Diane Barth's Open Salon Blog

The Mattress

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 09:03:14 -0400

Anyone who knows me at all would have been able to tell you that I would not change my son’s room when he left for college. I mean, really, just because my husband and I live in a one bedroom apartment that we gerrymandered into two tiny bedrooms when he was born, why would we feel like we needed more space? As my spouse and beloved partner (who like me, is not a great fan of separation) put it many times, “He’s still a kid. He still needs to have a place to come back to.”

When it became clear that our offspring was not coming home to live after he graduated from college, my husband and I decided to turn the no-longer-utilized bedroom into a legitimate office. (We have a lovely pullout couch in the living room, which he generally preferred on his visits, because he had gotten too big to sleep comfortably on the extra-long twin bed which was all that his tiny bedroom could accommodate.)

So, we started making plans. First, of course, we had to sell or give away the captain’s bed that took up most of the floor space in the room. (Many New York City kids will understand this: our child got to college after living his entire life in very small quarters, took a look at the crowded room he would be sharing with his new roommates, and let out a surprised and joyful breath. “Look at all this space!” he said.) I put an ad on Craig’s list, but got no responses – not a single one. We lowered the price and then offered to give it away, but still got nothing.

My husband called a variety of thrift shops and organizations that take used furniture. No one wanted a captain’s bed. “We just can’t get rid of them,” said the representative at Goodwill.

The bed had not been expensive and had certainly served its purpose, so it was not about getting money for it. But really, we thought, someone else must be able to benefit from this piece of furniture. And there was also the moral issue. We believe in recycling. We are careful about turning off our electric equipment when we’re not using it. We take public transportation instead of driving whenever possible. We simply could not tolerate the idea of throwing the bed onto our ever-increasing landfill.

Finally, the Salvation Army took the bedframe, but state law prohibited them from taking the mattress. Although it appeared clear that no one was going to take the mattress, we didn’t want to accept it. Having been bought shortly before our son left for college, it was practically never used. Our son, a varsity athlete, had spent his college holidays at winter and spring practice, and summers he had worked overseas or out of state. Over the course of four years he had probably slept on the bed a total of two or three months.

But we could not find anyone who wanted a gently used mattress. Even one with a dust mite cover which my son needed for his allergies; but which we also had heard protected it from bedbugs. We put up signs in our building’s basement. We asked at our local bodega, where I get my coffee every morning, and I checked with the kids who work in the copy shop where I copy papers for classes I teach. No one wanted it. We put up notes at the local colleges and in the local bookshop (yes, one still exists in our neighborhood). I asked my housekeeper to ask around, and for a week we thought we had found someone. But in the end, no one seemed to need an extra-long twin mattress.

Meantime, we set up the room with small table which served as a desk, a comfortable desk chair, phone, light, and the desktop computer that had previously sat in the middle of our living room. Now the living room looked much neater. It appeared that adults lived in this apartment. But the new office was marred by the gigantic, dust mite covered presence.

It looked like were going to have to bite the bullet and throw it out. But before we did, we decided to make one more last ditch effort to find a home for it.

This time I found a taker! A friend who had recently done some renovations on her home could definitely use it. And as often happens, when the moment is right, everything went smoothly. The mattress was retrieved, removed, and taken to its new home. The doormen and porters in my building, who had none of them needed or wanted it, were incredibly helpful as we transferred it from its old home to the van that would take it to its new one.

Maybe it’s true that the more you have to work at something, the more pleasure it gives you. Certainly, our new space looks wonderful to us now that the mattress is gone. We’ve brought in the old gliding chair from the living room, which makes both spaces look even nicer. I’m not even sad that it’s now definitely not my son’s room. Although I do have to move his old cuddly bear from the glider when I sit down to read.

Why IS Advice So Hard to Take?

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 10:03:39 -0400

There are lots of ways not to take advice. As a psychotherapist and a parent I’ve probably heard most of them. My son, for example, figured out when he was very young that he could shut me up immediately when I offered psychotherapy-sounding advice by saying, “That doesn’t work with me, Mom.” Many of my clients and friends, however, are more subtle. They might mean it when they say, “That sounds like a great idea” or “That’s really helpful,” but they could also be thinking anything from “Not a chance in the world” to “I’d like to try that, but I can’t imagine that I will.” If it’s frustrating for a therapist to give advice that doesn’t get taken, however, think how hard it is to be on the receiving end of unhelpful but well-intentioned counsel.

