To know that we are chosen in our relationships is both primary and fundamental to the health and to the longevity of a relationship.  Feeling chosen by our partners tells us that we are safe and is elemental in the creation of deep trust and profound intimacy.  However, if we are to determine what it is to be chosen in relationship, we must first establish what it is not.

Being chosen does not necessarily happen on the “big day”, in the pretty dress and in the fancy suit; it does not happen when everyone is watching.  Knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are who our loved ones choose happens in the dead of night, with a crying baby and a dirty diaper and our partner says “you sleep, I got this one”.  It happens in the heat of an argument where everything in us is telling us to win and to fight dirty if you have to and instead you ask “help me understand”.  The kind of choosing that is so fundamental to the health of a relationship not only happens in the difficult times, it happens in the everyday and the mundane. We find it in a cup of coffee made or a date night planned.  This choosing sends a clear message that you can count on me and that the shared space of our relationship is safe.

As we begin to recognize this safety, we find the capacity to be vulnerable.  From the roots of choice, safety, trust and vulnerability a deep and profound intimacy between us is born.   Letting our partners know we choose them in the difficult moments, the everyday and in the mundane is the mortar in the foundations of our relationships.

Lair Torrent is a couple therapist in private practice at East Village Counseling  NYC and runs workshops for couples at Midtown MFT (midtownmft.com).

Invariably in my work, I hear either one or both partners say “well, I love him”  Or “She knows I love her”.  My response to such statements is “How do they know that?”  You see, we can have all the sweet, soft, loving feelings toward our partners we want but if those feelings are not communicated in a manner in which they understand it’s all for not.

It is not sufficient to simply think or feel love for our partners, we must express it.  Telling our partners we love them is not an adequate method of communicating how we feel either. While expression through words can be lovely and may do for a time, if the loving feelings are not transmuted into solid action sooner or later it all falls flat.  More over whatever action we take to express love must also be something that makes our partners feel loved.   I can bring my wife flowers everyday of the week but if flowers don’t translate into her feeling loved then my communication has missed its mark.  It is our responsibility to find out how our partners feel loved and it must be our imperative to do those things.

Couples are continuously asking me to help them find the path to trust and intimacy.  For me, the path to real trust and deep intimacy is loving action.  When we tap into what makes our partners feel loved-when discover the specific deeds that they interpret as love we uncover the Rosetta stone to their hearts.

Though sometimes the mind can give us these high stake stories as tales of warning we should pay attention to, our brains can also hand us a list of who, whats, wheres and hows that are as false as any story printed by the National Enquirer, and are only in existence to make our anxiety more intense as we are experiencing it.

When we are unconscious to the intention of the running of negative thoughts in our minds during an anxious moment, it is likely that our anxiety will be increased, making it more difficult to find a place of calm. In other words, anxious thoughts usually lead to anxious feelings.  If we have not practiced slowing down and examining our thoughts when we have become anxious, our minds can produce slanderous, untrue material only suited to be sold next to the registers at Duane Reade.

    Developing and practicing fact checking is a simple process. Here is what to do:

• When you find yourself in an anxious state, pause as best you can (this can range from taking a few centering breaths, to taking a break from your current situation) , and look at your thoughts. To look at one’s thoughts means to examine them just as if they were printed words on a page of a book.
• Pause, breathe, and stay with your thoughts as best you can.
• Write them down to get a closer look. As you “read,” ask yourself if all of your thoughts in this moment are truly real and yours? Or are they fiction and are only fibs being spouted by your anxiety?
• Make a choice: Will you believe these stories or not? Decide whether to pay attention or to simply notice and move on from what you anxiety is telling you.

Developing one’s inner fact checker can assist the mind in producing stories that are more New York Times, less OK! magazine.

Even if our minds occasionally continue to spew such newsworthy stories of yet another Big Foot siting or Alien Invasion, at the very least we give ourselves the space to put it back on a shelf for a reading for another time.

When anger is kept inside without a voice or when it continually erupts it can cause great distress. When anger is expressed safely it can be a great catalyst for change and discovery.

At Midtown MFT, we provide a safe space for women to explore and discover all their anger is, where its rooted, and how to create change in their relationships.

This Group Meets Tuesdays at 6:30pm @ $60/session.

This group focuses on:

• Techniques to help moderate reactive anger by learning about our own needs and what is behind our “upset”
• How emotions impact our body and ways we can use body sensations to help us become aware of our reactivity
• How to be more compassionate and empathic with ourselves and others.
• How to be more articulate and effective in communicating.
• Understanding and taking personal responsibility for our perceptions and our thoughts.
• Looking more deeply at unconscious patterns and ways of thinking that may be getting in the way of communicating more effectively
• New ways to respond to emotional triggers in intimate relationships, the workplace, and family by identifying and owning feelings, setting boundaries, and communicating needs.When anger is kept inside without a voice or when it continually erupts it can cause great distress. When anger is expressed safely it can be a great catalyst for change and discovery.

