I was always drawn to kaleidoscopes growing up…being able to look through and see colorful patterns shifting and changing could mesmerize me at a moment’s notice. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m drawn to symbols and metaphors in my own life. I use them to ground myself and articulate meaning. In fact, within arm’s reach on my desk at home sits a small wooden bowl that holds various treasures I’ve collected over the years…there’s a marble doorknob from my immigrant ancestor’s home, a ginkgo leaf from a recent trip, stones from a well in Ireland…a variety of valued items that speak to me in a way words just can’t.  

As my own path started shifting back in 2018 when I began my coaching work in a corporate setting, I often used the symbol of a prism to think about my work. As a person who innately appreciates the uniqueness of people, I was interested in the different sides and perspectives clients offered. I thought about our work exploring like a prism, using multiple facets to refract light and produce an array of beautiful colors. Uncovering potential was such a highlight of this work together. 

My time here at PCS has offered me a new perspective on my work. I have grown to appreciate the symbol of a mirror in our work here. At its most basic, a mirror reflects back a single image. And we say a lot in how we think about and describe that reflection when we look at ourselves in a mirror, don’t we? I’ve seen the power of mirror work here and learned how those reflections can deepen our own sense of identity. And yet the symbol of the mirror is useful too as a tool. Our role as therapists, in effect, is to offer a second mirror for our clients in the questions we ask and things we notice. As we work together, we can use that mirror to offer different angles, unlocking perspectives and reflections kept hidden or previously unexplored. And I’m drawn to how these new reflections of self change the stories we tell ourselves about our past, our present, and our future. So next time you stop at a mirror to check for a hair out of place, smile and take a moment to honor the beauty and uniqueness of you, appreciating the depth of the image you see reflected back.

At any given moment in time, your senses are bombarded with a vast amount of data. To effectively filter and prioritize what you pay attention to – or orient toward – you must, therefore, select some environmental cues to the exclusion of others. This process is correlated with your internal state, and thus, an important aspect of self-regulation and the maintenance of mental health. 

All mammals, including humans, have a reflexive instinct to orient toward novel stimuli so that safety can be quickly determined: a loud noise, the sudden presence of a stranger, odd smells, physical pain, or an unexpected touch can all but demand instantaneous and focused attention. Once safety has been assessed and confirmed, this involuntary orienting reflex yields more readily to conscious choice, potentiating greater agency. Over the course of your life experiences, the polarity between the orienting instinct versus the orienting response intersect to create a range of habitual patterns that subconsciously drive how you pay attention. 

To better understand the relationship between your internal state and your orientation, try the following experiential exercise: 

1. Figuratively step into your observing mind and begin looking at your immediate surroundings through that mindful lens. 
2. Now, pick something in your environment that elicits a pleasant internal state. Perhaps a sunset, your beloved pet, a soft blanket, or the smell of a good meal. Linger there for as long as you reasonably can. 
3. When you are ready, shift your focus. This time, orient toward something that is mildly unpleasant. Perhaps your to-do list, traffic, a stain on the carpet, or a smelly trash can. Linger there for as long as you reasonably can. 
4. Lastly, return your focus back to something pleasant and note the impact on your internal state. 
5. Come back to your thinking/analyzing mind and reflect on your experience. 
6. For the remainder of the day, take note of the relationship between your internal state and what you are oriented to, jotting down any personally meaningful insights along the way. 

Studying your own habitual orienting patterns is a valuable skill for improving your overall well-being and fostering a more enjoyable existence. This is because your orienting habits, like most other conditioned patterns of behavior, are often directly related to past trauma or attachment deficits. Habits do not easily update by their own accord, especially if they are connected to our survival instincts. It is not uncommon, for example, to predominantly orient to potential threats while driving in the wake of an automotive accident. If, however, sufficient time has passed and these orienting patterns remain, hypervigilance, stress, and fear may also become coupled with the act of driving, making the experience aversive, even when conditions are favorable for safe and comfortable travel. In essence, learned coping strategies that originated from past trauma, or relationship wounds, can keep you oriented to reminders of the past even when circumstances have changed. 

