There are real heroes out there. I know. I’ve met them. I don’t mean celebrity heroes we never meet. I mean personal heroes—people who intervene when there is trouble in our lives. A hero has a choice, and does not do what they do for recognition. A hero is not a hero without the desire to act when there is no reason they should act, save necessity. According to the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, it is the nameless heroes which deserve the greatest praise of all—those that do the right thing, not out of hope for recognition, or because they think they are supposed to, but because it simply feels like the right thing to do. A hero helps someone else live a better life because that’s the kind of person they are. That’s it.

I cannot remember the names of all the heroes that have come into my life, and feel guilty for that. They deserve to be remembered, and much more. Those that do stand out in my memory stand out for good reason. These I call my personal heroes; not heroes to you, or maybe anyone else but me, but heroes they are, all of them.

In second grade, school staff must have noticed something was very wrong inside Michael Kinzer’s little head. Michael was a constant distraction for the teacher, seemed always to be getting into fights with lots of different kids, and never did what he was told. Michael was usually very far away, in a different world. Something was wrong, and needed intervention. Enter a counselor. He was a man. Nice, good looking, maybe 30 to 40. I can’t really remember. He came to my school on Tuesday mornings. I never saw him around at any time other than when he came to see me. He took me out of class every week and spent an hour with me. I told him nothing about what my father was doing to me. I knew the consequences too well. I wanted him to come, to show me how to throw a baseball, or just sit and talk on the playground. I have no idea what we talked about. I knew he was very worried about me. It never occurred to me that there was anything he could possibly do stop the beatings at home.

In third grade, the school nurse became a small hero for a day, in a way. My shoes had been canvas tennis shoes at one time. Now they were flip flops, with the canvas ripping from the rubber souls. It was dead winter, and my feet were wet and freezing every day after recess. The school nurse either noticed, or a teacher told her. She called me down to her office to take me shopping for new shoes. I pleaded with her not to do it, telling her my parents would buy me new shoes. She insisted. I had never bought new shoes before. I was thrilled, though scared of my father’s reaction, and my brothers’ jealousy. I was told to pick any pair I wanted. Consumer freedom tasted good. All my clothes and shoes had always been bought for me, or were hand-me-downs. The raised tendons on my feet today continue to tell the tale of shoes always a size or a year too small for my growing feet. At home that night, I was beaten so badly my father couldn’t let me go to school for a few days. I don’t know if there were inquiries or not. When I did get back to school, no questions were asked. I was glad to have a new pair of shoes. Getting beat was worth it. Heroes reappeared now and then, but never with enough power, information or concern to do much of anything about what must have been fairly obvious.

Heroes also come from places you might least expect. More than anyone else, my brother Paul, three years older than me, helped to protect me from my father. Again and again, he took beatings onto himself to help me get away, knowing that he was bigger and could partially defend himself. He may also have known that my father didn’t question Paul’s heritage and the beating would not be as severe as what my father had intended for me, the outcast, the abomination. Either way, of all my siblings, Paul deserved a special heap of praise for his courage.

Heroes can be dangerous, because they don’t always know they have the power to do only enough to leave you worse than you were before you met them. After my mother left when I was 12, we were told to go to a counselor at Catholic Charities. I went, but didn’t want to. The counselor convinced me that I was safe in telling him anything that was going on. I did. Boy, what a huge mistake. I remember telling him everything I could within the short time I had, hoping he would put a stop to it, and get me out of that house. I pleaded with him not to tell me dad, warning him that I would be beaten if he did. He did anyway. He told me he didn’t believe me, that I must be lying to him, and that my father had the right to know the kinds of things I was saying about him. Need I say what happened then, when my father brought me home? Of course I was beaten for it, and never went back.

One name I will not ever forget: Lorene. It is no exaggeration to say I would likely not be here to tell you this story if it were not for Lorene. Or, if I were here, I might be scratching this story out on pads of paper in a prison cell or a padded cell. Thank God for Lorene. Lorene was my social worker from the age of 12 until I was 18. She saved my butt so many times I cannot tell you. When my mother left, all hell broke loose. My father’s violence became homicidal. I knew it was only a matter of time before he would kill me. My brother Paul was the first to go into foster care, with the rest of us quickly to follow. The first time I met her, I called her on a pay phone, after my father had tried to hit me in the head with a baseball bat. He had wanted to kill me. He missed me entirely, this time. I told Lorene baseball bat and said I would never return. She suggested we meet at a restaurant. We talked over a dinner. She believed everything I told her, without hesitation, or suspicion. She intervened once and for all by removing me from my father’s house within a few weeks, and was smart enough not to let him know that I had anything to do with her intervention. She was discreet. She seemed to understand the possible consequences of being careless when it came to what my father knew and didn’t know. The County forced me to return home when I was 15, but Lorene kept a close watch on my father, and when he tried to cut me in the neck with a wood saw, removed me from my father’s home again, permanently.

Sometimes a hero becomes a hero when they help you find other heroes. Lorene did this, by introducing me to the foster parents I would have from the age of 16 until I completed my first year of college. Carol and Russ were the real deal—Russ had lived in foster homes as a child and was now returning the favor. Carol was a naturally very giving person and derived much of the meaning from her life by helping kids like me get a chance to succeed in their lives. We are still in contact on a fairly regular basis nearly 30 years after I moved out. What was special about them? I never had any doubt about their motive. In previous foster homes, I had known parents in it for the money (by cramming five boys into two smallish bedrooms out of sight of the rest of their biological family), in it for the work (by making us cut and stack wood without pay every other weekend so they could sell the wood for extra money), or for the control (by kicking me out when I did not want to be adopted). Carol and Russ were none of these. They were simply heroes, doing what they could to improve the lives of the kids in their home, at great personal cost, which was rewarding to them just because they knew they were doing something important, something special.

A few years ago, I called Lorene at her office. I told her who I was, not even sure she’d recognize the name. She knew who I was immediately. I called her to thank her for all that she had done on my behalf. I also told her what I had done with my life to that point (family, house, successful career as an attorney, and sane). I told her I wanted her know it could not have happened but for her. She cried. I cried. It was very very nice.

Personal heroes mattered to me because they came into my life at exactly the right time—when I needed them most. I could not have been helped by any personal hero, though, unless I were willing to trust them. I only trusted those mentioned here because I believed each of them genuinely cared. I wasn’t always right in those I trusted, but I would not have trusted any of them if I thought they were bogus, pretending to care. When those that really cared reached out to me, I am so glad I responded by using what they had to give to improve my life. I hope you will do the same when you need to.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

I see this kind of thing with clients in therapy all the time.  It makes sense in a way, which is probably why it is so common.  We want to learn from our past.  What better way to learn from our past than to review what we can now see were mistakes, so we do not make those mistakes again, especially if we are confronting the same kind of decision again.  Okay, that actually sounds pretty healthy.  If we are in the process of a breakup and we can look back to see where we’ve regretted break ups in the past, we can ask whether we will once again regret our current decision.  We can ask the “what ifs” before we make a crucial decision. We can ask ourselves, “when I have hindsight about this decision I am making right now, will I wish I had decided things differently?”  Call this a built in impulse control.  It is worth repeating another saying here, “those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” So, fear of regret later, for the decisions we are making now, can actually be very reasonable.

Go ahead and learn from your past.  Don’t make big decisions in your life without reviewing how you now feel about similar decisions in the past.  You might learn that your decisions are overly influenced by fear of risk, by avoidant behavior, by some insecurity that compels you to flee when over time that turns out not to usually be the right decision over the long haul. You might suffer from the syndrome of “I always quit (a job, a relationship, a situation) before I get fired” and then realize you weren’t really at risk of being fired. On the other hand, instead of overreacting, you might see that, when it comes to big decisions, you are too passive, you do not make decisions, but rather let life make its decisions for you, which you later wish you had taken a more proactive approach.  You stay in a job or relationship or an educational program long after knowing pretty well that you do not want it to continue and are really dissatisfied. Or maybe you don’t so much make decisions, as let others make them for you, and then find yourself resentful of the person that “made the decision” (when you actually made it, but allowed them to tell you what to do).  You stay in a job you hate for years because you are the breadwinner and your partner needs to you make the money.  Reviewing years of decisions that you later regret is probably the best way to change these patterns.

Here’s the problem, though—Hindsight is not 20/20.  “20/20” is “perfect” vision.  It means we see things at 20 feet exactly how we should see things at 20 feet.  With hindsight though, we often insert a level of clarity that is not really there at all. We take it too far.  We think, “if I had known then, what I know now, I would never have… (insert decision).”  This is very likely completely untrue.  Why?  Because our decisions are not merely based on what we know in the moment, they are based on who we are in the moment.

