TEN TIPS TO USING YOUR DARK SIDE TO LIVE WELL

 

1. Anger

Ask yourself what you’re angry about.  If you’re not angry about anything now, think about the last time you were angry.  Listen to what you’re anger is telling you.  What is it that you want to get rid of, protect yourself against, overcome?  What is keeping you from taking care of yourself?  Use the energy in the anger to do something about it.

 

Anger is extremely useful. It tells us what we don’t like, what is threatening us, what we want to get rid of and be careful about. And it gives us the energy we need to address things we don’t like and want to get rid of or protect ourselves against. But how we use it makes a big difference. O.J. Simpson used his anger in a way that ruined his life. Martin Luther King used his anger to fuel leadership of a non-violent civil rights movement that essentially wiped out blatant and legally protected racial segregation in this country. When I write this, it makes it sound easy. You just have to use your anger in a smart and benevolent way. But, of course, it isn’t easy at all. It’s very difficult and complicated. One of the things that makes it difficult is that, when we are in the grip of the first rush of anger, when we’re in the “throws” of it, we can’t think very well. We can’t use our rational faculty. Somehow, Martin Luther King was able to step back from the emotional rush of the anger, to get enough distance from that rush of adrenalin so that he could put his rational faculty to work in building an effective non-violent movement for social change. O.J. Simpson was unable to engage his rational faculty. What he did was totally irrational. After all, he threw away a life that was the envy of a nation of men. How can we understand and use this difference?

One way is to recognize that, in many cases, anger sits on top of three other emotions – shame, hurt and fear. If we can stop long enough to ask ourselves, “What is underneath this anger?” and get in touch with the shame, hurt and fear, we may be able to gain the space we need to engage our rational faculty.

I learned this lesson one day playing basketball. It was shortly after my therapist had pointed out this relationship between anger and the hurt, fear and shame that is sometimes underneath it. I had just gone up to block a shot; one of my teammates said “that looked like a foul” so I gave the other team the ball but as I was doing that I said to the man I was guarding, “I don’t think I fouled him.” He looked at me and said, “We don’t talk here; we play.” My immediate impulse was to blow up and tell him to go you know where – which would have ended the game one way or another.  But I caught myself and realized that he had shamed me. So I kept quiet and let the shame sink in as I played. I began to think, “Maybe I do talk too much; maybe it would work better if I just shut up and played.” At the end of the game, my opponent and I shook hands and we eventually became pretty good friends.

When it is bottled up and not expressed, anger is a killer. It makes people sick and it makes them crazy. This is because there is lots of energy in anger. If that energy isn’t expressed, it goes inside and wreaks havoc. I have treated numerous patients who suffer from fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is the latest diagnosis that is given to people who are troubled by constant pain and weakness but whose lab reports and x-rays come up negative. All of these patients have trouble expressing anger. They are nice people, reasonable and understanding. They don’t want to rock the boat or cause problems. They don’t want other people to see them as troublemakers or ingrates. They don’t know how to be mean and assertive. They aren’t comfortable being clear about what they want and going after it with a vengeance. They haven’t learned how to use their anger.

Interestingly, many of these patients had trouble with their mothers. Here are three brief profiles. Roberta’s mother was an alcoholic. Like most children of alcoholics, Roberta had to take care of her mother. At the age of 10, she became a caregiver for her mother, having to take responsibility for herself and her mother and having to spend lots of energy covering it all up. As she entered her early 20’s, her relationship with her mother began to change. They became closer and more friendly and supportive of each other. Just as they were beginning to heal some of their wounds, her mother committed suicide.

Isabel came to me because she had a history of sabotaging herself. She would take a job or begin studying and perform so well that she was a star. Then, all of a sudden and inexplicably, she would stop going to class, get into trouble with co-workers, make inexplicable mistakes, quit or get fired. She grew up in a household in which her father absolutely doted on her. She was the “apple of his eye.” He paid lots of attention to her and helped her grow into a very talented young woman. At the same time, her mother was being neglected. Resentful and angry and either unable or unwilling to confront her husband, she took it out on her daughter, constantly criticizing, nagging, berating. No matter how hard she tried, there was nothing Isabel could do to please her mother.

Margie’s mother was a businesswoman, a firm taskmaster. Margie could never do anything well enough to please her mother. Her mother would ask her to clean the living room, check on it, say “Oh, this will never do” and get her older sister to finish it up. One evening at the dinner table, Margie mildly suggested that her mother might not have worked very hard that day, a transgression that earned her a beating from her father and icy disdain from her mother. In her 40’s Margie was still obsessed with pleasing her mother.

None of these women had learned to express the anger towards her mother and all were suffering from it. After all, it’s not easy to be angry with our parents. They have given us the gift of life and sacrificed on our behalf. Somewhere deep inside, we know they have done the best they could, have had to deal with their own demons and live their own lives. In many cases, they have let us know that it’s not OK to be angry with them. The great psychoanalyst Alice Miller found after working for years as a therapist that there was a simple formula for making people mentally ill. All you had to do was not let them be who they were and, when they got angry about it, not let them be angry. That’s a good description of what goes on in many households today and of how the public schools treat their students. So here’s the dilemma. We need to acknowledge our anger towards our parents and find ways of expressing it even though we know they aren’t to blame, they didn’t want to hurt us and they were being driven by their own relentless, demanding needs. Following are three options for dealing with this dilemma:

§ Find a psychotherapist who understands the importance of this process and will help you go through it;

§ Write about your anger towards your parents. Don’t edit what you write. Just write it in a kind of automatic writing in which you are letting the words flow out of your mind;

§ Use the chair technique described below on page 137 to verbally express your anger towards your parents.

