Friday, February 27, 2015

On Time Pressures

I have a cut-off, discordant relationship with time. I try to ignore it a lot of the time, but it seems to be slipping so fast from my fingers that I need to find a way to relate to it better. I am someone who resists schedules and planning, and some of it, I think, is related to removing a sense of reality, of getting disconnected from things so that they don't quite touch you so deeply.

It's a way of numbing myself.

Maybe you are nothing like me, maybe you are an expert at planning and scheduling. Maybe you need every moment accounted for, and just the thought of not sticking or following through a deadline stresses you out completely. Maybe over-scheduling is your way of tuning things out, of gaining a sense of control.

In her lovely book "The Not So Big Life," Sarah Susanka talks about people like us: "time obsessers" and "time resistors." We both need to relate to time in a better way, so that our lives can flow better. Susanka talks beautifully about going with the current, neither trying to obsessively control it nor resisting it. She says, "Think of leaves on the surface of a stream. They're floating along, carried by the current.

Some drift from one side to the other as the stream flows along, whereas others appear to be floating more or less down the central channel. If you follow one particular leaf with your eyes, however, you'll discover that a leaf that's moving fast at one minute will be aimlessly sidelined a few minutes later, and a leaf that is slow-moving at this minute will become speedy the next. 

Every leaf has its natural passage downstream, but if you were to try to write a script for each leaf and coordinate it with the scripts for all the other leaves, you would have a monumental task on your hands. If, in addition, you thought you were responsible for getting each leaf to its proper destination and if you believed that your not doing so would result in all the leaves bumping into one another and blocking their collective progress downstream, you'd be thinking like a typical micromanager, a "time obsesser."       

If, on the other hand, you believed that no leaf should be forced to flow if it didn't want to and that it was up to you to hold back the flow so that each leaf could exercise its free will, you'd be thinking like a "time resister." Neither approach is tenable. The river and the leaves will flow just the same, and all you'd be doing by obsessing or resisting would be burning yourself out."

I have a deep sense of what Susanka is saying here, and yet, I don't understand everything she means. I do know that the way we relate to time has to do, on some level, with our anxieties and what we are trying to control or get away from. We get so focused on this that we try to get away from the  nature of time. It will flow. The leaves will go down the path.

What Susanka points to is getting to a healthier place. We see that time is passing, and all we have is right now. So, for "time obsessers," the remedy is in letting go of some of the control. Things can happen even if we are not always making them happen. For time resisters, the remedy is also to do the opposite of what our personalities are comfortable with. It is to get still and not fight the limitations that time necessarily imposes on us. It is to give ourselves a schedule that we can easily meet. It is to learn the skills to plan and follow through.

Susanka says, "Burnout is the result of our conditioned patterns. Those who resist scheduling often find themselves just as burned out as their overscheduled counterparts. If you always blow deadlines, your challenge is to learn to meet deadlines. If you always make deadlines, your challenge is to learn to ask for more time when you need it."

When we are neither obsessing nor resisting, our minds can finally relax. We can feel more engaged with right now. And as Susanka reminds us, that's all there ever is, that "life is the experiencing of the experience."       

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Using the Gift of Emotions

We are never taught about feelings, about what they mean or how to listen to them. The world inside is lost in shadow, and our attention is fixated on the outside.

When feelings become insistent, they just feel problematic to us - something to be fixed or eased. We never get right to the heart of them, to try and understand what they are trying to tell us.

We don't know how to use their energy, or how to respond to their call.

For HSPs, the rip-tide of emotions can be extremely strong. So, getting acquainted with our feelings - our longings, frustrations, or sadness - can help us immensely. Maybe we can build a boat to help take us safely through the waters, instead of getting swept under the waves.

Last week, I talked about Karla McLaren's wonderful book The Language of Emotions, and how to look at anger in a different way. McLaren tells us that anger, channeled properly, is a very useful emotion. It helps us build boundaries that keep out what doesn't work for us. It helps us say, only this far and no more.