Through a new insight into the protection anger provides, clients will learn to focus and witness their own wounding that precedes anger, to stop waiting for the source of their anger to change, and to find within themselves the strength and courage to accept the call to action: a voice holding us accountable for our own suffering.

The primary teaching used in this workshop comes from the work of Marshall Rosenberg and his “Nonviolent Communication” model.

For more information, call us at 917-968-5599 and ask to speak with Rachel McDavid, LMFT, the group facilitator.

To register online follow this link to our Midtown MFT website.

Women’s group focusing on anger and relationships.

Our support group for women offers a safe forum in which women can find ways to transform their anger through insight, self-expression, and awareness.

This group will focus on:

• Techniques to help moderate reactive anger by learning about our own needs and what is behind our “upset”
• How emotions impact our body and ways we can use body sensations to help us become aware of our reactivity
• How to be more compassionate and empathic with ourselves and others.
• How to be more articulate and effective in communicating.
• Understanding and taking personal responsibility for our perceptions and our thoughts.
• Looking more deeply at unconscious patterns and ways of thinking that may be getting in the way of communicating more effectively
• New ways to respond to emotional triggers in intimate relationships, the workplace, and family by identifying and owning feelings, setting boundaries, and communicating needs.When anger is kept inside without a voice or when it continually erupts it can cause great distress. When anger is expressed safely it can be a great catalyst for change and discovery.Through a new insight into the protection anger provides, clients will learn to focus and witness their own wounding that precedes anger, to stop waiting for the source of their anger to change, and to find within themselves the strength and courage to accept the call to action: a voice holding us accountable for our own suffering.

  The primary teaching used in this workshop comes from the work of Marshall Rosenberg and his “Nonviolent Communication” model.

  Typically, clients are asked to register in 8-week cycles, which is why the payment buttons reflect $480 for eight group sessions, and $580 for the intake plus eight group sessions. This helps keep consistency within group members. If you are unsure of the amount of time appropriate for you, Rachel McDavid, the group facilitator, can help you with this on the intake session.

To Register please visit MidtownMFT here… http://www.midtownmft.com/womans_anger_group.html

This morning, I was listening to a lecture that I attended with Jack Kornfield a few years ago, and he mentioned this great quote by Annie Lamott:

It made me laugh, and I also know the wisdom in it.  Years of practice with my friends in RockBlossom Sangha in Brooklyn provided me with the opportunity to be present with my oh-so-challenging mind over and over again, held by the anchor of my friends and their breathing and their solidity.  But of course we can’t always be with others.  And this morning I suddenly thought about it in a new way.  I thought, yes, I don’t need to go into that bad neighborhood alone, as long I have my body with me.  It was such a startling thought!

Bodily awareness grounds us in the here and now, and even if this moment is REALLY DIFFICULT, it becomes worse when the mind starts to take off!  So in good or bad moments, bodily awareness brings us back to the relatively minor misery of the actual present moment, or often, to the startling joy that is possible!

If you would like to learn more about mindfulness classes, please feel free to contact me or register on the web.  The next class is scheduled to being July 6th.

http://www.midtownmft.com/mindfulness_therapy_group.html

Mary Myers: 917-386-3286

Create a comfortable quiet space for yourself and put a large sheet of paper before.  Have your favorite journal by your side.  Use a gratifying writing instrument, be it a sharpie, an ink pen, a paint pen, a pencil, or even a collection of colored markers.  I have a favorite ink pen that feels wonderful to write with and it makes such a difference in the quality and fluidity of my writing.  Take a moment to close your eyes or soften your gaze and breathe deeply.  Settle yourself, longer exhales naturally relax the body.  We are going to invite your imagination to guide you in hearing and unfolding your own myth, your own symbolic story.

Experience

Take a few moments to write out your responses to the following questions on the sheet of paper before you.  Write freely and take space wherever you feel moved to write on the page.  Trust your imagination , your inner world, to bring forth images and responses.

What was your favorite story, fable, or myth when you were young?

Was it one that you read, watched, or created yourself?

Was there a special animal, character, object, or location you connected with?

(maybe a place in nature like a special tree, a heroine, a magical power or a stuffed animal that felt absolutely real?)

What experience in the story was most compelling for you?  What caught the light of your imagination, of your young wisdom?

(Feel free to combine elements of more than one story if you find that you were drawn to different moments in different stories.)

