these opposites, like eating when we are not hungry, or staying awake when we are exhausted, are so common that we may not even notice them. Some, however, are so significant that we cannot miss them and cannot imagine how we can manage them.
For instance, political leaders, who we hope will make the world a better place for our children and ourselves, tell lies, spew hatred, and threaten the safety of their own and other countries.
Some of us watch horrific scenes of mass destruction and death at the hands of humans and natural causes, from the comfort of our own secure homes. How do we manage that contradiction?
On a smaller yet still highly significant level, how do parents manage the push pull of making a child feel secure and safe without spoiling him?
In recent weeks I have heard numerous questions like this one: A couple has been planning their wedding for more than a year. Two days before, there is a mass murder in Las Vegas. Should they postpone the celebration in recognition of the suffering of others? Or should they celebrate life to honor those who died?
The natural world is also filled with disturbing opposition, from something as simple, yet potentially unpleasant, as the fact that some animals survive as a result of the death of others. Yet while we might accept those contradictions as part of the cycle of life, others are harder to take, as when a hurricane devastates Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands and an earthquake decimates parts of Mexico while New England enjoys a beautiful, albeit abnormally warm, autumn.
As ecosystems change with global warming, according to the National Geographic, “Some species will move farther north or become more successful; others won’t be able to move and could become extinct.” Further, the article reports, while there is more rain and snowfall across the globe, there will be an increase in drought in countries like Ethiopia, which already suffers from a lack of water.
A client who supported the presidential campaign of the President of the United States, who ran on a platform criticizing government spending, tells me that he finds it intolerable that two of the President’s advisors have acknowledged traveling on government planes rather than commercial carriers, at a tremendous and “completely unnecessary cost to the American people.” After reading an article in Fortune, reporting “A $1 trillion spending bill Trump signed Friday while in Bedminster includes $61 million to reimburse law enforcement agencies for the costs of protecting Trump and his family when they are at his private properties in New York and Florida. The bill would cover expenses incurred at Trump Tower and the Mar-a-Lago resort from the Nov. 8 election through September,” he asks, “How do I put that together with the fact that I believe that his ideas about government are right?”
The painful thing is that these opposites exist simultaneously. How do we manage them? How do we live with pain and anger, helplessness and sadness, and joy, pleasure, and excitement?
Sometimes opposites feel impossible to bear, but as Judith Viorst writes in her book Necessary Losses, some of these opposites are essential in order for us to grow. She calls it “the vital bond between our losses and gains…what we give up in order to grow.”
My PT colleague Leon Seltzer says that we can’t literally feel two different emotions at the same moment. “Rather,” he says, “it’s a situation in which both feelings constitute your emotional reality but can’t be felt, or experienced, to the same degree simultaneously.
The psychologist Virginia Demos tells us that we have feelings for a reason. But why would we have painfully opposing feelings at the same time? And what can we do about them?
The psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl coined a concept called “paradoxical intention,” in which a patient was asked to go intentionally engage in a behavior or thought that he or she wants to get rid of. The idea is that rather than trying so hard to get rid of the unwanted thought or behavior, by going more deeply into that very place, we can have a better understanding of it and, as a result of this understanding find ways to manage it differently.
His own experience in Nazi death camps, where he lived from 1943-1945, and where he lost his parents, brother, and wife and unborn child, as well as the experiences of his patients led Frankl to develop his approach. Frankl believed that humans are driven to search for meaning. He says that while we can’t avoid suffering, we can learn to find meaning in it and through that meaning, we can learn to cope with it.
Mindfulness practices, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, to name only a few contemporary approaches to psychological and emotional pain, echo Frankl’s thinking. My PT colleague Deborah Barrett writes about this idea in her post The Dialectic of Pain: Synthesizing Acceptance and Change. One of the things she says is,
As Marsha Linehan, founder of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) succinctly expressed: pain without acceptance = suffering. Linehan created the therapeutic approach of DBT to alleviate the intense emotional pain associated with borderline personality disorder. Its core assumption is that change and acceptance are intertwined. At first glance, this can be hard to fathom. We typically think of our efforts to change things as emerging out of non-acceptance. We either decide to accept things as they are or we seek to change: change or acceptance, not both.
Yet acceptance is, according to these practitioners, itself the first step on the path to change. *
Deborah Barrett says, “Through acceptance, people can commit to the process of coping as best as they can.” She also adds that acceptance reduces “negative self-talk that come from denying the problem.”
In my experience, negative self-talk often also comes when we think we need to take a big action to change a big problem. Many of us want to act, but we do not know what to do to change the situation. As a result, we feel helpless and hopeless. Depression, listlessness, and failure can follow.
Paying attention to what is hard also does not necessarily mean that we have to or can take immediate action to rectify the difficulty. In fact, we can’t change what is hard in a minute, a day, a week, a month, or sometimes, even in a year. But allowing ourselves to recognize pain, hurt, sadness, anger, and frustration and other difficult feelings also means that we will be able to feel love, happiness, contentment and other more pleasant emotions.
Although it sometimes feels like we are doing nothing, behavioral research has shown that simply allowing space for the hard, painful stuff along with everything else that we feel can make a shift in our own psyches and can also create tiny, almost unnoticed shifts in how we interact with others, which can change not only our own experiences, but in the world we live in.
If you want to see how this works for yourself, try a simple behavioral experiment: pay attention to how you are feeling. Try to find a single word to describe it – sad, angry, frightened, happy, joyful, etc. You may find that you can’t put all of your feelings into one word. If that’s the case, try to find a word for the feeling that is most dominant. Now try to find one for a less dominant emotion.
Try to communicate the more painful of those feelings to someone, not necessarily in words. You can try smiling at someone if you are happy, or frowning if you are angry. Notice the other person’s reaction. Marcia Linehan found that when she had DBT practitioners smile at strangers on the street, they started feeling better about themselves. Without any words exchanged. This is because people respond to our nonverbal cues, and we respond to their responses. Over time, our nonverbal communications have an impact on others, who may then spread that same emotion to still others.
Recognizing, accepting, and communicating your pain may not seem like a way to improve any situation; but maybe, if enough of us allow what is truly hard and painful to be hard and painful, we might just communicate the pain and difficulty to others. Over time, as a larger group, we might find ways to understand what this situation means, not just on a personal, but also on a global level. And when we understand what it means, we might be able to come up with some new ways to manage it – ways that genuinely do make a difference.
*My thanks to yoga teacher Ilana Siegel who opened this door for me and reminded me about Vitor Frankl’s work. She encourages students and teachers in training with her to pay attention to what is hard, and to allow it to be hard, rather than to try to force their way through.
copyright@fdbarth@2017
Also, please note: I love to know what you think about what I’ve written, so please leave your comments below, and if you have questions about the content or the ideas in this or any other post, put them in your comments! If you’d like to get feedback from other commenters, feel free to ask them questions as well. However, it is not possible for me to respond to individual requests for personal advice through email or the Internet. Thanks so much for understanding. DB
