General Housekeeping: A Year End Review
Good afternoon on this quiet Friday, though not so quiet in the news cycle for the past two weeks.
This will be the last post for 2023, a bit later than desired, but here we are.
Below is a year-to-year chart for growth for this publication. Since TPT’s inception Dec. 31, 2021, this little newsletter has grown quietly and steadily for the past two years, thanks to the regular interest and support of the readers who subscribed.
Around May of 2023, I received a boost.
put out a call for reader submissions, and published a link to my work about poverty, culture, and connections, featuring Henderson himself and J.D. Vance as examples of how and why they were able to beat generational poverty. The boost kicked me from around 70 to almost 90 subscribers, and has gone through a period of flattening and growth for the past 8 months.It’s not leaps and bounds, but it does mean a lot that you’re still here for my semi-philosophical therapeutic ramblings.
To be quite honest, I’m not exactly sure how y’all are finding me, but I’d wager a guess it’s from
or . Substack doesn’t exactly break this down, but as I’ve been more active on those newsletters comment sections, I’m guessing that’s where people find me the most and subscribe from the most, as well as through Facebook and occasionally Linked In.The above data table is helpful, but I don’t write for clicks. I write to try and help people, based on the general trends I see in the interpersonal day-to-days of their lives and gripes.
And then I notice patterns.
Like my previous post where, as a friend humorously titled it, “How to Get a Personality”, I talked about the trend of using other people as procrastination and decision-makers by proxy in
As I announced back in post #26, my work is going to go behind a paywall. Starting January 1, 2024, everything prior to January 1, 2023 is going into an archive with a preview. By the end of 2024, all 2023 posts will be archived as well, leaving ample time for the free subscribers to have access to read what they want, get what they need, and look forward to the next post. I’ll be playing with leaving certain things free, but for now, the goal is to be paid for my work.
I’m also launching more officially a serialized book on my writing Substack.
My childhood dream was not to be a therapist, but a novelist and storyteller. As much as I love what I do, it’s my bread and butter, not my dream.
As such, I launched
, and have created a system for publishing that book. Tentatively, it will publish twice a month for a $10/mo subscription, though there will be a discount for a full year.The point and purpose is to collect member/patron fees, set that aside, and use the subscription dollars to print a nice hardcover copy of the book that will be sent to the initial subscribers. The fees will also cover the editing and rewriting process of those chapters, as the book was written more than a decade ago, and both my style and perspective have, joyfully, changed.
If it is a successful venture, I plan on using that model going forward to write and publish other novels, short stories, essays, and poems. That is to say, if I can be consistent, now that I am fully caught up with my paperwork and documentation. You can head over and sign up, though it is still woefully empty, mostly because everything is going to go into effect on Jan. 1.
While I will give more information as things draw closer, I would like these two publication to remain separate. You’re here because you find it interesting, or maybe are looking for some practical insight and advice. If you want to read it, please consider subscribing and I’ll see you there in the new year.
As an additional side note, I write under a pseudonym. For anyone who noticed the change in October, I had a client find me online and discuss what is written here with me in session. I will probably not revert back to my actual name, and will continue with the pseudonym.
This is a safety concern, and a precautionary measure to protect myself and my family.
In my first year as an intern, one of my classmates at my worksite suddenly stopped showing up for group supervision. We later found out as a cohort that one of her clients had begun actively stalking her. She had to change her phone number, move, and dyed her hair a completely different color. I take incidents of stalking very seriously, and though my client does not appear to be a danger, I am also painfully aware such incidents do occur. In some instances, it has resulted in the death of the therapist.
For anyone in my circle of immediate friends or who found me through Facebook, that was the reason for the change, and I felt it important to disclose that to you.
And now, without further ado, this week’s newsletter.
The Practical Therapist is a free enterprise. Please consider a paid subscription, or, you can donate through this nifty link/QR code through Buy Me a Coffee.
The world seems to fall into a dark place this year, the darkest in memory depending on whom you ask.
The left and right engage in their respective forms of fear-mongering, and at the present writing of this piece, there’s a war happening in the middle east and in Europe. War threatens to spill over from China, who’s been muscling and making quiet movements in Taiwan and the Pacific for the better part of a decade now.
As for Russia, their movements look alarming, and though my expertise in geopolitics is limited, it doesn’t seem to be looking up anytime soon.
Election issues, ballot bootings, and confusing double-speak for the world of Catholicism that’s got many of us scratching our heads at recently released documents and court proceedings for members of the Holy See.
