Category: Vulnerability

Emotions are a strength, not a flaw by Joanna warwick @ Tiny Buddha

8/7/2014

Emotions Are a Strength, Not a Design Flaw By Joanna Warwick (orginal blog post link:) http://tinybuddha.com/blog/emotions-strength-not-design-flaw/

Eyes that do not cry, do not see.” ~Swedish Proverb

Just get over it; don’t be so sensitive. You should toughen up and grow a thicker skin…

I’ve heard this advice so much over my life, but I’ve never seen it make anyone happy.

Advised to toughen up with thicker skins so we can protect ourselves, we end up just bottling it up inside and pushing away how we feel, hoping it looks like we’re strong.

It’s like trying to avoid our own shadow; believing it’s gone because it’s behind us, but it’s totally visible to anyone else who cares to look.

Instead of becoming stronger, this denying and rejecting behavior makes us more susceptible to danger, more fearful and wary, resulting in confusion and unhappiness, because we’ve thrown away the information we need to survive and thrive.

The Rhino’s Lesson While I was volunteering in South Africa for an animal conversation charity, I found myself in close proximity to a wild rhino in the early hours of the morning.

She was beautiful.

With only a few feet between us, and little shrub to block her path, she did not seek to fight or flee; she just stood there.
Although rhinos are quite blind, they have other strong senses, including smell, hearing, taste, external touch, and instinctual felt sense (internal and external nervous systems).

They have thick, layered, armored skin that protects them from sharp, thorny bushes, but they are not insensitive and tough.

In fact, their survival and ability to thrive is wholly dependent on their sensitivity.

She didn’t run or charge because she didn’t feel I was a threat.

Sensitivity Is Power Sensitivity means to be connected and aware of all our senses.

Our bodies are descendants of mammals, so we’re sensory beings.

This means, like the rhino, we are designed to use sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and felt sense to navigate the world around us and survive.

This sensory information creates an internal response to everything, including danger and safety, separation and bonding, otherwise known as emotions.

It’s a fact: we’re all emotional, male and female!

Unlike our animal cousins, though, we have an evolved conscious awareness to this emotional information, so they become defined as feelings—the language of emotions to which we attach judgment.

Instead of responding naturally and appropriately to this navigation system, we stress ourselves out, worry, shame, analyze, get embarrassed, get scared, get stuck, don’t act, ignore, or do the total opposite of what our body tells us to do.

The rhino does not question the sensory information the brain collects, it just acts appropriately either by running away and avoiding the danger, or standing still to assess and inquire.

Or, by running toward it, threatening with their full force of size, strength, weight, and their strong, sharp horn, not because they are bad tempered, but because they must still protect their well-being, even though they are naturally shy, curious, and non-predatory.

Confusing Safety and Danger Our brain continually processes sensory information to inform our responses to a situation or person by encouraging slowing down, moving toward or further away.

Teaching us to ignore, shame, disregard, and disconnect from this emotional sensory information leaves us unarmed, unprotected, and unsafe. It’s like being in conversation but only talking, never listening, and assuming what the other person thinks and feels.

The result:

We’re unaware of danger, so we don’t know how or when to protect ourselves.
We’re unaware or unsure if the people we choose to surround ourselves love, accept, and respect us, or are out to harm, belittle, or control us.
We lose the ability to know what is right for our happiness, peace, and love.
Our brains rewire to associate fear and danger with safety, and love and kindness with danger and being unsafe, so we seek the wrong thing.

This would be like the rhino ignoring her survival senses, walking up to a pack of lions, and saying, “Hey, I’m just as big as you, can I come hang out…”

How A War Zone Becomes Your Norm This behavior is most obvious in adults who experienced abusive childhoods or were parented inconsistently by alcoholics, drug addicts, or the mentally unstable, and if they were conditioned to be good girls and boys and shamed for expressing anger, desire, or tears.

In these environments, a child absorbs the message “Don’t express how you truly feel.”

If they accepted the sensory information they received, they would have had to accept that their home environment, where they needed to be cared and protected for survival, actually felt unsafe and rejecting to live in.

It’s unimaginable for a child to acknowledge that the parents who they love might not be safe, even if they come to see a difference in other families.

They learn not to respond appropriately, as it would result in possible physical danger, punishment and abandonment, so they disconnect, desensitize, do as they are told, try to please to make it safer, and stop trusting their feelings, because they lie and let them down.

If they continue this behavior into adulthood, they will keep seeking out the familiar—hurtful, disappointing, painful, unstable, rejecting, or even dangerous relationships and circumstances, to mirror the feelings of childhood.

Getting Emotionally Reconnected I used think women who cried were pathetic. I thought they should just get over it and pull themselves together, as this was how I saw my own emotions.

