Permanent link for Don't compare your insides with other people's outsides on May 13, 2020

I invite you to take a couple of minutes to review the past month. What have you been feeling? Have you felt the same thing every day? Have there been good days? Have there been bad days? Have you had some pretty negative thoughts at times? How about positive thoughts? Days with the glass half-full and other days with the glass half empty?

Has your energy been the same every day? Or has it been up and down? And what about self-care? Have you consistently eaten, exercised, slept, and relaxed in healthy ways?

How about your relationships? Have things gone well 100% of the time, or have there been moments of conflict?

I am going to bet that your life has varied in most of these areas. It’s not possible to be “on” every minute of every day. One trap we may fall into is comparing our insides with other people’s outsides, and then wondering what’s wrong with ourselves. We become self-critical because we perceive that we don’t measure up.

Often what we know about others is their Instagram or You Tube selves. We know what they project about themselves, the image they portray and what they want us to know about them. Think about the COVID posts that you have seen. Others aren’t likely to post things about how they were tired and snapped at a friend who was asking a simple question. They don’t usually post about the four days they didn’t go to the gym last week, or about yesterday when they had a healthy salad for supper but ended up eating an entire package of Oreos before the evening was done. What you see is the highlight reel of their lives—5 minutes of exciting outtakes from 30 days of being average. You can perhaps see how it’s a trap to compare your past 30 days of ups and downs with someone else’s 5-minute highlight reel.

What can we do about this?

One way to get out of the trap is to begin sharing more honestly about the good and not-so-good parts of your life. Pick someone who seems able to have those kinds of conversations. Be a little bit vulnerable and observe what happens. If someone can handle it and be a little bit vulnerable in return, it may be safe to try sharing a bit more. Often when we are real with others, it can be a relief for them because they get the message that they don’t have to pretend or live up to an unrealistic image. That can decrease loneliness and isolation. That can lead to the kind of intimacy that gives life beauty and meaning.

A word about sharing—take time to observe whether the other person has earned the right to hear more about you. Are they able to listen well? Can they validate your feelings? Can they be empathetic? Can they keep what you share confidential? Is the sharing mutual? If so, it may be safe to share more. If someone is constantly critical of you, puts you down, always tells you what you “should” do, or invalidates your feelings, it’s okay to move on to someone else.

During this time of COVID isolation, I encourage you to experiment with being more real with at least one other person in your life. As your relationship deepens, you will be able to compare your insides with their insides, and you will probably find that your feelings are quite similar at times. Emotion is the common, shared human experience and sharing at that level decreases our sense of isolation. Being vulnerable takes courage---and it is the pathway to intimacy and connection.

Posted on Permanent link for Don't compare your insides with other people's outsides on May 13, 2020.

Permanent link for It's okay to be okay and it's okay to not be okay on May 4, 2020

Several people in my life have recently shared that when the pandemic crisis surfaced, they rose to the occasion and made this stay-at-home, quarantine thing work. Their adrenaline helped them make some changes fairly quickly, and they adjusted to this new way of living. They ate healthy, they started a new exercise regimen, they created a schedule for themselves, and they stayed positive. In some ways they were pleased and surprised about how well they coped.

…………………And then they hit a wall. The adrenaline ran out. The novelty wore off. There were way too many exercise videos, sad news stories, “life hacks”, video chats, new recipes. It was too much. They got tired.

Some days we are okay and some days we are not. If we were not okay before COVID, we may be struggling even more. Or maybe we took it as a challenge to establish a healthier lifestyle but it has been difficult to stay consistent. If we were positive, glass-half-full people before COVID, we may be having difficulty staying positive. Or some days we might be feeling just fine, but nobody else around us is, and they don’t want to hear about it—so we feel isolated.

If you can relate to any of the above, here are three things you might consider:

1. First, it’s important not to judge ourselves, no matter where we find ourselves on a given day. It’s okay to be okay or to not be okay. The important thing is to accept yourself and the circumstances exactly as they are in this moment (look for mindfulness resources on our website). If you are experiencing pain, it’s a normal, human tendency to push those feelings away. That strategy works when it’s time to take your hand off of a hot stove—it doesn’t work with emotions. The more we try not to have an emotion the more we have it. While we are trying to pretend the pain is not there, the pain is in the parking lot doing push-ups and getting stronger.
2. Acceptance is counter-intuitive. If I accept my pain, isn’t that the same as giving in to it? Fair question. Acceptance allows us to interact with pain in a different way. We develop the ability to observe it, noticing how it ebbs and flows. We might become curious about where it comes from and how it might motivate us to make some changes. It might point us towards a wound that needs healing. In the end, pain is part of the human condition and part of us. If we reject the pain, we reject a part of ourselves.
3. Use pain as a cue to treat yourself a little kinder. If you had a friend who was going through the exact same thing, what would you say to them? What would you do to comfort them? How would you try to validate their feelings and let them know that what they are experiencing is normal? Can you begin to experiment with talking to yourself in the same, kind manner? Can you begin to validate your own feelings and find ways to comfort yourself? This is called “self-compassion”. (Check out the resources for self-compassion on Kristin Neff’s website

- Les White, LMSW, CAADC

Posted on Permanent link for It's okay to be okay and it's okay to not be okay on May 4, 2020.

