Sophisticated Relationships

“Don’t underestimate the things in your life that bring you happiness.” – Pema Chödrön

In last week’s post, I discussed practicing patience with your emotions when you feel yourself getting hooked.

In addition to practicing patience, Pema Chödrön recommends and discusses the practice of cheerfulness. Both of these practices go hand in hand. Practicing patience allows us to reframe how we think about situations, and practicing cheerfulness causes us to become less provocable.

Practicing cheerfulness entails consciously taking note of all the little things throughout the day that are good: the sun on your back, a hot cup of tea, a smile from a stranger, an email from a friend. By doing this, we “begin to let the world touch our hearts.” And the result is that, over time, we become more easily touched, and more easily grateful, more easily appreciative of the smallest things.

Sometimes these moments are with things like the sky, the sun, birds… but often these moments are with people. So when we begin to notice the small kindnesses of the people around us, we increase the feeling of our connection with others… causing us to feel more kinship with people.

“Cheerfulness practice is not letting pleasantness or kindness or anything that feels good in your life go by, but actually noting it.”

I quoted this last week, but I find it’s so important that I want to reiterate it again this week:

“The more easily you are irritated, the more you strengthen the anger/hatred/aggression habit. Then you’ll find that less and less pleases you, and more and more things cause you to be unhappy. In other words, you become more thin-skinned. You kind of create your own future misery by strengthening your aggression and then, instead of as the years go on, having more and more inner strength to work with what comes up, it’s just the opposite. You become more irritable… more set in your ways… more provocable.”

We are generally addicted to our strong views and opinions… our self-righteousness (It IS right… it IS wrong) and giving that up is not at all comfortable. It’s not comfortable because we’re left with the restlessness of all of that energy. But we can reframe how we think about the discomfort that we go through. We can stop feeding and strengthening the “I don’t likes” and the “It is bads”… We can sit with the energy that all of this conjures and just let it course through our bodies.

There will always be something unjust happening in the world around us… do we want to become like those people? Do we want to behave as those people do? Or do we want the aggression to stop with us?

“If you see injustice, but you don’t get hooked/righteously indignant/enraged by what you are seeing, but somehow just clearly see that harm is being done, you can act in such a way that’s much more apt to achieve your ends. Getting hooked does not solve the problem.”

Does this mean that we shouldn’t be involved in social change? No… the basis of non-aggressive communication is to work on ourselves so that we can be really effective instruments of social change… “so that we can communicate from the heart with people and bring down the barriers rather than put them up between us.”

When we get hooked, the first thing to do is practice patience… notice our emotions and get curious about them. In the beginning, we will want to do what we’ve always done (verbalize our anger, hit someone, have a drink)… but we should stop and ask ourselves “Does doing what I’ve always done make me feel better?” And really, the best answer we can say is “Yes, for a short time”. But really, it doesn’t make us feel better in the long term and it actually increases the duration of the discomfort we are experiencing. If instead, we just sit with the discomfort and notice it, the duration of the discomfort, with practice, will get shorter and shorter. In addition, by training our minds in this way, the things that provoke us become less and less.

So this week, continue your practice with patience, and now add in the practice of cheerfulness. Notice the warmth around you. Steep yourself in the smallest actions of love and maybe you’ll find yourself smiling a little more often.

*~Lighthouse~*

Tags: Lighthouse, gratitude, happiness, insight, love, relationship with self, well-being by Lighthouse
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 ”Are you intimidated by me? Because if you’re intimidated by me, that’s something you’ll have to deal with.”

-Ving Rhames

I used to be afraid of and avoid people that I felt intimidated by. If a person was smart, pretty or both I felt intimidated. If a person was a bully, I felt intimidated. I avoided all people that made me feel intimidated. 

In my second year in college, I signed up for a study abroad program. We had a few class meetings wherein we got to meet everyone that would be traveling with us. I did not talk much to my classmates.

Between the long plane ride across the pond, and sharing four classes, I got to know a few of my classmates quite well. I became close with a few girls; two became my travel adventure partners, Kay and Michi.

One night in a pub in Mallorca, we were talking about first impressions. Michi confessed to me, that when she first saw me in class, she found me intimidating. I was dumbfounded. How could I be intimidating?

