The kids are not the only ones leaving the nest this spring. Parents are graduating too, ready or not, especially if their child will be leaving home for college or a new job. Graduations are the end-of-a-life phase, and there is an art to doing it well.

Children cost time, money, and energy, but they give us an all-important mission in life. While one study found that childless couples reported higher life satisfaction, people with children reported having more meaning in their lives. Instead of the quick pleasure of doing what we want, we can find meaning in contributing to our kids’ future welfare—a diabolical trade-off, to be sure.

Life with dependent children is vastly simplified. Decisions are made on the basis of how things might affect the kids. Limiting our choices is one of the things children do best. Restrictions on our freedom give an odd kind of security, like having a map with clearly marked routes instead of vast unexplored territory. There are only a few ways of giving kids what they need, and these things often weed out what we would prefer to do on our own. After a while, we get used to thinking this way.

Then the children grow up and leave, taking our map with them.

It is a little like getting released from a job you thought you would have for the rest of your life. What that feels like will depend on how identified you were with your parenting role. It might be a relief, like the person in a convertible with the license plate KIDZRGON. But it might also feel like hello, freedom—goodbye, meaningfulness.

As children mature, their job is to need us less and less. We are responsible only for the beginning of their lives, not the rest of it. When the adolescent part of a child’s life is wrapping up, the parent mentally graduates from parent to bystander. We are no longer their safety net; we have graduated to being spotters. Kids may still need financial help or occasional advice and suggestions, but the parents at some point must sit on their hands and let events unfold.

The essential question becomes: do we trust our kids? Do we trust that somewhere deep inside them is a force for maturity, even if it is not looking like that at the time? Do we trust that ultimately they will learn from their mistakes and figure out the consequence-equation of life? Do we trust that they will rise to the level that is just right for them, all things considered?

Many people answer these questions with a yes, but… We hope that our children will be able to survive out there, but their behavior so far may not inspire confidence. Raising a child to the point of graduation is like being in on the sausage making—and then being expected to have a different reaction when it arrives on your breakfast plate. It just does not seem possible that all those years of childish behavior are going to add up to a capable adult.

Yet that is job number one for the graduating parent. Somehow our disbelief must be suspended in the service of our child’s creating his or her own adult story. As our legal responsibilities to our children end, we begin to worry how they will handle being legally responsible for themselves. If their bedrooms are any indication, we may fear complete chaos. Somehow we have to trust that organization and getting up on time will happen if we let it. We have to trust that there will be things they want as adults that will motivate them into maturity. We may not believe this, but we have to try. Forming a positive fantasy about children’s eventual maturity helps them have faith in themselves. We have to believe in them before they show any signs of deserving it.

Of course, we think our worry is about them, but maybe it is about us.

Maybe somewhere in our parenting heart we are terrified about what we will do if we no longer have the mission of looking out for our child’s safety and well being. Who will we be without that worry? What unexplored parts of ourselves and our lives may come to the forefront? Are we nervous about a void we do not want to face?

Facing the void is an important part of any life transition, as William Bridges talks about in his excellent book, Transitions. When the old way has come to an end and we cannot go back (a nice definition of graduation, by the way), there can be a highly uncomfortable period of not knowing what is coming next. We may find that we long for the safety of what we did before. For our children’s sake, however, we must keep looking forward into our own void, trusting that just as they find their adult way, we can find our post-parenting way. Until we accept our own graduation to bystander-spotter, we will keep seeing our children as children when they really need to be seen as nascent adults.

Finding our own way forward and celebrating our parental transition is one of the best graduation gifts we can give our kids. They don’t need a new car as much as they need this. Knowing that you have a parent who has confidently turned responsibility for your life over to you can be an incredibly freeing experience. It does not mean that we never help our kids, nor even that we miraculously stop worrying about them. It just means that their life is no longer our life, and at some deep level we accept that. Like a spotter we may still have to step in and help them avoid a catastrophic event, but then we step back and do our best to resume bystander mode.

Our message to them needs to be: you’ll get it, just keep trying. It is the same message we need to tell ourselves when life after parenting seems a little pale and we don’t know what we are going to do next. It is a normal feeling after parental graduation. We, like our kids, need time to figure it out.  

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach. For information, call 757-490-7811.

Some psychological syndromes are so familiar that we do not recognize them as a disorder. For instance, in big business, psychopaths might become hot commodities for their cold-blooded focus on the bottom line. In the same way, the psychological problems of self-sacrificers might go undetected because they meet the highest standards for desirable behavior.

Self-sacrificers have huge hearts. They react to the needs of others with an impulsive generosity that can make ordinary people feel stingy and self-centered in comparison. You know you can always turn to them. They seem the perfect model of altruism. But take a closer look and you will see that their behavior sooner or later costs them and certainly costs the people closest to them.

New York psychologist Jeffrey Young has identified the self-sacrificer’s pattern of compulsive overdoing, excessive empathy, and hidden issues with anger. Theirs is not ordinary generosity and empathy, and their anger is not just a healthy reaction to someone doing them wrong.

Self-sacrifice looks like a kind of altruism, but it is only a second cousin to that genuine helping instinct. Altruism is spurred when a person is moved to help in a situation that is clearly dire. Altruism does not seek to establish a grateful or over-involved relationship with the other person. Nor does it go around with radar for needy people. Altruism is not a compulsive life pattern; it is a response to a situation.

