Building Resilience in Resistance

Clinical psychologist and Being Seen therapist Paola Bailey had a sleepless night after the events in Charlottesville this past month, leading her to reflect on the psychological effects of the current administration. In a post on her practice’s blog, Bailey writes eloquently about living within an “emotional and psychological bombardment of news,” and what she notices in the bombardment — a new wave of American storm and stress her clients need to process:

People tell me of panic attacks, desire to leave the country, nightmares, and not knowing how to talk to their children about all that is happening. They talk to me about fights with their parents, friends, and coworkers. They tell me of total disorientation as they struggle to find a way to cope with all that is happening.

Bailey, who practices in Manhattan and Brooklyn, NY, offers her guide to coping with metabolizing news that insults our moral core and challenges us to keep on fighting against injustice.

Below is an excerpt from her guide, which outlines ways to both activate and deactivate as you go in your daily life.

Balancing activating and deactivating strategies, Bailey argues, is necessary for staying resilient, right now:

Activating Strategies
Find and join your community. Humans are social animals. We are not lone hunters, but instead survive, thrive, and flourish in community, be it families, cliques, or tribes. Right now, this is one of the most important tools at your disposal. Find and connect to your people, whoever they may be. Artists, musicians, activists, introverts, immigrants, women… whoever you are and identify with, find them and join them. Perhaps this means a weekly dinner, or a joint passion project, it doesn’t really matter as long as you frequently and consistently do it. Resist the urge to isolate.

Do something. This is our chance, our right, our responsibility. Figure out what matters most to you and then set aside a few hours a week and actually do something. Nothing fights depression and hopelessness like the sense of actually doing something about it. Need ideas? The obvious: attend a protest, write a letter or call your representatives. Even better, find what you care most about and then use whatever gifts you bring to this world and use it in service of that cause. Do you like bringing people together? Host a potluck and raise funds for your favorite nonprofit. You think of yourself as a passionate person who likes to dedicate time and energy to things you care about? Volunteer for one of those causes. Do you speak another language? Consider offering your language skills for translations, something small organizations often need help with. You feel strong and grounded in your body? Help escort patients into a Planned Parenthood clinic. You are a designer or artist? Help your friend who is hosting that potluck by creating a gorgeous and eye-catching invitation. You get my drift: find your cause and use your gift.

Exercise. When we are stressed, our parasympathetic nervous system fires and leaves you pumped full of various hormones, including adrenaline and corticosteroids. This leaves you feeling jittery, jumpy, exhausted and irritable. One of the best ways to use this energy in a way that actually lessens that chemical domino effect is to exercise. I don’t mean yoga, I mean intense, sweaty cardio. Go for a run, take a dance or spin class, chase your dog around a park. The best exercise to beat stress (1) pumps your heart rate, and (2) one you will actually do!

Read. Get yourself informed. Whatever your cause, whichever your top concerns, or your personally relevant topics are, find some good resources and read. I don’t mean more news and personal stories on social media, I mean literature, philosophy, history. Information is power and it is inspiration.

Deactivating Strategies
Unplug. This one can’t be repeated often enough. Your brain needs some downtime. Even if you feel things are moving fast and constantly changing, the truth is only a few important things happen every day, the rest is an echo chamber on repeat. Set a window of time each day during which you will catch up on news, and then stop. This means really stop, don’t watch the news while you run on the treadmill, or on your phone as you engage in other activities, including waiting for the train or on your commute. This brings me to another important point, stop staring at your phone in bed or right before you go to sleep. I suggest you buy yourself a good old-fashioned alarm clock and make a habit of charging your phone anywhere other than on your nightstand. In another room, preferably, but even a dresser across your bedroom will do. This is just good “sleep hygiene” (the blue screen light actually prevents your brain from adequately producing melatonin — the sleep hormone). It’s hard to relax and go to sleep when you’ve been plugged into the news or social media for the couple hours leading up to your bedtime. Enforce a time out, set a time when all electronics will go off for the night and stick to it. Your brain and body will thank you in the morning.

Give it (you) a rest. See point above. But it goes even further, to a broader, more holistic level. Set time aside to rest and recover. We all find different activities restorative, so take a couple minutes to make a list of your own (e.g., going for a walk or hike, taking a bath, listening to your favorite album, cooking a meal, strolling through a museum, getting a massage, or sitting in a steam room or on a beach, or on a mountaintop) and have it handy for those moments when you notice you are starting to feel worn-out and tired. These activities are generally much more helpful if you engage in them prior to being exhausted. Think of this as more of maintenance than damage control.

Meditate. Meditation has been repeatedly proven to be immensely helpful in battling depression, anxiety and insomnia. Science has also shown that it creates actual structural and functional changes in your brain, so not only are you less likely to develop cognitive impairments as you age, you are also literally building your brain’s stress resilience muscle, meaning that it will be stronger to face any stressors down the line. Don’t be intimidated by the word, meditation can be as light and casual or as disciplined and structured as you want it to be. As with exercise, the best type of meditation is the one you will actually do. So if this means closing your eyes and focusing on your breath for 10 minutes before starting your day, do that. If you find you crave a deeper practice, there are generally plenty of readily available and affordable community resources (think your local YMCA, JCC, or other community centers). There are also plenty of great books on the topic if you’d prefer to learn and practice on your own.

