Mindfulness in a Mindless World

Mindfulness in a Mindless World

Do you feel like you are constantly on the move? Being rushed from one thing to the next? It feels like there is always the next person to talk to, the next event to go to, the next work thing to do, the next chore to do. If we let it, the current of life will wash away without us truly knowing who we are or why we are here. 

Life can feel mindless at times, with all the activity and pressures weighing us down and keeping us hectic. That is where mindfulness comes into play. To put it simply, mindfulness is being in the moment. It is being aware of yourself, your body, your thoughts, your emotions, your environment, your present moment. This world wants us to be ever focused on the next, but mindfulness invites us to pause, to be, to live.

Being mindful and living in the present moment takes intentionality. We must choose to stop and focus on the here and now, instead of the future. Taking moments throughout the day to breathe, to meditate, and to focus on your own sensations and awareness. These small choices of mindfulness can help you to fully experience and enjoy who you are and the life you live. Take the time today to be mindful.

Disavowal and Projection: an example from the life of King David

“You are the man”. These are the words spoken to King David from the prophet, Nathan in 2 Samuel, chapter 12. Two words in the Hebrew (atah ha’ish), translated as four words in English. As the author describes this story, the reader gets the sense that David immediate understood what was being communicated to him; and it put a chill down his spine.

Prior to hearing these words from the prophet, David had committed adultery with a married woman named Bathsheeba and then had her husband killed to cover up a possible scandal. As far as we know he thinks he’s gotten away with it all. That is until God sends the prophet Nathan to confront him.

Nathan comes to the king and tells him a story about a man who had one sheep. This man loved his sheep so much he named the sheep and thought of it as a child. One day his rich neighbor who had much land and hundreds of sheep was hosting a visitor and needed to slaughter a sheep for his meal. Instead of choosing a sheep from one of his flock, this neighbor sneaks over into the man’s yard and steals his one and only sheep to slaughter and serve as a meal that night.

Upon hearing this, David is outraged at the injustice and shouts out, “That man must die!”

The prophet Nathan responds back to David with the two Hebrew words that began this paper: אתה הא'ש. Translation: You are the man!

You, David. It’s you I was just describing. You are the man who has any resource available at his disposal; and it’s you, David, that stole from your neighbor something that he dearly loved and cherished. You are the man that I was just describing, David.

With this, David falls on his face and weeps. He knows what Nathan has just said is true; and he experiences the conviction that naturally went along with his wrongdoing.

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Sometimes it’s too scary to admit our own faults, to take an honest look at our behavior and admit wrong. In those circumstances one way that the mind avoids feelings of guilt and shame is by finding other people in the world with similar attributes that we can express our outrage at. The psychological term for this phenomenon is called projection.

During projection, we disavow the unwanted feelings we have inside of us and project them into another person in order to avoid our own disappointment and outrage at ourselves. All the while projection frees us up to express our full outrage at someone other than ourselves, and gives us permission to say things like, “That man must die!”

As therapists, one of our jobs is to recognize projection when we see it in our clients and find a way to give those projections back to their owners, much like Nathan does with David. Only then is one capable of processing their pain in a healthy way. Very carefully, we find ways to say to our clients, “Actually, I think this belongs to you.” If the projection is taken back two things become possible in that moment: 1) one can begin the work of self-forgiveness, 2) we can love our neighbor more fully.

Psychological Defenses: the healthiest and unhealthiest defenses we should know about

Defense mechanisms are the mind’s way of protecting itself from thoughts/feelings that would cause distress. Psychological defenses are the visible expression of an invisible anxiety.

For example, someone that feels weak and insecure may understandably be reluctant to reflect on and acknowledge such feelings, and so a defense of grandiosity emerges in their personality. This person may think of themselves in a larger-than-life type of way in order to guard against inner feelings of worthlessness and helplessness.

Defenses defend against the anxiety that we would experience if we were conscious of certain thoughts/feelings we have.

The most common defense is repression, where the mind simply “forgets” something that would otherwise be too painful to remember. Other common defenses are projection, denial, and splitting.

It is important to know that we all have defenses. We all have things in life that make us anxious and have thus found ways to guard against feeling those anxieties.