The compulsive overdoing of self-sacrificers is seen in the involuntary nature of their urge to help. They focus so intently on other people’s predicaments that their own needs are often eclipsed—and sometimes the needs of their immediate family members. Often there is a dysfunctional person or two in their family that get the lion’s share of their attention, in spite of repeated evidence that their efforts are not helping. The self-sacrificer focuses on the one with the most apparent need, whether that is good for that person or not. It is nearly impossible for them to step back and evaluate their own behavior because they have already decided up front that their generosity and empathy are good things. Other people reinforce this view, giving them lots of sympathy, because self-sacrificing behavior is so culturally admired.

So if dysfunctional people need help and these people are willing to give it, what is the problem? The problem is that self-sacrificers trap themselves in a self-denying way of life that can result in outbursts of anger or secret self-gratifying behavior that would surprise anyone convinced of their selflessness. Affairs are a classic way that people exhausted from self-sacrifice find room for their own emotional needs, but affairs do not solve the problem of not taking care of oneself in one’s primary relationships.

The anger felt by self-sacrificers can be expressed in several ways. They can have blow-ups, complete with screaming tirades, which are always caused by giving too much and neglecting their own needs. These tend to be infrequent, and it is easy for the self-sacrificer to dismiss them as simple stress reactions or not feeling well. But it is plenty shocking to the people who live with them. Or they can indulge in bitter, silent moods that make it clear how furious they are. Finally, they can defeat others with passive-aggressive behavior that withholds what others want from them.

Why are self-sacrificers so angry? Because they are trying to solve their own childhood emotional deprivation by taking care of others. Unfortunately, you cannot satisfy an emotional need of your own by doing for others. Sooner or later, the self-sacrificer feels the anger of being used and disregarded by the very people they are pouring their energies into. Self-sacrificers are frustrated because the more they do, the less they get. Their efforts, Herculean though they are, are never adequately appreciated, and the person they are helping usually does not improve much. The anger and frustration of self-sacrifice can lead to both emotional and physical problems.

Healthy self-interest is as necessary as good blood sugar or low cholesterol. People who are not self-sacrificing do not feel resentful or used. Instead, they expect fair trade and reciprocity in their relationships. The non-sacrificing person chooses relationships with people who can give back.

There is usually great childhood sadness in self-sacrificers, a result of emotional neglect in their early relationships. They were often the parentified child in their family, the little adult that parents counted on not to give anyone any trouble. They learned that the way to be noticed was to be extra good and always be there for other people. Unfortunately, since much of their empathy is based on the projection of their own emotional deprivation, they exaggerate the helplessness and neediness of others. And because emotional deprivation is rarely labeled as such, these people have no idea why they feel a chronic sense of being overlooked.

The way out of self-sacrificing is to finally have empathy for one’s own emotional deprivation, both now and in childhood. Once we start feeling for ourselves, we can start taking care of ourselves. Our inner child-self needs to be protected from over-doing and feeling for others so excessively. The cure for self-sacrifice is self-care.

When self-sacrificers recover, they realize that they were projecting their lonely, deprived child-self onto others, imagining a neediness that may be only partly true. Instead of exaggerating the recipient’s problems and ignoring their own needs, former self-sacrificers can hold back and evaluate if their help is really needed. They can give without depleting themselves and let others solve their own problems as much as possible. They may act quickly to help in a real emergency, but they have sensible standards for what really requires their sacrifice. They do not give until it hurts; they give as much as they realistically can, then they seek outside help. Best of all, they do not harbor resentments concerning those who did not appreciate them enough. They stop trying to save everybody else and finally reach out to that tired child within who needs some caretaking of its own.  

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach. For information, call 757-490-7811.

What if a wise being lived deep inside you, someone who knows you far better than you know yourself, who has the answers to your deepest questions and works for your health and well-being at all levels—would you listen to it? Would you listen to it if it told you uncomfortable things that were hard to hear? And would you pay attention if it could only communicate with you in moving pictures, like a silent movie with minimal dialogue?

This wise inner being is our dreammaker, the part of our mind that sends us updates all night about our life and how we are doing.

Most people would say they would love such an advisor. But when the wise one lets the pictures roll, awkwardly spliced together and full of symbols, you might feel frustrated. It is easy to say “No thanks” to such unusual guidance, wise or not. If the dreammaker cannot even produce a sensible narrative, how are you supposed to trust its message? In your frustration, you might stop remembering your dreams altogether.

The wise being comes from a place where everything is expressed mostly through pictures and actions, not words. It does not waste time on logic; it just produces snapshots to show us what we need to know. But those snapshots are taken with the camera of symbolism, producing pictures that must be deciphered into names and words.

Why doesn’t the dreammaker just speak our language if it has so much to tell us? Sigmund Freud explained that although dreams want to show us our secret wishes and fears, they don’t want to wake us up in the process. He described an internal censor that protects sleep by translating the dreammaker’s message into something so unrecognizable our sleep is not disturbed. Our brain is free to process important information overnight, but the censor allows us to stay asleep while it does so.

Figuring out the meaning behind the pictures is the tricky part. Dreams are like those many-layered cakes, each level as delicious and real as the next.

