Further Explorations: Existentialism & Existential Psychology

Quick note: As I thought about the past few posts, and then tried to come up with resources to point you towards, I realized that a lot of my reading and learning has been at the level of primary texts; that is, reading Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, etc. These are pretty tough entry points, and since I am working on putting together my existential group this fall, I’ve been trying to come up with more normal-person resources. But I admit, it’s a little thin. 

Stuff to explore online

  • Existential Comics. I’m not kidding. First off, it’s hilarious. Second, Corey Mohler (the creator) does offer you little windows into philosophy’s heavy hitters. Each character generally plays an (obviously comedic) role in each narrative that somehow reflects the philosophical positions that philosopher held. 

  • Some philosophy YouTubers

    • Mark Thorsby contributed to me getting through grad school. His videos are definitely in-depth — this isn’t philosophy lite — but he’s crystal clear and really knows his stuff.

    • This is more if you’re just interested in philosophy generally, but Jared Henderson is someone I’ve been following more lately. He also has an excellent Substack. He doesn’t generally get into existentialism per se, but his approach to philosophy is quite accessible. 

  • The Existentialists podcast. This one is great for actually applying existential psychology principles to our lives. Not just philosophy, but really existential psych.

  • Both the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are, again, fantastic philosophy resources generally. Keep in mind that these articles are written by professional philosophers who are not always the best at thinking about how to apply philosophy to lived reality. But if you get excited about existentialism (or any other philosophy!), they’re invaluable resources for pointing you in future directions.

  • This may feel a little intimidating, but Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism is genuinely quite accessible. Personally, as an old Gen X lady, I’d recommend printing it off instead of trying to read it online, but whatever works for you!

  • And of course, if you’ll be in Washington State this fall, I’ll be leading an existentialist psychotherapy group. Because it’s an actual therapy group, you do have to be in Washington to participate. But I’m genuinely excited about this group. My goals are to help people 1) start to figure out what role the intellect plays in therapy, and 2) get their feet under them with existentialism.

Books

  • Full disclosure: I haven’t actually read this one yet, but I swear I’m going to! At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell is one that I keep meaning to get to. My phenomenology professor recommended it, so it’s got to be good, right? I’m guessing it has a bit of a French bias, but that’s pretty common.

  • My #1 recommendation for getting started with thinking existentialism in your actual life: On Being and Becoming by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei. Gosetti-Ferencei isn’t a psychotherapist, but/and she does a fantastic job of walking the edge between explaining the philosophy and talking about it in terms of human life. We’ll be using this book in the therapy group this fall.

  • If you feel up for a primary text (though I might suggest starting with the aforementioned Existentialism Is a Humanism), The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon feels particularly salient for our times. I’m convinced that Fanon’s young death is one of the greatest tragedies of 20th century philosophy. Fanon was a psychiatrist, Martiniquais, and an absolutely brilliant analyst of what colonialism had done/was doing to the psyches of both colonized and colonizer.

What existentialism is not (necessarily)

Jean-Paul

It’s funny how we get introduced to a concept, and how that introduction can shape our impression of that concept for years. Even a lifetime.

When someone first introduced existentialism to me, 1) they only talked about the concept of radical freedom, and 2) they talked about it as a monolithic philosophy. What I now know is that this was both an entirely Sartrean understanding of existentialism (obviously he was a big deal, but he was by no means the defining voice on existentialism), and even there, it oversimplified things. 

The way (Sartre’s) radical freedom concept is usually understood is in the context of Western philosophy’s ongoing debate regarding determinism; that is, how much/many of our choices are we “freely” choosing, as opposed to being directed by unseen forces outside of our control. This is a massive debate, and I won’t get into it here. But suffice to say, I don’t think it’s really the right starting place for Sartre’s radical freedom. From what I can tell in my albeit limited reading of his work, Sartre wasn’t really “doing” physicalism. That isn’t to say that he believed in a soul, or that he rejected natural science. But Sartre was primarily concerned with what a human being is from a human being’s perspective. From a human being’s perspective, we are not atoms and neurochemicals. As an example, as I write this, I am not experiencing myself as an anatomical substrate, with electrical firings going off in my “brain.” I’m experiencing sitting in a chair, with my laptop on my lap. I’m sitting in a funny spot in my kitchen, because the morning light is killer on the other side of the kitchen, and I see my little black cat Charlotte off to my right. My back hurts a little, and I’m thinking that it’s because I didn’t get any exercise yesterday.

Sartre was analyzing this reality. The lived reality. And his concept of radical freedom also held the reality of being “condemned to be free”; that is, for humans, there is an element of the necessity of freedom. You cannot escape the fact that you could, in fact, decide to do any number of things, including one of the most apparently absurd actions, suicide. 

This isn’t how it was presented to me. It was presented in a sophomoric, “We can do whatever we want!” kind of way. When what Sartre is saying is, “We can do whatever we want . . . or don’t want . . . or what other people want . . . and it’s terrifying.”

Groundlessness

I should preface this part by saying that I am not yet deep enough into Sartre, Yalom, and Buddhism to offer a robust defense of this idea. But here goes.

