Author Archives: Admin

Bully Gets “Girl”

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Originally Posted on April, 6, 2012 on
The Huffington Post
 
Over the past two years, a national conversation has developed around bullying.  A critical aspect of this conversation is the growing perception of bullying as a real and dangerous threat, as opposed to a normal phase of youth development.  At the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention last March, President Obama expressly rejected the idea of bullying as “just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up.”  While the president should be saluted for his general leadership and this specific observation, another aspect of the conference gave me pause, namely the president’s attempt to universalize bully-victimhood, as if each young person is equally vulnerable in this regard.  Using his famed charisma, Obama reassured the audience that even he had been teased as a child for his big ears.  This moment encapsulates a danger that the conference and the broader conversation on bullying both face: losing sight of the rash of teen suicides, mostly by males who identified as or were perceived to be gay, that originally catapulted the issue of bullying into the national spotlight.

A similar universalization took place last October, at a CNN-sponsored special at Rutgers University entitled “Bullying: It Stops Here.” In his opening remarks, Anderson Cooper acknowledged the recent suicide of gay 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, almost a year to the day after the death of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, who was also gay. Following these remarks, gay teen suicide was never addressed as a distinct or revealing symptom of the problem of bullying, and the program instead focused on bullying as a broad concept, including a Dr. Phil segment on how bullies are victims, too. One illuminating exchange between Cooper and a black high school student offered a chance to reinscribe the particular within the universal: the student explained that his teachers would be more likely to protect him if someone called him “the n-word” than if the same person called him “faggot” or any other anti-gay term. This was not expanded upon.
People can easily agree that bullying for any reason (e.g., race or ethnicity, physical or mental disability, real or perceived sexual orientation) is harmful and wrong. But in the well-intentioned effort to address bullying as a broad concept, specific insights may be lost that can help us understand commonalities behind many forms of bullying and the connection between bullying behavior and our broader culture. The double-digit string of gay teen suicides that launched this national conversation indicate that certain youths are more vulnerable than others to bullying — or, in other words, there is a real hierarchy to bullying that remains a large, tense, pink elephant in the room. Refocusing for a moment upon these suicides helps to reveal the deeply ingrained ways in which our cultural expectations of what boys and girls are — and how they should act — informs every aspect of the bullying problem.
Our culture is ruled by the gender binary, a system to which we all contribute in order to delineate between female and male. While open to contestation, this system frequently preserves a sense of masculinity/power for men, and prescribes one of femininity/submission for women, ultimately securing male dominance. The effects of such a system can be felt beyond the literal image of what a man or woman is; more generally, in a misogynistic culture, every identifiable difference between people is filtered through a misogynistic lens. Indeed, every characteristic for which youth tend to be bullied has been studied in terms of its being “feminized.” A quick Google search reveals studies on the “Feminizing of African Americans,” the “Feminizing of Asians,” of Southeast Asians, of Native Americans, the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, the overweight, and so on. Given these realities, it also holds that a particular group — or perceived member of a group — will be more vulnerable to bullying and abuse to the degree that such a group is not supposed to be feminine. This may help to explain why effeminate or gender-nonconforming male youth (i.e., those who are perceived to be gay) are in such regular and tremendous jeopardy, symbolizing as they do a loss of male power and privilege. We may also expect that other targets of bullying singled out for entirely different characteristics may be referred to by terms reserved for effeminate or perceived gay males, because such males are at the very bottom of the cultural barrel.
Lee Hirsch’s just-released documentary Bully is an evocative depiction of how the gender binary impacts acts of aggression. The subjects — several kids facing repeated bullying in school, as well as the families of two boys who committed suicide — are all seen through a misogynistic lens. The boys are constantly called “bitch” and “pussy,” while school administrators try to explain away the harassment, noting that “boys will be boys” and encouraging the youths (at least the boys) to resolve their “differences” with a “manly” handshake. Similarly, though none of the subjects are out, self-identified gay males, the word “faggot” is uttered throughout the film more than any other derogatory term, and in one scene a 12-year-old boy named Alex is threatened on the bus by a peer who says, “I’ll shove a broomstick up your ass.” According toThe Los Angeles Times, this explicitly homophobic scene was the lynchpin in the ratings controversy surrounding the film and was almost cut in order to change the MPAA rating from R to PG-13 — still another example of the “gay” aspect of this epidemic at risk of being minimized or erased. The two female subjects are featured less in the documentary, and though we do not learn much about them, it is made clear that one of them has deviated from gender and sexual norms, having come out at her school as a lesbian.
The insidiousness of the misogynistic lens even affects how the parents of the children in the film view them. When Alex tells his father how his peers have been treating him, his father’s knee-jerk reaction is to suggest that Alex has failed to protect himself and thereby failed to protect his sister, who will be attending middle school the following year. The reaction is clearly borne of love, fear, confusion, and desperation, but it shows just how deeply embedded the gender binary is in our minds, and how we perpetuate it (and its damaging effects) even with the best of intentions. Alex’s father unwittingly establishes role expectations for Alex and his sister — male vs. female, hero vs. victim — thereby failing to empathize with or validate Alex’s experience of victimhood, and instead exacerbating his feeling that he is less than normal.
We may be blind to the misogynistic gender binary in our own country by proximity. Perhaps it is easier to recognize it, and the brutality it inspires, by looking across the globe to the gruesome murders of “emo” youth in Iraq. “Emo,” short for “emotional,” is an identity adopted from the West, in which tight clothes, piercings, and spiked hair are flaunted as chosen emblems of vulnerability. Since last year over a hundred emo youth, mostly females and gay males, have been stoned to death in Iraq, and the killing hasn’t stopped. Scott Long of The Guardian reports, “It’s all about boys showing vulnerability in unmanly ways, girls flashing an unfeminine and edgy attitude,” and it’s causing a “moral panic” in Iraq. The idea of teenagers being massacred for presenting vulnerability and conveying gender-nonconforming expression sounds horrific, but how truly different is it from the bullying currently taking place in our own American communities?
The gender binary and its relationship to bullying may be an elusive and challenging concept for many, because it requires us to self-reflect, examine our own expectations, and perhaps even change some of them. No one wants to feel he or she is part of the problem. But we are, all of us. An awareness of the systems through which we live and perceive the world, and which we maintain everyday, is essential for healing and change to take place.  

