Sheldon Kopp

You may remember being a kid, and having someone suggest you write an essay about the person who influenced you most.  With the exception of a musician or two, the person that is likely that for me is Sheldon Kopp.  I was given his most famous book "If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients" by my then "mentor", when I was 17.  It's really a book about principles, an organized way to live our lives and deal with Things As They Are.

He's written something in the way of 18 books, died a while ago not of the brain tumor he had (that required removal 3 times), but of heart failure and pneumonia.  Having heard a rumor about his death, I looked him up on the internet once, and sent an email to a similarly named person, hoping I might find him or learn of his passing.  Essentially my note stated that this was a person who had been extremely influential and helpful in my life, and I wanted to know if it might be him.  I was lucky enough to get a response, that made it clear it was actually him: "Yes Petar, I too have heard rumors of my untimely demise, but I find them unconvincing."

In "Buddha", as became customary in many of his books, at the end was included ideas that he considered truths, or principles.  This was the most famous of them, called, "An Eschatological Laundry List: a Partial List of 927 (or was it 928?) Eternal Truths."  Many of the ideas here have guided me in everything from my own emotional and "spiritual" work, work with my clients.  People that have suffered all of the things here that I'm trying to diminish for as many people as possible- depression, stress, relationship issues, abuse, loss and grief, addiction, self esteem issues and the like.  Hopefully, they will give you as much as they've given me, inspire you to read his books, and of the greatest importance: give you a ways and means of passing the ideas on to others.  Would love to hear what you think of them.  And to the "Truths"...

1. This is it!
2. There are no hidden meanings.
3. You can't get there from here, and besides there's no place else to go.
4. We are all already dying, and we will be dead for a long time.
5. Nothing lasts.
6. There is no way of getting all you want.
7. You can't have anything unless you let go of it.
8. You only get to keep what you give away.
9. There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things.
10. The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune.
11. You have a responsibility to do your best nonetheless.
12. It is a random universe to which we bring meaning.
13. You don't really control anything.
14. You can't make anyone love you.
15. No one is any stronger or any weaker than anyone else.
16. Everyone is, in his own way, vulnerable.
17. There are no great men.
18. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.
19. Everyone lies, cheats, pretends (yes, you too, and most certainly I myself).
20. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation.
21. All of you is worth something, if you will only own it.
22. Progress is an illusion.
23. Evil can be displaced but never eradicated, as all solutions breed new problems.
24. Yet it is necessary to keep on struggling toward solution.
25. Childhood is a nightmare.
26. But it is so very hard to be an on-your-own, take-care-of -yourself -cause-there-is-no-one-else-to-do-it-for-you grown-up.
27. Each of us is ultimately alone.
28. The most important things, each man must do for himself.
29. Love is not enough, but it sure helps.
30. We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that's all there is.
31. How strange, that so often, it all seems worth it.
32. We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge.
33. All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data.
34. Yet we are responsible for everything we do.
35. No excuses will be accepted.
36. You can run, but you can't hide.
37. It is most important to run out of scapegoats.
38. We must learn the power of living with our helplessness.
39. The only victory lies in surrender to oneself.
40. All of the significant battles are waged within the self.
41. You are free to do whatever you like. You need only to face the consequences.
42. What do you know . . . for sure . . . anyway?
43. Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again. . . .

Therapy is Not the Answer

This is sort of a PSA for clients and therapists alike.  Therapy is not the answer to our problems of relationships, depression, grief/loss, addiction, taking food from others, communication, our sense of broken-ness/low self worth/shame, loneliness, etc.  Therapy isn't just a way of being either.  It's probably a way of being that solves these problems, and can prevent many in the future as a result.  The only exception, if seen in a particular light, might be around issues of safety that require immediate intervention.

Therapy should be a space where we work through the feelings we're carrying with us that prevent us from coming to these answers on our own.  It's an activity that should prompt us to be without our defenses and distractions as much as is possible, with a guide that has done enough of their own work that we can be taught how to live gracefully with these feelings, let go of them/transform them, and provide us principles and ideas that will help us not make some of these mistakes in the future.

We certainly should be giving direction about how to handle some circumstances, communicate more effectively, learning parenting and relationship skills, symptom management, relapse prevention and etc.  There should be an organized body of material to assist with these things.  They will all be rendered useless though, in absence of a principled way of operating, and or in the presence of enough emotional intensity that the tools cannot be used or we cannot see "answers" clearly or the simple consequences of not having these feelings gracefully end up exacerbating problems.

So, a suggestion.  Learn some survival skills that lend themselves to our ability to get some new ways of operating.  Have enough support from family, friends, and professionals that will enable surviving the process.  Deal with the feelings that come up, then set about "solving" things.

