Tag Archives: Meditation

Meditation and Owning Your Response to Others

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In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck the author argues that we have responsibility for everything that happens to us. He stresses, accurately, that we are not at fault for everything. Which means that bad things happen and these bad things can happen to us in a way that there was nothing we could do to prevent them from happening to us. For example, emotional abuse or physical abuse that you suffered at the hands of your parents are not your fault. The resulting trauma is not your fault. You are not responsible for what that person did to you. You are responsible for how you respond to that abuse now. this is a subtle but important distinction. You are not responsible for the actions of another nor are you not at fault, instead you are responsible for your response as an adult and how you carry that trauma into other relationships.

This is something that’s taken me a long time to understand. I knew I wasn’t responding well to situations all the time. I’d get a lot angrier than I should over something small. I didn’t understand I was responding the way I would have to my mother when I should have been looking at the situation differently as it was my wife that I was talking with. I should not have been as angry, because my wife didn’t do anything to warrant that reaction. Furthermore, I thought it was my wife’s fault and responsibility to not upset me.

I needed to own how I responded to her. I needed to take that as my responsibility to understand why I was responding the way that I was. Especially if we were having a series of blow ups, it was even more important to understand what I was feeling and why. This was not something I had the skills to handle.

Through the course of my therapy and reading, I’ve found that meditation has really helped me with my responsibilities. Whenever I’m very stressed, I’ve used a few minutes to step aside and do a breathing exercise. According to The General Theory of Love, this is a way for your body and mind to reconnect. It is a way for your rational mind to give your emotional mind a hug. This is similar giving a dog a hug during a thunderstorm. The dog doesn’t understand why there is thunder. Just that there’s loud noises and bright lights. Things that can hurt the dog. We know that we’re safe in our house. That the thunder is noise and the lightening bright, but not something that will come and get us. So we comfort the dog through hugging and petting.

We need to do the same to our own mind. The emotional part of our brain isn’t much different from a dog’s and our rational part is the same part we use to comfort the dog. Meditation and focusing on breath allow us to calm ourselves. Over time meditation is a powerful tool for beginning introspection.

I use Headspace, but there are other apps like it, such as Calm and YouTube channels, etc… There’s no one perfect tool for helping you with meditation. Each one does have guided meditations to help you understand your behavior in relationships with friends, family, and colleagues. The technique asks you to imagine yourself happy, then other people. This approach makes you think about why you get angry. Why you respond the way that you do and think about how you have hurt other people. It’s a step in understanding yourself better. It’s a way to both hug yourself and take a look at who you are and what type of person you want to be.

Talking About Depression: On Being Defined by Trauma

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I saw a tweet last night that went something along the lines of “People with trauma are afraid to get help because they’re afraid of who they would be if they weren’t defined by their trauma.” At first, I thought that this was an interesting thing to say. Yea, people need to get help and people are afraid of who they’ll be without their trauma. However, I think, for most people, they are terrified for their trauma and don’t want to be controlled by it. They have no real way of effectively dealing with their trauma. I’m going to use Shawshank Redemption as a way to talk about Trauma, it’s probably going to offend some people, but I think it will help people that don’t understand trauma how much it controls your life. I’m not even someone that has PTSD, but I understand how small trauma adds up through growing up in an unhealthy environment.

When you have trauma, you’re like Andy from the Shawshank Redemption. You were wronged in someway that takes your freedom away. You are basically imprisoned by that event. You aren’t able to mature or grow as a whole person. Like Andy, you do change. You learn new skills, you progress in your job and craft. In his case he learns how to break the law for the Warden, while you or I, might get a bachelor’s degree or become successful in our chosen profession. However, like Andy, you relive your traumatic event on a regular basis. In the movie, this can be represented by his rapes in the laundry room or his hopes being dashed when the Warden kills a man that could have vindicated Andy.

For a person, you’re stopped in physiologically, in such a way that when you are triggered, your mind and body returns to that point of trauma. There’s no light switch to get past it. You don’t want to be reminded of your trauma, but you have to deal with the fact that the trauma existed. In cases where people have defined their life by their trauma, it’s not a badge of pride it’s a coping mechanism. You’re trying to find a set of people that allows you to talk about your trauma and actually listen. For people with depression and trauma, you don’t want to feel like a burden on your friends and family. In cases of extreme trauma, people don’t want to hear about how nasty and horrific the events were.

