Psychology: The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People

How to succeed at self-sabotage

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/14-habits-highly-miserable-people?paging=off

Psychotherapy Networker / By Cloe Madanes

November 18, 2013

Most of us claim we want to be happy—to have meaningful lives, enjoy ourselves, experience fulfillment, and share love and friendship with other people and maybe other species, like dogs, cats, birds, and whatnot. Strangely enough, however, some people act as if they just want to be miserable, and they succeed remarkably at inviting misery into their lives, even though they get little apparent benefit from it, since being miserable doesn’t help them find lovers and friends, get better jobs, make more money, or go on more interesting vacations. Why do they do this? After perusing the output of some of the finest brains in the therapy profession, I’ve come to the conclusion that misery is an art form, and the satisfaction people seem to find in it reflects the creative effort required to cultivate it. In other words, when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity. It can even give life a distinctive meaning.

So if you aspire to make yourself miserable, what are the best, most proven techniques for doing it? Let’s exclude some obvious ways, like doing drugs, committing crimes, gambling, and beating up your spouse or neighbor. Subtler strategies, ones that won’t lead anyone to suspect that you’re acting deliberately, can be highly effective. But you need to pretend that you want to be happy, like everybody else, or people won’t take your misery seriously. The real art is to behave in ways that’ll bring on misery while allowing you to claim that you’re an innocent victim, ideally of the very people from whom you’re forcibly extracting compassion and pity.

Here, I cover most areas of life, such as family, work, friends, and romantic partners. These areas will overlap nicely, since you can’t ruin your life without ruining your marriage and maybe your relationships with your children and friends. It’s inevitable that as you make yourself miserable, you’ll be making those around you miserable also, at least until they leave you—which will give you another reason to feel miserable. So it’s important to keep in mind the benefits you’re accruing in your misery.

• When you’re miserable, people feel sorry for you. Not only that, they often feel obscurely guilty, as if your misery might somehow be their fault. This is good! There’s power in making other people feel guilty. The people who love you and those who depend on you will walk on eggshells to make sure that they don’t say or do anything that will increase your misery.

• When you’re miserable, since you have no hopes and expect nothing good to happen, you can’t be disappointed or disillusioned.

• Being miserable can give the impression that you’re a wise and worldly person, especially if you’re miserable not just about your life, but about society in general. You can project an aura of someone burdened by a form of profound, tragic, existential knowledge that happy, shallow people can’t possibly appreciate.

Honing Your Misery Skills

Let’s get right to it and take a look at some effective strategies to become miserable. This list is by no means exhaustive, but engaging in four or five of these practices will help refine your talent.

1. Be afraid, be very afraid, of economic loss. In hard economic times, many people are afraid of losing their jobs or savings. The art of messing up your life consists of indulging these fears, even when there’s little risk that you’ll actually suffer such losses. Concentrate on this fear, make it a priority in your life, moan continuously that you could go broke any day now, and complain about how much everything costs, particularly if someone else is buying. Try to initiate quarrels about other people’s feckless, spendthrift ways, and suggest that the recession has resulted from irresponsible fiscal behavior like theirs.

Fearing economic loss has several advantages. First, it’ll keep you working forever at a job you hate. Second, it balances nicely with greed, an obsession with money, and a selfishness that even Ebenezer Scrooge would envy. Third, not only will you alienate your friends and family, but you’ll likely become even more anxious, depressed, and possibly even ill from your money worries. Good job!

Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and, for 15 minutes, meditate on all the things you could lose: your job, your house, your savings, and so forth. Then brood about living in a homeless shelter.

2. Practice sustained boredom. Cultivate the feeling that everything is predictable, that life holds no excitement, no possibility for adventure, that an inherently fascinating person like yourself has been deposited into a completely tedious and pointless life through no fault of your own. Complain a lot about how bored you are. Make it the main subject of conversation with everyone you know so they’ll get the distinct feeling that you think they’re boring. Consider provoking a crisis to relieve your boredom. Have an affair (this works best if you’re already married and even better if you have an affair with someone else who’s married); go on repeated shopping sprees for clothes, cars, fancy appliances, sporting equipment (take several credit cards, in case one maxes out); start pointless fights with your spouse, boss, children, friends, neighbors; have another child; quit your job, clean out your savings account, and move to a state you know nothing about.

A side benefit of being bored is that you inevitably become boring. Friends and relatives will avoid you. You won’t be invited anywhere; nobody will want to call you, much less actually see you. As this happens, you’ll feel lonely and even more bored and miserable.

Exercise: Force yourself to watch hours of mindless reality TV programs every day, and read only nonstimulating tabloids that leave you feeling soulless. Avoid literature, art, and keeping up with current affairs.

3. Give yourself a negative identity. Allow a perceived emotional problem to absorb all other aspects of your self-identification. If you feel depressed, become a Depressed Person; if you suffer from social anxiety or a phobia, assume the identity of a Phobic Person or a Person with Anxiety Disorder. Make your condition the focus of your life. Talk about it to everybody, and make sure to read up on the symptoms so you can speak about them knowledgeably and endlessly. Practice the behaviors most associated with that condition, particularly when it’ll interfere with regular activities and relationships. Focus on how depressed you are and become weepy, if that’s your identity of choice. Refuse to go places or try new things because they make you too anxious. Work yourself into panic attacks in places it’ll cause the most commotion. It’s important to show that you don’t enjoy these states or behaviors, but that there’s nothing you can do to prevent them.

Practice putting yourself in the physiological state that represents your negative identity. For example, if your negative identity is Depressed Person, hunch your shoulders, look at the floor, breathe shallowly. It’s important to condition your body to help you reach your negative peak as quickly as possible.

