"Mustache Moment"

A few days ago I wrote about a DBT skill useful for coping with distress. The acronym I.M.P.R.O.V.E. (Imagery, Meaning, Prayer, Relaxation, One thing at a time, Vacation, and Encouragement) includes the concept of taking a mini-vacation from tasks and responsibilities. No, this isn’t the kind of vacation that calls for luggage. It’s simply taking a few moments to approach life with playfulness, childlike whimsy, and an uninhibited sense of fun.

Until last week, I hadn’t tried this skill at all. That’s because, when problems and crises arise, I tend to distract myself from whatever is bothering me by buckling down and getting to work. Sublimation works for me. It helps to shift my focus outward to an activity. But playing? In the middle of a distressing situation? I wasn’t so sure it would help. Even more importantly, I didn’t think I could do it.

That is, until one of my grandkids left a fake mustache on the kitchen counter where my husband, Fred, found it last Monday and stuck it on an orange. I’d been starting each morning down in the dumps for a few days, bothered by nightmares and a situation with one of our grown kids.

That morning, I faced my day ready to do battle with depressing thoughts by being mindful, distracting myself, and radical acceptance. Instead, I saw the orange wearing a mustache and I laughed.

Two can play at this game, I thought, and moved it to the bathroom mirror.

What followed that week, were interspersed moments of silliness, with the mustache disappearing for a day or so, then showing up in surprising places—the ceiling in our bedroom, a pair of Fred’s pants, my laptop screen, the toilet lid. Each discovery and concealment invoked laughter and served as a little “vacation” from day-to-day responsibilities.

As is usually the case, the crisis eventually passed. And I had coped--thanks, in part, to an overall reduction in my stress level as a result of a bit of laughing and playing. That, and a stick-on mustache from the dollar store.

Thoughts on Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday, a day on which many Christians receive a mark of ashes on their foreheads to symbolize their regret of wrongdoing and their acknowledgment of mortality—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  Even without the religious connotation, ashes have always reminded me of the temporary nature of things.

I grew up in a small row home with a coal burning furnace to keep us warm in the winter. Coal burned hot and bright for only so long. After that, we just had buckets of cold gray ash. One night when I was six, fire burned a hotel in our town to the ground. Of the velvet couches, oak paneled walls, and wingback chairs only powdery mounds of silt remained.  And, as I grew older, I knew that when my dad lit a cigarette, it heralded the beginning of a few moments of conversation. Cinders marked the end of it.

Accepting the impermanence of the world isn’t easy. Especially on a day which focuses on the fact that I’m not permanent either. But today I tried anyway. I reminded myself that this present moment is all I am ever really sure of. I encouraged myself to let things go, to release control, to loosen my grip. I practiced a DBT skill called “radical acceptance.”

This skill involves completely and totally accepting the reality of a thing, just as it is. And, no, it’s not the same as approving of something. Rather, it is coming to terms with your whole heart, mind, body, and soul that “it is what it is.”

Elisabeth Kubler Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist alluded to this type of acceptance as the fifth stage of grief. As an example, she pointed to dying people who choose to stop fighting the inevitable and to enter a stage of accepting “what is.”  Peace often accompanies this type of total acceptance.

Ashes remind me that comfort runs out, landscapes change, time with those we love comes to an end, and no one lives on this earth forever. Today as I practice accepting, I breathe in the sacredness of the present moment. It is enough.

Life in the Middle

Taffy, homemade mozzarella cheese, bread dough--many things benefit from the tension of being pulled in opposite directions. I’m not one of them.

Whereas taffy becomes more filled with air, cheese curds become more pliable, and bread dough gets stronger, being “pulled apart” sometimes has the opposite effect on me. I breathe in less air, tense up, and feel weak.

It’s been my frequent, involuntary physical response to conflict. That is, to people around me arguing, to people squaring off in diametric corners of opinion, to people I care about getting caught up in unresolved conflict. In other words, being “stuck in the middle” is a place that causes me distress.

However, what I’m discovering through DBT is that successful coping is often all about “being in the middle” The “middle” is where markedly different viewpoints, experiences, and realities co-exist. DBT reminds me that few things in life are completely black or white, all or nothing, the high road or the low road, here to stay or gone forever.

For proof, I need look no farther than the stack of DBT diary cards I’ve kept for the past year.  Each includes a section in which I rate various moods and emotions each day on a scale of one to ten. I’ve neither recorded many rankings of 1… nor of 10. Surprisingly, even on what I’ve perceived to be my worst days, I’m usually in the middle numbers—things are neither all terrible nor all wonderful. At the end of the day, feelings, moods, events somehow even themselves out.

Lately, I’ve been trying to keep this in mind when I feel pulled in opposite directions in the midst of someone else’s conflict. Things might feel irreconcilable at the moment. But both black and white objects have the same gray-colored shadows, constantly changing according to the light source.

 I’m learning to recognize and appreciate the shadows of life, ever shifting, moving, coming and going. And that includes moments of conflict.

Just the Facts

Thoughts--those little bursts of electricity that twinkle throughout my mind both consciously and subconsciously--affect the way I experience and interact with the world around me.

So nowadays, whenever I catch myself passing judgment on others, on events, on myself, I try to STOP.
Instead of following that line of thinking, I try to allow the judgmental thoughts to dissolve away.

My goal is to focus instead on the observable facts at hand. 

"The phone is ringing" is the observable fact. "Telemarketers are terrible people and they always call at dinnertime" is the judgmental thought. 