What to Do?

From P.16 of the PDF "Statutes and Regulations" from the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (the regulatory agency that oversees MFTs, Social Workers, and etc):

"§4980. NECESSITY OF LICENSE (a) Many California families and many individual Californians are experiencing difficulty and distress, and are in need of wise, competent, caring, compassionate, and effective counseling in order to enable them to improve and maintain healthy family relationships."

Clients as above, come to us for wise counsel.  Among other things of course.  This idea has far-reaching implications, not just for our clients, but for us.  Wisdom is hard to come by!  Oversimplifying, "wisdom" in this case is often a euphemism for answers.

Claiming (or believing) one has wisdom or answers is of course a Bad Idea, yet it seems we have a responsibility to work toward them.  There's some great ideas and techniques supporting the principle of not giving "answers" (suggestions, direction, etc) outright to clients (or loved ones, certainly) from the therapist's chair.  My basic mode of operation is to try to lead someone to those answers, typically only giving direct suggestions when my efforts to lead a client to their own answers have been exhausted.

We do treat several diagnoses and/or issues that have "community standards", fundamental practices or "conventions" most therapists agree on how to treat.  Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other more severe illnesses for instance almost always direct the client to: not "self-medicate", takes the best supportive medication regime as directed, and is getting :talk therapy" and/or peer/familial support with their illness.  There are few that argue with the utility of these interventions.  There are other examples for addiction, depression, anxiety, and more.

Two things are of interest to me though.  The first is that during the therapeutic process, I often see clients get a suggestion, and dismiss the suggestion out of hand.  What I think is happening is that rarely do I suggest an idea that in a vacuum will ever be sufficient.  What I mean is, most any suggestions I have will never be singular.  It seems that the depth of our sadness or anxiety or pain or whatever often keeps us from "getting" what is offered, unable to accept the responsibility of taking several suggestions.  Summarizing: rarely is one idea sufficient to change anything in the therapeutic process.

The second thing that prompts me to mull this over is the "active" therapists versus the "passive" therapists.  In my view there is room (and each therapist I think, ought use) both styles, often with the same client.  There are times that we should be directive, and not just in terms of extreme examples like when a client is being abused.  Discouraging self-medicating, engaging a support group, ruling out medical concerns with a physician, ways to stop a behavior etc are all examples where there is little controversy over giving someone "direction" about an issue.

People come to us for answers.  We are paid to have a toolset, methods, principles of operating that in many cases should help diminish depression, stress, relationship conflicts, behavioral concerns and the like.  On the subject of not holding these ideas close to one's chest: there is a great (and occasionally controversial) martial arts instructor who critiques traditional means of training, idealizing the "teacher" and etc.  He also critiques traditional martial arts training as being "cultish"- keeping secrets, claiming answers from some (out of touch and unknowable) "higher source".  His "instructors" are all referred to as "coaches" or by their first names, and their focus is very simple: performance improvement.  That last idea is part of what I'm getting at here- the "answers" we give as therapists should improve "performance", which I would argue is diminished if we are too passive.  It is very significant of course, that what is being improved, is clearly defined.  If we think something might be helpful though- there are certainly compelling reasons we should disclose it.

When it comes to performance, we should be helping people get more in touch with their emotional condition, have those feelings gracefully, diminish (but not eliminate) the intensity of negative emotions.  Our interventions should help decrease or stop unwanted behaviors.  The direction we give should help increase intimacy.  Of course this is not an exhaustive list, it may take a long time for these things to happen, and some cannot happen without the others.

My experience has been that many (arguably most) of my clients have come into my office, suffering enough, and out of enough answers, that they are willing to do most things we come up with together.  Had they been in possession of this material on their own to begin with, there would be no (or little) need for my education and experience with the issues they struggle with.

My effort is to put me out of a job and it does people a disservice I think, to have an insight that I wait for them to come to on their own... which they've already arguably been trying to do.  Sometimes I ask my clients if they have spent a great deal of time in their lives, saying something like this to themselves: "I just wish someone would tell me what to do about this."  There are many things, that most (not necessarily all) people can do, directly, to diminish feelings of low self worth, sadness, struggles in relationships and most of the problems they come to a therapist.  If I didn't go to school to learn to help people know and do these things, then what exactly did I go for?

Transformation.

So, we can't heal what we can't feel.  If we're really trying to transform "depression" (not a feeling, but a diagnosis), "anxiety" (another non-feeling), grief and loss, abuse, abandonment and neglect etc- we have to "let go of some old ideas" about how we perceive and experience these circumstances, and the attendant e-motions (emotions, energy in motion).

