Pain sucks… really?

There are many people smarter than I who have written about pain. One of my favorite examples is the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis. He wrote an entire book called The Problem of Pain. For your sake and for my own, I’m going to keep this much briefer than a book. There are only three things I am going to address in this particular blog. One is the fact that pain sucks. Another is the fact that pain is awesome (This might be hard to believe). The final part will be about balance. We know pain sucks. On a good day we can usually admit that it has a purpose that is good and healthy. How do we balance the two views? I suggest we look at it as part of our design.

The challenge of pain:
It would be foolish of me not to recognize that each of you have pain that is very real and possibly traumatic in your history. The pains you have felt may have shaped defense mechanisms you still use today. I call this scaffolding and will likely blog separately in the future. In some cases, the mechanisms are unhealthy and can recreate different forms of the pain you felt the very first time you experienced it. For example, sometimes little children are taken from their homes and put in foster care. They may experience the separation as a terrible loss of their primary care giver or they may experience the separation as an extreme relief due to the poor attachment to their primary care giver. Both situations cause real and memorable pain and both situations can cause unhealthy mechanisms that may lead to additional future pain. Boldly put, the suffering part of pain sucks.

Let’s take the same example and fast forward ten years. The little child is now sixteen years old and has their first boyfriend or girlfriend. They begin to feel very close and even express that they are “in love”. The child who, at age six, felt relief from the experience of separation may find themselves wanting to break up because the emotions are too intense. The defense mechanism that helped them survive an early trauma can prevent healthy attachment to others.

The positive side:
We are designed to heal! It may be very difficult and it may take an entire lifetime but our brains are designed to take in new information all the time and the brain is even designed to “trim” unnecessary paths (Badenoch, 2008). In English, this means we can take bad situations and make them unbelievably positive points of change in our life.

I have a bias toward finding positive things even in the most hideous of situations. The reason I feel it’s important to give you this disclaimer at this point is because I am going to take the example from above and show some positive aspects to the difficult situation. There is no intent to minimize how difficult it is to make changes and to heal wounds that run as deep as many of you have. With that said, there exist other perspectives to every situation. Sometimes it’s helpful to learn new ways of viewing old stories. It might create a paradigm shift that will change your life forever in very good ways.

Let’s take the six year old child and say that they felt relief after being removed from their home. Let’s also say the child gets placed in a home with adults that know how to create a healthy attachment to children. The child may feel scared and nervous as they attach to the surrogate parents but with patience and empathy, the child is able to create a healthy attachment. The child has worked through the pain. The key is they didn’t ignore it and they had someone who showed them appropriate empathy. If these things happen, pain can be an awesome thing. Awesome is a powerful word and appropriate because pain can improve resilience. When difficult things arise in the life of a person who is resilient, they can often feel as though it will work out in the end. People who have suffered and worked through the pain often carry more hope. This is one way how the terrible thing of pain can be an amazing and powerful benefit.

A balancing act:
For those of you who are up for a challenge, I’m going to get a little psycheducational now. Pain is felt physically and mentally. If you ask someone who has a bad back problem, they might say the most annoying pain of all is the one you can’t see but still puts you on your knees in pain. Emotional pain can be just as intense as bad back pain for many people. It can make a person curl up in the fetal position and sob uncontrollably or it can make a person completely irrational. The pain is real! I don’t have all the answers as to why this happens. I wish I did. I have learned a few things about the healing process that might be helpful though.

First, everyone is unique and their situation is also unique. You don’t have to try to be special because you are. It’s amazing to me how many people are trying to be unique rather than being who they are. At the same time, anyone who assumes they have the answers for you probably needs a little more humility in their life. I, by no means, believe that what I suggest to folks is going to heal them. Sometimes I get lucky and look like I work miracles but my suggestions are merely an attempt to empathize with people and present other possible outlooks. The real work and growth comes from the people I have the privilege to know.