In my own work, as a therapist — as an American therapist, in the 21st century, shaped by a childhood in the Cold War, and an adulthood defined by technological rapaciousness and ongoing conflict in the Middle East — I think that the word freedom is pretty irredeemably tainted. Americans have, overwhelmingly, naïve and self-gratifying ideas about freedom. If they want cherry soda, they think it’s freedom to get cherry soda. If they want to make other people sick, they think it’s freedom to make other people sick. As a nation, we’re not very good at considering nuance, and we’re so accustomed to a shopper’s mentality that freedom does often seem to boil down to getting what we want.

A big part of therapy, in my opinion, is coming to terms with how little you are going to get what you want. So the word freedom, to me, just muddies the waters. What I’ve landed on, to convey the same concept, is the Buddhist idea of groundlessness. 

We encounter groundlessness whenever we discover that our neat and tidy little assumptions weren’t in fact true. 

Oh, you thought you were going to get married and have a couple of kids? Surprise! You’re infertile!

Thought you were going to move out to one of the San Juans and watch your golden retriever galumph through the long grass? Surprise! You’re getting a divorce, and now you’re in a custody battle over the dog.

You lose your job, after building the technology that’s replacing you. Your kids have “special” (most obnoxious euphemism of them all) needs. You get cancer. Your spouse dies. 

And each horrible step along the way, you have to choose. You have to make decisions about what to do next, or you avoid making choices, and that is actually itself a kind of choice. 

Yes, you can go through IVF. And it’s absolute hell for a lot of people.

Yes, you can do couples therapy. And it won’t save a marriage that’s been unraveling for decades. 

This is groundlessness, and I think it’s also a lot closer to what Sartre was describing than my ability to choose chocolate versus vanilla. Perhaps a better word, instead of “freedom,” would be, “anchorlessness.”

Pessimism versus optimism

I realize that, at this point, existentialism might sound like a fairly bleak approach to life. Westerners tend to gravitate towards more cheerful philosophical concepts, and groundlessness — and, if I’m right, Sartre’s “freedom” — are anything but cheerful.

So here’s what I’ll posit: the main reason we think this sounds so damn bad is that we’re addicted to problem-solving. In grad school, one of my professors brought up Maslow’s law of the instrument: to paraphrase, give someone a hammer, and suddenly everything looks like a nail. 

Give someone Python, and suddenly everything looks like a problem to solve. Give someone  structural engineering, and suddenly everything looks like a problem to solve. Give someone cardiology, and suddenly everything looks like a problem to solve. They may be smart enough to know that their wife’s sadness will not be solved by Python, or their child’s’s Level 2 autism will not be solved by cardiology. But in the modern world, we have a very real tendency to view everything that we dislike — everything that makes us uncomfortable, everything that our minds suffer over — as a problem to solve. We search, and spin, and play out arguments and scenes in our heads, striving to find the solution.

In this context, I believe, Sartre’s freedom is both intimidating and liberating. Because at the end of the day, if my child’s emotional volatility is a safety risk for my other kids, that just is what it is. I can’t make autism go away. What I have the power to do is decide how I want to relate to it. And in Sartrean fashion, I really do have that freedom. I can decide, for example, that it’s more than I want to handle on a daily basis, and that I think my kid would be better served at a residential program for high needs kids. I may even surprise myself, and be reminded that I do, in fact, love them. I may feel guilt, and compare myself to parents who kept their Level 2 kiddos at home. 

If my spouse is sad — and maybe she’s sad a lot, maybe it reaches to the level of clinical depression — I can decide how I want to relate to her depression. I certainly can’t make it go away, but I can support her in getting help. She can also decide she doesn’t want help. I can decide that I want time away from her heavy depression sometimes, and do my own thing. And maybe we do grow apart. That’s entirely possible. I can absolutely decide I don’t want to live with a depressed person anymore. Or not! I can decide that it’s not worth the cost of divorce to me, and I want to stick it out. 

The point is, much of our lives, we like to tell ourselves stories about how it’s just obvious that we can’t get a divorce. Or, conversely, that it’s just obvious that we can’t stay married to someone who never wants to have sex with us. We tell ourselves that no reasonable person would choose to quit their job in this market. Or that no reasonable person would decide to go to nursing school in their late forties. 

Existentialism’s job, in these cases, is to keep holding up a mirror and say, “No, no, my friend. You have chosen to remain in a sexless marriage.” “No, no. You are choosing — right now, every day — to remain in a miserable job, with a boss you hate.” Importantly — I can’t emphasize this detail enough — you get to. You get to remain miserable. You get to be mercilessly selfish. But existentialism says, “Don’t you dare write the story with yourself as helpless pawn.”

To me, this seems incredibly . . . well, not exactly optimistic. But helpful. Genuinely helpful. Because when you reflect on your life, it is shocking to realize how little of it you had control over. You were born in a certain place, to certain parents. You were a certain race, which is its whole own can of worms. You were born with a certain, shaped body, and everyone around you interpreted that in certain ways. And then you went to schools (not of your choosing), in certain places (not of your choosing), speaking a specific language (or languages) (not of your choosing), a member of a certain religion, or not (not of your choosing), and you felt certain sexual impulses (not of your choosing), and there was a whole world around you full of people buying and selling things, among which were things like housing and medical care and clothes and food, and you were equipped with whatever cognitive and physical capacities you had to try and navigate the balance of your needs and that world. People around you were always going to get cancer, or be infertile, or enter your life after experiencing trauma, and you were always going to be constantly trying to respond to a world of impermanence.

