In his book, Your Emotional Type, Michael A. Jawer and Marc S. Micozzi, Ph.D. examine the interplay of emotions, chronic illness and pain, and treatment success. They discuss how chronic conditions are intrinsically linked to certain emotional types.

I found the boundary concept they explain in the book — first developed by Ernest Hartmann, MD, of Tufts University — especially intriguing.

The authors define boundaries as more than a measure of introversion or extroversion, openness or close-mindedness, agreeableness or hostility, and other personality traits. According to them, boundaries are a way to assess the characteristic way a person views her/himself and the way he or she operates in the world. To what extent are stimuli “let in” or “kept out”?

How are a person’s feelings processed internally? Boundaries are a fresh and unique way of evaluating how we function.

For example, thin boundary people are highly sensitive in a variety of ways and from an early age:

• They react more strongly than do other individuals to sensory stimuli and can become agitated due to bright lights, loud sounds, particular aromas, tastes or textures.

• They respond more strongly to physical and emotional pain in themselves as well as in others.
• They can become stressed or fatigued due to an overload of sensory or emotional input.
• They are more allergic and their immune systems are seemingly more reactive.
• And they were more deeply affected — or recall being more deeply affected – by events during childhood.

In a nutshell, highly thin boundary people are like walking antennae, whose entire bodies and brains seem primed to notice what’s going on in their environment and internalize it. The chronic illnesses (including depression) they develop will reflect this “hyper” style of feeling.

Thick boundary people, on the other hand, are fairly described as stolid, rigid, implacable or thick skinned:

• They tend to brush aside emotional upset in favor of simply “handling” the situation and maintaining a calm demeanor.

• In practice, they suppress or deny strong feelings. They may experience an ongoing sense of ennui, of emptiness and detachment.
• Experiments show, however, that thick boundary people don’t actually feel their feelings any less. Bodily indicators (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow, hand temperature, muscle tension) betray their considerable agitation despite surface claims of being unruffled.

You can take the boundary quiz for yourself at the authors’ website: www.youremotionaltype.com.

Jawer and Micozzi then offer some alternative therapies that work best for your type. I would use these in addition to the traditional therapies already working for you. For example, I think it would be very irresponsible of me to go off Lithium and try acupuncture alone. However, some relaxation technique in addition to my medication treatment and other tools I already use (swimming, light therapy, fish oil) might do me some good.

Today I read a meaningful email by someone who had read my book. She said it was the passage on page 120 to 121 that provided the epiphany moment she needed to seek help for her mood disorder.

I was curious to see what was on these pages, so I got a copy out and read this…

Trying too hard was precisely my problem. It was the “mind over spoon” [trying to bend a spoon with my thoughts like the famous psychic Uri Geller does] issue again. In my mind, I was failing because I couldn’t think myself to perfect health. I couldn’t do it all myself.

Dr. Smith salvaged the last crumb of my self-esteem with this compassionate statement: “Mindful meditation, yoga, and cognitive-behavioral therapy are extremely helpful for people with mild to moderate depression. But they don’t work for people such as yourself who are suicidal or severely depressed.”

Her advice was grounded in neuroscience.

One research study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in particular, used high-definition brain imaging to reveal a breakdown in the emotional processing that impairs the depressive’s ability to suppress negative emotions. In fact, the more effort that depressives put into reframing thoughts–the harder they tried to think positive–the more activation there was in the amygdala, regarded by neurobiologists as a person’s “fear center.” Says Tom Johnstone, Ph.D. the lead study author at the University of Wisconsin: “Healthy individuals putting more cognitive effort into [reframing the content] get a bigger payoff in terms of decreasing activity in the brain’s emotional response centers. In the depressed individuals, you find the exact opposite.”

And then Dr. Smith asked me this: if I had been in a terrible automobile accident would I be so hard on myself?

“If you were in a wheelchair with casts on each of your limbs,” she said, “would you beat yourself up for not healing yourself with your thoughts? For not thinking yourself into perfect condition?”

Of course not.

When I injured my knee while training for a marathon, I didn’t expect myself to visualize my tendonitis away so that I could run. I dropped out of the race to rest my joints and muscles so I wouldn’t further damage them.

Yet I expected myself to think away my mood disorder, which involved a disease in my brain, an organ just like my heart, lungs, and kidneys.

“What’s most important is to find a medication combination that works so that you can be able to do all that other stuff to feel even better,” she said. “I will give you a list of books you should read if you want to study depression. Until you feel stronger, I suggest you stay away from the type of self-help literature you have brought it because those texts can do further damage if read in a very depressed state.”

I have drifted a long ways from that wisdom.

I am back to trying to bend the damn spoon. Forcing it with all my strength.

Back in August, I nearly died because I believed that I could fix a ruptured appendix with my thoughts. I held off on doing anything about the severe abdominal pain for a day or two because I was sure the agony was all in my head, and that if I convinced myself I wasn’t in pain, then I would start to feel better.

“I’m definitely on the road to recovery,” I explained to my husband keeled over at the kitchen table. Thank God he insisted I call my doctor, because I would be still be trying to bend that spoon in the afterlife had he not been there to knock some sense into me.

A few weeks ago I was encouraged to get a biopsy for the growing lump that my endocrinologist found in my thyroid. I was disappointed that the result was negative.

This should alert the average person that something might not be right. But for me, that only meant I had to try harder and swim more laps, run more miles, sit longer under my HappyLite, and carve out more time for prayer. The death wish translated to my carelessness about letting some component of my recovery plan slide. There was no thought of calling my doctor.

Ironically, the pressure I put on myself to think right and to feel right is aggravating the healing process and making me feel much worse. Just as the University of Wisconsin neurobiologists explain, my amygdala is over activated, on fire, and is in a reckless pursuit of controlling everything and anything it encounters.

So here’s a good reminder to you, and especially to me, that your thoughts can only help you so much. They cannot piece together your appendix, or fix your knee tendons. There are things like biochemistry and faulty brain circuits, cell death and susceptibility genes, and many organic structures of the brain that need to be taken into consideration, so that we all don’t perish as we stare at the spoon.

Psychologist and psychoanalyst Todd Essig sees what he wants to see in the movement. When contrasting it with the Tea Party, he idealizes the motivations and focus of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, as though they were all joined together in a common cause (other than the cause to agitate for change, something President Obama actually started more than 4 years ago).

What I have a hard time wrapping my head around is to understand how people who have such a deep understanding of psychology and insight can’t see how they turn such demonstrations into their own personal Rorschach test.

