Shame acts as if it precedes Being which translates into: “I suck therefore I am!”

The face of shame hides its eyes from the world.  The feet of shame walk in the margins and gutters of the world.  The tongue of shame speaks of unworthiness.  The body is disfigured: too small or too large. Achievement, gratitude, and joy slip through the cracks in the self.  The mask of shame wears the thin smile of normality and with an element of luck the sneer of excellence.

Shame lives as clearly in the window paned-towers of Wall Street as it does on the planes of the Kalahari, and as it did in that prosaic moment in the garden.

Shame mistakes the false self of defectiveness for the true self and weaves a dream-like veneer that is taken for Reality! The simple tragedy of shame is that it wants to be other than itself. It drives itself to extreme lengths. It swims against the current of being and the textures of life in tantalizing pursuit of this other self. It gauges the world with an instrument of impossibility whose gravity is a force beyond measure.

The future of shame is an endless repetition, a flat line, a cracked pitcher.  Like the proverbial frightened dream-figure who cannot move, or the mythological prisoner enchained, it stands fragilely in the presence of beauty, and destitute by its encounter with chance.

Shame goes to therapy as it goes to the bar.  It enters the consultation room with one hand extended and the other withdrawn, its fingers crossed in fear and disgust. Shame engages the therapist with small talk and the desire to change: its need for help an open wound.  Shame brings to the table a plenitude of rage that surrounds the pain. It can only seem to ask for help, and as quickly reject it. Shame is anchored in the conviction of defectiveness that dresses every wound, and shadows every movement. This belief that can appear as humility is shored with contempt.

Shame presents difficulties, tests, and temptations for the therapist.  It extends a mirror for therapists to reflect upon and sets a stage upon which the two can play, with the preferred role assumed by the therapist.

Shame softens within the tenderness of a patient psychotherapy. When effective, psychotherapy secures its role as a beacon whose illumination glows in presence and wanes in absence.  In time, in the face of all that has been remembered and forgotten, and through repetitive movements that seem like a glacial dance, Shame releases shame. It staggers forward across the emotional precipice of unworthiness and surrenders to a warmth that learns empathy for itself.

I write these words as I climb my wall of shame erected by the pain of my faults. I can see from my small perch across the wastelands a reflection of a better being, beckoning sometimes in the form of a lover, other times a dream, and ever mysterious as if seeded by a spirit.

While there has been considerable theorizing about the impact of computers on identity, its immediate impact can be gauged by utilization patterns. A study conducted by the Stanford University Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society 10 years ago found that most people utilized the Internet for mundane purposes: communication, information gathering and entertainment. Little has changed. A more recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation study, “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds” (2010) found that the three most popular computer activities among 8- to 18-year-olds are going to social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, playing computer games, and watching videos on sites such as YouTube.

In an article titled “Slouching Toward the Ordinary: Current Trends in Computer-Mediated Communication,” (2004) Susan C. Herring concluded by stating, “In short, after barely more than 30 years of existence, Computer-Mediated Communication CMC has become more of a practical necessity than an object of fascination and fetish.”

Even the more alluring virtual worlds lean toward the conventional. Tom Boellstorf conducted an anthropological field study of the culture of Second Life that he published as a book, Coming of Age in Second Life in 2008. He conducted this study using an avatar who lived in and observed the activities of Second Life. In his concluding chapter, he wrote, “Throughout my research, I was struck by the banality of second life.” He quotes a second life resident who said, “the dirty secret of virtual worlds; all people end up doing is replicating their real lives.” “Virtual worlds do not change everything, but neither are they reducible to what came before them.”

The gap between the potential and actual effects of the Internet is enormous and not to be bridged. It speaks to the intrinsic dialectic between the wonderment of our creativity and the conservative nature of our being. The dialectic of change and stasis is an evolving structural dimension of the individual and culture. Between the possibility of transcendence and the tedious replication of reality that the Internet presents, we are uncertainly and inescapably drawn towards questions of being-in-the-world that inform this process and humbled by the unpredictability of the next moment.

Part One: The Potential

Echoing Marshal McLuhan iconic phrase “the medium is the message,” Mark Poster emphasized that to understand the impact of the computer on the individual one needs to view it not as a tool but as a complex, multidimensional experience.  In What’s The Matter with the Internet, (2001) he wrote, “The computer is not a hammer…The Internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like Germany than a hammer.”  In the spirit of expansiveness I would suggest that the potential effects of the computer are more like a distant planet than a familiar geographical place with predictable rules.

At the contact zone between human and networked computer lies the next frontier, a promise of something latent and unrealized.  Cyberspace, virtual reality, and digital environments while not interchangeable terms, describe the computer generated creation of interactive spaces ranging from email, to social networking sites like Facebook, to simulated gaming, to virtual worlds such as Second Life, an online 3-D interactive virtual environment that some call a parallel universe.

