Tag: relationships

Movie Recommendation (on Netflix)


A Man Called Ove is an inspiring movie about a quintessentially grumpy old man with unyielding beliefs, strict routines, and the belief that everyone around him is an idiot — and who never hesitates to tell them so. When his new neighbours accidentally run over his mailbox, the curmudgeon’s solitary, over-regulated world is shaken in ways he would never have imagined.

What is so deeply moving for me about this story is the way it perfectly captures and expresses the fundamental truth that being needed is an essential human longing, and that life is so much sweeter when we share it with others.

I was also struck by how A Man Called Ove conveys the process of healing and change in in ways that are so familiar to me as a psychotherapist. For example, Ove’s story unfolds in a back-and-forth movement between present and past as we see the losses and wounds that shaped who he is. The movie also uses repetition, like Ove’s neighbourhood patrols, to show how he grows and changes, and how other people’s perception of him transforms.

In talk therapy we’re engaged in a similarly cyclical motion of emotional healing where we repeatedly encounter and explore our deepest feelings, traumas and behaviours in order to expand our conscious awareness, challenge assumptions and narratives from the past, and develop and integrate a stronger sense of self.

This is a movie that touches on some of the biggest existential themes in life with humour, intelligence and charm – I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Tunnel Vision

Hidden Brain is one of my favourite podcasts, and this episode is particularly good.

 Hidden Brain logoTunnel Vision

When you’re hungry, it can be hard to think of anything other than food. When you’re desperately poor, you may constantly worry about making ends meet. When you’re lonely, you might obsess about making friends. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the psychological phenomenon of scarcity and how it can affect our ability to see the big picture and cope with problems in our lives.

click here to listen

Improving our Emotional Intelligence

Harvard Business Review logo

4 Ways to Control Your Emotions in Tense Moments

By Joseph Grenny

December 21, 2016

emotional intelligence illustration - Mar 27 17

Twenty-three years ago, one of my employees — I’ll call him Dale — asked for a private meeting. Dale was serious and bookish and had very strong opinions. His work was fastidious. He rarely socialized with colleagues, but he was impeccable in his commitments to others. And he was skilled at his job.

As I closed the door to our huddle room, he came straight to the point, “Joseph, I’d like to offer you some feedback.”

I had expected a different agenda. But given my professions about candor in our culture, I was somewhat trapped. “Please do,” I said cautiously.

“Joseph, you are arrogant and difficult to work with. Your first inclination is to shoot down criticisms from me and others. That makes it impossible for me to do my job as an editor.” And with that, he was done. He looked at me calmly.

I compressed an hour’s worth of emotions and thoughts into mere seconds. I felt waves of shame, resentment, and anger. In my mind, I made a frenzied inventory of Dale’s defects — as though assembling a case to rebut an aggressive prosecutor. I fantasized briefly about firing him. My chest felt tight. My breathing was shallow. Through it all, I did my best to fake a composure I clearly did not feel. My tacit logic was that confessing hurt would telegraph weakness.

An overwhelming majority of the bad decisions I’ve made in my life were impulsive. They weren’t errors of faulty logic or ineffective deliberation. They were avoidable mistakes in moments when I was unwilling or unable to manage potent negative emotions. Likewise, the most consequential progress I’ve made in my development as a leader has been not in professional but in emotional competence.

The career-limiting habits I entered my profession with were a direct result of my inability to deal with emotions like anxiety, embarrassment, and fear. For example, I routinely procrastinated on tasks that provoked anxiety and a lack of confidence. I reacted defensively when embarrassed by criticism. And I struggled to speak up when my views were at odds with powerful colleagues.

The ability to recognize, own, and shape your own emotions is the master skill for deepening intimacy with loved ones, magnifying influence in the workplace, and amplifying our ability to turn ideas into results. My successes and failures have turned on this master skill more than any other.

But can you strengthen this core muscle of your emotional anatomy? If your impulses tend to override your intentions in cherished areas of life, is it possible to make the converse the norm?

Four practices have made an immense difference for me at important moments in my career, like this one when I faced “Dale.”

Own the emotion. Emotional responsibility is the precondition of emotional influence. You can’t change an emotion you don’t own. The first thing I do when struck by an overpowering feeling or impulse is to accept responsibility for its existence. My mental script is, “This is about me, not about that or them.” Emotions come prepackaged with tacit external attribution. Because an external event always precedes my experience of an emotion, it’s easy to assume that event caused it. But as long as I believe it was externally caused I am doomed to be a victim to my emotions.