For the record, I’m not a proponent of either the Tea Part of Occupy Wall Street. While they both have important things to say (Smaller government? You bet! Get rid of corporate greed and tax loopholes? Who among average Americans would be against that?), neither is particularly attractive to me. I’m a small business owner who grapples with the daily realities of the economy, an unfair tax burden (I probably pay a greater percentage in taxes than any large corporation), and an inability to hire people in a tough economy because of an uncertain future. And don’t even get me started about the obscene amount I spend in healthcare premiums each month.

Unlike Todd Essig, I don’t see the Tea Party as a group of people who are about “exclusion.” They are, from my understanding, a group that is about limiting the intrusive reach of government into every component of our daily lives. In that way, I have to agree with some of what the Tea Party is for, because they speak more to my Libertarian leanings. Get government out of our personal lives, where it has little business belonging. That’s not “exclusion” in any normal sense of the word — that’s respecting individual freedoms and personal rights. You know, those things that this country was built on.

Xenophobia is nothing new, and the Tea Party hasn’t invented it. Cultures since the beginning of time have had fear of “outsiders.” It’s no wonder — they bring strange ideas (some good, some bad), new ways of looking at life, and often challenge the status quo. Virtually everyone in America (except Native Americans) is an immigrant, yet that doesn’t stop us from pretending that new immigrants are somehow inferior to older immigrants.

I think I lose Todd Essig right about here in his cultural Rorschach rant:

Everyone is included, everyone gets to have a say. Rather than policy they have process. The “we” of OWS is worldwide, a globalized, networked “we” full of good and bad existing simultaneously and everywhere. The messier the better; better to let in those you don’t want then miss out on including those you do. Of course, inclusion can be a big problem because people say and do lots of really stupid things.

Ummm, okay. How is that different than a representative democracy — you know, the one we live in in America today? You elect representatives to do you bidding in our society. Did that change while I was sleeping??

And how can an “occupation” — possession, settlement, or use of land or property, often with the connotation of doing so under military authority — be something about “inclusion”? Do occupiers generally say to the people they’re occupying, “Hey, no problem, we can all live here together in peace and harmony?” (I don’t think the Poles or the French — amongst many others — would agree with you when it came to their being occupied by Nazi Germany.)

Of course not. The occupying force seeks to overrrun the native people with their culture and ideas. And while that may have been fine for Wall St. (where few actual Wall St. firms actually have offices, ironically enough), it seems to me to be less fine as it spreads to dozens of other cities worldwide.

What does ‘Occupy Boston’, for instance, stand for? I’m a citizen of the greater Boston area, so I get a little fearful that people want to occupy the very city I now call home. Are they coming for me in the middle of the night? Do they want my property, my home, my family??

How is this a movement of “inclusion” when the very terms they’ve chosen — occupy and occupation — are those of an invading army? If they wanted to be seen as a group of “inclusionary” people, they could’ve chosen far more neutral terms, no?

But nevermind, Todd Essig believes these folks are all peaceful people who have no harmful intentions in mind:

What becomes clear through a psychological lens is the optimism of cooperation and relationship, of being imperfect together, of searching for repair as community even while knowing no repair is perfect.

That lens, of course, is Todd Essig’s lens. It is not the lens of the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement. That lens has no focus since it has no leaders.

And that’s the problem.

The American Revolution wasn’t led by a group of anonymous patriots who wanted to remain leaderless while they forwarded their radical ideas of the day. Leaders rose from the ranks to speak clearly and forcefully for their list of grievances (so well-documented in the Declaration of Independence).

That’s where the Occupy Wall Street movement falls flat. Because of their lack of leaders and vision, they share little in common with our Founding Fathers. People who took the extreme risk of putting their names in ink on a document that instantly branded them traitors to the Crown.

In doing so, they made it clear – here is what we stand for, here is what we want, and yes, we’re willing to wage war if necessary to attain our demands. Oh, and by the way — here are our names. That is truly exhilarating in its grandeur, audacity and scope.

I’m not sure what Occupy Wall Street has in common with these people. Protesting is as old as America, so there is that. But what is clear is that others will use this movement for whatever purpose they want. To forward whatever political or economic agenda that helps that individual.

Me? I’m going to continue sitting here what I do day in and day out — try and run my small business in an increasingly competitive environment. And in an economy that does little to reward hard work.

What choice do I have? I live in the greatest society on Earth right now. For that, I am eternally grateful for the opportunities made available to me.

Read the full article: The Contrasting Psychologies of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the ‘Tea Party’

What might surprise you are the details of this work. For instance, as neuroscientist David Eagleman writes in his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain:

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia—hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city. And each one contains the entire human genome and traffics billions of molecules in intricate economies. Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundred of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

The cells are connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessities new strains of mathematics. A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Below are several other interesting and surprising facts about our brains from Eagleman’s Incognito.

1. We’re notoriously poor observers of our environment.

But we have the false idea that we see things just as they are. Still, we can very easily miss stimuli that are right in front of our eyes if we’re not looking for them. Similarly, we don’t see just with our eyes. We see with our brains. The phenomenon of “change blindness” illustrates these points perfectly.

Consider the following experiment: Random people passing through a courtyard are asked for directions by an experimenter. During the conversation, workers carrying a door walk in between the person and experimenter. After the interruption, most of the people simply continue giving directions, picking up where they left off—even though they’re talking to a completely different person! That’s because another person involved with the experiment (known as a confederate) hid behind the door and switched places with the original experimenter.

Eagleman writes: “In other words, they [the participants] were only encoding small amounts of the information hitting their eyes. The rest was assumption.”

Another good example is magic tricks. Magicians’ “actions should give away the game—but they can rest assured that your brain processes only small bits of the visual scene, not everything that hits your retinas.”

To learn more about change blindness, check out this website, which is maintained by a psychologist, and this cool video.

2. Some people experience the world differently than most of us — and it’s totally normal.

Here, we’re not talking about debilitating disorders like schizophrenia, when a person’s brain produces visual, tactile or auditory hallucinations (or delusions). Rather, for some people, there are “magenta Tuesdays, tastes that have shapes and wavy green symphonies,” writes Eagleman. He says that one in 100 people experiences the world like this. And there’s a name for this not-so-uncommon condition: synesthesia.

Basically, people experience a mix of sensations simultaneously, and they do so automatically and regularly. They don’t just hear music; they might also taste it. Eagleman gave more examples in Incognito: “…the feel of sandpaper might evoke an F-sharp, the taste of chicken might be accompanied by a feeling of pinpoints on the fingertips, or a symphony might be experienced in blues and golds.”