Between the world of social networking that involves the establishment of a personal profile, a data centric image, and sharing and updating of personal information within a network of  “friends” and virtual environments such as Second Life where individuals construct anonymous personas, avatars that work, play, and interact in a constructed online environment, there is a world of difference that speaks to the complexity of the phenomena of the Internet. We are ambling on a long yellow brick road with multiple forks and multiple dimensions leading from each fork.

Choice and utilization patterns are critical dimensions that affect how the networked computer impacts the individual. Yet, as we become more empowered by the use of the computer, we also become more love-blind and dependent. As we become more dependent, we risk becoming increasingly unaware of the affective significance of its impact.  Choice then becomes situated as an after thought.

Sherry Turkle who wrote Life on The Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet in 1995 captured the transformative potential of the computer.  “The computer takes us beyond a world of dreams and beasts because it enables us to contemplate mental life that exists apart from bodies.  It enables us to contemplate dreams that do not need beasts.  The computer is an evocative object that causes old boundaries to be renegotiated.” (p23)

Turkle asserted that these environments hold the possibility of personal discovery and transformation. “The Internet has become a significant laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize post modern life.” She sees Virtual environments as providing a moratorium in Erickson’s terminology or a transitional space in Winnicott’s words, a place to play, to try things out without actual consequence.

These digital environments give expression to emotional and unconscious aspects of our personality. Their malleability extends the domain of unconscious realization. Freedom from embodiment and the constraints of matter provide the possibility for play that alters the boundaries between the real and virtual, the self and the not-self.  Something of dream-space has been deposited in the virtual waking world.

Theorists have represented this intertwined relationship with terms like posthuman, cyborg, and digital self to suggest a new symbiotic humachine entity. Katherine Hayles in her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) employed the term posthuman to envision the outline of an emerging conception of the individual defined “by a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines.”  (p288) She views the individual’s self and capacities for thinking as constituted by the smart machines in the environment. Hayles employs the concept, “distributed cognition,” to emphasize the social, contextual aspects of thinking. One doesn’t exist as an autonomous self whose essence is kept deeply within, but rather as an interdependent entity whose capacities are exquisitely and complexly coordinated with objects, machines, and individuals in the environment. The Google search engine exemplifies distributed intelligence as it supplements memory.

At the contact zone between human and networked computer our unconscious needs, and desires perform. What qualities of the networked computing greet us, act upon us, tempt and lure us, change us or simply beguile and seduce us? Where do we go online?  Who do we become? What is our digital fingerprint?   Most importantly what is the relationship between our online and offline selves? Have we become posthuman?

Recently, two clients weeks asked me the same question in response to my suggestion that they need to forgive themselves.  “How does one forgive oneself?” For a moment I was silenced. I didn’t have an immediate answer.

One client remarked that he couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of self-forgiveness;  “It is such a cliché,” he said. It was not my intent to prescribe clichés as solutions to complex and painful psychological states.

To each client I said the question was an excellent one that required further thinking. I realized that the superficial way we as a sanctioned healing profession bandy the prescription “forgive yourself,” reveals a larger dilemma that is weighted down by cultural values. A quick palliative would be a disservice. As a profession we must question our impetus for quick cures and recognize the presence of external pressures, cultural and economic, along with internal pressures that might lead us down soothing but misleadingly easy paths.  Psychotherapists neither administer absolutions nor wave magic wands.

I did suggest that forgiveness was not a simple matter of saying, “Sorry self I didn’t mean to beat you up.”  It is an attitude born out of self-examination.  Without self-examination forgiveness is like putting a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. And with each of my client’s, the wounds were deeply embedded in a vast interior region of shame.

We had entered difficult emotional territory.  One client pulled back, retreated into a series of intellectualized questions brined with anger.  The other client went deeper, making connections between earlier wounds and his current malaise.  What differentiates the psychological capacity of individuals for self-examination is a subject for another essay.

The client who explored the question of forgiveness is a single, successful professional in his early 30’s who had been feeling anxious and depressed for many years prior to starting therapy.  I had been seeing him in weekly psychotherapy for about three years.  Recently, he had been arrested for a DUI after having been stopped for speeding.  He was angry and ashamed.  His blood alcohol level was just below the legal limit.  Although he felt that the police unfairly arrested him, his anger was directed mainly at himself. He described how he had been initially polite with the police, but continued calling them “sir” with what he derided as a “pussy bullshit attitude” even after the police had handcuffed him.  He felt that this was unacceptable.

