Anger is a universal emotion, designed to give us much-needed information. There are many helpful ways to think about this common emotion; one stands out to me today. Facilitating a support group whose focus was 'Exploring Anger’ last Fall, we discussed how anger can be an indication that one of your boundaries is being tested or violated.

Are you feeling anger (or it’s other faces: frustration, resentment, and hatred)?

What events have preceded the feeling? How does the anger feel? Where is it? What does it tell you about your needs? If the anger wants something, is that thing a boundary? Is the boundary within yourself, or within a relationship with someone else?

If you have taken an action, like setting a boundary, check back in with yourself. How do you feel now?

Our mentors, by definition, are a great influence on us. Some of us have a natural mentor in a parent or a relative. If we’re additionally lucky, we can follow the teachings of these elders for many years.
As life treads on, we more actively discern who it is that we want to emulate.
 
Recently I sat in a circle with three of my mentors and another therapist, all clinicians like myself.  We met with the goal of receiving clinical supervision from a clinician with whom we had a standing monthly meeting.
 
The supervision tradition in counselling psychology is an old one. Jeffrey K. Edwards locates the origins of clinical supervision in the field of medicine, and later the progenitor of all psychological therapy: psychoanalysis (2013). A truth in our field is that all things are worthy of exploration, including, and of great ethical importance, the practitioner’s work.
 
Counsellors creatively provide care, respect, and guidance to our clients, and what this looks like varies widely. We all benefit from another person’s impression of how we can improve or continue to do what we’re doing. To this end, bound by the stringent guidelines for privacy and confidentiality, therapists meet with an elder in the field and we talk.
 
Sitting together, the topic of fantasy arose. A fellow therapist voiced confusion about how to support her client, knowing that there was a facet of this client’s life which he was unable to acknowledge. The practitioner felt challenged; she had brought up what she thought was an important point that would benefit him; he didn’t see it. So should she just ‘let it go’? Isn’t it important to see our clients’ lives through their eyes alone? Why should she feel the need to convince this man of anything? But she was unsure of how to proceed, having the intuition that her client, for whom she cared deeply, could be postponing the wellness he desperately craved.
 
Our supervisor’s feedback on this quandary was so simple it makes me chuckle.
‘It is a fantasy. He’s living in a fantasy, and this fantasy is what will keep him unhappy and hurting. You must pop the bubble!’ Do it nicely, she added.
 
I thought about all the clients I have met over the years, some of the pieces of their lives which were very hard to identify, to name, and to face. How diligent my attempts to create an environment of safety to encourage these revelations. And it landed on me like a pile of bricks: we all do this! That day alone I had probably retreated into incorrect ‘fantasies’ about my life four or five times! Oh my.
 
Let me clarify that fantasies are negative and positive and anything in-between. They are simply a divergence from reality. Speaking for myself, I have a huge range of fantasies; from getting everything I want from life to possible catastrophes. The less-familiar position of this binary, the negative fantasy, can have such a great impact on our behaviour that practitioners of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) work with these beliefs almost exclusively. For example, if I believe I am uninteresting and therefor will never have a close friend, this is a negative fantasy about who I am and what the future holds. If you have ever felt that way, or currently do, you know that the stakes are high when negative fantasies are concerned. If I believe this about myself I may retreat, or become unsure when I’m shown normal social behaviour.
 
Another fantasy that some of us may relate to is Melvin Lerner’s ‘Just World’ (1980). If I am good, do good things, and live correctly, good things will happen to me. Same as for others. This, however, is a fantasy. Bad things do happen to good people, the evidence for which is a click away, on the sidewalk, or in the mirror, you name it.
 
We all often think in fantasy, and we are completely unaware. It is not usually of our choosing, we think it is reality, that is arguably the reason our fantasies stubbornly persist. And yet, life can burst our bubbles, other people can point out our blind spots, and we can seek to know this part of ourselves through self-reflection or working with a counsellor.
 
