CHAPTER 1
Mind
If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
—Lao Tzu
Jon's First Session
Jon walked into my office with a glum expression, and his shoulders slumped as he settled in a chair. Pulling a tissue from the box, he said, "I don't know what I'm going to do." Jon wiped his nose and started to cry. "I have problems sleeping," he told me. "I have migraine headaches and stomach problems. I have a beautiful wife and two great kids, and I'm miserable. The fire is out of me."
Jon grabbed another tissue and then continued. He said that he had just turned fifty and was experiencing a fear of dying. He mentioned that he was financially secure; his family had taken care of that. And there Jon sat, telling me that he could never say that he had done anything important for himself, for the world, or for anyone. He didn't know how good a father he was or how his kids felt about him, how his wife felt about him, or how he felt about himself. He saw himself as a robot with no feelings and no passion—no anything. And then he asked me, "What can I do?"
"What do you want to do?" I asked him. "You mentioned that you were in therapy for five years, from when you were eighteen until twenty-three, and nothing changed. It sounds like you have been miserable for most of your life."
Jon nodded and then shook his head at the state of his life.
I told Jon that I wanted to help him with three areas: (1) understanding how he had created this reality for himself, by looking at his old patterns of thinking, believing, being, and behaving; (2) deciding who he was and what he wanted his life to be like; and (3) constructing the steps necessary to get himself to his goals.
Then I asked, "What did you hear me say, Jon, and what is your response to that?"
"Dr. Lita, I'm so depressed that I am willing to do almost anything," he answered. "However, I'm not interested in taking any kind of medication. But I'm tired of spending all these years complaining and blaming. I won't go on like this anymore."
"It sounds like you're willing to start the journey," I said. I then asked Jon to tell me about what growing up in his family was like.
"I'm the oldest of three children," he said, "and the only one that completed a college degree. My brother, Craig, is forty-eight, and he's still into sports and plays basketball with his buddies in Ohio. Craig is in his second marriage, but there are no children. My sister, Marianne, is four years younger than me, and she travels all over the world. She's not married and has no children, and we never know where she is."
Jon told me that his father was the CEO of a major insurance company. His dad had spent several years of his life in the fire service. He loved taking care of the land and people and teaching others how to protect nature. Jon continued, "Dad was very strict with all of us, including my mom, who was a nurse during my early childhood. We started out very poor, but my father had a great intellect as well as the drive and passion to get us to a point where we would be financially comfortable. He actually became very successful pretty quickly."
"Now tell me about you, Jon. What were you like as a child?" I prompted.
Jon shared that he was a creative kid. "I used to love to create, to make paintings, write, restore artwork, and invent things," he told me. "I loved surfing and learned it from my cousin at a very young age. As I got a little older, I spent a lot of time repairing classic cars."
Jon recalled that he frequently felt lonely as a child, because his mother was busy with his two younger siblings, and his dad was often away. "I was in my dream fantasy land a lot," he said, "and I felt a bit confused about the real world and growing up."
Jon's brother, Craig, got into sports at an early age, and his sister, Marianne, acted rebelliously, even as a little girl. Marianne got most of the attention in the family because she was always up to something and getting into trouble.
Jon and I were off to a good start. He was sharing good information that would be helpful in our work together.
Sharing these patterns of his life with me helped Jon become aware of what it was like for him living in his family. He was creative and also responsible in his family, being the eldest. Being the oldest made him behave as his father had—he was strict and conscientious in all that he did. Although he was creative, there was a lot of rigidity, and it was difficult for him to access that creative part because of his rigid thinking. As he went through this journey to get to that place of inner peace, Jon became aware that he needed to be more open, to have a loving heart, and to love himself. Through therapy and our work together, he became conscious and aware of the work that was necessary for him to do.
We will follow Jon's journey of personal growth throughout the book.
Making Sense of Your Reality
This journey requires you to look at the reality you have constructed for yourself. How do you go about building a reality? Well, your mind uses your five senses to take in the data you experience in the world. The information that comes in through your senses—taste, sight, sound, touch, and smell—is sorted in a way that confirms and validates the ongoing story being crafted. A person's vision of the world and the story that each individual believes to be his or her so-called reality is actually an internal product of the mind.
All the raw data you received during your growing-up years was constructed into a story. The mind establishes values along the way: This is good. This is bad. This is to be feared. This produces pleasure. Throughout your life, you assemble your values and your stories in an ongoing process.