But the truth is that while most of us can give good advice, we can’t always take it. Freud figured this out early in his work. He knew what was wrong with his patients, and he knew how they could get better. And he told them what he knew. Some of them got better. But lots rejected his excellent suggestions. So he called this “resistance.”

Today most therapists don’t buy into all of Freud’s theories; but we still use the concept of resistance to explain why people don’t accept perfectly good advice: people resist advice because we don’t like to change. We’d rather stay miserable and be the person we know than take the chance of being happy if it means being different.

But that’s not really a very good explanation. It’s like saying I don’t eat peanut butter sandwiches because they taste like peanut butter. More recently, neuropsychologists and psychotherapists have been looking at the possibility that we don’t change for two very good reasons. First, our brains are wired to keep doing the same thing. In his book The Developing Mind neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel writes that our neurons behave like people walking across a field of tall grass, tending to follow an established path rather than breaking through a new one. So our brains automatically keep us doing the same thing over and over again.

But, according to Siegel and many contemporary psychoanalysts, the brain is only part of the story. The other part is our need for other people – what psychoanalysts today call our “relational” needs. For many of us, the need to maintain relationships with people already in our lives is key to our inability to change. Sometimes these are living, active relationships in the here and now. And sometimes they’re old relationships that stay inside us even when the original people have themselves changed.

We may be afraid, for example, that if we try something new and we do change, people who have supported us might think we’re fine on our own and stop being available for us. Or people who love us the way we are might not love the changes we make. Either way, we’d be different and all alone.

On the other hand, we might be afraid that if we change we’ll be disappointed – nothing will be any different. Or we may think we want to change; but what we really want is to be accepted and loved just the way we are.

But given all of these possibilities, what’s a therapist supposed to do? It’s easy enough to say that our job is not to give advice, but many clients actually ask for suggestions, and it doesn’t seem fair not to offer our thoughts when they’re asked for. But we do have to remember that asking for advice and taking it are two different things.

Sometimes people just want us to listen to them – without trying to change them. One of my favorite supervisors when I was in analytic training used to say that two things have to happen before someone can change: first, they have to feel accepted for being who they are; and second, they have to understand why they are the way they are.

Neither of these steps is easy to take. In fact, that’s part of why change takes time. Lots of time. And here’s the thing: change is a process. Which takes us back to the question of why we often don’t take even really good advice: it is frequently given with the goal of making us change. Immediately. So we resist, almost automatically, without even thinking about it.

Sometimes, however, even the most resistant of us will, eventually, act on good advice. We just have to do it in our own time.

References:

Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind, Second Edition: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to ShapeWho We Are. Guilford Press, 2012.

Can We Know Too Much?

Tue, 6 Mar 2012 06:03:38 -0500

At a party recently I was trapped in a conversation with a man who clearly knew everything – or at least, so he thought, and he wanted to make sure I thought so as well. Until I was able to get away, I entertained myself by trying to imagine why he needed so badly to know so much. Then a colleague joined us and asked him a question which he could not answer, but he got around that problem by informing my colleague that the question missed the point and continuing to lecture us both on whatever it was that the question had missed. A minute later, when one of us had another question he couldn’t answer, he suddenly recognized an important acquaintance across the room and had to excuse himself from our company.

The man was a bore, but even so, I felt sorry for him. It’s really too bad when we feel that we have to know everything in order to feel good about ourselves. As I say regularly (sometimes too often, according to some of my clients), not knowing is not bad. In fact, doubt, uncertainty and confusion are extremely important, if sometimes uncomfortable, feelings in the human repertoire. Without them, for example, we would never learn and never be motivated to change and we would not be able to learn. As the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald writes, in fact confusion is part of letting go of what we already know and taking in something new.

As my acquaintance at the party didn’t get, acknowledging that we don’t know something and being curious about what someone else is thinking can make us look much smarter than pretending to know everything!

Acknowledging that you don’t know something and asking for help doing it can prevent costly mistakes.

