We think of motivation as something driven by discipline. Often it is just that, a pressurized pushing and shoving from behind, away from the possible bad consequences of our inaction. As someone like Jordan Peterson is happy to remind us, discipline guards against the perils of what some people call laziness. But discipline is not the only form of motivation.

Rather than being pushed from behind, away from the failure we dread, we can be drawn forward from in front, led onward by curiosity, fascination, and a desire to explore the world. I do not believe in laziness. I think what we call laziness is actually internal conflict, a pattern in someone’s functioning, not a trait of his or her nature. If together we can bring the conflict into focus, you can position yourself to make more free, informed choices about what it is you actually want to do with your opportunities. “All you have to do,” as Gandalf said to Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, “is decide what to do with the time that is given to you.”

I had a teacher years ago—a brilliant, soulful teacher of Ancient Greek, the late Jack Collins—whose maxim was “To row is human; to sail, divine.” Of course it was a play on the old proverb “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” What he meant was that there’s a place for discipline, and it’s often necessary, especially near the beginning of a project. But after discipline has done its work, after it’s gotten us launched, rowing our boat away from land, pushing on the oars, there comes a time when discipline is no longer needed, and the serious joy of the work takes its place. When you row a boat, there’s a 1:1 correspondence between the effort you invest, and the result you get. Shove on the oars this much, and the boat lurches forward so much as a result. But when we sail, we hoist the canvass, and thereafter the job is just to maintain the right relationship to the wind—a mighty force, for whose creative power we are not responsible. The wind is a free-flowing, abundant aspect of the environment, and the sailor(s) work is to keep the sail so oriented that the ship can move in the desired direction under the wind’s wild, natural power. Rowing is no longer necessary. One unit of effort can now yield much more than one unit of progress.

Reading books, or writing them, works the same way. At first, you’re counting how many pages you’ve read since you sat down; how many minutes you’ve been reading; what chapter you’re up to; and so on. But then you get successfully caught by the unfolding story, and you forget about all that counting and measuring. You read on because you want to know what happens next; because you care about the main character; because the story is carrying you along. Of course it isn’t only our intellectual tasks that work this way. So do a great many more of our human endeavors…

Therapy is sometimes a form of rowing out, away from the familiar shores of our trouble, and toward the open world, where there are currents and breezes that we can harness for our purposes if we can find the right balance of humility, self-knowledge, and ambition. To row is human; to sail, divine.

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.

We were all born innocent and beautiful. Then we had a childhood, in which the people who raised us gave us some combination of three things: love (getting the good stuff), neglect (not getting the good stuff), and abuse (getting the bad stuff). When a kid gets neglect and/or abuse from a parent, the psychological process involved is something like this. The person who is supposed to take care of him with nurturance and protection is giving him pain instead. Why? Because the parent is a bad parent. He or she may be a good person, but too damaged by their own untreated trauma to provide good parenting.  If the child realizes this, he will be forced to see that his parent will never meet his needs for consistent nurturance and protection, since they aren’t capable of it. That’s despair, and no kid can tolerate that, because the younger you are, the more your very survival is at risk if your parent is bad. Babies can actually die from lack of love, even if they get all their physical needs met (food, cleanliness, protection from heat and cold, etc.). The name for that is marasmus, or “failure to thrive.” To avoid such life-threatening despair, the child uses the only available defense, despite the terrible price it will cost him. He keeps the parent good, by taking their badness into himself: he must be the bad one, so that the parent can still—in his mind—remain good.

This defense solves the terrifying problem of being stuck with a bad parent. But it does so at the expense of the child’s self-respect, and he grows up believing that he is bad to the core. After all, only a bad child would get bad treatment from a parent who was fair and just. If the parent is good, and yet she treats him badly, it must be because he himself is bad: he must deserve the bad treatment. Believing this, he grows up with a heart full of toxic shame. Guilt is pain about something you have done, but shame is pain about what you are. Some kids misbehave—lying, stealing, hurting themselves or others, abusing drugs, failing at school, having sex too early and unsafely—in order to verify that they are indeed the bad one. If they are going to get neglect and/or abuse no matter what they do, then doing bad things will at least mean that they really do deserve the pain they get, and that feels less unjust. This story accounts for the fact that, when troubled adolescents do get asked why they behave so badly, they often have no idea.