Part of the solution lies in changing our expectations for how males and females “should” behave, particularly males.  We can take a page from the fathers in Bully, all of whom have been forced to walk in the shoes of their victimized, “feminized” children, all of whom now allow themselves to be emotional, to cry, and to take action against this problem.  We cannot wait for more young people (and their families) to be destroyed before we too make the necessary adjustments in our expectations of what is “male” and what is “female”.
 

Game Change: Life Imitates TV Drama for Republican Women

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Originally Posted on March 16, 2012 on
LOGO: Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
 
 
The HBO film “Game Change”, which bowed on March 10 with Julianne Moore starring as Sarah Palin, effectively tells two stories: The first is about the rise and fall of Palin’s vice presidential campaign, and the second has to do with how the GOP views women.  The real Sarah Palin insists that the film is pure fiction, but given the recent news on contraception, the film does seem to accurately capture how Republicans use women as political pawns–something to which female voters are getting wise.

Take, for example, an early scene during which John McCain’s national campaign manager, Rick Davis (Peter MacNicol), uses YouTube in search of the best possible running mate to help McCain win. He clicks through videos of qualified women, all of who lack swimsuit-competition cred, and all of who are pro-choice. They are all passed over for Palin, who with her experience (of the swimsuit-competition variety), guns, religious extremism and political pliability (or is it naiveté?) is a conservative Republican’s wet dream. Davis couldn’t have materialized the campaign’s fantasy more precisely had he hired Industrial Light & Magic to digitally create her.
 
The remainder of the film looks at Palin’s experience in the now-legendary 2008 presidential pageant through an empathic lens—aided by sharp, sensitive direction by Jay Roach and a deeply absorbing performance by Moore that transcends caricature. While the campaign team, led by strategist Steve Schmidt (Woody Harrelson), strains to fashion Palin to its fancy, we see her—a talented but tragically uninformed human being whose fragile ego has only ever found strength by being incorporated into male power structures—desperately fumbling for autonomy.
 
On the surface, the movie is a backstage drama about the McCain campaign’s failure to pull a Pygmalion on the nation. However, the underlying drama is a disturbing depiction of gender relations, as the men who selected Palin experience an array of emotions including shock (when she won’t follow orders), frustration (when her obvious ignorance proves to be less than charming), shame (having been blindsided by this “siren”) and finally full-throttle fury (when she insists on doing things her own way).
 
When Schmidt unleashes on Palin, soon after McCain’s official loss, Harrelson’s performance not only conveys his understandable rage, resentment and self-blame, but also a virile aggression, almost suggesting that to hit her would be just deserts. It’s an evocative moment, offering us the choice to identify with Harrelson’s aggressive, “male” power or Moore’s vulnerable, “female” humiliation—which may help explain why women like Palin allow themselves to be adopted by conservative male ideologies in the first place.
Adding insult to her injury, Ed Harris’ McCain then warns Palin not to allow the conservative male pundits to “co-opt” her. This, of course, is backhanded advice after he and his managers have done precisely that, only to disassociate from her when she failed to let them fully possess her.
 