Explore

Now take a walk around your room, your home, or your personal space as if you were an explorer. Notice what you see, what you’ve naturally surrounded yourself with.  Notice the images, colors, textures, objects, symbols, views, faces, music, and books.  Write down or draw symbols for these observations on your paper.  Look with the curiosity of an anthropologist trying to know the story of the person who dwells here.  Take your time.  When you feel complete, sit in front of your paper which by now may be filling up with words and/or images.  This is the raw material for your unfolding myth, fable, fairytale or story.

Unfold

Open your journal and begin arranging the pieces before you into a story of your own.  Trust yourself and try not to judge whether your story is good or bad, let yourself be guided, play more than think.  Mythology and fairytales carry the darkness and the light, obstacles and accomplishments, moments of impasse and reunion, relationships along the way and solitude.  There is a journey that usually includes a leaving of home to come home to oneself.  You can even begin with “Once upon a time…”

*If you would like more guidance for story writing you can check out Juliet Bruce’s Story Medicine  http://www.julietbruce.com/Story_Medicine.html

“Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again”

Joseph Campbell

5 Incredible Tips:

HURT is what usually causes anger.

UNDERSTAND how your expectations are influencing your frustration.

LEARNING what defended parts of you are present in any given situation.

KNOWING, that just breathing, can relax your nervous system and bring unmanageable emotions to a more manageable level.

SPEAKING about your anger helps give a voice and vocabulary to what hurts you.

Many of the men that attend my Men’s Anger Management groups at Midtown Marriage and Family Therapy describe their attempts to manage anger with references to the Incredible Hulk.  They use terms like; over powering force, uncontrollable feeling or knee jerk response.  All of these feelings and reactions to stressful or hurtful circumstances have been depicted in the comic books, T.V. series and movies.  In all of these genres, the good doctor Banner is somehow injured, igniting his temper and the frustration that lives within him.  In turn, he transforms into the embodiment of rage exacting his fury on his assailants.

As exemplified by the Hulk, anger is most often a secondary response to something else.  That something else is usually an injury or a wound.  The problem for men in our society that struggle with anger is that we are not given the skills or understanding to effectively deal with anger.  Keys to managing anger start with knowing that anger is not a primary response and that our expectations tend to fuel frustration.  Furthermore, understanding the parts of ourselves (e.g. the defensive or protective parts) that come up when we are angry is pivotal to anger management.   In addition, learning to breathe into and to talk through anger are effective techniques in dealing with our rage.

The five incredible anger management techniques the Hulk never used:

HURT is what usually causes anger.

In the therapeutic community anger is widely recognized as a secondary response to an injury.  In the case of our Dr. David Banner the injuries he received caused his rage.  In life the injuries we sustain tend to be the precursors to our anger.  Angry reactions are in the moment; direct responses to situations such as fear or hurt.  Our responses to these injuries are an attempt to try to manage the pain of our wounds.  The hurt feelings we experience are often obscured by the secondary anger response.  Like Dr. Banner, it is essential that we understand that if we are angry we are probably hurt.  If we can begin to recognize our wounds, we can begin to process our feelings.  This processing gets us out of reactionary responses and into choice about the way we respond to others.

UNDERSTAND how your expectations are influencing your anger.

Expectations play a big part in the way we move through the world. To a large degree our expectations determine our emotional state. In the T.V. series, Dr. Banner’s expectation of life and of others continued to get him into hot water as he expected those around him to behave as he did. Our expectations set up the judge and jury on how we feel about our lives, ourselves and how we experience others. If we learn about our expectations and where they come from, then we can find ways to deal with them in a healthy manner. If we can learn to expect that other people might not behave according to our well laid plans, then we can take our power back and have more choice in how we view and interact with our world.

LEARNING what defended parts of you are present in any given situation.

When we have been injured, humiliated, frightened, or shamed in the past, internal parts of us will hold the feelings and memories from those experiences.  When something happens that reminds us of one of these injurous incidents we can quickly be activated into old response patterns designed to protect us from being hurt again.  The Incredible Hulk is a metaphor for this very human experience. The Hulk is a protective part of Dr. Banner that comes to his aide whenever he is vulnerable. Like the Hulk, our protective parts come to our rescue as well,  however, protector parts can carry with them rage and anger.  These parts often exact their protective energies indiscriminately causing unintended harm. Becoming aware of the parts of us that become activated around threatening situations is a valuable key to managing anger.  If we feel judgmental, remote or frustrated a protective part of us may be present and an anger response will often follow.  Bringing awareness to the protective or wounded parts of us that are present in the moment puts us in a place of choice in how we react to others and our world.

KNOWING, that just breathing, can bring unmanageable emotions to a more manageable level.