After talking to Michi, it turned out that one thing she interpreted as intimidating was a combination of my confidence in interacting with the professors and my lack of confidence in interacting with my classmates, I simply didn’t. When I wasn’t interacting with my classmates at first, she thought it was because I thought I was better than them. The reality was I didn’t know how to open a conversation. She also commented that I dressed differently from my peers, more grown up. That part was due to wearing work clothes to school, since I worked in an office part time at that time.

After my conversation with Michi, I continued to avoid people I felt were intimidating.

In my fifth year at college, I had a roommate, Ed, an expert in wine, a fabulous cook and pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Language. Not only was he all of these, I really enjoyed spending time with him.

Because of his culinary skills, and my desire to improve mine, we would throw occasional dinner parties. My friends got to know him. At one of our gatherings I invited my friend Andrew, whom I had not seen in a long time.

Andrew really liked everyone he met, except Ed, whom he thought was intimidating! Andrew explained that what made Ed seem intimidating was how he could go on endlessly about wine, that he talked about his Ivy League undergraduate school, his precise speech and his minor quibbles with language usage. He said if Ed didn’t do that stuff, he wouldn’t feel intimidated. Andrew said it was Ed’s fault. 

When did being yourself qualify as something to hide for fear that others might not like you or be intimidated by you?

My roommate’s precise speech and his minor quibbles with language usage are a result of him being passionate about it. Passionate enough to work hard and go for a Ph.D. As for Ed talking about wine and his undergrad school? Both responses to questions someone had asked—he wasn’t talking to brag.

I found Ed to be thoughtful and considerate. He made an effort to get to know people. Granted, he didn’t care to keep the company of everyone he met, only good matches.

My mother met Ed and she felt intimidated by him because he clearly could “best” her in his use and understanding of language. She concluded that he must think she was an imbecile in comparison with him.

My mother’s explanation was curious to me because Ed was not actually trying to “best” anyone, he simply is an expert in language. The way he talked, and what he talked about was a reflection of what was important to him. I’ve concluded that Ed was not trying to be intimidating, how Andrew and my mother thought about Ed was what caused them to feel intimidated.

It dawned on me; maybe many of the people I felt intimidated by was a product of me intimidating myself because of how I thought about them.

I took on a new challenge:

Get to Know People I Feel Intimidated By

I tested this new theory by making a concerted effort to get to know everyone I felt intimidated by. One story that comes to mind is a woman I’d met in grad school that I thought was a genius. I’d read one of Whitney’s essays and was stunned with how well written and researched it was, compared to everyone else’s- including mine. I was not alone in my high opinion of her. Additionally, she already had a Masters from a prestigious University.

I dreaded any interaction with her, because I couldn’t measure up. As I got to know her I realized I felt intimidated by what I thought about her and myself, not because she was trying to make me feel that way. I’d put her on a pedestal. Through getting to know her, I learned she was human just like me. We became regular lunch buddies until the end of the school, and still keep in touch.

When I was 25, I volunteered at a start-up non-profit organization and like everyone there I wore different hats. One of the hats included working on and co-hosting their first fund-raiser, where at the party I met several people, one of whom included a stunningly gorgeous woman Ella and a man I would date for a short while, Simon. They were good friends. I hadn’t thought much about Ella after the party, until the first time I went to meet Simon who was staying with friends.

His friends happened to be Kurt and his Ella. Gulp As I learned more about Ella, I found that not only was she stunningly gorgeous, she was smart, she worked at a tech company, she was a phenomenal cook, a stylish dresser, kept a magazine ready home and was somewhat aloof. Yikes. Up went the pedestal.

Ella and I had mutual friends in addition to Simon. One of them, Travis, invited me to go hiking with Ella and her husband. I accepted and on the hike spent most of my time with the woman that scared me. Travis and Kurt were a little faster than we were, so Ella and I spent most of the hike talking. It turns out, she, like me, was also human. Again, my fears were all in my head. What I perceived as aloof was shyness.

That was five years ago. Today, Ella is one of my best friends. So much for intimidating.

Once in a while I came across someone who intentionally tried to be intimidating. Jack was one such person.  Jack’s company purchased an apartment building I lived in. He tried to illegally evict my roommate and me. He said that we were just little nobodies and we shouldn’t even try to fight him, that he could outspend us in legal fees. Jack wanted to cow me into doing what he wanted so he could make more money off of the unit I lived in.  He was so mean that I was in tears after some conversations.  That settled it for me, I wasn’t going to try to get to know him, but I would stand up to his challenge.