Exercise: Write down 10 situations that make you anxious, depressed, or distracted. Once a week, pick a single anxiety-provoking situation, and use it to work yourself into a panic for at least 15 minutes.

4. Pick fights. This is an excellent way of ruining a relationship with a romantic partner. Once in a while, unpredictably, pick a fight or have a crying spell over something trivial and make unwarranted accusations. The interaction should last for at least 15 minutes and ideally occur in public. During the tantrum, expect your partner to be kind and sympathetic, but should he or she mention it later, insist that you never did such a thing and that he or she must have misunderstood what you were trying to say. Act injured and hurt that your partner somehow implied you weren’t behaving well.

Another way of doing this is to say unexpectedly, “We need to talk,” and then to barrage your partner with statements about how disappointed you are with the relationship. Make sure to begin this barrage just as your partner is about to leave for some engagement or activity, and refuse to end it for at least an hour. Another variation is to text or phone your partner at work to express your issues and disappointments. Do the same if your partner is out with friends.

Exercise: Write down 20 annoying text messages you could send to a romantic partner. Keep a grudge list going, and add to it daily.

5. Attribute bad intentions. Whenever you can, attribute the worst possible intentions to your partner, friends, and coworkers. Take any innocent remark and turn it into an insult or attempt to humiliate you. For example, if someone asks, “How did you like such and such movie?” you should immediately think, He’s trying to humiliate me by proving that I didn’t understand the movie, or He’s preparing to tell me that I have poor taste in movies. The idea is to always expect the worst from people. If someone is late to meet you for dinner, while you wait for them, remind yourself of all the other times the person was late, and tell yourself that he or she is doing this deliberately to slight you. Make sure that by the time the person arrives, you’re either seething or so despondent that the evening is ruined. If the person asks what’s wrong, don’t say a word: let him or her suffer.

Exercise: List the names of five relatives or friends. For each, write down something they did or said in the recent past that proves they’re as invested in adding to your misery as you are.

6. Whatever you do, do it only for personal gain. Sometimes you’ll be tempted to help someone, contribute to a charity, or participate in a community activity. Don’t do it, unless there’s something in it for you, like the opportunity to seem like a good person or to get to know somebody you can borrow money from some day. Never fall into the trap of doing something purely because you want to help people. Remember that your primary goal is to take care of Numero Uno, even though you hate yourself.

Exercise: Think of all the things you’ve done for others in the past that haven’t been reciprocated. Think about how everyone around you is trying to take from you. Now list three things you could do that would make you appear altruistic while bringing you personal, social, or professional gain.

7. Avoid gratitude. Research shows that people who express gratitude are happier than those who don’t, so never express gratitude. Counting your blessings is for idiots. What blessings? Life is suffering, and then you die. What’s there to be thankful for?

Well-meaning friends and relatives will try to sabotage your efforts to be thankless. For example, while you’re in the middle of complaining about the project you procrastinated on at work to your spouse during an unhealthy dinner, he or she might try to remind you of how grateful you should be to have a job or food at all. Such attempts to encourage gratitude and cheerfulness are common and easily deflected. Simply point out that the things you should be grateful for aren’t perfect—which frees you to find as much fault with them as you like.

Exercise: Make a list of all the things you could be grateful for. Next to each item, write down why you aren’t. Imagine the worst. When you think of the future, imagine the worst possible scenario. It’s important to be prepared for and preemptively miserable about any possible disaster or tragedy. Think of the possibilities: terrorist attacks, natural disasters, fatal disease, horrible accidents, massive crop failures, your child not getting picked for the varsity softball team.

8. Always be alert and in a state of anxiety. Optimism about the future leads only to disappointment. Therefore, you have to do your best to believe that your marriage will flounder, your children won’t love you, your business will fail, and nothing good will ever work out for you.

Exercise: Do some research on what natural or manmade disasters could occur in your area, such as earthquakes, floods, nuclear plant leaks, rabies outbreaks. Focus on these things for at least an hour a day.

9. Blame your parents. Blaming your parents for your defects, shortcomings, and failures is among the most important steps you can take. After all, your parents made you who you are today; you had nothing to do with it. If you happen to have any good qualities or successes, don’t give your parents credit. Those are flukes.

Extend the blame to other people from your past: the second-grade teacher who yelled at you in the cafeteria, the boy who bullied you when you were 9, the college professor who gave you a D on your paper, your first boyfriend, even the hick town you grew up in—the possibilities are limitless. Blame is essential in the art of being miserable.

Exercise: Call one of your parents and tell her or him that you just remembered something horrible they did when you were a child, and make sure he or she understands how terrible it made you feel and that you’re still suffering from it.

10. Don’t enjoy life’s pleasures. Taking pleasure in things like food, wine, music, and beauty is for flighty, shallow people. Tell yourself that. If you inadvertently find yourself enjoying some flavor, song, or work of art, remind yourself immediately that these are transitory pleasures, which can’t compensate for the miserable state of the world. The same applies to nature. If you accidentally find yourself enjoying a beautiful view, a walk on the beach, or a stroll through a forest, stop! Remind yourself that the world is full of poverty, illness, and devastation. The beauty of nature is a deception.

Exercise: Once a week, engage in an activity that’s supposed to be enjoyable, but do so while thinking about how pointless it is. In other words, concentrate on removing all sense of pleasure from the pleasurable activity.

11. Ruminate. Spend a great deal of time focused on yourself. Worry constantly about the causes of your behavior, analyze your defects, and chew on your problems. This will help you foster a pessimistic view of your life. Don’t allow yourself to become distracted by any positive experience or influence. The point is to ensure that even minor upsets and difficulties appear huge and portentous.

