Therapeutic Thinking Tools

Allow me to introduce you to Lyrical Work, as an aspect of psychotherapy. I understand it by analogy to dreamwork, which is the therapeutic practice of narrating and interpreting dreams to help clients develop personal insight and self-knowledge. Similarly, lyrical work refers to a practice of eliciting and illuminating the lyrical forms of speech that build clients’ sense of personal presence. Both affirm the presence of unique persons, who dream only what they can dream, and speak only what they can speak. This personal presence is a central focus of psychotherapy: How clients can be present to themselves and present to others as sources and recipients of love and understanding.

So how is it that we can come to feel, instead, like helpless sources and recipients of pain and scorn? I would argue that most of us suffer from a breakdown of personal presence, which manifests as lack of confidence, poor self-image/self-esteem, vulnerability and anxiousness, difficulty setting boundaries, overwhelm and dissociation, discouragement or despair, loneliness and isolation. Trauma is typically implicated in the breakdown of personal presence.

According to the poet Allen Grossman, lyrical poetry “has the function of making persons present to one another in that special sense in which they are acknowledgeable and therefore capable of love and mutual interest in one another’s safety.” Grossman’s poetics has taught me a lot about psychotherapy and how to be present for my clients in order to elicit their presence in turn. I chose the term “lyrical work” to refer to the therapeutic process of building personal presence through speech.

I believe lyrical work is a part of all successful therapy—perhaps most clearly in those moments when a client says something incredibly personal, and only then begins to think and remember—even if most therapists or theories of psychotherapy don’t account for it this way. Lyrical work does not require the writing and reading of poems, but those practices as parts of therapy (popularly known as poetry therapy) can certainly support lyrical work.

I’d like to make it clear that in my usage “lyrical” does not mean eloquent or charming but describes the kind of voice that breaks from oppressive conventions and makes known the presence of a unique person. We need this lyrical voice to speak from our pain, to express our desire, to tell the truth about ourselves, to get our needs met and to protect our values. With a lyrical voice, we can transform a fragile self into a strong person. Lyrical work, as I conceive it, is different from writing poetry for a public audience; it is the therapeutic work of making someone fully present to themselves as a person first.

This work is not easy. Work always implies toil, which is a kind of pain, but some kinds of work are so meaningful and worthwhile that pain is transformed through it. According to the philosopher Elaine Scarry, “The more [work] realizes and transforms itself in its object, the closer it is to the imagination, to art, to culture; the more it is unable to bring forth an object or, bringing it forth, is then cut off from its object, the more it approaches the condition of pain.” The object of lyrical work is presence. Those who have experienced the breakdown of presence are familiar with some of the worst conditions of suffering, meaninglessness, and despair. Lyrical work helps us approach the condition of persons who feel their place in the world and align with their values in action to participate in mutually supportive relationships.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7m5IAh1dmgrmZtn7xxP5ZT?si=w_cTcayeQyuUqCHqOZto4g&utm_source=copy-link

A pleasure to read Chatter by Ethan Kross. He happens to describe some strategies I've used with clients to quiet their inner critics/abusers and engage instead with wiser and more compassionate parts of themselves. If you're curious, check out Kross on Hidden Brain podcast: https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/you-2-0-befriending-your-inner-voice/

Following is a quotation from the introduction

"Our verbal stream plays an indispensable role in the creation of our selves. The brain constructs meaningful narratives through autobiographical reasoning. In other words, we use our minds to write the story of our lives, with us as the main character.

Doing so helps us mature, figure out our values and desires, and weather change and adversity by keeping us rooted in a continuous identity.

Language is integral to this process because it smooths the jagged and seemingly unconnected fragments of daily life into a cohesive through line. It helps us "storify" life. The words of the mind sculpt the past, and thus set up a narrative for us to follow into the future.

By flitting back and forth between different memories, our internal monologues weave a neural narrative of recollections. It sews the past into the seams of our brain's construction of our identity"

You 2.0: Befriending Your Inner Voice | Hidden Brain Media You know that negative voice that goes round and round in your head, keeping you up at night? When that negative inner voice gets switched on, it's hard to think about anything else. Psychologist Ethan Kross has a name for it: chatter. He says it's part of the human condition, but there are ways to....

Enduring hardship 3.1 In this episode, Tyler discusses the topic of enduring hardship that he writes about in the blog by the same name. Among the figures referenced are Odysseus, Jean Valjean, and Viktor Frankl. Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3742-fearless-first License: http...

"The management of appetites--when and how to cultivate them, when and how not--is part of Stoic practice....