An important part of healing, therefore, involves becoming curious about, and mindfully aware of, how you pay attention. It is one of the first steps you can take toward gaining a greater sense of competence, empowerment, and life satisfaction after adversity. Then you can choose, with intention and purpose, to change your orienting habits toward what feels “good” or “safe,” instead of what feels “bad” or “unsafe.” This will allow for different responses and meanings to emerge, while cultivating new and updated patterns, thus paving the way for a shift in how you experience the world around you.

References:

Ogden, P., Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for trauma and attachment. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

I have typically not embraced the New Year as a significant transition point. I enjoy the year in review summaries to reminisce on the prior year events but not found the motivation or purpose in setting goals for the year. Goal setting has always been an ongoing process for me, an ongoing evolution of direction. While friends who create vision boards or thoughtfully create goals for the year have always been impressive to me, it has never inspired me to do so, it just never fit.

While this past year has not generated the motivation to set goals for 2025, it did gain my attention. There have been significant losses, medical issues, and no small amount of anxiety producing situations. As a result, 2024 is one I am looking forward to putting behind me. Yet, here I sit into the first few weeks of January feeling some of the same feelings of last year – overwhelm and discouragement. Perhaps my dismissal of punctuating the New Year is not serving me well, or this is a reminder the idea of simply leaving the past behind is not reasonable.

Although I would dearly love to leave the year behind and move into a glorious new year, the one we call 2025, the first two weeks are not promising indicators. I decided to try something different this year, the art of reflection. For some of you who already practice this skill, congratulations. Reflecting on my losses, I realize I have made new friends and deepened existing friendships. Medical crises have led me to slow and focus on the needs of those I most love. The inability to resolve the anxiety provided an invitation to greater embrace the concept of powerlessness. For someone who is accustomed to accomplishing what he sets his mind to, the latter has proven most helpful in calming my soul.

You may ask how reflection impacts my overwhelm and discouragement? Well, on one hand it certainly has not absolved me of those feelings. On the other hand, I notice the learning over this past year helps me engage life with more patience and understanding, greater self-compassion and compassion for others, and equally important a sense of hope in acknowledging even the most difficult circumstances offer profound opportunity for personal growth and connecting with those around us.

A new year is something that begins with creating resolutions, goals for the future, and brings a renewed sense of energy and motivation. One consistency through each new year that I have observed, is the idea on everyone’s mind: “What can change look like for me this year?”. Desired change is something that feels exciting and hopeful. These goals are often set with the best intentions and the aspirations to be even greater than you were last year. Unexpected change often creates a different outcome, mentally, behaviorally, and emotionally. When change is unexpected it tends to create stress, overwhelm, pressure, and hardship. The ways in which we handle that unexpected change is essential to developing a stronger sense of well-being.

At the start of 2024, I had expectations and a set plan for what my year would have looked like. As I moved through the year, there were many unexpected changes that brought adversity, grief, challenge, and created a different outcome than what I had expected. The more shifts that occurred throughout my year, the more I found myself judging where I was versus where I had wanted to be. I became caught up with how my reality was so different from my expectations. I found myself focusing on my “shortcomings”, instead of on all of the great things that I had learned about myself, and appreciating the resilience it took to get through the pain that this past year brought me.

When a person has focused so much on the expectations they’ve set for them self, there is unnecessary pressure put on the goal or outcome they had in mind. There is a tendency, as humans, to focus on what wasn’t achieved, instead of acknowledging the strength that it took to overcome the barriers that got in the way of achieving the set goal.

The biggest lesson I learned in 2024 is: what will be, will be. Change is not always expected or hoped for, but it is something that happens in life. The most important reminder that we can give ourselves is that change can bring incredible knowledge about how resilient we are, what our capabilities can be, and allows us to develop a deeper understanding of Self. I now know, I am able to embrace all of the unexpected change that the New Year may bring, and can understand the ways in which to acknowledge my strength, instead of focusing on what may not have been achieved.