You can ruminate on the problems of others or the world, but make them about you. Your child is sick? Ruminate on what a burden it is for you to take time off from work to care for her. Your spouse is hurt by your behavior? Focus on how terrible it makes you feel when he points out how you make him feel. By ruminating not only on your own problems but also those of others, you’ll come across as a deep, sensitive thinker who holds the weight of the world on your shoulders.

Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair and seek out negative feelings, like anger, depression, anxiety, boredom, whatever. Concentrate on these feelings for 15 minutes. During the rest of the day, keep them in the back of your mind, no matter what you’re doing.

12. Glorify or vilify the past. Glorifying the past is telling yourself how good, happy, fortunate, and worthwhile life was when you were a child, a young person, or a newly married person—and regretting how it’s all been downhill ever since. When you were young, for example, you were glamorous and danced the samba with handsome men on the beach at twilight; and now you’re in a so-so marriage to an insurance adjuster in Topeka. You should’ve married tall, dark Antonio. You should’ve invested in Microsoft when you had the chance. In short, focus on what you could’ve and should’ve done, instead of what you did. This will surely make you miserable.

Vilifying the past is easy, too. You were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, you never got what you needed, you felt you were discriminated against, you never got to go to summer camp. How can you possibly be happy when you had such a lousy background? It’s important to think that bad memories, serious mistakes, and traumatic events were much more influential in forming you and your future than good memories, successes, and happy events. Focus on bad times. Obsess about them. Treasure them. This will ensure that, no matter what’s happening in the present, you won’t be happy.

Exercise: Make a list of your most important bad memories and keep it where you can review it frequently. Once a week, tell someone about your horrible childhood or how much better your life was 20 years ago.

13. Find a romantic partner to reform. Make sure that you fall in love with someone with a major defect (cat hoarder, gambler, alcoholic, womanizer, sociopath), and set out to reform him or her, regardless of whether he or she wants to be reformed. Believe firmly that you can reform this person, and ignore all evidence to the contrary.

Exercise: Go to online dating sites and see how many bad choices you can find in one afternoon. Make efforts to meet these people. It’s good if the dating site charges a lot of money, since this means you’ll be emotionally starved and poor.

14. Be critical. Make sure to have an endless list of dislikes and voice them often, whether or not your opinion is solicited. For example, don’t hesitate to say, “That’s what you chose to wear this morning?” or “Why is your voice so shrill?” If someone is eating eggs, tell them you don’t like eggs. Your negativity can be applied to almost anything.

It helps if the things you criticize are well liked by most people so that your dislike of them sets you apart. Disliking traffic and mosquitos isn’t creative enough: everyone knows what it’s like to find these things annoying, and they won’t pay much attention if you find them annoying, too. But disliking the new movie that all your friends are praising? You’ll find plenty of opportunities to counter your friends’ glowing reviews with your contrarian opinion.

Exercise: Make a list of 20 things you dislike and see how many times you can insert them into a conversation over the course of the day. For best results, dislike things you’ve never given yourself a chance to like.

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I’ve just listed 14 ways to make yourself miserable. You don’t have to nail every one of them, but even if you succeed with just four or five, make sure to berate yourself regularly for not enacting the entire list. If you find yourself in a therapist’s office—because someone who’s still clinging to their love for you has tricked you into going—make sure your misery seems organic. If the therapist enlightens you in any way or teaches you mind-body techniques to quiet your anxious mind, make sure to co-opt the conversation and talk about your misery-filled dreams from the night before. If the therapist is skilled in dream analysis, quickly start complaining about the cost of therapy itself. If the therapist uses your complaints as a launching pad to discuss transference issues, accuse him or her of having countertransference issues. Ultimately, the therapist is your enemy when trying to cultivate misery in your life. So get out as soon as possible. And if you happen upon a therapist who’ll sit quietly while you bring all 14 items on this list to life each week, call me. I’ll want to make an appointment, too.

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Cloe Madanes is a world-renowned innovator and teacher of family and brief therapy and one of the originators of the strategic approach to family therapy. She has authored seven books that are classics in the field: Strategic Family Therapy; Behind the One-Way Mirror; Sex, Love, and Violence; The Secret Meaning of Money; The Violence of Men; The Therapist as Humanist, Social Activist, and Systemic Thinker; and Relationship Breakthrough. Contact: madanesinstitute@gmail.com.

What Could Be More Biblical, More Redeeming, than the Non-Stop, Screwed-Up World of Glee?!

 

The Senseless, Beautiful, Topsy-Turvy World of Glee

 

Glee has hit the world running exposing all the best and worst of the human spirit. It focuses on the disabilities and insecurities of our impersonal societies and heartless spirits. From its nastiness to its beauty – from humanity's warts, pimples, byoptic near-sightedness, weirdness, and ugliness, to its wonder, amazement, incredibility, incredulity, and soaring hopes and dreams. Glee is the Disney version of the Bible’s exposure of our hearts, minds, souls and spirits. It shows to mankind the worst and the best within us. From our disabilities and disbelief, to our insecurities and inner turmoils. From our gross frailties and failures, to our impossibly unchained ambitions and soulful concessions.

 

God’s Word exposes us. And so did Glee as we sat glued to the TV waiting breathlessly for the next big blowup, the next devastating heart break, the next miraculous human touch that would make sense of the senseless world thriving around us. It’s topical pop music lifts our spirits giving hope, healing, and a steely-eyed reality of strength to the deep complexity and oft-times senseless destruction that overwhelms us. A destruction that never quite ends in our teen years but seems to hang-on through our later mature years of denial. Our bigotry. Our unresolved hurts and harm. Our need for compassion, mercy, understanding. For real friendships that stay with us through all that we are and hope to be.