Second, empathy is a requirement in healing. We cannot heal ourselves no matter how strong we are and no matter how much we want to. It’s the reason I have chosen the counseling profession. I may not be able to work miracles but I can be present for a person in need and sometimes that’s enough. Many counselors use treatment techniques to promote healing. I’m still learning about the techniques. It seems to me that the techniques being used are generally different ways of showing people empathy. If I’m right, I don’t know for certain if I am, then empathy is the healer more than any given technique. If empathy is the healer then we all have the power to heal by listening to the story of another unique person.

For those of you who want a more scientific explanation, this part is for you. There is a place in the brain called the hippocampus. According to Paul David Nussbaum in his book titled Save Your Brain, the hippocampus is said to be an area of the brain that decides what will get stored in long term memory. An interesting thing happens when we feel pain that is physical and/or emotional. The hippocampus is highly active. Joy has a similar effect on the hippocampus. We can only make a conjecture about the meaning. It seems reasonable to guess that we were designed to remember pain and joy. If this is the case, then I believe we were designed in this manner as a means of staying balanced and protected simultaneously. We’re supposed to experience pain and joy.

To all you logical people out there, feeling pain and joy lead to intelligence. Intelligence leads to improved decision making ability and improved decision making ability leads to hope. Even though hope is an emotion, it is a logical emotion because the logical path comes from preparation just as hope comes from preparation, also known as pain and joy.

Thanks again for taking the time to read a little about my perspectives. I hope you find the content to bring you appropriate joys and struggles. I also hope you have people in your life that support your growth. Remember that there are counselors in almost every community that would love to get to know your personal struggle. They are bound ethically and legally to keep your information confidential in almost every case. Please feel free to read my very first blog if you would like to know more about why I think going to counseling is a good idea.

Badenoch, B. (2008). Being a brain-wise therapist: A practical guide to interpersonal neurobiology. W.W Norton Company.

Counseling Religion

For all those who are returning, thank you for taking the time to read my blogs. For all of you who are new to my blog, welcome.

As part of my educational experience at George Fox University, I have been challenged by several instructors to learn how to get to a place where I am comfortable talking about religion in sessions while simultaneously holding my personal values aside so the client doesn’t feel judged or criticized. I’ve been thinking about this lately because it is a real and, at times, difficult thing to do. Some questions that come up are as follows. 1) Can a counselor have a different belief system than a client and still be the right fit? 2) Can a counselor truly set aside their view of anything, let alone religion?

I would like to make a point of clarity for the sake of neutrality. I view religious perspective and the belief in any specific deity to be different things. For example, a person can believe in God and still have misconceptions about God. The misconceptions would be what I call religious perspective, while the fact that the person believes in God is their decision. As a counselor, I think it is very important to make this distinction. I believe it’s my duty to challenge religious perspective when it is causing dysfunction but I believe it is completely inappropriate to challenge someone’s belief in God. One of the great things about living and working in the United States of America is the fact that we have the right to peaceably assemble for religious purposes without persecution. Plus, who am I to judge someone else’s life as right or wrong. Being a counselor doesn’t give me the right to judge people. It gives me a platform to challenge inconsistencies in people’s lives. This applies even if the inconsistency is a client’s religious perspective.

Now we’ll take a closer look at the questions that came up earlier. The short answer to question one is yes. Many people believe that a counselor needs to have had their experience, in this case religion, in order to provide insight. I don’t agree with this thinking. In many cases similar thought can keep people in ruts that they otherwise might be able to find their way out. For example, it’s often seen as advantage to go to a marriage therapist who has experienced a long marriage. Though there are times where it is helpful to have the insight of someone experienced in marital endurance, the fact that they have stayed married doesn’t necessarily make them more qualified to handle any specific kind of marital issue. The same is true for religion in counseling. If you find a counselor who matches up with your religion and is still able to challenge your religious perspective then that’s great. Just remember, counseling should not be comfortable all the time. If it is comfortable all the time, you’re probably not progressing at a rate that you are capable of.

