“If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself.”

Norman Vincent Peale

From brain imaging research we now know the average person has between 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts per day, 90% of which will be repeated tomorrow. Students of life realize they won’t be making much progress if they are thinking 90% of the same thoughts day after day.

If your life is ever to change, one of two things will have to happen:

• Either something new will have to come into your life, possibly a new insight, or perspective, or a powerful idea

OR

• Something new will have to come out of you

In order for something new to come into your life, you’ll have to learn to quiet your mind. A quiet mind is a receptive mind. Robert Brault when asked what he would do differently if he were to make a change in the way he lived his life, responded:

“I’d ask more questions and interrupt fewer answers.”

Seriously, have you noticed how noisy your mind has become with all the useless mental junk mail you’ve retained at the alter of staying abreast? Here’s a simple exercise to assist you in developing a quiet and receptive mind. Receptivity is fundamental to all effective learning. Here is the exercise:

• Purchase a “Pitch Counter” from your local sporting good store. The same counter used in baseball is used in business to count products on a shelf, or people attending an event.

• Find a clock with a second hand. Sit in front of the clock and practice quieting your mind for 60 seconds.

• Every-time you notice a thought, click the “Pitch Counter.” The goal, like golf, is to achieve lower and lower scores, until you quiet your mind.

A quiet mind is without thought. It just is. You can learn to do this. The ultimate goal is to practice your quiet mind in the presences of others. Once you have learned to quiet your mind in the presence of others, you may be shocked to learn how much you have been missing.

Someone once said, “If you live in the past you have no future. If you long for the future, you do so at the expense of the present.” The present is the only true reality of life. Being present means you are not distracted by the internal dialogue of your competitive thoughts. In a noisy mind, each thought competes with the others, each desirous of being voiced and finding acknowledgement. If you need to be heard, you’ll not hear another, nor develop a quiet mind. Quiet minds are needless through practice.

A quiet mind seeks to understand not be understood

If you choose to quiet your mind by the “Pitch Counter” exercise I discussed, you will have learned to be present in the best way any of us can. I created my website to uniquely prepare you through a series of vicarious experiences to understand and better care for yourself and ultimately those you love.

“I crave thought experiments the way some people crave carbs.”

Since the Industrial Revolution shifted the world into high gear, the cult of speed has pushed us into an ever-accelerating breathless relationship with time. Most of us live on the edge of exhaustion few of us recognize. Our minds and bodies pay an unrecoverable price for the consequences of living in this accelerated culture of our own creation.

One experience disrupts all other attempts to cram more into each minute of the day – funerals. Funerals are one of the few permitted reprieves where we’re allowed to push the pause button and contemplate depth. In funerals we’re re-introduced to deeper intrinsic questions and perhaps contemplate realigning our values and priorities. The agenda that brought us into a memorial service may seem less compelling after an encounter with the question, “Is this life all there is to living?” Funerals extend our vision from the stewardship of minutes to the contemplation of eternity. What exists beyond the power of now?

In my reading of obscure authors, I came upon a parable, a thought experiment from a Hungarian writer Utmutato a Leleknek. The title of his poem is:

“Do You Believe in Mother?” 

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.” “Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?” The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.” The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible, and eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. Because the umbilical cord is so short, life after delivery is logically impossible.”

The Second baby insists, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.” ”The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It delivers us nowhere.” 

Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.” The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is she now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.” Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.” To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

Utmutato a Lelekneck – Hungarian writer and poet.

People say, Age is an attitude, that it isn’t how old you are, but how you are old. I’ve also heard, Age is a matter of mind; if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. Others advise us that, Age is just a number. Yet my accountant reminds me, numbers count. So what’s the number? How Old Are We, Really?

It seems like a straight up question, easy enough to answer with sufficient evidence to back us up. I’m not a betting man until now, but I’m willing to wager lunch that no one will find the answer to the title of this Second Opinion by consulting any of the following, otherwise, reliable documents. Neither your government Drivers License, nor your Passport, if you are lucky enough to need one, not even the standard barrier of our identity, our Birth Certificates, can answer the question, How Old Are We, Really?

For some odd reason, I’m one who is fascinated by esoteric questions, such as, how much does it cost if it’s free? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Is there a third possibility to the question of the glass being half full or half empty? How old are we, really?