He had a court appearance and had consulted with an attorney.  Even though he felt reasonably certain that charges would be dropped, he described feeling an overwhelming sense of weakness” and that everything was out of control since his arrest.  He was plagued by obsessive thoughts.  Repeatedly, he imagined going to court, angering the judge who then sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

I asked why he thought he was having such thoughts.  He didn’t have a clue. Knowing his history, I suggested that his obsessive thinking represented a punishing fantasy in which he repeatedly victimized himself for acting weak.  He took in what I said and thought it made sense. I wondered why he was so angry with himself for what seemed at worst a minor offense.  At this point I suggested that he might forgive himself.

As we explored the question of forgiveness, he realized that the thought of forgiving himself had never occurred to him; instead he felt that he needed to teach himself a “hard lesson,” a lesson that he had been hammering himself with for many years. His obsessive fantasy represented one module in the lesson plan.

The obstacle to forgiveness is self-hate: hatred for the objectionable and unacceptable aspects of the self. Self-hate is embedded in core beliefs about the self and is often unwittingly administered.  It is unconscious and present in what I’ve described in an earlier blog as negative self-talk, the background noise of self-loathing. The personal obstacles to self-forgiveness are reinforced by cultural values that prescribe a “tough love” regimen for self-improvement.  The essence of this regimen is embodied in the message “Be strong, show no vulnerability, admit no weakness” as you learn the hard lessons of life on your own.

In contrast, self-forgiveness is an integral aspect of personal growth that involves examination and acceptance of weakness, failure, and disappointment.  It entails identifying personal shortcomings, recognizing the subtle judgments, punitive fantasies that characterize one’s reactions, and challenging their veracity.   It calls for an effort to understand these failings within the larger context of ones’ life. To this end Carl Jung said, “The patient does not feel himself accepted, unless the very worst in him is accepted too.”

My client had his court date.  No charges had been filed, and he was feeling much better. He described how the last session gave him the “bonk on the head that he needed.”  He explained how he had not realized how badly he had been torturing himself with his obsessive fantasies until I had pointed it out.  When he stopped the fantasizing, he began to feel better.

Sheepishly, he said that he was beginning to understand what forgiveness meant.  He compared his situation to being in a relationship. “If you were angry at your partner and did not forgive her, you would be stuck, not growing. I was doing that to myself.” With this insight, he felt he had found a new guiding principle. He was eager to put this realization at the front of his conscious mind and wondered what that would be like.

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You’ll be drenched to the bone.”

”The times they are a-changin’”

Bob Dylan

I would like to share some impressions about the conference on Psychology and Technology that occurred on November 7, 2009 in Pasadena,  as well as more general thoughts about the impact of technology on the practice of psychology and the personal experience of identity.

What is a conference?  To borrow a concept from (1) Mary Louise Pratt a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, a conference is a “contact zone.” She used the phrase to describe the “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”

This phrase has evocative relevance on several levels.

In my pre-conference reflections I employed the phrase to describe the intertwined, complex, and symbiotic nature of the relationship between human and networked computer, to underscore the unspoken power dynamics embedded in this relationship, and to implicate certain mythic narratives in the amplification of this relationship, beginning with Prometheus who stole fire from the gods, through Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, and leading to Hal, (perhaps a post-modern Prometheus) whose independent artificial intelligence turned against the crew of Discovery One.  I will return to this relationship in a subsequent post.

The phrase also speaks to the idea that “disparate” cultures came together at a conference.  According to Bruce Gale Ph.D. our first speaker, one way to describe these cultures is by analogy. Dr. Gale illustrated these differences through a humorous comparison of how ostriches, owls, and otters employ tools.

There were a few wise otters in the audience, and we certainly benefited from the wealth of knowledge of our presenters.  The owls, if present, kept their predatory nature in the shadows.  What about the ostriches?  As Dr. Gale informed us, ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand, only humans to.

A courageous group of ostriches removed their heads from the sand to attend this conference. Were their anxieties allayed?  Were their concerns addressed? Were they motivated to cross the technological divide?  And what about the ostriches who kept their distance? What is this fear of technology that seems to characterize many in our profession?

One participant described the conference as equivalent to exposure therapy, which we know is a well documented treatment for phobias. Those who attended were exposed to a rich, detailed, complex and at times overwhelming amount of information that has the potential to enhance if not transform their practice.

Bruce Gale Ph.D. exposed us to the basics of computing.  We learned about web tools, online resources, office hardware and specialized software. Marlene Maheu Ph.D. and Skip Rizzo Ph.D. respectively exposed the group to glimpses into the present and not too distant future where telehealth and virtual reality applications will become an increasingly larger part of the clinician’s toolbox. We learned from Anna Marie Piersimoni about the labyrinthian world of social networking and from Kaveri Subrahmanyam’s Ph.D. research how adolescents use social networking applications like Facebook.