One of the benefits of doing this work is that, after you express your anger towards your parents, you’ll find it much easier to forgive them and love them for what they have given you. But the greatest benefit is that you will find ways of using the energy in your anger to create, build, develop and contribute to other people instead of leaving the energy trapped inside, sapping your vitality and making you sick.

Anger can also be useful in helping us become more considerate of other people. When I get angry at someone else’s behavior, it tells me what makes other people angry, an insight I can use to be more considerate of others. I, for example, become angry when drivers pull in front of me making me stop or slow down. This has taught me to be more careful about pulling out in front of other drivers.

This excerpt is taken from Harness Your Dark Side. To buy the book click here.

     

    2. Stress

    The next time you feel stressed – in your gut, your head, your chest, your eyes or anywhere else, ask yourself what is threatening you or what is being demanded of you and use the energy in the stress response to deal with the threat or meet the demand. If you decide not to deal with the threat or meet the demand, find some other ways of using the energy in the stress response so that it doesn’t hurt you. 

     

     

    So how do you identify what it is that is causing the threat or demand? One good way of starting is to ask yourself: What is getting in the way of my loving and working in the way I want to? (Here I need to include an aside about the word “work”. When we use the word “work” in the context of stress management, we are talking about how we express ourselves, how we use our minds, bodies, hearts, voices, our creativity and problem-solving ability.  Some people are able to do this at their jobs. Those who aren’t have to find ways of expressing themselves outside of their jobs – in the evenings, on weekends, on vacations.). This is a key question because human beings have an innate drive to love and work as they want to. And anything that gets in the way of that drive will be experienced as threat and will cause a stress response.  Since the drive to love and work is innate and is part of our reptilian brains, you don’t have much choice over whether you express it or not. It’s not as if you can easily say, “Oh well, I’ll just have to learn to live without loving and working the way I want to.” Yes, you can override those drives and learn to live without expressing them, but you run a great risk of paying a price in terms of your health and well-being.

    So this is a crucial question for you: Are you loving and working in the ways that you want to?  If your answer to that crucial question is “No,” then you ask the next question: What is getting in the way of my loving and working in the way I want to? Your honest answer to that question will help you identify the threat or demand which is causing the stress in your life. Identifying the threat is a crucial first step in managing stress. But now comes the hard part. Because what is getting in the way and causing the threat is probably either another person, some moral principle or rule that you have decided to live by, or some fear, inability, deficit or block inside yourself. Whatever it is, it is not going to be easy to deal with. If it were easy to deal with you would have already dealt with it. It would be a no-brainer. So it takes courage to be willing to know what is causing the threat or demand and what has to be dealt with. And - here’s the rub - dealing with it is going to be difficult, uncomfortable and stressful. Yes, in order to deal with the threat that is causing the harmful “distress” in your life, you are going to have to use the energy from the stress response. That is why the First Principle of Stress Management is:

     

    NEVER SEEK COMFORT OR AVOID DISCOMFORT

    Because, if you seek comfort, you won’t deal with the threat or demand that is causing the harmful and uncomfortable stress in your life. And you will buy comfort in the short run at the expense of discomfort in the long run. 

     It is very important that you honor this First Principle of Stress Management. Some of you may have been exposed to stress management techniques that focus on reframing the threat, thinking yourself out of it. This is the “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff – and It’s All Small Stuff” approach to stress management. For the small number of people who tend to exaggerate threats or see threat where none is there, this may be a good approach. But for most of us it is very dangerous: dangerous because some stuff is not small stuff. Loving and working the way you want to love and work is not small stuff. If you don’t deal with the small stuff, it will become big stuff and then you’ve got more stress and difficulty to deal with. Not dealing with the small stuff can lead in the long run to a world of hurt. It also won’t work to avoid stress. Because if you try to avoid it, you again won’t be addressing threat or taking the action that is being demanded of you and, in the long run, you’ll be under even worse stress.

     This is a dilemma. If you decide not to address the threat you are going to be living with it and, therefore, experiencing high levels of stress. And, if you decide to address it, you’re going to be facing the stress associated with taking uncomfortable and scary action and running into the inevitable, roadblocks, hiatuses and disappointments along the way. It’s time to use the Second Principle of Stress Management.

     

    FIND HEALTHY WAYS TO USE THE ENERGY IN THE STRESS RESPONSE

     

    Following is a list of some ways of doing that:

    1. Find a creative activity to engage in. This might be some artistic work, building something, creating an organization or contributing to an already existing one or engaging in competitive sports.

