A Season of Grieving

By Elizabeth Austin, Guest Blogger 

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven . . . a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” –Ecclesiastes 3:1,4

The past year has been my season of grieving.  Needless to say, it’s been a long, hard year, but also, in a way that seems impossible to pinpoint, a transformative year, a year of blessings.

Much of 2011 blurs in my mind.  It started with my father’s recurrence of lung cancer, then his mercifully brief, anguished last few weeks. It was the first parent I lost, and one I loved intensely.  The pain of watching him suffer and of losing him matched that intensity.

On the other hand, many were the blessings of being with him during his last few weeks, offering him comfort, love, and physical relief.  For all the world, I would not have been anywhere else.   What amazement and joy it brought to watch my mother, usually so reticent with her love and emotions, shower him with reassurance, affection, words of adoration, and comfort.  I had no idea their bond ran so deep, naïve as it is to admit.  To bear witness to your parents’ love for one another in such a raw, powerful way changes you.  It’s brought me closer to my mother, which is another thing I am thankful for.

My stalwart brothers and sisters stepped up too.  So often you hear about families driven apart during times of crisis and loss.  One sibling or the other often feels they are carrying the heavier burden as caretakers of older or ill parents.  Not in my family.  When we knew Daddy was not long for this world, we showed up.  And not out of obligation, but out of love.  We showed up again and again each week to help care for him, to provide respite for our mother, to make sure he left the world knowing that we loved him and would take care of each other.  Did I know this before about my siblings, about my family?  I’m not sure, but I now wonder at how my parents managed to instill in us this deep love and loyalty.  If only I am able to instill that in my children, I will have succeeded.

After the loss of Daddy, our Southern patriarch, our family farm, which he had worked his entire life, became my respite to get through the heavy, dense fog of grief.  In fact, one moment will forever remain seared in my memory:  It was the morning after he died.  The house was full, so my family stayed in my aunt’s RV, parked next to one of the hay fields.  I woke early the next morning, face puffy from crying, filled with a mix of varying emotions, but mostly dulled with grief and confused about how to go on without the man who had helped bring me into the world.  I opened the door to the RV on that cold, bright morning, and the sun was just beginning to rise over the trees beyond the hay field.  It was a brilliant sunrise, beautiful over the forest and the ocean of lush, green hay sprouting.  The pond, which my father built, was visible in the distance.  The scene took my breath away, such beauty in the face of such grief.  My first thought was, “Daddy loved this farm.  Now he’s gone.”  My second thought was, “This is so beautiful.  I wonder if someone is trying to remind me that life goes on, that there is beauty in this world?”

I still wonder.

It’s been a year of soul searching, leaning into the grief, trying to learn from it, take what I need from it, then move on.  My children are a reminder to me every day to show up for this life, to be present for them.  My children and Daddy’s death help me to remember that life is to be lived, that it is precious, and that we only get so much time.  Don’t get me wrong, I fail at showing up and being present over and over again, but I keep trying.  That’s all you can do.

I’ve found comfort in many things this year.  One thing is this passage from No Death, No Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh:

The day my mother died, I wrote in my journal, “A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.

I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tenderly, very sweet . . . wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine alone but a living continuation of my mother and father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. These feet that I saw as “my” feet were actually “our” feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.

I don’t know exactly how Thich Nhat Hanh meant this passage:  Literally or figuratively?  I guess it doesn’t matter, but I like answers.  The problem is there are no absolute answers about death.  No one can tell us exactly what happens, if we live on (literally), though many of us take solace and comfort in what our religion teaches about death.  I have faith, but I’m a Westerner too.  Cold, hard facts, scientific evidence speak to me.

Nonetheless, I have felt my father with me.  I understand what Thich Nhat Hanh is saying, at least in the figurative sense—and I have a lot of hope for the literal sense.  My father is me.  My grandparents are me.  My mother is me.  I take forward a piece of all of them in this life, in my life.  My children do too.  Throughout this season of grieving, I have come to believe that, yes, we are all connected in some way that cannot be seen, heard, or touched.  It brings me great comfort.