In being a professional listener for nearly forty-years, I rarely answer first questions. Doing so prevents engaging the second more pertinent question, which typically reveals more personal information. The art of understanding comes through listening deeply to uncover the primary unarticulated question. In this case the question in the title merely provides the clue to answering the primary, second question and subject of this article? When does Aging begin? Once you understand the title question, you’ll realize I provided you one obvious hint by the title’s emphasis on the word, Really. Here’s another:

It’s a fact, May 4, I reached 69 years of Age, but just as true by August of this same year, I will celebrate 70 years of Age.

This is neither a moral nor religious question. I’m not asking when life begins. I’m asking when does the Aging process begin? We know as fact, our birth mothers deliver us at approximately 9 months of Age. For the preemies, you’ll have to do your own math. Why is it in so many societies that once we are delivered and the pregnancy is complete, we get no credit for the first 9 months of development, and our Age accounting starts again at zero? My Second Opinion is that it’s time we began celebrating our true Age, rather than just our Birth.

The following poem by an author unknown to me, summarizes the point of this article better than I ever could:

On the Home page of my website, you’ll find a welcoming introduction to the pilgrimage of psychotherapy. As I reread this introduction, I saw something I hadn’t seen before. I invite you to read the following paragraph of my introduction and substitute the word marriage, or however you term your committed relationship for the word Therapy or Psychotherapy.

Welcome to the pilgrimage known more popularly as Therapy, a wandering, digressing sort of journey that loops, spins, backtracks and often contradicts itself.  Therapy is a potentially powerful and delicate exercise, which is, although chancy and difficult, worthy of our best efforts.  Psychotherapy is a noble profession and its practioners, although ordinary mortals do have moments of genuine transcendence during which they are able to promote the healing and wholeness of others.  As one who attempts to assist those who seek his assistance, I acknowledge that not all best-intentioned efforts succeed.

In my previous article, Affairs of the Heart, Affairs in the Making, I stated “Affairs are significantly associated with dissatisfaction within a relationship.” It’s a popular aphorism that marriage is a verb not a noun, and that relationships keep no better than fish. All relationships age, but how?

After nearly 40 years of private practice, I can state confidently, your relationship will begin to uncouple, and drift when your attention and efforts are recommitted elsewhere. When the distance between the two of you increases, the identifiable turning point will not hinge on an argument or the typical emotional catastrophe that besets any relationship. Instead, uncoupling will be related to changes in each of your individual social worlds. Slowly over time, if you are not careful, you will begin to redefine yourselves as separate people, developing separate lives, complete with separate friends, experiences, and futures. When being partners is no longer a major source of identity, and your identity comes from other sources, then neither of you will find your uncommitted relationship satisfying.

By contrast, committed relationships begin when two individuals renegotiate who they are with respect to each other and the world around them. They begin to restructure their lives around each other, creating common friends, memories, and a common future. When two become one, it doesn’t mean I become you, but successful coupling isn’t afraid to redefine their identity as a couple. The coupled identity becomes constantly reaffirmed through public confirmation providing a stable location in the social world validating your committed identify.

A satisfying relationship requires strategic care and weeding:

• Focus on understanding the needs of your partner and commit to meeting them
• Seek to understand more than try to be understood
• Support the relationship when at times it is not supporting you
• Understand how you contribute to every problem in your relationship
• Seek a second opinion through counseling sooner than later
• Keep a sacred date night just for the two of you every week!

Although our relationships “take place” in public, outsiders know little about the intimate environment we create with another person. No one has continuous access to our intimate relationships, not our closest friends, relatives, or many times even the children who live with us. What’s more, we actively generate privacy by giving our various publics only selected bits and pieces of information about our private undertakings. We work to sustain a public impression of our relationships in keeping with the image we want to convey.

In That Garden Fair Came Launcelot Walking; This Is True, the Kiss Wherewith We Kissed in Meeting that Spring Day, I Scarce Dare Talk of the Remember’d Bliss by: Florence Harrison (Artist)

One form of relationship risks jeopardizing all other privacies. Affairs these untidy, emotionally tangled, tenacious patterns of secretiveness, betrayal, and seduction call to us beyond the potentially troubled present relationship from the birthplace of unmet need. For an Affair has more to do with meaning than sex.

Love and betrayal, those powerful and human themes are most dramatic in our affairs, adulteries, and infidelities. History is replete with recounting the great passions and deadly secrets, deep love and idyllic illusions. No wonder Affairs capture our curiosity and provoke our judgment.

Not all human entanglements are the same, nor do they all call for the same response. To assist you in making the complexity of human functioning more clear, I offer the following distinctions to counter the more popular intolerance, “It makes no difference, it’s all the same.”

• Adultery: a legal term defined as “sexual relations with someone other than one’s spouse, domestic partner, or any relationship committed to sexual exclusivity.”
• Infidelity: literally “unfaithfulness or disloyalty,” breaking of a promise or vow.
• Affair: “an illicit amorous relationship or liaison.”

Accurate statistics on affairs are hard to assemble due to the secrecy intrinsic to affairs inhibiting most research, however, the following can be said with some assurance:

• Affairs are significantly associated with dissatisfaction within a marriage
• Affairs are increasing among younger women at a rate greater than men
• Social background does not influence a person’s tendency to have an affair
• Premarital sex is correlated with the likelihood of having an affair
• Statistics together suggest that about 70% of marriages experience an affair
• Woman are more likely to participate in an affair sooner than their husbands when emotional satisfaction within a marriage is a governing principal

During a recent interview I was asked, “After being a Marriage & Family Therapist for 39 years, what would you identify as the top 5 marital problems today?” Honestly, I said I didn’t think there were any martial problems, just adjustments. I went on to say, what I think we are witnessing is a number of unresolved individual problems being brought into our marriages causing marital repercussions, but are truly individualistic in nature, and should be addressed in individual therapy not marriage counseling. Adultery emanates from an unfulfilled individualistic need, which if unaddressed can undermine a relationship. The failure of either party to address the other member’s emotional need is one of the greatest threats to marital satisfaction.

Next months article is “How To Affair Proof Your Relationship.”

If you have trouble reading other people you may find yourself confessing at some later date,  “I wish I had known then what I know now?”  Read this outloud, “It was knowable then, where were you?”

Lasting and fulfilling relationships have this in common, true information.  The more reliable the information, the less likely we will later say, “ I wish I had known then what I know now.”  Wouldn’t you agree,  some people are as easy to read as a car wash flyer?  Do you think you are easy to read?  Whatever answer you gave, don’t be so sure.

Learning to read people triggers healthy curiosity.  I recommend learning the skill of seeing with your ears or listening with your eyes?

I received two-email questions recently.  Sharon writes:  “I hear you discuss the need to conduct a sober interview during the dating period.”  Q. “What prevents us from seeing the obvious and avoiding unnecessary mistakes?  What makes us blind?”  A.  Unmet needs.  When you need the relationship to work, you may turn a blind eye to the truth designed to save you later potential problems.  The wise axiom promises: The worse you want it, the worse you’ll likely get it.

Gene writes, Q.  “You mentioned that dating is an interview.  How does one learn to better interview?  I have been dating this lady for over 5 years.”  A.  Gene, honestly I think many people after 5 years aren’t dating, they are loitering.  People may still be interviewing, but more likely, they don’t know how to close.

I have enjoyed a rather privileged position as a psychotherapist over 30 years.  I have listened to thousands of confessions, been privy to the story behind the story and witnessed countless people come to terms with issues in their lives.  I observed the single most important factor in the ultimate success of any self- improvement, or personal growth program is an individual’s commitment to understanding oneself.  Remember, what we fail to learn about ourselves, we fail to understand about others.  And what we do not understand about others, we fail to know about the world in general.

In the process of learning to read a relationship, we must grow alert to the more subtle signs.  We must not only learn to see the handwriting on the wall, but read between the lines.  Many relationships are complicated texts.  Instead of learning a few speed-reading techniques, some people settle for a glance at the book cover.  If you find yourself trapped in a series of unfulfilling dead-end relationships that turned out in the end to be nothing they promised to be at the beginning, pay close attention, and turn down the noise around you.  Every dream date that turns into a nightmare displayed early red flags and warning signals you missed, reframed or denied.  If you agree say, AMEN.

Knowing I was preparing this article, I asked a number of people to provide me (you) interviewing tips they either employed while dating – interviewing – or wished they had known at the time.  Here’s their contribution:

INTERVIEWING TIPS

John….Become proactively aware of all that takes place in a relationship

Monica…Question what you do not understand or disrespect

Carrie…Avoid the temptation to gloss over what you don’t understand

James….Resist rationalizing or making excuses for another’s behavior

Monica…After asking a question, step back and observe the other person’s answer

Carrie…Mark or flag confusing or problematic parts of the relationship for later discussion

Frank…As a policy, don’t default to giving people the benefit of the doubt

You have to agree these people are sharing some remarkable insights.  When you stop and consider that insight is pain turned inside out, you realize that maturity is learned not granted by age.

