On Gratitude

joy! (Photo credit: atomicity)

I always feel funny talking to clients about gratitude, although I do it often. I worry that it sounds Pollyanna-ish, that flying in the face of their very real (and often truly insurmountable) difficulties, I am, in effect, advising them to whistle past the graveyard. I suspect that the only reason I'm able to do it is that I try to practice "an attitude of gratitude" myself and I know that it works. 

There are all sorts of How-To instructions out there. One of my favorites is Kathleen Adams's Pockets of Joy.  The expression comes from her childhood, when her mother would be emptying the pockets of her jeans before throwing them in the wash. There were always in them the cool things that kids collect during an adventurous day outside--pretty rocks, dead bugs and the like. And her mother would remark that she must have had another wonderful day, because she had her "pockets of joy" again. Adams advises journaling three things every day that you have in your Pockets of Joy. Sometimes when we think we've had a tough day, we can surprise ourselves, discovering that we actually had a pretty amazing one, too. And if we can hold those two views in our minds at once, we can feel better about ourselves and our days.

I've learned that there are dozens of things, often tiny ones, that we can be grateful for in any moment of a given day--or night. I may be lying awake anxious and frustrated because I'm not sleeping, worrying about the day gone by or the day to come, but I can be grateful that I have my nice warm waterbed with my nice soft sheets to lie and worry in. I can be grateful for a roof over my head, and central heating and air, and the dog at the foot of the bed and the partner by my side. And if I focus on those, then lying awake at 2 a.m. can actually become a pleasant experience.  

In a recent post on Tiny Buddha, guest blogger Alexandra Hope Flood advised listing things in your head that you are grateful for from your day as you lie in bed waiting to fall asleep every night. And in the morning, she says, while you're brushing your teeth, list ten things that you are grateful for to start your day. If you're having trouble thinking of anything, begin with having teeth to brush, and being able to stand there and brush them. From there, I might go on to being grateful for meaningful work to do, and a place to go and do it in.

I like that one, and I'm going to start prescribing it.  

The practice applies to far more serious problem states, too, than a little insomnia. Are you sick? injured? possibly even dying? Still. As Jon Kabat Zinn says in Full Catastrophe Living, "as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you, even if you are sick or troubled or in pain and things in your life feel dark and out of control." So start your gratitude list with the fact that you are breathing, if you can't think of anything else. And while you're at it you can send a smile, as Thich Nhat Hanh advises, to every body part that's working. This is something you can practice at any time throughout your day. Right now, for example, you can smile to your eyes that they see these letters, and to that part of your brain that comprehends the words. Smile to your eyelids that blink, to your tear ducts that moisturize, and to your lashes that keep junk out of your eyes. And then direct your attention back to your breathing. Put a half-smile on your face as you do, on the principle that "neurons that fire together wire together," to paraphrase Hebb. In this way, over time, you develop a habit of being happy.

Gratitude is one way I deploy Wood's Rule #4, and its corollary, #5. Focusing on what you can be grateful for in the moment is a mindfulness practice that is the perfect antidote to worry about what is not happening now, may never happen, in fact, and which, in any case, you can do nothing about right now. 

Now mind you, I'm not saying not to worry, period. That would be Pollyanna-ish. And it wouldn't do any good to try, because we're hard-wired for worry. I mean, think about it: The Pollyannas of the savannahs would have been eaten by sabre-toothed tigers before they ever got old enough to reproduce. What I am saying is that we are all so good at worrying that it tends to crowd other things out. We lose sight of the big picture. Cultivating an attitude of gratitude is just remembering to add our assets to our bottom line before we hit "Print" on the balance sheet of life. No matter what else is going on in my day, right now it's spitting snow, the birds are mobbing the feeders outside my window, my dog is lying beside my chair, and I am writing. There are problems, yes, and I am happy. No reason both can't be true for you, too. As one client said recently, "That's the power of 'and'."

When you are in a seriously foul mood, I think it's best to make a written list.  I advise people to use their journals for this, because you can look back over your  lists when you are making the cognitive error of thinking, "Oh, this has been such a bad week!" or some such. Read your lists and it will give you a more balanced perspective. Don't limit your list to a prescribed number, but keep writing until you run out of steam. It's ok to repeat things from previous lists: The dog and the sky and my mate go on nearly every list. And you can list the same thing multiple times from various points in time or points of view on the same list: Mine might, for example, include the way my dog's silky coat feels under my hand, the warmth of her body curled up next to mine during our afternoon nap, and something cute she did this morning, all on one day's list. I guarantee your mood will be improved when you're done, if only by a few percentage points. And that's good. At least while you are writing this list, you definitely feel better. So if nothing else, you've given yourself a break for five, or ten, or fifteen minutes from your unhappiness, and those breaks are essential for all of us. One thing we are often guilty of as humans is 100% thinking, as in "This is a bad day." Stopping and making a list proves to us that no day is 100% bad, including this one.

