Life & Therapy

I read an article recently, on how to get rid of mice.  The last sentence said something about not letting the little rodents get to you too much, and to remember that we humans are bigger than them. It is easy to feel helpless or overwhelmed when mice invade your home.  The truth is that they are not the ones in power- they are dependent on you to leave food out and to leave openings for them from the outside.  They are definitely weaker than us, but it sometimes does not feel that way.

There are times in which we might give our power away to another, making them seem much more important to us than we are to ourselves.  If we find ourselves in a situation where it seems that the power balance has been thrown off, it is very possible that we have been giving our power and our resources away.  What was it that made us give our power away in the first place?  We might not think we are deserving of love, so we hand our power over to whoever is willing to love us.  It could be that we feel lucky to get any kind of work, so we give our power over to a boss who is really an incompetent tyrant.  Perhaps we aren’t confident in our parenting skills, so we are afraid to put our foot down when we need to.  

In these situations, we need to build our confidence back up, so that we learn that we are deserving of love, or that we are good at the work we do, or that we are capable of parenting.  We may need to heal old wounds that have us believing that we aren’t worth much.  We need to become important to ourselves, we need to understand that we are valuable.  When we do, we will be less likely to hand our power over to people who don’t deserve it.  

One of the less charming aspects of living in an old house is the attraction mice have for them, and the ease at which they enter.  So many cracks, holes, nooks, crannies!  When you have mice in your house, it is incredibly tempting to go into denial about it all.  It is completely understandable that you don’t want to admit that you are rooming with rodents, but ignoring it has some big consequences.  Mice do nothing but chew, poop, and breed, and they do all three in great abundance.  The more you try to ignore them, the more they are multiplying in the dark shadows of your house.  Eventually, you won’t be able to ignore them because they will be everywhere- chewing on things, pooping on things, eating your food, possibly your wiring, and generally making life miserable for you.

Sometimes, we have traits, tendencies, or desires that we don’t like to admit to ourselves, and sometimes we push them into the shadows of our minds, pretending that they don’t exist.  Like mice, these things don’t go away if we just ignore them- instead, they get bigger, and more complicated, and eventually overwhelm us when they come to light.  An extreme example of this would be the politicians or preachers who are overly-identified with being virtuous, but who suddenly get caught in acts that go against their self-proclaimed morals .

The first step in dealing with mice in the house is to admit that they are there, and to shine a light in the dark corners to see where they’ve settled.  It may help us to know that many, many people struggle with mice in the home- we are not alone, and there is nothing to be ashamed of.  The first step in dealing with the parts of us that we’ve hidden from ourselves is quite similar.  We can shine a light into our own dark corners, without shame or judgment, opening up to our full selves, rather than fighting what is true.    

I am not a great bowler; in fact, I’m pretty terrible, so I am well acquainted with the gutter ball.  I often throw the ball, and it veers to one side, flirts with and then hooks up with the gutter.  I notice that during the veering stage, I mentally and physically try to reverse the fate of the ball.  I might do a little lopsided jig in the opposite direction of where the ball is headed, trying to convince it to magically change directions, while in my head I might be saying something like “No, no, no, no, no!!!!”  or “Go THIS way!”  Sadly, the ball never listens to me.

When we don’t want things to go a certain way, we may fight the truth for a while, as if we can game the system.  We don’t like to admit when we are not in control of a situation.  We have no control over the ball once it leaves our hands, but we still may try to influence its path with our magical thinking, dancing and mental commands.  We may feel that if we even open up to the possibility of things going where we don’t want them to, we are somehow committing to that reality.  So, we fight the things we don’t want, we close ourselves off from that which we are afraid of, and we imagine that we are in control of everything.  

We invite pain into our lives when we try to control that which is out of our hands.  By not allowing the possibility of disappointment into our imaginations, we are less prepared to deal with disappointment when it comes our way.  Ironically, by trying to control outcomes that are beyond our control, we wind up feeling even more out of control when the outcome isn’t to our liking.  We may not have a say in how some things turn out- such as whether our bid for a promotion is accepted, or whether a medical diagnosis is one that we want, or whether our flight arrives on time.  We do have a say in how we respond to the outcome of any given situation.  If we focus less on trying to influence things that are beyond us, then we have more energy to respond to whatever comes our way in life.     