    2. Get some vigorous exercise every day. Spend at least 30 minutes every day in either running, aerobic walking, swimming, bicycle riding, rowing or some other activity that gets your heart beat up to 80 percent of maximum. If you feel too tired to do it, do it anyway. You’ll feel a lot more energetic after you do.

    3. Engage in some kind of relaxation practice. This can include meditation, yoga or simple relaxation exercises.

    4. Talk with a friend, confidante, counselor, therapist, clergyman or spouse about the threat with which you are dealing. Find someone who is just willing to listen and encourage you to talk without trying to solve your problem for you.

    5. Find a place where you can scream bloody murder and/or pound on something. I have used my car after closing the windows and getting on the Interstate or some other safe road on which I don’t have to pay too much attention. The car is good for this. You can also find a secluded spot, park the car and do it or walk deep into the woods or desert beyond the reach of civilization and do it. When you’re doing it, know that it is totally normal, natural and healthy to have that kind of rage in you and to express it in that way.

    6.  Do some kind of volunteer work that involves directly helping people: working at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter, coaching kids, candy-striping at a hospital.

    7. Spend some time writing about traumatic experiences you have suffered and/or things that are upsetting you, threatening you, embarrassing you. Explore your deepest thoughts and feelings and why you feel the way you do. Write about your “negative” feelings such as sadness, hurt, anger, hate, fear and guilt. Write about the most emotionally painful experiences of your life. Don’t edit or worry about how it sounds or that it might be petty, selfish or stupid.

        This excerpt is taken from pages 48, 49, 53 and 54 of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side Click here to buy the book

      Hint:  Anything which gets in the way of you loving the way you want to love, expressing yourself the way you want to express yourself (including work) or enjoying life the way you want to enjoy it will trigger the stress response.

       

      3. Accountability

      Pay attention to what happens to you – not what you think you want to happen.  Whatever happened – especially if it’s not what you wanted to happen – ask yourself the following questions:

       

      • How did I contribute to this happening?

      • Why might I have wanted this to happen? 

       

       

      There are some things you can do about this. They are relatively simple but they take some work. And they take some courage and conviction.

      The simplest thing you can do is:

      • Pay attention to what you do and to what happens to you, not to what you think you wanted to do or wanted to happen to you and ask yourself:
        • What does this tell me about what is going on inside of me that I may not be aware of?
        • How did I contribute to doing this or to this happening?
        • Why might I have wanted to do that? or Why might I have wanted that to happen?
      • This is especially helpful when what you have done or what has happened to you is not what you wanted to have happen - is, in fact, something that will cause pain, problems, hardship, unwanted complications.

      This excerpt is taken from pages 73 and 74 of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side. Click here to buy the book.

       

      4. Mistakes

      Pay attention to the mistakes you make – mistakes of speaking, hearing, writing, forgetting, missing appointments, losing things, having accidents, etc.  Ask yourself:

       

      • What is the meaning of this mistake?

      • What can this mistake tell me about what I want, what I don’t want, what I’m afraid of, what I want to avoid, what I like, what I don’t like?

       

       

      Another relatively simple way of getting in touch with your unconscious dynamics is to pay attention to the errors that you make - errors of hearing, speaking, forgetting, losing things and work at making some sense out of them, perhaps finding a pattern in them, some meaning from them. I, for instance, will often say my “mother” when I want to say my “wife.” The significance of that is pretty clear. In fact, my wife is very much like my mother in some ways. Her father is an immigrant. She is a social worker. She is basically introverted. I long ago accepted the fact that one of the reasons I fell in love with my wife was to work on some of the issues I had with my mother.

      In one of my therapy sessions I said, “I was 43 years old when my father was born,” inverting the fact that my father was 43 years old when I was born. After working for a while on what the slip might mean, I came to see the significance of it: It wasn’t until I was around 43 years old that I could see and accept my father as he was – a relatively normal human being with good points and bad points, worthy of neither idolization nor demonization.

      In the process of telling me a story, a colleague of mine said “my second wife” which was a slip since he was married to a first wife. The slip doesn’t mean that he is going to have a second wife but it certainly suggests that something might be going on inside that he might want to take a look at.

      Forgetting is a common way for unconscious dynamics to play themselves out. As I say to persons who are having a hard time owning the significance of their forgetting: “Funny thing, I’ve never forgotten a date with a woman who I cared about or a date to play tennis or golf.”

      This excerpt is taken from pages 84 and 85 of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side. Click here to buy the book.

       


      5. Thoughts

      The next time you’re aware of feeling bad, down, sad, depressed, anxious, stressed, ask yourself these questions:

       

      • What am I thinking?  What thoughts are in my head?

      • To what extent are those thoughts realistic, supported by evidence and helpful?

      • What are some other thoughts I could have that are more realistic and helpful?

      • If the thoughts that are in my head are not realistic and useful, where are they coming from?  What is behind them? 

      • What can they tell me about the beliefs, attitudes and assumptions that are hidden deep in my psyche? 

      Here’s the good news: You’ve got this wonderful brain that you can use to make sense out of things, plan your future, analyze complicated situations, make decisions, create, imagine and build.

       Here’s the bad news: You’ve got this wonderful brain that you can use to create thoughts that make you feel bad, keep you from doing what you should do and help you do what you shouldn’t do.