Some of these ideas we have to let go of are:

1.  That we can turn our feelings on/off. 
Stimulus/response (to steal loosely from Gary Larsen and others).  All we perceive has a stimulus and response attached to it.  It both amazes and saddens me that despite such a fundamental law of physics we behave as if we can somehow do something (or not) that will allow us to not have a response to a stimulus about what someone says or does.  Some basic "untruths": "I need to not take _____ personally, give _____ power over me/allow them to 'get to me', it's water under the bridge, it's all in the past..." etc ad nauseum.

2.  That we can decide how intense a feeling we are having/going to have.
Back to physics- we can't decide or influence how much of a stimulus we take in.  Save with the use of drugs or alcohol, even despite attention- we experience what we experience.

3.  That we can decide what type of feelings we're going to have in response to some experience.
Sometimes we feel sad about something, only to have a similar experience later and feel hurt instead.  If this were true- why couldn't we simply "decide" to feel joyful, grateful, happy, etc about a thing?

There's more, but these are a fairly good starting list.  If we're going to transform our feelings (or help others to do so), we have to change our philosophy, our relationship to our emotional condition.  Some of the most frequent problems I run into both personally and professionally around this are around the kinds of beliefs above.

Beyond this, we do things that prevent us from being fully in touch with our emotions.  As Sheldon Kopp has famously (or not so famously) said, paraphrasing: "When we stop trying to overcome anxiety, avoid depression etc, we can experience how sad and scared and hurt we sometimes truly feel."  I would argue that one of our most basic problems as humans is that we do things that put distance between us and us, us and others, us and the "universe" or "God" as we MISunderstand he/she/them and/or it.  The list of the things that we do that result in these effects, is the list of things we have to stop doing to have access to how we feel, and transform it.

On a professional level, I have been struggling deeply with how far away we've gotten from doing "depth work", processing, "uncovering, discovering, discarding", "naming it, claiming it, and dumping it" (or whatever euphemism one prefers) for dealing with the likes of grief, loss, addiction, depression, anxiety, relationship problems and etc.  "Outcome measures", insurance companies etc do not support this process.  There are sociopolitical (or as I prefer, "sociopolytrickal" as in "many tricks") forces that diminish both focus and support on these types of services.  The hows and whys of this are beyond the scope of what I'm getting at here.

My tactic for dealing with issues are (hopefully) pretty simple and direct.

1.  Take the list of things we do that put distance between us and us/others/the "universe" and/or "God" if one prefers, and stop doing those things.  If it's hard to stop doing them, try doing these things. 

2.  Take steps to survive not doing those things.  This may take therapy, a support group, a church, support group, or whatever.

3.  What will most definitely take therapy: process what comes up.

Even if one does need medical intervention with psychopharmaceuticals, has a medical condition that might prompt difficult feelings/behaviors etc, getting therapy can only support this process, and arguably in some cases, is insufficient without it.  These three simple ideas above support all the ideas about "processing" (like the "uncover, discover, discard" etc above).  Hopefully we will get past the era of simply thinking that we all only need to act better, or otherwise "get over it".

Lastly, need to make mention that this is of course not this simple, and would encourage more work around these things to be "happy", free of depression, anxiety, addiction, etc.  A "resource group" of supportive people is necessary.  An organized set of principles to deal with new issues is significant.  Would also say that it's important to have principles that allow us to grow as people- doing the work to transform and/or let go of these issues are the bare essentials for us to get to these things... and are totally possible.

Feelings Aren't Necessarily Facts.

Because it's been coming up recently, and because it's a fundamental principle of what I do in terms of therapy:

Feelings aren't necessarily facts.  They are just indicators of possible realities.  Of course this doesn't mean they're not facts- but that's beyond the scope of a blog.  They give us information about our environment that might not otherwise be discernable or supported by our other senses.  They do much more than this, but that too is too long for a blog.

Unless we have a relationship with our own emotional condition that is healthy, I'd argue that we will have a difficult time "seeing" things clearly (circumstances, other relationships, etc.), and making choices about how to handle things.  This is true even in absence of grief and loss, depression, relationship problems, abuse, addiction and etc., and is certainly made worse by the presence of these issues.

Processing feelings (emotions as some call them, or as I often do, e-motions), transforming them, reconciling with them, how to identify them and what to do about our sense of things in light of our feelings is of course what counseling, therapy, and life coaching are all about.  At least seeing this idea as a principle, even in absence of those things can help us tell real alarms from false ones, provide some simple relief in some circumstances, give us an opportunity to be kinder to ourselves, and an opportunity to be kinder to others and more..