How to Speak Clearly When Things Get Heated

Posted on by helpingsoul

 

A Practical Approach to Assertive Communication, Updated for What I Have Learned in the Years Since I First Wrote About This

A substantial revision of an earlier 2014 post titled 6 Tips to Improve Communication with Difficult People. The skills are largely the same. The framing has matured.

In 2014, I wrote a blog post called 6 Tips to Improve Communication with Difficult People. The skills in it were sound. The framing was a product of its moment, and there is one thing I would change before anything else.

The word difficult, in that title, located the problem entirely in the other person. The reader was the reasonable one. The other was the difficult one. This framing was popular in self-help writing of the era, and it has not aged well, for two reasons.

First, almost no one is purely difficult. The person who feels difficult to you is usually someone whose own nervous system is activated, whose own communication patterns developed in their own history, and who is responding to you according to dynamics that include both of you. Naming them as difficult flattens what is actually a co-created pattern.

Second, the framing implicitly excuses the reader from examining their own contribution. The communication you are struggling with is rarely produced by the other person alone. Your response patterns, your tone, your timing, your assumptions about what they meant — all of it is part of what is happening. Naming them as the difficult one closes off the more useful question, which is what would shift if you changed something about how you are showing up.

So this refresh begins with a different framing. The skills below are for any conversation that has become activated, whoever is producing the activation. The goal is not to learn to manage difficult people. The goal is to learn to communicate clearly when the conditions for clear communication have started to deteriorate — which can happen with anyone, including yourself.

Where assertive communication comes from

Most of us did not learn assertive communication in our families. We learned other things. We learned to suppress our own thoughts and feelings to keep the peace. We learned to manage other people’s emotional weather to keep ourselves safe. We learned to say yes when we meant no, to swallow what we needed to say in order to stay connected to someone we feared losing. We learned to be invisible when visibility had been costly.

These patterns were not failures of character. They were survival adaptations. The child who learned to suppress her own voice did so because her voice was unwelcome, mocked, criticized, or punished. The body that learned to swallow what it needed to say was protecting the relational connection that the child needed to survive. The adaptations made sense at the time. They worked. They kept the child safe.

As adults, the same adaptations cost us. The voice that learned to suppress itself in childhood continues to suppress itself in adult relationships that could actually receive it. The body that learned to swallow needed words continues to swallow them with the people who could actually hear them. The conditions have changed. The system has not yet updated.

Learning assertive communication as an adult is the work of updating the system. Slowly. With practice. With the recognition that the skill was suppressed for survival reasons and is being rebuilt now under different conditions. The skill is learnable. The work is real. And the relationships in your life that can survive your assertiveness will become stronger as you develop it. The ones that cannot will reveal what they actually were.

Regulate first

Before any technique, before any acronym, before any specific words you might use, the most important element of assertive communication is the state of your nervous system. Words spoken from activation almost always fail. The technical content of what you said may be perfect. The delivery, shaped by the activation in your body, will land as something different. Your face will signal something other than what your words say. Your tone will carry the urgency that came from the activation rather than the steadiness that effective communication requires. The other person, sensing the activation, will respond to that rather than to your content.

The single most important thing you can do before initiating an important conversation, or in the middle of a conversation that has begun to get heated, is to regulate. Not perfectly. Just enough.

If you can, take the conversation somewhere quieter. Walk away if necessary and return when you are calmer. There is no rule that important conversations have to happen in the moment of activation. Most are better when both parties are regulated.

If you cannot leave, take silence in the conversation itself. Three deep breaths, slow, with the exhale longer than the inhale. Four counts in, seven counts out, three cycles. About a minute of silence. Silence is allowed. It often produces a different conversation than the one that was about to happen.

Notice your own body. Is your chest tight? Your jaw clenched? Your breath shallow? These are signs the system has moved from social engagement into mobilization. From this state, the words you say will not land the way you want them to. Regulate first. Speak from steadier ground.

The skill itself — what I called PASARR in the original

With the regulation in place, here is the structure of an assertive exchange. The original post called this PASARR — Pause, Acknowledge the Truth, Stay True to Self, Ask for a Request, Repeat, Repair. The acronym still works as a memory aid. The content of each step is essentially the same now as it was then, with some refinement.

Pause

Before you respond to what was just said, take a moment. Notice your own reaction. Notice what wants to come out of your mouth. Notice whether what wants to come out is actually what you mean to say, or whether it is the reflexive defensiveness, justification, or compliance that your earlier conditioning trained you to produce.

The pause is short. Sometimes only a few seconds. But it is the space in which choice becomes possible. Without the pause, your response is automatic. With the pause, you can choose.

This is a learnable skill in its own right. People who have spent decades responding reflexively often need to practice the pause many times before it becomes natural. The early attempts feel awkward. The other person may notice the silence and ask if you are okay. You can say yes. You are just thinking before you speak. This is allowed.

Acknowledge what is true

If the other person has said something that contains accurate information, acknowledge it. This is not capitulation. It is not agreeing with the entirety of their position. It is acknowledging the specific kernel of truth in what they said.

If your partner says you have been distracted lately, and you have been distracted lately, do not deny it. Say yes, I have been distracted. Tell me more about what you have been noticing. This acknowledgment de-escalates the dynamic. It signals to the other person that you are not going to fight them on every point. It also clears space for the actual conversation, which is usually somewhere underneath the surface complaint.

If your boss says your work has been below standard, and you can identify one specific instance where this is true, name it. *You are right about the report I turned in last Tuesday. That was not my best work. The presentation I delivered on Thursday, on the other hand, was strong.* Specificity matters. Generalized criticism becomes more workable when met with specific acknowledgment of what is true and specific clarification of what is not.

If the other person has said nothing accurate, you do not have to invent something. But often there is something accurate in even the most charged communication. Finding it is part of the work.