That is a lot of stuff completely outside your control. In this context — which, I believe, is a usefully accurate view of human life — deciding how we respond, how we interpret, how we make meaning . . . that is all we have. And it is actually, incredibly powerful. I get to decide — you get to decide — how we respond to our loneliness. We get to decide how we live in relation to our jobs, how we interpret our familial religion. And yes, we get to deal with the consequences of those choices. That is Sartre’s freedom, and it is both freeing, and sobering.

Why I almost abandoned existential psychotherapy

Reasons to not be an existential therapist

I didn’t become a therapist until I was almost 40 years old. 

Some folks who become a therapist in their forties have the great excuse of having already had a “career,” as we call it. Or maybe they’ve had kids. I had no such excuses. 

To be frank, I struggled with jobs. In my twenties, I was 100% committed to being a writer and artist, and I worked nothing jobs in retail and food service. I got fired from jobs for “not smiling at the customers.” I lived below the poverty line so that I could avoid spending the time and energy needed to build a “career.” My goal was to write poetry, to get that poetry published, and of course, to be recognized as the genius of a generation.

There was another complicating factor, though, and that was that I kept either meeting or hearing about absolutely terrible therapists. 

Years ago, at a burrito shop with a friend, we ran into his therapist. His EXISTENTIAL THERAPIST, he clarified. 

It should be noted that this friend was . . . intense. He was, like many of the men I’ve gravitated towards, loud, assertive, and intellectually brilliant. He talked about a million miles a minute, and his mind leaped from Kant to Mogwai to Russian anarchist philosophy. This was what he was like, so when he excitedly saw his therapist and introduced him to all of us, no alarm bells went off.

Until the therapist simply . . . joined him.

The therapist began vigorously debating my friend. They immediately got into a heated exchange about . . . oh, one of the things philosophers argue about . . .  and they just sat there, yelling at each other. My friend was, as he was wont to do, clearly getting high off the whole thing. And I get that. I get high off intellectual debate, too. But the therapist was also clearly getting high off it. At one point my friend gleefully told me, “This is exactly what our therapy sessions are like!! I’m basically getting a free therapy session here!”

Later, after the very annoying therapist had left to (as he of course had to announce to everyone) “have sex with one of my partners,” my friend kept reiterating that he was an EXISTENTIAL THERAPIST. This had the predictable effect of making me file away “existential therapists” under “pretentious, self-gratifying assholes.” 

In which I try to not be a pretentious, self-gratifying asshole

To this day, when people ask me what existential psychotherapy is, I hesitate. 

My first priority is to ensure they don’t envision my old friend’s jerk of a therapist. But there’s a bigger question at play. While that poly-before-poly-was-cool dick was doing a bad job at it, his engagement with my friend was an answer to a question, the question being: what is the role of logic and intellect in therapy? The therapist’s answer was patently wrong — therapy is not an intellectual debate — but he was at least answering the question.

You might think that my grad program in existential-phenomenological psychology would have answered this question, but alas, such a program left me with more questions than I started with. Also, existential and phenomenological psychotherapists tend to see their approach as having more to do with the person of the therapist, or how they do therapy, rather than prescribing what they are doing in sessions. 

One thing I can confidently say is that existential psychotherapy is not a so-called “manualized” approach like CBT, DBT, or EMDR. I like to call these approaches 1-2-3 therapies: first do this, then this, then that. 

The thing is, I’ve found that I sometimes need a 1-2-3. Sometimes the patient needs a 1-2-3. With complex and/or developmental trauma, many patients flail in emotional overwhelm. It’s an absolute lifeline when I can tell someone, “First, I want you to put your phone away. Second, every day for the next week, do this breathing exercise. And third, when X thought comes, here’s how you can respond to it.”

In my grad program, I did feel like the teaching for how to respond to emotional overwhelm was basically, “Sit with the patient. Allow them their feelings.” I tried this until I had my first borderline patient who was — lucky me! — literally my first patient. In my internship. First day on the job. It was a shit show, and I feel confident saying I did her absolutely no good at all.

So after grad school, I sought out the 1-2-3 approaches for trauma, which quickly became my specialty area. 

Coming home (question mark?)

Maybe if I’d lived during a different time, I wouldn’t have returned to existential therapy. But the times are . . . something. 

Many of my patients work in the tech sector. They have built things that, apparently, will make it impossible for their children to have a job. Other patients work in medicine, where the insurance-companies-turned-cartels dictate care for their patients. Others are being driven insane by their screen addictions and rising panic. Those who are religious potentially have some kind of a meaning-making system, but those institutions also have to navigate current questions about gender, politics, and nationalism. And those who aren’t religious have no easy solutions; reasonably, they aren’t going to just submit without question to a faith they don’t endorse, but that also removes the possibility of a ready-made community.

So, I caved. I went back to my existential books. I restarted intentional journaling about questions like, “What do I think a person is?” and “How do I feel in my current dialogue with technology?” 