To interpret your dream, write it down, and start by asking what it is trying to tell you. Then ask yourself what each dream image makes you think of, and write down honestly whatever pops into your mind. A good dream dictionary also can point you toward ideas and symbols that might click meaningfully. The next step is to close your eyes and recall the physical feeling of being in the dream. Then ask yourself what situation in your past or present life has felt like that. This will guide you to the part of your life that the dream is commenting on. What do the images in the dream seem to be saying about your situation? What feelings have you been overlooking in your daylight hours?

The characters and objects in dreams are chosen by the dream censor to represent something the dreammaker wants us to pay attention to. For instance, a sword or a pitcher has very different energies as dream symbols and can correspond to the kind of energies in your psyche that are important at the moment. Ask yourself, “What does a sword do? What does a pitcher do? What is it used for?” Even small details and objects in dreams are chosen for a reason, much like a set designer selects objects that reflect or amplify the main character’s issues.

Characters in a dream are often disguised. The censor might substitute one character for another who has the same type of energy. When you wake up and wonder why you dreamed about so-and-so, ask yourself what energies or similarities they share with someone else, perhaps someone you have been dealing with or thinking about. It may actually be a message about that other person, revealing something you have not been aware of in your relationship.

Rarely does the dreammaker come straight through with an undisguised dream about a real person or situation, but when it does, pay attention! These can be warning dreams, and the censor willingly steps aside in order for the warning to get through, even if it has to wake you up. Most troubling dreams are some kind of warning, but the less disguised they are, the closer the danger.

Carl Jung believed that a fruitful avenue to dream interpretation was to consider all characters, places, and things in a dream to be aspects of our own psyche. He believed we are all engaged in a lifelong quest of individuation to become the unique, whole individual we were meant to be. Every character or symbol in a dream can represent different parts of the psyche and their relationship to one another. If dreams are about conflict, fear, or danger, it can mean that the psyche is out of balance, with one part battling another. This is often the case when we are repressing or avoiding our feelings about something important in our daytime hours.

Disaster dreams (tornadoes, tsunamis, storms, etc.) often represent our fears about our secret wish to wipe out the old order and start fresh. Such images may look destructive, but they aim to cleanse and free us from too restrictive a life. In other words, if we refuse to see how deep our need is for change, the dream disaster might do it for us. At another level, the disaster dream may be warning us of an actual external problem coming our way, and we need to do something about it before it is too late. It is only our own associations that can tell us which interpretation “clicks” as true.

We hide much from ourselves in our daily life, just to get by. The dreammaker alerts us to which parts of our life and psyches we are ignoring too much. It points the way to corrective action so that we can flourish, not just exist. The censor guards our sleep, but the dreammaker looks out for our safety, health, and wholeness. Learn to speak its language, and you will have a wise advisor for life, every time you close your eyes. 

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach. For information, call 757-490-7811.

When I listen to a parent despairing over their child’s fascination with video games and social media, I like to imagine a caveman mother’s concern about her hairless offspring, worried about how he will ever keep warm. I think about the father hominid, wondering how his son will make it through the treetops with those prehensile thumbs of his. I wonder if alarm bloomed in a Neanderthal’s heart when her daughter’s bulbous high forehead set her apart from the other infants.

Apologies for having my anthropology all wrong, but parents’ universal reaction when evolution shows up in their kid is to want to turn back the clock. Parents only feel secure when their kids seem normal. And normal means where the parents think evolution should have stopped.

Parents know that times have changed and activities are different, but they still want their children to be the kind of kids their grandparents would approve of. The trouble is that technology has changed things so much in the last two generations that a child’s literal physical environment is vastly different. Advertising surrounds us on every usable surface and tells us all to want more and go faster. Nobody is telling people to sit down, pay attention, and comply with authority. It just doesn’t sell.

I see no signs of things going backwards—with children settling down to read a good book and happily doing repetitive homework. I don’t see them going back to the landline phone to talk to their friends or giving up TV and video games to play in the yard. Parents who expect their children to enjoy working hard at paper-based tasks are probably courting disappointment.

Why is this? Why is our electronic media body-slamming our beloved paper-based society? Because the human brain has always loved speed and hates to wait. When the technology was slow and the distances were great, people had to wait, to pace themselves, to plan. Slow and careful came to be seen as a virtue.

But what does human evolution think about that? The evidence is that the human brain has always lit up in response to anything that broadens its horizons and lets it go really fast. Nothing is going to stand in the way of that. Once we go fast, we are not content with slow. Touch screens trump paper every time.

If we feel embarrassed when our child is resisting the old work ethic of step-by-step learning or when our child must be reasoned with before they will do something, it just means that we have stepped into the brave new world without knowing it. It does not mean we are bad parents. Perhaps education has not caught up with the amazing, lightning-fast circuitry that now sparkles in our children’s brainpan.

Let’s face it: the signs of the world to come suggest that the ability to do ponderous repetition over long periods of time is losing its market value. That may be a bad thing—evolution will let us know—but it is still happening. Patience and planning will always have a role in success, but it may play a smaller part. People who can think this way will probably go the way of engineers and math majors—absolutely essential to the betterment of humanity, but there may not be many of them.

What may emerge as the preeminent survival skills is the ability to mentally turn on a dime and to quickly work deals with other people that satisfy both parties. This is because there are so many people and companies in the world now that the rigid person who cannot negotiate or spot an opportunity will fall in the dust like the dinosaur he has become. Training our children to always be compliant might have been adaptive in a world where large businesses offered stability and security. Now it is a recipe for obsolescence. We might as well give them a buggy whip as we send them out into the world.

