Can our sense of spirituality be nurtured in psychotherapy sessions? Do spiritual beliefs have a place in developing insight and emotional authenticity? What about feeling our strongest emotions; anger, for instance? Does a spiritual practice, if we have one, require us to “turn the other cheek?”
My work as a psychotherapist gives me a privileged glimpse into peoples’ inner world. I have become the keeper of profound secrets that are revealed to no one else, of thoughts, feelings, past actions and current urges, both spoken and unspoken. I am a witness to unbreakable strength and glass-like fragility, at times within the same person.
Knowledge, education and training can provide much preparation for conducting psychotherapy, but my patients have taught me that the true work of healing comes not just from the mind but from the heart and soul.
Alongside other good and capable therapists, I’ve learned the art and science of behavioral change. I can speak easily of psychological armor, defense mechanisms, relationship dynamics, addiction, depression, anxiety, self-sabotage and so on. Yet, there is something in the mix when a person comes into my care that is a departure from the conventions of traditional psychotherapy. I want much more for my patients than symptom relief or remission from their pain. What I seek in our work together are these things, of course, but much, much more.
My own personal life and my work with probably a thousand patients in my private practice in Montclair, New Jersey and NYC has taught me something I could have never learned in graduate and post-graduate school: that healing is not something that I do to or for anyone, nor is it something that happens to the patient alone. Rather, it is an alchemy, a reciprocal transformation that takes each of our pain blocks and transmutes them into not just “non-pain” but something immeasurably more beautiful and sustaining: a deep and abiding knowing that there exists an Infinite Intelligence that not only lives within us but expresses Itself through us, AS us.
As a therapist and healer, I believe that I can take my patients only as far down the road of transformation as I have traveled myself.
For this reason, I feel strongly that I must continue to grow as a person and seek to always go beyond my limitations. The more I help myself, the more I am able to help my patients.
As I have navigated my flaws, foibles, missteps and messes along the way, I consulted with several excellent and good-hearted therapists who cared about me and my well-being. I learned from each of them and will forever be in their debt. It wasn’t until one of life’s twists (make that a dark night of the soul) brought me – quite surprisingly – to a spiritual center in North Jersey, however, that I had my awakening. It was my work and subsequently my deep friendship with Rev. Michelle Wadleigh, the Minister who runs the Center, that led me toward a path of greater wholeness (and holiness) than I could have imagined. Not a religious path, you see, but a sacred one. Not paved with rules, but with love. And not exclusive but welcoming to all.
Since then, my work with the individuals and couples who have honored me with their trust has never been the same. I now view fulfillment, meaning and purpose as accompaniments to good clinical outcomes. In fact, I believe that with the former comes the latter. I know this more and more because my patients tell me so.
Over the years, Rev. Michelle and I have had many deep conversations about the role of spirituality and psychotherapy. I love our talks. They stretch me, make me think, and can be very spirited!
If you would like to eavesdrop on our conversations, tune in Sunday nights at 9:pm, EST, beginning January 7th. Or, better yet, ask questions and comment! We’d love to know you’re listening so that we can create, with you, a podcast experience that may very well make your Sunday nights a little more peaceful and your Monday mornings a little brighter.
Join us, live. Sundays, 9:pm, EST, right here at: https://ntmedia.org
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this statement, you know how uncomfortable it can be.
Even when the intention is genuine, this ominous preamble can create anxiety, defensiveness and emotional shutdown, the kind that makes the atmosphere between two people more contentious than collaborative. There are more constructive, neutral conversation openers that can go a long way toward meaningful conflict resolution.
Conversations deemed difficult are like a complex dance where every step holds the potential for misunderstanding, frustration, or growth. As a psychotherapist, I’ve often witnessed that the ways in which people attempt to talk about delicate matters often makes the original problem worse. The escalation or the resolution rests in HOW things get discussed. In this exploration, let’s dive into the nuances of navigating these tricky dialogues, understanding that they are not roadblocks but gateways to deeper connections.