For example, my anger following Dale’s criticism had nothing to do with Dale’s criticism. His statement could have corresponded to feelings of curiosity, surprise, or compassion as much as resentment and anger. The fact that I experienced the latter rather than the former was about me, not him.

Name the story. Next, you need to reflect on how you colluded with the initial event to create the present emotion. Emotions are the result of both what happens, and of the story you tell yourself about what happened. One of the powerful practices that helps me detach from and take control of my emotions is to name the stories I tell. Is it a victim story — one that emphasizes my virtues and absolves me of responsibility for what is happening? Is it a villain story — one that exaggerates the faults of others and attributes what’s happening to their evil motives? Is it a helpless story — one that convinces me that any healthy course of action (like listening humbly, speaking up honestly) is pointless? Naming my stories helps me see them for what they are — only one of myriad ways I can make sense of what’s happening. As I sat with Dale, I realized I was deep in victim and villain stories. I was thinking only of reasons he was wrong but not of how he was right — and I was attributing his criticism to his personal flaws, not his legitimate frustrations.

Challenge the story. Once you identify the story, you can take control by asking yourself questions that provoke you out of your victim, villain, and helpless stories. For example, I transform myself from a victim into an actor by asking, “What am I pretending not to know about my role in this situation?” I transform Dale from a villain into a human by asking, “Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person say this?” and I transform myself from helpless into able by asking, “What’s the right thing to do now to move toward what I really want?”

As I pondered these questions in my interaction with Dale, I saw how my impatience and… gulp… arrogance, was a big part of why he was saying this. As I asked, “What is the right thing to do…” I felt an immediate release from resentment and anger. A calming humility emerged. And, I began to ask questions rather than present my defense.

Find your primal story. Over the years, I’ve wondered why the stories I tell myself are so predictable. In my research with hundreds of leaders, I’ve found that most people have habitual stories they tell in predictable circumstances as well. Early life experiences that we perceived at the time to be threats to our safety and worth become encoded in our potent memories.

For example, perhaps a classmate in second grade coaxed you to an unsupervised place in the schoolyard and bullied you in a traumatic way. A parent may have shown you less approval than a sibling. From these experiences, the most primal part of our brains code certain conditions as threatening — physically or psychically. And from that point forward, you don’t get to vote on whether you’ll react when those conditions are present. When a larger work colleague raises his voice, your brain might connect with the old bully experience. Or, when Dale accuses you of being arrogant, your parental criticism triggers flare. I’ve found greater peace over the years as I’ve become aware of the primal origin of the stories I tell — and learned to challenge the perception that my safety and worth are at risk in these moments. When my chest got tight sitting across from Dale, simply thinking, “This can’t hurt me” and “Humility is strength not weakness” had an immediate calming effect. Reciting a specific script in moments of emotional provocation weakens trauma-induced reaction that is not relevant in the present moment.

Dale and I worked together productively for years after this episode. I’ve failed as many of these moments as I’ve mastered — but by working intentionally on these simple exercises, my successes are far more common.

 

Joseph Grenny photo - Mar 27 17

Joseph Grenny is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and leading social scientist for business performance. His work has been translated into 28 languages, is available in 36 countries, and has generated results for 300 of the Fortune 500. He is the cofounder of VitalSmarts, an innovator in corporate training and leadership development.

How we attached as children is how we relate as adults

I really like this article, but I don’t love the title.

The last paragraph is key – try reading it first, then read through the whole piece.

 

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Yes, It’s Your Parents’ Fault

by KATE MURPHY, nytimes.com          JAN. 7, 2017

    We live in a culture that celebrates individualism and self-reliance, and yet we humans are an exquisitely social species, thriving in good company and suffering in isolation. More than anything else, our intimate relationships, or lack thereof, shape and define our lives.

     While there have been many schools of thought to help us understand what strains and maintains human bonds, from Freudian to Gestalt, one of the most rigorously studied may be the least known to the public.

     It’s called attachment theory, and there’s growing consensus about its capacity to explain and improve how we function in relationships.

     Conceived more than 50 years ago by the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby and scientifically validated by an American developmental psychologist, Mary S. Ainsworth, attachment theory is now having a breakout moment, applied everywhere from inner-city preschools to executive coaching programs. Experts in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, sociology and education say the theory’s underlying assumption — that the quality of our early attachments profoundly influences how we behave as adults — has special resonance in an era when people seem more attached to their smartphones than to one another.

     By the end of our first year, we have stamped on our baby brains a pretty indelible template of how we think relationships work, based on how our parents or other primary caregivers treat us. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense, because we need to figure out early on how to survive in our immediate environment.