Our world, as we have known it, appears to keep unraveling.
Perhaps we turn our eyes away from the catastrophes of the world and its failings—for those who suffer from anxiety can experience an addictive quality in constantly doom scrolling, a need to know what’s going on that alternately disquiets and aggravates their anxiety while also providing a soothing mechanism to combat their internal sense of losing control—and consider what we do have.
But how do we find hope amidst the despair and darkness, after many year of paranoia, heartbreak, inhumanity, and suffering?
To my Christian fellows, we look at the simple image of a baby, lying in a manger (feed trough) who came more than 2,000 years ago to free us from sin, and be our consolation—the Prince of Peace, our comfort, and our promise that once our days of toil are over on this earth, we may find that reward in Heaven with our Father and his Son, Jesus Christ.
But not everyone who reads this work, I would wager, is a Christian, and some who are Christian may also not be Catholic, and smart at the core theology from which I base my beliefs, values, and morals.
If you’ve read this far, hang on, because I’m not quite finished, and I promise, this isn’t proselytizing.
I often find myself at odds with myself and in my profession.
You see, my profession is agnostic at best and atheistic in full —not worse—due to the men and women who founded the basis of modern psychology more than a century ago. My primary experience generally centers on working with people who have severe depression, sometimes bad enough that they become recluses and pull away entirely from the world. As a devout Roman Catholic, it can be a challenge to counsel and give hope to my clients, especially if they are a completely different faith than myself, because the methods and means by which I would encourage people are not permitted:
The ACA’s counseling ethics document strictly cautions against religious counseling from one’s particular background.
Unless I have a degree as a Christian Counselor from an accredited school, such a thing is not permitted. I cannot call myself a “Christian Counselor” as that is a legal, definitive title.
There is a sorrow in being unable to share a deep, rich, interior life of love for Christ with others, especially those that do not believe, are dismissive, hostile, even lukewarm—let alone any kind of God or religious belief, period. It is felt in my relationships—to friends, to family. How does one explain the interior movements of the heart to Christ, to weep, soaring joy, quiet peace and in contentment, in true knowledge that one is loved? How does one convey in a tongue misunderstood or disbelieved how deeply each of us is desired most intimately by the God others do not believe in, scoff at, hate, despise, or are angered at by the mere mention of such a person?
And that in that infinite unconditional love, there is hope, for the redemption of all, for gratitude of life—the good and the bad. For as a fellow therapist once told me, all is gift, the light and the dark, the sorrows and the joys.
How, in the darkness of night, in the troubling times and the midst of difficult circumstances, do clients find hope in their situations without religious ideas or language to offer succor and comfort? How do I help them, when the very reason that gives me hope and peace, is not an option to provide them with a ray that pierces the clouds of their interior cave?
Slowly, gently, with love, and great care.
Let us first define our terms.
What is hope?
Oxford Reference1 defines it as:
One of the three theological virtues. In its widest sense it may be defined as the desire and search for a future good, difficult but not impossible to attain. As a Christian virtue its primary end, its motive, and its author is God Himself.
While the Oxford English Dictionary, circa 1980 states:
a feeling of expectation and desire combined, a desire for certain events to happen. 2. a person or thing or circumstance that gives cause for this. 3. what one hopes for.
It is considered both a noun and a verb, and yet none of the definitions quite capture the full connotations of what the word encompasses. In times of bleakness, hope appears scarce, and what inspires it seems in short supply as well. As my husband and I discussed it this morning on the way to Aldi, he produced his usual suggestions of places to look that involve even greater exploration of the topic than my limited cortex can produce.
Hope can be an emotion, an action and by extension, an act of the will, thus, intellectual; or, it can be supernatural, as produced by the Oxford Reference definition.
New Advent, a phenomenal repository of documents and Catholic Encyclopedia, gives a fairly complex philosophical explanation,2 which I will quote briefly:
Hope, in its widest acceptation, is described as the desire of something together with the expectation of obtaining it. The Scholastics say that it is a movement of the appetite towards a future good, which though hard to attain is possible of attainment. Consideration of this state of soul is limited in this article to its aspect as a factor in the supernatural order. Looked at in this way it is defined to be a Divine virtue by which we confidently expect, with God's help, to reach eternal felicity as well as to have at our disposal the means of securing it. It is said to be Divine not merely because its immediate object is God, but also because of the special manner of its origin. ... Like supernatural faith and charity it is directly implanted in the soul by Almighty God. Both in itself and in the scope of its operation it outstrips the limits of the created order, and is to be had if at all only through the direct largess of the Creator. The capacity which it confers is not only the strengthening of an existing power, but rather the elevation, the transforming of a faculty for the performance of functions essentially outside its natural sphere of activity.
