Therapy is a psychological effort to heal psychological wounds. But it also includes a “coaching piece” which supports your efforts to solve objective problems in the outside world. For example, getting and keeping a good enough job, partner, or circle of friends can require plenty of collaborative work, bringing the situation into sharper focus and finding the most strategic spots where a little pressure can turn things around.

But what about those giant historical forces that contribute to depression and/or anxiety, but that can’t be addressed by personal coaching? They shouldn’t be “therapized away” either, because they’re mostly objective and external, not subjective and internal. It isn’t neurotic at all to be concerned about climate change, or the loss of the natural world, or the rapid erosion of public institutions that used to guarantee a basic standard of political stability. In fact, being concerned about these huge trends is an important part of living together in the real world, and a therapeutic culture of atomized individualism can prevent the public from getting together to improve things.

Yet this, too, is a delicate balance to be struck and maintained, because we don’t pay our therapists to sway us into their favorite world-saving projects. Politicized utopian therapy tends to help nobody at all. In it, the patient is manipulated and under-prioritized; the therapist becomes a self-important priest of virtue; and the public they pretend to rescue is never actually served in any detectable way. The proper balance, it seems to me, remains focused on the patient’s individual well-being, and includes bigger issues only insofar as the patient is already struggling with them. I don’t cause people to start worrying about global warming, but I do not flippantly suggest that patients who are losing sleep over rising sea levels should just forget about it.

I’m a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, and I’m aware of the extremely serious state of the world’s natural systems on which our safety depends. I’ve been interviewed on Guy McPherson’s Nature Bats Last radio show several times, and the recent book I Want A Better Catastrophe by Andrew Boyd contains an interview he did with me in Los Angeles. So I get it. 

I’m a bit more hopeful about the human prospect than I was when those were recorded, some years back. But our industrial system of living arrangements hasn’t changed, and humanity still seems locked into the cornucopian dream of infinite economic growth on a finite planet. The world needs collective psychoanalysis, but there’s no way to deliver that. A decade ago, Naomi Klein wrote a book about the climate crisis, saying we had just about missed our chance to address it democratically, so that only a top-down, autocratic solution would have much chance of reversing our reckless course. Now it seems we’re getting the autocracy, but without much progress on climate change—indeed the opposite, at least for the moment. 

And yet, here and there amid the mayhem, courageous people achieve real improvements every day, with a local reforestation program here, a soil restoration project there; another solar power plant replaces another coal plant; a threatened species like the peregrine falcon is nursed back to sustainable population levels in the wild. Though Yes! Magazine ceased publication in June of this year, you can still get a regular dose of positive reporting, environmental and otherwise, at https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/.

None of this is enough, of course, and the big climate problem is a trillion tons of excess carbon already in the atmosphere. “Net zero” is politically frozen, and even if it were enacted tomorrow, it would only prevent new carbon from adding to the existing load. Yet all is not lost, and that margin of brighter possibility—however slim—means two things: 

One, we have to try. As Rabbi Tarfon says in The Ethics of the Fathers: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it” (Pirkei Avot, 2: 16).

Two, we cannot let the giant issues of our day prevent us from fulfilling our birthright: our lifetime’s chance at the earnest effort to achieve wisdom and well-being. I use those terms instead of the Declaration’s famous “pursuit of happiness” because the latter is often too light a word, given what many of us deal with, and what we face as a society and as a species. If happiness is to be our aim, let it be a deeper version that includes the bittersweet struggle to achieve it. As I often mention, Aristotle says happiness “is not amusement; it is good activity,” and goodness often involves the sober and courageous confrontation of what’s necessary. 

All is not lost. Two organizations, and probably more, are focused on restoring the climate, not just slowing its destruction. One is www.climatefoundation.org, based on a fine book by Peter Fiekowski called Climate Restoration. The other is Project Drawdown, which includes a range of already-existing efforts to pull carbon out of the air, and into commercial products and processes that benefit the public and the natural world. These need more attention than they now receive, but that’s changing every day. 

I’m a therapist and a writer, not a climate scientist or an industrial engineer. I don’t know the future. But I am entirely convinced that your best bet, and mine, is to live lives of hope and effort, reaching for agency and awareness rather than helplessness and dissociation. When I work with patients who aren’t troubled by the giant themes of our collective historical moment, I let those sleeping dragons snore in peace. But when patients suffer from excessive preoccupation with problems of greater-than-human scale, I invite them to toggle back and forth between brave confrontation and merciful rest. If your top priority is to push back against the Big Troubles of our historical moment, remember that you can contribute a lot less when you’re exhausted and despondent than when you’re healthy and strong.

