Confronting Family and Antwone Fisher
Among the topics that bring people into therapy, one of the most prevalent motivations involves the client's wish to seek closure with issues they face with their parents and other family members. Typically, the client feels wronged by a parent (often for legitimate reasons) and wants to finally tell the parent what a lousy job they have done in rearing them.

As a therapist, I feel very good about client's who would like to resolve issues with their family. I believe that in order for us to move on to other challenges in our growth as an adult, we need to confront our pasts and to discharge the energy that they take from us. All of us--regardless of the health of our relationships in our families while growing up--have some issues to clear up (in fact, given the complexity of family relationships, it would indicate a problem to me if a client told me that he or she did not have some lingering issues with their parents or siblings).

So, confrontation is good. But, the form that this confrontation takes requires some delicate thought and planning. In general, while clients often know that they want to take some steps in approaching their families, they also don't have ideas about what will produce results.

I recently watched Antwone Fisher, a Denzel Washington film from 2002. In the true story film, the title character (played by Derek Luke) must grapple with how he can approach his family and confront childhood experiences of abandonment and abuse. In doing so, he sets a fine example for how a character can succeed at achieving closure with his family.



Shortly after meeting Fisher, we see him running into problems serving in the Navy when he repeatedly becomes violent with other soldiers in his unit. As a result, his commanding officer sends him to a Navy psychologist (played by Denzel Washington) to evaluate his worthiness to stay enlisted in the armed services. Fisher builds a relationship with his psychologist and winds up confronting some of his experiences from his past, including physical abuse by his foster mother and questions about why his parents failed to play a role in his upbringing.

In the work that Fisher does with his psychologist, he demonstrates the first step in confronting one's family: he confronts himself. By revisiting his past and describing it to somebody else, he makes the his first move in confronting other people. To succeed in this step, we need to bring to awareness what realistically happened to us. We also need to come to grips with how these events effected us in our ability to live our lives as adults.

Frequently clients face difficulties with their evaluation of the effects of these past events on their current lives. They believe that they have been damaged by these events and that it holds them back. In some cases, prior events have indeed impeded my client's life, but more often, I find myself impressed with how my clients have already gotten beyond some of the pain that they experienced while growing up. Admitting to this progress feels risky. It seems to exonerate the people who caused this pain. Thus, a second facet of work in the phase of working with a therapist involves seeing oneself as strong and normal and intact (despite the things that have happened in the past). This healing occurs through the positive relationship formed with the therapist, and Antwone Fisher demonstrates this phase quite well.

After Antwone Fisher begins to accept himself and his experiences, he moves to a second phase of approaching people from his past. Again, Fisher sets a great example in some of the appropriate steps for succeeding in this phase. Two details stand out in his discussion with his foster mother, as a way of example. First, he does not hide that he has overcome his pain. He, in fact, declares that he is strong and has grown to be a good person. Second, he separates his discussion with his foster mother from a sign that he forgives her. Nor, for that matter does he try to get any form of apology (this relates to the first point, in that he does not feel that she owes him some compensation).

I have noticed, among my clients, that initial confrontations with family members fail because they do not follow Antwone Fisher's approach. First, they emphasize how their brokenness. Second, they demand an apology and an acknowlegement of the evil things that their family thrust upon them while growing up. It makes sense that clients will want to take such an approach. They define their goal in confrotation as getting retribution and punishing the people who hurt them in the past. Coming across as whole and functioning undermines the message that the prior pain had an effect. And, the desire for an apology allows the client to rightfully claim a role as a victim of their parent's hurtful behaviors.

Such an approach, however, rarely produces a positive result. When we see somebody as broken or as a victim (trying to pin their brokenness on us), we can put the blame back on the victim and free ourselves from feeling responsibility. Particularly when we, ourselves, feel like victims, we don't have a lot of sympathy for victimhood as an excuse for poor behaviors. So, a key aspect of confrontation involves come across as worthy of respect.

Finally, in Antwone Fisher's confrontations, he refrained from showing anger. Admittedly, he felt a lot of anger to his family for the troubled youth they created for him. However, at the time he confronts them, he does not come across as angry. He is honest and not willing to tolerate twisting of facts by his family, but he does not approach his family members to show that he's enraged with them.

This too, seems like a common pitfall of the confrontations that I see in my practice. Clients want to unleash their anger in their communicatin with their family. Once again, this has a counterintuitive effect. I consider anger a "hostile" emotion. Thus, when we show people our anger, we give them a message that we want to overpower them. We want to win. And, we want them to see us as capable of winning. Antwone Fisher demonstrated that he didn't care about winning. He had already won in accepting himself as a good person and he no longer needed his family members to confirm this for him.

In working with clients as they plan confrontations of family members, I encourage them to tone down their expressed anger to their family members. Instead, I help them to experience and communicate some of the more vulnerable emotions like sadness and shame. These emotions better reflect the actual experience of living with hurtful behaviors of people who are supposed to love us.

