KURT FROST psychotherapy

Category: đź”± Psychology & Mental Health

  • Sometimes unsafe & shame can feel similar

    Reading Time: 5 minutes

    American Gods is a show I finished recently and really enjoyed. Neil Gaiman is a masterful writer and has written many comics/graphic novels and books that I really love. His work is not only entertaining, but extremely well researched and has many layers to consider in the stories.

    Toni inviting Salim to a party that he feels uncomfortable attending. (American Gods)
    Toni inviting Salim to a party that he feels uncomfortable attending. (American Gods)

    At this point in American Gods, all we really need to know for what I am saying here is that the scene I am talking about is about a guy, Salim, who is struggling with love, the loss of love and trying to understand and accept who he is. He meets this woman who runs the hotel he is staying at, Toni, and she invites him to the party they are having that night. He is feeling awkward and self-conscious. He makes some comment about feeling “unsafe”, to which she replies:

    Sometimes unsafe and shame can feel similar, but shame is a whole lot of made-up bullshit… Try being your true self, in your own right. It may feel scary at first, but you’ll be safe.

    ~ Toni – American Gods, S3E8, 30 min

    I really liked this line and have a few thoughts on it…

    —

    Unsafe is a form of fear. That we are not going to be OK. It may not be a life and death kind of unsafe, but something still feels like it will be jeopardized if we do not protect ourselves or do something so we can move back to feeling OK again.

    What if Toni is right and feeling ashamed is just masquerading as feeling unsafe, because that feels more acceptable? Our safety is something we can externalize and shift the danger and “bad guy” to something outside of ourselves. Shame is all inside. It is us. We protect ourselves when we feel unsafe. There is a sense of power and control in that. We hate ourselves when we feel ashamed. There is nothing much more vulnerable than feeling like we can’t even count on ourselves. Like we are less than.

    But, as Toni says, “…shame is a whole lot of made-up bullshit.” It is the story we are telling ourselves and because it is spawned in the depths of strong negative emotions, we can be sure that it is also largely “made-up bullshit” of distorted thoughts and beliefs.

    Merely knowing this truth is not enough to just let the shame go. But being able to see the shame for what it is allows us to bring it more out into the light of our consciousness and view it in ways that we maybe haven’t before. The superficial story of shame can be an infinite amount of things, but the deep-down belief that we keep telling ourselves is always the same: we are not good enough or OK as we are.

    If shame is about not being whole – for that is what being less than OK or good enough is really saying – then it is also completely understandable that the emotions get switched so easily to the fear and categorized under the feeling of being unsafe. For if we are not our complete self, we are truly playing with “less than a full deck”, so to speak. It can feel like there is not enough of us to manage, care for or protect ourselves. It is infantilizing ourselves and that can feel not just embarrassingly shameful, but terrifyingly unsafe. Again, even if it does not feel like a life and death scenario, we may sit back and believe deep in our heart that we don’t have what it takes to manage ourselves and our life adequately. To watch ourselves show up in the world, day after day, knowing that it is only a matter of time before we screw it up again. No wonder we feel unsafe and want to protect ourselves…hell, mostly from ourselves!

    Now, we have already established that this is all bullshit… the made-up kind. We’ve also gone over that merely knowing this won’t really save us from doing it again. But, at least one antidote to this stinking pit of a hell of our own making is to start to wonder where the rest of “us” has gone. The rest of us that we feel is not present in us. Unless something is going on that I am not aware of, all of us, all of our parts, are there, somewhere. It was never gone and it has been only a whole lot of internal propaganda that has brainwashed us into believing that we are deficient.

    Just like believing that we are unsafe can give us power and control to think we are protecting ourselves from some outside threat, it is that same thinking that allows us to give up ownership to the parts of ourselves that can make this better…make us whole again. The others in the world whom we’ve been jealous of for being able to handle things that we can never seem to get together ourselves are really just us desperately looking for that part of us that we are too afraid to embrace.

    I mean, it is not literally that. Who knows exactly what it is for each of us, but it definitely is us not giving ourselves (our whole selves!) a chance to see if we can do it. It is so much easier to look at others, see just the positive outsides that they show us and compare that to our most negative beliefs about our insides. We just never give ourselves a chance and definitely miss the part about how other people are probably doing the same messed-up thing we are. (Why are humans so complex and messed up?)

    Once again, Toni comes to the rescue with “Try being your true self, in your own right. It may feel scary at first, but you’ll be safe.” Specifically, she means that Salim will have others to support him if he can let himself go tonight and be his true self, but we each have our own version of this fork in the road. It would feel a whole lot easier if we all had a Toni and those awesome, supportive, polyamorous, sex party people there to let us relax into being us, but it doesn’t mean that we are totally alone. Believing that is also selling ourselves short.

