{"id":291,"date":"2017-05-16T16:19:48","date_gmt":"2017-05-16T16:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/?p=291"},"modified":"2017-05-26T20:17:48","modified_gmt":"2017-05-26T20:17:48","slug":"why-stop-lying-why-get-in-touch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/why-stop-lying-why-get-in-touch\/","title":{"rendered":"Why “Stop Lying”? Why Get In Touch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cStop lying\u201d, I wrote in the book<\/a>.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a case which illustrates how to do this and why it\u2019s important to do.<\/p>\n

\"StopLying<\/a><\/p>\n

When Jack started with me, he was an extremely successful businessman, not yet 30, utterly unable to enjoy his many successes, on the verge of ruining his marriage.\u00a0 He could participate in a party or dinner with his wife for perhaps 10 minutes before feeling deeply, intensely compelled either to rush off to another social event or to jump up and check e-mails he\u2019d checked scarcely an hour earlier.\u00a0 During our sessions it was difficult for me to get a word in.\u00a0 He spoke rapidly, with a pleading quality, and almost nonstop.\u00a0 He had a beautiful, bright, sensitive, and aware wife \u2013 I met her for several sessions as well \u2013 on whom he often depended to prevent his anxieties from escalating into panic; she was very helpful to him, for example, as he agonized over how best to cope with a client, colleague, or employee.\u00a0 And yes, their sex life was great.\u00a0 Still, he obsessively thought about other women.<\/p>\n

Things became better after some time in therapy.\u00a0 He no longer worked 25 hours a day, he enjoyed his wife and friends, his marriage improved, he became an attentive father who greatly enjoyed his two kids, and when facing or finishing a task or decision he no longer agonized as before.\u00a0 His business thrived and grew, despite his somewhat more relaxed approach to everything.<\/p>\n

But dealing with people still triggered his old problems and sometimes he astounded both of us with the degree to which he distorted things.\u00a0 For example, an important CEO client \u00a0forwarded a copy to Jack of an e-mail this CEO had sent to colleagues praising Jack and encouraging other large companies to use his services; in response, Jack felt only intense anxiety that he was about to be exposed as a worthless fraud.\u00a0 Similarly, Jack described himself almost drowning in uncertainty and rage when one of his employees spoke to him with a rather sarcastic and an entirely inappropriate tone.\u00a0 Despite Jack’s position as the owner\/manager of his own company, his years of experience compared with this underling, and the feedback from me and his wife that indeed the employee was quite out of line, he worried that he had no right to object or that he would overreact; he found himself raging, “burning” with frustration that he realized was far beyond a reasonable response to such a minor slight. \u00a0 (When Jack eventually confronted this employee, the latter apologized profusely and subsequently adjusted his behavior to be more respectful and cooperative.)<\/p>\n

What was going on with Jack?\u00a0 As with all of us, when the current situation cannot account for his reactions we can be sure Jack was enacting forgotten or barely remembered scenarios from his past.\u00a0 In simpler language he was lying about what he was experiencing.\u00a0 This is where \u201cgetting in touch\u201d comes in.\u00a0 First, he has to articulate just what he is feeling, not rehash the particulars of the employee\u2019s behavior, his own options for responding, or the surface reactions such as \u201cI was pissed\u201d.\u00a0 Jack described “burning fear, terrified someone’s got a gun in my face, like I have to run for my life” all triggered by this awkward moment with his underling.\u00a0 Then he must begin to notice from where else he knows such intense feelings.<\/p>\n

So with some questioning from me, he began to vividly describe earlier experiences in his life which it turns out account entirely for his episodes of marked indecision, anxiety, and rage.\u00a0 The rejection, humiliation, and baffling inconsistency to which he was subjected as a child and young man are beyond what I can describe in this blog entry; the case examples in the main website<\/a>\u00a0go into such histories in more detail.\u00a0 The important point here is that when Jack could focus on and articulate the feelings aroused by whatever event \u2013 such as his employee\u2019s sarcasm \u2013 triggered the symptoms, he could also then remember and recount earlier and more deeply painful experiences which would always make the intensity of his reactions seem entirely justified!\u00a0 \u00a0By contrast, when such strong reactions to minor triggering events such as the snide employee do not match up, we label them \u201csymptoms\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 That term itself implies symptoms of something \u2013 of deeper\/older issues, of memories and experiences which have been forgotten, at least on the surface; they emerge with the help of a guide.\u00a0 In his conscious daily life, Jack was reenacting those intense and forgotten experiences in more current and trivial situations.\u00a0 If all this sounds a bit theoretic or speculative, hang on for a few paragraphs.<\/p>\n

People do this \u2013 this lying about what they are experiencing by displacement of painful experiences onto trivial events \u2013 because it is safer and easier.\u00a0 It is easier to obsess about a snide employee, about some curious anxiety or indecision, about handwashing or checking a locked door, about an insult from a friend or lover, or about some minor decision, than it is to face the more frightening and unwieldy causes of one\u2019s unhappiness such as having perhaps married the wrong person, chosen the wrong career, or grown up feeling unwanted or worse.\u00a0 When people begin to face those issues, they do feel better and they function better, but it hurts.\u00a0 Remember, Jack felt not just \u201cpissed\u201d but “burning fear\u201d, terror for his life, panic, all triggered by this awkward moment with his underling.\u00a0 Then once he articulated those feelings, he immediately remembered other times he felt that way \u2013 times when such feelings were justified by the circumstances and scary people involved \u2013 and he thus felt better.\u00a0 But those memories hurt.\u00a0 We do all we can to avoid them.\u00a0 They are the half buried experiences that people resist “getting in touch” with, events they’ve completely forgotten or which they may remember but claim to have no feeling about.<\/p>\n

A quick digression to provide an example of this kind of resistance:\u00a0 Fred is a lawyer who saw me for about three years.\u00a0 One day he began telling me a story from when he was seven years old in which he was publicly humiliated and punished by his father for misbehaving at a large family gathering.\u00a0 Halfway through the telling, to his considerable surprise, Fred began sobbing; he described how painful, humiliating, frightening the experience was. \u00a0He’d told this story many times to friends and dates, but it always felt like an entertaining and mildly amusing anecdote.\u00a0 It was only in the context of our session that the buried part of the story emerged \u2013 the pain of it.\u00a0 And again why is this pain important?\u00a0 Why \u201cget in touch\u201d?\u00a0 Because that buried pain was never really gone.\u00a0 It was something that I and others who know Fred could always see in his tense, overly apologetic, even tortured speech, and in his social demeanor in general; and although he did not know why, Fred did indeed know that he was an unhappy, tense guy.<\/p>\n

Now to return to Jack, how do we know anything I said about him is true?\u00a0 Because \u2013 and again this point is made more explicitly and with more illustrations in the main website<\/a>\u00a0and the book<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 when he would remember, discuss, and feel the pain of the memories that arose as we spoke, he would end up feeling “calmer, lighter, saner but sadder.\u00a0\u00a0 And his symptoms diminished.\u00a0 So he both felt and functioned better.<\/p>\n

So: \u00a0Get in touch. \u00a0Catch and stop the lying.\u00a0 It works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cStop lying\u201d, I wrote in the book.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a case which illustrates how to do this and why it\u2019s important to do. When Jack started with me, he was an extremely successful businessman, not yet 30, utterly unable to enjoy … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[5,4,11,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions\/295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}