Question two is one of the hardest questions to answer from my perspective. The truth is, I don’t believe a counselor can be authentic in the relationship and set aside all their views. Nor do I think they should try to. In everyday life we set things aside in order to make other things possible. At times a counselor should and will do so. First and foremost, a counselor should feel like they can be in an authentic and professional relationship with the client. When it isn’t possible to set aside personal emotions in order to learn about the client’s struggles and successes, then it’s probably time for the counselor to seek consultation or to refer the client to a counselor better suited for their needs. For example, a client who was raped at one point in their life may, at some point, need to describe the rape in detail or draw the rape artistically in order to relive the experience and feel the empathy they didn’t feel from people shortly after the original trauma of the rape. If they are seeing a counselor who was also raped earlier in life and has not processed it at length, possibly in their own counseling, the counselor might re-experience their personal rape. This could be a problem for the client and for the counselor if the counselor is not very careful and attentive to their own care. So, I feel like I’ve talked around the question a little so I’ll try to make sure I’m blunt for those whom that works best for. I think a counselor can set aside their views on things and stay focused on the client’s reality. It requires purposeful attention by the counselor in order to do so and often times is very difficult because counselors are people too, which makes it easy to fall back into the trap of the idea that “it’s just who I am”. If I were to suggest a type of counselor to you, I would always suggest a counselor who strives to learn about themselves as well as their clients.

Unspoken Rules

Every system has rules. In most cases, the rules are verbalized, written or communicated in some clear fashion. However, every system has rules that are more obscure, making them hard to clearly identify. I refer to these as “unspoken rules”.

In most cases, everyone in the system knows there is some kind of a force acting on them but they may struggle to identify the force when they are dealing with unspoken rules.

Example:
Amy and Ben have been married for 20 years. Ben openly verbalizes his disapproval when he doesn’t agree with something. Amy is much more discrete. They have three children in the home. The oldest is a 14 year old boy. There is also a 12 year old boy and an 8 year old girl. Ben has never been abusive to any of the children or to Amy, but all the children are careful not to “make dad mad”. Ben and Amy both know the sentiment of the children and have different views about it. Ben and Amy recently decided to see a counselor because they can’t agree on how to raise the children anymore. Amy struggles to get compliance and Ben gets compliance without difficulty, often without even having to ask for it. Ben feels like Amy should be sterner with the children and Amy feels like Ben is too tough on the children.


There are an infinite number of things going on this family. You may think Ben is emotionally abusive or that Amy is a passive, weak mom. As a counselor, I’m not looking for right and wrong. Instead, I’m looking for incongruence. Where actions don’t match up with desires, there are often “unspoken rules”. Will there be things I agree with and disagree with in family systems like this? Sure. However, I don’t believe it’s my place to point out my beliefs because it would make me part of the system. The only exceptions are areas of legality. In some areas we have legal definitions of wrong, such as physical abuse. I’m always assessing legal situations throughout the counseling relationship.

In the example above, it’s pretty likely that Ben views his response from his children as a mutual understanding. Amy’s view might be that Ben uses fear based leadership to get the children to do things that make him comfortable. Somewhere in the gap is a rule that may or may not be fully understood by Ben and Amy. For the purpose of changing the focus of what may be viewed as the blame game, I would like to suggest that the 14 year old boy may have figured out the Mom and Dad don’t talk to each other about the children enough. This might suggest the possibility that Ben and Amy can be manipulated if they are pitted against each other. This isn’t to say the 14 year old is a bad kid. The system allows for him to get what he wants in this way. The unspoken rule may be “blame someone else”, or “don’t make Ben mad”. It could also be “Amy is a softy when Ben is pointed to as a mean man”, or “it’s us against the parents”. The list of unspoken rules could go on and on.