I encourage you to take this for granted, rather than calling it an illness or pathologising it. The point is that we cannot ‘know’ everything, ever, life is not like this. However for my clinical practice and my own personal work, I have found a richness in this way of reflecting on what’s actually going on. I want to help my clients to burst bubbles that are keeping them in cycles that they ultimately want to exit. Or that make people other than themselves the authors of their lives. I want to burst my bubbles that have me preoccupied with living in the way I think I ‘should’ be living, instead of reveling in the reality of what is happening now.
 
A quote from John Kabat-Zinn: “This is it.” Right now is my life. This realization immediately gives rise to a number of vital questions: “What is my relationship to my own life going to be?”
 
So you see, a relatively short conversation with this clinical mentor has permeated my world-view and impacted me professionally and personally. I’m appreciative of how my mentors and I have found each other, and the sweetness of each of these relationships. As I write this I look forward to connecting with a new mentor in the coming weeks and beyond. I have begun learning from a Haida elder, and I wonder how I will reciprocate some of what she is gifting me.
 
Dropping out of fantasy and into reality doesn’t have to shatter us, although none of us can avoid pain (a good fantasy to demolish). Notice what is 100% factual about your experience, and then notice what else is left. Be gentle with yourself as you do this work; you can try something creative like joking or singing your fantasies away. Suerte!




Edwards, J. K, (2013). Strengths-Based Supervision in Clinical Practice. Sage: New York.
Lerner (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Plenum: New York.

Sometimes certain themes come up in my life, one that has recently repeated is the theme of the relationship between 'who I am and who others think I am.' In particular, how other peoples' behaviour influences the receiving person's identity.

When we think about the type of person we are, we often use our name, our gender, our age, our profession, who our family is, and we name our geographical location. We say if we're partnered or not, parenting or not, where we went to school (or dropped out), how we relax and recreate, maybe the purpose we've identified for our life. Our greatest challenge. We talk about values, dreams, longings, nightmares. Identity is dynamic, layered and rich. Totally subjective, which is part of the intensity of the human experience.

I encounter wonderful people. Each one of my clients is a unique treasure, a being whose world I get to enter for a time. I have noticed that some of my clients experience a low-level suffering in their daily lives, which undermines their decision-making, their empowerment, their self-love, and their identity. I want to name this as 'taking how you're treated as a reflection of who you are.'

A fictional vignette: A young woman, widely skilled and educated, cannot find full-time work. She goes to WorkBC religiously for employment counselling, she wakes up every morning at 6 am to exercise and go online to apply for jobs. This goes on for six months, and she is called for interviews, but is not offered a position. The woman is frustrated, impatient, and frankly feels like she is going crazy. She has no savings, and is living in credit. She's afraid she won't make ends meet ever again.

After the sixth month of this hamster-wheel she starts to believe she isn't hirable. No one is hiring her. Other people have jobs. There is something wrong with her approach, and it is all she can do to continue applying for jobs. She walks around her community feeling vulnerable, as if people can tell her bad she is inside.

The world can be hard as hell. We have experiences which are very challenging to survive. And often there is an emotional impact when we're pushed to our edges. The woman above started feeling bad about who she is as a person, because the mirror the world seems to be showing her is that she is incompetent. But the truth is, she's not.

In this woman's case, she is living in an area where the labour economy is insufficient ot meet her needs.

Has this happened in your lifetime? Whether it is your sense of the world, or how people close to you behave towards you, has your identity been impacted by how you're treated?

What profound challenges you have with decision-making, empowerment, self-love and identity, and how have those challenges been informed by what's going on around you

What qualities about you can you identify that come from inside you instead?

I cannot remember a time in my life when feelings of insecurity have not come up in conversation.

As a young woman, my peers would often talk openly about things they badly wanted: a slender body, even skin, smaller nose, and on. This expression of insecurity about one's own appearance is so normal.

Other topics reveal one's insecurities: "If I speak up will the person I care about dismiss me? Will I lose their esteem?" This could be termed insecurity of connection/relationship.

More recent conversations may sound familiar:

"She said she wanted to hang out this weekend and I haven't heard from her. Should I send another text? She didn't respond to the last one for two days. Why do I feel so crazy? She's probably thinking I'm an idiot." Feeling insecure in a relationship, and of one's self-worth.