To the agnostic, irreligious, deists, atheists, and everyone outside of Christianity, this would likely not pass their radar as acceptable.
If the root and historical definition is practically unusable, we define hope then by it’s simplest terms of understanding:
the desire of something together with the expectation of obtaining it
Often those suffering from depression and anxiety, fear of possible potentialities, the what if’s, could’s, mights — the death cults surrounding environmental toxins, climate change, war, and diseases at the far end of the extreme to the point of being a caricature of Chicken Little—wind themselves ever tighter into knots of tension.
To unravel it, one must be able to picture the world outside of the mental picture we have of the catastrophe. But without hope, or even the possibility of hope, it’s a painfully long, tricky business.
Recently, I was reading “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” by
and . 3 Their argument is that through many years of some well-intentioned—others perhaps misguided—ideas about teaching and raising kids, along with a host of other variables, many of today’s adolescents, teens, and young adults in the Gen Z and younger generation are unable to deal with the world through a poor framework of how to combat fear and anxiety, and suffer from self-inflicted and parental-figure enforced over protection, and shy away from adversity—or so the first 60 or so pages seem to indicate. One of their main points is how frequently these kids and the adults in their circles often suffer from cognitive distortions:4A cognitive distortion is an exaggerated or irrational thought pattern involved in the onset or perpetuation of psychopathological states, such as depression and anxiety. Cognitive distortions are thoughts that cause individuals to perceive reality inaccurately.
Over the years, I’ve often found myself greatly at odds with most people I meet, and I’m regularly dinged for being “harsh” “highly critical” “mean” “unfair”. Much of what their first few chapters detail is a regular list of cognitive distortions or forms of emotional thinking, that these young adults and older adults around them engage in.
Here are ten of the most common forms of cognitive distortion:5
All-or-nothing thinking: You restrict possibilities and options to only two choices: yes or no (all or nothing).
Over generalization: You view a single, negative event as a continuing and neverending pattern of defeat.
Negative Mental filter: You dwell mostly on the negatives and generally ignore the positives.
Discounting the positives: You insist your achievements or positive efforts do not count.
Jumping to conclusions:
Mind-reading: You assume that people are reacting negatively to you without any objective evidence.
Fortune-Telling: You predict that things will turn out badly without any objective evidence.
Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or minimize their importance.
Emotional reasoning: You base your reasoning from your feelings: "I feel like a loser, so I must be one."
"Mustabatory thinking" or "Shoulding All Over Yourself": You criticize yourself or other people with "musts," "shoulds," "oughts," and "have tos."
Labeling: Instead of saying "I made a mistake," you tell yourself "I'm an idiot" or "I'm a loser."
Personalization: You blame yourself almost completely for something for which you were not entirely responsible.
I would also add:
Projection: seeing flaws in other people you don’t like in others, or, accusing others of having “x” thing or emotion happening to them that you are not dealing with.
Imaginary Audience: assuming others are judging and making comments about you, being concerned with the opinions of others based on your internal fears, anxieties, and insecurities.
This last one is not a cognitive distortion per se, but a holdover from adolescence that I will see in clients who tend toward neuroticism. Neuroticism is not “crazy", as it often refers to people who are more emotionally sensitive and can ruminate on thoughts and get caught in cycles— a la Woody Allen-like characters; neuroticism is defined as people who are more prone to negative emotions, and because of that, they can be more ruminative. It’s a personality trait, not a curse.
Lukianoff and Haidt discuss how many of these cognitive distortions are successfully countered with the likes of an excellent research-based method that has had great success, called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT.
When we get into cycles of anxious, unhappy, depressive thoughts, or thought spirals, it can be difficult to break ourselves from those cyclical patterns. We engage in familiar thought patterns like wooded trails we’ve walked a hundred times before. These wood paths, a.k.a. our neural pathways, become packed down more and more, better and better tread, easier to access and course down because that is the way we get from point A to B in our thought patterns. Negative thought spirals become as ingrained as muscle memory and we are habituated to feeling unhappy, miserable, anxious, sad, hopeless, despairing, etc. since we’ve now done this routine so many times.
