Tag: Psychologist Manila
Pain vs. Suffering
by Nathan Chua
There’s an old aphorism that goes, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional,” credited to Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami.* Have you seen a kid who was disappointed by a parent or primary caretaker who wasn’t as appreciative of a pyramid of blocks it created, and then proceeds to wipe out the masterpiece with one quick stroke of an arm? I do remember myself doing so but can’t remember what my creation was. If we look closely, we as adults sometimes revert to this way of coping with the inevitable hard feelings or the pain we get in situations at home, at work, and at random moments in our days.
I am here borrowing a series of questions you might ask yourself when faced with a challenging moment in these situations. This can help you see if you may be causing more pain on top of what is already an emotionally difficult moment. I borrowed this from a book written by experts in functional analytic psychotherapy.**
- In that situation, can you notice what it is that you do in reaction to it?
- If another person is involved, what do they do in response to your reaction?
- What do you think it is that you do that aggravates or contributes to the problem?
- Did the way you reacted show up in other places or with other people?
- What is immediately rewarding about what you do?
- What is it costing you in the short term?
- What do you foresee will happen if you continue doing what you’re doing in the long run?
- What would happen if you stopped doing what you’re doing now? What would you have to be willing to accept?
- Is there a purpose important enough for you to accept or face that?
In your relationships with your partner or your family:
When people in close relationships fight, there’s usually a reason for such behaviors. Very often life’s stressors provide enough of a catalyst for differences and emotional sensitivities to be highlighted. Couples and parents often believe that their partners or children need to be exactly just like them. There is a tendency to believe that what is evident to one should be evident to the other. There is nothing wrong with these thoughts for that is a typical function of our minds. We compare and find out what should or should not be the same. However, in your attempts to change the other, what results do you notice you get? And if you didn’t do this, maybe you would have to accept that you and your kid or your spouse are different from you. Now is there a purpose here for which you would be willing to accept that?
In your relationships at work
Just like in other areas in your life, change happens at work. Let’s take for example your boss. We all hope that we have only one boss who happens to like us and the way we work, usually for life! Unfortunately, that is not, most of the time, under our control. Many decisions from within the hierarchical structure are handed down from above. So ask yourself the questions posed above. Let’s say you end up consuming hours contemplating how bad things have been since your company had a change of management. You may notice that there are short term costs involved in this behavior, like procrastinating on your work tasks. In the long term, such a habit can only lead up to you losing your job or getting bad marks on your performance. Would you be willing to accept the fact that companies change and at times your boss will frustrate or be different from you? What would be reason enough for you to accept this reality? Is it the family that you love and care about who depend on your job to sustain their needs or even lifestyles? Is it that long wished for vacation that you planned to spend with loved ones?
At random moments
You and I know that driving in a megapolis like Metro Manila can be rather challenging. Anger and frustration are easy to come by when you have to contend with multiple threats to your peaceful drive home. When you yell and scream inside your vehicle while your kids and partner are with you, what do you notice are the payoffs and both short and long term negative consequences? Has it gotten in the way of an otherwise happy ride home? Would you have to accept that at times driving in an overcrowded city can be challenging? Is your drive home important enough of a reason for you to hold your peace?
There you go my friends. Hope these examples will give you a snippet of what you can learn from what the experts have painstakingly worked to provide us with, which is the knowledge that we are not free from life’s pains, but we are free to choose how we respond to them. Will we follow old rules of thumb that have both long and short term costs to what otherwise are things we most cherish about our jobs and relationships? Or will we stop and take a step back and see from a distance what we can do differently to avert the costs and live well in the moment?
*https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/613585-pain-is-inevitable-suffering-is-optional-say-you-re-running-and
**FAP Made Simple by Holman, Kanter, Tsai, Kohlenberg
Common Sense and Psychological Sense
by Nathan Chua
As I learn more in the field, I can understand why some people might have a negative view of psychology. Besides the stigma, there is plenty of material out there that can make any person think, “Do you really need a PhD to know that?” In this article, I’d like to talk about some examples of how this happens and why much of the common sense advice we hear online can at best, be heard but reflected on before implementing.
Here are some examples of very common common sense advice we all may have heard about at some point:
A common sense or logical approach to sadness or depression:
Eliminate negative thoughts! Think positive! This will work only if we eliminate a function of our thinking, which is thinking of the opposite!