And here’s an interesting piece of information: asking someone what they know about something and listening to their answers can activate your brain and theirs, can actually make you both feel good, and will make you both smarter! (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-03-21/features/ct-tribu-weigel-listening-20110321_1_emotional-intelligence-travis-bradberry-listeners)

Years ago, when I was beginning to teach other therapists, I worried – like most new teachers – that I didn’t know enough. I was particularly concerned about what would happen if someone asked me a question I couldn’t answer. A very wise colleague told me, “The best response a teacher can give is, ‘that’s a really good question. Let’s see if we can find an answer. I’ll do some research on it, but why don’t you also see what you can find out about it, and we’ll share our findings in the next class.’” Over the years, I have found that most students forget to look for the answers, but are thrilled when their teacher has taken their question seriously enough to look it up and come back to them with a response. And they have learned something much more important than the answer to their question. They have learned that it is smart not to know and that asking questions will making them even smarter.

Inevitably when I talk about this topic, someone says, “Yes, but I got a bad review at work because I asked too many questions. My supervisor told me to take some initiative, to make some decisions myself.” This is an important comment, because it highlights the difference between taking responsibility and acknowledging not knowing. If you have been criticized for asking too many questions, try to ask yourself a few things. First, are you paying attention to what you do know? Are your questions the result of genuine curiosity, or are they based on your assumption that anything you might know could not valuable? Is there a psychological or emotional reason that you ask so many questions? Is it possible, for example, that you are afraid to take responsibility for possible mistakes, so you ask someone else what to do so that they will be responsible? Of course, if you are genuinely having difficulties learning your job, there are other questions you should be asking yourself, including trying to understand what is making it difficult and who can help you figure it out?

And this takes us to another crucial part of not knowing. It is extremely important to have others who can be with you as you explore the unknown. Philip Bromberg, a New York City psychoanalyst and author, calls this “standing in the spaces.” It is easier to navigate the spaces of not knowing when we have someone who will join us there. They don’t have to tell us the answer, just offer us support while we’re searching. A friend, who had recently gone through a difficult patch in his life, told me that his wife of many years often got him through the darkest times by simply saying, “I know you’re feeling terrible. But that thought isn’t you, dear.” She was not denying his bad feelings or his struggle to understand the source of his emotional pain; but she was saying that she knew that there were other parts of him. Although he could not access those parts at the moment, she suggested, they were still there and would return. He could not tell her at the time, but later he was able to let her know how comforting her words were. “She was holding onto parts of me that I could not see,” he said.

Sometimes we don’t allow anyone to join us in the spaces of our uncertainty because we are afraid of being judged or criticized. The fear of being judged, as author and my fellow Psychology Today blogger Jonathan Fields writes in his book Uncertainty, can be a major block in life. He says this fear “leads many to either cut creative quests short or, worse, never even begin.”

When we do not allow ourselves not to know, we can cut off not only creativity, but curiosity, knowledge, the capacity to grow and develop. Not knowing, or uncertainty, is as necessary to human growth as is sleep. We can’t get stronger, smarter, healthier, or more successful in life without both.

So the next time you worry that you don’t know enough, take a deep breath and let yourself be curious instead. And see where it takes you.

The Sudden Fall From Grace of John Friend

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 15:02:25 -0500

What happens to a teacher’s teachings when he betrays his students’ trust?

I never took a class with John Friend, the founder of Anasura Yoga, but this charismatic leader inspired many of my own yoga teachers, who have helped me recover from injuries caused by years of ballet classes, a black ice tumble, and the chronic back problems that come from sitting long hours every day. Some of these teachers never spoke of the man. Others shared anecdotes from their classes with him. Some talked about his “philosophy of intrinsic goodness” and others about the principles of alignment that were a central part of his teaching http://www.anusara.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=68&Itemid=77 .

Being a somewhat cynical person by nature, I could never quite buy into all of the excitement about Mr. Friend, who was described as a charming, charismatic, and energetic man. We cynics generally don’t take descriptions like this at face value (my analyst used to say that the definition of a cynic is “a disappointed romantic”—which means we are suspicious of anyone that sounds too good or charming because we have previously been disappointed by exactly such a person). But it didn’t matter to me, one way or the other. What I was most aware of was that the approach to yoga taken by my Anasura teachers was one that helped to heal injuries that already existed and kept me from being hurt again. With the bad press that yoga has received recently (see, for example, William Broad’s article in the NY Times) this sense of safety and well-being should be more than enough.