A client named Jill (not her real name) tells me, “I cannot believe I ever married him 12 years ago, if I had known what he was truly like when he asked me to marry him, I would never have said yes.”  Jill now finds herself living in resentment against herself, bitterness toward her husband Mark (not his real name), and daily almost overwhelming regret about her decision to marry Mark. There’s a real problem here.  She is making a fundamental mistake about hindsight. She is inserting the person she is now at the age of 32 into the situation she was in when he asked her to marry him. But she was 20 then.  She was not the same person. She was not in the same place in her life.  She hasn’t merely learned a lot about her husband along the way. She has learned much about herself, her life, how she feels about being a mom, about her career options. She has lost her mother to cancer, after her mother spent 30 years in a marriage she found miserable.  I could go on with many other facets of the way her life has changed. The important point is this:  Jill’s hindsight is not 20/20. She cannot separate the Jill that exists at the age of 32 from the Jill that existed at age 20.  Jill probably can’t really even remember, except vaguely, what it was like to be Jill at the age of 20. Her reasons for marrying Mark at 20 were partly the result of needs she had then that she no longer has (financial, emotional, social).

Jill lives in deep regret because her hindsight is warped. Yes, warped.  Hindsight is not 20/20.  Hindsight is nearly always warped by the misperception that we are now who we were when we made a decision that we now wish we had made differently. I do the same thing, and am pretty sure you do too.  I think we all make this mistake.  We forget that we evolve as we move through time. The more time, the more we have changed.  We enter into parts of our lives that are fundamentally different, not just based on knowledge, but based on our changed identities, personalities, and priorities.

I can make the same kinds of mistakes about regret as Jill made. I might regret deciding to go to law school instead of graduate school for philosophy.  I might wish I had known back in college that I would eventually find the practice of law unfulfilling, or worse.  If I had only known that back then, I could have had a totally different and possibly better career experience from my late twenties to my early forties.  This regret kind of makes no sense, once you factor in that I am now the person I am in part precisely because I went to law school, then practiced law for 13 years.  How can I get around that part of who I am now to honestly and accurately review my past?  I cannot.  My hindsight is warped by the fact that I have spent half of my adult life steeped in the law. The best I can do is recognize this, and when reviewing the past, take that into consideration as part of my reviewing why I made those decisions.  Like Jill, I also need to recognize that I was in a completely different part of my life when I made the decision to go to law school than I am now. My needs were different, and so were the needs of my family.

It is unlikely that every part of the 12 years Jill and Mark have been married were regrettable.  It’s more likely that Jill now knows with clarity that she is ready to not be married to Mark anymore, but thinks she should have known this along.  Not only is this a mistake, it is also unnecessary.  We don’t need this kind of clarity about our past to make good decisions for ourselves now. Sometimes, though, it seems easier to make difficult decisions by telling ourselves that we should have known all along, that the whole thing we are now rejecting was a mistake, bad, so we can remove it from our lives completely without fearing regret.  Jill is ready to leave Mark because she can now see things about Mark that she finds intolerable.  Part of the reason they are intolerable, though, is that Jill is different too.  Jill finds things intolerable now that would not have mattered as much when she was 20.  That is the result of time, growth, changing values, priorities and perceptions.  Those things are actually not about Mark at all. They are about Jill, all about Jill.

If we can remember that hindsight is not actually 20/20, that it is warped because it carries with it the trap of assuming incorrectly that we are now who we were when we made past decisions, hindsight can be a useful tool.  Only in this way can we both learn from our past, while also avoiding misplaced regret that can haunt us and make us unnecessarily resentful of ourselves or others who participated in the decisions we can now see led us to a place we do not want to be.  A better alternative is to recognize that part of the reason we have the clarity we now have is because we made the decisions we now wish we had not made.  Jill can see she no longer wants to be married to Mark because she married Mark.  I can see that the practice of law is something I no longer wish to do because I practiced law long enough to know this in my bones.  Actually, I do not regret law school or having practiced law because it taught me so much about who I am now, and helped shape me.  Jill will get to a place where she will be able to appreciate all that her marriage to Mark has taught her, given her, shaped her, led her to a place where she can say she no longer needs to be in that relationship.  When Jill gets to that point, she will no longer have the regret, the resentment against herself and Mark, and the bitterness of thinking she wasted 12 years. That is my hope for Jill, for myself and all of my clients, and it comes only in time, with balanced clarity about our past decisions.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

In my first blog on this topic, “Forgiveness and Letting Go, Part I,” I focused on how to decide when you can allow yourself to forgive others for their transgressions against you and when you might decide to let go of feelings even if you can’t completely forgive.  Basically, I suggested that forgiveness seemed to require that the other person be willing to change their behavior, and maybe even that they have had an opportunity to demonstrate their desire for change was genuine (that they could both “talk the talk, and walk the walk”).  I also said letting go is possible when you believe the person is not going to change, but you decide you are not interested in carrying around resentments and other negative feelings based on their behavior, but are not willing to give them the gift of forgiveness or the benefit of the doubt because you don’t want to open yourself to the vulnerability of being hurt again. I still think this is all true, but it has limitations and there is a third possibility, forgiveness even when you know the other person is not likely to change.

The distinction between forgiveness and letting go based on whether someone has shown real change applies only in a circumstance when you want to continue to have a relationship with that person that depends on their ability and willingness to engage in that kind of change.  Take for example a relationship you might have had with a friend that seems one-sided.  You are always the one calling (or texting, emailing) them.  You tell them this. They tell you they can see what you mean, and will make a real effort to put energy into the friendship. They call you a few times, you get together. You feel better. Over time, though, they fade, again.  Until you realize you are back where you started. They didn’t “walk the walk” (make the change you wanted).  So, you let the friendship fade.  You feel hurt.  Maybe sad, but also a little resentful that they didn’t care more about keeping the friendship going.  You decide to let go of your feelings.  You have other friends, and can’t be bothered by the feelings of remorse, resentment, missing them.  You hang onto forgiveness though because you don’t want to fall into the trap of believing they want a friendship with you again, when it is clear to you now that it is just an act they put on occasionally to keep you in their life.  So, you let go of your feelings, but remain guarded, unwilling to completely forgive them for their seemingly irresponsible behavior to you which feels very inconsiderate to you. On the rare occasion when they do call (or text or email), you go through the motions of  a friendship to avoid offending them or getting into a conflict, but are uninterested, not invested.  If this were a client I was referring to (and yes, it applies to many clients over the years), I would readily suggest they have done a good job of navigating a delicate and difficult situation.

A more serious example, which I have used in other blogs, is a marital or other long term partnership in which one person has been injured numerous times in a way they both acknowledge.  Perhaps it involves physical or verbal abuse or infidelity.  Maybe it also involves addiction, and multiple failed attempts at recovery.  The addict begs for forgiveness, she pleads with utterly sincere earnestness of her intent to mend her ways, to repair damage, to change.  Her partner wants to forgive, to give her another chance, but without risking further injury. He decides he can do both.  He can give her another chance, but withhold forgiveness until he sees real change in her.  So, he begins to let go of the pain from past transgressions while watching her make necessary change for recovery, while holding back on complete forgiveness.  Like the ignored friend above, this too seems like a good way for my client to navigate a difficult and potentially devastating situation. If she stays in recovery, he can begin the process of going beyond letting go of his feelings and begin to forgive her, changing his way of perceiving her, not based on pain, but based on hope, losing the fear of the past repeating itself. If the partnership ends, though, will my client ever be able to forgive his ex?

There is another alternative, which can involve a third way to forgiveness.  If you are the ignored friend, you could be honest with your feelings, tell them you are no longer interested in a friendship with them on terms you find hurtful.  If they really do not change, and you no longer hear from them, can you forgive them?  Yes.  If you choose too.  In this case, you could forgive without being vulnerable to repeated hurtful actions.

We all have within us the capacity for enormous almost limitless compassion (okay there are rare exceptions, but not anyone reading this blog). This means we have equally vast capacities for forgiveness.  If we use compassion as a way of seeing others, we can nearly always forgive them for whatever they might have done to us or to others.  Compassion is a state of being in which we recognize that the experience of others is unique to them, that we cannot ever know completely what that experience is like for them, and that we can accept that their experience explains everything that they do, no matter how bad it might be.  Compassion involves an acceptance that we can never really leave our own subjective experience, but can readily, almost completely, accept the experience of others as something completely different than our own.  Only with compassion, can we say, “I cannot agree with what they have done, or even understand why they did it, but I can accept they had their reasons.”  With compassion, we don’t even have to go through any logical analysis of a person’s motivation.  We can say, “I will never understand or agree with you, but I trust that you either thought what you were doing was justified, or there is some other reason I cannot begin to understand that compelled you to do what you did, and I can accept that and leave it at that.”