You and I can test this for ourselves. Living in a tropical country like the Philippines, note what thoughts come to you when the heat and humidity become unbearable. Your mind will probably remind you of how much more pleasant the weather is in the cooler months of the year. During the cooler months, you would probably remember the impending summer months and how short-lived these more pleasant temperatures are. This is our minds’ propensity to think of opposites. For our minds to not be able to do this, we would have to damage it in some ways. Thinking positive will only remind us of the negative thinking that we were trying to avoid in the first place.
Here’s another reason why it becomes difficult for you and I to simply think positive. In fact, it can even be counterproductive. The command here is, “It is important for you to not think that negative thought.” The paradox of this command is that it makes you monitor your thoughts, specifically, your negative thoughts. So how do you know you’re successful? You’re not thinking of the…oops! In other words, simply using common sense to not think about a negative thought, already reminds you of what you are avoiding in the first place and it has taken such an important place in your mind.
This war between positive and negative thoughts is unending. One thing for certain is life will provide us with challenges, which inevitably produce negative thoughts. This is part of what we mean when we say that depression is not really due to sadness, but it is mostly about the struggle with sadness. Thinking only positive thoughts may sound logical by the process of elimination, but it leaves us in a losing war with our feelings which will only disappear if we are in a state of numbness from medication, or if we were dead..
Common sense advice on sleeping problems:
Be prepared to go to sleep! Keep it as dark as possible, with just the right temperature, and dead silence. What’s more, follow a routine of taking a warm shower or a hot bath and make sure you have comfortable clothes. The fact that you are prepared to go to sleep means you are primed and anxious for a battle with your insomnia. If you are prepared for a battle, it goes without saying that you will be awake!
I remember in the early days of my work as a therapist, I used to give one piece of advice to conquer insomnia, try not to sleep! In other words, come to an acceptance with your insomnia and you will probably be more able to sleep. So common sense advice as mentioned above may only serve more to keep you awake than it is to help you get the rest you want.
Couple advice on apologies or using formulaic sentences:
Be quicker to forgive or apologize to your partner or spouse. That’s a common statement we hear from different experts in the field. When taken as a rule for its own sake, it forgets about the different contexts that couples have. As I have mentioned before in a previous article, context does not just refer to a physical location but also people and our very own thoughts and memories. If applied without sensitivity to context, this can lead to misinterpretations and even more loops in a couple’s arguments. A quick apology can be interpreted as insincere just as a quick word of forgiveness. It’s easy to say words we don’t mean but body language is harder to disguise. This can lead to more vigilance from one of the partners and more frustration on the other. One is seen to be insincere while the other is perceived to be unappreciative, which leads to the point of them giving up on each other.
The kind of psychology I espouse is not difficult because it takes a lot of effort, it is difficult because it is tricky. As you might have experienced yourself, common sense advice can be effortful and offer more opportunities for discouragement and escalation to even bigger problems. To paraphrase a famous psychologist, we are not in therapy to do the logical thing, but the psychological thing. So next time you hear someone give common sense advice, please either think critically or try not to generalize. You may even give it a try if you wish, but also be more noticing of the results. What makes psychological sense may not be what common sense dictates, and that’s the whole point of this blog post.
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Living with Purpose and Intent
by Nathan Chua
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever,”
Mahatma Gandhi
Have you come to a point in your life when you feel like as it says in the Bible, chasing after the wind? Have you ever felt like every day has become a pointless pursuit of comfort and tranquility? Has your life turned into an endless problem to solve? You go from fixing one problem after another. When’s the next challenge going to come? Will I be able to surmount the bigger ones down the line?
If you have, don’t worry, you’re not alone. I came from the same quagmire. Early in my career, I started believing that life was about fulfilling a role of being around to be the problem solver. Furthermore, I had learned from my history that the secret to the good life is the comfortable life. One in which I can be the great problem solver, conquering one obstacle at a time until there remain only the easier ones. I dreamt of eventually coasting along as I moved into old age.
I lived that way for the first 20 years of my working life. People around me would notice how I looked then. I often carried a tired and angry expression on my face; always on alert for the next challenge that comes my way. I was the hero who was always ready to come to the rescue.
To borrow a metaphor I saw in a YouTube video, you can view a rabbit running across from a window, but you wouldn’t know if that rabbit was going for a carrot or running away from a predator. I was like that rabbit that people saw from a window. One couldn’t tell if I was in business because I simply enjoyed doing it or if I was doing it to avoid the shame that comes if I had failed in business. For those who are new here, I spent the first 20 years of my career as a businessman. A failure in business meant I had failed my family.