So hop to it. Unhappy? Get out your pen and paper!

#7: Patience is a virtue

Image by 1Sock via Flickr

Patients occasionally (okay, frequently) express impatience with their progress in therapy. Impatient with themselves, they become impatient with me for not fixing them faster. And they worry that perhaps I am impatient with them for not doing more, better, faster than they actually are. 

Wood's Rule #7: Patience is a virtue

Because cultivating this virtue helps you "cease contributing to your own suffering and confusion and perhaps to that of others", Jon Kabat-Zinn¹ describes patience as a "fundamental ethical attitude" (1994, p. 48).

"From the perspective of patience," Kabat-Zinn writes, "things happen because[emphasis added] other things happen" (p. 48). You get sober, whether sooner or later, because you got drunk. The teenager you've brought to me for therapy will develop maturity and judgment (eventually) precisely because he has been immature and impetuous. For that matter, we can only learn patience who began our journey with impatience.

And if that is true, then it is also true that

what will come next will be determined in large measure by how we are now. This is helpful to keep in mind when we get. . . frustrated, impatient, and angry in our lives (p. 50). 

What will being impatient and irritable right now this two seconds create in our next few minutes, days, weeks, or months? Years down the road, what quality of life will all this rushing around and crankiness have produced for us?

So I would remind my patients to, in Kabat-Zinn's words,

. . . [remember] that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a hurry usually doesn't help, and it can create a great deal of suffering--sometimes in us, sometimes in those who have to be around us (p. 48).

It's how I think of you when you are struggling, when you have hit a wall. I know that I cannot make a flower bloom, or control its form and color when it does. All I can do is make sure to plant it where it receives enough sunshine (but not too much); then I must water and fertilize it (but not too much). It grows on its own, in its own time and in its own way. And so will you, dear, so will you.

Kabat-Zinn closes this chapter, poetically titled "The Bloom of the Present Moment", with a quote from Lao-Tzu:

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself
                            -from the Tao-te-Ching 

If I allow myself to become impatient in session, then I act before my mud has settled. It is not likely that anything that I do will come out of right mindfulness or right understanding. To the contrary, it is highly likely that I will do something to make your journey harder, or longer. And that would be unethical.

 

1. Kabat-Zinn, Jon (1994). Wherever you go there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life, pp. 47-51. Hyperion: New York.

Wood's Rules: #2

Rule 2: I never wait for anyone, not even God, for more than 20 minutes.

The Mister and I went to vote this morning. Lines have been long, but Mr. had called ahead and was told that we could go to the front of the line because of my disability. So we turned up promptly at opening time this morning (8 am). It was a madhouse. The parking lot was full and there were lines of cars snaking up and down the aisles looking for a spot. Which of course they weren't going to find because no one had voted yet and therefore no one was leaving. Ever the optimist, Mr. dropped me off at the front door and I went to the front of a very long, very fat line--only to find that handicap voting didn't 't start until 9:30!

But it all got me to thinking again about disability rights, which we talked about in Ethics class on Wednesday. Going to the front of the line is not a privilege. It merely evens up the playing field. I could wait in line all day, and have done (Jimmy Carter's election comes to mind) but a lot of handicapped people can't maintain for that long. So they could not vote the way things are this year. Point is, "privileges" like going to the head of the line enable us to do things we could not otherwise, things the able-bodied take for granted.

The dean of my graduate school told me once that my fellow students envied my special parking space. At the time we were moving through a buffet line: I picked up a carving knife and told him that anyone who wanted one could bend over and I'd qualify 'em for special parking right here, right now. He did not get the message that he had it all backwards. Curb cuts, special parking, wide doors, grab rails, ramps, all that stuff is not a privilege to be resented by TABs (Temporarily Able Bodied people) like him, but assists that we need so that we can attend graduate school, travel, get to a job, go to the store, stay in a hotel, see a movie, and partake in community life in general. His facial expression clearly said that he thought I was the one being inappropriate.

Anyway, to get back to Wood's Rule #2, which is where we started, I wasn't inclined to wait an hour and a half for special voting privileges. Why, if everyone else can start voting at 8, can't we? Mr. and I have things to do this morning, so we came back home. We will try again later. Maybe we will be able to get a parking place.

But it did occur to me that every rule has an exception, and this rule is no exception to that rule. I would wait in line ALL DAY to vote, if necessary. In fact, before I found out about my disability getting me to the head of the line, I had planned to take Tuesday off if standing in line all day today didn't get me to a voting machine before closing. It took all night to vote the year Jimmy won: I went to the polls after I got off work at 4:30, and they closed the doors at 7. There were so many people already inside that gym that it was after 10 before I finished. Boy was I bored! There's only so much you can chat about to the total strangers in line with you, and you can only study your ballot for so long. Somebody had a paper, and we read it about seven times each, then that got old, too. But voting is so important that it was ok. I would have still been standing there at daylight if that's what it took. I'm just glad the pollworkers were willing to keep at it until we had all voted.