In this fabulous video, McLaren tells us more about relating to our emotions, about having empathy, and the reason why boundary-work can be such challenge for some of us. As we know, anger is the emotion we use to set limits and guard our personal space.

But for some people, some other emotion can becomes their dominant feeling. For them, anger never quite comes up, and this feeling dominates the landscape. Unconsciously, they respond to situations that need anger with either fear or sadness.

Why does this happen? For people who have suffered through any kind of physical abuse, fear can become their dominating emotion. For an HSP who has gone through trauma, this means that not only do they have the heightened sensitivity of other HSPs, but that they are also hyper-vigilant to any kind of potential threat.

Fear of what might happen, of all the things that might go wrong colors how they see the world. They might avoid even minimally risky situations because of what they have experienced before.

This is normal for anyone who has suffered through any kind of trauma. The world becomes a dangerous place, and now we respond to it with fear and mistrust.

Unconsciously, without understanding or meaning it, we use fear to set boundaries. McLaren talks about this in the video, how that can keep us running here and there, feeling shaky and out-of-control. In a similar way, if our predominant emotion is sadness, an emotion that helps us let go, we will just keep on dropping things that are important to us. Anger, used neither expressively nor repressed, actually helps us contain, helps keep things in. When anger has gone underground, we can be left less than fully functional.

The way McLaren talks about emotions is novel. It is something we have never learnt, not in school, not anywhere else. She gives us a map to get to the heart of every emotion. It is challenging to learn, but trying to figure this out and getting reacquainted with the language of our feelings is something we need so much.

Maybe once we know and understand that emotions are actually part of cognition, that they inform us, that they have specific functions, maybe then we can build our rafts and coast on them. Maybe then our sensitivity can start yielding its gifts, gifts that lie hidden in the shadow.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Boundaries and HSPs

In her insightful book The Language of Emotions, Karla McLaren talks eloquently about how all emotions come to us with their own, specific gifts. This is true even for the so-called negative emotions like anger and fear. They speak of our deeper truths, truths we don't want to deal with, but that ask us to pay attention, so we can grow into more of who we are.

Anger is one such emotion, and the truths it tells can be troublesome. As sensitive people, we might try to turn away from anger. Many of us identify closely with being "nice," and when anger comes calling, we might try to avoid it because we don't want anything to challenge this self we have constructed. 

We are the perpetually giving ones. We are the ones who don't turn other people down. We are the ones who are always "so understanding." 

We are all these things, and yet, sometimes, we feel like we are cut into a thousand pieces exactly because we do this. Instead of making a whole offering to the world, we are giving in bite-size acts to whoever asks us, and whenever they ask us. 

Doing this means we never get to really create something of lasting value. It means that we blur our sense of who we are when we step this way and that to be all things to all people. 

Anger, for us, is a useful guest. It points to the places of our violation. It tells us what feels good and what doesn't. It informs us of all the areas where we feel short-changed. It prods us: What are we going to do about it?

Because it asks so many uncomfortable questions, we normally default to what we have always done - repress it. So, we abandon ourselves, feel apathetic or depressed, and sense that our boundaries are shaky. Without hearing what anger has to say, we feel powerless, victimized. 

And yet, we don't know what to do with our feelings of outrage, with an anger that feels like it can go dangerously out of control. This might be one pitfall of being a sensitive person. 

We can see so easily all the ways in which expression can go wrong, or confrontation can go wrong that we swing to the opposite side of the pendulum and focus on maintaining an unnatural calm.  

That, of course, doesn't help us. And neither does venting anger, McLaren tells us. Exploding with anger only makes us feel horribly ashamed of ourselves. In fact, people who have serious anger issues can actually end up feeling debased, as if they have done something wrong. 

Anger can become a weapon that hurts both others and themselves. 

