Taming the Polar Bears in Focus - Taming Empathy

I first introduced this topic in the fall of 2015 in the piece Bipolar in Focus - Empathy and Bipolar Disorder. In that piece we looked at how bipolar seems to have an especially strong capacity for producing empathetic pain and suffering but we also saw that many people who suffer from anxiety and depression do as well. At the end of that piece I suggested that we did not have to necessarily suffer so much and that there were things we could do to alleviate and reduce our capacity for empathetic pain and suffering.

So yes, you read that title correctly - taming empathy, meaning your empathy is one of your "polar bears" that must be tamed.

In modern society we are more and more taught that empathy for others is a virtue and are implored to feel more empathy for the plights of minorities of all kinds and those less fortunate around the world. This of course is important - it's what impels humanity to improve the overall quality of life for all and to reduce prejudices or unfair practices against particular groups. All advances in human rights and improved life quality for others has at its roots, empathy for others. However, like any human capacity, empathy is something that can get overly dominant in our mental and emotional makeup and run amok with the potential to cause us terrible anguish and personal suffering, as we explored in the introduction piece. For many of us, it's not a matter of not having enough empathy for others; we in fact suffer from "overactive" empathy and empathetic pain regions in our brains and this becomes a great deal of our overall depressed mental states and mental suffering - hence the need for "taming" empathy.

To learn why your empathy must be tamed, we'll need to talk a little bit more about what empathy is - and isn't. And most importantly, we'll start to learn how to take better action to satisfy this empathy beast within us.

Did I just call empathy a "beast"? Yes, I did and not by accident. For to learn to truly understand empathy, we first need to learn about:

The Dark Side of Empathy

It is naturally assumed by most (but never by moi) that empathy is a virtue, an ever positive trait to be able, as many put it, "stand in someone else's shoes, to feel with his or her heart, to see with his or her eyes". We feel that to be an empathetic person is to be a "good person", it is something we are proud of in ourselves - we don't stand idly by while others suffer or turn cold shoulders to the suffering of others! And this is largely true, of course.

However, nothing about any human trait is so simple. It's something I learned very early on in my study of neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience (the former is more strictly about the nuts and bolts of the brain, the latter more about how those nuts and bolts create our cognitive abilities and behaviours) - no trait or behaviour is clear cut in how it's created in the brain or manifested in our inner mental worlds or our outward behaviours, nothing is black or white and almost everything about us will be in gradients along a spectrum of many differing shades and hues from good to bad that can slide up and down along that spectrum depending on a great deal of other factors, both internal and external.

And so it is with our capacities for empathy.

Let's look a little more into what empathy is.

While empathy is not unique to humans, human empathy works differently - or should work differently (more below) - than that of, for example, our closest primate cousins. Human empathy arises at least in some part from theory of mind. This is a cognitive ability that is unique in the animal world. (1) To summarize theory of mind very briefly, it is:

... the branch of cognitive science that investigates how we ascribe mental states to other persons and how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons. More accurately, it is the branch that investigates mind reading or mentalizing or mentalistic abilities. These skills are shared by almost all human beings beyond early childhood. They are used to treat other agents as the bearers of unobservable psychological states and processes, and to anticipate and explain the agents’ behavior in terms of such states and processes.

Cognitive abilities associated with theory of mind are critical to humans' ability to socially organize and cooperate on the scale that we do and the evolution of theory of mind in our minds was one of the greatest foundations for the very evolution and advancement of the human species in the first place. Neurologically speaking, it is located in our vaunted pre-frontal cortex (the area of the brain right behind our forehead), the area of the brain that most differentiates us from any other animal species.


Related to this and also critical for advanced human capacities for empathy is the power of imagination. This is not hard to understand for it is the power of imagination (again, a very unique human trait and ability) that allows us to, well, imagine what's going on in another person's life and paint a picture of it in our minds even though we had no direct role nor bore any direct witness to what the other person went through. This role of the power of imagination in empathy partly explains, I'd posit, why artists tend to be highly empathetic people caring greatly for the world (or to put it another way, why empathetic people tend to make better artists).

So far, so good, right?

Well, not quite.

There is now a great deal of research and evidence that looks at the "dark side of empathy".

What could this possibly mean? How can such a virtuous trait such as empathy have a dark side?

While the idea of a dark side to empathy is not exactly new (philosophers have observed and written on this for some centuries), the cognitive sciences have more recently been able to design and perform better experiments to shed a deeper light on the entire spectrum of empathy and - more importantly - the feelings and actions that can arise from it.

It turns out that our feelings of empathy - and its pain - could very well drive us towards feelings of hate, vengeance and aggression towards the perpetrators of actions against those we empathize with.

As just one small example (out of dozens, if not hundreds) of the neurological underpinnings of this, recent studies have been done that find that those with a genetic disposition towards being more sensitive to vasopressin and oxytocin - hormones implicated in feelings of compassion, helping and empathy - were paradoxically more prone to feelings and acts of aggression.

I spoke in the previous piece on empathy about how bipolar people are especially driven to take action. This is part of the "manic energy" side, a side which could drive great action that can often get us in trouble (a verbally or physically violent altercation, for example).

These powerful empathetic feelings could well cloud our judgments and lead us to jump to conclusions and judgments or to highly biased thinking. This too is now all well studied. It is part of what can lead to an "us vs them" mindset and to create great chasms and conflicts between peoples, races, groups and so on.

The human mind is all too full of "brain bugs" and our hidden capacities for prejudice and racism (various cognitive sciences have many clever ways of demonstrating that we are all probably much more prejudiced and racist than we would believe or portray publicly) and thus we form alliances and identity groups and, more importantly here, biases and prejudices against "opposing" groups in many possible divisive ways.

These natural tendencies towards bias and prejudice plus powerful empathetic feelings may drive us to forget that our value judgments are just that - our values and that they are not necessarily universal or universally "right". Thus as we witness or perceive any action against our views or values or which harms peoples or creatures in ways that offends our values, we often feel a surge of anger and hateful feelings against the persons or group that performed the harmful act. Powerful thoughts of vengeance may take hold. Our judgements may be clouded to the point that we include in our anger rage and thoughts of vengeance against anyone who appears to belong to the group that acted against our values (as just one example, this is most easily observable in hate for all Muslims because of the terrorist actions of a few).

Political leaders* often exploit these capacities for group bias and empathy in ways that may make us support a national or regional act of aggression towards others or against a rival political group that we might not otherwise rationally support. Yes, you read that correctly - empathetic feelings can drive us towards irrational thinking and behaviours.

[* - I don't, by the way, just mean leaders of political parties. I mean leaders of political or politicized groups of all kinds]

All of which means we can be driven - by feelings of empathy - towards feelings of hate, anger, rage and of vengeful aggression and judgment against others in very unhealthy ways.

Feelings of hate, anger, rage and of vengeful aggression and knee jerk irrational judgment? I think we can all agree that none of these are particularly healthy ways of being nor are they particularly useful for solving any human condition or conflict, or those involving other things we often empathize with.

And this same basic dark side to empathy is possible in virtually all peoples around the globe.

Now, does this mean that empathetic feelings necessarily lead to improper actions and behaviours as we've (very, very) briefly looked at here today or does it mean that actions based on this sort of "quick reaction" empathy necessarily wrong?

Of course not. This empathetic burst of pain we feel for another (either physical pain or psychological pain) can absolutely impel us to take quick action to save or help another. What I'm trying to lay the grounds for here is that we have to be careful about jumping to too many conclusions based on empathetic sympathies alone.

