Tag: authenticity

Existentialism and psychotherapy

Posted in comparative religion, philosophy, psychological models, psychology, psychotherapy, religionLeave a comment

Although I studied a variety of therapies in my preparation for a career as a psychotherapist, I never identified exclusively with one approach – gestalt, client-centered, behavioral, psychodynamic – as a descriptor of my style of therapy. I was an eclectic practitioner, but have always considered my therapeutic orientation to be existential.

I respect that there are therapists whose work has a religious foundation, but mine was a secular practice. I validated faith in God and prayer as best I could, with clients who found meaning in their religious beliefs; but if clients asked me to pray with them, I declined. Although I was raised as a Christian, and most of my values are rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic, I’m an agnostic of the kind that’s very comfortable with saying “I don’t know” when asked about specific religious beliefs. I think that it’s just as arrogant for an atheist to assert sure knowledge that there is no God as it is for a religious person to assert that I’m in error for not believing what they believe. Define God, then we can talk.

I don’t believe that I have the authority to definitively answer questions about religion and am tolerant of  those who claim to “know” that their beliefs are true, as long as they do no harm as a result of religious beliefs. Of course, there’s considerable room for debate about what constitutes harm. (I personally consider any form of indoctrination to be harmful.)  I consider myself an existentialist because existentialism directly addresses morality and personal responsibility, without the excess baggage of sin and redemption and pleasing God. I’ll briefly summarize some of the basic principles of existentialism, as I understand them.

First, existentialism asserts that there’s no universal Meaning “out there” that all right-thinking people can apprehend – as opposed to religions, which assert that there is, i.e. “God’s plan.” To existentialists, concepts like Sin and Redemption and Divine Intercession are constructs based on religious doctrine. They don’t exist in any objective sense. Meaning only exists in the eye of the beholder. Life is absurd, as illustrated by Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus.”  Sisyphus continues to push the boulder up the hill, despite knowing that it will just roll back down. He persists, despite the absurdity of his efforts, because the act has meaning for him.

Because there are no absolute rules, or Divine rewards or punishments in an afterlife, we are each free to do whatever we want. But the other side of the coin of freedom is responsibility. We’re absolutely responsible for whatever we choose to do, and can choose to behave morally even if we don’t believe in Heaven and Hell. We can choose to live in good faith with others, because of our moral responsibility for all of our actions. Although we can find joy and meaning in authentic relationships, we’re all essentially alone in our lives. (A song sung by Country singer Bill Monroe expresses this as well as anything I’ve read on the subject; “You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley,/ You’ve got to walk it by yourself,/ ‘Cause nobody else can walk it for you./ You’ve got to walk it by yourself.”) We each have to deal with Angst (anxiety) and dread that comes from the knowledge that we will someday cease to exist. Existentialists don’t rely on the comfort of religious promises of eternal life for the faithful, to come to terms with our mortality.

To say that there’s no objective Meaning to existence “out there” isn’t to say that meaning is unimportant. As an existentialist I’m free (like Sisyphus) to find, or create, my own meaning. One of the best-known existential therapists, Viktor Frankl, named his school of psychotherapy logotherapy – from the Greek “logos”: meaning, or reason. (I’ve written about Frankl in previous posts. I’ve recommended his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, to more clients over the years than any other book.) Although I didn’t practice logotherapy, per se, I’ve worked with many therapy clients to help them find or create meaning in their lives. It can be a life-or-death matter with people who are suicidal.

I initially saw existentialism as grim and forbidding: if there’s no extrinsic Meaning to existence, then all we can do is to sweat along with Sisyphus, acting as if there was meaning to our lives. But now I see the richness of choice, where I once saw austerity. Existentialism gave me a philosophical context for the I-Thou encounters of psychotherapy. We all have a need for our lives to mean something; but we needn’t rely on “God’s plan,” as taught by this or that religion, or on promises of eternal life, to find meaning in our lives.

If you want to learn more about existentialism and the colorful characters (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Camus, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) who formulated its principles, I recommend Sarah Bakewell’s highly-readable At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails. I’d never have guessed that phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty was good at dancing the Jitterbug.

Authenticity and congruence

Posted in Humanistic Psychology, Parenting skills, psychology, psychotherapyLeave a comment

This a continuation of my last post, “How to be more like you,” in which I wrote about phoniness vs. authenticity. Most of us come by the inauthenticity that Fritz Perls described as phoniness quite  honestly, via the process of socialization. As children, we learn from the adult role models in our lives, and we’re often taught to be inauthentic. The template for prescribed phony behavior might be “politeness,” or religion, or social expectations about “correct  behavior” or even “correct feelings.” I’ve known people who were abused and/or  neglected by their parents who still, as adults, felt guilty about not loving them the way they “should.” Many children are taught who they are “supposed to” love, from grandpa to God. Genuine love can’t be forced.

