Shame{dot}exe

I’d like you to see your mind like a computer. There are all sorts of different programs running across your operating system. These programs can include simple biological tasks - Breathe.exe or more complex daily tasks like MorningRoutine.exe. But I’d like to show you a program that most of have running in the background called Shame.exe. This software ends up being used for all sorts of tasks that must be accomplished. This .exe file allows people to execute tasks that are generally held as socially good or necessary and is used sparingly to help promote change and positive growth. However for many people, this file has gone from an occasionally helpful resource to a program that takes up almost all available RAM and processing power in the human mind.

Shame.exe, simply put, is our tendency to use shame as a motivator in order to be productive. Shame.exe is a file that most people have running some way, shape, or form. However this executable file can be manipulated as an effort to overclock our productivity; Shame.exe can be exploited to get an individual to perform beyond their emotional limits . So what happens when Shame.exe is over-relied upon? We tend to find that Shame.exe begins launching on start up and slowly takes up all available computing power in order to function.

Its best to look at Shame.exe as simply a program in our minds. It will do whatever we tell it do and to its best ability. So when it becomes the primary program we use to function, it eats up all our bandwith and RAM of our mind. As it runs more and more frequently and we rely on it too heavily, we have less active space to run any other tasks and will ultimately live underneath all of the implied limitations and burdens. We won’t be able to launch programs like Wonder.pdf or Joy.jpeg or Rest.tif. Instead our entire operating system will be subservient to the thralls of Shame.Exe. Thus turning Shame.exe from a sometimes helpful background program into a harmful and damaging virus. So what can be done to shutdown this program or at least regulate its hold on the processors that are our minds?

One route to fixing this issue is to begin by acknowledging how much of the processing power this file is taking up. Honor its existence upon start up and note if it begins on boot-up or if there is another program (internal or external) that launches Shame.exe. Depending on what makes the program boot up, consider your relationship to the thing that launches the executable file. Social media programs, when engaged with for too long, begin to suck up all the processing power and can contribute to the booting of Shame.exe. A poorly balanced diet, a lack of physical exercise, and mismanaged daily habits all certainly contribute to the excess reliance on this executable file. But there are other fixes to this problem depending on severity.

Another route is looking at other .exe files that launch upon start up. One common file that tends to launch along side of Shame.exe is UnmetExpectations.exe. UnmetExpectations.exe is a really tender program and often launches Shame.exe almost like a trojan-like fashion. It may be a very reasonable program that has simply never been allowed to run or be honored. Begin by opening this .exe and letting its program execute by giving it voice. What does it launch? What are the contents within? What do they want? Letting this program run can be a great way to reduce the drain that Shame.exe is having on your processor.

Finally if these two fixes are not enough, you may want to consider reaching out to tech support. Technicians can take a deeper look at Shame.exe, help you identify which programs are launching under Shame.exe, and generally give you tools for managing Shame.exe and free up your processors’ power. Remember this is just a program - not a fact or identity - and does not have to be anything more than that. Don’t let Shame.exe continue to tank your CPU’s performance for another day.

Want a better online therapy session? Try doing it in the car.

One thing I’ve noticed in the work I do is the effect that environment plays on our thoughts, feelings, and even our predisposition to said thoughts and feelings. If you are in a therapy office you are much more likely to give the types of responses that someone who is in a therapy office might give - for better and for worse. It can be very easy to fall into a script of who you think you should be and how you should present. These feelings can vary per person. Some people who have a naturally angry predisposition, will highlight their anger in the therapy office. This, as a practitioner, signals me to enter their world with compassion. A person who is predominantly feels shame risks presenting as someone that only feels shame. This signals to me to enter into their shame with a special kindness and to honor that feeling as the only concern. Strange as it sound, many people enter and leave the therapy office unknowingly as a character.

Doing therapy from home sounds like it would be the antidote - and in a way it is. However when the pendulum swings it tends to swing equally as far in the opposite direction. When people meet with me online from their home I often find a notably different problem. Many of the people I meet find themselves stuck in a completely different headspace. Since they typically work from home and do Zoom calls all day with their bosses and co-workers, they often find it hard to take off their “work masks”. They respond to me like they would to a member of their cohort, blasting over personal questions with sidestepping etiquette. This means that 50% of our time together is spent going from work persona to normal persona.