You would probably understand why I often looked tired and angry. Tired because life has become a struggle and angry because I didn’t see any end in sight. Life was sending me challenge after challenge to surmount. Like the rabbit running away from a predator that eventually tires out, I was exhausted escaping from the jaws of my shaming, “Whatever happens, don’t be a failure,” thoughts.
One day I woke up and started noticing the hamster wheel I was on. It was as if I was living backwards. Like some of what I learned in psychodynamic therapy, I lived hoping to come back to the safety of my mother’s womb, wishing to get back to that fetal position of a tranquil life.
That tranquil life turns out to be a mirage. No matter how much we try to avoid it, life has its challenges and running away from the feelings and thoughts that these challenges come with, is like becoming a rabbit that spends most of its time fleeing a predator, although in my case the predator is my own worst fears.
You and I can pivot towards a life in pursuit of what truly matters to us. Rabbits run away from life-threatening circumstances. We humans though can run away from our thoughts and not just actual threats to our safety. It only takes the rabbit to notice when the noise behind the bushes was just a gust of wind to make it go and pursue food or a mate. Although it is difficult, we can start to make changes in our life directions by noticing if we are spending much of our energies running away from our unpleasant internal experiences, or if we are pursuing the qualities of being and living that matter to us.
The happy rabbit is the one that pursues nourishment and the possibility of a mate. Take it from there, are you willing to start pursuing the rich and meaningful life, even if it means that your fearful inner experiences will become more evident as you go. Maybe that’s what Gandhi meant in his words. His life was mostly about pursuing something that was good and noble, rather than about running away from the dangers his mind reminded him of. He pursued the irrational move to expose himself to the dangers of a life spent for the welfare of others, and paid the ultimate price. Nonetheless, he lived, not the tranquil life, but the meaningful one. He is the quintessential rabbit moving in the direction of what he wanted to do with his time…every single minute.
Are you a walking diagnosis?
by Nathan Chua
In my more than a decade’s work, one of the most common questions I get from people inquiring about mental health services is, “Can you give me a diagnosis?” These come in many forms. Some call already with a prior diagnosis from another practitioner, “I had been diagnosed as a borderline personality, is there anything different about the way you treat people like me?” Even as I had training from that very same school of thought, I had always had my reservations about the practice of diagnosing. I had been diagnosed once, and I know how it feels and I know that it really wasn’t helpful. It is as if knowing what people have can make them somehow more aware of their tendencies and therefore allow them to be more cognizant of their actions.
Does knowing one’s diagnosis really help? Let’s take a look at what a diagnosis really comes up to, by taking this to an absurd level of analogy. If one were diagnosed to be bipolar, would they go around eating in restaurants and meeting people and saying, “Hi, I am Nathan. I am a bipolar disordered person!” Would they introduce themselves in every situation the same way? Like would that be how you would tell someone about yourself in a group class? From this, we can notice that we all act differently depending on the situations that we are in. We act differently when we are at work and when we are at home. We act differently when we are stressed and when we are relaxed.
Based on my experience, I have seen how this happens to people who had been dealt with a veritable life sentence of being attached to a label. At times, even worse, pinned with an inaccurate one at that.
As human beings we have evolved into a group of cells and individuals that thrive and survive through cooperation. One of the scariest parts of being human is to become isolated from a group. Being creatures who survive in communities, we have yearnings to belong. In the wild, the isolated human’s fate is most probably becoming a dead human sooner than later.
Belonging is important to us. There was even a famous study in the past that showed how much humans require nurturing and caring. Babies cannot survive just being fed through a bottle. They need touching and the physical and mental stimulation that comes from a caregiver.
However in the age of social media and the rest of the modern accoutrements we enjoy, the mind has hijacked this inner yearning to belong. Our problem-solving minds are excellent in categorizing people. The way to this felt sense of belonging has turned into being special instead of being one with others who share the same doubts, fears, and inner perturbations. You and I can see this in how special people want to project themselves in their social media accounts. The way to belong is to become special! Do you notice the oxymoron here?
The other way the mind hijacks this yearning to belong is the complete opposite of the abovementioned example. Our thoughts turn us into especially vulnerable individuals that need special attention. I have bipolar disorder so you better be extra kind and loving around me.
