The Illusion of Control

I’ve been reflecting on the nature of control—what it means to have it, to feel like we are in control, and the ways we avoid the unsettling sense of being out of control. In many ways, this concept underpins much of why people seek out mental health counseling. When parts of our lives feel chaotic or unmanageable, we feel out of control and this discomfort often drives us to seek guidance in an effort to regain a sense of equilibrium and agency.

What strikes me, however, is that this control that we are seeking, when honestly interrogated, is revealed to be little more than an illusion. The aspects of my life that I consider "in control" are usually those where I feel at ease and balanced—and thus I don’t feel compelled to scrutinize the extent to which I am actually “in control” of these areas. It is this lack of interrogation that lulls me into the comforting illusion that I am in control. But if I consciously and thoroughly examine the dynamics at play, it becomes evident that what feels like control is simply a harmony of circumstances that doesn’t challenge my sense of stability.

Many of us approach counseling because we’re grappling with feelings of imbalance or unease and we frame this as a lack of control, which is a natural perspective to take - when we feel "in control," life feels manageable; we’re content, grounded, and calm. But when contentment and comfort are disrupted—whether by external events beyond our influence or internal reactions that spiral—we experience existential discomfort. This is when we reach out for support, seeking insight and strategies to reshape our responses and restore balance.

Much of modern therapeutic practice emphasizes altering thought patterns and behaviors in order to alleviate distress. Approaches like CBT, DBT, and ACT aim to help us identify and challenge unhelpful beliefs and thought processes, fostering a more balanced and logical response to life’s challenges. These methods are evidence-based and effective. They often lead to reduced anxiety, diminished negative self-talk, and an overall sense of improved well-being. From a practical standpoint, they provide invaluable tools for clients to feel more "in control."

Yet, at a deeper level, I see these techniques as tools for creating new mental habits that foster balance and reduce distress. These therapeutic approaches don’t grant us actual control over our thoughts or emotions; rather, they rewire the frameworks through which these thoughts and feelings arise. By practicing within these new patterns of thought and response, we cultivate a sense of ease, but the underlying reality remains: our thoughts and feelings often emerge unbidden, shaped by intricate interactions of biology, psychology, experience, etc.

This perspective might seem overly esoteric and unnecessary for direct client work. And indeed, I find it is not always relevant nor useful to bring up this philosophical nuance into therapeutic conversations when working with clients. What matters most is helping clients achieve the balance and contentment they seek, regardless of whether they frame it as "control," because for me, balance reflects a congruence between our internal processes and the external realities of our lives. My work with clients is about cultivating a state where their thoughts, emotions, and actions feel aligned within their moment-to-moment experience of living. When clients articulate a desire for "control," my focus shifts to helping them find this equilibrium within themselves. Once balance is restored, the question of control becomes secondary—it’s the sense of steadiness and contentment that truly matters.

Ultimately, while I view the experience of control as an illusion—a construct shaped by our responses to thoughts, feelings, and circumstances—this philosophical stance need not interfere with practical outcomes. The therapeutic work is about guiding clients toward a life that feels grounded and harmonious, helping them navigate challenges with resilience and grace. Whether through mindfulness, cognitive reframing, or other therapeutic tools, the aim is the same: to foster a deeper connection to the present moment and to themselves, so that peaceful contentment and balance can flourish.

Loving Kindness

So much of day-to-day living revolves around maintaining a degree of comfort and sustainability. We have bills to pay and rent or mortgages to cover to ensure we have a roof over our heads. We need to buy groceries, household supplies, clothing, shoes, and fuel for our vehicles or gear for our bikes. Part of growing up and maturing in this culture involves recognizing that unless we're extremely wealthy, comfort is a luxury that we only get to experience in a very sporadic and inconsistent way.

It's no wonder that many of us navigate life with an underlying buzz of anxiety and neurosis. I would even suggest that this anxiety is unavoidable, a consequence of our overactive minds constantly reminding us of what we lack or what dangers might be lurking around the corner—whether it’s the disappointment of a partner’s frown when we were expecting a smile or the close call of a truck that could have turned a few seconds earlier.

Simply existing and navigating the world inundates us with awareness of reasonably frightening things, leading to a low level of fear, anxiety, and insecurity that surfaces from time to time. It's no wonder we often feel agitated and uncomfortable. Life is hard. And if we have the misfortune of experiencing significant trauma or abuse, or if our brain chemistry predisposes us to mental health struggles, emotional dysregulation, or difficulty staying content or calm, it just makes life that much harder.

Navigating the world on a day-to-day basis can be exhausting. It can be challenging, if not impossible, to recognize our own emotional and spiritual needs, let alone take any actions to attend to them consciously and intentionally. I suspect that our psyches and mental processes, which constitute what we call our character and personality, are inherently geared toward fulfilling these emotional and spiritual needs. Even though many people might not use the same terminology to describe what I'm talking about, they are nonetheless driven by the same inherent need for emotional and spiritual fulfillment.

We often describe these needs in terms of values, morals, and ethics. From my perspective, we all operate from the desire to seek love and kindness, even if such terminology sounds off-putting or "hippie-dippie nonsense." This is evident because every culture and society's conception of a higher power contains some measure of love and compassion at its core, even if interpreted differently. The general sense that "God is love" persists across cultures. While someone might argue that some cultures or philosophies do not center on love and kindness, I believe those are exceptions rather than the rule. The very nature of humans as social animals who tend to form communities—villages, towns, cities, states, nations—suggests that, at our core, we seek love and kindness as a means of binding us together harmoniously.

Reconnecting with this sense of love and kindness within ourselves is our goal when we seek help from a counselor or therapist. This is the project we struggle to articulate when we reach out for help because things don't feel right—we're full of anxiety, dread, sadness, and insecurity. We feel unbalanced. At the core of this imbalance is a struggle to identify what love and kindness mean within ourselves and in our relationships with others, a topic I present as though it is two separate things when, in reality, it is one simple thing.

