The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

In episode 119 of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, I discuss the question of why, when we know reality is based on possibility, we still tend to reject uncertainty.

Listen as I explain why striving for certainty and predictability is actually fear-driven.

What’s the alternative?

You’ll have to check out the episode to hear all the details, but here’s a hint: if you’re in the Now, you’re automatically open to uncertainty, and possibility..!

Let me know what you think! Be sure to leave a comment!

Subscribe to The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a caller on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello everyone. I’m going to be bringing you another principle of uncommon sense today. This principle is around the myth of certainty. Reality appears thoroughly uncertain, so why don’t we embrace that uncertainty?

For nearly a hundred years, the new sciences, led by quantum physics, have been telling us that reality appears entirely uncertain. The problem is that we continue to be addicted to certainty and predictability. How is that possibly going to work out?

If you’re pursuing or seeking something that is unattainable, how frustrated do you think you’re going to get? And worse still, if we resist and fear what is unavoidable, we freeze ourselves in that fear. Remember, any philosophy for life that results in fear is a non-starter. This type of incongruity is a theme you’ll be noticing in these principles. Fear heads us down the wrong path.

The ability to determine the future, that’s the essence of determinism brought to us by the 17th century thinkers and philosophers Newton and Descartes. But in the early 20th century, the quantum physicist Heisenberg gave us the uncertainty principle which upended determinism. It appears that the fabric of reality is altogether uncertain. So science apparently has a mind of its own and it keeps on evolving.

Now wouldn’t it be great if we tried to do the same? What happens if we’re stuck in 17th century thinking?

You know, if life were an academic course, we’d be failing. Our addiction to certainty and predictability, it’s an invisible force in our lives as we try and try to predict the future. It’s natural to want some degree of assurance that the outcomes of our decisions and our actions will suit us. So we analyze the variables. For some people, we do it tirelessly, trying to make our very best decision.

The problem is that we’ve gone so far down the path of avoiding uncertainty that we become immobilized by our addiction to predictability. We’ve lost balance and we become servants to predictability. This paralysis freezes many of us. You know, those of you out there who struggle around decision making and succumb to analysis paralysis, you know exactly what I’m referring to. You freeze from the fear of making a mistake. We’ve become imprisoned by the shackles of predictability.

So you may be thinking, what’s wrong with trying to calculate the future? Nothing other than a matter of degree. You need to know what time the train leaves, your flight departs. You need to know what time to get to school to pick up your kids or when your doctor’s appointment is or your next meeting. And you can analyze a stock and try to make a well-informed investment. Or if you’re playing chess, you can try to calculate that future as best you can with your next move. But the addiction to trying to calculate our personal lives leaves us in a bind.

Think of it this way. Focusing on the future robs you of the ability to be truly present. Think about this. If you’re not present, how can you possibly actualize your life’s possibilities? Rather than thinking about the potential as a future event, you must actualize that potential in the moment you’re in. That’s all you have.

The irony here is that by being truly present, your future is more likely to unfold in the way you wish it to. So we call it the future because it’s unknown. When we need to know what’s unknowable, the result is fear, sometimes anxiety. So trying to calculate what is incalculable causes despair and anxiety. And this often induces that fear I spoke about a few moments ago. Am I making a mistake? That doesn’t work. Seeking certainty kind of causes us to live in a straitjacket, which binds us toward analyzing and predicting, but not free to engage in the flow of life. Be in the flow. You can’t if you’re calculating the future. You can’t be gripped by the fear of making mistakes and be in the flow of life.

I cannot exaggerate how big this conundrum is. Take a moment and reflect on this. What do you choose? To live in the fear of making mistakes or to get in the flow and navigate your life? Now, I do appreciate that you need to be mindful of potential risks when you venture into uncertainty and the possible consequences of your actions, but also contemplate the consequences of surrendering to fear. There’s a healthy balance you can achieve when you welcome uncertainty.

Modern physics describes reality as an unfolding energy of possibilities, not subject to certainty. Now, if you want to actualize your possibilities, you must loosen the noose of certainty that strangles you.

Let’s think about the word uncertain. Why does that word evoke a negative feeling? Ordinarily, the word uncertain creates a negative image, like your medical prognosis is uncertain or her future looks uncertain. Why do we equate uncertain with negative? This bias against what’s uncertain reveals a tremendous obstacle in being able to live well. Given that life is uncertain, if we don’t change our relationship with the unknown, we will swim upstream in perpetual fear.

Think of it this way. If your current circumstances don’t really suit you, the idea of uncertainty should release you from the imprisonment of certainty. If you’re in a conflicted or negative relationship, then uncertainty should be welcomed. It might change the current reality. If you dislike your job or feel undercompensated, the certainty of that situation should be depressing. In that case, you’d think you’d welcome in some uncertainty that would come with the possibility of change. The negative connotation around uncertainty is rooted in our addictive, pathological need for certainty.

On the other hand, the word possibilities evokes positive feelings. We all aspire to summon possibilities into our lives. Possibilities after all are the essence of hopefulness. Here’s the impasse. Visualizing new possibilities into your life requires welcoming uncertainty. If you remain stuck in the certain, how can you bring newness into your life? Whether that future is positive or not, certainty precludes possibility. The script is already written. Certainty forecloses on what’s possible. It’s like a mathematical equation. You become part of the formula of certainty.

How will demanding certainty impact your hope for future possibilities, the ability to bring newness into your life? What if you learn to welcome some uncertainty rather than avoid it? To experience the flow of your life and actualize possibilities, you need to embrace uncertainty. So re-envision uncertainty as your ally and you can actualize your possibilities. If you notice distress or fear around uncertainty, observe your reaction and release it. Employ the paradox. If you welcome in uncertainty, you’re not trying to hold back the future, but you’re navigating the flow of your life. You’re not without power. You’re not without mastery. You can navigate the flow of your life, but you have to get into that flow. But being bound up and a straightjacket of certainty, it dooms you to being a character in the novel, the plot already written.

Welcome some uncertainty, embrace possibilities, and your life can be navigated in the path and direction that you want.

Let’s take a look at the belief that it’s hard to change. Why do we experience personal change as such a heavy lift? Think it has something to do with our relationship with certainty? Think about this paradox. I want to change, but I cling to what’s familiar, what’s predictable, and what’s certain. When you become an indentured servant to the familiar, change would appear elusive, wouldn’t it? So perhaps we shouldn’t say change is hard, but rather that we struggle with change because we fear the unfamiliar. If our worldview, our old worldview is static and inert, then change would be the exception. And that’s why we have a commonly accepted belief that it’s hard to change. And a worldview that welcomes uncertainty, we’d no longer imagine change as the exception.

In fact, this new picture of reality coming to us from science would describe a reality where everything is in flow, nothing is fixed or static, and that would of course include us, humans. Wouldn’t it be great to release your fear of the unknown and get into that flow? If you embrace uncertainty, you shift into flow. Think of uncertainty as the wind in your sails, empowering you toward the changes that you seek in your life. Resisting uncertainty creates fear and anxiety. It cannot work out. We cannot predict the future with predictability, but being addicted to predictability, well, that will guarantee a lot of dysfunction in our lives. Certainly it’s not what we want.

So embrace some uncertainty and bring possibilities into your life. I’m not talking about being reckless. I’m not talking about being a daredevil here. The way to come out of our familiar zone is by welcoming discomfort. Instead of speaking about a comfort zone, it’s more accurate to call it the familiar zone. It may not be comfortable, but it is familiar. If you struggle with anxiety, depression, or anger, or fear, those feelings are familiar, but they’re not comfortable. Growth lies outside the confines of your familiar zone. So as challenged or as miserable as you may feel in your familiar zone, you may be still resisting discomfort, which is what’s required to break free. That’s why we feel frustrated and stuck like we’re a character in Groundhog’s Day. Change seems elusive and far-fetched when you’re imprisoned in the confines of the familiar.

So here’s the paradox. You may want to change, but fear becomes the guardrail that keeps you stuck. But fear of what? Fear of what lies out there in the realm of the uncertain. When you think about making the leap forward, you may stall out because it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Now, here’s the way out. If thinking about the change you’re seeking makes you uncomfortable, take that discomfort and turn it into your ally. If the idea of change frightens you, embrace that fear and make it your ticket to freedom. See the fear as your ally. Welcome it in. Growth always lies outside of your familiar zone. Embrace it. Invite it. Turn fear and discomfort into your ally, just as you might embrace the strenuousness of working out. Do the same with distress and it will evaporate. That’s the paradox.

When I am working with a client and trying to guide them as to how they can achieve the changes they’re looking to make, and on occasion they may say, I haven’t done it. It made me uncomfortable. I may smile and say, well, that’s good. A sign of discomfort means that’s exactly where you need to go. Embrace the discomfort, embrace uncertainty, and life will be an altogether different kind of experience for you.

Well, until next time, embrace that uncertainty. Look forward to speaking with you again next week. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #119 Uncertainty Welcomes In Possibilities first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

Episode 118 of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz features another nugget of uncommon sense: self-esteem is not what you think!

Listen to understand why what we think of as self-esteem is actually focused not on what we think of ourselves, but rather what others think of us.

In the episode, I explain the possible roots of this very common worldview, and help you adjust your thinking so that you can thrive in your life and in your relationships.

Once you’ve listened, let me know what you think! Be sure to leave a comment!

Subscribe to The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a caller on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello everyone. I’m going to be presenting another principle from Uncommon Sense and that principle is self-esteem is not what you may think it is.

Low self-worth is horribly common and it’s tragic. It impinges on our quality of life. So many people struggle with low self-esteem, arguably by my measure, probably more than half of the population. And the struggle with low self-worth is due to that wrong-minded common sense beliefs, which ironically result in low self-esteem and then indenture us as we become servants to our fears about what we think other people think of us.

Nothing is going to impact your life more than your relationship with yourself, your beliefs about yourself and your thoughts about yourself. This is the filter through which you experience virtually everything. Your life, your experiences, your relationships all come through the filter of your self-worth. What could be more critical in how you experience your life than how you feel about yourself? A society comprised of individuals with authentic self-worth, and wouldn’t that be a great place to live? It doesn’t have to be a utopian thought.

To achieve this goal, we have to examine true sources of genuine self-worth and cast off the damaging beliefs that we cling to and adhere to that result in shattering our self-worth. In other words, our beliefs about how to navigate worth, about how to navigate self-worth and our concerns about what others may think of us, that’s the problem.

So what do I mean by the term self-esteem? Simply put, it speaks very subjectively to how you feel about yourself, what you think of yourself. But what are the sources that inform how you value yourself?

We can easily appreciate our self-worth was powerfully shaped by our childhood, our parents, their relationship with each other, and the messages that we receive from them. You know, as a child, if you were told, think before you speak, well, there’s a wave collapse for you, that would impact your self-worth. As children, our parents were clearly the primary mirror from which we learned to see ourselves and how to see ourselves. So our first realization might be our initial sense of self-worth came ironically not from ourself but from others. Of course, we had no other choice and we were at the mercy of our parents’ influence on us.

But as we grow older and become more autonomous, as we progress through childhood to adolescence and young adulthood, this way of how we see ourselves and how we think others see us sets up a betrayal of our own inner well-being.

Let me explain. By the time we go to school, as children, the way we feel about ourselves is no longer only limited to how our parents see us and treat us. It now is informed by other sources. School-aged children’s sense of worth may come from having good grades or being really great athletically or popular or attractive. Now these are all good things, no doubt, but that positive feedback is not derived from yourself. It’s external. That esteem requires achievements or the blessing of being attractive or gifted as an athlete.

But what if you’re an average student with average intelligence and you’re not particularly popular or good-looking and you have tangled feet on the athletic field? Should that dictate that you need to feel poorly about yourself? You see the paradox here around what we call self-esteem? It requires high levels of achievement. Your self-worth in this case doesn’t come from yourself.

So what we call self-esteem, I call other esteem. It comes from outside yourself. As an adult, your self-esteem may be informed by how great your job is, how high is your income, what kind of car do you drive, or how big and expensive is your home, or your relationship success. Again, these achievements are worthy, but they all remain dependent on things external to you. But if you’re a high achiever and on the fast track and you get fired or have a downfall in business, what happens to your self-esteem? Success, compliments, approval, popularity should be seen as the icing on the cake. But when they become the cake unto itself, we have a problem. The cake is hollow. There is no self-worth.

I call this pursuit of feeling good about yourself chasing other esteem. Being approved of or valued or liked by others and succeeding in your aspirations, it’s all great. But we have to be cautious not to betray our own self just to achieve those results. And that’s exactly what so many of us do. Our culture generates countless billions of dollars of revenue from inducing people to seek vanity quick fixes. Social media is all about getting enough likes and follows. All other esteem. Self-esteem should imply that the self-worth, how you feel about yourself, originates from within yourself. But again, that’s often not the case. And the more we pursue other esteem, the more we sabotage our own self-worth.

Why do I say that? Because if we need to be liked or approved of, then we are manipulating ourself, betraying our authentic or genuine self, play acting in a way to get others to see us in a certain way. So our culture as a whole teaches us, it induces us. We learn this so early in life to conceal parts of our genuine self, hide our insecurity, our self-doubts and our vulnerability and mask it from others, which is actually utterly destructive to investing in your own self. So we modify and mold so much of our behavior and our personality to achieve other esteem. This actually causes us to create what I call personality masks. It’s not our genuine self, it’s our pretend self. This leads to a horrific onslaught of low self-worth.

I believe that low self-worth, which curiously is not a diagnosis in the DSM, that low self-worth contributes to anxiety, depression, and is the heart of so much relationship conflict.