Such a kid typically hates her parents and appears to be in a battle with them. Her destructive behavior is seen as a means of revenge against the parents, and in a way, that’s just what it is. It can also be a protest against a deeply felt though poorly understood sense of having been wronged. It can also be an effort to attract the parent’s attention so that neglect will be replaced by punishment (since, unlike neglect, punishment at least requires the parent to acknowledge the kid’s existence). And in an environment of authoritarian bullying, parental commands backed by force, and unexplained rules, a kid may become destructive in order to preserve her integrity. I may be a bad person, he thinks, but at least I’m my own person.

Now that you’re an adult, the old defense has worn out its usefulness. It costs far more than it’s worth. When you hear the question—what’s wrong with me?—the answer is nothing, because it’s the wrong question. The right question is, What happened to me?

There are several reasons why being kind to yourself might feel terrifying (at first). It requires admitting that the good parents you yearned for are never coming, because here you are, doing for yourself what they should have done. It reminds you of what you should’ve gotten from the people who were supposed to nurture and protect you. The better you treat yourself, the greater the contrast between what you got and what you now realize you deserved. And if you grew up believing that kindness was weakness, that kind men were feminine, that kind people were naïve and lucky and full of shit, then you have to admit you were wrong.

Feelings of worthlessness/self-hate are messages from a wounded child part of you. Don’t buy into what he says. You know things he does not know. Turn toward him, and in your mind’s eye (your imagination), pick him up and dry those tears and speak to that kid with soothing words of love. Tell your inner lonely little child: I love you… I got you… we’re ok… come with me. Talking to parts of yourself that way is not crazy, it is a survival skill.

When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, use your mind/your intellect/your inner observer. Say, oh, look, part of my mind is attacking me right now… isn’t that interesting. Say to that inner attacker: Oh, you again. Yes, I know what you think. But I know something you don’t know. Say to that inner attacker, Yes, I know you think you’re making some kind of contribution, but aggression is not the kind of help I need right now. When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, connect them with what you know about your history. Oh! This is an echo of other people’s shit that got thrown at me in the past. I do not have to hang onto it.

Your inner attacker is an internalized parent, a copy of the one(s) who gave you some amount of neglect and/or abuse. Your parent(s) may have grown old and harmless by now, but those aged parents aren’t inside you. What is inside you is a figure made of the young, strong, crazy people they were when you were a kid. You can’t get rid of that inner bully or kill him/her off. S/he has a place at the table. But not the head of the table. The inner bully needs a seat in the car, but not the driver’s seat. Get that person into a passenger seat so you can steer your life.

When you start to love yourself, it will soon become clear that the love that you have inside—which is yours to give, when and where you want to—is very high-quality, and it’s going to get even more valuable as you grow. It’s the good stuff. It is worth a lot. You can be a source of the good stuff, giving as well as receiving. When you’re accustomed to feeling like a vacant cave of darkness, a black hole from which not even light can escape, it’s strange to think you might turn into a star that radiates light instead. But it happens.

For Further Reading:

The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller

The Forgiving Self, Robert Karen

Healing the Shame That Binds You, John Bradshaw

Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach

Slings and Arrows: Narcissistic Injury and Its Treatment, Jerome David Levin

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.

Whatever your age, you are also all the ages you’ve been before. Part of your psyche is an infant, because past selves remain as parts of an increasingly complex self-system. Younger parts of self, with unhealed wounds and unmet needs, can interfere with adult life, until they get the necessary loving care from the most adult parts of self.

