This is Herman.

I drew him at my last Mastermind group meeting where I was asking for help yet again with my Eternal Quandary which one of the gals put succinctly as: I want to be famous but I don’t want to be famous. (And by famous, I mean internet famous — known amongst biz geeks for making cool things that help people).

I was lamenting finding myself in front of the same brick wall.

I wrote the problem down on my notepaper and randomly drew a circle around it.

Stupid problem.

I drew arrows and spears to represent all the angles of attack that had not worked to fix it. Therapy. Workshops. Morning pages. Etc.

Then, on a whim, I drew eyes on the top of the circle. And then arms and legs. And named the problem “Herman”.

With this simple drawing, something shifted inside me. I felt warmth for the little creature I had just given a name and a face.

Through this drawing, I had started to form a relationship with my “brick wall”. The problem was no longer a problem, it was a little being that wanted something.

The wall was its way of communicating. I was just unable to hear it.

As my perspective changed, I got curious about what this little guy wanted. What was his objection to fame? Why the big wall?

As the conversation continued, it turned out the “wall” was really a set of needs, wrapped up in a confusing jumble of beliefs about how those needs would not get met if I were famous.

For instance, if I were famous, I would have to be Eternally Productive, never play games, always be available, do interviews, enjoy schmoozing, etc. And I don’t want that, no sirree.

It turns out the resistance wasn’t about the idea of getting my work out to more people at all. It was about what happens next, and if I could maintain my boundaries.

It turns out that Herman is this amazing advocate for my self-care.

Herman wants to go to bed earlier. Herman wants time for me to think and process my feelings. Herman wants the freedom to attend to what I really need. Herman wants to stop working before I’m burned out and exhausted.

Herman may feel a little conservative and cautious. But he’s totally on my side.

Our demons are parts of ourselves we have miscast in the inner drama of our mind.

Herman was never a demon. But because I had never formed a relationship with him, I did not know his true face.

In fact, as I worked more with Herman, I found another demon — the part of myself who has a bundle of needs around contribution and purpose and thinks that if I don’t work constantly I won’t be proving that I’m enough.  Another set of real needs mixed up in a tangle of unhelpful beliefs.

These two play tug-of-war in my subconscious, pushing and pulling on me. One yanks hard and I stay up all night working on a project. The other gives a good pull and I spend hours vegetating in front of the TV. Neither are happy and both are afraid of losing their grip on the only way they know of to meet their needs: by pulling me into their habitual strategies.

The wall turned out to be just a weapon in a larger inner battle that I’m working to resolve. (Other symptoms of an inner battle include: endless discontentment, fantasizing instead of doing, and never moving in any one direction for very long.)

Once I get these two parts of myself talking, I can get somewhere with what my whole system needs to move forward.

Maturing psychologically means learning to play the referee with our subconscious parts.

The drawing was an avenue to start humanizing this tangled knot of needs and beliefs, and get curious about them. This is the first step.

To do this work, you need some consistent way to get underneath the symptoms that appear to your conscious awareness. Writing, drawing, and talking with supportive people who ask good questions are what work for me. Experiment to collect your own toolset.

Keep a completely open and curious attitude about what you will find. It’s a wacky world inside our minds. Demons? Walls? Those are my metaphors; you’ll find your own. Whatever you discover, don’t judge it, or it won’t reveal its secrets to you.

Have patience and self-forgiveness too. There is no magic wand that will make issues instantly explicable. The mind is a labyrinth full of characters with different motivations and horribly inexplicable ways of communicating. It’s up to you to make a map and translate the hieroglyphics on the wall.

I’ve been watching Stargate SG-1. Every episode they jump into a swirling pool of light to find out what new world is on the other side. Inner work is kind of like that. It takes cojones.

The last element is to continually experiment with new, healthy, adult ways to meet your needs consciously and consistently. By “healthy”, I mean that you don’t meet one need at the expense of another. For example, eating two chocolate bars for dinner meets my need for comfort, but at the cost of my need for nourishment. Eating one square of chocolate, making myself a decent meal, and curling up with my cat meets many needs without cost.