Now, that is for behavioural impulses among humanity as a whole. In us "highly empathetic" types, however - so called "empaths" - this is all a much bigger, different and more difficult kettle of fish.

To understand why we suffer so much, or at least much more than the average person (the whole point of this blog, after all), we need to look at two other aspects involved in empathy and empathetic response. Those are:

- Psychological pain

- and a favourite topic of mine, the stress response system

Psychological pain, ooooh boy, is this a big and favourite topic of mine and one that is historically - and horrendously - overlooked and misunderstood by a long line of professionals in the various fields of medicine, psychology and psychiatry (for whom I have a long list of rather unflattering and largely unprintable names).

It would take a separate post on psychological pain and how it works in many of those who suffer mental health problems but for our purposes here today we need to get into it briefly to further understand empathetic pain.

You see, it is referred to as "psychological pain" to distinguish it from physical pain. Physical pain has - ostensibly - an obvious source in our bodies; a broken leg or a burn, for example, that causes pain receptors in the brain to fire. That's what we experience as physical pain. For the most part the medical world can understand and deal with this kind of pain.

So called psychological pain, on the other hand, has no such obvious physical source. You can't "see" where it's coming from; hence, it's "psychological". It often still gets dismissed by the great majority of medical and mental health professionals as well by most of the general public as merely being "in your head", the strong - though usually unspoken - implication being that it's "imaginary" and because it's "imaginary" you should just "get over it".

However, there are a growing number of researchers who study how  both physical and "psychological" is created in the brain that are gaining deeper and deeper understanding into pain of all kinds and it turns out the most of what we experience as pain is, in fact, "in our head". Very briefly (and this is breathtakingly brief, but our space here today is limited); wherever we feel pain in our bodies, there is a corresponding group of neurons where signals are sent and it is the firing of these neurons that create the sensation of pain (the renowned neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran was and remains a leading pioneer and expert in this, most exemplified by his work in understanding and treating phantom limb pain).

Psychological pain is no different - it is generated by specific regions and neurons in the brain. As I explained in the original post, we - among many mammal and even bird species - evolved the capacity to feel and experience the pain of others as part of our learning abilities - as a group we learn faster to recognize and deal with a danger if we can feel and experience pain just by witnessing someone else going through a painful experience (either physical or psychological). It is also in good part what impels us to act to help or save someone. It is an integral part of our stress response system.

Now, to that stress response system of ours. The great Robert Sapolsky has researched, lectured and written about this in probably greater detail than anyone else in the neuroscience and neurobiology biz. He has long recognized and investigated how psychological pain activates the stress response system virtually identically to how physical pain does.

This bears repeating and highlighting, folks: psychological pain activates the stress response system virtually identically to how physical pain does.

In response to pain, the stress response system is going to kick off a cascade of hormonal, neurotransmitter and other neurobiological agents that are going to cause great physiological changes throughout your brain and body that you will experience in a wide variety of ways that would require at least a small book to adequately outline (Sapolsky has several large ones, not to mention hours and hours of lectures and dozens of academic papers devoted to the subject). This can all be good in the short term - if there's an obvious wound or danger to deal with. But when we have misunderstood and unresolved psychological pain that becomes chronic and thus keeps activating the stress response system, this is where we begin to see toxic levels of stress. For some of the most obvious and common symptoms of psychological stress, think of the pain in your chest and thumping heart and what could be raging emotions of all kinds that seemingly pop out of the blue in reaction to something you witness or read that "threatens" your own values, views or sense of fairness.

With a lack of understanding as to why it is happening and left unchecked, the stress response system being chronically activated with resultant spikes in stress hormones and other neurobiological changes will create destruction throughout the brain and body leading or contributing to just about every major health problem we have today, including - ta-da! - all major mental health disorders. Chronic stress is what could gravely damage the capacity of every cell in your brain and body to create energy. Chronic stress is just really, really bad news. 

Worst yet, for those who've long lived with psychiatric or mood disorders, there is a very good chance that we'll have lost a lot of our power to do anything about so many situations that arise even in our own lives, let alone large issues involving injustice and unfairness to groups we identify with or empathize with. We'll tend more to be powerless (in both psychological and literal senses) and feel helpless to do anything about all the sources for our empathetic pain.

And it is now well known that real or so called "learned helplessness" (an odd term to try understand the true meaning of) will further exacerbate and contribute to feelings of acute and/or chronic stress.

So perhaps this is the darkest aspect of empathy - runaway empathy creates both acute and chronic psychological pain, the great majority of which we feel powerless to resolve which causes acute stress spikes and/or chronically activates the stress response system which will go about creating all kinds of cellular destruction throughout your brain and body.

When we are "melting down" with pain - this so called "imaginary" psychological pain - I can tell you we almost literally are melting down in very real physiological ways at the cellular level in our brains and bodies.

Not only that, "stress responses" could lead to all kinds of short and long term behaviours or behavioural changes that may well be dangerous for us or at the very least not at all in our best interests (many of which make up a great number of the "symptoms" that are listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for most psychiatric or mood disorders).

Now, this is all incredibly brief (though I know it may seem incredibly long), but I hope I have built a compelling case for the need to "tame" your empathy "polar bears".

Empathetic pain isn't the only psychological pain we have to tame, but for many of you reading here, it's a big one - and a pretty important place to start.

Let's first go back to examining why some of us feel empathetic pain more than others. As I stated in the original piece, there's a good deal of evidence that bipolar people experience empathetic pain more than the average population (I have a separate essay in mind outlining that this could well be a root for some (though not all) of the cycling between manic highs and depressive lows). However, I also stated that since I first looked at the connections between bipolar depressive phases and empathetic pain I have spoken to and worked with many people who identify as "empaths" who suffer greatly as well.

So let's look at us as a group for now.

For starters, there is good evidence that so called "empaths" are "wired" differently; a great deal of our sensory equipment and the complex networks of white matter between them has formed and developed differently than that of the general population in ways that make us highly sensitive to all kinds of sensory input: we see more, feel more, hear more. We experience the sensory world around us in more intense detail (which again, is why perhaps many artists identify as empaths or why many empaths become artists). Facial expressions, tones of speaking voices, body language and much so on will be layered not only in much more detail, but will also be experienced more intensely. We read more "meaning" into all of it.

Many empaths I talk to refer to times when being in a room of people they can literally feel themselves deeply sense and "soak up" the vibes of everyone in the room. For many empaths these strong sensations can be very uncomfortable and overwhelming if not unbearable in ways most people simply cannot understand. This is partly what I was getting to in the introductory post on our differing realities.

It makes sense then that people who have this higher and more attuned sensory capacity for others' facial expressions, body language and tonal intonations in speech will have a greater capacity to sense and feel the pain of others as well - empathetic pain - and not only that, experience it much more intensely than that of the average population.

So there's that.

But does this mean that people who are not empaths do not feel empathetic pain as we do?

In some senses, yes. But that does not mean they do not feel empathetic pain. It is a very rare person who does not feel empathetic pain. What needs to be understood here is the wide, wide diversity of all human capacities. People empathize with many, many, different things, groups, peoples, races, genders, creatures and so on. Not only that, people are capable of nearly countless ways of reacting to empathetic feelings.

In other words, just because people don't share your empathies it doesn't mean they don't experience empathy. It may also mean that they have developed different - and perhaps healthier - strategies and powers for helping others they empathize with.

Also, however, I'd like to direct us back to the concept of "ego defenses", which I briefly examined and linked to many psychiatric disorders way, way back in a post I called Broken Ego Defenses. In that post I explained that we all have a number of specialized brain systems that we evolved to help block out psychological pain of all kinds for the very reason to prevent us from melting down with overwhelm from the many harsh realities of life.