The annoying EXISTENTIAL THERAPIST at the burrito shop was, yes, doing it wrong. But I also can’t pretend that a quiet, “And how did that make you feel?” is the right response to every moment in therapy. In fact — and I’m sort of shocked to hear myself say this — I think that therapists may have become a little too obsessed with pure emotions. Our logical and intellectual needs are real. They, too, are always connected to our emotional beings, because we are animal bodies that generate a felt sense. And I’m finding a deeper need to engage with the questions of existentialism in my therapy work, and not simply chalk everything intellectual up to emotional avoidance.

Again, sometimes at the end of a post, I offer you a quick pause. Maybe close your eyes, close your laptop, and consider whether you need to stay on your screen after this. Maybe you do. And maybe it’s time for a break, time to stop scrolling and clicking and reconnect with the real world. 

What is philosophical psychology?

Intellectualization

I frequently have patients and clients tell me that they struggle with intellectualizing their problems. What they mean by this is that they’ve read some books, analyzed their lives and thoughts to death, and all the while they believed that if they could just understand their struggles, they would evaporate. 

I suspect this is why psychobabble is so popular on social media. It feels powerful when you hear someone say, “10 Signs Your Ex Is Borderline,” you listen to the 10, you think, “My god! ALL my exes were borderline! Now I just have to figure out why I’m attracted to these kinds of people, and that will lead to peace and happiness.” Cue years of reading and therapy, and at the end of it you’re thinking, “Shit. Now my actual WIFE has a borderline personality. How did that happen?”

And yeah, it may have partially been because you were intellectualizing. It’s certainly the case that reading Susskind and Aristotle won’t necessarily teach you how to love humans and enjoy being alive. And yes, there are those who try to escape the wildly complicated and confusing realities of human relationships by plunging themselves into books, computers, intellectualism, and even meditation.

But blaming the intellect itself feels off to me. For one thing, you’re sort of . . . doing a bad job at being an intellectual if you fail to ask yourself, “Why am I so lonely?” If you are unhappy, and it seems to be part of a larger life pattern, you’re not intellectualizing very well if you keep circling around your two or three favorite answers to problems, repeating them to yourself over and over, never asking the question: what if I’m wrong?

Which is all to say, when people say they intellectualize or over-intellectualize, I want to say that they’re actually using the intellect poorly. 

What does philosophy have to do with psychology?

Honestly, it’s not hard to spot when the intellect is getting in the way in psychotherapy. When a patient offers a crystal clear, erudite, calm account of their failings and how “this all goes back to my mom/dad/dead cat/blah, blah, blah,” that’s the intellect trying to run the show. I look for ways to make them productively uncomfortable, and I don’t let up until they either fire me or see improvement. Simple.

Before I wanted to become a therapist, I wanted to be a midwife. The initial inspiration came when I learned that Socrates’s mother was a midwife. I was so fed up with Socrates and Plato’s misogyny, I could think of no better revenge than to follow in Phaenarete’s footsteps. 

Then I discovered I hate medical monitoring machines (apparently those are a big deal in medicine these days?), and suddenly I was in love with psychology. 

Over the years I’ve realized that my approach to psychotherapy is very similar to Socrates and Plato’s approach to philosophy, at least in the early dialogues. The gist of it was to ask a person what their interpretation was of a situation, poke holes in their interpretation, make them uncomfortable, and then . . . well, leave them that way. 

The benefit for the therapist, then, of thinking about philosophy is not to offer grist for debate in therapy sessions. Thinking philosophically is good for the therapist. Donna Orange puts it this way:

“[R]eading philosophy teaches us to read and listen differently and to notice what we might miss if we read only the theoretical formulations of our own tradition. Above all, we may notice the anomalies in our own clinical experience. Why does saying and doing what I have been taught seem not to work in this situation?”

Why philosophy is central to my work

A philosophical approach to psychology is, for example, why I approach the discourse around neurodiversity the way I do. On the one hand, I’m not one for bandwagons, and everyone on the Left is enthusiastically jumping on the neurodiversity bandwagon. This gives me pause in how I listen to and metabolize the discourse. On the other hand, I am shocked by how narrow the band for “normal” keeps getting, even within my lifetime. This prompts me to examine the definition of “normal” itself. The benefit of thinking philosophically is, to some extent, that I am made uncomfortable. Philosophy denies me the easy comfort of fitting in with any one ideological group. Intellectual rigor demands that I take seriously many of the lived experiences of ADHDers and Autistic folks, as well as the research being done on neurodiversity. It also demands that I take seriously the role of social media, and trends in devaluing expertise.

Other examples include how I think about and use Internal Family Systems and EMDR. Philosophy also helps me work through how to do therapy with people who are in polarized positions: e.g., one session may be with a woo-woo, I-heal-myself-through-communion-with-angels type, while the next is with an MD. For me, it’s a huge challenge to move between these folks, and I find philosophy indispensable in helping my intellect and my emotions talk to each other.

To return to Donna Orange’s point, this is why I say on my website that “it’s important to me that I avoid hitting everyone over the head with ‘what worked for me,’ or even what worked for previous patients.” I see my task as a persistent, almost obsessive, digging into what is not like me. What is not intuitive. What doesn’t feel obvious to me.