But one observation has captured my attention and I can’t exactly explain it. For some reason almost all of the most effective therapy sessions, especially during COVID, happened to take place while the other person was sitting in their car (not while driving of course). Sitting in the driver’s seat, parked in a parking lot, engines idle or off, and with pen and paper in hand; these sessions tended to either reach important conclusion effectively, help unearth long pent up emotions, or both. Being in a car and doing therapy made our sessions surprisingly more intimate and vulnerable.

I have my guesses as to why this was the case. First I think that we in the US have a distinct relationship with our cars. They are the place we spend a lot of our time and hold a lot of our emotional experiences. Went though a rough break up? Where was the first place you went after it ended? Probably into your car to drive home as you begin to process the raw emotional intensity at the top of your voice before calling a friend. Running late for a meeting? Where was it that you verbally beat yourself up again for ruining your work prospects? Probably in the car with your makeshift breakfast in hand as your car also made its self into a makeshift dinner table for you. Can’t sleep? What do you do when you need to calm your mind and find a sense of peace? Get in the car and drive. We share some very focused, personal, and intimate times with our vehicles so it comes as no surprise that therapy could be more effective in a place that already knows our most intimate secrets.

My next guess is that there is the perfect balance of safety and vulnerability in the car. Cars are like little drivable homes for many of us. Cars offer us the seclusion and safety of home while also giving us visual access to the outside world. We are safe to exist but also have people all around us looking into our seemingly safe mobile home. Our existence in cars is a lot like our own cognitive dissonance - we hold things together (the safety and the visibility) that normally don’t make sense. This is one of the things it means to be human - to be holding contrasting ideas and trying to make them work. The feelings we have while in cars are the feelings we have within ourselves.

My last guess is that cars tend to impart a sense of control to the driver. Being behind the wheel of a vehicle that is owned and insured by you is a very empowering position. When all else is out of control in your life, you have the car to manage and control in every sense of the word. Its also here while in control of driving the car, that we find a type of highway hypnosis. We are focusing just enough energy to safetly drive while also letting our brains be free to drift. Its here that we can more easily come into contact with our subconscious or entertain thoughts we normally don’t have access to because we are too busy to acknowledge them. Our brains are just occupied enough that we don’t fall asleep but unoccupied enough that the thoughts that haunt us are given free reign to creep ever so slowly into our psyches.

So in short if you want a better online therapy session try having it from the front seat of your car. You may just find yourself more engaged, more alert, more attuned, more honest, more composed, or more like the full version of yourself that you may struggle to be.

Photo by Kyle Perez

Too Little Too Late: Missing the point of men's mental health

There is a notable reason why so many men push away from the world of mental health. Men are often socially tailored to be overly attuned to focusing on productivity. And unfortunately this means that these men feel that they must achieve this by any means necessary. The means given to men are the tools of self-shaming, self-deprivation, and and self-hate. It is these tools that allow men to perform and get work done. And these tools are both incredibly effective and incredibly accessible to men due to a myriad of reasons. However the downsides of these being the primary tools in many men’s toolboxes is that it builds them into a difficult catch-22. You either succeed by hating yourself to make something happen or you fail and hate yourself because of the things you didn’t make happen.

With that noted, its no wonder why men have the issues they have. What must they do to function at the levels that society demands of them? They must medicate in some way, shape, or form. Drug addiction, excess anger expression, physical altercations, sex addiction, sexual violence, hate crimes, mass shootings, etc. all can come back to not just the results of social pressures that men are put under but also their lack of accessibility to more mental health tools. Why do we treat men’s mental health more in line with a medical disease model, only to be worked on after a problem is found, and not as a core-concept to be embraced and built upon?

While we have a plethora of mental health tools out there, they tend to be less accessible to men and often come far too late, missing the formative years of a man’s life. A man is given labels of lazy, irresponsible, or heartless. And while this can be true for a few, there tends to be missing any room for alternate labels like misunderstood, unheard, self-loathing, or abused. When these labels are given, it is only after they have had notable success and they have done something deplorable. Why is compassion for men publicly (and often privately) displayed only for successful men? Why are we directly teaching men that compassion is an award to be gained only after success has been reached?