People may read that last paragraph and think that they’re hopeless. However, those neural pathways in our brains are more like muscles than just well-worn paths for neural activity and electrical impulses to surge down. The more we practice awareness and short-circuit those cognitive distortions or biases, we create new pathways, and the old ones begin to atrophy as the brain rewires and redirects the circuitry to those other paths.
And this brings us back to CBT, and hope, from a nonreligious perspective, that there is a path forward. See what I did there?
If it is useful and applies to the situation, and the client is open to receive it, I can and will use religious imagery and quotes — certainly examples from the bible, to explain a point or give hope. I use this most often with people who are Christian and explicitly stated they were so.
Outside of that narrow set of confines, I do two things.
When the person is telling me how awful and everything is—and if I can get a word in and interrupt the spiral they’re mentally tumbling down—I ask them if they can think of a time that is the opposite of the current situation they are in where things turned out more positively.
We start small on this. Sometimes it is as tiny as “the server at the restaurant remembered my name and wished me a nice day”. Whatever works.
We discuss the relationship of how thoughts —> feelings —> behaviors, and how behaviors —> feelings —> thoughts, or how thoughts —> behaviors —> feelings, and back to behaviors …
And then we talk about cycles, getting caught in cycles, and learning to recognize cognitive distortions from emotional thinking, and how to recognize and interrupt that process.
Giving in to cognitive distortions when the news of the world is dark and dismal — that it will always be this way (over generalization anyone?) sets us up for further angst. We cannot control the goings on of the world around us—not the people in our lives, not the economy, not world events. Period.
You. Have. No. Control.
Certainly not over your emotions. Those are a reaction to external and internal stimuli.
What you can control are your actions and behaviors, if you know yourself, do your shadow work, and understand how and what and why you are reacting to whatever the thing is that is triggering you.
The world events make me anxious, especially the well-documented anti-semitism occurring in large cities on mostly the eastern and western—please correct me if I’m wrong. It if happens in my backyard, I’ll stand up for someone being abused or accosted—but getting into shouting matches with people half-way around the world will not solve the conflict, nor make me better. In fact, it will do the opposite for it is a need to establish an internal locus of control because the world makes me feel anxious, scared, and fearful.
In any given part of the world at any given moment, there is persecution, discrimination, poverty, war, rape, murder, crime, abuse, domestic violence, selfishness, cruelty, bullying. I offer prayers for people in those situations, because outside of that, unless I’m present for the melee, I can do nothing.
History goes through cycles, and humans have short memories and attention spans. Speak with your friends and neighbors, teach your children differently, read stories of hope and adversity, and keep in moderation or low level, access to social media, which drives the dopamine receptors in your brain to condition you to to stay addicted for another hit to satisfy whatever craving you have—or thing you are avoiding.
So stop avoiding. Change what you can actually change—your trash, keeping your home in navigable condition so you don’t cause later problems with housekeeping and vermin down the line. Don’t worry over what you cannot control. It will make you sicker and more panicked, and stuck inside your head.
Find what gives you hope that things will get better, even if you aren’t a believe in Christianity. Despite the darkness, dawn always comes, even if it takes time. One thing I’ve learned in my 30-some years of life is that we worry too much about everything happening now, at once. Events work themselves out—perhaps not in the way or to the favor you desired, but events resolve. Find your solace in what is real and grounded — a friend, your dog, your family. For whomever that person or those people are, they are what is real, not the outrages that are beyond your grasp.
As a useful side note, cognitive distortions have a root and great deal in common with cognitive biases and logical fallacies, as they often follow similar leaps in logic, jumping to conclusions, and false assertions. Here are two cool info graphics I found while working on this piece.
Since much classic western thought and philosophy isn’t taught unless you opt to take it, most of the people outside of Philosophy professors (thank you Dr. M) don’t always recognize the connection.
Use this to help guide your own thinking and awareness where your reasoning is faulty.
I wish you all a happy New Year, and if you celebrate Christmas, have a Merry Christmas for the rest of the octave of Christmas through January 1, or, the Twelve Days of Christmas, or for us, Candelmas, in early February.
From us here in NoVa, may the rest of this year and the next bring you peace and joy, and may there be goodwill to all.
Pax Christi 🕊️
P.S. Please ignore the errors; I ran out of time to proof before sending it out. Sorry!
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure”
Cognitive Distortion: https://g.co/kgs/VCtB2c
https://ubwp.buffalo.edu/ccvillage/wp-content/uploads/sites/74/2017/06/hand02.pdf