Jelaluddin Rumi

In the 13^th century a now famous Sufi poet – Jelaluddin Rumi wrote a poem entitled The Guest House in which he claimed that “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.” Rumi went on to encourage us to welcome them and entertain them all because each is sent as a guide or teacher.

Truly our feelings are our sixth sense. Feelings clarify, arrange, prioritize and direct the other five senses. Feelings are a guide for interpreting your experience. Another way to think about feelings is they provide psychological feedback for your consideration. How and whether you process this feedback makes you unique. That’s why no two people have the same experience. We process life so differently. The secret lesson in learning to maturely manage your life is to be open and honest with your feelings at all times. It’s your faulty pattern of dealing with feelings on a day-to-day basis that causes most of the difficulty in your life.

By way of analogy, feelings are the cat’s whiskers. A cat was not given feelings as we are they were given whiskers. Whiskers tell the cat where it is in proximity to life, much in the way our feeling do for us, but only if we are available to them. Cutting off your feelings is tantamount to cutting off a cat’s whiskers. You finish the sentence; how easy is it to navigate your course in life without navigational aids?

Fear, anger, joy, contentment, anxiety, and depression are examples of feeling. Have you ever heard, or perhaps thought to yourself, that certain feelings are negative? The truth is feelings are not positive or negative. Those who teach such nonesense do not understand the nature of this most human experience. Feelings are true or false, not positive or negative. You either feel the way you do or you don’t, true or false, never positive or negative, good or bad, right or wrong.

In the article entitled, “Don’t Believe Everything They Told You,” I asked whether you believe what is true or what you have been persuaded to believe is true? Part of what it means to grow up and not just old is learning to think for yourself and not believe everything others told you.

If you believe that feelings are to be shared, you believe what you were taught to a fault.  Feelings are to be felt not shared. Sharing doesn’t make them any more legitimate. Feelings are one way we communicate with ourselves. We usually think twice before sharing our other five senses. The only person who needs to know how you feel is you, every minute, every day. What you choose to do with what you experience is what makes you unique.

When you use words to describe what you experience you are managing your feelings and experience, rather than experiencing them. As valuable as communication can be, it can also distance you from your experience, just as too much talk from other people distances us from them. Feelings are an experience you are having with your life. Be there. Allow your life experience to affect you so that others can participate in your life.

• Modern affluent societies provide a paradox of choices. More choices make us not freer, but more paralyzed, not happier, but more dissatisfied. More is less.

• Practical wisdom is an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. Rules often fail us, incentives often backfire. It will take practical, everyday wisdom to rebuild our world.

• You don’t need to be brilliant to be wise. Common Sense is not common. B and C students often employ A-students.

• The wise person knows:
  • When & how to make the exception to every rule
  • When & how to improvise
  • How to use moral skills in pursuit of the right aims
  • Wisdom is crafted by experience not birth right
  • Wisdom takes time & experience mentored by wise teachers

• Rules and procedures spare people from cognitous engagement.

• When things go wrong we look to the short run benefits of:
  • Answers over Insights
  • Solutions over Improvements
  • More and Better Rules over logic, and when all else fails
  • Incentives

• Moral development is retarded by mere compliance. Defiance sometimes triumphs conformity.

• In seeking the moral high road, we must constantly distinguish between that which serves individual interest vs. that which promotes the common good will of moral responsibility.

• During this New Year let us all consider how to Re-moralize our work
  • Develop a Sensitivity Policy toward the many expressions of insensitivity
  • Reimagine that which no longer serves us, and
  • Be the Change we wish to see in others – Celebrate moral exemplary behavior

Tis the season to be jolly, so lift your glass, or bow your heads, the Holiday Season is an intimate time for family and dear friends.

By the time you read this article we’ll all be deep in Holiday preparations. Invitations to join in the gaity will be arriving. For those to whom the season is a rather mixed bag of blessings time of year, I offer you in the spirit of comedy, a contemplation on the stone cold truth of true friendship. Ah comedy, that rare opportunity where the truth is allowed to leak between the laughs.

