When we feel distressed, we want to find and eliminate the cause as quickly as possible. In our search for an explanation, we often focus on the people closest to us. You may begin to think, “If that person would only do X, then I could feel better.”
Have you ever said something like this to someone close to you?
“If only you. . .
. . . then I would feel better.”
Let there be peace on Earth
And let it begin with me.
When I’m frustrated with someone, I sing a different version in my head.
Let there be maturity in this room
And let it begin with me.
Though less lyrical, these words remind me of an important principle. It’s the idea that better relationships start with changing the only variable I can manipulate—myself.
I have spent many years working as a writer. But I have never been as excited as I am right now to share my work with you. My book, Everything Isn’t Terrible, is dropping on December 31st. If you’ve enjoyed my weekly anxiety letter, then I absolutely believe that it will be a resource to you. The book is a helpful and humorous guide to shedding your anxious habits and building a more solid sense of self in our increasingly anxiety-inducing world. It’s a wonderful guide for what’s certain to be an anxious 2020!
But here’s the thing–I’m way too excited to make people wait until New Year’s Eve to start reading it. So if you preorder the book and submit your receipt, the folks at Hachette Books will send you one of my favorite chapters to read right now. It’s called “Your Parents,” and I tell the story of Grace, a young woman who wanted to be less reactive and more mature around her anxious mother and distant father. It’s one of my favorite chapters from the book, one I think that will resonate with pretty much everyone.
When you preorder, you’ll also get some very cool bonus materials to supplement your reading of the book. I created an anxiety flow chart you can reference on days you feel reactive or worried, and I wrote some other helpful little materials you can print out and hang on your fridge or mirror.
So how can you start reading Everything Isn’t Terrible today?
1. You can order on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound, and many other retailers. You can buy it anywhere, but I especially encourage you to support your local bookstore in person or online. The book will be available in hardcover, digital, and audio form.
2. Once you’ve ordered, click here to submit your proof of purchase (before 12/30*) to receive bonus content and the sneak peek! Proof is simply a picture or scanned image of your receipt. The easiest way to do it is to take a picture with your phone.
Thank you again for subscribing to my newsletter, and following my thinking about anxiety, relationships, and my work on myself. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about the preorder materials or the book. I’ll be back next week with a new letter, but you can check out the archive and see what you’ve missed.
Thanks!
Kathleen
*[50 U.S./DC, 18+, Ends 11:59PM ET on 12/30/19, Terms and Conditions apply: http://bit.ly/EverythingIsntTerrible]
This week I’ve been thinking about all the strategies we use to stabilize tense relationships with other people. Often we avoid, we complain, or we try to control. But in our quest to keep things calm, we can miss out on more fulfilling relationships with family and friends.
Anxiety-managing strategies are kind of like emotional training wheels. When your bike has training wheels, your travel is stable, but limited. You can’t go off the beaten path, and you can’t go very fast or very far. This is the price of avoiding a tumble from a two-wheeler. Anxiety-managing strategies work the same way. They lower the anxiety of having to be around difficult or stressful people. But they prevent the development of a true, person to person relationship.
Nothing can make a person less capable than getting married. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” But in many relationships, the opposite is true.
Lately, I’ve been paying attention to how my abilities will weaken or even disappear when my husband is in the house. When he’s away on a work trip, I can take out the trash with ease. But when he’s around, walking the twenty steps to the alley feels like a Herculean task. When I’m driving by myself, I have no trouble navigating to a new destination. Put him in the passenger seat, and I might ask him if I’m making the correct turn. (more…)
You are having lunch with a good friend. After you order, the conversation begins. What do you talk about? The weather? How impossible it was to find a parking space? That friend who can’t seem to get her life together? The one who won’t return your texts?
Whether we realize it or not, most of our relationships are built on a foundation of superficial chatter, mutual disdain for others, and anxious focus on those we love. It’s only human to maintain a little distance by talking about the weather, or to riff on a third person. We do this because a two-person relationship is fundamentally unstable. When you both hate or like the same person, this twosome suddenly becomes a lot less anxious.
Dr. Seeley gave a presentation about how honeybees solve the dilemma of finding a new home. Bee scouts will individually visit a potential location, and when they return, they will perform a “waggle dance” for the others which communicates the distance and direction of the prospective site. The level of enthusiasm in their dance also indicates just how sweet the spot is. Over time, in true democratic form, the bees will keep voting via waggle dancing until there is a consensus on the new home.
As a counselor, I have a front-row seat for watching anxiety develop in new relationships. It is truly fascinating to observe how quickly two people can become emotionally stuck together. A therapy client will leave for a week and return reporting that he or she has started dating someone new. This former stranger now has the power to make my client very happy or very anxious. Thanks to their phone, my client might spend all day analyzing a text they received — or worrying about the lack of one.
Read the rest of my essay at Counseling Today.
Morgan came to counseling because of her boyfriend. He’d been seeing a therapist for the past several months, and she was impressed with his improved focus on his mental and physical health. When I asked her what she wanted to be different, she said that she struggled with low self-esteem when it came to her career and her appearance.
“The word growth has been so misused during the past decade, that it has become meaningless,” wrote Murray Bowen in his book, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. “It is common for mental health professionals to consider the disappearance of symptoms as evidence of change.”
Kathleen Smith, PhD 