We have to understand this from an evolutionary standpoint - in the strictest rules of evolution, the name of the game is to carry on. Things that prevent us from carrying on are a great disadvantage to us as individuals and to our "tribe" in general. Melting down and/or getting physically ill from stress and anxiety from emotional pain would therefore definitely qualify as "dis-advantageous" to our individual, clan and tribe genetic success. This is why our brains also evolved ways to block out too much emotional pain and overwhelm. The capacity to block it out is supposed to be there.

So while many people appear to have the emotional EQ of a fence post (as I am fond of saying), in many ways this is their brain doing exactly what it's supposed to do - protecting them from harm.

It is entirely possible - and I have observed this many times - a person may have a great capacity for psychological pain but at some point was hurt so bad, or felt the pain so intensely, that their mind/brain developed strategies to always avoid that in the future. This again is a great deal of how the stress response system and pain regulation is supposed to work - to learn strategies to avoid pain and its sources in the future. As it is with the great majority of how our brains plot strategies for survival and success, this is for the most part done deeply subconsciously.

Our brains not doing this is partly what I was getting at in the post Broken Ego Defenses and how this leads to a good deal of psychological distress, anxiety, depression, bipolar episodes and so on.

Now, it is also true that too many people care too little for and ignore too much about the world around them and this is obviously not good either.

Those of us who tend towards the higher end of the empathy spectrum have our role in the overall success of our group, tribe, people, gender, etc as well. We tend to be more socially aware. Despite our capacity for pain, we tend to seek out the injustices of the world.

Without people like us, many of the social equality and justice advances the world has steadily made in the last millennium or so would likely not have occurred.

Plus, this is simply the way the brains of us empaths are. As I've stated many, many times in this blog, nobody can just magically with their own willful volition change the way their brain works. This would simply go against all of what is well known about how brains develop and work. What we think of as "change" is really neuroplasticity at work, which means changing literally billions of synaptic connections, the axon wiring between brain regions (the white matter referred to above, otherwise known as our "connectome") and countless other aspects of our brain functioning.

No, no, that does not happen quickly or easily in anyone.

So what to do? How to "tame" these empathy "polar bears"?

Let's look at a few ideas and strategies.

First of all, I want to take another look at a line from the excerpt from the email sent to me that inspired the original post on empathy and pain - " ... there's no getting away from the overwhelming brokenness all around the world."

This, I must say, represents a sort of cognitive distortion, or what I like to call a "distorted reality" that many of us must address. It's a "cognitive bias" our minds can create the more we see injustices and wrongdoings around the world. If this is all we see - and our pain sears these into our memories and minds very strongly - then we begin to form a distorted view of the world that makes it seem all unjust and "broken".

And while there is no question these things exist, it is not a correct or balanced view of the world to see it as all "unjust and broken".

Since seeking better mental health without pharmacological help early in 2013 and as part of my Positive Difference Making Fundamentals, I saw that I had to change my "data input" - everything I take in through various media. I made great efforts to balance negative news with more positive and beautiful aspects of the world around us to give my mind a more balanced - and truthful - view of the world around me.

As well, I quite frankly stopped following a great deal of news in general.

Does this make me a more callous and uncaring person? Will it make you a more callous and uncaring person?

Absolutely not.

I'd also like to remind you of something I've been getting at in a number of posts - my mind, your mind, the human mind did not evolve to be able to handle everything that the modern world throws at it. Over tens of thousands of years, our brains evolved to care about and care for very small groups and/or clans, groups very closely tied to us and our own survival.

In no way, shape or form did your - or any - brain evolve or adapt the ability to handle a world of seven billion people and a communication system that brings news of that world to your fingertips twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week throughout the year. No freaking way. Anyone who tells you any different is greatly unclear of the capacity for human brain evolution and adaption.

So any way you look at it, you have to reduce the amount of news you take in, no ifs, ands or buts about it.

No, this does not make you a "bad person". Yes, I know many of us have been socially trained to feel that we need to be "aware" of everything around us and that to be unaware of the world's ills is to be "stupid" or make us a blind "sheeple".

It means instead that we are coming to terms with our very real and very human limitations in dealing with the pains and injustices of the world.

Let me get you to think of it a couple of different ways. One of these ways I discovered waaaaay back in my early twenties when I was pulling out of a long and dangerously deep depressive episode. I recognized then that a great deal of the overwhelm and meltdown I was experiencing was about things beyond my control.

Back then I thought "who is the most powerful person in the world?". I thought of the president of the United States. He (and  possibly one day she) can get on the phone and have direct and impactful contact with all kinds of other people of great power. Despite this great power, not even the president of the US can stop, for example, citizens of his own country from mowing each other down with automatic weapons.

It was then that I recognized that "if someone with that kind of power can't just change these things, what the hell am I going to do about it?"

This can be a rather unsettling, not to mention dis-empowering, feeling and yes, I know you hate this feeling.

So I'm going to tell you what I learned then: we - you, I, anyone of any capacity or power - can only work within our sphere of influence. That's how people work. If our sphere of influence is small, then so be it.

Throughout my life and as my circles of friends and spheres of influence changed over and over and as I cycled through periods of bipolar ups and downs, I've had to learn and relearn this lesson many, many times.

What this also means is that we must learn an ageless and universal fundamental truth - we must let go of what we cannot control.

Yes, Grasshopper - we must let go of what we cannot control. And I can one hundred percent guarantee you that the vast majority of the injustices and wrongdoings around the world are very, very much out of your control. Yes, I know ... that's very sobering. But it is a Truth. A truth that we cannot deny and must learn to accept.

This was an extremely hard lesson for me as the year 2013 wore on and as I delved deeply into the world of mental health, suicide and people becoming incapacitated by their conditions and suffering. I massively, massively took on that suffering. And as the manic energy that I had to start that year wore off and as fatigue took over and my capacities to do anything diminished to almost zero and I was melting down over that and my vanishing ability to help anyone, I realized that all I could do was write this blog and hope that I could help people in this way.

So I must suggest something similar - take on a small, doable project that you feel will help a group you feel needs help, and then focus - and limit - your energies mostly on that. Look for little victories. This is how all change in the world is enacted - small steps and little victories. Do this and your small steps and little victories will join larger streams of similar efforts to become a river of change (or a field of flowers, if you will). No, I am not blowing pseudo profound pop bullshit up your ass. This is really how it works.

None of this is easy, I can tell you. As I have discussed almost ad nauseum and at length all over this blog, no change is easy. Our brains did not get this way overnight nor are they going to change overnight. It takes time and regular and mindful effort.

Nor are we going to avoid being hammered by some especially bad news from somewhere in the world that rips at our empathies and pain. When this happens, I suggest stepping back from the world and allowing that pain to heal - for it must heal in a very literal sense; it's as real as any physical pain and wound.

Lastly and finally  I must raise the question of whether the painful empathy many of us experience is even "correct empathy", or the proper empathy to be experiencing.

Now what could I possibly mean by that?!

To understand that, we have to return to that previous piece on this subject and remind ourselves that homo sapiens evolved and share empathetic abilities with a good number of other animal species. And it is here that I must point out the uncomfortable fact that a good amount of what we experience as empathy is on the same level of, for example, a baboon. This is what's basically known as "mirror empathy". Hey, I've nothing against our close primate cousins and it's cool that we share these abilities with many other mammal (and certain bird) species but that doesn't say too much for having a higher, more evolved sense of empathy.

Mirror empathy, or the kind of empathy we share with many other species, is a rather base form of empathy, I'm afraid to say. This kind of empathy is what gives us that immediate impact of pain that hits us right in the gut.

But it is also the kind of "quick reaction" empathy that can be so easily manipulated and which is what makes up the dark side of empathy we're looking at here today.

Like many of our basic human abilities and instincts, just because we have it and it works in powerful ways in us, doesn't mean that this either "good" or "it" as far as the possibilities of a given ability go.

And so it is with empathy. Higher forms of human empathy have, or should have, more to do with what I touched on briefly at the beginning of the piece - the uniquely human theory of mind. This, remember, is what gives us the ability to look into and understand another person's mind.

And like any higher cognitive ability, it takes a lot of work to truly develop its upper limits and potential. For true empathetic feelings and understandings, it requires highly developed listening skills to truly hear points of view or values that differ greatly from our own. Mirror empathy only reflects our own views and values - members of "our tribe", in other words. While this kind of empathy remains important, of course, I'm afraid it will not do for a truly developed human higher form of empathy.

What we are talking about here is empathetic thinking rather than empathetic feeling. [To learn more on this concept and its power, please see this approximately ten minute long RSA Animate video]

No doubt that hurts to hear - it hit me hard when I first understood it - but there ya go. Learning about ourselves and limitations often hurts like that. And to fully learn and grasp something new, we often must first acknowledge and accept that what was is not all there is to a given aspect of our selves.

So to summarize, to tame our "empathy polar bears" we must:

- change how we take in news. Not only must we reduce the news we take in, we must learn to actively seek more positive and good news or stories of what's going on around the world.

- recognize and accept our limitations and act within them. By focusing on what we can do, we can stretch our limitations and abilities to enact change

- recognize that we must take care of ourselves and our own mental health. We are no good to anyone or any cause if we melt down so badly as to become incapacitated.

- realize and understand that it's okay not to take in every pain and injustice in the world. Nobody has the capacity to deal with all of that - nobody.

- in that vein, realize and understand that it's okay to build ego defenses to defend your ego. Yes, it is quite okay to a) have an ego and b) not to let yourself - your ego - get pummeled by everything going on in this big wide world. Having an ego doesn't mean we get a "big head" or anything like that; it means we build a balanced and healthy sense of self and personal boundaries.

- I also try to use my sessions of Mindfulness Meditation CBT as an opportunity to examine my feelings and actions generated by empathetic responses to the world around me. We can really get our knickers in knots over great numbers of things around the world and I use these sessions to work out those knots.

- and finally, think on the difference between "mirror empathy" or empathetic feeling and more highly developed forms of empathetic thinking. One of the easiest and most highly recommended ways of developing this - and a good body of evidence now supports this - is through reading fiction where to fully get into the various characters and their story arcs we must "get in their shoes" and see the world as they see it. This can also be practiced by viewing high quality movies. Being more aware of our listening skills and developing those is a must as well (yes, yes, I know, a lot of work but all the best personal growth work is).

We are not, after all, much good to any kind of true solution to world problems if we only react emotionally which most often leads to being confrontational and our actions easily manipulated by leaders of various kinds (and even in leaders we favour, this may not necessarily be good for solutions either). For truer solutions, we must work at using our unique human empathetic thinking abilities to hear and see other sides of views and values that are not our own and learning to better work together with and not against others.

(1) In the world of animal cognitive studies it has been becoming clearer that many animals have some level of theory of mind.

Flower in Darkness

The darkness descends

Envelopes you

Takes you

You resist it not and sink into it

Down and down

Until there feels to be only one escape

From the blackness

That has sucked out your light, your life

But you are not the darkness

You are the beauty, don't you see?

You see the world's pain

You feel the world's pain

You see the unfairness,

The unjust

The evil

The darkness is the pain of the world

But you are not the pain

You are the beauty the world needs

You are the flower
A pained world needs

Do not take yourself

Nor let yourself stay in darkness

Where the world cannot see your beauty

Don't you see?

The world needs flowers like you

You are not alone

Only in the darkness are you alone

But there are others like you

Together there could be a field of flowers

To allow yourself to succumb to the darkness

Would allow the world to become dark

And more people would be in the dark

It is hard, I know

But with beauty can come courage

Bring your flower into the light
Let us water and nourish it

Let it blossom

Let your courage and beauty bloom

You are a flower for a reason

Delicate, yes

But within your delicate petals

Is a beauty and courage

That the world needs

Do not succumb to the dark

And make the world a darker place

For your absence 

Positive Difference Making Fundamentals in Focus - Staying in the Now

Staying in the Now

I again must apologize, dear readers, for this post has too long been delayed.

I talk about all my Positive Difference Making Fundamentals yet have not delivered the most important factor and daily habit to truly making them all work and for you to get on the path to better mental health, better emotional stability and to work past and even end your suffering. Today's concept - staying in the now and living one day at a time - is the glue that holds it all together and makes it work. It's the glue that will hold you all together and make you work.

So again, I apologize. In my defense, however, I'll say that sometimes it takes the passage of time practicing all these things to realize which is the most important.

At any rate, better late than never.

We who suffer mental health difficulties ranging from anxiety to depression to major psychiatric disorders like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia will have to endure a lot of off the cuff "fluff advice". Actually, come to think of it, we'll have to endure a lot of completely useless "advice" from supposedly highly trained professionals. During the worst of my disorder between the spring of 2010 and the end of 2012, I often felt inundated with "advice", almost all of it unsolicited. None of it felt useful and as I was slowly (or at times quickly) losing my mind (not in the popular colloquial sense of that expression but in the real and severe sense), these barrages of seemingly simplistic folksy bits of "advice" not only didn't help at all, it only increased my frustration, aggravation and thus worsening mental states. The advice itself almost literally drove me insane.

Plus - plus! - I saw over the course of my roughly three and a half years at the hands of the mental health system no fewer than twenty psychiatrists and somewhere between half a dozen to ten psychologists. Every now and again the message was right, but the delivery was ... ham handed, shall we say. There are reasons for this disconnect between professionals and we peeps, but I'll get to that another day. Suffice for now to say that much of what we're told and how we're told it ends up being not particularly useful.

Two bits of advice that drove me crazy - and I'll get to why below - were being told to "stay in the now" and to "live one day at a time".

However, in the dawn of 2013 when I started my now (sort of) famous quest for "why?" in understanding psychiatric disorders and what to do about them outside of the dominant paradigm of the pharmacological treatment pushed by psychiatry and the mental health care system and I read anything and everything I could, I came across the concept of "staying in the now" again and again and again. One of the best books I ran across early in that mad (sort of literally) dash to learn everything I could was How to Stop Worring and Start Living by Dale Carnegie, a truly timeless book of practical approaches to dealing with stressful worry.

That book impacted me in a number of powerful ways. The interviews and real world research he did to compile all the stories and techniques that went into that book covered a span from the late 1800's up to the depression and World War II years. And as I read story after story of people being crippled and broken by anxiety and worry and depression to the point of destroyed physical health and to the brink of suicide, it struck me that people have always suffered for similar reasons. This is probably true of every generation but we modern generations - roughly the baby boomers through today's millennials - always somehow think we're the first ones in history to experience something like depression and anxiety. We could certainly argue that there are more stressors around today and that we're exposed to more of the world's ills (and today is nothing compared to many points of the past) and that this is making mental illnesses more common and widespread, but the core reasons and the experience of it are the same as always.

