Month: March 2014

Spring Is In The Air

Published on by Scott Williams3 Comments

“Change is needed, change is good”. Vaughn

Time to change it up a bit. I took a different job this week, one which a family member termed a “demotion”, but by choice.

I was tired of my life. Tired of sitting still all day. Tired of the grind, the relentless wheel of need that has no end. I knew I was getting this way months ago, but I didn’t do anything about it. I could have. I was going to. This week.

I quit my major part-time job. Well actually not really. Another position came up, outreach, and someone asked me to apply. Thank you someone. You know how it is, you don’t realize how badly you were doing until you look back. I realize now that I was coasting, coasting while doing a few other amazing things. But even those other amazing things couldn’t compete with the grind.

So here I sit in a new office, in a trailer, at a local First Nation Office. The people are amazing and the office is awesome. Tomorrow I hang out with teens at a unique high school for those who can’t handle the norm. Wednesday I will gratefully sit back in my counseling chair to help out for a day because Thursday is my day – I’ll find something to do. Friday I’m at the Laser Clinic and private practice, after seeing my two babies of course. Life just got mixed up.

I am a big believer in mixing stuff up. I have an entire life of variety and all I had to do to get that was to give up any hope of dying with a nice boat. Others do it better but I have a habit of getting bored, just when things get secure. My wife tells everyone I have ADHD but I’m the counselor and I’m firmly convinced that I don’t want that diagnosis. But then again, I’m bored now so let’s move on.

Change is good. It reminds us that we are alive. Change brings back our creative passions and exposes us to experiences. When this happens I like to call that “living”. Sometimes I can go weeks without really living, just getting by. I have no idea if I am going to like this decision, but there is no turning back without repercussions. I like that, in theory.

The chairs in this little corner office are very retro cool, and I have no idea what color they are. In my ear I can hear several creative females in my life-giving me “the look” before condescending to tell me the color is sea-foam hippy sweat or some such. They remind me of the talking chairs in Alice in Wonderland or The Beauty and the Beast or Sons of Anarchy, I get them mixed up.  It may all seem strange but soon, like anything and anyone, it becomes normal, regular. I’ll worry about that some other time. Today I’m just happy that it’s sunny out, I’m off to meet a Chief, and my sea-foam hippy chair mixes nicely with the 1978 carpet and the trailer paneling. I’m content.

How Long Can This Take?

Published on by Scott Williams8 Comments

It’s very sad. I have watched it happen for years but it continues to haunt me, just a little bit. She quit. She had been coming for just over two months and she was frustrated. The change that she was promised has not happened and probably never will. Something inside of her suspected this would happen but she thought she owed it to herself to at least give counseling “a shot”. Two and a half months.

So close.

I’m very weird. When I want to unwind I love to strap on my ear buds and listen to cosmology or physics or history. Atoms fascinate me. So does the universe. Like most of us who endured Physics in high school I learned that Physics is boring; and the only people who became physicists were the kind of people who would never have to worry about things like having a girlfriend or being popular. Physics was cylinders and math and radiuses..es. Bill Bryson was the guy who introduced me to this alternate reality. There was a book I once read about a journalist who was on an airplane flight and he realized that he didn’t know why the airplane was in the air, didn’t know anything about geography or science or the stars so wrote a book about a bunch of cool things I had never really taken the time to appreciate. I can’t remember the name of that book but if anyone has read it, let me know.

It was Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History Of Nearly Everything” that really rocked my world. I have read it cover to cover four times and will probably destroy it when I eventually read it again and again. Bryson helped me imagine 10,000 billion billion stars. He wrote about how on the very smallest level, far tinier than atoms, the basis of life is music. I am naturally a storyteller and this book has provided hours of fodder. It has helped me understand how precarious and unlikely life is, while showing me that there could possibly be a million worlds that could support intelligent life, though probably nothing like us for many reasons that I have learned from books like this. I met people like Michio Kaku and actually read Hawking. I am listening to “The Magic Of Reality” by Richard Dawkins but he is bitter and is killing my fascination with the magic of reality so I may listen to the original BBC radio dramas of Sherlock Holmes next to cleanse my palate.