Many Republican and centrist women voters can apparently identify with the plight of this “fictional” Sarah Palin. Articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among others, state that many women with tendencies to vote Republican are making an about-face in reaction to the current contraception issue.
It appears that recent events, which include the House Republicans’ selection of a panel of all-male “authorities” on women’s health and a certain conservative radio host calling a young woman advocate a “slut,” have amounted to a wake-up call for right-leaning women. Perhaps a number of them are feeling what Moore’s Palin emotes at the end of “Game Change”: the abasement of having been co-opted by a male-run organization, used as a political tool, stripped of dignity and then kicked to the curb.
 
As these women spring to life, unlike the “nonfiction” Sarah Palin, the light may be rising for them in the form of self-advocacy, as well as identification with kindred minority groups. For example, looking at some of the specific complaints some women have stated in the aforementioned articles—that the GOP tries to control them, instructs them how to act in the bedroom and commands them to “live as I live”—the overlap with the LGBT community is palpable.
 
This is far from coincidence, as Republicans’ resistance to both removing policies like DOMA and passing ones like ENDA, is more about what professor Judith Butler calls “the policing of gender,” about maintaining a gender binary in order to preserve male dominance, than it is about a fear of same-sex sex. In other words, much of homophobia is really just veiled misogyny, and women voters might be catching on.
This awakening could mean a sudden surge in support for rights such as same-sex marriage—which, as Slate writer Linda Hirshman clearly argues, may actually be a coup for straight women. It could also simply mean an increased demand for women leaders who actually stand for women.

Men in Drag: Armisen Charms, Sandler’s a Miss

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Originally Posted on March 6, 2012, on
LOGO: Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
 
During its theatrical run last fall, the response to Adam Sandler’s cross-dressing comedy “Jack and Jill,” which made its DVD debut on Tuesday, was an overwhelming thumbs down: The film’s approval ratings on the website Rotten Tomatoeswere 43 percent from audiences and an abysmal 3 percent from critics.  The focus has mainly been on Sandler’s portrayal of a woman–in fact, his record-breaking sweep of Razzienominations includes the distinction of Worst Actress–and upon the film’s recent U.K. release, The Guardian’s Steve Rose went so far as to writethat his performance may represent “the death of the cross-dressing movie”.

Why does Sandler’s shtick fail to elicit laughter—or anything but a furrowed brow—and what might be the significance of his profound unfunniness for broader issues of gender and media?

In order for the humor in a film like this to take flight, the “ridiculous character” (aka, the guy who looks awkward in drag) needs to be played truthfully. As fellow thespian John C. Reilly says, it is the actor’s job “to tell the truth as much as you can,” and this honest commitment to exaggerated circumstances is what makes a scene funny.
But in “Jack and Jill,” Sandler seems too uncomfortable to play Jill’s truth and instead defensively scrambles to make derisive jokes about her. He emphasizes her rough and crass masculinity, rather than committing to revealing her (and his) true feminine qualities. One wonders why he would choose this material in the first place, if only to grab some laughs at the expense of unattractive women. The Guardian’s Rose suggests that perhaps underneath on-screen drag performances like Sandler’s “lie the unrequited yearnings of our fading comics to really get in touch with their big, fat feminine sides. It’s a shame none of them seems to have the balls.”
 
The fear of identifying with a person who is female or feminine is an oft-unspoken reality in Hollywood. The greatest actress of her generation, Meryl Streep, says heterosexual male actors and audiences have always been resistant to “assum[ing] a persona if that persona is a she.” But if this insidious fear—or “Femme Phobia,” as memoirist Julia Serano calls it—is the root cause of “Jack and Jill’s” bombastic failure, then the film industry has a real problem on its hands. Breaking the silence on this issue is crucial to averting flops like this in the future, as well as to uncovering the myriad ways in which Femme Phobia is harmful.
To begin with, what exactly is so terrifying to men about femininity? Numerous social scientific studies conclude that, for most men, there is a fear that presenting as too sensitive, too soft or too feminine may read as “gayness.” In simple terms, all things feminine in male behavior are considered to be “gay,” and all things “gay” are considered to be undesirable and bad and the worst possible thing for a man to be.
 
Perpetuating these attitudes on screen certainly exacerbates problems for LGBT communities, especially young people too often memorialized in a relentless news stream of bullying and harassment to the point of suicide or murder. But infrequently discussed in such news reports is the fact that such violence usually occurs due to people’s perceived sexuality based on gender presentation (i.e., men who are effeminate) as opposed to their stated sexuality (men openly identifying as gay).
 