 

 

 

Postmodernity and Glee

 

At Glee’s essence is the struggle of the human spirit to know and express love beyond its bounded freedoms and chained disappointments. To find a group of friends - and especially that one close soulmate - who sees and accepts us at our most unvarnished exposure. Who brings out the best in us when we fail to be at our best. Who might endure our meltdowns and unkindness to help us become less toxic to those family and friends around us bewildered by our too-hasty actions, misspoken words, and intolerable cruelty. To reach a place that we might see sin’s ugliness in our lives and accept God’s world of love, hope, healing in bonds of unbroken fellowship. To find-and-recreate communities of redemption, hope, mercy and forgiveness. Here is the teenage world of postmodernity at its deconstructive best and reconstructive heights binding human souls into depths of fidelity unthought and undreamed.

 

To modernity’s excesses and brutalities, its impersonal arguments for-or-against God-and-country, comes postmodernity’s reach of the human touch admitting froth and failure, helplessness and lost, disappointments and reality. The youth-of-today give to the-world-of-tomorrow a pageantry of hope wrapped within the tenuous tissues of God’s redeeming love that would rescue the worst of us from the ugliness waiting within the cesspool of our loneliness. Tissues that tear too easily and yet cling tenaciously until our human souls might find the exit doors to its dilemmas and confusions, anger and hate, denials and destructions. God’s love is that fibrous tissue – so seemingly frail and yet spidery strong. It is everywhere around us to the one brave enough refusing to give-up or give-in.  His Spirit mighty enough to grant a strength we fail to have against such impossible odds of self and world. His Cross wide enough to take a world of suffering and give to it a resurrected hope little understood until personally found, claimed, and received. This is the world of Glee. The world of the Bible. Our world of God’s love and reach and depth. Cling to it and “Don’t Stop Believing” in the renewing worlds of tomorrow.

 

R.E. Slater

May 10, 2013

 

 

Glee - Don't Stop Believing

 

 

 

 

Short clip

Glee 3D Movie - Don't Stop Believing Performance

 

http://www.foxtv.de/serien/glee/start.html





Addendum

Below is a video produced by resident philosopher/theology Peter Rollins of Belfast, Ireland. His observations fall in-line with the biblical idea of redemptive introspection that was written of above. And is a consistent message of God's directive love and care through our own moments of implosion and failure, griefs and torments, where the bond of forgiveness and understanding through Jesus can bring restoration and healing by the hands and hearts of those God brings into our circumcised lives. - R.E.Slater

 

 

 

For Further Reference - Peter Rollins, "The Idolatry of God"

 

 

 

 

Fears, Anxieties, Discouragement, even Distress, are the times of Empowerment and Deliverance

 

As I read this piece in Relevant Magazine (unaffiliated to Relevancy22 here) I was reminded of the spiritual helpfulness that can come in times of personal distress affecting our emotional, social, and personal self-awareness. We've all been there at one time or another. A time of great personal darkness and destruction.  To many, these times are personally devastating and lead to greater helplessness, and/or stronger desires for avoidance and incoherent answers, addictions, or toxic lives (something known as an active "defensive position" of refusing to deal with the problem at hand because of its resultant magnitude of effect upon our lives). However, if attended to within the power of God, and faced honestly, we may find greater personal strength and more satisfying decisions than at first believed possible. David Guetta's "Titanium" is a good example of this dilemma where one's personal world must "blow up" if one is to grow beyond the confines of themselves and their limiting, or destructive, personal patterns of thought and living. Without letting go of the past we cannot move forward to our future.

 

All our questions, all of our struggles, all of our "black abysses," have become willfully entangled about our lives to the point of spiritually denying to us the power and freedom that God can bring to a life through Jesus. This is what Peter Rollins refers to as a personalized form of "pyro-theology' in its most basic reconstructive stages that comes into a person's life and must require one to be willing to deconstruct themselves in honest analysis (Christianity calls such actions by the cyclical pattern names of repentance and confession - which are a series of "death to life" sequences a believer must go through). Without such an effort of willful doubt, disbelief, and spiritual restructuring, a person can be left paralyzed to the Spirit of God's power of love and faith, becoming receptive to their darkest fears and hatreds without personal, positive effectual growth.

 

These darker times within our lives are not unusual. In reality they are quite normal when listening to the Christian testimonies one-after-another testifying to "leaving oneself behind" to find God's power of life and hope. Many, many Christians go through these darker times of "spiritual rebirth" by first going through their darkest afflictions and turmoils. That is, each has learned the lesson of coming to the end of oneself in order to be able to find oneself through Jesus' rebirth and spiritual liberation of spirit, soul, mind and body. More often than not this is the usual Christian story. Afterwhich this same form of docu-drama is necessarily replayed again-and-again within the growing Christian life as God's Spirit moves from room-to-room within our souls liberating us from the forces that would place us on Hell's doorstep and leave us for dead. At each entrance Jesus calls us forth to life just as He re-enacted in raising Lazarus from the dead... refusing death's hold upon our spirits which He has created for life and breath, renewal and reclamation, rebirth and resurrection.

 

I like to think of these cycles within the Christian life as cycles of applied atonement. That is, just as our Savior had to face His own wilderness of fear and temptation, His trial and crucifixion, death, and resurrection/ascension, so too must the Christian go through the same figuratively. We must not expect that any one of these stages must be left off in our own lives as deeply conflicted by sin and death as they are. However, in the struggle what we may expect is God's presence and deliverance - even when we feel most abandoned upon our own crosses of suffering and pain.... Spiritual deliverance is not a pleasant process. The cost is as high as Jesus said it would be - but it's attainments of contentment and peace will be well rewarded for all who submit to the Spirit's power of enlivenment. Doctrinally, these processes are known as "death and resurrection." Or, "justification and sanctification" (think "justified in Christ" and "sanctuary for Christ"). These are but aspects of Jesus' atonement being applied by the Holy Spirit into our daily living lives.

