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No Feeling Is Final

Posted on by Dana Goldman

No feeling is final.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s words “No feeling is final” are prominent on the wall of my counseling office these days, scrawled on an chalkboard that could as easily be used for grocery lists or ye-olden-days math problems.

At the center of despair and pain is often the terror that we’re stuck where we are — doomed to feel what we’re feeling until we die. Everything feels permanent in these moments. Everything feels locked in and locked down.

If it’s hard to believe Rilke’s words today, that’s fine. But do know that I am convinced that there is more out there for you than what you’re experiencing right now. Life can be better. Things can change. No feeling needs to be final.

 

When Clients Cry, I Think…

When Clients Cry, I Think…

Posted on by Dana Goldman

Unlike pop culture’s idea of therapy, I do not exist to make people cry. I don’t get excited when someone sheds tears. I don’t think, ‘Hurrah, now this is therapy!’

Instead, I feel compassion for the pain I see before me. After all, tears are one way we show our suffering.

But there’s something else to remember, too, next time you cry. Neuroscience is teaching us that we have the best chance of being happy when we can easily go into and out of our thoughts, our physical sensations, and our emotions.

For most of us, our thoughts are easy to go into but can be hard to shift away from. (“I can’t stop thinking about…”) When we bring our attention to our bodies when we’re stressed, we may notice a clenching or tightness in our chest or gut.

And then there are emotions. Most of us try to avoid our emotions – especially the ones that are painful and confusing. We’d rather do just about anything else to avoid them, including overeating, numbing out through alcohol or drugs or TV, or getting really, really busy with work or family or friends.

But we can’t block some emotions without also potentially blocking out others. We can’t decide to just feel happiness, joy, and gratitude without also allowing ourselves to experience sadness, grief and anger. I wish it was different, but the brain doesn’t work like that.

So when I see a client cry, I don’t think Hurrah! But I do feel glad for that particular person that they are allowing themselves to feel what needs to be felt. It’s only when we can be with all of life – the painful and the pleasurable and everything in between – that we have the best chance of health and happiness.

One Game-Changing Question for More Effective Therapy

Posted on by Dana Goldman

visual-complexity-by-casey-hussein-bisson-creative-commons-by-nc-saIt was as bizarre and shocking and smart of a question as I’d ever heard. “Can you help this be more complicated?” the therapist asked. She was giving guidance to another therapist, a fellow workshop participant, about a client.

At the time I had never considered the idea that sometimes what is called for is creating room for complexity. The task of making something more complicated for clients seemed antithetical to why most people come to counseling in the first place. Clients come to therapy seeking safe guidance through the deepest, hardest, most private parts of their lives–and that’s usually complicated enough.

But as I’ve sat with this question over the last six years, my understanding of its value has grown. Because often clients come in wanting to transform a part of their life that’s grey or rainbow-colored into something black and white. Should I stay or go? Is he good or bad? Am I right or wrong?  

We seek simple answers when we’re overwhelmed and anxious. Uncertainty and ambiguity can be terrible to tolerate.

But settling for false dichotomies (like good/bad and right/wrong) rarely help us answer big questions in meaningful, heart-felt ways. And so I’ve come to see the gifts of that question from years ago. Here is what I know for sure: It’s only when we acknowledge complexity that we can move through it. It’s only when we name the messiness and complications of life that we can begin to sort through it all to see what to keep, and what to release, and what’s beneath, and what’s within.

Reversing the Stress Response — New Relevant Research on Relaxation

Posted on by Dana Goldman

CureThe research continues to come out that mindfulness meditation can be useful to calm us down and, over time, rewire the brain for more relaxation and less of a hair trigger toward anger and stress. I loved listening to this interview on the NPR show Fresh Air with science writer Jo Marchant. Marchant’s just published a book called “Cure” and the interview gets into the mind-body connection and connects it to meditation, placebos, virtual reality, and other fascinating topics.

So often we think that living with anxiety is “just the way I am” — but neuroscience is showing that the brain is capable of change throughout our lifetime. If you can get better at driving, cooking, or riding a bicycle, then you can get better at recognizing stress, combating it, and reversing anxiety and depression. My belief in mindfulness meditation – guided by personal experience and the research – is why I continue to offer it to clients as a crucial part of talk therapy.