Permanent link for Your brain is a museum and you are the curator of exhibits on April 27, 2020

In the midst of a global pandemic, it’s important to be the curator of what goes into your brain.

The curator of a museum accepts items and arranges exhibits to impact your thoughts and feelings, and perhaps even to shock you. Imagine you are entering a museum that is dedicated to the Holocaust. Can you imagine what kinds of exhibits might occupy the space and what thoughts and feelings the curator would be eliciting in you? What would the tone and mood be like in that space? Or imagine that you enter a museum that has exhibits focused on the stories of inspiring women in history. How would that impact your thoughts and feelings differently? What mood(s) would the curator be hoping to evoke?

Every day we are bombarded with information to curate. The media offers unlimited items to place into our brains. Click-bait links sensationalize things that turn out to not be sensational at all. Clicking on a headline like, “So-and-so Destroys So-and-so” turns out to be 10 paragraphs about something that was Tweeted and will probably be forgotten by tomorrow. Media decides for us about the order of our news feeds and the size of the font used to grab our attention. Often the larger font and lead story is dedicated to things that provoke the emotions of anger, anxiety, fear, and sadness. Why? Because it sells. It stimulates the fight-flight-freeze part of our brain that tells our glands to release stress hormones. Our brains are wired for our survival and anything that provokes anxiety and fear is given top priority in our brains as if the bad thing is actually happening to us right now. So, this headline gets top billing in our brain. A steady diet of this creates chronic exposure to stress hormones which can negatively impact our physical and emotional health.

Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson has said that our brains are “Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good”. The brain locks onto anxiety and fear immediately, but it takes 20 seconds of savoring a positive event for it to become “wired” into the brain. On a practical level, can you think of a time when someone has given you a lot of praise? Or think of a time when someone said something negative about you. Which one sticks in your mind long after the conversations are over?

You are the curator of what goes into your brain. You get to decide what it focuses on. The following are some ideas about how to curate your own brain exhibit:

• Curate the amount of fight/flight/freeze material that you allow to enter your brain. Have times of the day which are completely free of corona-virus information. Think about limiting your news exposure to once a day. Consider limiting the number of controversial and provocative things you read on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit. Or limit your time spent dealing with relationship drama. This will allow your nervous system to experience periods of calm.
• Increase your exposure to positive people, news and experiences. During these experiences, intentionally focus on the good feelings you are having for 20 seconds, like you would savor the first bite of an amazing meal. Review that experience over and over in your mind. That will allow the positive to “wire” itself into your brain.
• Spend time doing deep breathing, mindfulness and meditation. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system (rest, digest, heal) and decreases sympathetic activity (fight, flight, freeze).
• If you are struggling with anxiety and fear, try asking yourself this question—"Am I safe right here, right now?” If you are safe right here and now, remind yourself of that, take a deep breath, and try to move on.
• Another useful question to ask is, “What’s the next right thing I can do to move towards calm and away from fear?” Then do that next right thing. Don’t think too big at this point. All it takes is a small step in the right direction like taking a short walk or putting in a load of laundry.
• Remember that we aren’t trying to “not have” fear and anxiety. The brain doesn’t work that way. You can’t tell yourself to not think about a pink elephant because you have to think about it in order to not think about it. You are trying to give your brain an “instead of”. For example, “Instead of focusing on this, I am going to focus on this other thing instead.”
• Distractions are okay, in moderation. Sometimes we need to distract ourselves with an activity that minimizes our focus on negative things. However, it’s important to maintain some balance and not use distractions as a way to deny or numb ourselves from difficult things.
• Seek out positive experiences and positive people. Help someone out. Look for news stories with a positive message. As Mr. Roger’s mother once said, “Look for the helpers.”

Take care of your mental health and curate what you allow into your brain.

- Les White, LMSW, CAADC

Posted on Permanent link for Your brain is a museum and you are the curator of exhibits on April 27, 2020.