I’d love to show you my appreciation for your subscribing to and rating this podcast by offering you a gift to one of the following. The Power of Mind, a live talk that I gave, or one of my digital eBooks, Creating Authentic Self-Esteem, Overcoming Anxiety, or Raising Resilient Children, and lastly, Cultivating Resilient Relationships. Once you have subscribed, please send an email to mel at melschwartz.com and just let me know which gift you’d prefer. Thanks.

Let’s look at the concept of judge. People are afraid of other people judging you. So often people have said to me, I wouldn’t say this or say that, I don’t want to be judged. The truth is others can’t judge you. They can have opinions of you. Everyone has an opinion, but to elevate their opinion to the status of a judgment, now that’s ridiculous. The only person who can arbitrarily judge you is the person that resides in the courthouse.

When we solicit approval from other people, we’re actually rejecting our own self and debasing our own self-esteem by seeking it from others. The expression, I’m concerned about what other people think of me is inaccurate because most often you don’t know what they think of you. So what I will say is, it’s what I think you think of me. Do you ever feel overly concerned about what others think of you? Most often you don’t really know. So instead be honest with yourself and say, it’s what I think they think of me.

Well examine why you think that. Sometimes you may not say something that you want to say because of your fears about others’ opinions. This tendency removes you from your authentic self as you pursue approval or at least try to avoid disapproval. This habit lies at the heart of other esteem and betrays your authenticity. If you see yourself doing this, pause and ask yourself, why am I so invested in what I think others think of me? You were probably taught this debasing habit really early in life. Your parents again may have said something like, think before you speak, which really leads you to subordinate yourself. Be afraid of what others think. So isn’t it crazy that what you think someone else may think of you is more important than what you think of yourself?

Can you see the consequences of subordinating yourself in this way? I’m not proposing that you should be indifferent or uncaring about what others think of you. You can be sensitive and caring, but don’t elevate them to this higher position of authority. It’s like being on a seesaw with that other person. You’re going down to the ground and you’re lifting them above you and setting them up as your judge.

There are so many other cultural influences that impact our self-worth. Look at the TV shows around who’s the biggest loser. The living in the culture that demands competing and winning sets up a narrative for marginalizing our self-worth. It’s as if we’re all contestants on a game show, only certainly most of us will lose. The biggest loser is far more than the TV show. It sets up a fear that we must avoid being seen as a loser and therefore we have to succeed in being a winner. So we fake it. You think of the common sense expression, the world is made up of winners and losers. Well, how do you think that impacts us?

Social media quantifies who the winners are. We call them influencers. People want to be the smartest, wealthiest, most attractive. These goals decimate the self-worth 99.99, go on and on, of us who don’t achieve that status. So people feel depressed and burdened with the belief that they’re not enough. And our beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies. This societal compulsion to achieve, to win, to be popular is antithetical to the core human value of genuine self-worth.

When I work with people who have self-esteem issues, I come across yet another irony. These people who struggle with insecurity and low self-worth often feel like they’re on stage and everyone’s looking at them. Remember, if this applies to you, you’re not the center of attention. It’s your insecurity that’s tricking you to think you’re the center of attention. The other people in your life are not so concerned about who you are. They’re likely focused on their own issues. Free yourself from this fear of judgment that you’re setting up. Again, it’s ironic that you may not feel worthy enough and good enough, but you feel like the center of attention. Just smile to yourself and say, I’m not that important.

Some people identify as I’m a private person. What does that expression really mean? From my experience, this claim to privacy is a cover for low self-worth and suggests a real correlation to other esteem. You see, if you can mask yourself well enough so others don’t really have an opportunity to know you, you feel safe from their opinion of you. This is a retreat into hiding from others and it makes you feel insecure about yourself. You’re projecting your own judgment of self onto them. They aren’t your judge, but if you need to hide yourself from others, you are judging yourself.

The last piece I’m going to share around self-worth is that acting strong is actually weak. Many of us operate from a very damaging common sense belief that we need to act strong and show no weakness. Maybe more true on the margins for men than women, but true for all of us. It’s a terribly wrong-minded theme that contributes to low self-worth. The word acting suggests that you’re hiding something that makes you feel insecure or vulnerable. So if we pretend that your flaw or your insecurity doesn’t exist, you bury it in the hope that someone else may not see it. Now, how do you think that’s going to work out?

Acting strong is the equivalent of armoring yourself in a pretend fashion, like a suit of armor, faking strength. Do you want to clank around through your life wearing a suit of armor? It can get really burdensome. And we’re against setting other people up as our judge. That insecurity remains close when we hide it from exposure. It locks in our insecurity, our sensitivity, or our fear. When you do the opposite and share your vulnerability, two things happen. You’re no longer operating from fear of what others think of you. And once you reveal your self-doubts and insecurities, they lose their grip on you. Bring your fears into the light, bring your shame into the light, and they retreat as your authentic self-esteem emerges.

Think about what your thoughts are telling you. Notice how they are setting other people up as your judge. Pause and think, that’s an old belief that no longer serves me. Free yourself from those limiting beliefs and thoughts.

The dictionary presents two primary definitions for the word vulnerability. The first suggests that by being vulnerable, you’re open to attack or criticism. Well, unless you’re living in a cave, you can assume there’ll be times when you may be verbally or emotionally criticized as part of life. Learning to develop the resilience to navigate those challenging experiences ought to be the goal. That would enable you to feel confident in yourself and how you engage others. By contrast, not allowing yourself to be faulted or criticized means you’re wearing that suit of armor, protecting yourself from being emotionally pierced. That is the essence of fear.

The second definition is that vulnerability is about allowing your weakness and emotions to be seen by others. Our societal common sense message, though, is show no vulnerability. Act strong, armor up. So this messaging really is that you should cover up and protect yourself from criticism. And if you are criticized, show no feelings, act impervious, be strong. So our prevailing life philosophy is hide it, just act strong. Can you appreciate how this approach has ruined us on so many levels?

Vulnerability is a love language and a feeling language. Hiding from vulnerability imprisons us in fear and it cuts off possibilities of growth and well-being. It stunts our growth and it leaves us on the sidelines as the flow of life passes by. This prevailing life philosophy trains us to avoid vulnerability at all costs. And it denies us a core quality of what it is to be human. And it’s rooted in fear. If you hide your feelings and insecurities from others, you’re selling yourself out. This game plan for life cannot work.

The paradox is embracing vulnerability is strong and fearless. It’s an investment in your relationship with yourself and your movement toward authenticity. Duck and hide or reveal. And remember, vulnerability is loving. Acting strong is impervious and doesn’t allow other people really to love you in the way that you probably want to be loved. If you want to be loved, reveal your vulnerability.

Well I hope this provoked some new thinking, considerations for you. Love to hear your comments. Please get in touch with me and let me know. And until next time, be well and I’ll speak to you soon.

Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #118 Self-Esteem Isn’t What You Think It Is first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In episode 117 of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, let’s talk about another example of uncommon sense: Objectivity doesn’t exist.

Listen to understand why this is, and why, despite often hearing that objectivity is a good thing, true objectivity is impossible.

I also discuss how the alternative helps foster compassion and empathy and paves the path to healthier relationships and an interconnected worldview.

Once you’ve listened, let me know what you think! Be sure to leave a comment!

Subscribe to The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a caller on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello everyone. I’m going to be providing you with another principle of uncommon sense. Here’s the headline. There is no such thing as objectivity and that’s really a good thing.

We have an unquestioning belief in objectivity. It’s actually fundamental to our sense of reality and how we engage life. It’s a primary pillar of our belief system and it organizes our beliefs and thinking. And boy, it really screws us up.

The premise of objectivity you see is actually fundamentally flawed once we look at it. We’ve all heard the critical comment, you’re not being objective. Well, your best response interestingly might be, well, of course not. That would be impossible.

Let me give you the background. And before I go into the science, I’ll share an anecdote. Some of you may have heard this before, so bear with me. I was a potential juror in an alleged drunk under the influence case. I was sitting on the witness stand being questioned as that potential juror and the prosecutor asked me, can you be objective? I admit, I couldn’t wait to create some chaos and I replied, absolutely not. The judge was curious. He leaned down toward me and asked, well, what do you mean, Mr. Schwartz? I paused for a moment and asked, judge, do you have beliefs? Well, he smiled and said, of course I do. I then levied the boom.

Judge, beliefs are biases, aren’t they? A belief is a subjective way of looking at things. As humans, we all have values and beliefs and biases and they are of course subjective. That’s the essence of being human.

The judge granted me my philosophical point and then asked, what should we ask the potential juror? I thought about it for a moment and I said, I’d ask the juror if they could be in touch with their bias, try to put it to the side and still feel they could make a fair decision.

Now, to strengthen this point around the myth of objectivity, recall the lessons that I have shared in my book, The Possibility Principle and from previous podcasts. What did the new sciences say about inseparability? They tell us that reality is thoroughly inseparable, not simply interconnected, but inseparable. Well, to be objective requires standing apart from what you’re observing, detached. But if there’s inseparability, we don’t stand apart from anything or anyone. We are thinking, feeling human beings. We are thoroughly interconnected. We are in some fundamental way participating with what we’re looking at.

Quantum physics calls this the observer participant problem. More importantly, on a non-scientific basis, this belief in our ability to be objective makes no sense. It would require an amnesia of any personal values and beliefs that make us who we are. I mean, we should all agree that the Holocaust happened and the Twin Towers came down, but human perceptions are subjectively informed. We are humans, not robots and not computers.

So what’s the big deal? You might wonder about this point I’m making. This is not simply a philosophical or scientific point. I’m going to be demonstrating how our belief in this false and unattainable myth of objectivity creates havoc in our relationships with ourselves and others. And objectivity is the heart of communication breakdown because it eviscerates compassion, feeling, and empathy. This illusion of objectivity lies at the heart of our relationship dysfunction and disharmony. And furthermore, the construct of objectivity has its roots in this illusion of separation.

Once again, as I’ve shared before, this comes to us from 17th century Newtonian thinking. That thinking was that reality was a giant machine and all the parts were separate from all the other parts, only connected by causality. And we became the cogs in that machine.

I’d love to show you my appreciation for your subscribing to and rating this podcast by offering you a gift to one of the following. The Power of Mind, a live talk that I gave, or one of my digital eBooks, Creating Authentic Self-Esteem, Overcoming Anxiety, or Raising Resilient Children, and lastly, Cultivating Resilient Relationships. Once you have subscribed, please send an email to mel at melschwartz.com and just let me know which gift you’d prefer. Thanks.

So, I’ll prompt you with a question. Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?

Sometimes I’m working with couples mired in debate and argument, and I myself have gone there and I find myself asking others or myself, would you rather be right or would you rather be happy? When I ask this question of other people, they will give me a well-considered answer, I’d rather be happy. But in a moment or two, they default right back to right versus wrong. This argument is rooted in the objective belief that one is right and one is wrong. Remember that’s either or thinking, we’ve talked about that before, if I’m right, you must be wrong. And it’s so natural for us to mindlessly descend into this debate.

Well, how’s that going to work out? If I need to be right, then you must be wrong. Now that doesn’t sound like a formula for harmony, or good feelings, or relationship health, does it? What causes us to default into this morass? My guess is it has much to do with our belief in objectivity, from which there is a right and a wrong. Now, of course, there are times when those verdicts make sense, but most often we’re communicating about facts rather than perceptions or feelings. We’re arguing about the truth rather than feelings.

Facts belong in the courtroom. Feelings are the basis of relationship. Facts don’t change opinions or move our hearts. Feelings do. Instead of arguing who said what, to whom, and when, what the exact words were, what day that happened, just release the litigation. Share how you feel. Feelings are the heartbeat of a relationship. And what we call facts may inform our feelings, but we need to express the feeling. When you find yourself mired in that mind-numbing back-and-forth argument, let go of the debate. Pause and ask the other person, do you care how I feel? Unless you’re on a debate team or you’re a party in a court proceeding, facts don’t matter, feelings do.

We may say I love you, but what does that really mean? Does it make sense to propose that you love someone and yet disregard their troubled feelings? If you say you love me, you should care how I feel. Let go of the objective argument and the extraneous facts and speak to your feelings. This moves you both to the heart of the matter, pun intended. Feelings aren’t subject to the right or wrong judgment and free us to express our deeper being. So try releasing the debate, the ping pong match that goes nowhere and just ask, do you care how I feel? And if the answer is yes, but bring it back to the feelings, don’t allow yourself to be distracted.

Have you ever been told your feelings aren’t rational? This is a case of leaning in. Once again, don’t defend your territory, lean in. Your response could be, of course my feelings aren’t rational. I didn’t know that feelings should be subjected to logic. You know, you can reflect on your feelings, you can appreciate what provoked them, you can reconsider your feelings, but feelings aren’t right or wrong, they simply surface. When you say I feel this and that, you’re speaking the language of emotions, not the words of objective rational logic.

Many years ago, half a lifetime ago, I find myself in a bedtime disagreement with my former wife. I’d say, it’s hot in here, I’m going to turn down the thermostat. Her response might sound like, no, it’s not hot, it’s cold. Well, I came to appreciate that making objective statements were getting me nowhere. So I learned to say I feel hot. That wasn’t arguable. It might not solve the problem over the thermostat, but at least a senseless argument was avoided. Feelings are usually catalyzed by a thought that precedes the feeling.

So you might ask yourself, what thought are you attached to? What thought surfaced that resulted in the feeling you’re experiencing? Now when you employ this exercise, you’re able to release the feeling if it’s sidetracking you by simply saying to yourself, well, that was just a thought. The takeaway here, objectivity has no real significant place in human relationships or in human communication. It blocks us, it intrudes on our well-being, it gets in the way of our being cared about and caring for others.