One type of synesthesia is called “spatial sequence synesthesia.” These individuals have locations for time and any other numbers. For instance, “They can point to the spot where the number 32 is, where December floats or where the year 1966 lies.”

Surprising, right? What’s interesting is that these people are so used to experiencing the world this way that they’re surprised others don’t have this “joined sensation,” Eagleman explains. “The mere existence of synesthesia demonstrates that more than one kind of brain—and one kind of mind—is possible.”

You can find out if you’re a “synesthete” with this test.

3. Our brains make up stories in order to make sense of what we do.

We thrive on patterns and try to make sense of our world. We do the same thing when it comes to our own behaviors. According to Eagleman, “We have ways of retrospectively telling stories about our actions as though the actions were always our idea.”

Take the example of patients who’ve had split-brain surgery (when the corpus callosum is severed to help patients with epilepsy). In a 1978 experiment of patients who had this kind of surgery, researchers showed an image of a chicken claw to a patient’s left hemisphere and an image of a snow-filled winter scene to the right hemisphere. When asked to pick the image that symbolized what they’d seen, the patient’s right hand chose a card with a chicken, and their left hand chose one with a snow shovel. As Eagleman writes:

The experimenters asked him why he was pointing to the shovel. Recall that his left hemisphere (the one with the capacity for language) had information only about a chicken, and nothing else. But the left hemisphere, without missing a beat, fabricated a story: “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why.

This rationalization also occurs when patients are given a command. Eagleman continues:

If you show the command “Walk” to the right hemisphere (the one without language), the patient will get up and start walking. If you stop him and ask why he’s leaving, his left hemisphere, cooking up an answer, will say something like “I was going to get a drink of water.”

But this doesn’t happen just to split-brain patients, Eagleman says. We all do it. Participants instructed to hold a pencil in between their teeth while reading a passage found it funnier. That’s because their brains tried to account for the smiles. Sitting up straight also made others happier because the brain again assumed that this meant they were feeling good.

Other experiments have shown the same thing: that our brains love to spin a story. Eagleman recounts an experiment he and a colleague devised in the mid-1990s. Their goal was to test simple decision-making. Participants were asked to pick between two cards on a computer screen: A and B. There was no indication of which was the better choice, so participants picked the cards at random. But they did receive a small monetary reward after each one. In the next phase, the cards were reset and they had to pick between A and B yet again. But the rewards were now different. What the participants didn’t know was that the researchers created a formula to determine the reward, which was too difficult for the participants to detect. This formula factored in the participants’ card choices.

After the experiment, participants were asked why they picked the cards they did, and they gave a variety of explanations. According to Eagleman:

I was surprised to hear all types of baroque explanations, such as “The computer liked it when I switched back and forth” and “The computer was trying to punish me, so I switched my game plan.” In reality, the players’ descriptions of their own strategies did not match what they had actually done, which turned out to be highly predictable. Nor did their descriptions match the computer’s behavior, which was purely formulaic. Instead, their conscious minds, unable to assign the task to a well-oiled zombie system, desperately sought a narrative. The participants weren’t lying; they were giving the best explanation they could­—just like the split-brain patients…”

By the way, if you enjoy learning about the brain and brain disorders, check out neuropsychologist Paul Broks’s columns in Prospect magazine. According to the excellent blog Mind Hacks:

The ‘Out of Mind’ column ran for the best part of five years. Alternately whimsical, profound and poetic, it recounted ephemeral scenes from meetings with brain altered individuals and spun them into reflections on the science and philosophy of human nature.

And be sure to check out our blog Neuroscience & Relationships by Athena Staik for tons of interesting insight!

So to explore this issue, I’d like to share some videos that discuss the unity of mind-body.  They can help us better understand how inseparable the mind and brain (body) really are.

Mind vs. Brain: In the above video, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom says, “The mind is a product of the brain.  The mind is what the brain does.”

Can we overload our brains?

Steven Pinker, a scientist at Harvard, discusses the mind-brain myth in the video above.  

Substance Dualism *Mirror*

This is an excellent video (above) that discusses and refutes many of the ideas perpetuated by substance dualists — those who believe in the separation of mind and brain.  From QualiaSoup, a science-focused project by a U.K. teacher, the video points out some fatal flaws in the substance dualism argument.

Mind-Brain dualism

In the above video, the narrator (with the pseudonym ProfMTH) points out “Dualism’s two fatal flaws.”

Aborting Mind-Body Dualism

In the above video, a frequent YouTube poster who calls himself SisyphusRedeemed debunks the mind-body dualism myth. The second half of the video by SisyphusRedeemed applies his arguments to the abortion debate.

People with mental disabilities experience one of the most serious negative consequences of misunderstanding the mind.

“If a person in wheelchair comes our way, we’re eager to clear a passage or hold open a door; we [see] their incapacity to be a blameless one.  When disabilities are less visible, hidden away in the wiring of the brain, we tend to show little sympathy or patience.  Our dualistic heritage still convinces us that all things mental are securely lodged in the realm of spirit.  Bad behavior can only be caused by poor choices and sinister character, an exercise of will” (McGraw, 2004, p.262).

There is absolutely no reason to be confident in the belief of a separable mind and body, mental and physical, while there are many reasons to not be confident in the mind and body dichotomy.

So let’s consider the following:

• What happens when individuals suffer brain damage, or experience the effects of mind-altering drugs, which correlate with changes in brain chemistry?
• If the mind is separable from the brain why do we only experience sensations and perceptions of the specific body where the brain is housed?
• Why doesn’t the mind ever project to other bodies?

The mind and body cannot be separated.

Reference

McGraw, JJ. (2004).  Brain & Belief: An Exploration of The Human Soul. Del Mar, CA: Aegis Press.

Yeah, well, that’s the theory.

So you jump into a pit bull fight and say, “Here, doggie, doggie, you want a treat?” If he doesn’t take your leg off, you are good to go!

If he does take your leg off, you have much more exposure therapy ahead of you… For which you might want to wear a padded suit.

Exposure therapy has two forms: systematic desensitization, which is more gradual, and flooding, where you jump in with your doggie treats. I learned all this in the book, Extinguishing Anxiety, by Catherine Pittman, Ph.D. and Elizabeth Karle.

I believe in the effectiveness of exposure therapy. I believe that our brains are plastic and, through exposure therapy, we develop new connections that compete with the jaded old guys, that our brains are capable of birthing a flock of optimistic buggers who are eager to try anything.

