Monday, October 15, 2012

How to be happy

A patient told me a few days ago that he had seen a therapist previously for treatment for his depression.  He quoted the therapist as saying "You have to choose happiness".  He commented that if he knew how to do that he already would have.

I agree with him.  We can't "choose" happiness. Happiness happens while we're busy doing other things.  Happiness is something that has already happened while we weren't thinking about it   But there is something we can do to make it possible.

We can choose to let go unhappiness.  When Buddhists say "suffering is optional", that is exactly what they mean.  It is possible to let go our old resentments, hatreds, grievances and fears.  Dwelling on them and making them part of us is how we make happiness impossible.  We can simply let them go.  We don't have to let them define our lives.  If something in our past seems unfinished, we can choose to finish it and let it go.  We can give up the hope of having a better childhood.

 Happiness can happen by itself when we're not busy being miserable.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Religious Corruption

Driving past a large church, empty during the week for the most part, I was struck by how much money church-goers spend on possessions.  While I am not a Christian, I am fairly well acquainted with Christian beliefs, and I began thinking sbout how anti-Christian such behaviors are, yet how widespread.  Early Christians met in small groups, much as the Jews of their day. They met in one or another's home;  they knew each other and reinforced each other's faith.  They knew what modern day Christians have mostly forgotten:  ten percent of their money was to be spent to help the poor, the sick and disabled, the children in need.  It was NOT to be spent on buildings and salaries and decorations and automobiles for the minister.  Every penny spent on such things is in direct contravention of what Jesus taught.  Whatever your religious practices, you should not call yourself a practicing Christian unless you  are doing what Christ instructed you to do.  One need not be a Christian to dislike hypocracy.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Election corruption

As long as we require politicians to finance their campaigns by soliciting voluntary contributions, we are supporting a system in which every single elected official owes more to the money men than to his electorate,  We absolutely know that the elected politician owes a debt to the contributor.  How could we possibly think that they can vote independently from their debts?  Yer we allow it, while self-righteously condemning the corruption and bias in public office, as if we didn't know what was going on.  We  are exactly as corrupt as they are.  Unless and until we are willing to stop this practice we cannot expect to have politicians in office who can genuinely vote on the issues in an unbiased way.

So let's stop complaining about corruption in a system we have complacently allowed to become corrupted right in front of our eyes.   We allowed it.  We need to stop it.  We cannot expect it to be a better system until we ourselves change what we are allowing to happen.

Sunday, July 08, 2012

Starting psychotherapy

When people come to see a psychologist/psychotherapist, they have relatively little information as to what to expect, other than what they have picked up incidentally from television dramas and the like.  Some therapists like to provide as little information as possible (a tactic dating back to early psychoanalysis) in order to determine what the assumptions and preconceptions the prospective client may have.
What the patient understands and expects may have little in common with what the therapist understands.  Often patients expect that we will fix something that hurts psychologically, just as they would expect a physician to fix something that is wrong physically.  They may take a passive stance, waiting for the therapist to direct or prescribe just as a physician might.  When the therapist doesn't do that, the client has no clear idea as to what should happen next in their treatment.

Currently I am starting new patients off with a short introduction.  Of course, it begins with some questions intended to get an idea as to what might be wrong.  If the problem is a simple reduction in unpleasant symptoms, such as a recent depression or sudden increase in anxiety, I can tell them what techniques I will be using and about how long it will take.  I can tell them what the financial and personal  costs are likely to be.  I can tell them exactly what I expect them to do and the outcomes they can anticipate.  But if the problem is a more complex one, such as when the symptoms arise from conflicting values and/or a dysfunctional life style, I use a different approach.

I tell them something like the following:  I will work with you to show you how to make changes in your life.  I can't make the changes for you.  You will have to decide what kind of person you wish to become over the years. You are in charge of who you will become, and every choice you make will brings your goal closer or moves it further from you.   Sometimes people make changes quickly;  more often they need more time to make them, so I can't tell you how long this might take.  I believe that is up to you.  My job will be to get you started along that path and show you how to continue it on your own. 