So, what do we do with anger if neither venting nor repressing are healthy alternatives. The answer is that anger actually informs us of what is going wrong, so it points to the need for action. 

Instead of merely repressing anger, next time, maybe if you listen to it and decide what action you can take, that could be immensely helpful. Maybe you will decide that you build up resentment when you give away too much of yourself. Then, you might step back and instead of just getting angry at people who do the taking, you can tune in and ask yourself, "Why am I so invested in being nice?," "What would happen if I didn't go along, if I didn't do what I normally do?"

Maybe you'll find that you have gotten the most appreciation for being "nice" in your life and so, it has become something that now holds you back. Maybe you'll find that you never learnt to give yourself positive strokes, and so, getting approval now stands in place of that. 

Maybe you'll have to take apart different areas of the structure of your life to figure out what exactly stops you from having and maintaining boundaries. 

In the meanwhile, you and I can listen to McLaren's wise words and pay attention to the rising energy of our anger. The roots of the word emotion point to the fact that they are something that moves us. Anger will move us too. 

One way to process and let go of its vigorous energy might be vigorous exercise or dancing. That way, some of the stagnant energy that creates so much pressure inside us, can find relief. This can give us time to think about what's the best thing to do right now, instead of stewing in the negativity. 

What about you? What is your anger trying to tell you? What will its healthy expression look like?   

Thursday, February 19, 2015

HSP Tools: Conscious Complaining

There's a fog settling down on the hills outside. I can see the traffic moving along, sighing under the weight of the approaching darkness. The general mood is hazy, compacted. 

Sometimes, our feelings can build up like that. They come swirling around the corner, and soon, our internal landscape seems saturated with them. 

They settle down into nooks and crannies, and believing that we can' really do anything about them, we let them overshadow everything else. We don't think as clearly. We let our feelings roll us along, and we don't act as cohesively. We are left off-center. 

But generally though, there is something, even if it is small, that we can do to shift our energy. One such tool is conscious complaining. Karla McLaren talks about this in her lovely book The Language of Emotions. When we are stewing in negativity and complaints, we can cordon off some time for ourselves, sit alone, and just vent and give voice all that is going wrong in our lives. 

We can complain about what hard luck we have. We can moan about all the things we have to do, but don't really want to. We can let go and show the irritation that we always side-step when we are actually talking to someone. We don't need to play nice. We don't need to pretend that we are above it all. 

What this might do is, what this complaining out loud, all alone, might do is release some of our pent-up frustration. Many of us, and I suspect many HSPs, spend a lot of time playing nice, while just beneath the surface, our real feelings - our anger, our fears, our doubts and hesitations -- are coalescing into un-identifiable sloppy messes. 

When we take the lid off of them, when we speak about our hurts and grudges and misgivings, we air out our feelings, so to speak. They are no longer the faceless monsters becoming bigger and bigger because we are not paying attention to them. In the light of the day, we can see them a bit more objectively, and if there really are some monstrous specimens, we can at least lessen their force by doing something with their energy. No one is hurt by it. We are not venting at or to someone. 

We are learning to slow down and see what these feelings are made of. We are practicing getting in touch with what we feel, and giving ourselves permission to express the "not-nice" feelings. It really is okay to be angry, or tired, or hurt. It is okay to feel our feelings, and let them out in a way that is healthy for us. 

Maybe conscious complaining could help you be more emotionally self-regulating because you have already gotten something out of your system. Maybe it can help you get in touch with what it is that you really feel, beneath all the masks that we put on for everybody else. Maybe it can be like a safety valve for your emotional experience. 

Maybe it can be one more tool in your arsenal that you can pick up and use when the emotional clouds start darkening your inner sky. 

Friday, February 13, 2015

HSP Tools

Yesterday's post was about Dr Ted Zeff's wonderful new book The Power of Sensitivity. While reading it, I thought about all the different strategies that we come to learn while navigating the stormy seas of our sensitivity. 