Stay true to yourself

Use I statements. Not the cliched I-feel-when-you-do-this format that has become a parody of itself, but the genuine practice of speaking from your own experience rather than reporting on the other person’s behavior as if it were the only fact in the room.

Instead of *you never listen to me*, try *I have been feeling unheard in our conversations this week*. The difference is significant. The first is a global statement about the other person that they will resist. The second is a report from your own experience that the other person can engage with.

This is harder than it sounds, especially when the activation is high. The instinct in difficult conversation is to focus on what the other person is doing wrong. Learning to redirect that energy toward what you are actually experiencing is part of the practice.

Ask for what you want

After acknowledging what is true and speaking from your own experience, name what you would like to be different. Specifically. Concretely. In a way the other person can actually respond to.

*When you are late and do not call, I find myself worrying and getting angry. Would you be willing to text me if you are going to be more than ten minutes late?* That is a specific request that the other person can say yes or no to.

*You need to be more considerate* is not a request. It is a vague criticism. The other person cannot do anything specific with it. They will respond defensively because the statement does not give them a path to action.

Specific requests, made from a regulated state, with acknowledgment of what is true and speaking from your own experience, are the actual mechanism by which relationships shift over time.

Reflect and repeat

Ask the other person to share what they heard. Not as a test. As a way to ensure mutual understanding. *Can you tell me what you are hearing me say?* They will often paraphrase back something slightly different from what you meant. This is information. You can clarify. They can clarify what they meant when they said the thing that activated you. Over time, the gap between intent and impact narrows.

Repair

If the conversation has gotten heated, if either of you has said something that landed harder than intended, name it. *That came out sharper than I meant it. Let me try again.* Repair is one of the most powerful tools in any relationship. The capacity to recognize when something has gone off track and to gently bring it back is what distinguishes relationships that endure from relationships that gradually erode.

Repair does not require either of you to be the one entirely at fault. It just requires the willingness to attend to what is happening between you and to try again with more care.

A note on what makes this hard

Reading these steps, you may notice that none of them is complicated. The skills are simple. They are also profoundly difficult to do in the moments when they would help most.

This is because the moments when you would most need these skills are also the moments when your nervous system is most activated. The pause is harder when you are flooded. The acknowledgment of truth is harder when you feel attacked. The I statements are harder when the urge is to focus on what the other person is doing wrong. The request is harder when what you really want is to be understood without having to make a request.

This is the work. You practice the skills in low-stakes moments so that they are partially available in high-stakes moments. You catch yourself, sometimes after the fact, and reflect on what you might have done differently. You return to the practice. You get better, slowly, over years.

And in the meantime, you are not failing. You are practicing a skill that most of us were not taught and that takes most adults a long time to develop. Patience with yourself is part of the work.

Where to begin

Pick one upcoming conversation that you anticipate being difficult. Before it happens, rehearse what you want to say. Use the structure: pause, acknowledge what is true, speak from your own experience, ask for what you want.

Notice your own state before the conversation begins. If you are activated, take five minutes to regulate first. Walk. Breathe. Place your hand on your heart and your belly. Do not begin the conversation until your system is closer to baseline.

Have the conversation. Notice what worked. Notice what did not. Notice where the practice was easy and where you reverted to old patterns. None of this is failure. It is data.

Repeat with the next conversation. Each one builds capacity for the next. Over months and years, the skills become more available. The relationships that can hold your developing voice will deepen. The relationships that cannot will reveal themselves.

And the felt sense of speaking your truth, in a moment that requires it, from a regulated state, with care for the other person and care for yourself, is one of the most powerful experiences available to a person who has spent decades silencing themselves. It is worth the practice. It is worth the awkward early attempts. It is worth the patience the work requires.

In love and dignity, speak the truth — as we think, feel, and know it — and it shall set us free.

— Melody Beattie

Further reading: Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger. Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability and difficult conversations. For the companion piece on detachment with love, see The Art of Detachment with Love on courageous-arts.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Meet Your Future Self: A Visualization for Better Decisions and Deeper Self-Knowledge

Posted on by helpingsoul

Research shows that people who feel connected to their future selves make better long-term choices. Here is a guided practice that helps build that connection.

When clients ask me how they can develop better self-knowledge, make wiser decisions, and find clearer direction in difficult periods of life, I often introduce them to a practice I have used for years in my work as a marriage and family therapist: the future-self visualization.

The practice is simple. You enter a guided imagery sequence in which you meet a wiser, older version of yourself and ask them what you most need to know. The wisdom that arises is your own — accessed through the structure of imagining your future self, which research suggests is one of the most reliable ways to bypass present-moment defensiveness and reach what you actually know underneath.

This is not magical thinking. It is a clinical practice grounded in psychological research on prospection and future-self continuity, and it produces real results when used consistently.

The research behind the practice

Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist who studies prospection — the human capacity to imagine future scenarios — has documented how powerfully our ability to imagine our future selves shapes our present-day decisions. His research with colleagues shows that the human mind is, in essence, a prospection machine, constantly generating possible futures and using them to guide current behavior.

Hal Hershfield, a UCLA psychologist, has extended this research specifically to how we relate to our own future selves. His studies, including work using fMRI brain imaging, show that many people experience their future selves almost as different people — strangers whose welfare feels less urgent than the welfare of their present-day selves. The neurological signature of thinking about your future self can resemble thinking about a stranger more than thinking about yourself.

This matters enormously. People who feel a stronger sense of connection to their future selves — what researchers call future-self continuity — make better long-term financial decisions, take better care of their health, and report greater life satisfaction. The future self is not an abstraction. It is the actual person who will live with the consequences of your current choices, and developing a felt sense of connection to that person changes how you treat them.

Visualization practices like the one below are one of the most accessible ways to build this connection. The guided imagery activates the same neural systems that ordinary self-perception uses, creating an experiential rather than purely cognitive sense of relationship with the person you are becoming.