When I was growing up, I played on a soccer team with just about every other girl in the area. It took me a while to understand the concept of defense, which is where I spent most of my time. One day, the ball came flying at me rather fast, and there was no one else nearby. While I should have met the ball straight on with my head, I shrank away from it and threw my arms over my face in fear. Of course, the ball hit me right on my hands, and I got a penalty AND a nickname for the rest of the season: “Hands.” While I never reacted that way again, it did take a long time to learn that good defense involves running toward the ball rather than away from it.

In life, there are times when something or someone comes at us very fast. Our initial defensive reaction may be to shrink into ourselves, hoping that we will be protected from the onslaught. Often, this approach has the opposite effect, and we get run over by the oncoming person or thing. As we shrink, our fear grows. As scary as it feels, sometimes we need to make ourselves bigger rather than smaller, and move toward that which is coming our way, rather than shrink and try to hide from it. As we learn not to shrink, our confidence grows.

When I lived in Oregon, I went tubing once on the McKenzie River which has both calm and choppy parts. It is wide enough to hold both simultaneously as you float down the river. This was the first time I’d tubed, and I was quite afraid of the choppy bits, so I very much wished to avoid them. At one point, I saw a choice ahead of me: on one side of the river, there was a scary, choppy stretch with low-lying branches, and on the other, a smooth and gentle stretch. Panicking, I stared at the scary part while paddling furiously to get away from it. The more I stared and floundered, the faster I headed toward it. When I redirected my gaze to the place I wanted to be, it seemed that the tube just naturally headed that way, and it became an effortless ride to the gentle part of the river. The lesson for me was to focus where I wanted to be headed, rather than staring and fighting the place I wanted to avoid.

In life, there are many ways in which we try to avoid and fight things that seem overpowering, only to discover that the avoidance brings us closer to, rather than further from what we are trying to avoid. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we are going to stop eating compulsively, or we are not going to react angrily when someone triggers us, or we are not going to overspend our money. Then it seems like the more we try not to, the more we really want to do it, until we can’t help it, and we binge, we strike out at someone, or we blindly splurge.

Just as in the river, avoidance is much harder to accomplish than having a focus on where you actually want to be. In other words, it is much harder for humans not to do something than it is for us to do something. This is a similar concept to the child who hollers “I WILL NOT FALL DOWN!” in hopes that saying so makes it true, but who would likely fall anyway. Instead of trying to avoid doing those things we’d rather not do, we can instead decide that we will try to notice our feelings and our physical sensations before, during, and after we do those things. The goal changes from avoiding a behavior, to staying connected with ourselves during that behavior. That connection will give us an awareness that can help us to move in our desired direction gently and effortlessly.

Last spring, I noticed something about how I viewed my garden. After a long day, I would walk around and look at the plants. This sounds relaxing on paper, but I was looking at the plants that weren’t there yet, or the weeds that I hadn’t gotten to yet, or a fungus here, an aphid there. I was not really looking at my garden at all! I was looking at a series of potentials and flaws and responsibilities. Meanwhile, there was much more that was beautiful and right about the garden in real time. After some effort, I learned to sit and look at all of the garden: the blooms, the tender shoots, the lady bugs, the butterflies, as well as the flaws. I found out that the beauty was outweighing the flaws by quite a lot.

In life, we often look at ourselves as if we are just a series of flaws and things to improve. We may look in the mirror and see a dot-to-dot of blemishes, rather than looking at our whole face. We might home in solely on parts of our bodies that we dislike, until we can see only flaws and nothing else. If a cartoon were to be drawn of our flaw-focused approach to ourselves, it may be quite funny. Maybe there would be a giant nose with a pimple mounted upon a gigantic disembodied butt or belly, with no arms, hands, legs, eyes, etc.

It might take some effort, but if we can shine awareness upon our tendency to see ourselves only through our flaws, we can then learn to expand our awareness to our selves as whole, complex and beautiful creatures. We all have some flaws, but there is so much more to us than that, and it is well worth it to learn to see our whole picture!