This is not the only reality that has to be but this is the reality that is. Men have little practical choice but to engage self-scathing monologues to feel like they can earn their sense of self. And we must admit this is the demand of society and the failure of society - that we actively encourage men to hate themselves. Men do this to other men too yes, but it’s an all around problem. Places of personally centering and psychological decompressing/destressing for men are not readily available or at least socially difficult to access.

Where is the Brene Brown for men? Where is the masculinization of mental health? How can we find a way to engage the innate dignity of men to gain a sense of personal inspiration and not leverage self-hatred as a means to progress? Why aren’t we building a better narrative for men that is compassion-led or based on recognition of virtue? Why is the building of emotional vocabulary and emotional understanding one of our last priorities?

*Image by Erendira Tovar

Social class and anti-validation: Gaslighting without realizing it

When looking at the world of therapy and mental health needs, one area that is often criminally overlooked is the role that Socioeconomics play on our mental fragility. The lower the class you come from, the more the communication style changes. If you are middle class or lower middle class, you tend to find more demand put on to you than others of a different class might. Its expected that you have to work harder and know how to do more things than those around you and that you at all times are closer to failure than anyone else. And only you alone understand this and bear this burden.

This is an isolating truth to wrap our minds around but, if you have experienced this and are honest with yourself, you know this feeling intimately. Why is that? Lots of reasons really, but one I want to focus on anti-validation in communication. To put it another way: Any time you do something that you enjoy that doesn’t add up to social gain, its presented to you as a character flaw. Want to play video games because you enjoy it? You are made to feel like something is wrong with you. Want to learn a new skill that (likely) isn’t able to be turned into profit? Wasting your time. Want to learn to play an instrument without intents of becoming a professional musician? You must be distracting yourself from your real calling - work.

And this emphasis to this group of people is often abusively gaslighting. They carry this feeling with them constantly - the only value they can ascertain is work. This is not due to a character flaw - though it is presented to them that way. Its due to a mindset of the people around them, like parents, who are supportive (sure you can do that) but is anti-validating (but you are wasting your time). So now everything that individual does that isn’t about sustaining themselves or working is actually a burden to carry or a shame to hide. And that sort of psychic damage adds up.

And getting out of this is not easy. How do you undo decades of programing? It takes a lot of work from the individual and surrounding culture. For the individual you have to build an awareness of how you are promoting this system in yourself. Begin drawing attention to the repeating cycle of downplaying or gaslighting your own wants and needs. Begin to build a new view that sees things like personal creative endeavors, taking in entertainment, or simply doing nothing as both valid and fulfilling in themselves. They are not just something to be earned to be enjoyed but can also be a part of being human. As Bernard Suits puts it in his book “The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia” - 'playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’. Relaxation and work are one in the same. Taking the steps of action and changing the rhetoric around this takes focus and will. Talking about it more is a great step in changing this and finding a more enjoyable and thus more fruitful life.

Socially for those of us who did glean this insight and knowledge and were not given the burden of work as our only value, I’d make an argument that a change in rhetoric is a necessary one. We can’t go around just telling others that ‘self-care is important’ since we now know that the people receiving the message are feeling guilty for doing self-care. Out rhetoric must shift to one that sees the demand of self-care as placing yet another burden. We must dignify the underlying feelings of the people receiving this message. We must hear their words, know the struggle of the lower-middle and middle class workers, and act on their behalf. For them self-care feels like an act of defiance and an action that is against their survival. Social supports - legislation and community engagement - is part of the answer here. But individual recognition that there are class differences and not living there are class differences can be just as gaslighting as any of the previously mentioned actions. Begin by making these a part of your casual conversations. Ask questions of your struggling friends like “what was it like growing up where you grew up?”, “Do you find it hard to relax sometimes?” or “What was it like for you as a child?”

This is a problem that takes both personal and social work. We can’t do it together unless we do it alone. And we can’t do it alone unless we do it together.