    Be brave, take small steps, look at your fears and wonder where inside of you the hero you are looking for is. Trust that others are not judging you nearly as harshly as you are yourself and that there are many more people who want to support you, to love you if you are brave enough to try being your true self. And most likely won’t throw you away if you aren’t very good at it yet… stop buying into that BS.

    Why it is so easy for us to believe we are so shitty is beyond me. I get why it happens and see all the ways I do it to myself. It is just heartbreaking that it is so universally easy for us to do. How so many full and rich lives are wasted looking for a missing piece that was just hiding out inside us looking like someone else out there in the world. We can stop trying to look for it outside of ourselves and stop seeing others as a fix for our broken selves. Others will seem all the more beautiful when we can start seeing ourselves that way too.

  • Improv & Personal Development

    Improv & Personal Development

    Reading Time: 5 minutes

    The idea of “yes… and…” is a mainstay in improv. It’s also a good attitude to have towards personal development, healing and life in general.

    As I generally understand it, the basic idea for “yes… and…” is that it’s about keeping things moving, not shutting them down with something new or overly clever and different. It is collaborating and sharing and not taking the limelight for oneself. It helps to keep the improv going and to build a more cohesive narrative. A useful tool to help everyone play well with others.

    The exact, nuanced idea of how it works in improv is less important than the general idea of being open to something that we have in front of us and seeing what we can do to work with it which I think is so valuable.

    Sometimes we need to have hard boundaries and close things off. Boundaries are extremely important, but often it’s not so black-and-white. Instead of “No… end of story.”, sometimes we can be open to saying yes to something, but also not sell ourselves out in the process. Maybe we can agree to something for a certain period of time or under specific conditions? Sometimes we can say yes to a person or an idea, but does it mean we have to throw ourselves fully in?

    We can say yes and still have boundaries. 1

    When it comes to working with other humans, relationships don’t need to be all or nothing either. This may seem like a no-brainer, but we often get lost in how we apply it.

    I think that it is easy to get caught up in the extremes of thinking that we need to protect our personal sovereignty if someone does not fully resonate with us. Or that we can be patient, flexible and accommodating, even if it does not resonate or serve us, because we are convinced we can find a way to make things work. You go down either ends of that spectrum of independence-dependence and trouble will be waiting for you.

    I’ve heard relationships described as overlapping circles (Venn diagrams). Some people overlap with us a lot (strong connections) and some very little (weak connections). The degree of the relationship is the area where the two circles overlap.

    Problems seem to come when we think of connecting with someone as a binary interaction of connection-no connection. From that mindset, someone can be great and they fully resonate with you, they “get” you or they are “not right for us” or “bad news”. Again, at the extremes, this is easy to get. Someone who seems so great and then we find out they are also a serial killer is easy to let go of. (I don’t think it has helped Harley Quinn to be so flexible with her undying love for the Joker, in DC Comics.)

    But, what about connections of more marginal relationship overlap? I argue that the marginally overlapping circles of relationships make up a vast majority of the relationships we have. Do they get excluded from regular or larger portions of our lives because they don’t make the cut to be “besties”?

    The other extreme is just as bad. It can be easy to delude ourselves into thinking that we completely connect (overlap) with someone. Though some people do definitely have more in common with us than others, it is certainly quite improbable that we are going to find someone who can meet us so completely. 2 This is most likely happening from a deep desire to want connection (and probably some lacking self-esteem and hurt parts in us) and we will convince ourselves by any means possible that this is good and we can make it work. In this scenario, people can go to great lengths to try to make someone meet all their needs, which actually only ends up showing to the other person how different they really are from you. In this scenario of basically trying to absorb the other, we end up missing the true connection by trying to force a complete one.

    To apply this “yes… and…“ to relating to others is to simply appreciate them for the amount of the relationship that we realistically have with them.

    Life is far more complex than we will ever understand and even though we need limits in order to function well in the world, we don’t need to close ourselves off from many beautiful opportunities, people, etc. when it just might need a little bit more out-of-the-box thinking.

    Like with everything, this idea, this interpretation does not work in all situations and is not even appropriate sometimes. Some things need to have hard and fast boundaries. Some things are generally just bad for you and others. We have to see what is right for ourselves in each situation. The idea I’m trying to put forth is that life is not always about us. Things are not always perfect. You sometimes can’t get what you want (Mick Jagger is not wrong). When the miracles or ideal situations we were imagining don’t seem as readily available to us, maybe it’s time to think what our next best option is. We might need to think about how it’s not all about us. That there are good things that aren’t even within our perspective or even preference.

    Maybe it’s us that will have to develop and change?

