When Moving Is the Answer

I was pointed to an emotional piece on self-development and emotional decision making by Bethany Suckrow called "When Moving is Not the Magic Solution." It's a quick read, and seems to be talking about a very real concept: trying to change external factors to facilitate internal change. She thinks it didn't work out how she planned, which may be right. I think it worked out exactly how she needed it to.

I like that the article speaks indirectly about the predictive nature of our brains. In two places she refers to the narrative being much more beautiful than the actuality.  Her brain (and, she expects that of the reader as well) had filled in the story's gaps with positive predictions. She didn't state this directly, maybe because she doesn't know what's happening, but what she's referring to is normal reaction: the brain of a healthy adult tends to fill gaps in information with happy, positive projections. The brains of depressed individuals tend to be more accurate in their predictions. Spend some time chewing on that.  

Brains (especially those influenced by Facebook) also tend to share what makes our situation look positive. You can watch the author try to be honest about what happened in her situation, but she actually spends only a tiny amount of time describing the negatives and only in very general terms. It's as if her healthy brain is still monitoring and filtering what she shares, so as to keep her focussed on the positive aspects of her life. 

Suckrow tried to present the reality of what moving means, but I think she missed the real issues, those being emotional. Even the hardships she talks about are as damaging emotionally and as difficult to get over internally as they are externally.  It's really interesting to see that her conclusion is emotional even though she speaks only about functional changes and problems ("my mom had died"). She seems to still be caught in the trap of presenting empirical problems and information, even when she knows the struggle is emotional. Again, her brain seems to be in a healthy place, protecting her from both internal and external judgement about her emotional struggle in the situation. 

“Lies don’t need an aeroplane to chase you down”

— Avett Brothers - The Weight of Lies

Really lovely stuff. It's this stuff that makes me think that she got exactly what she needed: the space to fail, survive and prove to herself that her life isn't dependent on her mother or the stability of what she had in Chicago; that it's really dependent on her own work and actions. I think she found some beautiful conclusions, and I think we could enrich it more.

What if we changed: "Wherever we go, there we are." 

Into: We can be, wherever we are.

Bethany thinks it this way, "Each of us absolutely have permission to pursue lives that make us content and fulfilled. But there is no magic formula, no reset button, no shortcut to a better version of our lives. There’s no quick leap into the future where everything is fine and nothing hurts." I don't agree with this. 

“Given sufficient internal and external motivation for the change, people are able to move themselves internally without having to move anywhere physically. ”

I think that people who dare to take risks and seek more true answers (and to follow the path these answers necessitate) are able to make dramatic changes quickly. Given sufficient internal and external motivation for the change, people are able to move themselves internally without having to move anywhere physically.  It may be tough for her to realize, but she actually got exactly the change she needed and should have expected if she had ignored her healthy brain and looked at realistic expectations. 

So we need to decide if it's more important to be realistic, to post pictures of how our lives really happen or is it better to keep a presentation that's focused on how we want things to appear, how we want our lives to be.  Our healthy brains know the answer they want. 

Not that it's perfect, but it's a good song to accompany the post. 

The 3 Cs of Preferred Reality Formation

What initially looked like Clickbait on Psychology Today, turned out to be a good article:  

5 Types of Self-Talk That Guide, Heal, and Motivate

The content is quite important, especially the 3C trick to positive neuro-behavioral predictions. 

The 3 Cs are: Catch, Challenge, Change. But while Psychology Today wants you to challenge your irrational beliefs, I think it is more important to catch your "old" or "outdated" thought patterns and change them into your preferred beliefs.  

Catch yourself using a thought process that is problem-perpetuating or problem-flooded, such as "I want to get away from these people that are talking to me and bugging me."

Challenge the reasoning and the source of those thoughts: maybe by calling out the depression for what it is doing to you by thinking or saying "The depression is trying to remove me from people who want to help me by tricking me into wanting to remove myself."

Pretty Picture Because it Helps Make it Easier to Read

Change your thought pattern by replacing it with your preferred reality thoughts and actions: You could fight back against the depression by talking to the person who the depression wanted you to avoid, you could choose to push back by talking to someone you have already identified as supportive and helpful, or you could simply reframe the thoughts in your head: "Depression is a very strong influence right now and I need more practice and support to be able to fight back every time, it's okay that I leave and sleep, but it's not okay for me to let depression trick me into believing these thoughts are okay or from who I know I am." 

You don't have to win every situation to keep pushing back. What you need to do is start reframing thoughts and feelings to fit your new, preferred way of being in the world and keep practicing. Just like practicing almost anything, over time you will notice you are getting better at it.

Neuroplasticity and Narrative Therapy

Using a Narrative Therapy background and orientation, I help clients separate themselves from the problem, to place that problem within a social and cultural context and then to see how their own behavior has really been a way of dealing with and limiting the damage of the problem.  In this way I externalize the situation, changing a depression from being an internal weakness to an external disease that has infected the person.