       By now most of you have lived long enough to know how this amazingly facile and flexible organ can make you feel miserable and get you into trouble. You’ve had thoughts like these:

        • “I’ll never learn to do this.”
        • “I’m just no good.”
        • “I’ll never be as good as ___________”
        • “I’d better not bring that up because, if I do, things will get worse.”
        • “Let’s face it. I’m a nobody/a loser/a retard/a jerk.”
        • “I’ve taken enough of this. S/he’s going to have to make the first move.”
        • “People are just mean, selfish, competitive, insensitive, prejudiced, dense, stupid (add your favorite adjective). It’s no use. I’m just going to lay low for a while,” or “I’ll find a way to get back at him or her.”
        • “I wonder why s/he’s angry with me.” (When I’m actually angry with him or her).
        • “It’s my own fault. If I just were (smarter, braver, stronger, more loving, less impulsive – choose your adjective), that wouldn’t have happened.”
        • “Things are out of my control. There’s nothing I can do about them.”
        • “What do they expect from me? I never had a chance. I was handicapped from the start.”
        • “Things never work out the way I want them to. It’s really no use trying.”
        • “I should do/be better.”
        • “I shouldn’t have done that/been like that.”
        • “I’m too afraid to do that.”

      The incredible distortion machine and its myriad uses

      What is the function of this kind of thinking? Remember, one of the basic messages from this book is that all of our experiences are there for a reason and are potentially useful. 

      Of course, one possibility is that these thoughts are accurate. Perhaps we really aren’t very good, are at fault, are angry with someone, are seeing the ugliness of the world as it really is. If so, it’s helpful to know the truth and not be in denial. As the saying goes: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t really after you.”

      But more often than not, these kinds of thoughts are distortions, exaggerations, misinterpretations. So what is their function? How do we use them?

      Perhaps these painful, uncomfortable thoughts are designed to make us right. If we’ve been told that we’re no good, undeserving, essentially bad and that we shouldn’t be wrong, these negative thoughts can make us right which is, of course, what we want to be, even if it makes us feel bad.

      Or these thoughts can keep us from being winners and having to suffer the attacks of people who don’t like winners. One of my therapists used to regularly remind me that people like losers. They like people who aren’t threatening and who aren’t better than they are. And, for sure, as soon as you start to be a winner and to be very successful, many people are going to start taking shots at you to bring you down. So these kinds of thoughts can keep you from being a winner and subject to such attack.

      Or you can use these kinds of thoughts as an excuse for not trying hard and running the risk that, even if you put tremendous effort into something, you may not succeed. Thus, they can protect us from disappointment. One of the most successful men I know told me: “Al, I didn’t succeed until I was willing to fail.” What he meant is that he took away all the excuses. He put so much effort and took so much risk that, if he failed, his only explanation was that he wasn’t good enough. That takes courage.

      Thoughts like “It’s no use. It will never work. If I confront him or her, it will make things worse” can be used to avoid risk, to avoid taking the chance that somebody won’t like you or will be mad at you. Some people would rather be miserable than be disliked or considered selfish and difficult.

      Thoughts like “He or she is useless, not worth it” can make one feel superior, even at the expense of being lonely and separated.

      Or maybe we use these thoughts to keep from trying and failing once again. That would certainly be understandable.

      Or some of these thoughts can be used to keep you angry and upset so that you don’t have to deal with the real issues of your life. I’ve sometimes thought that the worst thing that could happen to me would be for my pet peeves and major dislikes to all of a sudden dissolve. What would I do with my righteous indignation if that happened? I’d have to find something else to target.  One of my patients was a very striking African-American woman. She dressed well and always wore her hair in a unique, attractive way. She was married to a white man. Often, she would tell me about how they had gone to a restaurant and “all those jerks were staring at us, Dr. Al; they just couldn’t stand seeing a black woman with a white man.” “Well, Rachel, that might have been the reason they were staring at you,” I would say. “Oh yeah, well what would be some other reason?” she would ask. “They might have been staring at you because you are a very striking woman and you know how to make an entrance and command attention.” “Oh, Dr. Al, that’s bullshit – pardon the expression.”  Maybe Rachel was right. But she was, indeed, a very striking woman. And thinking she could read the minds of the other patrons did keep her angry at white people and led her to react towards them in a distancing way that brought on the very attitude she was imagining.

      Or sometimes we use distorted thinking to avoid feeling guilty or bad. Here are two examples:

      • A man decides that he wants a divorce from his wife. It’s not really because of anything she has done or not done. He’s just tired of being married, wants the excitement and adventure of a single life. But he wouldn’t hurt his wife unless she deserves it. So he makes up reasons for her to deserve it. She doesn’t wear sexy enough clothes. She doesn’t keep the house clean enough. He doesn’t like her friends. She doesn’t understand him. Etc., etc., etc. Instead of being honest with her, he creates reasons for why she deserves to be hurt. 

        This excerpt is taken from pages 56 - 59 of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side. Click here to buy the book.

      6. Jealousy 

      The next time you find yourself feeling jealous, ask yourself:

       

      • Where is this jealousy coming from?

