How My New Shrink Brought Me Back from the Brink

2. Write Your Own Instruction Manual for Life

After my new shrink pulled me out of my dark hole, our sessions began to combine talking therapy with psychology classes – the kind that used to fascinate me in college. Lesson 1 was on default personality characteristics, described by the acronym O-C-E-A-N:

• Openness to experience versus cautiousness
• Conscientiousness about structure and organization versus flexible and carefree
• Extraversion versus being solitary and reserved
• Agreeableness versus challenging or detached
• Neuroticism versus secure and confident

Just as we’re born right-handed or left-handed, we’re naturally inclined more toward one or the other of these traits. The trick is to know who we are, to understand that being thrust into situations calling for us to deviate from our default characteristics will trigger stress, and to adjust accordingly, bracing ourselves before the challenge, powering through it, and giving ourselves recovery time afterwards. So, if I, as a cautious and reserved introvert, have to run a coaching workshop with a bunch of gregarious and challenging extroverts, I prepare myself to be pushed out of my natural tendencies and do my best to shine in uncomfortable territory. Then I give myself permission to collapse and recharge by store of psychic energy afterwards

3. Jump Off the Treadmill

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result doesn’t necessarily mean you’re crazy, as the old saying goes, but it does mean you’re neurotic. You’re like a hamster running for dear life on the treadmill, chasing a piece of cheese – some goal, possession, ideal or illusion of happiness – which will continue to elude us. I desperately wanted the recognition of a writing award and when I finally got one felt over the moon – for about a month until I began to realize it wasn’t going to bring about some dramatic change in my life. That won’t stop me from trying again, but I’m approaching it in a more realistic and tempered way, and that makes all the difference.

4. Embrace and Harmonize Perceived Opposites

There’s a Buddhist proverb about a student who plays the lute asking the master if he should be tighter or looser in his practice of meditation, and the master asks him if his instrument plays more beautifully when the strings are tighter or looser. The student answers that the lute plays best when each string is in tune. Some of us play instruments with just a few strings and others with grand pianos with 88 finely calibrated ones. And the tuning can change with the temperature, the humidity, and other variables. The solution is continuous adaptability to the circumstances. I’ve struggled for decades about whether to be more disciplined or more flexible and free-flowing. I’m improving on adapting to my moods, circumstances, and necessities. And it’s working.

5. Understand that Ego Is NOT the Enemy!

Somewhere along the way, the ego got a bad name. Dr. Jeremy E. Sherman, writing in Psychology Today, attributes it to popular interpretations of Eastern traditions like Eckhart Tolle’s “Course in Miracles” and his best-selling, Oprah-endorsed books, including “A New Earth” and “The Power of Now.” Maybe The Dude in the Coen brothers’ “The Great Lebowski” is partly responsible. These sources, Sherman writes, reflect the common misconception associating ego with unhealthy and troublesome self-consciousness and self-infatuation – ego as egomania or being egotistical.”

Not so, says my shrink. In a healthy mind, the ego is the fulcrum that maintains balance between the id, our internal fountain of desires, and our super-ego, which is the conscience within us that expects us to be our ideal selves. When the ego is too small or too weak to handle this role, it can be overwhelmed by the internal forces of the id or the super-ego. It can also be put on the defensive by external criticisms and fail to fight back even if the negative assessments from others are not supported by facts. Only a strong and healthy ego can do the job. The consequence of a weak ego is an over-active id, causing the impulsive self-gratification and ultra-high self-regard known incorrectly as egotism but more accurately described as narcissism, or a controlling super-ego, causing rigid moral and judgmental attitudes and behaviors.

And if you didn’t develop a healthy ego in childhood, you’ve got your work cut out for you as an adult. We have a finite amount of psychic energy that powers our ego strength and fortifies our rational mind. When it’s used up dealing with excessive stressors and over-extending ourselves, the more primitive parts of the mind, notably the danger-seeking amygdala – take over and flood us with fears of tragedy, death and all the “what-ifs” that fuel our anxiety.

Making Sense of It All

Ironically, the unprecedented circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic have given me lots of downtime to ponder everything my new shrink is teaching me and to review, digest, understand and act on the insights our sessions spawned. I can see and feel progress being made.

And I’ve developed a new mantra: Patience. Perseverance. Perspective.

Untangling and reprogramming a tangled mind takes patience. Sticking to a corrective course and newly conceived goals takes perseverance. And recognizing the progress that’s taken place not over days or weeks but months takes a shift in perspective – from outcome to process, small picture to big picture, temporary gratification to more permanent contentment.

Now that my new shrink has lifted me out of the dark hole I was in, he’s continuing to guide me onward and upward. He calls it “peeing off layers of the onion” known as neurosis. And even though I’ve been in and out of therapy for 50 years, he’s still teaching this 68-year-old dog new tricks. I hope some of them are useful to you.