I found Jon's description of his creativity as a child and his love for making, fixing, and remodeling things to be impressive. What had happened to the spirited, excited, creative energy of that young Jon? Had the influence of a critical, demanding, strict, and rigid father impacted that beautiful energy?
Jon's ability to use analogy was also impressive. An analogy shows similarity between things that might seem different. If two things are alike in some ways, they are alike in some other ways as well. Analogy is used to help provide insight by comparing an unknown subject to one that is more familiar.
Jon mentioned many examples of his analogies over the course of our sessions. For example, Jon once said, "I just peeled off my coat," after his mother gave him a banana and asked, "Could you peel off the skin before I slice this into our cereal?"
The Voice inside Your Head
In case you haven't noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It keeps going on and on until you learn the skills to deal with it.
While you're driving away from home, you think, Did I close the garage door and turn off the coffeepot? I didn't call my mother. Maybe I should stop and call her now. No, I don't want to call her right now. Notice how the voice takes on both sides of the conversation. It doesn't care which side it takes as long as it gets to keep talking.
When you're ready for sleep at night, it's the voice inside your head that says, What am I doing? I can't go to sleep yet. I forgot to call my mother. I remembered in the car this morning, but I didn't call. If I don't call now—oh, it's too late. I shouldn't call her now. I don't even know why I thought about it. I need to fall asleep. Oh boy, now I can't fall asleep. I'm not tired anymore. But I have a big day tomorrow, and I have to get up early. No wonder you can't sleep. Why do you tolerate that voice talking to you all the time?
When you tune into it, this constant mental chatter will become obvious to you. It's actually a shocking realization when you first notice that your mind is continually talking. You might even try to yell at it in an attempt to shut it up. But then you realize that it is the voice yelling at the voice. It soon becomes obvious that you can't shut it up that way.
The best way to free yourself from this incessant chatter is to step back and view it objectively. View the voice as a vocalizing mechanism that is capable of making it appear as if someone is in there talking to you. Don't think about it; just notice it. In a way, the content of the voice's words doesn't matter, because it's just a voice talking inside your head.
An important step in true growth is realizing that you are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it. Realize that none of these voices are who you are. Most of the talking is a waste of time and energy. If you spend your time hoping that it doesn't rain tomorrow, you're wasting your time. Your thoughts won't change the chance of rain. You will someday come to see that there is no use for that incessant internal chatter, and there is no reason to constantly attempt to figure everything out. Eventually, you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself. It is the commotion the mind makes about life that causes the problems!
The mental voice talks for the same reason that a teakettle whistles. There is a buildup of energy inside that needs to be released. If you pay attention objectively, you will see that when there is a buildup of anxious, fearful, or desire-based energies inside, the voice becomes extremely active. For example, when you're angry with someone and feel like telling him or her off, watch yourself, and notice how many times the inner voice tells him or her off before you even see that person. When the energy builds inside, you want to do something about it. That voice talks because you're not okay inside, and talking is releasing the energy.
If you study this phenomenon carefully, you'll notice that the narration attempts to makes you feel more comfortable with the world around you. Like when you're a backseat driver, talking can make you feel as though things are more in your control. You feel as if you have some relationship with the things that are out of your control. By verbalizing mentally, you have brought that initial direct experience of the world into the realm of your thoughts. There, it becomes integrated with your other general thoughts, your analogies, and the thinking that makes up your value system and historical experience.
Look at the difference between your experience with the outside world and your interactions with the mental world. When you're just thinking, you are free to create whatever thoughts you want to in your mind, and your inner voice expresses these thoughts. You're accustomed to settling into the playground of the mind and creating and manipulating thoughts. This inner world is an alternate environment that is under your control. The outside world marches to its own rules.
When the inner voice narrates the outside world to you, those thoughts are side by side with all of your other thoughts, and they have equal weight with them. All of these thoughts intermix, which influences your experience of the world around you. You end up experiencing a personal presentation of the world, according to you, as opposed to a stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in.
For example, there are many things that you see at a given moment, yet you narrate only a few of them. The ones you discuss in your mind are the ones that matter the most to you. As you are hearing all of those different ideas in your mind, you are controlling what your consciousness is experiencing and the idea of your present reality. The reality your mind constructs is not reality itself.
Pay attention to this, because we do it all the time. As you're walking outside on a chilly day, you start to shiver, and the voice says, I feel cold. Now, how did that help you? You already knew it was cold. You're the one experiencing the cold. Why is the voice telling you this information? Well, remember that you re-create the world within your mind because you can control your mind, whereas you cannot control the world. That's why you mentally talk about the cold weather.