Forgiveness, like compassion, is a gift. They are gifts we can find within ourselves and offer to others, even if we also know they might not “deserve” it. We do not have to offer forgiveness to anyone, but we can, if we choose to do so willingly.  Forgiveness, though, is a gift we must choose to use only when it is genuine.  Simply wanting to be compassionate and forgiving in the wrong circumstances can actually be harmful to ourselves and others.  If the husband above uses compassion to avoid the difficult decision to leave his partner if she relapses again, he will make himself vulnerable to the damage of her addiction and might also in the process enable her to continue to be self-destructive.  On the other hand, if he uses compassion wisely, says to himself that he doesn’t understand her addiction, but can accept that for her it is real, difficult, and terrible for her too, he can give her a chance and give himself a chance to forgive her.  The point of this blog is that he can forgive her whether she relapses or not.  If she does not relapse, he can begin the process of forgiveness as they rebuild their relationship.  If she continues to relapse, and he makes the decision that he must leave to protect himself (or his children too) from her addiction, he can still say, with deep compassion, ‘I wish you had been able to recover from your addiction, but I am not you, I cannot ever completely understand what it is about being you that prevents you from recovery, and I am sad for you, and love you, and wish you could find it within yourself to recover, and I forgive you for all that your addiction has done to me.”  He can give this forgiveness as a gift of compassion.  Notice, though, that this generosity of spirit need not come with continuing to make himself vulnerable to her addiction.

The same can be said for the ignored friend. She can tell her friend (or just herself), “hey, I will never understand why our friendship didn’t seem as important to you as it did to me, but I am not you, and I can accept that your needs are not the same as mine, and leave it that, let you be you, and forgive you for actions which caused me pain.”

Forgiveness, with compassion, but without continued vulnerability, can be given in any circumstance.  We have seen on the news mothers forgive those who killed their child.  I have known children who have forgiven parents, other family members, and even strangers for unspeakable things done to them as children. Our generous spirit gives us the capacity to say, “I am not you, you are not me, you have your needs, your motives, your history, your struggles, your limitations, your humanness, just like I do, and I can accept that whatever you have done, you have done because you are you, and I choose to accept this, and let it be.” This is the ultimate gift of forgiveness. As you can see, it requires no vulnerability to future harm.  It only requires the generous spirit of compassion. In the process of offering forgiveness, you will feel better by releasing from yourself the burden of negative feelings and perceptions about that person and you will at least give the other the gift of freeing them from the burden of your feelings to change or not change, whichever they decide, whichever they are able to do. When we forgive, we give ourselves the gift of knowing deep generosity and we give others the gift of freedom to be whomever they are or might become.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

During one of the first few sessions, clients sometimes ask me if I have been in therapy myself. Not surprisingly, they find the question awkward because they both want an answer and consider it important and because they are not sure if it is okay for them to ask. As with almost anything in therapy, I think a client should ask what they think is important for them to know about me, and then I will hold myself responsible for telling them whether I am willing to give them an answer. Sometimes the answer is no, I do not want to share that information. That exchange itself can be a good therapeutic moment, even if the client didn’t get what they wanted, because I try as hard as I can to ensure that they know I still wanted them to ask, because they couldn’t have known I didn’t want to share the information they wanted from me until I told them. And much of the time, if I think sharing the information will be good for the client, I will gladly answer their question So, this blog is a way to avoid all of that awkwardness, if possible, by answering the question about me and therapy in advance of the first session of all future clients (that care to read this blog): yes, I have been in therapy. In fact, I have been in therapy multiple times, at several different points in my life. Sometimes the therapy has not been helpful, and has even been a real turnoff, and at other times, it was a godsend. I have no magical answer about why it worked sometimes and at others did not. I can give you some clues though, in case you want to know.

First, let me share with you a couple of real turnoffs that will tell you a lot about when and why therapy definitely did not work for me, and which still inform much of what I do in my own therapy practice—to help my clients stay as far away from those kinds of experiences as possible.

When I was 11 or 12, my father took me to a therapist. I can’t tell you what prompted my dad’s exercise in self-help. If I had to guess, someone else told him to do it (like a school or the county). I didn’t want to go, I remember that. It didn’t seem I had much choice though, so I went. I think I thought it was like going to the doctor (first mistake). The guy gave me the whole speech about confidentiality, telling me everything I told him would go no further. I trusted him (second mistake). After telling him all the kinds of things my dad had been doing to me (basically, beating the crap out of me), this guy didn’t believe me, told me he thought I was making it up, and then told my dad (third mistake). Guess what my dad did to me when we got home? Yup, he beat the crap out of me.

Fast forward four years. I’m 16, trying to stay off drugs. Back in school after dropping out for almost a year. Depressed. Bored with school. Hating myself. Not wanting to go back to drugs, but not sure what I wanted to do. I had a good foster mom (bless her heart, for real). She strongly suggested I give therapy another try, knowing what happened before. I trusted her (not a mistake). I went. Nothing terrible happened. Nice guy. Good looking, I think. Nice hair, nice smile, nice office, nice compliments toward me. I didn’t buy it. Seemed to good to be true, or just not very helpful. So, I went for a while, then started missing appointments, then stopped going. Good in a way, because it helped me get over my fear of therapy, and therapists. It also left me feeling therapy was pretty useless.

Okay, one more lame therapy story (I’ll try to put you “there” by telling it in the present tense, like it just happened). I was going through a very painful breakup in my 30’s. I was really sad. I call a clinic in Uptown, Minneapolis. They have several therapists, one is available for a session that day (hmmm….). Okay, I need to talk to someone, anyone. I go. I start to tell him what’s grieving me. I want to say he interrupted me in mid-sentence (doesn’t that sound dramatic), telling me I smelled like cigarette smoke. Um, yeah, I say, cause I smoke (I did back then). So? Well, he launches into this ten minute lecture about how smoking leads to depression, and all kinds of health issues, finally suggesting the answer to what ails me is smoking. He kept at it, despite my assurances that this was not a topic I wanted him to talk about. I knew smoking was bad, and I didn’t care. That was the problem, not the smoking, but the not caring. He wanted to set up an appointment but asked me to promise to quit smoking immediately. I didn’t do either. I never went back, and smoked at him in my mind for about two weeks. By then, I’d gotten a grip on my grief.

Along the way, though, in my late twenties, I had the very good fortune to meet a great therapist, who also seemed to be a great person. Craydon worked at a nonprofit therapy center for poor people in the skid row part of San Francisco (which is where I lived when I was a poor student living there). At the end of our second session, after telling him some details about my childhood, and that much of it was from what others had told me because I could remember virtually nothing from before I was about 12, Craydon paused, looked over his notes nervously. Then he said, “Okay, Michael, I need to tell you that I just graduated with a Master’s Degree in therapy, and I don’t even have my license yet. Based on what you’re telling me about what has happened to you, I do not think I am qualified to work with you. You really need someone with a lot more experience and education. I will need to talk to my supervisor, who has a license, and a Ph.D. I think you should see him, he will be much more able to tell you what you need to do to get a handle on all of this.” (I am paraphrasing here).

His complete sincerity, compassion and humility were so refreshing, like nothing else I’d seen in a therapy office before. I told him I thought he would be perfect. I said I wanted to work with him because he didn’t try to tell me who I was, what I needed to do, he just wanted to listen, to talk with me, and that was exactly what I needed. He smiled, and agreed to try. I saw Craydon every week for an hour and a half for three years, until with a license, his own office in a nicer part of town, more confidence, and no less compassion, he told me, “I think you are close to ready to being done in therapy, Michael.” He was right, for that part of my life, for what I was trying to do then, which was to make sure I understood how the violence inflicted upon me as a child still worked its way through my mind. I’d just become a father before starting therapy with Craydon and was very worried that I would do to my new son what my father had done to me. Now that my son is an adult, I wish I could find Craydon to tell him how much he did for me and for my son—I did not end up becoming to my son what my father was to me, cruel, mean, or violent. This is the power of therapy, and is part of the reason I am now a therapist, because I have seen what it can do at the right time with the right person in my own life.

I have since then, from time to time, sought out therapy to address more specific situations. I have been more selective about who I see because I have learned the importance of the kind of connection you can make with a therapist, either positive or not. Sometimes even when the connection is really good, and the therapist highly competent, the work doesn’t go well. Some time ago, I saw a family therapist to try to save my marriage. The therapist was highly recommended by someone I trusted very much, who is herself a really good therapist. Despite our marriage therapist’s insights, knowledge, and skill, she was not able to help us figure out how to save the marriage. My sadness about the end of that marriage might never completely go away, but I still feel very satisfied that I found a good therapist to work with us. I can look back and honestly say, if she were not able to help us, that’s a pretty good sign that the marriage needed to end, despite my sadness about it.