Before you begin

Set aside fifteen to twenty uninterrupted minutes. Find a comfortable, quiet space. Have a notebook nearby for journaling afterward.

If you would like, record yourself reading the script below in your own voice, slowly, with pauses between sections. Many people find the practice more powerful when guided by recorded audio than when reading and visualizing simultaneously.

Approach the practice with openness rather than expectation. The first time you do this, you may not connect deeply with your future self. That is normal. The capacity develops with repetition. Many of my clients find that the third or fourth session produces a felt sense that the first one only hinted at.

The visualization

Sit comfortably. Place your feet flat on the ground. Ensure your torso is sitting upright and resting against the back your seat. Gently close your eyes. Take a few slow deep breaths through the nose, expanding the breath into the belly, and then slowly exhale through your mouth with a slightly longer exhale than each inhale. Repeat at least three times. With each inhale, breathe in peace and relaxation. With each exhale visualize all the tension, tightness and any discomfort in your body is set free.

Once you feel relaxed and fully present in your body, begin to imagine yourself standing at the entrance to a forest path. The forest is welcoming and safe. Sunlight filters through the leaves above you. The air is fresh and cool.

Begin to walk along the path. Notice the trees on either side of you, the soft, leaf covered ground beneath your feet, the sound of birds chirping in the distance, and the wind as it whistles the leaves of the trees. With each step, you feel more relaxed and more present.

Ahead of you in the distance, you see a bright light. As you walk toward it, you realize the path is leading you out of the forest into an open meadow. The meadow is filled with brightly colored flowers and tall green grasses moving gently in a soft breeze.

In the center of the meadow, you see a welcoming log cabin. Smoke rises gently from the chimney. The cabin feels warm, inviting, and somehow familiar.

You walk across the meadow toward the cabin. With each step, you feel a growing sense that you are arriving somewhere important. Somewhere that has been waiting for you.

You reach the steps of the cabin, walk up to the porch, and knock softly to the entrance. The door opens. Standing in the doorway is your future self — a wiser, older version of you who has lived through the questions you are currently sitting with and arrived at a place of greater peace and self-knowledge.

Take a moment to notice this person. How do they look? How do they hold themselves? What do you sense in their presence? They smile at you with warmth and recognition. They have been waiting for you. They invite you in.

You step inside. The cabin is warm and softly lit. A fire is burning in a stone fireplace. Two comfortable chairs sit facing each other, and on a small table between them is a teapot and two cups of tea waiting.

Your future self gestures for you to sit. You both settle into the chairs facing each other. The fire crackles softly. The tea is warm in your hands. You begin to notice what the inside of the cabin looks like, pictures of family hanging on the walls, and the decor, the architecture and anyone else in the room. Notice any other details of interest.

Now is the time for your conversation. Take another deep breath through the nose and slowly exhale through the mouth. Allow yourself to fully relax and ask whatever you most need to ask.

What do you most need to know right now?

What is the wisdom they have gained that you do not yet have?

What is the next step they want you to take?

What is one thing they wish they had known when they were where you are now?

Ask any other questions that come to mind. If there is something they want you to know that you did not think to ask, allow yourself to receive that too.

Sit quietly, calmly and listen for the answers. They may come as words, as images, as feelings, as a sudden knowing. Whatever form the answer takes, receive it. You do not need to evaluate it or argue, just receive.

When you feel the conversation is complete, thank your future self. Notice how this person has been changed by the conversation as well. Know that you can return here whenever the need arises.

Slowly stand. Give your future self a long loving embrace. Walk to the door. Step out onto the porch, down the stairway, and into the meadow. Walk back across the field of flowers and grasses. Re-enter the forest path. Walk back the way you came.

As you walk, notice that the wisdom you received is staying with you. It is not staying behind in the cabin. It is coming home with you.

Slowly bring your awareness back to the room. Feel your body in the chair. Feel your feet flat on the floor. Take a deep breath and slowly exhale. Wiggle your fingers and toes. And when you are ready, open your eyes.

After the visualization

Take out your notebook. Without editing or evaluating, write down everything you remember from the conversation. The questions. The answers. The images. The felt sense of being in the cabin. The presence of your future self.

Some of what comes will surprise you. Some of it will confirm what you already suspected but had not allowed yourself to fully acknowledge. Some of it will be confusing and will only make sense in the days that follow.

This is the wisdom from inside you, accessed through the structure of imagining a future you. The structure does the work that direct questioning often cannot — it creates the necessary distance from your immediate reactivity, allowing what you actually know to come forward.

Return to the practice when you face significant decisions, when you feel stuck, when you need direction, or simply as a regular part of your self-knowledge work. Write down any questions being presented pondered and bring them to your future self. With repetition, the relationship with your future self deepens. The cabin becomes more vivid. The conversation becomes more nuanced. The wisdom becomes more accessible.

Why this works

This practice combines several psychological mechanisms. The visualization reduces present-moment defensiveness by creating temporal distance — you are not asking yourself for advice, you are asking someone else (your future self) who happens to share your circumstances. The setting of the forest, meadow, and cabin engages parasympathetic nervous system regulation, putting your body in a receptive rather than activated state. The relational structure of the encounter — knocking, being welcomed, sitting together by the fire — taps the same systems that govern ordinary trusted relationships, allowing you to receive guidance from a position of safety rather than evaluation.

Most importantly, the practice strengthens future-self continuity. Each session builds the felt sense that the person you are becoming is real, present, and worth caring about. That felt sense, accumulated over time, changes how you treat your future self in your everyday choices — and the everyday choices, in turn, become the path that leads you to the version of yourself you have been visiting.

The future self in the cabin is not separate from you. They are the version of you that becomes possible when you take seriously the wisdom you already carry and act on it. The visualization is not the only way to reach them. It is, however, one of the most reliable.

Try it once. Try it again. Trust what comes.