The conference clarified two trends that characterize the trajectory of technological change. The first speaks to the conservative nature of change. Dr. Subrahmanyam’s research on how adolescents use technology, particularly Facebook indicate that adolescent’s extensive use of technology is characterized by conventional objectives: they use social networking applications primarily to connect with their offline peers.  Most adolescents are not seeking new online relationships, exploring virtual worlds and experimenting with alternative versions of self.  Adolescent developmental needs trump technology and illustrates how the dynamic of change, even rapid technological change is constrained by shifts between processes of accommodation and assimilation.

The second trend speaks to the speculative not too distant future that portends more dramatic change to the way we practice and the way we live. Dr. Subrahmanyam referred to the adolescents in her study as “digital natives,” individuals born into a digital environment where the medium of exchange whether shopping, socializing, listening to music is digitally mediated. These “digital natives” will be our future clients.  As they grow up, they will not only look for therapists online, but they will be comfortable with and might seek technologically mediated therapy such as virtual reality treatment applications or online counseling.

What will clinicians need to do to adapt to this changing environment? It is not news that mental health professionals are lagging behind the curve of technological change. While many clinicians use email, shop, and bank online, they have yet to adapt their practice to this changing environment, outside of some who use billing software and perhaps have signed on to the Psychology Today Therapist Directory website. More and more clinicians have websites, few blog, and many look upon Facebook as a scourge. We won’t even mention Twitter.

There are many reasons for this reluctance, some fear based and some based on conceptions about the practice of psychotherapy.  What we learned from Dr. Subrahmanyam’s presentation is that ostriches are “digital immigrants.”  “Digital immigrants” are newcomers to this mediated world of networked computers and smart phones. Like most immigrants we are threatened by the necessity to learn a new language and set of social-cultural guidelines for acting and conducting business.

So what don’t we do? I am reminded of my grandparents who until this moment I never identified with.  They emigrated to the U.S. from Russia when they were in their early twenties.  They lived in this country for over 50 years.  They never really learned English and they associated exclusively with relatives and their immigrant friends.  They had a pervasive fear of the dominant culture and a deeply rooted sense of insecurity and I believe inadequacy. They buried their heads in the sand and stood on the shoulders of their children to navigate their new world.

So what do we do? Most immediately we need to acknowledge our fear and examine how we are coping with this challenge.  At the very least we must remove our heads from the sand and take stock. Beyond this recognition, we need to become fluent in basic computing, understand the communicative power of the Internet, and then make decisions about how to implement these tools into our practice. Adaptation will not simply involve taking online and offline classes; it will also require an openness to change our conceptions of how we practice psychotherapy.

Perhaps we are amidst a paradigm shift that at present has mostly the scent of fear.

“If your time to you

Is worth savin’

Then you better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin’.”

(1) Pratt, Mary Louise,  1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation,  Routledge.

I wake up most mornings, make coffee, shower, shave, and go to my MacBook.  I read news headlines, check email, go to Facebook and make a move in the online chess and scrabble game I am playing with my daughter, peruse my 40^th HS reunion Facebook page, check my banking, possibly record a dream, and do some writing. My entire creative, personal, and professional life is stored on my computer and backed up on a hard drive. I ride this most seductive wave of technology as I submit my writing, research, memory, and social relationships to the structure of the computer and the extensive networking capacity of the Internet.

The more I outsource myself to the computer and the virtual world the better I feel. I spend more time with this marvelous machine than I do with any single individual.   I love my MacBook more than I have ever loved any machine.   And this love is a term of devotion to a quid pro quo unequalled in my other interactions. Most mornings the seamless Mac operating system carries me from one application to the next like the more than good enough mother I never had. The occasional appearance of the rotating beach ball that can signify a crash jolts me like the abrupt withdrawal of the nipple from a nursing infant. I feel that my Mac has made me a more effective professional, but is it making me a better person?

The easier it is to use technology, the more difficult it is to fathom.

Forty years ago Marshall Mcluhan presciently wrote, “The medium is the message.”  This iconic phrase captures an essential aspect of technology. When we use a tool that extends our capacities and empowers us, whether phone, car, eye-glass, or networked computer, it also changes us. The process of change occurs subtly within the shadowy parameters of the “medium” that exert influence not directly as content often does, but outside awareness. The question that McLuhan poses is not what technology can do for us, but what is it doing to us.

Computers and the Internet have dramatically changed the architecture and geography of our culture. Since the adaptation of the Internet for public use in the 90’s, there has been massive transformation of society that has altered how we do business, how we get our news, listen to music, watch movies, and communicate with others. What is the effect of these macro changes on the individual’s private experience of Self, cognitive functions, and his/her interpersonal relationships?  Mark Poster, in his book What’s The Matter With The Internet, states that “the Internet forebodes a reconstruction of the basic elements of human culture.”

“Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

Should we rest easy in this foreboding as the networked computer increasingly mediates our relationships to the world?  Technological innovation historically has triggered two contrasting responses: one that idealizes the potential for change, and one that fears and resists change.  Each position exerts a strong bias that interferes with a critical understanding of the impact of technology.  To move beyond the limitations of this either/or perspective requires a dialectical approach that maintains the tension between these two opposing positions without prematurely resolving them, an approach that can see how the positive and negative are inextricably intertwined.

Le me pose some questions that will hopefully lead to discussions that will deepen our understanding of the impact of the networked computer and its supplemental technologies on our daily lives and internal states.

• How has technology changed the experience of and the conceptualization of identity?

• What is the transformative potential of virtual reality?  Will it lead to a blended identity hinted at by the term cyborg?

• What are the most salient aspects of technology affecting individuals?

• What is the relationship between anonymity of online presence and what seems to be a compelling drive toward self-disclosure?

• How are cognitive functions and language structures being changed? Should we be concerned as Nicolas Carr provocatively asks in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google making us stupid?”

• Has the Internet destabilized existing human experience and social-cultural modes of expression? In an article written by William Deresiewicz titled “The End of Solitude” he wonders if the power of Internet’s connectivity inadvertently leads to the “production of loneliness.”

These questions shift the focus of inquiry to the intimate relation between the individual and machine asking not what the machine can do for us or but what it is doing to us for better and for worse. To this quest we might heed the message in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The great paradox of progress is that our efforts to master the environment often turn against us. If there is anything that we can be certain about as we proceed forward, it is expressed by Mark Poster in What’s The Matter With The Internet, where he states, “One rule that characterizes the development of technology is that the trajectory of new technology is unpredictable.”

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Transforming Negative Self Talk

Part Two: The Road to Healthy Self-esteem

Changing negative self-talk is not simply a matter of replacing negative statements with positive affirmations.  The psychological work involves altering patterns of thinking and behaving that have been intimately connected to one’s identity. The goal is to learn how to view oneself in a more balanced and integrated manner that will lead to changes in behavior and greater fulfillment in life.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

While I will break down the process of changing negative self-talk into three steps, the work doesn’t occur neatly in sequential steps. The statement two steps forward one step back captures the non-linear path of change. The key to this process is commitment and stamina, especially following the inevitable setbacks. Psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists describe this process as “working through.” Psychological change requires an effort that is equivalent to the work needed to learn a martial art or to play a musical instrument.

·      Step one – becoming aware of the problem

·      Step two -  challenging the validity of self-critical statements

·      Step three – taking risks and changing behavior

Becoming aware of the problem involves developing the ability to step back and critically examine one’s thoughts and feelings.  Becoming aware of negative self-talk involves attending to one’s internal chatter and  noticing what one is saying to oneself with the ear of a compassionate observer even  when the last thing that you want to do is be aware of your feelings.  What stands in the way of self-awareness is shame.  We have learned to be ashamed of our feelings of weakness and vulnerability. When we feel shame, we dim the lights of consciousness. At this moment the idea of self-awareness feels like salt on a wound.

The Road to Hell is Paved With Shame

The major challenge in overcoming shame is understnding the need to disidentify with the negative punitive perspective that  has been such a familiar presence.  The recognition that negative self-talk represents only one point of view among many is a good start. Beginning to monitor your internal dialogue introduces the possibility of a personal corrective second opinion.  In fact catching yourself in the act builds up the strength of the observing ego.  It allows one to wonder, “Why am I saying such mean things to myself?”  “Under what circumstances would I ever talk to a friend like I am talking to myself?” When you can reflect on your feelings, then you are  on the road to recovery and  achievement  and far from being lost off road in some desolate woods.

The Power of Negative Thinking

The mind requires self-monitoring and self-correcting in order to keep thoughts in check with the ever-shifting subtle changes of reality.  The second step in dealing with negative self-talk follows from the ability to self-reflect and involves questioning the validity of self-criticism. It might seem counter-intuitive to suggest that questioning how one feels is an adaptive function, but feelings can be misleading.  Feelings are signals that communicate information about the world. They do not simply represent reality. The ability to make this differentiation is a critical aspect of self-reflection.  

When you are self-critical, you may view the self and others through a distorted lens. You believe in the “Truth” of these feelings with a certainty that defies logic.  Projection is a powerful and subtle mechanism that underlies this distortion.  If I am feeling stupid, it is likely that I will project these feelings onto the people I am interacting with.  The projection appears as the thought,  “they think I am stupid. “  I will notice something  in their look or tone that conveys a judgment that confirms this feeling.  Ironically under the social pressure to appear smart, I might end up saying something stupid.  Ah, the power of negative thinking!