For me, one of them has been learning to calm my mind. The best way, of doing this, has been through practicing a gentle form of yoga, which connects my awareness with what is happening in my body. 

When I don't do this, I feel as if my energy is dissipated, or I am stuck somewhere jutting out of my body. 

For many HSPs, a regular practice of some kind - a gentle form of exercise, meditation, reiki, or prayer - provides the groundwork for harnessing our energy in other areas of our lives. 

One of the wonderful things about being an HSP is that although the valleys that we go down can be dark and deep, our peaks can be just as expansive, just as exhilarating. Sometimes, when I think of my awareness as porous, letting everything in, it only seems like a disadvantage. But there is another side to the coin. And it is the fact that when I give myself what I need, I am almost as easily lifted, elevated. If I hear a beautiful piece of music, it nourishes me in the deepest kind of way. 

The challenge, really, is to develop the habit to regularly give ourselves what we need. It's a hard challenge for some of us, and our struggle with developing self-compassion can be extremely frustrating. It can make our progress really slow. 

I recently read Sonia Connolly's lovely book Wellspring of Compassion again. What she says resonates with me so much and I expect, you will find yourself reflected back in her words. "Self-care can sound like an obligation, one more item on a long to-do list. Self-care can sound like abandonment if we were emotionally or physically neglected as children and still long for someone to rescue us. Self-care can sound selfish, self-indulgent, or forbidden when we are accustomed to caring for others first." 

For a lot of us, all these things make it incredibly hard to do self-care. This is a subject I want to explore more deeply this year and find solutions for. 

What about you? How do you think an increased sense of self-compassion can help your life? What stops you from actually giving yourself what you so acutely need?  

Parenting HSP Children

Dr Ted Zeff's wonderful new book The Power of Sensitivity gives us many insights into what it means to be a sensitive person. It gives us the privilege of looking through the window as many different HSP lives change and shift patterns. 

It includes real stories of sensitive people coming into their own at workplaces, dealing with feelings of overwhelm, and learning how to navigate the world in their own special way, instead of looking outside themselves for guidance. 

One such story that deeply touched me is told by Cecilia Bonnevie, who talks about the gifts and challenges of raising an HSP son. Cecilia talks about the deep appreciation that they have for their eight-year old son's sensitivity. He has deep sympathy for people. He has recently turned vegetarian because he feels so sad for the animals that get killed. He is not afraid of expressing his warmth and deep love for people who matter a lot to him. 

At the same time, this greatly heightened sensitivity also means that he gets easily overwhelmed, especially when he is entering a new situation. He needs to be well-prepared to perform at his best. He needs guidance in understanding and dealing with his emotional reactions. 

What's so heart-warming is the love and thoughtfulness that Cecilia and her husband pour into guiding him in learning about who he is and how he can use that to the greatest advantage. Cecilia tells us about how when her son needs to enter a potentially over-stimulating environment, her husband and she take extra care to prepare him for the shift. 

"For example, a week before school started we went to his new school as a family, played at the playground, and talked about his feelings and fears of starting a new school and meeting new friends. We assured him that he wasn't alone in feeling overwhelmed and anxious and let him know that other kids felt the same way on their first day of school. Since the teachers in our school put up a list of children's and their teacher's names before school starts, our son felt more relaxed and confident having this information beforehand."    

Cecilia talks about how they work closely with their son's teachers and help to inform them about his trait in a way that would not "label" him. They also give then a copy of "The Twenty Tips for Teachers" from Elaine Aron's book The Highly Sensitive Child. This proactive approach helps create a much more understanding environment for her son. 

Cecilia also shows us how love can shape a child's sense of self. When she notices that her son does not participate in big groups because he is overstimulated by the noise and commotion, she starts volunteering for field trips and in gym class. She plays with other kids so that her son can see how much fun it could be to join in on all the fun and games. He just observes her the first few times she volunteers, but pretty soon, he starts participating. As he starts discovering himself and his abilities, he finds that he is, in fact, very athletic and a fast runner. This, further, adds to his confidence. 