However a person frames it to themselves, whatever language they use for their own internal narrative, when I work with someone, my intent is to help them recognize the path within themselves that leads back to finding what love and kindness mean for them. This involves vulnerability, compassion, self-awareness, and, ultimately, present-moment contentment and consciousness.

Yes, writing about this concept can become immediately esoteric, but it need not be off-putting to the pragmatist. No matter how emotionally disconnected we may be from ourselves or how "hard" and "realistic" we consider ourselves, deep within us is a tiny little infant that was once utterly dependent on emotional and spiritual connection with a loving caretaker—a loving parent if we were lucky. In our work together, you may frame this idea differently, and that is wonderful. It all boils down to seeking love and kindness in some form or another. And often, the path towards balance, contentment, security, and mental well-being aligns with this journey towards love and kindness.

Those who work with me know I encourage taking that path—the path of love, kindness, and compassion. Truly, the only course towards contentment and living a fulfilling life comes from following the direction of love and kindness.

Codependency and Manipulation

Codependency and emotional manipulation can subtly infiltrate any relationship, even with the best of intentions. Most people would likely claim they want to avoid unhealthy codependent dynamics, especially those of us interested in self-improvement. Yet, the concept of codependency is often vague and difficult to define in a way that fits everyone's idea of healthy versus unhealthy emotional interactions.

When I think of codependency, I refer to a dynamic where two people in a relationship—be it romantic, familial, or friendly—are so emotionally entangled that one's emotional well-being heavily depends on the other's state of mind. For instance, in a codependent relationship, my happiness would be contingent on my partner's happiness, and if they aren't happy, I cannot be happy until they are.

It is of course important to recognize the difference between healthy empathy and unhealthy codependency. It's natural to feel upset when your partner is upset or to share in their joy. The transition from healthy empathy to unhealthy codependency is a gray area, where one’s emotional state becomes almost absent without the confirmation that their partner feels the same. This can lead to an adjustment of one's behavior and attitude to align with how they perceive their partner feels, slipping into a state where their own emotions become secondary to their partner’s.

As relationships deepen, we naturally develop an understanding of our partner's emotional needs and how they might respond to different situations. This awareness, while necessary for empathetic connections, can also open the door to codependency if not handled carefully. Often the problems arise when we begin to habitually shield our partner from having negative experiences. This develops into anxiety and an obsessive need to ensure their contentment, a dynamic which can escalate until what began as a thoughtful gesture of empathetic kindness becomes a source of anxiety and growing resentment.

For example, if we know our partner becomes frustrated by a messy kitchen, we may commit to cleaning up before they arrive home, as a means towards thoughtfully demonstrating an interest in their happiness and well being. But then, over time, if we are not mindfully paying attention to our own emotional condition, this thoughtful act can morph into a source of anxiety as we find ourselves stressing over the “need” to maintain this cleanliness. We begin to project that our partner will have a negative response if we are negligent on what we have adopted as our “duty” to maintain this clean kitchen. Before we know it, we begin to harbor resentment towards our partner for having such high expectations of perfection in their immediate surroundings. And what began as a thoughtful gesture has now become a source of anxiety and festering resentment for us as we have inadvertently built a story in our heads about what our partner’s expectations of us are.

At this point, what was once a genuine effort to foster our partner's well-being becomes a form of manipulation. We try to predict and thus pre-manage their emotional responses in an effort to avoid our own discomfort at what we assume will be their negative emotional response. In doing so, we stop allowing our partner to experience their own organic, emotional reaction to a given situation – we have, unintentionally, decided for our partner how they will react and then take measures to avoid this reaction. We become committed to crafting an emotional environment around them that serves to propagate what we assume they want, often rationalizing this to ourselves as being something they “need,” generating an environment that reinforces this assumption. Thus, we begin to have a relationship not with the person as they are, but with a version of them that we’ve constructed in our minds.

This kind of unhealthy codependency and the attendant subtle manipulation often develop in romantic relationships, where we are inclined to be open, honest, and (hopefully) vulnerable. These are the relationships where emotional responses have the most significant impact on us, making us more susceptible to falling into these patterns. This underscores a common struggle experienced by couples who have been together for a long time: a surreal sense from one or both partners that they no longer recognize the other person. If we have been crafting a relationship with an image of how we assume our partner is going to behave, it is unsurprising that when they behave differently – when they have an organic reaction that doesn’t exactly match our assumptions of what we thought they wanted or “needed” – that we become confused.

This clean-kitchen example is trite, however it illustrates the kind of patterns that we can easily fall into with loved ones – although it is often more subtle than the physical cleanliness of a kitchen counter: perhaps we find ourselves avoiding referring to a specific person or event in conversation, out of an awareness of some negative feeling the reference brings up in our partner; maybe we defer the decision of where to eat or go for a hike or some other joint activity, remembering that once our partner expressed frustration at not being asked this in the past. Whatever it is, we find ourselves subtly shifting our approach to accommodate a view of what we believe it is the other person is wanting.

Fortunately, the remedy for this kind of unhealthy codependency and manipulation is straightforward: frequent self-awareness and consistent, open communication. Checking in with yourself and with your partner is essential. Ask yourself if you're acting out of fear of your partner's reaction or because you genuinely want to help them - am I engaging in this behavior because my partner “needs” it, or is it an assumption that I have made? Make the effort to directly ask the other person if your actions are actually contributing to their well-being or if you’ve built up these expectations in your mind.

For instance, in the kitchen example, after a few times of ensuring everything is tidy, you might say, “I have been trying to keep the kitchen tidy because I noticed it reduces stress for you. I just wanted to check in with you, I am cool keeping up with this, for the most part, but sometimes I will forget or be too tired – please let me know whether my focus on this is as important to you as I think it is.” Or, you might simply let the kitchen be messy – or at least not-perfectly-tidy – one day and see how your partner reacts, and then have a loving, kind conversation about it. This kind of open communication can be challenging, especially if you struggle with anxious attachment, but it’s crucial for a healthy relationship.