Generally speaking, however, I consider my time valuable, and I hate late. If you are my last client of the day and you aren't there by 20 after, I'm gone. If you are meeting me for lunch and you aren't there within 20 minutes of the agreed-upon time, I'm ordering without you. If you're my doc and you aren't ready for me within 20 minutes of my appointment time, I'm leaving. And I tell my classes that if I'm not there within 20 minutes of the scheduled start time, I'm not coming and they are dismissed. I once had a professor whom I never actually met because he was late for every single class the first few weeks of the semester. The fourth time this happened I went to the Registrar's at 20 after and withdrew: I made them give me every penny back, too. No withdrawal fees, or late registration fees for the new class I signed up for either. I felt disrespected, and I worry that, when I'm late, no matter the reason, that I am communicating a disrespect that I don't feel to the person cooling their heels waiting on me.

Why is this such a big issue for me? Possibly because my mother was late everywhere she went. When I was a kid, I don't think I ever saw a movie from front to back. We would arrive late, stumble around in the dark looking for a place to sit, then climb over people in the middle of the movie. I was always so embarrassed! We'd watch the last half of the show, then sit through the previews and the newsreels and the cartoon and watch the first half of the movie. Mom would announce, "This is where we came in," and we would get up and leave, climbing over everybody again and stumbling out of the theatre in the dark. My mother-in-law was the same way: The Dad-in-Law used to always tell her things were starting 45 min. before they actually did in order to get her dressed and out of the house in time, and even that didn't always work. Mr. is prompt, thank heaven, or we never would have made it as a couple.

Part of promoting Rule #2 to patients is that so often they--especially the women--do not hold themselves in high enough esteem. They are willing to be kept waiting endlessly by people who obviously are disrespecting them by making them sit. One of the faculty at the Internship From Hell pulled that on me once, deliberately, and when I left after 20 minutes he went ballistic. (It turned out that he had not arrived for nearly two hours!). In business and politics, apparently, keeping people waiting like that is a deliberate ploy to establish dominance: What made the guy so mad was that I didn't demonstrate the expected subservience. I won't play that game, and don't encourage my patients to, either.

Anyways, that's Rule #2.

Postscript: The second time was the charm. There were no handicapped spaces available, so Mr. had to drop me off, take the car across the street to the drugstore, and walk back, then repeat the process in reverse afterwards to pick me up. But except for that we were in and out with no problems. The guy in front of us, who had come through the regular line, said he'd been there 4-1/4 hours. My hat's off to him and to every one of those other good people so determined to vote. You go, America!

Wood's Rules

You may have noticed the new name on the banner. Or perhaps not.

You may be wondering what it means. But perhaps not.

I am going to tell you anyway.

There is a pretty good blog out there already with a version of the shrink wrap pun, which confirmed for me my suspicion that I wasn't being very original when I named mine. Wood's Rules, on the other hand, are my own invention, and since what I am offering here is more of the same, to wit, my opinions on nearly everything, "Wood's Rules" makes a better title.

Anyone who has been in therapy (or class, for that matter) with me for any length of time has heard of Wood's Rules. Wood's Rules are little maxims for therapy and for living that I share occasionally, always with the comment, "That's one of Wood's Rules." There are not many--less than a dozen--developed over my last 30 years (most in the first six months, actually) as a therapist, and I will be posting on them over the next few weeks by way of explaining the title further.

For now, they are, simply:

1. Rule 1: Where there's breath, there's life--and the corollary, where there's life, there's hope.
2. Rule 2: I never wait for anyone, not even God, for more than 20 minutes.
   
3. Rule 3: Never be afraid of a fact.
4. Rule 4: If you don't have a problem right now, then for all practical purposes you don't have a problem. (Also, see Rule #5.)
   
5. Rule 5: If there's nothing you can do about it right now, you don't have a problem right now. If you're still convinced you have a problem, refer to Rule #6.
   
6. Rule 6: This, too, shall pass!
7. Rule 7: For the first year after your divorce (or its moral equivalent) becomes final, you are forbidden to say "I love you" to anybody or anything who/that weighs more than 50 lbs.
8. Rule 8: You can (indeed, should) say anything you are thinking or feeling in therapy--this is not, after all, Amy Vanderbilt's Manners Class--but you may not do anything to hurt yourself or me, or to bust up my place.
9. Rule 9: If you come to therapy drunk or drugged, I will not meet with you. And, of course, the corollary: You're not driving yourself home.
10. Rule 10: Never lie to your kid(s).
    

There may be more, but if there are, I can't remember them right now.