If we feel like we are often haggling or negotiating with our child, maybe it is because that is exactly what evolution is pushing us toward. In the future, our kids may need those skills more than unquestioning obedience. When we see our kids absorbed in video games, reacting instantly to one surprise attack after another, think of them as preparing themselves for a global world of instant change at electronic speed.

In other words, what we call Attention Deficit Disorder may be where we have been heading all along. Knowing how to enjoy and pursue superficial social contacts (facebook, Google, etc.) may be turn out to be an excellent way to prosper in the global environment. Certainly the traders and explorers in the old days were the fittest specimens as it turned out, working the outermost edge of social evolution with great benefit for us all.

It remains to be seen if this will continue to be the direction of our evolution, but barring a technological catastrophe of some sort, can you really see it slowing down or kids becoming more docile and respectful of authority? In prehistoric times, the evolving brains that craved novelty and speed kept our species competitive for survival. It worked so well that humans ultimately were able to create their own environments, not just adapt to what was there.

The lifestyle the young human brain likes is fast, stimulating, and worldwide. Our children’s brains have smelled the change in the air and are responding like all new generations have responded: eagerly flourishing in the new environment. They may be adapting to their environment faster than we can keep up, but isn’t that what parents have always wanted for their children? As far as evolution is concerned, a child’s primary job is not to please the grandparents, but to be prepared for the future. 

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach. For information, call 757-490-7811.

Christmas has come and gone, but Scrooge is a character who still has something to teach us. A Christmas Carol is really a New Year’s story, one about new beginnings. Can we really hope for change, or are we stuck with old patterns forever? Is personality transformation a real thing, or just a fantasy?

Yes, transformation is possible, but only when motivation is extreme. That is why profound changes like Scrooge’s are often associated with deep losses, helplessness, and fear. We usually do not give up our old ways of doing things until it costs us dearly. In Alcoholics Anonymous, they call it hitting bottom, when the old ways of escaping simply do not work anymore.

Emotional pain brings to our attention that something is wrong. Sometimes when the suffering gets clear enough, people may feel so bad they start to consider that their way of doing things may be mistaken. Then they finally become willing to self-reflect, as in let’s-take-this-apart-and-see-what’s-wrong-with-it thinking.

People don’t always need therapy to do this. They just need information, in whatever form they can get it. Realizations and new thinking are all around us every day, free for the picking. Like Scrooge, we just have to get to the point where we realize we need them.

David Malan, a British psychotherapy researcher, has explained why it is so hard for us to change our habitual patterns, even if they are causing us distress. It is because we embrace the psychological defenses we learned as children and keep trying to make adult life work according to the lessons we learned during the worst times of our young life. A Christmas Carol has the ring of truth in the way it shows how Scrooge shut down his heart as a result of loss and loneliness early in life. When his transformation occurs, it really is a return to the openness and love of his earlier life before he learned to defend himself against hurt.

Malan explained that we all come equipped with core feelings that are originally helpful and adaptive in dealing with the world. Core feelings and impulses drive us to do the things that protect us and keep our energy good. When we are in touch with our core feelings, our energy and self-esteem feel full. We can take action and express our feelings, making us effective at work and connected with other people.

But if we grow up in a family that has certain rules about what can and cannot be expressed, then we quickly learn that our expression of feelings and impulses leads to alienation from loved ones. Since a child will not survive if cut off from the family, children find ways of obeying the family emotional rules so they can feel included. A family rule about feelings might be something like: it is weak to feel sad, but it is impressive to get mad. Or, it is okay to want connection with others, but the best way to do it is through teasing or insults.

When a child unwittingly breaks a family emotional rule, the adult’s negative reaction teaches the child to associate anxiety and feelings of badness with the innocent core feeling. For instance, feelings of fear or anger should not be a cause for anxiety or guilt if you grew up in a healthy family, but just as Pavlov’s dog learned that a bell meant food, children can learn that these healthy emotions and needs mean something bad is about to happen. This prompts the child to inhibit those emotions before the parents get upset.

The original core feelings get suppressed, and in their place come defensive actions. The energy that was supposed to be expressed is rechanneled into defensive behavior that hides the original need. Now instead of feeling scared and expressing fear, the child learns to act like nothing bothers her. Instead of asking for affection, she becomes sarcastic or critical, forcing others to pay attention to her, but in a very negative way. Living in a chronic defensive state will result in impaired relationships, emotional disorders, or physical problems.

When we understand our own defenses and where they come from, we can choose to respond in fresh ways. Any new behavior that is more authentic will usually be accompanied by anxiety, but the trick is not to withdraw just because something new is making you nervous. Getting healthy means that we learn to use our anxiety to figure out which core feelings we might be suppressing.  The challenge is to see the anxiety as the first step in rediscovering your true feelings and really connecting to others from your core experience. Scrooge went through plenty of anxiety before he finally gave into his emotions and begged for a new life.

How do you know when you are living life from a defensive position? You will feel driven, chronically unsatisfied, or drained. No one ever does enough for you, and you will feel fatigued and swamped.

How do you know when you are living life from your core feelings and impulses? You are aware of what you really feel and have energy to do things. You have a friendly relationship with your impulses, and you feel free to express yourself and take action on your own behalf.