If you have issues that you would like to address with your family, I highly encourage you to see Antwone Fisher. It's both entertaining and exemplary in its handling of human relationships and the role of therapy in healing family pain. After viewing it, I'd be happy to talk with you about your particular situation or to set up therapy in Seattle for your particular issues. If you don't live in Seattle, we can arrange a phone conversation or an online chat as well. You can find my contact information on my website (see links at left).
- posted by Eric @ 5:05 PM

 
Hatred
I've been finding myself thinking a lot about hatred and how it applies to my clients lately. As a Couples Counselor in Seattle, I frequently wind up confronting my partnered clients about whether they experience hatred of each other. Most people have difficulty acknowledging that they do, at times, feel such intense negative feelings.

The issue of hatred has also come up in my practice as an individual therapist in Seattle regarding the hatred that some adult clients feel towards their parents. Many of these clients struggle with their hatred and deny its existence. Quite often, they do not realize that their parents may have them, too.

Part of accepting hatred as a healthy component in our significant relationships involves the acceptance of the paradox that both love and hate can exist at the same time. I might even argue love and hate must exist together in order for a relationship to thrive. Martin Buber writes eloquently on the mutual needs for both independence and together in a philosophical piece entitled "Distance and Relation". In his writing, he points out the unique quality of humans in their need for both distance from others--a sense of uniqueness--as well as the conscious need for affiliation. Given these dual needs and the obvious contradictions that they make, it seems quite reasonable that the very person who might invoke feelings of communion on some accounts might also invoke intense odious feelings in others.

We tend to deny this truth for various reasons, but perhaps the most important is the desire that somebody will love us unconditionally and will see all the good in us. Most relationships start in the euphoric state that denies that the other person has faults and, in the process, allows us to deny our flaws as well. In other words, initial love (whether romantic or parental) focuses on a sense of innocence and perfection. We develop in a way that initially accepts this idea of somebody being all good or all bad. Yet, over time, we know that as we get to know somebody else, we learn of their imperfections and their differences from ourselves. These differences highlight our own shortcomings and the initial ideals of unconditional love begin to fade.

As much as most people accept this notion of love fading, they do not accept the legitimacy of hating their loved ones in response to their disappointment and frustrations. I believe that we redirect those feelings in a number of unhealthy ways that may explain many of our psychological diagnoses and relationship failures.

For example, I see in my counseling in Seattle quite a few couples who feel that they cannot sustain their relationships because of the level of anger and hate they experience. Usually, one partner will declare this hatred from the other unacceptable and say that if it does not stop, he or she will leave the relationship. Because of the views of hatred as incompatible with love, this often resonates with the hating partner, who feels that (s)he must tone down the hatred in order to function as a reasonable partner. In a sense, the couple colludes to reduce the reality that hatred exists.

I believe that hatred may also explain some forms of depression. Often people talk about depression as anger turned inward or directed at oneself. In my practice, I have found that people often turn their anger inward because hating someone (especially a parent whom they view as loving) feels too dangerous and so they cut off their hating feelings and keep them inside. In these cases, I suspect that the client received overt and covert messages about the inappropriateness of hatred. Parents may have verbally condemned it. Or, in cases where children tried to express their hatred, the effect on the parent (who him or herself hoped for unconditional love from a child) proves to threatening to the child as the parent withdraws.

Anxiety sometimes seems to result from the fear of hatred. The anxious patient tends to fear the hatred of a parent and therefore feels an overwelming pressure to control his or her environment to reduce the chance of becoming the object of another person's hatred. Again, this effect might become enhanced by parents who themselves express their hatred but cannot tolerate the coexistence of that hatred with love.

Substance abuse and alcoholism seem to creep up around hatred issues. People drink (or use) to soothe their own feelings of being hated. They also rely on substances when they feel ashamed about their hatred. Because hatred has a taboo feeling to it, the cause of the seemingly hateful behaviors becomes the drugs. In other words, the excuse becomes "I don't hate you; I just act that way when I'm drunk". Coupled with our societal acceptance that addiction is a disease over which we have limited control, clients whose parents drank accept this notion that face value. Unfortunately, they also assume that they, too, will inherit the same lack of control. The result is a sense of powerlessness that helps to explain their parents hateful behaviors without acknowledging the actual hatred.

Through the discussion of hatred and the challenging of clients about their abilities to hate and tolerate hatred, people often find a deeper sense of meaning and explanation in their lives. Relationships that felt untenable become more acceptable when hatred can exist with love.

For more information on Marriage Counseling in Seattle, Couples Counseling in Seattle, or Therapy in Seattle, please visit my website at www.candell.org.

For an interesting read about Hatred, you might check out a book called Hatred by Willard Gaylin. Click on the link below to purchase it from Amazon.



- posted by Eric @ 9:24 AM

 
A Wasted Life?
Quite frequently, my clients seek therapy because they feel a sense of remorse about how they live their life. They feel as if they are wasting their life, not living it to its full potential.