So what do trilobites and neutrons and anxiety have to do with each other? I almost forgot… quitting.

I never took that second Physics class that Bryson talks about, the one that introduced you to real physics – the universe, the atom, the amazing. I was stuck with the volume of a cylinder and boredom and the pledge to never read physics again the rest of my life, so help me God. So close.

Apparently the next year you were introduced to the meaning of life, the beginnings of the universe and the mysteries of existence, so all-in-all I probably didn’t miss much.

I have mentioned in other articles here, here, and here that most people do not really change, especially if they are dealing with anxiety or trauma, because change is very hard and takes a long time. We have been sold the lies that promise to transform us with little or no effort. We are in love with shortcuts and our brain in neurochemically wired from an amygdala level on up for novelty. Many of us have also helped evolution along through our excessive use of drugs or alcohol, maybe our parents drank a bit when we were in the womb, perhaps we have inherited the douche bag gene, etc. Whatever the situation you can bet your 1984 Klondike Days Commemorative Coin Collection that you won’t be over your mental health issues in two months… or six months… or probably a year or two. It just takes however long it takes. There is no epiphany day for most of us. After three months of intense introspection (literally a few weeks after she quit) most people begin to notice something happening, though they are hard-pressed to describe it or even understand what “it” is.

We meet and something about you is different. Maybe you decided to go for a walk this week after ten years of depression and guilt because your psychiatrist, who never took the time to meet you, told you that you needed to walk for an hour, every day. What an idiot. Don’t even get me started…

Don’t quit. You only have one shot at this and contrary to what I really, really really want I probably won’t find a time machine so that I can go back to high school with all I know now and rule! Being free of those demons that haunt us is something that must be earned, and comes at a terrible price for some. All I can say is, I know personally that it is worth any price. I’m not there yet, but to paraphrase Martin, I can see the mountain top.

Some of you know what i mean.

Experimenting With Deductive Reasoning

Published on by Scott Williams5 Comments

I watch a lot of Sherlock Holmes. No one is as good as Basil Rathbone, no matter what you might think. I can see him clearly in my mind’s eye, which is amazing when you consider I cannot imagine the faces of some of my relatives. Cumberbatch may be second, his latest take outstanding and entirely believable (as long as you don’t mention the utterly ridiculous plot twists in the last episode. An assassin? Seriously? Moriarty?). Watson’s wife notwithstanding (although I love her as an actor and it’s cool that they are married in real life), I have endeavored to incorporate Sherlock’s love of deductive reasoning more and more into my life (Don’t even get me started on Iron Man’s version with the dude from the movie about Stalingrad).

Years ago watching Lie To Me led to a fascination with John Gottman’s techniques, even enrolling in the online version of his facial recognition course and reading his magnum opus (dry). The power of television.

Back to my experiment with deductive reasoning. I work part-time at an addictions center (www.alouetteaddictions.org) and on any given day you can find a needle or sterile water container, maybe a rubber tie or a cooker, in our very parking lot. I have mentioned this to other colleagues who have, without exception, been surprised because they have never noticed anything amiss. This is interesting inasmuch as there are often several of these discards within feet of their cars. Several.

One day I had a banana on the way to work. When I got to my regular parking spot I found myself in a quandary. It was icky and I didn’t feel like carrying it to the front door, unlocking the door, doing the stairs and hallway, unlocking my door, etc. I am, by nature, a lazy person.

Fully intending on grabbing it later I slid the banana under the driver’s seat car door and under the car. I would simply grab it once I sat in the car at the end of the day. My car (1985 300zx) is a very low riding vehicle and it would be as simple as reaching my long arms under the car. I forgot.

About a week later I noticed a dark brown old banana peel that looked as if it had been there for six months. And it dawned on me.

Recently I have gotten into the habit of eating a banana for breakfast on the way to work almost every day. Every morning I am faced with a dilemma. Then I thought of Sherlock. He loves to say, “you look John, but you do not see”.