Cecilia and her husband show us how parenting a sensitive child is about working with their sensitivity, and not against it. They don't try to impose any outer standards of behavior on their son. Instead, they unconditionally love him for who he is. 

They see all the amazing gifts of sensitivity, and give it shape and direction. Their love and acceptance ensures that their son become more and more confident as time goes on. He participates in the world around him, and discovers who he is in the process. 

This heart-warming real-life story tells us of the ways in which parents can nurture their sensitive children. When the child feels this love and interest, it is natural for him to grow into someone who also loves and accepts themselves. This is one of the gifts that understanding parents can give HSP children - the self-acceptance that is at the core of later success and happiness in life. 

Friday, February 6, 2015

Who are you without an automatic habit?

I have been feeling very restless recently. It's the kind of restlessness that feels promising, as if I am getting in touch with my own appetite for life again, wanting to taste it and touch it and consume it. I feel like I am reaching out to something more, to something more alive.

And in this mood, I just read something that makes complete sense to me. It's an exercise from Sarah Susanka's lovely book The Not So Big Life. She talks about an assignment her first teacher gave to her that profoundly changed how she experienced her daily life.

Susanka says: "Once she had named these patterns, I recognized my attachment to them, but until that moment I had been unaware of how much each one defined who I took myself to be. These were the three patterns she identified and her requests for change:

1. You always wear long skirts. No more skirts. 
2. You have worn your hair long for many years. Cut your hair.
3. You have a glass of wine when you return home  from work each day. No more alcohol after 5.00 p.m.

The three assignments proved to be brilliant catalysts for change, not only in those patterns of behavior but in my entire self-image."

When she was given this exercise, she didn't own a pair of pants, so she had to go out and buy a couple of pairs. She had never thought about it, but her self-image was deeply tied to her skirt collection. She found the hair assignment even more difficult. She did cut a few inches off her hair, but she felt that she didn't quite fulfill the assignment as completely as she could have. She did stop having the glass of wine, and this small shift actually dramatically changed the quality of her evenings, simply because she was more alert.

She kept this up for nine months, as prescribed by her teacher.  

Susanka says: "All these changes allowed me to experience firsthand that my ideas about how I "am" are quite arbitrary and that by making even small changes in behavior patterns, big shifts will occur all by themselves."

As we begin to identify our own daily habits, we may find that we think of some as practical choices and have no good rationale for others. "Either kind of habit will work in this exercise, since even those habits you think you've adopted for purely utilitarian purposes will in all likelihood prove to be more than that. What you'll discover, whichever habits you change, is that everything you do affects both how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you."

And how do we identify these habits? We can think of how we dress and we can think of what our routines are. For example: Are your clothes predominantly one color? Then, maybe stop wearing that color for six months. Do you always or never wear makeup or perfume? What if you changed that? What if you only wore skirts instead of jeans?

What about your routines? Do you habitually watch the news or read something at a particular time? Do you clean up from meals right away or later? Do you habitually have a cup of tea or coffee at a certain time?

Which of these do you feel most attached to as something that you "have" to do? Which of these ways of being do you feel most resistant to changing? You could choose something to change that either feels hard or simple, though the harder thing will, of course, be more rewarding.

What happens if you do something different for six months? What have you broken away from? What have you discovered? Were you using something as an excuse? Was your self-image closely wrapped around something insubstantial?

How does changing your moves affect the rest of your life? Does it make you feel a little bit more alive? Does it make you feel vulnerable? Does it make you feel something else altogether?

What do you think? Would you like to try something like this - something that shifts an underlying pattern and reveals something more about how you live your life?        

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Being an INFP writer

We all struggle with different parts of the writing process. As we write more and more, different tendencies within us stop us in our tracks. Sometimes, it feels like we are trying to move a mountain outside, when the real problem is the way we are relating to our work.