Is it possible to change old patterns? Yes, just as it is possible for a cork to bob to the surface once we stop holding it under the water. But first of all we have to realize that the cork is being held down, and by what.

Scrooge realized how his defensive behaviors were holding him down and making him his own worst enemy. Just like us, he was not bad or ignorant; he just had never thought to update his childhood solutions. Scrooge came back to life as soon as he stopped trying to protect his heart, instead of using it to feel life fully. This New Year can be our chance to do the same. 

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach. For information, call 757-490-7811.

Do you make the mistake of believing everything you think? Do you trust your brain to think the best thoughts for you? Do you trust that your thoughts are your own?

If you answered no to even one of these questions, congratulations! You are on your way to self-mastery! It is a tremendous accomplishment to have a healthy skepticism toward your own brain.

Perhaps you know people who believe everything they think, who are sure their brains are thinking the best thoughts, and who are absolutely sure their thoughts are their own. You might find these people charming in their self-satisfaction and surety, but I find them alarming. Maybe it is because, as a psychotherapist, I get to see the people whose lives they are trying to control.

Give me a person riddled with self-doubt any day. They are nicer, kinder, and generally speaking, more open to learning something new. The self-doubter knows better than to completely trust his or her own brain, and that’s a great place from which to start any journey of self-enlightenment.

To  objectively assess reality, the brain needs to question itself and its motives, as well as whatever is going on around it. This is because the brain is a slush file for all kinds of stuff that other people dumped into it when we were very young, not to mention the things that advertising, neighbors, and spouses might have added. Any learning that occurred when we were emotionally aroused for any reason is likely to stick, whether it helps us now or not.

Our brain’s alarm center, the amygdala, will push the panic button whenever we see anything that once scared us. The amygdala does not know that things have changed since childhood, and it does not care. Once learned, the amygdala never willingly drops a file.

As a result, the amygdala can confuse us about what is dangerous and what is safe. It all depends on our childhood experiences. For instance, if emotional intimacy led to hurt as a child, the amygdala will make sure we feel very uncomfortable whenever people get too close later. The amygdala has zero discernment. It is simply a file cabinet of adrenaline-driven memories. But if you are not wise to it, it can run your life into the ground.

In addition to the false-alarm problem, the brain has a bad habit of laziness. The brain loves to keep thinking the same thoughts over and over again. It likes efficiency and keeps a strict economy of effort. You might disagree, saying that your brain works overtime with worry, obsessing, and disaster fantasies. But just as a rock rolling downhill would look plenty active if you didn’t know about gravity, the brain is simply following the principle of least resistance. It can stay on a subject forever if it is on the downward slope of familiar thinking.

The brain sits in its blacked out skull-box and has no idea (literally) of what is going on in the outside world. All it cares about is which parts of your mind you are using frequently. If you are worried a lot, or looking for love a lot, the brain figures these must be essential survival activities. Whether those types of thoughts are good for you is not the brain’s concern. That is why you cannot always trust what your brain is doing. Once it gets used to a familiar thought loop, it wants to keep it up solely because it is so effortless.

When we use certain brain pathways frequently, the brain insulates these neuronal tracks with myelin, a fatty tissue that, like rubber around a copper wire, makes electrical brain impulses zing. Those myelinated pathways become super-efficient and effortless. This pays off big time in playing tennis or learning videogames; the more you do it, the faster and better you get. But if the activity is worry, or obsessing, or even suspicion, the brain wraps those lines, too. Because this efficient use of well-traveled pathways feels so good to the brain, we think these thoughts must be important. But the real reason it feels so natural is because the brain loves to save energy!

If a bad idea got into your head early in life, the brain may over-use it to the point of making it extremely easy to think that way later. Personal psychological growth is all about encouraging the brain to do something it naturally wants to avoid. But just as we can learn things at any age, we can change our brains with conscious effort. After a while the new pathways will get myelinated, too, making it easier and easier to override the amygdala’s panicked yappings and do something more suited to present time and circumstance.

To practice a new way of thinking takes effort and time, but it pays off. The frontal cortex of the brain can stop the amygdala dead in its tracks with a well-aimed refusal to keep going down that old path. You can decide to think differently. The brain may resist you, activating the old pathways as soon as your back is turned. But you can repeat the correction, and talk yourself into a new line of thought. You just have to remember that the amygdala is a drama queen who likes to throw a fit when you try to change it.

Know your brain, and don’t let its fear or laziness dictate how limited your life is going to be. The higher centers of your brain are ultimately stronger than the amygdala and can bring it under control. Like an old horse heading back to a barn that is no longer there, the brain needs you to pull the reins.

Healthy self-doubt shows a willingness to think about your thoughts. Questioning the origins of your habitual thoughts is the first step toward a new life. What a world we would have if instead of trying to boss other people, we all tried for mastery of our own minds.  

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach. For information, call 757-490-7811.

We know we should change filters frequently to keep things working well. But when it comes to our mental filters, we hold onto them as if they were precious family heirlooms. Instead of tossing our mental filters when they start gumming up the works, we pretend they are working perfectly fine. Perhaps it has never occurred to us they ought to be replaced.

In the simplest case, we use our mental filters to watch what we say or to take things with a grain of salt. Mental filters also structure our view of reality, and they do a convincing job. We are sure we know what is going on, and we expect everyone would feel the same in our shoes. We filter out the bad and let in the good. But sometimes our filters do not work well. They tune out the good as if it were the bad, and we never know the difference.