I spent 8 years in Philadelphia at the Center for the Continuum of Care in the Addictions and the Treatment Research Center through the University of Pennsylvania. We focused on testing low-impact, problem-focused, harm reduction-based methods of treatment.  What I found through that process was that addictions, anxiety, depression and other issues of emotional regulation often are compounded by a person's cognition-behavior feedback system.  Someone believes they have depression, feels they have depression and then starts to identify their behavior as that of someone who "has" depression, instead of that of someone who is fighting depression. Once we have changed a person's orientation to the problem, changing their cognitive responses becomes easier.

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Sagittal Fibers

With the influence of the methods we used at the University of Pennsylvania and my brother's scientific work as a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, I have developed a system of Neuroplasticity Enhancement and Retraining that allows people the freedom to create a preferred reality by giving them the awareness of their own ability to change their emotions by changing their active thoughts. It is similar to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy but without the messy homework of action.  Instead we do homework of thought practices and of logical exercise. 

In practice though, you should forget what I said above.  All of that junk is nice, but I've found that my real asset is my ability to connect with and join in a person's emotional and spiritual growth.  I really like people and love being a part of their change process. I find that by being very present, very emotionally available and by respecting a person for where they are at the moment I can help them feel the support and acceptance they need to move from that sticky, uncomfortable spot that necessitated reaching out for counseling. 

Our Self Constructed World

I spent some time trying to figure out the proper phrasing for what it is we are trying to accomplish with the combination of Post-Modern Narrative Therapy, the emerging science of Neural Plasticity development and my own predilection for Motivational Interviewing techniques for engagement.  What I came up with was a mishmash of words, all that I felt needed to be crammed into the modality name.  It would be something like:

Heroic Targeted Intentional Revisionist Cognitive Neural Preferred Story Reconstruction. I'm open to suggestions. 

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You can change your past by changing who you know yourself to be

But here is the problem and the opportunity.  I believe that people, when presented with the overwhelming information regarding our own self-creation of the world around us, will choose to work towards a creation of their preferred reality instead of continuing a problem-saturated reality.  But introducing this in therapy is a bit clumsy, much like telling a story and getting kids to come along with you in a game of make-believe. Only in this story the hero is you and it's not make believe, it's self-revision.  

Self-revision is the key component in real cognitive change. It is the result of retelling the stories of your life in a way that reframes them to come in-line with the person you want to be.  Our histories structure our future by forming our beliefs about what we are and what we can accomplish.  We see this technique starting to change the paradigm of treatment in domestic violence and child abuse, as people affected by these problems are called survivors instead of victims.  What are some of the titles you carry?  If these titles are the name tags we wear tightly pinned to our chests, how would you like them to be re-visioned to more accurately reflect who you want to be. 

So-here is where it gets important. How do we free up the activity of the limbic system (blog post for clarification) to allow for more pre-frontal activity, which is what we need for self-recreation.  We need to practice with our active mind in order to convert the new belief into our durable self-concept.  So instead of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, we are in effect doing Cognitive Identity Therapy.  

Ask a question, post a comment or start a conversation if you want to take this farther. 

Your First Session

Your first session should take about 90 minutes and will involve only some paperwork, as we work to preserve as much time as possible to start the real work. 

The most important task in the first session is for you to get a feeling or a sense of how it will be working with me.  A good thing to ask yourself is if you are going to be able to be honest with yourself while talking to me, and if you are going to feel respected and supported properly for what you need to accomplish.  I am not offended by clients preferring another person for specific reasons (gender, age, location) or more general reasons (fit, feelings, or just because). If you are serious about making your life better, it is worth it to leave treatment that does not fit with you personally.  That being said, I've found that I work well with a broad range of people from many sorts of backgrounds and experiences.  

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Opportunity often is ephemeral, like the lilac. 

My job during the first session is to help you get a concrete idea about what you want to get out of therapy and how you are going to go about doing that.  I also will ask a lot of questions regarding your past medical and mental health history as well as specific questions about substance (drug & alcohol) use and previous psychological treatment.  This information is most easily completed through my online intake process, but we can do it in person as well. 

I recommend that you spend some time deciding how much you are going to share and when you are going to share it.  Counselors like to pretend that clients are always completely honest, but quite often it just isn't realistic to expect real people to share real emotions and experience with someone they met only that day or only a few times.  That's understandable and fits right into the method of treatment I follow.  My job is to help you start working on your identified problem right away, with the information you are able to share at that time. 

Near the end of the session we will check in to see how it is going so far.  This is your time to be honest about how you feel it would be working with me.  If you decide to make another appointment, we will do so and I will probably ask you to fill out some forms either online or on paper before the next time we meet.