I tried this exposure therapy in May, when I spoke to about 3500 to 4000 people. Upon seeing all the chairs set up on the lawn, I experienced the same nausea that I do every time I have to drive across the Bay Bridge to the eastern shore of Maryland. Ever since my colossal breakdown, public speaking and pretty much everything that exposes me has that effect. So when I was trying out the microphone and sound system, I may as well have been looking down at a pack of pit bulls. However, I managed to get through the speech using relaxation techniques, exercise (I ran eight miles just before) and other tools that are described “Extinguishing Anxiety.” I am positive that my brain formed new connections from that experience, and that every time I walk up to a podium from now on will be a tad easier.

With that victory behind me, I have decided to use exposure therapy to conquer another behavior of mine in need of major modification: apologizing.

I have what my therapist calls an “apology problem.” I guess you could say that I am an apology addict. I can’t say “I’m sorry” enough in a day. Somewhere in my amygdala is written that if I say I am sorry, the person in front of me or on the other line of the phone has to like me … that my apology will smooth out any awkwardness between us. Sometimes it does, and I can live the next ten minutes with a tranquil consolation that the person now likes me and the world is one giant smiley face. However, two minutes later, I will inevitably say something inappropriate and I am back to apologizing.

It gets tiring, this apology habit.

So, as part of an exposure therapy exercise, I decided to try and see what would happen if I didn’t apologize…if I jumped over the neighbor’s fence and said hello to the pit bulls and gave them all some belly rubs.

Two nights ago was my big test.

There was a woman at a party with whom I used to be good friends. I really like her, but the friendship was not healthy for me… for many reasons. However, I have always felt guilty for distancing myself from her rather suddenly. If there was ever a temptation to apologize, this was it, and as the night went on, my need to apologize grew bigger and stronger and louder and wider. I felt like if I opened my mouth, nothing but an apology would come out. So I didn’t open my mouth.

“You’ll be okay. Really, it will be okay,” I had to reassure myself, just like when I was on the podium talking to 4000 people or at the highest point of the Bay Bridge.

I waited for the room to erupt in flames. But it didn’t. Or for me to suddenly collapse because she had been practicing with her voodoo dolls. But that didn’t happen either. There was a country’s worth of discomfort and awkwardness as I ate my crab balls … but nothing that eventful or bad happened. I was pretty sure that, by seeing me, she was reminded that she doesn’t like me. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe I can live in my community knowing that a few people disapprove of me or something I have done.

By the time the three hours were over, the temptation to apologize was still there, but I knew that my brain had developed at least a few new connections that said it was okay to put my “so sorry” sign away. Moreover, I know that every time I resist the urge to apologize, and participate in a kind of exposure therapy, I will have paved a brain highway that communicates to my mouth that it only has to apologize when it’s appropriate and necessary.

If not, I’m sorry for wasting your time.

One reason: this obsession has reminded me about the nature of learning. I’ve been struck by how much I’ve learned in the last few weeks. I went from knowing almost nothing about the scent of smell to knowing… well, quite a bit more. And without any effort, any drilling, any assignments on my part. Quite the contrary. I’m gulping down books, jumping around websites, eager to learn more, more, more.

The same thing happened when I was working on my Churchill biography. In college, I’d taken classes that covered World War II, and I had to force myself to do the reading, and I struggled to memorize the facts. But through the lens of my limitless fascination with Churchill, I couldn’t get enough of these materials, and I remembered facts easily.

And what’s strange — for me, at least — is that this interest clicks in so suddenly.

Two months ago, if you’d handed me Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York, I would have been only mildly interested. But last week, I was racing to the library to get it off the shelves. Same thing with Churchill. I went from mild interest to wild curiosity in the space of an hour. I remember that hour very well.

The desire to learn strikes me as quite significant. Sheer curiosity! It’s so powerful. When researchers tried to identify the factors that allowed third and fourth graders to recall their reading, it turned out that the students’ level of interest in the material was very important — thirty times more important than how “readable” the material was.

I was talking about this aspect of learning with a friend, and she said, “So you’re saying, being motivated to learn makes the learning process easier.”

“No!” I answered. “There have been plenty of times when I’ve been motivated to learn, but I didn’t desire to learn.” Law school, say. I was highly motivated to learn, but I had to make myself learn the material. And I saw people around me who loved the material, who learned effortlessly.

In the past, I might have fought against my interest in the sense of smell, out of a belief that it was unproductive to spend so much time and energy on it. Now, however, I let myself follow such interests as far as they lead — and these passions give me great happiness. Happiness from my interest in the subject, and also from the happiness that comes from the atmosphere of growth created by gaining knowledge.

I started asking my friends, “Do you have an area of weird, crazy knowledge? Where you know far more than most people, without making a special effort to study? A limitless curiosity about a particular subject?” A surprising number of people answer “Yes.” How about you? Do you have an area where you have an intense desire to learn? And that subject could be anything — baseball statistics, song lyrics, anything.

This subject makes me want to pull Johnson’s Life of Samuel Johnson off the shelf, because I keep being reminded of passages that I know I shouldn’t quote at length here — so the next best thing is to re-read them all.

I mean, even those who claim they are normal may, in fact, be the most neurotic among us, swimming with a nice pair of scuba fins down the river of Denial. Having my psychiatric file published online and in print for public viewing, I get to hear my share of dirty secrets—weird obsessions, family dysfunction, or disguised addiction—that are kept concealed from everyone but a self-professed neurotic and maybe a shrink.

“Why are there so many disorders today?” Those seven words, or a variation of them, surface a few times a week. And my take on this query is so complex that, to avoid sounding like my grad school professors making an erudite case that fails to communicate anything to average folks like me, I often shrug my shoulders and move on to a conversation about dessert. Now that I can talk about all day.

Here’s the abridged edition of my guess as to why we mark up more pages of the DSM-IV today than, say, a century ago (even though the DSM-IV had yet to be born).

Most experts would agree with me that there is more stress today than in previous generations. Stress triggers depression and mood disorders, so that those who are predisposed to it by their creative wiring or genes are pretty much guaranteed some symptoms of depression at confusing and difficult times of their lives.

I think modern lifestyles — lack of community and family support, less exercise, no casual and unstructured technology-free play, less sunshine and more computer — factor into the equation. So does our diet. Hey, I know how I feel after a lunch of processed food, and I don’t need to the help of a nutritionist to spot the effect in my 8-year-old son.

Finally, let’s also throw in the toxins of our environment. Our fish are dying… a clue that our limbic systems (brain’s emotional center) are not so far behind.