If you are reading this, it’s highly likely that you have heard of the idea of “New Years Resolutions” and have also heard the highly optimistic phrase “New Year, New Me.” I have begun to ponder why there’s such a busyness and bustle about these ideas so much so that gym memberships flourish at the start of every year. I wonder what it would be like to face the New Year with the same you and no grand new resolutions and simply a resolve to be.

I’ve noticed that what we all need most is not usually another goal, self-help book, or dramatic new self-care routine plan. Maybe it would be to our benefit if we chose to simply be. That is not to say there are no redeeming qualities in these things or ideas but in a world so saturated with messaging about who, what, and how we should be in 5 easy steps right at our fingertips 24/7 we are so often driven to overwhelm, burnout, anxiety, and this nagging feeling that we are not enough. These things are largely unhelpful and rarely bring any meaningful change we actually want in our lives.

The real challenge and gift to ourselves lies in simply being who we are. This is hard because we’re used to being always occupied with something. Often with the unconscious plan to avoid seeing ourselves because busyness has taken up all the space. We must find a way to get comfortable with what is happening inside our heads, hearts, and bodies. If we are not taking the time to do these things and be with ourselves, how can we possibly know what we need? How can we set resolutions or declare a “new me” if we do not know what is happening within us? The truth is we cannot.

My proposal is to set these things aside and instead this next year commit to being. I have a hunch that what will emerge is the same you. My hope is that there will be a shift to more awareness, compassion, and grace for yourself. A comfort developed with what is happening inside your head, heart, and body. Maybe even a realization that you probably do not need a “new” you because perhaps in doing so you find you become more intentional about who you choose to be.

I have been thinking a lot lately about stress and pressure and how all encompassing it can be. I see it everyday as a student and as an intern at PCS. The external pressures that come from every angle externally. The societal, familial and peer pressures to live up to a certain standard, to be something that was modeled to you either implicitly or explicitly. All of these pressures can have a compounding effect, each one adding to the weight of the feeling of not being enough.

The result of these compounding pressures is a sort of Sisyphean masochism wherein we are perpetually striving to be THAT much better in the eyes of others. If we just change one more thing about ourselves in order to fit the mold we believe others want us to fit, only then we will be complete. Satisfied because we have reached this imaginary template of what we believe others think we ought to be. The result of this chase is a perpetual treadmill of futile self-actualization, with internal psychological conflict being the unfortunate by-product.

The issue here is not the motivation itself. Change is inevitable. Change is what drives us forward and what makes life worth experiencing. Change is something worth striving for in the name of growth in every sense of the word. The problem is with the underlying motivation to change. It takes careful self-inspection and reflection on the forces which have influenced you throughout your life to recognize where your motivation for change truly lies. Whether those be your parents, siblings, peers, teachers, bosses, etc. Pay attention to the messages you have received throughout your life and ask the question: “Is this my standard or someone else’s?”

I have come to the realization that for most of my life has been marred by the anxiety of reaching a certain standard to please others. As I attempt to shed that burden there is an undeniable component that must be fulfilled as a duty to yourself within this process. Grace. Grace and kindness toward yourself is paramount. Once you can begin to have empathy for yourself, the weight of external pressures can begin to lift. I have noticed once I presented this thought to myself, life has begun transitioning from an arduous journey, to just a journey. A journey you deserve to experience fully and completely. You owe it to yourself.

Humans are herd animals. That is, we are hardwired for connection and togetherness. We depend on being connected to physically survive, and we absolutely need it in order to thrive psychologically, physiologically, emotionally, and socially.

So what is connection? It comes from the Latin word connectere which means to “fasten together” or “bind together.” As a verb, connection means “to bring together or into contact so that a real or notional link is established.”

In the absence of real connection, we quite literally risk death. Nowhere else has this been illustrated so clearly as in King Frederick II’s 13th-century experiment, where babies were fed, clothed, and changed by nurses, but otherwise not allowed to be touched or spoken to. The experiment, which had intended to discover what language children would learn to speak if never spoken to, ended prematurely because no babies survived long enough to develop language skills.