Generally our demon strategies are costly and habitual. It’s up to us to investigate what they need, help them feel heard enough so they stop taking over, and develop the discipline of consistently choosing healthy strategies.

This takes a lot of practice. Again with the patience. Be good to yourself.

Worksheet!

I wrote up the drawing exercise and some of the questions I asked myself. Enjoy (and let me know in the comments how it works for you).

All emotional suffering and stuckness is caused by closing down and contracting around pain. Pain happens, and change happens – this is the nature of life. However, suffering is an add-on that we create through our reaction to that pain and change.

Healing is the process of grieving and accepting this pain and change, and integrating the information into our lives in a way that supports our growth and wellbeing. Healing is an opening-up process. The ultimate goal is to reconnect you to the flow of life.

Our resistance to pain and change blocks this flow. Our ability to adapt to change, and to grieve pain and loss, determines how much we will be able to taste life as it unfolds before us.

The stages of grief apply to all transitions.

If you look at the five classic stages of grieving, there are four stages of resistance/contracting/”inner war”, and then one stage of healing/expansion:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

And that’s OK. This model was developed for dealing with death, which takes our bodies and minds some time to adjust to. It’s OK to take however long it takes to go through the grief process. But in each stage, one can hold in mind the idea to open up and to be kind to oneself (this supports opening up).

I believe that all change requires grieving on some level. Our bodies and minds naturally attach to things and it’s up to us to develop the ability to move through change and transformation gracefully.

Acceptance is not resignation.

Resignation is a form of closing-down. Acceptance is an opening-up. To cultivate acceptance means practicing opening our heart when it wants to close.

Being open-hearted requires skilled self-protection.

Pain is always an opportunity to open up more; but this requires skill, not just ambition. Constant exposure to pain will not transform you. It’s being able to learn from pain that helps us to grow.

To do this requires inner and outer boundaries. If we open our heart when it’s dangerous to do so and if we don’t look out for ourselves, we will get hurt more and shut down again.

Part of cultivating acceptance and open-heartedness is developing the skills to protect ourselves in healthy ways. They go hand in hand. Our mind is not going to give up its shutting-down behaviors if it doesn’t have any sense of trust that we can provide protection for it any other way. You have to earn the trust of the scared parts of yourself by learning to care for them well.

You can learn and practice these skills.

If your family did not model skillful adaptation to change, this is something you will need to learn and coach yourself through.

But it’s well worth it–developing this “grieving muscle” gives you a strength and inner resilience that keeps you steady and centered throughout everything that life brings.

Feel your feelings.
All of them.
All of them, feel them, as much of the time as you can.

But, don’t identify with them.
Don’t loop around in thoughts that make them worse.
They are messages, they are flags.

Feel them in your body. Not in your head.
Feel them and let them go.
Listen to them, heed them, and let them go.

Listen to them, but remember you are not them.
You are vast; your emotional brain is limited.
Whatever the feeling, you can handle it; you are bigger than it.

It will not kill you.
Really.
It just feels that way. So feel that too.

Lately the feeling I’ve been processing is anxiety. I never thought of myself as an anxious person before, but now I realize that’s because of all the unconscious patterns I had in place to avoid feeling it. Lovely.

I don’t have much to say on this topic that hasn’t already been written, except to just encourage you to do it.

This is what is on the other side of that feeling you don’t want to feel: freedom. Ease. That soft relaxed feeling in your belly. (There is nothing better really than a relaxed belly.)

10 reasons to feel your feelings:

1. When you suppress a negative feeling, you are suppressing your ability to feel positive feelings like joy, aliveness, happiness.
2. Suppressing emotions is courting depression.
3. It’s not fun, I won’t say it is, but all the antics we do to not feel aren’t fun either. Is your favorite habit or addiction really fun? At this point? Really?
4. There is a wonderful you on the other side of those feelings that you haven’t met yet. The you that can handle whatever comes her way.
5. You stop projecting so much and  become a much nicer person to be around.
6. You get the energy back you were using to suppress your feelings.
7. You get the acceptance you always wanted from everyone else – from yourself – and realize you can give that to yourself any time you want to. You gain emotional independence. Which is fabulous.
8. You feel worse for awhile, but then you feel SO MUCH BETTER. After all that work to avoid it, it’s such a relief to have it over with.
9. You grow and mature as a person as you integrate all the messages those feelings were trying to get to you.
10. You have more access to your intuition as the channel between you and your inner self clears up.