Maybe the same amount of people have genes that predispose them to depression as in the Great Depression. But the lifestyle, toxins, and other challenges of today’s world tilts the stress scale in the favor of major depression, acute anxiety, and their many relatives.

Of course we can’t forget today’s technology and cutting-edge research of psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists. Because of medical devices that can scan our brains with impressive precision and the arduous work of scientific studies done in medical labs throughout the country, we know so much more about the brain, and its relationship with other biological systems within the human body: digestive, respiratory and circulatory, musculoskeletal, and nervous. All of that is a very good thing, as is knowledge and awareness.

A few years ago, psychiatrist and bestselling author Peter Kramer penned an interesting article for Psychology Today rebutting the claims of popular authors — spawning a new genre of psychological literature — that doctors are abusing their diagnostic powers, labeling boyishness as “ADHD,” normal sadness and grief as “major depression,” and shyness as “social phobia.” Because of their rushed schedules and some laziness, doctors are narrowing the spectrum of normal human emotion, slapping a diagnosis on all conditions and medicating people who would be better served with a little coaching, direction, and psychotherapy.

As I explained in my piece, “Are We Overmedicating? Or Is Our Health Care System Inadequate?,” I believe the problem is far more complicated than overmedication. I’d be more comfortable labeling it “really bad health care.” And if I had to pick a culprit, I’d point my finger at our health care insurance policies, not the doctors themselves. But I don’t even want to get into that, because it causes my blood pressure to rise and I’m trying really hard lately to live like a Buddhist monk.

What I liked about Kramer’s article is that he doesn’t deny that there are more diagnoses today, and yes, some people may feel the damaging effect of stigma. However, more often than not, diagnosis brings relief and treatment to a behavior, condition, or neurosis that would otherwise decay certain parts of a person’s life, especially his marriage and relationships with children, bosses, co-worker, and dare I say in-laws? Kramer writes:

Diagnosis, however loose, can bring relief, along with a plan for addressing the problem at hand. Parents who might have once thought of a child as slow or eccentric now see him as having dyslexia or Asperger’s syndrome—and then notice similar tendencies in themselves. But there’s no evidence that the proliferation of diagnoses has done harm to our identity. Is dyslexia worse than what it replaced: the accusation, say, that a child is stupid and lazy?

People afflicted by disabling panic or depression may fully embrace the disease model. A diagnosis can restore a sense of wholeness by naming, and confining, an ailment. That mood disorders are common and largely treatable makes them more acceptable; to suffer them is painful but not strange.

Then Kramer asks this question: What would it feel like to live in a world where practically no one was normal? Where few people are free from “psychological defect?” What if normalcy was a mere myth? He ends the article with this poignant paragraph:

We are used to the concept of medical shortcomings; we face disappointing realizations—that our triglyceride levels and our stress tolerance are not what we would wish. Normality may be a myth we have allowed ourselves to enjoy for decades, sacrificed now to the increasing recognition of differences. The awareness that we all bear flaw is humbling. But it could lead us to a new sense of inclusiveness and tolerance, recognition that imperfection is the condition of every life.

Amen to that.

According to author Alina Tugend, the best way to become an expert in your field is by making mistakes, lots of them, but to cooperate with the brain on learning from them. In her new book, Better By Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, explains the science of making mistakes and why learning from them is vital in a culture of perfectionism. Tugend has been a journalist for nearly 30 years and for the past six has written the ShortCuts column for the New York Times business section. She has written about education, environmentalism, and consumer culture for numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and Parents and is a Huffington Post contributor. I have the honor of conducting an exclusive interview with her for Psych Central.

1. I was very intrigued by the research and physiological components behind making mistakes? Could you briefly describe why dopamine is an important contributor to learning from mistakes?

Alina: Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a role in how we process errors. Dopamine neurons generate patterns based on experiment — if this happens, that will follow. The Iowa Gambling Task, developed by neuroscientists helps prove this point. A player is given four decks of cards and $2,000 of play money. Each card tells the player whether he won or lost money, and the object is to win as much money as possible.

But the cards are rigged, with two decks paying out small amounts of money, like $50, but rarely causing a player to lose money. The other two decks have high payouts, but also high losses. So if a player pulls from the first deck — the one that gives low but steady payouts — she will come out far richer in the end. It takes an average of 50 cards before people began to pull more regularly from the more profitable first deck, and about 80 cards before they can actually explain it.

But by hooking up players to a machine that measured the electrical conductance of their skin, neuroscientists found that players became more nervous after taking only 10 cards from the less-profitable decks — although they weren’t even aware of it.

This is due to dopamine, which figured out the patterns before the player’s brain registered it consciously. When scientists watched a patient undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy while playing the Iowa Gambling Task — with local anesthesia but remaining conscious — the dopamine neurons immediately stopped firing when the player chose from the bad deck. The patient experienced negative emotion and learned not to draw from the deck again. But if the choice was accurate, he felt pleasure of being correct and wanted to do the same thing again.

People who produce too little dopamine in their bodies, such as those who suffer from Parkinson’s disease, tend to learn more from negative than positive feedback. But once they took medication that boosted brain levels of dopamine, they reacted more strongly to positive feedback than negative feedback.

So the best way to become an expert in your field is focus on your mistakes, to consciously consider the errors being internalized by your dopamine neurons.

2. If you were to give a perfectionist instructions on how to accept her mistakes more easily and learn from them, what would they be?

Alina: In some ways, perfectionism has become a catch-all phrase. People who are conscientious and have very high standards aren’t necessarily perfectionists. And there is certainly nothing wrong with striving to be the best in certain areas. The trouble is when we believe that we can be perfect at everything, and if we’re not, we’re a failure. When mistakes, no matter how small, are a crisis. These are super (sometimes called maladaptive) perfectionists.

For those kind of perfectionists, it’s necessary to internalize the concept that the point of a task or job is not to do it perfectly the first time, but to learn and develop. Super-perfectionists need to be honest with themselves — even if they publicly bemoan this attribute in themselves, do they secretly think they’re right in their approach to life and everyone else is wrong? Why is it so important to be flawless?

Perfectionism is not necessarily something to be proud of. Research has found that those high in perfectionism did worse on a writing task than those lower in perfectionism when judged by college professors who were blind to the difference in the participants. It may be because maladaptive perfectionists avoid writing tasks, and avoid having others review and comment on their work to a greater extent than non-perfectionists — and therefore don’t practice and learn.