It’s so easy to invalidate each other and be unfeeling when we’re arguing about objectivity, which again, doesn’t exist. It’s all a matter of perception. So try to let go of this false mythology about objectivity. It puts us in a straitjacket of logic.

I’ll close with a quote. It’s not exact, it comes from my memory, from Thomas Jefferson. He said, or he wrote, I never heard of a circumstance in which an argument was settled by the addition of more facts. Now ain’t that the truth, unless you’re in the courtroom.

Well, hope this was provocative for you, gave you some new perceptions. I look forward to talking to you again soon, next week in fact. Until then, be well and come into your participatory subjective mindset. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #117 The Myth of Objectivity first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

Episode 116 of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz continues my exploration of the themes and principles of my next book, Uncommon Sense: How to Live a Fearless Life.

Often, we’re inclined to think our lives are difficult because that’s just what it means to be human. This perhaps fatalistic assumption is rooted in the fact that we’ve accepted certain assumptions, a certain philosophy we’ve received from our parents, our peers, our educational system…

…but what if that’s not the only choice?

What if we rejected so-called “common” sense and opted for a worldview that lifts us up rather than brings us down? An “uncommon sense” that emphasizes our limitless potential and doesn’t encourage adherence to the status quo?

Listen to this episode and discover how to depersonalize our struggles and harness life-affirming uncommon sense.

Once you’ve listened, let me know what you think! Be sure to leave a comment!

Subscribe to The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a caller on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello everyone. Last week, I shared with you some initial thoughts and a bit of a preface to my new work, a forthcoming book, still way down the road. It’s called Uncommon Sense. As promised, I’m going to now move a little more deeply into the premise of Uncommon Sense. So let’s begin.

Do you ever feel like life is really challenging? More importantly, do you ever wonder why it’s so challenging? You know, if you haven’t, if you haven’t thought that and felt that, you’re pretty much in the minority. So I want you to depersonalize your struggles. And in fact, you can ponder a different question.

Do you think your challenges, your struggles, do you think they’re simply human nature? Is life just intrinsically so difficult? There’s something else at play. I’ve come to believe, strongly believe it’s the latter. Life shouldn’t be so intrinsically difficult. I think the reason we have these challenges is we’ve been playing from an incoherent, insane game plan for life. You know what we call common sense, our underlying philosophy for how we do life, this lies at the heart of our struggles and it derails our ability to really thrive. To truly reach our human potential, what should be our human nature, we’ve got to operate from a life philosophy that supports us, not derails us. Most people ascribe to and follow the guidelines of what we call common sense without giving it any thought at all.

But what if common sense turned out to be misinformed, even nonsensical? I’m not talking about expressions like look both ways before you cross the street, but the larger operating rules of life that guide us and shape how we live, what we believe, what we think, how we interact and how we communicate. We pay so little attention to these large meta beliefs that script our lives, but they have an unimaginable impact on us. I’m speaking about commonly accepted beliefs like be careful not to make a mistake or change his heart, don’t show weakness or always do your best. These beliefs demonstrate the explicit operating rule book for how we engage life. And I believe that following the path of these unexamined common sense beliefs lies at the heart of our struggle with happiness, self-worth, results in fear, relationship conflict, and so much more.

If we follow these unwritten tenets, the golden rule book of life, you’d suppose that life should be going reasonably well. But is it? We tend to fall short or very far short, don’t we? With few exceptions, we struggle with unrelenting challenges, anxiety, depression, conflicted relationship, doubt, insecurities, anger, frustration, and existential struggle. All of that besets most of us. When your personal experiences don’t match up with your hopes and expectations, you think we should go back to the proverbial drawing board and rethink our game plan, but we don’t. Instead, we personalize our disappointments and upsets, and we think there’s something wrong with us. Or we continue to walk into the same wall, feeling frustrated, sometimes depressed. From this experience, we wrongly conclude that change is hard, but we rarely ask the questions about these guidelines which make us indentured servants.

So who wrote this rule book of commonly accepted wisdom that we blindly accept? Silly question, rhetorical question. I can’t answer it, neither can you. These beliefs and adages are just ingrained memes from unknown sources. You know when someone says, everyone knows you should say this or do that, or somebody says, they say, dot, dot, dot. Those are examples of unexamined common sense about how you ought to conduct your life. But do you ever ask yourself, who are they? Our culture at large, our parents, our families, our friends, all echo similar messages. What we refer to as common sense may be nothing more than believing what we’ve always believed and doing what we always do.

Common sense themes become indomitable. We cling to them fervently, and that’s why we get stuck. We conform to the very system that fails us. And this creates a program conformity, a consensual reality. This absence of self-reliance, which you’ve heard me speak about a lot, it blocks us from our authentic, resilient well-being. Sometimes people ask, what’s the right thing to do? They struggle making challenging decisions. In these cases, we surrender to what we think the anonymous, monolithic opinion of other people on what they would do. Defaulting to what we think they would suggest we should do means we haven’t developed our own inner wisdom.

And why would we assume that these others, they, are any wiser than we are? Or that there is a universal right thing to do or say? Reality snuffs out developing self-reliance.

Now here’s the key. In science, in business, and elsewhere in life, we test our theories and we evaluate the outcomes. And the results should either affirm or disprove our operating assumption. That’s how knowledge progresses. We discard what doesn’t work, and we invite in new thinking and add new methods. This enables businesses to increase profits, technology to advance, medical knowledge evolves, athletes improve their performance, and science surges forward. That type of progress requires critical thinking.

Now the way that I’m applying this term critical thinking simply refers to your capacity to look at your beliefs and actions and ask, how did I come to this belief? Why do I think this belief or action is sensible? How’s it working out for me? Why am I doing this and not that? Ask yourself, have you reflected on those questions? And if you shrug your shoulders and say, I never thought about it, there’s no critical thinking. And that is a common denominator in most of our lives. It’s kind of like a blind apathy that leads us to stumble from today into all of our tomorrows. And so life goes by.

Critical thinking requires contrasting our beliefs with our lived experiences. Think about how you think you want to live your life and how you are living your life.

I’d love to show you my appreciation for your subscribing to and rating this podcast by offering you a gift to one of the following. The Power of Mind, a live talk that I gave, or one of my digital eBooks, Creating Authentic Self-Esteem, Overcoming Anxiety, or Raising Resilient Children, and lastly, Cultivating Resilient Relationships. Once you have subscribed, please send an email to mel at melschwartz.com and just let me know which gift you’d prefer. Thanks.

When the evidence and your beliefs are at odds, we have to embrace the dissonance and shift our beliefs. Beliefs are simply biases and they shape our thoughts, our feelings, and our life experiences. At times, our beliefs are simply a dulled, unthinking mirror of our early life experiences. But on a deeper level, our beliefs and our common sense are informed by a prevalent philosophy. When I speak of philosophy, I’m referring to the underlying belief system that holds sway over our truths. And picture the word truths in quotes. It’s subjective, not objective. Much of the Western world is influenced by a philosophy of competing, winning, consuming, and a toxic individualism. And these themes strangle us with fear. And that in turn shapes and directs our common sense beliefs. Fear is a pervasive and dominating force in our existing common sense life philosophy. And a life that is predicated on fear cannot work out well. Fear precludes love, joy, and happiness. Now certain aspects of our lives like health, longevity, material comfort, financial security may be improving. But our happiness, fulfillment, and gratification, they tend to lag. Our personal intimate experience of life hasn’t kept pace with the remarkable advances we’ve made in our material and technological world.

If we applied the same scrutiny to our blueprint for life as we do these other matters, we’d really be evolving to a greater wisdom instead of floundering. Here’s an example of what I’m speaking about. What often begins as romantic relationships, they tend to devolve toward conflict or at least disappointment over time. We don’t question the unwritten rules of relationship that disrupt our harmony. We fall in love, maybe get married or partner, exchange vows, but only a small minority of relationships thrive for very long. The fact that half of marriages end in divorce, that is not the problem. The real issue is in intact marriages or committed relationships become discontent over time. Only a small percentage of committed relationships endure happily. That is a staggering rate of failure. If marriage were a corporation, it would be bankrupt. But when a business falls for bankruptcy, it needs to reorganize and develop a new business plan if it hopes to secure a second chance.

But do we stop and consider what needs to change for our relationships to thrive? Unfortunately the common sense path that guides us in relationship fails us way too often. We then wrongly conclude that relationships are hard and they are. If we go after them without insight or awareness, don’t you think it’s time to rethink our relationship and our communication rule book?

Here’s another example. According to the CDC, your likelihood of suffering with a mental illness at some point in your life is about 50%. That’s a staggering and bizarre rate of failure. Do you think it has something to do with living life from an incoherent, fearful and unsustainable way rather than your own personal dysfunction? But we have ignored ourselves to thinking of these dysfunctions as normal. If these emotional and psychological disorders are so prevalent and we acclimate to it, what does this suggest about how we’re living? Anxiety and depression don’t come to us as an infectious disease. We don’t catch them as we did COVID. This should be an alarm that signals that we are not living sensibly. You know, if a recipe results in a distasteful meal, you wouldn’t repeat the same recipe. Well, we need a new recipe for living.

Something appears terribly misguided in our plan for life when all of this disorder is our outcome. This should be screaming for our attention. Think about this. Do you feel genuinely happy, fulfilled and joyful? Do you feel sufficiently confident and self-assured? Or do you struggle with some aspect of self-esteem? Low self-esteem, as you’ve heard me say before, very curiously, is not a DSM diagnosis, but it underlies deeper emotional, psychological and relationship challenges. I will be sharing with you how common sense ironically contributes to low self-worth. Hear that again. Our common sense rule book contributes to low self-worth.

The expression, how’s that working out? When applied to this application of common sense, should cause us to stop and rethink how we are engaging life. So what would I propose as some solutions? Well, imagine if our educational curricula focused not only on academics, but on emotional intelligence and relationship skills, on how to develop authentic self-esteem and master your communication skills and how to ride the waves of change. What if you learn not to medicate or manage emotional and psychological troubles, but to actually transcend them? If we only appreciated the hard skills we learn in school or after math, reading, science, they are not more, but perhaps ironically less critical than learning human-based competencies. We only address our inadequacies when we derail.

But our education and our upbringing never provided the rails to begin with. So of course we derail. But what we need is this shift of mind so we can experience our lives differently. And we were never taught these valuable life enhancing skills and so we may stumble through life illiterate on what’s required to truly prosper. Again, you may have succeeded in educational, financial, material aspirations, but I bet you struggled to thrive in some actual experience of life. Success in and of itself does not ensure harmony or wisdom. In fact, there are times when there may be an inverse correlation.

Okay, so I’ve looked at all of these common sense strategies and I have found many of them to be utterly ridiculous. Not only do they not work for the most part, they actually wreak damage. We need a new philosophy for living, a new guidebook that opens our minds and our hearts to love and compassion, to authentic self-worth, and to thriving relationships. Now the word that summarizes this goal, the important ingredient, is authenticity.

Ask yourself, do you personally know anyone that you’d say is truly authentic? Authenticity is a rare commodity. It means that you wear no masks. You’re not worried about what other people think of you, but you remain caring and sensitive at the same time. And authenticity can only flourish in the absence of fear. But fear permeates the fiber of our lives. And fear seems to be the common underpinning of our existence. You know, we’re urged to be present and live in the moment, be in flow. But common sense rules tell you to do the opposite. Those rules are be wary of making a change, be afraid of making a mistake, worry about what others think of you. You see the wall you walk into there? Common sense counterintuitively freezes us in fear. And fear is the primary component of common sense.

So that is what has prompted me to write this book, which I’m just beginning, which I’m calling Uncommon Sense. Uncommon sense requires stripping off many of our personal operating beliefs. These new beliefs become the foundation for love, connection, meaning and purpose. Again, how did I come to write this book or to speak on these matters? Well, as you may know by now, I question things. I look at deeply accepted beliefs, actions, behaviors, and I ask, why do we think and believe and act the way we do? And from that perspective, I’ve been fortunate to view life from a different perch, a different angle, which has allowed me to source some insights.

I’m going to be introducing a fundamental rethinking of our operating beliefs and introducing what I call an emerging worldview, a new philosophy for living. This new way of contemplating reality invites us into innovative critical thinking, a gateway for better living. This is what I referred to earlier as the adaptive process of critical thinking that we apply to technology, science, business. Now we’ll apply that critical thinking to the underlying principles of how we do life. These new principles that I’ll be sharing with you offer an urgently needed rethinking of reality, universal reality and personal reality.

In coming weeks, I will be introducing some of the principles of Uncommon Sense. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. I hope it gave you cause for reflection, contemplation, and an opening to the embracing of uncertainty and asking what if in the positive way, full of wonder, not of fear. Until next time, be well. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #116 The Gift of Uncommon Sense first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

Welcome to episode 115 of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! This time around, I look forward with you to the subject and topics to come in my next book, Uncommon Sense: How to Live a Fearless Life.

To understand the book to come, it’s important to review how I came to the wisdom I’ll present in Uncommon Sense. Let’s travel back to before my last book, The Possibility Principle, and before my first book, The Art of Intimacy, The Pleasure of Passion… back before I had even considered becoming a psychotherapist!

What inspired me to leap off the conveyor belt of life and change my own script?

Listen, and discover the key piece of advice I gave myself that helped me eventually embrace uncertainty and find my calling.

Let me know what you think! Be sure to leave a comment!

Subscribe to The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a caller on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello everyone. I’ve been working on an upcoming book for some time and I thought it would be good to share with you some of my initial thoughts and drafts about what’s coming your way down the road. The title for the book at this moment is Uncommon Sense, How to Live a Fearless Life.

So here are my thoughts.

As a psychotherapist, there are times when people might ask me, where were you trained? You know, I can be provocative, even a wise guy, and I might say, I wasn’t trained. I like to keep my mind as open as possible. You see, for me, the word training is suggesting narrowing of my mind and my thoughts. So you think and see from a very focused singular perspective, like the small end of a funnel or tunnel vision.

Think as you’ve been trained to think. Boy, I hate that.

I’ve resisted this indoctrination professionally and personally, and I think we’d all be better to do so, to resist the training of our thinking. I can remember instinctively resisting, corralling my beliefs and thoughts into that never nding funnel of consensual reality making. Keeping my mind open, for me, feels like freedom. The freedom to navigate my own path, to come out of consensual reality, not playing by the rules, the mandated rules of the rules of engagement. You know, when we mindlessly conform to a singular way of thinking and communicating and relating, it feels dehumanizing to me, robotic and mindless, but that’s where we go. That’s how culture corrals us into everybody thinking and acting the same way.

So from this vantage point, many questions arise for me. I’ve asked myself, why do we struggle so terribly in reaching and sustaining happiness? And why do anxiety, depression, distress, and fear, why do they all dominate our lives? Why do our relationships become a source of conflict and pain rather than joy and love? Why do we do battle with self-worth, meaning, and purpose? Why is there such a gap between what we say we value and how we end up living our life?

I look for the larger influences that have derailed the heart and soul of our human experience. And so I’m simply asking, why? The belief that I’ve come to is that it’s the operating rule book for life that we follow. Without any consideration or awareness of it, it fails us. I’m referring to the deeper, invisible forces that script how we live. We’ve become indentured servants to a template that we’re unaware of that tells us how to think, how to live, and how to love, and it misguides us. This unwritten but pervasive philosophy for living, it riddles us with fear. In this fear, obviously, it decimates our lives.

Here’s the lead up to my thinking. I’ll share a bit of personal biography, and many of you may be familiar with this, but for those of you who aren’t, it’s important to hear it. I had a life-altering, defining moment when I was about 40 years old. My identity was really shaped during my college years in the early 70s. I found great calling and passion as an anti-war activist, and the excitement of participating in this emerging counterculture, man, was it exciting.

And what an identity. I believed that we could change the world, and I was playing a part in this adventure, and I was having the time of my life. I even managed to delay graduating college for as long as I could so I wouldn’t disrupt this fun, wondrous time. Thankfully, tuition was really nominal at that time, so I thought another semester or two wouldn’t be too onerous on my parents, or at least I rationalized that. I will confess that I stretched out my indulgences by taking several incompletes so I could extend college. But you know, as George Harrison sang, all things must pass, and it reached the point where I had to pay the piper, and I couldn’t stay in school any longer. But I hadn’t given any thought to what my next step would be. So I applied to law school, more from default than from intention.

I was admitted, but within a month or so, it became evident to me that the law was not my calling, and I withdrew. Now the question was, what was I going to do with my life? I didn’t have any clear path forward. I reluctantly accepted my father’s offer to join him in this business. I was grateful for his generosity, but I didn’t feel inspired. My father was a clothing manufacturer, something I had no interest in. But with sadness, I cut my long hair. I transitioned into a suit, a job, and life in New York City. I had stepped onto the conveyor belt that we call life.

But when I did, I made myself a promise. Every so often, I would jump off the conveyor belt and ask myself, how’s it going? I’d remind myself to think about whether I needed to make any adjustments. I had an image of a piece of luggage on the conveyor belt at the airport going around and around ad nauseum until someone retrieved the baggage. I was fearful that my conveyor metaphor might resemble my future life. My fear simply was I’d make a few major decisions, blink my eyes a few times, and half a lifetime would pass. I dreaded becoming a character in this life script without an opportunity to edit or rethink my life. This turned out to be a really fruitful promise for me.

I’d love to show you my appreciation for your subscribing to and rating this podcast by offering you a gift to one of the following. The Power of Mind, a live talk that I gave, or one of my digital eBooks, Creating Authentic Self-Esteem, Overcoming Anxiety, or Raising Resilient Children, and lastly, Cultivating Resilient Relationships. Once you have subscribed, please send an email to mel at melschwartz.com and just let me know which gift you’d prefer. Thanks.

As the years went by, I acclimated to this new identity, and I progressed in learning the craft of apparel manufacturing. I eventually started my own business, doing well enough financially, but not really aware that something vitally important was missing. I spent the coming years following the path toward what I thought success and happiness would look like.

At 40, I was married with two young children, living the life I was supposed to be, at least I thought so. I vividly recall the moment in which my change process ignited.

I was driving from my office in Manhattan to my home in Aranoth in Westchester County. During that car ride, I had been reflecting on my life, and in particular, my passionless career. In one singular moment, with one new thought, a seismic wave overcame me. Everything shifted, and my insight crystallized into this single thought. Is that all there is? Am I going to spend my life making clothing? I came to see myself as the character in that script that I fearfully presaged many years earlier. I was well along on that conveyor belt’s ride of life.

My earlier vision of living my best life was one that was bubbling with meaning. It was now feeling corrupted by simply making a good living. Creating and producing clothing was falling way short of my ideal of living a life with purpose. My business, although providing me with a really generous income and a great home and lifestyle, it still left me feeling shallow and uninspired. I was longing for the deeper values that I felt in those earlier years. I felt revolted by the idea of just surrendering to a purposeless life, one that provided financial reward but left me feeling empty and vacuous.

This dispirited feeling really evaporated in a few moments, and it was transformed by the time I reached my house. I felt this stirring proclamation beginning to percolate within me. As I entered my house, I said to my future former wife, I know that’s a funny term, my future former wife, I said, sit down, we need to talk. She probably thought I was going to share some divorce news, but that wasn’t yet on the horizon. I said, I had an epiphany during the drive home. I realized I need to find a new career path, something that can inspire me with more meaning and purpose. She looked at me like I was from the moon. She asked me what I was planning. I told her I had no idea.

I didn’t feel worried, but I felt really alive. I spent the night sleepless.

I thought this profession might align me with that deeper calling. Maybe I could write books, give talks, podcasts weren’t invented yet, and whatever else came my way. Bear in mind, I had very little familiarity with the field of psychotherapy, but the idea was romantic and it was pulling me. A deep intuitive knowing that this might be my passionate path, it began to resonate with me.

Still, I had significant concerns. How would this new direction impact my family’s lifestyle? I could anticipate earning far, far less income, at least for quite some time, maybe forever. Were we prepared for this downshift economically? Would we have to sell the house? Could we even live in the same town? Was this fair to my children and to my wife? And more fundamentally, would I be able to earn enough to financially support them? Friends and family surely would have urged me caution, be cautious, slow down, think more deeply about this. If only I had chosen to consult with them. But perhaps that’s the very reason I chose not to share.

Was my decision impetuous? Well, rational common sense would have me analyze the downside and weigh my risks. This led to a breakthrough in my thinking. Let’s call it new thinking. Words like be reasonable, be prudent, be sensible, they were all over my mental radar. People in my circumstances encumbered with such financial responsibilities didn’t just make such radical changes unless you’re in the midlife crisis. But I was seeing this as a midlife opportunity, not a crisis. You see, not making this transition might assault my well-being at a slow but irreversible pace. I might end up falling into depression. My internal monologue was clash of opposing thoughts. Why I can’t versus why can’t I? I began to see myself dueling with the conformity of normal behavior, which would have me focus on the negative consequences that might occur. Those thoughts grappled with uncertainty and would fire up fear.

Instinctively, I knew that I did not want to surrender to this fear. That in turn ushered in a new way of thinking for me. I welcomed in the dissonance I experienced. I felt this surging desire to break free from the grip of limiting and fearful beliefs and thoughts. So instead of simply focusing on my fears, on the negative consequences that might happen, my revelation was, why not consider the consequences of not making a change?

Wow did that open new thinking. We worry about what will happen if I do this, what will happen if I say this. Do we ever think about what happens if we don’t do this or say this? I realized that this new way of thinking for me was very atypical. But I felt convinced that we only look at one side of the coin. What will happen if I do something? The other side, what will happen if I don’t? Something started to shift within me and I began to just strip away traditional ways of thinking and invite in what I now call uncommon sense. I was embracing uncertainty to supercharge my change process and I was choosing not to live in fear. I took the leap and here we are.

In my next episode, next week, I’ll be providing you with some of the basic principles of uncommon sense.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please send me emails, leave comments, let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to hear, what you’re enjoying and what you’re not. And until next time, I wish you uncommon sense. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #115 Being True to Yourself first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In this re-issue of the second episode of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz you may have missed when it was first released almost five years ago, I explore the nature of romantic love: how it begins and why it tends to wither, and what it takes to make it work over time.

After an introductory discussion, I speak with two clients regarding emotional reactivity and why we shouldn’t put our best foot forward in the early stages of relationship. Together with my guests, we examine the nature of authenticity, which is essential for resilient relationships.

Let me know what you think! Be sure to leave a comment!

Subscribe to The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a caller on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

MEL: A couple of weeks ago, I went to a family wedding. It was the children of one of my cousins, beautiful couple in their late twenties. They were all full of love, flush with excitement. I was paying close attention when they were exchanging their marriage vows. They pledged each other everlasting love, honoring and respect to each other. And I thought to myself, it was so hopeful. They were so inspired. But another voice was going off inside of me.

MEL: It made me think, do they know how terribly stacked the odds are against them? Do they understand the likelihood that in a number of years or certainly a number of decades, they’ll no longer be feeling in love? In all probability, they may say they love each other, but they have fallen out of love.

MEL: I’ve learned that love isn’t all you need. It’s not like the Beatles song: “love is all you need.” We need very much more to sustain love. Let’s take a look at that. The fact that half of marriages end in divorce isn’t really the major issue. The larger concern is that the majority of intact marriages fall very far from being joyful, resilient, happy. So if only a small percentage of marriages or committed relationships actually thrive, what does that tell us about how we are engaging in the art of relationship in our love life? If we play by the same rules that disappoint us and create such failure, we’re doomed to have the same outcome.

MEL: Getting back to that couple, on occasion, I have had couples who were engaged come in for some premarital counseling and there are no issues in their relationship that are apparent. They’ve come to me out of the wisdom that they want to learn the tools, the techniques, the method, a new game plan, if you will, for being able to sustain passion and emotional and verbal intimacy. They’re looking to get the education that others don’t have. When my children were in high school, they had something called seminar day for certain parents who were invited to come in and give a talk. On the day that I came in, my kids were so embarrassed that they made sure they were nowhere within sight, but they shared the fact that we need to be educated in the foundations of what creates a thriving life and thriving relationships. And that information is available to us, but it would be so much better if we tried to access that information, those insights, those skills in advance of running into trouble. So let’s take a look at this concept of love.

MEL: Firstly, what do we mean by the word love? Love has many nuances, lots of context. I believe that the Greek language, they have perhaps 21 different words for love. In today’s episode, we’re going to be focusing on romantic love. The kind of love where two people are resonating, there’s a shared energy with one another.

MEL: Let’s take a look at the phenomenon of falling in love. The experience of falling in love is truly a thing of marvel. Time seems altered and our senses become very alive. You may experience each moment as having meaning and intent. It’s a peak moment in life. But sadly, over time, we tend to fall out of love, possibly as easily as we fell in love. We may say that we still love each other, but we’re not in love. This happens often in my work as a couple’s counselor. Let’s explore why this happens and what this phenomenon is that we call love.

MEL: The notion of falling in love is one of the most dominant, powerful themes in our lives. It sells movies and books, fashions and cosmetics. It drives the gross national product and it’s a central theme in our fantasies. Along with achieving material wealth, love is the primary driving force in our lives, but it’s poorly understood. The euphoria felt by falling in love is actually a profound merging of energies. In quantum physics, this is known as entanglement. Entanglement is a sense of oneness where separation dissolves and falls apart. I’m not talking about an unhealthy co-dependence, but it’s in that entanglement, that oneness, that empathy and compassion become stimulated, where our driving energy is to care for, intend and nurture the other. That’s what falling in love feels like.

MEL: All animate beings are energy fields manifesting in physical form, so simple physical attraction to one another predicated on lust is not the same as love. Falling in love requires that our energies coalesce with each other. When this occurs, our energy field literally resonates with our partner’s energy field. It’s like striking a tuning fork and seeing both ends vibrate in perfect harmony. It’s like being in concert. Think about listening to an orchestra performing. The musicians are in concert with each other. Their individualism is still there, their unique talents, but there’s a synergy. That’s what being in love feels like. The shared energy manifests in the partnering feels deeply committed. Any disturbance or disruption to that harmonized energy causes us to feel we’re not in love. When our energies become blocked by any host of impediments, we no longer feel in love. So our energy field has gotten disrupted.

MEL: What are the things that get in the way and impede that loving energy? Sometimes it’s simply due to hurt feelings, resentment or anger. Without having authentic communication skills to permit these issues to be resolved, the energy system of the relationship is at risk. It withers. Many people believe that it’s natural to fall out of love. I don’t think it’s natural. You see, we shouldn’t confuse natural with commonplace. Regrettably, it’s altogether common, but it’s not natural. The problem is that we are illiterate in this field, relationship and love. Falling in love and sustaining it requires maintaining the sense of oneness. And this is a skill set that can be learned.

MEL: You know, in the turmoil we experience when the relationship becomes adversarial and conflicted, we need to acknowledge or change something to shift that negative energy, which has fallen into a sense of separation, back toward the entangled oneness. Making that shift may mean changing our beliefs, perceptions, or our behaviors, or all of them. You might ask yourself, what is my partner seeing in me that I don’t see in myself? That self-reflection is a great technique to employ. If you set out with the intention to re-enter that harmonized energy field, the initial romantic entanglement, you can selflessly get into the other’s shoes. That’s empathy.

MEL: Try the exercise of empathy. What does my partner, what does my spouse feel like in this moment? Doing this doesn’t mean you’re abandoning your position. It simply means loving and validating your partner. You know, it’s very easy to say I love you, but it’s challenging to act lovingly. To act lovingly means that if you’re feeling denigrated or nullified or put down or ignored, you’ll still be able to advocate and care for the other in a loving way. If I try to appreciate and care about my upset partner’s point of view, I’m creating a shift of energy. Acting empathically with your partner is the most powerful thing you can do in such troubled moments.

MEL: One of the things that gets in the way in sustaining loving relationships is the tendency to take each other for granted. What began as an earnest connection where we were amplifying the importance and tuning into each other, over time tends to retreat into this individualism. This is where passion dies. Passion doesn’t have to die. It’s just that our intentions get distracted.

MEL: Too much individualism is at the core of relationship trouble. Excessive individualism, the breakdown in communication for right versus wrong is a mindless exercise and a mindless encounter. And it severs that loving energy that I was speaking about.

MEL: Let’s talk a little bit about communication. I wrote an article many, many years ago called, “Would You Rather Be Right or Would You Rather Be Happy?” Well, so often in my relationship counseling, I find the breakdown over right versus wrong. Couples will argue over the most inane points and correct each other in the need to be right. Try to ask yourself at any moment as you’re about to interrupt the other person and correct them. Does this really matter? Now, sometimes it may vary well, but most often if you’re being reflective and you’re mindful and present, it doesn’t. Right versus wrong thinking precludes validation. If your partner says to you or your spouse says to you, I’m really feeling hurt. You hurt me. You put me down. You made me feel worthless. You should never respond by refuting what they’ve said and trying to prove your point. That is invalidating the other person. What we need to do in a moment like that is get out of our own way and act lovingly, which means caring about how they feel.

MEL: Now, validating isn’t simply mirroring the words back that you just heard. It’s a deeper trying to connect with empathy and get into the other shoes and ask questions to experience how did they experience you.

MEL: Another premise to what gets in the way of sustaining loving and romantic relationships is that if two individuals don’t each commit to their own individual growth, we’re left kind of like two halves comprising a whole. You know that expression, my other half, sometimes that can be taken quite literally. But if two people only feel like a half, it’s going to set up dependency needs, frustrations, fears. When I work with a couple whereby both people are committed to their own individual growth, there’s a much greater likelihood of a positive outcome.

MEL: There are ways to break the cycle of negativity in relationships. One of them is a positive feedback. When I work with couples, I often see both persons individually as well. And in an individual session, the person may say something favorable or positive about their partner who’s not in the room at the moment. There has never been an occasion when I have asked, did you share that with your husband, with your wife, with your boyfriend or girlfriend, that the answer has ever been, yes, I did. This is astounding to me. You have something positive to say and you withhold it. But the critical is right out there in the open. The spout is wide open and we share the critical and we withhold the positive. How do you think that impacts sustaining a romantic and intimate relationship?

MEL: Now it is possible to fall in love, fall out of love, come back in love. Sometimes couples will ask me, is it possible for us to fall in love? My question will be, did you ever feel in love? If you did, that energy was there and you resonated, then there is a possibility we can get back that harmony, that relationship. What we need is a game plan for sustaining emotionally and verbally intimate relationships for sustaining romance. My first book, The Art of Intimacy, The Pleasure of Passion was intended as a primer for what we need to develop toward the foundation of an enjoyable and thriving relationship, creating a shared vision about what we want in our lives to look like. My new book, The Possibility Principle, goes very deeply into the techniques that we can develop and employ in our communications.

MEL: This is all about new learning. It’s developing a new game plan for our life. Just recall that love isn’t all you need. We need to learn how to sustain it. This is achievable and it can be the icing on the cake of your life. It’s going to require some thoughtfulness and some new learning, but it’s readily available to you.

MEL: The topic of this show, as you know, is love isn’t all you need. Please tell us about yourself and what question you might have.

MATT: Well, okay, so I have been married once before many years ago when I was about 21, 22 years old and I was married for about 10 years and ended up getting divorced. I have an 18 year old boy and he’s doing great. He’s in college. I had some relationships, probably two long-term relationships after that divorce. And by the way, that divorce happened probably about 15 years ago at this point. So I was single for a while. And just in October of 2017, I got married again to a wonderful woman.

MEL: Wow. Congratulations. What’s her name?

MATT: Her name is Christina.

MEL: Great. Well, congratulations to both of you.

MATT: Thank you very much. Thank you. And she’s pretty much what I’ve been looking for. I mean, she’s wonderful. She’s beautiful. Now, I have had many times throughout our relationship, we’ve been together for a couple of years now, where I have felt inadequate as a partner, very frustrated because I feel like my ego gets in the way. I feel like I understand a lot of principles of how to communicate based on some previous lessons in teaching and mentoring and therapy, but yet I still run into these issues where I lose my… Anything that reminds me of conflicts that I had in my previous relationship prior to this new marriage, namely things that come up regarding my son, strike a chord with me that it’s really… I lose my patience and I can’t have the kind of dialogue and conversation that I know I should have because I feel like it’s the same old story all over again.

MEL: Well, here’s the good news, Matt. You’re halfway there. You’re on second base because you are aware of what you’re feeling. You’re aware of your reaction. So what I propose you do is when you notice your reaction, the key to communication or one of the keys is to notice your reaction and don’t become your reaction. So when you notice that your trigger point is being pushed, pause, take a deep breath and engage her. Engage Christina by saying to her, look, this probably isn’t about you. I’m feeling reactive and this is not about you. It’s my button, capital M, capital Y. But I need to tell you how I’m feeling and what’s coming up for me. When you communicate in that way, Matt, you open up the dialogue and you open up to a coherent communication where there’s no right or wrong or blame. I’m feeling this. You see, when we’re feeling something, we have to identify the feeling and communicate it. These feelings are not right or wrong. They just are. What we’re seeking from our partners is a sense of validating our feelings. That doesn’t mean I agree with you, Matt. Your feeling about me is correct. It means I appreciate that this has triggered a memory for you. So can you see yourself being able to do that? Being able to say to her, this is not about you. It’s old history for me. This is what’s coming up.

MATT: Right. I can say that. And this is where I run into trouble. I understand what you’re saying and I believe I can do that. The trouble that I have is twofold. One is, there’s something, even if I can see my thoughts and not necessarily be my thoughts, it’s a real struggle for me because you could hear it in the tone of my voice. The words might be the right words, but still, the energy and the tone behind my voice is one of frustration, fear, agitation, anger, frustration mainly. And that’s one of the things that gets me into trouble is just the tone of my voice. So I guess I’m really not successfully being, I mean, seeing my thoughts. I must be coming up because…

MEL: Okay, you’re quite right. You’re becoming your thought. Moreover, you’re becoming your feeling. Now it only takes about two or three seconds to take a couple of deep breaths. When you take two or three deep breaths, you quiet everything down. Everything starts to slow down. Your pulse isn’t as quick. Your heartbeat is not as rapid. So the moment you notice where you’re going, pause and take two or three or four deep breaths and that should calm you down.

MATT: Okay. All right.

MEL: You know, I remember as a young man, when my dad was teaching me to play golf, we’d get up on the tee and boy, I wanted to hit that ball so far and I would wind up and really crack at it. More often than not, I missed the ball, hit a terrible shot. My father used to say to me, when you get up to the tee, exhale, let a long breath out to calm you down, to slow you down. Students do that. People meditate to do that. The moment you notice that you’re getting reactive, give yourself two, three, four seconds. Nobody’s going to notice but you. And then you should be prepared to communicate effectively.

MATT: I got you. I’ll try that. Definitely. I hope it works because that’s clearly one of my issues is you could see through the intellectual words. You can still see through it because you can feel the anger. And I’m going to try to do that and take deep breaths and pause.

MEL: Once again, you’re ahead of the field because you are aware. As I said earlier, you’re on second base already. Now, you’ve just gotten remarried. You’re all full of enthusiasm. To make this love last, to allow it to be sustainable, typically requires that both of you dedicate yourself to the process of the relationship. The process is not the outcome. You know in relationships, we commit to the outcome. I’ll love you forever. I’ll never cheat on you. More often than not, that doesn’t work. What we have to commit to is the process. The measure of a relationship is not how good is it when it’s good. It’s how do we conduct ourselves when things are challenging. The commitment to the process is to set aside time to talk to each other, to be present with each other. The commitment to the process is when you need help, go out and seek that help. It’s a complex process. If you commit to that process, there’s no reason why the two of you shouldn’t succeed and have a beautiful life together. I wish you well and stay in the process.

MEL: I’d love to show you my appreciation for your subscribing to and rating this podcast by offering you a gift to one of the following. The Power of Mind, a live talk that I gave, or one of my digital eBooks, Creating Authentic Self-Esteem, Overcoming Anxiety, or Raising Resilient Children, and lastly, Cultivating Resilient Relationships. Once you have subscribed, please send an email to mel at melschwartz.com and just let me know which gift you’d prefer. Thanks.

MEL: Hi Diane, good afternoon. How are you?

DIANE: Hi Mel, I’m good.

MEL: Feel free to go ahead and ask me a question or two and we’ll have a conversation.

DIANE: The topic is very intriguing to me, about love is not all you need, because I once was told that love is not enough, and so that question has always kind of lingered for me, especially considering that this person went on to be in a relationship with someone almost exactly like me in every way you could imagine, except for just a few. And so if love wasn’t enough, it was the something else that wasn’t enough, and I’ve always been curious, what is the something else?

MEL: To start with, we don’t know what all of us mean, what each other mean by the word love. Is it romantic love? Is it passionate love? Is it spiritual love? So I don’t know what this individual meant by the word love, but I’ll certainly ask you, what does the word love conjure up for you, Diane?

DIANE: To me it conjured up everything encompassing compatibility, likes, even maybe disliking habits, things that you have to have agreements about or to work through. Sensual, sexual chemistry, personality chemistry, perhaps similar likes and dislikes, loyalty.

MEL: So that’s very comprehensive and very well put. So that’s the entire continuum of different aspects of romantic love. So when we share that with each other, for a period of time we’re acting as one, we’re feeling as one, we’re still our own individual self, but there’s a sense of oneness. And that feeling is what occurs early in the relationship when you fall in love. In quantum physics we refer to that as entanglement. When two particles share a state, they’re in a shared state no matter how far apart they are, they’re entangled as one. That’s what that feeling of love is. Now in the relationship you were referring to, there was no way to really know what he meant by love isn’t enough. People come into a relationship with so much complexity. What can help love prosper is the need to be self-reflective, to communicate effectively. There are so many different dynamics of a love relationship. So I juggle the balls, we need to keep them all up in the air. And honesty and transparency, so the very fact that you don’t know what he meant by that statement, love isn’t enough, speaks to a lack of transparency. He left you not knowing, didn’t he?

DIANE: Yes. Yes.

MEL: And that’s not fair. Did you ask him that question? What did he mean?

DIANE: I did, in probably too subtle of ways over a few times. I think the first answer that he gave was, it was not well formed, it was along the lines of shared, you know, I interpreted it as like my habit, my way of doing things, maybe shared hobbies, maybe me being messy. It seemed to encompass very superficial things to me.

MEL: And how long were the two of you together?

DIANE: At that time, it was within a year of the relationship, although I had known him from a very early age and we came together 20 something years later. So I had a lot of implied trust that I thought I knew him. But no, I didn’t get an explanation, really.

MEL: This speaks to the heart of the matter. When two people first meet and perhaps start to feel like they’re falling in love, the euphoria, the high, it’s so great. We don’t want to disturb it. But what’s necessary to sustain a more mature, evolving love relationship is to be able to ask each other deep, compelling, inquiring questions so that we don’t just put our best foot forward, but we’re putting our authentic self forward. I see in my therapy practice so often, and outside of my therapy practice, that people have not truly revealed their inner self to each other. So these relationships operate on the somewhat superficial level. In relationship, we have to be prepared to be transparent and open and vulnerable and ask each other questions, not in a prosecutorial way, but in a way of inquiry because we’re curious, we want to know each other. So it sounds like for both of you, that deeper sharing wasn’t there. And without that, you don’t typically sustain a deep, loving relationship.

DIANE: Yes, I think I thought that I was being very transparent. And so I assumed because I was being transparent and maybe I was sharing too much, I assumed that he was too. I now know, never assume.

MEL: No, that’s quite right, never assume. And I would ask you to think that you couldn’t have shared too much because by sharing fully, he gets to see who you are and there may be triggers and fears and insecurities within him that came up. But we don’t want to manipulate and manage a relationship and each other. What we want to do is reveal your authentic self. You see, being in love and sustaining that requires an authenticity. The two people are free to be their genuine, unbridled self, nothing to fear. Love can prosper in that dynamic. Without it, it’s actually very conditional and that’s what leads to many of the problems we have. So never blame yourself or concern yourself with, am I sharing too much? It sounds to me, Diane, like for you, the challenge might be for you to ask more and inquire more and perhaps not be passive about that. You have a right to ask those questions.

DIANE: Yeah, well, I feel like I learned that lesson the hard way, for sure.

MEL: Well, the best lessons are often the hard way. Hopefully it will assist you in moving forward and learning a new way. So I hope it was helpful for you.

DIANE: I thank you for confirming that I should share more that, you know, I didn’t mess it up.

MEL: Yes, absolutely. No, you did not mess it up.

MEL: I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #114 It’s Easy to Say I Love You first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

Would you rather be right, or be kind? In The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz 113, I explain why our almost instinctive urge to be right and criticize in relationships hinders our potential to communicate and damages intimacy.

What to do? Listen to learn how to engage with others — in any relationship, including friendships, at work, or romantic — in a way that fosters connection and growth.

Let me know what you think! Be sure to leave a comment!

Subscribe to The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a caller on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Today we’re going to look at why we’re so driven to be right, what inclines us toward arguments in our relationship and how that leads to the death knell of vitality of relating. We’re also going to look at a couple of techniques that I’ve developed, which I’ll be sharing with you as to how we can break through that impasse. Look at today’s episode as the start of a journey and by no means the conclusion.

In marital counseling or couples counseling, when I see couples engaged in the argument, I sometimes find myself stopping and asking them, would you rather be happy or would you rather be right? Although everyone says I’d rather be happy, not a moment passes until we default into the right versus wrong battle. We’re kind of hardwired in a way, although I hate that expression wired because we are not machinery, but our nature, our acculturation is to try to win. After all, if I’m right, that means you have to be wrong.

How do you think that’s going to work out in relationship? It’s an insane way of operating.

This need to be right is rooted in either or thinking. It’s an inclination that doesn’t serve us in any way. The need to win an argument assures that no one’s actively listening. We’re not learning anything. We’re not validating, having compassion or empathy, and it’s destructive, of course, to romantic relationships.

This compulsion to be right sidetracks our lives and then impedes our happiness. The need to be right is antithetical to enjoying empathic and compassionate relationship. I’m going to share a number of stories with you in my work as a therapist.

Long time ago, when I first began practicing, I was working with an older couple and every session would kind of look the same. She would come in and start to complain about her husband, indicting him and throwing the book at him about everything. I would intervene and say, listen, I’m not the judge and this is not about right or wrong. We need to turn toward your perceptions and feelings. No sooner did I intervene, she would go right back into her assault.

I think it was about the third session that we had when I realized I needed to do something different. I was not all that experienced yet in this practice of therapy. So I paused and I said to her, Emily, you’re 100% correct. I agree with you completely. You win. John, you’re absolutely wrong. Emily is right. You wanted me to render a verdict. There you have it.

She paused. He looked unfounded. A moment or two went by and she started to go right back into the assault.

I stopped. I put my hand up gently and said, you won. The debate is over. Now what are we going to do?

I’m not proposing that we made great progress then, but it was a detour from the right versus wrong battle. As I began to notice my frustration in my attempts to assist couples with whom I was working, I needed to develop a new approach. I was watching as couples were tirelessly mired in their argument and listening to them was like watching a ping pong ball being knocked back and forth. Only nobody was scoring any points because no one was listening. I was searching for a way to help people slow down and listen to each other and to get past their gridlock.

Some years later, I was in the middle of a session reflecting again on how I could help people approach this impasse differently. I began by asking the husband, let’s call him Joseph, Joe, can you try to find just a small percentage of what Helena is saying to you that you might agree with? Let’s just look for arguably 5% that you can acknowledge and try to temporarily suspend the 95% that you’re sure she’s wrong about. I was asking Joe to act counterintuitively by neither defending himself nor trying to score a point. I explained to him that he wasn’t pleading guilty or surrendering his point. The goal was to simply establish a rapport so that they could begin to truly hear each other.

He finally managed to affirm one of his wife’s complaints as he said to her, I can see that I do do that and I imagine how that might feel for you. He took ownership of a particular action of his that upset her.

I noticed that Helena barely paused as she was to go right back into the argument. I interrupted her and said to her, she should reflect for a moment about how it felt to be at least harshly validated by what Joseph just said to her. She begrudgingly said to Joseph, I appreciate that you care about my feelings and you’re acknowledging that you hurt me felt good. I then asked Helena to validate some part of Joseph’s issues with her as he had just done in reverse.

Their energy started to coalesce as they moved away from the competition of being right into a collaborative effort to empathize and connect. It began to shift back toward connection, moving away from the separation that was driving the argument.

I found that I had started a new technique for me. I now call that technique the 5% rule. If you can affirm that there’s 5% and of course I’m just making up the number five, but if you can find some small part of the other person’s argument that you can agree with, in no way have you abandoned your position regarding the 95% you disagree with. You’ve simply laid the groundwork for them to take in what you have to say. You’ve disengaged from trying to win an argument and the energy can shift. The 5% rule permits us to halt our addiction to being reactive, which we’ll be talking about in just a bit, and it moves us toward being responsive, present, listening. The next time you’re engaged in a disagreement or a confrontation, challenge yourself to resist the argument and search for a small piece of what the other person’s saying that you can affirm.

Timing is essential here. If you rush to reframe or assert your position, then your affirmation will appear disingenuous. You can’t just say, yes, but, boom, right back into the argument. That is actually the process of invalidating. Be cautious about yes, but. Instead, validate something, pause, and let the conciliatory spirit fill the space that would have otherwise been occupied by this noisy, mindless, back-and-forth argument. That shift of energy now becomes fertile ground for a meaningful transition and a constructive exchange. Remember, even if you disagree with the vast majority of what you’re hearing, you can usually find some small content to acknowledge. Ordinarily, we marginalize or ignore the small part because our default position is grounded in winning the argument.

We have a cultural mandate to be right, regrettably, and so our thoughts automatically seek to refute the other rather than confirm. Even though we say we care about each other, we don’t act caringly. If you need to win, the other person has to lose. How does that work out?

You know, we may say to each other, I love you, but it’s challenging to act lovingly. Act lovingly requires that even if we hear something that we feel defensive about or we think is wrong, that we temporarily put that aside to care for the other. The success of this 5% rule allows both people to behave with compassion and empathy, to cooperate rather than compete. Remember, the goal is not to win, but to care. You can immediately apply the 5% rule in your communications, romantic, close, intimate relationships, a friend, relative, or in your business dealings. What you want the other person to hear is vitally important, but you need to set the stage so they can take it in.

I’d love to show you my appreciation for your subscribing to and rating this podcast by offering you a gift to one of the following. The Power of Mind, a live talk that I gave, or one of my digital eBooks, Creating Authentic Self-Esteem, Overcoming Anxiety, or Raising Resilient Children, and lastly, Cultivating Resilient Relationships. Once you have subscribed, please send an email to mel at melschwartz.com and just let me know which gift you’d prefer. Thanks.

Let’s talk a little bit about how we can set that stage. When I need to express something that I think is going to be difficult or challenging for the other person to hear, if I anticipate they’ll be reactive or defend it, I have found that devoting a few sentences as a preface can be very helpful. One of my clients once referred to this technique as foaming the runway.

In other words, you can set up the discourse to better succeed by setting the stage. If you think about it, sometimes runners will stretch before they run in a baseball game, pitchers warm up before actually getting into the game. We study before taking a test. Just as importantly, we need to ease into a challenging exchange rather than simply dive in. It may sound as simple as this, I’m having a problem and I’m wondering if you can help me, or I’m confused about something. Can you try to help me understand? Another approach that’s successful is I have something on my mind that I really want to talk to you about, but I’m anticipating that you’re going to be upset and angry, so I don’t know what to do.

You see, you’re inviting the other person in, and that will tend to mitigate or lessen their tendency to be reactive. When we do this, you’re enrolling the other person and you’ve invited them into a provocative topic, lessening the chance of their being reactive. This technique moves both people into the field of what I call a shared inquiry, very much the opposite of the debate and the argument.

To experience really effective interaction and communication, which regrettably is an exception, we need to establish something called shared meaning about the words and ideas we convey. I call this coherent communication, which doesn’t require agreement, but simply shared meaning. I’ll give you some examples.

One day some years ago, I was walking by a restaurant near my home and I saw the parking attendant, Jacques. I was kind of friendly with Jacques and we used to shoot the breeze now and then. I asked him, how are you? He smiled and said, I can’t complain. I continued walking, and as I did, a thought occurred to me. Jacques could have meant either he had nothing to complain about or he wouldn’t give himself permission to complain. On my return home, I ran into him again and I asked him which meaning he intended. It took a long time for him to be able to share with me that what he meant is that he couldn’t complain, was because nobody would be interested. That’s what his belief was. I explained to him that when I asked him that question, I truly did care and he might make an exception to his rule. If I hadn’t bothered to confirm what I can’t complain meant, I would have assumed all was good in his life. We wouldn’t have connected. Sharing our meaning is an integral part of emotional and verbal intimacy. To pause and ask someone what they meant by the words they’ve just spoken is also deeply respectful.

Respect comes from a Latin word. I think it’s something like resposir, which means to look again. That’s what shared meaning is. It’s not dashing past each other, but taking time to go slowly. You see, what someone thinks I’ve said is actually more important than what I was intending. The disconnection between my meaning and what I intend and someone else’s interpretation can disrupt the entire exchange.

There’s a quote from Abraham Lincoln that I’m fond of. We all declare for liberty, but in using this word liberty, we do not all mean the same thing. How true. We take for granted that our words convey what we’re intending. In my experience as a therapist, I’ve come to see that this assumption is wrong. I’m still stunned by the impact of miscommunication.

Dave and Karen were in a relatively new relationship, but finding themselves mired in disagreement. In the middle of an argument, in a session, Dave proclaimed to Karen, I can’t do this anymore. Karen became noticeably agitated and I asked her what she was feeling. She actually began to cry and said, I can’t believe he’s breaking up with me. I turned and asked Dave, is that what you were saying? Dave looked unfounded and said, not at all. I meant I can’t do this arguing anymore. His expression, I can’t do this anymore, was open to interpretation. By the time we exchanged a few sentences with each other, it’s often a misinformed understanding of what’s happening. Neither person is sharing the same conversation. Our own internal monologues have branched off as we react to a word or a phrase, which is not necessarily what the other person was intending.

I’ll give you an example, another one. It was my first session with Jerry and Diane, a long time married couple. I asked them how I could help them, what brought them into therapy. Without much pause, Diane said, he has no idea how to be intimate. Jerry immediately tightened and shot back, I have no idea how to be intimate. I have no problem at all with intimacy. It’s you that does. If I hadn’t intervened, it would have reprised a familiar battle and they would have paid little attention to my presence. They were so deeply entrenched in their right versus wrong argument, but they hadn’t identified what they were truly talking about.

After a pause, I broke in. I said to them, I’m not at all sure what you each mean by this word intimacy. Can you take a moment and tell each other what this word means for you? After some reflection, Jerry explained that intimacy for him ranged from physical affection all the way to sexual intercourse. As he was speaking, Diane looked incredulous. She said, you must be kidding me. That’s not at all what I mean. I encouraged her to go further. Not surprisingly to me, she spoke of intimacy as sharing deep feelings and thoughts with each other. Once we exposed this essential misunderstanding, they were able to engage each other in a meaningful exchange about their needs and preferences.

Let’s turn to how we can lessen and mitigate our tendency to be reactive, which is so disruptive. If our goal is to understand and connect rather than to win, we have to witness and suspend what our thoughts are telling us, at least temporarily. When we react to someone’s words without pausing to reflect, to inquire, to seek shared meaning, we’re stuck in an old groove of reactivity. As a result, we’re not only reacting to each other in the moment, but to a whole history of our lifetime of experiences and interactions with each other. Reacting is spontaneous. It’s instantaneous. We can learn to see our reaction, and that’s what I call being responsive. The distance between the reaction of a millisecond and a thoughtful response of a moment or two can be monumental. It’s like the difference between blasting your horn or tailgating someone who cuts you off or learning to keep your hands on the wheel.

The fraction of a moment in which you suspend your reaction provides a state of potential, of possibility to facilitate a meaningful discussion. Learning to observe your reaction helps you not become the reaction.

Take anger, for example. If I notice that I’m feeling angry, but stop myself from acting angrily, I can’t communicate how I feel in an appropriate way. If I react and become angry, my angry words and actions are going to make the situation worse and create worsening results. That spirals us down, in which our ensuing actions then shine the spotlight on my behavior. If I’m acting angrily, then the spotlight’s on me. But if I said, I’m feeling angry and I want to explain to you why I’m feeling angry, that is an altogether appropriate communication. It’s an opportunity for discourse.

The next time you feel the urge to defend yourself or your position, here are some questions to ask yourself. What is the other person trying to convey? Let’s not take their words literally. What’s their intention? You should also ask yourself, is it more important for me to correct the other person or to stay present? During couple sessions, almost without exception, the need to correct small, irrelevant points of information is mind-boggling. He may say, you know, I called you two times yesterday, and she will interrupt to say, no, it was three times. Is that correction necessary? Think about what you’re hearing that you think is a misstatement or inaccurate and choose to stay present and ask yourself, is this correction necessary? Then ask yourself, would I rather be right or do I want to learn and understand and be compassionate and care? Am I judging or am I truly listening?

Watch your thoughts. Are they acting a literal way where they’re telling you the truth? Objective truths mislead us. What we want to do is to seek a subjective experience of how we’re each feeling. To not become reactive, train yourself and ask yourself, what am I feeling? And you can communicate the feeling. You don’t have to be the feeling.

We’ve covered a lot of territory today in a brief amount of time. So I’d like you to take an opportunity to let this sink in. You can find in far greater detail many of these messages in my book, The Possibility Principle. And if you have further questions about this, feel free to send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com. We can discuss this further. If you have particular challenges that you’d like to discuss, I am available for FaceTime sessions if you’re outside of my area.