About the author: April Wright, MA, LMFT, is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. Her holistic, trauma-informed approach integrates somatic awareness, mindfulness, and creative practices. http://www.thecourageousself.com

Where Does the Playful Spirit Go?

Posted on by helpingsoul
Baboon laughing

An essay on laughter, play, and the slow rediscovery of what gets squeezed out of adult life

This essay is a revisit of an old 2013 post on the same theme. The earlier version was a list of benefits. This version is a longer reflection on what gets lost when we stop playing, and what becomes possible when we begin again.

“Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top.” — Norman Cousins

“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” — Proverbs 17:22

Laugh out loud. Play. Be silly. Joke around. Have fun. These are some of the words I think of when I watch children play. Years ago I wrote a blog post about laughter and the lightness of children’s play, and the question that has stayed with me since is the one I asked then. Where does that spirit go?

Some days I see a child make ordinary life into a moment of joy and I am reminded of the answer. The spirit does not actually leave. It gets buried under the weight of what we begin to think is more important — the deadlines, the responsibilities, the bills, the lists of things we have not yet done, the conviction that adulthood is not the time for silliness. The playful spirit does not die. It gets covered over. And what changes is not the spirit itself but our capacity to access it.

One afternoon recently, walking through the neighborhood, I saw a small girl turning an ordinary sidewalk into an entire world. She was with her grandfather and her mother. She tagged her grandfather. She spun toward her mother. She skipped, twirled, and laughed at her own laughter. She made a destination out of nothing, simply because she was moving through the world the way children move — with imagination treating every step as material for delight. Her family was laughing along with her. Other adults on the sidewalk were smiling without quite realizing they had begun to smile.

I watched her for a moment longer than was strictly polite. She was, in some ways, more accomplished at being alive than most of the adults around her. She was not earning her joy. She was not waiting until her tasks were complete. She was not making sure she deserved to enjoy herself. She was just enjoying herself, fully and uncomplicatedly, in the most ordinary moment possible.

And I wondered again. Where does that go? When does it get traded for the somber-faced productivity that most of us mistake for being a competent adult?

Laughter as medicine

There is older literature on this question that has held up beautifully across the decades. Norman Cousins, the journalist who used humor to recover from a serious illness in the 1970s, wrote in his book Anatomy of an Illness about the specific finding that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter gave him at least two hours of pain-free sleep. He pursued this discovery deliberately. He watched Marx Brothers films. He read humor. He treated laughter as a clinical intervention, and his recovery surprised the physicians who had not expected it.

Cousins’s work was anecdotal but it pointed the way for more rigorous research that followed. Laughter does measurable things. It releases endorphins. It reduces stress hormones like cortisol. It improves immune function. It increases blood flow. It helps regulate emotions. It strengthens relationships. It diffuses tension in conflict.

Albert Einstein, of all people, understood this. He kept extensive notebooks. Some were filled with mathematical equations. Others, less famously, were filled with jokes. He took breaks to laugh. He understood — perhaps because his mind was working so hard in such serious territory — that the brain works better when it is allowed to breathe. The same insight, less articulated, has been carried by every culture that has held space for ritual humor, for the trickster figure, for the holy fool, for the necessity of comic relief in tragedy.

And it is not only humans. Marina Davila-Ross, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth in England, has shown that chimpanzees use laughter to strengthen social bonds. The vocalizations chimps make during play — short, rhythmic sounds — are not random. They serve the same function laughter serves in human social groups: they signal safety, they invite continued connection, they create the social glue that holds bonds together over time. Laughter is not a uniquely human invention. It is something we inherited from a long line of primates who used it for the same reasons we use it now.

What laughter is doing in the nervous system

Contemporary research on the nervous system, particularly the work of Stephen Porges on polyvagal theory, gives us another way to understand what laughter is doing in the body. Porges describes a part of the autonomic nervous system that handles social engagement — the felt sense of being safe in connection with other people. He calls this the ventral vagal system. When it is active, the body is open. Breath is easy. The face is animated. Eye contact is comfortable. The voice has prosody. And the body is available for the spontaneous responses, including laughter, that mark genuine human connection.

When this system is not active — when the nervous system is in a state of threat activation or chronic shutdown — laughter does not come easily. People in chronic stress states often report that they cannot remember the last time they really laughed. They produce polite social laughter on cue. The deep belly laughter, the involuntary kind that takes the body over, is absent. The system that produces it is not online.

This is one of the clinical observations I have made repeatedly in my work as a therapist over the years. The absence of laughter in an adult’s life is often not a personality trait. It is a symptom. It is the body’s report that the social engagement system has been offline for a long time. And the restoration of laughter, when it happens, is often one of the most reliable signs that nervous system regulation is genuinely returning. Clients who have not laughed in years begin, sometimes shyly, to find themselves laughing again. The first time it happens they often look surprised. The body has remembered something it had forgotten.

What the research has not quite captured

The research on laughter tends to focus on what laughter does — the benefits, the mechanisms, the measurable outcomes. What it does not always capture is what laughter is. Laughter is, in its deepest sense, the sound a body makes when it is willing to be moved by the world without trying to control the response. It is the body saying yes to being delighted. It is the body trusting that the moment is safe enough to let the diaphragm shake.

This is why laughter is so closely connected to relationships, to safety, to the felt sense of being seen by another person. We laugh more easily with people we trust. We laugh less easily, or not at all, with people in whose presence we feel exposed or evaluated. Children laugh more than adults because children’s nervous systems are not yet carrying the accumulated armor that adult life teaches us to develop. They are not constantly assessing whether laughter will be received well. They simply laugh.

Adults who have spent decades in environments that did not welcome their joy — critical families, demanding workplaces, relationships in which lightness was treated as immaturity — often arrive at midlife genuinely uncertain how to play. The instinct has not been killed. It has been carefully suppressed for so long that activating it feels foreign. The same person who laughed easily at five may find at fifty that laughter requires conscious permission and even then arrives reluctantly. The body remembers how to laugh. The system that gives the body permission has been overruled for too long.