How long would it take, at a rate of a banana a day, for people to notice that the parking lot was filling up with bananas? They don’t tend to notice a tiny syringe but surely, within a few days, someone would mention in my hearing that there is a preponderance of bananas where no bananas should be. A week at most?

It’s March 18 today. It seemed only appropriate to begin the experiment at the beginning of the month. I can look out of my window and clearly see…. 11 bananas. The others are out there, they have become a more integrated part of the landscape and are not as easily detectable from the second floor.

18 bananas.

I promised myself, back on day two, that I would shovel up every single banana. The task now seems a little daunting. Within a few days I will have over 20 bananas to scrape up and it is going to be noticeable. People will want to ask me why I am shoveling up 38  bananas won’t they?

Look but don’t see.

(UPDATE: I just asked a co-worker, shrugging as I pondered, “Have you noticed that banana peel in the parking lot?”
“What banana peel?”)

From time to time my clients hook up with new partners. Never do this if you are seeing a counselor. Ever. We will make you miserable. I often tell clients that counseling, if it is really working, totally sucks. Counseling rips open your life and exposes stuff that you have tried to keep away from for decades. The very coping skills that have worked for you all your life are the very things we will take from you. You are not in my office for a good time and I spend a lot of money on Kleenex. It is one thing to look at your inner life – your emotions and motives and hurts and private junk – it’s another thing altogether to really see what is going on.

So why would I pick on you for dating someone? Most of us who have a history of making poor relational decisions will continue to make poor decisions until someone stops us. We do not naturally understand our dysfunction and are prone to make the same mistakes, time after time after time. Unfortunately there is no roadmap for life and no one taught us how to understand this stuff. I am finally, at my old age, figuring a few things out… someday. We may learn eventually and we call this “experience”. My job is to help you have less experience.

20140318_160239Tomorrow will be banana number 19. It’s actually already here, sitting beside me as I write. We are down to a few bananas at home and I did not want to have to go to the grocery store after work so that I could continue my precious experiment tomorrow. I am counting on the fact that everyone else in our household likes bananas and Annette will go get more before I have to get my lazy butt off the couch. I try to be an equal partner, but this is science and I need to preserve my strength for the investigation.

Bore Me To Life

Published on by Scott Williams4 Comments

I have spoken with a lot of people about trauma. It’s kind of my job. Rarely a day goes by without hearing about someone’s life taking a tragic detour, of heartache and ruined families and ruined lives. That’s pretty much what we call “a week day” around here. I love it and I hate it.

Most of us know a little something about trauma. We’ve seen enough and heard enough to believe that people who have deep-seated resentments need to “get it out”. Pain breeds bitterness and bitterness breeds an ugly and petty life. Just get it out.

I used to think that “getting it out” meant that we had to go over every little ugly detail, line by line, over and over again. We called it Exposure Therapy, we called it CBT. We called it a lot of things. Over and over and over.

There may be something to that, though maybe something different from what was initially intended. Talking does, for reasons that often even escape me, help. This is not even a controversial truth. Everyone, with the possible exception of a few Scientologists out there, understands that counseling can have value.

Quite a bit of this is really about boredom.

The jury may be out on whether or not rehashing your childhood “until you can let go of it” is even possible. What I do know is that if we talk about this stuff long enough you are going to grow tired of rehashing it over and over. Eventually I am going to wear you down until you care about that issue – 1% less. With time the emotional death-grip that this hurt has on you begins to loosen, very very slowly. With time the details seems to matter a little less. Talking about something you have spent your life trying to ignore helps to loosen up the vice. There is insight and perspective, arguments and pain. One day you realize you haven’t grieved in a few days and you know that you are learning to walk again.

Time heals, sometimes.

Working through your issues and coming through to the other side is less about techniques and more about showing up. If you find a counselor that doesn’t suck and are willing to put in the effort, anything is possible. It may take a lot longer than you first imagined but it is always, always worth it. You have only one life, and I don’t know about you but I do not wish to spend that life broken.

Maybe moving forward begins with some of us walking into a counselor’s office and saying, “bore me to life”.