It doesn’t take a long time to obtain the benefits of therapy if you know what you want, and are willing to do the work to get it. I saw a therapist during a very difficult time in my son’s life, when I was struggling to figure out what I was supposed to do to help him, feeling both helpless and some despair. I saw a sharp attentive solution focused guy. After three sessions, he said, “what seems to be bothering you is that you know you are in a ‘no-win situation’ but won’t accept that is how it is. So, my suggestion is that you remind yourself as often as you can by telling yourself, ‘this is a no-win situation.’” As simple as it sounds, he was absolutely right about what I was doing, and his suggestion worked very well, as long as I kept telling myself the truth—that I was in a no-win situation and had to accept it for what it was. I did not need to return to that therapist.  I had gotten what I needed in a short time because what I needed was very specific, very contextual.

As a person who now provides therapy to others, I feel very fortunate to have had a well-rounded basis of experience as a therapy client. I have learned from these experiences some basic and powerful ideas about what works and what does not work. I try to use these experiences in the therapy I practice with my clients now, so I can help them avoid the foibles of my predecessors while hoping to give them some part of the almost miraculous benefits that have been given to me by some of my therapists over the years. Who I am as a therapist now, and what I have learned works for me as a therapy client, does not apply to everyone, and that is how it needs to be. We need to find what works for us, for whatever issue and whatever time in our life we decide to seek the help of someone else in therapy.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

So far, the discussion of existentialism might imply that an existentialist must believe there is no life after death, and even that existentialists are all atheists or agnostics (lack faith or doubt faith in God). This is not true. One of the first people credited with the term “existentialist” was a guy named Soren Kierkegaard, who was until his dying day a devout Christian. Throughout its history, existentialism has included both secular and theological thinkers. What they all have in common is the value of accepting that there are things about life worth recognizing will not make sense to us, no matter how hard or how often we try to make sense of them and the best we can hope for is to gain a better understanding of our existence, as it is, right now.

Giving up on the pointless exercise of trying to make sense out of things about life which will never make sense is extraordinarily liberating, freeing, if you let it be. So, let it be. Let it sit for a minute. If you stop trying to make sense of why you were born, why you will die, how and when you and everyone else you have ever known or ever will know will die, you will stop spending energy on something that can never and will never make any real sense. You have your life, and even though that doesn’t make sense, it is there. Now, use it. Use it how you want, not based on some kind of idea of how it should be, but on how you want it to be.

At the risk of seeming like I am trying to sound like I am smart, I will do as my professor suggested back in college, and tell you, “I am an existentialist.” Let me change this just a little though. Instead, I will say I “adhere to a philosophy of existence.” Specifically, I believe that a substantial part of my essence, and your essence, are the result of choices you make in your life, after you were born. I prefer the term “philosophy of existence” to “existentialism” because it seems more open to variance, and less pretentious somehow. We are of course limited by the genetic endowment given to us at birth (nature) and by the irrational and unpredictable parts of our lives (nurture–0ur upbringing, culture, social class, race, gender, etc.), but beyond this we are completely free to live our lives as we see fit. Existentialism says to me, “I exist, now what?” Talk about freedom! How can this be pessimistic? It is so full of possibility.

Even though there are some really important parts of our lives that do not and never will make sense (see above), there are other parts of our lives that make sense because we can make them make sense (what we want to do with the lives that have been given to us for whatever reason). I feel bad for so many people who spend so much of their mental energy trying to make sense of parts of their lives that they cannot possibly understand (e.g. why they were born), so that they never end up being able to pay attention to the parts of their lives they might actually be able to understand if they changed their focus (who they are becoming based on the choices they make every day). Paying attention to our choices, and taking full responsibility for the meaning and the consequences of those decisions on who we are is another tenet of a philosophy of existence.

One of the criticisms of existentialism, which is well deserved in some cases, is that it leaves wide open a person’s morality, how they decide right from wrong, without the structural restraints of religious or social influence. If we are fully responsible for making whatever decisions we want to make in our lives to become the kind of people we want to be and live the lives we want to live, what is to stop us from doing things others would consider really awful? Wouldn’t there be some risk that we would become selfish, bullying, lying, cheating, socially reprehensible? In some cases, I think the answer has to be yes. In fact, to tell you the truth, one of the most prominent early existentialist thinkers ended supporting Nazis. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

So, how do you limit your sense of right and wrong if existentialism is at least partially valid? Let’s just say for now that it puts the responsibility for doing what is right squarely on you, and no one else. And that is a good thing, I think. I have already touched on part of the answer to these questions about morality in my blogs, Selfishness and Love, To the Weak I Became Weak, the DEA and CIA–making better decisions, and in little places all over in other blogs. I happen to have a very positive attitude about what lies at the core of most people. I truly believe that most people want to do the right thing, and know what the right thing is, without having to be told by someone else. The more I work with others in my therapy practice, the more I believe this is true. If we give ourselves permission to make the choices we think are right, while being aware of who we are, we will become better people.  How to give ourselves permission to act in accordance with our own sense of right and wrong based on who we think we are, is a topic for a blog I will be writing fairly soon.  Its been on my mind more than usual lately.

Now let me bring this a little closer to home. Like I said in a previous blog about 12 step recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, existentialism is yet another set of ideas that changed the direction of my life forever. If I didn’t need anyone else’s permission or approval to be who I chose to be, to live how I wanted to live, then I could stop worrying about the Catholic Church and my father looking over my shoulder, and make the kinds of changes that made sense to me. I could look back at the teachings in the bible as guides to my own personal integrity, rather than a rule book I had to follow “or else.” I had lived until that point with a nagging feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be alive at all, brought about by things my parents said and did when I grew up. Existentialism gave me permission to be, to exist, to live. And now it was going to be up to me to decide what to do with all that life in front of me, the life that had been given to me, and now was mine for the taking, the defining. I would now find the part of my essence that existed at that and other points, and then begin to create the parts of my essence that didn’t yet exist. I am still doing it now, several decades after someone first talked me about existentialism. I encourage you to do the same, now and for the rest of your life.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

Once I began to learn what “existentialist” meant, I realized the term probably has almost as many meanings as the number of people who describe themselves as such, and many of the most famous people called “existentialists” would deny the attribute. So, I better define what it means when I use the word. Keep in mind that I am going to try to explain in a few pages what it has taken countless writers over a century to explain, so this is going to be very limited, and incomplete. But, then again, its just a blog, so we shouldn’t expect it to be much of an expose. For a much more involved explanation, you click on this link to go to an article about existentialism at Stanford University’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy introductory article on Existentialism.

In its most basic sense, existentialism is a philosophy of human life that basically says, “we are who we make ourselves become.” One of the most famous proponents of “existentialism” is a French guy, named Jean Paul Sartre, who described this with the phrase, “existence precedes essence.” By “essence” he meant, more or less, “what kind of person we are.” So, “existence precedes essence,” can be explained by saying that we existed before we became who we are. This might seem obvious. At least it seems kind of obvious to me, at this point in my life. When I first heard it, though, back in that philosophy class when I was 18, I was blown away.

It might help to understand that I was raised in a pretty strict catholic upbringing. My dad took it very seriously, and we were expected to do the same. And for many years, I did. I went to church several times a week for a while as a kid, I went through catechism. I attended a catholic school for four years, from 5^th to 8^th grade. In this kind of environment, you hear things like “he was always meant to be a priest,” or “you were blessed to given the gift of [insert any number of talents or skills].” In other words, in the Church I was raised in, a person’s essence definitely preceded their existence in some really important ways, like what you were supposed to do in your life, what kind of person you would end up being, what kind of special talents or limitations you had.

Existentialism turned all of this on its head. It rejected the whole idea of being born with predisposed traits that would determine who you would become. Instead, it suggested you focus on who you want to be or better yet, how to make the kind of choices that will lead to you becoming who you want to be.

Existentialism also has the reputation of being kind of a downer, a bummer, pessimistic, using words like “dread,” “anxiety,” “angst,” “nausea,” and “absurdity” to describe the normal mood of living an honest life. Some of this reputation is deserved because a lot of existentialist writers looked at some very tough aspects of human “existence,” but it is not the whole story, or I couldn’t very well use it as the basis of much of my thinking about the value and the process of therapy. Therapy can’t be too successful if it is a complete downer.