What is talked about even less is the impact these attitudes have on straight men. In a 2010 piece for The Christian Science Monitor titled “Homophobia hurts straight men, too,” Jonathan Zimmerman emphasized how this contagious fear creates harmful limitations for straight men, like keeping them from having intimate, long-standing friendships with one another. This toxic fear seems to keep certain male actors, like Sandler, from maximizing their obvious creative potential. By widening the margins of their own gender expression, male actors would make room for more honest, effective and funnier work.
 
Not all straight male actors are so constrained, however, as evidenced by “Saturday Night Live” cast member Fred Armisen’s performance in IFC’s “Portlandia.” This sketch comedy series, which mocks hipster culture on the West/Left Coast, features Armisen in various roles, including several as women. Armisen’s performances are the polar opposite of Sandler’s: He fully embodies his female characters, honestly exposing his sensitive and feminine qualities—often to extremes—resulting in hilarity without mean-spiritedness, misogyny, homophobia or self-hatred. Armisen is authentically funny, and critics and audiences have embraced the show.
If more male actors allowed themselves to play a wider spectrum of gendered behaviors as Armisen does, the benefits would be subtle but substantial. This could reduce an epidemic male fear of seeming sensitive, feminine or gay. It might even contribute to a reduction in violence against all women and men, particularly those in the LGBT communities, as so often we behave, enact and are what we watch.

LOVE BITES

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For many, Valentine’s Day is the time to indulge in romantic delights, typically of the instantly gratifying but not so long lasting variety. This is all very well when your love’s fire is newly kindled, but several years in, the chocolates, bubbles and baubles may be inadequate fuel.This February 14th I recommend sharing something perhaps less arousing but far more sustaining than small bites, sweet bites, and all other bites you’re likely to share with your partner, sincere sound bites.

 

Yes, I know what you’re thinking, “that doesn’t sound very hot”, but I assure you, even hotter – not to mention more durable – than expensive expressions of passion is the ability to authentically listen, talk to and be heard by your partner.

 

Where to begin? First, we must acknowledge what happens to relationships once the Hollywoodized, hue of the first year or so has begun to fade.You each become exposed, and the magnetic love fields at your inner cores – the very specific, subjective, and deeply-rooted reasons you have gravitated to each other – begin to reveal themselves, making you vulnerable. Many of your conflicts as a couple derive from a fear of this vulnerability, which leads you to rely on opportunities like Valentine’s Day to glaze over the rough spots with chocolate denial.But it is in precisely this vulnerable place that you need to be to keep the love flame alive.

 

Vulnerability is necessary in order to have a “strong sense of love and belonging” says research professor Brene Brown, who has studied vulnerability, authenticity, and shame for over a decade.Brown says that a crucial component of this is being able to say “I love you first” and having “the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees”. This aspect of love often bites.

 

Now, the tricky thing about being vulnerable in love is that it can easily lead to unfocused emotional chaos, which is why we so often avoid it.We need to harness our vulnerability by defining where each of us is coming from, and thus clarifying our specific emotional needs.To accomplish this, it is helpful to establish the boundaries around each of our “characters”.As actress Mary McDonnell says, “Great characters develop out of restricted situations.When people feel the limitations of life, something else takes over that’s specific and colorful.”Much like acting, defining our roles can be incredibly helpful in freeing our expressions of emotion.

 

I must say, I often try to resist oversimplifying, generalizing or categorizing relationship roles (i.e. books of the “Men are from Jupiter, Women are from Neptune” variety only apply to a limited number of romantic pairs), but I’ve learned that defining emotional roles that are somewhat flexible, and which reasonably account for nuances, can create focus and lead to clear and productive communication.

 

Having worked with a variety of couples for years, and reading about couples’ work from myriad schools of thought, the two roles that I’ve identified in every single romantic relationship are what I call The Engulfed and The Abandoned.

 

What does that mean?Well, couples, I’m telling you that without exception, that one of you is The Engulfed – meaning you learned from a very early age that emotionally intimate relationships require you to be engulfed, enveloped, or somehow encompassed, to varying degrees, by the other person. And the other one of you is The Abandoned – meaning you learned from a young age that emotionally intimate relationships cannot be taken for granted and constantly require you to do something to maintain them, or you risk abandonment.

 

A few clarifications need to be made. We’ve all been abandoned in one form or another, and we’ve all experienced some version of engulfment.It should also be noted that I am not making any assumptions about gender, personality, temperament, passivity, or dominance in utilizing these terms. What these labels refer to are the highly specific ways in which each of us has learned to attach emotionally, and from what I’ve seen in my practice, there is always one person in a couple who does this by becoming engulfed, and another driven by a fear of abandonment.