These super-perfectionists are motivated by a fear of failure rather than the opportunity to learn. They consider anything less than 100 percent — say 98 percent — inadequate. If this sounds like you, you need to rethink whether your perfectionism is serving you well.

Super perfectionists can try to break tasks down into more manageable bites, so they don’t feel overwhelmed. They can learn to prioritize and set deadlines, so they won’t get subsumed in every project to the detriment of other needs. They can work on getting feedback at an early point in a project to get a reality check. Most of us fear hearing criticism, no matter how constructive, even if we’re not uber-perfectionists. But the more we get it and find it’s not as frightening as we think it will be — that we can survive, and yes, even learn! — the easier it is to hear it in the future.

3. Are there any exercises we can do to remind ourselves that perfectionism is a myth and that error is part of being human?

Alina: We really do need to keep telling ourselves — and others — that perfection is a myth. It’s not easy in a culture that prizes the concept of effortlessness, success and results over the process. But we need to constantly remind ourselves that every time we take a risk, move out of our comfort zone and try something new, we’re opening ourselves up to potentially making more mistakes. The greater the risks and challenges we take on, the greater the likelihood that we’ll mess up somewhere along the way — but also the greater the likelihood that we’ll discover something new and get the deep satisfaction that comes from accomplishment.

We also have to acknowledge that screwing up doesn’t feel good. I’m not saying we should cheer when we err. But we need to figure out what went wrong, apologize and make amends if necessary and move on. If we spend so much time beating ourselves up, we’re not learning any lesson from the mistake.

In most cases, the mistake may feel bad in the moment, but those feelings pass. Often days or weeks later we can’t even remember what the error was.

I’ll end on a quote from a 10-year-old boy who was learning to ride horses and not doing as well as he wanted. Although he was disappointed in where he placed in a few competitions, he told a reporter, “If everything always went well in riding, why would it ever be fun? If you were always perfect, nothing would ever be amazing.”

At my last therapy session, I was telling her how scared I was that everyone was going to find out that I was inherently stupid. She laughed out loud and said, “Do you know how many times I hear that a day?”

Oh. Good. Then it’s not just me.

I don’t know when it started. It could be a result of being a twin, and needing to form a sense of identity separate from my sister. Since she stole “tomboy” early on, I became “the brain,” except that mine didn’t work, but no one really knew that but me. And I was able to keep it a secret all through my childhood and adolescence.

My condition was reinforced by those damn standardized tests, the ones that tell you that if you score below one thousand, you need to eat more Wheaties, hang out with smart people (writing down the things that come out of their mouths known as vocabulary words), and apply to community colleges… Oh, and that your chances at success are found somewhere in the hair-thin piece of that pie chart that predicts future earnings.

Having a best friend in college that was valedictorian didn’t help. The same homework from French class that she sailed through in a half-hour had me pursing my lips and looking up terms for six hours.

For several years in college and afterward, I had the bright idea of pursuing a Ph.D., which, in my mind, stood for “Proof of a Highly Developed brain.” Surely if I had those three initials following my name I would no longer feel insecure about the vacancy in my brain and its troubling horsepower. But then I met some people who did have the three coveted letters, a certificate of proven intelligence, and they were still insecure! So I was thankful I saved myself some money and years of frustration writing a thesis.

In fact, as I discuss this pea-brain fixation among other educated types, I discover one successful person after another — New York Times journalists, bestselling authors, international speakers, neuroscientists — who have not been able to shed their stupid complex. I was dumbfounded. Surely if I had their credentials I would never suffer another insecure day in my life.

But that’s just not the case, is it?

No accolade or degree has the capability to zap the stupid complex. That is ultimately good news, really… if you are chasing the next big promotion or award or degree to confirm that your brain is just fine. It means we can sit tight and watch SpongeBob, because we will feel as stupid on our couch as we would in an uncomfortable chair during a Harvard lecture.

And there is great relief, I think, in knowing that there are more of us that feel stupid than there are that feel smart.

Image courtesy of PopartUK.com.

According to a 2001 poll, more than 40 percent of Americans confess to a dread of appearing before spectators. (In some surveys, fear of public speaking even outranks fear of death, a fact that inspired Jerry Seinfeld’s famous observation that at a funeral, this means the average person would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.)

To get to the solution of this phobia — which can help us with all our other phobias — Clark tells the story of cellist Zoe Keating. Today her music is featured everywhere from National Public Radio to film scores to European ballets. Clark attended one of her performances and comments, “Keating seemed entirely oblivious to the hundreds of eyes watching her. She played as though she were in the midst of a dream, eyes closed, swaying languidly with her cello, utterly immersed in her performance.”

But it was a long way getting there.

Her process is intriguing and insightful for anyone trying to get over a severe case of jitters, or any phobia for that matter. Clark explains Keating’s starting point:

Stage nerves first hit Keating when she was fifteen years old—right when music becomes a brutally competitive dogfight for serious young orchestra musicians—and from that point on, each public performance felt like a battle for psychological survival.

Keating received nothing but bad advice, which is often the case when you are dealing with something psychological. Friends and mentors told her to practice more. If she was comfortable enough with her piece, then she wouldn’t feel nervous. Practicing, however, did little to alleviate her anxiety.

Here’s where Keating’s story takes a fascinating turn.

She detoured from the professional classical performance track. It was just too much torture. Despite scholarships to impressive programs, she chose to pursue her undergraduate degree at a small, liberal-arts college studying experimental electronic music composition and improvisation. Not exactly classical cello. She attempted to pay her bills with a slew of dead-end frustrating jobs.

Broke and desperate in the San Francisco Bay Area, she headed to the Embarcadero and Powell Street Bay Area Rapid Transit (or BART) stations and began to play her cello for change at rush hour.

Playing in front of this uncaring audience was a perfect way for her to confront her fear. And then once they became a caring audience — actually thanking her for playing — she became even more empowered. Her playing became a kind of ministry, where the focus was taken off of her and projected unto the folks she played for.

According to Keating:

Even if I’d gotten the technique wrong, people would hand me a five-dollar bill and say, “That was fantastic!” That was the first sense I ever got that musicians might have a role in enriching the world….In other words, I allowed myself to play the music without worrying about all the little things—“Is your shoulder too high? Is your vibrato correct” And it was fun.

