Chill the F*** Out
Coping with anxiety can often be a staid, tiring endeavor, and it helps to occasionally take a lighter approach. To that end, I give you this entry from one of my favorite blogs, Dear Coke Talk
.
A woman writes in lamenting about her new boyfriend and some of the feelings that she’s experiencing.
My boyfriend and I are in what I suppose would be considered a “serious relationship.” I don’t date a lot, only had one other “real” relationship and it was a joke compared to what I have now. I have never felt better about myself, what I’m doing in my life, or where my life is headed. Even though I’m a college senior and about to jump into a life of uncertainty when I’m a person who hates change, I’m excited about what will happen to me and to us.
And:
Is it egotistical of me to think that after three months of a relationship he’s seriously considering our future together? After all, we talk about how we would raise kids and even looked at engagement rings (in what I thought was just a goofy moment).
Pretty typical stuff, right? And those of us with anxiety issues should immediately recognize a key phrase used by the reader. Did you spot it?
Dear Coke Talk did:
Okay, I need to read between the lines for a second. When you say “I’m a person who hates change,” what you really mean is “I’m a magnificent control freak.”
Also, when you say “I’m excited about what will happen to me,” what you really mean is “I’m terrified of the gigantic spinning fireball known as adulthood hurtling toward me at incredible speed.”
I point this out because it’s key to what’s going on here. You’re anxious about the future, and all of this silly flirtation with notions of marriage is merely is a coping mechanism for dealing with your crippling fear of uncertainty.
Bingo!
The rest of her response is equally precious. This passage stands out:
I know I’m stepping outside the boundary of the question here, but this next bit of advice doesn’t just apply to your relationship: don’t be in such a rush to play it so damned safe.
I know you can’t wait to be a music teacher and a stay-at-home mom, but why not start a fucking band first? You’ve got your whole life to drive minivans and vote for Sarah Palin. Go do something wild before settling down.
Go conquer your fear of uncertainty. Go spend some time experimenting with the human condition. Go have your own personal rumspringa and only come back when you know you’re ready.
Come on, you’ve got the soul of an artist. I don’t want you to regret not having any crazy stories to tell your grandkids.
Good advice for us all.
Mindful Parenting
Over at his Psychology Today blog, Jonathan Kaplan has quite the essay on how the Buddhist concept of mindfulness can help you be a better parent.
Anyone who has been around small children can tell you that achieving the perfect alignment between what the adult thinks should be happening and what the child wants to happen is nearly impossible. That doesn’t stop a lot of parents from trying to force this convergence via sheer force of will, or failing that, misdirection and/or manipulation. More often than not, frustration sets in for the parent, the child, or both.
In Jonathan’s case, he attempts to get his two year old son to help decide on what he would like on his daycare blanket, but is repeatedly thwarted by his son’s focus on trains, apple juice, and jumping on the bed. Who can blame him? Jumping on the bed is awesome!
Jonathan shares one of his lessons learned:
Fortunately, I learned a few things from this experience. First, parenting can be a quite a fruitful area for informal mindfulness practice. At a conference recently, Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn described parenting as an “18 year retreat.” They noted how kids “push our buttons”, which can prompt us to react negatively. As Myla stated, “Sometimes, we don’t live love. We live fear and anxiety and the thoughts that take over us.” In this instance, I started to feel anxious about my son’s unhelpful replies and became lost in my own reactions. By seeing this circumstance as problematic and trying to fix it, I unfortunately missed out on some fun play time.
That’s a lightning bolt observation for me – “Sometimes, we don’t live love. We live fear and anxiety and the thoughts that take over us.” Being present, being mindful, especially when it comes to family, was a huge struggle for me, as I detailed in my postings The Struggle To Be Present and Teaching A Kid To Listen .
As I worked through becoming more mindful and present, it was readily apparent that my parenting style was undergoing a tweaking. Rather than becoming frustrated in dealing with my young son, I began to look at things from his perspective more, and the key question I started to ask myself during these sorts of situations was if what I was wanting him to do was important, or if it was only important to me.
More often than not, the latter was true, and that’s just plain silly. As noted in Jonathan’s essay, I was missing out on wide swaths of my child’s experiences because of my narrow focus on achieving the goal at hand. Kids take a very circuitous route through life, much like a butterfly fluttering around a meadow, and that’s part of the beauty of youth. I should encourage that, not restrict it, either knowingly or unconsciously.
Extrapolating that even further, if I was caught in this pattern with parenting, undoubtedly it was applicable in other aspects of my life. So, by practicing mindfulness in all aspects of my day-to-day interactions, I would be appropriately focused. Parenting turned into a daily reminder and exercise.
It’s also a good prompt to see and interact with our kids as they are, not how we want them to be, or how we see them to be. It’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing everything through a parental filter, and then all events and decisions downstream are based on clouded, unrealistic information.
No Holding Back the Tears
Wednesday night was “graduation” night at my son’s Montessori school, where parents, grandparents, friends, and family pack into the gym and celebrate educational milestones such as moving from kindergarten to lower elementary, lower elementary to upper, becoming big-kids-on-campus by heading to middle school, and finally, the 8th graders departing as they head out for their high school experience.
It’s nice that they celebrate important transitions such as these, and it really builds a sense of community and continuity. The mere fact that an eight year old wants to go sit in the gym for an hour for this demonstrates how much the kids benefit from the event.
Avoiding Toxic People
Michael Leddy at the Orange Crate Art blog has some thoughts gleaned from graphic designer Milton Glaser on 
toxic people and how to avoid them.
The posting was featured on BoingBoing, which led to quite the kerfluffle over the advice that was given, to which Leddy responded that he never said the advice was good, but he did find it useful. I’m sort of with Leddy on this one.
The important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
Dating After Mental Illness
This will be a straight-ahead linking to a blog posting on Psychology Today about how to get back up on that relationship horse once you’ve had a confirmed diagnosis of mental illness. Since I don’t have a lot of personal experience with dating, having spent the past 24 years essentially married to one of two women, I’ll let someone who seems to be right in the thick of things share her views.
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