Self-care. This is an obvious one, but usually, the first thing to get pushed aside when we are stressed or overly busy. Self-care varies for us all and can mean a great deal of many things to different people, or even to the same person at different points in their life. The bottom line is to do something kind and generous for yourself. Think about what you might do for your best friend or partner if they were facing the same stressor. Maybe it means picking up some nice flowers on the way home, taking a yoga class, or maybe scheduling a road trip with your pals for the weekend. Self-care can be a solitary or joint activity, it can include friends, family, or pets. The only thing that matters is that you slow down long enough (refer to my meditation point above) to figure out what would help soothe, encourage, and comfort you, and then to decide that you are worth the time and energy to invest in yourself.

Bailey emphasizes balancing activities from both lists — using activating and deactivating strategies, never taking from one list more than the other. The goal is resilience, a word that is cropping up more and more, as journalist Steven Petrow pointed out in the Washington Post recently. “Resilience grows when we become intentional about bringing our best to difficult life seasons,” writes psychologist Tara Brach. Difficult political seasons, too.

Read Dr. Paola Bailey’s full post, “How to cope with the current political climate, a therapist’s guide.”

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View Paola Bailey’s practice page on Being Seen.

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Photograph of courtesy of Paola Bailey, Psy.D.

We want you to know the name Claudia Rankine. Rankine won the National Book Award in Poetry in 2015 for Citizen: An American Lyric. The book was also a National Book Award finalist in Criticism the same year — something that had never happened in the history of the prize. Citizen is not just a prose poem, not just a critical essay. It is a book that tasks itself with putting into motion — as experience — what it feels like to be black in America.

In Citizen, Rankine addresses the reader as you, asking the reader to feel and think through the violence of the events she distills. Rankine’s charged and plainspoken style speaks to what is inside: anguish, loneliness, grief, rage. You, the reader, must constantly take your temperature, position yourself within what’s happening on the page. It is a book about the constant assault on the mental health of black Americans. It is a devastating and necessary read for anyone practicing psychotherapy in our country today.

One page in the book is particularly disturbing to us as therapists who are advocates of social justice, shaking us in a way that we need to be shaken. It documents an incident of overt racism inflicted by a therapist:

The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone, Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.

At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house! What are you doing in my yard?

It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.

I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

Rankine’s project is deeper than calling out the therapist for her overt racism. We enter the moment. Rankine asks us to involve ourselves in what we are already involved in — the relentless pain and trauma internalized by every black person in our country. She asks us to see, feel, think through it. To be American citizens, we must. To those who will hear, Rankine offers her voice.

Citizen: An American Lyric, was published by Graywolf Press in 2014. To this date, it has been reprinted 13 times.

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Purchase Citizen: An American Lyric from Graywolf Press

Graywolf’s guide to reading Citizen with your book group

Claudia Rankine talks about Citizen on Studio 360:

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Selection from Citizen above reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press. Copyright 2014 by Claudia Rankine. Photograph of Claudia Rankine at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Award Festival used in accordance with a Creative Commons 3.0 license. Book cover for Citizen designed by John Lucas using an image of In the Hood by David Hammonds, 1993.

On Monday, August 21, 2017, we will experience a total solar eclipse in part of the United States. Some people are calling it the “Great American Eclipse.” We aren’t. We’re weary of forces — the complex white supremacist forces in our country — forcing a warped version of American greatness. So we’re looking to an event greater than us that reminds us we are all different and earthbound and small, together. We hunt for NASA-approved eclipse glasses. We google “path of totality.”

We’re also rereading Annie Dillard’s unsettling essay, “Total Eclipse.” Dillard viewed the last total eclipse in the U.S. (February, 1979) with her husband Gary and a myriad of strangers on a mountain in Washington state:

It was odd that such a well advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have known right then that I was out of my depth.

Dillard’s essay tracks the interior and the external, the human and natural, with precision. If you know her work, the precision will not be unfamiliar. The experience shakes her, even as she writes with grace and clarity in reflection. What’s beyond Dillard’s depth in “Total Eclipse” is a sure footing about anything except that our time here is short, borrowed, and always at risk of being lost. Even sight (our potential to see and be seen) will be lost. This sense seeps into her recollection of the eclipse viewing:

That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky.

This essay is not for the weak of heart. It will be available online via The Atlantic until eclipse day. After 8/21/17 the essay will disappear; the link will be broken; you’ll have to try somewhere else.

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Read “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard.

What to expect when you’re expecting a total eclipse.

The USPS’s “Total Eclipse of the Sun” stamp sheet (seen above) is the first to use thermochromic ink and features an image of a total solar eclipse photographed in 2016 by Fred Espenak in Libya. The image is true. The sun is gone.

Patti Smith wrote an astonishing ode for her friend, author and actor Sam Shepard, on the occasion of his death this week. Outside of the fame that happened for both of them, the two former lovers forged a resilient lifelong friendship. Smith’s ode (published in the New Yorker) tells all we need to know. We’re not going to quote it; it’s too good to pull apart. Print it out, read slowly — maybe even aloud to a person in your life who sees who you are.