Remember, communication is the heartbeat of relationship. It’s also the heartbeat to self-esteem and authenticity. I will be exploring in great detail those opportunities that await you in future episodes.

Have a great day.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #113 Why Do You Need to Be Right? first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

Join me for The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz #112, in which I explore how we can each adopt a worldview of empowering and pragmatic optimism.

Listen to learn how our life experiences guide our perceptions and attitudes… and how we can choose a different, more enriching path.

Let me know what you think! Be sure to leave a comment!

Subscribe to The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a caller on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

My thoughts for today, our subject for exploration and inquiry, is about looking at the terms optimism and pessimism, optimist or pessimist. Think for a moment, where do you fall in that range? You think of yourself as an optimist, a pessimist, or perhaps somewhere in between. These broad categories are really about the filter through which we experience ourselves and our lives.

I wrote an article some time ago which was called “Why I Can’t or Why Can’t I?” In a way, that really illustrates the difference between optimism and pessimism. The optimist clearly says, why can’t I? They’ll move forward and they’ll try, they’ll venture forth. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it speaks about an engagement in the process, trying. Whereas the pessimist thought will go toward, why I can’t? Why I can’t try that business? Why I can’t ask that personnel on a date? It’s a foreclosing of possibilities. Optimism opens us up to possibilities.

Remember my work and teachings around uncertainty and embracing uncertainty; it’s a range of absolutely extensive, remarkable reality of possibilities. The optimist can try to seize those possibilities. The pessimist doesn’t trust it, or perhaps is afraid of failing and not succeeding, whereas they think other people might. Think of it this way, optimist or pessimist speaks to the filter through which we see and experience our lives and other people. When I say filter, let’s take that literally or metaphorically. If you went through your life wearing a pair of very dark sunglasses, it would look a lot cloudier, a lot darker than if you didn’t have the sunglasses on. Only you’d stop becoming aware that you’re wearing sunglasses and it filters everything you see and experience. Take the sunglasses off, well, you might be looking through rosy colored glasses if you’re the optimist.

So I’m generalizing now and there are always exceptions to every generalization, but pessimists tend to be guarded and self-protective, whereas optimists are comfortable with their vulnerability, taking a chance, going for it, maybe succeeding or not. Now there are terms that we use around optimism. They can be called a naive optimist, which suggests that they’re not doing their homework, they’re not doing their due diligence, they’re just hoping for the best. And certainly that category of person exists.

And then there is the realist. Now you can be a realist and still be an optimist, but there are people who consider themselves pessimists and equate that with realism. Now don’t be a naive optimist, be realistic. Now let me ask you this, when Steve Jobs quit college to start off on his entrepreneurial venture, was Steve Jobs being a realist? Was he simply a blind optimist or something in between? His move toward optimism, toward why can’t I, actually ultimately became his reality.

You see, reality isn’t out there as I’ve always spoken to you about. We participate in creating reality. It is a reality making participatory universe. We construct our realities. So let’s leave aside the outcomes for the moment and look at the process.

If you’re a college student about to take your ACTs or SATs, you don’t want to be naively optimistic and just think I’ll do great without doing your preparation. But optimists have different life experiences internally. Sometimes it’s not about the results. I find that when I go through periods of feeling daunted or confronted with challenges, things that might ordinarily get me down, my thoughts immediately turn to possibilities, solutions. The moment my thoughts head in that direction, I’m creating a new brain chemistry for myself. My actual lived experience internally have nothing to do with the outcomes. My lived experience benefits by being an optimist. Optimism informs your lived experience internally, not just externally. And pessimism puts an absolute clamp down template on your lived experience. You’re viewing everything through fear, limitation, and negativity. So optimistic thoughts alter your brain chemistry. Pessimistic thoughts alter your brain chemistry. Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist is basically a question about your meta beliefs about yourself and reality.

Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, ask yourself, how did I come to this belief, to this outlook? Remember what I have taught you about wave collapses. And for those of you who are listening to this for the first time, let me explain a wave collapse. We learn in quantum physics that reality is in a suspended state waiting to happen. And reality doesn’t actually happen until an observation is made. That observation is called a wave collapse. More specifically, a particle, a light particle can exist as either a wave or a particle. The wave represents pure possibilities like the optimist’s thoughts. The moment the wave is observed, the wave literally collapses and it becomes a particle, a fixed entity. And the same thing happened to us in our lives. We come into life in a state of pure possibility. But based upon life experiences, childhood experiences, acute or chronic messages we got from our parents, we develop these meta beliefs about ourselves, which might be, go for it, go for your possibilities, no risk in trying. Maybe the only risk is in not trying. If those were the wave collapses, the messages you receive from your parents, you’re likely going to be an optimist. As well, if the messages you receive from your parents or other significant influences in your life were to take no risks, be cautious, don’t draw attention to yourself, then that explains why you came to the meta belief of pessimism.

So wherever you categorize yourself, simply ask this, how did I come to be an optimist? How did I come to be a pessimist? Or am I somewhere in between? And if I’m somewhere in between, what new reflections should I be having? What new contemplations might I have to be able to allow me to live my life in harmony with myself in a humanistic way where I can approach and embrace my possibilities without fear, without recrimination to myself, to others. So if you find yourself somewhere in the range of a moderate to a significant optimist, you’re not naive, you’re not going to a casino and losing your net worth so that you can’t pay the rent or feed your family because you had blind optimism that you are going to win that hand to blackjack. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about, I can put my best self forward and go for it. Whether it’s friendships, romance, work, any area of relationship, the optimist engages life with an attitude of why can’t I? And with that life philosophy, it allows you to potentially thrive. The pessimist is burying their head in the sand, protecting themselves from further defeat, embarrassment, humiliation, loss, again, probably due to childhood lessons and experiences. You choose. Optimism will allow you a healthy brain chemistry and an engagement with life where you’re hoping for the best and moving toward the best. No guarantee of outcomes. Pessimism is a dog eat dog world. That’s how it is. I’m not getting involved. Well, that closes the script for you. Nowhere to go with that.

So just a few thoughts on optimism and pessimism. And I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts on this. Please challenge me about something I missed or your own experience, which may be very different than what I am describing.

Until next time, wishing you well, wishing you optimistic thoughts and feelings and a full engagement with your life. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #112 The Power of Optimism first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz #111, I explain how our innate state of potential becomes narrowed and finite due to personal experiences; often early in life. From these events our sense of self can become limited and we may attach to limiting personal beliefs. Utilizing principles from quantum physics, I demonstrate how we came to these false beliefs and how we can transcend them, illuminating the pathway for us to once again stake claim to our infinite possibilities.

Listen, then let me know what you think! Be sure to leave a comment!

Subscribe to The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a caller on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello everybody and get ready for an interesting ride in today’s episode. I’m going to be explaining a phenomenon in quantum physics. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand and as a reminder to all my listeners, I’m not a scientist and in fact, I was an average student at best in science. But my new book, The Possibility Principle, explains how we can profit and benefit by looking at some principles of quantum physics to better understand our own lives and to make some adjustments in embracing the messages from quantum physics to allow us to live resiliently, joyfully, without fear, and on and on.

In today’s episode, we’re going to be looking at how we can reclaim our lost sense of potential. Going to begin by explaining this phenomenon of quantum physics and how we can apply it to our own lives. One of the fundamental aspects of the quantum worldview is that elementary particles can sometimes exhibit what’s called a schizophrenic nature. I’m using that term not in a clinical sense, but using the word schizophrenic to suggest it has a split personality. Physicists refer to this tendency in what is known as the wave-particle duality. Ordinarily, we believe the things either are or are not, that they are distinct in nature. This either-or thinking can also be called binary thinking, which leaves only two paths open to us. Binary thinking is a major aspect of how we observe and construct reality. And in later episodes, I’ll be sharing with you what is wrong with that limited way of seeing reality.

But this either-or reality apparently doesn’t apply in the quantum realm and is questionable in our everyday lives as well. The quantum reality exists in a series of what is called probability waves, which have an infinite number of potential outcomes. This means that when a particle is not being observed, it doesn’t exist as a particle. It exists as a wave or a waveform. In quantum language, that’s a state of pure potential, also called superposition, pure potentiality. This term superposition proposes that as long as we do not know what the state of any object is, it actually exists in all possible states. In that sense, the wave represents pure possibility. And the act of observing the wave reduces the wave. The wave collapses and it becomes a fixed thing, a particle. This is called a wave collapse.

Now, this may sound removed from our day-to-day world of relationships, fears, and anxieties, but I have found that metaphorically speaking, a similar thing occurs in our lives. When we have particular experiences or make certain observations of ourselves or have them made of us, typically in childhood by parents, a teacher, or friends, we experience the psychological equivalent of a quantum wave collapse. You see, as newborns or infants, if not at conception or in utero, we resemble the infinite potential possibilities of the wave. Our personality, our identity is not yet defined and exists in the state of pure potential. Notwithstanding matters of genetics, environmental influences, or considerations of astrological or karmic influences, our identity is not determined and fixed. But before long, we start to move from the potential of the wave to the thingness, the particular quality of the particle. The personal evolution of our personality gets stunted and our growth becomes fitful.

How did this happen? Let me share a story to provide a backdrop.

One day in my office, a client I’ll call Jill recalled the words that her mother spoke to her when she was about eight years old. Her mom said, when I was pregnant with you, I told your father I didn’t want another baby. Despite the fact that her mother was otherwise devoted and loving, Jill’s acutely personal takeaway was damning. She felt unwanted and therefore unlovable then and ever since. She carried this core belief with her throughout her life. Her own inner monologue was perpetually self-critical, confirming her belief that she wasn’t lovable. The snapshot that Jill took of herself early in life became etched into her psyche and became her embedded truth. Jill’s beliefs affected her relations with her husband, children, and friends. Notwithstanding that her husband Bob was lovingly devoted to her, Jill questions his loyalty and truthfulness in light of seeing herself as unlovable. Her belief about herself was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. She forced Bob to withdraw his love as his frustration mounted. What Jill experienced is not uncommon, for what we believe to be true about ourselves and others contributes to our reality-making process. Prior to her mother’s remark, Jill’s identity, her personality, her sense of self could have evolved in an infinite number of ways, but that range of possibility became narrowed by that one short sentence.

I call that a wave collapse. Ordinarily, even a single but significant experience is sufficient to collapse our personal wave of potential. Jill experienced a powerful wave collapse after her mother spoke one particular sentence to her. Sometimes, all it takes is a hurtful statement or even an embarrassing experience to reduce the potential of our personality to a narrow, restricted self-image. These events don’t need to be traumatic. They could in fact be subtle. Yet in these moments, our state of potential, our possibilities fade. It’s as if we’ve taken the snapshot of ourself and become frozen in time. I call these confining wave collapses.

In contrast to defining wave collapses that usher in defining moments and help us break free. In confining wave collapses, we’re no longer the potential of the wave, but we have become the finiteness of the particle. And we carry this picture of ourselves with us throughout our lives, allowing it to burden and limit us. We actually lose the authorship of our life story. We no longer write the narrative. We become a character in the narrative already written. The initial wave collapse, I’m speaking of confining wave collapses here, sets up a recurring incidence of similar experiences as our beliefs about ourselves and others become self-reinforcing. You see, what you think of yourself shapes your interactions with others and with yourself. This habit obstructs our ability to change or to evolve as we cling to a false perceived truth of who we are. The themes of subsequent collapses may vary, but they’re often self-limiting, if not denigrating. We may generate thoughts like I’m not good enough, or I’m not smart enough, or even more simply, I’m not lovable. The actors who perhaps unwittingly participated in scripting our personal beliefs are typically our parents, but they may be our teachers, friends, relatives, and in some cases, even strangers. We cling to these habituated beliefs about ourselves in accordance with our primary wave collapses. In spite of new events, which should create dissonance and have us look at ourselves differently, like Jill’s husband being so loving, they fail. And we tend to remain rooted in the way we see ourselves.

Part of the reason that we experience change is hard. We become embedded in the groove of our self-referencing beliefs, which blocks the opportunity for growth and change. Less dramatically than hurtful comments or abusive actions, the patterns of family dynamics may cause us to acquire certain personality traits. These influences tend to be chronic rather than acute and fly beneath our radar screen. For example, if you grew up in a highly conflicted or alcoholic family, you may have coped by developing a people pleaser or peacemaker persona. We can think of this chronic condition as an extended wave collapse rather than the result of an acute single event.

I had referred another client, Helen, to meet a colleague of mine so that they might explore matters of mutual interest, professionally that is. Helen made an appointment to meet with Jim at a conference that he was attending. When Helen arrived, Jim was engaged in conversation with others and he didn’t notice her waiting to introduce herself. Shortly thereafter, Jim left the conference without acknowledging Helen. Helen said to me, I guess I just wasn’t important enough for him to meet me. She reported this as though it were an established fact instead of an interpretation, an opinion of her own making. I asked her how she knew this to be true and whether there might be other explanations. For example, I knew Jim to be notoriously absent-minded. Could he have forgotten he was supposed to meet her or maybe he didn’t notice someone waiting to introduce herself. In fact, he overlooked appointments with me in the past and I certainly didn’t conclude that I was unimportant. I suggested that Helen saw herself as not valuable and she was projecting that insult onto Jim. At first, she resisted this possibility. She relayed this in compelling stories though, which revealed that as a child, she felt like her mother’s servant, waiting hand and foot on her mother, a reversal of roles so to speak. And her entire childhood was about her obedience to her mother. Helen was deprived of the value that every child deserves and so she basically felt unimportant. This chronic wave collapse had disastrous effects on her self-esteem. Throughout her life, her thoughts almost automatically continued to affirm this affliction. I’m not important. I just don’t matter. Our primary beliefs about ourselves have been generated by our wave collapses, which orchestrate the quality and nature of our beliefs and thoughts. If like Helen, our core belief is that we’re not of value, we can predict the kinds of thoughts we might then experience. These thoughts measure ourselves against others and the predictable result is that we see ourselves as subordinate to others. These thoughts and their resulting feelings can leave us trapped inside a self-induced container of low self-esteem.

