Category: Josh Feingold Blog

Humans are incredibly complicated, and the one thing that we all try to do is avoid pain.  So the first step in working on yourself is making the choice, and it is most certainly an choice, to look at yourself in the mirror, and face down your fears, and start looking into the very painful thoughts and fears that you have.  The person who can best help be your guidepost in this process is a therapist.

It’s unfortunate that in the US, we recognize physical symptoms of pain, but not real mental symptoms, but in truth, the mental ones are probably much more destructive in the long run.  Which means that typically, we have to pay out of pocket for therapy and counseling.  However, let’s face it, if you have read my blog for a while, you know that relationships are one of the most important things in the world, and one of the only real things in the world, and if you can’t have a relationship with yourself, how can you realistically expect to have one with someone else?  Further, until you learn to have an honest relationship with yourself, you will never be happy in life.

So by making the investment in a good therapist, you are really improving your standard of living for the future, which I think you will probably find to be the best investment you will ever make.

So what makes a good therapist?  One that makes you look at yourself, and ask the hard questions about who you are, and why you do what you do, and when you don’t know, pushes you to dig deeper and not just give up.  On that note, if you find that you are not getting anything out of therapy, it is probably because you are fooling yourself about what your real issues are.  Of course, there are most certainly bad therapists out there, but if you find you have been to three or four and still find that you are getting nowhere, the problem is probably with you not admitting to yourself that you have an issue, out of fear of dealing with the issue.

Oh yeah, one more point.  No young therapists.  They don’t have the life experience to really give you good advice.  If you are paying big bucks, get your money’s worth with experience so when you come in, the therapist can quickly help you figure yourself out.  Also, remember that the therapist is not God, and isn’t you, and that you need to take things in the direction that you think makes sense, and not let them overly impact your decision making process, rather provide an outsiders perspective that can help you come to your own conclusions.

But the main take away is that if they don’t make you focus on yourself, move on to someone else who does – they are just wasting your money.

P.S. Much of the work I have done personally, has centered around REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy).  I found out about it quite by accident around a year ago, doing some research online, and much of the foundations of my personal discoveries as discussed in this blog are a result of the work that I did using that methodology.  If I was going to recommend one place to start, I would start with that methodology, since in truth, if my blog post surrounding personal improvement have spoken to you, this will probably be right on target for you as well.

Nothing will make your life more ordinary and boring than going through the same routine day after day.   Eat at the same restaurants, orders the same dishes, browse the same websites, read the same types of books, you get the idea.

So how do we get out of our daily routine and shake it up a little?  Enter spontaneity.

I’ll tell you a story.  One day, a few years back I was frustrated at work when a big deal turned south, so I went for a drive.  I ended up passing a cigar shop, and even though I didn’t smoke, I figured, why not stop in and see what happens in there.  So I did.   And I met a guy who I almost put a huge deal together with.

The point is that by changing your routine, you open yourself up to new opportunities, and never know what you might find or learn.   The simplest way I have found to practically implement this rule, is simply to try something new whenever the opportunity presents itself (as long as it is not bungee jumping or parachuting). So add some spontaneity into your life, and watch it burst open with flavor.

Once when I was feeling very alone, someone told me that I should tell myself, “You are alone right now.”  It helped at the time, but upon reflection, I am not really sure that the message was totally correct.

What I have come to realize, is that we actually make ourselves feel alone by unintentionally cutting ourselves off from our family and friends.  It is more that we have some control of how alone we feel by regulating how separate we make ourselves feel from our community.

So if we make ourselves feel we have family and friends and they are there for us, then we are never alone.  But if we we feel that although we have family and friends they are off doing their own thing, and not really there for us, we feel alone.

The goal, therefore for the person feeling alone is to reinforce the idea that your family and friends are there for you.  Which is actually very easy in theory, but pretty hard to for some people to implement.

You have to reach out to your community and tell them you are alone, and need their support, and see how they react.  Hopefully, your support group will react like mine, and make it know to you in a concrete way that no, you aren’t alone, that they are there for you.  Just call, they’ll answer.  Or perhaps they’ll just call to check in from time to time.

Soon you will see that, no, you aren’t alone.  You are only as alone as you made yourself.

I’m not sure how it happens, but somewhere between childhood and adulthood, fun gets sucked out of us.  Its a slow and hard to notice process, but by the time we are old, few of us are any fun anymore.

How can that be?

Because play is considered irresponsible by society, since in its essence play is engaging our imagination, and mature adults seem to have no need for imagination.

How very sad.

The only place we ever see people using their imagination if I am to read into the jokes I hear, is sexually which is ironic considering that it is also the one place that people are uncomfortable due to our puritan society.  It’s almost like in this one already minimally allowable place people allow their imagination to run wild.  Let it all go, baby.

You know I’m right.  In general, at least.

The point is that we need to play and imagine, but we can’t admit it to ourselves as adults.   So what are we to do?  Play, baby, play.  If you have kids or grandkids, roll down a grassy hill with them.    I did it last week, and it was great.   Well, after I got over the nausea.   Another side benefit, is that you get to send the message to your kids that adults play too. If you don’t have kids, grab a friend and make a commotion at a restaurant over dinner just for the heck of it.

As adults we need to play just as much as kids, it’s just that somehow we have been taught to suppress that need.   So remember, you are never too told to play!

 

 

 

In the interest of never passing up an opportunity to try something I have never done before, yesterday, I tried a street tarot card reader at a festival in Asheville.  Growing up, tarot card reading was a silly thing to do, and then in my interim years when I was religious, it was a forbidden thing to do, so this for me was wild and crazy.  But not really.  Anyways, I sat down, shuffled the cards, and she arranged them in front of me.  The skeptic that I am, I didn’t talk the entire time, rather listed to her assessment of what the cards said about me and my life, and I have to say at the end of the twenty minutes, it pretty much sounded like she had my situation spot on.  Wow, how did she do that, I wondered?  I really didn’t give her any clues into my life that would allow her to read me, and in fact, had tried to throw her off course.

Which is when I realized at a core level that we are all the same.