    Humans are social creatures and thus most of our problems come out of social environments. Thus, the solutions should also be social. (Again, not everything, but it’s worth consideration.) Life is lonely and limited when we try to be islands unto ourselves. We need personal space and we need those boundaries, but ultimately more connection to the world and others and learning to flow with that is what seems like it would bring us into greater harmony. Even saying the word “harmony“ brings up positive feelings. We can still be us and not be “wasting our time” with others who are “not us”. We can find a great depth of connection with someone, even if there are many things they might not be able or even want to completely share and appreciate with us.

    So, consider saying yes to whatever is important to you, but be ready to consider an important “and“ that maybe you can add to it. Maybe it is me thinking that life is short and we have to make the most of it and all the experiences that it can offer, but that does not seem like a bad thing. The world gets a lot bigger and more fun when we are brave enough to step outside of our personal bubbles or feel the need to drag everything into them.

    1. In his great book The Power of a Positive No, William Ury has the notion of sandwiching a no between two yeses. You need to first stop and think about what you need and want and “say yes to yourself”. You can then set a boundary with some sort of no to support that first yes. Then, only after you have taken the time to fully consider yourself and your needs, you can then engage with someone else to see how you can say yes in a collaborative way with them. ↩
    2. No one can be fully everything to us and this is worth some discussion at another time, as there is more to say.
      Plus, as a wise and dear friend of mine reminds me, “No one wants vanilla all the time.” Different people offer different perspectives of life and it seems a shame to close ourselves off in the hopes of looking for clones of ourselves. ↩

  • Upper Limit Problem

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    I often get in my own way and how I do this is best described by psychologist, Gay Hendricks’ idea of an Upper Limit Problem. Beliefs about myself and my limitations keep helping me to sabotage myself time and time again.

  • My Struggles with Productivity – Intro

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    I have been doing a lot of thinking and self-reflection on how I consistently struggle with getting things done in my life. I’ve tried many things and dove deep into the productivity sphere for answers, only to keep coming back with the same issues.

    So, I thought I would go through the many things I have learned about myself and productivity and put myself in front of the camera to explore it in a series of short videos.

    This should be fun…

  • Relationships aren’t fair

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    We often expect things to be fair in relationships. We may not consciously frame it this way, but people quite often think of it as if we do something that helps another, then they owe us somehow or at least should reward us in some other way with appreciation or reciprocity. Reality is just not quite like this.

    It is easy to deny this for little things, but over the long haul and as more is asked of us, it can seem imbalanced and unfair. There are many situations where there is a control or power imbalance in a relationship where more responsibility or emphasis in some other way is going to be placed onto one person than another. (Think of caring for an elderly parent or chronically sick family member.) Our desire may be to be helpful, but we can grow resentful when it is “always up to me”. This is why so much has been written on caregiver burnout. It wears you down and can make you petty.

    A client told me years ago that he had heard that relationships are not 50-50, but 100-100. (I should have maybe paid him for that session, as I have appreciated and used that idea ever since.) This gets out of the tit for tat dynamic that is so easy to fall into. Instead of working to hold up your end of a relationship (50%), you should take full responsibility for it (100%). Love should not be conditional.

    This does not mean that you are supposed to and should want to work more and have it all be about you. It means that you can’t control others and should focus on what you can do, without conditionally wanting something in return. Ironically, it is when we take this position that we can see the greatest positive shifts in our relationships.

    It is doing what you can because the relationship matters to you, not because you are trying to get something in return. The person that has to bear more of the relationship responsibilities should look at it as an act of service. Things may balance out down the road, but maybe they won’t and you need to wrap your head around why you are doing this in the first place.

    This is a bigger can of worms, but it brings up equity vs equality. A conditional, 50-50 approach to a relationship expects things to be equally distributed between partners. As I mentioned above, equality might not be possible, but this is also based on a superficial view of what the relationship is. Maybe the core of what matters in the relationship is not about the transactional aspects. One person may provide more tangible support or carry more of a load on many things, but maybe the other person provides “value” in other ways (equity). Think about the things you really like about someone you have a relationship with. Maybe they are funny or spontaneous or patient, etc. Those are valuable. They attracted you to create and maintain this relationship with them. This should be enough.

    Psychiatrist, Gerald Jampolsky smartly once said,

    You can be right or you can be happy.

    We sometimes need to stop and think a little deeper about what makes us happy in a relationship and try to do more of that. Trying to enforce what is “right” and fair only drives a wedge in.

