Tag: Face-to-Face Counseling

Do you have irreconcilable differences with your partner?

by Nathan Chua

Couples often wonder how the person they loved has turned into someone they can’t stand at all. Why can’t he be responsible enough to take care of our finances? Why is she so disorganized and impulsive? He seems to care more about his family than he cares about me. I’m bored in this relationship. My partner doesn’t care about what I feel. She is too quiet and aloof. I don’t feel any closeness anymore.

Of course, there are legitimate reasons for you to consider leaving your partner such as violence and infidelity. But most couples often say that their issues mostly revolve around their differences. Thus comes the term, irreconcilable differences. What I enumerated in the first paragraph can be summed up in this term that we often hear couples declare as their reason for separating. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that these cannot be legitimate reasons to call it quits. I am in no position to tell you that you should stick to your relationship just because your problems simply fall into this category. And if your partner refuses to seek the help that your relationship could benefit from, then you may have a legitimate reason to find a more meaningful life either without a partner or with someone else.

Herein lies the beauty of Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy or IBCT. One of the details that I look for in couples as I work with them, are the reasons why they fell in love with each other in the first place! Let’s take the complaints that couples bring to the therapy room that I enumerated in the first paragraph.

Contextual Thinking vs. Essential Thinking:

Complaint #1: He’s not responsible enough. He is disorganized and impulsive.

You may have liked the idea that your partner now was, during your dating days, the helpless person who appreciated it everytime you would come to his rescue. Somehow you found a role that was satisfying in this relationship. It could also mean that your partner’s impulsiveness in certain contexts, can be an endearing quality! Why, he would buy me an expensive gift out of nowhere!

Complaint #2: She seems to care more about her family than us.

I think this is one of those issues that couples complain about quite often. Given our culture of being in a context where family is a Filipino’s greatest resource in hard times, is it any wonder that your partner finds it difficult to split loyalties in the context of your relationship?

Complaint #3: I’m bored in this relationship. My partner doesn’t care about what I feel. She is too quiet and aloof. I don’t feel any closeness anymore.

Maybe when you were looking for a partner, there was an attraction to this person’s aloofness. It made this person mysterious and interesting. She is also quite the opposite of the noisy, agitating people you grew up with as a child. Finally, I can have the peaceful and quiet relationship that I was looking for. At the same time, your aloof partner may have liked the idea that you gave him the emotional element in his life. So goes the saying that opposites attract.

IBCT encourages couples to see that their partner will never be everything to them. No couple is one hundred percent compatible. In fact, the chances of you ending up with someone who is incompatible with you is 100 percent! Let’s face it, your partner who goes at a snail’s pace will go at a snail’s pace in situations when this quality can be disadvantageous to facing life’s inevitable problems as you go through it no longer as individuals but as a couple.

So if you are wondering what I mean by contextual vs. essential thinking, your partner and you behave differently in different contexts! Your partner is not essentially a bad person. (Believe me, I have yet to encounter a client who I felt had inherently harmful intentions!) If you come to therapy with the same intention of saving your relationship, it is more likely that you and your partner are doing your best to show that you care and you want your partner to be happy. Your partner is not essentially defective. They just learned to behave in certain ways in certain situations that at times covers other situations that do call for a different behavior!

That’s what IBCT makes you aware of as aspects of your relationship that are better off accepted and may take a long while or even forever to change. If we can learn to notice and accept these so-called irreconcilable differences, chances are, your partner will notice that. And having the minds that we have, I always go back to what Carl Rogers had said many years ago. Let me paraphrase it to apply not just to yourself but also for your partner and your relationship.

The Quote from Carl Rogers:

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, just as I am, then I can change.”

Paraphrase:

“The curious paradox is that when my partner accepts me, just as I am, then I can change.”