If this perspective appeals to you, consider booking an appointment with me today at 917-873-0292, or use the contact form on this website.

A couple asked me about body-image issues today. They had already communicated with each other about their preferences—which is not always a great idea. She now knows he (thinks that he) prefers a certain waist-to-hip ratio, and he knows she (thinks that she) likes it better when he’s got a bit more muscle than he seems to have these days. Saying that stuff costs more than it’s worth. Why not just assume your partner shares the same general taste as the rest of the culture around you, and live your life? If and when you’re ready to attempt the kinds of changes that suit you, give it a shot. If you have some success, and your main squeeze actually notices it, that’s great. You want to be changing for you, not for them, anyway. 

Fussing about how you think you prefer your partner’s body to look, is a fool’s errand. You can advocate for an increase in your shared activity level; get some bicycles; get a dog to have to take constant walks with, etc. There’s plenty of stuff you can do that may help get you both into shape. But there’s usually no good reason to say you’re disappointed with the other person’s body—unless things are really out of control, and the physical issues are egregious enough to be part of a larger problem. Which is pretty rare.

Most of the time, our bodies remain more or less the same, and most of us exercise just enough to keep them roughly the way they are, staving off deterioration. Sometimes an exercise program will get sustained, and somebody will win-through to eventually obvious good results. But most of us aren’t chasing that anyway—just exercising to stay healthy. Life is for living, and as a professor of mine once said, “It’s not a damn beauty contest.”

Often patients report feeling icky about the naked body they see in the mirror. That hurts, and there are many good books (not all of them addressed to women, though most are) about how to cope with those painful feelings and neutralize them. I want to offer an analogy that the people I saw this morning found very helpful.

It goes like this: 

When we talk about monetary wealth, it seems obvious that the more dollars you have, the less poor you are. What seems to count is simply the number of dollars in the bank. But that’s only part of the truth; it’s just an approximation. The real measure of financial freedom is purchasing power. One dollar in the year 1900 paid for the same goods you can only buy today for $38. So the single bill in that era was worth more than a twenty is worth now. Because of inflation, the absolute number of dollars is relevant but misleading; their actual value is the meaningful thing. 

In a similar way, the numerical data you associate with your appearance—your weight, measurements, various muscle sizes, BMI, the dimensions of gendered body parts, all that quantitative stuff—is relevant but misleading. The actual value lies in the quality of your experience as an embodied human being. It’s your body image, not your actual body, that determines whether you’re at home in your own skin or miserable about not looking like someone else, whether that’s a past self or a rival or a movie star. 

If you don’t like your belly, or your arms, or whatever, there are two main issues: the physical facts, and your difficult feelings about them. Both can change. But you can start with the feelings. Easing up on the scornful judgments will make you more free, not less free, to govern your own policies about your physical life. Hating the flesh that keeps you alive is not much of a real contributor to your motivated self care (i.e., getting-in plenty of regular physical activity, or refraining from impulsively eating your feelings). People work out or stay active because it makes them feel good, not because they’re at war with themselves. Letting go of the anxious high standards, letting go of the contempt, letting go of the relentless measuring and comparing—it won’t prevent you at all from going on to do the kind of incremental improvement that feels good and gradually makes a sustained positive difference. If loving your body still feels unfeasible just now, start off by being polite to it, and build from there.

If you’re married, or in a committed relationship, the way your partner responds to your physicality is probably part of how you feel about what you see in the mirror. Give each other the working materials to easily generate an erotic home-base that feels hot and sexy sometimes, warm and friendly most of the time, and coldly evaluative never.

Judgements and measurements are for competition, and home is not a place to compete. Make it easy to feel good naked there. Make it easy to delight in your gift of aliveness, as you both already are, right now. And if it feels important, you can also make it easy to reach for small wise lifestyle changes in the name of longevity and embodiment, not shame or guilt. Help each other to move away from the darkness of measurement and evaluation, toward the light of acceptance and exploration. You might as well.

People have an evolved need to be part of something – to belong to a family that belongs to a tribe. Anyone who doesn’t have that can become susceptible to whatever offers itself as a substitute, even if the eventual price of belonging is unclear at the outset, and turns out to be too high. We are a profoundly social species, and the more isolated somebody is, the greater their risk for getting absorbed into a company that has cult-like features—especially if these only become obvious after some time has passed, and ties have been formed.  

