For the sake of continuity, this week I’m returning to a portion of my book, Balanced Living: Don’t Let Your Strength Become Your Weakness (Wipf and Stock, 2009), pp. 40-41.
Two weeks ago, I shared, from an introduction to the book’s signature chapter, “Balanced Living” (pp. 39-40), the important understanding that “good mental health” is always “relative,” rather than “absolute.”
This week, I’m picking up where that discussion left off.
“Another observation on which my theory of balance is based is that the difference between being fairly healthy and getting pretty sick is not great, but instead rather slight. If I were demonstrating this visually, it would be the difference between holding my arms and hands a span apart, as against holding my thumb and forefinger an eighth or a sixteenth of an inch apart.
This comes from the observation that extremes tend to reinforce their opposite.
What’s that cliche’ about how “opposites make good bedfellows”? At their extremes, they’re not nearly as far apart as they might appear. Since the pattern of such polarities tends to be cyclical. When extrapolated, they turn back toward each other.
That’s why skillful psychotherapists will often ask clients to change their ‘buts’ to ‘ands,’ as a way of emphasizing that what may seem like contradictions in our lives are usually more complementary than we realize.
As in, for example, ‘I’d like to try out for the team, but I’m scared I won’t make it.’ Are you willing to change that ‘but’ to an ‘and’? Given that re-frame, here’s what you get: ‘I’m scared and I’m going to try out for the team.’
How about, ‘I love my husband, but I don’t like his interrupting me.’ Or again, ‘I believe in God, but sometimes I have my doubts.’
Are you willing to change the ‘buts’ to ‘ands’?
We are empowered when we embrace the polarities, the dualities in our lives. This applies to any number of apparent opposites that tend to be mutually reinforcing.
For example, what is the distance between how generous I can be and how resentful I can get? Between my gentleness and my rage, between self-sacrifice and bitterness, my blessing and my condemning?
How far is it from my need for control to being out of control? Between my passivity and my aggression, my humility and my self-righteousness? Between prudery and profanity, being compliant and rebellious, between being inde-pendent and de-pendent?
What’s that old saw? ‘Neurotic people build castles in the sky; psychotic people move into them.’ I would merely add: and it’s not that far to go. After all, they’re kinfolk–or at least next door neighbors!
I consistently ask the graduate students I teach, or the post-graduates I supervise for licensure as professional counselors or marriage and family therapists, to pay attention to ‘opposites.’ When someone seems so ‘nice,’ or so ‘angry,’ so ‘happy,’ or so ‘sad,’ so ‘helpful,’ or so ‘resentful.’
So ‘passive,’ or so ‘aggressive,’ so ‘rational,’ so ‘rigid,’ so ‘sensitive,’ so whatever . . . .
What would the opposite of that adaptation–which it often is–what would its opposite look like? Remember–opposites–they’re not that far apart.”
And in case you’re looking for likely the most contemporary of examples of what I’ve just described and interpreted–if anyone could imagine a “worse-case” scenario–consider that the same young man who committed such an atrocity a week ago in Aurora, Colorado, was also a super-star student pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience. A kid who seems to have been sufficiently–to quote Willy Loman–“well-liked.” At least among those who thought they knew him, as socially shy and guarded as he appears to have been.
If “brilliant” is often a term used to describe the smartest-of-the-smart, in the tragic case of James Holmes, such “brilliance”–it finally couldn’t hide the “darkness” it tried to conceal.
Mentally healthier people people are reasonably “well-integrated.” This means that they tend to “embrace, own, claim,” even “bless” the seeming “contradictions” of their lives.
For anything we’re trying to “run and/or hide from” has, ironically, an inordinate capacity to not only “find us,” it can end up “running,” if not “ruining” our lives. Even, too often, the lives of others.