 

These two roles are complimentary, which is how you ended up together, but they are also threatening to each other. Like a wandering oyster and free floating sea particle, the two of you found each other, aggravate each other, and are in the process of forming a thing of beauty. Knowing and accepting which of you is which, will take you both to the place you need to be.You’ll be vulnerable, but with clarity and on equal footing, as neither of these roles is more powerful than the other.They both imply a need for the other, and if these needs are acknowledged and authentically expressed, neither one of you can rise above the exposure of your emotional nakedness.

 

There are various methods I use to help couples get to this place and to communicate with each other once they’ve arrived but for now, in order to apply this concept on V-day, think of it as an acting exercise. Like an actor preparing for a big scene, much of the “work” will take place within you, as you take some time to reflect upon all of the reasons you are drawn to your partner. You will want to make special note of the contradictions in your attraction, and to consider the psychological literature that contends we are attracted to aspects of our partner that seem familiar – whether that be comforting or frustrating, good or bad. Think about your own reasons for choosing someone “so controlling” or someone “so elusive”. Meditate on all of the caretakers you had as a child, what you got from them and what you didn’t, what overwhelmed you and what you didn’t get enough of.

 

Keep all of these reflections in mind as you approach the hot seat, and choose to share one current feeling, desire, concern or request with your partner, delivering the line from a place of vulnerability, clarity, and truth. This is a frightening task, so one of you will likely need to set up the scene, to “say “I love you” first, and once you take this leap of faith, you’ll need your partner there to catch you. You will need to prepare your partner to listen…carefully, lovingly, and without judgment. The listening is just as important – if not more. The unconditional listening of a romantic partner is incredibly healing, and can help one to integrate seemingly contradictory feelings.

 

Psychologist Harvel Hendricks suggests a listening tool that you can both use, not unlike mirroring exercises developed by the acting teacher Sanford Meisner.The idea is to listen to your partner describe a feeling, desire or concern and to say it back to them neutrally, without attitude or interpretation.The next step is to validate their statement and then to empathize with it.That’s it.As any good actor would do, simply play each of those actions in your own way.

So, in review, your effective Love Bites can be achieved through the following steps:

 

1) One of you will have to initiate a dialogue.

 

2) You’ll both have to agree to be vulnerable with each other.

 

3) Cast yourselves as yourselves: Acknowledge who is The Abandoned and who is The Engulfed, and then reflect upon your attractions to one another.

 

4)One at a time, state one feeling, desire, concern or request – possibly sharing a specific memory for context.

 

5)Wholeheartedly listen and mirror what your partner has said to you.

 

And you’re done!

 

If you both can allow yourselves to be fully present and follow these steps, expecting “no guarantees” – much, much easier said than done – you’ll feel closer to each other than any oysters, petit fours, or champagne would ever allow.You’ll also likely find yourselves open to exploring more potential possibilities in your relationship…perhaps even bites you haven’t yet imagined trying.

Don’t Act, Don’t Tell!: Discrimination Based on Gender Nonconformity in the Entertainment Industry and the Clinical Setting

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Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health
Published in the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health Vol. 16 Issue (3)
ABSTRACT
The author describes anti-homosexual attitudes in the entertainment industry. Effeminate male actors generally have a hard time being cast, whether for gay or straight roles. Attitudes in the performing arts mirror those in society as a whole. Case reports are interspersed in the discussion to illustrate the points.
 
INTRODUCTION
There is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” practice in the hiring of actors for film, theater, and television—but it is certainly as ubiquitous in casting for the world’s stage as well. Here is how it works: actors can avoid discrimination so long as they do not disclose being homosexual. What is considered to be a disclosure in this case can be verbal, but is more often non-verbal, and merely a casting director’s perception or interpretation of the actor’s sexuality based on their gender presentation. This practice limits work for out and “seemingly gay” actors, and also severely limits audience perceptions of both homosexuality and gender. A simple example of this can be found in the film Brokeback Mountain, for which straight, masculine movie stars were hired to play gay men. By restricting the presence of gender-nonconforming people in film, television, and theater, the message, “you are permitted to be gay, just don’t flaunt your identity” (Yoshino, 2006), reverberates like an earthquake and without anyone having to claim responsibility or fix the problem. Until this phenomenon is brought to the surface – by naming and aggressively discussing it – homophobic discrimination will continue on and below the surface. Specifically we can expect to see more job discrimination, bullying, suicides, and hate crimes against gender-nonconforming people (both gay and straight)……



ACTING OUT
 
by Mark O’Connell
 
The following short film is a collection of interviews with lesbian and gay self identified actors. The actors discuss the pressure they often feel, to modify their instinctive gender presentations in order to appeal to casting directors, producers and directors. Casting director Brette Goldstein very honestly and eloquently shares her experiences working with gender nonconforming actors, and the way the business responds to them.