How Anxiety Can Limit Your Life Choices

by Nathan Chua

Anxiety is probably one of the most common complaints that people come to therapy for, which makes me wonder why this has not been a subject that I discuss more often.  I think a lot of my own anger issues stem from a deeply held anxiety about an assortment of issues in life.  I grew up in a home full of unpredictability and the sight of anger and acts of intimidation familiar.  It is therefore quite easy for me to feel anxious about any kind of turn of events that don’t go my way.  I became very strict with rules that I felt were needed to keep things in check even if much of these were out of my control.  

I recently came up with a metaphor that I hope people who suffer from anxiety due to a past traumatic experience, can benefit from.  This provides a simple imagery of what goes on in us when we become overly controlled by our anxiety in situations that could mean a lot to us if only we could “overcome” our difficult feelings.  Unfortunately, that is most of what we have learned from mainstream psychology for many decades now.  We should be able to bring anxiety down to certain levels in order to function and live meaningful and purposeful lives.  I will have to leave this discussion for another time.

The subject I wish to talk about is how we can understand what we do when we allow our anxiety to dictate our lives.  Sort of a step backwards to see the unworkability of the things we do when we experience anxiety.  Let’s say one day a person gets involved in an accident caused by a yellow car.  As we have minds that are capable of remembering much more than other animals do, that person’s mind will remind him of the terrors caused by yellow cars in his life.  In fact, even the word yellow can bring back all the sordid details of the accident.

Now let’s imagine that this person went for a pleasure trip someday where he enjoyed sightseeing so much that he forgot that there will be no options to get back to his hotel anymore other than riding a yellow cab.  Unfortunately, he or she or they would have to walk to the hotel in the middle of the night where there is less certainty that it will be safe.  Would the person summon the courage to take a yellow cab then?  If safety and enjoying the vacation is important enough, one can be forced to ride the cab and by forced I mean, by the person’s own free will, and how much more workable taking a yellow cab would be. 

Now here’s how this story can relate to our own histories of past traumas.  In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT, not being able to realize the different contexts in which real danger should be avoided is at the heart of what is called psychological rigidity or what I prefer to call behavioral rigidity or inflexibility.  

One thing that happens if we start following rules that our minds offer us to protect us in situations where there is an actual danger or threat, we begin to lose sight of other options available.  We hold on to limited patterns of behaving in dealing with the myriad of situations that happen as we go through different life stages or even daily challenges.  

If you are like many of us who have lived with imperfect parents or caretakers, there will be situations that will cause us to feel anxious.  But some of these situations can call for our willingness to open up to these difficult feelings in order to enrich our lives.  Noticing how our minds overgeneralize with rules is the key to breaking out of the limits our minds make.  Opening up to our past histories and noticing them as they are is key to what is possible.  

If we stay and see behind our difficult memories, there may be something that we can learn which is important to us.  In my case, I hated my own anger because I cared about being kind in the presence of that anger.  If you have been bullied or rejected, that hurts because you care about not being bullied or about being accepted.  There’s much to learn from what is painful.  Don’t run away.  Stay and watch how much your pain says about you and the beauty of all that you hold dear and care about.  In other words, don’t run away from your own humanity.  As it is often said in ACT, open up to your painful thoughts and feelings, and see what gifts lay behind.

Watch this on YouTube!

ACT Matrix for Anger

Interviewed by Jacob Martinez, ACT Matrix Expert and Professional Counselor from Wisconsin!

Not Everyone is a Zelensky, Not Everyone Ends Up a Hero

by Nathan Chua

How many times have you and I been discouraged at the results of our hard work?  How many times have you and I loved but failed?  Have you ever taken care of a stray puppy and ended up seeing that puppy die in just a few months?  Have you ever done something that you thought would benefit your organization but end up unappreciated?

Welcome to the club my friend.  This is something that you share with countless others who have lived long enough to experience the pain of the human condition.  Oftentimes, we get disheartened by the results of our hard work and our standing up for what we believe is important.  This could be mostly because we often miss seeing the value behind the goals that we set for ourselves.  Goals are guideposts that tell us that we are heading in the direction we want for our lives.  Goals are benchmarks we either look forward to or look back on with much pride and sometimes with mixed feelings.  Goals are also not a sure thing.  They can be elusive or even unachievable in our lifetimes.