I’d love to show you my appreciation for your subscribing to and rating this podcast by offering you a gift to one of the following. The Power of Mind, a live talk that I gave, or one of my digital eBooks, Creating Authentic Self-Esteem, Overcoming Anxiety, or Raising Resilient Children, and lastly, Cultivating Resilient Relationships. Once you have subscribed, please send an email to mel at mel schwartz dot com and just let me know which gift you’d prefer. Thanks.

I’ve given you an extensive explanation of what happens in a wave collapse. Now let’s turn and look at how we can return to our state of pure potential. To free yourself from repeating harmful and confining wave collapses, consider this tenet of the possibility principle. In the nanosecond before your next thought, you exist in a state of pure potential. In the space between your thoughts, you are similar to the wave, full of possibility. But once you attach to the next thought, the ensuing wave collapses and we create a reality in that moment. If we continue to have self-limiting or injurious thoughts, we remain adhered to the damaging effects of primary wave collapses. In therapy, clients often experience a breakthrough with me, a significant moment during which a highly anticipated insight becomes clear and illuminated. This event can present a new state of potential and with it, the possibility of a breakthrough, a defining moment. The person I’m working with will then select which reality to summon by thinking either, that’s great, what a relief, I’ve broken through. Or regrettably, their thought might be, what’s wrong with me? Why is this taking me so long? The first thought is self-affirming and offers relief and possibilities, while the second is self-critical and resists progress. You see, the thought you select will chart your path.

Simply put, the thought we engage will summon the reality of our next moment. We can move forward in breaking into new terrain or we can summon an old familiar thought, abandoning the insight. Obviously, we can choose vastly different experiences. The potential is all that exists prior to your next thought. Our struggle with change is in part caused by our habituation and habit of old thought. Old thought defends its territory. It doesn’t loosen its grip on you easily. Helen’s confining wave collapse of feeling devalued set in motion her lifelong inner narrative. I could see the automatic nature of her thought coming from the statement, I guess I wasn’t important enough for him to wait for me. This type of thought, instinctive and programmed, burdened and afflicted Helen, as similar thoughts burden and afflict most of us. I worked with her to identify that thought and separate from it so she could see what the thought was telling her. This established another principle for her. If you can learn to see the thought, you don’t have to become the thought. As we talked further, I asked Helen whether she attempted to contact Jim after the conference. She continued to cling to her story. There wasn’t any point in doing that because she had been blown off. I suggested that her thought had told her that she was blown off, but how could she actually know that? What she was doing was creating a storyline to conform to her beliefs and her personal history. Was she actually replicating wave collapses from earlier in life? Was this her thought stuck in an old groove? When I pressed her, she couldn’t offer proof that she knew her story was true. Now if we can’t know for sure that our story is true, then we need to look at how we confuse our story with being the truth in any given situation. I asked Helen if it was plausible that she had believed an untruth about herself her entire life. She reconsidered and acknowledged that she might be personalizing events around her meeting with Jim so as to conform to her self-image. When I explained to Helen the theory behind wave collapse, she grasped the concept. I asked Helen to envision an alternative and positive wave collapse in which her mother had been maternally inclined and actually doted on her. What then might her belief about herself be? She permitted herself this alternative point of view and considered that perhaps she wasn’t irrelevant. Doing so meant that she also needed to embrace her discomfort as she moved beyond the limits of her familiar zone.

Our work then focused on helping Helen break free from her addictive tendency to malign herself or more precisely the habit, the tendency of her old thought. From that point on, her progress was impressive. She started to value herself and this shift in self-esteem led to her experiencing her relationships in an entirely new way. When Helen learned to sever the grip of her old identity, she created the opportunity to select a new and positive wave collapse. A defining moment with self-affirming thoughts. Breaking free from the predictability of confining wave collapses simply requires uprooting the repetitive thoughts that inform our old belief. Notice the repetition of these old thoughts in lockstep with the wave collapse and that will enable your shift. The quantum worldview of the universe tells us that reality appears to unfold inexorably and perpetually from a pure state of potential. Earlier I referred to that as superposition. For us to access the universal potential, we must devote ourselves to apprehending that possibility, which lies in the instant prior to collapsing the wave with our next thought or feeling. Our thought literally summons our constructed reality. These thoughts emanate from the groove of old wave collapses and therefore our thoughts represent our past experience. Learning to take a new snapshot and actualize new thinking will help script a new experience allowing you to participate fully in your own evolving reality. Reading how the wave collapses in our lives informs a sense of self that’s just essential in priming the pump for your change process.

Often the meanings we attribute to the events of our personal history prevent us from creating effective change and we become reduced and see ourselves often as victims. Many adults have memories of abusive, loveless, or disappointing childhoods because they didn’t receive the nurturing and love that is every child’s birthright. If we choose to keep focusing on the limiting events of our past, then we choose a present and a similar future that replicates the past. At some point we need to stop choosing to believe the meaning we ascribe to our past and script a different present. I’m not suggesting that we avoid or suppress painful memories. By all means, we need to bring them into the light and process them. The goal though is to disarm the old memories and eventually release them. The thought that we choose in the present moment is almost entirely responsible for who we are in that moment. Remember the moment you choose a thought, the accompanying feelings arise as well. So if we continue to summon old habitual thoughts, we’ll never reclaim the potential that awaits us. What we are seeking are new wave collapses, defining moments that implant positive self-reflections as we grow past the grip of the negative ones.

In working with Jill, I asked her to reconsider what she could have said when her mother told her that she didn’t want another baby. Jill could have said, that makes me feel terrible and unwanted. Had she actually said that at that time or any time later, she might have experienced a positive, defining wave collapse, which was self-affirming. Simply reliving that encounter in a way that gave her some power became part of her healing process. By expressing her feelings, she was able to establish a much stronger, worthier sense of self. Now instead of thinking I’m unlovable, which spoke to her fixed state of being, she could reframe her belief. I’ve thought of myself as unlovable and now I know why. Now this belief is amenable to change. Let’s try an exercise. Think of a core belief you hold about yourself that limits your experience of yourself and your life. We think of these beliefs as truth. They may range from I’m not smart enough to people don’t respect me. Or it might sound like I’m a poor communicator or conflict makes me uncomfortable so I avoid confrontation. Whatever the core belief is, once you’ve identified it, ask yourself how you came to this belief. You might recall an embarrassing, shameful or traumatic moment from earlier in life when this truth took hold. For example, you raised your hand in class to ask a question and everyone laughed at how silly your question seemed so you decided to never risk that exposure again. Now you play it safe and think long and hard before you speak. Or your belief could have been caused by more chronic circumstances like growing up in a volatile home and coming to believe that you couldn’t really take the risk of sharing how you felt. These are the confining wave collapses that have created your limiting beliefs about yourself. They were caused by a specific moment or chronic moments in which you felt shamed or ridiculed.

Now imagine yourself finding your voice. Tell those involved how you feel about what just happened or what they said to you or did to you. Finding your voice in this way helps you release yourself from the bondage of these confining wave collapses. Reflect on how different your beliefs about yourself would be if these events never happened. If your beliefs about yourself were informed by chronic rather than acute circumstances like having an alcoholic or abusive parent or growing up in a volatile home, remind yourself that these beliefs were a product of your experience. Now imagine yourself being raised in a loving and supportive family. You see how differently you might feel about yourself? Once you choose to reclaim your potential, you stop being a victim of damaging circumstances. Say to yourself, I don’t need to be imprisoned by my past if I choose to free myself from my limiting beliefs. You are more than your experiences and an infinite potential awaits you as you allow your identity to break free and evolve. Once you learn to see how your beliefs are informing you, you’re free to break into new terrain and achieve defining moments.

Witness your thoughts and recognize the story they’re telling you and don’t confuse them with being the truth. You can learn to rewrite your story. Many individuals were fortunate enough to have experienced exemplary, defining, beneficial wave collapses that affirmed them and helped them to secure a strong sense of self. This typically leads to authentic self-esteem and these people can craft their personalities free from constrictive encumbrances. But for those of us who haven’t yet experienced such a gift, we can learn to overcome our burdens and reach our full range of possibilities. The way we’ve been trained to think that change is hard or implausible once again grows out of our operating worldview. This belief in inertia developed from the mechanistic worldview that I’ve described many times before in which Newton pictured reality to be like a giant, inert, lifeless, hapless, machine-like universe. And we became the cogs in that machine. The new worldview coming from quantum physics suggests that there is no separation. Everything is in perpetual flow and movement and we can be too. We can embrace that potentiality which invites us to free ourselves from aspects of the past that didn’t serve us. We don’t need to stay stuck like a fixed state of the particle, but we can ride the possibilities of the wave.

I hope this has provided some insights for you. And now there is much significant work to be done in learning to understand the nature of old thought and break free from it. In a previous episode entitled Breaking Free from the Grip of Old Thought, I do explain the techniques for doing this. And of course my book, The Possibility Principle, goes into great detail as to how you can identify your wave collapses and begin to break free from the old thought that limits you.

I wish for you the opportunity to break free from any old wave collapses that limit you and to establish some new defining wondrous moments so you can reach out and embrace the possibilities that await you and that you deserve. Until next time, be well.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #111 How to Reclaim Your Potential first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz episode 110 features a recent experience that inspired me to speak to you about connection, compassion, and other aspects of being human we sometimes lose sight of.

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Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book, The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Well hello and welcome to today’s very mini episode. In fact, I wasn’t thinking of recording an episode today, but let me tell you what happened. I’m spending the summer in the little town of Amagansett, Long Island, just east of the famous Hamptons. You know, the place where the celebrities, the rich and famous, the very affluent mingle and spend summers at just a magical topography, an incredible ocean. So I’m in the little town of Amagansett. I went out this morning to a spot called Amber Waves, local farm stand to serve some food, kind of a community place.

I’m standing on line, a very long line to check out, and a man walks in who catches my eye because he stands out from everyone else. He looks like he has a second-degree sunburn. I noticed that his pants are tied with a rope. He looks disheveled. Clearly, he looks out of place in this location. He looks out of place in most locations. So I’m curious. While I’m standing in the line, I watch him meander through the grocery, looking at the food in all different sections, opening up refrigerated drawers and peering in.

I think to myself, am I certain that this poor man is homeless? I shouldn’t call him poor man, but I’m having compassion and empathy for him. Clearly, something is off. It’s not just his attire. It’s not just his sunburn. It’s how he’s navigating through the grocery. After a while, I conclude he probably is homeless. He certainly is unwell psychologically, just from his habits.

But then I become curious about something else. Am I the only person noticing him, paying any attention to him? And as I scan the dozens of people, I can’t catch anyone, even remotely, looking at him, acknowledging his presence as though he were invisible. And indeed, I assume, perhaps incorrectly, he was invisible to everyone that was there.

I thought perhaps I should get out of line, offer him some money so that he might have a decent meal. But then I thought, I don’t know what harm that would do him if he’d feel offended. I can’t be so presumptuous as to know how he would receive my offer of generosity. So I demurred and chose to do nothing. Still watching, scanning everyone, nobody looked at him. When he left, I did notice that he had his belongings packed in a shopping cart, you know, a supermarket wagon, and he pushed it down the street.

Clearly, he was homeless. More importantly, well, it’s not important that he was homeless, but the important thing to me was how we inure ourselves and desensitize ourselves. We don’t even glimpse someone else’s plight.

As a kid, I remember the expression, there but for the grace of God go I. Compassion, empathy, it seems in such short supply. I recall when I was in Greenwich Village once when my sons were quite young, and my oldest son, Jesse, I’m going to guess maybe he was eight. He said, Dad, could I have a dollar? I don’t know if it was a dollar or 50 cents. Absentmindedly, I said, sure, and handed him the money. We were online outside of a takeout pizza place. I kept my eye on him, of course, we were in the city in Manhattan. He goes about 50 feet down the street, and there is a homeless person, not begging for money but camped out on a blanket with a cup. And Jesse put the money in his cup.

It’s shocking. It’s just shocking how we tune out. We complain about homelessness. We may say something needs to be done. Of course, NIMBY, “not in my backyard,” becomes prevalent. But I’m speaking here about simply compassion, not what do we do about the problem, but empathy. This person today was an adorable baby just like we all were. Hopefully cared for and loved by one or two parents, maybe not. He was born as a baby, a human being, the same as all of us. And I’m afraid that we’ve become so calloused and desensitized to the plight of others who are less fortunate than we are.

So my musings today and my sharing today is about slowing down, seeing the humanity in every one of us, trying to reach for something to connect with instead of just passing each other by in this terribly transactional way that we do. And I know there are exceptions to the rule that I’m stipulating right now, and to those of you who are the exceptions, bravo, great for you. But for those of you who are just anesthetized once again by the pace of life and the not caring, just take a moment and tune in. And sometimes if you have the opportunity to reach out and touch somebody’s soul, their heart, their being, not only will it be good for them, but it will restore a sense of humanity, a kindred spirit to you and to all of us.

So this was brief. That’s all I had in mind. I look forward to talking with you again soon, in which case, no doubt, I’ll be going into much greater length about something that remains to be seen. Bye for now, and stay connected.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #110 The Inhumanity of Being Invisible first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.