Tag Archives: responsibility

Healing and our Brains

What are you bringing to the party?

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A thought for today… what are you bringing to the party called life?

I’m talking about conscious bringing, not just what you have inherited in any manner. That means that if you are inherently intelligent thanks to your parents, what do you do with that intelligence? Do you put it to good use in bettering the world?

If you are attractive looking or talented in some way (musically, for example), are you making good use of that aspect of yourself , striving to improve the world and the people you meet each day?

If you happen to have a lot of money thanks to your predecessors, are you investing in that which will be of benefit to more than just you?

No matter what you inherited, and no matter what you have accomplished in any realm, each and every day you have the opportunity to make a difference.

Even if you consider yourself to be without anything, you still have how you interact with the world to offer.

Here’s my suggestion for a new meaning for the term BYOB:

Bring
Your
Own
Being

Bring your joy, your compassion, your understanding, your thoughtfulness, your attention, your acknowledgment, your presence to each and every day.

And watch what happens when you do…

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert

Moving to a stress-free reality

Searching for the Perfect Band-aid?

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For many people, if not most, when a problem arises, they look for a way of fixing it or making it “disappear”. Living as we do in a world of instant gratification, it is not uncommon to see people reach for a band-aid, a temporary solution, that will alleviate the problem, at least for the moment. These band-aid solutions allow us to cope temporarily with the issue.

Using a coping mechanism approach is normal, acceptable and makes a lot of sense, when dealing with temporary issues, as it is usually quick and economical. However, it is not an ideal long-term strategy, particularly when confronted with emotional matters, as coping mechanisms are not usually designed to resolve the underlying problem.

We cope, we live

Humans have developed many coping strategies and mechanisms over time. These coping mechanisms keep us safe and serve a useful purpose, as relatively efficient short-term solutions to problems. One definition of coping is “the process of managing taxing circumstances, expending effort to deal with personal and interpersonal problems, and seeking to master, minimize, reduce or tolerate stress or conflict.” Managing, minimizing, reducing, tolerating… all of these presuppose the continued existence of the problem and a continued effort to deal with it each time it appears. As the problem is not really dealt with, it will continue to present itself.

After a while, we get so used to reaching for a coping mechanism that we might not stop and consider if we could take another approach. Given that a coping mechanism is really only a temporary fix, it is not surprising that many of us keep looking for new ones when the old ones no longer do the trick. Out of this ongoing need for more and better coping techniques, a whole industry has arisen, providing us with a plethora of coping tools to try:

– relaxation techniques
– improved communication skills
– problem analysis approaches
– empathetic problem discussion
– acceptance of personal responsibility
– improvements in assertive behaviour
– trust building exercises
– techniques to handling insecurity
– affirmations
– enhanced forgiveness
– development of detachment
– development of patience
– Critical Thinking skills

as well as the old standards of simple denial and distraction, where we try to distance ourselves from the issue.

Some of the coping skills mentioned above will certainly benefit us in many areas of life. However, just as putting a daily or hourly band-aid on a cut that requires stitches for it to close, using a coping mechanism inappropriately can become quite tiring and ultimately quite expensive in time and effort.

Don’t cope, resolve

Rather than constantly coping, which really is mainly about dealing with the symptoms instead of the underlying problem, it is wiser and more efficient to seek out the most effective way to deal with the issue itself.

For example, if you were someone like me who suffered a loss of a parent at an early age, you might adopt coping mechanisms like mine: I would avoid at all costs any situations which would remind me of my father’s death. I would not attend funerals, would not discuss him, would not spend any serious amount of time in the town where I grew up, etc., etc. I moved to another country, lived an entirely “different life” and yet, the pain I felt around his death remained with me. My coping approach dealt with the symptoms by keeping me away from that pain, but never actually resolved anything. I dove into the business world and became a workaholic, studying business techniques and eventually running two companies simultaneously. I was distracted, yes, but the pain was always there, waiting for the day when I would finally face it and release it.

When I retired from running companies, I entered into the world of personal development and tried out many, many of the standard coping mechanisms available – I spent countless hours using my large collection of relaxation and affirmation recordings, attended numerous workshops on everything from hypnosis to meditation to communication skills to living from the heart, went on inner quests, etc., etc. I learned all kinds of ways to temporarily get myself into a better state of being or feeling, but soon it would be obvious that the pain was still present, waiting for me. In reality, these techniques are all good ways to cope better with what life throws at us, much like talk therapy can potentially teach us. But, bottom line, the pain was still there.

When I finally found myself in a situation where it felt somewhat safe to dip my toe into the pain, I knew I had to finally do something serious about it. 20 years of denial and avoidance and another five years of intense study of even better comping techniques was enough. Still with the results orientation I had cultivates as a businessman, I set out to find a way to release the pain, set it and myself free.  I did not need to seek out any more band-aids – it was clear that that approach was not effective nor cost-effective. I needed something that would help me, once and for all, release the pain I held over my father’s death years earlier.