"I feel sad" is the fact. "I shouldn't feel sad... I have no reason to mope around" is the judgmental thought.

 "It is snowing" is the observable fact. "Spring is NEVER going to come" is the judgmental thought. 

Little by little, choice by choice, I am increasingly successful at replacing judgmental thinking with mindful thinking. I'm far from 100% successful. However, during those times when I'm unsuccessful, I've found it helpful to heed advice from my DBT therapist: "Don't judge your judging."

Letting Go

Just a few years back, I had eight grandchildren under the age of ten. They all lived minutes from my home and I spent as much time with them as possible. I knew all too well from raising my own kids that childhood is gone in an instant.

Most of the time we just played—messy, loud, wild fun involving creeks and salamanders, paints and any flat surface, lawn sprinklers and popsicles, harmonicas and firecrackers.

But some of the time, I spent teaching, especially traits and attributes I thought had been most helpful to me in life. For example, I intentionally demonstrated patience and respect of others when the traffic light turned green and the car in front of us didn’t budge.

I reminded them always that hands are for helping, working, creating, playing, and expressing affection—not anger or hurtfulness.

I also modeled perseverance by unflinchingly tackling broken bicycle chains, cracked whiffle bats, and headless teddy bears until they were fixed. Patiently connecting and re-connecting webs of video game power cords one by one, over and over. And unsticking, unscrewing, and untangling a seemingly unending amount of stuck, screwed on too tight, and tangled objects.

 I’m not sure which one of the grandkids said it first, but the phrase they eventually came  up with to associate with me was, “Nana never gives up.”  

Now that most of them are teenagers, however, I’m making sure they know the difference between “not giving up” and “letting go.” Recently, on the way back to the high school after an orthodontist appointment, my eldest grandson was talking about relationships.

Mostly I listened, but at the end of the conversation, I reminded him that while I am notoriously persistent in working on what needs to be changed in my life if it is within my power to change it, I am getting better and better at letting go of those things that are not within my power to change. The key to success, I told him, is knowing which is which.

He grinned and said, “Yeah, I know, Nana. Love you.” And with that, he grabbed his backpack, closed the car door, and took the school steps two at a time.  I watched him disappear through the doors into the high school world of uncertainty, ups and downs, pressures, and difficult choices... and then I let him go.

Get Out of Your Head and Into Your LIfe

This morning on television, the news broadcast ended near the top of the hour and two talk show hosts came on the air. The topic of conversation turned to something that had happened in Hollywood overnight. I wasn’t all that interested so I turned the TV off.

How great it would be, I thought, if I could do that with the stream of chatter that frequently runs through my mind.  If only there were a remote control to shut off or at least turn down the volume of repetitive thoughts, my self-critical “inner voice,” and worrying.

Most likely, you can relate. Like the background noise of a radio or TV, streams of thoughts can rattle on and on, especially when you’re doing something you’ve done a thousand times before--driving to work, brushing your teeth, eating at your desk, and so on.

That’s why a skill set in the first DBT module, entitled “Mindfulness,” makes sense to me. They’re as close as I can get to turning the channel, lowering the volume, or simply shutting off unwanted, repetitive thoughts.

By practicing these skills over and over, I’m increasingly able to shift brain activity away from inner “self-talk” and to fill my mind instead with a greater experience of the present moment.

Here are the “Mindfulness” skills which help me be more present and aware of the moment at hand:

·        Observe: notice life experiences without judging them.

·        Describe: put words to those observations and stick to observable facts, not judgments about them.

·        Participate: be fully engaged in each moment.

I’m discovering that the fuller my mind is of what I am presently experiencing with all five senses—hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling, and tasting—the less room there is for negative, critical, repetitive “self-talk.”

I once heard someone say, “Observe, describe, and participate are ways to get out of your head and into your life.” I agree.

A Letter to My Young Facebook Friend

A letter to my young Facebook friend:

I was scrolling down through Facebook posts this morning when seven short words stopped me in my tracks: “numbing is the only way to cope.”

You, the writer, are away at college and my only contact with you lately has been through Facebook, so I don’t know what is causing you such distress.

But here’s what I do know and what I wish someone had told me 40 years ago.

Life events often bring emotional pain so intense that, in my opinion, it’s only natural to want to make it stop. Immediately. In any way possible. At any cost.

At 20, conflicts, stressors, and problems also threatened to undo me at every turn. I didn’t know how to cope. So I also tried to numb, escape, and control. The problem was, the “anesthesia” always wore off and the pain returned.

Decades later and now knowing what I do about the way brains work, I understand that every time I chose to “numb” (in my case, drinking and self-harm) in response to painful events, I was adding another “paver” to that particular neural highway. Life itself often whizzed by me as I drove down that road.

Stuck on the road of habitual numbing behavior, I began to see signs warning me to turn back—such as the consequences of arguments while intoxicated and the suffering of destructive out of control behavior. Fortunately, by the time I accepted that fact that I was completely lost and needed exits, there were several in sight.

But I had to choose. If I kept taking the “numbing” exit, I would always wind up back on the same road. On the other hand, if I steered toward organizations, treatments, and programs that would teach me new skills with which to cope, new horizons would spread out before me. I turned.

Now admittedly, at sixty-years-old, I have a distinct vantage point that comes with age. Life events have reinforced my belief that I will make it. I can stand it. I can let it go. I can forgive. I can move on. I can accept.

But even though you are young, I know you. You’re smart. You’re persistent. You’re destined for something greater than whatever the current circumstances are. You just need a better map to chart new paths for yourself. The future is yours. Turn.