      • What is it telling me about what I want and don’t have?

      • What can I do to get that?

      • Why do I want it?

       

      Jealousy tells us what we want and don’t have, what we are missing; certainly, a useful piece of self-awareness. Knowing what we want is crucial to being able to live well. But we’ve been taught that it’s not quite right to want. It’s OK to need but not to want. There’s something about knowing what we want and going after it with zeal and ferocity that is too self-absorbed, too selfish. Perhaps this is because jealousy has fueled dangerous and harmful behavior. But again, it’s important to separate the feeling from the behavior. The feeling is potentially valuable; the behavior may not be.

      The worst kind of jealousy is the jealousy that is not acknowledged, not understood, not used. Another example from my life. Around age 11 or 12, it seemed as if my father turned on me. Earlier in my life, he would bounce me on his knee, throw me up on the top deck of my bunk bed, playfully bite me. He seemed to delight in my presence. When I hit puberty, that all changed. He began to look at me with disdain, to regard me with a wariness and diffidence that hadn’t been there before. I of course, reacted to that and our relationship during my teenage years was marred by suspiciousness, distrust and veiled hostility. At the time I didn’t know what was going on. Now, I think I do. He was jealous. He certainly had a right to be. I was young, bright and healthy. I had my whole life before me. He was in his mid-fifties, in some ways stuck to his business and having to wrestle with the constraints that most 50-somethings deal with. Worse yet, I was going to use his money to go to college and enter into the adventurous and challenging time of my 20’s and 30’s. Even worse, his wife was paying a lot more attention to me that she was to him.

      I became more aware of this dynamic when my own children reached puberty. I was jealous of them. My son was a strong, good-looking hunk of a young man. He had girls falling all over him, calling at all hours of the night, coming after him, a fortune I had never experienced. My daughter was a wonderful athlete, later to become an outstanding college volleyball player. The biggest regret of my life is that I didn’t play intercollegiate sports.

      The difference between me and my father is that I told my children that I was jealous of them and that jealousy might cause me to behave unreasonably and stupidly towards them. I encourage any readers who think jealousy may be affecting their relationship with their children to bring it up and share it, thereby exposing it to the light of day.

      I once heard a professor talking to his class about the obverse of my situation. You’ve got a 40-year-old mother who’s been married for around 20 years and a 15-year-old daughter. It’s likely that the sexual life of the mother has evened off into a pleasant but not particularly fiery occasional romp in the sack with her husband; for some such women, sex has become even less present than that. On the other hand, there’s this 15-year-old daughter who is just entering into the first stirring of sexual energy and who is looking forward to the exciting blossoming of early sexuality. Only the most heroic of us would be able to avoid at least a slight tinge of jealousy in such a situation. Could it be possible that jealousy as much as anything else fuels the mother’s admonishments to “make sure you get home by a decent hour”, “I don’t think should go out with him” “take care of yourself” and “don’t do anything stupid.”

      The point here is that, perhaps more than any other emotion, jealousy becomes toxic when it goes underground, is repressed and unacknowledged. It’s a difficult emotion to experience and acknowledge. It is uncomfortable. It’s a sign of weakness and it’s against one of the Ten Commandments. It is the antecedent of murder and mayhem. No wonder it is maligned, degraded and given a bad rap. Still, it is valuable and we need to reclaim it and use it as a signal telling us what is missing from our lives and what we want.

      This seems like a good place to write about the dangers of repression. Sigmund Freud was the first psychologist to discover the harm in repression and an important discovery it was. He learned from observing many people that when powerful emotions like jealousy and anger are pushed down and repressed, they don’t go away. Rather they become expressed in harmful, bizarre and perverse ways. When kept inside, they make people ill. When they leak out like the steam in a pressure cooker, they do so in the form of nasty attitudes, hurtful and often self-defeating behavior. Had my father been able to acknowledge and openly express his jealousy, our relationship would have been a lot better and we both would have been happier men.

      This excerpt was taken from pages 31-33 of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side. Click here to buy the book.

       7. Fear

      The next time you find yourself being afraid, ask yourself:

       

      • What exactly am I afraid of?

      • What is the worst thing that can happen?

      • Use your intuition to decide if you are going to walk with the fear or going to stay away from what you are afraid of and protect yourself.

       

      Fear is perhaps the most useful of the “negative” emotions. Fear tells me what I need to be careful about, what can harm me, what is dangerous, what I need to avoid. And it gives me the energy I need to be able to protect myself and do what I need to do. But fear can also be hurtful to me. It can make me avoid doing what I need to do. It can keep me from addressing problems that I need to address. In extreme amounts, it can keep me from leaving the house, interacting with other people and fulfilling my responsibilities. 

      Fear is the trickiest of all emotions and the most difficult one to manage because sometimes it must be listened to and quickly followed with no time for reflection; other times it must be questioned and investigated to see how we should respond to it.

      One way of understanding this difference is to draw a distinction between rational fear and irrational fear. The one enables us to stay alive and kicking; the other keeps us from living the way we want to live, keeps us from being aware of what is going on inside us and outside us. The hard part is knowing the difference. How does one know the difference between rational and irrational fear? I once asked a personal growth program guru that question. His answer: “You just know.” Not very illuminating but perhaps the best answer I could get.

