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Recording: …are not necessarily those of the staff, management, or ownership of WGCH Radio.

Dr. Jerry: Good morning, This morning I’d like to talk about when divorce occurs. We’ve spoken about marriage consciousness, a kind of “we consciousness”, and the need to foster it as a way of experiencing a deeper relationship and actually as a way of accepting, in a marriage situation, what Ford spoke of when he spoke of everyday unhappiness. We’re not supposed to go through life jumping along, happy all the time. That’s obvious, and yet in practice a lot of times we forget it.

Sometimes however, divorce seems the only viable way to resolve difficulties and persistent irresolvable unhappiness. Actually it’s at these times that a couple would benefit from psychotherapy. We’ve seen and I’ve heard, socially and professionally, too many cases where divorce occurs where people think that they can just do it on their own. They’ll just go to lawyers and the deeper issues involved are never addressed.

At times of divorce passions are usually running very high and obviously social embarrassment can be present. Clearly when decisions are made about each other and more importantly about children, they will affect each other and affect the children for years. It is precisely at this time a few sessions with a neutral well-trained therapist can help alleviate a lot of persistent, really unnecessary problems.

Now why do I say that? I say that because not all the time, obviously, but frequently, a divorce is really not a divorce for both people. What do I mean by that? Because, after a divorce, either one or other of the spouses continues the relationship, many times for years on end, but they continue the relationship in their heads so to speak. They’ continue being married negatively…. they’ve given up being married positively, they’ve gotten the legal separation, but they’re still married…they’re just married negatively in their head.

Now, some of the signs of being married negatively?. It’s a marriage where anger has obliterated any of the original feelings and the anger becomes so pronounced that the children are the ones who suffer; they are the ones who are used to express the anger. I say this very strongly because I’ve seen it too much and frankly I think it’s outrageous.

When I see a husband or a wife using the children to express their anger, to get back at the spouse, to secure stuff that they didn’t get during the marriage, irrespective of the child’s physical and emotional needs to love both mommy and daddy, frankly I think that’s humanly outrageous. We should socially condemn that. There’s no excuse for that.

For example, A mother or father who continue to talk to their child about the former spouse in constantly negative terms. What this is, in fact, is that such a parent is trying to take the other parent away from the child. You’re trying to alienate the child to make sure what? …all too frequently to guarantee that the child thinks that you’re wonderful and you’re right.

Now remember the image that I’ve used many times during the show of the queen looking into the mirror. You may think that’s a fairy tale but I hope by now you understand it’s not just a fairy tale. That human beings have a propensity to think that they’re right and that they have to prove that they’re right, and they’ll do almost anything to prove that they’re right. That’s just destructive narcissism; such behavior is one of the most destructive things any parent can do, and yet it’s done unfortunately, in my experience, fairly frequently.

Now, why? Why do couples continue their anger after they have been separated? The divorce is over; hopefully the legal separation is more or less fair, whatever that means. Unfortunately that frequently depends on each state’s rules. As I’ve said before, I believe neither parent has come to terms with their anger and/or their need to be right, as well as the basic reality to accept the everyday unhappiness that will come along with living on one’s own again and the possible social awkwardness that it may follow. Even in our current society individuals are still embarrassed that they’re divorced; the way they’re going to handle that embarrassment is to talk against their spouse.

This is where, frankly, talking to a marriage therapist or any therapist can help alleviate one’s personal unhappiness, and, in the process, lessen damage to the children. Now, it’s not just talking about a former spouse. All too frequently a father, because he has more finances, whenever he gets the children will splurge them with gifts and shower them will all kids of stuff and giving the child the message that his or her the mother is not as generous as he is. A lot of times the children don’t know the whole financial arrangement. But it’s a pathological way of saying you should love me more, I’m the better parent.

If anyone out there is contemplating divorce, I realize it’s a painful very difficult decision, but keep your anger and your disappointment for your spouse. Don’t bring the children in on it. That sounds very simple. It’s not very simple. It’s very difficult, but it’s very necessary.

Some other examples: when either spouse will not let the other spouse have more visitation rights than is allowed. One of the best cases I heard of was a colleague who got divorced and both parents worked the divorce out well. Besides the father being able to see his children every other weekend and every Wednesday, he would come every night for 15 to 20 minutes more or less, and tuck them in bed and just say goodnight to them, and give them a goodnight kiss. He did that while the children grew up. Here is an example that resulted in very healthy children as a result of a very healthy divorce.

Whereas you hear too many cases of a wife, or a husband, whatever the case may be, saying oh no, no, no. You only can visit them when you’re allowed. This is another example of using the children for the parent’s purpose, not for the child’s purpose.

Other examples: …. when either parent loses a capacity to be generous and holds the other responsible. I’ve heard of cases, this almost sounds silly for me to mention it, but it creates an atmosphere where a spouse who may, a father, who may have a great deal of resources will ask the wife for an extra four dollars because he got his young son a haircut, and that’s the mother’s responsibility…so he wants to be repaid his four dollars, or whatever. That’s an example of what I mean by being married negatively.

Divorce is no excuse to fail to meet the human obligation to be generous to life, to be generous to the people around you. And if divorce issues in people who instead of being generous, withdraw within themselves and then becoming stagnant, …that’s really a tragedy … if you can’t pay four dollars for your son’s haircut, you’re really just continuing to fight with your former spouse and not getting on with life.

Obviously these are rather petty examples but they evidence is that a divorce has not been internalized and accepted. That’s what I’ve meant a few talks ago when I spoke of everyday unhappiness. Everyday unhappiness means I come to terms with what is. Not what is supposed to be…not what I would the world to be like. But what is. And if I can accept that, then I will learn how to be happy. But if I can’t accept everyday unhappiness, I will never learn how to be happy. Kind of paradoxical but think about that.

I’ve spoken a number of times about our human need always to be right. I’ve mentioned it before. As if being right guarantees self worth. And as you know I’ve said that the need to be right does not guarantee self worth. That’s really very important to remember because if we feel our self worth is being attacked or lessened we can get very, very defensive. Self worth is guaranteed by self-honesty, creativity, and generosity.

Narcissism does not guarantee self worth. Narcissism is just a nuisance to ourselves and a nuisance to everybody around us. So self-honesty, creativity and, as I’ve said, creativity can be anything that we do. Creativity is an attitude that we bring to something. The same is true for generosity. If we don’t have self-honesty and generosity, think about it, we don’t really have self worth. That’s where we get our sense of who we are. That’s ultimately what we want to pass on to our children. Not that we were right and mommy or daddy was wrong.

Our goal in life is to take care of what’s given to us. Not to constantly to be looking in the mirror and finding ourselves wonderful. Now, if either spouse is wasting their time figuring out how to get even with their former spouse, they are, as I have just spoken about not accepting reality.

In the process, they are no longer, in a sense, parents, if you know what I’m saying. They’re no longer parents. They have forgotten their role as parents and they’re using the children to assert, to express their anger, or to express their disappointment.

There’s no question, and I certainly wouldn’t question it, that divorce can be painful and difficult to experience. It really calls upon people to reach deep within themselves. That’s why for so many of these sessions that we’ve had together I’ve focused on how we should try to develop a marriage consciousness. How we have to learn to accept everyday unhappiness. How we have to try to work through frustration and not let frustration build up.

That’s the only point of marriage therapy. It’s not to go to someone and have him or her tell you what to do, or to be a referee and say who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s not to point the finger. It’s because if we can get a better understanding of ourselves, the original good feelings, the original love we had for our spouse has a chance to be rekindled. You don’t get married once, you get married many, many times, if a marriage is going to last. You have to re-find each other many times and it’s that failure to re-find each other many, many times that leads to accumulative built up frustration. When it gets too high of course, then there seems to be no other option but divorce.

But if we’re able to reach deep within ourselves, if we’re able to step back from our anger, our hurt, our wounded pride. Not easy. We all have pride. We don’t like to have it wounded. We can learn to simple take care of those that we have brought into the world.

A person does not become a parent simply by giving birth. That identity, that identity as a parent, has to be reinforced, has to be re-found many times over, particularly after a divorce. You have to find yourself and create yourself as a parent.

We’ve said there’s big difference between just going thorough life existing and going through life alive. Recall that I love that quote of Dr. Winnicott in England, “Oh, God, when I die, may I be alive.” If we want to be alive, we have to re-find ourselves as adults. We have to find ourselves as spouses, if we are married. And if we are divorced, we have to re-find ourselves as parents. We have to learn to be a good parent after divorce. Not just in memory of what we did when we were married.

If person does not take care of children in a generous way, if a child’s well-being is really being subordinate to either parent’s need for revenge, then such a parent will be in danger of living a life of stagnation. That is, they’ll be caught in the past, not living in the present. Stagnation is the opposite of what it means to be alive, appreciating what life is, the gift that life is.

Lack of generosity closes us up. It never guarantees protection. It forces isolation. The most important thing we give to our children is not just whatever inheritance we give them. Obviously we try to give them a very good education. Obviously we try to make them sports people to the extent that they want to be sports people. All that’s important. But the most important thing you can give your child is a sense of joy in life and an experience that they were treated generously; so that in their adulthood, and not even in their adulthood, they will treat others generously. That’s an invaluable gift. It’s that kind of gift that we want children to have. Not just beautiful clothes or the best education around.

After a divorce what you want to inculcate in your children is that mommy and daddy made a decision, they still love you totally, they are not going speak badly about mommy or daddy. That is one example of what I mean by generosity.

I’m going to take a break for just a minute and I’ll be back, and continue our discussion.

Dr. Jerry: Welcome back. Dr. Jerry 1490 WGCH. We’ve been talking this morning about divorce and if divorce is an option that seems the only option you have, why it’s particularly important to come to terms with the fact that you’re divorcing your spouse not the children, and that the children have a right to experience your respect for their need to have a mother or father, without that mother or father being constantly criticized or overshadowed.

I ended up a few minutes ago speaking about what we really want to give our children. We want to give our children first of all, an experience that once you are generous in life that makes life worthwhile. Another thing that divorce can teach, and divorce is unfortunate, but it doesn’t have to be destructive. Divorce can be another way of showing children how to take mature responsibility for one’s life. If one is consistently unhappy and is not open to resolution, and one has tried various approaches to resolve that unhappiness, then one takes responsibility. You take responsibility for you life situation without blaming someone else.

Again, that sounds easy when I say it. Most people just nod their head, well of course, yes of course. And yet, let me tell you, it’s very hard to do to take responsibility for our actions. To take responsibility for example, to say, “You know, mommy and daddy got divorced because mommy was too young and mommy didn’t really know the kind of person she liked, and I realize now that was really my fault and I made a mistake.” Or visa versa on daddy’s part. That’s much more mature. That’s what I mean by taking responsibility, rather than simply blaming the other spouse for not fulfilling one’s own personal fantasies, half of which no one else could fulfill anyway.

It’s important to teach children that if you make very painful decisions in life, you don’t get lost in anger and that you continue to care for them or for anything that you have brought into the world. That’s the best kind of inheritance frankly, if you give that to your children. That a fall in the stock market is not going to effect. It’s really what we owe our children. We do not owe our children a great deal of money. We owe our children a great deal of love, the experience of competence, the capacity to appreciate and enjoy life. That may sound idealistic but I assure you it’s very basic for mental health. When we don’t have that and we don’t have therapy we very frequently fill ourselves up with drugs, legal or otherwise.

What are we trying to do here? We’re trying to pass on to ourselves and to our children, we are trying to give them the capacity to reach for life. What I’ve said many times, that we have to create our own life. I obviously don’t mean we create ourselves. Our parents give us existence; but we have to create the type of people we are. There’s an enormous difference between that and simply living out what we were told we were supposed to do.

In that vein let me reiterate, for a minute, some of the point that we’ve made in our past discussions. Life is not supposed to be easy, and I’ve said that many times. It’s supposed to be real but it’s not supposed to be easy. Difficulties can be occasions to learn about ourselves. Now sometimes difficulties overwhelm us. I know that. But when we have an attitude of, wow, even thought I created this difficulty for myself I’ve got to figure out what I can learn from it. Otherwise difficulties in our life become occasions, really frankly, to simply, as mention, to us medications, legal or not, to avoid facing our life situation.
I happened to hear on Larry King the other night, the author Deepak Chopra, Dr. Chopra, really excoriating his fellow medical doctors, particularly many of them in Hollywood for simply and un-reflectively giving out drugs to a lot of Hollywood stars, instead of helping them understand that life is difficult and that you don’t drug yourself out of difficulty. You try to work yourself out of difficulty.

Happiness, in distinction to American advertising, happiness is not one’s right. It’s everyone’s possibility but it entails personal growth. I don’t think any of us have an automatic right to be happy. We have a right to pursue happiness. The talking cures I’ve mentioned is one way of finding out as well as creating who we are and who we want to become. So in The Psychotherapist’s Corner, I’ve talked a lot about the talking cure only because it helps us, it can help us rather, find out who we are and who we want to become.

I would like to urge you to keep that in mind. The Psychotherapist’s Corner will be off the air in the summertime. I will be returning in the fall. So I would like to end that with a few perhaps reminders, sum up thoughts for you to keep in mind. Human beings are not destined. We can’t always go for the quick fix. We have to learn that an essential part of adulthood, I believe, is the capacity to take quiet ownership of our lives.

Quiet ownership of our lives means I come to terms with everyday unhappiness, I try top achieve what we’ve talked about as everyday wisdom, and I try to recognize that I don’t just bounce through life… life deserves some thought and some reflection. Even if it means two or three times a week when I talk a walk …I try to think about who I want to be and what I’ve done. That’s what’s helps make us. That’s a very little example of what I mean by taking ownership of our life…that is not just letting things happen to us. We all have financial needs. Most human beings have financial needs and of course we have to pursue those needs, but the function of being an adult is not simply to pursuing financial needs. It’s to try to be real, generous, and responsible, particularly in the area in divorce…. particularly in the area of children. Try not to forget that.

The short-term moment of expressing anger, and, for instance, not letting a father or a mother visit their children except when it’s legally permitted, such behavior can come back to bite, so to speak. Children grow up. Children remember how they were treated. Children remember the attitudes that they were given towards the father or the mother. They will remember anger and they will remember generosity.

If you find that you can’t, if the anger is so deep and the hurt is so deep, that’s when you go and talk to a therapist. That’s when you talk it out rather than act it out. Those are the options we have as human beings. We can try to drug it out. That doesn’t work. It works temporarily, but really doesn’t work anything. We can act it out or we can talk it out.

Within those three options I think you will see that talking it out actually is really the best option. There are lots of therapies around and there are lots of place that have sliding scales, so that finances should not be a major concern in trying to talk it out.

Now before I end the session this morning I want to say goodbye. I’ve enjoyed these sessions. We’ve had 14 of them. As I said they will resume in the fall. But I want to urge my listeners, and I understand there’s a kind of natural shyness particularly in talking to a shrink. Sometimes I go to parties and people say, “Oh, my God, I won’t be able to talk because you’re going to analyze everything.” And I say, “No I’m not. I’m just here to eat the food and drink the wine. That’s all.” But if you have any thoughts or suggestions in terms of what you would like me to talk about in the future, or if you have any reactions or responses to what I have talked about, or frankly if you have just any questions that you’d like me to perhaps address, I’ll give you my website there. It’s JerryGargiulo@Gmail.com. I want to thank you for listening. I hope you all have an absolutely wonderful summer. I wish you well and I wish you life.

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If you prefer to read rather than listen, here is a transcript of the podcast.
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Note: portions of the text may be slightly edited for clarity in written form.
Recording: . . . radio.

Dr. Jerry: Good morning. This is Dr. Jerry, The Psychotherapist’s Corner, 1490 WGCH. This morning, I’d like to continue some of the things that we were talking about last week, namely in terms of, “What do we mean by a marriage consciousness, and what does that got to do with our lives, and the life in the community? What do we mean by a demo-cratic consciousness?” So, we talked about that a little last week and I want to continue that now. Okay.

And, again, what I’m trying to say, and I say this to myself and to all my listeners, the point of psychology is not to have answers. The point of psychology is to open up continually throughout our life, so that we can continue to learn. A society that can’t learn is really dead, is stagnant. And when we get into a situation where we’re no longer learning, where we see our shortcomings and our lack of knowledge as defects rather than as opportunities to continue learning, when that happens, we’re in danger of getting stagnant.

So the best understanding I have of psychology is, that which helps us to keep open, that which helps us not collapse in to the mirror, as the Queen did, that which helps us feel real and effective. All right, we were speaking last week about what we call “marriage consciousness”. That’s, what did we say, it is the capacity not just to think of one’s self, alone, that is as relating to one’s spouse as another alone person, so to speak, but really to change one’s inner perception of one’s self.

In past talks, I spoke about how it’s necessary to put oneself in another person’s shoes. Not all the time, but certainly with our spouse, or with our good friends, with people we work with, particularly if we’re having areas of tension with them.. If we can, if we’re able to step back for a minute and try to momentarily put our self in their shoes, a lot of times that will just open us up a little and a lot of the passions that be aroused in us may recede.

We have to be able to identify with people if we’re really ever going to have any comfortable relationship with them. Comfortable relationship. It doesn’t have to be a profound relationship, but it has to be a comfortable relationship.

As I mentioned, marriage and close relationships are not easy to navigate. Each of us brings our own personal history, our culture, our family background and all of the little personal idiosyncrasies that we have. We actually bring all of that to any relationship. There’s nothing wrong with that. That makes us individuals….that’s like the adjectives, the color, it’s like the beautiful color of the leaves in the fall. Each tree is a little different. So our personal idiosyncrasies can compliment each other. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, we just have to be aware of them.

Besides our idiosyncrasies, of course, we have areas inside our self, and I have tried to focus on this in our talks, that we forget, that we repress. Remember in our first talks we had, I spoke about Barbara Streisand’s song “What’s too painful to remember, we simply forget, we simply choose to forget,” well that’s what we mean by repression. That’s what we mean by the unconscious. There’s not a great mystery to that.

What we do not like about ourselves, what causes us anxiety, we will simply push out of our awareness. And, unless we’re aware of that, and try to address that, and try to understand what’s going on, we’re going to have difficulties relating to people.

But recall last week I spoke about any two people having differences. There’s no such thing as a perfect relationship. I’m always rather suspicious of any kind of perfect relationship. Human beings have differences. That is not cause for despair, or resignation. It really is a cause for growth. They can be worked out. They can be talked about. Isn’t that really what we mean by community? Community isn’t just living alongside of each other, of course it’s that. But community, the human community, is talking and working out and understanding each other. That’s really the definition of it.

And that’s what I really mean by “democratic consciousness.” That is, that we’re not just a bunch of 350 million citizens living along side each other. If that’s all we are, we’ve lost something. When we handle marriage counseling, when my wife and I do marriage counseling, we are trying to address some of the difficulties that human beings have that they, particularly, that they are not aware of. All too frequently they no longer can experience a marriage consciousness, the spouse is experienced as over against, so to speak, not another side of myself, as it were.

It’s easy to just deny that people have difficulties. I’ve had a few, frankly, colleague friends who maintain, amazingly to me, that their marriage was absolutely perfect, that their relationship was perfect, that they never had any difficulties. Well, I wish such a couple good luck. I very rarely found that in my 30 years of marriage counseling.

The other alternative to, “My marriage is absolutely perfect,” is “We have too many fights, we’re going to get a divorce.” I personally think neither of those extremes really works. I think a better way to go is to, each of us, periodically, to understand what we’ve talked about before, namely that there is such a thing as “everyday unhappiness” that life just brings along, and that the different personalities, different tastes, different histories, have to be made conscious. And each of us has to try to recognize their personal input. And that will help lessen the every day unhappiness which living with a person sometimes brings along.

Along with that, though, what I also want to focus on the reality that we only feel real and effective when we’re doing something, not just when we’re defending ourselves against something where we can experience creativity and generosity in our lives. And creativity, as I’ve said before, doesn’t mean you’re a great artist. Creativity can be how you make the meal. Creativity can be in how you do the garden. Creativity can be in how you do the work. And generosity, goes along with this…to be creative is really also to be generous. Both of these categories, creativity and generosity, are intrinsic, I believe, to our experience of self worth.