This is because these mental filters were factory-installed in childhood. Our original filters were formed to help us adjust to our families of origin. We noticed how the big people felt about things, and this got inside us in a deep way. We soaked it up because all children must learn how to act from the people around them.

This is the way that family dysfunction is passed down the line without anyone being aware of it. We learn how to work, how to have fun, and how to have relationships. No one has to spell it out; we react to each other’s moves as if practicing a wordless dance. After a while, our deep perception of the world matches that of our families. Of course, we have our own personalities and adult thoughts, but the deeply unconscious assumptions we follow are strictly hand-me-downs.

That is why we often lose the feeling of being in control once we get involved in a deeper relationship. It is also why we feel intense anxiety when faced with a challenge that our family did not prepare us for. We tend to use the old coping mechanisms that were necessary in our original families, often to the detriment of our current relationships and potential success. Our mental filters pop up and make us perceive the current situation as if it were from our past. If the emotional tone is similar enough, we start reacting as if we are trapped back in childhood.

One of the clearest books on this topic is Reinventing Your Life by Jeffrey Young. He called his approach schema therapy, meaning that we need to examine the schemas, or mental filters, that give form to our expectations about the world, other people, and ourselves. His point is that while we usually see something in the outside world as causing our problems, the person who is projecting these patterns is none other than oneself. This is because we respond to other people in ways guaranteed to maintain the behavior we do not like. As children, we learned to conform to other people, and now we may not realize we are still doing it.

For instance, let’s say you grew up with a narcissistic parent. As a child, you might logically assume that the world is made up of people you must please in order to avoid an unpleasant scene. You may learn to subjugate yourself to others and be overly concerned with their feelings. The trouble is that you will do this even with people who are not narcissistic, working way too hard to be self-effacing even when it is not necessary. Ultimately you will blame and resent the other person because you are convinced this is the inescapable price of being in a relationship. You will not question the feeling that the other person’s needs should come first and that you should put yourself last.

Or you may have had experiences with emotional deprivation, making your filter catch the slightest signs that you are being overlooked. No matter how much your current family or friends value you, you may feel that they do not really care—not enough, anyway. If you had a critical, perfectionistic parent, no amount of reassurance will make you relax and feel you have done well enough. You exhaust yourself with unrelentingly high standards that you never quite meet.

Every time you use old mental filters, you replay old experiences. If you grew up believing that it is not okay to ask for what you want, you cue other people that it is not necessary to think of you or your feelings. With our old filters operating, we see a world in which unhappiness is the price of having a relationship. Those filters keep you from creating relationships in which you count, too.

The first step in changing your filters is to figure out what they are. Taking the quizzes in Young’s book can give you a more objective perspective on why you keep getting what you do not want. Journaling your feelings and looking for repeated themes of loneliness, anger, or powerlessness is a good way to find out which filters are active in you. Seeking out self-help groups or psychotherapy can also help when the filters are hard to see and an outside viewpoint is needed.

This fall, when you are changing those dusty filters in your home, let them be a visual reminder of your own mental filters. Maybe it is we who are blocking out the good stuff that would naturally flow into our lives, simply because we do not know how to react when we get it. Not everybody is going to treat us as our families did, yet we let this small handful of people continue to dictate our experience of the world.

We would never look at our old air filter and say, “It is impossible to change it.” We would take it out, install a new one, and throw the old one away. Go looking for your filters. It may be time to replace them. 

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach. For information, call 757-490-7811.

It was a memorable walk in the neighborhood. I was going along, enjoying the beautiful day, when something made me look up at a second story window on my right. Movement behind the window, curtains pulled away, and then a classic moon job by what could only have been an adolescent male. With his buddy laughing in the shadows to the side, the sense of hilarity in that room was contagious, and I found myself laughing out loud as they jumped back, curtains falling back across the window.

My gut-level laugh was the right response, but I had to run through all my stuffy socialization training anyway. Should I call his parents? Maybe walk up to the front door and ask to speak to the young man, just to see how many shades of scarlet he could turn? Maybe he would give me his allowance for a few weeks’ hush money. I briefly enjoyed my power fantasies, getting high on feminist sensibilities, huffing about how many eons women have had to put up with such stupid male behavior.

I sorted my reactions for the rest of my walk. On the way home, I checked out the window as I passed that house again. The curtains were drawn, the lawn was manicured, and the crepe myrtles were perfect. The house serenely presented its lovely façade as if to say: “Nothing wild going on here.” Seeing that blandly boring perfection, I knew how I really felt about the whole incident. I felt honored. In the midst of all that suburban conformity, I had been granted a rare glimpse of homo loco juvenilis.

In spite of what I am sure were his parents’ best efforts to make him an upstanding citizen, that young male broke through the suburban paradigm with a bang. His dumb idea defined his age, while his behavior shouted that he came from the wild and of wildness he will remain.

One of these days I want to do a research project in which successful men describe a teenage exploit that could have ruined their lives or at least dinged a resume. I have collected some already. A couple of my favorites involved fraternity boys driving to the bank in their underwear and stuffing a golf shoe into the vacuum tube at the drive-through (police were called), and another had to do with teenagers lifting a car onto the tracks of an abandoned train line for a joy ride (ended up in court after someone reported their headlights.) All those guys turned out fine, sent their kids to college, and had careers.