 

Containers and Pinatas

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We can all identify with the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. At some point in our lives we’ve unwittingly sat on the wrong wall (some taller than others), fallen (some more disastrously than others), and broken into so many pieces we feel beyond repair. Whether our breaking has taken the form of a simple blow to the ego (i.e., not getting cast as the Jolly Green Giant in the school play—because you’re four feet tall), or severe trauma, abuse, or loss, each of us has felt broken, disconnected, and fragmented.
 
Recognizing that all the king’s horses and men can’t put us back together, we try to reassemble ourselves, or at least attempt to contain our broken bits – as if temporarily storing them in an urn – until we figure out how to heal, and to feel whole again.
 
Here are a few ways we try to contain our feelings of brokenness:
 
1) We seek mastery over our great fall by overcompensating. Not only are we determined NEVER to fall again, but we are also determined to become absolutely UNBREAKABLE. For example, if as a little girl you were cruelly criticized for your inadequate tennis skills, you might attempt to contain your feelings of incompetence through the single-minded goal of becoming the next Serena Williams.
 
2) We might use the creative arts to express our brokenness. The parameters that surround a work of art might allow us freedom to express ourselves. By directing the focus off of us and onto our creation, we contain our fragmented feelings within the part we play, the dance we choreograph, the picture we paint, or the book we write.
 
3) We seek guidance in the form of a therapist, counselor, or spiritual advisor – Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion used the term “container” to describe a process where a psychotherapist holds, and reflects back a client’s thoughts and feelings for the client, until the client is ready to identify with those thoughts and feelings and possess them as their very own.
 
Containing our shattered emotions can be the beginning of great healing, but it only works if the container is secure. If it leaks, breaks or combusts, then it is no longer a container, but rather a piñata instead. When the walls of our containers crack, this can re-stimulate the experience of our original fall, leaving us once again feeling vulnerable, weak, broken, and hopeless. Here are some examples of the containers that I described above, becoming piñatas:
 
1) We are simply unable to overcompensate for the damage caused by our shattering fall – overcompensation being a precarious goal/container to begin with. If the little girl who was criticized for her inadequacies as a tennis player, fails to become the next Serena Williams, her debilitating feelings of inadequacy will inevitably become re-stimulated.
 
2) The work of art we create, in order to hold our broken feelings becomes too revealing, too unfocused – a scattered expose. If the parameters of the character we play, the story we’re trying to tell, or picture we’re trying to create, are not clear and appropriately observed, the work could potentially become too unnecessarily personal and exposing, leaving us vulnerable to harsh rejection and judgment by our peers and audiences that is directed at us and not our creation.
 
3) If our therapists, counselors, or spiritual advisors, take on more personal roles in our lives (friends, peers, co-workers, lovers, companions), or freely expel information we give them in confidence to anyone who will listen, we are being compromised, and will likely become less trustful, less hopeful, and more broken then we were when we sought help.
 
It is far easier to freely discharge our broken fragments into piñatas, rather than endure the discipline of keeping them contained. However, by respecting the solid parameters of a container, particularly in terms of a psychotherapeutic relationship with clear and agreed upon boundaries, much progress can be made. Emotional healing takes time, it is a process, and it is hard work, but respecting and accepting the limitations of a container can result in great liberation—and with time, you may even feel “back together again.”

AND THE OSCAR GOES TO…YOU!