In any case, reading through all the stories or case studies, the striking familiarity of them to today's cases and the language used to describe them hit me between the eyes. This made the methods described within the book to overcome acute or chronic internal crises all the more interesting and powerful to me.

Two chapters stood out most to me and were the greatest source of methods for learning to live more free from stress and anxiety and how to get through the periods of being hammered by suicidal darkness. The one I'll get to another time and the other forms the basis for today's post - learning to live one day at a time, stay within one day at a time and within the moment.

Carnegie laid out the basic principles of living within the present day in multiple ways from the scriptures of various religious books to the teachings of ancient texts to how modern (at the time of the book's writing in the 1940's) CEOs managed their enormous workloads and pressures; all stressed the importance of staying within the present day. Throughout ancient history through to more recent times, it seems, people have learned that the best way to deal with life's stresses and sources of anxiety was to stay within the present day and present day only.

As well, Carnegie gave numerous examples of how people on the verge of suicide or were literally becoming sick with stress and anxiety turned their lives around in big and productive ways by simply learning to stay within the present day.

So that's a very powerful historical perspective.

Not to mention that the concepts of one day at a time and staying in the now are fundamental tenets of Eastern thought and mind philosophies that have been successfully taught and practiced for 2,500 years.

This is a very brief summary of everything I looked into regarding "living one day at a time" but I can tell you that the real world historical evidence for it being necessary to a healthier mind was pretty much irrefutable.

However, as most of us who struggle with moderate to severe mood or psychiatric disorders will know, "staying in the now" or "living one day at a time" ranks very high in the easier said than done department; it's very easy to say (and give out as advice), quite different in actual daily practice.

As with everything we are told to do for healthier minds but which we find so hard to practice, I wanted to know why it was so difficult for us to do.

Why it's so hard

Staying in the now or the present day and keeping our minds within these "compartments" (as Carnegie referred to them) is not easy. There are reasons most people have such difficulty with it and why we mental health peeps especially struggle with it so let's have a look at some of them.

One reason is memories and the power of them. Much of what we experience as memories is of past events and of our past lives (known as "episodic memories"). These kinds of memories, of course, are a massive part of Who We Are. As well, it is now well understood that painful memories will become more "seared in" to our memory banks and thus will haunt or plague us more (PTSD is at the high end of this scale). One thing that differentiates us mentally suffering peeps is that we form memories more powerfully than most people. As our lives become more painfully difficult, circuits and regions involved in memory formation create more negative memories. This can build up over a lifetime or it can take place during a several year stretch of particularly difficult mental health struggles during which a great deal of very powerful and painful memories can almost literally burn themselves into our minds making them seemingly inescapable.

Additionally, there are some powerful brain regions involved in what is known as ruminating thoughts. These are thoughts in which we examine our distress and pain and their causes and consequences, largely by accessing the aforementioned memory "data". It is not necessarily wrong to ruminate or reflect on what we'll term simply as "things that went wrong", it is an important and perfectly natural part of how we learn from past mistakes. This brain and mental circuitry is supposed to be there and utilized. As with all our neuronal hardware, it evolved for a reason. It is in these specialized networks where we experience and process such feelings as guilt, remorse and "right and wrong" and so on. People in whom these regions and circuitry are not as active become disordered in a different and perhaps less socially correct way. Inactivity in these regions is thought to be a part of what goes on in the brain of a psychopath - this absence of ruminating over guilt, mistakes, right and wrong, etc. We wouldn't want to be like that, would we!

However, in the "disordered thinking" we see in unipolar depression, the depressive phases of bipolar, and anxiety disorders, the regions and networks involved in ruminating thinking become far too stimulated and activated becoming "locked on" thus "trapping" us in nearly endless loops of ruminating and guilt and grief filled thinking which almost invariably ends up in very negative thoughts and mindsets and beating ourselves up. These endless thoughts - and look at the ginormous amounts of "past memory data" we could dig up and go over - become a massive weight we drag around that makes it nigh on impossible to move forward in life. This then becomes an enormous source for further anxiety, stress and dark depressive episodes.

Because the brain regions involved in creating ruminating and guilt and grief filled thoughts are a very powerful and important set of brain regions, however, it does not relinquish its "role" in your thought processes and mental states easily (and for good reasons, as we saw above). More in a moment.

On the opposite side of the coin is our deeply and uniquely human "predictive functions". A huge part of what makes humans able to do many of the things we do which other animals cannot is being able to "plan for the future". What enables us to do this are brain regions that can take all kinds of present and past information and extrapolate that into the future, creating a "model" from which to work and plan on. As with any networked brain function, though, it can work for us or against us. When we are getting trapped in worry and melting down with anxiety, a good deal of that is over the future and what we "see" there.

Again, this is a very powerful mental process of networked brain regions that, like all our brain functions, is to a great extent part of our "zombie programs"; brain functions that run for the most part autonomously below our conscious control. Our self-reflection and "ruminating on mistakes and the past" regions are the same - programs that more or less will "run" whether we want them to or not.

When you look at and study depression and anxiety at their roots, much of what both drives and creates it is this constant loop of ruminating about negative past events and projecting this forward into a negative future.

This is partially how the stress response system and related networks are designed to work. This system "records" a bad event, kicks in the brain areas involved in examining these bad events (ostensibly to learn from them), then notifies the "predictive functions" that are supposed to help us prevent them from happening again. But with chronic stress and anxiety this system gets "locked" into this maladaptive loop creating a tragic cycle that traps us into negative rumination and "forecasting" scarily dark futures.

But the more we dwell in negative pasts and forecast negative futures, this - guess what?! - creates more anxiety, which further stimulates the stress response system which further stimulates the "examine past events" regions which further stimulates and floods the "forecasting" equipment with dark negativity and ... well, as you've no doubt noticed, that's a hell of a shitty loop to be caught in.

Tied to both of the ruminating and future forecasting regions are various brain networks involved in the human capacity for imagination which, by its very nature, works well outside the laws of "objective reality". These networks that create the power of imagination can become terribly tied up with both our past and future mental images, also creating frightening mental states which again triggers our stress response system which again triggers "examine mistake" and "project future" regions and ... round and round we go, where we stop, nobody knows. You know the drill all too well.


Why Not Staying in the Present Day Creates So Much Mental Distress and Anxiety


To begin to understand this, let's go back to our "conscious awareness plate".

For new readers, or to remind regular readers, we'll just briefly revisit what consciousness is. "Consciousness" is that moving picture show you see when you are awake. It represents what you are thinking and imagining, it is what the brain is experiencing and then puts in your "mind". We can also think of it as "conscious awareness" - what are aware of and what our brain is telling us needs attention and to work on at any one time.

I have likened conscious awareness and this "work space" to the screens and speakers of our computers. What is on the screen and playing through the speakers is what we deal with on our computer at any one time out of all the programming and tools our computers are capable of and so it is with our mind.

This concept of conscious awareness and what we're "working on" at any one time - this brain work space - is not unlike the RAM memory in our computer. In brain parlance these are known as working memory and short term memory. while related, they are somewhat different. Both will be involved with what we are consciously working on at any one time. If we attempt to run too many programs on our computer at once, it will freeze or crash. And so it is with our working minds. It is literally not possible for your brain, your consciousness, your mental "work space", to hold so much from our past plus so much from all our future days PLUS the present all at once and actually deal properly with any of it.