 

I speak of these times of life as one who himself has gone through personal sorrows and woe to the great grief of my soul. Mostly as a Christian. For my spiritual rebirth was one of a child coming into his pre-teen years realizing my need for Jesus' salvation in my life. And yet, this did not disallow me of sin's ruin and wreck upon my life. Whenever I gave in to sin it was there. And whenever I learned by God's Spirit to let it go it remained ever near and present, but absent its destructive power upon my life. Most of all I have trusted and believed in God's love to reclaim my life. It is by this divine power of love that hope and trust have grown. In times of personal anxiety or distress I am learning to claim God's stabilizing strength of love, hope, spiritual empowerment. Each time can be hard, but the practice of it has become more normal than my practice of disbelief, distrust, or hopelessness. Those Christians whom I know have gone through no less... it is a badge of honor that we each wear as reclaimed by Jesus' love and redemption however tattered and worn those badges are. In Jesus we may find hope. Love. Life. To Jesus I commend each reader His power of grace, mercy, love and forgiveness. It is freely given to all. Take this power and claim it for your own. It is meant by God to be yours forever and everlasting.

 

R.E. Slater

May 8, 2013

 

*ps - for further on this topic, see the sidebar "Deconstructing Ourselves."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Kierkegaard Changed My Life

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/practical-faith/how-kierkegaard-changed-my-life

                                                                                                             

By Michael D. Stark
May 3, 2013

Michael D. Stark is an adjunct philosophy professor at Trinity Christian College. He previously taught philosophy at Colorado Christian University. He has been awarded a research fellowship at St. Olaf College’s Hong Kierkegaard Library for this upcoming summer. You can follow him on Twitter @michaeldstark.

 

 

On the famed philosopher’s message for anxious Christians.

 

I have always lived in anxiety.

 

In grade school, I was the kid who got picked on. I was timid and anxious, and the torment inflicted upon me by my peers only perpetuated my anxious behavior. Throughout my adolescence, my anxiety quietly festered. In college, I felt trapped, alone and terrified. It took every ounce of strength to go to my classes. If someone tried speaking to me, I would often shut down. What was very much internal angst began to show external physical signs. Panic attacks, sweats, shortness of breath and other anxiety-ridden symptoms took over. I was prescribed medication for this, which helped physically, but mentally I removed myself from the internal issues I needed to confront.

 

Kierkegaard taught me what I had been waiting to hear my whole life: Anxiety is necessary and even good.

 

Then I enrolled in a philosophy course. We studied the typical figures—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, etc. It was the first time I encountered Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. I didn’t know it at the time, but my life was about to radically change.

 

Here was a philosopher—and a man of faith—who actually experienced anxiety like me.

 

Kierkegaard is unique among philosophers, in that he listened to and even trusted human emotions. Whereas some philosophers dispose of and do not trust the emotive state of individuals, Kierkegaard not only embraced them, he wrote entire books on them. I began to pursue my masters in philosophy, and Kierkegaard took a prominent role in my life.

 

Throughout my education, I’ve studied many arguments for the existence of God. While I believe some are successful, many lack the existential pull that is so prevalent in Kierkegaard. My second year living in Denver for graduate school was perhaps the most treacherous year of my life, but it was indeed the most formative. Despair is the single word that sums up that year of my life, a word Kierkegaard knew much about. As it is described in the The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, “hopelessness is just a sign that one has reached a point where the goal of oneself must ... be re-conceived in a way that offers new hope.”

 

I remember vividly reading this line—sitting back in my rocking chair, putting down my pipe, and weeping. There it was. It seemed simple, really. But the moment was as profound as the quote itself. I’d been doing things all wrong. Everyone, included myself, told me I had to get rid of or at least suppress this fear. But the everyday task of taming and attempting to repress the anxiety and fear was futile. The anxiety, the hopelessness, was always there. It was a part of me.

 

So I read Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety. It’s a difficult read, perplexing at times, yet the lessons radiated in my being. Kierkegaard argues that anxiety is not, in fact, the enemy, but a part of humanity. The attempts to remove anxiety are futile, he says: “Anxiety is an alien power which lays hold of the individual, and yet cannot tear oneself away, nor has a will to do so; for one fears, but what one fears one desires.”

 

Hopelessness, Kierkegaard teaches, is a catalyst—it is a moment in which one must refocus, shift the paradigm and find new hope.

 

Kierkegaard taught me what I had been waiting to hear my whole life: Anxiety is necessary and even good. It manifests itself at the juncture where an individual realizes the power he or she has in making decisions. Anxiety is the realization of freedom and the possibility of choice. Some decisions are easy, and sometimes we become paralyzed in our decision-making. Anxiety provoked me to face those decisions, the seemingly infinite possibilities set before me, and walk forward. It provoked me to move.

 

This book so radically reoriented my concept of anxiety that I was able to develop who I am instead of run from it, condemn it or suppress it.

 

Society is so quick to run from what scares us—even if we are the object of our own fear. But such hasty movement away from ourselves leaves us feeling hopeless. Yet hopelessness, Kierkegaard teaches, is a catalyst—it is a moment in which one must refocus, shift the paradigm and find new hope.

 

What’s surprising is that many Christians don’t see it this way. Many will cite passages such as Philippians 4:6-8:

 

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition,

with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which

transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

 

They read this and think anxiety should have nothing to do with the life of a believer. From this passage, there seems to be a common—though unrealistic—perception that to worry or to have anxiety is to sin. This is not only false, but incredibly unrealistic. To remove anxiety would be to separate oneself with an attribute of humanity.