How to begin again

If you recognize yourself in this description — and many adults in my practice do — the work is gentle and slow. You cannot force laughter. You cannot make it arrive by deciding it should. What you can do is make small moves that put your nervous system in environments where laughter becomes available again.

Spend time with people who laugh. Not people who tell jokes, necessarily. People who laugh easily, who find ordinary moments funny, who can be in the kitchen together and crack up about something neither of you can quite explain afterward. The body learns from other bodies. Your social engagement system was built, originally, through the eye contact and shared smiles of the people who held you as an infant. It can be re-tuned, in adulthood, through the eye contact and shared smiles of the people you choose to be around now.

Watch something funny on purpose. Not as a self-improvement project. Just because you want to laugh and you have given yourself permission to want it. The current era has good options that the original 2013 version of this post could not have anticipated. Bridesmaids. Ted Lasso, which is gentle and warm and tends to produce both laughter and tears, sometimes in the same scene. Schitt’s Creek, which became a touchstone for many adults during the pandemic precisely because it modeled a kind of family warmth and absurdity that many people had been missing. Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Stand-up specials from comics whose voices feel like company. The classic films from the original 2013 list — A Thousand Clowns, Patch Adams — are still there for those who want them. Add what speaks to your particular humor.

Notice the absurd. Adult life is, when you look at it without the filter of seriousness, often genuinely ridiculous. The way we line up obediently for things. The earnestness with which we sometimes respond to small inconveniences. The peculiar ways our bodies behave when we are not paying attention. Comedians make their living by pointing at exactly this. You can do it for free in your own day. The amount of comedy in ordinary life is roughly infinite for anyone who learns to look.

Be silly with someone safe. Not in service of being funny. In service of remembering what it feels like to not be performing competence for a moment. The grandparents who play horse with their grandchildren. The partners who do voices for the cat. The friends who break into spontaneous dance moves in the kitchen for reasons neither can later explain. These are not childish behaviors. They are the behaviors of nervous systems that have remembered how to engage with each other in the absence of evaluation.

And laugh at yourself. Not the cutting self-deprecation that is actually self-attack disguised as humor. The real version. The genuine recognition that you, like every other human, do absurd things and that those things are sometimes funny. Tripping over nothing. Walking into a room and forgetting why. Saying the wrong word at the wrong moment. These are part of being a body in a world. The willingness to laugh at them is the willingness to be human without requiring yourself to be flawless.

A gentle reminder

Some days the laughter will not come. The work will be heavier. The body will be tired. The losses will be too close. This is also true and also human. Forcing laughter on a day when grief is what is present is not the work. The work is making room for whatever is true, and on days when laughter is true, letting it have its full place in your body without apology.

If you have been doing hard inner work — therapy, processing trauma, working through grief, navigating significant change — you may have found that the seriousness of the work has temporarily covered over your access to play. This is common and it is not permanent. The work is not opposed to laughter. They are companions. Some of the deepest moments in my own clinical practice have involved laughter — clients who reach a hard truth and then begin to laugh at the absurdity of having carried it for so long without naming it. The laughter does not diminish the truth. It honors it.

Joy and seriousness are not opposites. They are different colors in the same range. You do not have to wait until your life is fully repaired to laugh. You can laugh in the middle of the repair. The laughter is part of how the repair happens.

Final thought

If a child can turn a sidewalk into a moment of joy, you can turn five minutes of your day into something lighter. You do not have to earn this. You do not have to deserve it more than you do.

Find one thing today that makes you laugh out loud. Not a polite social laugh. The real kind. The kind your body remembers from before you learned to suppress it. The diaphragm shaking. The breath catching. The sense afterward of having been, briefly, fully alive.

Your nervous system will thank you. And the part of you that has been waiting, since you were a child, to be allowed to play again, will notice that you have come back for it.

Further reading: Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness. Marina Davila-Ross’s research on primate laughter at the University of Portsmouth. Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory. For the clinical companion piece on laughter and the social engagement system, see thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Principles of Prayer and Meditation

Posted on by helpingsoul

prayer-meditationStep 11 – Through prayer and meditation I seek to improve my conscious contact with God as I understand God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for my life and the power to carry that out

The principal of the eleventh step of Alcoholics Anonymous is prayer and meditation.  Taking a few minutes a day breaking away from everyday frustrations, distractions, and multitasking’s for self-examination can change your life.  Spending just a little time each day consciously connecting with your higher power can directly influence your thoughts, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors.

For most people, serenity is far off in the distance due to those day after day interruptions, obligations, and disturbances that cause chaos and clutter. Making prayer and meditation a daily routine is your path to new hope leading to a more serene life.

Whenever you are feeling stuck, confused, need help, or don’t know what to do next, take a few minutes to talk to your higher power.  Ask for guidance and help.  At first, it may feel awkward talking to a force you can’t see or hear.  Stay with the uncertainty and within a short period of time you will see results.

There are many books, articles, and literature on how to pray and meditate.  Most religions have formal guidelines for prayer.  Religious guiding principles include confession of wrongdoings, asking for forgiveness, expressing gratitude, asking for guidance, asking for blessings on family, friends, and loved ones or trying to love.

Choose your own religious ritual or spiritual pathway that works best for your lifestyle and beliefs.  Select a regular routine that will enable you to continue and make it a habit.  Pray in nature, taking a walk, in the shower, or on your knees by your bed.  Meditate in a group.  Bow your head, clasp your hands, or close your eyes.  Or sit alone, quietly and just think.

Talk out loud or write entries in a journal dedicated to your higher power.  Dictate a long prayer in the morning, night, or recite short messages throughout the day.   Whatever the method, you have the autonomy to choose your own process for prayer.