So if you can't get the outside world the way you'd like it, you internally verbalize it, judge it, complain about it, and then decide what to do about it. This makes you feel more empowered. When your body experiences cold, there might be nothing you can do to control the temperature. But when your mind verbalizes, It's cold, you can tell yourself, "I'll be home in a few minutes and feel warm and cozy in the house."
In the thought world, there is always something you can do to control the experience. Basically, you re-create the outside world inside yourself, and then you live it in your mind. What if you decided not to do this? If you decided not to narrate the world and instead just consciously observed it, you would feel more open and exposed, because you wouldn't know what was going to happen next, and your mind is accustomed to helping you cope. It does this by processing your current experiences in a way that makes them fit within your view of the past and visions of the future. All of these mental processes help to create a semblance of control. If your mind didn't regulate your view of reality, you would become too uncomfortable. Reality is too real for most of us, so we temper it with the mind.
True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection. You do this by constantly remembering that you are the one inside who notices the voice talking. The one inside who is aware that you are always talking to yourself about yourself is always silent. It is a doorway to the knowledge and the depths of your being. To be aware that you are listening to the voice talk is to stand on the threshold of a fantastic inner journey. If used properly, the same mental voice that has been a source of worry, distraction, and anxiety can become the launching ground for true spiritual awakening.
Later in this chapter, you'll have an opportunity to do exercises that will help you bring the mental voice under your control: journaling, self-talk, thought stopping, and self-love.
Back to Jon
During our first session, I shared this type of information with Jon. Near the end, I asked him, "What are you taking away from our session today?"
Jon said that he was on a new journey, and he felt committed to it. He would review his life growing up and pay attention to what it was like and how it felt. Jon said that he would keep a journal and write things down so that he could be clearer and understand how he thought and his process of creating his reality.
Jon realized that he was privileged, spoiled, and indulged as a kid growing up. He said he got everything he ever desired. Jon never had to get anything for himself or follow up on a task and complete it so that he could feel good about himself. Jon shared that he had never experienced a sense of confidence or a feeling of being happy from within. He told me that his family made fun of him because of his attempts to invent things, but he remembered that it was one of the hobbies that gave him the most joy.
"I'll work on my early stories and analogies and try to understand them and my old patterns so that I can see things with a new, clearer lens," Jon concluded.
Attachment Patterns
In working with his childhood stories, Jon took a look at his patterns. A pattern is a repeated way of doing something. A revealing pattern in how we think, feel, and behave as well as how we create our stories is our attachment style. These patterns are based on how we connected with our primary caregiver during childhood.
Attachment experiences in early childhood strongly influence whether an adult is secure in his or her relationships. For example, a secure child tends to believe that others will be there for him or her, because previous experiences have led the child to this conclusion. Once a child has developed such expectations, he or she tends to seek out relationship experiences that are consistent with those expectations. He or she will also perceive others in a way that is influenced by these beliefs.
Research has shown that our adult relationships are attachment relationships, and children who had secure relationships with parents will grow up to be secure in their romantic relationships. Having emotionally and physically available, attuned, responsive caregivers leads to the secure attachment style.
People with secure attachments have the following:
• long-term relationships
• high self-esteem
• support from their partners
• good sex
Individuals who had inconsistent parents who were sometimes there emotionally and physically and were sometimes not there will have anxious, resistant attachment patterns, characterized by the following:
• frequent breakups
• low self-esteem
• emotional instability
• lack of support
• jealousy
Other children found that their needs were usually not met by their parents, who were neglectful or even abusive physically or emotionally. They came to believe that communicating their needs was futile, as it would have no influence on the caregivers. This type of experience leads to a dismissive, avoidant pattern in adulthood. Individuals with this style will
• not put much effort into their relationships;
• find it easy to move from one relationship to another;
• prefer being alone;
• find excuses to avoid their partners, such as working long hours;
• not support their partners when required; and
• not disclose much about themselves.
These attachment styles create the thoughts that we have in our mind, the way we feel and behave, and our personality styles.
Secure Attachment
Personality style: Is balanced, has emotional equilibrium, is resilient, is able to make choices in life.
Thinking: "I am secure within myself. I can do what I need to do. I love myself."
Feeling: Relaxed, peaceful, positive, and joyful.
Behavior: Is emotionally and physically available to their relationships.