Exactly what does it mean to waste one's life? I've found that it can translate to a number of interpretations. First, one wastes life if he has some particular skill talent and fails to utilize it to its full powers. Second, clients feel that they are wasting their life when they don't feel as if they are "changing the world" or "leaving the world a better place". Finally, some clients equate wasting life with feeling that they're being lazy or enjoying themselves too much.

It does not surprise me that I frequently hear about wasted life in my practice. In the modern world, we put an extraordinary emphasis on measuring the utility of our actions. We talk about establishing personal visions and attainable goals that we seek to systematically achieve. With the incredible technologies at our disposal, we actually do achieve a lot of these goals in reasonably short periods of time. And, we equate our achieving of these goals as a mark that we make the world better somehow. Our technologies of communication and transportation allow the impacts of our actions to have universal impacts--effecting not just the people near us but countless strangers around the world. In our competition to stand out, we equate the import of our achievements with the broadness of their direct impact. A person who sells software to millions of users globally has more impact than an account who helps a handful of people with their tax return.

Strangely, the achievement of the goals that people set often does not alleviate their sense of wasting life. With each goal ticked off the list, we feel a sense of longing for the next goal that will continue to make our life meaningful, lest we grow complacent or rest on our laurels. Furthermore, even after achieving a world-changing goal, we realize that we cannot really see the huge change that we thought we would bring on. Our achievements lead to our feeling empty and pursuit of something bigger and more grand.

Thinking about this dilemma--this need for life to make a difference yet feeling empty when you achieve the things you thought would make that difference--I have come to the conclusion that we have an inflated estimation of how much we can control how we change the world. Sure, I believe that virtually everything we do does change the world. I just suggest that the ways in which our actions translate to changes in the world go well beyond our ability to predict. What seems like an important contribution to the world of science might have untold consequences as people use or misuse its implications. Or, what seems like a small gesture to a friend might have profound impacts as its domino effect ripples through the network of people who that person touches in turn.

I also think that we've inadvertently made an error in focusing so much on achievable goals as a source of progress in our lives. Ironically, if we can identify an unachievable goal, we will always have our work cut out for ourselves--and a sense that we have not wasted our lives.

So, what does this suggest we do to make sure that we don't waste our lives? I believe that it all comes down to pursuing the things that selfishly motivate us, picking projects that give our own lives individual meaning. Where possible, we should attempt to understand why we derive meaning from these activities. What do they have in common? What clues does this give us about what future activities we should persue to achieve this personal satisfaction in the future?

By looking at the things that we most enjoy (and being honest with ourselves about what those things are), we can often find a sense of coherence that suggests a pursuit that we might never fully achieve. A goal that is larger than we are but that guides us in our future activities. This grandness and unconquerable aspect of our goal actually provides comfort because we know we will always have things to do in our quest. At the same time, we must have faith that in our pursuit of our passions, we will still manage to touch the world in many varied and unpredictable ways.

We will not waste our life if we pursue activities that appeal to our personal sense of meaning. In practice as a therapist in Seattle I help my clients to find the common links between the activities that they most enjoy and to frame them in a pursuit that they will never fully achieve (and hence will keep them engaged for a long time to come). Often, getting to these personal sources of meaning requires examining the impact that our families and friends have had on our values for what we ought to do. But, for my clients who have a sense that they are in the process of wasting their lives, the identification of a life long and selfish curiosity often lifts the depression that comes from feeling hopeless about how they can impact their world.
- posted by Eric @ 5:51 PM

 
Introduction
Having never posted here before, I suppose I should give some information about who I am and what has inspired me to write a blog.

For starters, I'm a therapist in Seattle with a private practice. I offer individual therapy and couples counseling to a wide variety of adult patients in the Seattle area.

I have created a website for my practice at www.candell.org. It has lots of information about me and my views about therapy. If you are looking for therapy in Seattle or couples counseling in Seattle--or you just want some more information about choosing a therapist, feel free to stop by my main site.

I have chosen to work in the field of psychotherapy because I'm fascinated with people--why we behave the way that we do and how we change the way that we behave to fit the situations in our lives. In the course of working with clients, I hope that I will gain additional insights on these topics (though I know that I will never completely solve the puzzle).

I primarily want to use my blog to reflect on some of the lessons that I learn from my clients. Much in the way that therapy helps us to work out the personal issues that we're facing, I would like to use my blog as a way of putting into words some of the lessons of life that come from seeing people solve their problems and change the way they think about the world. Given that I have devoted my life to understanding how people change, the putting of my thoughts into words and making them make sense to potential readers seems like an important step in moving my own understanding forward.

For the sake of privacy, I do not intend to talk about specific clients or therapy cases in this public forum. While my clients might see parts of themselves here in my writings, I will only write about lessons that seem to emanate from enough sources that they potentially have relevance to us all.
- posted by Eric @ 12:03 PM