Now, without an awareness that the self has parts, we are likely to feel crazy the moment our feelings do not agree with one another. I want to eat the cake, but I also want to be in a caloric deficit. I want to keep playing in the snow, but I also want to go inside and warm up. Knowing it's impossible to do both, I might well feel crazy whenever a pair of incompatible desires assails me. 

Unless, of course, I have an understanding of the self as a dynamic composite, in which case it all makes sense. A more ancient version of this same fact can be found in the distinction between monotheism, and the polytheism it replaced. If there are many Gods, as Plato pointed out in his Euthyphro, their desires can be in conflict with one another. But the God of a monotheist cannot do this, for lack of any opposing competitor. In the work of making sense of a dangerous world, each had its advantages. And it was Plato who first discovered (or at least, first mentioned) the inner child, in the Phaedo. But I digress. Let’s return to the self. 

Think of a moment when your behavior seemed to you to be immature for your age, or otherwise irrational--procrastination, for example. What tasks are you avoiding? Part of you wants to complete these tasks and enjoy the sense of accomplishment and relief that comes from a job well done --but part of you prefers to keep deferring the inevitable. When you catch yourself engaged in this pattern, perhaps you are harsh and punitive with yourself. Perhaps both the avoidance and the punishment feel somewhat alien—-as if you were not quite in charge of either of those inner and outer goings-on.

Where, then, do they come from? Whenever anything just doesn't fit with the present reality, we can ask ourselves what it might fit with from the past. The mind doesn't randomly generate errors, so much as it displaces significant, meaningful things from one context to another, where their meaning is far less evident. 

Perhaps the part of self who is responsible for procrastinating is an overwhelmed five or six year-old kid who is genuinely frightened of adult tasks, and concerned that completing them would result in abandonment. That is, if he shows he can take care of himself, nobody will ever take care of him again—so he procrastinates, instead. Or rather, he forces you to procrastinate. The purpose of his boycott is to make sure that he, the inner child, gets the loving attention he needs, as a matter of (what feels like) life and death.

Perhaps the part of self who is responsible for the punitive attack on the procrastinating, needy child is an embarrassed, rageful adolescent. The inner teenager is, after all, disgusted and repulsed by the frank, naive, primitive neediness of the defenseless child. The teenager’s whole existence is about escaping from childhood, parting company with it, and often marshaling a bitter contempt for it in order to bear the terror and loss of saying farewell to childhood forever. This explains the savagery of the “super-ego” when it punishes that lost little kid for the sin of imposing inconvenient delays on the whole (inner) family.

The inner adult, the most adult self, is the part who is best able to nurture, respect, protect, and educate all the younger parts of self whose difficult states of mind sometimes rise to the fore and feel intractable. Instead, your most mature self, the parts of your personality that are most intact and best developed, can be encouraged and equipped by psychotherapy to re-parent the rest yourself. Freud taught long ago that each of us is all the ages we have ever been. Like ancient Rome, the psyche is a many-layered thing, in which deeper levels from long ago persist beneath contemporary layers with more life and less history. Conversely, being young involves more strength and less wisdom, so that the middle-age we so long dreaded becomes a domain of awareness, rather than mere lost youth.

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.

When a young person presents with both addiction and failure to launch, there is almost always a pressured tension between the patient and his or her family, especially those who control the pursestrings and pay for the therapy. The twenty-something’s journey (out of addiction and deferral, and into adulthood) should be distinct from his relational process with his family. In fact, it may even be psychologically necessary for him to move forward without having reached a stable accord with them. That way, he can be sure that his progress is not mere compliance. As that progress yield concrete results---especially, paying more of his own bills---he can be more confident that it isn't mere defiance, either. 

Compliance and defiance typically have been the poles between which the patient has been running back and forth for years, inside a family system which is stuck in that pattern. His compliance seems to be movement forward into adulthood, so long as most of what he complies with happens to be good advice, and reasonable rules, that come from exasperated elders who may well love him. But compliance is never really as good as it looks, because it's not autonomous, so it is not sustainable; it builds resentment that comes out sooner or later.  His defiance appears to be much worse, of course, because it's often full of hostility, self-destructive, anti-social, risky, and debilitating. 