And our personal experience of our self worth is the foundation for a good relationship. And, as we know, I’m sure, I mean, self worth is not how much money we have. I’m talking about an inner experience of our self that enables us to have a relationship. A lot of the tension that couples experience is because one or the other feels their self worth threatened. Or they come into a marriage very damaged, because of their own personal histories, their experience of self worth. That’s, that is really one of the core issues in resolving marriage difficulties. And when they know who they are, with calm assurance, they can very frequently negotiate a lot of the other difficulties.

In a capitalist society money does indicate a de facto social standing. But it really has nothing to do with self worth. And it’s important that we remember that. Self worth depends on one’s capacity, I believe, to experience personal and intellectual honesty….in one’s capacity to put one’s own needs aside, on occasion, in order to help another human being.

Self worth, if you think about it, shows itself through a lot of acts of kindness and good manners, and with an attitude of generosity towards the world. And I’m purposely mentioning every day virtues, if you want to use the word virtue. You know virtue is from the Latin “virtus”, meaning strengths, so a virtue is a strength that we have. And it’s the everyday strengths of kindness and good manners and generosity that will strengthen us, so that we know who we are.

Any good relationship, friends or marriage, really should help enforce the self worth. Just as, and I keep making this comparison, just as a democratic society should enforce the self worth of in its citizens through its dedication to fair opportunities for the growth of all of it’s citizens. It’s the same kind of thing. People will get along much better when they experience their self worth and experience that others recognize that.

Now, let’s go back to marriage for a minute. Too frequently, when a couple begin counseling, they are all too ready to indulge in accusing each other. They come in with a list, sometimes very consciously but very frequently unconsciously, a long list of each others faults and misdeeds. And the first few sessions, a lot of times they just have to get all this stuff out. Now, sometimes such an initial attitude is understandable. Because they often feel because their self worth has been in eclipse. And when our self worth is in eclipse, when we don’t feel the other person respects us, or recognizes our needs, we get hurt, we get angry; we get reactive to that other person. So that’s what I mean by it’s understandable.

And again, sometimes the concept of virtue is used to hit people over the head. “Oh, that’s not a virtuous thing to do.” A virtue is strength that we develop inside of our self. Self-condemnation is very rarely helpful. Why? Because self-condemnation doesn’t help us understand our self. It really alienates our self. So, even though, initially, it’s not very helpful for a couple to have a long list of accusations, a person has to be allowed the chance of saying it. They have to be allowed a chance to hear what they’re saying, before they can get beyond that.

Now, obviously, and we have spoken about this a lot in these little talks that I’ve had with my audience, in order to benefit from any kind of counseling, in order to benefit from any kind of friendship, each person in the friendship, or the marriage, has to give up the fantasy that they are right. And that sounds very easy. “Oh, I should recognize that I’m not right all the time.” It sounds simple. It is not easy to give up the fantasy that one’s right. It is possible, and it is important to do it, but it’s not easy.

The opposite of generosity, I think, the opposite of good manners, compassion, creativity, the opposite of that is, “I’m right.” Now, “I’m right’ doesn’t give me self worth. It just makes me very defensive. It’s very close to the Queen, “I’m the most beautiful.” It’s the same kind of thing. So, it’s pulling back from that absolutely universal, and we all suffer from it, I suffer from it, everybody suffers from it, but one has to quietly and slowly recognize when the passions subside a little bit, you know, it’s possible, “I’m not right.” It’s possible that maybe I have to listen to another person. And it’s possible that maybe I really am influenced by things that I have forgotten, but which are influencing me anyway.

And again, that’s all that we mean, and I don’t mean to over simplify this, that’s all that we mean by depth psychology. It’s made, at times, to sound very obtuse and very mysterious. It’s not. And when I’ve spoken about the Psychotherapist’s Corner inside each of our lives, inside each of our minds, is to recommend that a few times a week, if possible, we sit quietly and think about our self and our reactions to things.

All I’m saying is that we sit quietly and realize that, “Wow, you know, I suddenly remembered something from my child hood,” or “You know, my gosh, I’m yelling at the people I work with the same way my dad used to come home, telling me he was yelling at the people he worked with. Wow. Not, “Oh, I’m right and he was wrong, but I’m right because they do such-and-such”….none of that stuff. It’s just a quiet capacity to think about our self.

Now, let’s go back to marriage for a minute. Giving up the need to always be right is a little more possible if a person can remember that a marriage implies a new consciousness. That’s what I’ve been talking about. When an individual no longer defines his or her self, by themselves, so to speak. What do I mean by that? When a husband or wife can stop saying “my husband is always doing such-and-such,” and then the husband will retort, ” but you always do such-and-such…always, all the time. You drive me crazy when you do that.”

If eventually you can change that to both spouses are able to say, “You know we keep running into the same difficulties over and over again when we’re living together in this area, we keep running into the same difficulties, when we, in our living together, we get into this area,” that changes, that indicates a really interesting switch inside. Of course the issue is just as real. Of course the issue still has to be addressed. Of course personal exploration has to be studied. But it’s a different way of experiencing your self.

It’s not,… “I’m caught in this legal thing called marriage and I have to make it work for me.” That’s what I’m getting at. We have to try to make it work for us. It sounds easy. It’s not easy. It’s just possible. And so that, that simple sentence that we are together in a relationship that takes time and a lot of self work is obvious. Now, we can also ask, “Why should we do this? Why should a person develop a marriage consciousness? What is Dr. Jerry talking about, a democratic consciousness? Why should we define ourselves with another, rather than just by ourselves?”

And we could say that in marriage we are frequently prodded to do this for the children. That is, in order to provide a safe, and caring environment for children. Ideally, when we have children, we should stop looking in the mirror. The Queen couldn’t stop looking in the mirror, so she couldn’t take care of Snow White. She had a kill her. And when we are overly, when we are overly narcissistic, in a sense, we, unconsciously, we are killing off our children.

Had the queen turned her attention to taking care of Snow White, with all the difficulties that that involves, she might have had a whole different experience of herself. What is the reward of having a social consciousness and a marriage consciousness. But let me stop for a minute now………

Dr. Jerry: Welcome back, The Psychotherapist’s Corner. We’re talking as I mentioned “Why bother? Why bother with a marriage consciousness? Why bother with a community, democratic consciousness?” And I raise that question now because it’s very clear in our society, in particular, and many psychologists and philosophers and social commentators have made note of this, for better of worse, and not that we’re bad people, but we are living in a very narcissistic society. In a society where our individual wants and desires are elevated to a point of, very frequently, ignoring the common good.

But that’s really deceptive. The advertising, the movies, everything is focused on, what something or someone can do for one’s self…. Over and over…that is… I have a right to such-and-such and such-and-such. You see ads, “You have a right to such-and-such.” And I always say, “Isn’t that remarkable. You don’t even know who you’re talking to. How do we know they have a right to such-and-such?”

Narcissism, and what’s behind narcissism, very frequently, is the need to feel powerful, the need to feel, quote, “That I’m right. And, I’m powerful. And therefore I have achieved, I am no longer vulnerable.” Now, if we have repressed a lot of our anxieties from our childhood, if we have repressed a lot of the painful experiences that we’ve had growing up, I understand why a person has a strong commitment to being powerful and right, and controlling everybody. Unfortunately, that’s not going to help us.

How is it not going to help us? Just as society, as we know, has to put some kind of boundaries on sexuality and aggression, a society should also help us, force an awareness, that we have to put some kind of boundaries on greed. We have to put some kind of boundaries on excessive individualism. Why? Because to the extent that we don’t connect with a fellow human being, to the extent that we’re not able to cross-identify, to that extent, if you think about it, we are little less real.

Remember, I’ve spoken a great deal, quoting Donald Winnicott, the English pediatrician psychoanalyst, and his prayer, when he said, “Oh, God, may I be alive, when I die.” He wasn’t foolish, he was very intelligent, a very deep thinker. He wasn’t just playing with words. What he was saying is, many of us go through life existing. We don’t go through life alive. What I’m saying to you this morning is that one of the elements that makes alive possible, which makes feeling real possible, is our experience of connection.

Let me clarify that…that is our recognition and our fostering connection. We know, for instance, as I’ve mentioned a few times, we know from quantum physics, that there’s no question that every atom in the universe is related to every other atom. That has been established. That is no longer a question. The technical term for that is entanglement. Entanglement. We human beings seem to have a capacity to try and step outside of that obvious fact about existence, and pretend that it’s not true.

And yet, when we do recognize it, when we can develop a marriage consciousness with our partner, with all the difficulties which I haven not whitewashed, that that may entail, when we can recognize that, “I have to live along with other people in a society, even if I disagree very strong with their opinions, that, when I can do that, and try to understand where they’re coming from, I will feel more real. I will feel more connected with my fellow human beings.” And that feeling, and out of that feeling, one has to develop generosity to sustain that, I will be able to feel that my life is real, not that it’s just happening to me.

So, that’s really what I’m, I’m been trying to get at in a lot of these talks that we’ve had. That to make it clear that psychology is not just something that we do inside our heads. It’s really something that we do between people. That’s how I understand psychology. And when I talk about social consciousness and our experience of connectedness, I’m not, quote, “Making nice.” And I’m not being idealistic. Because, if we don’t have this capacity, a society rots away from the inside. And this lack of connection is as serious as any psychological illness, frankly, that I can think of.

So, just hold that, think about that in your own lives, and here I’m not talking about even marriage counseling, I’m talking about when you’re at work, for example, if you have a fellow worker or a boss who’s just a pain, so to speak. Of course you’re going to be irritated at their behavior, or at their response to you. But when you’re able to step away for a while, try to figure out, is there a way that maybe I can understand where they’re coming from? It’s not always possible. But if you could try to do that, you would not experience yourself simply on the receiving end of a person you can’t get along with, you might actually understand that you might have some things in common.

I’m saying all this because it seems to me we have to live productively in society or we don’t live at all. If we don’t feel that we’re alive, really, then what’s the point of it all? And, as I’ve mentioned, being alive, that experience, “I’m alive,” is essential to experience of self worth, of living with a sense of generosity. How can we be generous towards other people? How can we be generous towards ourselves? How can we be generous towards the world? We have to practice all these things, it gives us self worth and one of the rewards of self worth is we fell alive. We don’t feel as if life is merely happening to us.

One last thing, I only have just a few minutes more, I just want to leave you with and maybe we’ll end up with it next week… and it’s really just the same thing I’ve been saying… I’m just hitting it from another angle, in order not to get caught in that need, “I’m always right” kind of syndrome, which is the same as the Queen’s, “I’m always beautiful.” It’s the same thing, “I’m always right, I’m always beautiful,” it doesn’t make any difference.

In order to do that, we really need to develop a capacity to negotiate. A capacity to negotiate with our self, within our self, that’s really what therapy gives us, capacity to negotiate with our self, with our history, capacity to negotiate with the world around us, capacity to negotiate with friends, our boss, our spouse.

I want to go back to Donald Winnicott, because he said something that’s really obvious, almost funny and yet profound at the same time. Winnicott said, “The capacity to negotiate is not a quality of the insane.” The capacity to negotiate is not a quality of the insane. Meaning, that if a person can’t negotiate, we have some very serious concerns about their mental stability. Mental stability doesn’t mean rigidity, mental stability means flexibility. That’s what mental stability means. It means that I’m flexible. It means that I don’t hold onto everything in my life with a level of rigidity that doesn’t allow any negotiation.

So there’s a kind of psychological fundamentalism, there’s political fundamentalism, there’s religious fundamentalism. Any fundamentalism that hinders negotiation is really not our friend. Because it doesn’t help us live in the world. It doesn’t help us cross-identify. It doesn’t help us step outside and look at our self. Had the Queen been able to negotiate, she could have said, “You know, I’ve been beautiful for many years, and wasn’t life wonderful to give me such good looks. And now the mantle has passed over to Snow White, and I can enjoy her beauty.”

In that little twist, in that little giving up of personal power, she would have found out what it means to be alive, what it means to be a mother, what it means to be real. It sounds very easy, as I’ve said before, it’s not easy, but it’s very, very important. So, let me leave you with that thought. That, on the inside, we have to think about ourselves and try to understand the factors that make us do what we do, and the factors that keep us from being generous and kind, if there are factors that are doing that.

On the outside, we have to develop a capacity to negotiate, particularly with those whose pinions or thoughts we may not like. On the other hand, that’s the way to developing a community consciousness…a democratic, better. I don’t want to say community consciousness…a democratic consciousness. The kind of respect I give to other human beings who are in the same boat with me…in the same situation with me. Thank you very much folks, we’ll talk again next week. This is Dr. Jerry, The Psychotherapist’s Corner.

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Dr. Jerry: Good morning. This is Dr. Jerry. 1490 WGCH, The Psychotherapist’s Corner.

This morning I want to continue some of the things we started to discussed the last two sessions, namely identity, what does identity mean, what does it mean to have a democratic identity in a democracy such as us and also in marriage.

Again, let me just reiterate why I’m calling this The Psychotherapist’s Corner. Really, what I’m inviting all of us to do, myself included, is to make sure we have a certain amount of time each day or a few times a week where we can just sit and kind of think about ourselves. Think about what we want out of life. Think about what life has given us, so that we reflect. So that we don’t just spend our lives going from one thing to the other, without reflecting really on what we’re doing.

Let me start this morning by talking about power and its abuse since this what frequently undermines a society as well as a marriage. And I tie both of these together, our experience of ourselves in society and our experience of ourselves in marriage, because I think all too frequently psychology, my own field included, psychology overemphasizes the individual.

We are not just individuals. We are individuals in a society and how we live in that society affects who we are and who we are affects that society. So we’re not a bunch of ice cubes floating down a river of democracy unconnected to each other.

Now, I think it’s very important to remember that. Otherwise, we tend to view ourselves as simply isolates and then pursue our own needs, not infrequently at the expense of the common good. If we’re going to live with our fellow citizens in a better and happier way, as well as if we’re going to live with our spouses, we have to understand the type of consciousness that’s required.

That’s really what I’ve been trying to talk to you about in a number of these broadcasts. It’s not just our defenses and our childhood. Of course, I’ve spoken about that but I’m really talking about how do we change our sense of who we are. How do we change our consciousness? And when we change, for lack of a better word, how do we broaden our consciousness, that might be a better way of saying it, how do we broaden our consciousness because when we broaden our consciousness, we live in a new world. We live in a different world.

Democracy as we know is not just the ability to vote. Of course, it is that. That is one of the ways the power is equally distributed or, at least, ideally. It’s been a long road for many of our fellow citizens to get that power. But along with that, it demands a different way of experiencing ourselves. It demands a level of openness, of cross identification. Remember we’ve spoken about cross identification. And what does that mean? It means a willingness not only to put oneself in someone else’s shoes on occasion. Try to understand the world from their perspective. It means we’re willing to recognize that we can’t have our way all the time. It requires what I’ve called a democratic consciousness.

Obviously, that notion that we can’t get our way all the time, that we have to cross identify is absolutely crucial for marriage. I have to tell you when I, and I’m going to get to this in a little while, when I hear people talk and lawyers and sometimes the popular papers that discuss movie stars and their frequent divorces and they talk about irreconcilable differences. People had irreconcilable differences. I absolutely chuckle to myself. Two human beings always have irreconcilable differences, unless you marry a mirror and if you marry a mirror, you’re going to have a very dull life. And unfortunately I have to say, my own field and I have to judge the lawyers field, the legal field as well, have, at times, made a bonanza out of exploiting irreconcilable differences.

Democratic consciousness, marriage consciousness means that I recognize I have deep-seated differences but I have enough areas of commonality to try to work towards a more community awareness.

Now, what does that mean in practice? One of the things it means in practices is that I have to give up the pretense and the human need, and we all have it, I have it and everybody listening to me has it as well, that need to be right. Of thinking that we understand what’s going on in the world and that if something is wrong it is really our partner’s, or our children, or our boss, or our parents fault.

And very frequently an understandable need to be right precludes our having what I’ve spoken about before, a sense of that quiet space where we can look at ourselves, where we can say, “My Goodness, maybe I’m having trouble in such and such a situation because, isn’t that funny…its the same kind of issue I have had with my dad or my mom or my brother or my sister.” We automatically bring a lot of the ways that we’ve learned how to relate to our present day situations and we do this automatically, that is we are not aware of it. This doesn’t mean we’re bad. Doesn’t mean we’re malicious. It means we’re relating to people in ways that we’re not fully aware of. So a democratic consciousness in marriage means I have to open myself up and think about different options.

It’s very difficult for any of us to think that we might be imitating our parents, particularly if we may have suffered at the hands of our parents or whoever raised us. That we are maybe perpetuating how our family origin related and yet what I’ve stressed in all of these programs, not in the sense of again bad me, but in the sense of let’s broaden our awareness. Let’s broaden our awareness.

The same thing, haven’t we done that in the U.S.? If you look back, at the most dramatic example we have in terms of the areas of civil rights or the area of women’s rights…. we have progressively learned to broaden our consciousness and to recognize that if not every citizen’s free, none of us are free. If certain citizens can’t vote, in a sense our vote is meaningless. That’s an awareness that’s taken us a long time to understand and it takes human beings time to grow and to understand things. That’s okay. It takes every human being time. That’s what we call education.

The same thing is in terms of what goes by the name of women’s rights. Women’s rights is not just letting women having more access to more things. I mean, that’s obvious. Women’s rights is changing, particularly in men’s minds, changing our experience, and recognizing we have misunderstood the role of females; that is that woman are equal and can contribute absolutely the same and sometimes better than men can. That’s a change in consciousness. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s not just a change in what you do or what you don’t do. If it’s merely what you do or what you don’t do, you really haven’t changed your consciousness. You’ve just been forced to give somebody more power and then you’re going to unconsciously resent it.

Well, the same thing is true in marriage. It’s not a matter of, “Well, I went to psychotherapy and I found out I have to share my bank account with my wife who I’ve been married to for 25 years.” Humorless but I’ve heard that said. Or, “I have to go along and visit her relatives although I don’t like them,” et cetera, et cetera.

That’s two people living alongside each other. And that’s sad because then the two people have not learned that when you’re married, part of you has given up that exclusive sense of personal identity. At times you no longer have, I don’t know any way of saying this, you no longer have just a personal identity. You have a marriage identity. And so that the kind of refrain that I sometimes hear, “Oh, we have to go visit his family again,” that little sense is really saying a great deal and it’s that kind of issue that, if it’s not addressed and talked about and kind of worked out and resolved, builds up a slow resentment, which ultimately starts undermining any kind of relationship.

So when I’ve spoken in the past about what marriage counseling should offer, it’s not just in terms of behavioral changes, what we should do or we shouldn’t do. It’s a different way of experiencing ourselves. That’s what I just meant before when I said people get divorced. People get divorced, I’m sorry to say and I really do believe this, much too easily because they haven’t been made aware, I think all too much, that marriage is not just living together, it’s not just being physically intimate, it’s not just raising children. It’s a willingness to grow and change my sense of who I am, my self-identity.

Even in, at times, very extreme situations, my wife and I have worked with a number of couples where, all too frequently it’s the men, may have had an affair. And I will tell you, I would think the majority of the couples we have worked with, it has not ended up in divorce. The wife wanted an apology, and she got it and she wanted to work to an understanding of what happened that an affair could happen.

That to me is a much more sensible solution at times than when I hear people sometimes on TV or reading a magazine, “Oh, well, my husband or my wife, more frequently the men, I’m sorry to say, had an affair and so I divorced him.” Well, if it’s as simple as that, then that’s really unfortunate, not only because divorce but it’s almost as if the partner was a product and the minute the product proved defective, you threw the product out because who wants defective products? And I just don’t think that’s life. I don’t think that’s realistic. It doesn’t allow us to grow. It doesn’t allow us to say, “Wow. I wonder if I might have done something that propelled him, not directly of course, but hopefully but maybe my way of relating has been so unsatisfying and so unresponsive that, without excusing his behavior, it might explain his behavior.” Well, that’s the kind of thought that is more helpful. Not self-recrimination. A broadening of consciousness….a broadening of consciousness.

Now, why am I relating this to democracy? You remember last week I spoke about that, frankly, that gentleman who felt he had to kill the abortion doctor because he disagreed about what he was doing? Isn’t that the same thing? Well, that’s real pathology and killing another human being is real pathology, but have we educated people to say as painful as it is, we do, in a democracy, have to tolerate radical difference. And the only way of handling radical difference is through legal means. That’s how we change a situation we don’t like.