Confronting these events in an attempt to heal from them and put the trauma behind you is terrifying. Therapy may look very clean and clinical, but that’s because that’s the physical location. It’s designed to provide a very safe space for you to work through your trauma and root cause of your depression. Psychologically it’s closer to “crawling through 500 yards of shit and stank” to get to freedom. But those 500 yards could take years to move through. You could get stuck in there. You have no idea where the end of the pipe is, if you’ll make it the whole way through, if what’s on the other end is really worth it.

Being able to make the plans to escape is terrifying. I haven’t had the trauma that a lot of people have had out there. I know how difficult it was for me to start therapy. For someone with a history of rape, molestation, child abuse, or survived a war it must surely seem insurmountable. You have to find someone you can trust. You have to feel safe. You have to be helped through a flashback when the trauma is too much to handle. You have to be able to afford it.

Defining your life by trauma is a coping mechanism. It’s driven by fear in a lot of ways, but saying that the person is afraid of not being defined by that trauma shows that they don’t truly understand trauma and the amount of effort that a person goes through to survive the trauma, let alone to address the trauma.

I definitely recommend, when you are experiencing an overwhelming flashback, to pull out an app like Headspace and do the one minute SOS meditation. Then, two minutes, and finally three minutes. By the time you finish with those 6 minutes, you’ll have centered yourself on your breathing and helped yourself to comeback to the present and out of the past. Physiologically, it’ll help get your blood pressure and hearth rate under control. As well as giving you a sense of control of your mind and body.

This advice is going to be nearly impossible to follow if you’re not already building the practice into your life already. So, start with doing daily meditation before you beat yourself up when you don’t do it. It’ll take time to get to the point where you even think about something like that. Don’t feel embarrassed about needing to that take minute for yourself (or longer), you’re going to take it anyway. This will help that minute be much more meaningful in dealing with your trauma and anxiety.

Talking about Depression: Starting Somewhere

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I was tweeting earlier with @WoytekNives about my blogs. First, I really appreciate the feedback, second, he mentioned that he was feeling better about starting somewhere because he’d seen so many other people talking about depression. This is great. It’s fantastic that people are talking about it. That’s why I started writing about this topic. I knew I needed an outlet for it and I had hoped to help other people.

I want to talk about the steps that I’ve taken again. I started with Therapy. I know I’m really fortunate to be in a position where I can afford it. However, I didn’t take advantage of it for a really long time and that was a mistake. It had some negative consequences with my marriage because of how depressed I had gotten.

So it’s important to start somewhere. You won’t be perfect when you first start. I recommend starting with meditation. It’s tough, so I don’t recommend doing it alone. I suggest using an app like Headspace, because it’s a simple guided meditation. There are these little animated videos to help you understand the point of the exercises you’re doing. I’ll be honest, at first I just wanted to skip them. I know I’m not alone in that. They can feel a bit off putting, because you’re there waiting to get started to meditate and THEN this damn animation starts. However, it can help provide an image to help you center your meditation on. Especially when you start doing the Blue Sky meditation, the animation provides great context and images to help you imagine the blue sky more clearly.

You won’t be perfect, you’ll miss days. I still miss days fairly often. However, the important thing is that you start. Because as Jake the Dog says “Sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.” Going in knowing that it’s there for you when you need it and won’t judge you if you miss it, is great too.

If you’re feeling down, start with something simple. Then move on to the harder stuff. Because the simple stuff is hard. Doing something is hard. It’s hard because while you’re depressed, your time horizons collapse around you. Planning more than a few days out is tough. Thinking about a trip is overwhelming. Even when that trip is to something like, PAX, where you hope to meet up with some of your friends. It can both be the life preserver you’re wearing as you’re muddling through the days and weeks up to it. Otherwise, you’re so overwhelmed by life that you can’t see beyond getting enough food for today or tomorrow. Thinking about yesterday is hard too. You don’t want to.

So starting with something that doesn’t require you to think about tomorrow or yesterday. Just to think about how your body is moving while you’re breathing. It can be liberating. If you give something a try today, let me know. I’d love to hear what you did to start you on your journey to feeling better.

Talking about Depression: Your Depression

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As I stated in my last blog post, one of the most difficult things to do is understand your depression. This is because you have to actually sit and try to understand why you’re feeling the way you are. Which means you must be still in a manner of speaking. To sit with your emotions, means you cannot turn on a show, be it TV, Twitch, YouTube, Netflix or whatever else. It means  you cannot just idly scroll through a social media account. This is a double no, because when you look at a site like Facebook or Instagram, you’re likely increasing your feelings of depression even though you’re probably, even if you’re not aware of it, trying to run away from your emotions.