In the end, maintaining self-awareness and regularly checking in with yourself and your relationship is key. If you find yourself walking on eggshells or feeling resentment over caretaking behaviors, it's a signal that a conversation with your partner is needed. Chances are, unless your partner is also sharing in this codependency with behaviors of their own, they may not even realize the anxiety you’re experiencing. A simple, honest conversation can alleviate the pressure and bring you closer together.

Regular communication and self-awareness are the antidotes to unhealthy codependency, ensuring that both partners can be present and loving toward each other without the burden of unnecessary emotional caretaking.

Present Moment Awareness

Attempting to stay engaged and present in the moment is a struggle we all experience. I’m not sure I have any profound insight to add about the importance of being mindful and living in the here and now for our well-being. Anyone who has explored self-improvement and cognitive awareness or sought to improve their spiritual, mental, and emotional well-being has certainly come across the concept of mindfulness, including mindfulness meditation. This involves having a rigorous and regular practice, which can significantly impact our well-being and sense of balance in our lives. In this regard, I'm no different from anyone else discussing self-improvement methods.

If the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, then embarking on a journey toward mental and emotional well-being means this “first step” is becoming aware of our experiences right here, right now. This is frustratingly difficult since, despite inherently understanding that we are alive and living in the present moment, we also find ourselves predominantly lost in thought. It’s paradoxical because even the attempt to notice and pay attention to the present moment is itself a thought, which, if we notice in the moment, becomes the very thing we are attempting to disentangle ourselves from in this abstract effort to be simply “present.”

I'll admit that my own mindfulness practice is inconsistent, with periods of consciously and consistently setting aside time to meditate followed by periods where I neglect it. Like many people, I start my day, and often hours pass before I realize I've neglected my mindfulness practice. There's no rule book, but it feels inherently natural to begin the day with mindfulness practice; the calm and quiet of a burgeoning dawn feel inherently connected to taking time to sit and simply be with myself.

 As I said, none of this is particularly unique or novel. There’s a reason mindfulness and mindfulness meditation practices have saturated the “market”: they tend to work if implemented with any degree of regularity or rigor. The idea of implementing mindfulness practices consistently aligns with my personal experiences of the importance of present moment awareness. There is no script to follow, no predefined mantra, series of movements, or breathing exercises inherently required to experience the benefits of mindfulness. One only needs to become familiar with the experience of being present, of having a present moment awareness.

This is why counselors and therapists sometimes ask, “What’s coming up for you right now?” or “Where are you feeling that in your body?” It’s not simply to fill a momentary lapse in the session but to bring both the client and themselves into the present moment. The practice of checking in with our body and our current experience is a sufficient mindfulness practice. It reminds us that no matter where our thoughts are taking our attention, we are sitting right here in this moment, our hearts are beating, and we are breathing in… and out… in... and out.

Reorienting our focus from wherever our minds have drifted to present moment awareness is significant because it’s the only way we can hope to fundamentally modify our relationship with the emotions and thoughts that unsettle us. Our minds instinctively and thoughtlessly carry us away all the time. We daydream, ruminate over past conversations and conflicts, and worry about future interactions and outcomes. At any given moment, we find ourselves so caught up in our heads that we forget we are also presently experiencing this precise moment. This is effectively the human experience: a side effect of our big brains, or perhaps an important aspect. This ability to compartmentalize and distract ourselves helps us endure hardships and protects us from emotional traumas that feel too significant to handle.

I am convinced that the peculiar way our brains function and our subsequent thoughts are a mixture of evolutionary imperatives and personal experiences hardwired over the years into a default mode. This default mode results in our brains efficiently and consistently flooding our conscious experience with thoughts, music snippets, brief memories, or tangential thoughts connected to our immediate environment. We often take this for granted as simply what experiencing life is. When we slow down and experience the present moment, we have the opportunity to recognize that reorienting ourselves in relation to these thoughts is tantamount to embarking on the change we hope to make.

This all intertwines and dovetails back to the concepts of detachment and experiencing ourselves as context, ideas I’ve blogged about in the past. That is the rub: it all implies present moment awareness. Attempting to describe the importance of having a present moment experience is inferential—like reiterating the necessity of a breathable atmosphere when discussing the importance of breathing to live. Because our minds frequently carry us off into thoughts, memories, and fantasies, practicing being present in the here and now at any moment within the day provides us with the opportunity to reset or break habits of thought and mindlessness that no longer serve us. This underscores all psychology and counseling theories as methods toward helping guide people to whatever degree of balance or self-improvement they seek.

Dropping into the Present Moment

At one point soon after I was separated and on my way towards divorce, while I was embarking upon my own journey of self-improvement and self-awareness, I found myself contemplating what codependence meant to me. Like a lot of people, my ex-wife and I had blurred the lines between healthy emotional interdependence and partnership into a confusing miasma of a singular dynamic. This made it difficult for me recognize what my own personal emotional needs and responses were in any given situation, independent of hers - and vice versa. I was journaling about this concept one afternoon, attempting to stream of consciousness contemplate why I was having a certain emotional reaction do some incident or other, following an interaction with my then soon-to-be-ex-wife. I noticed in that moment that every time I attempted to contemplate my feelings about her my thoughts would immediately shift to something random, sometimes tangentially related to the incident, sometimes connected to seemingly nothing at all - but consistently my brain kept telling me that it simply didn't want to go there.

This was my first conscious experience of dropping in to the present moment to notice what was happening with my thought process, quasi-removed from the distractions of my thoughts; I found myself journaling confusing words along the lines of “my brain isn't letting me think about this!” Over time I came to recognize this aspect of how my own mind tends to work: that when I am in the present moment, aware that my thoughts are scrambling or that I'm suddenly flooded with a deep contemplation of something intellectually “important” when, a moment before, I was attempting to think about something difficult or emotionally challenging in my life. This is a defense mechanism of my brain; there is something underneath that sudden jumble of thoughts and contemplation worth uncovering and experiencing. For me, this tends to be fears and insecurities that make me uncomfortable. And even though my brain is helping me by giving me intellectually stimulating trains of thought to consider I know inherently that if I continued to allow these fears and insecurities to reside beneath the surface and I don't experience them it will be very difficult for me to achieve the level of serenity and balance in my life that I personally hope to experience.