Their positive outcomes are explained by the fact that the male brain is still under construction until about age twenty-five. By construction, I don’t mean painting and sanding, I mean not having the roof on. There is still plenty of hope for young males that they will approach life very differently once their frontal lobes are fully developed. Like a miracle, they begin to show foresight, impulse control, and better judgment. Insurance companies recognize this neurological milestone by lowering their rates once they pass the twenty-fifth birthday.

All you parents who are despairing of your teenage son’s ever showing commonsense, just give it a little time. If they were okay before age eleven, they will probably return to their senses after twenty-five. You just have a bit of desert to cross before then. Of course some behavior is a cry for help, or a sign of a real problem needing attention, but a stupid act or two does not a character make, especially in boys.

How do I know that boy was not a budding pervert? I was not vulnerable, and he was not creepy. Perverts like to pick their marks in isolated or anonymous places, they don’t do it out of their own homes, and they don’t do it with a buddy. While frontal exposure is a deeply disturbing behavior, showing one’s backside in broad daylight belongs to the long history of male-taunting behavior, especially in the context of all-male groups.

The real puzzle is how adolescent males have survived long enough for the adult male to evolve. Especially since in prehistoric times males probably did not live for much more than thirty or forty years. If twenty-five of those years were spent in impulsive, dangerous behavior that made other people mad, where is the evolutionary benefit in that?

I discussed this with an adolescent therapist, Karen Neymark, and she reminded me that back in the hunter-scavenger days, this kind of inventive, impulsive behavior was just the ticket. If we now expect our kids to look before they leap, the best advice back then was probably more like get it while you can. The prehistoric adolescent male who paused to think, “Maybe this is not such a good idea” probably missed his chance at all kinds of things.

A taste for thrills was a good thing for a caveman teen to have if he ever hoped to hunt or mate successfully, both of which require a huge amount of trial and error. Back then if a teenage boy worried too much about rules and consequences, he might not learn all he needed to by age twenty-five. With a limited life span, males had to learn a boatload of survival information fast, and the best way to do it was to dive in and make lots of mistakes. Young males have always had to blunder their way into competence.

I did not rat on my neighbor’s kid. I like to think he is still out there somewhere doing dumb things, depending on the mercy of adults who can laugh at inane behavior. Thousands of years ago, in a jungle or on a savannah, his behavior was the equivalent of getting noticed, a definite plus for a competitive up-and-coming guy. I like to think of him at forty, looking back with relief that nobody turned him in on that sunny afternoon when hormones were running high. 

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach. For information, call 757-490-7811.

Anxious people may not believe it, but they have an abundance of energy. They may not believe it because they spend much of their time in a state of exhaustion, feeling overwhelmed. It feels to them that the world and its demands are too much for them, making them crave a simpler life where they can get away from things and just catch a breath.

The reason they feel so tired and overwhelmed is because of the amount of brain activity they endure every day. They think things out ten different ways, nervously anticipating outcomes, predicting other people’s feelings, and trying like crazy not to make mistakes. Someone once told me that people who do work using their brains are burning as much glucose as a construction worker every day. I don’t know where he got his research, but it has a ring of truth to it. Mental fatigue is a real experience, and nothing is more fatiguing than worry.

I like to think of it as an energy issue. We only have so much energy. We can use it for activity, creativity, libido, or worry. If we overdraw our energy account, everything must stop until we can build up more. But why would someone end up spending most of his or her energy on worry?

The answer lies in understanding where our energy comes from and how we naturally increase it over the course of a day. We increase it by seeking things that seem interesting, safe, and pleasurable. We may do that in a shy way or an extroverted way, but what raises energy is embracing good experiences. We are motivated to do so by our core feelings and impulses. Under ordinary circumstances, these core experiences arise naturally and authentically. As we acknowledge and express our feelings and impulses, our energy remains in a balanced, gently fluctuating state of well being. Even if we are in a crisis, our energy can remain good if we stay aware of what we are feeling and what we want.

But energy and initiative turn into anxiety if we repress our feelings so we do not upset someone we love. If this conflict between expressing feelings and pleasing others occurred too regularly in our childhood, there will be a disturbance in the person’s level of energy.

Under these conditions of living with caretakers who are reactive and easily disturbed, the child learns that his or her feelings and needs cause more trouble than they are worth. Anxious people figure out that there are family rules about who gets to express feelings and act freely, and that does not include them. As a result they constrict their natural self-expression, and all that good energy gets tied up in fighting against their own impulses. When the impulses try to sneak out anyway, anxiety ensues. Originally purposeful energy then becomes nonproductive static in the system. Unfortunately, we learn not only to hide our feelings from other people, we learn to hide them from ourselves. Now we are anxious and don’t even know why.

Any system, including the human organism, wears itself out when you tell it to go and stop at the same time. Instead of spontaneous feelings and impulses generating creative enjoyment, you get exhaustion and entropy, a winding down and oversimplification of the personality. Anxious people always have the feeling there is another personality inside them, one much more open and fun loving if only they could let it out.

Recovery from excessive anxiety is helped by techniques like yoga, meditation, and the conscious stopping of catastrophic thinking. Medications are a godsend for both the acutely and chronically anxious person. But when anxiety has gotten into the personality in a more long-lasting way, it is often important to figure out why and how the person learned to stifle his or her true feelings and impulses to such an extent. She needs to figure out who or what made her believe her safety or well being would be threatened by just being herself.

