Catherine Auman, LMFT

I’ve been thinking about the two earthquakes that happened a month apart last year. The one in Haiti got a lot of media coverage; the photos broke our hearts. The deadly impoverished country was devastated and still hasn’t recovered to this day.

Many people weren’t aware that a quake of far greater magnitude shook Chile, the affluent nation running down the west coast of South America. The Chile quake was 501 times stronger than Haiti’s according to the Huffington Post, and yet we didn’t hear much about it because there was very little damage. Chile has had a long history of handling emergencies so homes and offices were designed to withstand disasters. The country was in all respects better prepared. By contrast, in Haiti there were no building codes, and Haitians had not been schooled in how to react. Although the earthquake was so much stronger, the damage was minimal in Chile.

Of course, there is a lesson here that it would behoove all of us to be physically prepared for emergencies. There are easily download-able lists on the Internet of items we should have in our cars and homes for emergencies: bottled water, snacks, blankets, candles, etc., and it’s a smart thing to do. It’s prudent to be prepared as Chile was.

But what I’ve been thinking about is the lesson these earthquakes have to teach us about our emotional lives.  People whose lives are stable are like Chile; that is, they are more easily able to deal with an emotional “earthquake,” than people whose lives are not.

For example, I often suggest to my single patients that they focus on having enough platonic friends first before they focus on finding a partner. They will be more emotionally prepared for the “earthquakes” of dating if they have enough emotional support in their lives and aren’t waiting for their partners to provide that stability.

If you develop emotionally supportive networks around you now, they will be there for you when life brings you an “earthquake,” as it inevitably will.  Life brings emotional suffering to everyone at some time in their lives. Someone you love will die; someone might leave you; you may have financial difficulties. These events are universally devastating, but if your life is stable, you can survive the earthquake as a prepared country such as Chile did, rather than be rocked to your core and barely able to recover like an impoverished Haiti.

© 2011 Catherine Auman

Loneliness is on the rise. The most recent US data studied by John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, found that almost a quarter of people today are plagued by frequent loneliness, regardless of gender, race, or education levels. A 2010 AARP survey found that of the people age 45 and up who participated in their study, 35% reported chronic loneliness compared with 20% ten years ago.

This disturbing trend reflects the fact that increasing numbers of people are living alone, added to the decrease in people joining groups and organizations that in the past fostered a sense of community. Robert Putnam, Ph.D. from Harvard (Bowling Alone, 2001), puts the blame on the long-term decline in Americans’ civic engagement. Boomers and those younger have been less likely to join churches or other groups that supported feelings of belonging to something meaningful.  The fact that a person has hundreds if not thousands of “friends” on Facebook can actually make loneliness worse, because we seem to need to be in the presence of each others’ bodies.

The hidden costs of this isolation are now linked to serious health problems such as depression, alcohol abuse, sleep disorders, chronic pain, anxiety, and even dementia and Alzheimer’s.  The World Health Organization has rated loneliness as a higher risk to health than smoking and as great a risk as obesity. Lonely people’s immune systems become compromised, increasing their risk of health problems, as well as their feelings of discouragement that affect their willingness to practice good self care.

Despite this epidemic, there appears to be a positive correlation between spirituality and lower reports of loneliness. In a study by Jacqueline Olds, M.D., people who identify as “very religious or spiritual” report half the degree of loneliness than people who identify as “not religious at all.”  People who attend religious or spiritual services once a month or more reported the lowest incidences of loneliness of all.

There is also a correlation between low reports of loneliness amongst people who donate their time to charities and other nonprofits. Volunteers who work together toward a common goal of helping others often develop meaningful relationships with each other.

It appears that spirituality is good for your physical, emotional, and relational health. Research indicates that the best prescription to prevent loneliness is to meet with others on a regular basis, join and become active in groups, volunteer for causes you believe in, and to put into action your understanding that we are all in this together.

© 2011 Catherine Auman

Previously published in Spirituality and Health magazine, May/June 2011

Justin is a creative person struggling with the evidence that his life is not working. He has no regular source of income, no girlfriend, and nothing to show for his years in LA. He has so many talents he can’t figure out his direction so he keeps starting over, creating plenty of drama. When I suggest that he may need to get a regular job to stabilize his life, his response is, “But I don’t want to be normal!”

Believe me, I understand. Back when I was a hippie/beatnik/punk alcohol-abusing waitress in the ‘70s, dreaming that some day I would be a writer, I despised the word “normal” and all I thought it stood for. “Normal” connoted people who had sold out, people who were not living on the edge, people walking around half asleep, and worst of all, people who had given up on their dreams.

After being lost for longer than I care to mention, one day in a meeting I heard someone say, “I finally believed I was good enough to lead a normal life.” I realized that was true about me, too. My desire to not get stuck in a bourgeois life had been motivated partly by my artistic drive, partly by not having high enough regard for myself, and partly by a misunderstanding of how life works.