We have to deepen our understanding of the different needs that live inside us.

We have to approach these needs holistically, instead of trying to ram through a perceived block.

I have written before about clarifying my writing process here and here.

One more aspect of my struggle became clear to me as I read this article by Dr. A.J.Drenth that talks about  INFPs' (and INTPs') quest for convergence and certainty. For those of you who are not familiar with personality types and MBTI, this link might be helpful.

Essentially, what the article says is that there is an innate drive in all of us to reconcile our natural way of being in the world with the most undeveloped aspects of our personality. For an INFP like me, this means trying to reconcile my natural preference for engaging with the world (through the lens of my feelings) with a more objective world-view.

I can see this happening inside of me, this struggle to arrive at a concrete conclusion. But what this article says, and what can be so helpful for INFP writers, is that trying too hard to arrive at a final conclusion or identity might be premature for us. One of our natural preferences as INFPs is looking at the outside world and noticing infinite possibilities and patterns. This means that if we try to force a final conclusion, that conclusion is often brittle and changeable.

We are too aware of the infinite possibilities to arrive at the kind of surety that we sometimes see and envy in the people around us. By trying to force a conclusion, we are trying to act like these other people, people who are nothing like us.

One reason why we do this, of course, is because of the deep need inside us to integrate different aspects of our personality. But we stumble when we bypass the process required, and also bypass our natural openness in order to quickly resolve this tension that we feel inside. 

Another reason could be that we have faced uncertainties in our live that have left us scared and wanting to cling to some permanent answer. Our minds are trying to fast-track to an illusive place of certainty and stability.

It could just also be that we discount our natural preferences because they have some down-sides. We envy people who have firm opinions about how the world is because our own nature sees too many possibilities that can leave us feeling paralyzed. We could be going from one option to the other without really following through. 

So, we start feeling that the answer is to act like people who have strong judgments. But trying to do this too fast, too soon means that we fail to use our own strengths. We can only arrive at a stable opinion once we have experimented, asked questions, and meandered this way and that. This process asks us to take our time.

How does this understanding - that our natural strength lies in possibility, in asking questions - help us as INFP writers?

One way it can benefit us is that it makes us realize that we might have been wrongly assumed that the world needs us to provide conclusions in our writing. Because we believed this, we might have been trying to force answers. But what the world really needs from our writing is the willingness to go down the rabbit-hole, to be the explorer of nooks and crannies. We can provide the vision that expands and fortifies conclusions.

This is what Dr A.J. Drenth has to says about INFPs struggling with their own natures: "But these assumptions are merely projections of their own subjectivity. The truth is that the world needs them to ask probing questions, to poke holes in existing theories, and to provide creative or explorative “food for thought.”"

This is a common human problem. We all discount what comes to us most naturally, and try to move to the opposite extreme. INFPs who are spontaneously creative and bursting with ideas wish they could focus on only one idea like INJ personality types and build it into something towering over the course of a lifetime. On the other hand, INTJs and INFJs face their own struggle where they think that the world needs them to make art or combust into spontaneous self-expression, instead of providing the deep analysis that is their strength.

As an INFP who absolutely loves INFJ writers and philosophers, it's hard for me to understand how they could be blind to their own strengths. And yet, I discount the strengths of my own style - the pictures tumbling out of my head, the endless ideas I want to engage with.  

But just the awareness that our drive to integrate different parts of ourselves comes from somewhere deep inside can help us be more compassionate with our struggles. We start understanding what this tension is all about. We start channeling our strengths, instead of getting our foot caught up in the knots in our psyche. We can acknowledge that there is a push and a pull inside us, and that it can only really be resolved when we act authentically and struggle with the challenges that our gifts bring us.  

If you are an INFP writer, honor your creativity and value your style. Be who you are, and stay with the questions instead of forcing the answers. The world needs your unique expression, it needs you to keep asking so that the answers can crystallize in their own time.