The funny thing about what I have discovered on this quest is that the answer is incredibly simple and yet missed by so many due to a natural feature of humans – we avoid pain. This pain avoidance means that we look for the sugar coated pill that will magically dissolve our ills and pains, without our suffering. It can also be likened to wanting to win the life lottery – all our pains and tribulations dissolved away without our having to do much of anything. Given the constant influx of the latest and greatest coping tools (new meditations discovered by some guru in some distant land, new mind tricks we can use to cover our internal cow patties of pain with better whipped cream, more and better magical thinking involving aliens, ancient lands or dolphins, etc.) it is nor surprising that we get perplexed as to why they are not helping us beyond some minor pain alleviation.

The answer is simple and yet counter-intuitive. Research and field work by people like Dr. Peter Levine and Dr David Bercelli, just to name two, have shown that we can allow feelings to pass through us instead of “storing” them. If we do store them, we can access them and then release them, and that is what my AER (Awareness Expression Resolution) process facilitates. Learning how to release stored feelings is not hard and does not take a lot of time, does not require mind trickery or the intervention of anyone else, and can be learned in an hour or so.  But, since releasing requires us to become aware of our pain and consciously let go of it, people tend to seek out magic painless pills instead. And, while they get some feel-good sugar for the moment, their pain continues to be with them.

So, if you are tired of searching out that perfect band-aid, and ready to actually let go of your pain, try something radical: feel your feelings (stored and new ones) without resistance or judgment, and let them flow through and out. You might just find they are ready to leave…

Copyright 2010 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved.

Moving to a stress-free reality

So, how does that make you feel?

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OK, I admit it, the title is a trick question. But don’t be surprised if you got onto that track of thinking that “something makes you feel a certain way.” These days, it is the thing to do, promoted by therapists, counselors, moms and dads, teachers, popular music, etc., etc.

And, crazy as it might seem at first blush, that line of thinking is just plain silly. (I actually had some much less nice words to describe this concept, but good sense got the better of me.)

We unfortunately live in times of little personal responsibility. For quite a few years now, we’ve been encouraged to blame others for our actions and now for our feelings. We blame our misbehavior on our early years, our lack of nurturing as a babe in swaddling, our absent parent. Heaven forbid that we might have something to do with our actions today – no, it is far easier to blame it all on something or someone in the past.

A quick Google search turned up thousands and thousands of references to songs which have the words “you make me feel”. Actually, I fudged – there were more than 3 million hits on that phrase! Listening to modern music is like being brainwashed – endless references to how someone made someone else feel good, bad, upset, ecstatic, and more.

The expression “that made me feel…” has crept into our language so much that we take it for granted. And, like a mind-virus, it has taken over some of our critical thinking functions. Instead of understanding that our feelings arise inside us, we are constantly telling ourselves that somehow someone or something outside us is causing us to feel a certain way. Did you just hear that “boggle” sound? That was my mind…

Some people might think this is just nitpicking over language. However, there are lots of studies that show that we are influenced by the language we hear and the language that we use.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany

The current propaganda is that our feelings are generated and controlled by others. This means that we are not responsible for them, and so when we act inappropriately as a result of our feelings, we can always blame it on someone else: “They made me so mad I punched the wall.”

Say this sort of thing to yourself often enough, and you’ll start to believe it. Instead of owning your feelings, you’ll spend your time blaming others for how you feel (and act), and end up feeling … powerless and stressed. How else could one feel when someone else can make you feel a certain way at their whim?

Take back your power

The funny thing is that all you need to do is take ownership for your feelings and you get all that power back. Rather than saying that someone else made you feel a certain way, you state the more accurate truth: they said/did X and as a response, you felt Y.

Let’s try this on:

  • Joe said that I was lazy and I felt mad.
  • Jill made a face at me and I felt sad.
  • Billy paid little attention to me and I felt ignored and hurt
  • Mary said I was silly and I felt ashamed

and so on.

The key thing here is that by stating the actual relationship between the exterior event (actions or words spoken to us) and our inner world response, we start to see how we are not subject to an outside power, although we can be influenced by exogenous (outside of us) elements. Notice that a cause -> effect relationship is not being used here. Instead, we state that something happened and then how we felt. This differentiation is also particularly important, as our response/reaction to an external event can vary tremendously.  One day we can be very upset by something and the next we can shrug it off, depending upon our mood, our level of distraction, our hormonal levels, etc.

The other thing that can really affect our response to a situation is how much emotional pain we still carry from prior similar situations. If we carry little pain, either from not having had much history of this sort of situation or by having released that pain using a technique such as AER, then our response is likely to be moderate. If we have lots of accumulated pain, we are more likely to get really upset and or hurt.

Talking and thinking about how we respond to situations reinforces our sense of ownership of our responses. No longer are we blaming others for how we feel – we are owning those feelings and noticing them arise in us. And, as a result, we can also own our actions. We get back our power in relation to our feelings, and we can actually have less stress, since we are not in a position of having handed over our power to others.

“Man’s unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden.   Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”
Viktor E. Frankl

So, the next time someone tells you that you made them feel a certain way, ask them where exactly on them is this magic button to make that feeling appear – it may be on their elbow… Tell them you want to make a note of it, so you can use it in the future. 🙂

Yes, you’ll probably get a puzzled look in response, and maybe you’ll have to thank them for giving you so much power over them, so they start to see what is really happening.

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved.