A few days ago, in the midst of my allergic haze, I sat down to meditate. I felt nauseous. I hate feeling nauseous. Who doesn’t? I started meditating and all of these thoughts came flooding to my head: “Do I need to go to a doctor? I don’t want to take an antibiotic. Is it allergies or a cold? Why am I nauseous? Does it have anything to do with the aged hummus that I ate last night? Do I have food poisoning?”

You get the picture. I was flooded with thoughts and feelings in reaction to my nausea. I reached a point where I became aware that I was swimming in this sea of neurotic panic and began to observe the thoughts and allow myself to feel the nausea for as long as it needed to be there.

This is where the amazing part comes in. Literally a few minutes after I started to do this, the nausea started subsiding. This led to more thoughts: “Is it going to come back? What’s going on? Am I a hysteric?”

But I kept returning to my breath and observing and the nausea was completely gone by the time I finished my meditation. I was literally making myself sick.

We do this all of the time without realizing it. The Buddha encapsulated our capacity for enhancing our suffering in the parable of the two arrows. The first arrow is the initial physiological sensation, which alone would be noticeable, but bearable. The second arrow is all of the reactions, thoughts and feelings in response to the first arrow. The two arrows together produce the suffering.

It is certainly very challenging to just let it be when we feel psychological or physiological pain, but the bottom line is that when we attach to it by thinking about it and wishing it away, it only serves to stoke the fire.

Try it out for yourself the next time you are in pain. Take a few minutes to breathe and recognize and allow the sensation to be there without doing anything about it and see what happens. It’s worth experimenting with. It certainly was for me!

By David B Younger, PhD, CGP, PC

Emotional deprivation is an example of a common schema that is born out of a persistent lack of empathy, nurturing, and/or protection in childhood.

The Detached Protector is an example of a mode. It is a defensive or a coping mode that commonly develops as a way of defending against the aforementioned deprivation.

The Detached Protector is characterized by numbness, and literally, a lack of connection or attachment to one’s emotional world. It can be misinterpreted as a state of contentment, because on the surface, someone with a strong Detached Protector can seem quite serene.

The Detached Protector develops in childhood as a necessary survival tool, but it doesn’t automatically switch off once one reaches adulthood and the traumatic situation is no longer present.

Dealing with the Detached Protector is one of the greatest challenges in therapy. It’s like a stubborn old soldier that doesn’t want to lay down its weapons even though the war has ended years ago. We must respect, acknowledge, and understand the reason for its existence, and convince it over time that the danger is no longer real and present, and that it is in fact safe to stand down.

Once the Detached Protector relaxes its defenses, it is possible to access one’s internal world of feelings and emotions and memories. This inevitably involves feeling pain and sadness; the same pain and sadness that was thwarted years ago. Except now as an adult, in the majority of cases, there are many more tools to deal with and process the pain, and one can learn that feeling it will not kill or overwhelm. It requires a lot more psychic energy to keep the pain at bay than to acknowledge it and accept it and let it go.

By David B Younger, PhD, CGP, PC

Couples need to refuel too, but life often gets in the way. Even five to ten minutes of quiet solo time can go such a long way. It can be spent hugging and kissing or talking about the day, but it serves the same function as for children. The biggest mistake couples make is putting their relationships on the back burner.

I recommend making it part of your routine. Remember that the happier the couple, the happier the kids!

By David B Younger, PhD, CGP, PC

When I work with people with strong punitive modes, which is most people, I encourage them to simply observe how often it comes up and in what circumstances. No need to push it away or judge it. Just observe.

The process of observing is part of the cultivation and/or strengthening of the healthy adult mode. Observing creates an inevitable distance between the healthy adult (the observer) and the punitive mode. The distancing is empowering even though it can be painful at first when one realizes just how prevalent the punitive voice can be.

By David B Younger, PhD, CGP, PC

Take your hand and hide it behind something and spread your fingers and slowly lift your fingers up so only your fingers can be seen and not the palm of your hand. If you did not know that this was a hand, you would assume that the five fingers that you see are separate individual entities. As you slowly lift the hand up, you see that they are all connected and part of the same organism.

This is an exercise that I learned in a mindfulness and psychotherapy class with Dr. Ron Siegel. It is a simple and poignant way of demonstrating the limitations of our perceptions as well as the interconnectedness of things that may not appear to be connected at all.

We that think that we can really see everything with our own eyes are truly blind. It is truly humbling to realize that as much we know, we really know so little. Compartmentalizing and seeing things in black or white terms is comforting to the human mind, but it is also so limiting and ultimately serves to make us more blind than we need to be.

So the next time you make a judgment or an assumption about someone or something, try to be aware that you are judging or assuming and ask yourself if that is the truth or something you are simply settling on in order to simplify things.

By David B Younger, PhD, CGP, PC

Clinging to certain emotions or wanting to push them away only serves to create the opposite effect. We inadvertently create the illusion of permanence with all the attributions that we make regarding a given emotion. This creates a pathway to pain and suffering.

The good news is that there is much more choice involved in this process than we think. We can cultivate an awareness of the workings of our minds by simply noticing when thoughts and emotions arise. This process of awareness serves to distinguish between the observer and the mind. This awareness implies that we are not our thoughts or our emotions. It can sound very philosophical, but the manifestation of this awareness is very tangible.

Mindfulness meditation embodies this practice of observing the mind without judgment or attachment. A great book to read for those that are interested in exploring this is “The Miracle of Mindfulness” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

By David B Younger, PhD, CGP, PC

• Stress levels changed based on the order in the social hierarchy. This was true for baboons and for people in the workplace. The higher in the hierarchy, the lower the stress. Stress was measured physiologically, not psychologically.
• Stress reactions caused neurons to dramatically decrease in size.
• All animals, including humans, release stress hormones in response to stress, which aids in the stress response when a threatening situation arises. Humans also have stress responses that are work or money related, etc., so that the stress response inevitably becomes chronic causing a host of ailments and disorders such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and ulcers.
• Social isolation is a huge cause of stress. Contact, care, nurturing and compassion all significantly reduce stress.

There are so many things we can do to mitigate stress including exercise and meditation. You can rent Sapolsky’s documentary on Netflix.

By David B Younger, PhD, CGP, PC

One thing that we can do when our kids are upset is to help them put words to their feelings by saying things like: “Are you feeling mad because we had to turn off the TV before your program ended so that we can go for dinner?” Another thing we can do is to be empathic. For example: “I know it must be hard or frustrating right now. I can remember feeling similar feelings when I was your age”. This helps children to feel understood.

Do not tell them to stop crying. That’s one of the worst things to do. Do not call them babies for being upset over something that you think is trivial. It is not trivial for them. Children can easily learn to feel shamed for expressing their natural emotions. You more than likely experienced this at some point in your own life.

Parenting is hard work. It is especially hard when we are triggered by something and have to make concerted efforts not to react impulsively and to give our children the space that they need to express themselves.

By David B Younger, PhD, CGP, PC

In the Vedic tradition, a mantra is used to anchor the meditation. One of the biggest benefits of meditation, as far as I am concerned, is that it is a consciousness and practice of training the mind. I didn’t realize the full extent to which my mind was a wild animal until I began the practice of taming it. Jack Kornfield compares the mind in meditation to a puppy. It keeps trying to run off in different directions and you gently continue bringing it back.

Thoughts used to keep me up at night as well as hook onto my moods and take them swinging through the vines of my mind. I never even entertained the notion that this would be something that I could control. But that is what meditation has helped me to do. This does not mean that my mind never wanders. I am still human. But I do not feel like I am at the mercy of my mind anymore. I don’t allow it to race when I am about to sleep, and I am able to recognize when I am feeling low and start to attach negative cognitions to the feeling, which feeds it and enables it to persist way more than it needs to.

Thoughts and feelings are like waves that rise from the vast reservoir of the mind and melt back to the source. This is happening all of the time. Tsunamis are in large part self imposed. The process of attaching to specific thoughts and feelings blocks the natural ebb and flow. Pressure builds and the wave grows until it crashes down.

There are many different types of meditation. It doesn’t matter which one you choose, but I strongly believe it is one of the most natural and powerful remedies that exists with respect to psychic suffering.

David B. Younger, Ph.D, CGP, P.C.

When assumptions become the norm in most interactions, both members of the couple end up feeling emotionally deprived and victimized. When they show up in my office, they are fighting about everything. You can feel the chill in the air.

The goal in the beginning of the therapy is to break this vicious cycle of assumptions and to create enough safety via validating both partners’ hurt so that an environment of sharing and healing can be created. Couples can become aware of their assumptions and the impact they have on each other. They can be taught to listen in a new way. When this happens it feels as if arid ground has been fertilized and new life can grow.

If you feel like you are caught in this pattern with your partner, it is really worth seeking help and doing something about it. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

David B Younger, PhD, CGP, PC