     “If you’re securely attached, that’s great, because you have the expectation that if you are distressed you will be able to turn to someone for help and feel you can be there for others,” said Miriam Steele, the co-director of the Center for Attachment Research at the New School for Social Research in New York.

It’s not so great if you are one of the 40 percent to 50 percent of babies who, a meta-analysis of research indicates, are insecurely attached because their early experiences were suboptimal (their caregivers were distracted, overbearing, dismissive, unreliable, absent or perhaps threatening). “Then you have to earn your security,” Dr. Steele said, by later forming secure attachments that help you override your flawed internal working model.

     Given that the divorce rate is also 40 percent to 50 percent, it would seem that this is not an easy task. Indeed, researchers said, people who have insecure attachment models tend to be drawn to those who fit their expectations, even if they are treated badly. They may subconsciously act in ways that elicit insensitive, unreliable or abusive behavior, whatever is most familiar. Or they may flee secure attachments because they feel unfamiliar.

     “Our attachment system preferentially sees things according to what has happened in the past,” said Dr. Amir Levine, a psychiatrist at Columbia University and the co-author of the book “Attached,” which explores how attachment behaviors affect the neurochemistry of the brain. “It’s kind of like searching in Google where it fills in based on what you searched before.”

     But again, history is not necessarily destiny. Intervention programs at the New School and the University of Delaware are having marked success helping at-risk groups like teenage mothers change their attachment behaviors (often passed down through generations) and establish more secure relationships. Another attachment-based intervention strategy called Circle of Security, which has 19,000 trained facilitators in 20 countries, has also proved effective.

     What these protocols have in common is promoting participants’ awareness of their attachment style, and their related sabotaging behaviors, as well as training on how to balance vulnerability and autonomy in relationships.

     One reason attachment theory has “gained so much traction lately is its ideas and observations are so resonant with our daily lives,” said Kenneth Levy, an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University who researches attachment-oriented psychotherapy.

     Indeed, if you look at the classic categories of attachment styles — secure; insecure anxious; insecure avoidant; and insecure disorganized — it’s pretty easy to figure out which one applies to you and others in your life. The categories stem from tens of thousands of observations of babies and toddlers whose caregivers leave them briefly, either alone or with a stranger, and then return, a test known as the “strange situation.” The labels can also apply to how adults behave toward loved ones in times of stress.

     Secure children get upset when their caregivers leave, and run toward them with outstretched arms when they return. They fold into the caregiver and are quickly soothed. A securely attached adult similarly goes to a loved one for comfort and support when they, say, are passed over for a promotion at work or feel vulnerable or hurt. They are also eager to reciprocate when the tables are turned.

     Children high on the insecure anxious end of the spectrum get upset when caregivers leave and may go to them when they return. But these children aren’t easily soothed, usually because the caregiver has proved to be an unreliable source of comfort in the past. They may kick and arch their back as if they are angry. As adults, they tend to obsess about their relationships and may be overly dramatic in order to get attention. They may hound romantic interests instead of taking it slow.

     Insecure avoidant children don’t register distress when their caregivers leave (although their stress hormones and heart rate may be sky high) and they don’t show much interest when caregivers return, because they are used to being ignored or rebuffed. Alternatively, a parent may have smothered them with too much attention. Insecure avoidant adults tend to have trouble with intimacy and are more likely to leave relationships, particularly if they are going well. They may not return calls and resist talking about their feelings.

     Finally, insecure disorganized children and adults display both anxious and avoidant behaviors in an illogical and erratic manner. This behavior is usually the lingering result of situations where a childhood caregiver was threatening or abusive.

     Tools to determine your dominant attachment style include the Adult Attachment Interview, which is meant to be administered by a clinician, or self-report questionnaires like the Attachment Styles and Close Relationships Survey. But critics said their accuracy depends on the skill and training of the interviewer in the case of the former and the self-awareness of the test taker in the latter, which perhaps explains why you can take both tests and end up in different categories.

     “It can also be possible that people should be viewed as along a continuum in all categories,” said Glenn I. Roisman, the director of the Relationships Research Lab at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

     It’s worth noting that just as people in the insecure categories can become more secure when they form close relationships with secure people, secure people can become less so if paired with people who are insecure. “You need social context to sustain your sense of security,” said Peter Fonagy, a professor of psychoanalysis at University College London.

    He added that having secure attachments is not about being a perfect parent or partner but about maintaining communication to repair the inevitable rifts that occur. In the daily battering of any relationship, Dr. Fonagy said, “if free flow of communication is impaired, the relationship is, too.”

 Kate Murphy is a journalist in Houston who writes frequently for The New York Times.