 

Without room for extensive hermeneutics, the Philippians passage speaks as to how one should engage with anxiety: Enter into it with prayer and supplication. It would be foolish to wrestle with anxiety without seeking God’s help through prayer. Whereas anxiety is a part of what it means to be human, it can indeed turn dangerous thing if not engaged properly. And it can lead a person into sin.

 

Being anxious does not necessarily imply that our faith is weak. Rather, anxiety tests our faith in relation to decision-making. Anxiety reminds us that they are free to make own decisions—whether that decision will better ourselves and our relationship with Christ, or glorify our own self-interests.

 

Kierkegaard voiced what many of us know already firsthand: “Anxiety is potentially present at every instant.” This seems true enough for my life. In his journals, Kierkegaard writes, “All existence make me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation; the whole thing is inexplicable to me, I myself most of all; to me all existence is infected, I myself most of all.”

 

Kierkegaard did not cure me of my anxiety. But he showed me what to do with it. Today, every time I enter the classroom to teach, I enter with some degree of fear and trembling. But the angst is not formed from a lack or preparation. Rather, it is the realization that I can influence my students. The angst reminds me of my own responsibility as an educator, and the seriousness with which I take such a role.

 

Today, I thank God for my anxiety. And I thank Søren Kierkegaard for changing my life—by teaching me that there is room for fear and trembling in faith.

 

 

 

Sylvia Plath: The Stigma of Writing and Mental Illness

February 11, 2013

You’ll Love Her! She’s Crazy!

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/youll-love-her-shes-crazy.html?mbid=nl_Daily%20(178)

Posted by Sarah Manguso

I’m told that one of my grandmothers suffered from what must have been postpartum depression. She was prescribed Miltowns in the forties, and hid an opiate addiction for more than fifty years. On the same branch of my family tree is an aunt who ended her life. Everyone who would know the details of either story is dead.

Many somber words have been intoned about the taboo surrounding mental illness, recently and notably by former congressman Patrick J. Kennedy this past January, soon after the shootings in Newtown. “If we’re going to get rid of the stigma—one of the great civil-rights challenges of our time—we need more discussion in the real world, and less shame by those suffering with mental illness, or the loved ones around them,” he wrote, in an essay published by The Daily Beast.

Until recently in human history, mental illness was indeed a stigma, discussed in whispers with the vocabulary of shame. To varying degrees, however, these whispers have always been accompanied confidently by the vocabulary of pride.

In her 1978 essay “Illness As Metaphor,” Susan Sontag wrote about the received ideas that surrounded tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, and cancer in the twentieth. The tubercular character was vaunted as “sensitive, creative, a being apart.” She added, “In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of ‘spiritual’ feelings and ‘critical’ discontent, is insanity.”

Indeed, wherever I go in the twenty-first century, people are proudly mentally ill, and conversations about mental illness invoke the idea of specialness and the stereotypical mad genius. Contemporary scripted TV advertises the benefits of disordered thought, perception, and behavior, from the associative manias of the bipolar C.I.A. officer Carrie Mathison on “Homeland” to the precise memory of the phobic, obsessive-compulsive private detective on the eponymous “Monk.” Unusual brains are shown to correlate with creative intelligence and exceptional cognitive sensitivity. Stereotypes of shameful weakness come far behind, if at all.

Most educated people can name half a dozen poets who are more famous for their messy lives and deaths than for their poems. The short lives of Shelley and Byron comprised several suicidal lovers and a half-dozen unfortunate children, all adopted or dead by age five. Deaf, miserable Beethoven; van Gogh and his severed ear; Hemingway and his shotgun; Poe in his gutter; Woolf in her heavy raincoat. The narratives endure because they align with the popular understanding of what it is to be an artist.

* * *

Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, attended my high school, Gamaliel Bradford Senior High, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1950, and when I graduated in 1992 she was still the most famous person ever to have gone there. Her long shadow remained, decades after her death, and the writing prize was named for her.

She’d sat in the back right-hand corner of Room 200, the room where Wilbury Crockett had taught his English courses. We all knew it. I often ate lunch by myself, in Sylvia’s seat, when the room was empty—not because it was her seat but because it was the seat furthest from the door. I never read her poems. I didn’t like the idea of poetry. I liked the idea of long books that were impossible to understand, and I read Pynchon’s novels laboriously, consulting multiple reference books as I inched down the dense pages. Plath had been dead longer than I’d been alive, but we didn’t count the years. She was ageless and occupied all history.

Mr. Crockett, a legendary teacher whose written comments on Plath’s poems allegedly first encouraged her to become a poet, retired when I was in kindergarten, but when he was seventy-eight he visited my eleventh-grade English class. Our English teacher had prepared us to receive his great wisdom. Most important of all, she reminded us that he had been the teacher of Sylvia Plath.

What never seemed strange to me until much later is that Plath’s poems weren’t taught to us in high school; only her suicide was taught to us. A lady, who had lived on Elmwood Road, across the street from my elementary school, had become a poet and become inconsolable and stuck her head in an oven. The books we were assigned to read for our English classes were tedious novels about boarding school and dated plays about the American Dream. Our frowsy English teacher who had invited Crockett to speak assigned each of us to read a different Dylan Thomas poem, and we each presented our poem to the class, and that was it for our education in poetry.

A minute into Crockett’s presentation, a straight-A student made a sound. Did he mutter something? Whatever Crockett thought he’d heard, it lit a fuse. We sat silent while the great man raged. In our shame we knew Crockett had chosen the wrong boy to castigate—he was humorless and inoffensive. That the boy would have insulted an honored visitor is unimaginable. Crockett screamed that we had rejected a great gift, and that we were worthless. Worthless! He strode out of the room. Two years later, he died, and our sparse little school library was named in his honor.