All right. Let me come back to marriage a little bit. Love, as we know, is a feeling and a desire to do good to and for another person. That’s what I think love is. It’s a certain amount of captivation with the person but it really is a desire to do good to and for another person. As I said, it’s a feeling of being captivated by them. A commitment to marriage, however, also requires a conscious act. It is a commitment, not just to get married, as I mentioned but also to be married.

Now, what does that mean, to be married? That is to try to experience that type of personal awareness that always includes the other. And again, what I have said and my wife has said many times, it may sound funny or interesting or odd but you don’t get married once. If you get married once, you are in trouble. You get married a lot of times over. My wife and I happen to be married 45 years and we’ve been married many, many times. You don’t get married once, because then it becomes an act that you did in the past. Or I had children. Well, any good parent knows, once you had children you always have children. And once you are married, you are married, which means that you have to find deeper ways of working some situations. Be they the extreme situation that I mentioned of infidelity but sometimes sickness. Sometimes boredom. That has to be worked through. It’s not just to be fled.

Love as we know it, obvious, love is like the waves of the ocean. High tide sometimes, low tide sometimes…sometimes mild, sometimes stormy. All of which means a commitment of marriage, to marriage, is the willingness to define myself as together. That is, I’m open to difference… I’m willing to relinquish a certain amount of my personal power for the experience of cooperation. That sounds very obvious. And let me tell you that’s a goal. That’s not easily achieved. Very easily said but it’s not easily achieved.

We human beings hold on to our power and I’m not against power, obviously, but marriage and even in a democracy, for me to allow other people or different political parties, different religious groups, whatever different education perspectives for me to respect them means I give up some of my personal power.

This is a personal decision. Obviously, the willingness to negotiate, not all of our personal power but I’m willing to say that all of my personal preferences are not always going to be fulfilled. That type of willingness is really at the base, if you think about it, of democracy. I believe that’s what it means when we say that the majority wins. Majority wins doesn’t mean if I lose, I go off sulking into a corner. It means, okay that’s part of, remember we spoke about that is, everyday unhappiness…the ordinary unhappiness of life? Well, if I lose in a political election, I have everyday unhappiness but I don’t have rage and I don’t sulk in the corner. Because if I had rage and I sulk in the corner, and I spend the rest of the next two years or four years taking pop shots at the person who won, then I don’t understand democracy. All I understand is holding onto power.

And it’s the same think in marriage. If either party does something unfortunate, doesn’t have to be as extreme as an affair. One party, I’ve had cases where the husband, maybe not maliciously but went out and spent X amount of money without telling his wife. Not on himself but on certain things but didn’t want to tell his wife. Didn’t want to have a big discussion. Well, those things you don’t use those things as a celebration to hit your partner over the head with how right you are and how wrong he is or she is. That’s against, again, that’s retreating back to personal power at the cost of cross identifying and trying to understand and trying to negotiate.

Again, simple term, broaden our consciousness. Broaden our consciousness. It’s easily said, hard to do. We have to give up the fantasy that we are right. That we now have things as supposed to be. In marriage we have to negotiate difference without condemnation. To judge, to constantly criticize one’s mate is to constantly turn that marriage into a playground for the exercise of power. And I can’t tell you how many married couples come to us originally and they just inadvertently, they’re not bad people, but they inadvertently have a long list of what their mate’s problems are. And it’s just very sad that when we impose patterns that we very frequently saw growing up on our mate, we’re no longer living in the present. We’re no longer here. We are really trying to live out maybe a lost sense of power, a lost sense of being right with our mate. That’s not particularly helping us.

Let me stop for a minute and I’ll be just back and we’ll continue this discussion.

Dr. Jerry: Hi. Dr. Jerry back again. The Psychotherapist’s Corner.

We’ve been talking so far this morning on how do we broaden our consciousness so that we can live in a marriage productively, so that we can grow.

Remember last week we spoke, and two weeks ago we spoke about everyday wisdom, we spoke about, of course we have everyday unhappiness. But we also need everyday wisdom to live with just the normal things that life throws our way.

Now, I’ve been talking this morning about tolerating difference. I’ve been talking about the need to be able to cross-identify, not all the time obviously, not all the time. But enough of the time, particularly with our mate, to put ourselves in their shoes…that doesn’t mean we have to always agree with them. It doesn’t mean they’re right and we’re wrong. It means I try to see where they’re coming from. That’s all cross-identification means. I try to see where they’re coming from and a lot of difficulties in marriage actually can be worked out that way. I don’t believe we should celebrate difference and as I said in the beginning of the show, I think my own field, psychology, sometimes is overemphasize the individual at the cost of understanding how we live in community. I think sometimes the legal profession, particularly marriage lawyers that specialize in marriage, have over-emphasized differences at the cost of finding commonality.

These are just human situations but there’s a reason why all of the sudden in the U.S. we’ve been hovering between 50% and 60% divorce of those people who get married.

Now, a more dramatic way of saying this, remember last week I spoke about we have to allow people who have different opinions and certainly that rather deranged individual who killed a doctor who did abortions in the name of life, you suddenly decide to kill somebody is a bit odd, to put those two sentences together. But let me just stay with that dramatic sense that we have in the commandments, “Thou shall not kill.” Thou shall not kill has been interpreted and been ignored at the same time. You shouldn’t kill another human being. We obviously still haven’t learned to obey that rather simple 3,000-year-old commandment.

But Thou shall not kill also means Thou shall not kill people in my mind who I disagree with. It means we shouldn’t kill off different opinions automatically, about different opinions people have about others, about themselves, about the society they live in. It means that I’m willing to entertain the fact that I can’t obviously always be right and a lot of times when people unilaterally dismiss their opponents, they’re really killing them off, with that innocence of satisfaction. That’s the essence of any ideology, I don’t care what the ideology is, extreme, radical, left ideology, extreme radical right ideology. Doesn’t make any difference. Ideology kills off opponents and therefore it doesn’t allow for negotiation.

Self worth has nothing to do with always been right, has nothing to do with refusing to negotiate our positions, self worth has nothing to do with defending one’s personal ideology. I frankly think that’s nonsense, actually nonsense. I think it’s a defense. I think any ideology and no matter what side it’s on, is narcissistic. It’s the queen looking in the mirror and wanting the mirror, in this case the world, to say, “You’re totally right. There’s no one else in the world who is as right as you are.” That’s what the queen asked. That’s just the content of I’m beautiful.

But people who are extreme ideologues are just, I think, at heart basically have not resolved this really pernicious illness we human beings have, that all of us have. We just have it in different degrees, of narcissism. Self worth is not guaranteed by being right. It simply isn’t. Not in a democracy and not in marriage, particularly in marriage.

Self worth is guaranteed by what we spoke about last week in speaking about Erikson. It’s guaranteed by generosity, by a capacity for generosity and a capacity to exercise everyday wisdom. That’s where we get our self worth. We get our monetary worth on how much we have. That’s not self worth. And unfortunately in a capitalist society, sometimes we really confuse those things as if self worth means how much money do we have. No. How much generosity we can experience towards our self and towards those around us, how much everyday wisdom we have. Those are the norms that discuss self worth.

Now, we have to recognize I fully understand that until we kind of broaden our consciousness we can be anxious at the thought we don’t know something. “Oh, my wife is right.” “Oh, my husband is right,” “Oh, so and so is right, I’m wrong.” That can create anxiety unless we get to a point where we say “It’s perfectly okay if I’m wrong. I can learn. I don’t like being wrong.” Nobody likes being wrong, no one likes being mistaken but if you can’t learn, you can’t change. You close all the doors. And then self worth is locked into a fantasy, not into how I live in the society in which I’m living.

So this kind of thought, again, these are basic ideas but let me tell you, in our marriage counseling we have found once you work out these basic, let’s call it, ways of being, a lot of the other problems of life are just the problems of life. Remember we spoke about everyday unhappiness? You don’t overcome everyday unhappiness and you’re not supposed to. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to handle everyday unhappiness, not pretend that everyday unhappiness doesn’t exist.

Marriage really demands the same type of awareness and commitment that we have to live cooperatively in this society. Consequently, no one person, a husband, a wife, child, should control a family. If anyone does, and I put a child in there on purpose, then it’s not a marriage consciousness and one has to grow.

This may sound ideal and to certain extent maybe I guess it’s ideal but I know it’s possible. Not necessarily all the time but a good portion of the time. Next week we’ll continue this discussion. If there are serious difficulties in a marriage, financial difficulties, sexual difficulties, alcoholic difficulties, any of these at least can be discussed. I’m not maintaining that they can all be resolved and we live happily ever after. I don’t believe anybody ever lives happily ever after unless they’re very ill. That’s not what life is made out of. But I certainly think that human beings can discuss things in a way that at least cuts down acrimony, cuts down difficulties, cuts down the pain that we inadvertently all too frequently inflict on each other. And if we can do that, if we can lessen the pain, then the everyday unhappiness that we live with becomes a little bit more bearable. And the everyday wisdom we should have becomes a little more available.

Thank you for listening. This is Dr. Jerry. The Psychotherapist’s Corner, 1490 WGCH.

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Dr. Jerry: Good morning. This is Dr. Jerry, Psychotherapist’s Corner, 1490 WGCH.

This morning, I’d like to continue what we spoke about last week, talking about Erik Erikson’s book, and I’m going to focus on the whole issue of personal identity, our personal identity. Just the recoup a little bit, Erikson talks about the eight stages of man, and without getting overly complicated here, I just thought I would highlight some of the positive things he has said i.e., we should be able to experience, and even provide for those who are in our care.

He starts off his discussion of the life cycle with the experience of basic trust; we spoke about that last week. He goes on to autonomy. He speaks about the capacity have initiative, enabling a child to feel that their curiosity is good, their explorations are good, and that develops a capacity for initiative that stays with an individual their whole life.

Stage four that he speaks about is industry, the capacity to work and to enjoy one’s work. In our society, industry, for many, many years, is really almost limited to school and our capacity to master intellectual subjects, because we are a highly literate society.

He then goes on and speaks about identity in terms of intimacy, generosity, and ego integrity. Those are the last stages he talks about. Identity versus confusion about who we are…intimacy versus a sense of being alone, not able to connect with another person… and finally generosity, which he says is really very important, versus just holding everything to ourselves and really becoming stagnant.

So, this morning, I’m going to really combine some of these just to summarize it for us. I don’t want to turn the programs into a class, and I’m going to talk about identity and the all the others together…. so to speak.

As we know, sameness and change are really inherent in being alive. We human beings can greatly love and we can greatly destroy. We are usually ambivalent about a lot of things. That is, that we can be attracted to and sometimes feel alienated from those people around us. We can be generous and we can be self-serving. Our identity is made of all these experiences.

Sometimes, when people experience ambivalence towards someone they love, they get very concerned. It’s really essential to understand that ambivalence, that is, wonderful feelings and sometimes angry feelings are just in the whole mix and we have to recognize it very calmly. We have to recognize it particularly with our children. Our children can love us, and at times they can be very angry with us. That doesn’t mean that they’re bad kids or that we’re bad parents.

It’s because of these factors, that’s why I’ve spoken about identity as something that we constantly have to work on, believe it or not. It’s not just achieved. Identity is something that we experience, and we deepen, and we take ownership of ourselves, ideally, as we go through life. It’s not like just buying a house and living in it for the rest of your life. Because things change so much, really our sense of self-worth is also an ongoing issue.

We all know this today; marriages are no longer a guarantee of anything. They break up. 50% of marriages in America break up. Jobs, unfortunately, are no longer a guarantee. Our children face very different issues than we might have faced, and we’re frequently not sure how to respond to them or help them. Our sense of community, unfortunately, is not quite as strong as it was in past eras, and so relying on outside help is not always as available as it used to be. Yet, we have to keep alive, and keep our sense of who we are alive.

I’ve spoken in the past about in marriage, identity, and a husband and a wife forming who they want to be, not living out unconscious stereotypes from their childhood. It’s very, very important that a husband not live out maybe some of the behavior that he simply saw his father do, if he had an absent father, or if he had a father who was very bossy and controlling of his wife. It’s very important that the husband understand that he has to form who he is, not imitate his dad, even if he loved his dad. That, of course, equally applies to the woman.

Now, sameness and change can also foster anxiety as to who we are, how others respond to us. Human beings, in a sense, we’re always little children. Part of us is always a bit like little children in the following sense. We’re always concerned, are we being good or bad? Do we do the right thing, or do we do the wrong thing?

One of the things I want to talk about this morning, particularly with identity, because I was struck this week, and I’m going to describe this in terms of absolutes, I was struck this week with this terrible death that this doctor was killed for practicing abortions and was killed by this gentleman for committing abortions. I’m going to get around to that this morning, because I think that really touches on a very core issue: When our identity is not able to be flexible, what can come about because of that?

One of the ways of resolving the anxiety that we all experience in finding out who we are, who we want to become, how to live in this terribly complicated world that we all live in, one of the ways of resolving such anxiety is to opt for a life of constraint and have unyielding rules which mask our ability to handle any of the ongoing anxieties of life.

Whether it’s political, religious, educational, it doesn’t make any difference, whenever any of us get into a situation where we have absolutely unyielding rules, we have to be aware that is probably addressing a very deep anxiety in us. So the question arises, how do we avoid either extreme? You know the extreme of having absolute servitude about everything, so we don’t question ourselves, or, so to speak, just winging it, and making up our life as we go along.

Now, I’m well aware that the more we interact with other cultures, and we do, our particular society through television, through radio, through whatever, we interact with other cultures a great deal. The more we interact with other cultures, the more we realize how dependent we are on the particular culture in which we live. Knowing that cultures are different, and that there is no right answer to many of life’s questions, is a way of avoiding absolute unchanging beliefs.

Now, I am not talking about anything goes, believe me. I don’t believe anything goes, but I do believe that whenever we have to rush in and have absolute answers, we are liable to really stultify ourselves. Part of the need for each of us to accept what I have spoken about as our everyday unhappiness is that we frequently don’t know what to do in many situations.

Now, I can understand this gentleman, who unfortunately thought he had to kill somebody, held onto his beliefs about abortion very strongly. I don’t have any problem with that. I’m not criticizing that. I think what I’m highlighting is that he didn’t appreciate that one can hold one’s convictions, and that, “My identity is through that, but that I don’t impose that on someone else, and that if I really believe someone else is doing something terribly wrong, I simply have to use whatever means my society tells me to.”

Now that’s obvious, and yet, sometimes we forget that identity means, “I am flexible enough to recognize I can’t impose my values on a society. I have a constant dialogue with this society. A constant dialogue.” To me, that’s the essence of democracy. Not that we know the right thing, because I don’t think anybody knows the right thing, I don’t think the Democrats know the right thing; the Republicans know the right thing necessarily. What’s essential for our personal life and to live in a community is a capacity to dialogue.

Now, that’s very important to teach our children. Of course we want to give them values of integrity, and honesty, and hard work, there’s no questions about that, but we want to do that through talking, not through absolutes. Because only through talking and dialogue, frankly, do I think we manage to get through life.

Very frequently, I understand in past generations, particularly when religion was a much stronger force than it is today, we had a very clear sense of what was right and wrong. People today are constantly reevaluating what’s right and wrong. What was acceptable 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago, is no longer acceptable. Although this is understandable, I can understand that it’s also rather upsetting.

This is why I’ve spoken in the past for the need for everyday wisdom. Namely, we have to tolerate a certain amount of everyday unhappiness with the world in which we live in order to have everyday wisdom. We can’t have our way all the time. Very frequently, on a deeper level, we don’t even know which way to go. That’s what I also meant a few broadcasts ago when I spoke about everyday unhappiness.

Now, within this context, because I do want to highlight for the people who are listening, really, what psychotherapy is. Psychotherapy, and I’ve mentioned this many times, cannot and should not give us answers as to how to live our lives. A therapist should never be telling us what to do. That’s not a part of it. I don’t go to work out my identity by going to a therapist and then he tells me what to do. But talking to someone in a quiet, trustful situation can help us come in contact with our own strengths, our own capacity to think things out. It can help us by showing us how our childhood plays an important role in our living and in our experiencing ourselves.

As I’ve said many times, if you don’t have therapy, or don’t have it available for a variety of reasons, try to find a little quiet space each day, or a few times a week, and just think about who you are and who you want to be. Not that you’re right or wrong, that doesn’t help, but try to find a Psychotherapist’s Corner inside yourself.

Now, Erik Erikson speaks about, along with this whole notion of how do we develop who we are, how do we develop our identity, Erikson speaks about the need to be generous, particularly as we grow older. Not to hoard as we grow older, the exact opposite, to be generous. And, he also speaks about the need to appreciate what we have learned, without the fantasy that we have found some unchanging truth.

Now, that sounds obvious, and yet I’ve met many, many people who are so anxious that perhaps their life is meaningless, or perhaps they didn’t do it right, that they are absolutely convinced that all of their opinions are correct, and other people’s are wrong. I understand that comes from normal anxiety, which is what I’m talking about this morning, that we have to have an ongoing sense with ourselves, with our communities, probably our whole life. There is no easy answer. There is no automatic formula.

Erikson says that we have to be able to do two things in order to avoid a sense of stagnation and despair in our life, and in order to avoid a deep depression as life goes on. One of these, what he says, is that we have to will what has happened to us, and we’re going to talk about that in a second.

The second point that he calls is that we have to give wisdom to the oncoming generation without a sense that they have to accept it. In other words, we have to recognize that whatever we give the oncoming generation is relative and that’s all we have to do. We don’t have to give them something absolute. We have to give them the tools to think. We have to give them our generous desire to help them. That’s what people incorporate.

From the best teachers, in my experience of grammar school, high school, college, and post-graduate work, what I remember most is the generosity of the teachers wanting to convey something. We can always learn content, but you can’t go on fire for learning if you don’t feel that someone is generous and wants to share with you.

Now, let me just touch a few minutes on the first one, and then we’ll take a break, and then we’ll come back. The first one, Erikson says we have to be able to will what happened to us. Again, that sounds very, very simple, but really what it means, even though I’m going to use very simple terms, just try to hear me, we have to come to terms with who our parents were: What they were able to give us, and what they were not able to give us.

That doesn’t mean that we approve of everything they did. It means we have to recognize their behavior without spending the rest of our lives complaining about it. We have to accept how we look, our physical self, as well as our intellectual and our emotional self. We are who we are because of all of the particular things that happen to us.

Too frequently, when people keep saying, “Oh, my parents should have done such and such, my spouse never appreciated me, my children didn’t do what I really wanted, they’re really ungrateful kids, they didn’t accomplish what I wanted for them,” or, “I should’ve been able to do such and such,” while I humanely understand that talk, I simultaneously know that all of this kind of talk makes it impossible for anyone to appreciate that we are who we are because of the things that happened to us, which, for the most part, we had little control over.

We free ourselves for the future only when we recognize the past and let it be. I think that’s really what Erikson is talking about. We recognize the past and let it be. We don’t try to impose a new reality on our past, because that doesn’t work. We live in a democracy, and the gentleman who felt he had to kill a doctor because he disagreed with him didn’t understand that he lived in a democracy. In a democracy, you simply don’t do that, no matter how strong your beliefs are.

I’m going to take a break for a second, and we’ll come back for the second point of Erikson. This is The Psychotherapist’s Corner, 1490 WGCH, Dr. Jerry Talking.

Dr. Jerry: Welcome back to The Psychotherapist’s Corner with Dr. Jerry. We’ve been talking about Erik Erikson’s notions of identity, and some of the things that we have to do to recognize what the human identity is.

To summarize just briefly, it’s not something we achieve at somewhere around 16 to 18 and then hold onto for the rest of our life. Our identity is an ongoing dialogue with ourselves primarily and our dialogue with those around us, and our dialogue in the communities in which we live, and it’s a dialogue we have to keep up our whole lives. Actually, that’s part of the joy of life. That’s part of creating who we are, and the only reason I’ve spoken about the past, and coming to terms with the past, is not to dwell in the past, but because only when we know it can we be free of it, and when we’re free of it, we can live more fully.

That’s, in general, the points. The last point that Erikson makes, and I want to spend the last section of the show on it, Erikson speaks about either we develop wisdom in life, or we go into despair. Despair is usually masked by very deep depression and withdrawal, or sometimes, extreme rigidity. That’s really despair, where people no longer feel that they have any inner flexibility, that they no longer can have a dialogue with life.