In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam showed that people in the USA used to be connected to large numbers of neighbors and peers, by all sorts of clubs and civic groups and religious institutions that were larger than the household, but smaller than the state—the Elks Club, the Knights of Columbus, Boy Scouts, B'nai B’rith, and so on—and that since the 1970’s, most of these have shrunk or even vanished. For my MFT internship (2012-2016), I trained in Gestalt therapy at a Los Angeles nonprofit called The Relational Center whose motto was and is: Isolation hurts. We help. See also Johann Hari’s excellent book on this issue, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.  

Our drive to be part of something larger than ourselves is a core need that’s sometimes fulfilled in wholesome ways, even today. If we’re fortunate, it can arise where we earn our daily bread. Teamwork on the job, if it goes well, feels good and works effectively. It’s not necessary to spoil it with cynicism by deciding that it’s all a swindle, just because management planned it for the purpose of maximizing the owners’ profits and the shareholders’ return on their investment. Yes, management did set up a personnel structure, with its cooperative and competitive dynamics; and yes, they did so mainly with those financial motives. But it’s a wasteful mistake to use this fact to empty-out the value of a collaborative experience. Enjoying your job doesn’t make you the dupe of exploiters—unless your employer happens to be exploitative. So it’s pretty important to have some criteria for that category.  

If the company’s internal communications are laced with the rhetoric of family life, does it feel icky and bogus?  

Prioritize your physical and mental health, and take a close look at the effects of your current employment on those two factors.

Is it a permissive environment, where bad interpersonal behavior has no consequences? Or an over-policed one, where H.R. feels overzealous and unpredictable?  

Do rewards for extra hard (or extra good) work go to everybody, not just the suits in the suites?  

Are you stuck in your current role, or can the leadership be convinced that they could make better use of you in another one where you feel you’d add more value? If you contribute advice for improving processes, products, or practices, does that get rewarded or punished?  

Do you feel misled about important aspects of your role, or are they frank with you where it counts?  

Bonuses and raises are not the only genuine sort of rewards—there’s paid time off, broader choice of tasks and teammates, more control over your schedule and remote work, and so on. Be wary if you put in a heroic chunk of overwork, and they either ignore it, or pay you in symbolism, praise, and thanks, but nothing more.

Consider that the ideal job, the real peach on a high branch, gives you three things:

·      enough meaning

·      enough money

·      adequate work-life balance  (WLB) 

Awful jobs are missing all three, and are way too close to what sociologists have called “social death,” in which one’s humanity is under dire assault by some combination of abuse and neglect. The late Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a poignant bestseller called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, about such jobs, and the vexing struggle for upward mobility. More recently, in Democracy Awakening, professor Heather Cox Richardson has taken account of the way access to opportunity waxes and wanes cyclically through the history of the United States.  

A good job can provide you with any two of these, but not all three—and if the one you need most is the one that’s missing, the job’s not so good. Sociologist David Graeber made a splash with his Jeremiad on corporate culture, Bullshit Jobs, which he defined thus: “…a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Bullshit jobs pay plenty, and they don’t take over your whole week—but their lack of meaning takes on a creeping toxicity the longer you work there, because the company culture requires you to fake it. Even if the work is (relatively speaking) socially and environmentally harmless, you still come to feel you are selling your integrity because you have to bullshit other people, and yourself, that the work is not, in fact, the bullshit it really is. This is sometimes called “golden handcuffs.” 

If there’s work-life balance and meaning, but not much money, it may be possible to add a lucrative side-hustle without becoming exhausted. If there’s good money and real meaning, but you’re frazzled and sleepless, that strategy’s not available; you may need to negotiate more time away, or build an exit ramp.  

Aristotle wrote a book of ethics for his son, where he states: Happiness is not amusement, it is good activity. Ideally, work is a form of serious play that gives us a role in the community and compensation for our labor in that role. On your way to a vocation that really suits you, remember that the gatekeepers will be behind you one day; that the stepping-stones are temporary phases of your life with something to teach you, however unpleasant; and that you must steer your life in the direction where you want it to go.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

Preoccupied with freedom, we can miss out on the full possession of whatever it is we have already chosen, or might choose now.

Keeping open as many future choices as possible is a great way to wind up with nothing.