The Stoics recommend in general: spending less energy on getting or avoiding things, and more on knowing why we want them (or don't) and how the way we think might affect this."

~Ward Farnsworth, The Practicing Stoic, A Philosophical User's Manual

I'm always on the lookout for books written for a popular audience that do a good job of explaining the value of philosophical thought for personal well-being. Highly recommended: The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook by Ward Farnsworth.

"A philosophy is often thought to mean a system of ideas that provides answers to fundamental questions. Socratic philosophy is different. It is a commitment to a process rather than to a result...

It feels good to know what you think. When people turn to philosophy they usually want more of that pleasure--if not more of what they already think, then something else to be sure about. Socrates won't cooperate, which seems frustrating. Where's HIS philosophy? But in his view our most urgent problem is that we're certain when we shouldn't be and think we know what we don't. That is why the philosophy of Socrates mostly isn't a set of beliefs. It's an activity. The Socratic method doesn't replace your current opinions with better ones. It changes your relationship to your opinions. It replaces the love of holding them with the love of testing them."

An identity is not something within a person that has been determined by their past; it is the story that a person tells in order to make sense of their past experiences in light of their values. These values set the course for our future lives, and that is why forming meaningful relationships often has more to do with where you want to go with the cherished people in your life than where you’re coming from.

Read more at https://therapeuticthinkingtools.com/thinking-tools/identity

Image: “The Two Fridas” by Frida Kahlo

For those who appreciate Viktor Frankl, Tyler discusses Frankl's three types of values.

Values 2.1 In this third episode of the Thinking Tools podcast, we drill down into the buzz word “values.” We hope you enjoy! Music credits: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3742-fearless-first License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Rite of Passage by Kevi...

My favorite ancient philosopher, Plato, wrote that, just as our eyes see physical objects in the light of the sun, our minds think (a kind of mental seeing) in the light of the Good.

With practice we can develop the insight and wisdom to recognize a path, even through extremely adverse circumstances, toward a better world for us all.

https://therapeuticthinkingtools.com/therapy

Therapeutic Thinking Tools Tyler Fyotek offers a unique form of psychotherapy that high lights diverse frameworks for making meaning from experiences and constructing more empowering self-narratives by drawing on ancient wisdom traditions and modern research in psychology, cognitive science, and the social sciences.

“Love enormously increases receptivity to the fullness of values: The gates to the whole universe of values are, as it were, thrown open,” according to Viktor Frankl.

Love is not an emotion per se, even though it can be associated with complex emotional dynamics. Unlike basic emotions including anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise, which help you interpret experiences in light of your values, love could be called a prime value that helps you identify other more specific values. To use an analogy, love is like having an excellent ear in music, detecting the off notes and savoring the sweet ones.

Activities become meaningful “life tasks” when they are carried out in the furtherance of values, and when emotions work in terms of values that are congruent with love, you will be capable of feeling true, deep joy. In other words, with love you can train yourself to make choices that resonate meaningfully with your values.

Excerpt adapted from: https://therapeuticthinkingtools.com/thinking-tools/meaning

Image: “Looking through the Tunnel” by Marge Healy

I’ve often heard from clients, “feeling sad doesn’t fix anything, so why bother?” Well following are reasons to heed your sadness:

“If you never feel sad, how would you know what joy or happiness feels like? You get to know much of your experience through contrast: You know what tall is only by also knowing what short is. You know what hard is only by also knowing what soft is. You know what bright is only by also knowing what dark is. Allowing yourself to feel sad also allows you to savor happiness and joy.

Kahlil Gibran in his book The Prophet says: ‘Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.’

Sadness points you to what’s important and valued in your life. Sadness brings with it an important message. If you are missing a friend, it is because that friend is important to you. If you feel sad when you’ve failed at something important to you, the sadness reminds you to think through the changes you need to make in your life. If you feel sad because you’ve hurt someone’s feelings, the sadness reminds you to take responsibility for your actions. Sometimes, sadness reminds you to take responsibility for your actions. Sometimes sadness just reminds you to slow down and take care of yourself.

Sadness adds value to your everyday functioning in more subtle and perhaps surprising ways as well. Joseph Forgas, professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has conducted extensive research on the purpose and value of sadness. He describes five specific ways in which sadness is important: improving memory, improving judgment, increasing motivation, improving interactions with others, and helping us be more fair and generous.”