I hope it brings you comfort too.      

Elizabeth Austin is a wife, mother and writer living in Raleigh, NC.

Maintaining Marriage Through Midlife

Vivian Diller, Ph.D., a psychologist in private practice in New York City, wrote this post. It appeared in Psychology Today.

By Vivian Diller, Ph.D.
At age 58, I have now been successfully married to the same man for over 25 years. I write ‘successful,’ rather than ‘happy’ to emphasize that marriage through midlife is not just about blissful sailing, but about the ability to navigate the realities of long-term relationships over many years.

Sure we have our ups and downs — and our differences — but I can say with confidence that my husband and I will never part. Why such assurance when the divorce rate in this country is so high? How do we differ from the couples described in Iris Krasnow’s The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes To Stay Married, who “have been married forever but think about divorce if not weekly, at least once a month?” Perhaps, both being psychotherapists, we have a heightened awareness of what it takes to keep marriage alive for all those ‘forever’ years. Perhaps it’s our work helping troubled couples that reminds us to appreciative the relationship we have. Most of all, our optimism is the result of keeping “Marital Myths” from interfering with realistic love.

My husband wrote about these myths in his book, “All You Need is Love and Other Lies About Marriage.” Below I’ve selected four that we debunk regularly in our work with couples and in our own relationship. Believe these myths and you may see even the strongest relationships head toward failure by age fifty. Face the truths behind them and your relationship has a greater chance to make it through midlife and beyond.

Myth #1: All you need is love.

These words may have made beautiful music for the Beatles, but when it comes to long-term marriage “all you need is love” is not just wishful thinking, but dangerous dissonance. It’s why so many couples come to therapy asking, “if we love each other, why are we so unhappy?” We are bombarded by this mythical message from early childhood onward; in fairy tales, then romance novels, films and in reality shows. Doesn’t every little girl and boy grow up believing that love conquers all? The Bachelor and Bachelorette, most popular with young adults of marriageable age, confirm the fantasy; find the right guy or gal, fall in love and happiness will be achieved. And as long as our culture continues to perpetuate this message, couples will struggle maintaining their relationships.

The truth is, given how long we live and how complicated married life is, this belief is just not realistic. Unconditional love may be appropriate for parent — child relationships, but not for husband and wife. In fact, the opposite is true. The expectation that ‘love is all you need’ undermines the importance of developing the real skills needed to keep marriage alive and well through midlife. Debunk this myth and begin applying relationship skills that go hand and hand with love and your marriage may just work.

Myth #2: Talking is the key to success.

“Keep the lines of communication open” and our relationships will be okay, right? Marital experts imply this when they tell us to talk through our difficulties. Openness is good. Avoidance is bad. We have even learned from Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that males and females have their own communication styles, and as long as we understand these differences, we can solve our marital problems? Wrong.

We may be the generation that was encouraged to ask, “What do you think? How do you feel?” and expected to be understood, but few of us have been taught how to differentiate between effective versus ineffective communication. We were told to be brutally honest so our partners would know how we really feel. But the truth is, people are often more brutal than honest. Spouses sometimes use their version of the truth to bludgeon their partners. Couples may do a lot of talking and think that should be enough, but they behave badly. Communicating alone is not the key to solving marital problems. Rather, it’s in how we talk, how we listen and most importantly, how we behave that leads to the success of long-term marriage. How often do we treat strangers — the woman who waits tables or the guy behind the deli counter — better than our mates? Too often. As my husband and I often say, “there’s no excuse for bad behavior” in any relationship, but especially with the person you love.