Our values on the other hand, are qualities of being that we aspire to be about.  It is inexhaustible.  It does not have an end point that we either look ahead to or look back on.  It can be the fuel that burns the fire for our daily existence that could otherwise be meaningless or pointless.       

As we live our values and pursue those goals, not all of us will end up getting the acknowledgement we want.  Not all end up on the cover of Time magazine like the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.  Even in such challenging places like the Ukraine, many soldiers in the Ukrainian army or even civilians, have bravely stayed to fight for their territorial rights, but unlike their president, many of them will die unknown.  At best, their names might be engraved in some memorial one day, but how many of us really take the time to get to know each one of these heroes.   

Ask yourself this question, regardless of the results of your small but heroic endeavors, whatever your lot in life, would you still do what it is that you just did?  If you were to dedicate most of your adult life to something you want to do, and no one would know, what would you choose to do?  Maybe you can relate to these stories:

  • A security guard earning what can hardly be called a living wage, returns a bag full of cash to an unsuspecting tourist;
  • A homeless person rushing in to save another pinned underneath a burning car;
  • A dedicated worker who contributes daily to their organization without much recognition or reward but a measly salary.  

So let’s get back to the questions that I started this article with.  Read them again and ask yourself, would you have still done it?  Would you have still worked hard to help the group of people who toil with you everyday in the office?  Would you still have loved that person the way you did?  Would you still have taken that stray puppy?  Would you still have done that for your company regardless of the results? 

If your answer is yes to any of these questions, then welcome to the club again my friend.  You are in the company of the nameless soldiers who died in war for the sake of something bigger than themselves.  You may not end up a Zelensky or on the headlines of a broadsheet, but you stood for something you wanted to be for that moment.  

If you ask me why we do it?  Blame it on Darwinian evolution.  There is a part of us that has never left us in millions of years of evolution.  We are the most social of all primates.  We have that gene, that social gene that tells us that we are capable of doing caring things even at the highest of costs, with little reasons for these deeds than just being the creatures that we are.  That’s the kind of programming we have, fortunately or unfortunately.  We can do really big things, for nothing more than love.    

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Successful But Unsatisfied

by Nathan Chua

Do you sometimes get that gnawing sense that you seem to have all the trappings of a happy and successful life, but feel an empty void inside nonetheless?  Have you felt that life has hit a ceiling and you’d never get to a point where you have reached your full potential?  Does it seem like you have made very logical decisions in your life and have come to a point where there is nothing more you can do?  Have you gotten congratulatory messages from people that were important to you, but somehow feel like you have done this not out of your own wishes, but only to earn the respect and regard of those around you?

This is the last of a series of articles about Relational Frame Theory or RFT.  The phenomenon described above is called reaching an adaptive peak in RFT terms.  Some of us may have had this experience in our personal journeys through large chunks of our time.  Here are some examples of how this might manifest in your life:

  • You’ve gained a lifestyle level that feels comfortable but nonetheless leaves you unfulfilled.
  • You’ve been living with an abusive partner who has nonetheless given you the comforts that you want for yourself and your kids.
  • You’ve performed well in your work but also had to ingest chemical enhancers for many years.

If you find yourself in these situations, then maybe you are reaching high points in your life with the accolades that you receive, but still feel like you have not gone toward who or what you want to be.

Here is a direct quote from the book, “Mastering the Clinical Conversation,” by Hayes, Villatte, and Villatte, containing questions you might want to ask yourself and see if they can motivate you to move in a different direction:

  • “As you’ve focused more on that goal, do you have a sense you’ve put your life on hold? Like life itself can start after this goal is achieved?” ​
  • “It seems that it has had some payoff—some benefit. The question is, is that payoff worth all this energy invested in it?” ​
  • “If you back up and look broadly, is this the kind of life you wanted to live? Are there any things you deeply care about that you have pushed to the side or put on the shelf?”

If you have heard some stories about people getting to a level of success in their lives and they suddenly surprise you about a sudden move to another career, this is what you might have witnessed.  If you are like me, we can sometimes get caught up in achieving goals and forget what qualities we want to live.  

