The good news in the reality that we make up our world…is that…while our anxieties can make the world and people scarier than they are…We’re in charge of the process!  We can change our experience.  The effort, however, is not for sissies.

Heh…heh…Since we make people up….We can even make them up nicer than they are.  (I suspect that everyone is secretly crazy about you and me.  Even though some of them are prit-tee excellent at keeping their feelings hidden.)

Will the real Galena, Illinois, and the REAL Dubuque, Iowa, please stand up?

What?  There isn’t a REAL Galena, Illinois?  At least not ONE that can be seen and reported by a human…because we’re all subjective nuts, you say?

“Which is more important?  The Galena, Illinois that could be captured in a photograph?  Or the Galena, Illinois I made up?”

In the previous full post (there was the ‘quick post’ on my complete failure at being cool)…title, your fearless leader was preparing for a book-signing venture to Galena, Illinois and Dubuque, Iowa.

Now…Was I preparing for the REAL Galena, Illinois, and Dubuque, Iowa?  Was I preparing to meet people like myself with their own imperfect natures?  Of course not.  That sort of preparation would depend on the facts regarding these two spots…and a reasonable way of rating my experiences with humans so far.  Neeeuuuu.  I was preparing for the Galena and Dubuque I constructed in my head.  I was preparing for experiences based on my anxieties, which, given my weinnie nature…well, let’s just say…it ain’t a pretty picture.

Had I visited either place before, or met the people I was working with before, perhaps I’d been slightly more prepared to take in how terrific, exciting, and interesting these places and people are.  But, no guarantee. 

We fit the people we meet into the people we ‘expect’ them to be…and this varies depending on whether or not we’re hungry, down about something at work, reactive to physical traits, oh good grief.

Think of what happens when you visit family in another city.  You do not prepare for them …as they are…you prepare for them as you remember them…even though your memory is a subjective mess based on your anxieties and expectatations….and…

Come on… those people have changed from the people YOU MADE UP last time you visited.  Are you with me here?  Repeat:  We are all nuts making up people and the world as we go along.  And that’s okay, because…We live and work with other people who are all nuts and who are MAKING US UP out of their anxieties and expectations.

We’re all a mess.  Really.

How’s your “Own Little World?” 

How great would your own little world be if you were suddenly Star-Trek-rematerialized as a child beggar along a filthy bridge where no prospects came along beyond a few street drunks, a tourist or two from small Pacific Islands where newspapers are scarce….and one dopey blond who ignores the truth about Mexico today because her mother, who died suddenly at forty-two, had, along with Dad, every summer, loaded up the peach-colored van, the blond, her sister, and brother…to spend summers in Colonial cities and Indian villiages, while Mom wrote her travel column on Mexico adventures with children?

How great would your little world be if you were on that bridge?

Dateline: Tijuana, Mexico.  Crossing the riverbed bridge. 

Incident:  The day is hot and windy.  Sand swirls on the bridge stinging those very few of us who still dared to cross the Big Brown Line.  The landscape is grim.  The future looks worse.  The police wear masks to keep the drug lords’ slaves from taking their pictures then going to their homes and murdering their families. 

My Own Little World’s a mess.  My feet are killing me.  What’s wrong with me that I just had to come across?  What was I thinking?  I mean, the armed forces have banned their personnel from crossing into Mexico… Why do I get myself in these ridiculous situations? I hear a siren, and whirl heading back to the USA at a trot.  My head down, charging for the border, I hear a wild squeaking sound and tiny high-pitched shreiking voice.

What?  I spot her.  A little girl, in full Tarahumara modest garb–full-length dress, hightop leather shoes, leggings, and a straw hat.  Maybe five, probably four.  She sits with her back braced on the inner wall of the bridge, her legs stuck out in front of her.  Her blue-black Indian hair squirts off her scalp in pert ponytails.  On her lap she holds a squeezebox.  Her eyes are closed but still she’s grinning big-time.  She’s singing a tune only she knows as loud as she can and clutching her squeezebox in and out with her happy screeching.  She’s having a good time in the middle of all this.  She’s singing her song as if the whole world and all the angels are listening.

How can she do that?    Who knows?   Exactly, I mean.  If there was a formula, if it were as easy as positive thinking, there’d be no exaggerated braking and hand-signalling on the freeway, no relentless dieting and gaining and useless machine buying, no avoiding high school reunions, no picking at the spouse when we know that action never turns out well, no criticizing at all since criticism is only anxiety shot outward and stuck on someone else.

Behind me, in the bar of my San Diego Hilton national world branch office I hear an ESPN story asking if a quarterback with too many interceptions had considered suicide . . . And I see that little girl’s estatic face.  Sure, she had a dirty paper cup between her ankles, hoping.  Sure, her shawled four foot mother was only a block away holding the cheap bead earrings she’d strung last night into the path of every hopeful.

Why this blog?  I want what that little girl with nothing had.  I want you to have it, too.

But ours will not be a journey for the weak or the crowd looking for easy answers.  Take that back.  For I’m certainly among the weak.  However I am determined.  There’s no easy formula for managing what goes on inside our chest cavity….no list of tricks to change our hearts and our energies…  Speaking for myself, of course.  Could be for you…being told to “get over it,” “think positive,” and “Dr. L. on the radio telling you to grow up and do what she–as a descended goddess of all that is ‘right’…maybe that  works for you.  Naaah….

You’ve read this far, so you’re trying along with me.  You’re trying to better understand and learn to manage anxiety. 

“Which is more important?  The world of facts, the world you can touch?  Or the world you are making up to fit your fears?  The world you are responding to?”

Come along….Next we take a look at how we’ve put our own little worlds together….

The goal?  To sing like the world and all the angels are listening.  Nothing less.  I will settle for nothing less.  Yes…I’m going crazy.  Care to join me?  The music’s terrific. 

Note: For those of you still wondering, I haven’t forgotten I still owe a Mexico confession of utter Emotional Guidance System idiocy. 

 

 

 

Small animals, with their short lives, remind us to live in the now. 

Head colds remind us to enjoy good days when we can breathe and our head doesn’t feel like it’s caught in a fan belt.

  I have to believe that loosening the EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM’S grip on life is as hard for other people as it is for me.  (With the exception of Dr. L on the radio who apparently sprung completely emotionally mature and without sin from the forehead of her immaculate father.)

Which takes me to an experience in which I was able to keep my THINKING GUIDANCE SYSTEM in charge most of the time.  hy?

Because I had the parents of young physically-challenged children to answer to. I was teaching riding to eight to ten-year-olds with various level of impairment due to cerebral palsy. As it was a hunter-jumper stable, the time for teaching them to jump. 

The EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEMS of the children are saying,   “I can’t do this, I’m going to hurt myself, Something terrible and awful is going to happen!”

I go over the facts:    “One, we are going to start so very small, just a pole on the ground, that the new skill will hardly be different than what you are able to do already.”

“The horse you are riding has done this successfully many times.”

“Two, I’ve worked with many riders at your level,   they all were able to do this, and you can to.”

“Three, the worst that can happen is you will fall off, but then you’ve done that before and I’ll be right here.”  

And, perhaps most important, “Even though you’re afraid, maybe so afraid that you FEEL LIKE you don’t want to do this, if you can put those fears aside for a minute and give this new skill a try, you are going to be very glad   you did.”

And the connection between learning to jump over a pole on the ground and taking a step toward MANAGING ANXIETY better?

1) just a tiny increase from a skill we already have–breathing.

2) others have succeeded in staying calm without imploding.

3) the worst that can happen is still better than not trying.