Whatever your course is for prayer and meditation ensure it is one you can do consistently.  During this time for yourself, you can address self-care, including how to nurture inner peace, when to reach out to others, and how to find a way to embrace a perplexing task and really own it as yours.  You can reflect upon ways to carry through on good intentions, where to make time for fun, and to be present for your feelings.

Prayer and meditation is a time to be open and receptive to whatever comes up.  Honor the process by being with and allowing your feelings to move within and through you at their own pace and timeframe. Stay with the practice trying not to change, distract, distort, or numb what is happening within.

Respect what is happening inside by mindfully acknowledging your thoughts, emotions, and perspectives.  It may be a good time to reach out to a trusted friend, your therapist, or your sponsor for validation.  Eventually you will get to a place of acceptance, understanding, and a renewed sense of relief and peace.

With an inner sense of tranquility, the hurt, anger, and helplessness is diminished.  When the walls of fury are dropped, the gates are open to a pathway for love.  You are more receptive and able to connect to those you love or trying to love. Your connections are expanded because you set free your loving presence to soar.

Cultivating a deeper prayer life provides new opportunities for reflection, affirmation, and lasting change in your relationship to yourself and others.  The eleventh step of Alcohol Anonymous is one that is encouraged to practice every day.  With diligence and consistency, a spiritual consciousness awakens a fuller, robust life with rich, meaningful relationships.

Here is a prayer to get you started.  It is a recovery prayer based on Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous:

“Thank you for keeping me straight yesterday.  Please help me stay straight today.  For the next twenty-four hours, I pray for knowledge of your will for me only and the power to carry that through.  I pray that you might free my thinking of self-will, self-seeking, and wrong motives.  I pray that in times of doubt and indecision, you might send your inspiration and guidance.  I pray that you may send me the right thought, word, or action, and that you show me what my next step should be.”

Open up and say ‘neigh’: Horses Help Teach Med Students

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Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Video: For America’s next generation of doctors, bedside manner can fall by the wayside in the first few years of medical school. But one doctor in Arizona is hoping to change that by offering a first-of-its-kind class using horses to instill compassion. NBC’s Dr. Nancy Snyderman reports.

For the next generation of doctors to develop a better bedside manner, it’s important to spend some time in a stable.

Neurosurgeon Dr. Allan Hamilton of the University of Arizona Medical Center, Tucson, is using his ranch for a first-of-its-kind class to help train first year medical students, bringing the humans in close contact with large flighty four-legged patients who can’t talk and who can be highly — and violently — reactive to doctors who aren’t attuned to their patients’ body language.

At his first “lecture,” Hamilton shows this year’s class how to safely approach a horse. He slowly walks up to one of his horses, running his hand over the animal’s body as he moves around it.

“I put my arm around him like this so the whole time, even when I go through his blind spot, he knows exactly where I am,” Hamilton tells the students and NBC chief medical editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman.

The slow, careful contact with the animal is not only for self-protection — the reaction of a startled horse can range from bolting away to spinning and kicking out at something it perceives as a threat — but also as comfort and reassurance.

The idea for the course began when Hamilton caught himself approaching a patient too abruptly and without the right amount of sensitivity.

“The whole thing started one day when I was in a hurry,” he said. “I was delayed getting to clinic and we just burst into this room because we were in such a hurry and this woman, she just screamed when we walked into the room because we came in so fast. I just remember thinking to myself, ‘boy I never would have done that if that was a horse.’”

The concept makes a lot of sense to Snyderman, a horsewoman herself. “As a physician I hear from medical school professors all the time who say that the students come in eager and passionate about helping others, and leave as cynical and harsh doctors,” she said.

Riley Hoyer, one of the first-year medical students who signed up for Hamilton’s innovative class, recognizes the skills he’s learning.

Right now, “I’m studying books instead of focusing on patient care and so this was just one class that I could do as an elective to try and better learn how to interact with animals and learn how to use my body language to interact with patients,” he told TODAY.

Because horses can’t talk, students need to learn to read their body language to set up a “conversation.” They need to have a rapport and develop trust before the horse will stand still to have its heart monitored with a stethoscope or to get an inoculation.

Snyderman watched as one of the other students connects with a horse. “And now he’s making eye contact with you because you approached him in a very sensitive way,” she said. “It’s a lot like [approaching] a patient.”

Hamilton believes that the program can build better doctors, helping them to overcome fear and improve confidence.

“Probably even more important is it saves doctors,” he said. “Our salvation is going to be to go back to what really makes us fulfilled, which is this essence of human-human interaction and the ability to take somebody in the most dire of circumstances and say,’grab my hand I know we’re going OK we’re in this together.’”

Hamilton’s class has been offered since 2001 and it’s gaining attention around the country. Stanford University and University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey are now offering similar courses.

Hamilton didn’t get his horses with a plan to teach students a better bedside manner. “I moved out here specifically to do neurosurgery by day and horses by night,” he said with a chuckle.

5 Ways to Improve Your Conscious Listening

Posted on by helpingsoul

active-listening_pinkTaken from Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better | Video on TED.com

Conscious listening is understanding sound.   It increases empathy, connection, consciousness, and peace.  Listening externally improves relationships.  Listening internally increases awareness of inner wisdom and self-sabotaging talk.  Read on to learn ways to uplift your capacity to hear with clarity.

1. Sit silently for three minutes a day to recalibrate and hear the silence again.

2. Listen and count the many channels of sound (i.e. count birds chirping or the different depths of sound listening to the flow of a creek, or the clasps of the coffee machine being worked at Starbucks as you stand in line).

3. Savor mundane sounds.  Turn the sound of a washing machine into a waltz.

4. Listening positions allow room to navigate, see different perspectives, and find solutions.

  • Active | passive
  • Reductive | expansive
  • Critical |empathetic

5. R A S A is an acronym to simplify the rules to listen better.

  • R = Receive, pay attention
  • A = Appreciation, thank for sharing
  • S = Summarize, use so… frequently
  • A – Ask, pose many questions

Listening is a rare art form that takes practice, dedication, and consciousness.  Notice how slowing down to listen to others and yourself can help transform your relationships, decision-making, and peacefulness.