To be clear, this is not easy. For one thing, I have my own moral, political, and spiritual values. And I notice that it’s tiring to always be open to looking at things a new way; I frequently feel exhausted by my job, and I often think it’s just from having spent eight solid hours telling myself over and over again, “Okay, that’s your knee-jerk response. What are some other possibilities?” But the fatigue of it doesn’t make it not the right way to go about psychotherapy. And I can’t imagine trying to do therapy any way that doesn’t include philosophical inquiry.

Further explorations: Mindfulness, and Buddhist psychology more broadly

Stuff to explore online

  • The OG “Mindfulness-Based”: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. As noted in my post about mindfulness and “mindfulness,” I do have a hankering to go deeper than . . . well, just “mindfulness.” That being said, MBSR works, and I want nothing more than for my patients and friends experiencing stress and burnout to get relief. 

    • If you’re in Washington, do yourself a favor and check out Mindfulness Northwest. Seriously. They even have MBSR offerings specifically for healthcare providers.

    • If you’re not in Washington, and/or you’d like to study MBSR more at your own pace, Palouse Mindfulness is a treasure. Literally the entire curriculum of MBSR, offered entirely for free, with periodic Zoom meetings available to connect with other people working their way through MBSR.

  • “White Guy Buddhism.” Excellent Substack post about some of the cultural impacts of Western values on Buddhism’s path in the States. From the Substack WeirdCraft: 

  • Spirit Rock. On the West Coast and available online, Spirit Rock is a goldmine if you’re interested in exploring Buddhism more deeply. I’m currently enrolled in both their Buddhist Psych Training for psychotherapists, and a sutta study. The teaching is extremely high quality. Explore it here.

  • Everything Happens for a Reason. Okay, full disclosure: This book isn’t Buddhist at all. The author is Christian, and either a theologian or historian of Christianity. But it’s AWESOME for both 1) laughing your ass off, and 2) exploring how harmful trite little feel-good phrases can be. The author, having spent years exposed to prosperity gospel teachings, is diagnosed with cancer. Needless to say, hearing that “everything happens for a reason” was and is not helpful. If you enjoyed my post on psychobabble and near enemies, you might like this very quick-to-read memoir. 

Books

NOTE: There are lots of different traditions in Buddhism! In the interests of simplicity, I won’t differentiate between them all here, but if and when you ever do explore the dharma, keep in mind that there is a lot of diversity of thought and practice.

Near enemies of the truth, and psychobabble

Like many therapists, I have mixed feelings about the proliferation of psychobabble online. Psychobabble is the (non-)technical term for pop-psychology terms like speak your truth, trauma bonding, gaslighting, and my personal favorite, triggered. “I just feel so triggered when you acknowledge that my ex-boyfriend exists. Could you not do that?” 

If we think about this in terms of on-the-ground psychotherapy, a lot of it comes down to how specific words and concepts actually feel to any one individual. For example, while initially I found the whole red flag, green flag, pink flag, beige flag, and green-flag-with-purple-polka-dots discourse exhausting, I’ve grown interested in it. Several of my patients are very invested in understanding the concepts of the red, green, pink, and beige flags (I’m sure there are others), and I’ve realized that they never organically learned — on a felt level — what it means when their whole self and body say things like, “Hmmm… That felt uncomfortable,” or even, “Oh, hell no.” 

The whole flag conversation feels like a way of turning to an external set of criteria that will help you out when your internal criteria have their wires crossed. 

Near enemies

One of my favorite concepts within Buddhism is near enemies of the truth. Near enemies are emotions that feel very close to the brahmaviharas, but don’t quite hit the mark. I believe there are many more, but some of the traditional ones are these:

Desired Virtue: Equanimity

Near Enemy: Indifference, disconnection

Desired Virtue: Lovingkindness

Near Enemy: Conditional love

Years ago, when I was more within the Hindu/Yogic traditions, I came across the work of Hareesh, or Christopher Wallis. Wallis is someone I genuinely respect within the Western yoga world, and I don’t say that lightly. He translates Sanskrit, and he has in-depth knowledge of the history of yoga and other Indic religious traditions. To be clear, Wallis is coming from the yogic angle, not the Buddhist angle. But years ago, he started a fantastic series on his blog called “Near Enemies of the Truth,” which later evolved into a book. He dissected a wide range of the feel-good phrases in religious and spiritual traditions outside of the monotheistic realm. Phrases like “listen to your heart” and “all paths lead to the same goal” abound. They often land on the hearts and ears of people who are suffering, and they sound like a relief. 

But these are trite little bits and bobs that actually reinforce some of the deepest-rooted poisons in Western culture, like individualism and neo-liberalism. 

Near enemies in psychotherapy

In the past decade or so there has been an explosion of psychological discourse on social media. Some current trends that make me gag are “lucky girl syndrome” (law of attraction bullshit) and the conflation of random or impulsive thoughts (“I wonder what would happen if I pulled that fire alarm lever?”) with intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts are typically associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and may mean that a person cannot stop themselves from thinking about raping someone, or having sex with a family member, or molesting a child. Intrusive thoughts are, to be frank, upsetting as fuck, and no, your sudden impulse to point the hose at your spouse while they walk past you is not one of them.  