 To help you make those changes, I need to know who and what you are now.  I need to know what you believe and how you behave in accordance with what you believe.   Your part in this process is to demand of yourself uncompromising honesty.  Lies or dishonesty, whether of omission or commision, will stop the process of change.  Begin by telling me about yourself, what is important to you and what doesn't work, and we'll see how it goes. 

Since new patients are frequently uncomfortable with the idea of criticising the therapist, I am hoping that you as a reader will be willing to comment as to how you might respond to this beginning to therapy.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Losing weight

Like most psychologists, I see many obese patients.  They inevitably have the same story of how they have tried to lose weight or actually lost it, only to immediately regain the weight they had so laboriously lost. 

I have come to a working conclusion as to what went wrong and what might be tried to fix the problem.  All these patients had something in common beside their overeating:  what little pleasure they had in their lives came from eating.  They had no real fun or pleasure from other sources, except such passive pleasures as watching television, playing around on a computer or reading.  When they set themselves to losing weight, they became increasingly unhappy.  The primary source of joy in their lives was shut off.  Their only positive rewards were in what seemed a distant future.

The solution to the problem may lie in the following suggestion:  We should not give up eating until we have developed another source of pleasure in our lives that is as frequent and rewarding as food.  Food is easily obtained and is always satisfying.  What will we find to replace it?  Exercising is rarely a source of joy even remotely comparable to food, so that's not going to do it.  No one prescription will suffice, because the source of our happiness and joy is peculiar to us as individuals.  We must have access to this source of satisfaction as readily as we do to food.

It's hard to lose weight.  It becomes harder when our lives are joyless.  And we can't count on joy in the future.

Monday, June 04, 2012

The Price of Personal Freedom


Personal freedom and its costsThe central idea found in Buddhist philosophy (especially in Zen Buddhism) is “enlightenment”, which means (among other things) the recognition of one’s absolute personal freedom.  Freedom, as described by Zen philosophers, arises from full awareness (satori), which in turn arises from the recognition that all human rules and boundaries are essentially self-created and self-imposed.  Freedom thus presents the individual with the possibility of existing in a boundless, open universe which imposes no personal nor moral obligations.

Humans seem to prefer to operate as if they had far fewer choices than in fact they have.  Perhaps we find having essentially limitless choices overwhelming.  Certainly many (or most) of us are more comfortable with a relatively limited outlook, restricted choices, some self-chosen obligations and the like.  Where there is an empty boundless plain, we like to construct fences and to constrict our world to what we have confined inside them.  By doing so we easily may become less aware of the choices that we make every minute.  In a sense we usually prefer to operate on automatic pilot, as if all our choices have already been made and don’t require any further thought.

It’s not very practical or useful, for instance, to try to choose among the hundreds of actual choices available to us each second.  For instance, at every intersection we can choose another direction, or decide to get out of the car and walk, or hitch a ride with a stranger to wherever they may be going, and so endlessly on.  It’s far easier to ignore all the choices that we could make, or to assume that they are already irrevocably made, and just keep on keeping on.  By limiting our awareness of our choices we gain convenience and ease but we lose some of our sense of personal freedom.

Every day I see people who feel “trapped” and powerless, unable to find ways to change their situation or even to see that there might be such ways.   I sometimes remind them that there is literally nothing to stop them from “changing your name and moving to Seattle”.  They tend to treat such a comment as a joke.  Another “joke” I tell people:  A drunk presses up against a light pole on all sides.  After he goes completely around, he falls to his knees and shouts "I'm walled in!"

Freedom is a very real thing.  Zen literature is full of examples of Buddhist monks demonstrating the abitrariness of their rules:  The student asks the master “What is the nature of the Buddha?” and receives an arbitrary answer:  a dried up stick, or perhaps a slap in the face.   The point is made that although the student is obeying "the rules" as he sees them, the master is demonstrating the triviality of the rules themselves by stepping "outside the box", and it is hoped that the student will awaken to reality.