Erikson speaks about the need to pass on whatever we have learned, and we have struggled to learn, and very hard to learn, we have to pass that onto the oncoming generation, knowing that what we pass on is relative. It doesn’t have to be an absolute, and that’s his strong point. To offer and to provide what we have learned to our children, literal children and those who come after us, is what we mean also by being generous.

Being generous doesn’t just mean giving things; I don’t mean that. I mean a generosity of spirit. The best way of counteracting depression, actually, is to develop and to force a generosity of spirit. We pass on whatever we’ve learned so that the next generation has more tools to handle life. Life really does seem to be getting more complicated in our technological society, and so the recognition that we pass on what is needed is, I think, really basic, and as I spoke about a few minutes ago.

The opposite of recognizing that what we are passing on is relative is to think that what we know, what we give to the next generation, is some unchanging absolute truth. Here, let me just focus, what we pass onto our children is a sense of integrity, a sense of honesty, a sense of commitment, a sense of work, and dedication to community and those around us. Those are absolute, but those are process, if you can follow what I’m saying. They’re not content.

What we have to pass on is a way of living in the world. That can be very absolute, but when we start getting into content, unchanging content, then I think we’re headed for a little trouble. Content doesn’t make us creative and generous. Actually, if you have an absolute content, you very frequently are desperately afraid that history might judge as less than correct. Whereas when we teach people integrity, and honesty, and work, and commitment, those are universal values. We don’t have to worry about that.

Now, why am I saying this? I’m saying it because the reality is, each generation, and we have to give this to our children, each generation must find its own truth, with as much help from past generations as possible. Each generation has to find its’ own truth. This is true in science, it’s true in life in general, it’s true in education.

Being real, being alive, as we’ve spoken about, has nothing to do with being correct all the time. That’s not what being alive means. We can hold our beliefs and our opinions strongly, as long as we do so, so to speak, with an open hand. Why I say this is because, I’ve reiterated throughout these programs, when we don’t hold our beliefs with a kind of open hand, we’re really in danger of imitating the queen’s narcissism, that what we have is correct, what we have is the most beautiful, what we have, other people should admire. That kind of narcissism is very dangerous for all of us.

So, everyday wisdom really means holding on to what we believe with an open hand, and passing it on to the oncoming generation with a sense of generosity. A father gives an example to his son about working by working, and by being dedicated to his family, and dedicated to those in his community. That’s passing on wisdom, not making sure that the son gets into a certain job no matter what, and holds onto it no matter what. That’s not teaching the child industry, that’s teaching him simply possession. Generosity is sharing who I am, trying to help those around me.

Wisdom means, as I’ve said, that we give to the next generation the truth as best we know it, not angry or intimidated if some of the truth proves no longer to be viable. I’m always struck, again, particularly in a democracy, where a democracy really demands a lot of us. To be alive in a democracy means we have to keep a certain internal flexibility, and I am surprised at times when events change, and facts change, and situations change, that people hold onto a position that they maybe held ten years ago, and they hold onto it merely because they had it ten years ago. That’s what I’m talking about, in terms of a lack of flexibility.

Emotional health is strengthened by an ability to be flexible and to entertain alternative explanations, even for our most deeply held convictions. I want to reiterate that. Emotional health is strengthened by our ability to be flexible. That doesn’t just mean relative, it means to be flexible, and to entertain alternate explanation, even for our most deeply held convictions. That doesn’t mean we give up our conviction. It means we’re willing to dialogue about them. We’re willing to think about them.

Political convictions, educational conviction, religious convictions, marriage convictions, I’m including the whole lot here, that if we can have that sense of inner flexibility, that, “I’m willing to listen to alternate opinions, and to stifle my immediate angry response, perhaps, and to entertain that someone else can think very different from what I think,” that capacity will not only make us happier, it’ll deepen whatever convictions we have, without anger, without righteousness, without narcissism, and it’ll also aid us in living in our community.

I think that’s really what Erikson is all about when he said, “We have to give to the oncoming generation whatever we have learned.” That seems to me to actually be essential, and when we don’t do that, we really dry up inside, and we hide inside ourselves, and when you think about it, what an awful waste of a life.

As I’ve said many times in these programs, our life is a remarkable, wonderful gift that we should enjoy and celebrate, and anything that can help us do that, whether it’s love, or a good friend, or a wonderful family, or psychotherapy, anything that gets out of ourselves to enjoy life, and to dialogue with life, is really what we need to get through it all.

Frankly, when democracy works well, it’s a great aid to each citizen’s psychological and emotional health, much more than any kind of other political system. I’m not saying the other systems are bad and ours is the only right one at all, I’m not saying that, but I’m saying that, certainly, my experience in education and reflection on it, is that democracy can help us enormously develop that inner flexibility that we all need to live life.

Thank you again for listening. This is 1490 WGCH, The Psychotherapist’s Corner.

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Good morning. This is Dr. Gerry in The Psychotherapist’s Corner, 1490 WGCH. Last week I spoke to you about everyday unhappiness. What Freud meant by that term was that if we don’t really come to terms with everyday unhappiness, we’re just going to be subject to neurotic misery. Today I’d like to speak about some of the ingredients for happiness.

One of our great psychoanalysts, I’ve alluded to him before, Erik Erikson, came from Germany, taught in Harvard for many, many years, and wrote about the eight stages of man. How we humans grow in strength and confidence, and therefore are prepared for a certain sensible amount of happiness, and more specifically, so that we can experience a realistic form of freedom. Now, no one is absolutely free. In fact one of the goals of therapy is to enable a person to have more emotional freedom. And, if we have more emotional freedom we have more de facto freedom. Erikson spoke about eight stages we human beings grow through. And I’m going to talk this morning about a few of them, and we’ll finish them off next week.

Let me just mention the most basic stages, and then I’m going to double back and talk more specifically about each. The first stage he speaks about is basic trust versus mistrust. The second stage, around three to five or six years of age, is the experience of autonomy, versus shame and doubt. After that, from six probably up until about eleven or twelve years of age, is initiative versus guilt. The fourth stage, again eleven to twelve years of age, the specific ages are not that important, is industry versus inferiority, identity versus identity confusion. The next stage is capacity for intimacy versus isolation. As we grow older, the next stage is generativity versus stagnation. The capacity for what Erikson calls generativity. It’s his own term. Generativity mean’s a capacity to be wise, to be generous and to be emotionally sober. Generativity versus stagnation….and finally, in our last periods of our lives, ego integrity versus despair.

Now what Erikson is trying to outline here is that all through what we call the life cycle, nothing is set in stone. Even though therapists focus on our childhood and on our unconscious, what we deny and don’t allow into our awareness, nothing is set in stone. We are continually growing. We are continually facing issues in our life. And the role of the therapy or the role of maturity is to enable us to handle those issues so that they don’t overwhelm, but rather we’re able to integrate them so that we grow and expand. We should keep growing, really, right up until the day we pass.

Erikson speaks about the basic materials that make up the personal identity. And therefore go into what we call the experience of freedom. In order to do that, we have to actually start in the beginning. We have to go back to each of our childhoods to our individual Eden, the first months and years of life. It is really here, that it is believed that really some of the most formative years of our life. Think of a great oak tree. A great oak tree has very deep roots. So when I allude to what happens to us growing up in our childhood experience, all I’m talking about is the roots. I’m certainly not denying the tree. Sometimes in some of the psychology that we are exposed to in the media, we are given the impression that we can be a great oak tree, with very, very shallow roots. That’s not possible. Each of us never stands alone. This is one of the basic premises that we all recognize today. We exist in community from the first moment of birth on. Mother and child create a mood, as it were. And from their interaction, the child gradually builds up an emotional image of the world.

Now what’s particularly important for young mothers to realize, and for us to remind ourselves of, is that we don’t just know reality as if we’re a movie or TV camera just filming what’s out there. Our experience of reality depends on how we experience the world, in those first years of life. It doesn’t totally depend on that, but it certainly has one of its foundations in that. If the mothering environment is personal and stable, if it’s what Erikson and Winnicott call “good enough,” then the child will experience the world as fulfilling. What does that mean? It means that a child is not left crying too long, a child is not left wet in its diapers too long, a child is given enough food to satisfy its hunger, a child is held enough, a child is not exposed to wild noises, that there is a level of consistency. All of those everyday seemingly simple things, go into allowing a child feel that the world is reliable and safe. Namely, his or her inner needs, such as hunger or discomfort or love, are not overwhelming but are met by outer satisfactions.

But what makes us unhappy, when our inner needs as children or as adults are not met in the world? If they’re met, just “good enough” this is what Wainnicott says, we don’t have to be perfect parents. That’s just an illusion. If we start worrying about being perfect parents, we’re liable to drive our children and ourselves crazy. But we do have to be “good enough” parents. And “good enough” parents have consistency and stability. The gradual and repeated harmony of what Erikson speaks about as inner and outer interaction. Inner needs that the child has, outer responses of the mothering environment. The mothering environment can be Daddy as well as Mommy. Will be a source for a sense of the world as trustworthy, as a reliable place. If a child does not experience this, if the mothering environment is highly unstable to the child, varying her or his emotional and caring responses, then the child is not going to be able to experience the world as reliable. A person’s objective experience is going to be a basic mistrust in him or herself.

Now that mistrust, namely will generate later on, it’s not just for how we have to take care of kids. How we handle our first relationship, for instance, is going to affect how we handle our relationships in late adolescence and in marriage. As you know, sometimes many marriages founder because one or the other of the partners can’t really trust, can’t experience reliable stability in their relationship. They are always suspicious of their spouse. They’re always nervous about their spouse, or they’re always complaining that their needs are not being met. They will throw this out to the spouse and very frequently what they are complaining about is an inner discontent that has very deep roots.

In the technical language, inner needs that are unmet by outer confirmation, they wander aimlessly, as it were. If this happens an individual will develop a sense of homelessness and foreignness in the world. I think it is difficult for adults to understand that as infants and small children each person has to learn reality. Now, what does that mean? Each person has to learn how to interpret and respond to his or her experience, it is not automatic. This makes up the differences that we have. It’s the foundation for some wonderful experiences in life, and some dark experiences in life. When we get reversals as adults, even simple reversals such as we lose a sports game and refuse to shake the opponent’s hand, or we don’t come in first in a music show, if that suddenly throws us for a loop, what we’re really saying is that there is no inner stability by which we can accept reversal and still hold onto the experience that the world as trustworthy and that we are good, even if we have happened to have lost a game, for example. Basically, the capacity to trust a world and not to regard it as hostile, to have hopes and dreams and to work because one feels that one’s dreams can come true, means that in that the first six months to a year or a year and a half of life, the environment was stable enough to guarantee basic trust.

A lot of times, I’m speaking here about family. But on a wider framework, which I alluded to a couple of programs ago, is society. You know one of the signs of being civilized, and I used a kind of humorous example, was it was 12 o’clock at night, you’re in Vermont, you come to a red light, and you stop for a red light. You put a limit on yourself and you go when it turns green. There’s a side to that which I think that our society is fairly falling down on. We owe that to society. We obey laws because we owe that to society. Society also owes something to us. Society has to guarantee, citizens a stable environment and I’m not talking in political terms as in “the dole.” Society owes its citizens a stable environment. Society owes its citizens an environment where they can live, where their basic needs are met and the opportunity to meet those needs is given to them. That’s how we guarantee a basic trust and cooperation in society. I’m concerned that we have lost a certain amount of cooperation in our society and I’ve spoken about that before in terms of our capacity to cross-identify with one another.

Trust versus mistrust is not obviously an absolute alternative. In each of us there is a balance of moods. What we’re trying to describe here, is a preponderance of one mood over the other. If distrust is too predominant, we really become paranoid. We can’t connect with another human being. We’re distrustful that anyone could really care for us. We’re suspicious when we get reversals or setbacks. That’s a predominant mood of distrust. This is not to deny that people have moments of mistrust and doubt, but for a person to have autonomy or direction in his or her life, basic trust has to predominate. It has to predominate in different experiences. When a child goes to school, how do we know that they have basic trust or that they have an inner conviction that they can learn? Now the school has to promote that, and that has to encourage that, but without that inner conviction that one can learn, a person is going to have a lot of difficulties in school. When an individual gets into adolescence, and they start dating or going out with members of the opposite sex, they have to have an inner feeling that they’re good, that they are worthwhile, and not that they are hopelessly lost. Later on, when one gets to adulthood, one has to not experience setbacks as personal punishments. One has to experience that when someone disagrees with one, this doesn’t mean that they are disrespecting one.

These adult manifestations of mistrust really go back early in our life. People have to be able to disagree with us without our feeling that they’re against us. That’s something that we constantly have to remind ourselves of. Because as I’ve said many times, I think we’ve lost a little bit of that. I’m a man in my seventies. Certainly the political climate in our country has changed significantly in 30 years. We don’t seem to be able to allow disagreements, without impugning a person’s motives, without assuming hostility. Those are all signs of distrust and it concerns me, because we have to take care of the body politic, as well as the body personal. So the mothering environment has to try to be stable, has to try to be consistent. Which means that mother and father, or single parent, has to be happy enough, “good enough,” to try to convey that to the child. The relationship has to be “good enough.” Also, the mother has to realize that in the first few years of life, children take a lot of our time. They take a lot of our concern, they take a lot of our money, and we can’t resent it. It’s very important, particularly in the first few years of life. It’s like planting a tree, for those of you who are gardeners. You know you have to plant it and stake around it so it grows straight. Once it starts growing it’s okay on its own, but it needs help in the beginning. Almost all living creatures are like that. So when a person decides to have children, it’s important that they realize that children are not just a gift, a profound gift, but they are also an obligation.

Let me go into the second stage and then we’ll take a brief break. Erikson speaks about autonomy versus shame and doubt. The second stage comes between 15 months or so, and three years of life. When our emerging selves along the path of autonomy or shame have to be resolved. It is a time when as a child we have to learn to crawl. We have to learn to walk. We have to get away from mother. It is a time when a child has some rudimentary language and is able to distinguish him or herself from others. It’s very important during this stage that the child can start doing things for himself that earn a reward or a punishment. One has to survive humorously the “Terrible Twos.” But the “Terrible Twos,” those of you who are parents know this, is an enormous turning point in a child’s experiences. Am I allowed to have autonomy, or are do my actions simply produce Mommy yelling at me, Daddy yelling at me, and I’m a bad person”. We’re going to go into this a little bit more, but we’re going to take a break now for just a minute. [Commercial Interruption 00:16:35]

Dr. Gerry: Welcome back, Dr. Gerry, The Psychotherapist’s Corner. We’re talking about the eight stages of man, we’re talking about childhood now. We’re talking about different ways that we integrate learning reality, that’s really what we’re talking about. And why are we talking about it? Because how we learn reality as young kids is obviously going to affect us as adults. It’s very easy to say, “oh that doesn’t make any difference.” The image I’ve tried to suggest to you to keep in mind is that of a great oak tree. Hopefully we can all grow to be great oak trees, in whatever way that makes sense for our personal life. But, if we’re going to be oak trees, we have to have deep roots. We can’t have shallow roots. We can’t deny that there is a great deal under the ground. In fact, there is more under the ground than there is above the ground.

We’re talking about the second stage that Erik Erikson speaks about, autonomy versus shame and doubt. Anyone that’s been a parent knows that the Terrible Twos are comparable to adolescence. One of the first tasks of parents is that they have to survive. After they survive, they have to then convey to the child that their growing sense of doing things is not bad. They do have to be trained and they have to be given direction. In their mastery of the body in potty training, they have to be given the experience of mastery, not shame. In such a basic, simple human task as mastering our bodily functions, if the environment shames them too much, you lay the groundwork for an inner alienation from their own bodies. As if there is something bad or disgusting about our bodies, rather than we just have to learn mastery of our bodily functions…..very big difference.

You have to allow a child a certain amount of initiative. If they go under the sink and take out all the pots and start trying to fit them together, it’s not helpful to scream at them for disturbing your kitchen. It’s much better to appreciate in your mind, that they’re really growing in curiosity and then try to direct that curiosity someplace else. These are very simple everyday examples, but believe me, life is mostly made up of these very simple, everyday examples. If over and over again, a child is yelled at for crayons on the wall, you have to give him a piece of paper. For pulling the pots out, if you yell at him, if he or she is constantly yelled at, they’re going to develop a sense that their initiative is not good. This would certainly be groundwork for a depression later on in life, and for not really accomplishing as much as our God-given talents really enable us to accomplish.

This second stage of autonomy versus shame and doubt really introduces a child to history. In the first period of life, if we assume a stable environment, it is like a child is living in paradise. His needs are met, his desires for the most part are fulfilled. And, he’s living without time, without a real experience of time. It’s like our common “Garden of Eden”. Progressively in the second and third years of life, the infant begins to process a separation from the mothering environment. Separating both muscularly and verbally, and begins to develop some rudimentary awareness of the here and now, different from before. This creates a lot of difficulty as a child alternates between these states of awareness. You have to allow a child to separate, to slowly begin to have a sense of themselves and the mothering environment must allow this. The person in adulthood who can’t be without another person, the person who is constantly anxious that they have someone around them, has never worked out separation individuation. It’s a paradox that it is only when we know who we are, only when we separate, that then we can join with someone else. There’s a paradox but it’s true. If we know who we are, then we can join, then we can cross-identify, and then we can unite with another person.

During these years from two to three to four, a child is faced with a profound problem. Namely, the child discovers a good mother is also bad mother. Good Mother, who provides food, care, warmth and love, and who plays with him or her, is also depriving mother, Bad Mother. Depriving mother will not feed him or her immediately when they’re getting super ready. She says that he may not climb on the bookshelves and takes the paintbrush away and says, ‘I’m sorry you can’t paint the couch’. Bad Mother puts him to bed early. These are very everyday simple experiences, but Good Mother and Bad Mother is really the foundation of a lot of the myths such as the Good Witch and the Bad Witch. Though it sounds simple, one of our primary tasks in life is to bring these two mothers together, knowing that the world is sometimes depriving but without personalizing it.

This joins up with what we were talking about last week. Everyday unhappiness is not a term that we Americans particularly like. But everyday unhappiness means that we recognize that we don’t always get our way and that’s okay. I don’t have to always get my way. If I don’t, it doesn’t mean that the world has turned black. In adulthood, if a person experiences that when they don’t get their way, the world turns black, this really goes back to not integrating good and bad.

Winnicott, the English pediatrician psychoanalyst, has written about this stage between ages two and four. He talks about it as ‘the fall from grace’. A more complex reality now confronts the child, and conflicts between good and bad have to be resolved. Am I a Good Self, or am I a Bad Self? Is the world a good world, or is it a bad world? Am I welcomed into the world? When the world says “no” to me, does that mean I’m bad, or is the world just giving me a boundary? These are very simple examples I’m giving you. Yet, just think about it, especially those of you who are young mothers raising young children. Negotiate boundaries with love, with care. Do not make your child feel guilty. If a child doesn’t master potty-training right away, he’s not bad. He may be upset, his musculature may be growing slowly, he may be angry at you, but you must try not to be angry back. Because the mood that you set there, as the great St. Augustine said, “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” So how young mothers and I include fathers in here today, because today many fathers take care of your children. How you handle these early stages, and handle the stage of autonomy, the breaking away and the “Terrible Twos” and the growing autonomy of the three and four year old, really sets the stage for how your child experiences adulthood.

Next week we’re going to get back to the fantasy stories that I’ve alluded to, such as Snow White and the Good Fairy Mother and the Bad Fairy Mother. These are all attempts in literature to try and depict some of the conflicts that we all experience during this stage and how necessary it is to resolve these conflicts and come to terms with both good and bad. I’ve spoken about learning muscular control. The child also learns that they have to respond to social demands, for example, as we mentioned, toilet-training is really a preparation of separation, individuation and learning social demands. You stop at the red light in Vermont because you’re able to control yourself. You don’t just go through it on impulse.

This learning to control yourself in adulthood goes right back to learning to control yourself as a young child. How parents handle tasks during this developmental period will, to a great extent, determine the child’s inner sense of personal mastery, over his or her actions. And it’s that sense of personal mastery that I want to leave with you. It is one of the most valuable things. Of course we want to give our children a good home, we want to absolutely give them love, we want to give them as much comfort as we’re able to, and certainly in our society we work very hard to do that. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. We want to give them love and we want to give them a sense of personal mastery over their life. If we do that, we’ve given them something invaluable. Without that, no matter what other material things we give them, they will have an inner feeling of being deprived. Give that a little thought. Erik Erikson has a book called “Childhood and Society”. I’m going to talk more about these inner stages next week. If this interests any of you, I recommend that you go out and get that book, “Childhood and Society”. Thank you very much folks. We’ll be talking to you again next week. [Commercial Interruption 00:27:58]

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Everyday Unhappiness
Good morning. This is Dr. Gerry at the Psychotherapist Corner, 1490 WGCH. This morning I’m going to talk about something that may sound a little bit strange initially. Namely, why is everyday unhappiness necessary? Freud, as some of you may know, said by the end of a good treatment, the patient should be able to exchange neurotic misery, for everyday unhappiness.