Many of these trends often proceed from — and then reinforce — a polarization. One example is the phenomenon of self-diagnosis. Many of us see social media videos and posts that have some information about a specific diagnosis — like ADHD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and others — and because some of the symptoms match our experience, we conclude that we have that mental health disorder. 

On the one hand, there are myriad online social spaces that will almost always give a thumbs up to self-diagnosis and point out that competent mental health assessment and treatment is inaccessible to many. 

On the other hand, there are healthcare providers who are concerned that people are misdiagnosing themselves, and the providers may reflexively reject the self-diagnosis of anyone who presents saying, “I’m pretty sure I have X.” 

Essentially, the trend bifurcates into two oversimplified responses: “Self-diagnosis good,” or “Self-diagnosis bad.” 

I have my concerns about self-diagnosis. It’s often attached to a long list of assumptions that I consider all “near enemies”: “speak your truth,” “you are the expert on yourself,” and “the customer is always right” all come to mind. But I also want to make it clear that the confidence many healthcare providers have — that they are the arbiters of accurate knowledge — is what I would also call a near enemy in the psych world. In some ways, we can’t help it. Having had just a taste of differential diagnostic training on ADHD specifically, I’m now keenly aware of how many different disorders can look superficially the same. Once you gain this kind of knowledge, you can’t help feeling frustrated by oversimplifications. But at the end of the day, we have to remember that we are working with a human conceptual framework, with its own rules, its own physics, and it’s not perfect. 

I also like that people are becoming much more aware of human psychology. Mental health counseling and addictions treatment are becoming more normalized, and that’s a good thing. Many of the patients I’ve had over the years who self-diagnose and/or analyze their lives with social media are working their asses off therapeutically and emotionally. They are often my hardest working patients, and they’re a joy to work with.

So my position on psychobabble is . . . complicated. I hear it, and my intellect immediately starts arguing with it. But something problematic which proceeds out of a polarization will not be remedied with a polarized response. To wit, it’s complicated. I can’t make a blanket statement that will answer, forever and all time, “Is my husband/wife a narcissist?” 

But man, if you come into therapy telling me you’re about to start manifesting abundance in your life, we’re gonna have a talk.


If you made it this far . . . nice! It’s great for your brain to finish reading something this long. Now maybe check in with yourself to see if you want or need to stay on a screen right now. If you do need to stay on-screen right now, maybe think about when you can schedule screen-free time. 

On mindfulness, and “mindfulness”

For the past decade or so, I’ve had a growing interest in 1) Buddhism, 2) Buddhist philosophy, and 3) Buddhist psychology. These are three quite distinct domains, which have a tendency to get smooshed together in the United States. Let’s take them one at a time:

  1. Buddhism itself. Buddhism is a religion. I know, I know. Your drug dealer says it’s “just a life philosophy, man,” but hear me out . . . He’s wrong. About many things.

  2. Buddhist philosophy: Buddhist philosophy, like Indic philosophy generally, is a rich, complex mesh of mathematics, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and more. And yes, Buddhists argue with each other. When you believe that the human understanding of reality itself hinges on discourse, you argue.

  3. Buddhist psychology: This is the very messy territory I’ve been wading deeper into lately. Because while much of Buddhist psychology, as we understand it in the West, was introduced via Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Jon Kabat Zinn’s work, Buddhist psychology of course goes back much farther and, again, there’s a great deal of disagreement amongst the various schools.

Satipatthana Sutta

The word “mindfulness” itself is the modern English word or translation of the Pali word sati. Sati refers to memory: the Wikipedia translation of sati is “to remember to observe.” 

The Satipatthana Sutta is a Pali text. Its title means simply, The Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness. As you can probably guess, this puts it in both the 1) Buddhism as religion, and 2) Buddhist philosophy buckets. 

There is potential to have a very long conversation about cultural appropriation here. I’m opting not to dive into that too deeply here, mostly in the interests of time and space. That being said, I do have mixed feelings about the particular path by which mindfulness-based techniques came to the United States. Jon Kabat-Zinn was seminal in this regard. Kabat-Zinn studied with a number of Buddhist teachers. Generally, I feel grateful for his work in developing Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. MBSR is an effective, non-pharmacological intervention that helped put mind-body medicine on the map. It got people to take seriously the health impacts of stress. And it taught people to slow down, and listen to their bodies. All of which I love.

Recently, though, I came across this quote. Which I did not love. Regarding teaching mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn said this:

“I wanted to offer instead a kind of translation of a universal understanding or approach that was never really about Buddhism. The Buddha himself wasn’t a Buddhist, and the term Buddhism is an invention of Europeans. And, of course, Buddhists could really care less because it’s all about non-duality."

That last bit pissed me off. It seems to conflate all Buddhists — from Malaysia to South Korea, India to Japan — and ascribes to them the beliefs of (you guessed it) your drug dealer who says, “Whatever, man! It’s all love!”