However, recent events in the Anasura yoga world have suggested otherwise. Huffington Post writer Stewart J. Lawrence reports, “In the past week, much of the yoga world has been engulfed in turmoil over revelations that John Friend, founder of the yoga brand known as "Anusara," may not be the saintly guru that his publicists have promoted so successfully over the years. It turns out, that he's allegedly a shameless adulterer, sex fiend, marijuana dealer, and small-time corporate thug who probably broke the law by freezing his company's pension fund, in the process betraying the trust and marriages of dozens -- and possibly hundreds -- of his loyal followers.”

It would be easy for me, already admitting to being a disappointed romantic, to simply say, “but of course. No one who has as much power and adoration as this guy has had can possibly remain – if he ever was in the first place – purely good.” I could point to all of the fallen idols of recent years, ranging from politicians to ministers to other figures in the yoga world, and to more sports, movie and music stars than we can count on both hands. Many, if not all, of these people probably started out as basically good, well-meaning individuals. But, to totally paraphrase an old saying, power and popularity are – or can often be – corrosive.

So what is one to do? What happens to the men and women who feel betrayed by Mr. Friend -- not just as a person, but as a teacher, a leader, a giver of meaning? And what happens to his teachings themselves?

From a purely selfish perspective, I hope that the teachings will continue. Despite Mr. Friend’s possible wrongdoings, the teachings stand alone. Well, maybe not the philosophy of intrinsic goodness, but certainly his approach to yoga technique – but maybe, in fact, even the intrinsic goodness stuff!

One of the teachers and writers whose thinking was key to my own development as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst was Heinz Kohut who developed a theory of personality called “self psychology” (or sometimes “the psychology of the self”). Kohut believed that human beings have an intrinsic need to idealize others – parents, teachers, love ones – and that part of healthy development is the process of learning that the idealized person is less than perfect. Sometimes a lot less than perfect.

Kohut believed that a manageable, or “optimal” disappointment in a loved one actually helps us develop into stronger, healthier human beings who are able to cope with our own failings and those of our loved ones. “Traumatic” disillusionment, on the other hand, is a disappointment which is too difficult to bear, and can lead to unhealthy symptoms and neuroses.

I know that many of the teachers who have followed Mr. Friend are feeling stunned and traumatized by the possibility that their beloved leader has let them down so painfully. Yet I believe that they will find that this disillusionment, while terribly painful, actually falls into the category of “optimal.”

I believe that these men and women have learned something important from the work they have been doing and the practices they have built with Mr. Friend’s teachings. While they may now be questioning every part of those practices that might be connected to Mr. Friend (a normal part of the disillusionment process), they will gradually begin to discover something else emerging within themselves.

They will, I believe, find that there are aspects of the yoga practice they have been doing under Mr. Friend’s leadership that capture the best parts of themselves. They will discover ideas that are actually not Mr. Friend’s, but their own. And they will be able to recognize the intrinsic truth and clarity of the ideas which may have been initiated by their leader, but are actually separate from him.

This is what Kohut believed emerged from disappointment: a healthy, integrated sense of self which recognizes that humans are imperfect by definition. Such a self can weather disappointment and find ways to hold onto truths, even when the person who taught those ideas has been unfaithful to them himself.

References:

How Does Analysis Cure? By Heinz Kohut. Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Will I ever be able to eat like a normal person?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:02:25 -0500

Beryl* has had an eating disorder ever since she can remember. As a child she was a little chubby and her parents, who had both struggled with their own weight, worried that she would become obese. They therefore kept a strict watch on her food intake, and as a result Beryl almost always felt hungry, even after she had just eaten. To make things worse, she had a younger brother who was thin and could eat anything he wanted.

“Mom would offer him a second and even a third helping of potatoes,” Beryl said sadly. “But I got just a half of a portion.”

Not surprisingly, Beryl began to sneak into the kitchen late at night, while the rest of the family was sleeping, to binge on all of the foods she had not been allowed to eat during the day. Her parents began to lock the kitchen cabinets and even the refrigerator, and complained that it wasn’t fair to them or to her brother, who needed access to the snack food. Beryl’s brother came to her defense, saying that it would be better to let her eat what she wanted and maybe then she wouldn’t feel the need to sneak all of the food. Their parents weren’t trying to be mean. They just did not want Beryl to suffer with her weight as they had. But unfortunately Beryl suffered anyway.