A kiss that is anything other than an expression of affection or love or sexual passion is a phony kiss. Jane may not have even liked Aunt Sadie, but her parents taught her to give her a kiss anyway, whenever she visited. Children are often given admonitions such as: “Don’t cry! You’re a boy!” and “Don’t you get angry at me, young lady!” and “Of course you love him; he’s your grandfather!”

Some people have jobs that require them to act cheerful, no matter what they’re really feeling. Behavior arising from authentic feelings might be judged by others as impolite or inappropriate in certain situations. We’ve all been in circumstances where we felt the need to hide our true feelings; but some people go through life feeling that way every day. They have their reasons.

Con men, sociopaths and bullshitters are purposefully inauthentic. Others have learned to habitually cover up their true feelings; it’s their default mode. One of the ways I would confront a client who was putting on an act in therapy was, “You’re always on stage, aren’t you?” The look in their eyes (busted!) told me that I was on target, and that this was something they needed to know that other people could see through. People whose default mode is authenticity know themselves better than people who constantly put on an act to win approval. They are also more secure and self-accepting. I know this from personal experience, as I used to be a people pleaser, myself. My phoniness arose from feelings of insecurity.

A related concept that was important to me as a therapist was congruence. There are two kinds of congruence. One has to do with they way you come across when communicating. If someone being threatened says to his antagonist, “You don’t scare me” in a soft, tremulous voice, with body language that indicates fear, his verbal message won’t be believed. It’s incongruent with his other modes of communication. If someone says “I’M NOT ANGRY!” loudly, with fists clenched and an aggressive posture, he’s giving incongruent messages. When a person’s words are matched by her vocal tone, facial expression and body language, her message is congruent. People who are seen as charismatic are highly congruent communicators.

As a therapist with training in gestalt theory, I became very good at spotting subtle incongruities in therapy. In gestalt therapy, incongruent messages get challenged by the therapist. If a client claims (incongruently) that it really doesn’t bother her when her husband calls her stupid, the therapist might ask her to say the opposite: “It really bothers me when my husband calls me stupid!” (“But it really doesn’t bother me!” “Try saying it anyway.”) This technique is very effective in getting clients to recognize their true feelings, which often rise to the surface as the client repeats the opposite of their initial rationalized statement.

The other kind of congruence is role congruence. Do you act like a different person in your different life roles, or would family members and close friends recognize you as the same person they know, if they saw you at work? Obviously, some jobs – like a drill sergeant at a military boot camp – require you to take on a badass role that is (one hopes) incongruent with how he behaves in other situations. But under most circumstances a congruent person is recognizably the same person as a worker, a spouse, a parent and a friend. Incongruent persons are role-bound, and might be a tyrant at home and a reasonable person at work – or the other way around. Congruent people are authentically themselves in all the roles in their lives.

The intrinsic reward for being yourself – warts and all – is that when people who know you give you messages (feedback) about who you are, they’re revealing the things you need to hear, to be self-aware. I’ve written before about the paradox of identity. You can’t have self-knowledge in a social vacuum. We need other people who know us, in order to know who we “really are.” They’ll tell us, and if there’s some disagreement, it’s all grist for the mill. A consensus will emerge over time about who you are.

If you were living alone on a desert island, like Robinson Crusoe, how could you possibly know what kind of person you are? How could you know if you’re generous or stingy, witty or dull? We depend on other people in our lives to have an accurate sense of our own identity. Being authentic and congruent helps us to know who we really are, and what we might like to change about who we are.

Your “self” is either a rigid construct – “that’s just who I am!” – or a work in progress. Whatever your age.

 

How to be more like you

Posted in Buckminster Fuller, philosophy, psychology, psychotherapy, self-acceptanceLeave a comment

My title for this post is ironic. How could I possibly know who you are or how you should be “more yourself”?  But surely you’ve known some people who sincerely believed that the world would be a better place if other people were “more like them.” When people think this way, they are probably not  referencing the “self'” that is known to others – warts and all –  but rather an idealized, cherished self-image. I believe that all of us have a cherished self-image that doesn’t necessarily coincide with the consensus image of ourselves as others know us. When you hear someone say something about you and your reaction is “I’m not like that!”, you’ve probably identified a piece of your cherished self-image.

Attachment to this cherished self-image is especially strong in people who have tried throughout their lives to live up to others’ expectations of them – parents or extended parental entities  such as church and culture. Many of us are taught how we “should” or “shouldn’t” feel in this or that situation. This attachment can also be strong in people who have tried hard to shape themselves in reaction to “parental” expectations, i.e. “I refuse to be who my parents (or the church or the State) want me to be.” I’ve known quite a few parents whose cherished self-images kept them from seeing that they were dealing with their own children in just the same dysfunctional ways that their own parents had dealt with them. When you’ve sworn to yourself, “I’ll never do that with my children,” it’s often hard to recognize when you do.