Permanent link for Understanding our own Grief and Loss in new ways. on April 20, 2020

Two weeks ago we discussed the idea that there are different types of grief. Sometimes there are “actual” losses that can be named such as losing out on fun times with friends due to moving back home or due to social distancing. Sometimes there are “anticipated” losses such as not being able to take a trip when the semester ends or the possibility that an internship or study abroad will be cancelled. Still other times, there are “ambiguous” losses. These are harder to pinpoint or name. Ambiguous loss can show up as a feeling of sadness or anxiety, that things will never be the same. Or it can show up as looking into the future and realizing you may lose out on important experiences and relationships. Perhaps as you are reading this, you can identify having losses in one or more of these categories.

Based on the pioneering research and writing by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross about death and dying, it became common and helpful to talk about “stages” of grief. However, these original writings were based on an individual coming to terms with their own death and did not address the many kinds of losses identified above. The “stages” model also implied that there is an ordered sequence that we move through and that we are either making “progress” or going “backwards” depending on how we feel.

With the types of grief we are discussing here, it is more useful to think about grief as a visitor that takes on many differing characteristics and emotions as it moves in and out of our awareness. These characteristics may include denial, sadness, anger, frustration, depression, loneliness, emptiness, or longing. Sometimes grief shows up with conflicting emotions, such as feeling relief about not having to attend class again this semester while also feeling sad that you won’t see a classmate again. Grief fluctuates. Sometimes grief doesn’t show up for days or weeks. Grief can include the entire range of human emotion.

Another characteristic of grief is that it creates a movement back and forth between being engaged with life and being disengaged with life. We need the disengaged times in order to name and grieve our losses. This conserves our energy as we re-calibrate what things will look like as we move forward in our lives. We also need times of engagement with life, which can bring about helpful distractions from our grief, meaningful connections with others, and even times of enjoyment and laughter. If we find ourselves getting stuck in either engagement or disengagement for long periods of time, it can be helpful to consciously engage in the opposite types of behaviors in order to create some balance. For example, if you are stuck in disengagement, you might try reaching out to a friend or someone else who is struggling. If you are stuck in disengagement and are avoiding painful emotions, you might spend some time journaling about your losses or reminiscing with old photos.

I also wanted to point out a couple of unhelpful things about grief that have slipped into our culture. One unhelpful thing you may hear is that there is a specific, acceptable period to grieve, after which it is unhealthy. I have heard people cite everything from 3 months to 1 year as an “acceptable” grief period. There is no science to back this up. Everyone has their own, unique timetable for healing. If you are concerned that you are feeling stuck, it’s always a good idea to talk with a therapist about it. Then you can decide for yourself whether it has become unhealthy. Another unhelpful thing can be our language about grief. You may hear people talk about “getting over” or “moving past” grief. There is no getting over, under, or around grief. There is only “through”. It is often more empowering to think of it as “moving through” and “moving forward” in grief rather than “getting over” it.

- Les White, LMSW, CAADC

Posted on Permanent link for Understanding our own Grief and Loss in new ways. on April 20, 2020.

Permanent link for What does COVID-19 have to do with grief and loss? on April 13, 2020

Human beings are wired to be connected to each other. When that connection is broken, we experience loss and grief. It’s easy to see how losing someone we love through death or a breakup can lead to grief. It’s also understood that we will have those same feelings if we lose a beloved pet.  But how does COVID-19 lead to grief and loss?

Robert Neimeyer, PhD, director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition suggests that we not only form attachments to people and pets, but to other things as well. We develop attachments to places, to our education, our health, our sense of personal security, and our freedoms. We develop a sense of security that the government and health systems which support us will continue to function. We develop strong attachments to our hopes and dreams for the future. This pandemic threatens many of those attachments and leads to a grief that is often unnamed and invisible to others.

What are some things we can do to address grief? Here are some suggestions:

1. Name the losses—it is important to identify the losses and write them down. Niemeyer calls it, “Name it and claim it.” There is strength in naming the losses. It helps us see the new realities before us and we will need to see those realities clearly in order to regroup and move forward.
2. Share the grief—right now the entire community around you is grieving for many reasons. This is a time we can stand in support of and solidarity with each other. If you are struggling with a loss, you can be certain that others are too. Name your losses and encourage others to do the same.
3. Identify your strengths, resources and coping skills—Make a list of your strengths. If you can’t think of any, ask others what they see in you. Identify the resources you have at your disposal and research other resources you may need to get through this time. Think about previous difficult times you have faced and the coping skills that helped you get through it.
4. Clarify your values—Before COVID-19, what were the things you valued and gave your life meaning? What was worth getting out of bed for in the morning? How can you continue to live out that value? For example, perhaps you value helping others, but because of social distancing, you can no longer do what you were doing. What else might you do that could be helpful to others, even if it’s not a face-to-face activity?
5. Practice gratitude—Research has shown that writing down three things each day that you are grateful for reduces depression and leads to a stronger sense of well-being. It trains your brain to notice opportunities. Start a list and add three new things each day, while reviewing the things you wrote down on previous days. Gratitude is not a practice meant to deny or minimize our losses. Those losses are real and painful. Instead, a gratitude practice sounds more like, “I am really in pain over the loss of ____, AND I am grateful that I woke up healthy today.”