I was lucky enough to find a mentor who taught me that it’s a required step to become “normal” in order to get anywhere in life. Unless you are willing to do what it takes to stabilize your finances, living situation, and emotional life, you can’t get on to solving more interesting problems. Without this stability, you don’t progress and you keep wondering why your life never amounts to anything. They don’t need to be magazine quality, but you’ll need a stable home, stable finances, and a stable emotional life to move to the next level.

Bill also taught me that you have to become willing to be bored; otherwise, you’ll spend your life chasing drama. You’ll make poor decisions like going back to school instead of buckling down to work, or you’ll throw out your perfectly good spouse to buy a more exciting model. You won’t mature, because there is always a new drama to solve. As soon as life starts finally coming together and boredom sets in, you’ll make a decision to ruin it, chasing what seems more intriguing and less “normal.”

To progress beyond sub-normal, Justin will need to pass through “normal” if he ever wants to spend his life in the way he aspires. Normal is a required stage on the way to excellence. What he’s seeking is there waiting for him; he just needs to do the work. He hasn’t yet understood that we all have to work for our success, one difficult step at a time.

© 2011 Catherine Auman

When pent-up emotional trauma gets released in psychotherapy, it’s a giant upheaval to the entire system – physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. The release changes lives for the better, of course.  All that secret, shameful, repressed garbage can finally be put out with the trash. A deep sense of relief and of lightness follows from not having to carry around the burden any longer.

It can be a great help during, or after, the time period when this cleaning-out is going on to have a series of sessions with an experienced bodyworker, in addition to the regularly scheduled psychotherapy. Talk therapy alone is sufficient to release enough of the repressed material for major improvements to be experienced, but for a more complete resolution, bodywork can assist the process by working on it physically as well as intrapsychically.

The repressed material does not exist only in the mind or the heart. It has been lodged in the body: in the tissues, the organs, the muscles, and the fascia that connect the muscles to the bones. Trauma, whether emotional, physical or sexual, can show up in the body as poor postural alignment, stiffness, lack of flexibility, or as more serious health problems. When the bodyworker skillfully eases the physical release of this holding in the body, the result is often a whole new way of being in the world.

Rolfing is one such bodywork discipline that works to change the structural problems resulting from trauma. I have personally found it to be highly effective. Once when the Rolfer was working on my foot, it suddenly began kicking on its own, expelling anger that was trapped in it. I found myself literally “putting my foot down.” In another session, I began crying with relief as he worked on my spine, and the greatest surprise of all was the session when trapped joy that I never knew was there was released and began streaming out into the world.

Other forms of bodywork that can be useful during therapy are acupuncture, chiropractic, the Alexander Technique, Reiki, and Feldenkrais. Receiving a massage is a necessity for those folks who have not been touched enough, which is nearly everyone in the Western world.  Of course it’s always helpful to take up a physical practice, such as running, hatha yoga, martial arts training, dancing, or even walking around the block. It’s wonderful to explore the myriad methods of enhanced physical awareness that can bring you to levels of well-being you had never imagined for yourself.

© 2011 Catherine Auman

When I lived in India for a year, meditating daily, surrounded by other seekers, and enjoying the relaxed ashram life, I entered a state of happiness I thought would never end. Finally, it seemed I had achieved what I had been reading about for years. It was ecstatic, every single day. I even planned to write a book when I got home: how to heal your depression for good.

Unfortunately, my happiness went away with a THUD when I got back to the West, bringing a depression that was as low as my previous state was high. My chronic depression was perhaps more virulent than ever, now that I was aware of what I had lost. My therapist at the time had never experienced what I had, but he was kind and solid as an oak. “I think your depression is the absence of That,” he said.

I ran around looking for answers, and found some when I was sitting in a small group of seekers surrounding Eli Jaxon-Bear. “I thought it would never go away,” I cried when it was my turn to talk.  Everyone in the group started chuckling softly. “You’re chasing the high,” Eli said. “Look at your pattern of addictions.” I didn’t think I still had them, but there they were – addictions to certain ways of thinking, to expectations, to ideas about how things should be — subtler than I had previously been able to detect.

These high states are not supposed to last. They are little tastes of the Ultimate – the carrot at the end of the stick. They are little morsels to keep us on track, to keep us searching for the real stuff.

People who have peak experiences, either through drugs, through meditation, through sex, or through Grace, often imagine that they have now arrived. It is beyond-belief painful when the realization sets in that the peak won’t be permanent. However, it was predictable, because every high is followed by the low, every mountain has its valley; that is, until you reach Everest, or so I’ve been told.

After the taste, the work resumes: the work on oneself to become more aware, more kind, more surrendered. More open to life, to love, to the divine. Like anything else worth having in life, it takes a lot of work to get there. The little tastes of happiness that don’t last can be reminders to not lose heart and to keep going until you’re home.

© 2011 Catherine Auman