Evolution Counseling

Any worthwhile undertaking is going to be a long, challenging road and you’ll probably be tempted to quit many, many times during the journey. It’s useful to remember that success in the worthwhile undertakings isn’t supposed to come easily or most everyone would succeed in them and there’d be little to remark upon in the first place.

One of the best ways to steel yourself for the long road ahead is to understand the behavioral reality that most of the time our continued behavior is the result of the external application of positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements and that, in the absence of these reinforcements, our behavior is likely to die out. Your undertaking will of course require myriad behaviors and depending on your situation you might find yourself more or less alone much of the time, with no one to positively reinforce your behavior through rewards like encouragement and praise or to negatively reinforce your behavior through aversives like nagging and threats.

In our Western world where popularity, fame, recognition, etc. are prized commodities we often start out in some discipline daydreaming about the accolades, imagining ourselves as conquering heroes. We get caught up in illusions of grandeur though in reality we’re less than novices. But the daydreams are themselves positive reinforcements and act as powerful motivators at the get go. Usually those daydreams run into the concrete wall of reality before long. We find that what we’re doing is really hard, that we fail often, and maybe worst of all that very few people if any are even paying attention to what we’re doing, let alone supplying us with the desired reinforcements at the correct times to spur our behavior on.

This is why if you want to keep at the worthwhile undertakings you’ve got to make sure that your focus starts with and remains on the undertaking itself, on your evolving relationship with it, rather than on the external reinforcements associated with that undertaking. The reinforcements might start appearing with greater regularity and they might not. You might achieve a skill level where rewards like encouragement, praise, and money are frequent but the reinforcements shouldn’t be the focus of what you’re doing or you’ll always remain in the precarious position where your continued journey depends not on your intrinsic love for and relationship with your undertaking but on the presence or absence of behavioral reinforcements.

Keeping At The Worthwhile Undertakings - Evolution Counseling Any worthwhile undertaking is going to be a long, challenging road and you’ll probably be tempted to quit many, many times during the journey. It’s useful to remember that success in the worthwhile undertakings isn’t supposed to come easily or most everyone would succeed in them and there’d ...

Many Western psychologists perpetuate the same cognitive bias in the therapeutic situation that the general population perpetuates in the wider sphere of life, and this is not only that minimizing the various problems responsible for dysfunction should be the focus of time effort but that upon the minimization of those problems the therapeutic alliance should come to an end since cure has been effected.

We can think of the above framework as a deficit based psychology rather than a growth based psychology. It’s a psychology with the implicit message that reaching a baseline level of functioning, a state more or less equivalent with the level of functioning of a typical member of a given society, is the endgame, the goal, as good of an outcome as can be reasonably hoped for. And embedded in this message is the rather sinister belief that mental health and well-being are defined as adjustment to the norms and values of a particular society. Conformity is praised, deviation looked upon with wariness.

It can’t be refuted that certain deviations from the norm are objectively dysfunctional and cause an undue degree of distress and suffering. It also can’t be refuted that problems of living are almost always what compel people to look hard at their lives and make changes on their own or seek professional help. Tweaking or adding to the psychological, emotional, and behavioral toolkit in order to more effectively manage these problems of living usually leads to a marked diminution of distress and suffering, and that’s a good thing.

But our point here is that whether in the therapy hour or in the world at large reaching a baseline level of functioning, reaching that sense of adjustment, should not be the end of the road but rather the true starting point from which one’s unique growth and self-actualization can begin, a growth and self-actualization that necessarily cause the individual to deviate from the norm once again. This second deviation is the definition of mental health and wellness not its antithesis. It’s a striving outward towards people and the world in the effort to unfold unique potentialities that end up creating a personal destiny that could only ever be fulfilled by that one unique individual.

Of course there’s comfort in fitting in and painful existential anxiety at the thought of sticking out, and this is probably why so many people on the journey from dysfunction to self-actualization grow complacent when they reach the middle stage of development we call the baseline, a stage that they take to be the endgame. They remember the stigma of sticking out all too well and aren’t in any hurry to suffer through that situation again. And of course depending on the situation reaching a baseline level of functioning might just be as far as the individual can reasonably be expected to go and in these cases that level can be celebrated as the accomplishment it is.

But for many deficit psychology and growth psychology could be considered two sides of the same developmental coin. It’s too bad that most people instinctively focus on the deficit side and then settle into a sort of happy complacency upon reaching a state of functioning in the world that various authority figures call well-adjusted. If they could only come to see their newly acquired adjustment as a safe and secure jumping off point for taking more risks, for reaching ever outwards, for pursuing interests and following passions, for connecting more intimately and authentically with the world, their self-actualization would kick into high gear. If people trying to improve their lives spent as much time and energy on moving from the baseline towards growth and self-actualization as they did on moving from dysfunction to the baseline they’d soon find themselves in a heightened state of functioning they never could have imagined.

Deficit Psychology Versus Growth Psychology - Evolution Counseling Many Western psychologists perpetuate the same cognitive bias in the therapeutic situation that the general population perpetuates in the wider sphere of life, and this is not only that minimizing the various problems responsible for dysfunction should be the focus of time effort but that upon the m...

You don’t understand addictions unless you understand the powerful role that denial plays, assisting people in continuing to use drugs despite severe consequences by ignoring or minimizing these consequences. Regardless of your problem, help can never be effective unless you admit you have that problem to begin with, something the Buddha was aware of when he crafted his four noble truths, the second of which was that we recognize the origin of our ill-being.

Denial comes in many different forms, but the one we want to discuss here is what we call denial through association. The basic idea is that by being part of a social group that engages in similar behavior you normalize your behavior, not considering yourself out of the ordinary but as just a person doing what everyone else does.