Acceptance is Key

I have spent more time in my life than I care to admit wishing I were someone different than who I am. This isn't as dramatic as it perhaps sounds; I have not experienced gender dysphoria, I don't struggle with any personality disorder nor do I experience anything close to manic / depressive mood swings, my sexual desires don't hinge upon taking advantage of other people's vulnerability In order for me to get off – indeed the extent to which I have ever questioned my sexual orientation is so small as to be uninteresting. That is to say that my daydreaming about being someone other than who I am isn't a result of feeling like I might be excluded from “normal” society (whatever that means). I mean I'm a middle class, heterosexual, cis white man born into late 20th century western civilization - in terms of winning the birthright lottery, I am extremely fortunate. But unsurprisingly even with the privileges and advantages I experienced through no effort nor fault of my own, I have experienced difficulties and struggles; none of us get to walk through this experience of life unscathed by traumas and anxieties. We are all human.

For me the “someone different” I spent the majority of my life wishing I could be took the form of a taller man, a leaner, more physically fit man –Someone naturally gifted at something cool like playing the piano or effortlessly dunking a basketball, relatively facile embodiments of attributes that If I were only able to achieve or experience I would be someone comfortable in my own skin. Someone who could confidently navigate the world without feeling negative about myself, without looking at myself as “less than” others. “If only…” seemed to be a regular refrain in my ruminations over dissatisfactions in my life. This is not to suggest that inspiration and motivation are not important for seeking positive change – there are endless self-help and motivational blogs and literature out there to help people self-actualize and strive for achievement and self-improvement and whatever. What I came to recognize was that before I could hope to embark upon any path towards self-improvement, towards finding balance in my life or to even begin to experience any substantive changes in my well-being, I had to accept the realities of who I am and where I am presently, in this moment, right now.

This was more than simply accepting I am 25lbs heavier than I want to be or that I need to re-enroll in college if I want to continue my degree – those are obviously baseline concepts I needed to “accept” before I could take the next right steps towards making the changes I sought. To feel more comfortable in my skin, to wake up and navigate the realities of the world in which I live without browbeating myself for working a job that I dread, a job that is unfulfilling, or without wallowing in self-pity for feeling dissatisfied with the quality of relationships I have with those I love, in order to address any of the dissatisfactions in my life, I needed to accept that as much as I may wish these life conditions were different, this IS my life.

I was a little boy effectively abandoned by his birth mother, only seeing her a handful of times every year throughout my childhood, each visit happening at a different, shitty, dingy Little apartment as I watched her fail to thrive, fail to accomplish any of her own dreams and aspirations and to slowly disintegrate over the years; I am terrified by failure, I am terrified of taking any risk in my life that might result in me becoming anything similar to the physically, financially, psychologically unstable person who gave birth to me.

I was sexually abused by an older boy when I was very very young - a member of my family, Who would abuse me in the next room, Directly under the roof and in the vicinity of other people, people I assumed could and would protect me; I have impotent rage and frustration within me, a seething need to be seen, to be heard, to be acknowledged and validated, When I am certain I understand what is happening in a given situation.

Maybe I am someone predisposed to fear and anger and frustration and anxiety and I just so happen to have experienced things in my life that exacerbate these underlying tendencies and make them manifest in a way that they don't for others. Maybe If the details of my own personal traumas and experiences were different I would have different anxieties, different obstacles that get in my own way. I don't know. I can never know. And the reality is it doesn't matter because whatever the source or impetus these struggles I experience are the struggles of my experience Having a deeper understanding of where they come from is only useful insofar as this understanding helps to change my relationship To these feelings and anxieties.

I spent years being afraid, being driven by an underlying fear, fear of emotional instability, of  financial failure, of being hurt and abandoned or even simply discarded and ignored - a nearly faceless, formless fear that was so pervasive I wasn't even aware of its presence most of the time. And when I became comfortable acknowledging the fear and even comfortable recognizing some tangible explanations for what underline these feelings of fear and insecurity I found myself adding a new layer to the browbeating and negative self talk that accompanied these experiences. “I'll never be good enough, I'll be a failure and pathetic I wind up hurt and alone,” these manifestations of fear that my brain would inundate me with on a seemingly never ending negative self-talk cycle, these were joined now by a new layer of self-loathing, an additional arsenal my brain could throw at me in the form of: what a pathetic dope you are, so afraid to be like your mom you won't even take a risk on your passions – so afraid of not being acknowledged that you’ll denigrate people you love just to show you were correct. Finding an underlying explanation for the seeds of my fears and anxieties only served to add a new layer to the anxieties themselves. Bravo brain, way to go.

And this is when I came to appreciate that acceptance is key, the idea that I could be someone who does not experience the anxieties and fears that were the seemingly natural response to the traumas and negative experiences I've had in life, this had to be dropped. I came to accept that I am someone lives his life with fear, with anxiety, with some measure of neuroses and unhealthy obsessive thoughts and behaviors and what have you. That in order to seek the balance and well-being I hoped for in my life it would need to be a balance that included all of these things about me rather than something I magically manifested despite these things. By accepting that these “negative” elements are woven into the tapestry of my conscious experience, that they have been a part of what makes up my personality In addition to all of the wonderful, “positive” elements of my brain chemistry and personal experiences I was able to begin a new relationship with them. The distinction was nuanced, subtle. I don't claim to be perfect at it. I still find myself attached to these feelings and anxieties on a regular basis. But remembering to accept that these are part of what makeup my experiences, my personality, this frees me to explore whatever emotional pitfalls these “negative” elements are presumably protecting me from, frees me to potentially experience the gratification of making a change, of having a novel experience I would otherwise have missed and avoided.