Next week we will take a closer look at grief and some new, empowering ways to look at it.

Human beings are wired to be connected to each other. When that connection is broken, we experience loss and grief. It’s easy to see how losing someone we love through death or a breakup can lead to grief. It’s also understood that we will have those same feelings if we lose a beloved pet.  But how does COVID-19 lead to grief and loss?

Robert Neimeyer, PhD, director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition suggests that we not only form attachments to people and pets, but to other things as well. We develop attachments to places, to our education, our health, our sense of personal security, and our freedoms. We develop a sense of security that the government and health systems which support us will continue to function. We develop strong attachments to our hopes and dreams for the future. This pandemic threatens many of those attachments and leads to a grief that is often unnamed and invisible to others.

What are some things we can do to address grief? Here are some suggestions:

1. Name the losses—it is important to identify the losses and write them down. Niemeyer calls it, “Name it and claim it.” There is strength in naming the losses. It helps us see the new realities before us and we will need to see those realities clearly in order to regroup and move forward.
2. Share the grief—right now the entire community around you is grieving for many reasons. This is a time we can stand in support of and solidarity with each other. If you are struggling with a loss, you can be certain that others are too. Name your losses and encourage others to do the same.
3. Identify your strengths, resources and coping skills—Make a list of your strengths. If you can’t think of any, ask others what they see in you. Identify the resources you have at your disposal and research other resources you may need to get through this time. Think about previous difficult times you have faced and the coping skills that helped you get through it.
4. Clarify your values—Before COVID-19, what were the things you valued and gave your life meaning? What was worth getting out of bed for in the morning? How can you continue to live out that value? For example, perhaps you value helping others, but because of social distancing, you can no longer do what you were doing. What else might you do that could be helpful to others, even if it’s not a face-to-face activity?
5. Practice gratitude—Research has shown that writing down three things each day that you are grateful for reduces depression and leads to a stronger sense of well-being. It trains your brain to notice opportunities. Start a list and add three new things each day, while reviewing the things you wrote down on previous days. Gratitude is not a practice meant to deny or minimize our losses. Those losses are real and painful. Instead, a gratitude practice sounds more like, “I am really in pain over the loss of ____, AND I am grateful that I woke up healthy today.”

Next week we will take a closer look at grief and some new, empowering ways to look at it.

- Les White, LMSW, CAADC

Posted on Permanent link for What does COVID-19 have to do with grief and loss? on April 13, 2020.

Permanent link for Tips for Managing the Disorienting Effects of COVID-19 on April 6, 2020

“I can’t believe this is happening!” “One month ago, we were going about business like this virus didn’t exist.” “Nothing is normal.” “When is this going to end?” “I’m missing out on so much!”

If you have thought or felt any of these things recently, you are not alone. We are in the middle of a disorienting experience, on a scale of which you, or even most your older loved ones have never experienced. It seems like things change every day and the bad news keeps growing. What is “normal” and how are we supposed to feel, act, or react? In an upcoming series of articles, we will look at some of our common, shared experiences and how we can respond in a way that’s kind and supportive to ourselves and to others.

Crisis can disrupt and disconnect people. This crisis has social distancing baked right into it. Practice staying connected to at least one other person daily through some form of virtual communication. Video chatting can be one of the best forms of connection during this time. Why? Because making eye contact stimulates the limbic system, the brain’s seat of emotion and emotional connection. Reach out to at least one person today.

Crisis leads to grief. One type of grief is “actual”—where we can identify specific things we have lost, and we have feelings about those losses. Another type is “anticipatory” grief—where have not lost something yet, but we know it’s coming, and we may have both grief and anxiety about it. Another type of loss is “ambiguous” grief—where there may be a feeling of dread for unknown losses ahead, but they can’t be specifically identified yet.

Give up the idea that grief comes in “stages” or there is a normal way to experience it. Because we are all unique and our losses are unique, we will experience it differently. Grief shows up in different ways and at different times for each of us. Your way of experiencing it is okay. It’s important to turn towards whatever feelings you are having and say, “Well, I don’t like this very much, but I accept that this is how my grief shows up.” Even though your grief process is unique, connect with others in their grief by sharing what you feel with another person. Try to look for what’s similar between your experiences versus focusing on what’s different. It can help you feel less alone.

In the coming weeks we will explore other ways to cope with this disorienting time in our lives.

- Les White, LMSW, CAADC

Posted on Permanent link for Tips for Managing the Disorienting Effects of COVID-19 on April 6, 2020.