Feelings need to be examined, questioned and reflected upon.  Questions need to be asked. “What am I feeling?”   “Are my feelings distorting my understanding of the situation?”  “Am I projecting my negative feelings onto the situation?”  This process is deepened by a psychological inquiry into the source of one’s core negative beliefs.  When you understand why you think and behave in a certain, not only do you feel less crazy, but you also can have compassion for your difficulty.

As you observe  and question  your feelings and perceptions, you begin to see patterns. Black and white thinking is a mode of thought that underlies negative self-talk. In this mode there are no shades of grey. You are all good or all bad.  Making a single mistake, no matter how small can be  costly because it is magnified to monstrous proportions and negates all that is positive and good about you. Black and white thinking is grounded in perfectionism that creates unrealistic standards for success.

Developing a balanced, integrated sense of self, in other words, good self-esteem works to dismantle the standard of perfectionism.  It introduces a new standard that is flexible, inclusive, and compassionate. This ability to see the big picture of yourself and accept your strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures  is  the hallmark of good self-esteem.

Beyond the Comfort Zone

The third step entails changing the behavior that has functioned to support negative self-talk. Self-critical individuals tend to be quiet, sensitive to slights, risk aversive, and anticipate negative outcomes. Their behavior often reinforces their subjective reality that in turn further reinforces their behavior.  As you begin to challenge negative core beliefs, you may feel more willing to take risks.  When you move beyond the comfort zone, core beliefs are tested in the great laboratory of life.  And in most situations, individuals are profoundly relieved to discover the fallacy of their convictions.

Transforming Negative Self Talk

Part One: The Problem

Negative self-talk also known as self-critical thinking afflicts millions of individuals. It can range in severity from paralyzing vicious attacks on the self to a steady, barely noticeable stream of chatter that deflates self-esteem and dampens motivation.  It can lay dormant within a field of good fortune only to be triggered by the smallest of mistakes that unleashes a flood of verbal attacks against the self.

Negative self-talk is co-extensive with a self-consciousness that casts a dark shadow over one’s life. Stopping it is not simply a matter of replacing negative thoughts with positive affirmations.  Self-critical thinking functions like an operating system that runs the multiple programs of the self, from self-evaluation to perception of others to decision-making. Having established dominion early and unwittingly in the sanctuary of the self, it is seamlessly woven into the fiber of one’s being. Seeing the world differently is as inconceivable as it would to be to imagine having three eyes and one ear.

The core of self-critical thinking is based on fundamental assumptions about one’s unworthiness, unloveableness, and defectiveness, assumptions that are accepted as fundamental truths. These assumptions are often internalized through the complex interactions with key individuals beginning in early childhood and extending through one’s development. Drawn from a catalogue of qualities such as intelligence, attractiveness, strength, creativity, etc. that constitute the vocabulary of self-esteem, individuals become fully armed with ammo for negative self-talk at an early age.  Under the tyranny of perfectionism, life becomes a painful, unwinnable battle against a simple, but harsh and unbending standard: if I am not perfect, then I am bad.

It is more than a curiosity to wonder why there is such a powerful attachment to the negative in the human psyche. One criticism seems to have the power of a dozen compliments. This curiosity is heightened when one considers that many individuals who are plagued by negative self-talk are competent, creative and accomplished. 

Self-critical thinking trumps what is worthwhile about a person and reflects a highly distorted, negative picture of the self.  It expresses a personal, subjective belief that doesn’t recognize or value one’s abilities.  One looks at the world from a position of inadequacy and defectiveness, characteristically feeling not as smart, not as attractive, not as creative, not as funny, not as sexy, or not as successful as others who are perceived in a much more favorable light.

Changing negative self-talk is a journey of self-transformation. There are many roads to change and psychotherapy can be an important part of this process.  While there are numerous theoretical therapeutic orientations, if you were to look at what effective clinicians actually do in therapy, you would find many similarities in contradistinction to the stated differences in their theoretical orientations.  In the next post I will outline a series of steps that provide guidelines to help deal with self- negative self-talk.

Washington Mutual NYC June 2009

The bubble burst. Waking up to this reality is a process. And there is no quick fix.  What burst apart was more than the banking, automobile, and housing industries. A set of cultural beliefs and values lay in the debris of the economic collapse. Reminiscent of 9/11, our “collective illusions of safety, inviolability and grandiose invincibility, illusions that had long been mainstays of the American historical identity” was shattered.  Stolorow in the Huffington Post (10/15/08). These illusions girded the economic growth leading up to the recession and remain a ghostlike presence in the recovery process.

“No Fear” is a slogan that captures the mindset of this identity, a mindset intoxicated with denial. Being intoxicated with denial glorifies risk and the accompanying blinding sense of invulnerability. Risk imbued our spending, investing, and thinking in general. Being guided by risk is like riding a motorcycle drunk without a helmet. Wall Street and Main Street bet that the cycle would not crash.