In this case, I initially found him intimidating, because he was trying to be. However I also would not let myself cave. No matter how afraid I was of him, I would fight this, and I did. Jack could not scare me into giving him his way. The more interactions we had, the less afraid I became.  He did not get his way. 

While I don’t want to spend time with Jack or people like him, he was a gift for me. I could have given up and moved on, and no one would have faulted me for it. Instead, I dug in my heels. Because of my experience, I grew. I learned his behavior is information about who he is, not about who I have to be in relationship to him. Even if I had lost, I would have still learned this.  I still have to relearn this every now and then.

So now when I don’t spend time with someone, it is not based on whether or not I feel intimidated by them.  It is based on whether or not we are a match.

What I found was that often times when I felt intimidated by someone, it was me doing it to myself.  Rarely it was someone trying to make fearful.  Feeling intimidated was a product of how I thought about and dealt with the situation, no matter what the other person was doing. I may have missed out on some marvelous friendships in the past.

Now, on the rare occasion that I am feeling intimidated I remember three things:

1) Most people that I find intimidating are actually pretty awesome and human just like me.

2) It isn’t them that is making me feel this way, it’s me.

3) I have the ability to think and act differently in the situation.

Lexi*

Tags: Lexi, anxiety, authentic, character, expectations, relationship with self by Lexi
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“Again and again, whenever we’re challenged, there’s the opportunity to open to the difficulty, and let the difficulty make us more compassionate and wise.” – Pema Chödrön

My friends and I recently got together to listen to a CD lecture by Pema Chödrön called Don’t Bite The Hook: Finding Freedom from Anger, Resentment, and Other Destructive Emotions. It’s a recorded talk where Chödrön teaches that it’s “possible to relate constructively to the inevitable shocks, losses, and frustrations of life so that we can find true happiness.”

I thought this post would just be a review of the talk… but as I was re-listening to the CDs and taking notes, I realized that there was so much important and useful information contained here, and myself and so many of my friends could really use this. So I decided to really dissect the talk… and it will be the subject of my next several blog posts.

Even though I am giving you a breakdown of the information here, I encourage you to buy the CDs and listen for yourself. The way Chödrön delivers her message – her stories, her wit, her humor, and her voice… it’s worth hearing and sharing with… everyone really.

There are two causes for our anger:
1) Getting what we don’t want
2) Not getting what we do want

Most of us are heavily invested in what we like and what we dislike. And it’s this investment, this charge behind our emotions, that Chödrön refers to as “getting hooked”

The goal isn’t to not have likes or dislikes. But rather, the goal is to be openly curious about other people’s views and to not be threatened by them.

Most anger starts with a small ember… a minor irritation, something that irks us. We usually feel some sort of discomfort… in most people, it starts in the stomach. And then our thoughts come in as reinforcement, telling ourselves story after story, until the anger becomes big enough to act on and be verbalized.

So what do we do when we feel anger, or resentment, or irritability?

The first thing Chödrön recommends is to practice patience. Patience, in this case, means “to sit still and with the vulnerability of the situation, let yourself feel the soft spot in your heart and let your mind remain open and not follow the momentum of aggression. Sitting still with the restlessness and the pain of that energy. That’s the challenge!”

What about instead of allowing our thoughts to fan the heat of the ember, we sat still with our thoughts and observed them? What if instead of doing or saying anything, we just sat and watched the discomfort? What if instead of feeding the story-line, we stayed with the restlessness of the energy?

What exactly does it mean to observe your emotions. DBT Self Help has a nice way of describing the process: “Put it over there and look at it, maybe as if it were on a screen or a stage. Describe in words what the experience of that emotion is like. This also helps to give you distance and perspective. Try to experience your emotion as a wave, coming and going. You may find it helpful to concentrate on some part of the emotion, like how your body is feeling, or some image about it.”

When you observe your anger you may notice that it doesn’t “feel” good. Next time you feel yourself becoming angry, ask yourself “Is this making me happy?”. The insight that your anger feels bad is important

“Foresight wisdom brings foresight courage”

Just having a sense of how things work and how things develop can give you courage to be patient and to not hurry to escalate your aggression.

Start practicing with the small things. Chödrön refers to this as “Bourgeois suffering”: traffic jams, lines for coffee, etc. Use the small incidents as practice, so when the large incidents come up, they are easier to deal with.