And that sounds particularly strange to our American ears. You know how in America we’re taught that we should always be happy; we should always be up. Unless something’s wrong we should always be calm. But, on the other hand, I think there’s a great deal of wisdom in what Freud said, in terms of living life and enjoying life. To be able to come to terms with what he calls, everyday unhappiness. We all know that there are many people that walk around, and sometimes even ourselves, who are always depressed, or they’re always anxious. Or, they’re always suspicious, or they’re always aggressive. They’re unhappy about something almost all the time, when you speak to them. That’s the kind of behavior that I’m indicating when we talk about neurotic misery.

It’s very difficult to be with someone like that. You may get used to them. They may be your spouse, or your boss. On the other hand you’re aware that there’s something off here. That is, there’s not a kind of sober sense, about life. As you know, and I think this is particularly true of Americans more so than just even Western Europeans…we really do believe in a lot of the books that you see around and sometimes some of the radio shows and TV shows that we see. They give you the impression that we’re always supposed to be happy. We’re supposed to be well contented. We should be psychologically healthy at all times. Now, although that sounds nice, and it does sound nice, I just don’t think it’s reality.

If we don’t have those things the implication is, you know, if we just found the right formula everything will work out for itself. In particular, we Americans are used to working very hard. The implication underneath working very hard is that if we just put our hands to the grindstone, we will be rewarded and we will be successful. All too often, the unspoken message behind that is if we are not successful it’s probably because we didn’t work hard enough. You know, you’re just supposed to work hard enough and then things are going to work out. And if you have the right attitude, things are going to work out. And if you know the right thing to say, things are going to work out. It sounds terrific. In point of fact through my many years of experience, it’s not quite that simple. It sells a lot of books, it even sells a lot of TV shows, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work. Now, it’s no question that a positive attitude will conquer and resolve some internal issues. On the other hand, if we just focus on that exclusively, I actually believe it’s dangerous for us.

It’s dangerous because it can set up a lot of discontent. It’s dangerous because it’s too simple a notion of what it means to be a person. What we’ve been talking about in the psychotherapist corner, what I’ve been trying to get across to my listening audience, is really share my understanding. I come from a psychoanalytic background. I’ve been practicing therapy, as you know, for 38 years. What does it mean to be a person? How do we achieve being a person? I don’t think being a person merely means that we exist. Being a person, for me, as I’ve spoken about many times, is integrating who we are. That is, progressively understanding who we are. Gaining whatever wisdom we can about life and growing throughout our whole life, even into our old age. That’s what it means to be a person.

Why do I think that this kind of popular, you know, if you put your mind to it you can do anything you want is dangerous? Dangerous might be too strong a word, but why I think it’s misleading, let’s say that. The reason for that is because we humans are pulled many different direction; we’re pulled in many different directions all at the same time. That’s all that a therapist means when he talks about we have human conflicts. Human conflicts are not bad, they’re not good, they’re just there. We love and we get angry. We can care for and we can exploit; we can give life and we can kill. We can want to be committed to a person and yet we can feel sexual desires puling us in different directions. And it goes on and on and on.

That’s essential to being human. Part of what we’re going to talk about, coming to terms with everyday unhappiness means, is recognizing that we didn’t create ourselves. We are children of our desires so to speak and we have many conflicting desires…we don’t have to condemn them, we have to know them. I’ve tried to say that many, many times in our sessions, in our talking here. That is, we don’t have to condemn ourselves. We don’t have to think we’re bad because we have conflicting desires. It’s much harder and much more rewarding when we know ourselves. Now, particularly in our country, hard work and success are sometimes unconsciously equated with God’s blessing. Actually those of you who know the history of religion a little bit, will know that was John Calvin’s thought. Calvin, at least originally, really believed that if you were successful, that was a sign of God’s blessing.

Such an idea really caught on in America. And through a good part of our history, given our people, given our great resources, given our resolve, that seemed to be true. That it was God’s blessing and that things would work out. Now, I’m not against upward mobility. I’m not the terrific American optimism that we have. On the other hand, the best way I think of getting upward mobility, is to be aware that things don’t always work out. That we are children of many different desires and that we have to develop what I’m going to speak about in a short while, what I’ve been calling everyday wisdom. Everyday wisdom enables us perhaps, to live with a boss that is driving us crazy. Everyday wisdom may allow us to live with parents who we have to take care of, and who maybe weren’t the most caring parents when we were growing up.

Everyday wisdom means we have to live with ourselves, with some of the odd strange things that we do and we wonder why we did such and such. We’ll return to this but all of that is what I mean by everyday wisdom. Our goal is to learn to live with who we are without denying our need to grow and to try and understand ourselves. Obviously as human being we die. Something we American don’t always talk about death. We frequently get sick, our children may get ill, or sometimes they disappoint us. We obviously grow old. All too frequently our bodies remind us of our age. All of these things are issues that we have to confront, to come to terms with in life, and not deny, or push aside. On the deeper level, one of the most, one of the recurring things we have to face if we want to not live out neurotic misery, but rather live out everyday unhappiness, is a sense of self honesty. Honesty enables us to recognize who we are, who we want to be, with as little distortion as possible. Honesty helps us be emotionally sober, so to speak.

You know, all too frequently we easily projects what we don’t like about ourselves onto those around us. You see this a lot with, I’ve used this example already, I don’t mean to overuse it. You see this a lot with married couples. When married couples come in for treatment, so much of the time, they have projected onto their mate the issues that they don’t really want to face inside themselves. They find fault, they find irritation in their mate. When, in point of fact, that doesn’t mean their mate is not irritating at times. Obviously of course they might be. But, in point of fact, if they were able to just stop and look at themselves and understand where they’re coming from, the other person’s irritating qualities, wouldn’t be so difficult.

The same thing is true at work with your boss and sometimes with your fellow workers. We frequently exaggerate the irritation that people cause us. When, in point of fact, it really has to do with some issues inside of ourselves that we’re finding it hard to think abut. Many of us, obviously, were not born with the same looks or capabilities. We’re born with a different social background, family histories. All of these things account for everyday limitations that we face and that are just part of us. And it’s foolish to think that if a person comes with different backgrounds, that everybody should be equal. We should be equal in opportunity, but we are not equal necessarily in terms of where we came from.

One of the benefits, as I’ve said before, one of the positive benefits of marriage is that each person in the marriage, when it goes right, can help the other person negotiate the everyday issues that come up. Couples should be able, ideally, to grow in their care for each other. When they cannot, it’s usually because one or other of the spouses is not willing to deal with the usual, everyday unhappy aspects of living. Why am I talking about this in reference to marriage? Primarily I think because all too often people rush, towards divorce without considering what it is that’s making them miserable. And it’s very easy to find what’s making one miserable outside of oneself. What I’m saying this morning is that once we can appreciate what it is to be alive, we can accept the normal limitations we have on being alive. The limitations our body gives us, our social background gives us, our intellect gives us, our education gives us. Once we come to terms with that, we’re less likely to be frustrated, with where we are.
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What Freud was trying to convey with his remark about everyday unhappiness, is that a certain amount, a certain amount of discontent is just part of being alive. We are not supposed to make believe that difficult things don’t happen to us. We are not supposed to always be up. Such an attitude, I think, makes normal down times much worse. If we think inside our head that we should always be serene, we should always be happy, we should always have a positive attitude, then when the normal depressing things of life come along, it’s going to be much more difficult for us to handle. When we are emotionally sober, so to speak, we are much closer to enjoying life. And that’s what I’m talking about this morning. What does it mean to be emotionally sober? We know what it means to be sober in terms of alcohol or drugs. But we have to equally be emotionally sober. And that is as important, if not more important, than being alcoholic sober, let’s say.

If we’re emotionally sober, we’re not going to excessively indulge in alcohol. When we’re emotionally sober we’re much closer to enjoying life. To valuing the people we live with. To knowing our strengths and our limitations, and therefore we’re on the road to being real. We can be comfortable with our strengths and our limitations without being angry about it. Without blaming someone else. Oh, if only my mother had done this, if only my father had done this. If only my spouse had been more flexible, if only my children had been much easier to raise, I would be in a whole different situation. Now, side A, maybe a little bit of that is true, we can’t just say that’s false. On the other hand, if one spends a great deal of time with “if only, if only” you’re not developing any emotional sobriety. You’re basing your life on resentment or ultimately on false hope. Either side , resentment or false hope, when they take over, don’t really help us be alive.

Emotionally sober means we are honestly trying to understand who we are. Now the way we resolve the ordinary conflicts and disappointments life gives us, particularly in the marriage, is by achieving what I have called an everyday wisdom. One thing an everyday wisdom means is how we handle the knowledge that we have. How we react to some of the situations I’ve mentioned. That’s what it means living with everyday wisdom. Everyday wisdom has to do with resilience as well. Resilience is a very important concept. Elizabeth Edwards’ latest book, some of you may have seen it in the New York Times…is named Resilience. And resilience means knowing where we are, and knowing where we would like to be; let me repeat that knowing where we are, and knowing where we would like to be. Understanding as well, what happened to us so w can go forward with less difficulty. Not experiencing what happened to us with resentment and anger and spending the rest of our life undoing what happened to us in our heads…in fantasy making believe.

Each thing that happens to us, big or small, creates a new place for us. You know, health means recognizing that. What do I mean by that? Not fantasizing that we should be back where we were before such and such happened to us. Oh, if only I was back before I was married, or before I had this job, or before I got sick, or before I did such and such, such and such a stupid thing that I did. I can’t believe I did such a stupid thing, whatever it is, or, before I got hooked on alcohol or drugs. If we make believe in our heads that we can somehow go back, we’ll never be resilient because we’re not recognizing where we are right now, where we are is essential to who we are. One of the great joys of life is finding out who we are, and that means identifying ourselves..

Being honest in terms of where we are, I’m sure Mrs. Edwards had a great deal to com to terms with. Not only with her husband behavior, but also with the death of her son, and with the cancer that she faced and faces. And if she were to spend her time thinking back, oh my gosh, why can’t I be back healthy again before I got this cancer, she would waste a great deal of energy. That’s what I’m talking about in terms of resilience. The fantasy that we could be someplace else rather than where we are makes for a neurotic misery. Coming to terms with who we are makes for Freud calls Everyday unhappiness. Let me stop for a second, we’ll have a momentary interruption and I’ll be right back with you. This is Dr. Gerry, Psychotherapist Corner, 1490 WGCH. [Commercial Interruption 00:16:55]

Dr. Gerry: You’re back with Dr. Gerry, Psychotherapist room. We were talking before about resilience just before we had the break. The point I was trying to make there is that if we spend too much time, a little bit is understandable. But if we spend too much time with “what if, if only this didn’t happen to me, if only I’d had a different spouse, different parents, different job, different teachers.” The list is endless obviously. If we spend a great deal of our time, “only if” we’re actually trying to escape who we are and where we are at the present moment. And we are indulging in what we call magical thinking. We’re going to go back and we’re going to redo life in our heads. I understand the need to do that, particularly when things are difficult or painful, or if a loved one has died, or is terribly ill.

I understand the propensity to do that. And yet, if we do that, we’re really starting to walk down the road to neurotic misery. Because we’re not facing where we are. OK? I’ve spoken a great deal about the queen and snow white fairytale, in my last broadcasts. The queen, as we know, if we just think about it again, it’s not really a fairytale for kids; it’s a fairytale that can teach us a lot about life. The queen was not interested in who she was, she was only concerned with what the world, that is the mirror, thought of her. That’s worth thinking about. That emphasis on who we are and how we are and how tall we are and how much money we are and how thin we are and how successful we ar can very easily slip over into the same illness that the queen had.

That she thought she was only what the mirror said she was. She didn’t have insides. The only thing she had was outsides. We all have to learn from the queen’s illness because such narcissism distracts us from what it means to be human and to have a hand in creating who we are as persons. Tragic, it’s a fairytale but it makes a very strong point. That she was in such rage at the idea that she wasn’t the most perfect person on the outside that she would murder.

And a lot of times if we don’t come to terms with our limitations, it is going to come up a great deal of rage and aggression inside of us, that we won’t even know what caused it. When I said before we are people who are pulled in many different directions, we can love and we can hate. All of us can love and hate. All of can be very kind. All of us can be very aggressive. We have to know that about ourselves in order to avoid some of the problems that lead us down the road of being particularly unhappy. We all want to be in control of our lives. We all want to think that we know what we’re doing… that we’re not overly influenced by how our fathers or mothers by our fathers talked to us. We all want to think, for example, that if we’re having trouble in our relationships it’s mostly the other person’s fault, rather than ours. We find it easy, all of us, to blame someone else. Even for the ordinary disappointments, that are just part of being alive.

In other words, we all want the mirror of life to smile back at us. Just like the queen, and to tell us how wonderful and correct and how on target we are. It was an illusion for the queen, and in a sense. it’s an illusion for us. If a person is frequently depressed or overly anxious, if a person has no quiet inside space so to speak, if they frequently feel criticized or on the other hand always assuming that what they do is right. I mean we’ve met people that seem to give that impression. No matter what you talk about with them they manage to do everything perfectly and right and then you feel somewhat inadequate inside, speaking with them. These are the signs that something is off in the integrating of their life situation. No spouse is always right, nor is any parent always right. No one needs constant attention. No one should demand constant attention. Nor is frequent depression or anxiety a way to live.

Any of these emotional possibilities are signs that we have to be re-calibrated. That is that neurotic misery is beginning to replace everyday unhappiness. We start to recalibrate ourselves when we can quietly and honestly learn to talk in a safe situation. And that learning to talk can be to a minister, to a close sensible friend, or to a therapist. If neurotic misery starts to take over and a person doesn’t find a friend, personal, or professional, then it’s not uncommon that addictions are one way of trying to solve such problems. I’ll just erase my inner feeling of depression, or anxiety or conflict. A hasty divorce is another way. Denial is another way. The only problem with such maneuvers is that they don’t work.

Neurotic misery locks us inside ourselves. That’s what we’re trying to walk around this issue with you here this morning. Neurotic actions lock us inside ourselves. We live out in practice or in fantasy what we should be talking about. If we lock ourselves, inside ourselves, we are all the less able to feel our common humanity. That is what I’ve spoken about when talking about cross identification. We’re all in the same boat. We’re all just human beings. We all have the same pain; we have the comparable pain, excuse me. We’re all pulled in many different directions and human beings can heal each other and help each other, except when they lock themselves inside themselves. That’s certainly I think, what scripture means when it says “man is not meant to be alone.” No one is meant to be alone. And only when we strive to have what I call everyday wisdom.

Only when we emotionally come to terms with who we are, only when we have truly put the past to rest, by understanding how it influences the present, can we meet another person and enjoy our common humanity. The goal of any therapy is not to make everything in life wonderful all the time. That’s frankly, ridiculous. But it’s to enable us to meet our fellow human beings on a new level where we truly feel connected and cared for.

Mental health, I dislike that term but I’m stuck with it…mental health is not some dark secret…some hidden special reality. It has to do with loving life. With caring for, and being able to identify with those with whom we live. That’s the basis of really justice in society. Psychological health shows itself in our ability to be generous without noticing it, I repeat, to be generous to other people and to ourselves without noticing it and to be fair and honest in our dealings with others. When we encounter roadblocks, and we always encounter roadblocks, that’s what we’re talking about this morning. That is when we have to re-travel the highways of our lives so to speak, in order to rekindle the fire of life. That’s when we should think about as I’ve mentioned, talking to a friend. Finding our soul so to speak. So that one way or another chimney cleaning, professional or personal, gets done. It’s when we don’t clean the chimney, that when we let too much of this stuff pile up inside of ourselves, that everyday unhappiness starts building itself up into neurotic misery. So really, what therapy is, it’s not some special hidden mysterious process. Therapy is learning to talk so that we can hear ourselves.

When a therapist understands us, and I’ve said this frequently to my patients, they’ve said to me “Dr. Gerry, how does therapy work? I don’t get it. Are you going to tell me what to do?” And I say no I’m not going to tell you what to do. If I do tell you what to do, please don’t listen to me. What I’m going to do is, if you, if I can understand you slowly, overtime, you will understand you. Once you understand yourself then you’ll be able to make decisions and you’ll be able to take responsibility for those decisions. Taking responsibility is what I mean by everyday unhappiness. I know it’s a kind of dramatic term. Everyday Unhappiness. But what it means is I know who I am, and if I made a bad decision I’m going to have to live with it. That’s what Elizabeth Edwards mentions. Resilience means I’m going to have to live with it, let me live with it. Let me not spend my time making believe something didn’t happen.

On the other hand, when we know who we are, we’re much more in contact with our flow as human beings; we’re less likely to do self-destructive things. So then, if we can avoid to the extent that we can avoid neurotic misery, we do it by kind of cleaning out the chimney periodically. By talking, as I said, to a minster, to a friend, to a spouse, or to a professional person. Have a great day today. This is Dr.Gerry, the Psychotherapist Corner.

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Good morning. This is Dr. Gerry, 1490 WGCH on your dial. I’m talking from the Psychotherapist’s Corner. This morning I am going to go over a few things that we mentioned last week.

I received a few emails from people interested in the whole point of couple’s therapy and one of you was kind enough to remind me that at times, I do speak a little quickly, and would I mind slowing up a little bit and going over some of the things. I appreciate those comments; so don’t hesitate at all to email your reactions to the content, or even to my style. So let me go back and reiterate some of the points we were talking about. We’re talking about marriage and marriage therapy. Before we get in to it, I want to refocus. A lot of times, people think that the primary and only function of marriage is children. Now of course, that is a significant function of marriage. But on a deeper level, it’s important for us to realize that human beings want to know each other; human beings want to be connected. That’s who we are.

A number of shows ago, I spoke about how we probably survived against some very big animals, a million years ago, by banning together. That banning together is essential to being a human being. We happen to live in a very individualistic, highly competitive society. And sometimes, one of the results of that is that we don’t always appreciate that we are community creatures, that is, we want to know each other from the inside out. Not just from the outside in. You know, when we know each other from the outside in it’s how tall we are. How rich we are. How beautiful we are. What house we have… What car we have, etc., etc. I’m not knocking that matter, it’s fine, as long as we keep it in correct focus, so to speak. That is that we don’t think that that’s how we know each other from the outside in, so to speak, rather then from the inside out.

I’m going to highlight a few of the points that I mentioned. More often then not, in couple’s therapy, what we have found, believe it or not, is that couples know each other and also don’t know each other. Now what do I mean by that? They know each other and they may know each other’s history, but they haven’t had the time or maybe not the ability to experience what we have spoke about, in terms of cross identifying. Now what does cross identify mean? It means that, the example I gave last week, if a wife happens to be married to a husband who is somewhat distant, a little closed off, a little bit over self protective, for her purposes, she may know, for example, that this particular fellow might have been a product of divorce and was left home alone with mom, and may have had to do a lot of stuff around the house while mom went out and had to make a living. She may know that fact, but she may not know what that meant to an 11, 12, 13, 14-year-old boy. She may not know what it did to him inside. A kind of predisposition he might have to generally be weary of a woman making demands on him.

In this case, the wife obviously would experience his actions as personal. She’s married to him. But, one of the points that we try to make and clarify for people, is that when any of us bring leftover issues, and we all do from our childhood, even though the person we are with may get the result of that, it’s really not personal. In that little example I gave you, if a husband is somewhat closed off and self protective, he’s actually protecting himself in adulthood, in a way perhaps he couldn’t protect himself growing up.

When I speak about cross identification, what I mean is, that each party, the husband and the wife should try to really gain an appreciation of that. Appreciating where our spouse may be coming from will make their actions less personalized, a little less painful to bear; cross identifying enables us to have a little more room to negotiate adult needs by enabling us to understand childhood needs. Each couple in a marriage situation always brings their memories of both their mother and their father to their present marriage table, so to speak. They are unconsciously, when I say unconscious that doesn’t mean they don’t know what they are doing. There are a lot of forces inside of us, and we can’t know all of them. But we model our behavior on our dads or on our mothers. If we model it positively; we’re going to imitate them. Or if we had painful experiences with our parents, we model it negatively. “Oh my God, I’m not going to do what my dad did to me. I’m going to make sure I do everything different.” Either way, our parents are very important, as you can hear.