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Face it, mid-winter is not your finest hour.Many of us are putting off our vows and ambitions for the new year.Some of us are unhappy with our bodies (holiday over-eating, relentless blizzards limiting effective gym time), and some just burying our heads like ostriches, in order to avoid the winter blues—or what some call Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).We hibernate, isolate, avoid invitations – preferring the couch to the concourse – all because right now you just don’t feel like being “you” and certainly don’t want to expose your sorry state to anyone else.Fortunately television producers know exactly how you’re feeling, and obligingly offer you a buffet of exciting special events – in order to lose your blues in someone else’s excitement – including the Super Bowl, the Grammy’s and the Oscars.
The Oscars are perhaps the most alluring spectator sport of all, since we get to observe our beautiful heroines and heroes of the screen as they enjoy a surprise moment of unequivocal attention and lauds.Witnessing the Oscar winner seize this moment of grand deference, in a speech of three minutes or less – speaking from the heart as she expresses gratitude, shares her passions, and takes a moment to mention the ideals and social issues which are important to her – transports us from our SAD obscurity into a thrilling moment of receiving vicarious reverence.Of course the big hangover comes when the show is over, you return to your own life…and realize that it’s very late, on a very cold Sunday night.
For those of you who connect with the above experience, here’s what I suggest: give your own Oscar acceptance speech to the bathroom mirror.In three minutes or less, tell your looking glass how grateful you are, why it is so meaningful to win an award for “this” particular project, thank all of the people to whom you are indebted, blow kisses to all those who enrich your life, share what you value most about the work you do, and emphasize one or two important issues to which you’d like to bring international attention.If you feel it wanders or bombs the first time, take advantage of the fact that there is no orchestra to bully you off the stage (or out of the powder room) and give it another go until it feels right.
I know what you’re thinking: (1) “Isn’t this behavior Narcissistic?”; (2) “Isn’t this behavior Psychotic?”; and (3) “How can this be healthy?”My answers to these are:(1) “Yes, but there is such a thing as healthy narcissism.If you repeatedly thank yourself, as opposed to other people, in your “loo” speech, that would be the unhealthy kind.”(2) “Only if you do it every day, and at the exclusion of conversations with other people.”(3) “Because we all need our emotions, urges, and creative desires mirrored back to us, in order to feel secure, integrated, and motivated.If we’re not getting this mirroring from our relationships, we can at least imagine how we would express ourselves if given the opportunity to be showered with infinite positive attention.Besides, most of you have done this already anyway, so…”
The goal of this exercise is certainly not to replace social relationships with a reflective surface – the literally fatal moment of the Narcissus myth – but rather to motivate you to get off the couch and engage with others more purposefully, meaningfully, and effectively.We can’t really see other people and offer them generosity, love, and support if we’re not feeling seen, loved, and supported in our own skins.Perhaps your private Oscar moment will inspire you to surround yourself with people who are better reflectors than your current friends, or maybe it could open up significant topics to be discussed in your therapy.Whatever the outcome, at least you will have given yourself a moment to reflect on your potential as an individual and as part of a community.Just take it easy at any imagined “Oscar after parties” after you’ve finished your “speech.”

Trimming Your Christmas THREE!

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As much as we may want to visit with family at the holidays (or just feel obligated to), many of us are weighed down with family drama. We feel heavy with the fear of unresolved conflicts being triggered, old wounds reopening, and multiple miscommunications devolving into emotional chaos.
 
Just as you might trim your waistline before summer, so, too should you trim your family drama before the end of year holidays. For swimsuit dieters, there are quick, easy and even healthy ways to achieve this trimming (such as The Southbeach Diet). For those of us carrying around a few extra pounds of family drama, there’s a surefire way to trim down as well – before getting caught in the “Hell”-iday flames.
 
The technique I’m about to share with you is simple as One, Two and….well, forget about Three. That’s it actually. That’s the whole technique. Drop the number three from all your family interactions in the days leading up to your family gathering. In other words, “three’s a crowd” and so don’t talk to anyone in your family about any other member of your family. At All.Under no circumstances. Keep all contact one-on-one.
 
Stick to this rule and just like abstaining from carbs will trim down your body in two weeks,trimming three from your family relationships will reduce your load of “dirty laundry” in the same amount of time. Keep it up between now and New Year’s Day, and you will coast through the holidays like Santa on a sleigh – minus the heavy load. I realize that this is easier blogged than done, but I promise you will see results if you are disciplined.
 
This means that if a family member calls you up to complain about a prehistoric argument with another family member, change the subject. Keep the subject of the dialogue positive, and only on you and the other person, not anyone else in the family. This may result in yourtriangulating relative (TR) to feel rejected. Kindly remind TR that you are very interested in them and their life, but that you simply do not wish to discuss the relative they have beef with – instead you’d rather hear what’s going on with them. Your conversations may become much shorter than ever before, and this is ok too. As long as the conversations are positive and dyadic (only focused on you and that other person) you’re good.
 
After trying this (for at least a week), you can help yourself even more by proactively contacting relatives you will see at an upcoming gathering, but are used to only being in touch with through someone else. Again, these may be short exchanges, but at least they will be positive, and you will have made a direct connection, thereby avoiding any preemptive fanning of “Hell”-iday flames. By doing this, you may also even create an unexpected firewall for yourself, if and when family drama erupts.
 
By the time you arrive at your event, you will already be familiar with how to have brief, positive encounters with each person present. Everyone will know that you’re not the person to confide in regarding their smoldering feelings about others present, and since you haven’t talked about anyone behind their backs, you can enjoy the levity of having nothing to hide.
 
Leave the number three to 1) the three blessings while lighting your menorah (for Hanukkah), 2) lighting the three candles of hope/ and the three candles of struggle (for Kwanzaa), or 3) for setting up the three wise men in your nativity (for Christmas); but trim the number three from your family tree.