Saying that Buddhists couldn’t care less because [insert pet stoner phrase here] is like saying that American Christians have no concerns about the US losing its cultural identity, because you talked to a bunch of priests and pastors. Talk to Christian clergy — or Buddhist monks — and you will walk away with a very different view of Christianity in America, or Buddhism in Asia, than if you spoke to non-ordained Christians in America or Buddhists in Asia. Not to say the clergy and the monks don’t have a right to their opinions, but they generally have different views than the everyday folks. 

It’s fair to say that the Buddha wasn’t Buddhist. But you know what? The people of Vietnam certainly are, and it matters to them. The nearly 10,000,000 Buddhists who remain in India are Buddhists, and it matters. 

And then I caved

Somewhere along the line, even though I get angry about the slicing and dicing of Buddhism into convenient, consumable little bites, I genuinely fell in love with mindfulness meditation, and — as cliché as it sounds — trying to bring mindfulness into my everyday life. 

On top of all of this is my work as a psychotherapist. What I’ve found, over and over, is that I can’t make heads or tails of any psychology that doesn’t take account of the human mind/heart, and body. For that, I need Buddhist psychology (which does indeed go much deeper than mindfulness) and somatic psychology. Embracing mindfulness has allowed me to ground myself and my patients, and it has been an absolute lifeline when it comes to working with stressor-related disorders (MBSR is, again, incredibly effective) as well as addictions. I can honestly say I wouldn't know how to work with addictions without Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention.

If you wanted to learn more about the history of Buddhism in the US, you kind of can’t dive into this without talking about race. A great book on the topic is Be the Refuge, by Chenxing Han. Roughly two-thirds of Buddhists in the US are Asian or Asian-American, a fact that is often unknown to the White folks who are interested in or even practicing Buddhism. I don’t agree with every take on things Han has (I mean, I don’t agree on everything with anyone), but she offers important corrective information on the cultural history of Buddhism in the US.

As before, I want to offer you a quick invitation to pause. Maybe close your eyes,, and consider whether you want or need to stay on your screen after this. If it’s time for a break, maybe step away from your screen, let your eyes adjust, and have a quick stretch. I swear, the internet will still be there when you get back.  :) 

I do not do silver linings

I confess that I enjoy making my patients laugh. One of the easiest ways to do so is to share my honest opinion: life absolutely sucks, a large proportion of the time.

And I mean it. I think it’s profoundly confusing, exhausting, emotionally painful, and excruciatingly boring to be human. Either that, or we numb ourselves to it. I think it’s hard to be a person. As a result of my cheerful pessimism, there is no faster way to piss me off than by saying the phrase:

Focus on the positive!

Whenever I hear this phrase, I always imagine a smiling young woman saying this to me, with some hideous GLIB in her voice. But I’ve certainly heard it from my share of irritating Boomers. If and when anyone ever tries to silver line shit for me, I have a strong urge to punch them.

But let’s think about this a little more methodically. What I want to do is draw a distinction between what folks generally mean by the phrase, “focus on the positive,” and what I think of as finding or cultivating goodness, dignity, and beauty.

A pox on your “Focus on the positive”

“Focus on the positive” generally means something like…try to find something good in your life, and place your attention on that, and try not to place your attention on the bad things. On the one hand, this isn’t a completely misguided approach (despite my grumpiness). Negativity bias is a well-documented psychological phenomenon, and there’s a strong argument that evolution resulted in negativity bias due to its evolutionary advantage. You are more likely to survive if you spot problems and do something to either resolve them, or at least reduce their negative impacts. There isn’t a lot of evolutionary advantage to, say, taking deep breaths and relaxing your shoulders and feeling a surge of gratitude for you and your family’s and your  pets’ good health. 

On top of all of this, there is research that suggests that folks with depressive disorders both 1) tend to make more negative predictions about the future, and 2) are actually inaccurate in their predictions. Whether this is a chicken-or-the-egg issue is up for debate. While I would never tell a patient to “focus on the positive,” if someone in therapy enjoys a lot of great things in life (safety, material comfort, financial stability, a romantic partner and or friends and family, good health, etc.), and they spend every minute of every session complaining, I’m certainly going to draw attention to this. I tend to believe that mood precedes thought (not the other way around), and I would start to wonder if they had a depressed mood that needed help. I would also — if their negativity bias was super-duper strong — encourage them to try to at least catch their negative, complaining, or critical thoughts and try to not feed them further. 

“See the inner nobility and beauty of all human beings”

This concept is offered as “a first principle of Buddhist psychology” by Jack Kornfield. And here’s what happened when I read it the first time: I rolled my eyes and put the book down and didn’t pick it back up for about ten years.

In my defense, I was going through a rough breakup, and the idea of seeing the “inner nobility and beauty” of my ex made me want to gag. And I’ve discovered that Kornfield maybe isn’t always the best teacher for me. He veers pretty close to “focus on the positive” sometimes, and I just don’t vibe with it.

But… Life happened. And somewhere along the line, I realized I’d never been taught to see the nobility and beauty in myself, and that made it near impossible to do so for other people. I also think it helped that I eventually encountered people who advocated not just for more typically feminine positive traits that align with this principle (compassion, kindness, love, etc.), but also for more typically masculine traits that align as well. Things like dignity, self-respect, honor, and ferocity are all traits I appreciate a great deal, and I’ve come to see them as perfectly aligned with Kornfield’s principle.