If you are as tired as I am of all those sissy, seasonal friendship poems that always sound good, but never actually come close to reality, then you might be entertained by the truth posed as comedy on the subject, “What a true friendship means to me.”

1. When you are sad – I will help you plot revenge against whoever made you feel this way, and take your side even if I think you are fully at fault.
2. When you are blue – I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you
3. When you smile – I will know you finally got lucky.
4. When you are scared – I will rag on you about it every chance I get.
5. When you are worried – I will tell you horrible stories about how much worse it could be until you quit whining.
6. When you are confused – I will use little words.
7. When you are sick – Stay the hell away from me until you are well again.
8. When you fall – I will point and laugh at your clumsiness.
9. This is my oath – I pledge it to the end.       Why you may ask?       Because you are my true friend!

Friendship is like peeing in your pants. Everyone can see it, but only you can feel the true warmth. I know you will try and share this to 10 of your friends. But seriously, how depressed are you going to get when you discover you only have four. And please remember … when life hands you lemons, get some tequila and salt, and call me immediately because that’s what true friends are for.

During a recent television interview the host asked what I thought the number one challenge facing the American Family today? My response was, “Confusion regarding the time limited nature of the growing up process.”

For most of us it is easy to have children; the challenge is raising them. As almost every parent will admit, raising children is a long-term responsibility, which is seldom accomplished as planned, but the effort to achieve it is one of the most important activities of their lives.

Recently, when I spoke to a group of parents and teenagers about their relationship, I asked the audience what they wanted from each other. The teenagers wanted to be listened to; they wanted concern and respect; and they wanted time and attention from their parents. It’s an obvious truth worth repeating, “If our children don’t feel listened to at home, they will be listened to by their friends, who by default will become an increasing relevant influence over our child’s behavior.”

Parents wanted their children to behave. Parents are often preoccupied with their children’s behavior, which includes school grades, issues of respect for parents, neglect of responsibilities around the home, use of alcohol and other drugs, and early sexual activity. Many parents commented that they were afraid of the influence of others – the peer group. Truest truth? It is the quality of the relationship between the parents and their children that will have the greatest influence, if not undermined by family dynamics.

The most challenging life stage for both parents and children is Adolescence. In seeking a simple, understandable structure for this crucial life stage, we need first to define two basic terms, childhood and adulthood, and draw some careful distinctions.

CHILDHOOD is defined as the time between birth through high school – 18 years of age, when a young person lives under the parental roof and is supported and raised by their parents. During this phase of life – childhood – parents have the right, and responsibility to set limits on the child’s behaviors, ranging from allocation of studying time, to conforming to curfews, to the use of alcohol and other drugs.

ADULTHOOD, as I define it, is reached when the maturing child assumes the financial responsibility for their own support. It is imperative that families plan for the age of 19 as the time at which the child becomes an adult. Should the child upon reaching the age of 19 desire to continue their schooling or seek employment, but have yet to save enough money to live independantly of their parents, then by mutual consent, the parents are encouraged to extend childhood longer until the child can successfully sustain themselves financially. Too many children and their parents go off to college confused that they are now adults and should be extended the privilage of adulthood, while still financially dependant upon their parents. This confusion of when Adulthood begins is a source of continual conflict between children/adolescence and their parents.

ADOLESCENCE chronologically extends from ages of 12 through 18. A short transitional period of academic, biological, emotional, social and intellectual elements which young people struggle bravely and often desperately to piece together. I am convinced the major tension between children and their parents is due to the failure in understanding that adolescence belongs to late childhood, not early adulthood.

LATE ADOLESCENCE, ages 15-18, is an intense time between freedom and responsibility, and the clumsy integration between personal, and peer-centered influences, and the traditional values of their family. The goal of the late adolescent period is the same for both parents and children: To do all that can reasonably be done to help the growing child acquire the skills, including educational, interpersonal, and self-mangement skills, which will maximize the young person’s ability to function as a productive independant adult by age 19, or extend childhood until such skills are acquired. There are no adults financially dependant upon their parents.

Children learn to become adults by understanding, accepting and working within reasonable rules for behavior, including participation in a family life, and avoidance of alcohol and other drug use.

The wise and effective parent not only enforces necessary rules and worthwhile values; he or she helps the child see beyond them to the working principles, which underpin them. Children become adults when parents parent. These important distinctions may help.