I recall a training with Kelly Wilson a few years ago. Several of my fellow therapists we expressing frustration about the amount of suffering our clients were experiencing. Kelly was passionate in his response. “Look, what your clients are experiencing is the human condition. You won’t be able to help people escape it.”
The moment has stayed with me. I agree, we can’t escape the human condition, but how we live with it is the subject of my work as a therapist, day in and day out.
Along these lines, Russ Harris has written the excellent The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living, (Trumpeter). He too, discusses our sometimes unrealistic ideas about happiness and how we live. Specifically, he is working with ways in we which try get rid of uncomfortable thoughts. Most of us try to push the thoughts out of our awareness, and we become frustrated when the thoughts don’t go away. This process only increases our suffering, in fact, it is suffering. One of the methods he suggests to deal with this is viewing the thought as a thought, in other words stepping back from the struggle, which is called defusion. A favorite quote from the book: “So, what if you’ve defused a thought and it doesn’t leave? Again, defusion isn’t about getting rid of thoughts. It’s about seeing them for what they really are and making peace with them; allowing them to be there without fighting them.”
I’ll have more to say about this in future blogs, but for now, I’d encourage people to take a look at his book. It is a wealth of good information.

Thinking of Martin Buber

When I was in high school, I had a wonderful psychology teacher who introduced us to a wealth of contemporary thinkers: Sartre, Camus, Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Erich Fromm, and Martin Buber. My thinking is still influenced in some ways by them.
I’m thinking especially of Martin Buber, and his influence on dialogic psychotherapy. Buber wrote about the genuine encounter, which he called I-Thou. This was an experience of mutuality, equality…perhaps a type of love involving genuine acceptance and understanding.
This is also the experience of sincere therapy and it’s why I love being a therapist. Of course, in-session I don’t share too much about myself. But I am truly honored to be a part of someone’s experience during this I-Thou encounter. I am not so arrogant as to think that I provide or cause the experience in another, but on good days I sometimes make the first move.
It can often be an awkward experience, because we are more used to the opposite: I-it. We treat ourselves and others like objects, imperfect projects that are also incomplete. And in this disparagement we cut ourselves off from so much of what we could be.
At its best, therapy has moments of true dialogue. It usually doesn’t feel comfortable--it’s hard to look at another and express ourselves sincerely and honestly. The thoughts are often confusing and irrational, but nevertheless true to our experience. And it is at these times that we speak both to the other and to ourselves. The value is an increase of our understanding of who we are.

How to Maintain Weight Loss after the 20/20 Lifestyles Program

There is probably no other behavior that is as important to maintaining a healthy weight as continued monitoring of food intake. Why is this so? Before I discuss why monitoring of food is important, we need to understand how we came to our current condition of being an obese society.

I believe the normal tendency of our body is to gain weight. For most of human evolution the food on our planet has been scarce, and when we encountered it we no doubt “binged.” At that time this wasn’t a problem because we were physically active and would burn off the calories, or it might be quite some time before we encountered food again and we would have lost weight before this. So, for tens of thousands of years, our thoughts and behaviors were conditioned to overeat when we encountered food. This approach helped us survive and made good evolutionary sense. Unfortunately it is also how we think about food and eating today.

Also, in today’s world our thinking looks for hundreds of ways to minimize or discount the intake of frequent small amounts of food, or occasional episodes with high caloric intake. Our thinking will tell us, “Go ahead, eat half a pizza, you can workout tomorrow,” or, “A few pieces of candy won’t hurt, I haven’t had any for weeks.” And of course as we continue this behavior along with a sedentary lifestyle we eventually gain weight.

There is a solution to this dilemma and it’s surprisingly effective: write down what you eat. The act of writing down how many calories you eat a day, as well as the foods you eat, will have a major impact on both your thoughts and your behavior. You will see in black-and-white exactly what your caloric intake has been. There can be no denial in this case, or minimizing of the behavior if you’re overeating. If your eating 3,500 hundred calories it’ll be become very clear to you, and it is unlikely your thoughts will easily dismiss the overeating.

The most amazing part of this is that your thinking will also quickly begin to plan ways to correct your behavior. Your thoughts will see a solution and begin to encourage behavioral change, and in this case healthier eating. Try this yourself and you’ll be surprised at how the process happens almost automatically.

For more information please see my website: www.coopertherapy.com