Embrace the Discomfort
One of the paradoxes of human interaction is that the most uncomfortable conversations can lead to the most profound growth. It’s in these moments of discomfort that true understanding can emerge. Instead of avoiding these talks, embrace the discomfort as a signal that something important is at stake. Let the other person know you want to collaborate in finding a solution that feels right to both of you. Try saying, “I’d like for us to try to iron out our disagreement in a way that feels fair to both of us.”
The Power of Active Listening
In the realm of difficult conversations, active listening becomes a beacon of light. As a therapist, I’ve seen the profound impact of truly hearing someone, not just the words they say but the emotions they convey. Practice the art of listening without immediately formulating a response. It’s in the pauses that understanding often finds its voice.
Choose Your Words Thoughtfully
Words have immense power. In the crucible of a challenging conversation, your choice of words can either escalate tensions or create bridges. Think about the impact your words might have on the other person. Consider using “I” statements to express your feelings and concerns, fostering an environment of shared responsibility. Sarcasm, defensiveness, cross attacking, and the silent treatment are all conversation busters.
Cultivate Empathy
Empathy is the secret sauce in any conversation, especially the difficult ones. Strive to understand the other person’s perspective, acknowledging their emotions and experiences. This doesn’t mean you have to agree, but understanding lays the groundwork for meaningful dialogue.
Navigate, Don’t Dictate
Avoid the temptation to control the conversation. Instead, think of it as a shared exploration. It’s not about proving a point but finding common ground. The goal is mutual understanding, not necessarily agreement. The key here is to be more curious than right.
Recognize Patterns of Communication
As a therapist, I often work with individuals to identify patterns in their communication. Be mindful of recurring themes or behaviors in your difficult conversations. Are you prone to putting up a wall? Does overall avoidance take the lead? Recognizing these patterns is the first step toward changing them.
It’s Okay to Press Pause
Difficult conversations can be emotionally charged. If you feel the conversation spiraling, it’s okay to press pause. Sometimes, a temporary break can prevent further escalation, allowing both parties to regroup emotionally before continuing. “Why don’t we come back to this when we’ve both taken some time to reflect?”
In the intricate dance of difficult conversations, remember that it’s not about avoiding conflict but navigating it with intention and skill. As a psychotherapist, I encourage you to see these conversations not as obstacles but as opportunities for personal and relational growth. Embrace the discomfort, lean into empathy, and let the dance unfold—one step at a time.
7 simple steps to calm your fears and let the real you shine!
Fear of rejection comes in many forms. Whether you feel it going on a first date, turning in reports to your boss, speaking in public, facing up to peer pressure, or going to social events, fear of rejection can be paralyzing.
Your hands sweat or tremble. Waves of stomach-churning nausea hit. Your throat goes dry and it’s hard to swallow. A headache starts to drum at your temples or behind your eyes. You start searching for a way out. You just want to run and do anything – ANYTHING – except the task before you.
Fear of rejection can make you avoid situations, and that can cause even more problems in your life. You know that if you could just get passed that overwhelming reaction, that dread, then your life would be different.
Maybe you’ve already tried a few things. Perhaps you’ve dressed for success, followed someone else’s routine for getting through fearful episodes, read ‘how to’ blogs, or even considered therapy. But that same fear keeps dogging you. You avoid your triggers every chance you get.
It feels like your fear of rejection is holding you back from the life you really want.
But fear not.
You don’t need to suffer in silence or white-knuckle your way through anymore. And you don’t have to avoid your trigger situation for the rest of your life or spend years in therapy to find relief, either.
There is a science-based method of reducing, and even eliminating, your fear of rejection that you can learn to apply whenever you need it.
I will walk you through the science and the method, and leave you with the skills to develop your own sense of mastery over your fear of rejection. You can free yourself and let the real you shine!
Let 2020 be the start of a new decade and a new you! I’ll show you how, and give you examples to get your started.