Taking a deep intentional breath is one of the simplest yet most powerful anger management techniques I know.  Stopping and taking a deep belly breath can help to reset our internal gauge on our anger taking our rage from an out control 10 or 11 down to a more manageable 4 to 6.  If the Hulk could have remembered to stop and take a breath during one of his out of control moments, he might have been able to learn to control the emotional flooding that plagued him.  Uncontrollable anger is at its core a flood of emotion.  These floods cause us to shut down, become less open and often create a defensive or fight response.   In these fight responses our nervous system has detected a perceived threat and is taking measures to protect us. Breathing intentionally sooths our activated nervous systems, staving off the oncoming emotional flood and helps to prevent angry outbursts.  Though simple, remembering to breathe deeply is a major key to anger management and the good news is the breath is always with us.

SPEAKING about your anger helps give a voice and vocabulary to what hurts you.

Creating a vocabulary around our anger is one of the most important tools in anger management for men.  In my experience in treating anger, men tend to have few words at their disposal that express their feelings.  Typically, men are able to talk about being angry, frustrated or pissed off, however they seem to have a dearth of words to accurately describe the hurt feelings underneath their anger.  In the example of the Hulk, Dr. Banner also could not speak about his anger.  His anger was his secret and his shame.  He tried in vain to keep his struggles quiet and to himself, ultimately making him the pariah of his community.  The experience of anger management for men in our society is reflected in the story of the Hulk.  Men who don’t learn to express their feelings in a constructive way are often exiled from their families and their communities.  The building of a vocabulary around feelings is part of the treatment plan for the men in my practice.  The constructive expression of feelings takes our anger out of shadow, absolves us of our shame thus helping us to reintegrate into our families and communities.

The Incredible Hulk exemplifies how men’s anger is both held and experienced in our society.  Holding the realities of anger management up to the light of the archetype of the Hulk, shows us that a few mindfully utilized techniques can yield incredible results when trying to control anger.

Winter to Spring can be a particularly evocative time as new life emerges out of the frozen forgotten ground, like Lazarous rising from the dead.  The boney webs of branches bloom: white to pink.  The bulbs have pushed green sprouts up through the soil that give way to scented waxy petals.  Every year…every year.  And we change our costume to attend to the new warmth; continuing our routine while an ancient instinct deep within us is responding to our natural environment.  How will we respond to the call of our inner wild nature that knows now is a time of change and emergence?  We are crossing a threshold where something new is being asked of us.  We are shifting from a wintry internal sense of being to more exterior presence and expectation.

The ask is not to turn away but to turn towards the calling of Spring.  Is the call to extend your internal winter, to slowly awaken like the leaves that follow the blossoms on the trees?  Is it, like the daffodil, to come through in full radiance at the earliest sign of Spring?  Maybe it is to invest more fully in something that has laid dormant, to push up through the soil like the lilacs.  Whatever it is, notice it!  Open your inner ear to your own instinctual response during the transition from Winter to Spring.

Instructions for Life

Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it
-Mary Oliver

It was incredibly gratifying to read this, and of course I immediately forwarded the article to the participants in the current eight-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy course.  We discussed it in class the next day, and it was clear that this news gave several people a new hope that in fact what we are doing might actually work for them.  It can be so hard for us to really believe we can be happy again or free from the need for medication, or simply have a sense of being in the driver’s seat of our minds and our lives.  Seeing concrete evidence of changes in the structure of the brain gave us a new, firm foundation upon which to stand as we navigate the mind’s turbulence.

Perhaps it is because we are just past the half-way mark in the class, but it also seemed that this new sense of hope inspired a little of what I like to call “healthy feistiness.”  Instead of sitting back and nodding vaguely when I suggested such outrageous notions as accepting the mind’s miserable gyrations, a new level of challenging and questioning arose in the class, which I am delighted to see arrive.  It means that people are beginning to encounter the real challenges of walking the walk — which is MUCH harder than talking the talk, especially when it comes to mindfulness of difficult emotions.  But hard isn’t bad.  We do all kinds of hard things, like rebuilding a car engine for fun, knitting an argyle sweater, participating in the AIDS ride or climbing a mountain.  We LIKE hard.  What we can’t tolerate is hopeless.  And this new study gives us concrete evidence that it’s not hopeless!

What the study showed is that participants in an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction class  (MBSR, the sister class of MBCT, which has a similar structure of developing mindfulness practices) had measurable increases in gray-matter density in structures in the brain associated with learning, memory, self-awareness, compassion, and introspection and decreased gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with anxiety and stress.

According to the article, the study’s senior author, Sara Lazar, said, “Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day. This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”

MBCT is rare in that it is a scientifically studied, short-term process to address depression and anxiety.  In duplicated studies, the eight-week course was shown to cut depression relapse by half in people who had experienced three or more major-depressive episodes.  Perhaps Harvard’s new brain research explains how it can be so effective.

Registration is open for the next eight-week MBCT class, starting on March 30^th.  Please feel free to contact me with any questions.   Mary@MidtownMFT.com