In the world of psychology, the presence of psychological defenses is not what makes a person “mentally unhealthy”. Rather, mental health is assessed by the type of defenses one uses. That is to say, that defense mechanisms are universal, we all have them. Which defenses we use on the other hand is what effects our mental health.

For this reason, psychologists have structured defense mechanisms in a hierarchy that arranges them from least to most healthy (or least mature to most mature).

Unhealthy defenses are ones that express anxiety by hurting others, such as displacement: yelling at our spouse when we are really mad at our boss; or ones that cause us to withdraw and isolate from others.

And at the extreme end of the unhealthy spectrum are the defenses that involve psychosis: delusional projection, psychotic denial, psychotic distortion. These are defenses that distort reality so much that a person becomes unable to experience reality the way most people do.

Healthy defenses on the other hand, helps one maintain a healthy sense of self and allows for the possibility of closeness to others in relationships.  So, what are the healthiest defense mechanisms to use? Let’s highlight the two that are widely considered to be at the top of the hierarchy: humor and sublimation.

Humor allows for one to acknowledge anxiety and express it in a safe way. All the energy that forms from the anxiety being provoked can find a healthy outlet through laughter.

“Humor allows us to share emotion, often aggressive, without discomfort, to regress without embarrassment, to play games with freedom, to laugh with impunity and relax with pleasure; it includes rather than rejects and may at times allow terrible tragedy to become bearable.” (Bateman and Holmes, pg. 93).

 It is worth mentioning that not all humor is healthy. Humor can take a very wrong turn when we use it for self-deprecation. Trying to make others laugh by making fun or ourselves is a way to decrease self-worth. Humor is at it’s best when we use it to maintain a positive view of our self and invite others to laugh with us, allowing the possibility for connection with them.  

Humor, of course, is something we see on a daily basis. But what is sublimation? We may not be as familiar with that word as we are with humor.

Sublimation is that ability to take feelings of anxiety and redirect them in ways that are socially acceptable and beneficial for society.

For example, someone who struggles with feelings of depression and low self-esteem might sublimate those feelings by expressing them through poetry, song lyrics, or art. Redirecting those feelings to such outlets allows one to share those feelings in a safe way with others (socially appropriate) and gives others an opportunity to relate to such feelings, not feeling alone for having them (benefits society).

Other examples of sublimation would be someone who struggles with strong feelings of rage and aggression taking up boxing; or someone that is self-absorbed becoming a stage actor or professor. In both cases, the person is taking something that is naturally occurring in them and redirects them in a way that is socially appropriate and helps benefit society.

The goal of anxiety is not to deny or avoid it but rather to acknowledge it as it’s occurring and find safe ways to process the emotion. Humor and sublimation offer the best ways to do just that.

What to do with emotions

According to Greek mythology, the Greek gods were once ruled by the Titans. Tired of being under their authority, Zeus rebelled against them and buried them deep beneath the earth in a big pit called Tartarus hoping that they would no longer pose a threat to him. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Although the Titans were now out of sight they had not disappeared; they remained alive under the surface of the earth. Their rumblings from below were believed to be the cause of earthquakes and tidal waves in the world.

Sometimes we deal with painful feelings in the same way that Zeus attempted to deal with the Titans, we bury them in hopes that they will just go away.

As the story of Zeus and the Titans illustrates, the problem with this is that it doesn’t get rid of our unwanted emotion; it just avoids the reality of its presence for a time. Just like the Titans from Greek mythology, our buried emotions tend to remain alive within us waiting to be felt and expressed.

Having such unprocessed emotion places us at risk of the emotion leaking out in ways we don’t intend for it to. Sometimes a person may yell at their spouse when they are actually angry at our boss. Or a person might have severe panic attacks every time they see a certain object because it triggers a flood of emotions that they have not processed yet.  Or perhaps a person may experience depression around the same time every year due to unprocessed emotion connected to a tragedy that occurred in that season of the year. Whatever it is, that which gets repressed has a way of returning in disguised form.

Therapy is designed to be a safe space in the hopes that unprocessed emotions from our past are allowed to surface back to conscious awareness and be reflected upon. Each suppressed emotion has a story to tell. It has a message that it is trying to communicate. As each emotion surfaces our goal is to: name it, know it, and hold it.