* * *

Despite having begun college determined to become a physician, I failed Chem 10 and, after a cascade of results, went to writing school instead. My first poetry collection was published modestly by a small press when I was twenty-seven. A few poems found their way into anthologies. I worked part-time as a copy editor and ate a lot of oatmeal.

After my book came out, my former college boyfriend said, “At least you can go nuts, now that you’ve become a real writer.” Like every recent college graduate I knew, bringing up the rear of Generation X, he yearned to check out and waste some serious time. Despite his classics degree he’d become a management consultant, though, and, as such, he simply couldn’t find his way into the seemingly exclusive and glamorous milieu of mental illness. Was he depressed? Perhaps, but he couldn’t conceive of it as a possibility—not because of the taboo but because he didn’t believe he’d fulfilled the prerequisites. Management consultants drank. They didn’t take antidepressants. They weren’t interesting enough to go nuts. Going nuts was a point of pride. You had to train for it.

One of my graduate-school colleagues used to boast about his antidepressant prescription. “I’m crazy!” he’d squeak at parties. A little depression? It probably was the most interesting thing about him. Fifteen years later, he publishes workmanlike best-sellers. Several of the poets with whom I went to school, clinging to modest functional abilities, are too mentally ill even to know they could be boasting about being mentally ill. You will never hear of them.

Shortly after I earned my degree, caught in a constellation of simultaneous disappointments, I found myself in a locked psychiatric ward. One of the social workers spoke excitedly about the therapist he wanted me to see after I was released: “You’ll love her! She’s crazy, just absolutely crazy!”

I remember responding to the social worker as coolly as I could while pushing down hard on a weeping rage: “I’m not sure we share the same tastes.” “What do you mean?” he asked in his best therapist’s voice, his little eyes open wide to indicate he cared. I tried to explain why standing around in a circle holding hands and talking about my feelings made me want to hang myself. Squinting, as if calling out from a high pulpit, he said, “Standing around in a circle holding hands is my favorite thing to do.”

Treating mental illness is an economic, and therefore practical, problem. But more fundamentally it is a problem of rhetoric and therefore also an abstract one. Before we can address it, we must speak about it, and the vocabulary we use is highly polarized. On one hand, the sufferer is responsible for getting over the shameful condition; on the other, the sufferer is a mad genius whose quirks and foibles demand respect. Seldom is mental illness just illness.

In order to develop workable policy serving those functionally impaired by mental illness, we need to learn to talk about it without recourse to the broad brushes of its existing metaphors. What if we could imagine a mentally ill person as neither a potentially violent simpleton nor a mad genius but simply a person with an illness that might be diagnosed, treated, even cured?

I expect that history might solve the problem all by itself, now that the very condition of illness has moved from a strictly medical milieu to a capitalist one. As far as the drug companies care, mental illnesses provide just another opportunity to sell pills to impressionable consumers. When I visit my psychiatrist, more often than not there sits a smartly suited young person with a full briefcase. Sometimes it is a man, sometimes a woman, but the suit is always navy blue. The person does not look tempted to sit upon the lap of the enormous stuffed bear I call Flat-Bear, who sits in the corner, against the wall, his lap increasingly grubby and compressed. The person enters and leaves the doctor’s office briskly, in a few minutes. On my bad days, I am sure I would buy whatever he is selling, and that psychotropic medications will become the twenty-first century’s bottled shampoo.

That the medical establishment is in league with the pharmaceutical companies seems inevitable and in fact has been widely observed. It seems dubious that the language of commerce could be a positive influence, but brisk business feels like progress beyond the language of myth.

And, even without the help of commerce, time wears away at myth and everything else. Plath’s suicide at thirty, after publishing just one volume of poems, invited the stereotype of the mad poetess, the wife betrayed; it was impossible to read the posthumous publications without considering the biography. But in the fifty years since her death the myth has dimmed; the work endures.

The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment.

Though the facts of her life won’t soon fade from historical memory, Plath is now, at least, more poet than suicide.

Sarah Manguso is the author of five books, most recently “The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend,” which will be published in paperback next month.

Photograph: Contrasto/Redux.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/youll-love-her-shes-crazy.html#ixzz2KhNvgmpu

How Full Is Your Life? Is It Filled with the Important Stuff?

Lessons of Life

from a mayonaise jar, some golf balls,

and a couple of cans of Beer...

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and 2 beers....

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.

When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He then asked the students if the jar was full.

They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly.

The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full.

They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar.

Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

He asked once more if the jar was full.

The students responded with a unanimous 'yes.'

The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.

The students laughed....

'Now,' said the professor as the laughter subsided, 'I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.

The golf balls are the important things---your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions---and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.

The sand is everything else---the small stuff.

'If you put the sand into the jar first,' he continued, 'there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.

The same goes for life.

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.

Spend time with your children.

Spend time with your parents.

Visit with grandparents.

Take your spouse out to dinner.

Play another 18 rounds of golf.

There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn.

Take care of the golf balls first---the things that really matter.

Set your priorities.

The rest is just sand.

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented.

The professor smiled and said, 'I'm glad you asked.'

The beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of beers with a friend.

Matthew 6:25-34

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

Philippians 4:6

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Pursuit of God’s Peace

in an Anxious World

http://www.pravmir.com/the-pursuit-of-god%E2%80%99s-peace-in-an-anxious-world/

Fr. Joshua Makoul

posted October 17, 2011

The world in which we live is an anxious one, rife with fear and doubt. Economic markets rise and fall, employment fluctuates, conflicts erupt in unexpected places, and each year seems to bring a threat of some new virus that threatens mankind. We are all continuously faced with events outside of our control. As time passes the future takes on greater uncertainty. Indeed, it is often our struggle with uncertainty that plagues our spiritual life and gives birth to fear and worry.