In other words, how our parents interacted with each other also becomes a first example for us, of how spouses interact. We simple absorb it. I have said to myself and I’ve said to the patients that I work with, “when I was growing up and before we had all the smoking laws that we have today. You’d go in to a restaurant and even if you didn’t smoke and you had a meal, you came out and of course, the smoke would be on your jacket. You could just smell the restaurant. Well, in a sense, you can use that as a model. We literally absorb our parent’s interaction like smoke on our clothes in a crowded room. It just comes in to us. We don’t even have to think about it, we don’t have to notice it. We notice it’s after effects. I don’t mean that in a depressing way or ominous way. The goal of therapy, formal or informal therapy, is just to know what happened to us and the knowing gives us a handle on it. In some cases, children are going to be very different from their parents; all of which is understandable, but it’s necessary to know what we’re doing.

What are some of the issues that couples, in particular, bring to therapy? The most usual ones, in my experience, is that couples feel that either he or she is being ignored. That he or her needs are being side stepped, being bulldozed, to put it strongly. Furthermore, underneath that complaint, you will frequently hear the spouse implying “It’s obvious that the other person is doing it on purpose, and they know what they are doing.” That conviction, of course, causes a lot of anger, frustration and difficulty. Now while a person can understand how angering such a situation is, it is usually not that simple. It’s not that simple actually in most situations in life, just to stay on the surface.

Tensions can arise, for example, in this situation, so I’ll clarify what I’m talking about. It’s very important that each spouse allow each other and that parents their children to have their own dreams. A wife or husband comes to a marriage with certain dreams about what marriage is going to be like. We have to know that, we have to hope and try to work towards it. We also have to know that dreams have to be negotiated. They need to be held as one’s own, but they also have to be negotiated. The same is true for husband and wife and for parent and child.

In marriage and couples therapy, to the extent that a person just stays on the surface and if neither one makes an effort to put themselves in each other’s shoes, the bottom line, unfortunately, is only settled frequently, by a lawyer, with all the financial and emotional expense that a lawyer and divorce entails. Once a person emotionally understands, and I want to reiterate that, emotionally understands then they can appreciate where their spouse is coming from, without compromising their own convictions. They can usually start to see if there is a sensible solution to a given situation. Because we are legally free I don’t really think we are emotionally free. To get frustrated and then just divorce or have a fight, walk out or not talk to one’s spouse. If you think about it, I understand those reactions, but that’s a reaction of when we were beginning adolescence. When we didn’t understand that one has to tolerate frustration and understand it, not just react to it.

A solution is possible when both people are willing to let go of power issues. A solution is possible when both parties are aware of our human propensity to overvalue our self’s importance. That’s what I’m talking about, when I use the example of the Queen in Snow White. What did the queen do? Yes, it was very dramatic… she wanted Snow White killed. But what was the Queen saying? Was she just talking about how beautiful she was? Well, that’s what the fairytale says, but what she was psychologically saying was “I am very important. I’m the most important person.”

Now all of us harbor that fantasy inside of us, I understand that, it’s very universal. It’s universal and it’s almost funny, at times. We have to appreciate it’s universality and it’s funniness. We’re not that important. We’re unique. We don’t have to be the most important person, that doesn’t make us valuable. What makes us valuable is that we are unique. What makes us valuable is the care and love that we give to ourselves, our spouse, our children, our community. That’s what’s valuable, not that we’re special. As people are willing to let go of their power issue, their narcissistic issues, they can experience more connecting issues. In reference to marriage, it’s very important.

There was a funny adage that was a very well known English writer in the 50′s or 60′s, some of you may know of him, called G.K. Chesterton, the author of the Father Brown Mysteries. Very well known writer and he was a very devoted Christian and at one point he said when they were speaking to him about evolution and creation, he said, “You know, I don’t know about evolution. I think each morning God wakes up and says, Hey let’s make the world anew today and let’s just see what happens.” What he was trying to get at was, that we have to have a sense of aliveness. We have to try to reach for that sense of aliveness and I don’t mean in a Polly Anna, silly way. Of course couples fight sometimes and feel alienated. Of course they feel burdened, particularly today, with this ferocious financial crisis we are in. I appreciate all of that. I’m not advocating some Polly Anna notion, but an inner sense that we are alive and marriage is something that should help us stay alive and feel alive.

My wife and I when we work with couples, we have been fortunate enough that many of them, who have stayed and have been willing to work it out, by being honest and letting go of the power, narcissistic issues, have been able to stay together. That is a great gratification for them primarily. I don’t have any investment in people staying together or not staying together, I have an investment in people feeling real and feeling connected and feeling that they know who they are.

I’m going to take a break. We’ll be back in just a minute. [Commercial Interruption 00:14:58]

Hi, this is Dr. Gerry, back again.

Let me continue what we were talking about. You know without connections, without love, life becomes more than tedious. It becomes dry and uninteresting. That’s when we usually have to over stimulate ourselves, with all kinds of things, to counteract an inner sense of loneliness. We all happen to live, myself included, in a society, where there is so much noise and distraction in our life. It’s easy to think that everything is OK as long as one is busy. That is, as long as one is doing something. It’s also equally easy to think that an inner loneliness is simply due to one’s spouse or to a situation, and so change one’s spouse or change one’s situation. Human beings are meant to be alone inside. But they are not meant to be lonely inside. When they are lonely that usually indicates some issues that have deep roots. We all have an area of being alone and that’s fine and absolutely necessary. But if we don’t recognize that and we are pervasively lonely, that deserves our attention, our honesty and our examination; because changing one’s spouse is not necessarily going to change that situation at all. It might change it, seemingly, but only temporarily.

Let me start now a little bit, I don’t know if we’ll finish in this morning’s broadcast, about what happens to children in a divorce. Children are usually the first casualty, when love can’t be re-awakened, when love can’t be re-found. Now, we happen to know that children are wonderfully resilient. We also know that a child’s reaction, sometimes even up to adolescence, they can consciously know that the parents are getting divorced, but they unconsciously feel that some how they may have contributed to it. Had they been better kids, maybe mom and daddy wouldn’t have fought so much, maybe they would have stayed together. It’s very important if a couple decides to get divorced, that they let their child know, over and over again, not just once, that it’s their decision and it’s their situation, and it is not the child’s fault.

In this regard let me say that we can know what we shouldn’t do and we just march right ahead and do it anyways. Children should never be used as hostages or bargaining chips in interaction with one’s spouse. For example, one spouse in a divorce may not inform the other when the child is ill. When they have them for the weekend or during the week. One of the spouses may constantly be talking to the children about how much money the divorce is costing. Or they may be complaining that mom or dad isn’t doing the right thing. Or they may talk to the child about why they had a divorce, because mom or dad insists on doing such and such and such. All that kind of behavior is destructive. All that kind of behavior really is the shadow of the Queen in our lives. The shadow of, I did everything right and the other person did it wrong. I have to show these children that I am wonderful and the other spouse is not so wonderful. Anything that approaches that is going to be ferociously destructive towards the child. We have to constantly remind ourselves, if we find ourselves talking about one’s spouse in a divorce situation in such a way.

You don’t want a child ever to feel that they don’t matter; you don’t want a child to feel that they are simply a distracting sideshow. I don’t know if we human beings have learned yet how to raise children. We live out, as I’ve said before, our left over dreams. We live out our ambitions and hopes with them. Very understandable, but I am not sure it’s always the best thing for the child. We are still struggling after 150,000 years of homo sapiens, in trying to figure out how to raise children so we truly respect their individuality and allow that individuality to grow. It takes a great deal of maturity in our society to get married. It takes a lot more maturity to negotiate marriage. I would say it takes even more to handle a divorce well. By maturity, I mean, for lack of a better word, a certain amount of everyday wisdom. I’m going to talk about that next week. What’s involved with everyday wisdom? I don’t mean an old man with a big beard that we go and get advice on some very complicated issue. I mean day to day, how do you live? How are you flexible? How do you forgive? How do handle anger? How do you handle sexual feelings, sexual desire, sexual fantasies? Day to day experiences, is what is crucial for people, is what I mean by maturity.

Getting back to children for just a minute, children obviously don’t ask to be born. But once they are born, they are owed care and love. That is absolute. When I hear parents say, “I wish this child had never been born.” Well, a moment of frustration, of course, anyone can understand that in a moment of frustration. But on a deeper level, it’s very crucial to remind oneself that children did not ask to be born. It was our decision, conscious or unconscious, to have a child. So therefore we owe them the respect of having brought them into life. They should not be used in any kind of way, to satisfy our needs or projection for our frustration or anger. Nor should a child be used to satisfy that inner loneliness. Nor should a child be not allowed to separate, not allowed to go their way, because of a parent’s inner loneliness.

In couples therapy, even when one’s love for each other seems to be gone, it can save a lot of emotional and financial expense to give it a chance, one more run around. Many people have no idea the emotional expense of divorce. They are running away from inner loneliness and inner frustration. But in point to fact, they are liable to walk in to a whirlpool of conflict of feelings. It’s in view of that actually, that I am recommending that when you find your getting stuck, that you stop and say, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Maybe I have to do a little chimney sweeping myself. Better I get a little soot on myself now, then the whole house go up in fire and everything we’ve worked for get destroyed, because I didn’t take the time to see if I could clean the chimney out and look at the daylight again.”

That’s really what therapy is all about. That does not imply, and I’ve said this many times, that does not imply that we are sick. That does not imply that someone else is going to tell us what to do. That does not imply that we are wrong and our spouse is right. Or, that our parents are bad, or that our parents are perfectly wonderful. It doesn’t imply any of that. It implies something essential about being alive. That human beings have to constantly re-examine themselves. Constantly find a quiet place, to think about who they are, where they are, what they want to be. You can be 60 years old and still think about what you want to be. I don’t mean necessarily in terms of a job. I mean in terms of how you want to live your life. It’s crucial that you think about that.

I’m as modern as anyone else, I drive a fast car and I watch TV and I have my cell phone and my computer etc., etc. But I know it’s important to have a quiet space. That’s what I mean by the Psychotherapists Corner. I want each of you to have a Psychotherapists Corner in your head, in your mind. In some section of your life, whether it’s driving to work for a half hour or an hour. You can turn off the radio, and give yourself some quiet time to just think. Feel what you’re feeling and decide what you want to do with that. We don’t have a society that particularly promotes that, and we can celebrate our great technological advances and at the sane time be a little wary of our technological advances because they are liable to alienate us from our insides.

If we find that there is a kind of pervasive, unresolved loneliness inside of us, then think about it. Think about where that maybe is coming from. If you are carrying, as most human beings do, very few of us get to adulthood without carrying a fair amount of pain from our childhood. That’s OK. That’s the human condition; we don’t have to be overly dramatic about. It’s just that if it’s still leaving a lot of residues, then it’s worth remembering in order for us to forget about. I want to reiterate that. Therapy is a paradoxical experience. We remember in order to forget. We go back to the past, in order to bury it. I hope that is of use to you. If I can be of any help or if you want to make any comments I gave you my email before. Feel free to email me. I would appreciate it. Thank you. We’ll be talking again, next week, on the Psychotherapist’s Corner.

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Dr. Jerry: Good morning. This is Dr. Gerry on this beautiful day. Doesn’t it make you fall in love with this planet again when we have a day like today? Dr. Gerry at the Psychotherapist Corner 1490 WGCH. What I thought I’d talk about this morning is why marriage counseling can help for a couple that’s run into some difficulties. And when couples are unhappy, very frequently they just either live out that unhappiness, or they start talking about divorce. And I’d like to give a wider understanding of really what marriage counseling can provide.

When I’ve spoken before about chimney cleaning, I was speaking about our individual need to understand ourselves. You know, one of the things that makes us particularly human is that we can understand ourselves. We don’t always like to and it’s not the easiest of tasks. But actually as I try to make clear in these shows so far, when we do have an understanding of some of the things that are propelling us, some of the actions we do which we don’t fully understand, we actually have a better sense of who we are and who we want to become. All too frequently it’s heard, even today, and it does surprise me somewhat…that if a person goes to therapy somehow they are sick or crazy or more specifically that they are weak or overly dependent. Now those kinds of thoughts really are just not only false, they’re just absurd. And actually they serve, frequently, defensive purposes.

Therapy is as necessary as education. It’s like saying, well I really taught my child to ready by age 8, so why does he have to go to further school? He can just read about the world. And he has a smart brain on him. It doesn’t work. Therapy is an integral part in our society, of living in this highly intense, focused financially pressured society that we all live in. If a person starts thinking like that, that somehow therapy is for the weak, or that I really understand myself, I don’t need to talk to anybody. That really, sadly, is a defense. And what it does is it condemns a person internally to just keep living out issues and feelings, which if they were able to bring them to the talking table, so to speak, they’d have more control over them.

So, again, the notion of individual therapy, the notion of marriage counseling, is not to go to someone and have him or her tell you what to do. That’s why when I do marriage counseling, when we do marriage counseling, my wife and I, we don’t give people tasks, we don’t tell them to do A, or B. We don’t tell them play make-believe and go out on Friday nights as if they’re not married and as if it’s a date. I’m not against any of that stuff. I just don’t think it works. I think it plays a bit too much on the surface of the issues. What I like to do and as I’ll talk briefly, is to try and help a couple understand what’s going on that they’ve suddenly run into tension and difficulty in their relationship. Therapy as you know, and couples counseling in particular, really demands, rather than weakness and dependency, it demands strength and honesty.

…Strength and honesty. It’s not for people who think they are just fine and everyone else is a bit off. And it’s only after a person or a couple decides to try talking their issues out, rather than living them out, do they understand where they’re coming from emotionally, and where they want to go with their life. Frankly, in my experience, I only think we have two choices. Sounds dramatic but I think it’s true. We either talk our issues out and get to understand our-self and the influences that have caused us to act one way or another, or, we live them out. And if we live them out and we don’t reflect on them, that’s one of the prime ingredients in suddenly becoming very defensive. As if our life is, we can’t question it. And yet, what makes us particularly human, if you think about it, is our capacity to question. That’s why we educate people, isn’t it?

We develop their capacity to ask questions about the world, about science, about everything from rocks to dirt to stars. Well, we’re in that mix also…. we have to ask questions about ourselves. Not nervously, not anxiously, not defensively, calmly. That’s really a road to a much happier life. Couples therapy, at least the approaches I’ve said that my wife and I employ, never means that we give you an assignment or we tell you what to do, or we point fingers.

The only formula I believe is the desire to be as honest as a person is able to be. Now that comes easy to the tongue, oh you should be honest. Let me tell you, being honest is difficult for everyone. Myself included. I don’t mean surface honestly; I don’t mean honesty about money or anything like that, but rather an internal honesty, that comes hard to us human beings. And that’s OK. We don’t have to be ashamed of it. We just have to know it … it’s kind of like driving. Everyone thinks they’re the best driver and that the other person got their license at Macy’s or something. Most people think that they know their past. Now to a certain extent, obviously they are correct. But all too frequently the emotional impact of how their life experiences have shaped their present responses are simply unknown. Let me repeat this because it’s important for individuals and for individual therapy.

Whether we want to forget it or not, our past, particularly what we no longer remember does shape our present experiences. How we respond to ourselves, our mates, our fellow workers, our children. When I say it affects us, I don’t mean we’re totally determined by it. But the father who may have a lot of demands on his son to get involved in certain sports, or not to get involved; or the wife who is suspicious that her husband is always going to abandon her or have an affair. Many times what we’ve experienced, is that although such fears can be based somewhat in the present, they have very deep roots that the person simply doesn’t recognize. Most of us harbor lots of reactions about talking about ourselves, and talking about our personal histories. And I understand that. That’s one reason why therapy and couples therapy in particular is totally confidential.

To talk about things we feel we have to keep quiet about, things we might be ashamed of…. a parents physical abuse or a parents alcoholic abuse for example. Most couples find it very difficult and maybe it takes them a couple of sessions before they can say, for example, when I grew up, my father or my mother was an alcoholic. Or, in the case of say a father who was always working. Who may have provided a wonderful lifestyle but who was never around for his children. Those facts, although one can appreciate perhaps the lifestyle that one provided, if you don’t look back and reexamine how that was experienced, emotionally, growing up, you are liable to live out a lot unconscious expectations with your wife or your husband, depending on the situation.

More then that, we hide from ourselves a lot of leftover hurt from our childhood experiences. That’s just the nature of who we are, we hide from ourselves. We can easily deny any anger and/or fear that we are bad for having it. Or worse, we tell ourselves that we should just grow up and let that childhood stuff go. Now here’s the paradox. Of course we should grow up and let the childhood stuff go. I don’t have any argument with that. My point is that’s precisely the goal of therapy… people will come and say, you know what Dr. Gerry, why should I talk about that stuff? It’s over with, I can’t do anything about it, let’s forget it and my response is, I agree with you, let’s forget it. Paradoxically, the only way to forget it, is to talk about it. I know it sounds funny, it is funny, but it’s also true.

That’s the only way we usefully forget it. Therapy is like a special ceremony, so to speak, if you allow me to use this analogy…that we can put the past to rest….that we can bury the past, and that’s the hardest thing sometimes for us human beings to do. The past is not buried by forgetting it, the past is buried by our remembering it, talking about it, understanding it and then saying, “OK, now let it be.” To a certain extent, we know this, when it comes to mourning. When someone we love dies, we revisit him or her many many times in our mind. We may visit the places they lived, we may revisit their favorite flowerbed or their favorite restaurant even. And it takes a while actually, we think it takes about two years, before a person can revisit someone close to them who’s died, and then let them die internally. That doesn’t mean forget them. It just makes them let them die, come to terms that we no longer have them.

So, we don’t want to tell another man or a woman particularly our thoughts, our fantasies, particularly sometimes our sexual fantasies. We human beings act strangely, as if our sexual fantasies are somehow unique to us. And yet, in point of fact, whenever, in my 38 years experience, I have never heard a unique sexual fantasy in all those years. We’re all in the same boat. There’s one thing to be modest and discreet….something our present media could learn I think…it’s one thing to be modest and discreet, it’s another thing to feel one has to hide one’s sexual fantasies, particularly if they’re interfering with one’s relationship.

Only when we allow ourselves to talk about what’s inside us, can we find out how human we are. And how our life and our psychological experiences unite us, rather than separate us. I’ve worked with many, many people who came in rather isolated. They were not able to connect with their fellow workers, with members of the opposite sex, very limited relationships with people of their own sex, accomplished people. And it’s only as they’re able to find their humanity, their common humanity that they automatically connect with someone else. As I’ve mentioned many times here. Human pain, having difficulty, conflicts are either experienced as a prison or ultimately experienced as a bridge. We can lock all that stuff inside of us, and have a strong external face, or always be smiling as if the world, as if we’re always supposed to be terribly happy about everything. Or, we can revisit that place inside of ourselves, and in talking about it, we actually can, it now becomes a bridge. And the result is that one is able to say …. I now understand my fellow man much more. I’m less likely to be judgmental; I’m less likely to feel isolated.

The goal of any dynamic therapy is actually to help people to grow up on the inside. It’s very important to remember that our emotional history is doomed to repeat itself and to live itself out in the present unless we know it. And the talking cure, I’ve used that term before, the talking cure. the term actually goes back to Freud, one of his patients. I think I’ve mentioned that…one of his patients said, oh this is really a talking cure, isn’t it? …a talking cure is one that may be used to figure out how to help ourselves put the past to rest. I think it’s worth repeating since so many people misunderstand why anyone should, along with their present problems, bother to talk about their past. And again, I know I’m focusing on this but this is I think the biggest resistance to coming to therapy. The truth is only when we understand and work through whatever leftover issues we have, can we let them be.

Can we let the past be the past, rather than constantly overshadowing the present? When a husband or the wife, who may in a fit of anger, says to their spouse, “oh you’re just like your mother,” or “oh you’re just like your father.” A spouse can get very defensive and angry and shouts back. Well, of course, a sentence like hat can be used to just express anger…. But, not infrequently, a sentence like that really has a grain of truth. If a person could understand it, realize it, they might have a little more freedom…their marriage might be saved. I think I mentioned last week, for example, a man whose parents have gotten divorced while he was a young person….he was left home with his mother; a mother who very frequently, in our society, had to go out to work …such a person will usually bring many feelings into his adult marriage.