    These ideas may seem to not generally apply to some of the more day-to-day scenarios in relationships, but they definitely do. You don’t have to be a primary caregiver for someone to take the approach of owning the health of the relationship. Maybe you are “always” the one to do the dishes or apologize or [insert act of personally perceived awesomeness]. You could talk to the other person and maybe the two of you might work out a new dynamic that feels better to both of you. However, there are bound to be certain things that will most likely never swing into balance. If your partner has been leaving their socks on the floor for the past 10 years or forgot to call you once again when they were late because they got lost in their work, maybe that is just who they are going to be in the relationship. Is this a make or break issue for you or do you just want equality? Think of the benefits they bring to the relationship and (less desirably) all the things that you similarly do that chronically bother them. Not everything needs to be a hill to make a last stand on. There’s no need to escalate it to that through days, months and years of building annoyance into resentment over it.

    Think of a few things that you really appreciate about someone you care about and go tell them why this matters to you. Rinse and repeat. This is a good step to focusing on the things that matter.

  • Failure of Awareness

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    We tend to focus most on our strengths and things within our awareness. Whatever is the most developed part of ourselves tends to lead our experience through life. E.g. Someone who has a rational, intellectual view of situations will tend to be rewarded for this awareness, because it worked for them, and do it more in the future. This just reinforces that trait and tends to weaken other ones that we may pass over from lack of use. Over time, this helps us to build a toolkit of traits that we identify as “us” but not necessarily all that is open to us.

    The same can be said for our weaknesses. We may know that we do this or that, but if we do not take the time to look into it further, they will keep doing their things below the surface. This is because we are still relying on the objects in our awareness of ourselves and the world as we know it and not the bigger picture of what our and the greater reality is. In short, what we don’t know about ourselves controls us.

    It takes a fairly insightful person to stop and wonder what they might be missing or not understanding. The question is then, how do we become aware of the things we are not aware of? There are many ways to increase awareness, but here are a few thoughts:

    • See what others keep telling you about yourself or complain about you.
      • How others experience us is also not the whole picture, but it is often a perspective we had not considered.
    • See what upsets or emotionally triggers you.
      • If you don’t know why you are emotionally reacting in a certain way, there is most likely a story under the surface that you have not delved deep enough into yet. Even if you think you know why you feel or react in a certain way, there probably are aspects of it that you can unravel more fully.
    • See where you are having problems in your life or what roadblocks seem to keep appearing in front of you.
      • The patterns of conflict and struggle in our lives tend to follow a certain pattern. See if you can tease out what that pattern is and try something different.
    • Meditate
      • Find a practice to inquire into your thoughts. Through continued practice, this is a well-established way to peel away at your layers of self-identification, like an onion.
    • Question everything.
      • Don’t take this to the level of neuroticism or paranoia, but don’t take it for granted that what you believe, what you trust is happening, what is “true”, etc is necessarily the case. Ask questions to yourself and others to see if there are other perspectives that you have not considered.

    Again, this is not a definitive list, but merely a few ideas to consider. A good exercise would be to ask yourself in what ways you could delve a little deeper into yourself. You and those in your world will be happier for it. Let me know what you come up with!

  • What Makes Difficult Conversations Difficult

    What Makes Difficult Conversations Difficult

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Some conversations are much harder to have than others. I have quite a few books on communication and some specifically on difficult conversations, but I had not quite thought of exactly why this is so. Then, listening to Seth Godin this morning, he hit it right on the head by saying that some conversations are more difficult than others because in the difficult ones we want two things, not one.

    …we want someone to change and we want them to like it; we want someone to stop doing something and we want them to not be mad at us; we want someone to change their behaviour and we still want them to be our friend…”

    Seth Godin on Akimbo – Difficult Conversations

    Seth has some good suggestions on how to look at these conversations differently (and the podcast explains them well), but my sense of it is that we need to be clear on what our goal of having this difficult conversation is and why it is important for us to have it. When we are clear on this what and why it will be easier for us to move into this difficult conversation because we are removing, or at least lessening our attachment to, our secondary goal (sometimes called a competing commitment).

    It is important to understand this inner conflict more. The first part of these “two things” is behavioural: we want something to be different. The second part is interpersonal or emotional: we want to preserve a relationship or not feel bad. We want the first part because of some boundary that has been crossed that is important to us. Our concern over the “second thing” is because we either are concerned about the relationship to the other person will be harmed or we are worried there might be some backlash that will harm us (more specifically hurt our feelings or ego).

    Once we get clear what it is we need and why it is important to do the “first thing” (set the boundary), it should be easier for us to realize that the “second thing” is more of a distorted thought rooted in fear. If we handle the “first thing” in the difficult conversation well – be clear, concise, and not emotionally reactive – we will be less attached to the outcome of how another responds to our concerns. Also, it may occur to us that we may be not jeopardizing a relationship by bringing this up, but honouring or strengthening it. You obviously care enough to bring it up, so the other person may recognize and appreciate this.

    It is never easy to have difficult conversations, but we need to be mindful to not let our own fears muddy our perception of them. By dispassionately working to resolve conflict we can, funny enough, tend to have less of it, both with others and within ourselves.