Clark goes on to explain why this exercise was invaluable from a psychological/neuroscientific standpoint:

Based on what we’ve already learned, we know that by exposing herself to her fear without running away, Keating was letting her brain slowly habituate to the idea of performing for an audience. Over the hours, as the realization dawned in her unconscious mind that these commuters weren’t going to descend on her like starving jackals, her prefrontal cortex taught itself to soothe the amygdala’s reaction to the crowd. …

But neuroscience aside, Keating was also coming to an important conscious insight: her listeners couldn’t see through her like she’d thought they could….No one really saw her nervousness. If people stopped to listen, that meant they were enjoying the music, not judging her. Keating had finally broken through one of the most pervasive misconceptions underlying performance anxiety, the “illusions of transparency” bias. Put simply, we tend to believe that our internal emotional states are more obvious to others than they truly are.

The final step in helping Keating transform her stage fright into passionate shows was changing her interpretation of the fear. In her practice at the public transit stations, she learned that anxiety can actually facilitate a performance. It can augment your performances if you learn to interpret the fear that way. Says Clark:

The move from a debilitative view of performance anxiety to a facilitative one is more than a mere sleight of hand. Several studies have shown that a major difference between novice and accomplished performers isn’t how much fear they have but how they frame that fear.

So, in summary, here’s how Keating demonstrates for us a way to overcome performance anxiety:

• Keep the focus off yourself, and on the people you are playing for. Attempt to have some fun!
• Know that the folks in the audience don’t know how nervous you are. In fact, they are blind to the psychological mess that is happening in you.
• Interpret fear as your ally … it’s normal, and can help you perform even better!
• Attach your performance to a higher cause. You are offering a gift, and it’s the gift—and not the perfection—that’s important.

For a great piece on overcoming public speaking, click here.

Photo courtesy of www.musicartsschool.org.

I’m cheap and I’m tacky. Yes I am. Proud of it!

Is that why I’ve been placed on probation?

Yes. A two-day probation. Like the kind I used to get in Catholic grade school when I couldn’t stop giggling in church or cheated on a test because I was too embarrassed to confess to my teacher that I couldn’t read.

I hadn’t expected the blow from my networking machine, Facebook, my BFF who is the gateway to so many random, pathetic, but oh so entertaining dialogues and makes getting anything done during the workday really freakin’ hard … my imaginary pal who I was unable to give up for Lent because I missed him so badly. Through Facebook I could weasel my way into the networks of countless journalists across the nation!

Or not.

Without any warning (even the nuns gave me three tries!) I was issued the “Dear John” letter that explained I had been placed on probation for trying to friend too many people whom I didn’t know.

Ouch.

For two days I can’t friend anyone that I don’t know. How they know who is my buddy in real life is beyond me, and freaks me out a tad, actually. If my behavior doesn’t improve over the next two days, my friending rights will be abolished indefinitely.

Say it isn’t so!

I got flashbacks of sitting in the corner for passing notes in class in the fourth grade, for explaining why I was throwing food at lunch in junior high (You really want to know? I was anorexic and didn’t want to eat it.) And, ah yes, the afternoon I got busted for smuggling vodka into band camp. I was immediately thrown off the dance team and my parents were notified. I wonder if Facebook has contacted my mom yet. It’s a good thing my dad is already dead! He would have been pissed that I was abusing the system in such an unbecoming way.

Really … WTF? The social network that has the word network as part of its essence, fabric, make-up?

And seriously. How did they know those people don’t know me. Were they asked my birthday and mom’s maiden name? My favorite movie or the city of my first job? I mean, I didn’t try to friend a perfect stranger. I limited myself to folks (working at prestigious journalism outlets) with whom I shared at least 25 mutual friends. Did they nark on me? Do they really have that much time to nark on me? Aren’t they supposed to be writing really important articles that all of us will read and comment on?

So I did the responsible thing and posted as my status that I had been put on probation. By Facebook. The comments are great Seinfeld material. Among them:

Didn’t Thomas Jefferson advocate for separation of church and internet?

It happened to me. I kept friending my mother and she kept ignoring me.

What would happens if I used a bad word? Something worse than “nark”?

Let’s try it! Shit, damn, hell.

I thank God my mother is nowhere near here.

Do you think all of us will have detention?

I also role play here, or did, and my character was obliterated by the power that be here.

And here is where I feel as though I’ve just joined the seminary:

They flash me three friends who I “might” know, with whom I share 65 mutual friends. I recognize their names. I think I’ve emailed them once before. Oh my God, one was my maid of honor! But alas. I can’t press “add Friend.” Facebook can advertise. They can name drop all they want and throw it in my face, but I have to look at the screen and take my finger off the mouse. Just as you do in every Catholic institution.

Cruel! Downright cruel!

So I guess I may have to buy that expensive media database after all. Or maybe spend more time on LinkedIn. Or maybe start my own social networking site where you can, um, network!

The almond-shaped clump of tissue called the amygdala can be a real troublemaker. Whenever you sense potential danger (26 voice-mails on your cell phone coming to life like the Nutcracker), the amygdala triggers an “oh, crap!” reaction, pumping adrenaline and other (not so great) hormones into your bloodstream.

A fraction of a second later, the higher, more educated, evolved, sophisticated (Harvard professor type) region of the brain gets the signal and takes on the case, digging for the truth, sometimes accusing the amygdala of being an over-reactive alarmist. Unfortunately we experience fear more vividly than we do a rational response, and can sometimes make decisions based on the immature brat of our amygdala.

The trick is teaching the amygdala to chill out while you get the real story from the upper regions of the brain, where you’ll get a more thoughtful, considerate analysis.

In other words, try not to act like a monkey.

Having been asked to give one in May to my alma mater, Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, I have been studying Commencement addresses of the pros: J.K. Rowling, Anna Quindlen, Oprah Winfrey, and Steve Jobs. And here’s what all of them had in common: suffering.

Yep. The primary theme in each of these essays is that suffering is the rubble on which success is built. I’m sure that you can bypass suffering altogether, but then you’d have a rather boring Commencement speech. I’ve read some of those too.

It’s the First Noble Truth of Buddhism: “Life is suffering.”

I’m very comfortable with that.

Because I agree with that statement wholeheartedly.

However, not everyone does. In writing my speech I came across some very different philosophies. One friend told me that my early draft was depressing. “This is not going to inspire college kids,” she said. “It’s pretty much saying that life is one hard test after another, but you get lucky every so often with a moment of happiness.”

“Yep,” I said. “That’s accurate, don’t you think?”

“No. I don’t,” she responded. “I would say that life is mostly good with an occasional moment of hardship.”

“Wow. Really? What kind of drugs are you taking?”