This also applies to aspects of my history about which I have guilt and shame. I spent many years of my life drinking alcoholically, being emotionally unavailable for myself and for others in my life. Unsurprisingly I've been engaged in behavior and treatment of others that are inconsistent with my moral compass, with my personal values. I spent a long time beating myself up and berating myself for these behaviors. I was mired in so much guilt and shame that I found myself perpetually trying to escape these feelings and thoughts by numbing myself with alcohol. I actively participated in the cycle of chemical dependency familiar to so many. And like so many others have experienced, once I became sober, once I found recovery from alcohol, I was still riddled with guilt and shame. My behavior, my treatment of others was unacceptable, I perpetually reminded myself, browbeating myself - my brain working to ensure that I could never find balance or emotional well-being. And until I was able to accept that I was someone who, while in the throes of his addiction, behaved and engaged in a thought process that was fundamentally different than how I think and behave when not in the throes of this addiction, I wasn't able to take any steps towards balance and emotional well-being. Constantly ruminating over behaviors about which I am not proud, “unacceptable” behaviors, had me perpetually mired in the negative feelings associated with those behaviors. Accepting that these negative aspects of my history or part of me provided me a path forward, a path away from feeling stuck in the cycle of perpetually reliving the negative feelings and emotions, a path towards being able to sit comfortably beside them, accepting them as part of my story, as part of my experiences from which I can learn and grow and even help others learn and grow.

All of this is what I mean when I say acceptance is key. It's not resigning myself to the fate and consequences of whatever is going on in my world and in my life, it is accepting that I am a human who has had experiences and I can still navigate the next year, the next month, the next week, the next day, the next hour, the next minute, the next breath - whatever underlies my anxieties and fears and” negative" emotional states I can take these into my arms and allow them to join me as I proceed into the next moment of my life. And every time I do so the gravitational pull towards the cycle of negativity and self loathing becomes a little less significant.

Detaching from Negative Self-talk

The other day I was cleaning up following an afternoon of yard work. As I was drying my hands, I realized that I had intentionally not looked at myself in the mirror. Now I am someone who has spent his entire adult life – indeed the majority of my conscious awareness of living – with a fairly consistent if not extreme sense of body dysmorphia. I've gone through long periods of time struggling with the image of who I see in the mirror. The exact roots behind where this sense of self-loathing comes from are unclear but I have no doubt that the celebration of the rail-thin, cocaine-chique look that was ever present during my adolescent and teenage years certainly didn't help with my self-image; I have always been someone with a propensity towards chubbiness, with an unfortunately slow metabolism that encouraged comparisons to the character of Chunk in the movie Goonies when I was roughly the same age and cut a similar silhouette as that kid doing the “truffle shuffle” for the amusement of his friends and movie audiences. This has been a struggle I've dealt with throughout my entire adult life with the pros and cons of engendering an eating disorder and cycling me through periods of obsessive fitness and nutrition goals that have landed me in moments where I feel great about the way I look and even feel comfortable within my own skin – always with the underlying thought that such moments of time are fleeting.

So having noticed that I was once again employing my age-old habit of avoiding any glimpse at myself in the mirror, I was intrigued. As far as I was consciously aware, I was not engaged in a period of body dysmorphic self-loathing nor was I experiencing the attendant general dis-ease and discomfort of being within my own skin. And yet here I was actively avoiding looking at myself in the mirror. Curious.

 As an experiment I intentionally turned back around flipped on the overhead lights to force myself to look at myself in the mirror. What I saw looking back at me was a big dumb head, melting face, cross-eyed goon looking back at me under the uncomfortably bright bathroom lights. However, unlike the countless times in my life I've seen this same strange and unappealing face looking back at me in the mirror, I noticed that this time, I wasn't engaging with the feelings of self-loathing and self-hatred that were cropping up and sitting on my chest. Indeed, I was simply watching myself look at myself. I was seeing myself experience the stream of ugly, negative self-talk, the tired and familiar old tape of self-repressing monologue that has played in my brain as far back as I care to remember. And I was able to see it as being nothing more than some peculiar expression of my brain working to bring me down for no good reason. And from the perspective of seeing it rather than being inside of it, I found I was able to kind of laugh.

 “What the hell is wrong with you,” I said out loud to my brain, forcing my eyes to fixate on themselves in the mirror despite this swirl of crow’s feet tempting me to squint away and look down at the sink. “None of this is true,” I thought to myself. I actually look fine, I actually feel fine, I am simply watching my brain try to tell me otherwise. “This is amazing! It's like my brain hates me!” I laughed to myself a little bit. And the more I noticed that I was simply having the experience of negative self-talk, that I was simply having the experience of self-loathing towards the man in the mirror directly in front of me – the more I noticed I was experiencing these sensations without sitting in them, that I wasn’t attached to the self-loathing and dysmorphic disdain, that these weren’t now filling my conscious experience of being me – the more I also noticed a sense of comfort or at least calm; I'm just a person having a momentary sense of disdain and self-loathing for no apparent reason. I'm not caught up in this, I'm simply watching myself experience it.

This was a freeing moment. I was experiencing the sensation of having these feelings, experiencing the familiar creep of disdain and dis-ease with myself while also recognizing that not only was I not attached to it, not only was I not caught up in it but in a very real way I never have to be.

 To test this sudden sense of detachment and unexpected comfort within the familiar moment of self-disdain, I lifted up my shirt to expose my torso to the light. This is an action that is absolutely forbidden by the inner monologue when I am caught up in the malignant disdain for the way I look and the way I feel about the way I look that as a rule accompanies this entire running tape of disdain. And as I expected, there was my old friend: hatred of my body. There was my brain only enabling me to see the flaws, to see the lingering remnants of the 40 lbs of unnecessary weight I was able to shed a few years ago, the sagging skin and areas of poor muscle tone. And just as I was experiencing moments before, I found myself laughing at my brain. This is just my brain trying to tell me I'm a piece of shit, trying to remind me that Dylan hates Dylan's body, a tape that has played no matter where I have been in my physical fitness regime throughout my life. I remembered the brief interlude with abdominal definition I experienced in my early 30s – a moment which was of course followed by my brain reminding me that I am still just a short man even if I now look good strutting around the beach.