      One way of getting some help with this problem is checking it out with another person, someone you trust and who knows you well. Tell them about your fear and see what their reaction is. I received that kind of help from my therapist. Back in 1984 at the age of 44 I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I had gotten a Master’s degree in Public Administration at age 28, spent 10 years managing city, urban and regional planning activities, precipitously quit a management job at which I had been quite successful, gotten scared and quickly taken another similar job, finally been reorganized out of that position, spent three years nominally as an external consultant but really focused on singing, dancing and acting and had now decided I was going to become an organization development consultant. I knew that pursuing that goal would take me away from the city which my wife loved and didn’t want to leave. In a therapy session I reported two dreams. In one, I had slapped an elegantly dressed woman who had just emerged from a limousine at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street in Manhattan, slapped her so hard that it had spun her around. She put her head down and walked away without saying a word or uttering a sound. In the other I had just laid down on the floor of my office for a short nap and closed my eyes. The vision that appeared was of my wife’s face being hit so hard by a hoe handle that it was distorted as if being seen in one of those mirrors you see at a fun house. My therapist’s response was “Those are good ways of scaring yourself.” I took it to mean that I was scaring myself unnecessarily, that I was in danger of stopping myself from doing something that I wanted to do. In the years that followed, my wife and I found a way of protecting our relationship without requiring her to leave her beloved city or me to abandon my pursuit of organization development consulting.

      Some people refer to this process as “walking with fear”, a useful and comforting metaphor. It’s not that you push fear way, beat it off or run away from it. Rather you say “Hello” to it and bring it along with you as you do what you have set out to do.

      Another way of knowing the difference between rational and irrational fear is to ask yourself: “Is this fear that I feel related in any way to the ways in which I block myself, get in my own way?” One of the keys to psychological health is knowing how you get in your own way, especially how you use thoughts and feelings to stop yourself from doing what you want to do. One of the things I learned in therapy is that I have some fear of being successful and exalted because it will fuel my father’s jealousy of me, a jealousy that was very harmful to me as an adolescent. Given that at the time I became aware of that fear my father was in his late 70's and had turned into a somewhat curmudgeonly but basically mellow and sweet guy, that was certainly an irrational fear. But it was getting in my way nonetheless.  My therapist helped me get in touch with that fear by saying from time to time; “You wouldn’t want to be disloyal to your father by being too successful, would you?”

      So these are examples of times when it made sense for me to walk with my fear and not let it stop me, to say “Hello” to it, bring it along with me and let the energy in it help me do what I needed to do. But what about times when I shouldn’t walk with it, when I should pay attention to it and let it stop me? The story is told of Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic, waiting for an elevator. The elevator doors opened, he looked into it and then stepped back without getting in. The elevator then plunged to the ground floor killing everyone in it. Somebody asked him why he hadn’t gotten into the elevator. “Those people had no aura,” he replied. In that case, it was a good thing that Mr. Cayce didn’t walk with his fear.

      A final way of distinguishing between fear that you should walk with and fear you should carefully heed is to ask yourself the following two questions:

      What is it exactly that I am afraid of?

      What is the worst thing that could happen if I walk with this fear?

      If you are clear about what is scaring you and if you can live with the worst thing that could happen, it makes sense to walk with the fear.

      This excerpt was taken from pages 25-28 of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side. Click here to buy the book.

      8. Getting Along

      The next time you are aware that somebody is behaving in a way that is a problem for you, bring it up with them in a way that won’t harm your relationship, make them defensive or make things worse. Here are some hints on how to do that.

      • Describe what you are noticing. Don’t evaluate it, i.e. say it is bad behavior.

      • Tell the person you are having a problem with what you are noticing. Don’t say you have a solution.

      • Tell the person you’d like to work with them on coming up with some solution.

       

      So what do you do when your perception of somebody else’s behavior - what somebody else is doing or not doing - is creating feelings of anxiety, anger, resentment or fear in you? You tell the person what is going on with you in a way that is not likely to make them defensive. You use the following principles of non-defensive communication that were succinctly described forty years ago in an article by Dr. Jack Gibb.

      Describe, don’t evaluate.

      The most effective opening you can make in this conversation of confrontation is to start with “I” and tell the other person what you are seeing, hearing, and/or feeling. Just describe what you are perceiving without making any judgements or evaluations of it.

      Talk in terms of having a problem, not having a solution.

      Describe how the behavior of the other person is a problem for you. Don’t suggest that you know what to do about it, that you have a solution. Invite the other person to join with you in exploring possible approaches to resolution.

      Don’t be strategic or manipulative.

      As you are describing what is going on with you and your view of the problem, be straightforward and direct. Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t mince words. Don’t put it off on the other person by saying something like “How would you feel if...”

      Be empathetic, not cold and neutral.

      Let the other person know that you realize there are other things in her or his life besides worrying about how he or she’s behavior is affecting you - that there may be plenty of reasons for the behavior that is at issue.

      Speak as an equal, not as a superior.

      This is a good idea even if you are in a position of authority over the other person.

      Be provisional, not certain.