Like traits, all these diagnoses serve more to put us in boxes of categories. Experts have seen how countries that had adapted this system of classification (or what we call our DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorder) get worse results. What we used to think were just the shy nerdy types in school have now turned into walking diagnoses that need special attention and worse, medication. We had forgotten an era when that shy, quiet girl in class can turn into the next world class stage performer.
So let’s get back to how I started this blog post. What do I say when asked about whether or not I can give a diagnosis? I just tell them that I don’t.
Getting Hooked by Angry Thoughts!
by Nathan Chua
If you are old enough to watch the daily news or get regular updates online through social media platforms, you would be familiar with the all too common sights of road rage or someone who had just lost his or her temper and did something that was captured on a phone camera. We have seen how people do things that they would never have even dreamt about in reaction to their angry thoughts and feelings. How many times have we seen previously law-abiding citizens commit heinous acts and then later on regret what they had done when it was too late. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the term used to describe this process of fusing with thoughts is “getting hooked.” Fusing with thoughts means our thoughts dictate what we do.
Yes, I should have seen it coming! It was in late September this year that I realized I had to re-register to vote. For those who are not from the Philippines, the background is about being automatically delisted as a voter if one has missed voting in two consecutive elections. I had thought all along that I had just missed one midterm election, but only to realize accidentally when I came upon a Facebook post that assessed my eligibility as a voter in late September, that I had missed voting in a small town (barangay) election that was held one year before the midterm elections. Of course, that induced some panic in me when I recalled online videos showing the horribly long queues of people lining up in the midst of a pandemic to register before the deadline set by the end of September! As I attempted to find ways to register where there were shorter lines and found out how tough it was to navigate the government website to print out the necessary forms, I realized that this will take a herculean effort. Sacrificing a day of productive work just to register as a voter was not exactly what I had envisioned for what is supposedly a democratic country where the right to vote is protected, facilitated, or made as easy as possible.
To cut the story short, I finally ended up having to deal with getting requirements to register all over again. And true enough, I felt the process was disproportionately tedious for the simple act of voting. Upon completing my documents I set out to register only to be told rather nonchalantly that my documents were unacceptable! You can just imagine how frustrating that could be after you had braved the long lines and a pandemic just to register.
I eventually got into a heated argument with the two people in charge of checking my documents. It took me about five minutes to realize that I had gotten hooked by my angry thoughts! Upon noticing what I had been doing, I quickly apologized for my behavior. It was not the person I wanted to be in that moment, and not the way I wanted to handle the situation. As you can see you are not alone in struggling with your anger. Even counselors like me can get hooked!
Here are other examples of getting hooked by our thoughts:
- Have you ever had an experience when you were having a dinner conversation with someone important only to realize that you missed half the conversation?
- Have you ever played with your child and all of a sudden noticed that your toddler is just about to fall off the crib?
- Or drove all the way to work and didn’t know how you got there or which route you took?
- Have you ever come home after someone tried to steal your bag during your walk? Once you arrive to your family, you would probably be talking about this experience with them for hours and even days. The experience can get you off your normal routines at home.
All of these involve something grabbing your attention and our minds start giving us reasons for not playing with our kids or hugging our partner. In other words, your world stops in those moments. You become less of the kind, loving, and caring person you used to be.
In my case, with all the bureaucratic requirements I had to go through, I was hooked by the thought that the government is bad. Hence, I felt physically tense the minute I went into the registration site. I failed to notice this and went about the business of registering not ready for any possible frustration that might come my way.
In hindsight, I was already hooked even before the challenging situation happened! It’s hard to recognize a hook until we notice that biting the hook has brought us in a different direction! This process of unhooking from our thoughts is based on what Dr. Steven Hayes explains as looking at our thoughts rather than looking from our thoughts. The original name for ACT was comprehensive distancing, which means distancing from the thoughts that our minds give us, so our thoughts don’t dictate what we do.
The first step in being able to distance ourselves from our thoughts is to be more noticing.
On that afternoon at the voter registration facility, I got hooked! I noticed only about five minutes into my ranting and quickly made amends to my ways. Some damage had already been done though and my thoughts began to run wild with shaming accusations that I am just not a good enough person, much less a counselor.
Well, here’s what ACT has to say about that too. We will get hooked no matter how hard we try to be more noticing, for we are only human. What doesn’t change though is that little voice in our heads that reminds us of what we want to be about in each and every moment. Realize that and ask ourselves after getting hooked, “Has anything that was important to us changed?” Perhaps not. Every time we fall into not noticing, we can always get up again and do our best in moving towards the person we want to be and the life we want to live.