I let my shirt fall back down and flip the lights off shaking my head to myself. Thanks for that brain, I said to myself. Whatever's going on I guess you just wanna remind me to not be too happy. Thanks again, you really know how to step in and get in the way of my having a nice day.

And then I went upstairs and fixed myself some lunch.

—

This mirror experience reinforced that detachment offers me a clearer perspective. I could see my self-loathing as just another part of my mental landscape, not the entire picture. This awareness brought a sense of freedom. For a moment, I was free from the grip of negative self-talk and could witness my thoughts and feelings with calm objectivity.

Detachment is about stepping back and observing our experiences without becoming enmeshed in them. This perspective helps us navigate our inner world with greater clarity and less distress. By detaching from my negative self-talk, I could see these thoughts as just thoughts, not truths.

This detachment does not eliminate negative thoughts and feelings, but it diminishes their power. It allows us to live more fully and authentically. Instead of being consumed by self-loathing, I could acknowledge it, thank my brain for its misguided attempt to protect me, and move on with my day.

Detachment is about creating space between ourselves and our thoughts. It’s about recognizing that we are not our thoughts, and we don’t have to act on them or let them define us. This realization is a powerful tool for managing distress and enhancing well-being. My mirror moment vividly illustrated how detachment can transform our relationship with our inner world, offering a fleeting sense of freedom and peace amidst life’s tumultuous storms.

Embracing Self as Context

It is easy to get lost in the shadows of my worst experiences, to tether my identity to the mistakes I've made, to see myself as identical to my worst experiences; my internal narrative tells me “I’m a failure,” “I’m a piece of shit,” I’m no good. But what if I dared to view myself from a different perspective? What if I embraced the idea that I am not defined by my darkest moments, by the worst things I’ve done in my life? What if I recognized that I am not my worst experiences but rather that I am a human who has had experiences in my life about which I am not proud?

This shift in perspective was transformative for me. I realized that I didn't need to carry the weight of my past actions as badges of dishonor. I acknowledged that clinging to these negative self-images only served to deepen my despair, keeping me trapped in a cycle of self-condemnation. This is the power of viewing myself as context, rather than as the sum of my actions. I understood that I was not inherently flawed or irredeemable because of past mistakes. Instead, I began to see myself as a person who had experienced certain things, made certain decisions, taken certain actions but I do not have to be defined by them - I do not have to attach my self-identity to the experiences. This shift allowed me to detach myself from the relentless grip of self-criticism and embrace a more humble perspective. I realized that I wasn't a failure; I was simply someone who had faltered along the way. This subtle yet profound distinction opened the door to true change, inviting me to reevaluate my approach to life.

As I learned to observe myself from a distance, to take an “observer self” position, I found a newfound freedom. No longer enslaved by my negative thoughts and emotions, I could simply witness them as passing phenomena, rather than attaching to them - internalizing them as “truths” about myself. This isn’t to say that taking the observer-self perspective is a simple. I am perpetually experiencing attachment to my old patterns of negative self talk. But the more I practice self-awareness, the more I am able to recognize emotional upheavals and temptations and cravings and moments where I’m thoughtlessly attaching myself to the stream of conscious thoughts and feelings playing through my mind, the more effective I become at stepping back and observing these from a (metaphorical) distance and allowing them to simply pass by my conscious mind rather than allowing them to hijack my consciousness and carry me along with them - drag me down.

And embracing this view of seeing my self as context is by its nature a humbling experience. Recognizing that the fabric of who I am, of how I view myself, is a fluid and ever-changing construct, not bound by the constraints of past actions or future expectations, leads me towards a deeper awareness that the concept of “self” is itself an illusory construct. A shorthand description for the consciousness I am experiencing on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute, breath-to-breath moment. I am simply me, experiencing my conscious experience.

I know, I know, this sounds esoteric. It doesn’t have to be.

Pragmatically, what viewing the self as context boils down to is an acceptance that we are not prisoners of our past experiences nor to the thoughts and feelings we experience in any given moment. We are dynamic beings, capable of growth and transformation. By embracing self as context, we can cultivate a deeper sense of humility and self-compassion, freeing ourselves from the shackles of self-judgment and embracing the endless possibilities of who we can become.

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Picture Day

I am a single father. I have three kids: 12, 9 and 7 – Girl, Boy, Girl. Their mother, my ex-wife, committed suicide almost 3 months ago. We are on our own now.

My 12 year old daughter has taken to picking up some of the slack that is left from a motherless home – not in that she volunteers to do more of the work around the house nor does she make any kind of concerted effort to feed her siblings or mother them in any way. Rather, my eldest daughter has adopted the obstinate attention to specific details that colored their mothers life. She threw an indescribable shit-fit when I moved the big green hutch from one side of the room to the other, because it “looks stupid over there.” She “[wouldn’t] even look at it there, because it’s stupid and [I’m] stupid for even moving it” and broke down in to tears when I refused to simply move it back, stomping out of the room, smashing things to the ground in furious response to the moving of the big green hutch and to my having the audacity to rearrange the location of a few items on its shelves. She has adopted her mother’s insistence upon a single way being the correct way, the only way.

I am nervous for her.

This morning was picture day. The 12 year old helped by laying out clothes for her brother, by selecting a dress for her little sister and volunteering to do the younger girls hair for her – so that everything will be “just right” for picture day. See, picture day is important, it’s a snapshot of their life today, a commemoration that will go on refrigerator doors and hang behind frames on walls and book shelves, eventually to be stashed away in a drawer or stuffed away in a box somewhere; a permanent reminder of life as it is today. It’s important, especially to her. And it’s important to me, because I want to…I need to provide these children with as much consistency as I can muster, I need to ensure that little things go smoothly, that little moments which will inevitably remind them of their mother pass as smoothly as possible, that they ride thru this ever growing tide of emptiness with as much grace as I can provide for them. It’s a challenge because many of these moments, these important details, are insignificant to me; they are unimportant to me. Meticulous decorations at Halloween or Thanksgiving or Easter or Valentines, they are not important to me; X-mas time I understand, I can participate in overblown decoration, even if I can’t provide the level of detail to which they are accustomed, even if I don’t feel the need to take Polaroids of the house to ensure each year is as precisely identical to the previous years as possible.