Here is a question I would like to ask you and see if this strikes a chord with you:  How old is this thought that you need to pursue these outward signs of success?  Maybe you came from a difficult past as a child.  Your family could barely make enough to pay the monthly mortgage or rent.  Have you gone away from some of your deeply held dreams in the pursuit of acknowledgement and material security?  If your answer is yes, then you might have hit an adaptive peak or a ceiling in your life.  It is understandable because these successes do pay off in the short term.  

Your next step would be to examine yourself and see what it is that makes you tick.  When do you have a sense that life is moving in the right direction?  If you sense that being a creative artist or a dutiful teacher is what you want to be, take small steps in that direction.  Find something creative or helpful to kids that you can do within your current setup.  Experiment if this works for you and see where it takes you, because you’ll never know what life awaits you on the other side.  

Listen to this article on Spotify!  Click here!

Noticing the “If Onlys” of Your Life

by Nathan Chua

This is the second part of a series of articles about rules that our minds give us that can lead us to ineffective behaviors.  In the ACT or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy world, we don’t subscribe to the idea that a person is somehow damaged or broken.  We think this just leads people into their own prisons, seeing as if their limits are set in terms of what they can do about their inner experiences.  I have seen it so many times in therapy sessions, when people come armed with some diagnosis/diagnoses that a mental health practitioner just bestowed upon them.  What ACT advocates for is the notion that most of us end up in stuck patterns of relating to our inner world.  This is in contrast to the idea that we “have” something that we need to get rid of in order to live a rich and meaningful life.  One of these stuck patterns of thinking is the subject of discussion for this post.  These are the “if onlys” of life.  

Here are some examples that might help you see how this happens.  

  • If only my partner would be more understanding of my feelings, then I could be nicer to them.
  • If only I didn’t have this ailment, I could become the person I want to be.
  • If only I had chosen differently, life would be so much different today.
  • If only I didn’t have these urges, I would do things differently.

These are just some of what we call inapplicable rules that we follow.  They essentially make sense but when followed, they lead us into nothing because of their very nature.  They’re simply inapplicable.  

How then do these rules affect our behavior?  Before I get back to the examples above, I would like you to notice if you have any “if onlys” in your life.  Once you’re done, you can continue to read on.  

Here are potential ineffective actions that we end up doing if we get hooked by these if onlys:

  • If only my partner would be more understanding of my feelings, I would nag them less. 
  • If only I didn’t have this ailment, I could have started finding a job or creating a business.
  • If only I had chosen differently, I would not be stuck here in my room.
  • If only I didn’t have these urges, I’d be more focused on doing things that matter to my work or my partner.

As I go through more learning in ACT and Relational Frame Theory (RFT), I am beginning to see how important it is to let clients figure out the answers for themselves.  It is what makes the client therapist relationship so different from just coming to join a workshop or learning from an online workshop.  I don’t want this post to be just another set of rules for you to blindly follow.  I want you to come up with your own conclusions.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you start learning to notice such inapplicable rules taken verbatim from the book, “Mastering the Clinical Conversation” by Hayes, Villatte, and Villatte:

  • “If we just go with that thought, exactly what does it suggest you do right now?
  • Is this rule for you to follow, or is it one for others to follow?
  • What is the next step, then?”

If you find yourself answering with an I don’t know, or I guess I just have to wait for things to change to the first question, then it could get you to realize that this is an inapplicable rule that you might have been following to the detriment of pursuing the life you want.

If you answer that the rule is not for you to follow and just for someone else or no one to follow, then you may come to the realization that again, this is another inapplicable rule that has so far taken control of your actions.

If you find it hard to answer what would be your next step as you follow this rule, then you probably realize that there is nothing you can do to change the results of the rule.

So as you notice these inapplicable rules, what then can you do even as your mind keeps reminding you of these rules?  In ACT, we don’t argue with them or try to get rid of them, but rather bring them along for the ride towards a more meaningful, purposeful life. 

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