The Art of the Narrative: How to Journal for Personal Growth

Posted on by helpingsoul
Is your journal a place of growth or a loop of stress? Discover the creative science of "narrative construction" and learn how to write your way to a clearer perspective

Is your journal a place of growth or a loop of stress? Discover the creative science of “narrative construction” and learn how to write your way to a clearer perspective

Journaling: The Art of Rewriting Your Story

Journaling is journaling, right? Actually, come to find out, the way you use your pen can either bring relief or keep you stuck in a loop of distress. It all depends on your focus.

The “Healthy” Narrative When you write about a particular event, focusing on cognitive processing helps you resolve the experience and find positive outcomes. Research on bereavement (Purcell, 2006) shows that people who externalize their thoughts and engage in “deliberate, effortful thinking” are more likely to find greater meaning in their relationships and values.

Modern research (Tartakovsky, 2022) calls this “cognitive defusion”—the ability to look at your thoughts rather than being in them. This creative distance allows you to:

  • Clarify what makes you happy.

  • Solve problems more effectively.

  • Increase your awareness of your deepest wants and desires.

Avoiding the Rumination Trap An ineffective way to journal is to focus only on the “raw” emotion. While “venting” feels good in the moment, centering solely on the emotional trauma without searching for a lesson or a new perspective can actually hinder your well-being (Nauert, 2012). We naturally tend to focus on the negative; without a structured representation of the event, we can’t find the “gain” in the pain.

The Creative Advantage Writing helps organize the “mental clutter.” By turning stressful images into a simplified, linguistic form, you restore your sense of mastery over your own life story.

Journaling is journaling, right? Well come to find out, it can either bring relief or intensify misery. It all depends on the focus of writing.

What is the best way to journal?

When writing about a particular event, focusing on cognitive processing (making sense of a stressful event) and emotional expression helps to resolve the experience and find positive outcomes. Research shows writing about a stressful incident with emphasis on thoughts and feelings increases positive growth. It directly affects beliefs about the self, the world, and the future (Ullrich & Lutgendorf, 2002).

A study regarding bereavement supports that persons who engaged in deliberate, effortful thinking about the death and externalized their thoughts on paper were more likely to find greater meaning in their relationship with their lost loved one.  They came attuned to more values, priorities, and perspectives in response to the death (Purcell 2006).

Writing not only has mental improvements but also physical.  Here is a list of just some of the positives of journaling:

  •   Strengthens immune system
  •   Increases white blood cells
  •   Decreases symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis
  •   Reduces stress
  •   Effectively solve problems
  •   Resolve Conflict
  •   Clarify what makes you happy
  •   Helps to resolve stressful experiences and find positive outcomes
  •   Increases positive growth
  •   Increases ability to find multiple solutions to a single problem
  •   Helps broaden perspective and enables resolution to disagreement
  •   Provides clarity about situations and people
  •   Increases awareness and organization of wants and desires

What is an ineffective way to journal?

The negative consequences to writing persist when focusing solely on emotional expression. Centering on emotional aspects of traumas or stressful situations may not produce greater understanding. One study explains that expressive writing can actually hinder emotional well-being without any relief from distress. We naturally tend to focus on negative emotions and in doing so further deepen despair about the event without concluding anything positive from the experience.  As daunting as some experiences are, there is usually something that can be learned or gained.  It may be hard to find and may not reveal itself immediately but over time may turn into the best thing.  Change usually doesn’t happen until the pain persists and becomes unbearable ( Nauert 2012).

When expressing just your emotions on paper, the negative consequences can effect your physical and mental health.   The following list describes just a few negative costs:

  •   Increases physical illness
  •   No relief from distress
  •   Lowers immune system
  •   Decreases emotional well-being

Thus when writing about a stressful experience hone in on your emotional outlook and cognitive reasoning. Writing about events and reactions to the situation can help to restore self-efficacy, mastery, and add meaning to the incident. Eventually traumatic or stressful images and emotions are translated into organized, coherent, and simplified linguistic forms. Structured representation of the occurrence can be assimilated with other schemas and subsequently can reduce suffering related to the event.

Your life is a story—are you the narrator or just a character? Explore more tools for creative living and self-expression at courageous-arts.com. If you’re looking for deeper support to navigate life’s transitions, visit thecourageouself.com to explore my psychotherapy services.

References

Nauert PhD, R. (2012). Journaling May Worsen Pain of Failed Relationship. Psych Central. http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/11/30/journaling-may-worsen-pain-of-failed-relationship/48379.html

Purcell, M. (2006). The Health Benefits of Journaling. Psych Central. http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/the-health-benefits-of-journaling/

Ullrich, P. & Lutgendorf, S. (2002).  Journaling About Stressful Events:  Effects of Cognitive Processing and Emotional Expression.  Annals of Behavioral Medicine.  Volume 24, Number 3. University of Iowa.

The Secret of Love (Spoiler Alert)

Posted on by helpingsoul

journey by Deepak Chopra, MD

The Internet has taken up the slack from print media by offering tips on love and relationships, which pop up on home pages, in tweets and in news teasers many times a day. If the secret to lasting romance could be shared like a recipe for cinnamon buns, our problems would be over. But love isn’t a fact, formula, or definable in words.

Love is a process, perhaps the most mysterious one in human psychology. No one knows what creates love as a powerful bond that is so full of meaning. If romance was only a heady brew of hormones, genetic inheritance and sex drive, all we’d need is better data to explain it. But love is transporting. It carries us beyond our everyday selves and makes reality shine with an inner light. The reverse can also happen. We crash to earth when the wear and tear of relationships makes love fade.