You may be wondering how to identify which rule it is. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter at the beginning. I take a guess and ask if it sounds like something that is going on in the home. The clients will assess whether it is one of their rules or not. An interesting thing happens when an unspoken rule is identified. Usually, one or more members of the family have a feeling that it makes sense and they hold on to the rule for a while and, possibly, test it out. Over time, they are usually able to verbalize the, previously, unspoken rule. Once the rule is verbalized, the family can decide how much power the rule holds in the home. Essentially, my goal is still the same as you may have seen on my web page. I am here to help create insightful opportunities. You can look at the blog about Johari’s Window for a clear perspective on what I’m trying to achieve as a counselor.

This blog, however, is intended to help us remember that we have unspoken rules in our systems and that those rules impact everyone in the system, whether it’s in a good way or a way that complicates things. What are the unspoken rules in your family? What about your family of origin (where you were raised)? What are the unspoken rules between you and your spouse or girlfriend? Ask yourself some of theses questions. They won’t be easy to answer. You’ll have to think about them and possibly talk to others about them. You may reflect on old journal entries and notice that there was a rule you always followed but never knew. Whatever the case might be, identifying the rules we conform to is a valuable piece to taking control of our lives. Once we know the rules our systems adhere to, we can decide to use them purposefully rather than having them “happen to us”.

Frequency, Intensity & Duration

For those of you keeping up with me each week, you'll notice I didn't post last week. I was doing some self care by doing some camping. My supervisor at Fairview Clinical Services recently drew my attention to a process this week described by Ray S. Anderson in his book “Self Care”. The process was described like this:


Beginning at the bottom with any event that comes to mind, it is explained that we experience a trigger which gives us an internal sensation that becomes a feeling. From the feeling state, we have the option of going down the thinking path or the emotion path to the application phase. For the purpose of this blog, I’m not going to go into much more detail than that. Instead, I would like to take a moment to focus a little bit on the part in the middle that is bold and in red. I added this piece based on what I learned in Research Methods and Statistics a couple years ago. I’ve found it very helpful.

Frequency-Intensity-Duration

As part of our design, we are intended to measure subtleties. It helps us survive and thrive in our world. When we encounter a trigger that leads us to “thinking” or “emotion” it is sometimes helpful to slow the process down. Slowing down the process gives us the opportunity to more clearly identify the trigger before we get too far away from the trigger. Ultimately, growth or healing is easiest when we can identify what causes us to respond in certain and sometimes unhealthy ways. Could we wait for the behavior (Application Phase)? Sure we could. What I’m suggesting is that when we find ourselves moving from the observation phase to the application phase, we consider three things.

1) Frequency
2) Intensity
3) Duration

These three things provide us great insight. With insightfulness, we can be more purposeful in our decisions and actions. The truth is, people are often hurting others or helping others without even knowing it. Through insight, I believe people can maximize how much good they do for themselves and others.

When I find the right person, I always seem to screw it up.

For those who have read my blog before, welcome back. For those who are new, I hope you enjoy. Please feel free to click on the archives to the right if you are interested in seeing previous posts. I welcome comments and followers but it’s important to read the disclaimer prior to doing either.

Why do couples work so well together only to irritate the heck out of each other shortly into the relationship? How is it that people lose patience so quickly with the one they love so much? Have you ever seen behavior from yourself that shocks you? Maybe you broke something or threw something in anger because you were mad at your relationship? Maybe you’ve even been physical with your partner out of anger and you never thought you would be like that. Are these problems solvable?

Whether these questions are solvable is up to the couple. The key factors that I look for in a couple who wants to be together is 1) the couples approach to communication and 2) the amount of individual work each person is willing to put into the relationship. I find four subjects very useful in revealing a couples style of communication and how much work each person is willing to do. I have also never yet met any couple who line up identically about religion, sex, politics and money. These subjects can bring out authentic individuality and through individuality within the relationship, I can most easily identify a couples motivations.