If he had, if a young say teenager, had to emotionally take care of his mother. If, maybe, he had to do some housework or cooking, if dad was absent, maybe he’s home every other weekend, but emotionally absent. All these experiences are important to understanding why he might develop a very self-protective attitude that he would bring to his marriage. That the wife would experience as him being closed off and non communicative and he would experience as simply protecting himself. Because he had to learn somewhere between 12 and 18 that, that’s what he had to do, since he was thrown into a kind of emotional washing machine, and he had to protect himself.

As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes a mother or father, who is alcoholic, or just not able, or sometimes not willing to hold down a steady job, in that situation a child is going to feel constantly tossed and turned. And it’s very hard for someone, as a child, to understand what’s going on. And what they will do, very frequently a child will do, is simply deny it, give themselves a strong upper lip, and get through it. And is that admirable? Of course it is. But is it going to have consequences? Yes it is going to have consequences. And those are the consequences that affect people in their relationships. Children expect to be taken care of, they want to be taken care of. And when a parent’s needs interfere with that need, although the child might adapt to the situation, they might stay home or help with the housework, or go along with the situation, it always leaves unresolved issues. It has to.

Even in a household where there is no divorce but where a mother or a father doesn’t give the kind of sensible love and caring, I don’t mean gifts, I just mean sensible love and caring a child expects, in that circumstances as well, a child collects a lot of feelings and simply buries them. But what we bury, does not, for the most part, stay underground. What we bury from our emotions or our memories collects, like soot in the chimney. And unless we clean it out, it will, whether we know it or not, affect our lives. It will affect the fire of our lives. Whether or not we clean it out. So let me leave you with that thought for a minute. We’re going to have an interruption. Not interruption, break. Excuse me. And I’ll be back in just a minute or so. [Commercial Interruption 00:17:05]

Let me continue with what we were talking about. As we’re growing up we have many difficult experiences, and actually even if they’re not so difficult, human beings simply develop what we call defenses. And defenses develop because we have no other choice usually at that particular moment in our life, with our emotion and intellectual understanding.

Not infrequently when a couple is having difficulty or one or other of the spouses will show a defense, will use a defense of projection. I’m going to just talk now briefly about a few of the defenses that we human beings use. That is when a person finds fault with those around them. Constantly projecting one’s fear of being deficient for example, onto others, whom they experience as deficient or uncaring…very, very common defense and yet very hard to capture. Because the person will say, “no you don’t understand, he does this, he does that, or she does this or she does that.” And they’re just not able to see how what they’re complaining about in someone else is truly present in them…very difficult defense to get a hold of. Only by remembering one’s own parent’s actions, their way of handling problems and issues, can a person get an understanding of such a psychological maneuver. Sometimes a person simply claims not to remember their growing up years. I’ve had many patients who would, with honesty, initially say; “well I don’t remember anything before I was 15.” And that’s nearly almost impossible. If someone tells me that, it doesn’t indicate bad will. It just indicates, I suspect, they had a lot of pain and difficulty and that they just pushed it away.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with pushing it away, except if we really could just push it away and it doesn’t have any effect on us, good for us. The point is, it does have an eff3ect on us. Patients will sometimes say to me, “well those years really don’t matter at all.” Sometimes a person will ignore the hurt they feel at the hands of a self-preoccupied father, or mother. or even an older sibling. They ignore such life experiences although they frequently are living part of them out with their own wives, or children. Now, what’s very important when I said before that we’re not interested in giving people directives of formulas, because they don’t work. That may work for a little while but they really don’t work in the long run. I want to make another thing clear. When we talk about parents with defenses, or parents we had, even alcoholic parents we’re not talking about blaming anyone.

Nor should any competent therapist be interested in pinning the tail on the donkey, so to speak. That’s not what we’re about, that’s not what real therapy is about. Every human being comes, as I said, with his personal history and his reaction to that history. And that’s true of one’s parents as it is of oneself. One of the goals of life, I think, is to learn from our experiences and not to just past them on. I’ve spoken about creating our lives, when I’ve spoken about being alive. I’ve thinking about to own our personal life by confronting and resolving what is painful, difficult, or embarrassing. Projecting is very hard to get a hold of; denial is very hard to get a hold of.

The wife or the husband who will say to their spouse, “you don’t understand, I’m really very unhappy here, you keep doing A, B, and C. A, B and C.” and the husband or spouse who then says, “but don’t you understand A, B, and C is necessary, that’s who I am and I’m really doing it for all these motives.” In that kind of situation you have an impasse. And it’s only in that kind of an impasses that really talking with someone, can help both parties see where they’re coming from, and perhaps there are other scripts around that they’re not aware of. Very frequently one or other spouse in the marriage really doesn’t recognize the importance of what may have gone on in their own childhood. They’ll have surface knowledge. They can know where they grew up and what their father and mother did, etc, etc. But unless they talk out what happened to them, in the presence of their spouse, now, they will not convey very important aspects of themselves. Why is that important?

I don’t mean it’s important because if we join up what I said last week, one way we have of getting along with each other is when we’re able to put ourselves in each other’s shoes. And the technical term for that is “cross identification.” You will be surprised to find out, and we’ve been surprised over many, many years, that couples can truly love each other and have lived together for many years and don’t really have a deep emotional understanding of what happened to each others spouse and how it affected them growing up. Once they have that knowledge, suddenly they’re able to put themselves in their spouse’s shoes, so to speak, and a lot of the surface tension is resolved. Why? Because they now understand it, if you understand something you don’t have to just constantly react to it.. Big difference. Understanding help us handle the situation, not constantly react to it.

How can anyone really make a decision, either to stay in a marriage, or to leave marriage, unless they know who they are living with, unless they have this kind of knowledge? People make this kind of decision all the time and frankly it escapes me. Our divorce rate is somewhere between 50%-60%. And I’m not against divorce per se, but there is something really, really off, that it’s such a high degree.

What I’m saying here is that it’s very possible to live with someone, to react to their actions, and to be convinced that one knows them at a deep level and yet not really to have an emotional understanding of them. Very frequently all the anger and frustration and hurt that can come from a decision, and the decision either to stay, or to divorce, is just accepted, rather than confronted – with some attempt to look into the issues. That is for each spouse to say something like …let me examine this situation a little bit, let me not be defensive, as if I suddenly find out that I’ve been defensive, I’ve lost my self worth.

Exactly wrong. If I find out that I’ve been living in denial for a coupe of years, I’m embarrassed. I might even be a little humiliated. But once I get through those surface feelings, I realize I now have much more freedom. I don’t have to defend my action as if I’ve lost self worth. And I think a lot of resistance to therapy comes from that. That people feel they’re going to compromise their self worth if they suddenly realize that they’ve been doing things not fully in their own awareness. Each couple in a marriage situation brings, as I’ve said, their memories of either their mother or father, to the present marriage table. They’re either modeling their own behavior and what they experienced, or in some cases, desperately trying to act totally different.

All of which, as I’ve said, is perfectly understandable. But when difficulties and strain become an everyday occurrence it’s worthwhile to think about the possibility that one might be imitating a certain aspect of ones’ parents’ behavior and simultaneously be perfectly oblivious to that fact. That may seem hard to accept, but I assure you it is more than an everyday occurrence, particularly if we had a parent who we had ambivalent relationships with. Many times the last thing we want to see in ourselves is oh my gosh, I’m just like my dad. Wow. I can’t believe that. You’re wrong. You’re wrong, I’m right. I’m not like my dad at all. And it takes a little while; hopefully it only takes a little while, before a person can say, “ I didn’t know that.”

I’m going to speak about this a little more next week. Some of the issues, well actually, I won’t get into it in too much detail right now…but some of the issues I want to talk about next week, is, what are some of the defenses that we’ve heard of and how can we handle these defenses in a way that makes us feel that we’re in control of our life? That we’re not humiliated by self-knowledge, so that we’ can be more open to life. You know, I started the show this morning saying, wasn’t it a beautiful day. Doesn’t it make you just love this blue, green planet that we live on?

We’ve got to love ourselves on a deep level and when we can do that and we know who we are, we can bring love to those around us. And frankly without sounding maudlin or simplistic about this, isn’t that really the goal of life? So, have a great week. This is Dr. Gerry in the psychotherapist corner. We’ll see you next week.

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Dr. Jerry: Good morning, this is Dr. Jerry, and I welcome you to, The Psychotherapist’s Corner 1490 WGCH. Last week I spoke about work, and how work helps us find our own competence. And yet how careful we have to be that if we lose our job for example, we don’t start feeling that we’ve lost all of our competence. In that instance, we want to avoid the thought that we have nothing to offer the world and consequently we have no way of supporting ourselves. In other words, we want to avoid a self-defeating attitude that can easily lead to depression. Understandable, but one has to try to avoid it.

Today I’m going to speak about a human quality that can lead us away from depression, and anxiety. I’m going to talk about a common activity, namely play, in a much wider context than we usually think about it. One of the essential aspects of enjoying our lives depends on our capacity to play. Incidentally, I just want to reiterate what I’ve mentioned in past shows. It was Sigmund Freud who spoke about one of the essential goals of life being able to love and to work, …to love and to work. The English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, I’ve mentioned him a few times added to that, the capacity to play. Within that context, that’s what I’ve been talking about these past few broadcasts. To love, and to work, and to play.

What do I mean by the capacity to play? Are we just talking about games? Not really, we’re talking about something that is particularly human. That is our capacity for sustained creative interaction with each other and with the world. I believe that play is creatively interacting with each other. Play is a special area in human experience. In it’s widest possible meaning, play has to do with something else we spoke about. Namely the way we humans create civilization. Civilization as you know, just doesn’t happen. We hopefully build it up, we homo sapiens insist on destroying it every couple of years, but we seem to recuperate and then continue to build it up.

Actually if we’re going to understand individual psychology, we have to understand it in such a wide cultural framework. No human being is self-created. We all function in a particular culture, we speak a particular language, and we live by certain beliefs. All of that is what we really mean by culture. That’s what creates civilization.

Play is another way we describing how we humans interact with each other. Not only on the game field, but in the fields of art and law, of education, of music and medicine, as well as and perhaps most importantly, in friendships and relationships. Now what do I mean by that? To answer that, I want to give my listeners a little quiz. What do you think is wrong with the following situation?

A young girl, let’s call her Margaret, any where between say five or six years old. Goes into her room and colors a picture. When she’s done, she excitedly comes out and gives it to her mother, and tells her mother, she made a picture for her. The mother, a person who’s dedicated to facts and rules, told Margaret…. no, she did had not made the picture; all she did was to color in some numbers on a page. Margaret, feeling dejected, returns to her room. If we put aside the mother’s bad manners, what else do you think is missing?

I’m actually sorry, on occasions, that this is not a call in show. since there are many possible answers to that question. But from my point of view, what is missing is an essentially element of play and also an essentially element of friendship and relationships. What the mother is missing is what we call a capacity for cross identification. Or to say the same thing in everyday language, the mother’s willingness as well as her ability to put herself, so to speak ,in her daughters shoes….to put herself in Margaret’s shoes.

The little girl wanted to give mommy a gift. She didn’t want a lesson about coloring by numbers, and original works of art. The mother in this story was functioning as just an outside observer. Not putting herself, so to speak in her daughter’s shoes. That’s a simple phrase obviously, and yet it has profound meaning. Before going further, again I keep returning. I hope I’m not burdening our listeners. I keep returning to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And as I mentioned last week, notice that when Snow White is brought in by the Seven Dwarfs and they tell her you can rest here, we’re going out to work. She makes dinner then she goes to sleep. She understands that when they come home, they’re going to be hungry. And so she’s anticipated their need and attempted to answer it. She put herself in their shoes. …this is a very simple sentence, but it is actually essential for civilization as well as a human accomplishment that we have to understand and develop within our-self.

What makes cooperation possible from simple doing certain tasks together, to friendships, to relationships, is the ability an in obviously varying degrees to put ourselves in another persons shoes. To anticipate how they might feel if such and such happens. That is to understand their hopes and dreams, because we have hopes and dreams. And our hopes and dreams are community experiences, there not just selfish possessions.

That the mother in our story was not able to show Margaret this level of sensitivity is just sad. Given a history like that, unfortunately with a mom like that, such a child might very likely grow up with less capacity to understand capacity to understand those around her, her friends or family. That is , it might very well be harder for her to feel another persons insides so to speak. Sense her emotional insides were not recognized when she was growing up…her actions were categorized, her emotions were not recognized.

It’s very important when we raise children we do both. Obviously we have to teach them right and wrong as we understand right and wrong. Obviously we have to teach them reality. One stops at a red light, one doesn’t go through it because you feel like doing it. Obviously there’s a difference between a Van Gogh, and coloring by numbers. That’s secondary though to responding to a child’s emotions. When we can respond to a child’s emotions genuinely it will be much easier for us to teach them all the other things. If we don’t respond to a child’s emotions, it’s going to be much more difficult to teach them all the other things.

Now obviously one incident does not in itself predict future experiences. This Margaret might grow up because of her innocence deprivation; she might actually grow up to be extremely sensitive, recognizing that she hadn’t been given a level of sensitivity. But we try to avoid those extremes by being good enough parents.

I’m assuming for the sake of our discussion that the mother’s approach would be repeated obviously over and over again in different circumstances as the child develops. For that young child, for Margaret, her picture was the most wonderful gift in the world that she could possibly give her mother. Her mother’s focusing on the gift and informing her child that it’s not an original work of art, is an example of what we call, obsessive compulsive thinking. With just a little touch of the queen’s narcissism thrown in.

Usually when we suffer from obsessive-compulsive thinking, which means that everything gets categorized and organized. Everything is put in its place and the person, usually unconsciously extraordinarily proud of themselves for being so well organized and being so efficient. That’s what I mean by the queen’s narcissism. But when obsessive-compulsive mechanisms take over, and they take over quite a bit, we really lose a sense of our emotional connection first of all to our self, then to those around us.

Our relationships become organized rather than spontaneous, rather than a capacity of play. Play as I am using the term here. Coming together with another person in a kind of intermediate place. A little bit like a place of make-believe. Obsessive-compulsive mechanisms really force excessive self-preoccupation. In this case the mother had to make sure she was literally correct, and teaching her daughter the difference between an original work of art and her work of art, she missed the forest for the trees, unfortunately.

When we go to a movie or a play, when we listen to music or see art, in all it’s forms, when we read literature we are in a certain sense really going into a special world. A world that is not just our own imagination and yet is not just outside us functioning like things around us, like traffic moving around us. It’s like a middle world, it’s a middle world for lack of a better term, a middle world of make believe where the play is real, the novel is real, the music transports us. That is a world where we actually experience a different type of reality. Margaret in this short episode was entering that special world of creativity. Mother unfortunately didn’t know how to foster it.

This is the deepest meaning of play. How societies organize themselves comes from such a special in-between place. That’s why actually many of the old Greek philosophers said that one thing that helps civilizations is expose people to good music, to good plays, to good literature, I don’t mean by that highbrow, I just mean that which is real, which touches human beings on the inside, it gets us out of our self and into another persons shoes. That is the best anecdote to narcissism.

I’ve spoken a great deal about narcissism in these show so far, because I really feel as I have mentioned before a virulent virus that affects all of us. Not maliciously, we don’t chose to be narcissistic maliciously but our self-preoccupation gets in the way of hearing another person. Of putting our self in their shoes, of understanding where they are coming from, because they may happen to differ from us on opinions about child raising, opinions on people living together on political opinions, religious opinions.

One has to be particularly careful, I think, in political and religious opinions that we try to stay with the facts and not with the kind of narcissistic fortress that we build around us, because it won’t really help us. The mother in our story didn’t go along with Margaret’s make believe. She didn’t put herself, as I mentioned, in her daughter’s shoes. She didn’t feel her daughter’s generosity or foster her budding creativity. That’s what I mean by obsessive compulsive. She missed all that, she simply named what was going on, but she missed the reality. She focused just on the object. There was no common ground between mother and daughter where they could meet, and in a sense play make believe together. You can imagine something like the following.

The mother saying, oh, what a beautiful painting you are going to be an absolutely great artist some day. Mommy loves your gift, thank you so much. Now it’s possible the girl, Margaret could grow up to be a great artist, not likely but quite possibly, so here mother is not giving her reality, she’s giving her an emotional gift of encouragement, of creativity and she’s saying I’m going to play make believe with you. But it’s not the make believe of frivolous nonsense it’s the make believe that builds up our sense of self worth.

Many times when you’re working with adults and they have very little self worth, this is not something that can be addressed with just formulas. And it certainly can’t be addressed with drugs. It has to be addressed by them going back an understanding perhaps how they were treated, not with any sense of judging their parents and pinning the tail on their parents. I don’t mean it that way at all. But going back and kind of digging and understanding that maybe mom or dad were just not able to respond to something inside. Maybe they were so concerned with putting food on the table, with raising one’s brothers and sisters, with surviving their own relationship that they were just not able to create that special in between place. And it’s that special in-between place where we learn how to feel real and how to have self worth. That’s what we need, self worth.

Only when we play make believe so to speak, only when we put ourselves in other people’s shoes, can we experience some sense of other people’s needs and not just our own. I’m not knocking our own needs obviously, but our own needs if you just step back a little bit, more times than not are communal, they’re not just selfish.

As we know now in this present economic nightmare that we’re living through, our economic needs are communal, somehow we forgot that, and people just took the money and ran, like Woody Allen’s old movie. Everyone thought the goal was take the money and run. Well when we take the money and run we all suffer and perhaps if we can come through this and learn that it’s not quite that simple that there’s a community aspect even to business. There’s a community aspect even to supporting our self, even to personal saving there’s a community aspect. Why we might improve our selves and our culture at the same time.

Play is our capacity to meet others on common ground, i.e., we’re all in this together. When we are free and not oppressed by mere functions of just doing things..
But let me take a break now, and I’ll be back in just a minute.

Dr. Jerry: Hi, this is Dr. Jerry talking to you again from The Psychotherapist’s Corner. Now more specifically we’re talking this morning about play. When we watch sports events, particularly if you’re involved with sports, when we watch sports events we can feel the victories, particularly if it’s a team that we support. And unfortunately we can feel the defeat as well, as if they are our own. The victories are our own, and the defeats are our own. Now why is that possible, how is that possible?

It’s possible because of what we’re talking about this morning. Cross identification, we’re on that field. We not only admire our hero’s competence and prowess and expertise, but somehow part of us is out there on the ice with them, on the field with them, that’s cross-identification. True we admire their skill as I just mentioned. But we put ourselves in their shoes as well.

Greedy people, are not just persons who may hoard things and not share, they are greedy because they make no effort to put themselves in another persons shoes. The normal meaning of greedy is someone who hoards everything from them self. The most dangerous thing we can hoard is our emotional sympathy, our capacity for empathy…our capacity for cross identification.

Spouses can be ungenerous with each other. Not just on how they may handle the household finances, but in withholding a willingness to understand their spouse’s emotional history, and therefore to have more generosity toward them. Putting yourself in your spouse’s shoes is, so to speak, one of the best ways to resolving difficulties. Every couple brings their personal history to their marriage. Every couple when they get married particularly when they have children, they are reliving part of their childhood with the children they have. They are reliving part of their childhood in the role that they play, man or woman. That is, how they experience their fathers or their mothers. That’s okay, as long as you know it. Unfortunately many couples can acknowledge that somewhat, but they really don’t understand that if a husband, for example, has had a very demanding mother, for example, a mother who for what ever reason was terribly preoccupied when the child when he was growing up and he had to do a lot of work around the house …maybe make supper now and then… do a lot of the cleaning, because mother was out doing a hundred different things. In that situation for the husband to be somewhat withholding from his wife is not necessarily mean. In that situation the husband is reliving an expectation from a woman that he hasn’t quite brought to consciousness yet. A wife can help a husband in that situation by understanding where he’s coming from. Putting herself in his shoes, and then trying to work it out from there.

When I’ve spoken of sweeping the chimney and understanding and cleaning out all memories, or confronting old patterns I had such situations in mind.. I was also focusing on the need to feel the sunlight of others in our life.