“If you try to be patient in great adversity if you haven’t developed the habit, it’s very tough. It’s a quality that you develop of humor, lightness, perspective…”

“The more easily you are irritated, the more you strengthen the anger/hatred/aggression habit. Then you’ll find that less and less pleases you, and more and more things cause you to be unhappy. In other words, you become more thin-skinned. You kind of create your own future misery by strengthening your aggression and then, instead of as the years go on, having more and more inner strength to work with what comes up, it’s just the opposite. You become more irritable… more set in your ways… more provocable.”

If there is a way to solve the problem, then take steps to solve the problem. If there is nothing you can do, ask yourself “What is the point of getting worked up?”

Perhaps this week you can try to sit with your irritations… practice patience and see what the result brings to you.

“There has to be groups of people that are of like mind to hold our seat in the face of challenge and not follow the momentum of escalating the aggression in our own hearts and minds… And instead, letting the very same circumstances cause us to have a feeling of kinship with the suffering of other beings no matter what side we think they’re on… no matter what their views are. That the whole situation could make us more open and more loving to the world rather than more afraid” – Pema Chödrön

*~Lighthouse~*

Tags: Lighthouse, action, gratitude, happiness, relationship with self, well-being by Lighthouse
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“If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.”

-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Last week I said, “We are all born into some kind of mess for which we are not responsible, and if we want something different, we must become responsible for making that happen.” In order to have a healthier relationship with others, and myself I’ve decided it is time for to walk my talk and work on a mess that has nagged me for years.

Essentially, I have a little gremlin on my shoulder constantly nagging me about my appearance. While appearance is important to a degree, the degree my gremlin nags me is irrational and unacceptable.

At 5′8″, I have weighed between 115 and 155 pounds. At any weight, I would look in the mirror and see myself as a huge beast. I would hone in on areas that had fat (as they should) and upset myself because I was not thin “enough”. Usually the lighter I was, the more I would obsess. I have no realistic desire to weigh less than 125lbs again, anything less than that is unhealthy for my frame.

I was not willing to starve myself to be “perfect”, nor was I willing to binge or purge because I was also interested in being healthy. For several years, I hit the gym six days a week. Many people complemented me on my physique; it didn’t count, because I didn’t see it.  While I was smaller, because muscle weighs more than fat, I still felt fat.

Eventually I would give up the healthier lifestyle.  I would get tired of always working at looking better, and not seeing any results.  I would give in to eating more, eating poorly, and not exercising. Eventually I would start again, when I was tired of being heavier and less healthy than I would prefer.

Over the last two years, I tried again, and started to appreciate my results.

Ten months ago I had been consistently eating well and excercising regularly for a while.  Then I, or maybe my gremlin, became hyper-focused on other things. My hairline? Was my hair getting thinner? My skin, was that a new blemish? Was I wrinkling? My nose, perhaps it was swollen on one side, was it getting bigger? This last one was somewhat of a wake-up call, as up until then I perceived my nose as one of my better features.  These kinds of thoughts are not ones I share often; I tend to keep them to myself. 

Another irrational thought that I managed to put to rest a while ago was that other people were lying to my when they complimented me.  At some point, I chalked it up to their lack of standards.  While I no longer think either of those things now, reassurance from other people does not actually shift my self-perception. 

Then I stressed out in March and gave myself a “break” and many excuses as to why I could stop eating well and exercising regularly. I gained weight, and stopped obsessing on my other perceived appearance issues, which was interesting, and went back to obsessing on weight being the primary one. By October, I started encouraging healthy habits in myself, again.

I’ve noticed a pattern over the years– no matter what, I don’t like how I look more often than I appreciate or like it. At any point in time when I looked at pictures of my past self, my present self sees them as better looking than I remember feeling. Although I remember feeling as bad about myself then as I do.  This was a clue into my pattern.

The relatively recent beliefs that other things were wrong with my appearance when I was okay with my weight was another wake-up call.  I would obsess on my skin, and check in the mirror to make sure nothing had gotten worse. I looked at every photo someone took of me so that I can veto it if I think I look too ugly. I spent $6,000 dollars on a dermatologist to fix my rosacea.  After everything was done, I still sometimes cannot perceive a difference in my skin.  Yet others can. I had a mole removed on my arm that was not particularly noticeable. If I have acne, or a perceived blemish, I pick at it, increasing the likelihood of scarring or infection!  I actually feel embarrassed talking about my inner irrational beliefs.

I recently helped some friends with a conference.  I was on stage in front of an audience and a camera.  My thoughts were dominated by my gremlin.  How did I looked on film, what was the camera noticing? Was my hair a mess? Did it see my pooch? Was my skin red? Could it see that zit on my chin? Was my skin too shiny? Was my posture good enough?