And a final example: "I want to spend time with this person I know who is brilliantly smart, will they notice I am less brilliant? Can I hide the dull parts of myself?" This could be termed insecurity in one's wisdom and again self-worth.

Insecurity is painful. Many people feel pain or muscle tension physically when they have feelings of insecurity. Additional feelings of self-loathing, sadness, loneliness, fear, anxiety, grief, anger, and low self-worth, as seen above, can accompany insecurity.

Learning about the challenge and the solution can clarify the path to feeling secure, and be motivating.

Here is an approach I like:

When you feel insecure, still yourself, and tune into that feeling.
Give yourself a quiet moment to do a history-taking of this feeling.

• Investigate the context: When do you first remember this type of insecure feeling? What was going on at that time? How did you cope? Were there accompanying feelings?
• Think about other, subsequent experiences with this insecurity. What was happening for you then? How did you cope then? Were there accompanying feelings?
• Are there other insecure feelings connected to the particular one you're investigating?
• Who has known about your feelings? What was their reaction to you?
• How did significant people in your life deal (or not deal) with their own insecurity?

Once you've done your history-taking, consider the times in your life where you did not feel this type of insecurity.

• What was going on at the time? Where were you? Who were you with? Did anyone witness this? What would they say about you in these moments? Really investigate the context
  
• What have the times when you felt secure shown you about your strengths? Your coping? And about your capacity to feel this way again?
  
• What would you tell yourself now, if you were closer to feeling secure?
  
• How can you feel a bit more secure, based on your life experience?
  

Accessing your wisdom about the challenges and solutions can be empowering. Having reflected in this way, what do you want to do to feel secure today?

How does this sentence end for you?
The course of my life was altered when I decided to ______________________.

How would you finish this sentence?
When I am feeling down,
I'd like the people in my life to ________________________

Earlier this month I posted about tracking the physical sensations of your emotions, in particular those of anxiety and stress. So now that you know how your body expresses your emotions, what next?
• Consider jotting down some notes, bullet-points will do, about your thoughts when you notice the sensations. For example, if you feel back pain when under stress, write down your thoughts when you notice this pain. This process can provide you with some new clarity as to your personal history with an emotion, for example your normal coping with stress.
• Consider the greater context: is there something you need in this moment?
•If your need is relief of the emotion, can you stop and take care of yourself in some way? Jot down as many soothing and nurturing things as you can think of to do, and pick the most attracting one to start.
• If your need is to make a decision or to express something to someone, like where you stand on some interpersonal matter, consider how to do this. You cannot control the outcome of communication but you can do your best in being clear with the people around you.
• If you experience chronic pain or significant discomfort, draw your attention to a neutral or pleasurable sensation, such as your breath or the softness of your clothing on your skin. This attention to comfortable sensation can be combined with 'physical grounding,' for example by firmly planting your feet on the ground until your awareness of discomfort decreases.

Recently I facilitated a group session for survivors of trauma, with the topic of Assertive Communication. Learning about styles of communication is a transformative thing. In the model I used in the session clients step back and look at their patterns of communication, noting if they are Assertive, Aggressive or Passive. They look at the costs and benefits of each pattern of communication.
None of us stick to one style of communication at all times. With each relationship it can feel as if there is a different balance of 'us' and 'them'.
Take note of where and when and with whom you can easily say 'yes or 'no' and mean it.
http://recoveringengineer.com/…/the-difference-between-pas…/

When is the last time you had a fear-based thought? Noticing when fear drives our thoughts can help us to have agency in our lives. This is because many times we think, feel and act as if we were under threat. The threat could be one of illness, rejection, poverty, judgment, or of violence. The list is long. If you want to improve your emotional, psychological, spiritual, and physical safety, you can explore what is and what is not dangerous to you.
The article below shares Buddhist perspectives. One writer suggests that simply sitting alone can be an opportunity to learn about your fears.
http://www.lionsroar.com/fear-and-fearlessness-what-the-bu…/
If you are experiencing violence, there are many supports to which you are entitled. Contact me for information on resources in your area, and call 911 in an emergency.