AutoNOmy vs. AutonomYES

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Finding mutual satisfaction in relationships (be they romantic, familial, professional, etc.) is often a tough and awkward dance. We take lumbering steps trying to satisfy both our own needs, as well as those of the other person. To make things easier, some of us take the lead in this dance, thereby saying, “No” to the other person – which is only satisfying until we become bored, lonely, or resentful in this role, (or until the other party revolts). Some of us assume a passive, accommodating role and say, “No” to ourselves –until we start to feel suffocated or invisible (perhaps causing us to revolt). What we all generally share is a faulty belief; that in order for a relationship to work smoothly, someone must completely surrender his or her autonomy.
 
The “On Demand” culture we live in certainly doesn’t help us to resolve this dilemma. We regularly try to take the lead in our relationship to entertainment, as we flip through channels, DVR, Pay-per-View, don’t Pay-Per-View (a la Netflix On Demand)….until we realize that we are actually disappointingly passive in this relationship and stop the program, defiantly start another, say “No”, “No”, “Next”, “Next” (they should really call it “Next-Flix”), all in search of the perfect, most pleasurable entertainment. We are a culture of consumers, constantly battling for autonomy (I could write another piece entirely on the topic of our dependence on bad entertainment, and the importance of creating more of our own art, but for now we’re talking about relationships).
 
We look at our relationships this way as well, as consumers as opposed to creators. For example, we say things like, “I want a girl who listens to me”, “I want a guy who’s tough”, “She’s too assertive”, “He lacks drive”. We say a lot of “No” on our quest for the perfect “dance partner”, trying to take charge of this audition process and continuing to feel passive discontent. We rarely consider that rather than waiting around for the perfect match, we have the power to actively engage in this process of getting along – for some this means offering more of our opinions and feelings, for others this means being open to listening and discovering alternative perspectives to our own. We often fail to see that being autonomous in a relationship doesn’t have to be about consumption, it can be about creating new possibilities, for you and the other party involved.
The first rule of acting in improvisation is to never say “No” while performing a scene. You can say ‘Yes, and…….” or “Yes, but…..”, but it is never an option to say “No”. We can consider using this rule in our relationships. If something doesn’t feel quite right when we’re engaging with another person, before we say “No” and change the channel, consider that we often have more power than we think to create a more agreeable reality for both parties. We don’t have to shut ourselves down in order to maintain a relationship and we don’t have to shut the other person down in order to be autonomous. Be a creator in your relationships. Say, “Yes, and….”, or “Yes, but…”, but saying, “No”, will only leave you feeling discontent.

Tell, Don’t Show!

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“Show, don’t tell”. These magic words are often used to remind artists not to over-think their work, and instead to work from a playful, creative (arguably regressed), place. Screen actors in particular benefit from this advice, as their job is not to use fully articulated, eloquent bits of text in order to make a crystalline point – the way a character in a stage play written by Shakespeare, Shaw or Stoppard might – but instead to indulge in the mysterious drives and emotions that lie between the lines, in other words to “act out”.
Many of us are guilty of regularly “acting out” in our lives – here are a few examples; 1) Ignoring phone calls and emails from people we’re angry at. 2) Flirting, with someone other than your partner (in the presence of your partner), to make them pay attention to you. 3) Complaining to a friend or family member, about a third party (friend or family member) who is in the room with you. 4) Posting pictures, updates, on a social networking site, intended to indirectly induce jealousy, anger, fear, sadness (or some other emotion) in someone you’re connected to.
 
It makes sense to “act out” when your entire purpose is to keep a juicy conflict alive – as in the case of a screen actor (or reality tv personality for that matter) – but when it comes to maintaining the relationships in your real life (as opposed to your “real” life – ie. Facebook, Twitter, or reality television incarnations) it usually makes more sense to reduce and eliminate conflict, making the maxim “Tell, don’t show” more appropriate.
 
In most cases we don’t actually want conflict to be furiously, and ruinously tearing through any of our significant relationships. So, if we want to feel less tense, anxious, and frustrated by the people we deem to be important, and instead to feel more connected to them, it’s up to us to work toward “Tell”-ing them (and only them) what we want and how we feel. We can then save our compulsion to perform/ “act out” for our artistic/ creative projects.
 
With so many audiences available to everyone in the way of the internet and television, it’s more tempting than ever to “act out” your own life, sacrificing insight, self reflection, and our ability to effectively connect with people we care about. Whether we choose to remain in constant conflict via “Show”, or make a conscious effort to maintain relationships that are free of drama via “Tell”, we must be aware that the choice is ours. A clear, connected, and conflict-free relationship does not an entertaining film, tv program, or internet post make – and vise versa.