      Let the other person know that you are open to hearing their response, that you’re bringing this matter up in order to explore it, address it, confront it, not to impose a solution that you have already decided upon.

      Obviously, this conversation is not going to be as clean or orderly as suggested by these steps. But, as you have the conversation, keep the steps in mind and use them as a guide.
      We have been working on what to do when the behavior of somebody else creates a problem for you. What about the opposite situation? Somebody comes to you and tells you that your behavior is creating a problem for them. This may well happen to readers of this book who are working at changing themselves and the way in which they live. The people who live with such readers or are close to them will be just as affected by the changes as the readers themselves. 
      Dr. Thomas Gordon has written a number of books that contain useful responses to people who say they are having problems with your behavior. His first and most popular book was called Parent Effectiveness Training. He wrote it to help the parents of teenagers avoid the power struggles that arise in those years without abandoning their responsibilities as parents. Here is the approach that he suggests, again to be regarded as principles rather than a script for a conversation.

      Let the other person know you heard what they said and that you would like to hear more.

      This is what Dr. Gordon called “active listening.” The best way to let the other person know you heard what they said is to repeat it back to them as you heard it and to check if you heard it right. This is very disarming. It will calm the other person down, encourage them to say more and set the stage for useful confrontation. Important distinction: You are not saying that you agree with what they said - just that you heard it.

      Ask open-ended questions for clarification.

      Open-ended questions are questions that don’t have “Yes or No” answers and that invite the other person to think, reason, express themselves. So you ask questions like:
      How are you affected by what I did?
      What is it about what I didn’t do that bothers you?
      What thoughts do you have about what I do or don’t do?
      Can you give me some examples?

      Give the other person your response to what you have heard.

      Now that you have worked at understanding the situation, get in touch with your response to it and share it with the other person. As much as possible, use simple, straightforward and direct language.

      Invite the other person to join you in exploring approaches to solving the problem.

      These techniques can be useful in all of life’s contexts: romantic relationships, parent-child relationships, at work, with friends and with family

      This excerpt was taken from pages 99-101 of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side. Click here to buy the book.

        9. Dreams

        Work at learning from your dreams.  If you don’t remember your dreams, put a pad and pencil or pen by your bed and, as soon as you are barely awake – even less than half awake – write down your dream.  Before you go to sleep, tell yourself that you want to remember your dream so you can learn from it.  Once you remember even a small part of your dream, use some way of listening to the message from it, learning what it has to tell you. 

         

          When you think about it, it makes sense that dreams would be an avenue into that deep, hidden parts of ourselves. After all, dreams are the images we create while our conscious minds are out of the picture. While we are sleeping, the filtering and censoring function of our conscious minds is dormant. So the deeper, more essential material can come up and present itself for consideration. Sigmund Freud referred to dreams as the royal road to the unconscious.

          The first step in using dreams is to remember them. One way of doing that is to tell yourself before you go to sleep that you are going to remember your dream and to put a notebook and pen on your bed table. As soon as you wake up - even before you are fully conscious - write down whatever you remember of your dream. You may recall only brief snatches or only a few disjointed images. Write them down. Even fragments of dreams can be useful. Following is an exercise you can use to get some idea about what the dream is telling you.

           

          LEARNING FROM YOUR DREAMS

          There are hundreds - perhaps thousands - of approaches to interpreting dreams. The one I like is a Jungian approach which I learned through reading Robert Johnson’s book Inner Work. 

          • Step One: Associations
            • First, go though your dream and write out every association that you have with each dream image. The basic technique is this: Write down the first image that appears in the dream. Then ask yourself: “What feeling do I have about this image? What words or ideas come to mind when I look at it?” Your association is any word, idea, mental picture, feeling or memory that pops into your mind when you look at the image in the dream.

           

          Step Three: Interpretations

          • Step Two: Dynamics
            • In this second step, you connect each dream image to a specific dynamic in your inner life. It is important to find out what is going on inside yourself that is represented by the situation in the dream. To perform this step, go back to the beginning and deal with each image, one at a time. For each image ask: “What part of me is that? Where have I seen it functioning in my life lately? Where do I see that same trait in my personality? Who is it, inside me, who feels like that or behaves like that?” Then, write down each example you can think of in which that inner part of you has been expressing itself in your life.
            • The interpretation of your dream is the end result of the work you have done in steps one and two. It ties together all the meaning you have drawn from the dream into one, unified picture. It is a coherent statement of what the dream means to you as a whole. At this stage you ask questions like: “What is the central, most important message that this dream is trying to communicate to me? What is it advising me to do? What is the overall meaning of the dream for my life? What is the single most important insight that the dream is trying to get across to me?”
          • Step Four: Rituals
            • By the time you reach this fourth step you have made an interpretation. You have done your best to understand the dream with your mind. Now it is time to do something physical. This step is very important because it helps you to integrate your dream experience into your conscious, waking life.
            • This step requires a physical act that will affirm the message of the dream. It could be a practical act - paying your bills on time or straightening out a relationship that has become confused. Or it may be a symbolic act - a ritual that brings home the meaning of the dream in a powerful way. Any physical ritual will serve if it affirms the message of your dream.