 It should be clear that freedom is not something we achieve through meditation (or medication) but something that we already have. We already have the capability of acting with freedom, that is, without reference to what we consider to be "the rules".  We can do as we like.  We can go off “automatic pilot” and control our lives directly.  We can move to Seattle and change our name.  Nothing stops us but our unwillingess to act freely. However, what is not clear is that the price for such freedom may not only be the loss of personal possessions but the end of our belonging to others that we love.

No human relationship can survive in the total absence of rules.  We like to be able to predict what will happen at dinnertime tonight, at least to some degree.  We want some stability in our relationships and our lives.  In fact, we are willing to sacrifice some of our freedom in order to obtain stability and predictability.  In that process, however, we may forget that the sacrifice of some personal freedom is a choice, and that we may unmake that choice just as we made it.  

Freedom means no obligations of any kind, given or taken.  We are free to walk away from our job or our marriage, for instance, but we can't take them with us.  It is true that our "obligations" are arbitrary and self-imposed;  at the same time there is a price for discarding them.  Our relationships become unstable or disintegrate entirely.  Who will stay with us and love us if we cannot be expected to repay the gift?  Who will pay us money for work that we may or may not do?  It's not an accident that the wise Masters in Zen stories live alone in the forest, or teach for handouts.  And there seems to be nothing in the stories about them that implies happiness or satisfaction.  Freedom?  Yes indeed, but without the human relationships that give our lives much of their meaning.

It's also the case that we tend to become afraid of freedom.  When choices are actually endless, how do we make one?  Perhaps it doesn't matter what path we choose, but most people don't find the prospect of a trackless, pathless universe very comforting.  We tend to choose the devils we know rather than those we don't know.  We also forget that this act is a choice.  We are not limited unless we choose to be.  There is also a great deal to be said for being limited as long as we do not forget that being limited is a choice.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Congress And The Pig Party

Make no mistake. Both parties are charter members of the Pig Party, which entitles them to vote for their own salaries, benefits including health care insurance better than citizens can get, and retirement for life at a high rate of pay for any service at all in Congress.

Why did we ever think that Congress should set its own benefits? Why did we ever think that the Pig Party members should be allowed totally free access to the feeding trough without any limits or supervision?

It seems to me a simple enough proposition: All benefits, pay, retirement and the like, should be voted on by the entire populace during Presidential elections. We're paying these Pigs, and we should be the ones who decide how much they should be paid.

And the second thing that needs to be corrected IMMEDIATELY is to stop allowing unrelated "riders" and "amendments" to bills. This obviously allows Pig Party members to attach unacceptable bills to bills that are important and necessary, and hold important up bills indefinitely in order to arrange greater access to the Pig Trough.

And the third thing we need are (is?) term limits. Although I suspect if we made the above changes they would be willing to get out faster.

And the fourth thing we need is public and LIMITED funding for advertising, tv and the like for applicants for public office. National funding for presidential elections keeps the Presidency from being sold to the candidate with the greatest access to private funds. Local funding should help keep Congressional seats from being sold to the fattest Pig. But the funding has to be limited so that the richest Piggy candidate doesn't get any advantage.

I feel better now. Thanks for listening.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Another Presidential Magic Trick

It should be obvious that the President has relatively little to do with the tax structure and government expenditures/debts. Yet debts and taxes are talked about as if the President were responsible, when in fact, and by Consititutional law, the Congress is solely responsible for all these items. The President cannot make a new law. He can only act on the laws passed by Congress.

In many ways the President is a figurehead and a whipping boy, serving to take the blame for the sins of Congress. The media focuses on the election of the President as if it really mattered, when what the American people should be paying attention to are who we elect and re-elect to Congress. We are encouraged to focus on the Presidential election, just as the stage magician urges us to look at the wrong hand. This simple trick serves to keep us functionally almost impotent.

Instead of the Presidential election occupying our attention, we should be looking at the voting records of those who represent us in Congress. We should be looking at how they voted on the bank bail-out, and how they monitored the expenditure of the billions spent and where that money went. We should be looking at how they vote on tax structures, public health and welfare, Social Security. They should not be allowed to continue cheating the American voters and blaming it on the sacrificial lamb, the President.

I am in favor of voting them out.