What the Frederick experiment illuminates is the absolutely essential nature of human connection. It is not enough to be physical fed, clean, warm, and kept safe from predators. We must also be held and heard. As herd animals—or maybe it ought to be heard animals—we are hardwired for meaningful connection. We need it, and in a number of ways, if we are to truly flourish in life.

Connection to Others… begins when our life begins. Healthy connection tends to look and feel like closeness, support, compassion, empathy, caring, curiosity, joy, nurturance, safety, co-regulation, attunement, peace, honesty, understanding, acceptance, commitment, collaboration, communication, and love.

While healthy connection breeds wellness, and even healing, unhealthy connection breeds distress, and even disease. As the African Proverb goes, “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it to feel its warmth.” We have a vital need to belong. To be with. So we instinctively resort to utilizing whatever means we have available to ensure our basic need for connection is met.

Connection to Self… is born out of healthy connection with others. In healthy families, attuned parents act as mirrors for their children, helping them to gradually see, know, and grow into more of who they genuinely are. Much like a tree grows deeper and more rooted as it expands upward and outward, so too does a child who is well-anchored in their relationships with both self and others.

In less healthy families, misattuned parents may overlook or override their child’s needs, preferences, and traits, which leads to a disconnect between who the child actually is and who the child thinks they need to be in order to feel loved, accepted, and safe. This chasm between who a person actually is and how they have learned to present themselves is not only a source of great inner conflict but of deep psychic pain. And it is the pain of this misalignment that often drives people—consciously or not—into therapy.

Because it hurts to be anything other than who we truly are. To be anything other than connected to one’s innermost essence. Just like we need real connection with others to both survive and thrive, we need authentic connection with our own selves to prosper. In its absence, we not only deteriorate, but sometimes we even die (possibly by suicide).

Connection to Something Greater… arises through any pursuit, cause, or idea that infuses life with meaning and purpose. While spiritual and religious traditions are one route for accessing Something Greater, many people make equally meaningful contact with Something Greater via purely secular pursuits. It might be traversing through nature, volunteering with animals, raising kind children, being a servant leader, having a well-defined “Why,” or engaging in human rights advocacy that fosters a feeling of being connected to something beyond one’s own self and/or lifespan. Whatever it is, it’s a necessary domain of connection because we are hardwired herd creatures… who also happen to have fancy frontal lobes. So while we need to belong to someone, we also need to belong to something.

Connection to the present moment… is perhaps the straightest path to deeper, more rewarding connection to ourselves, others, and Something Greater. To be immersed in the moment that is actually happening is to be in the center of the eye of the storm of life. It is how we find stillness amidst chaos. It is where we come back home to ourselves. It is when we hear the subtle voice of our own inner wisdom speaking to us. It is where we plug our heart fully into the heart of another. And it is how we find awe and wonder in what stretches infinitely beyond ourselves and our finite time on earth.

The season is changing, and coming with it is the shift into the holidays. While the holiday season can be wonderful, there are often many stressors. Some people struggle around their families. For others, the holidays are a painful reminder of a difficult time. If you struggle to manage your stress and obligations, here are some tips.

Keep up With Self-care

You’ve heard it before, but it’s worth the reminder because keeping up with our self-care is critical to maintaining our mental health when we’re stressed. Not getting exercise, not sleeping enough, and consistently eating poorly will impact our mental health. One strategy for keeping a routine going is to ensure we don’t miss more than one day. The more days missed, the harder it is to get the routine going again.

Get Good at Saying No

It is easy to become overscheduled, thinking we must say yes to every invitation. The reality is that saying yes to everything can be detrimental to our well-being. It’s okay to say no to or limit time at events that will have a negative mental health impact.

Talk With Your Therapist

There is no substitute for being proactive. You know yourself best and talking over some strategies with your therapist will help you stay on track. If you regularly see a therapist, try not to skip your regular sessions.