I’d do this by looking, first, at articles on Reddit, then pictures, and then anything else that I could look at to avoid how I was feeling. What I’ve been doing instead is stopping. When I notice that I’m feeling down, I’ll stop. I’ll take a moment to look at how I’m feeling. This isn’t easy. I’ll look at the moments leading up how I’m feeling and try to understand what happened. I acknowledge that I’m feeling however I’m feeling. This means that I try to describe how I’m feeling.

Putting into words some of these sensations isn’t easy at all. One way to help with this is to pull up an emotion sheet like this, below. It’s not going to be perfect, but it’s a way to stop and investigate how you’re feeling rather than just trying to move away from your emotions. It’s further complicated by the fact that you’re probably feeling a number of emotions at once. Or in my case, I often felt completely flat, or a feeling of emptiness. For me, this happened a lot. It didn’t matter how good of a day I was having, I’d eventually end up feeling flat or empty as the day wore on. It was crushing over time.

It’s something that’s difficult to explain to a loved one. If you can’t really explain why you feel that way to yourself, what hope do you have to explain it to someone that cares about you? For me, this was made even more difficult since my family didn’t really talk much about feelings, so I had a stunted vocabulary when it came to how I felt, but I could, through reading and other media, articulate how and why I thought other people were feeling. I “simply” had to start using that same sort of analysis to look internally.

As I reflected, I would certainly feel anxious. It was very uncomfortable for me to investigate my emotions. Furthermore, I knew that just being able to explain what was happening to me to myself wasn’t enough. I had to start explaining how the actions of people around me started to impact how I was feeling. This primarily revolved around my relationship with my wife, where I haven’t been able to explain why I react to things the way that I do. I still don’t always understand why I react the way that I do.

If you decide to give this a try, feel free to leave a comment or ask me how I’ve been doing it. I’d love to offer some tips.

Emotion sheet

 

Talking about Depression

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Writing and talking about depression isn’t easy. It’s not easy because we have a stigma around depression. Add a general lack of understanding of what depression is, you have a mix that means people end up talking past each other. Depression is hard to talk about because it is the opposite side of the anxiety coin. Even if you don’t realize you have depression, if you have anxiety, you have depression. Conversely, if you have depression you have anxiety. Being anxious about things makes dealing with your depression even harder because you want to talk with people about it. You want to get help from friends and family, but because you’re anxious about it you are afraid of being a burden on that person. You aren’t going to be a burden. Most of your friends probably know that you have your moods or get defensive about things or whatever else. They don’t understand why you always behave the way that you do, but they are concerned about you and would want to help you.They may not know the best way to do so and may, in their ignorance, say unhelpful things like “Cheerup” or “this will pass you’ll feel better.”

The first step to helping the people around you understand depression is to get a better understanding of what it means to you. You’ll need to develop the right language so you are able to articulate exactly what’s going on. This isn’t easy. I’ve been going to therapy for over a year now and I now feel like I’m developing the correct language to discuss it. In many cases it’s actually been the joint therapy sessions with my wife where I’ve developed the interpersonal language to describe what’s going on between her and me.

So to develop the right language, I strongly recommend reading Lost Connections. Once you’ve made your way through that, you’ll have a better understanding of what is the major driver of your depression. That will really help you articulate what’s happening. If you get through it and feel that all of them are contributing to your depression, don’t feel overwhelmed. Focus on one of them that you think might be easiest to address through the help of your friends. Friends will be a key part in helping you recover from your depression. Being open with them about this will help them understand what you really need.

If trauma is the root cause of your depression or could be, then I recommend reading a much more emotionally difficult book called The Body Keeps The Score. This book will help you understand why you might be having the reactions you’re having when you have an event that triggers a memory of that trauma. Yes, being triggered is a real thing. It causes you have to a similar physiological response that you had during the actual trauma. However, keep in mind that lashing out at your loved ones will not really help you resolve the trauma.

Next you should begin meditating. This will be hard and scary. It’s terrifying and you’ll feel like you’re doing it wrong because you cannot sit with your emotions. You cannot be still with your self, because it means you’re still with your depression. No, it is not easy to do. It’s difficult to stick with it as well. You aren’t alone in feeling scared of being with your emotions alone.

It’s important to do because this is a way to cognitively digest some of your daily anxiety. It’s a way to allow you to look at those feelings. Turn them over and then pass them. The pause of meditation can help immensely when you’re having an anxiety attack. Even if you only do it for 3 minutes. This is because you begin to focus on your body, calming your body, which allows your reptilian/emotional mind to calm and to allow your mammalian/rational mind to hug and hold your emotions.