Myth #3: Change my mate and everything will be fine

Couples who seek marital help most often come in saying they want to work on improving their relationship. Yet, frequently what they really mean is this: “If you can change my mate, everything will be fine.” On some level, both men and women actually fear that their problems are so intractable that they are wasting their time trying to change the way they feel toward one another. People are convinced that their marital problems lie in their partner and that fixing them will fix their marriage. Not only is this is an incorrect belief, but it can sabotage the real work that can improve salvageable marriages.

The truth is that most couples spend a lot of time trying to improve their relationships in unproductive ways. They remain fixed in destructive cycles and as a result, get frustrated by their unsuccessful efforts and pessimistic that they, as a couple, can feel better. Many fear that shifting marital patterns is too complicated, so they bail out of the demands required for productive marital work. In reality, there is tough work involved in couples getting what they say they want from their marriages. And while we may not be able to change our partner, there’s a lot we can do to foster change in our relationships.

Myth #4: Children solidify relationships.

One of the most important myths that interferes with successful long-term marriage is the belief that children help keep people together. Even if creating families may have been the motive behind why some couples marry, the truth is that placing your focus on children over your marital relationship invites major problems over the long term.

That is not to say that children don’t need our attention. No doubt we love and devote ourselves to their welfare. But in a culture where couples already work long hours and spend little time together, we need to be aware that family life can wear down marriage life. The sleepless nights during infancy right through the terrors of teenage years have a greater tendency to unglue a marriage, rather than solidify it. Children’s needs are ever present and unpredictable. They have unexpected difficulties — emotional and physical — and when they do, it grows increasingly difficult to keep their needs from interfering with our marriages. It may be counter-intuitive, but a couple’s relationship must be made a priority, not only for the sake of preserving our marriages, but so that our children grow up within intact families.

Which is all to say that recognizing and acknowledging these four marital myths can make it more likely that you can maintain your relationship through midlife. My husband and I continue to feel romantic love, in spite of — and perhaps because of — our continued awareness of these myths about marriage. And, while love alone is not enough to keep couples together, relationships rooted in firm realities can deepen the love that does exist between them.

Do you know any other myths that make it hard to maintain marriage through midlife?

Vivian Diller, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice in New York City. A professional dancer before becoming a Wilhelmina model, Dr. Diller co-authored FACE IT: What Women Really Feel As Their Looks Change (2010), a psychological guide to help women deal with the emotions brought on by their changing appearances. For more information, please visit www.VivianDiller.com

Aspire’s Blog: 2011 In Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 23 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Should You Stay or Should You Go?

By Christine Carter, PhD of The Main Dish

Lucky us: We live in a world where many of us have an abundance of choices: where to live, what to do for a living, and, of course, who to marry—or whether to get married at all.

All these choices give us certain freedoms, but they don’t necessarily make us happier. They create certain perfectionistic expectations: If we aren’t perfectly happy with the one we love, for example, might we have chosen wrong? Should I make a different choice now? Would the grass be greener with my high school sweetheart?

Here’s where I find John and Julie Gottman’s seminal research to be totally essential to understanding the problems of long-term romantic relationships. Here are two key things I’ve learned from them.

First, all couples have problems. Think the grass might be greener? Remember you’re trading out one set of problems for another. It isn’t about finding a conflict-free relationship, or even about solving all of your relationship’s problems, but rather about accepting the problems you can live with.

In her book Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert offers a very useful metaphor for this, quoting her gem-buyer husband:

A parcel is this random collection of gems that the miner … puts together. … Supposedly, you get a better deal that way—buying them all in a bunch—but you have to be careful, because … [he’s] trying to unload his bad gemstones on you by packaging them together with a few really good ones. …

After I got burned enough times, I … learned this: You have to ignore the perfect gemstones. … Just put them away and have a careful look at the really bad stones. Look at them for a long time, and then ask yourself honestly, “Can I work with these? Can I make something out of this?”

Spouses are much the same: They come with flawed bits as well as sparkly strengths. The question isn’t so much whether you want the sparkly parts (of course you do) but rather whether you can deal with the flaws.