Before proceeding further, I must confess I don’t subscribe to the definitive labeling processes often used in therapeutic settings. It’s my opinion that labeling people with disorders or highlighting only the less functional parts of a person can be cruel and inappropriate. Who wants someone to point out all their flaws? However, I learned from a professor by the name of Rand Michael, Ph.D. that identification and classification are important in the process of identifying differences and therefore critical to helping us decide who we are. For this reason and only this reason, I will explain some identification and classification provided by the book titled “In the Quest of the Mythical Mate” by Ellyn Bader, Ph.D. and Peter T. Pearson, Ph.D. The insight gained is not to label anyone as superior or inferior but to identify differences that will strengthen understanding of yourself and those you care deeply about.

Bader and Pearson offer us four phases of a couple’s relationship. They call them symbiosis, differentiation, practicing and rapprochement. A couple can be in different phases at the same time or they can be in the same phase together. Each scenario presents different kinds of struggles and excitement.

Symbiosis – The early phase of a relationship is described as the joining phase. It is natural to highlight similarities and minimize differences.

Differentiation – The second phase of a relationship highlights differences. The identity of each person in the relationship is no longer defined by the other person, which is typical in the symbiotic phase.

Practicing – This phase is where an individual has differentiated enough to remember their own dreams and aspirations and is devoting themselves to agendas that are outside the relationship. It requires a lot of practice to manage the needs of the relationship, one’s self and aspirations. Trust is essential at this point because time apart is more common as goals require time and energy. This stage is often very scary for many people because their past often influences their ability to trust in a healthy way.

Rapprochement – In this phase, an individual would be learning how to manage closeness and independent distance within the relationship. It’s more a matter of learning to shift in and out of the relationship without feeling guilt, anxiety, etc.

So, what does all of this mean? It means what most things in the mental health arena mean, it depends. That’s right, “it depends”. What I have found very useful about these categories is that they provide some normalizing to the complexity of relationships. For example, a couple in symbiosis is often referred to as “fake”. They may even refer to each other as fake if they break up in or near this phase. The reality is they are acting perfectly natural to highlight similarities and minimize differences. We would all look a little fake if we responded in this way all the time but it doesn’t mean that we are. It also means we all have the potential within us to have a long term relationship if we choose to do the individual work and put in the work as a couple.

What I would hope for all of my readers is that they may gain a little perspective about themselves that would allow them to look at their partner with a bit more patience and empathy. If any of this is new knowledge for you and it is used to point out superiority or inferiority of one individual in the relationship, my words have been in vain. The descriptions, as I provide them, are intended to create improved empathy for where you and your partner are in life as a couple and in life as unique individuals.

Have you ever wondered how others see you?

In the 1950’s Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham created a model of mapping personality awareness called the Johari Window. The idea was to create opportunities for improved awareness and therefore opportunities for personal growth. Like Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, I believe personal insight is a key piece to becoming who we want to be.

So, what is Johari’s window? The first image below is for all of you who are more visual and the second image will tie it all together. Johari’s Window takes into account the perspective from an individual and from people around that individual. You’ll see it described as “self” and “others”. The second image describes the visibility from the self and from the other. You’ll see that each person can only see part way across the box. For example, we have “blind spots” that others can see but we can’t and we have an “unknown” section that no one can see, including ourselves. The “façade” section is the section that we choose to keep from others and I will refer to it as secrets.