When it did, there was an eruption of fear, panic, and pain. During stressful times, emotional life becomes turbulent and complex. It is the nature of being human that current stresses, especially when severe, can trigger old wounds and memories. The stress associated with financial worry can feel like a brain wreck. Real survival concerns and worries are intertwined with past experiences, stirred by feelings of shame and guilt.

Conventional wisdom often fails to grasp the complex psychological dimensions of hard times. It values hardiness and active mastery and devalues vulnerability and weakness.  It preaches a code of behavior embodied by the saying, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Its message exacts a quiet toll as it encourages the restoration of self to its prior position of power and invincibility at the expense of authenticity.

Store Closing (freefoto.com)

Ironically, when the going gets tough, the tough don’t always get going.  Many get irritable, hide their fragility, drink excessively, and isolate themselves or at least their pain.  Rather than aspirational, these behaviors represent a model of maladaptive coping. In contrast when the going gets tough, the weak and vulnerable become depressed. They feel conflicted, confused, doubt themselves, blame themselves, complain, possibly drink and withdraw, but are more likely to seek support and even professional help.

A commentator recently suggested that we call the recession a reset as a way of thinking more hopefully about current conditions. If we reset the economy without re-evaluating the assumptions and beliefs underlying the mindset that generated these problems, then the reset will simply create the conditions for the repetition of old patterns in new situations.

As Stolorow suggests our individual beliefs about ourselves are deeply rooted in our collective psyche. Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction provide a framework for understanding this connection. According to Derrida (1)(Sarup 1988), western thinking is rooted in a “logic of binary oppositions” that establish the hierarchical categories that we use to think. This form of thinking splits reality into polarities such as good/bad, active/passive, rational/irrational, masculine/feminine, sane/insane, strong/weak, and healthy/sick. Psychoanalysts refer to this polarization of reality as splitting. Colloquially it is referred to as black and white thinking.

In Derrida’s framework, the first term of the binary is privileged and overvalued.  It depends on its meaning through the tacit exclusion and subordination of the second term. In other words when the tough get going, weakness is present through its absence. Life is never simply how it appears. Tough and weak are not mutually exclusive, but indivisibly alloyed.  One quality is felt and the other split off

While Psychoanalysis views splitting as a form of primitive thinking characteristic of severe personality disorders, Derrida’s framework suggests that binary oppositions (splitting) permeate psychological discourse and structure the categories we use to understand and describe who we are and how we judge others,

Splitting as a phenomenon of everyday life is illustrated in how average individuals experience the Self. Personal identity and perceptions of others are gauged on a dichotomous rather than continuous scale. Binary terms like good/bad, strong/weak, extrovert/introvert, smart/dumb, beautiful/ugly, cool/uncool form the building blocks of identity that become fixed ideas, and endure as convictions that indelibly define the self and the Other. I am not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough speak to how individuals experience their low self-esteem and constitute the reasons many seek psychological counseling.

It is helpful to think of these psychological splits like fault lines that lie beneath the earth’s surface creating an invisible structural fragility. The dichotomization of reality exemplified by splitting creates a linguistic matrix in which self and others are judged against absolute categories. It engenders an “us versus them mentality,’ where individuals either externalize blame on others or collapse under the weight of self-blame. Somebody wins and somebody loses. Splitting reinforces the polarization of difference between sick and healthy, high and low functioning, good and bad, tough and weak that leads to an increasing sense of either personal inadequacy or grandiosity and to the alienation of the individual from the group.

The collective anxiety and uncertainty about our future is potentially transformative. The psychological reset that is needed starts with personal accountability, but not accountability driven by the logic of binary oppositions. Different conceptual tools are required to facilitate this personal/cultural transformation. We need to develop a more permeable, flexible, and compassionate way of thinking about the self while creating a greater openness to and acceptance of the influence the others. Our need for a psychological overhaul while perhaps more subtle is just as critical to the nation’s wellbeing as the economic bailout.

(1) Sarup, Madan, (1993) An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism

Bollas’ essay prompts therapists to examine the countertransference significance of the frame or risk acting out their countertransference in their maintenance of the frame.  If the classical frame expresses the analyst’s unconscious needs along side conscious practical considerations, the frame becomes a psychological construction that blends contradictions and inconsistencies with procedures.  One can look at the classical frame as one would examine a dream. The patient, the analyst, and the rules governing their interaction represent different aspects of the analyst.  The patient is expected to free associate while the analyst acts in accordance with the principles of abstinence, anonymity, and neutrality.  One can see how the analyst/patient amalgam embodies a paradoxically scintillating tension between the wish to be known intimately and the fear of being known.