Second, there are really only four types of problems. The key is knowing what type of problem you’ve got, and then deciding whether or not you can work with it. The four kinds of problems are:

(1) One-time, solvable problems. I think many of us bull-headed people assume that all problems are solvable. They’re not.

But some are. These tend to be the types of conflicts that arise from a unique situation rather than differences in our personalities.

Say one person wants a dog and the other doesn’t. This is a conflict that can be solved, using your well-practiced conflict resolution skills. (I’ll be blogging about that next.) If you don’t resolve the conflict, it can turn into #2, below: a conflict that comes up again and again and again, until you just get the darn dog.

(2) Cyclical conflicts. The Gottmans call these problems “perpetual issues.” Unlike solvable problems, they are based on fundamental differences in your personalities, emotional needs, or ideas about how you’d like to live life—and they will never, ever go away. Period. Accept that now.

They can become workable, however. The classic example of this is the slob who is married to a neat-nick: She wants the house hospital-clean; he leaves piles of crap everywhere. Being neat is hard for him, but easy for her.

Even if he commits to putting his stuff away, she can’t really turn him into a neat-nick, and so this is a problem that will wax and wane. His efforts to be neat will gradually fade as he gets busy or stressed or just lazy. She’ll get frustrated and the conflict will resurface. He’ll redouble his efforts, and the conflict will fade again, and so on.

The question is not whether you can get the problem to go away completely—you can’t—but whether or not you can establish a constructive dialogue about it (again, using your superior conflict resolutions skills—more coming soon!) and make periodic headway toward solving it.

Cyclical conflicts can actually create intimacy: You’ve worked together to improve a problem, and that feels good. So the question is: Can you arrive at a workable solution, knowing that you will continue to revisit this throughout your time together?

These are the lesser-value gems. Can you work with them?

(3) If you can’t work with those imperfect gems, you’ve got a deal-breaker issue on the table. Abuse is a deal-breaker that sometimes masquerades as a cyclical conflict.

Other deal-breakers aren’t so obvious. I have a friend who couldn’t establish intimacy with her husband unless she was very upset and let him come to her rescue. She got tired of having to be stressed-out (or freaking out) in order to feel connected to him, and she realized this was a deal-breaker for her. If they couldn’t move the problem into a different category—making it a cyclical conflict based on their personality differences—she didn’t want to be in the relationship.

They started seeing a counselor to see if they could establish intimacy in other ways. They couldn’t. After a year of trying in vain to make headway on the problem, they parted ways.

(4) Wounding problems are similar to cyclical ones, in that they can be fights you have with your partner over and over and over. The difference is that you never really make any headway on the issue.

Wounding problems generate frustration and hurt, they get worse over time, and they lead to feeling unloved, unaccepted, and misunderstood. These conflicts are characterized by the presence of the four things that the Gottmans have long found to predict divorce: defensiveness, contempt, criticism, and stonewalling (think of talking to a stone wall: The other person is totally disengaged).

Many couples can move their wounding problems into the cyclical conflict category by learning how to fight differently (again, those stellar conflict resolution practices). Spouses who raise their issues with genuine respect and appreciation for their partner other tend to engage in radically different discussions than spouses who launch headlong into a fight and hope to “win” it, blaming and vilifying the other and going right for the jugular.

So, should you stay or should you go? I shared this framework with a friend who is trying to decide whether or not to stay with her main squeeze, and it was nothing short of an epiphany for her.

She wants more romance; he thinks anything that smacks of Hallmark is needy and lame. She’d been thinking this could be a deal-breaker. “It’s NOT a deal-breaker!” she declared with obvious joy. “It’s a CYCLICAL CONFLICT!”

They talked about the conflict in a way that made them both feel understood and loved. He admitted that while romance was hard for him, he enjoyed making her feel loved. They established a dialogue, made some headway (he even brought her flowers the next day), AND have also accepted that this is something likely to arise again in the future.