Each of us – even those with low self-esteem – is the hero of our own personal drama, because we all live at the center of our perceived world, and none of us can be completely objective about ourselves. Our “heroic self” may wear the mask of the conquering hero or the rescuer or the wronged victim. But this heroic self is just as much an artificial construct as any image of ourselves projected onto us by others. I remember an epiphany I had as a young man. Seeing my reflection in a mirror, I thought “That’s who they think I am!”

One’s true self isn’t a thing, fixed and immutable, but is best seen as an evolutionary process, a work in progress. Buckminster Fuller put it this way: “I seem to be a verb.” Rather than trying to nail down some finished portrait of one’s self, I think that it is more helpful to have a picture in mind of who you are today, in the here-and-now of your experience and behavior. Your actions, not your thoughts, ultimately define you as the unique person you are.

A concept that was important to me as a psychotherapist was authenticity. In studying gestalt therapy in grad school, I became aware that many of my habitual behaviors were what gestalt guru Fritz Perls called “phony.” I was a people pleaser, always trying to guess what was expected of me in each situation and to behave in ways  that were attempts to please or impress the people around me. I realized that I wanted everyone to like me – even if I didn’t especially like them. But, to the extent that I was phony, if someone seemed to like me, what they liked was my act, not me.

I knew that if I was going to be a good therapist, I had to become more spontaneous and authentic – even if that meant that some people wouldn’t like me or approve of my actions. I stopped making phony excuses for myself, like saying “I really have to leave now,” when I really just wanted to leave. I stopped rehearsing for social occasions such as parties. I learned to walk into a roomful of people with an “empty mind,” primed for spontaneity. I wanted to get to know the person behind the masks that I wore. Some people may have seen me as blunt or curt, or even rude, as I worked on becoming “more myself.” I knew that not everyone liked me, and that was okay. The work that I did on myself enabled me to help therapy clients to identify and confront their own inauthentic behaviors, and to work on changing them.

Gestalt therapy is especially effective for working with people who want to discover their authentic selves. Some gestalt techniques (which I described in a prior post) serve to unmask phony roles that people play, leaving them bereft of their usual defenses, and open to sudden insights. Fritz Perls is perhaps best known for what is called the Gestalt Prayer: ” I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find one another, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.”

More about authenticity, and the related concept of congruence, in my next post.

 

What you’re “supposed to feel”

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No matter what kind of family or culture we were born into, we got instructed on what we should feel under this or that circumstance. Some of the instructions came in the form of admonitions (“Of course you love him, he’s your father!”) and some in the form of role modeling. As children, we learn a lot from the behaviors we observe being demonstrated by those around us.

Real love is rooted in a naturally-occurring feeling we have for another person, but love is institutionalized in a variety of ways. New mothers are “supposed to” love their babies, but this isn’t always the case. It may be a hormonal thing, as with post-partum depression, or it might be that the child was conceived by rape; but a mother who doesn’t spontaneously feel love for her newborn is usually judged or blamed. Children are “supposed to” love their parents, but not all parents are worthy of their children’s love.

We all have feelings about our feelings. We may feel ashamed for having been afraid, or angry at ourselves for being depressed. A number of people I worked with over the course of my career felt terribly guilty for not loving a parent or other close relative who had neglected and/or abused them. We can’t choose what we authentically feel about anyone, and nobody has the authority to tell you what you’re “supposed to” feel. Real loving feelings either arise spontaneously, or they don’t. It’s not something we owe someone just because we’re blood relatives.

Gestalt guru Fritz Perls said that most people are socialized to be phony. Ideally, a kiss is a genuine expression of affection or love. But many times in some families, children are told to hug and kiss a relative because (s)he’s kin, whether or not the child feels affection or love for that person. Kissing may become a hollow social ritual, performed because it’s expected. In some family situations, a child may be expected to kiss someone who has abused or neglected them, or whom they find “creepy.” In some cultures a child may be required to kiss a dead relative at a funeral. This sort of thing can be a traumatic experience. It can be a perversion of what a kiss is meant to express. You can’t make yourself love someone any more than you can make someone love you. But you might be put in a position where you feel you have to fake it. When Perls called a behavior phony, he wasn’t judging the client; he was observing that the behavior wasn’t an authentic expression of feeling.

I’ve worked with couples in loveless marriages who reflexively claim to love one another, because that’s what’s expected, when they haven’t felt love for their partner in a long time. It’s not always black and white, however. Observing my father’s parents as a youth, I came to understand the term “love/hate relationship.” Love and hate can be closely allied, and it’s been suggested that the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference.