Here is a Table of Contents for the post so you can see what’s ahead:
What Causes the Fear of Rejection? Your Brain on Fear The Roots of Rejection You Could See A Therapist What’s the alternative to therapy for fear of rejection? What is EFT or “Tapping”? How Does EFT Work? The 7 Steps of EFT An Example EFT “Script” for Fear of Rejection Tapping to Release Your Fears
Harry Chapin’s life began in NYC, was lived making other peoples’ lives better, and came to an end on the Long Island Expressway 40 years ago today when the Volkswagen Rabbit he was driving was hit from behind by a tractor-trailer. He was 38.
I’m remembering him today as I so often do.
Sometime before that July 16th afternoon in 1981, I had the occasion to sit in his car while I watched him comb through its assorted contents: music equipment, clothes, coffee cups, and spare change. Lots of spare change. He was searching for a pair of jeans, other than the ones he was wearing. He would later auction them off from the stage. On the worn denim pant leg he would write the opening lyrics of “Taxi.”
The jeans ultimately ended up in the lucky hands of the highest bidder, a drummer named Susie, for $75. By today’s standards, it doesn’t sound like much. But It was the 1970s, after all, and that was a sizable amount of money for a student.
He had come to the small, all women’s college I attended to perform for free. All the money earned from the show – $3,500 it turned out, plus Susie’s $75 – would be donated to World Hunger Year, an organization he started to fight poverty and food insufficiency. It felt like a million dollars to us and he accepted it as graciously as if it were.
Like a lot of people, I loved Harry Chapin’s music. I would get lost in his stories. And, like a lot of people, I wanted to meet him. When the yearbook committee that I headed up wanted to include never-before color photographs in that year’s edition and funds were nil, I saw my chance. “I know,” I thought. “I’ll call Harry. I’ll see if we could get him to perform at our small college. If we sold out, I figured we could pay him about one thousand dollars and still have enough of a profit to upgrade the yearbook. I was certain he’d be as excited about my idea as I was. I’ll simply get in touch with him.
But how? How do you call a Grammy-nominated artist? Well, you start by calling his agent who won’t take your call. Then you look in the phone book (yes, I said phone book) and you phone everyone named Chapin in the NY Metro area. Then you get lucky and get his sister on the phone. Shocked, you tell her about your obsession: the yearbook. She gives you the number to Harry’s house. Your stomach drops. You call.
“Hello. May I speak with Mr. Chapin, please?” “Which one?,” asked the older man on the other end. “Harry, please.” “Hold on.” (Hand over receiver), “Harrry …telephone!”
“Hello!”
“Mr. Chapin, my name is Cathy Duca, hello. I’m the editor of the yearbook at my college and we’d really like to have color pictures this year, and …”
“First of all, don’t call me Mr. Chapin. That’s my father. Call me Harry.”
“Okay, Mr. Chapin, thank you. Anyway, the yearbook …” I tell him about paying him the thousand dollars. He laughs.
“I normally get twenty-five thousand dollars for a show.”
I gulp. “Well … well … “
“Thanks, Cathy. Sorry. I wish you good luck. Bye now.”
Before I heard the click of the phone, I said emphatically (urgently), “Mr. Chapin, I mean Harry, it’s not just about the yearbook. We’re an all-women’s college and … and … we believe in the same things you believe in, helping one another, giving to one another . That’s the kind of school we are. Maybe if we split the thousand, and give five hundred to an organization?”
“Okay, tell you what. Come up with something. I’ll be there on October 18th at 8:00. That all right?”
We never spoke again until he and his band walked onto the campus at 8:00, as promised. He pulled up in his blue VW Rabbit. He felt like a big brother. He performed to a standing room only crowd of about one thousand people. Every single ticket was sold by word-of-mouth, no advertising, no budget, just a couple of months of handing out flyers and telling everyone we knew what we were doing. Each person there knew the cause – the larger one – and seemed excited to be a part of it. A personal highlight was when Harry shared with the audience the story of our phone conversation. I think he referred to me as “fast-talking” Cathy Duca and then invited me on stage to sing the prelude to “Cats in the Cradle” with him. I’ll never forget it, ever.