Knowing that she has a cyclical problem on her hands, and not a deal-breaker, has given my friend some peace. I hope having a better understanding of the problems that beset relationships also brings you a bit of well-being in this month of love.

Think about the problems that you have with your beloved: Are they solvable? Cyclical? Wounding? Or just plain deal-breakers?

Quashing the Self-Improvement Urge

By Leo Babauta of the blog zenhabits:

One of the driving forces of my life for many years was the need to improve myself. It’s one of the driving forces for people who read my work as well.

It’s an incredibly pervasive urge: we are always trying to improve, and if we’re not, that’s something we should improve.

It’s everywhere. Where does this urge come from? It’s embedded in our culture — in the U.S. from Benjamin Franklin to the early entrepreneurial titans, everyone is trying to better themselves. It goes deeper, to ancient Western ideals of the perfect well-rounded person. But it flourished in the 20th century, from Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill to Stephen Covey. And now it’s in full bloom, with blogs. And yes, I’m part of this movement.

So what’s the problem? You could say it’s great that people are constantly trying to improve themselves, but where does it end? When is anyone ever content with who they are? We are taught that we are not good enough yet, that we must improve, and so … we always feel a little inadequate.

This is true no matter how much you’ve accomplished. You might have achieved a thousand goals, but do you have defined abs? Are your boobs big and bouncy? Do you have perfect skin? Have you read every classic in literature? Do you know fine wines, fine art, and every great musician from classical to jazz to punk to rock? Do you have success as an entrepreneur, as a writer? Can you speak several languages, and have you traveled the world? Do you own fewer than 100 things, or a small house? Are you a fast runner, and have you run a 100 miler? Can you Crossfit, or lift 1,000 pounds in the Big Three lifts? Do you have the perfect home, and can you cook gourmet meals? Are you the perfect parent, or have perfect work-life balance? Can you do yoga, meditate, juggle and do magic? Do you brew the perfect cup of coffee, or tea, or beer? Can you recite Shelly, Shakespeare, Homer? Are you good at picking up women, are you the perfect friend, the perfect lover, a romantic husband, a wife who meets her husband’s needs, a master craftsman, a hacker and a programmer, a knitter or sewer, a home-repair expert, knowledgeable in investing and real estate, do you know the perfect system for goals and use the perfect to-do software, is your phone as nice as his, or your bag as nice as hers, do you have cute boots or a manly shave? Are you debt free, or car free or gluten free? Do you give to charity or volunteer at shelters or build schools for Africa? Is your TV as large as mine, or your penis?

Are you adequate? Are you confident of that?

We are never adequate, never perfect, never self-confident, never good enough, never comfortable with ourselves, never satisfied, never there, never content.

And it becomes the reason we buy self-help products, fitness products, gadgets to make us cooler, nicer clothes, nicer cars and homes, nicer bags and boots, plastic surgery and drugs, courses and classes and coaches and retreats. It will never stop, because we will never be good enough.

We must improve. We must read every self-improvement book. When we read a blog, we must try that method, because it will make us better. When we read someone else’s account of his achievements, his goal system, his entrepreneurial lifestyle, her yoga routine, her journaling method, her reading list, we must try it. We will always read what others are doing, in case it will help us get better. We will always try what others are doing, try every diet and every system, because it helped them get better, so maybe it will help us too. Soon, we will find the ultimate solutions, soon we will get there. No, that hasn’t happened yet, but maybe this year will be the year.

Maybe 2012 will be the year we reach perfection.

Or maybe it will never stop, until we die, and that’s a part of life — life is a constant striving for improvement, and we’d hate to ever stop wanting to improve, because that means we’re dead, right? Even if that means that as we die, we wonder if we could have been better, and our last thought is, “Am I adequate as a person?” Even if that means we are never happy with ourselves, at least we are striving to be happy with ourselves, right?

What if instead, we learned to be happy with ourselves?

What would happen?