The recovery from a life of anxiety often entails sitting with and exploring the anxiety signal, rather than giving into it and withdrawing. As we learn to tolerate the experience of anxiety and to ask ourselves why this situation feels so dangerous, we can unravel that old learning back to its source. By tuning into the anxiety, we often see how irrational it is and begin to separate the past from the present. We begin to build a beachhead of reason against the irrational onslaught of childhood fear.

All of us can learn to comfort ourselves and not be held back by anxiety. We can go ahead and gently do those things that are good for us and our health, things which might have been squelched in our childhood family. We can learn to use anxiety as a signal that we are suppressing our feelings and thoughts and figure out what it is about this situation that is making us feel like a vulnerable child. We are adults now and have an adult’s mind. We are also lucky enough to live in a culture that supports and defends our right to expression.

Tuning into our feelings and needs is the first step. We don’t have to tell anyone, confront anyone, or take any action. Writing in a journal can be an easy first step toward improved self-awareness and self-acceptance. Once we are comfortable with our own feelings, we can begin in little ways to express ourselves among safe, supportive others. Anxiety transforms into good energy when we listen to ourselves and claim our right to have our own feelings and needs. 

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach.

Nothing grows without delight. Green-thumbed gardeners know this, and so do child-friendly parents. Showing delight in someone’s growth gives the person fuel to keep trying. Good bosses do it, the best spouses do it, and we should do it, too. Enthusiasm for our progress is the most powerful motivator we have.

Praise from others can be as big as a whoop of joy, or it can be as subtle as a softening of the eyes. But whatever form it takes, the person being praised feels proud she did it right. In childhood, praise guides the way, like a light along the path. There is no mystery to it; we just follow the smiles. Later on we learn to give ourselves that good feeling by feeling proud of ourselves. Pride is the natural feeling of delight in growth.

But all too often, healthy pride gets confused with narcissism. If we are proud of ourselves, some of us fear we will be disliked or taken down a notch. As a result, some people superstitiously deny themselves pleasure in their accomplishments in order to ward off a comeuppance. Pride has even been labeled a sin, and acting conceited is a definite no-no.

Another practice that has given healthy pride a bad name is effusive praise for the smallest childhood success, from earning tokens in the classroom to the trophy glut at Little League. Many self-respecting adults are turned off by this over-praise, sensing that the children are being done no favor. In fact, research has shown that many children over-praised for success end up becoming more cautious and less motivated than the kids who were praised only for their amount of effort, successful or not.

However, if you as an adult are trying to make positive changes in your life, then you must notice and take time to feel good about even your smallest successes. To do so is just as important as figuring out what you wanted to change in the first place. We have to teach our brains that it is good to grow, and we do this by allowing ourselves to take pleasure in our changes. The pleasure we feel tells the brain to keep laying down these new tracks of changed behavior.

Unfortunately, we often discount our success moments, not pausing to enjoy or analyze our success. Yet without focusing on what we did, it makes it nearly impossible to repeat it. There are plenty of times when we spontaneously experience a positive shift or do something differently with good results. We might feel a lifting of depression or an absence of anxiety. We might interrupt a self-critical thought or speak up for ourselves. But instead of noticing and celebrating our positive changes, we might tell ourselves not to get a swelled head. Even worse, we may tell ourselves that because we feel so good, we are sure to have something bad happen soon, just to even things out. The brain then learns to stop construction on that new outlook or improved self-concept because it is causing anxiety, not pleasure.

We downplay our best moments when we should be enjoying and learning from them. Instead of dashing past our best moments when things are changing for the better, we ought to be asking ourselves how we did it. If we don’t analyze and take pride in what we did right, we will not know how to get there again nor will we have the enthusiasm to keep trying. We would be like those artist elephants in the zoo who wave paintbrushes over paper, creating beauty that they have no way to ever replicate. We like it, but we don’t know how we did it. Analyzing why we feel better makes it more than a happy accident; it makes it a conscious skill we can hone further.

Deliberately pausing to feel delight over our changed behavior encourages more growth. But many people find it hard to feel proud of themselves for very long. They squirm and resist, minimizing the fact that their changes had a huge impact for the better on their emotional state. Many times people do not think it is possible to really change, and they ignore the evidence of it as soon as they do it. Phobic about praising themselves, they undo their delight and accomplishment, insisting they are the same old people. What a way to guarantee they will stay the same old people.

If you want to keep having good feelings and a better life, learn to analyze what you are doing right and make a point to feel good about each improvement. You are not being prideful or vain. You are simply learning to feel proud of yourself for well-earned success. That warm glow in your chest and that broadened sense of possibility are the natural, organic results of feeling what you are supposed to feel when you are getting it right. If you make a point to stop a moment and enjoy it, you can fan that spark into a sustaining fire of motivation. If you close it down too quickly out of false modesty, you extinguish not just the good feeling of the moment, but your energy for the future.

Take every chance you can to feel good about feeling good. Build up your tolerance for enjoying the feeling of pride; it is what successful people have always done to keep their motivation strong. You won’t be an egoist; you will be an enthusiast. Then you can pass it along to others.

Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in practice in Va. Beach. For information, call 757-490-7811.