4) my body and nerves can use the break.     So, I’m working on this, and you’re welcome to see how it goes.  I’m not sure exactly what it will look like, but I’m hoping I’ll stop my addiction to honey-roasted peanuts (See Practice What I Preach?), preferential airplane seating, and being in the first half of the cabin to be served a Coke. And that’s three that raised their ugly heads in about a minute and a half.

 

  Okay, so there I am standing in the back yard, a hundred degrees outside, and a bleeding knuckle from a scrape on the lawnmower (If you’re lost, see “The Mower Fueling Incident.) By now I’ve stopped whining, “Why am I the only one who ever notices what needs to be done around here?” 

I’ve not stopped, but have begun to taper my exaggeration statements, “I canNOT stand this!  This is horrible, terrible, and hideous. My whole day, probably the whole WEEK is shot, now that I’ve got this knuckle BLEEDING ALL OVER THE PLACE.  Okay, a couple of drops hit my shoe.

And, by now I’ver realized that my AUTOMATIC ASSUMPTIONS in the service of my mighty EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM are what caused me to be in this predicatment in the first place. Had I noticed that the cap on the gas can was a funnel . . . but we’ve covered that.  No sense beating myself up, now that I have this gushing bloody finger and messy shoes.

Let’s suppose someone walks up at this moment and points out my disturbing error.  What will be my response? 

Of course.  I’d start dancing some kind of “it’s not my fault” jig.  “Too hot to think . . . stupid lawn mower gas can designers . . . been working too hard . . . I shouldn’t be the one here in this heat mowing to start with . . .”

But here’s the lesson. You’d think there’s no way for me to not come out looking like a nutcase, right?

Here goes, great big ole psychologist’s tip that has taken years to perfect: When some poor soul wanders up and points out your lastest goof, and says,  ”What are you, crazy?” 

You smile and say, “Yes!  As a matter of fact I am CRAZY  and, let me tell you I’m getting WORSE everyday.”

And, there you go.  You don’t have to play that silly, your fault-not my fault game. You’re out. 

Tomorrow: Fear, Part One.

    The Horse In the Cattle Guard Incident

    Summers during college I taught riding at a day camp.  One morning I arrived driving a Volkswagen busload of kids to see Blackjack, a horse I’d bought at auction the day before, stood screaming, one of his legs jammed down in the cattle guard. 

Note:  Examples may be used more than once.  I cannot keep up with what I’ve used in a current clinical session or reported here.     Uncle.  Defeat.  Can’t do it.   

     Okay.  Back to Blackjack, the big, old, raw-boned, hundred dollar horse that was perfect for carrying beginners for a few weeks.  Unfamiliar with the cattle guard, he’d stepped through the bars and was ramming his bloody hoof upward, over and over, in an attempt to escape his problem.  He was clearly in terrible pain and desperate to improve his circumstances.

    So why didn’t he do what would work instead of doing the SAME THING, which clearly did not only NOT WORK, but was causing more and more DAMAGE? 

    If Blackjack could have called on his THINKING GUIDANCE SYSTEM, he would have have thought . . .  “Hmm . . . if I got my hoof down between these bars . . . if it fit going down . . . then, if I slow down, study my situation, and THINK . . . I can get my hoof back up through the bars. 

    But Blackjack didn’t have access to his THINKING GUIDANCE SYSTEM.  Later that morning he was put down.

    Now, we’re not ”putting anyone down” here, but how often do we do to ourselves what Blackjack did to his leg?

    When we worry about events we can’t control?  When we can’t stop bickering?  When we drive too fast?  When we hold a grudge?  When we refuse to apologize?  When we can’t stop apologizing?  When we get into someone else’s business?  When we complain and complain    even though we know we’re bringing other people down and turning them off?  When we say negative things about someone else?  When we say negative things about ourselves? 

     When we can’t say clearly what we will do and won’t do?  When we can stop criticising? 

     We are pulling a Blackjack.  We are being a Blackjack.   

    More tomorrow on being more in charge of your reactions.