But picture day I understand. It is not too much to expect my children to be dressed nice, to be cleaned and their hair done-up, their teeth clean, their eyes happy. And even if the obsessive need to control the moment is appearing dangerously too sincere within her, I appreciate my 12 year olds attempt to make picture day “just right.” It is strangely comforting to watch her step in to provide this semblance of mothering behavior to her siblings, to see her matter-of-fact approach to ensuring they are appropriately prepared. It gives me a few moments of feeling like things are alright in their world, like they are prepared to take care of one another.

The 7year old red-headed spit-fire came down the stairs wearing the white sun dress with pink and green watermelon wedge print all over, the dress she picked out the night before. This was not the dress her 12 year old older sister picked out for her. This is apparently the “ugliest fucking dress” that my 12 year old has ever seen (I’ve taken to letting her swear, as long as she swears correctly) and there is no way she is going to touch her little sister’s hair if she is going to wear that dress. The 7 year old was equally adamant about not changing in to the dress her big sister has picked out for her. My happy family sensation disappeared in a flash as the 12 year old angrily threw the hanger and hairbrush across the room, stomping out of the kitchen.

The normal dad response here is to bring the hammer down, nip the bullshit attitude and the bullshit pouting behavior in the bud – no conciliation, no mercy. The 12 year old is punished, banished to her room and away from her friends for the weekend, a potential long-term loss of ipod and internet access pending if the stomping around in inane fury persists. But this is the first picture day of our new lives and during the fleeting moments before the watermelon wedge sundress arrived on the scene it occurred to me that part of why the mothering 12 year old was so touching was precisely because this picture day is significant to her; to all of them. That in her typical pre-teen way there are volumes of unspoken dramatic significance underlying the focus she is giving to this, the first picture day. As I try to reason with her, as I watch her mascara pour down her tear stained cheeks, as my reasoning digresses into reasonable but curt ultimatums surrounding precisely what she can and cannot control in this world; as I see the familiar unbridled hatred emanate from the smoldering eyes of her mother perched now within the furious, red face of my daughter, peering into me, begging me to give in to her insistence, to understand that things simply must be a certain way, begging me to stop the obstinate insistence that life can potentially function in a way different than her expectations, as I am brought silent by the impasse that is my oldest daughter’s need to run this show I realize that I am stuck.

I will allow the 7year old to wear the pink and green watermelon wedge print sundress on picture day; I will do the little girls hair by myself – to which the 12 year old scoffs, adding “great! One more way you’re RUINING PICTURE DAY!!!” – they will all survive this day. But I will also face a year, probably several years, of continual fighting over the ruined pictures from this day; the 12 year old will make good on her threat to destroy all and every picture of her little sister in that “fucking ugly dress.” It will be a pain in our lives for a very long time, the sadness and emptiness that underlie all of this argument, all of this need to make things “just so” will be conjured up immediately every time we see pictures of the pink and green watermelon wedge print sundress. Even if she is a dramatic 7th grade shit, she is correct – in its current fashion, picture day will indeed be ruined.

But what can I do? I successfully conned the 7year old red-headed spit fire into “trying on” the dress her sister picked out for her, “just to see.” But she has developed some inexplicable connection to the pink and green watermelon wedge sundress that extends beyond the need to defy her sister, to be a thorn in her sisters’ side. She is a porcelain skinned little orange haired doll; once the tears begin to fall from her eyes there is no coming back, they become bright red welts that spreads thru her face until her entire body is a crimson radiation of unhappiness – I try desperately to squelch this rising tide before it grows out of control, allowing her to angrily remove the other dress and return the pink and green watermelon wedge sundress to her body.

As we all return to the kitchen, listening to the 12 year old go into further explicit details of exactly how awful picture day is going to be now, turning her ire more directly upon me, upon what a terrible mean person I am because I “don’t understand” what she is going thru with her little sister not doing what she is supposed to do, because I “don’t understand” how important all of this is to her…to them. I do understand. I tell her this: I do understand – because I do, I see just how dramatic this is for her. Just how significant this need to have things go the way she sees them as needing to go is for her. I do understand, kid, I understand all too clearly – this is the behavior that drove your mother. This is the compulsive need to be in control, the black-and-white view of the world, of everyone in the world being either with you or against you, I do understand this. I understand the world of pain and resentment this will create for you, the frustration that will be forever weighing down on you when you make the slightest effort to peek your head out from inside the little world you have to build around yourself so as to ensure you can be in total and constant control. I watched this eat away at your mother, kid; I saw it turn her into an ugly, angry, broken woman, a woman who eventually became so lost in the complications of real life, of the world that simply has no time for her insistence on details, that she could see no other choice but to give up – to exit, rather than face the fear of being simply another voice in a universe overflowing with voices, hers no more or less important than that of her deepest enemy nor closest friend. I understand kid, I see what this means to you. I see, more than I can possibly explain to a young, frustrated child, I see precisely how important this is.

But explaining to a 12 year old that she can only control her reaction to things, that she cannot expect to be in control of anything else in life – this is not a constructive response and is met with only further accusations of my awful parenting, of my terrible and mean spirited, not-understanding ways, punctuated this time by an insistence that I allow her to remain home from school rather than go to picture day – for it is now all ruined. Her makeup, her hair, her life – all ruined, by me apparently, the slamming door to her room seems to punctuate. I implore the 7 year old to once again reconsider the dress her sister picked out for her but this has grown beyond a simple power control, she has decided this pink and green watermelon wedge sundress, a dress that I purchased for her myself and that I kept with me at my house so that it was only available for her to wear at my house and not at their mother’s house – this dress which was obstinately part of “my house” not “her house” (as in “don’t pack that dress to take with you back to Mommy’s! That dress lives here…I don’t care, go pack a different dress, that dress stays at Daddy’s house” divorced parent ridiculousness) – has for the purpose of this mornings obstinacies and arguments, become the 7year olds attachment to her mother. The idea of removing the dress has now graduated from being something she was simply not interested in doing to now having the heaviness of being a beautiful, if fabricated, reminder of her mother. And thus removing the dress was now untouchable for further discussion.