One of the basic goals of any psychotherapy should be to help us cross identify with others. It has to make cooperation pleasant, make friendship mutual and in this context make play as we’ve talked about it possible. One reason why raising adolescents is so difficult is that adolescents have little capacity to put themselves in their parent’s shoes. They’re just getting use to their own sort of speak. And another person’s shoes are alien and different and consequently cooperation to an adolescent seems like capitulation. Once a person is more stable in who they are, they can play at being another person, they can play at being another person…they can cross identify without feeling depleted, rather they feel expanded.

If we cannot love generously, if we cannot work competently, if we cannot play freely, then we have some wires crossed in the grid-work of our lives. And when that happens we’re usually not much help to our friends, families or the particular society we’re living in. Yet only by being a help to all those around us, I believe, will we be on our way to feeling real, and I’ve spoken about that repeatedly, to feeling alive, despite all the sorrow and setbacks that every one of us go through. Feeling alive doesn’t mean skipping down the yellow brick road happily ever after, that’s only in the movies.

What I’m saying here is that sensible happiness is not a private possession but an accomplishment within the small and large societies that we live in. I enjoy a sports victory with my fellow fans. I share my happiness over a child’s accomplishments with my spouse. I clap together with others in the theater, or at the end of a good speech. Because of this basic capacity we have which I have called cross identification. Cross identification again doesn’t mean I relinquish my sense of self. I’m not talking about that. I’m not saying I’m less important than someone else.

In the example I mentioned before a wife or a husband, has to try to understand where their spouse is coming from. That is not saying that the wife or husband is less important. It means I won’t understand their communications unless I know the context. Unless I, in a sense, talk from their place. I listen to them, and I’m also talking from their place. I grasp that, oh, you know the reason why he’s so reluctant to help me with the household cleaning is because my poor husband had to do the house cleaning between 12 and 16 because his mother forgot to do it, or whatever. So let me not regard that as just being mean to me or not being helpful to me. Let me understand that maybe I can talk to him about that and maybe we can bring it out into the sunlight.

Out of the chimney, into the sunlight. That’s what we’re doing in therapy. Out of the chimney, out of the soot, soot that is dangerous for us. That can build up and destroy the house, into the sunlight of awareness.

Awareness helps a great deal. I clap together with others in the theater, at the end of a good speech. Because of this basic capacity we have which I’ve called cross identification. If you think about it also, every atom in our body is connected with every other atom in the universe. That is just remarkable, I get dizzy when I think of that. Every atom in our body is connected with every other atom in the universe. That’s what we mean by cross identification….that we are ultimately connected.. Quantum physics says that we all live as if we’re all separate little systems. Ourselves are separate systems, our countries, and our societies are all separate little systems, and out planet is a separate system, etc., etc. The reality is the opposite, there is only one system, and that is the cosmos. And everything is connected with everything else. Even our rather insignificant planet given the extent of the universe, our planet is very insignificant, and therefore we should understand ourselves and correct the queen’s narcissism with that awareness. If the planet is insignificant, we can think about our own personal importance.

Well if we can bring that awareness down to our personal lives, we will have accomplished a great deal. We, as I have said before, we will not fell depleted, I am convinced, we will feel expanded.

Thank you for listening this morning, this is Dr. Jerry, The Psychotherapist’s Corner, 1490 WGCH, talk to you next week.

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Dr. Jerry: Good morning. This Dr. Jerry at the psychotherapist corner, 1490 AM on your dial, WGCH.

As I’ve said before, the psychotherapist corner is little place in your mind, where you can just think about who you are as well as how you want to live. Actually, as we know, thinking, when we’re able to think like that is one best ways of being happy and satisfied in life.

This morning, I’d like to talk about work; why we work, should if work is work just a burden, or, is work something that can help fulfill as human beings.

Before I get to that, let me summarize, a little bit, from last week. We spoke, briefly, about love, in terms of our human need to feel love and give to love. As I mentioned, while a romantic occupation is part of love, I spoke of it more in terms of just willing something good to another person, taking care of, being considerate of, even being polite to a person, I believe, are small signs of love.

As I mentioned this morning, I want to talk, a little about work…work, love, and play, are integral to understanding ourselves.

What does work means to us? Many people, as we know, define themselves by what they do, for better or worse. Understanding how work defines us, also, can very helpful. We have to ask ourselves, do we work just to produce things, just to get things done. I think if that’s our understanding of work, ultimately, we’re doomed to extinction. After all, computers and drones will, eventually, do a lot thing’s that have to be done. Therefore, the notion that we work, merely, to get things done, I think, is pretty limited.

We have to ask; does work serve human function besides just a necessary function? I think, in order to answer that, I want to step back a little bit, be a little bit academic, here, this morning, for a few minutes, so that we can understand how work functions in our human societies.

As you know, man is really a creature, man and woman, excuse me, we are really creatures that are pulled in many different directions. We are creatures who experience a lot of conflict, pleasures, or work. We have impulses towards love, impulses towards destruction, self-reference, and responding to other people. This is the human condition and it’s important that we know that and we don’t whitewash it.

Pathology is not evident by the fact that we are pulled in many different directions. Pathology is evident by the fact that we don’t know that. It’s very important that we know that we are creatures in conflict. Right back to 3000 years B.C., in the deserts of Northern Africa, Zoroastrianism spoke about light and darkness. All of the great religions and philosophies of the world, have reiterated those notions of good and bad, reality and pleasure, and self and other.

In my story, in the first few sessions of our discussion on these programs, I spoke about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The queen, in a very simple way, represents just doing things for yourself, whereas, Snow White, as some of you recall the story, not only when the little dwarfs find her and they leave her in the little cottage in order to go off to work, actually, what Snow White does, before she goes to sleep, she is very tired since she was abandoned in the forest, she makes soup for them and then she goes to sleep. Isn’t that interesting, she does something for somebody else and then she goes to sleep.

We have to ask ourselves, does work serve a function besides putting bread on the table? I’m not knocking putting bread on the table; we all have to do that. I think it does serve a function and, actually, many of the philosophers, though out the ages, think that. More up to date, Freud and I’ve studied a great deal of Freud, Freud wrote a little book and he called it, “Civilization and Its Discontents”. What was he saying with civilization and it’s discontents? He’s saying, in a sense, now Freud was a little bit pessimistic, a European pessimistic, a little bit, but he was saying that human beings have to renounce many immediate gratifications. That is, they have to not always give into their immediate pleasure, if they are going to build a civilization.

Frankly, the best little story, not even a story, a little image that I have that represents that, someone told me many years ago when I, I think I was in class and someone said well, “Give me an example of what being civilized is,” and they said, “Well, here’s an example of civilization. You’re driving and it’s 12:00 at night and you’re in Vermont and you come to a red light and there is no one and you wait until the light turns green.” You don’t give in to impulses to go through, you wait. So, controlling our impulses is an essential part of being able to work.

What does it mean, just controlling our impulses? In the sense, why should we control our impulses? What do we do with that energy? I think, one of the things we have to do with that energy and one of the functions of work is to develop competence and skill; competence, personal skill, and creativity. That energy that we use that doesn’t immediately find expression in what we want to do at that moment because we want to do it, that energy can be directed to developing our competence and our skill. Competence and skill has it’s own reward. That’s what I meant by something more than just putting bread on the table.

Skill leads to creativity. We human beings feel better when we do something creative. Creative doesn’t have to be a great work of art or a great musical composition. Creative can be, frankly, hopefully, how we raise our children, how we handle the garden, do we take care of our pets and sensitivity, with some sense of imagination. All of that is creativity. When work goes well, it combines the necessity to support us with the pleasure of competence.

Let’s stay, a little bit more, with competence. I believe, in one of our past programs, I quoted that wonderful Greek expression, an ancient Greek proverb, “Happiness is the full exercise of personal competence.” “Happiness is the full exercise of personal competence.” I don’t mean by happiness that we reach a stage and we’re always happy. That’s simplistic, foolish, and unrealistic. We’re not made to always be happy nor should we think that it’s a goal life. We should be sensibly happy. Sometimes great sad things happen to us, in which case, we should be sensibly sad. “Happiness is the full exercise of personal competence,” meaning, when we’re able to express and possess skills, whatever they are, we feel more real, we feel more alive.

Again, one of the quotes that I’ve, if you recall, for those of you who have been to listen to the programs, the wonderful English pediatrician psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, said, “Oh, God, when I die, may I be alive.” What was he talking about? He was talking about experiencing the full extent of his competence, the full extent of his creativity.

Learning to do things well, physically, mentally, or both, is rewarding for us human beings. Work, as I mentioned, while serving our individuals needs, ties us to each other in communities. It’s one of the glues, work is the glue, not just of getting things done, it’s the glue that ties together as a community. We are group creatures. Individually, in our history, if we went out to slay a big mammal, we’re probably lost. It’s only when there’s four, five, six, or seven who get their spears together and did it as group were they able to survive. That’s the nature of who we are and that group experience is as integral today, and perhaps, even more so, than it was a million years ago.

What we recognize today is that if we want to experience personal happiness, we have to get to a place where work is experienced not just as a necessity but in some ways, an opportunity as well. It’s an opportunity to see us as increasing personal competence. When that doesn’t happen, when we don’t experience that, when just doing something, when we’re have a drone type of job, unfortunately, we feel frustrated and angry. If we have an superior or a boss, who doesn’t let us develop personal skills, frustrations and anger very easily follow. Actually, nothing undoes a sense of competence as quickly as a feeling of depression does.

I want to give you an example, I was speaking with a friend of mine, he worked for many years with a very famous national bank and he was in the investment area and when this very known national bank absorbed a stock company, recently, why, after many years of service, they let this fellow go, which was rather shocking and upsetting to him. He’s a man with four children in probably his late 40′s.

Well, of course, it took about a week or two to overcome the shock because he had been, certainly, according to his judgment, a very good worker, and it’s just that the bank went in a totally different direction. Luckily enough for him, he was able to find another job and when I asked about him about it, you know what he said to me was, “You know, I, actually, am going to enjoy this new job. I have fewer clients. I can service them better. I am going to feel more real.” I am going to be able to experience my competence, my words, or more to the effect. I think it was because he had that basic feeling that he had developed competence, that he didn’t just collapse into depression, anger, and frustration at being fired, at being given a pink slip.

As we know, today, lots of people are being given pink slips and what we have to be careful of , particularly, in many cases, is to recognize that this frequently happens through fault of their own, it isn’t that they did a bad job, that their being let go. What we have to be particularly careful of is falling into a sense of depression and frustration. Nothing clouds one sense of personal competence as much as depression. A person begins to feel worthless, unappreciated, and even sometimes guilty. Not withstanding the fact that an employer has been, specifically, aggressive towards or indifferent to us. When we get depressed, we start to feel guilty, as if it’s our own fault.

Depression can be seen not only in the person who sits alone and does not want to do anything but also in the husband or wife who argues over every issue, is irritable with themselves and their family. It’s understandable if one is let go of a job all of the sudden and yet, it’s a red flag. Depression can also show itself when a person is so anxious about his or her future, as we’ve spoken about before, that they are not able to focus, they have constant upset stomachs, and they suffer little sleep at night. Anxiety or depression has taken over the field and legitimate, mobilizing fear, which helps us focus, is gone.

My friend was able, fortunate for him, to mobilize his fear and recognize he couldn’t give into depression; he had four children to support. He knew that he knew what he was doing. That is the point I want to make. It is very important we hold onto that inner experience that we know what we’re doing. Whether the world recognizes or not, we want the world to recognize but it doesn’t have to depend on the world. If we can hold onto competence, we can’t be fired from ourselves and that’s crucial to remember.

As I said, my friend had four children, he simply could afford to let anxiety and depression cloud out his need to focus his energies and get another position. He had to think of his family and forget any personal insult after so many years of good service. He was able, with the help of some friends, to do that. That’s why I think I’ve started off and keep referring, frequently, to the fairytale of the queen and Snow White.

The queen’s narcissism really is a kind of endemic virus; lately we have been made aware of the swine flu. There are psychological flu’s that go around. One of the dangerous psychological flu’s we all can get is something like the queen narcissism. We can wind up getting so self-preoccupied, we, literally, forget to relate to other people. We relate to them only in terms of how they serve us. That kind of virus we have to be very careful of. It’s dangerous because, a lot of times, we don’t know we have it but when we suddenly feel isolated and not connected to people.

When we no longer feel real and that life’s terrifically enjoyable for it’s own sake, it should raise some suspicion that maybe we have to think about the fact that we live in community and that we owe the community and ourselves a sense of competence and a sense of skill and out of that competence and skill, we can start to experience feeling creative, that the world doesn’t have us, so to speak, we have the world. We are able to relate to the world in a way that fulfills the world and fulfills us at the same time. Isn’t that really what creativity is? We fulfill the world in some little way and we fulfill ourselves.

I’m going to take a break for just a minute and we’ll be back in just a second.

Dr. Jerry: Welcome back to the Psychotherapist’s Corner, 1490 on your dial, WGCH and this Dr. Jerry talking to you.

We’re talking this morning about work and how works serves us as human beings. We’re talking about the opposite of work, the opposite of experiencing our competence, the opposite of experiencing creativity, namely depression and frustration. I’m focusing on depression and frustration because their understandable reactions when we’re fired, when we suddenly have a reversal of fortunes. Of course, one is prone towards depression and frustration, there is nothing wrong with that in it self, we have just have to be aware of it.

When I spoke before, the fact that we are conflict creatures, that we’re pulled in so many ways; we’re pulled toward love, we pulled towards hate, we’ll pulled towards altruism, we’ll towards selfish, towards giving and caring for some else, and for just caring for our self, that’s part of our human situation. We don’t have to be ashamed of it; we just have to know it. There’s a big difference between being ashamed of it, denying, or just knowing quietly. When we know it, we have a handle on it. When we don’t know, it has a handle on us.

Depression, as I’ve spoken about before, is using our energies up in wasteful ways. It’s like leaving a cellphone charger plugged in even when we’re not connected or leaving the lights on upstairs and then goes out all day working. Depression is most frequently anger and frustration that have gotten locked up inside of us. Like soot in the chimney, it’s need to cleaned out. As you remember, I’ve often spoken about the talking cure, as chimney sweeping. What we cannot see or feel, unless we look up the chimney, can, never the less, do a lot of damage. If we accumulate a lot feelings that we are not aware of, if we accumulate a lot of anger, collect a lot of frustrations, very human, very human, but if we’re not aware of them, they can collect in the chimney of our minds and then start to do some damage.

If irritability, anger, frustration at work or at home, all though stimulated by current situations, usually have deep, unseen roots and, obviously, can have very damaging consequences in our life. The reason I mention this, particularly in this rather difficult financial times that we’re all going through right now, is that if a parent, mother, or father is experiencing this, I will just let you know that children, in particular, frequently think, that they are fault if mom or dad is irritable or angry. I’m not suggesting a Pollyanna solution to life difficulties but I am suggesting, and that’s why I think I’ve called the show The Psychotherapist’s Corner, that all of us need a little place in our minds were we can sort things our and understand what the situation is, so that we don’t just simply react on impulse to what life happens to give us.

Actually, now, if you think about it, our lives, what I’ve been saying throughout all these programs, our lives should be a work in progress. We have a level of competence and skill and creativity to how we live our life. That’s what I mean when I’ve spoken about how do we become real in life, that’s really what I’ve been trying to get at. Real doesn’t just mean successful, there’s nothing wrong with being successful, but in itself, it guarantees nothing. If we don’t experience a sense of personal competence and personal creativity, success becomes just a burden because then we spend the rest of our life just being successful period and making sure we stay successful.

Finding out what it means to be alive. Each of us, obviously and clearly, is unique. We have to find our own personal way and very few formulas will help us. Now, when we live in a complex society, as we do, we are herded one way or another but certainly with our children, we have to give them a certain freedom to know that they don’t have to imitate us. They have to find their personal competence. They have to find their skill. They have to find how work fits in and makes them not only put bread on the table, obviously, but also feel more that they have fulfilled what they wanted to do in life. Incidentally, if we’re able to do that, maybe 40% or 50%, we achieved a great deal. Our dreams, frequently, outreach our capacities and the human situation.

To be able to work experiencing our particular competence is, also, I think a form of play. Next week, I want to speak a little bit more about play. Remember the definition I gave you last week about play; play is what we do when we’re free. Aristotle said that, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, play is what we when are free. What does that mean? Does that mean we’re not in prison? Well, all too frequently we can be in prison in our minds. We’re not able to experiment. We have to be able to try different things; try different paintings; to try different recipes, it doesn’t make any difference. Creativity transcends, go from one to the other.

Competence, personal skill, is ultimately, if you think about it, the playground for the expression of our freedom, that’s really the role of competence. It’s a playground. I don’t mean the playground of just games, it’s playground where we can feel effective, where we can feel free because we know what we able to do and we know what we’re able not to do. One of the most important inheritances we can give our children is an opportunity to develop their individual competence, easier said then done but necessary, nevertheless. Without such ability, the idea we are creating ourselves as we go through life becomes meaningless. Creating ourselves becomes just a nice little Sunday morning phrase, in a sense. We have to create ourselves and we have to understand why we have to create ourselves. When we start focusing on that a little bit, we suddenly appreciate our life on a deeper life.

Now, Eric Erikson, I’ve spoke about Eric Erikson before, Erik Erikson is a psychoanalyst. He wrote a number of books, two of them in particular, if you folks remember it, “Childhood and Society” and “Identity in the Life Cycle.” He’s written about the different stages of life and in future programs, I hope to talk you about that. For now, we can say, work is experienced personal levels at different stages in our life. The different periods or stages in life offer us different strengths. When we call on those strengths, we are less likely to locked inside ourselves and more available to the world.

Believe it or not, when we’re available to the world, we are paradoxically more available to our selves. Just think about that. When we’re available to the world, we’re more available to our self. That is we’re able to master just a little portion of this wonderful world we live in. Mastering a little portion of the world, no matter how seemingly small, is what we have been talking about this morning, finding and developing personal competence. Mastering a little portion of the world and that’s okay.

If there are too many roadblocks, if we have lost any sense of the personal, if work is just a burden and not in anyway an opportunity, then I suggest some chimney sweeping is in order. Sometimes, it is a burden but if it’s just a burden then chimney sweeping is in order. Think about the talking cure. It can help us find the sunlight. That’s really one of the functions. When we clean out the chimney, the sunlight will come in a little more. Not only we eliminate fires in the house but also we have a better flow of the energies from the fire out. This is what we want in our lives. We want a flow of energy. We don’t energy locked up.

A lot of times, I’m simplifying it a little but pathology, a rather serious word, but pathology is locking up the energies inside of our self. We’re not designed that way. We’re designed to be responsive and interactive. When we’re not responsive and interactive, when we’re sitting alone in the room, either literally or figuratively, in our heads sitting alone, we’ve locked up something inside and depriving ourselves of contact. We do not survive that way; we’re not that kind of creature. We must have contact.

I hope some of the thoughts we said this morning is a benefit to you, particularly, in terms of appreciating that work, even in trying financial times, even though it may preoccupy us in terms of guarantying a certain level of income, work has to be experienced, should be experienced, and can be experienced as fulfilling us as human beings. As finding out who we are and in the process of finding out that we can work with another person.

You can work alone and still work with another person. We always are having a dialog in our head. With the services that we perform, even if we happen to working alone, we have, in fact a community function. That’s crucial to understand because it then gives us experience of connecting with each other. It’s connecting with each other that help us feel real. It’s connecting with each other that lessen the pain of, frequently; the isolating memories of many of us bring from our childhood to our adulthood.

The isolation serious setbacks bring. As you know, many the 60′s, the song of the Beatles, “I can by with a little from my friends.” It’s, actually, a very profound philosophy, terrific song but also profound philosophy. We can get by with a little help from our friends. What is the function of the talking cure, to come back to what psychotherapy is? It’s not to tell people what to do. It’s not to give them formulas. It’s not to give them dictates. It’s really to help them find the world again so they can by with a little help from their friends.

I hope, this morning, this has been helpful. Next week, I want to talk in more detail about play because I really believe, if we can just hold these three words in our head, for the time being; love, work, and play, we’ll have a better sense of where we are and who we are.

I want to thank you, again, for the listening to The Psychotherapist Corner on 1490 AM, WGCH. This is Dr. Jerry and if I can be of any help to you, please don’t hesitate to call. If you have any suggestion of what you’d like me talk about, again, please don’t hesitate to call. Have a good day.