This is what I’ve come to think of as cultivating goodness, dignity, and beauty. And one of the ways you can cultivate these qualities is by — surprise! — focusing on them in others and ourselves.

From an ethical and even a justice perspective, it’s important to clarify that this doesn’t entail naïveté or permissiveness. I can see and honor the dignity and value of even those in prison. And I can believe that some of them need to remain there to protect the public. I can see and honor the goodness and beauty of political opponents, and still firmly, actively oppose their efforts. Kornfield calls this sacred perception, and he describes it this way:

“To see with sacred perception does not mean we ignore the need for development and change in an individual. Sacred perception is one half of a paradox. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki remarked to a disciple, ‘You are perfect just the way you are. And…there is still room for improvement!’” 

Marsha Linehan almost certainly borrowed from these principles when she developed some of her basic assumptions within Dialectical Behavior Therapy, including, “Everyone is doing the best they can,” and “Everyone could be doing better.” 

If you’re interested in reading more on negativity bias, I recommend this article. I don’t love the use of the word overcome in the title, but I do think that negativity bias needs to be addressed. And if you’d like to dig deeper, I recommend this podcast episode by Kornfield.

And as always, this is your quick invitation to pause. Close your eyes and ask yourself, “Do I want or need to stay on a screen right now?” And if you do need to stay on-screen right now, maybe think about when you can schedule some time off-screen to give yourself a break. Remember: breaks are good.

:)

Hello!

Hi there! I’m a psychotherapist and mindfulness/yoga facilitator in private practice in Seattle, Washington. Before I became a therapist, though, my primary focus was on writing, literature, and philosophy.

As a practicing therapist, most of my psychology-related reading and thinking is oriented towards what I can use in sessions with patients. At the same time, I find that some of the fields I read in — particularly psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience — just keep providing so much interesting material, I can’t even begin to explore it in therapy with folks.

In therapy sessions, it’s important to me that intellectual concepts be usefully applied to my patients’/clients’ lives. For example, in EMDR, the theory is that it works by taxing working memory, and that somehow allows the brain to “re-process” past trauma. That’s important for the actual, clinical use of EMDR.

But then, outside of sessions, I wonder things. Like, what does it even mean to “re-process” something? Also, what does it mean for humans to have these different parts of their brains that sometimes do and sometimes don’t talk to each other? Is this what a theory like Internal Family Systems means by “parts”? If there are physical correlates to different parts of ourselves, does it make sense to think of humans as somehow multiple? And how does (or doesn’t) IFS map onto systems like Yoga, Samkhya, and Buddhist psychology?

Another example that comes up frequently has to do with spirituality. I have patients who fall across all kinds of spectrums, both politically and religiously. If a patient believes, say, that after we die, we go to a place like heaven or hell, how much does it matter to me if that doesn’t align with my own beliefs? Personally, I incline to thinking we either simply cease to exist, or in reincarnation. What do I believe a soul or spirit is, if anything? Does anything of us persist past death? Frequently, I think my own beliefs are completely irrelevant in therapy. I’m there for my patients’ well-being. I think of these things, but I don’t want to turn therapy into a philosophical debate, so I’m careful to keep things clinically focused.

But I want somewhere to explore these things!

So that’s my plan for this blog. I make no promises in terms of frequency. I will generally try to keep things on the short side. I have a lot of other writing projects at this time — one Substack going, possibly another on the way, and a collection of essays I’m working on — so I’m a little busy! Also, I don’t want blog posts here to take readers more than a few minutes. Think of the posts here as tasters, with maybe some suggestions for further reading if you’re interested.

So, as a preview, here are some of the topics I’ll be writing about here:

  • Buddhism and Buddhist psychology and philosophy

  • Existentialism, and existential psychology and psychotherapy

  • Somatic theory and psychotherapy

  • Neuroscience, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science

  • Yogic philosophy, including Vedanta and Samkhya

  • Political psychology and behavioral economics

  • Ecopsychology and ecosophy (fancy term for eco-philosophy)

  • Technology, cyberpsychology, and philosophy of technology

    • Note: This is one of my strongest interests right now. I’m thinking a lot these days about AI and AI ethics; how social media has changed our brains; how young men are being sucked into some very, very dark spaces; how the internet is impacting democratic pathways; and how cancel culture impacts both the individuals that get canceled, and those of us who keep our mouths shut for fear of the same.

Also, I might do some cross-posting with my Substack(s) or other website(s), if the topics feel aligned.

So that’s it! A quick intro to what you can expect to find here. Oh, and — side note — I cuss. I debated over trying to be more professional, but I need to enjoy this process or I won’t do it, so there. In the same vein, I plan on keeping comments off (all blogs should have their comments off), but you can always feel free to reach out directly to me via the contact form here on this site. I likely won’t have information in my blog posts about my availability, but I do try to keep my website and Psychology Today profile up-to-date with that info.

AND LASTLY. . . Sometimes at the end of a post, I want to offer you a quick invitation to pause. Maybe close your eyes, take a slow breath, and consider whether you want to stay on your screen after this. Maybe you do! And maybe it’s time for a break, time to stop scrolling and clicking and reconnect with the real world. I’m a big fan of breaks. We all need them.

:)