As a psychotherapist who has been working with people with eating disorders for three decades, however, I can say one thing for absolute certain: there is no single, simple solution to the issue of bringing up a child with healthy eating habits. I have heard other people complain about exactly the opposite problem – their parents did not restrict their food enough. But the reality is that growing up without an eating disorder these days is not simple.

And therefore, there is no easy answer to the question Beryl asked me one day: “Will I ever be able to eat like a normal person?”

To even consider this question, we have to also ask how a normal person eats. Is it normal to worry about our weight all the time? In many contemporary cultures, the answer may very well be yes. Is it normal to consider all fats, sweets and processed foods “bad”? Again, at least in parts of the world today, the answer is yes, even though the evidence is that this belief is not accurate.

When my son was little he would eat only foods in shades of white and orange (pizza, chicken nuggets, pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches, supplemented by an occasional banana or a few slices of apple). Friends, colleagues and even my pediatrician reassured that this was “normal” eating for many young children.

Interestingly, this way of eating can also be a healthy way to control weight, so long as you get all of the nutrients you need. According to diet and fitness expert Dr. Melina Jampolis, http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/expert.q.a/06/12/diet.repeating.foods.jampolis/index.html “research shows that having less variety in your diet, especially when it comes to high fat and sugary foods, can help with weight loss and weight maintenance.”

But here’s another thing. What’s normal at one stage in life may be less normal at another. Today, at over six feet tall, my son is not only healthy, but also an excellent cook who loves to experiment with all sorts of interesting and unusual ingredients.

But what Beryl really wanted to know was whether she could hope to ever eat enough to satisfy her hunger without worrying that every bite was making her fat. And further, could she actually lose some weight by eating that way?

The answer is a mixed one. On the one hand, Beryl is in the process of retraining her mind and her body so that she can eat mindfully, healthily and in a way that will slowly help her begin to lose weight. That takes work and in many ways it is not as satisfying as a strict diet in which the pounds fall away and the fat visibly disappears. But of course, as we all know, recent research has shown that most people re-gain weight after dieting. And being on that yo-yo cycle of alternating over-eating and restricting means that we are never free from worrying about what we’re eating and what we weigh.

And yet, here’s a painful truth about trying to lose weight. It’s all about procrastination. Even when we’re on a diet, we’re often putting something off – whether it’s feeling good (“I’ll be so much happier when I’ve lost these ten pounds”) or enjoying ourselves (“I’ll do x y or z when I’m at my perfect weight”). (If you like, check out my post on procrastination on my Psychology Today blog http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-couch/201202/procrastinate-or-not-do-you-have-choice)

We often procrastinate about doing things we don’t like that will actually lead to things we do like. When it comes to dieting, procrastination is a major problem. But here's a different way to frame this process: In order to lose weight and maintain the weight loss, you don't have to diet. In fact, you just have to start eating “normally” right now. What does that mean? Translate "eating normally" to eating mindfully, consciously, healthily and interestingly!!! And not just today or tomorrow, but every day.

Susan Albers writes about this in her book Eating Mindfully: How to end mindless eating and enjoy a balanced relationship with food, and in her blog, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/comfort-cravings.

The problem is that eating mindfully may not be as much fun as eating mindlessly. And in this day and age, it almost certainly is not at all normal to eat in a way that you can maintain every day for the rest of your life. But it is a way of eating that doesn't involve worrying about everything you put in your mouth every second of every day.

In fact, eating normally – that is, mindfully, and in a way that you can maintain forever – doesn’t mean eating the same amount or the same thing every day. It also means eating foods you love every day – maybe in smaller portions than you really want, but it can help to know that you can have more tomorrow; and more the day after; and more after that as well.

And some days it’s okay to splurge – oh yes, that bad word, even to binge! – but then the work is to go back to “normal” eating. Over time, as your body begins to settle into a rhythm and your metabolism adjusts to a more stable eating regimen, you will find that you can handle an occasional splurge. Because then even a splurge will be mindful – and that’s what I call “normal.”

*names and identifying information changed to protect privacy