The path to healing springs from self-discovery

I would like to begin by thanking you for visiting my website.  It is my hope that this site will offer you useful information about different therapeutic approaches and information about me and can inform your decision in finding a therapist.  As an aside, I never imagined myself as a blogger but I do consider myself a writer and I often find myself reflecting on human nature and the human condition.  In my college years I enjoyed Irish literature including James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.  It is my aim that my blog entries will serve as useful reflections and will give you a different perspective.  Now without further ado, my first blog post.

     I was recently listening to a somber song with lyrics that included, " When it Rains it Pours, When it Rains it Pours...It Pours."  In listening to this, I started thinking of the impact of our language on shaping the context of a situation.  In the ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) realm, there is a concept called Relational Frame Theory  which focuses on the way in which our language shapes our experiences.  Throughout the English language, there are multiple idioms such as "When It Rains It Pours" or "Bad Things Come in Threes."  I mention this because it struck me how these sayings tend to perpetuate negative emotions such as sadness and worry.  Before I continue, I want to be clear that I am in in no way trying to deny that people can experience difficult and often tragic events which lead to immense pain.  I am also not trying to invalidate people's pain.  However, I am trying to shed light on the impact of our use of language in magnifying that pain and turning it into something else...into suffering.

    If, for a moment, we imagine a scenario in which we have had one bad thing happen or even two things happen, the saying that "Bad Things Happen in Threes" can lead us to worry about the next impending crisis.  There is no evidence to confirm this idiom and challenging events can occur with any given number of frequency.  Perhaps a more useful replacement would be "Bad things happen and so do good things."  A simple adjustment to our language has a number of subtle impacts on altering our perspective which then leads to us feeling a different way.  

     Similarly, if we consider the saying I began with, "When it Rains it Pours," and consider the implications of this perspective.  To paraphrase, when something bad is happening, it's really bad.  This perspective serves to magnify the severity/intensity of the challenging moment which can decrease our tolerance of the situation as well as our own confidence in our ability to navigate the difficulty.  This phrase of "When It Rains It Pours" leads a person to put undue emphasis on the event rather than acknowledging the event for what it is.  I've found that "When It Rains, It Rains," instead acknowledges that sometimes it's raining and in that vein, sometimes, things are difficult, and if we consider it from this perspective we perceive the situation as it is and thus, put ourselves in a position to deal with the situation at hand rather than the situation which we've built up in our mind.  

     In closing, this isn't to say that this will be easy.  We are all human and we all have moments when we're more vulnerable to our emotions and to being reactive.  However, I think that when we're mindful of our perspectives and the language we're using, we can catch ourselves and adjust the way in which we're describing the situation and task at hand.  We can even find idioms that are more effective and more helpful for us.  In these moments, we can (as one such idiom recommends), make lemonade from lemons.  In doing so, I believe we free ourselves up to be the best versions of ourselves and to overcome the obstacle in front of us.