Married men can cheat themselves out of a lot of wellbeing and self-respect by over-associating masculinity with novel erotic adventure, with an unrevised ideal of “fun,” with youth and its open horizon. It makes them underestimate how much wellbeing and self-respect can be had by freely choosing to love the person they have already chosen. Resentment blocks this process, so it’s an important early step in therapy to check for resentment. If there isn’t much of it there to obstruct the flow of feelings, then the man may be relatively free to make a new use of his freedom: namely, choosing afresh the same person he chose in the past, but this time making the choice as the more mature fellow he has become in the meantime. Suppose I first made the commitment when I was 27, and now I’m 41. My forty-one year old self has (and needs, and deserves) his own chance to make the choice on his own terms, for current reasons: to stay or to go.

Why stay? The fact that you promised to stay should be one reason, but it can’t be the only reason, or the promise is a prison. It is your exercise of your own liberty that liberates you, but it’s a common mistake to suppose that only a break-up would be an exercise of free will, an action, a difference-making choice. There are at least two other choices. One is to stagnate, to resent and to sulk, to withhold affection and sex and boycott the marriage without changing or ending it: choosing not to choose. Such a marriage is kept just-good-enough to be tolerable, but no better and no worse. The third choice is to opt for renewal and flourishing, despite uncertainty about just how best to go about it, and just what you can reasonably hope for by trying.

The goal is to open your heart. There is a better life waiting, though from where you now stand it may be invisible to you. Inside an attempt at an enduring monogamous commitment, a couple builds a small relational micro-culture in their home, that defines the norms of what they can expect from each other. How much verbal affection? How much sex? How much gift-giving, and on what occasions? Is it ok to yell? To use demeaning language, and call it “just a joke”? How much emotional safety is it reasonable to require? How much information about plans and spending and schedules is supposed to be shared in advance, to make the other feel included and facilitate collaborative problem-solving? How much of my time and attention should I expect to share with this person, and is it acceptable for one or both of us to be staring into a cell phone during that time?

The answers to all of those questions can be changed, but it takes deliberate effort. The ends will illuminate the means for achieving them. To find out what you need to do to improve things, envision the kind of relationship you actually want—the one that’s good enough that you could freely decide to stick with it despite your spouse’s limitations, and yours. Some of those aren’t going to change, but what might well change is how much that stuff actually matters to you. If she really can’t sing, she might sing anyway, but not well. If your husband has poor proprioception so that he never knows where his elbows and knees are, that’s unlikely to go away. Rarely does a person start to move like a gazelle who never resembled one before. People can learn to manage their A.D.D., but some of it may be intractable, and the chronically late person might never be consistently on time.

But what empowers us to look past those foibles is the much larger, more important open field of shared loving trust, joy, kindness, humor, help, reminiscence, learning, encouragement, celebration, and sex. Besides all those good things, the experience of shared suffering—getting through difficulty together—is a big contributor to bonded intimacy. And compared with the sum of these, a few human faults might not amount to much. I was going to add, “the signal-to-noise ratio is what matters,” but that metaphor won’t do, because exercising your freedom to improve your marriage doesn’t just make the music of love more clearly audible, it also makes it better music.

All of this assumes that becoming more invested and relationally ambitious is going to be appreciated and, at least somewhat, matched. If it’s not, and you’ve spent the past six months being more thoughtful than before, more firmly-but-gently assertive, more decisive-but-cooperative, more affectionate, more vulnerable, and more present—but your wife or husband has not changed at all, nor acknowledged it, nor made some similar changes to validate and reinforce yours, then you have to consider new options. Couple’s therapy can be a way to figure out how to stay together, or whether to stay together, or how to break up. It can be used to improve a good marriage or a bad one. It can also be a way of finding out whether the thing can be saved or not; if not, you can leave with the confidence that you tried your best. Or it can be a venue for discovering in greater detail just how to go about consistently making each other happier, perhaps even happier than you had thought possible.

With or without the help of a therapist, people in committed relationships who find themselves preoccupied with freedom will benefit from remembering that freedom is useless unless you make use of it. That can be done in ways that are immediately easy to observe, but some of the most consequential and wise uses of freedom are inward shifts that can bring to bloom enormous changes in due course. Among the best of these is the free decision to open the faucet in your chest from which love can flow when you dare to allow it.

For those whose marriages are dormant but good enough, and potentially very good indeed, it’s well to take a leaf from Homer’s Odyssey and reflect: you may find yourself sometimes fantasizing about Circe and Calypso, and that’s fine. But Penelope is the truth.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.