The time was drawing short, there were perhaps seven minutes remaining before the 12year old’s ride to school arrived, before their Nanna arrived to say hello and see how sweet and darling the kids are on picture day. The boy had remained thankfully marginal throughout the entire episode, taking a brief dabble into the foray by attempting to override his sister’s selection of a nice shirt for him with a plain white t-shirt – so obviously inappropriate for picture day there was no resistance, even from himself, when I told him “no, go put the shirt your sister picked out on and don’t make this worse.” He could sense the tide had welled beyond the humorous aspect of stirring his sisters up worse, that there was something beyond the scope of his little 9year old brain comprehension going down in the arguments around him, and he chose to simply make things as easy for me as he could.

But the fact remained: in the current scenario my 12year old was insisting on returning to bed rather than face picture day with her tear stained cheeks, her red, swollen eyes. The 7year old would have a very cute picture day in her pink and green watermelon wedge print sundress, even if her hair remained wild and unkempt in the way that has come to signify Dad’s attention to detail. But the pictures would be a continual bane on my relationship with my eldest daughter, if not upon the relationship between all of us; even if only representing a small moment in the grand scheme of life – the potential vast repercussions were beginning to take shape. It seemed an impossible situation, I felt on the verge of actual failure, on the verge of the first of small failure; relatively benign on its own but the starting point of small, insignificant seeming failures that will begin to stack up, culminating to form a cascade of failures – an event that I can’t help but suspect many people, many of my deceased ex-wife’s friends and confidants, are simply waiting to have happen, are waiting to see me buckle under the weight of single-parenting. The show down over the 7 year olds dress on picture day was a seemingly simple scenario but it contained an undercurrent of significance that belied the straightforward “you cannot give in” advice that would otherwise take precedence in dealing with a hormonal and bratty pre-teen. Life, my life, is not that simple.

As my attempt to elicit any type of friendly response from the 12year old was rebuked, again, insolently and maliciously, my hand swatted away before it could even come to rest on her shoulder, I turned my attention instead to the 7year old as she sat quietly running her spoon thru her chilling oatmeal. I embraced the sweet, obstinate little angel from behind, hugging her and kissing her forehead as she turned slightly in her chair, saying “I love you daddy,” partly to me and partly to her big sister, stewing dramatically at the kitchen counter. As her head was turned towards me, I slipped my thumb into the little girl’s bowl of oatmeal and slid a two inch slug-trail of oatmeal schmooze down the front of the pink and green watermelon wedge print sundress.

“Oh no, angel!” I said to her in what I hoped was a sufficient display of surprise, “you spilled oatmeal on your dress….” She looked down at the mess and then back up to me.

“It’s okay. Water can get it out…” she began, but she could already sense what this meant, that the dress was now out of commission – that circumstances beyond all of our control were now in play. She started to cry, to get upset, to turn her alabaster body into a bright red kick-ball of sadness, but her sister and I acted swiftly. The dress was removed and stuffed deep into the dirty clothes bin by the time the other dress was being pulled down over her head. Within 2 minutes her hair was a tight and beautiful array of French braids punctuated with a cute little bow and the arrival of Nanna and her big sisters friends interrupted any further displays of dissatisfaction. The 12 year old ran out the door, offering me a brief one-arm hug as she darted away and the 7year old allowed herself to be placated and distracted with the cooing attentions of her Nanna.

I don’t know if I made things better or worse. I don’t know if manipulating the situation (I prefer “ninja parenting”) as I did will ultimately make things worse for my blossoming young control freak. I don’t know where the line between typical, bratty child behavior ends and the genuine depth of childish grief playing out in the only way they know how to behave begins.

But I got all three of my kids out the door, beautiful and on time for picture day. And on picture day, that is really all that matters.

I’m Here

My son told me he hates living with me, that he wants me to “just go away.” He stopped short of informing me that he wished that it was me who was dead instead of his mom, which has spilled from his trembling lips only once in the handful of weeks since her death.

My son is nine years old. He does not mean what he says. He has an overwhelming amount of sadness crushing him every night as he is faced with laying alone in his room, a general frustration and confusion that a grown man would find debilitating searching for words to express. He grits his teeth and growls and throws himself against the pillows in his bed, flailing away from my hand as I try to reach out to touch him, to comfort him. He goes silent, staring blankly at the spot where his bed meets the wall. “Dad...” He says, a furtive request, a pleading confusion contained in the simple utterance. Heartbreaking and thin, a cracking child’s tone, “Dad…” – he doesn’t have the language to express his confusion, can’t voice his frustration any more concretely than simply uttering “Dad.”

I try to comfort him, I lie by his side and hold him, accepting that he pulls away instinctively, expressing his general anger by focusing it on being upset with me, punishing me, not accepting my comfort. I pull him close any way, forcing him to loosen, to uncoil and breath as I hold him, my hand on his chest, feeling his heartbeat steadily beneath the quiet sobs.

None of this is okay. I comfort myself in the knowledge that everyone grieves in their own way, according to their own timeline, that a nine year old boy has no idea why he does what he does, has no control of his thoughts, still lives in the little-kid world that exists only in the moment, even as his brain is developing the skills to connect him to the rest of his world more concretely. That right now he is forming memories and emotional impressions that will last with him his entire life. I hold him until his breathing returns to normal, until attempting to remove my arm results in a clutching embrace, a whispered “no,” and I settle in closer to him, kissing him behind his ear.

“I’m here, Dante. I’m here.”