Five Ways to Feel Better Right Now

Posted on by Dana Goldman

I often tell new clients that I wish I could offer a magic pill that would completely take away anxiety, depression and suffering, even if that means I’d be out of a job I love. While there’s no quick cure-all for the challenges and messiness that come with being human, there are quick right-here-right-now ways to increase your sense of inner calm and stability no matter whThere ain't no magic pillat’s going on around you.

  1. Take a walk, ideally outside. More and more research is showing the benefits of physical activity for reducing stress – especially when you’re outside, not on a treadmill. This doesn’t need to be a long walk in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, or a fast walk in midtown, or the sort of walk you’d consider “exercise” and therefore never want to do again. Just a walk. Outside.
  1. Turn off the news. Studies show that lots of exposure to news – especially negative news – makes us feel more negative about ourselves and the world around us.
  1. Call someone who cares about you and have a real conversation. One big antidote to the isolation that comes with depression and anxiety is connection.
  1. Do something interesting that will get your mind off of, well, your mind. In other words, do something that’s not about you. This can be as simple as working on a crossword puzzle or listening to an interesting podcast (I recommend RadioLab, StartUp, and Intelligence Squared among others).
  1. Practice guided breathing for ten minutes. There’s massive amounts of research about how intentional breathing can reduce our reactivity and increase our sense of well-being.

Got a great tip? Feel free to email me about what relaxation techniques work best for you to feel happy and peaceful.

Surviving Our Families Over the Holidays

Posted on by Dana Goldman

 

“If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.”

-Ram Dass

It’s that busy few weeks right now between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when many of us have barely had time to recover from one family gathering before the next one looms. We don’t need to have deep, dark family histories in order to find extended time with family challenging. Stick us in a house with anyone, add in lots of expectations for how Thanksgiving or Hanukah or Christmas or Kwanzaa “should” be, and we’re bound to feel challenged.

Holiday survival with familyToo often, these holidays are also a reminder of loss – who isn’t here with us, how these holidays used to be, and what may be missing right now from our lives. Underneath the cheer is often a layer of sadness or worry or regret tinged with some self-recrimination. Shouldn’t we be enjoying ourselves right now?

My wonderful colleague Tara Lozano reminds me that sometimes the only thing to say in these moments is “This too.” It’s the exciting holiday season – and we feel sad. We love our extended families – and they drive us crazy. Saying “This too” makes room for the fact that our lives often have elements of wonder and despair at the exact same point. Saying “This too” makes space for the facts we can want to hug and kill our relatives, sometimes at the exact same time. This is normal. It doesn’t make us bad people that we hold such a wide range of emotions – it just makes us human.

 

Mindfulness and Finding Our Own Way Home

Posted on by Dana Goldman

Sometimes my therapy clients accidentally assume that I don’t have a speck of crazy in me, that I never, ever fight wiimgres-1th my spouse, and that I emerged from the womb a calm, centered being—and that nothing has ever happened to get me off center.

But of course that’s not true. The reality is that it’s hard to get to any adult age without struggling over the difference between the ways we want life to be and the way life actually is. Rough stuff happens to all of us if we’re leaving the house on a regular basis and trying to live a connected, meaningful life.

I was thinking about this over the weekend while on a mindfulness retreat with the Atlanta Mindfulness Institute. Put simply, mindfulness is the act of learning to be in the present moment even when we’re bombarded by difficult situations, demanding people and an onslaught of thoughts and emotions. Instead of needing to constantly ask the people around us, “What do I do now?” mindfulness (like therapy) connects us to our own hard-earned knowledge and insight.

Mindfulness meditation is a consistent part of my life because I know that I can’t help clients with their own challenges unless I’m willing to face and be present with my own. When life is sticky and messy and takes us in directions we’d rather not go, we all need experiences like mindfulness and therapy to get us back on track – our own track.

 

 

 

Learning from Bad Therapy

Posted on by Dana Goldman

I keep an informal list of the sorts of terrible things that clients have told me about past therapy experiences. Here are some that are so bad that they make me cringe.