Often an addict will cite a friend who he believes has a worse problem, as if this somehow lets him off the hook for his own problem. This type of comparison is an effective form of denial because it insulates him from taking an objective look at where he falls on the continuum of substance abuse.

One of the criteria for addiction I really like for cutting through this clever denial strategy is that if you often consume more of the substance than you were planning on consuming, it’s a clear warning sign. This one doesn’t let you off the hook for the fact that the people around you are consuming a lot too, because the volume is not what matters per se. What matters is the fact that the volume is more than you planned, pointing to an inability to control your habit.

If you believe you’re not an addict, prove it by setting an amount for how much of the substance you will consume the next ten times you use it and then see if you can quit on the spot when you have reached that threshold. A non-addict would have no problem accomplishing this task of self-limiting but the addict usually finds it impossible.

Denial through association is a potent way to rationalize your problematic behavior. But it doesn’t matter what those around you are doing, because obviously you’re going to be attracted to and surround yourself with people who share your interests. Their addiction or lack thereof is not your primary concern, yours is.

Denial Through Association - Evolution Counseling One of the most clever strategies drug and alcohol addicts use to deny that they have a problem.

The critical mistake most of us make when people experiencing life conflicts come to us for help is that we think what they want is our advice. Of course they often think what they want is our advice too. But more often than not our supposedly well-intentioned advice is actually a cover for the chance to derive feelings of efficacy and superiority out of the situation.

When we jump straight to giving advice we’re seeing things from our points of view, from what we’d do in similar circumstances, which means we’re not really listening, we’re not really creating a space for the other to feel heard or to explore possibilities. Instead we project our own hidden values and biases onto that person, all under the rubric of providing help.

In the Catholic tradition hell is defined as the absence of God. This is a powerful symbol for human life. Feeling isolated and alone, bereft of community, cut off from anyone who really knows us or understands us, is hell. The unobserved life is hell. Sometimes simply knowing someone is there in the boat with us is all that’s necessary for us to summon up the courage and tenacity to weather the storm, to activate our individual powers in order to move through our life crises on our own instead of depending on someone else to do it for us.

Offering advice right away narrows possibilities. And widening possibilities is the name of the game when we realize that the anxiety and doubt embedded within conflict situations tend to create tunnel vision. Helping people move through conflict starts with the firm decision to practice compassionate listening, to be actively interested in the meaning of the other’s words, in understanding things from the other’s perspective, rather than quickly categorizing those words within the parameters of our own life constructs and spitting out a solution based on those subjective perspectives.

Two of the most effective ways to help others explore possibilities while engaged in compassionate listening are strategies therapists use with their clients all the time. These are mirroring and asking open-ended questions. Mirroring repeats back, in our own words, what the person struggling with conflict has just said to us. Open-ended questioning gets away from yes/no answers, phrasing the question in a way that allows for any number of answers and can’t simply be confirmed or denied.

In all of this what we’re really trying to do for people embroiled in conflict is help them combat the unconscious pain and isolation of the unobserved life by letting them feel truly heard and understood. In this paradigm, where seeking to really understand the other’s viewpoint and assisting in the other’s personal exploration are the primary goals, people are often able to come to their own conclusions for what they need to do, they’re able to give themselves their own advice for how to move forward. But even when they can’t figure out what to do, that feeling of trust and community that’s being generated will make our own advice, if and when we choose to give it, much more likely to land, much more likely to be earnestly considered rather than given lip service.

Helping People Move Through Conflict - Evolution Counseling The critical mistake most of us make when people experiencing life conflicts come to us for help is that we think what they want is our advice. Of course they often think what they want is our advice too. But more often than not our supposedly well-intentioned advice is actually a cover for the chan...

Many of us feel ill-equipped when confronted by hopelessness in our lives or in the lives of people we care about. Comfort and encouragement seem like inadequate allies against despair and the firm belief that the world no longer offers and will never again offer anything worth living for.

Some common approaches are to try to see the bright side, minimize the negatives, be grateful for the gift of life, or to hold out hope for a better tomorrow. These strategies are usually pretty flimsy though. You might be able to understand them logically but they do not pe*****te the outer shell or affect present reality in any meaningful way. It’s like offering a towel to dry up a lake.

I use a philosophical approach that tends to get better results. This is that remaining hopeless is completely fine. But hopelessness has as little to do with outcomes as does hope. They are both states of readiness. These states do not predict anything. Actually people have their hopes dashed every day all over the world. Someone who is now hopeless was probably, once upon a time, quite hopeful and look how that turned out.

If you start out hopeful and end up disappointed, it follows that you can start out hopeless and end up pleasantly surprised. Hope and hopelessness are like a promise. A promise is worthless until the follow through. Hopelessness or hope certainly set different courses for a person, but nothing is determined until life comes to fruition. For any of us to believe that we can perfectly predict the future and know exactly what the world, other people, and we ourselves will throw our way is quite egocentric. Life is full of surprises, and if we use the metaphor of it being a game, the only sure way to make the prediction of hopelessness come true is to cheat by taking yourself out of it before it’s really over.

It’s not actually necessary to change one’s outlook from hopeless to hopeful. It’s only necessary to recognize that both outlooks are nothing more than predictions. They may or may not come true. No matter how full of promise or how incredibly desperate a situation might seem there are no guarantees on either side. What is necessary is to keep playing the game. Ironically, this attitude tends to automatically increase hope.

Hopelessness - Evolution Counseling Some philosophical ideas if you have started to feel hopeless that will intrigue you and make you rethink your situation.