Would we stop striving to improve? Would that be horrible, if we were just content and didn’t need to better ourselves every minute of every week? Would we be lazy slobs, or would we instead be happy, and in being happy do things that make us happy rather than make us better? And in being happy, perhaps we would show others how to be happy? And crazy as it might sound, maybe we’d start a little mini-revolution of happiness, so that people wouldn’t feel so inadequate, or need to spend every dime on products, or spend all their time on self-improvement.

A revolution of contentment.

Think of how this might simplify your life. Think of how many self-improvement books you read, or listen to in the car. Think of how many products you buy to make yourself better. Think of how many things you read online, in the hopes of being better. Think of how many things you do because you feel inadequate. Think of how much time this would free up, how much mental energy.

Realize that you are already perfect. You are there. You can breathe a sigh of relief.

The urge to improve yourself will come up again. Watch it, like a funny little clown trying to tease your soul, but don’t let your soul feel worse for the teasing. Don’t let yourself react to this little clown, nor feel the pain of his attack. Let him do his dance, say his funny things, and then go away.

Quash the urge to improve, to be better. It only makes you feel inadequate.

And then explore the world of contentment. It’s a place of wonderment.

‘Contentment is the greatest treasure.’ ~Lao Tzu

Aspire Quoted in N&O Article

One of our very own Aspire clinicians was quoted in today’s News & Observer about how to keep your kids’ behavior in check during the holiday madness. Check it out here: From Naughty to Nice.

Let this set your intention for today. . .

Let this set your intention and bring you awe and wonder as you move through this day: http://ow.ly/7QczG

Rick Hanson: Are You Adding Insult to Injury?

If you know me, you know I often use the metaphor of “the second arrow” in my work with clients. In his most recent e-newsletter, psychologist Rick Hanson adeptly describes the second arrow and how we inflict more pain on ourselves than anyone else ever could. The article is taken from Hanson’s most recent book Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time. The practices and wisdom in Just One Thing can help you put the bow down:

The Practice
Don’t throw darts.

Why?
Some physical and mental pain is inevitable. I remember being six and slipping on an icy sidewalk in Illinois and landing hard on my tailbone: ouch! Much later, in my fifties, when my mother passed away, there was a different kind of pain. To survive physically, you need a body that tells you it hurts when it’s ill or injured. To flourish psychologically and in your relationships, you need a mind that sends different signals of distress – such as loneliness, anger, or fear – if you’re rejected, mistreated, or threatened.

To use a metaphor from the Buddha, the unavoidable pains of life are its “first darts.” But then we add insult to injury with our reactions to these darts. For example, you could react to a headache with anxiety that it might mean a brain tumor, or to being rejected in love with harsh self-criticism.

Further, it’s common to have upsetting reactions when nothing bad has actually happened. For instance, you’re flying in an airplane and everything’s fine, but you’re worried about it crashing. Or you go out on a date and it’s fun, but then he/she doesn’t call for a day and you feel let down.

Most absurdly, sometimes we react negatively to positive events. Perhaps someone complimented you, and you had feelings of unworthiness; or you’ve been offered an opportunity at work, and you obsess about whether you can handle it; or someone makes a bid for a deeper friendship, and you worry about being disappointing.

All these reactions are “second darts” – the ones we throw ourselves. They include overreacting to little things, holding grudges, justifying yourself, drowning in guilt after you’ve learned the lesson, dwelling on things long past, losing perspective, worrying about stuff you can’t control, and mentally rehashing conversations.

Second darts vastly outnumber first darts. There you are, on the dartboard of life, bleeding mainly from self- inflicted wounds.

There are enough darts in life without adding your own!

How?
Accept the inevitability of first darts. They hurt, but pain is the price of living. Try not to get offended by pain – as if it’s an affront – or embarrassed about it, as if it’s a personal failing.