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Read “My Buddy” by Patti Smith.

Detail from a photograph by David Gahr

Therapy begins in a room. The client enters, takes in the space: light, colors, objects, and their arrangement. And for a new client, the first question: “How will I feel being here?” A therapist’s office sets a tone. How do therapists create clear, comfortable spaces that help build trust over time with a variety of clients?

Meet April McDowell, a Marriage and Family Therapist who created Fresh Practice, a blog revealing the offices of therapists, one space at a time.

Dr. McDowell, based in Virginia, curates images of the offices and interviews the therapists about their design choices. Think Apartment Therapy — except these are image-rich tours of actual sites where therapeutic work between humans happens.

“Intimacy needs the heart of nest,” wrote Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard was writing about our homes, but the idea applies in a different, perhaps more urgent way to the therapy office. How do therapists create offices that can be experienced as nests, places where difficult things can be approached, contained, released? “I want my client to feel as if therapy is a luxury, not a dreaded thing to have to attend,” writes Melissa DaSilva, LICSW, in her Fresh Practice feature. (A view of DaSilva’s office is above.)

Fresh Practice reflects a keen curiosity about how therapists from different parts of the country construct private practice spaces where comfort, safety, risk and the distinctive taste of the therapist all come into play. Also, it’s fascinating to gain a glimpse into the real rooms where this work — in all its forms and modalities — occurs.

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Visit Fresh Practice.

Are you a therapist? By joining Being Seen, you’ll be able to view April McDowell’s video, “Office Design Tips,” along with our full suite of videos on how to effectively market your private practice. Join here.

Sommerville Bevilaqua, LPC, out in the wild.

“For some, summer’s promise of ease can turn into greater stress, which in turn can move us into a place of resentment, irritability, and far from showing up as our best self,” writes Asheville, North Carolina-based psychotherapist Sommerville Bevilaqua on her blog, News from the Grove.

We found ourselves exhaling, reading Sommerville’s slow-down strategy for how to let go of the pressure we all feel — once the good weather arrives — to get outside and have a blast:

To love all of our self means first, that we need to acknowledge our whole self. The part of our self that is not Instagram-able, the part that is embarrassing, or even mean, or the part that sacrifices one highly held value in order to prioritize another, only to see the disastrous aftermath in full effect when it is too late.

In addition to seeing clients in private practice, Sommerville runs Aspen Roots Collective, offering therapeutic adventure retreats with her colleague and fellow guides, Sara Hunter, LPCA, and Maz, a “therapy-puppy in training.”

As we move through July and August, we’re going to take Sommerville’s recommendation to heart:

To let go of the ecstatic summer energy a little, to slow down and feel…to sit along the river bank, in the boat, or atop the SUP board, feet dangling, and to notice the cool water flowing over our skin…moving effortlessly around us,

regardless of who we are,

what we have done,

or said,

or thought,

or felt.

Read more of Sommerville’s summer strategy on her blog post, “Take Me to the River.”

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View Sommerville Belivaqua’s practice page on Being Seen.

Are you a therapist? Learn more about how to be listed on Being Seen.

Looking for a Being Seen therapist? Start your search.

What is Being Seen and how might it boost your private practice?

Paul Fugelsang talks with Annie Schuessler, therapist and host of the Therapist Clubhouse podcast, about the idea behind Being Seen on the most recent episode.

Paul mentions how the idea for Being Seen grew from the feedback he received from therapists who participate in Open Path Psychotherapy Collective, the affordable psychotherapy nonprofit organization he founded in 2012:

Paul: Many [Open Path Psychotherapy Collective] therapists over the years have said, “Hey, you’re doing such a good job of sending us low-fee clients, can you also send us full-fee clients?”

Unlike Open Path, we’re not inventing something new here, but what we thought we could do was change up the model and get a little bit more creative, and help therapists more in the process.

Annie: So it offers more support, and it looks very modern…What else is different about [Being Seen]?

Paul: Creating a modern, good-looking website was really important to us because for so many [therapists], a website is their calling card. So we wanted to give them a site that looked really good.

We also offer incentives to Being Seen therapists to join. One of those is a lifetime discount to the Zur Institute CE courses, a 20% discount. We also have an online wellness classes that are designed for clients. Classes like Anger Management and Relationship Skills and Meditation and Anxiety & Stress Reduction. They’re fun, interesting, and engaging. All of our Being Seen therapists have access to these classes and they can give a code to their clients. Additionally, we offer training videos from Psychotherapy.net: every month we offer a different video.

The larger company that does this has become saturated, especially in larger cities, and it’s easy to never have your profile be seen.

So what we’re doing with Being Seen is capping our limit of therapists by population size. This guarantees that one’s profile is going to come up in the first pages. In a big city like New York, we’re only letting a maximum of 300 therapists in. We don’t want anyone’s profile to be buried on page 20.

Listen to Paul’s full conversation with Annie about his own private practice beginnings, the creation of Open Path Psychotherapy Collective, and more about Being Seen.

Learn more about Annie Schuessler and her private practice coaching service.