Relationships can be emotionally nourishing or, at the other end of the continuum, they can be toxic. People can change, and family systems can change. Often the goal of family therapy is to change the family system and to promote reconciliation between family members. But this isn’t always possible. Bad marriages can be terminated by divorce, but your parents will always be your parents – for better or for worse. I’ve worked with people who’ve tried time and again to reconcile with family members, only to find that the relationship remains toxic to them despite their best efforts. If a client had gotten to the point where they’d concluded that a family relationship would never be anything but painful for them, I’d suggest that she had the option to “divorce” that relative. It’s a sad happenstance, but it’s sometimes necessary for healing to begin.

I’ve also suggested that not all “kinfolk” need be blood-related, that you might have brothers and sisters you haven’t met yet. There are several people in my life that I consider “found” brothers and sisters. Someone who was abused or neglected by a parent might later find a nourishing relationship with an “other mother” or with a man who feels like the father he wishes he’d had. I’ve seen it happen. The mere fact of blood relationships doesn’t necessarily confer lifelong obligations, and certainly not the obligation to feel a certain way about a member of your birth family. We feel what we feel, and there’s no “should.” Rational thinking can free us from the tyranny of “shoulds.”

The paradox of identity, Part 2

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“Authenticity” is one of the most important words in the lexicon of gestalt therapy, and it’s an essential component of intimacy. I’ve described intimacy as “emotional nakedness” with another person, but that doesn’t imply a sexual relationship. Sexual intimacy is just one kind of intimacy. People in authentic relationships don’t put on acts with one another. They aren’t afraid to be seen as they are, warts and all.  Unfortunately, authentic relationships are hardly ever modeled by characters in TV dramas and soap operas and sitcoms, because it doesn’t make for good drama – which relies on conflict to keep things entertaining.

Dr. Fritz Perls, the reigning guru of gestalt therapy when I was in grad school, wrote a lot about how we’re socialized to be “phony,” in the guise of politeness. He said that it was the job of the gestalt therapist “not to let go unchallenged” any inauthentic expressions by a client in a therapy session. The client of a skilled gestalt therapist often finds himself “sitting on the hot seat,” even in individual therapy. There are some highly effective gestalt techniques that disarm the client’s typical, often reflexive, defenses, leaving him to experience his own “unedited,” authentic here-and-now feelings. Perls said that past and future are fictions; we live our lives in the here-and-now.

If a client started to relate a past unpleasant experience, the gestalt therapist would ask her to relate it in the present tense, to bring it into the here-and-now of her experience. If the client made a statement couched in generalized terms, i.e.”You know how it is when someone gets on your case…” the therapist would ask her to make it an I-statement, i.e. “When somebody gets on my case I ____.” The therapist might interrupt a rationalized response to a question about a thorny issue and say, “Are you aware that you’re  clenching your fists?” This call to be present in her body in the here-and-now disarms the client’s intellectualizing.

When a client “protesteth too much” an inauthentic feeling or response, i.e. “It really doesn’t bother me anymore when my father tells me I’m stupid.” the therapist might say, “Say the opposite. Tell me that it really bothers you when your father calls you stupid.” “But it doesn’t!” “Say it anyway.” Having the client repeat the opposite statement – usually more than once – often produces an authentic emotional response (sometimes tears or rage) and a moment of insight. Probably the best known gestalt technique is the “empty chair,” where you have the client face an empty chair and visualize her father (mother, boss, lover, molester, etc.) sitting in that chair. “Now I want you to tell him what you just told me.” “But he’d never let me!” “He has to listen. He can’t interrupt. Tell him what you’ve always wanted to tell him.” This technique often elicits powerful, authentic responses that the client has typically repressed.

In my last post I wrote about people pleasers and their phony (inauthentic) behaviors. Another mindset that engenders phony behavior is that of the “con,” the bullshitter. Like the people pleaser, the con tries to read you and puts on an act; but unlike the people pleaser, the con wants to get something you have. If he wants you  to like him, it’s only a means to an end. A con is always onstage, performing. Cons and people pleasers pay the same price: they deprive themselves of the opportunity to have an authentic identity. Most of us want to be liked for who we truly are. People who can’t or won’t be authentic in relationships can never know who they truly are. If someone seems to like or admire them, is it really them they hold in esteem, or their act? They can’t come to know the real person behind the masks they habitually wear. It can be scary to enter into a truly intimate relationship, whether with a therapist, a new friend, or a lover. But the more intimate relationships we have in our lives, the better we know who we uniquely are.

“Autonomy” is another important word in the gestalt lexicon, and increased autonomy is a frequent goal of therapy. In my experience, the best marriages and friendships are characterized by intimacy and a mutual respect for one another’s autonomy. This ideal of intimate relating is captured in Fritz Perls’ “Gestalt Prayer,” which was a very popular poster back in the days of hippies and encounter groups:

“I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.”