Find New Traditions

Traditions are a great way to honor our past or create a new way of moving forward. Sometimes, we must let go of old traditions that no longer serve us and create new traditions that keep us happier and healthier. If a loved one was lost around the holidays or this was a special time for them, why not create a new tradition in their honor? The time can remain special by always remembering that person in a way that celebrates their uniqueness. Traditions from our parents or other family members may no longer be healthy for us to maintain. If that’s the case, find something new that works for you.

Don’t Be Afraid to Walk Away

During the holidays, we often find ourselves with people who we might not otherwise choose to be around. Not everyone deserves your attention. Walk away from people who put you down, make you feel unsafe, or are otherwise unhealthy for you to be around. Just because someone is a family member does not give them the right to treat you poorly. This doesn’t mean walking away from every upsetting conversation but having appropriate boundaries around how we’re treated.

Keep Kindness First

You may encounter many people this winter who are suffering for one reason or another. It may be a rude person in the grocery store or a relative at a family gathering. Either way, you have an opportunity to respond with kindness, and if appropriate, curiosity. Rather than hanging on to someone’s rude behavior or comments, try and look through their perspective and see why they might be struggling. This doesn’t mean being a doormat but rather, asking ourselves “how important is it?” How important is it that I allow this person to occupy space in my mind and take up mental energy that could be best suited for other uses?

Start Planning for Next Year

If you have not had a holiday plan in the past, or if the holiday season always seems to go awry, it’s time to start making a plan for next year. Start by noticing what parts of this time of year are most painful for you. What thoughts are coming up when times are hard? Is there always conflict with particular family members? Do you routinely become stressed from being overscheduled? As we notice what aspects of the holiday season are most painful, we can work toward keeping ourselves healthier the next year.

There are moments when you feel securely tethered to the truth. These are the times when you are more confident in your knowledge about how the world works and how to best move through it. Within this mental comfort zone, your stress response is diminished, and your social engagement system becomes more active. This felt sense of internal security thus motivates calculated risk. However, as you begin moving toward your desired goal, subjective and objective realms begin to collide in new and unfamiliar ways, challenging perception and generating different choice points along the way. In these moments, when certainty becomes less certain, what is your habitual response pattern?

According to cognitive psychology, every brain is pre-wired to engage in logical fallacies, heuristics, and mental biases. These are ubiquitous thinking patterns that, in certain circumstances, enhance your ability to cope effectively with the complex and dynamic world around you. Under less ideal circumstances, these same patterns lead to cognitive errors with wide-ranging consequences. To illustrate this point, let’s consider the confirmation bias as one example.

The neuroscience of belief teaches that, “Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs [while simultaneously ignoring evidence against those beliefs], which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation” (Shermer, 2011, p. 5). This dizzying definition explains why, when we are thinking about buying a particular make of a new vehicle, we suddenly notice that vehicle everywhere. It helps to explain why stereotypes persist and why placebos and algorithms work. It’s why we tend to think a referee made a good call if it’s in favor of our team, and a bad call, if it’s in favor of the opposition. Simply stated, the confirmation bias is perception through a filter (McRaney, 2011).

The trouble with the confirmation bias is that it hinders an ontological exploration of facts and blinds us to possibility. In the following excerpt, Terry Pratchett (2000), through the character Lord Vetinari from his fantasy novel, The Truth, makes this point more artistically:  

Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things … well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds … Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true. (p. 99)

It’s perplexing and humbling to think that within the neurological mush inside our skull lies a vast network of circuitry for self-deception, but it’s true. Our worldview is, in part, a product of erroneous cognitive procedures designed to maximize individual survival, not veracity. To make matters worse, humans enter this world as babies, with a long developmental road ahead.

Babies and children, by nature, are egocentric and concrete thinkers (Wadsworth, 2003). Consequently, the mental maps they form about themselves, and the world they live in, are also self-regarding and literal. As you know, you were once a child, indicating that you historically made meaning out of your own experiences, in similar ways. Fortunately, you eventually made it to adulthood, where your cognitive abilities became more sophisticated and abstract due to neural maturation. Nevertheless, much of what you concluded as a child, has remained preserved in your nervous system as implicit knowledge. This knowledge is stored in the form of generalized beliefs, along with the emotional and sensory components of memory. 