This paradoxical tension persists in contemporary psychoanalytic and psychotherapy practices. The therapist’s wish for intimacy and the countervailing fear create cross currents layered into the psychotherapeutic frame.  Clients walk into an office.  They accommodate to a structure that combines personal and impersonal elements in the most tantalizing ways. They are clients or patients, not friends, but they are privileged to an intimacy that few friends enjoy. They experience an unparalleled though limited exclusivity: they are listened to, encouraged to be intimate for 45 or 50 minutes once or multiple times a week.  They pay for this privilege and then leave.  This is indeed a strange configuration that conjoins intimacy with the formality of a business relationship.

While there has been much focus on the co-construction of therapeutic meaning, the frame is the unilateral creation of the therapist. The length of session, flexibility over ending session, fees, personal disclosure, gift giving and receiving, and extra-therapeutic contact have been set up by convention with the needs of the therapist in mind.  Historically, therapists viewed the frame as inviolable (2). Therapists have too uncritically accepted the conditions that structure clinical practice as necessary givens, without examining either its psychological significance or its impact on the client. Therapists consciously maintain these conditions, and only under duress and with great reluctance modify them. Client’s counter reactions to the frame have been interpreted as acting out.

Often the settings of the frame sift out those clients who accommodate from those who don’t within the first few sessions. It is not surprising that most clients who remain in treatment accept the frame, though some grudgingly.  I have had clients politely joke about paying to have somebody listen to them.   I’ve had one client; however, whose articulate protest of the frame provides a client’s perspective on the frame.   She was a therapist in training who came for counseling to fulfil her graduate school requirement. She was never comfortable in her role as client. She made this clear in the first session when she told me that she didn’t like the idea of therapists telling clients what to do.  I was never comfortable in my role as not therapist. There was often anxiety mysteriously floating in the office creating a background of suspense and discomfit that could not be addressed. I believed that her unarticulated anxiety associated with fears of dependency prompted her to avoid the role of patient.  This triggered in me an anxious uncertainty about my role, and an insistence on acting more like the therapist. The more I acted like a therapist, the more she resisted acting like a client.  We became locked in an impasse. Efforts to talk about the impasse only deepened it. We sustained a tense and uncomfortable relationship for 11 sessions, until she decided to find another therapist.

One can look at our brief therapy as a struggle over the frame. She was articulate and insightful.  She felt that the frame was established and maintained for the comfort of the therapist at the expense of the client. It was a mechanism for therapists to titrate the needs of the client. She claimed that the therapist’s narcissistic insistence on maintaining the frame encouraged the client’s accommodation, and accentuated the compliance of the false self. She felt that the needs of the true self, especially the regressive needs, cried out against the rigidity of the frame, particularly the compulsive commitment to ending sessions on time. While the client is invited to open her heart, she must abruptly stop at the end of the hour.  This rigid adherence to the frame posed a grave threat to the client who might need more flexibility in order to grow.  My client felt this rigidity to be harsh, insensitive and potentially re-traumatizing for the client.

In thinking about this case years later, I realized that I failed to be the therapist that she needed. I was unwilling to understand and accept her wish not to be a client. She was pleasant, neither demanding nor argumentative.  She would casually minimize the value therapy, frequently remind me of ways in which she obtained therapy from friends, alternative healers, while complain that she wasn’t getting anything out of the therapy. She would articulately highlight the artificial impersonal aspects of the frame.   She made her co-payment at the start of each session with a certain ambiguous acknowledgement that left me feeling unmistakably paid. I viewed her statements about the inequality of the frame as defensive. While she never explicitly asked or demanded me to modify my approach, her Being insisted on what I unthinkingly felt to be a massive demand. I thought about her personality inconsistencies as evidence of underlying problems of dependence and trust.  I believed that she didn’t want to be in therapy. I did not consider that she did not want to be in with me.  I did not think about my need to end sessions on time and the subtle or not too subtle ways in which I began to disengage as the clock approached the end of the hour. I did not consider my focus on her defensiveness as counter defensive.  In the end, she felt that I didn’t get her resistance to therapy and told me so. I was wounded, but relieved.

As I thought about the issues of this case, the following images emerged.  I imagined swimming in the ocean toward a raft located not too far from shore. I recalled childhood memories of arduously swimming toward a raft and the relief I felt when I had arrived.  I thought about how my feelings in a therapy session resemble the feelings I had swimming. Will the ocean become too rough? Can I make it?   Am I going too far?  Will I be able to get back?  Not being a strong swimmer, these feelings were always present when I swam away from shore.  Another image entered my mind. Years ago I participated in a one day process-oriented group therapy training.  At the end of the group, after we addressed termination, the facilitator left.  As he opened the door to leave, it creaked.  The sound stirred the still air. In the silence I felt the creepy image of a lid shutting on a coffin.
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(1) Bollas, Christopher  (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought  Known   New York, Columbia University Press.

(2) Robert Langs (1973 The Technique of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy,
(1976) The Therapeutic Interaction