A basic premise of existentialism is that we are born with brains that want to understand the world using “reason” (or “logic” or “rationality”). We want to make sense of the world by making the world make sense in our heads. But, the world doesn’t make sense. Fundamental aspects of the world are random, or at least they appear to be random to us, and are therefore unpredictable, sometimes in very scary ways. Tomorrow your best friend might be diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and find out she has 3 months to live. She didn’t do anything wrong. She is a good person. She might even have small kids who really need her. This doesn’t make sense. Yet, there it is. You can’t make any sense of it. Yet, you try. You reason it out, you try to give it a meaning it might not have, an explanation that doesn’t work. Your friend is going to die, very soon, and there is no reason to it at all. It just is. See what I mean about the reputation of existentialism as being a downer? It kind of is, so far.  Be patient, though, it gets better (less pessimistic).

I have just described one part of the existential notion of “absurdity.” Absurdity to an existentialist is basically trying to make sense of things that do not make sense. When we are born, to whom we are born, when we die, how we die; these are all questions  about aspects of our world that are completely beyond our control (assuming we do not kill ourselves). Trying to lend meaning to a thing that cannot have meaning leads to absurdity. It leads us to believe something that simply cannot be true, no matter how much we might wish it were true.  Even if there are ultimate reasons for these events, we do not know them, we do not understand them, and the result is the same: trying to figure out the reasons will get us nowhere.

So, now you have an idea of what “absurdity” means to existentialists. This attempt at figuring out the riddle to the absurd, if pursued with any level of frequency or vigor, can lead to a kind of anxiety. Like a dog chasing its tail, we look at our impending death with increased “dread” because we realize that our life’s supposed meaning looks much more fragile if death is completely unpredictable, might be final, and makes no sense at all. If we get stuck here, focusing on the irrationality of our birth and death, we may end up in a place of “nausea” about our life, a resignation into pessimism.

If I left it here, and said, “well, there’s existentialism in a nutshell,” you’d be right to suggest it has little use, especially to a therapist trying to help people feel better about themselves and their lives. But I encourage you to let it sit with you, just like this, for a little while. Let the possibility that the fact of your life, when it began, when it ends, by itself, is something you had no say in, didn’t control, didn’t ask for, do not choose. It was and will be completely luck, circumstance, good or bad, but there it is.  The next blog will show how this is actually a really great starting point for making huge changes in your outlook and your life.  At least, that’s what it was and still is for me, and is for a large number of clients in therapy.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a qualified mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

Relationships, jobs, career, school, housing, marriage; these are all “big picture” kinds of decisions. They require serious and sometimes lengthy consideration in order to make the best decision possible. Flexibility as the result of having a good handle on our inner feelings is certainly an important part of these kinds of decisions. This was the topic of my last blog on the importance of Flexibility. In this blog, I am more interested in exploring how deep understanding and sustained comfort with our feelings affects our capacity to be flexible when we must make decisions in the moment, many times a day, every day, in many different contexts.

Over time, these decisions become embedded in our relationships, our personality, the way others see us, expect us to behave, and how we see ourselves. Flexibility in these situations allows us to adapt, alter, change, modify, and most importantly, decide in advance how to respond to different situations differently. We do this more than we think we do. A hothead boss or colleague at work goes off on something we think is pretty ridiculous, or someone gets drunk and acts the fool at a holiday party, yet we say nothing. When our job, even our career, is on the line, we keep our cool, even if we are seething underneath, waiting with measured reaction for the right time to respond in the right way, which will not cause us serious financial consequences. We act by not acting. This is flexibility. It demonstrates flexibility because this might not be how we would normally act, if the same thing were done by a family member or a friend at a holiday party. We react differently to similar behavior because the circumstances, the stakes, the nature of the relationships are different.

Rigidity is the opposite of flexibility. Someone who is rigid reacts pretty much the same way all the time. Their expectations of “how things should be” do not differ between home, school, the mall or work. Rigid behaviors do not change, even when they should change. A person who acts by shutting down and trying to change the subject whenever there is something difficult happening, regardless if it is with his wife, boss, friend or son has very few options for dealing with adversity. Rigidity is like a tool box with one shelf and very few tools. Flexibility is a tool box with many shelves all of them full of different kinds of tools to handle many kinds of different problems.

In therapy, I often tell clients their problematic responses now might be the result of tools learned very well in circumstances (like our childhood or a previous long-term relationship) where they were highly effective coping skills. Without understanding this, or the feelings that trigger this response, they are more likely to use that tool again in a situation in which it is no longer helpful, and is in fact counterproductive to meeting their current needs. A great example, and one I’ve used elsewhere in my blogs because it comes up so often, is a kid who grows up with an alcoholic or otherwise erratic unpredictable or abusive parent. As a child, she learns to watch everything very closely, to read the signs of a brewing storm (mom and dad are not speaking or dinner is late or dad hasn’t come home at his usual time), to be prepared for the worst (how hard will it be to hustle little brother and sister to their rooms if dad comes home right now). She hangs onto these behaviors into adulthood. She remains “hypervigilant” in her adult relationships, watching closely for signs of trouble. She sees trouble when it isn’t there. She creates self-fulfilling prophecies, thereby causing what might have been good healthy relationships to deteriorate into jealousy and defensiveness and demise. Or when there is a real conflict brewing, she “catastrophises” it by imagining outcomes that are far more negative than is anything likely to happen (he is going to break up with me). Because she gets ready for the worst, she becomes very reactive, defensive, and hostile, to protect herself from the feelings she is sure she is about to feel (when he breaks up with her).

Confronting these issues in therapy, learning about where they come from, why they were there in the first place, validating them for the successful strategy they once formed, while also recognizing their destructive force now, this is a kind of flexibility. It can help that kid learn to use his skills of observation when it is beneficial (e.g. when she later becomes a corporate manager and uses them to facilitate constructive staff meetings by reading the complexity of all the needs and nonverbal cues of her employees). Flexibility also allows her to notice when she is doing it at home, when her boyfriend is arguing with her and she begins to look for the door, fearing things will get out of hand, when she shuts down, fearing he will become irrational, dangerous, but he is in fact just venting about his boss, wanting her support, and he isn’t mad at her at all. She can say these things to herself, listen to herself remind herself that this is a different situation and needs a different response. She can soothe herself, see the fear for what it is, that it is not really related to him, to now, to her, to this place. She can be flexible, not feel the need to argue, or flee, to set the stage for a showdown. She can calm herself, so he can calm down, mostly on his own, without her help, guidance or vigilance. She can hang her hypervigilance at the door, and realize her boyfriend is not her father or the last two boyfriends she had, she is safe, and maybe even tell him about her fears, but without making those fears his responsibility, while also asking for his support. Hopefully, in doing so, she has been able to test the waters to determine she has found for herself a relationship in which she can not only address her own inner life, but can feel safe in expressing it to those who are close to her. In this way, she is exercise flexibility within herself that allows her to be flexible in how she expresses her needs in the moment.

Let’s take a moment to review the previous example. “Flexibility in the moment” has two parts. One internal. One external.

The internal part goes like this. How do I feel? Where does this feeling come from? How much of it is due to this situation, this person, this thing they did? How much of it is really not related to this person or situation? How much of this is really about me, my issues, my history? Are my feelings right now based on old negative messages I heard, or told myself for years? Are my fears valid, right here, right now, or can I put them away (at least for now until I have a better opportunity to understand them) and focus only on the fears I am having about what is really happening here in this exact situation? Is this something I’ve noticed I seem to feel a lot, not just with this person? If you’ve previously done your work at understanding your inner life pretty well, answers to these kinds of questions will come a lot easier. Doing the work requires you to have explored much of this kind of thinking, feeling, reacting when you are not in the situation, but when you thinking about it and exploring it in your journal, or with a good friend, or a therapist.

The external part goes like this. Once you have considered where your feelings come from, and you’ve separated out the feelings that are not really about this situation, this person, what they said, or what they want from you, you will have a much better chance at deciding for yourself how you want to respond based on what you want or need, right now, rather than what a whole lot of history tells you what you should want. After you’ve gone through the internal process explained above, you will make it external by expressing what you want to express, right now, to respond to what is happening, right now.  You will have the chance to decide, actually decide, how you want to be seen, heard, understood, by this person in front of you, rather than allowing your feelings to dictate and decide for you how you will be seen.  You can quickly do this internal-external process every time there is an interaction, every time he says something, and then you need to do something. At first this will take time, and it is okay to ask for time.  Eventually it will become easier.  At some point it becomes like second nature.