Now it gets interesting. Through insight, I believe we can gain control over the impacts of our blind spots, the unknown, the façade (secrets) and the things we project in the open arena. For example, there are times in our lives when we keep secrets and it’s healthy. There are also times when we keep secrets and it’s unhealthy. Knowing the difference between when it is healthy and when it is unhealthy is very important. I was recently asked what kind of things would fall in the “façade” box that would be healthy. I responded by discussing importance of openly sharing details of previous relationships with a current partner. You may have dated someone in the past that shared too many details about other relationships. It can be annoying, hurtful, or just a waste of time to have all that detail. What matters most is who you are now and therefore some of the details are not necessary and can be kept secret. It’s often best to weigh the benefits and risks of each specific situation. As you might quickly see, there are many risks to keeping secrets. For example, if a man or woman cheats on their partner should they keep it secret? People who cheat on their partners have many things going on that need to be dealt with and it quickly becomes very complex. Therefore, each situation should be dealt with on an individual basis. Your counselor would become a great asset in discussing how and when disclosure should happen or if it shouldn’t happen. Through insight, possibly by use of the Johari’s Window, our actions become more intentional which makes mistakes less likely.

On a side note, I’ve modified Johari’s Window below to show an example of what I think happens as we learn about ourselves and consider other’s perspectives along with our own in making personal changes. Though the process of getting to this point can be long and difficult, notice the reduced risks associated with the long term work. The blind spots shrink, the secrets diminish and the unknown becomes discoverable.

Is there value in going to a counselor? If so, what is it?

Welcome!
I have thought for a long time about what I should post as my first blog. I hope the days, weeks, months and possibly years of posts to come are helpful in providing hope and insightfullness. We all experience difficult times and need voices of strength and wisdom. I hope to be a source of strength and wisdom for people. I won't always get it right but as part of my journey I will attempt to learn from all of my opportunities, whether good or bad.

My first post...
I would be in the wrong profession if I didn’t believe what I do matters. So, my answer is YES. Counseling has value and lots of it. It’s my opinion that most people don’t need consistent and long term counseling. However, almost everyone I know, or have come in contact with, would benefit from having a counseling relationship that they can go to when things in their life are particularly challenging. I can tell you that one of my goals with clients is to get them to a place where they no longer need me. This isn’t to say they won’t need to come back down the road, but I believe I should not be the source of a person’s strength because that strength should, ultimately, come from within them.
As a counselor intern I have noticed that people don’t normally establish counseling relationships when things are going well in their life. Though it makes sense financially and for the sake of time not to see a counselor when our lives are generally healthy, there are two reasons that I believe it is important to establish a relationship when we are in good health.
1) The client will be more selective
2) The counselor will have a chance to know the client
I believe a client in good health is better suited to ending a relationship with a counselor who is not a good match. The question I thought about was, “Do people make more rational decisions when they are in a good place or when they are struggling with things?” I think most people would say they make better decisions when they feel healthy, not necessarily stress free but healthy. In physics there is a great tangible example found in Newton’s first law of motion. It says an object in motion stays in motion until an object of greater force acts upon that object. In people terms, this describes the momentum of the good getting better and the bad getting worse until there is some sort of “shock” to the individual’s path.
Another reason I think a client should seek counseling when they are feeling like things are going well is because it gives the counselor a baseline of what the client views as healthy. I, personally, would love to have a frame of reference of what a client is like when they view themselves as healthy. I can think of several advantages to having this knowledge. For example, it would make it much easier to identify where the client is in the process of healing and growth. It would likely make it hard for a client to fall as deep into things like depression, anxiety, hopelessness, etc. In a literal example, a client would be able to say something like, “You know this isn’t like me. I don’t know why I’m feeling [depressed, anxious, exhausted, scared, nervous, etc.].” The response would likely be a more accurate form of empathy because the counselor would know what is being said to be factual and not a different symptom. Thus the speed of the healing process would be exponentially increased or the depth of the symptoms would be lessened.
With all this said, I believe it’s essential for a person in the middle of life’s struggles to get connected and a counselor is a great connection. It’s my belief that as part of the human specie, we are relational beings and our mental health improves through healthy relationships such as those a client should have with a counselor. So as a concluding statement, I would encourage everyone to find a counselor they can connect well with. Who knows when life’s challenges will get to be too much to deal with alone? Get prepared. Find a good counselor.