The process of love is kept alive by evolving and not getting stuck. Infatuation is an early stage of the process. You bond with another person as if by alchemy, but in time the ego returns with the claims of “I, me, and mine.” At that point love must change. Two people must negotiate how much to share, how much to surrender and how much to stand their ground. It would be tragic if romance faded into everyday familiarity, but it doesn’t have to.

Beyond the stage of two egos negotiating for their own interests, there is deepening love. It doesn’t try to turn the present into the past. A married couple of twenty years isn’t still infatuated with one other. So what keeps the process alive? For me, the answer was revealed by reading a startling sentence from the Upanishads, which are like a textbook of spiritual understanding. The sentence says, “You do not love a spouse for the sake of the spouse but for the sake of the self.”

At first glance this seems like a horrible sentiment: We all love on a personal basis and we expect to be loved the same way, for ourselves. But if “self” means your everyday personality, there is much that isn’t very lovable about each of us and as a marriage or relationship unfolds, there’s a guarantee that our partners will see those unlovable things more clearly. Even a knight in shining armor might want to save more than one damsel, and even saint must use deodorant once in a while.

In the world’s wisdom tradition, “love” and “self” are both universal. They exist beyond the individual personality. The secret of love is to expand beyond the personal. When people say that they want unconditional love, they often imply that they want to be loved despite their shortcomings, issues and quirks. But that’s nearly impossible if love remains at the personal level. At a certain point, if you begin to see love itself as your goal, universal love is more powerful and secure than personal love.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore described the spiritual side of love in a single expression” “Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.” The gift of human awareness is that we can locate the source of creation in ourselves. By going deeper into the self, asking “Who am I?” without settling for a superficial answer, the ego-personality fades. A sense of the true self begins to dawn, and it is this self that exists in contact with love as the only reality.

The journey becomes more fascinating if someone else travels with you. Life isn’t about abstractions; it’s about experience. If you have a beloved who stands for the feeling of love, bonding, and affection, your journey has a focus that can’t be supplied merely by thinking. The experiences that love bring include surrender, devotion, selflessness, giving, gratitude, appreciation, kindness and bliss. So if the phrase “universal love” seems daunting or improbable to you, break it down into these smaller experiences. Pursue them, and you will be traveling in the direction of your source, where the true self and true love merge.

That’s where my spoiler alert comes in. Announcing the secret of love cuts short the actual experience. It doesn’t always help to know what’s coming, because you might fall into exaggerated expectations and fall short. It’s better and more realistic to become aware that love is now your personal project. Show kindness and gratitude. Speak about what your beloved means to you. Every step on this journey works on behalf of the two of you but also on behalf of the self that unites you at the deepest level.

Want to be happy? Stop trying to be perfect

Posted on by helpingsoul

By Brené Brown

The quest for perfection is exhausting and unrelenting, but as hard as we try, we can’t turn off the tapes that fill our heads with messages like “Never good enough” and “What will people think?”

Why, when we know that there’s no such thing as perfect, do most of us spend an incredible amount of time and energy trying to be everything to everyone? Is it that we really admire perfection? No — the truth is that we are actually drawn to people who are real and down-to-earth. We love authenticity and we know that life is messy and imperfect.

We get sucked into perfection for one very simple reason: We believe perfection will protect us. Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.

We all need to feel worthy of love and belonging, and our worthiness is on the line when we feel like we are never ___ enough (you can fill in the blank: thin, beautiful, smart, extraordinary, talented, popular, promoted, admired, accomplished).

Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be our best. Perfectionism is not about healthy achievement and growth; it’s a shield. Perfectionism is a 20-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from being seen and taking flight.

Living in a society that floods us with unattainable expectations around every topic imaginable, from how much we should weigh to how many times a week we should be having sex, putting down the perfection shield is scary. Finding the courage, compassion and connection to move from “What will people think?” to “I am enough,” is not easy. But however afraid we are of change, the question that we must ultimately answer is this:

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think — or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

So, how do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to embrace our imperfections and to recognize that we are enough — that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy? Why we’re all so afraid to let our true selves be seen and known. Why are we so paralyzed by what other people think? After studying vulnerability, shame, and authenticity for the past decade, here’s what I’ve learned.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

There are certainly other causes of illness, numbing, and hurt, but the absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering.

As I conducted my research interviews, I realized that only one thing separated the men and women who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seem to be struggling for it. That one thing is the belief in their worthiness. It’s as simple and complicated as this:

If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.

The greatest challenge for most of us is believing that we are worthy now, right this minute. Worthiness doesn’t have prerequisites.

So many of us have created a long list of worthiness prerequisites:

• I’ll be worthy when I lose 20 pounds

• I’ll be worthy if I can get pregnant

• I’ll be worthy if I get/stay sober

• I’ll be worthy if everyone thinks I’m a good parent

• I’ll be worthy if I can hold my marriage together

• I’ll be worthy when I make partner

• I’ll be worthy when my parents finally approve

• I’ll be worthy when I can do it all and look like I’m not even trying

Here’s what is truly at the heart of whole-heartedness: Worthy now. Not if. Not when. We are worthy of love and belonging now. Right this minute. As is.

Letting go of our prerequisites for worthiness means making the long walk from “What will people think?” to “I am enough.” But, like all great journeys, this walk starts with one step, and the first step in the Wholehearted journey is practicing courage.

The root of the word courage is cor — the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.

Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic. Heroics are important and we certainly need heroes, but I think we’ve lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we’re feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage.

Heroics are often about putting our life on the line. Courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. If we want to live and love with our whole hearts and engage in the world from a place of worthiness, our first step is practicing the courage it takes to own our stories and tell the truth about who we are. It doesn’t get braver than that.

Brené Brown: Listening to shame | Video on TED.com

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TED Talks Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit, explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on. Her own humor, humanity and vulnerability shine through every word.