          This is an excerpt from pages 80 and 81 of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side. Click here to buy the book.

             

            10. Panic

            The next time you experience the symptoms of panic attack – heart palpitations, shortness of breath, sweating, numbness in your fingers and toes, feel like you’re going to faint, afraid you’re having a heart attack or stroke – focus on something outside of yourself, tell yourself “I know what this is.  This is a panic attack.  I’ve gotten through these before.  I’ll get through this one.”  When it’s over ask yourself:

             

            • Am I facing some dilemma that is so difficult it doesn’t have any good solution, so difficult that I don’t even want to know what it is?

             

            How to you know you’re experiencing a stress response. Immediately, you’ll feel like you’re getting armed for battle. You’ll feel:

              • § The rush of your heart pumping faster and harder, or
              • § A queasiness and tension in the pit of your stomach, or
              • § A tightness in your head or around your head, or
              • § A feeling of energy in your muscles, or
              • § A lightheadedness.

             

            But if you don’t notice these symptoms or don’t do anything with the energy in them, after a while you’ll begin to experience the following symptoms:

            • Fatigue, irritability and nervousness;
            • Trouble concentrating;
            • Sleeplessness or a desire to sleep all the time;
            • Lack of appetite or a desire to eat all the time;
              • Anger without knowing why, a desire to lash out at people for no apparent reason;
              • All kind of pain throughout your body;
              • Arms and legs going to sleep;
              • Headaches;
              • Upset stomach;
              • Shortness of breath;
              • Dizziness.
            • Dr. Selye’s prescription for dealing with stress was to identify the threat or demand that is causing it, turn the threat or demand into a problem that can be solved and work at solving it. This, I think, is the basis for good stress management. The necessary first step is to figure out what it is that is causing the stress. What is the threat or demand that you are responding to or think you may have to respond to or think you should be responding to? What is it that you need to do that is going to be difficult? Sometimes it is easy to figure that out; sometimes it is very difficult. It is difficult because, once you know what is causing the threat you are going to be compelled to either do something about it or decide that you are going to try to live with it. That is a tough decision. And, if you decide to do something about it, you are probably in for a battle: because, if it were going to be easy to deal with, you probably would have already dealt with it.

            So how do you identify what it is that is causing the threat or demand? One good way of starting is to ask yourself: What is getting in the way of my loving and working in the way I want to? (Here I need to include an aside about the word “work”. When we use the word “work” in the context of stress management, we are talking about how we express ourselves, how we use our minds, bodies, hearts, voices, our creativity and problem-solving ability.  Some people are able to do this at their jobs. Those who aren’t have to find ways of expressing themselves outside of their jobs – in the evenings, on weekends, on vacations.). This is a key question because human beings have an innate drive to love and work as they want to. And anything that gets in the way of that drive will be experienced as threat and will cause a stress response.  Since the drive to love and work is innate and is part of our reptilian brains, you don’t have much choice over whether you express it or not. It’s not as if you can easily say, “Oh well, I’ll just have to learn to live without loving and working the way I want to.” Yes, you can override those drives and learn to live without expressing them, but you run a great risk of paying a price in terms of your health and well-being.

            So this is a crucial question for you: Are you loving and working in the ways that you want to?  If your answer to that crucial question is “No,” then you ask the next question: What is getting in the way of my loving and working in the way I want to? Your honest answer to that question will help you identify the threat or demand which is causing the stress in your life. Identifying the threat is a crucial first step in managing stress. But now comes the hard part. Because what is getting in the way and causing the threat is probably either another person, some moral principle or rule that you have decided to live by, or some fear, inability, deficit or block inside yourself. Whatever it is, it is not going to be easy to deal with. If it were easy to deal with you would have already dealt with it. It would be a no-brainer. So it takes courage to be willing to know what is causing the threat or demand and what has to be dealt with. And - here’s the rub - dealing with it is going to be difficult, uncomfortable and stressful. Yes, in order to deal with the threat that is causing the harmful “distress” in your life, you are going to have to use the energy from the stress response. That is why the First Principle of Stress Management is:

             

            • NEVER SEEK COMFORT OR AVOID DISCOMFORT

             

            Because, if you seek comfort, you won’t deal with the threat or demand that is causing the harmful and uncomfortable stress in your life. And you will buy comfort in the short run at the expense of discomfort in the long run. 

             It is very important that you honor this First Principle of Stress Management. Some of you may have been exposed to stress management techniques that focus on reframing the threat, thinking yourself out of it. This is the “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff – and It’s All Small Stuff” approach to stress management. For the small number of people who tend to exaggerate threats or see threat where none is there, this may be a good approach. But for most of us it is very dangerous: dangerous because some stuff is not small stuff. Loving and working the way you want to love and work is not small stuff. If you don’t deal with the small stuff, it will become big stuff and then you’ve got more stress and difficulty to deal with. Not dealing with the small stuff can lead in the long run to a world of hurt. It also won’t work to avoid stress. Because if you try to avoid it, you again won’t be addressing threat or taking the action that is being demanded of you and, in the long run, you’ll be under even worse stress.

            This excerpt is taken from pages 47-50 of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side. Click here to buy the book.