In making conscious decisions about how to interact with others based on mostly or only the actual needs of the current situation, you will be able to exercise greater levels of adaptability, flexibility, and you will be far less likely to allow yourself to fall into entrenched patterns of interaction that do not work well except in very limited circumstances. You will be able to create new patterns of interaction based on the kind of relationships you want in your life now, so you don’t become trapped in relationships that look like the kind you might have watched adults have when you were still a child.

Ultimately, the greatest benefit of flexibility is that you get to decide and own all of your responses. You are responsible for all of your actions, no matter what someone else does. This doesn’t mean that anger, tears, yelling are never justified. They can be, depending on the circumstance.  Flexibility does mean, though, that when you do become angry, cry, or yell, you are much less likely to regret it later, or doubt yourself, because you made the decision to become angry, to let yourself cry, to yell, because you decided that is what was appropriate right then, in that circumstance, with that person. And over time, you’ve learned that you are not likely to do that kind of thing unless there’s a pretty good reason. At this point, our outward expression (what others see) will have become an accurate reflection of a internal process of discovering what we want, what we need, and who we are right now. Flexibility is a goal, but is also a continuing process we can use for the rest of our lives. This is why flexibility is the hallmark of mental health—it requires us to get to know ourselves now so we can make better decisions in our interactions every day, every minute, in everything we do, and each time we do, we change, grow, improve, evolve, we move closer to being the person we want to be.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

At the core of being stuck for most people is some kind of fear. Being stuck in fear can simply be the result of being afraid of change, which is a kind of fear of the unknown, fear of things being different than they are now. Many of us have made some kind of unconscious decision (meaning we might not even know we’ve made the decision, but it is in the back of our minds anyway) that being stuck in our lives, no matter how bad it might feel sometimes, is not as bad as what we think might happen if we try to bring about real change. For others, a traumatic event, like the death of a family member or friend, or a bitter end to a previous relationship, makes them wary of taking risks of that kind again (getting close to someone who might die or leave them).

Yet, we do not want to live in fear. We do not want fear to control us, to limit our lives, our choices, the way we feel about ourselves, our relationships and our situations. This alone is a good reason to be able to address our inner life. As hard as this is to admit sometimes, fear is a driving force behind so much of our experiences in life and the decisions we make. The more we know about the sources and the impact of our fears, the more we can avoid allowing those fears to control us.

Our “inner life” has a great variety and depth to it. It evolves as we age and learn and build new memories and skills. Fear is always there, though. Fear of change itself is a common element to clients who are stuck in a bad place in their lives. If we are not willing to address our fear, then it is not likely to go away, or diminish. If we are willing to address our fears, we can break them down, question them, see them from different perspectives, and often realize that we have far less to fear than we thought we did. I see this all the time in my own life and when I am doing therapy with clients. Fear of conflict, of change, of abandonment, of failure, of disapproval, of loneliness, of death are all legitimate fears at some point. Unfortunately, these legitimate fears often take on a kind of life of their own when they are allowed to grow within us, unchecked by a willingness to question these fears, to put them in their place, to overcome them by taking action for our benefit in spite of them.

Think of the times you yourself have stayed in a bad situation far longer than you should have, but you didn’t realize this until after you left that situation. Maybe it was a job, or relationship, or housing arrangement. You stayed, despite your dissatisfaction, based on fears that making the decision for change would make things worse—and those fears felt so powerful at the time you didn’t think you could do anything about it. Eventually, you felt you had little choice and took the necessary risk of bringing about change because you simply couldn’t tolerate things staying the same. Maybe an alternative presented itself that was just too good to pass up, and you jumped at it. Either way, you finally made the decision to act despite your fears telling you not to do so. Looking back, you could see that much of your fear was unwarranted, irrational, or just blown out of proportion to likely outcomes. You see then that you wasted time worrying so much and being stuck so long in a bad situation.

Fear can be a good thing, though. Fear can wisely slow us down when we need to think carefully about what might otherwise be impulsive decisions. The problem, then, is not the fear. It is our reaction to the fear—we give it far more power or meaning than it needs to have, even when it is a fear that has wisdom behind it. When we are in a bad job, where the pay isn’t what it should be or could be, our boss is at times mean and unpredictable, we are not appreciated, it is going nowhere, we need fear of unemployment to check our hand during an argument, to avoid announcing “I quit” and the immediate feeling of satisfaction that will surely come with it, only to find an hour later that we have no way to pay our bills, and not a lot of extra money to stretch things out until we find something better. So, yes we should fear unemployment. But we should not stay in a job in which our self-respect is shredded because we don’t want to tackle the fear of not finding a better job. We should look at the fear, listen to what it tells us, and then take action to address the bad situation while taking into account what we’ve learned from the fear. Don’t quit on the spot. Remember the berating boss when you get home to motivate you to fire up the computer, build that resume, and pound the pavement (email) sending out job applications, so when you do announce “I quit” the next time you feel berated, you have already found another job and your fear of quitting is sensibly gone.

Likewise, it makes sense to fear loneliness and grief when thinking about ending a relationship. The momentary and seemingly insurmountable issue that makes us think we should “end this” might seem relatively trivial in a week or two when cooler heads prevail and we are able to think about the deep love we have for this person, and how much they have meant to us over the many years we have with them. Fear of losing the person we love doesn’t need to mean putting up with years of fighting over the same issues, though. We can listen to the fear, while also demanding the respect, attention, the voice we deserve to have in any relationship. We can ask for our needs to be met, while trying to avoid the end of relationship with someone we don’t want to lose. We can listen to our fear, use what it tells us, to take action. The alternative is a nagging paralysis that stretches on because we don’t want to pay attention to deep-seated fears that we don’t want to address head on.

Although fear can be a useful tool to remind us to think long and hard about big decisions with big consequences, we should not allow that fear to keep us in a relationship or job in which we are treated badly with little hope of change. It’s a balance. Until we are ready to really examine whether the fear we feel is warranted and appropriate, we are likely to avoid taking action, or if we do, we are likely to take action we will later regret. We need to understand our fear, listen to it, not run from it, to make the best decisions both in the short and the long term. We cannot do this unless we are comfortable addressing our inner lives, including what might be our most difficult feelings of fear.

In this blog I have so far tried to show, using fear as an example, that understanding, exploring, identifying and then listening to our feelings will help us make better decisions (in addition to allowing us to be less uncomfortable with ourselves). I didn’t need to use fear, although it adds punch because it is usually the most difficult of all feelings to face head on. I could still `      have used any number of other difficult feelings to demonstrate the same thoughts. Feelings of inadequacy work as well as fear. A corporate director who spends 60 plus hours at work and works on the weekends at home might miss most of his children’s upbringing, not because he loves his job, but because he cannot bear the imagined or real disapproval of his parents, wife, older brother, or children if he doesn’t “make the grade” (however “the grade” gets defined in his mind).

Shame is another example of a feeling people often take great pains to avoid, which keeps them from making good decisions for themselves. A woman refuses to reach out to her family for financial support because she feels ashamed that she has been laid off and is a single mother, despite knowing her parents have plenty of money and would be more than willing to help. She doesn’t want to look at the primary source of her shame, which is a series of poor decisions in her life over the past several years, including becoming involved with the father of her children despite his drinking habit, dropping out of college, cutting ties with her family. So, her shame compels her to continue to make poor decisions, forcing she and her children to struggle without adequate resources to make real change for the better. If she were willing to look at her shame, see it for what it is, and also for what it is not (all about her), she would see that some of this shame is based on her mother’s scorn over the years, and giving her father’s ideas of who she “should be” more value than it deserves. If she could value the shame she feels based on her poor decisions, but reject the shame she feels due to her parents opinions, she might be able to get the help she needs, go back to school, get a better career and then need no more dependence on an alcoholic boyfriend, or a parent whose scorn no longer has the meaning it once had.

Flexibility is not possible in our lives unless we are willing to look right at our feelings, all of them, the good and bad, the easy and the difficult, and consider with each the likelihood that they are telling something valuable, but they are not telling us the whole picture. Flexibility requires that we realize that we always have many feelings all at the same time, and each of those feelings gives a different piece of the complete puzzle. If we can pay attention to them all, we can decide which ones should influence us the most, and make decisions consistent with what we know about the kind of person we are, and the kind of life we want to have. And then we can have that life because we’ve made decisions based on our deep and real feelings, not just on what we happen to be able to face. This is flexibility. This is the benefit of mental health, which is so much more than merely removing signs of mental illness. Attaining flexibility has no fixed point.  It is a process, a life-long process, in which we increase as the years go by our capacity to see the feelings that are there and act on them by our increasingly conscious choice.