I know at some point in my life, I want to do public speaking, and if I have that noise in my head, it will affect my ability to convey my messages. I didn’t have this problem in improv, because it was a small class, not a big audience.

Some things that have prevented me from being totally debilitated are: I believe that well groomed trumps ugly. I don’t care (often) what other people think of me. Some guys are not that picky when it comes to looks.  I would remind myself that I do not have the ability to judge my own appearance accurately.  I would focus on healthy as more important than underweight.  I would remind myself that my friends value character over appearance and would be honest with me (one of the virtues of hanging with a technical crowd).  I don’t have to live up to society’s standards.  I know that some of my beautiful friends think they are less than too.  I know that among millions of women and men, I’m not alone in my lack of appreciation for my body when it is healthy.

Where did this irrational way of thinking come from? A tiny bit from some of the very strict rules the media and society has over what is considered beautiful that leaked in before I could think rationally. More importantly, my mother was a huge influence.

Growing up as a child, my mother was always thin, youthful in appearance and well groomed. She dressed to impress men.  She constantly asked my younger sister and me if she was fat, or if she looked old. Even now, at nearly sixty, she doesn’t look a day over forty-six and a half.  She has stopped asking.

I was always extremely effortlessly rail-thin as a kid, and my sister was a cute baby-fat kid, but not actually an overweight child.  I looked at childhood pictures last night, and my sister was a normal looking kid.

Unfortunately, because of whatever demons haunted my mother, she would pick on my sister’s eating habits.  This heavily skewed my sister’s perception of herself.

While my sister got the brunt of it, both our perceptions of reality were skewed. For me a child who did not see my mother or sister as fat, I was constantly being told my perception was wrong.  This reinforcement from an authority figure damaged my ability to think of my body in a healthy way. 

The good news is this is not as bad as it could be.  The better news is I can change this.

I’ve been passively fighting this skew in my perception of reality most of my life.  I blamed my mother for it.  I forgive her now, realizing she did the best she could. 

I realize that while my life would be easier if not for this inter-generational transmission from my mother, it is solely my responsibility to help myself, regardless of what my mother does.  Taking ownership feels more active. 

My goals are:

1. Help my inner gremlin be a helpful rather than hurtful
2. To replace or eradicate my behavior of picking at blemishes
3. To appreciate my body, rather than criticize it.

 

The first step for me has already been taken, acknowledging that a part of my inner world is in need of recalibration.  This is something that I need to work on, as I improve my diet, exercise levels, and other markers of good health.  If I do not work on my inner-self, I will continue the pattern of being healthy, giving up, and becoming unhealthy.  Rinse and repeat. 

The next step for me is to have a very frank conversation with my mother, telling her that I don’t want to talk about appearance with her anymore.  When the topic is broached, to remind myself, it is not issue.  I’m fortunate in that this does not come up often any more and that I can have a conversation like this with my mother, not everyone can. 

Another is to stop picking at my skin.  I asked the dermatologist if he had any suggestions, and his solution was to put me on Wellbutrin.  I was suprised he didn’t just say something easier said than done, like stop it!

I declined the perscription.  Instead I used the idea of wellbutrin and my lack of desire to take it to help reduce the amount of picking that I did.  When I felt the impulse to pick, I would remind myself of wellbutrin, and then often I would do something else instead.

I recently remembered that giving people alternative behaviors to choose from when they wanted to reduce an undesirable behavior was sometimes helpful, so I decided my alternative behavior would be to floss my teeth.  I may add more.

I don’t know how to effectively create a helpful gremlin so I will educate myself with some books on the topic.  The first one I will read is Feeling Good About the Way You Look, if that is not enough I will read The Broken Mirror.

In addition, I will also seek therapy on this specific issue.  I know that is something that works for me.  Research shows that Cognitive Behavioral Therapies are most effective with this cluster of symptoms.

I am also curious about the readers of Sophisticated Relationships who have had similar issues.  How did you get there?  Where are you now?  What has helped you?  What has not? 

I know I won’t “fix” this overnight.  It will take some time, and patience with myself.  I do know that I will be able to have a more realistic relationship with myself.  I hope for a closer relationship with others– especially without all the chatter from gremlin.  This is a process.

Lexi*

Tags: Lexi, action, expectations, family, happiness, honesty, intimacy, relationship with self by Lexi
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