When pain does come, hold it in a large space of awareness. In a traditional metaphor, imagine pouring a big spoon of salt into a cup of water and then drinking it: yuck. Next, imagine stirring that spoonful into a big bowl of clean water and drinking a cup: not so bad now. It’s the same amount of salt – the same amount of physical or emotional pain – but now held and diluted in a larger context. Be aware of awareness: it’s like the sky – pain passes through it like storm clouds, never tainting or harming awareness itself. See if you can let the pain be without reacting to it; this is a key aspect of an unconditional inner peace.

Observe second darts. They’re often easier to see when others toss these darts at themselves – and then consider how you throw them at yourself. Gradually bring your recognition of second darts into the present moment, so you can see the inclination to throw them arise – and then catch them if possible before you stab yourself one more time.

A second dart will often trigger a cascade of mental reactions, like one boulder rolling down a mountainside setting off others in a chain reaction. To stop the landslide, start by relaxing your body as best you can. This will activate the calming, soothing parasympathetic wing of your nervous system and put the brakes on the fight-or-flight sympathetic wing.

Next, try to see more aspects of the situation that’s troubled you, and more of your life these days altogether – especially the parts that are going fine. Because of the negativity bias, the brain narrows down and fixates on what’s wrong, so you have to nudge it to widen its view to what’s right. The bird’s-eye, big picture view also deactivates the midline neural networks that do second-dart ruminating, and stimulates circuits on the side of your brain that can let things be as they are without reacting to them.

Don’t put more logs on the fire. Don’t look for more reasons to worry, criticize yourself, or feel mistreated. Don’t get mad at yourself for getting mad at yourself!

When you throw second darts, you are the person you hurt most. The suffering – mild to severe – in second darts is truly unnecessary. As the saying goes, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Rick Hanson’s “Confronting the Negativity Bias”

This most excellent post is from psychologist Rick Hanson’s blog, Just One Thing. Hanson wrote Buddha’s Brain, which gives a fantastic overview of mindfulness and the latest brain research. His recent post about our brain’s negativity bias:

My previous post used the example of Stephen Colbert’s satirical “March to Keep Fear Alive” as a timely illustration of a larger point: humans evolved to be fearful — since that helped keep our ancestors alive — so we are very vulnerable to being frightened and even intimidated by threats, both real ones and “paper tigers.” With this march, Colbert is obviously mocking those who play on fear, since we certainly don’t need any new reminders to keep fear alive.

Some Background
This vulnerability to feeling threatened has effects at many levels, ranging from individuals, couples, and families, to schoolyards, organizations and nations. Whether it’s an individual who worries about the consequences of speaking up at work or in a close relationship, a family cowed by a scary parent, a business fixated on threats instead of opportunities, or a country that’s routinely told it’s under “Threat Level Orange,” it’s the same human brain that reacts in all cases.

Therefore, understanding how your brain became so vigilant and wary, and so easily hijacked by alarm, is the first step toward gaining more control over that ancient circuitry. Then, by bringing mindful awareness to how your brain reacts to feeling threatened, you can stimulate and therefore build up the neural substrates of a mind that has more calm, wisdom and sense of inner strength. A mind that sees real threats more clearly, acts more effectively in dealing with them, and is less rattled or distracted by exaggerated, manageable, or false alarms.

Let’s start with the brain’s negativity bias. In this post, I’ll focus on why it evolved and how it has been built up in your brain. The next post will explore its consequences. The post after that will zero in on one key consequence: threat reactivity, which has many bad effects, including “paper tiger paranoia.” And then following posts will emphasize solutions to these problems, from activating the soothing and recharging parasympathetic nervous system to mobilizing more of your inner resources to address the real challenges our planet faces.

An Evolving Negativity Bias
The nervous system has been evolving for 600 million years, from ancient jellyfish to modern humans. Our ancestors had to make a critical decision many times a day: approach a reward or avoid a hazard — pursue a carrot or duck a stick.