Our society today has seen a dramatic spike in what psychologists call anxiety disorders. Many who struggle with these conditions wrestle with trusting, with uncertainty, with not having control. Not all who struggle with fear and worry, however, have a “disorder,” for such struggle is universal and comes with living in the world. There are many secular treatments and potential remedies for anxiety. As Christians we have all these, and much more, at our disposal in our fight against fear and anxiety. To the challenge of not having control, we have the ultimate answer and solution: God is in control. Those who deny God’s existence or who do not turn to Him in their lives, deny themselves the greatest treatment for fear, anxiety, worry and doubt. Our God offers us something that the world cannot give us, and that is His peace.

In the Gospel of John, our Lord tells us during the Last Supper, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; . . . not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27). God’s peace is real and tangible. It is there for all who desire it. Jesus posits His peace as the opposite of fear, and says that His peace counters fear and a troubled heart. We also know that God’s peace has protective qualities to it. St. Paul writes in Philippians 4:7, “And [may] the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your minds and hearts through Jesus Christ our Lord.” God’s peace is a gift of God and part of His grace. The peace of God is more than just a mere feeling, it is something given to those who genuinely desire God and a life in communion with Him. The peace of God comes from continual awareness of God, of His presence, and from communion with Him through prayer. It is a quiet contentment and joy that comes from knowing that God is present. To define God’s peace completely, however, would be an impossible feat, as confirmed by the Apostle Paul.

The peace of God, and fear or anxiety, cannot coexist. Fear, doubt, and mistrust are of the devil. As Christians, we may fluctuate with having and preserving God’s peace inside us, only to lose our focus on God and become filled with fear and doubt. It is a struggle, but there are steps one can take to obtain and preserve the peace of God in our hearts. Indeed, the peace of God must be desired, pursued, and maintained.

Prayer is the single most important activity we can do to obtain the peace of God inside of us, and to reacquire it if lost. When we go into our room, close the door, and genuinely seek God, we are opening ourselves for an encounter with the peace of God. Our God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. The events in the world and at times even in our life may seem chaotic and out of control, but they are not, for there is a beginning and an end. He is in control. When we bring ourselves into contact and dialogue with God, we are bringing balance and stability into our life.

That balance and stability, however, must be maintained. St. Isaac the Syrian often made analogies between how a ship sails from island to island, taking on supplies, and how we pray. We go through our lives sailing from prayer to prayer until we reach our destination. Each time we pray, we are taking on the peace of God which gives us balance and stability. Archimandrite Sophrony, a student of St. Silouan the Athonite, speaking of prayer, said, “Prayer affords an experience of spiritual liberty of which most people are ignorant. The first sign of emancipation is a disinclination to impose one’s will on others. The second is an inner release from the hold of others on oneself.” It could be stated that Archimandrite Sophrony is speaking of the effects of the peace of God on one’s soul. The peace of God has a liberating effect, for to allow oneself to fear what others think or to be driven to impose our opinion or will on others is to lose our spiritual and emotional balance. Indeed, the peace of God has a balancing effect on our lives as well.

One step we can take to preserve the peace of God in us is to be cautious about what we expose ourselves to. As a society, we have become increasingly dependent on the media to keep us informed. We are depending, however, on a media that exploits our fears in order to boost ratings. It is to the media’s benefit to create fear, doubt, and worry. To be dependent upon an institution that encourages fear and uncertainty is disastrous for our spirituality and brings us much unnecessary struggle. It is good for us as Christians to be informed, yet we must stay balanced, and beware falling into fear and worry and then repeatedly returning to the news for reassurance. Those who do this will only find more reinforcement for their fear. If we find ourselves in distress about something on the news, it is important only to give ourselves small doses, remembering always to turn it over to prayer. If a potential danger is resolved, the media will not offer reassurance, but will often simply cease to report on the topic, as it has then become insignificant. As part of maintaining God’s peace, we do not want to feed our fear.

Another step to preserve the peace of God in us is to walk and live according to God’s will, not just following His commandments, but also walking the path that He calls us to walk. As we hear noise when a car starts going off the road, so in our life we “hear noise” when we stray off the path that God has prepared for us. The noise in this case would be the loss of God’s peace. We then reacquire it once we have corrected our straying or wandering. Our work here is twofold: first we do our best to flee from sin moment to moment in our life; and second we keep our life on the path that is according to God’s will. When we sin, it is like the car going off the road; however, we can also lose our way completely and begin heading down a path that can lead to us becoming entirely lost. Such is the case when we try to live a life that is other than what God called us to live. We need to strive to live in a state of being attuned genuinely to God’s will. Such an open heart would readily become a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and not be subject to any distress from a lack of direction.

Finally, and especially in today’s world, we need to recognize the source of our anxiety, and consciously give up control, trust God more, and tolerate uncertainty, being at peace with not knowing all the details. Sometimes we try to control even the events in our life that we clearly can have no control over. Indeed, the more we try and control things we cannot control, then the more out-of-control we may feel. This is one of the fastest ways to lose the peace of God in our hearts. Many feel that, by worrying, they are somehow doing something about the problem, and as a result get a false sense of control. In the end, however, the worrying exhausts them and leaves them void of God’s peace.

The peace of God is a beautiful thing; it is there for each of us if we desire it. Assuredly, just as we miss the sound of a gentle wind blowing through the trees during a busy day, so we is all around us. Pray in silence, flee from sin, stay on the path that is according to God’s will, guard your senses, and allow yourself to give up control and trust God. Truly then we can have the peace of God which surpasses all understanding, and which will fill our minds and hearts.

Source: The Word Magazine, October 2011 Edition