~Khazan, Biofeedback and Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Painting by Kahlil Gibran

“One particularly helpful way of rethinking anxiety is seeing it as an overprotective caregiver. Imagine yourself as a child at a playground with your mom, dad, grandparent, or another caregiver. You are super excited to climb a cool rock wall or do some tricks on the monkey bars. But as soon as you are about to climb, your caregiver runs up to you saying: “No, no, don’t climb up there it’s too high, you’ll fall and hurt yourself.” At this point, you have several options for a response: you might listen to the caregiver and climb down disappointed, you might yell at the caregiver to leave you alone and not get in the way of having fun, or you might turn to your caregiver and say: “I’ve got it, I’ll be careful, thanks for the warning,” and then keep climbing.

Anxiety acts just like that overprotective caregiver. It sends danger signals whenever any kind of threat to your well-being presents itself, such as the discomfort of meeting a new person and the possibility of having your feelings hurt on a first date. An automatic reaction to the danger signal, interpreting that signal literally as a need to escape danger, may lead you to cancel or reschedule the date. Alternatively, getting mad at the anxiety and trying to make it go away will likely get you more anxious and stuck in the anxiety, still leading you to cancel the date.

A more helpful response to the danger signal is to recognize anxiety as well intentioned and protective. Seeing anxiety as a friend rather than the enemy will allow you to observe the situation mindfully, acknowledge the possibility of an awkward meeting and the vulnerability of hurt feelings, and then decide whether or not to keep the date based on what is in your best interest.”

~Khazan, Biofeedback and Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Image: ""Prevention"" by Boicu Marinela

Dr. Inna Khazan on the benefit of reframing a stressful situation as a challenge instead of a threat:

“When you interpret a stressful situation as one that you can handle, a situation where you have the resources to meet the demands of the situation, the situation becomes a challenge. If, on the other hand, you perceive your resources as inadequate in meeting the demands of the situation, meaning that you don’t feeling you can handle it, the situation becomes a threat

… [The] human body responds to challenges differently than it does to threats. When you interpret the situation as a challenge, your heart functions more efficiently and your coronary blood vessels dilate. When you interpret the situation as a threat, your heart has to work harder to pump the blood out to your body, and your coronary blood vessels constrict, which may raise blood pressure and make less blood and oxygen available to the rest of your body. Repeated activation of the threat response may lead to cardiovascular disease and faster brain aging in the long term.

So how do you turn a threat into a challenge? … It all has to do with how you interpret the presence and experience of stress–your interpretation of the experience is what makes the difference.”

Image: “No Limits, Just Edges” by Jackson Po***ck

Struggle with chronic anxious thoughts? It may sound simplistic, but have you checked to make sure you’re not over-breathing? Just as eating, sleeping, and exercise habits impact your sense of well-being in fundamental ways, so do breathing habits. Increased oxygen levels lead to increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system (associated with the fight or flight response). Consider the following behavioral signs and situations during which you are likely to be over-breathing (from Khazan, Biofeedback and Mindfulness in Everyday Life):

Tendency to breathe through your mouth
Yawning or sighing frequently
Running out of air while speaking
Aborting your exhalations
Rushing to inhale
Breathing fast and shallow or fast and deeply
Holding your breath
Need to take a deep breath after every few breaths

If you’re over-breathing, the simple solution is to practice breathing more slowly and focus on long thorough exhalations. If you want a hard reset, try this: count from 1 to 10 over and over again quickly without stopping to inhale until your voice becomes sub-audible. It may be harder than you think! If you’re a chronic over-breather, you might experience discomfort–almost a mild panic–and a reflexive need to inhale before you get there. If this is hard, that’s a sign you should practice!

Image: “Pranayama” by Day & Son

The importance of thinking about your emotions IN CONTEXT:

"We do not know the contour
of feelings: only what gives them shape from the outside."
~Rilke, Duino Elegies

Image: Mountain Stream at Champery by Ferdinand Hodler

What we end up accomplishing throughout our life is rarely what we intended or expected when we set out. We generally underestimate the hardship and suffering; instead we may wish we could accomplish things more easily. C.P. Cavafy helps us remember that we grow something inside of us when we overcome obstacles, and in the end, the inner growth may be more valuable than the original external goal. (Some context: Ithaka is the homeland of the famous ancient Greek hero Odysseus, and “much-suffering Odysseus” toiled 20 years before he could finally return)

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

If you find this poem by C.P. Cavafy speaks to you, check out the Therapeutic Thinking Tools blog post: ""Enduring Hardship"": https://therapeuticthinkingtools.com/thinking-tools/enduring-hardship

Image: “Storm-Tossed Frigate” by Thomas Chambers

Past pain and suffering are your belongings now. How are you going to USE what has happened to you?