Maybe it’s something you want to do for yourself personally – some aspect of self-care. Maybe it’s related to a goal you have for your business.

Some part of you is holding back, stonewalling, procrastinating, etc. And I mean that literally – some part of you. A distinct person-like part of you.

Our culture encourages this idea of forcing yourself – you make yourself go to the gym, make yourself go to work, make yourself eat your vegetables.

I find this a horrible way to live. I don’t want to make myself do anything! I want my whole self to be on board with everything I do. And that’s what this process is about.

Imagine your body and mind is a business. You have a team of people, all serving their function. When things are going well, they work together in harmony and things get done easily.

But what if the sales department and the development team aren’t talking? What if the president is out to lunch and not listening to his employees?

If you are having a problem with one segment of your business, what is usually needed? More communication. Listening, discovering what is going on, and brainstorming a real win-win solution. This is the same process I do inside myself, and it works just as well.

Step 1: Identify a part of yourself that is in resistance.

This works best with something that hasn’t responded to other things you’ve tried. Or that feels hard and stuck in your body. Something you’ve pushed away or tried to change by force.

The part I’m going to talk to right now is the part of me that wants to stay up late and keep my sleep schedule something around 2 am to noon.

I want to talk to it because I know I feel better and get more done if I wake up at 8 or 9 rather than noon. I’ve tried forcing my schedule to change and have not had any success – so I know I need to dig deeper.

Step 2: Open a dialog with an attitude of exploration, not an agenda to change or fix.

Even though you do want to see a change, think of it as a separate entity, a person that you really can’t change. All you can do is listen really well, explain your own needs in an open and honest manor, and hope they want to find a win-win solution with you. But to respect them, you can’t try to change them. You need to approach your inner parts with the same kind of respect you would show a colleague or friend.

The inner person you are approaching might be very suspicious of you right now and you may have to do some clean-up work before they trust you. If you’ve tried to force them or change them in the past, they might respond with things like “You don’t really want to hear from me” or they might not say anything at all. They might sound like a surly teenager – they might be a younger part of you.

Keep trying, just like you would with a good friend who you genuinely care about.

When you talk to the part, try to guess what it’s feeling and needing, to let it know you are listening, that you care, and that you want to help meet its needs. (Yes, it really is just like talking to a person who is deeply upset).

In the example below, I’ve worked with this voice a little before, so we have some rapport. It is somewhat guarded but it opens up pretty quickly.

The more you work with a voice and show you really are interested in what it has to say, and are not judging or punishing or pushing it, the more it will trust you and just tell you what is up.

Here’s a transcript of my inner dialog:

Me: Hi, part of me that doesn’t want to go to bed. What’s going on for you right now?

Part: You don’t want to listen to me, anyway. You just want to write your damn blog post. You want to be famous and have people like you. But I want people to like us for who we are.

Me: Are you feeling lonely, like nobody knows who you are?

Part: Like nobody would like me if they knew me.

Me: I know you and I like you.

Part: You keep trying to change me, to get me to go to bed earlier.

Me: Well, I do find going to bed earlier works better for me. Is there another way I could get to know you? Tell me more about who you are.

Part: Well, I’m quiet. I like the night-time because nobody is up and I can do my own thing. I don’t have to be responding to emails and whatever, I can just do something creative on my own time. And it’s after work hours so I don’t feel like “I ought to be working”. I like to make things. I made that design last night. I couldn’t do that during the day, I never get an uninterrupted block of time. There is always something that has to be done, a phone call, an email. Like right now you were writing this and someone called so you got up and answered the phone. I don’t like that, I want to just work. I wish they would just read the website or something and stop calling me. Blah.

Me: It sounds like you really like time to yourself to be creative without interruptions.