So I revised my essay it to be a perkier piece, spreading sunshine over the 10 minutes. I devoted paragraphs to the many joys of life: beautiful sunsets, babies born, weddings, yada yada through a little scrapbook of happy events. Life is one fun adventure and you are lucky because you are just beginning yours!

But somewhere in the process I lost my voice, my story, and the wisdom I earned in the psych ward. Not on peaceful walks with my dogs. Not while kayaking the beautiful fingers of the Chesapeake. All the good stuff came from intensely painful moments back when I was begging God for a malignant tumor. Those times became the irritating grains within the oyster shell that emerged as pearls.

Maybe I am a pessimist, but I do think life is pretty damn hard. Some days are easier, of course, but most, still, are pretty hard … If I’m not making myself swim 150 laps in the morning and practicing happiness exercises to better access my prefrontal cortex, (home of rational thought) then I’m putting a big old harness on the amygdala (fear center) of the brain, or trying to put the little almond shaped bugger down for a nap.

To be perfectly honest, I am always struggling with some kind of distorted thought, from jumping to conclusions to black and white thinking. I now have a handy dandy tool set with which I can untwist the suckers, but it’s work. Hard work. Every day. Not to say that I don’t believe that life is full of joy and hope, light and goodness. I believe very much in transcendence and redemption. But pain is still underneath it all. And then I read the newspaper and realize that I am among the most fortunate. If I struggle on a daily basis, then think of what a woman in Congo must feel like.

Back before I wrote Beyond Blue, I suspected I was alone with this jaded view. But the situations and problems of my readers have truly humbled me. Especially those cursed by chronic pain or some kind of chronic illness on top of depression and anxiety. For them, every day presents one challenge after another. And no, I don’t think they brought it all on themselves. I think those that say such things should take a course in compassion.

Yes, with meditation and yoga, and effective cognitive behavioral therapy and proper nutrition we can rewire the pathways in the brain to be more optimistic. The brain is plastic! By doing so we can convert unconscious messages of pain to ones of gratitude.

But at the end of the day, I’m still going to say life is suffering.

M. Scott Peck begins his classic, “The Road Less Traveled” with three powerful words: “Life is difficult.”

And I’m okay with that. For real. I’m okay if the next 40 years are as hard as the first 40 have been. Because what I want more than happiness or bliss is peace, and I do get a great sense of peace when I can turn my pain into something good, to transform it as best I can to service.

From the other Commencement speakers I admire:

Turn your wounds into wisdom. You will be wounded many times in your life. You’ll make mistakes. Some people will call them failures but I have learned that failure is really God’s way of saying, “Excuse me, you’re moving in the wrong direction.” –Oprah Winfrey

Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have changed at all. And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly. –Anna Quindlen

Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends who value was truly above the price of rubies. The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. –J. K. Rowling

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. –Steve Jobs

Recently I’ve had two people remove me as a friend on Facebook. Like that feels good. Was it my annoying status updates? The singing video that I uploaded (“A Few of My Favorite Things” … check it out )? I know I was off-key. Oh, the picture of the old lady that I posted and said it was me. You are that old lady? Geez… Sorry.

Frankly I don’t know what’s worse: the e-mails and the phone calls that aren’t returned, or the letter (or really painful conversation) explaining why the friendship is toxic and needs to be terminated. It all feels the same: REJECTION. Like you’re back in the sixth grade again, with bad acne, and the boys want to date your pretty and popular twin sister (that’s when my self-esteem issues started).

At any rate, there are ways you can get closure even when you don’t know why you’ve been dumped. Here are a few I try (every time I’m removed from someone’s friend list on Facebook).

1. Compose a good-bye letter.

Of course, no one is going to read it. But that’s not the point. The exercise of writing it is astonishingly therapeutic. I’ve written many old boyfriends letters that I never sent, some family members, and my father after he died. I needed a way to communicate that was for purely selfish reasons. So that I could hear myself say good-bye to this person that I really liked, or loved, or enjoyed having as a Facebook friend.

2. Pluck out the feeling.

Sometimes feelings need a little nudging in order for us to acknowledge and process them. It’s like they are seeds stuck in a shell, and we need to scoop them out in order to free them. Some helpful exercises for scooping out the seeds of rejection and sadness from a terminated friendship: looking through pictures of trips together or graduation from high school or college, listening to songs that trigger memories, or frequenting the coffee shop where you used to meet. They all help you to mourn an ending.

3. Plan a ritual.

I know this sounds voodoo-ish, actually that’s a step I’m getting to. But seriously, it’s not like you have a funeral to go to, or any way of moving through this in a symbolic way that can help you process your emotions. So you’re going have to create one … a ceremony of sorts.

After it was clear to me that an old boyfriend in college was simply not into me, I took the beautiful poem that he wrote me to a cemetery on the campus of Saint Mary’s College. I knelt there, ripped up the poem, and threw the pieces of paper into the air, crying (really hard). The most amazing thing happened. It started snowing. Right at that very second. It was like the heavens heard my cry, and the angels were tearing up sheets of paper right along with me. You don’t need the snow to feel better, though. Just the ripping should move you to a better place.

4. Fill the space with something new.

This is true for any loss. When I stopped drinking I had to come up with some sober activities ASAP. Ditto when I stopped smoking. And on down the addiction list … It always feels uncomfortable at first. That’s a good sign. It means you are processing emotions, which is part of closure. If it felt cozy, then I’d say you weren’t doing it right. But change can be fun and challenging at the same time. And you’re allowed to use four lettered words if you don’t like it at first, unless you’ve given those up too.

5. Get even.

Here’s where the voodoo comes in handy. Only kidding, of course, but I did tell Holly that if that bridesmaid/friend who dissed her (Holly) after the wedding comes begging for friendship later, when the chick is on husband number two, Holly has every right to dis her right back.

6. Make a plan.

I don’t really advise getting even, but I do recommend you think about what you might do if the friend comes begging back. Because it happens. Or you run into her at the bank or the grocery, and your mouth opens but no noise comes out. Best to have a script, to think it through: if this person wants into my life again, should I let her? That’s a hard one. Go back and view my video in order to answer that question. I ask myself this: Does the relationship empower me, or deflate me? Does this person build me up or tear me down? And can I be sincere–truly sincere–when I’m with her?

7. Stay with the pain.

You knew I was going here, because I always do. Back to Henri Nouwen’s words, about staying with the loneliness, about feeling it, not rushing into activity to skip over it … about going through it, not around it. He writes:

It is not easy to stay with your loneliness. …. But when you can acknowledge your loneliness in a safe, contained place, you make your pain available for healing.