  • “My old therapist left in the middle of a session to talk to a workman about some repairs.”
  • Stop Bad Therapy“This one counselor fell asleep while I was talking.”
  • “This therapist I went to once said that I was fine and that I’d be okay and not to worry… and that was all.”

Yikes. Counseling experiences like this give therapy a bad name. Making the important decision to seek out counseling is hard enough — but going to one therapist after another trying to find a good fit can add huge amounts of stress (not to mention cost) during what’s usually already a stressful time. Many people just decide that counseling isn’t for them and they try to find other ways to cope with what’s difficult in their lives.

I’ve made lots of mistakes as a therapist, but I can promise you that I will never leave a session, never fall asleep, and never tell you to just stop worrying. I subscribe to a national code of ethics and take it seriously. I work hard to give the folks who walk through my door the kind of experience I would want for myself or a loved one — the kind of experience that includes being professional, acting respectfully and doing my best to understand you and the series of events that have led to this difficult moment in your life.

So, that’s my promise to you. I hope for and work toward the day when all therapy is quality therapy. Our lives are important and we deserve nothing less.

Don’t Believe Facebook! Comparison, Judgment and What’s Not to Like

Posted on by Dana Goldman

Facebook contributes to comparisonY’all, it’s time to talk about Facebook, that addictive, terrible-wonderful black-hole of photos and words from friends and “friends” that makes about 90% of us feel like our lives are crap, at least occasionally. How do I know this? I was on Facebook for ten minutes up until about 10 seconds ago, and in that time I came to believe that all of my friends and “friends” are all unambivalently happy about everything in their own lives — kids and jobs and partners and the like — and all having a terrific ball in their abundant free time. Just like all of our lives really are, right?

Facebook comes up in my counseling office fairly regularly, since in addition to connecting friends and “friends” it also provides constant opportunities for us to compare ourselves and our lives to all the people we know. Since Facebook has us comparing our own inner experiences with curated external experiences, we’re usually doomed to feel bad. There is research to back this up.

Here is what I want to tell friends and clients: What people post on Facebook does not reflect the entirety of their inner and outer experiences. Since people rarely post, “Oh, hey, I feel really depressed today” it can be easy to think that nobody else ever feels depressed. Since people rarely post, “Oh, hey, I spent Friday night alone eating marshmallows and binge-watching American Ninja Warrior” it can be easy to think that everyone except you is always out having ridiculous amounts of fun with their amazing, hilarious friends.

But it’s important to remember that people only post on Facebook what they want you to know about their lives. And it’s the rare person who wants all our friends and “friends” to know about our deep sorrows, big regrets, chronic worries, or loneliness. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t all have deep sorrows, big regrets, chronic worries, or occasional loneliness. We are all human; we all feel all the human emotions, even the difficult ones. We just don’t always share them with others.

Most of my clients do have Facebook accounts. And if you met most of them, you would never think that they struggle in the way that almost all of us do at some point in our lives. My clients are good at putting on happy faces, just like most of the rest of us, and my guess is that they only post positive things on Facebook.  And until the Facebook Revolution or Be Honest On Facebook Day, it’s up to us to remember that what’s visible on the surface is rarely the full truth of what exists deeper down.

Serving as Our Own Judge and Jury

Posted on by Dana Goldman

figure-with-a-gavel-7523“I know you’ll judge me for this, but…” my client starts. She tells me what’s happened the previous week, and I keep waiting for the moment in which I will feel like condemning her to the ends of the earth. But… that moment never comes.

Oftentimes the depressed or anxious people who show up in counseling believe that I, or any other therapist, will judge them as much as they judge themselves. They feel so embarrassed or humiliated, so they assume we will laugh or humiliate them further. They look critically at themselves and their choices, and fear that I and others will too. This is why people dealing with depression and anxiety often isolate themselves and shut down. It can be terrifying to spend time with people if we believe that if they really know us they will judge us.

A big part of the work I do is helping clients look clearly at their own judgments of themselves, instead of simply staying immersed in the judgements themselves. Sometimes self-criticism can be a useful tool, but sometimes we can use it as a weapon against ourselves. Here are the sorts of questions I invite you ask yourself right now:

  • How would my life be different if I was less self-critical?
  • What stops me from being as critical or judgmental of my friends?
  • How self-critical would I want any children in my life to be?