There is a complicated network of regions involved with what we are consciously experiencing or working on at any one time and like all brain regions and networks, their capacity to handle and run "data" is limited. Greatly involved is our "short term" or "working" memory. This is very limited. It is not just your brain that is limited in this regard, all brains are. They can be trained to handle more (which is what I'm cleverly trying to get you to do), but the capacity of all the regions and networks involved is greatly limited by very hard "laws" of elementary brain functioning physics and biology. Not to mention, how every cell in your brain and body creates energy (a series that examines energy depletion in bipolar disorder but the fundamentals of which apply to all brain functioning) and the general "energy economy" of the brain is also of vital importance to understand. Think of your brain having limited watts on which to run and filling our "working plate" with too many functions of past, present and future very quickly drains the energy reserves down to very low - dangerously low for many of us. When our brain energy reserves run too low is when we are most likely to experience overwhelm and meltdown.

Thus, if we flood this "work space" of our minds with too much past, future and present "data", it will freeze, melt down and you will experience overwhelm and stress and anxiety (thus further stimulating this horrendous loop).

So it's not just that your brain cannot function under these conditions, no brain can - not even the healthiest of brains.

Another way to look at this mental state overload is as a form of multitasking. Numerous, numerous studies have demonstrated how poor we are at multitasking (and the better we "think" we are at it, the poorer we'll actually perform at it). So think of trying to juggle so much from the past along with so much from the future then piling that on top of the present as a particularly bad form of attempted and tragically performed multitasking - your brain simply can't do it, nor can any brain.

So learning to stay in the present moment and only deal with the present day is absolutely vital for clearing up space in your conscious "working plate" so that you can work on what is before you properly.

To further understand how all this works and why we get so easily trapped into these loops and why it's hard to break them, we need to quickly revisit something we've learned before - the principles of neuroplasticity - and something that will undoubtedly be new to many of my readers, and a rather recent way of how neuroscientists examine brain functions, the concept of default mode networks. These are highly complex interacting networks and regions that, to put it very briefly for today, are what your brain "defaults" to when it has "nothing better to do". In other words, in a more or less resting state, these networks and what they do are what our brains will fall back on when the brain appears to be "at rest", IE; what it will most naturally tend towards when not actively engaged in a relatively focused task.

There are many, many different and individualized kinds of default mode networks among us, and no two are exactly alike. I posit that in many of us mentally suffering peeps, one of our most pernicious resting state or default mode networks is this agonizing loop of suffering we just briefly looked at.

These networks and loops become part of our resting state default modes because of the "dark side of neuroplasticity" - the more a given set of regions and networks, etc is activated, the more "wired in" and dominant it becomes (this is a very well known and studied aspect of neuroplasticity).

I also posit that we each have more than one or several default mode networks; this negative past ruminating and negative future projecting and resultant meltdown one being but one of them - one that we'd like to rid ourselves of!

So to summarize, is it hard to stay "in the now" and live "one day at a time" and stay within the day and not get trapped in the past and not project negative futures?

Absolutely it is.

However, in all my research and study reviewing vast bodies of all manner of studies, I found no other way to retrain our brains to avoid these crippling cycles (and they are crippling) than to build the habit of living within the present day.

How to start training your mind to stay in the present day or moment

We'll try to keep this very simple for now.

What I'd love is for you to tie this into mindfulness meditation cognitive behaviour therapy. What I do is put on some zen meditation music (via YouTube), using that to slowly wake up my mind first thing in the morning. I do perhaps fifteen minutes of the mindfulness CBT to get my mind cleared of troubling thoughts or situations and then I try to set up my day. Based on what I've been working on in the CTB, I remind myself of my core values and goals based on them and then I do the best I can to plan my day around what I can do to move those forward.

Foremost, I remind myself to stick to what I can do that day and that day only. This will not, as we saw above, be easy for you in the beginning thus has to be a daily reminder.

The simple meditation practices I have utilized and talked about in the past help train my mind to stay on my present task and day (which in my present life is almost always reading and researching or holding discussions related to that).

You - or I or anyone - are defined by your daily actions, so ask yourself each morning - what am I going to do today to make a difference on this day? These needn't be major things. Just small steps and gestures can often do. And then do your best to follow through on what you can do to move these things forward that day.

There are times I think about the past and future, but I have now carefully trained myself to think only of "information" relevant to my present task or tasks. I have learned to better let go of the emotional attachments of past and future information.

This, however, is when times are "good" and things are going well and life (and I) is relatively stable.

As you know, we cannot avoid difficulties in life and days of bad mental states. These are not going to stop happening, I'm afraid. Something will happen - a trigger - and we'll get hammered by pain and perhaps experience times of panic. Or some sort of destabilizing event or events will happen in our lives that greatly stress us out and start the whole loop again. These are the days when our minds will most be tempted to get into that negative rumination about the past and imagining dark, hopeless futures. These are the days we will really be tested.

This though, my friends, is when the importance of making these healthy brain practices part of our daily routines really comes to the fore.

If we practice staying in the present day enough, if we consistently train our minds in these ways, it is during the hard times that our brains will have a better chance at "defaulting" to this new mental habit rather than the bad mental habits of the past. We may have to more consciously work on it, though. In hard times, we just have to focus on getting through the hour, then the morning, then the afternoon and then the rest of the day. Don't even allow yourself to think about the whole day!

This is the key to any seemingly impossible monumental task, my friends - breaking it down into the smallest doable bites possible and doing the best we can to only handle them one at a time (and I know how challenging this can be to those who are juggling home life and a career and so on).

And this is where another daily habit can prove invaluable - no matter the task, no matter the difficulties, no matter the pain, if it is important to my long term values and goals, I train myself to get the best possible result I can out of whatever it is. I have trained myself not to let myself plunge into the sinkhole of "fuck it" and throwing in the towel on myself. This has been and often remains very, very, very challenging but I have for the most part instilled this "refuse to lose" mindset. It is true that some days we have to say "fuck it", but instead of thinking of it as completely throwing in the towel, it is merely letting go of it for that day.

And it is through approaching each day like this that we learn to separate our present from our past, however painful or difficult it was. As we do this day by day, we can begin to leave our painful pasts behind, to lessen their grip on us. This is how we begin to retrain our brain networks to break the cycles we looked at above.

This is also how we train our brain to let go of it's predilection for "forecasting" the "future". This one of the human mind's worst habits and for mental health suffering peeps one of the greater sources of overwhelm and anxiety meltdowns.

Rather than getting stuck in the impossible (literally impossible) mind trap of "predicting" the future, practising staying within the day and doing the best we can with each day is how we build our future. Build each day as well as we can and the future will take care of itself. This is how we learn not to create self fulfilling prophesies for negative futures based on past events and not to erroneously believe we can "predict" the future.

This practice of staying in the now and within the day is how we can learn to bust many mental health crushing cognitive distortions and other cognitive bias thinking that sabotages our goals and truer needs.

I will admit that there are days I realize I just don't "have it" that day, and do what I can to defer the most difficult tasks to a time I have more energy or am more able. When we take each day on its own, when we get hammered by very difficult pain, we can remind ourselves that it's only "that day" and learn better to get through it and not let it become more major than it need to be.

Or I may remind myself to be compassionate with myself, to not expect to be my best all the time and to just see how I can get the most out of that day with what I have that day. I try to stay focused on getting the best out of whatever task I'm doing or situation I'm in and accept that that's the best I can do on that day.

At the end of the day, I sort of do a repeat of my morning mindfulness CBT, using it to evaluate how things went in a non-judgmental way.

Then - critically important - I let that day go. I can go to sleep knowing I did the best that I could in handling that day and that day only. I create a sort of "reset" button for my mind to "clear the cache" of that day and assure myself that I'll get through the next day in the same manner as well. This is how we prevent a bad day from becoming a massive long bad period that traps us back into the negative past/future loops we looked at.