Part: Yeah. You remember when we were kids, I would spend hours knitting and crocheting things? I always had 5 projects going and I wouldn’t finish half of them. =) I guess I still do that only with projects. Or in college, I would spend hours working on websites. We hardly ever get to do that anymore. I miss making something, having something to show for it. Answering the same questions every day doesn’t produce anything. Emails don’t produce anything. I like to make things.

Me: Sounds like the growth of the business and the customer service stuff we do is really wearing on you.

Part: Yeah, it feels like death. Day after day of trivial things and never making anything new.

Me: Sounds depressing.

Part: Yeah, completely. I started wondering if I even have any creativity left, I haven’t felt creative in so long. I was so glad I got that idea last night, and I’ve been making those cards. I feel so much better, but I don’t want to lose it again. I want to build my life around that, around making things. Maybe I’d want to get up at 9 if I knew I’d get to make things. I can’t give up my late night quiet time if it is the only quiet time I get. I don’t really know, I can’t be sure I’d want to wake up early, but it seems more likely.

Me: OK. I hear you.

Step 3: Do something.

Sometimes all the resisting part of you wants is for you to listen and understand it. But like here, sometimes you really have to change something about your life, because that part is YOU and you aren’t happy.

For me, this conversation with myself underscores a recent decision to find a Virtual Assistant to help with customer service.

Once I’ve made that change, I’ll see if the problem clears up, and if not, go back and talk to this part of me again.

EMDR = Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMT = Eye Movement Technique. It’s a thing.

Here was my first response to EMDR: Huh? Moving your eyes back and forth? You’ve got to be kidding me.

But apparently it does work. Something about connecting the two halves of your brain, while focusing on the situation, makes your brain process and integrate it better.

And you can do the same thing without the weird eye stuff, by tapping. Yeah, it sounds lame. But try it. It only takes a few minutes.

It doesn’t necessarily solve a problem per se, but it takes the extreme emotional reactivity or stress away, which makes the problem a lot more reasonable to deal with. And it can help release long-standing emotional knots like guilt, jealousy, fear, etc.

I tried it with anger. It seemed to work – the problem was still there, but I wasn’t as bothered by it. It was just, you know, a problem. Instead of OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVE THIS F*ING PROBLEM, THIS IS COMPLETELY UNFAIR AND I WANT TO DO SOMETHING DRASTIC ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW! I felt like, more perspective, and calmer. Good stuff like that.

And it’s really easy so I will tell you how to do it. They go into more depth in the book but here are the basics.

EMT for fun and profit (er…I mean, for emotional healing)

1. Bring up a stressful feeling. Imagine an incident that makes you angry, for instance, or a situation, or a person you have big painful feelings around. Go into the feeling, feel the sensations in your body.
2. Determine on a scale of 1 to 10 how stressful it is. It should be really stressful, at least a 4. If it’s not, find something more stressful to try it on.
3. Sit in a comfortable place. Put your hands on your thighs palm-down. Tap your right index finger on your right thigh. Then tap your left index finger on your left thigh. Now go back and forth like that, tap tap tap, at the rate of two taps per second. Do it for three minutes, while keeping your focus on that stressful feeling.
4. After three minutes, stop. Now note on a scale of 1 to 10 how stressful you feel right now when you think of the incident or situation.
5. If it’s lower, keep going and do a few more three minute sessions until it’s down to a 1 or a 0.
6. If it’s not lower, it could be that the emotion has changed to a different emotion or you are angry or stressed about a related thing, which you can then process the same way. It could have several layers which you can tap down through.

The book goes into more – why it works, what to do if it doesn’t work, why it may not be working, case studies, and all the various applications you can use it for.

Oh, and here’s the disclaimer: If you suffer from post-traumatic stress or think you may have buried unconscious trauma memories, maybe you should do this with a professional because it can bring up traumatic memories sometimes.

Otherwise, tap away.

Wait, what about the Eye Movement part of Eye Movement Technique?

Ok, ok. Well, if the tapping is not doing it for you, you can do this:

1. Bring up the stressful feeling and focus on it.
2. Sit up and look forward.
3. Pick a spot in your extreme left field of vision. Pick another spot in your extreme right field of vision.
4. Look back and forth between the spots as fast as you can about 30 times (30 back-and-forths).
5. Pause for a second. Do another set of 30.