Every feeling I had was buried away, unspoken, and unshared, branded as either a sign of weakness, as regards to crying, or unacceptable, if it was anger. I considered every other feeling bad and dangerous.

My exterior had toughened up until I was cold and as hard as an ice queen.

I chose abusive lovers, friends, and bosses over and over again, even though when I met them all I had the same uncomfortable, sickie, withdrawing feelings. I just ignored them and believed I must be wrong; and I jumped into, at worst, dangerous and, at best, rejecting and unloving environments.

Part of my self-discovery was learning to get out of my judgmental head and back into my body; and trusting its natural ability to know my boundaries and how to protect myself, so I could begin to make the right choices for my health, well-being, and happiness.

I sought people who showed me how to demonstrate my emotions openly and gave me permission to feel angry and cry. I came to understand my body’s language, so, if I felt something, I got real and responded appropriately.

If I felt happy and safe, I smiled.

If I felt safe and laughed, I opened my mouth wide and laughed wholeheartedly from my belly.

If someone tried to disrespect me, I called them on it or walked away.

If I felt desire to touch and be touch, I trusted my intuition.

No longer confused and distrusting of my sensitivity, I didn’t need to waste my energy fighting and denying how I felt.

I was now open to love and intimacy, no longer terrified of it as dangerous, or afraid of rejection, because I felt safe in my ability to know and accept the truth.

I was now listening to the whole conversation and all the information I was receiving, so that like the beautiful rhino I could own our greatest strength of all: our emotional instinct to navigate the wilderness and know who is part of our herd.

By Joanna Warwick http://tinybuddha.com/blog/emotions-strength-not-design-flaw/

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See, Touch, Go ~ Elisha Goldstein, Phd

6/3/2014

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Following up on yesterday's R.A.I.N post; here is "See, Touch, Go".....R.A.I.N and See, Touch, Go are both simple, yet effective ways to work with emotions through a more accepting, compassionate stance. "If all you did was put your hand on your heart, and wish yourself well, it would be a moment well spent" ~ Elisha Goldstein. His article, published in mindful.org, is below. (Link to original article is at the end.)

3 Ways to Train the Compassionate Brain ~ Elisha Goldstein, Phd

When you’re focused on any activity, whether it’s your email, listening to a friend, or sitting in a formal meditation practice, your mind is bound to wander. In The Now Effect, I introduce the phrase “See, Touch, Go” as a way to remember how to work with the wandering mind. When it wanders we “See” that it wandered, then we “Touch” or spend a moment with the thought, and “Gently Go” back to the initial intention. Recently, a friend opened my eyes to how this phrase can be adapted to be a simple and practical way to strengthen a more compassionate brain.

I can’t wait to share it with you.

One day my friend Robin and I were discussing the power of “See, Touch, Go” to help stay focused on what matters. We talked about how it’s made us better listeners, more focused at work and less judgmental of ourselves when we veer from our intentions. She also told me that the other night she had an idea that adapted it for compassion. She said that the other night she was having a particularly difficult conversation with a friend and in that moment was able to See her own frustration arising and because she was aware of this she took an opportunity to Touch her heart to ignite a more loving awareness and decided to Go from there.

This transformed the moment from a battle to seeing the person in front of her as a woman with her own moment of struggling and that behind her eyes she had the same needs of wanting to feel understand and cared about. Wanting to feel accepted and have a sense of belonging.

With this compassionate awareness, Robin dropped down from her mental chatter and decided to listen to her friend and try and understand what she needed. The conversation went a whole lot better from there.

We can use this version of “See, Touch, Go” with self-compassion too. In a moment we that the volume in our minds is turned up with self-criticism and self-judgment, we can See what is happening, Touch our hearts as a gesture of self-kindness, maybe even asking what we actually need in that moment and Go from there. Instead of allowing the ruminative mind to spiral, maybe we step into a loving kindness practice to connect deeper to our hearts, or maybe a forgiveness practice to practice letting go. Or maybe what we need is to connect with another person so we call a friend, or get some space by taking a walk outside.

This reminds me of a saying in The Now Effect:
If all you did was put your hand on your heart and wish yourself well, it would be a moment well spent.

Here is the compassionate version of “See, Touch, Go” spelled out:

• See the struggle that is there, within you or within the relationship in the moment.

• Touch your heart either mentally or physically. Sensing into this area of the body is likely turn the volume down on the chatter and connect you to what really matters in the moment.

• Go from there, Go from the heart. Ask yourself, what do I need in this moment? What really matters? What action will align with what I need or what matters? Then do it.

It’s easy to see where this can come into play with ourselves, in parenting, at work, or in many of our relationships. Play with this practice with yourself and with others in the days to come and fine tune the skill of self-compassion and compassion. Allow your experience to enlighten you.