Part of the reason this pattern is so terribly stable and hard to break up, is that the family's response to the young addict's defiance is usually a call for a return to compliance, this time a new-and-improved compliance that will last. That never works, because even if he does produce a good lengthy chunk of compliance, it's still mere compliance.  The solution is, in most such cases, to bring in a therapist whose client is not the family, but the patient himself. That way, the patient can continue doing the only two things he knows how to do, but in a whole new way which will permit him to learn new skills: he defies the family, and complies with the therapist in a genuine, collaborative search for what the patient (himself/herself/theirself) actually wants from life.

Why is that compliance somehow better? Well, between the patient and the therapist there is no personal history of being hurt, or betrayed, or robbed, or worried half to death. The professional is not burdened with guilt or regret about the past of the patient and his family. So she or he can afford to keep the patient's interests central, striving to collaborate with him on a viable path to a good-enough life (good-enough in the patient's own terms), at the heart of which must be a kind of guarded friendship between the struggling young patient and Reality. 

This is the same Reality which he has avoided for so long, languishing in addiction and the related un(der)employment. For him, Reality has been a place of failure, shame, and fear. Changing that is not easy, even with professional help. By the time such a patient arrives in the therapy office, he may have been to rehab, only once or many times. Depending on the nature of the addiction involved, recovery might be the first order of business; sometimes it has to come second or third. The choice (or the cycle) between abstinence and harm reduction should be respected, in accord with the specifics of the case and the values of both patient and therapist.

When something has been stable---even something toxic and annoyingly stable, such as a particular dynamic in a family system; a particular role for a particular person; any ongoing relational process that's been around for a while, even if it's one that truly sucks---its replacement by something better is still a big change. And all big changes, good or bad, are losses of the familiar. The good big changes are also gains, sometimes far bigger gains than the loss involved. So when a young person is coping with addiction and "failure to launch," and he or she manages to change and become successful-enough, sometimes the family gets upset---even though this good development is exactly what they've been pulling for all those years. It's new and it feels strange and people aren't sure how to respond to it.

And from the patient's side, as the therapy gains traction his capacity to manage his own affairs may be growing at a different rate than his capacity to deal with his family in ways that remain timely, kind, and effective for the pursuit of his own interest. Again: the patient's ability to cope with reality may be growing somewhat faster than his ability to deal with parents or other attachment figures in good-enough ways, enough of the time. Those older adults should try to keep these two capacities distinct in their minds, even though they are closely linked. Yes indeed, a guy who can keep a job ought to have the relational skills to manage his family elders without too much emotional noise-making. But as a therapist I can report it's extremely common for people of all ages to regress into childhood self-states when they deal with their parents---especially when purse strings are involved; or when there has been a divorce; or when there has been bereavement in the early death of a parent; and when addiction has been the main coping mechanism for a long time. If the patient acts messy with his folks, it doesn't necessarily mean he's still being messy out in the world.

In general, as far as good things go---things that might flow from the family to the patient, in recognition of his recent achievements---timing is important. It may be fine, and even lovely, for his family to use words and gifts to celebrate him for going straight after he manages to do so. But such things should never be mentioned beforehand, nor set up as an incentive. It has to be a free gift, at the right time, not too soon and without any strings attached. Of course, when therapy has just begun and addiction is still active, that's still a distant concern.

Compliance and defiance look and feel very different. Ultimately, both are forms of captivity to the cycle they form together. The way out is a genuine alliance between patient and therapist, in which it's made clear that there is a world---vital, interesting, unpredictable, sometimes friendly, and not impossible to join---beyond the one that has proven so painful and boring. Sometimes, the first hint of this lies with something outside the problem which can illuminate it: literature, or religion, or science and nature, or politics---it doesn't matter what the source is, so long as the patient gets the news (eventually, and as soon as possible) that, as Shakespeare's Coriolanus says when he leaves his mother: There is a world elsewhere.

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.