Yes, yes, I know what you may thinking - the present is what hurts and sucks so bad and that's the problem.

This is very difficult indeed and there were many times that the last place I wanted to be was in the present! This is when that fluff "just stay in the present" advice used to drive me nuts. "The present is the problem", I wanted to scream!

But in the end, I knew the only way to work past that was one day at a time and this started to pay off after a while. Each day I would try to commit myself to making that day the best I could make it, to create the most positive memories and outcomes I could and so on. If it was a terrible day and I managed to survive it okay, I would congratulate myself with a little fist pump and a "yes!".

And if we do this bit by bit, day by day, we can start to create a better and better "present" that isn't so hard to be in. Bit by bit we can create a present that we want to be in.

And of course every day I do as many of my Positive Difference Making Fundamentals as I can. I compiled a long list so that no matter how bad things were going, I could practice something that would have a positive effect on my mind. Many of those are designed for long term effects so I knew that even if it didn't have an immediate effect, I was doing my brain good for the long term.

And this is how all major change happens, folks - staying focused on little steps practiced daily. We go step by step through the day, then day by day through the week, focusing on creating the best outcomes we can for that day and that day only and one day we can look back and see that we're not in as bad a place as we were. Then another day we can look and see we have our lives moving forward more positively and with more hope and belief.

But we must be very, very cautious of "great days". These can be like hidden traps. We can get too up and feel like we can rush ahead and this can set us up for failure or a return to bad habits. So even on our best days, we must try as best we can to stay within ourselves for that day and not take on too much. Even the best days are only that day and that day only. The next day is a different day.

And this, folks, is how I deal with living with infamously hard to treat Bipolar Type I in men fifty and over (the well documented worst category of the bipolar spectrum) - without medications or drugs of any kind. This is how I keep my mental states relatively stable without medications or drugs. This is how I don't plunge into weeks and months of dark hopeless depression and how I prevent myself from kiting up into dangerous episodes of mania. This is how I worked - and work - my way past crippling anxiety and worry. This is how I get through the challenges of living with a condition the long term physical damage of which has left me disabled and not able to earn a living in normal ways. This is how I work my way past horrendous tendencies to suicidal distress. This is how I survived the horrendous prospect of living outdoors through a Canadian winter with a very difficult health condition.

A review of any case where a person grew out of terrible lives, circumstances and conditions will reveal the same process.

So I need you to commit to the same - living one day at a time and focusing on doing only what you can in that day only. Commit each morning to making that day and that day only the best you can that day. Then each day at the end, let that day go - think of it as emptying your "cache" - and reminding yourself that you'll get through the next day as well as you can too, no matter what.

Do this and in time I can promise you that you'll tame some pretty major polar bears. You'll sleep better, live with less stress and anxiety and work your way to a more positive future. This is how you'll train your brain not to get caught in those loops of rumination about the past and imagining dark hopeless futures.

I can also promise you - from the bottom of my neuroscience heart - that your brain cannot properly function any other way. NO brain can. If there is only one habit that I write about and teach that you choose to master, make it this one. Give your brain just the present day to work on and see what a difference it makes after a month, then several months, then a year and so on. All kinds of mental and cognitive functions will improve when you're not "overloading your circuits" all the time.

As always, thank you for reading.

And as always, yes you can. Yes. You. Can.

More Positive Difference Making Fundamentals in Focus - Self-Compassion

I'm pretty humbled sometimes by the success of Taming the Polar Bears. I suppose it's because almost everyone has some sort of "bear" (AKA inner demons) to "tame". 

While the page views run into the tens of thousands, the "likes" and "plusses" into the thousands, I can have no real idea how many people really read my posts and get value from them (probably I've put no small number of people to sleep with the length of some of them) but I do get a fair amount of direct feedback and occasional emails or private messages. And such was the case this evening, from someone I know to be a regular reader. 

It went,

Dear Brad,

 Regarding the post on Spirituality and Compassion, a question:

Would you please add some examples on exactly how to

practice self-compassion? How to catch yourself being too

harsh on yourself and then replace the self destructive

thoughts with more compassionate ones??!

Thank you :))

Actually, it didn't start off with "dear Brad" but I thought it'd be fun to give it a "dear Abby" tone. Maybe that should be a regular thing. 

Anyway, this of course is a great question (two actually). 

I talk to and have talked to a lot of people about "all this". Plus, in various online forums and communities I belong to or have belonged to, I have followed the personal stories of probably at least a hundred people. And I can tell you that for the great majority of the people whose story I've come to know and are suffering mental health problems in some way, that self-hate, self destructive thoughts and beating oneself up inner dialogue is distressingly common. Turning these things around and learning to practice self-compassion and better inner dialogue can be tremendously difficult.

I think most people just become okay with self-destructive inner language and mindsets. There will be times when it feels things in life are going better and one is feeling better that it will go away or diminish. Then something will go wrong - one of many possible triggers - and it will come flooding back; the fury with oneself, the self-blame, guilt, remorse, intense feelings of stupidity and inadequacy hit like a hammer blow then all the familiar beating oneself up dialog sets in and they will beat themselves up in every way about their appearance, their intelligence, their abilities, about their very being and place in this world, you name it. And what this will almost invariably create is this powerful vacuum that sucks us down into this dangerously dark depressive place we are all too familiar with. 

The fury of this tires out after while, it slowly ebbs away and for a while we may feel "okay" again. One can actually feel "better" after getting this all out of their system. The inner voice is still negative and unrelenting, we feel dark and down but it's "okay", it's tolerable. It just becomes part of the furniture or a kind of background noise, the darkness a part of our "reality", something we sort of learn to accept. Some may sort of learn to tune the inner nagging out or try to ignore it. 

Until the next trigger and go around, of course. 

That's the normal pattern. 

For me it was somewhat different. 

I don't want to get into the details of my story again, but for me it was extremely simple; change - or die. I mean that very literally and seriously. I know many people have or experience "suicidal thoughts", but a bipolar mind - and especially a male bipolar mind - unleashes these with a terrifying fury and power, will and drive to do something about it that is quite different from the vast majority of the population (this is all quite well documented in regards to the difference between bipolar and unipolar "depression"). (1)

For a variety of reasons, I knew I could not allow this to happen. Yet it kept happening. And with a violent suddenness and fury that was ... terrifying, once it passed and I looked back on it. 

When I started studying the brain and the power of thoughts, beliefs and mental states and the neurobiology of them and how they change the very make up and "programming" of our very neurons and then how our thoughts could - in the very literal sense of the word - be toxic, I knew I had to change how my mind works. 

It was either die a long slow death or a quick one. 

So for me there was never any choice. It was change - or die. 

Not many people have that same motivation. 

The other side of the equation was in all the studying I did, I found that it was simply not possible or reasonable to blame myself for everything my mind did or what I had become and the things I had done to become so angry with myself. Brains do a lot of weird - and wrong - things for all kinds of reasons that lie below our conscious control. That's why I write at length about all that. That's how I learned to forgive myself (though NOT forsake responsibility) and be more compassionate towards myself. 

But that's not what the reader asked - to hear more of my story or for more blah-blah-blah science explanations. 

So let's try a different angle. 

In talking to people who have a lot of self-destructive thoughts, I can't help but notice that many of them are full of anger, hate and blame in general. Things are wrong in this world and their lives and somebody has to be to blame for this. People, I've found, can be astonishingly vicious towards others. 