In the next blog on the topic of flexibility, I will show how we can use our understanding and comfort with our inner lives to change patterns of interactions with others, so our feelings give us insight into the momentary decisions we make again and again that form these patterns. If this blog was about the “big decisions” in our lives, the next blog is about how flexibility which is the result of self-awareness will aid us in making all those “little decisions” we make over and over every day.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

What would it be like to have many more choices about how to respond to people in your life–your husband, wife, daughter, boss, the grocery store cashier? What if you could predict how you will feel in different situations and have a good idea of how you want deal with those feelings ahead of time? Wouldn’t you be less likely to regret impulse decisions later, more likely to feel better about your ability to deal with those kinds of situations the next time? This is you. This is who you are right now, but with the added ingredient of flexibility in your everyday life. Flexibility is not just about bending to the needs of others. I am talking about flexibility based on choices you make, not choices others want to make for you. I am talking about choices you already have the ability to make, once you give yourself permission to try new approaches and start learning more about what feels best for you.

Therapy is about change—about wanting someone else to help us come up with ideas about how to get unstuck. We come to therapy to learn new ways of handling issues, relationships, situations and our moods and feelings. Flexibility is what we seek. We get into ruts and habits that keep us doing the same stuff over and over again until we feel stuck enough to do something about it. Flexibility gives us the way out, new ways of seeing things, different ways of dealing with ourselves and others. With some trial and error, flexibility gives us the chance to explore what works best for us to have what we want.

This series of blogs about flexibility is a culmination of thoughts I’ve had over the past year about an issue I think about every day I go to work. What is “mental health?” Back in 2010, I wrote two blogs on this subject. In the blog “What is Mental Health Part I,” I encouraged clients looking for a therapist to ask that therapist, “how do you define mental health?” I suggested then that many therapists might be great at defining “mental Illness,” but haven’t given much thought to what constitutes “mental health.” I also said that getting rid of the signs and symptoms of mental illness is only part of becoming mentally healthy.

In the second blog, “What is Mental Health Part II” I wrote, “mental health is a state in which a person is able and willing to address every aspect of their inner life, regardless of whether they experience difficult feelings, including fear, while addressing those aspects of their inner life.” This answer felt mostly right, but incomplete. It leaves several implied questions. How does it benefit us to be able to “address every aspect of our inner life?” If that is an ultimate goal of doing therapy in some sense, why does it matter, how will it change things for us? I ask myself these questions all the time. I’ll try to give answers I’ve been considering lately.

I can think of three possible reasons why it is better to be able to address all aspects of your inner life. First, addressing your inner life as much as possible will help you remove over time many of your most difficult feelings by giving you the chance to understand and then actually resolve previously unresolved emotional issues. You will feel better being you, living your life, being with your feelings. This is actually a significant part of the initial stage of making change in therapy. Second, addressing your inner life will help you stop doing things you might have been doing to avoid difficult feelings, like drinking, drugs, gambling, creating instability and distraction, becoming overly focused on the needs of others, of work, of things outside yourself. Third, by listening to your feelings, both those that feel good and those that do not, you can learn from them, and in doing so, will have the capacity to make decisions that are more likely to feel good to you after you’ve made them. You can think before you act, rather than acting, then realizing you’ve said or done something you regret. This process, including some trial and error, becomes part of the final stage of making change in therapy.  Once clients can see for themselves their capacity to do this in their lives without further assistance, they are ready to be done in therapy.

This is flexibility. People who exercise flexibility, who can react to difficult situations in many different possible ways, whichever seems to suit their needs the most, are more likely to make better decisions for themselves. Over time, it shows up in many ways, most notably, it shows up in how good they feel about themselves and their lives. Flexibility is a strong sign of increased “mental health” because it requires that we pay attention to our inner lives to achieve and exercise it. Flexibility is also one of the greatest benefits of “mental health” as I define it because it creates enormous capacity for meaningful change.

In Flexibility is the hallmark of mental health: Part II, I will explain how increased self-awareness about your feelings will allow you to use flexibility to make better choices about the “big decisions” in your life.

Copyright, 2012, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

For those of you who do not celebrate Christmas, either because it is not consistent with your culture or belief system, or because you for other reasons simply choose not to participate in this holiday, please bear with me. I actually believe Christmas can be a time for giving and connection and feeling good about fellow humans. The more cheesy me also likes the bright lights on houses at a dark time of year, shiny ornaments, and the surprises lurking under colorful and cheerful wrapping paper. I remember as a child that, no matter what might be happening in my life (insert references to physical abuse, poverty, alcoholism, police, chaos, etc.), really cool stuff sometimes happened at Christmas.  My great aunt Delores used her 100-year old foot-powered sewing machine to make us stuffed animals with used clothes that looked unrecognizable as anything other than the very sweet gifts of an elderly woman who cared. Or the St. Vincent De Paul society bringing to us new and shiny gifts we would never have seen without its help.  So, even now, Christmas brings me smiles, fond memories and hope each year, as I look back on and forward to the possibility of good things happening in otherwise dark days. This year, the Holiday Season brought something of a miracle to me and my family.  It’s a great story, with all the right (and true) ingredients: a small, helpless furry little puppy, a bitter cold night with snow and wind, wolves, foxes, cars rushing by, danger, new friends, an outpouring of support, lost hope and sadness, and in the end, something that seemed impossible but true.

Julian in my office in November 2011

I have a puppy named Julian.  Julian is a red long-haired, miniature Dachshund.  He was born on July 12, 2011.  So, he is about 5 months old.  As far as dogs go, even puppies for that matter, Julian is about as helpless as they come, or so we thought.

Enter the cabin. A few weeks ago, we bought ourselves a place in the woods up near the North Shore of Lake Superior. It’s nothing extravagant, but it is a special place for us; small, old, a fixer-upper, no lake, no river, a solid little log cabin on a small piece of land near hiking and cross-country ski trails.  On a cold and windy Friday night in early December, I took Julian to our “new” cabin for the first time. When we arrived, I let him out of his kennel to relieve himself after a long drive (with only one stop) from the Cities.  He did so with great satisfaction, and then looked around for a bit at his new surroundings.  I picked him up and brought him inside.  All seemed okay at first, so I set him down so he could familiarize himself with his home-away-from-home.  Something spooked him.  I am still not sure what it was.  Maybe the smell of a dog that lived there before we bought it, a desire to be at home, with his friends, my other two dogs (Collies: Sophie and Caesar). I had too much to bring with me to bring the collies this time, which was probably a mistake. Whatever it was, it sent him tearing out of the cabin, out the door, under the car, where he looked out, barking at me and the cabin.  I left him there for a moment to haul in some sleeping bags.  Big mistake.  When I went back out 30 seconds later, he wasn’t there.  Looking under the car, no Julian. Gone.

It was nearly dark. I put on my headlamp, which is bright, but couldn’t find a trace of him anywhere near the cabin.  There was no snow (yet) so no footprints to follow.  I walked around the yard for a long time, laying out bits of dog treats, hoping he’d come back.  He did not.  A few hours later, coming back from a walk pretty far down the main road in front of the cabin, a car pulled in.  A woman hopped out of her car, asked if I had been on the road looking for a lost dog.  I said “yes.”  She asked if it was a little red dog.  I said “yes,” hoping she had him in the car.  She saw my tears of relief, told me she did not have him, but had seen him, about a mile further up the road. She told me she’d stopped and tried to coax him to come to her, but he had run off into the woods. Without being asked, she offered to take me to where she’d seen him.  I jumped in and off we went.  Sharon and I introduced ourselves, and she took me to where she’d seen him.  It was snowing a little now, and the wind had picked up.  It was also getting colder, dropping to about 12 degrees.  I was sick to my stomach with worry for him.  I could see his little footprints in the snow, so I knew he couldn’t be far.  I called to him, offered him his favorite treats, but he did not come out from wherever he may have been.  Either he was too far off now to hear me, or he was spooked and no longer cared to be around anyone.

After nearly half an hour, with Sharon driving behind me as I walked up and down the road, Sharon said she really needed to get home, and offered to drive me back to my cabin.  I drove back in my car up and down the road for several more hours, with my wife helping to look after she arrived later in the evening.  We were out for 6 hours, calling to him continuously, and had lost all signs of him (due to the snow and the wind), several times thinking we spotted his tracks on the side of the road giving rise to hope, only realizing later they were too large or were not even dog tracks at all, dashing the hope we had begun to feel.  Bitterly cold, with numb fingers, hoarse throats, and lots of tears, we resigned ourselves to having to go home to the cabin for the night, knowing this likely meant we might never see him our little Julian again. We were wretched with the thought of him being all alone, scared, hungry, in the dark, and freezing. The temperature was now 8 degrees. The last person who’d seen Julian saw him running very fast, in the opposite direction of our cabin, and the only thing in front of him was the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and thousands and thousands of miles of forest and frozen lakes.