When we give something a name, we tend to have dominion over it. In the Bible, God creates Adam and then commands him to name all the animals which were in the garden. God had created Adam to rule over His creation, and naming the animals was the first act in establishing dominion. When we give an emotion a name, we shed light on it so it’s not so mysterious and uncontrollable in our mind any more.

Once the emotion is named the next goal is to get to know it. Emotions are simply a response to life. When our needs are being met appropriately, we respond to that with positive emotion: joy, contentment, connection. When they are not getting met appropriately, we tend to respond with negative emotion: resentment, anger, rejection. Attempting to get to know painful emotions is an attempt at trying to understand what needs were going unmet at the time it originated.

The reward of naming and knowing an emotion is the hope of being able to hold it. We can accept the reality that we did feel a certain way; and we can choose to extend empathy to ourselves for having that reaction at the time. A person can say in their head, “I was feeing rejected, and I can understand why I was feeling that at the time”.

We are emotional creatures by nature. Having a fuller ranger of emotions, we allow ourselves to feel is part of becoming emotionally and mentally healthy. Sharing them with others is how we engage in more meaningful relationships with others.

There’s an old Swedish proverb that says:

“Shared joy is twice the joy, shared sorrow is half the sorrow”.

The goal with our emotions is to attempt to be as present with them as we can when they occur. To deny or avoid them is to exchange short term relief for long term discomfort. Our emotions can be known and felt; and to do so is to attempt to be more human.  

The cost of not feeling emotions

Dr. Paul Brand was a medical doctor that specialized in treating patients with leprosy, a disease that effects the nerve endings in a person, preventing them from feeling pain. In 1946 Dr. Brand made a break-through discovery for the disease at that time - he discovered that the physical deformities that often accompany the disease were not an intrinsic part of the disease, rather the deformities were a result of not being able to feel pain. When a person with leprosy cuts themselves they may not see it, and since they can’t feel pain the wound goes untreated. The untreated wound eventually gets infected and escalates to more sever problems that lead to physical deformities.

In 1976 Dr. Brand famously said, “If I had one gift which I could give a person with leprosy, it would be the gift of pain.”

The irony of the cure to leprosy is that the cure would allow the person to feel pain. So many of us see pain as a negative thing. We avoid pain and medicate pain. But the biological benefit of pain is that it alerts us that something is wrong with the body. Pain prompts us to get out of certain situations or to seek help. But for a person with leprosy, the inability to feel pain is potentially life threatening.

Sometimes people come to therapy because they don’t feel emotion. It’s not that they have a disorder that prevents them from feeling emotions but rather they’ve slowly avoided painful emotions so much throughout their life that all their emotions stopped registering. They are aware that things are happening in their life that should be triggering emotion but it’s not actually resulting in feeling anything. They have an emotional form of leprosy.

Emotions are like the dashboard lights in our car, they tell us what is happening under the hood. Painful emotions are the “check engine” lights coming on. The car may be running just fine but the dashboard light is telling you that something is wrong. If you don’t get the car fixed some time soon it could break down.

Just like physical leprosy though, the problem with emotional leprosy is that it prevents us from knowing that there is something wrong internally and prevents us from opportunities to grow and mature. Feelings of regret and guilt, for example, signal to us that we may have caused harm to another person. Awareness of those feelings can motivate us to make amends where necessary, restore connection with them, and attempt healthy change in order to prevent causing that same harm to others.

Feelings of sadness indicate that something we valued is no longer available in the way it once was. Acknowledging sadness brings about a sense of reminiscence about what we once had, gratitude that it was once a part of our life, and leads to emotional healing and growth.

Feelings of anxiety communicate that we are afraid that one of our needs is going to go unmet in the future. They can motivate us to make preparations in a more responsible way.

Feelings of fear tell us that we are feeling unsafe. The gift of fear is that it can direct us away from what is dangerous. At its best, fear points us towards safe people in hopes of producing secure attachment with them.

Pain is not our enemy. It is often helpful information that can lead to healing. Rather than dismissing painful feelings, our job is to take them seriously and give them space to communicate what they have to say.