As anyone who's been paying attention can attest, this is all too common. What I've found with those suffering mental health problems, however, is how this can turn inwards. When this pattern of blame and anger turns in towards oneself is where we see what we looked at above. 

Violent emotions will be the root of any vicious and hurtful language. This I also learned (in my blah-blah-blah science way). I also learned this in the (pretty excellent) group therapy sessions I attended in the winter of 2014. 

So I knew I had to work on my emotions not only about what went wrong in my life but as well about the world around us before I could work more on self-compassion or else the violent inner outbursts would never truly go away. 

It has to start there then, I'm afraid to say. We can train ourselves to speak to ourselves in a kinder language, and that is essential too of course, but without taming our "emotional polar bears" in general, we will always be prone to ambush from our own very thoughts. 

Most of my work on my emotions I did with the daily sessions I created for myself for Mindfulness Meditation CBT, in which I learned to question my emotions. 

"Is this <insert source of the anger> really worth getting this angry about? What difference does getting angry and upset about this make?" And many questions along these lines. And if I came up with "reasons" - which were really just rationalizations - I questioned those too. 

And when I questioned myself enough and taught myself not to accept lame reasons or rationalizations for the basis of my negative emotions, I realized there wasn't a single good reason for getting angry or that it was ridiculous to think that getting angry would change any of the things in the world, or within my world, that were really outside of my control. I realized - and this is a universal truth that can be found in millenia old philosophies - that all I could really control was my own mind and my reactions to life around me and within me. 

Then I would remind myself of another very real core truth - that feelings of anger and bitter hate were literally killing me from the inside. And then this saying (2) would sear into my consciousness - 

Because it really is like that. Trust me. This can be explained in excruciating neuroscientific and body biology detail and it ain't pretty. As it just so happens, when brushing this piece up recently I came across this brief introduction and handy infographic that outlines this. This is exactly what I mean when I say that our reactions plus the thoughts and language we use for them are literally toxic and making us sick.

In the mindfulness CBT sessions, we also examine and work on our core values. So the question you have to ask yourself is this: "Is this really how I want to be? Is this <insert negative emotional state and its source> really what I want as a core value for myself?"

And when we really put it to ourselves like that, it sounds ridiculous. Nobody wants an angry, bitter, hateful person with venomous language to be our core self, for that to be part of our core values. I'd also bet dimes to doughnuts that there will be times when people have flashes of recognition about this and beat themselves up about this too.

So what would we like to be in place of that?

Personally, I think having as a core value being a kinder, more compassionate and gentler person in general would be awesome.

But I know what you're thinking - that's "wimpy". 

And that, my friends - and pardon the language - is bullshit. Complete and utter hogwash. Nonsense. 

For what I have also discovered is that emotional responses filled with hate and anger and bitterness are what's actually wimpy. These are the hallmarks of weak people. 

True strength lies in kindness and compassion - towards others, and our selves. 

So looking at becoming stronger through compassion and gentleness as becoming part of our core values begins to sound pretty awesome. We begin to look at it as growing into becoming a stronger person. We can look at it as building our "superpowers". For it is always better to build towards something than to just trying to leave something behind. 

So first we begin by learning the process of chosing different emotional responses. We begin that by questioning the basis for our emotions and especially anger and bitter blaming of others and our selves. For in fact, blame changes nothing and only hurts one person and one person only - you. 

Or it hurts those closest to us and that comes back to hurt us as well. 

Once we begin and establish a beachhead by questioning and then building better emotional responses, we can then begin to retrain our inner thoughts and dialogues. 

Now about those emotional responses. It is not reasonable or realistic - or even desirable - to expect us not to at times go through powerful negative emotions emotional experiences. Negative emotions like anger are a natural part of us, a natural reaction to what we feel is unjust (speaking very generally). We're not going to stop feeling it or having it triggered and while learning to stop beating ourselves up and learning better internal language are critical, what we also need to learn is how to better channel negative emotions when we do feel them. This is a whole different conversation for a different post but another strategy is learning ways to channel powerful emotions - AKA our "passions" - into something more positive and constructive. People sometimes ask me how I can take on such a big project as everything that goes into this blog and put so much into it. That's the answer - I took all the powerful feelings I had about all the wrongs and injustice I found in the world of mental illness plus the enormous empathetic pain I felt for everyone and I channeled it (and continue to) into all the research, writing and work I do.

I don't recommend taking on a project this big (though nor do I discourage it) but you too can find positive constructive ways to channel your passions and sense of injustice.  

These things like any habit change, we start with a larger goal - a want, in this case becoming an awesome kinder, gentler more compassionate strong superpower person and finding ways to channel our energies. Then each time we catch ourselves with beating ourselves up language we practice "won't" - stopping it. Then we replace with a better "will" choice. (I have a more detailed post for retraining our "inner critic" coming soon, I hope) 

We learn to do that with others, then ourselves - or ourselves, then others. It all has to work together.

Another trick I taught myself for cutting off negative thoughts and dialogue at their roots was that I set up all kinds of "police - do not cross" tape in my mind. I just took all kinds of really shitty stuff that was sure to bring feelings of pain, remorse, guilt, shame, humiliation and so on and put it all behind those "do not cross" barriers. I trained myself every time that shitty stuff came up in my mind to say to myself - "do not go there", and I literally visualized it behind that police tape. I put all the crap in territories of my mind that were strictly "off-limits". This really helps in preventing oneself from dredging up painful shitty stuff from the past. (I would later find this to be quite a common strategy)

I also worked hard daily to create things to feel good about. I tried daily to do positive, productive things and tell myself - "atta boy!". Seriously. This is how it works. This is how we slowly retrain our minds and thoughts and dialogue. 

It's hard to train our minds to think and talk to ourselves differently without "mentors" or examples. You have to seek what gentler language sounds like. You have to seek and read and hear and soak up examples. This also probably means cutting out half the crap you read and listen to (something I am getting to in more detail in a coming Positive Difference Making Fundamentals post on changing "data input"). 

It helps to practice daily - that's what I created my Brain Training Exercises for. 

The road to learning true self-compassion and changing our inner dialogue and thoughts is not perfect nor will you be perfect. It's a daily thing. We just try each day to be a little better at it. Some days will not go well. When you've had a bad day - and these invariably will be when we're tired and worn down and our "willpower" to resist natural urges depleted - we just let that go and try get a good night's sleep and try again the next day. Rinse, repeat. 

And slowly it will change.

So to start, ask yourself - look ahead a year, two years, three years, five years. Do you really want to still be like this then? Think and imagine hard on that. I know you all have very vivid imaginations for things like this. If you do this right, it should hurt. Really hurt. 

Good. Now imagine that pain again and again year after year and waking up five years from now and being even more bitter and angry and full of self hatred - and very likely more physically ill. 

Then understand that the only alternative to that is to be a kinder, gentler, more compassionate - and truly strong - person. 

Can you do it? Goddamn right you can. 

But as with thoughts and inner dialogue, we need examples and mentors. So find some. What does compassion look like? Sound like? Model that. 

The reader asked what I did - that's what I do. 

Then - then! - even more powerful - be a mentor and model for others. That, my friend, is when this will really begin to take root.

That's how you tame the polar bears of destructive self language and learn self-compassion.  

(1) My entire understanding of the mental states I went through and continue to deal with has changed radically since being diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encethalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that arises out of a history of early to mid life concussions. Many of the symptoms mirror those which could be found in bipolar. I'm still sorting through it all, as I literally have to "rewrite" the book of the mind phenomenon I experienced and suffered through for the past decade plus. 

(2) though popularly attributed to Buddha, this is actually not so - it holds up, nonetheless