If we set the intention to practice the compassionate version of “See, Touch, Go” throughout the day I guarantee you that not only will you find more moments of love and joy, but the world would be a better place.

http://www.mindful.org/mindful-voices/on-mental-health/3-ways-to-train-the-compassionate-brain

Elisha Goldstein, PhD
Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and conducts a private practice in West Los Angeles. He is author of book The Now Effect (Atria Books, 2012), Mindfulness Meditations for the Anxious Traveler (Atria Books, 2013), and co-author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook (New Harbinger, 2010).

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The Power of empathy

4/21/2014

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New video posted on "The Power of Empathy", narrated by Brene Brown. Two and a half (or so) minutes full of information, insight, and practical "how to's". Check it out under the Ted Talks and Other Helpful Videos link on the side bar menu.

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How to talk about Mental Health Issues

3/4/2014

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Let's help to de-stigmatize and bring awareness and compassion to discrimination and other issues folks with mental health issues face. There is no shame in having to struggle and figure out how to live with strong emotions. We all have feelings, and some folks have bigger, more complicated feelings to figure out and manage than others. And that's not wrong....it simply is. The blog post reprinted below is from the TED blog and Thu-Huong Ha is the author. Here is the link to the original post: http://blog.ted.com/2013/12/18/how-should-we-talk-about-mental-health/
TED Blog Post:
Mental health suffers from a major image problem. One in every four people experiences mental health issues — yet more than 40 percent of countries worldwide have no mental health policy. Across the board it seems like we have no idea how to talk about it respectfully and responsibly.

Stigma and discrimination are the two biggest obstacles to a productive public dialogue about mental health; indeed, the problem seems to be largely one of communication. So we asked seven mental health experts: How should we talk about mental health? How can informed and sensitive people do it right – and how can the media do it responsibly?

End the stigma

Easier said than done, of course. Says journalist Andrew Solomon, whose tear-inducing talk about depression was published today: “People still think that it’s shameful if they have a mental illness. They think it shows personal weakness. They think it shows a failing. If it’s their children who have mental illness, they think it reflects their failure as parents.” This self-inflicted stigma can make it difficult for people to speak about even their own mental health problems. According to neuroscientist Sarah Caddick, this is because when someone points to his wrist to tell you it’s broken, you can easily understand the problem, but that’s not the case when the issue is with the three-pound mass hidden inside someone’s skull. “The minute you start talking about your mind, people get very anxious, because we associate that with being who we are, fundamentally with ‘us’ — us as a person, us as an individual, our thoughts, our fears, our hopes, our aspirations, our everything.” Says mental health care advocate Vikram Patel, “Feeling miserable could in fact be seen as part of you or an extension of your social world, and applying a biomedical label is not always something that everyone with depression, for example, is comfortable with.” Banishing the stigma attached to mental health issues can go a long way to facilitating genuinely useful conversations.

Avoid correlations between criminality and mental illness

People are too quick to dole out judgments on people who experience mental health problems, grouping them together when isolated incidents of violence or crime occur. Says Caddick, “You get a major incident like Columbine or Virginia Tech and then the media asks, ‘Why didn’t people know that he was bipolar?’ ‘Was he schizophrenic?’ From there, some people think, ‘Well, everybody with bipolar disease is likely to go out and shoot down a whole bunch of people in a school,’ or, ‘People who are schizophrenics shouldn’t be out on the street.’” Solomon agrees that this correlation works against a productive conversation about mental health: “The tendency to connect people’s crimes to mental illness diagnoses that are not in fact associated with criminality needs to go away. ‘This person murdered everyone because he was depressed.’ You think, yes, you could sort of indicate here this person was depressed and he murdered everyone, but most people who are depressed do not murder everyone.”

But do correlate more between mental illness and suicide

According to the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), 90 percent of people who die by suicide have depression or other mental disorders, or substance-abuse disorders in conjunction with other mental disorders. Yet we don’t give this link its due. Says Solomon, “Just as the association between mental illness and crime is too strong, the connection between mental illness and suicide is too weak. So I feel like what I constantly read in the articles is that ‘so-and-so killed himself because his business had gone bankrupt and his wife had left him.’ And I think, okay, those were the triggering circumstances, but he killed himself because he suffered from a mental illness that drove him to kill himself. He was terribly depressed.”

Avoid words like “crazy” or “psycho”

Not surprisingly, nearly all the mental health experts we consulted were quick to decry playground slang like “mental,” “schizo,” “crazy,” “loonie,” or “nutter,” stigmatizing words that become embedded in people’s minds from a young age. NIMH Director Thomas Insel takes that one step further — he doesn’t like the category of “mental health problems” in general. He says, “Should we call cancer a ‘cell cycle problem’? Calling serious mental illness a ‘behavioral health problem’ is like calling cancer a ‘pain problem.’” Comedian Ruby Wax, however, has a different point of view: “I call people that are mentally disturbed, you know, I say they’re crazy. I think in the right tone, that’s not the problem. Let’s not get caught in the minutiae of it.”