I personally like the tapping better because I can focus on my body sensations more, and it’s easier and simpler and doesn’t make me dizzy. But both of them seem to work.

This is in response to David’s comment:

I guess I’m a little thrown off because it seems like every way of dealing with fear is appreciated and supported… except bulldozing through it, and feeling like a rock star afterwards.

I get the impression that’s…wrong.

It’s valid if it works for you, right? So it works for me. I wish I could explain it in detail, but I can’t.

Does bulldozing through it work? What’s going on here?

It sounds to me like David is re-grounding himself in reality: “OK, it’s only a half-mile more, I can make it.” Or, “OK, this IS actually something I can handle, so I’m just going to go ahead and do it.”

I think that’s a useful strategy for anyone. Re-grounding in reality. Doing it. Grounding the outcome in your body – teaching your body that it’s OK.

That is different than the “other kind” of bulldozing through it that doesn’t work:

1. feeling bad or wrong for feeling fear, wishing you didn’t feel it, not wanting to admit it
2. suppressing the fear, not dealing with it
3. doing it anyway OR not doing it anyway (it doesn’t matter at this point, and I’ll explain why below)

This kind of “bulldozing” doesn’t ground the fear – it usually makes it worse. Because the fear is trying to tell you something, and you are not listening.

Even if you do “bulldoze through” the experience in front of you, you will NOT experience the freedom on the other side, if you are bulldozing in this suppression-oriented way.

There are many things I’ve tried to bulldoze through and then had to go back and actually deal with the fear on: singing in public, dating, intimacy. The fear came back bigger and stronger later.

When you bulldoze through like that, the experience of doing the activity doesn’t become grounded into your body as “Ok, that was OK”, because you weren’t connected to your body while you did it. You were focused on suppressing your fear!

The Learning Zone vs The Panic Zone

When you do an experience that you are afraid of and have the experience of “it wasn’t that bad”, and your fear lessens or dissipates, that’s learning. But you can’t learn in that way if you are so afraid you are in panic mode.

I got the following from my completely awesome and highly recommended NVC teacher, who explains this at the beginning of all her classes.

There are three zones, think of concentric circles:
Comfort Zone
Learning Zone
Panic Zone

Oh heck, I’ll draw you a picture:

If you are “bulldozing through” while basically still in the learning zone, all is good. You’ll learn that it’s OK to do whatever it is, you didn’t die.

But if you are “bulldozing through” while in the panic zone, your body won’t learn a thing from the experience. It will just be more terrorized the next time.

And often the experience itself will really, really suck.

I remember trying to “bulldoze through” my fear of dancing in public when in high school. Wow. Most. Awkward. Dancing. Ever. And I didn’t feel like “oh that wasn’t so bad” when I was done. I felt humiliated and wished I could disappear from the face of the earth. I wish I had that magic ray-gun in the Men in Black movie and could zap people’s memories away.

Happy ending: Now I dance with wild abandon. But it took me a while to get there, and I had to do it by feeling the fear in my body. Well…and it was college, and some alcohol might have helped. (I’m not all peace and light, OK?)

There is a time when you need to feel the fear and do it anyway. But,

1. that’s feel the fear and do it anyway, not suppress the fear and do it anyway.
2. there will be some things where you will need to do a whole lot of feeling the fear (and talking with it, processing it) before you’ll be ready to do it anyway.

There is absolutely nothing to be gained, and a lot of damage to be wreaked, if you bulldoze through panic.On the other hand, there is definitely a time to stop hanging out in your comfort zone and bite the bullet.

It all depends on where you are at on the comfort/learning/panic spectrum – and your body is the only one who knows that. Trust it. And give yourself all the love and compassion and non-bulldozing you need when you are in the panic zone.

If you are in the panic zone, you WILL get to the learning zone and the comfort zone, and then you will be able to “do it anyway”, when the time is right.

Trust in that. It will happen. You were not made to suffer. You were made to shine.

And you don’t have to push yourself or do violence to yourself to get there. Love works much better. In fact, it’s the only thing that works.