The next morning, after a night of fitful sleep and nightmares about what might be happening to our little baby dog at that moment, we drearily got back out onto the road, hoping we could find him, and not as road kill or the remains of a predator.  While looking up and down that road, a young couple driving by, Travis and Molly, stopped to tell us they’d seen our dog the previous evening, even further up the road than we’d been looking, further than we had believed he could travel on his short legs so fast and so far. Without being asked, they said they’d spend some time that day driving back and forth up and down the road to help us find him. We drove up the road to where they’d seen him.  No tracks in the fresh snow.

We stopped at a nearby house, where a car sat outside the door, signs of life in this increasingly sparsely populated wilderness. Mark answered the door. When we told him about Julian being lost the night before, he kindly warned us to keep our expectations low for his survival, especially because he had heard a pack of wolves come through last night, howling as they moved through the area Julian had last been seen.  Without being asked, Mark offered to spend his day off with his dogs to track Julian and find him.

On and off all day that long Saturday we looked. We called the local radio station, and they agreed to put out an announcement that there was lost a little baby puppy in the winter woods.  We called the Sheriff’s office—they offered to keep an eye out for him and call us if anyone saw him. We called the local animal rescue, and a woman named Gay told us she’d put the word out. Gay called back a few hours later, telling us she and three other volunteers had been out looking for Julian but hadn’t seen any sign of him. Later that night, with no sign of Julian, our hopes all but gone, Karen called us. She was a volunteer with the local animal rescue and a friend of Gay. She told me she intended to make an announcement to the Church congregation the next morning at Sunday Services, and would ask for volunteers to search for our puppy.

As a last-ditch effort, on Saturday night, after the sun went down and the forest returned to an ominous darkness, we threw treats and bologna scraps onto the road, hoping to create a trail for him to find his way back to us. No such luck.  Late into the night, we called to Julian.  No response.  No footprints. Silence, except for the howling wind through the trees.  Hope had fallen to a new low with the setting sun. At one point, we glimpsed what we thought might be our little buddy off in the snow.  A flash of red fur and the gleam of little eyes peeked just barely above the hill leading down into a ditch.  I slammed the breaks, put the car into reverse and revved back down the road about 40 feet.  The tuft of fur was gone, and then it reappeared.  It was not Julian.  It was cute, and furry, and dangerous… for Julian.  It was a red fox, eating something, walking nonchalantly past us, through the glare of our headlights, still chomping, across the road and down into the ditch on the other side.  This was our sign to return to the cabin and wait out another night of bad dreams about our puppy freezing or being attacked by that red fox or his cousin the grey wolf.

Prior to the weekend, we had planned to leave Sunday morning.  With Julian missing, we could not tear ourselves away from the place, so we stayed well into the afternoon, still with some glimmer of hope for the impossible: that Julian would miraculously survive the bitter cold, the wolves, the fox, and all other manner of danger to a small puppy who’d never been more than a few yards from the feet of his family, that not only surviving, he would be found by some unknown volunteer, or a neighbor spotting him under their porch, or that he would be seen running down the road, hungry enough to come to the call of a stranger, despite his fears.  The weather had turned for the better.  It was a bright, clear Sunday morning, with temperatures rising into the 30’s. Unseasonably warm.  It had not been as cold the night before, staying above 20.  If Julian had survived Friday nights low temperature, maybe he survived last night.

I woke up Sunday morning with the dream that I had heard his demanding and assertive high-pitched yelping off in the distance. Fully awake, I knew it could only have been a dream.  Putting some dishes away, I realized I’d woken our daughter, sleeping on the futon in the living room.  I apologized. She said she was already awake, having dreamed she heard Julian barking. I just about ran to the door, threw it open and called and called to Julian, a tiny glimmer of hope having come back to me after my dark mood the night before.

There had been no sign of Julian now for nearly 48 hours. Until now, I hadn’t told anyone other than the townspeople and my mother that we had lost Julian.  I had been waiting, not wanting to cause unnecessary concern, in case we found him.  It was time.  We had given up. The chances of his still being alive were clearly slim to none at this point.  So, I texted a few friends, including those who had encouraged me to buy a mini-dachshund.  Of course they cried, like I did. Without being asked, they offered to drive all the way from the cities to help search. When I told them there was no point, that he was already gone, they agreed that was almost certainly true.

Sunday afternoon, we decided to take one last walk around the property where our cabin sits.  This was not intended to even be a search for Julian. We merely wanted to take a last look at the property we would be returning to on other weekends, in winter and summer, for many years to come.  We had given up all hope of finding Julian, and only prayed that, if he were still alive, which at this point seemed all but impossible, he might approach a house, looking for scraps of food, and we would get a call later in the week.

A few hundred feet from the cabin, on the edge of a little cedar wood, our daughter heard a clinking of metal, she looked over, and saw him, saw his orange sweater, his red fur, his wild eyes, he was running, not toward us, but away from her, terrified, she said.  Our daughter cried out, “it’s him!  It’s Julian!  It’s him, he’s back! It’s Julian!”  Running to catch up to her, my wife found him in a little bush, hiding from us. She slowly sank to the ground on her knees, afraid to frighten him further.  “Is it really him?” I yelled, bringing up the rear.  My wife said “yes,” in a hushed tone.  “Don’t scare him.  Try to get behind him in case he runs.”  So I did.  She sat there with him in the bush for nearly five minutes, gently calling to him. She took of her hat, gloves, and jacket so she would be smaller and more familiar to him. Eventually, the wild animal left his eyes, he seemed then to finally recognize her, and step by step slowly crawled out from under the bush toward her, until he was close enough to grab him, and when she did, she cried, “I have him, I have him, it is him.”  We all burst into tears of joy and relief.  He was thinner, scared out of his wits, disoriented, very thirsty, but okay, no scars, no bleeding, no bite marks, no frostbite.  Julian was back with us, whole, and healthy.

Less than a half an hour after we found Julian, and before she had time to even listen to the voicemail I’d left telling her we’d found him, Gay from animal rescue pulled into our driveway, so we got to tell her and show her in person that we’d been the recipient of a gift, a miracle, really of a puppy that could not have survived two days of winter by himself in the vast wilderness, and yet he did, here he was, a miracle.  When I called my friends in the cities back, they cried again (we cried together).  Without being asked, they had sent out a prayer chain message, and within 15 minutes 0ver 100 people were praying for Julian’s safe return.  Karen told me over the phone that,  when the pastor had made an announcement to the congregation at church that morning, there was both silence and audible gasps of concern, and that many people had told her they’d be on the lookout for him.

I want to be able to tell you I never gave up hope. That is not true though.  I had given up hope.  Late on Saturday night, I went out one last time to look for him.  I went by myself.  I had lost him, and felt a guilt for it that seemed to punch me in the stomach every couple of minutes.  I needed some time on the road to accept that I would never see him  again.  I drove for a couple of hours, looking up and down roads he could not possibly have reached, some of them 10 miles from the cabin. I wasn’t ready to come back, though, until I had given up all hope. And I did.  I sat in the driveway outside the cabin to finish my crying, walking in with dry, but puffy eyes, to a dark house, where everyone was already in bed.

This is a story of a miracle.  By nearly every rational and reasonable calculation, there is simply no way Julian could have avoided the wolves, the fox, the cold, the wind, the snow, the miles of wilderness between where he had run and our cabin. There is no chance that he could have found his way back after venturing so far in unfamiliar territory, a little (6 pounds) puppy with the survival skills of a pampered city lapdog.  It seems now almost as if he had been planted there, right there, where we would see him, when we weren’t even looking anymore, having given up the search, ready to leave, to go home without him, to admit a final defeat.

Julian at the dog park on December 17, 2011

This is also a story of generosity and kindness, of so many people, so many strangers, who took our concern for Julian as their own concern, who offered me a ride in their car late at night, without a moment’s hesitation, who offered again and again without being asked to spend their precious time and energy to look for a dog they’d never met, for people (us) they’d never met, who gasped in church when they imagined what it might be like for a little tiny puppy to be off in the woods all by himself scared out of his wits, lost, hungry, cold.

Finally, this is a story of survival, and fortitude, and love.  I have no idea how Julian found his way home. Was it the prayers, or God, or instinct?  All three?  I do not know.  What I do know is that, somehow, he did find his way back, all on his own, and I choose to believe he somehow could feel our love, and our loss at the thought of not seeing him again.  Like a warm glow on a cold winter night, maybe in his heart there lies a beacon, telling him how to find his way back to those who love him so much, and who felt so much pain when he went away.

Copyright, 2011, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.