If you feel comfortable talking about your own experience with mental health, by all means, do so

Self-advocacy can be very powerful. It reaches people who are going through similar experiences as well as the general public. Solomon believes that people equipped to share their experiences should do so: “The most moving letter I ever received in a way was one that was only a sentence long, and it came from someone who didn’t sign his name. He just wrote me a postcard and said, ‘I was going to kill myself, but I read your book and changed my mind.’ And really, I thought, okay, if nobody else ever reads anything I’ve written, I’ve done some good in the world. It’s very important just to keep writing about these things, because I think there’s a trickle-down effect, and that the vocabulary that goes into serious books actually makes its way into the common experience — at least a little bit of it does — and makes it easier to talk about all of these things.” Solomon, Wax, as well as Temple Grandin, below, have all become public figures for mental health advocacy through sharing their own experiences.

Don’t define a person by his/her mental illnesses

Just as a tumor need not define a person, the same goes for mental illness. Although the line between mental health and the “rest” of a person is somewhat blurry, experts say the distinction is necessary. Says Insel: “We need to talk about mental disorders the way we talk about other medical disorders. We generally don’t let having a medical illness define a person’s identity, yet we are very cautious about revealing mental illness because it will somehow define a person’s competence or even suggest dangerousness.” Caddick agrees: “There’s a lot of things that go on in the brain, and just because one thing goes wrong doesn’t mean that everything’s going wrong.”

Separate the person from the problem

Continuing from the last, Insel and Patel both recommend avoiding language that identifies people only by their mental health problems. Says Insel, speak of “someone with schizophrenia,” not “the schizophrenic.” (Although, he points out, people with autism do often ask to be referred to as “autistic.”) Making this distinction clear, says Patel, honors and respects the individual. “What you’re really saying is, this is something that’s not part of a person; it’s something the person is suffering from or is living with, and it’s a different thing from the person.”

Sometimes the problem isn’t that we’re using the wrong words, but that we’re not talking at all

Sometimes it just starts with speaking up. In Solomon’s words: “Wittgenstein said, ‘All I know is what I have words for.’ And I think that if you don’t have the words for it, you can’t explain to somebody else what your need is. To some degree, you can’t even explain to yourself what your need is. And so you can’t get better.” But, as suicide prevention advocate Chris Le knows well, there are challenges to talking about suicide and depression. Organizations aiming to raise awareness about depression and suicide have to wrangle with suicide contagion, or copycat suicides that can be sparked by media attention, especially in young people. Le, though, feels strongly that promoting dialogue ultimately helps. One simple solution, he says, is to keep it personal: “Reach out to your friends. If you’re down, talk to somebody, because remember that one time that your friend was down, and you talked to them, and they felt a little better? So reach out, support people, talk about your emotions and get comfortable with them.”

Recognize the amazing contributions of people with mental health differences

Says autism activist Temple Grandin: “If it weren’t for a little bit of autism, we wouldn’t have any phones to talk on.” She describes the tech community as filled with autistic pioneers. “Einstein definitely was; he had no language until age three. How about Steve Jobs? I’ll only mention the dead ones by name. The live ones, you’ll have to look them up on the Internet.” Of depression, Grandin says: “The organizations involved with depression need to be emphasizing how many really creative people, people whose books we love, whose movies we love, their arts, have had a lot of problems with depression. See, a little bit of those genetics makes you sensitive, makes you emotional, makes you sensitive — and that makes you creative in a certain way.”

Humor helps

Humor, some say, is the best medicine for your brain. Says comedian Wax: “If you surround [your message] with comedy, you have an entrée into their psyche. People love novelty, so for me it’s sort of foreplay: I’m softening them up, and then you can deliver as dark as you want. But if you whine, if you whine about being a woman or being black, good luck. Everybody smells it. But it’s true. People are liberated by laughing at themselves.”

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The Power of Vulnerability ~ Brene Brown

5/22/2013

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Just posted another great TED TALK video by Brene Brown (click on Educational Videos link on the left links bar to locate this talk.) Exploring the concept of 'Wholeheartedness", Brene explores the following questons: How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to recognize that we are enough – that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy?

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Emotions are a strength, not a flaw by Joanna warwick @ Tiny Buddha

See, Touch, Go ~ Elisha Goldstein, Phd

The Power of empathy

How to talk about Mental Health Issues

The Power of Vulnerability ~ Brene Brown

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