These early beliefs, combined with logical fallacies, heuristics, and mental biases, can result in an interesting array of behavioral trajectories. In the absence of metacognition, these behavioral trajectories gain momentum and become repetitive patterns bound by inertia. For this reason, feeling stuck, as if walking up a downward moving escalator, is a common human experience. So, in those moments when certainty becomes less certain, practice the pause and get curious about the thoughts priming your trajectory. Try using the sentence stem, “The story I tell myself…” to gain more objectivity. From there, begin to question your assumptions, identify the beliefs that shape the premise of your conclusion, fact check your data, and recognize how perspective informs individual opinion. Try pivoting to something new, novel, and unautomated. And don’t stop at your intellect. Invite emotion and body-based sensation into the change equation. “To capitalize on the body in therapy calls for a shift in emphasis from conversation to mindful exploration; from a sole focus on emotions and thoughts to the inclusion of body sensation, posture, and movement; from discussing new possibilities to experimenting with new actions” (Ogden, 2015, p. 53).

Change is, by and large, antithetical to our survival instincts. It takes a willingness to get uncomfortable. To slow time, engage in a process of introspection, and to risk the unknown. So be patient with yourself, and with one another, whenever you feel trapped on that proverbial escalator. As Shakespeare so wisely stated, “How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees? Thou know’st we work by wit and not by witchcraft, And wit depends on dilatory time.”

References

McRaney, D. (2011). You are not so smart. Penguin Group, Inc.

Ogden, P., & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor psychotherapy. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Pratchett, T. (2000). The truth: A novel of Discworld. HarperCollins.

Shermer, M. (2011). The believing brain. Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Wadsworth, B. J., (2003). Piaget’s theory of cognitive and affective development: Foundations of Constructivism (5^th ed.). Pearson College Div.

In the musical “Hamilton” the phrase “I am not throwing away my shot” references the concept of wasting an opportunity.  I think all of us can relate with the idea, particularly when we go into ‘coulda woulda shoulda’ thinking as we rehash historical content with the means to shame, blame, and/or revalidate negative cognitions.  We “should” on ourselves a great deal, unfortunately. 

As humans, we have a tendency to avoid things that make us uncomfortable.  Fearing rejection so I do not put my application in for a promotion because I will not get it anyway.  Wearing a “Funny Guy” mask to gain attention because if I make them laugh then they will like me. Utilizing work as a means to distance myself from home because there is too much chaos there. Intentionally withdrawing my affection because they angered me, rather than resolving the conflict and speaking my truth.  We all wear masks and have protective parts that attempt to keep us safe and comfortable.  So when it comes to wasting an opportunity we also get to ask ourselves, “Is this my personal expectation or an expectation that was put on me” and also “Why am I afraid of throwing away my shot?”

Identifying our protective parts and following the line to what wound/negative thought/emotion they are attempting to keep us away from can provide us with a better understanding of Self as well as identify when various parts are driving our bus.  Determining the motivation behind the drive of not wasting our shot can also help to decide how much emphasis, time, and energy we are putting forth to ensure we grasp that opportunity.  I challenge each of us to identify those “wasted” opportunities and move towards giving our self grace and healing. The drive to “not give up my shot” became an obsession with Hamilton, which not only negatively impacted him but also caused a ripple effect with everyone and everything in the general vicinity. Finding the healthy balance while grasping hold of opportunities is important.  Moving away from thoughts about never being good enough and towards the concept of picking up healthy opportunities of my choice.  It is very possible to take hold of opportunities without allowing it to totally consume you.

On a side note:  Hamilton is an amazing musical (and movie) that I highly recommend, not only to observe the previously discussed concepts but to also provide historical content. Plus the music in and of itself is utterly genius.