Two days later, another student from the college was on the local bus, returning to campus from her student teaching job. As the bus neared the campus, she overheard a man ask the driver if the upcoming stop was the correct one to get onto campus. He told the driver that he did a show there two nights earlier and his car wouldn’t start. It was apparently towed to a nearby service station. Exactly how he got back to Long Island after the concert I’ll never know. But clearly, he took public transportation to get back to NJ to retrieve his car. There was a trace neither of a limousine nor a huge ego.
Harry Chapin used his celebrity as a platform to bring attention and dollars to social causes. When he performed, he did more than entertain. He inspired. He aroused. He made you feel as though your worth was exactly what the world needed, and he made you feel as if you suddenly had more of it.
He is buried in a cemetery in Huntington, New York, his epitaph taken from his 1978 song “I Wonder What Would Happen to This World”:
Oh if a man tried
To take his time on Earth
And prove before he died
What one man’s life could be worth
I wonder what would happen
to this world
Harry Chapin traveled an arc from storyteller to activist. I suppose his last day on this plane completed his journey as he was headed to do one more benefit concert in East Meadows, NY. He closed his life’s circle having left a legacy of service, of love and compassion in both what he said and what he did. I think of him as a rugged and gentle troubadour. Anyone who knew him or knew of him was familiar with his mantra, “When in doubt, do something.” His philosophy was as simple and as potent as that.
You also knew that storytelling was his love language and touching hearts his currency. He deeply and forever touched mine.
Somewhere inside of me still lives that college student. She’s wrapped in a 60-something body and outlook now, with nary the innocence and idealism. Yet, as I reflect on the passion and goodness of one man, I can feel it scaling some of the jadedness and pessimism that has built up of late, like plaque around my heart. Legacy is a curious thing. It can, when focused upon, reignite a flame once thought gone.
In some way, to me, Harry Chapin will always be 38 and I will always be 18.
While I and others were off to find things like footlights, he was off to find the sky.
We may not realize it, but our day consists of a series of moments. Each moment brings with it a decision that either brings us nearer to or further from our desires.
If our mind is preoccupied, rushing, deflecting, avoiding, foggy, distracted or otherwise not in sync with the present moment, we can be left entirely disconnected from a grounding compass with which to navigate life. The result? Quite possibly a frenetic feeling, an unfocused approach to life, a chaotic or disorganized living environment, a gnawing sense that something is wrong.
One solution? To take the time and make the small effort to participate in a brief guided meditation. If you meditate regularly, you know how it goes. If you’re new to the idea of “sitting and doing nothing,” you are in for a very interesting experience. And probably a surprising one in that meditating is far from doing nothing.
Sure, there’s the mat or seat cushion that many people use when meditating. Me? I do my most valuable and practical meditation while I’m putting on mascara. Unconventional, yes. But it’s a time to collect my thoughts, tune into my body and let my mind drift until it lands not a problem, but on a peacefulness in my body. It is from this place of peacefulness that I then take myself into sessions with the clients I admire and respect so much. To be a holding container for each person, I must first clear out any emotional debris that I may be carrying. In many instances, I simply tell myself I’ll get to it later.
Even that has taken practice. I often have a lot of “Yeah,but’s …”, you see.
Today, though, I’m so glad that you’ll be joining me in a 5-minute meditation that is mascara-free. It is a “lite” meditation that is meant to set you up for your day. It is what I say to myself before leaving the house in the morning – or for the last number of months – heading to the Zoom screen. It’s how I get myself centered, clear-headed, and in the right vibration for my day. By vibration, I mean in the right mindset. When my physical state is aligned with my mental/emotional state, life is easier, more gratifying, and more productive. More productive, by the way, not because I necessarily do more, but because I bring more of myself effortlessly into each situation.
My only suggestion for the next five minutes is to get comfortable, drop down into your body, meaning feel your body at all the points where it meets up with whatever is supporting it, the chair, floor, wall, etc, and just breathe through your nose as easily as you can. Your eyes can be open or closed, as you prefer. That’s it. The rest will come naturally as you listen to the recording and just notice your own breathing. It’s that simple. See what happens. Notice what you notice. For the next five minutes.