Both are important. Imagine being a hominid in Africa a million years ago, living in a small band. To pass on your genes, you’ve got to find food, have sex, and cooperate with others to help the band’s children (particularly yours) to have children of their own: these are big carrots in the Serengeti. Additionally, you’ve got to hide from predators, steer clear of Alpha males and females looking for trouble, and not let other hunter-gatherer bands kill you: these are significant sticks.

But here’s the key difference between carrots and sticks. If you miss out on a carrot today, you’ll have a chance at more carrots tomorrow. But if you fail to avoid a stick today – WHAP! – no more carrots forever. Compared to carrots, sticks usually have more urgency and impact.

Body and Brain Going Negative
Consequently, your body generally reacts more intensely to negative stimuli than to equally strong positive ones. For example, intense pain can be produced all over the body, but intense pleasure comes only (for most people) from stimulating a few specific regions.

In your brain, there are separate (though interacting) systems for negative and positive stimuli. At a larger scale, the left hemisphere is somewhat specialized for positive experiences while the right hemisphere is more focused on negative ones (this makes sense since the right hemisphere is specialized for gestalt, visual-spatial processing, so it’s advantaged for tracking threats coming from the surrounding environment).

Negative stimuli produce more neural activity than do equally intense (e.g., loud, bright) positive ones. They are also perceived more easily and quickly. For example, people in studies can identify angry faces faster than happy ones; even if they are shown these images so quickly (just a tenth of a second or so) that they cannot have any conscious recognition of them, the ancient fight-or-flight limbic system of the brain will still get activated by the angry faces.

The alarm bell of your brain — the amygdala (you’ve got two of these little almond-shaped regions, one on either side of your head) — uses about two-thirds of its neurons to look for bad news: it’s primed to go negative. Once it sounds the alarm, negative events and experiences get quickly stored in memory — in contrast to positive events and experiences, which usually need to be held in awareness for a dozen or more seconds to transfer from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage.

In effect, as I wrote in my last post, the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. That’s why researchers have found that animals, including humans, generally learn faster from pain (alas) than pleasure. (For more on the neuropsychology of the negativity bias, and references, see the slide sets at my website.)

That learning from your childhood and adulthood – both what you experienced yourself and saw others experiencing around you – is locked and loaded in your head today, ready for immediate activation, whether by a frown across a dinner table or by TV images of a car-bombing 10,000 miles away.

What to Do?
To keep our ancestors alive, Mother Nature evolved a brain that routinely tricked them into making three mistakes: overestimating threats, underestimating opportunities, and underestimating resources (for dealing with threats and fulfilling opportunities). This is a great way to pass on gene copies, but a lousy way to promote quality of life.

So for starters, be mindful of the degree to which your brain is wired to make you afraid, wired so that you walk around with an ongoing trickle of anxiety (a flood for some) to keep you on alert. And wired to zero in on any apparent bad news in a larger stream of information (e.g., fixing on a casual aside from a family member or co-worker), to tune out or de-emphasize reassuring good news, and to keep thinking about the one thing that was negative in a day in which a hundred small things happened, ninety-nine of which were neutral or positive. (And, to be sure, also be mindful of any tendency you might have toward rose-colored glasses or putting that ostrich head in the sand.)

Additionally, be mindful of the forces around you that beat the drum of alarm — whether it’s a family member who threatens emotional punishment, or in the well-known example, a National Security Advisor (Condoleezza Rice) who warned in 2002 that the smoking gun of evidence for WMDs in Iraq could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Consider for yourself whether their alarms are valid — or whether they are exaggerated or empty, while downplaying or missing the larger context of opportunities and resources. Ask yourself what these forces could be getting out of beating that scary drum.

This mindfulness of both the inner workings of your brain and the outer mechanisms of fear-promotion can by itself make you less prone to needless fear.

Then you won’t be so vulnerable to intimidation by apparent “tigers” that are in fact manageable, blown out of proportion, or made of paper-maché.

Can you count on your partner or spouse?

Can you count on your partner or spouse? Does this question trouble you? Read on: http://ow.ly/6WImw