Suffering can have meaning if it changes you for the better.
~Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

Image: Self Portrait in the Role of Jean Valjean by Paul Gaguin

Regret may be inevitable, so what do we do with it?

"It is a privilege of human beings to become guilty, and their responsibility to overcome guilt." ~Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

Image: "Return of the Prodigal Son" by by Ghislaine Howard

Even a “whole-hearted” action can lead to regret, but feeling regret and processing loss are all part of learning:

"Even when we set our whole mind on one act,
There’s a twinge already of what it has cost us.
For us, the counterpoint comes next."
~Rilke, Duino Elegies

Image: Hercules at the Crossroads by Girolamo di Benvenuto

Here is the second episode of the Thinking Tools podcast that I produced along with my friend and co-host, Michael Overholt. We push the “emotional hospitality” metaphor to its breaking point and discuss what to do when emotions look more like misbehaving guests, how to think about emotion regulation, and what to do with the trauma our body stores.

We hope you enjoy!
Tyler Fyotek

Emotional Hospitality 1.2 In this second episode of the Thinking Tools podcast, we push the “emotional hospitality” metaphor to its breaking point and discuss what to do when emotions look more like misbehaving guests, what emotion regulation is, and what to do with the trauma our body stores.

On human ephemerality. The term comes from the ancient Greek term ephemeroi, which could be translated “creatures of the day.” Sure, we live short lives, but the term also captures the notion that we have limited knowledge and foresight and our minds must respond to and be shaped by each day's events and incidents, one day at a time. Anything more than that is divine, and perhaps wisdom is divine!

How do people make confident decisions and commitments even though we are such limited ephemeral creatures?

“We can be at one and the same time half-sure and whole-hearted.”
~Gordon Allport

Image: Depiction of consulting the Pythia (Oracle)

Compare that last post regarding finding the "common denominator" among your values to this bite-sized fragment of Presocratic philosophy:

“The hidden harmony is better than the obvious one”
~Fragment 54, Heraclitus

Image: Heraclitus by Johannes Moreelse

I appreciate the geometrical language Frankl uses in this excerpt. Consider transcending an impasse by finding a higher (or more fundamental) dimension where a perceived conflict is resolved. Anyone else have thoughts?

The impression that two values collide with one another is a consequence of the fact that a whole dimension is disregarded. And what is this dimension? It is the hierarchical order of values.... [T]he experience of one's values includes the experience that it ranks higher than another. There is no place for value conflicts... It is my contention that it is easy to compare the ranks of values if a common denominator is perceived.
~Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

Responsibility has two intentional referents. It refers to a meaning for whose fulfillment we are responsible, and also to a being before whom we are responsible. Therefore the sound spirit of democracy is but one-sidedly conceived of if understood as freedom without responsibility.
~Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

Love this passage in Frankl about the goal of our efforts in life. Check it out.

Normally pleasure is never the goal of human strivings but rather is, and must remain, an effect, more specifically, the side effect of attaining a goal. Attaining the goal constitutes a reason for being happy.... To the class of those phenomena which cannot be pursued but rather must ensue also belongs health and conscience. If we strive for a good conscience we are no longer justified in having it. The very fact has made us into Pharisees. And if we make health our main concern we have fallen ill. We have become hypochondriacs.
~Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

Normally pleasure is never the goal of human strivings but rather is, and must remain, an effect, more specifically, the side effect of attaining a goal. Attaining the goal constitutes a reason for being happy.... To the class of those phenomena which cannot be pursued but rather must ensue also belongs health and conscience. If we strive for a good conscience we are no longer justified in having it. The very fact has made us into Pharisees. And if we make health our main concern we have fallen ill. We have become hypochondriacs.
~Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

Because of the self-transcendent quality of human existence, I would say, being human always means being directed and pointing to something other than itself.
~Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

To detach oneself from even the worst conditions is a uniquely human capacity. However, this unique capicity of man to detach himself from any situations he might have to face is manifested not only through heroism ... but also through humor.
~Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

I've really enjoyed the discussions that the Nussbaum quotations created over the last week or so. I'm switching it up a bit by sharing some excerpts from Viktor Frankl.
~Tyler from Therapeutic Thinking Tools

Human freedom is no freedom from conditions but rather freedom to take a stand on whatever conditions might confront us.
~Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

Emotions are, in effect, acknowledgments of neediness and lack of self-sufficiency.
~Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought