Mark E. Williams, M.A. Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Couples
  • Intimacy
  • Sex
  • Parenting
  • Children
  • Teens
  • Anger
  • Blues
  • Anxiety
  • Groups
  • Fees
  • Legal Disclosures
  • Mediation
  • Directions
  • Contact & Payment
  • Appointment Calendar
  • Telehealth Consent Form
Counseling for Life Skills and Decision Making

Mark's Counseling Blog

Blogging our way to mental health.

Prince Harry: Surviving a Family

1/9/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
As Prince Harry's book comes out, there are cries that he has told too much. 
Interestingly very few are saying he got the facts wrong. Just that he told too many true facts to survive in a family. 
But Harry's contention is that there is a constant duplicitousness in the family he grew up in. He was always taught: never comment on a story, never react. While at the same time telling your Public Relations officer to plant a story that so and so was deeply hurt by such and such that Harry did, and “no comment from the royal family.” 
Harry's contention, that the royal family needs the press to survive, and the press needs the royal family to sell newspapers (and thus survive), is one I hadn't considered. This idea is coming from a man who lost his mother at age 12 to a paparazzi chase. He has clearly thought long and hard about his relationship with the press. 
He is also someone who tried to stay out of the press, and avoid pictures and publicity, up until he met the very successful American TV actress Meghan Markle. At which point he became terrified he would lose yet another girlfriend to the paparazzi. 
The press fell in love with Meghan Markle, her column inches pushed aside all other royals. And so old wounds and family jealousies were opened wide. 
Harry, who grew up in the family that survives on the column inches in the press, could see clearly that his closest relatives were feeding a torrent of nasty stories about Meghan to the press. Harry took his wife and child and escaped as best he could. 
But the royal family miscalculated. The Scapegoat no longer has to play by the rules. The royal family thought they could sacrifice and silence the rock star member, and then they could finally go on with their royal lives in peace, forgetting that the scapegoat is now free to give interviews and tell the truth over and over again. 
The triangle, of jealous royal family members, press, and Harry, is one that is familiar to anyone who grew up in a crushingly dysfunctional family. It is the old Shame Triangle described by Stephen Karpman: If you want to shame someone tell the nasty story through someone else. Don’t tell it face to face in an honest way, with the person you are upset at, instead tell it underhanded and roundabout, in a deniable form, so the Victim feels the most shame. 
Everyone is lamenting how terrible it is that Harry is telling the truth to the world, instead of to his family face to face. Except nobody is lamenting how underhanded, dishonest and downright nasty his own brother and father have been in feeding ugly stories to the press they can deny later, even insisting that Harry submit his royal negotiations and Meghan’s letter to her father, to them in writing, that mysteriously were leaked immediately to the press. 

This hits home for me, having been kicked out of a family myself. My father is a big fish in a very small pond. He is a fundamentalist Christian missionary in Johannesburg, South Africa for a very small American sect that believes they are the only sect that is saved and going to heaven. In my twenties when I began questioning the doctrines of the sect, my father used the power of the religious journals in the sect to confront me, debate me, and to expel me. It hurt like hell. 
Would anyone fault me for telling the truth? Would anyone fault me for putting up a webpage to help fellow ex-members of the sect to survive being kicked out? 
I did write my father a five page letter, which I somewhat regret. I wish I had written a letter focusing on just one issue, rather than a whole potato sack full of issues. But actually I had already done that to no avail. And my father, to his credit, did make an effort to do some of what I requested of him in that five page letter. 
I still haven’t recovered from being raised in a sect, I cannot join a church of any kind, and make it work for me, because I still have too many unhealed triggers. I enjoy my life now, I love my wife and children, and I have several close friends that I deeply value. I love the career I have chosen. But my family of origin? Still difficult. 
My children eventually decided not to have anything to do with my parents, to their bewilderment, but not much of a surprise to me. 
People are wailing about how Harry won’t be able to repair his relationship with his brother and father. But what is there to repair? How much was there to begin with? 
As good a queen as she was, she didn’t know how to raise children. Would you want King Charles as your father, sitting in a meeting listening to him tell lies to your grandmother, the queen? King Charles and Prince William have taken care of themselves, and been furious with Harry when he didn’t go along. When Harry asked for their help, they refused. Not much family there, and there never was. 
And what has Harry said that is so unforgivable? His brother loses his temper and shoves Harry around. His father is willing to tell lies to preserve his version of reality. His father is cold and distant. They are jealous. Are those secrets so terrible that Prince William and King Charles can’t recover from their exposure?
The only way to survive as the Scapegoat in a family is to enjoy the role, according to Murray Bowen, Family Systems theorist. Enjoy the freedom of being the Scapegoat, enjoy telling the truth, enjoy being more open and more flexible, and enjoy being more accepting of the world. 
The Scapegoat is in a double-bind, you lose if you tell the truth, you lose if you don’t tell the truth. So you might as well do what you feel is right: tell the truth. Go Harry!

0 Comments

Depression and Therapy

9/7/2020

0 Comments

 
Therapy is a give and take between a therapist and a client. It is a relationship that is entered into. The therapist is a resource, like a parent is a resource to a child.
The idea is that depression is a relationship between the client (the Self) and the idea of his/her parents in his/her head (the Object). When the client is depressed the Object is harsh or neglecting.
Therapy works on incorporating a nice, supportive, encouraging, capable therapist into the picture of the Object in the head. So the client relates to a much nicer Object, thus is not depressed anymore.
So that’s why information about depression is only helpful to a certain extent. The final cure is a relationship that is encouraging.
Often when someone asks for information about depression, they are saying in essence that they are skittish or nervous about starting a relationship with a therapeutic authority figure, because the Object they carry around in their head is so harsh, that they are pretty sure the therapist will be equally harsh or neglecting. It is refreshing to the client when they find out the therapist is not like that at all.
Picture
0 Comments

Pandemic Isolation Syndrome

5/15/2020

0 Comments

 
I call it Pandemic Isolation Sydrome. It’s not just about staying home. It has three components:
  1. Anxiety: worrying about dying. Worrying about the economy and one’s job. Worrying about people not being safe. Worrying about people not going down the grocery aisle the correct direction. Worrying about people passing me too closely on the sidewalk. Worrying about the neighbor’s dog licking me. Listening to the news and talk shows.
  2. Depression: Loneliness, and then self-doubt. Everyone wearing masks in public so you can’t connect on a personal level. This affects extraverts and relationship people the most. On the MBTI the ENFs are the most affected by the masks and distancing. No hugs! No handshakes. Distance. People who need physical affection and oxytocin (the hormone that is activated by skin contact). The elderly in nursing homes can only see people with masks on and seldom get touched, and then, only with a gloved hand!
  3. OCD: A pandemic raises OCD to an art form. Researching safety rituals, hand washing, washing the groceries, laying out delivery boxes and the mail for two days before opening. Coming up with a detailed routine for shopping: have a box of gloves in the car. Whenever leaving car put on gloves, when returning to car discard gloves in trash bag. As soon as you get home strip down and put clothes in washing machine, then shower.
We have created a survival strategy which is so detrimental to our health that we need another survival strategy.
Survival:
  1. Choose two people that you can hug. Sorry, you will have to sacrifice some of your safety for this. If you can’t manage this, it’s not going to work. This is non-negotiable. You have to find 2 people to hug on a regular basis. 
  2. Accept that we can’t control what we can’t control. Trying to control the uncontrollable is the source of most anxiety.
  3. Take a walk every day without a mask. Inform anyone that asks that you have medical permission to not wear a mask for your mental health. Then smile at them.
  4. Spend time on Zoom or Facetime with your friends. You need to see the expressions on their faces. 

​
0 Comments

Where does Depression and Anxiety come from?

1/5/2020

0 Comments

 
Understanding Object Relations Theory
0 Comments

The Effect of Exercise on Anxiety and Depression

6/11/2019

0 Comments

 
PictureIan Kelley recommends 300 minutes per week of physical activity to combat depression and anxiety.


One of the symptoms of both anxiety and depression is often an urge to stay in bed or lay on the couch and not move. Moving stirs up emotions that we are running away from. 
And that leads to the theory: Much of depression and anxiety is caused by running away from emotions. In the case of anxiety, one panic attack at the mall can motivate a person to stay away from the mall for the rest of their life. That is the opposite of what is effective to cure anxiety. We have to encourage the anxiety to emerge slowly, bit by bit, and effectively process the anxiety. That is why your counselor will have you close your eyes and imagine being at the mall, experiencing anxiety. When you begin to sweat or shake, the therapist will ask you what you are thinking.

"I'm thinking about how I need to leave the mall immediately. I'm going to fall down in the mall, pass out, and embarrass myself. Everyone is looking at me."

Counselor: "Okay, that's good! Now we can start examining what is causing the anxiety. Let's start with how everyone is looking at you. What if the people who are looking at you want to help you?"

"No, they are laughing at me."

"But it is your fantasy. Nobody else is creating this fantasy. You can decide what you want it to be. How about trying to imagine that the people are kind and want to help you? Wouldn't you want to help someone who is having a panic attack?"

"Yes."

Another thing that is a circular cause of anxiety and depression is lack of physical activity. Our bodies were not designed to run around in automobiles and sit in chairs all day. We were designed to be active, running and walking barefoot, lifting, hunting, cultivating, etc. 

My friend, Ian Kelley, has been a personal trainer for years. He says the ideal amount of time for a person to engage in physical activity is 300 minutes per week. That can be walking, dancing, exercising, weeding in the garden, cleaning the floors or the windows, etc. Our bodies automatically get depressed and anxious when we fall below that level of physical activity. It is not appropriate to take antidepressants and anti anxiety medications just to avoid exercising. First excercise, then see if you still medications. Ian has a personal training program that you can access online (I receive no commission from mentioning his program.)  My friend, Peter Milhous is my personal trainer and he also has an online training website (also no commission for me).
​

Recent research at UVM indicates that taking 90-180mg of magnesium per day is as effective as taking one of the anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medications that is currently being prescribed. Magnesium is considered to be far more healthy for our bodies than anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications, and has mostly healthy side effects. (If trial subjects got a stomach ache they reduced their magnesium in half, and it remained just as effective.) Magnesium is a nutrient that occurs in the foods that we eat, but it is supposed that our soil has been depleted over the years, so we need supplements to keep up with the way our bodies originally functioned. 

In the documentary Super Size Me, the author interviewed an alternative school program administrator who stated that one of the main things they do for hard to control and hard to educate teens is to make sure they eat an organic lunch, heavy on leafy green vegetables and other vegetables. They found that just keeping them off of caffeine and fried salty foods made them instantly calmer, friendlier and more focused.

The most effective treatments for depression and anxiety are:
1. going for a 20 minute walk first thing in the morning without sunglasses.
2. Tai Chi for 45 minutes five days per week in a park with friends. 
3. Gratefulness twice a week. 

These activities combine meditation, exercise, sunlight, friends and sometimes music, all things that have been shown to ameliorate anxiety and depression. 

Which of these suggestions can you see yourself enjoying?

Picture
Peter Milhous demonstrating his Johnny Travolta exercise.
0 Comments

How would you handle it if your parent got angry at seeing your self-harm scars?

5/27/2019

0 Comments

 
That would be tough! Is that one of your worst fears?
There is no good way to handle it.

However, your question is very significant. Notice that your question is focused on two topics: self harm and your parents, specifically your parents’ reaction to your self harm.

I remember when I was feeling a little suicidal in my 20s a therapist asked, “And who would find your dead body?” My parents!

​He suggested I might be a little angry at my parents, if in all my fantasies my parents were the ones to find my dead body.


“Oh, no! I wouldn’t want to hurt them. That’s why I resist killing myself, so as not to hurt my parents.”

“But in all your fantasies your parents are hurt by discovering your dead body.”

Hmm….

So I kept a dream diary for a while. I had a dream that a woman was having a garage sale and she was selling five squashed babies. “You don’t get into trouble with the state if you report it within 24 hours, she said.”

My mother loved garage sales. She had 5 boys, even though she wanted a daughter, not sons.
​Hmmm…
0 Comments

Help! My teen doesn't want anything to do with me. How can I reconnect with my teen?

2/10/2019

1 Comment

 
Congratulations! You have successfully raised a normal child. Normal teenage daughters do not want to be around their parents.

Children are programmed to slowly become ready to move out of the house and become independent adults. Your daughter is right on track to move out when she is 18 or 19 years old.
One of the stages of independence is to stop listening to parental advice. They will have to make 95% of their own decisions once they have moved out. So they have to start letting go of parental advice long before that time. They help themselves let go by persuading themselves that their parents’ advice is stupid, and their parents are embarrassing.

This was less of an issue 100 years ago when preteens were enrolled in apprentice programs for their careers. My great grandfather in Virginia moved out of his parents’ house, and moved into the barn of the harness maker down the road, when he was 11 years old. So no need for him to avoid his parents, be rude to them, and think they were stupid. He was already an independent wage earner, learning a trade. In modern times, we have delayed adulthood, prolonged dependence on parents, such that teens have a difficult time declaring independence and moving out of the house. The first record of a teen culture was in the 1920s, shortly after states enacted compulsory education laws.
Teens use their friends as a stepping stone away from their parents. They follow their friends’ advice assiduously. Don’t make the mistake, as I did, of trying to be cool. Your teens need their parents to remain the same, solid and immovable, so they can rebel against them. Don’t try to smoke weed with them, don’t try to learn the names of their favorite bands, don’t try to use their lingo. They need you to be of a different generation, and for you to be solidly happy with your unfashionable choices.

Disciplining teens is mostly just saying what you disapprove of, and ignoring the irritation and door slamming. They will get you ready to let go of them. You will breathe a sigh of relief when they move out.

Yes, parents feel rejected, sad and lonely when their teens reject them. But that is not their job, to keep us company and be our friends. Their job is to grow up and move out. We have to have our own friends our own age.

Your adult children will want to reestablish stronger ties with you from age 28 years old on. From now until then, you get a break!
1 Comment

Complicated Grief, 2

1/21/2019

0 Comments

 
How do I deal with my son? Since the death of his dad he has become prone to violent outbursts and is very uncommunicative. Therapy and doctors have not helped in the last 4 years amd I no longer know what to do. Do you have any advice?

Hi Cameron,
You must be exhausted!
Thirty years ago I was teaching a teen class. Two of the boys in the class had lost their fathers to black lung disease from coal mining. I asked them what it felt like to lose their fathers, and one of them said, “I felt like nothing. I was nothing.” The other boy agreed. The boy who agreed with him started drinking and never recovered from alcoholism.
Your son is ten years old now. Part of him is still stuck at being abandoned by his father at 5 years old.
I would say something like: “So, now that your father is gone, you feel worthless now?” Then just wait silently.
This is the difference between a counselor and a family member. A counselor will go ahead and say the painful thing that they are feeling, and sit with it. The family member will contradict the painful thing they are feeling. When you contradict the painful feeling, then the child has to argue with you to get his point across. And then the family member won’t listen, they just keep negating what he is feeling. And he ends up feeling more worthless.
It is very very difficult to listen without arguing. That’s what play therapy is all about. A child will play a game where someone gets killed or eaten or jailed. The professional therapist will join right in and gleefully enjoy the maiming or annihilation of the villain. The family member will want to rush in with forgiveness and gentleness for the villain. Not therapeutic for the child. Once the villain is completely dead and destroyed and dismembered, then sometimes I ask, “Shall we put him back together? Take him to the hospital? Call an ambulance?” If they say No, then it is No.
At the heart of play therapy is putting yourself in the child’s shoes. What is the child feeling? Angry, scared and abandoned.
You might say one day: “When your father died, I was worried that no man would ever love me again. I would be alone for the rest of my life. Do you feel that way? That nobody like your dad is ever going to see you as important again?”
When you suggest things to him, he’s going to get sarcastic with you. “Mom, that’s stupid! Why would you say that? That’s stupid!” Because he is ashamed for his feelings. Then is your chance to say in his voice, “Yeah, Mom, you’re so ignorant. You don’t know anything. You’re so stupid that maybe they should just come and take you away next time they pick up the trash!” Keep going until he laughs. “I’ve never met a Mom as stupid as you are. If you look up the definition of Stupid on the internet, they have a picture of you, Mom.” Taking his viewpoint, and voicing it for him, especially when it disagrees with your viewpoint, is hugely gratifying to an angry child.
You could also play the game: What if Dad were still alive? If Dad were still alive what activities would he do with you? Would he sit and eat dinner with you? Would he tell his favorite joke? Would he play football with you? Wrestle with you?
You could watch movies about children dealing with parents who have died. My favorite is Millions.
Take him to the cemetery to put something on the grave. Ask him if he wants to take something to leave on the grave. Give him some time to think. Your son will pick out his favorite possession, very expensive, irreplaceable, or something he made himself, and leave it on the grave. Don’t argue with him. Let him leave his favorite possession on the grave. Or maybe he doesn’t like that idea. Maybe he doesn’t want to visit the grave. Instead pick out something that Dad liked to do, and suggest that the two of you do that thing in memory of Dad. If Dad liked to make pancakes, then every Sunday morning, it’s Dad-pancake time.
In the same vein, ask your son to think of a project to do in memory of his Dad. Let’s say Dad liked to put up shelves. We’re going to learn how to put up shelves. We’re going to watch YouTube videos, and we’re going to use Dad’s tools to put up a couple of sets of shelves. Let your son do the fun parts of putting up the shelves. If he says it's not as good as Dad's shelves, then say, "Well, when your dad was ten years old, this is what his shelves looked like." You are reassuring him that he is going to be as competent and as strong as his dad was.
Create a memory shelf of his dad. Maybe it is in his room, maybe it is in the living room. Photo of Dad hugging his son. A couple of Dad’s things. A photo book of Dad and son together.
The suggestion is to help him express the verboten aspects of grief: fear of abandonment, anger at abandonment, fear of loss of identity, fear of loss of power. And then structure the grief in constructive ways: good memories of a loving father who treated his son as important.


0 Comments

Complicated Grief

1/20/2019

1 Comment

 
How do I deal with a severely grieving mother? We lost my brother to horrific circumstances 6 years ago. As time goes by, she has become progressively worse. She has violent outbursts towards me and my dad is her weapon of choice now. What do I do?

The violent death of a family member is devastating to all the members of the family. It takes years to get your life back to a manageable place. Trust is one of the biggest things that gets lost in a violent death of a loved one.
  • Your mother is saying she doesn’t trust the world anymore. She views the world as cruel and evil now. It is weighing her down, and she is probably wishing that she was dead right now.
  • She is also saying that the love she received as an infant and child is not enough to carry her through this grief. When she is grieving she doesn’t have enough warm memories of her mother or father or grandmother comforting her.
It might be helpful to you to:
  • view her as a bereft hopeless child. What would you do if a neighbor child felt totally unloved and hopeless? How would you comfort that child?
  • In addition, I would say to her: “I want to go out to eat with you to a special place that you choose. I want to have mother/child time with you.” What that says to her is that she has a child who is alive right now, who wants to love her.
  • I would also phrase the grief for her: “You loved my brother for years. He knows that, wherever he is now. He knows you love him.” (This helps her focus on continuing to love him, instead of being devastated he is gone.) “Let’s go put flowers on his grave.” (or wherever the ashes were scattered, etc) Give her something concrete and beautiful to do that helps her focus her grief: Flowers on a grave, plant a tree in his honor, give a small scholarship to a needy boy who struggles with the same handicaps your brother struggles with, etc.
The reason doing something concrete, beautiful and constructive is so important, is because she has driven her grief into a dead end street: “I have to make sense of my son’s horrific death. I can’t. I’m stuck.” She replays the horror over and over a hundred times a day. If she had something beautiful and concrete to do that focused her grief, then she would be thinking about beautiful things all day long. Her grief energy would be building her and everyone else up, instead of taking her down into a black hole of hopelessness.
Be patient with her. View her as a hopeless child right now.
1 Comment

Question: How would someone tell their parents that they are toxic and you want them out of their life?

1/7/2019

0 Comments

 
PictureSeries: Shameless, on Netflix

Answer: I wouldn’t tell them they are toxic. That invites a discussion that will be toxic to you. So just focus on getting them out of your life. I would just say I need a 3 month break from them. Don’t give a reason. Don’t argue. Don’t answer questions. Send it as an email. Ignore their replies to your email. Don’t answer the phone, don’t reply to texts. Nothing.

The question is very interesting, because it is clear you are entangled in their lives. And you want an argument with them. That is normal for a toxic relationship. We want to either heal our parents or get revenge on our parents, but seldom to just walk away from our parents, which is the healthiest choice.

Having a discussion about wanting a break from your parents hinders you from getting what you want.
A toxic person I had kicked out of a singing quartet I direct, wanted to rejoin. He said that if I didn’t let him rejoin our quartet, he would have to tell our next gig that we were woefully under prepared, and not to rely on his good word that we were ready to perform. I wrote a lengthy email reply, but before I sent it, I showed it to some trusted friends.
My brother asked, “What is your goal?”
“To get him out of my life, but still be reasonably amicable so if I see him at a singing club we both attend, we can be polite.”
My brother said, “This email won’t get you that. Don’t reply.”
He was right. A lengthy email invites a discussion or an argument. Was I ever going to convince him he was toxic? No! One of my mentors used to advise: “Don’t feed the fire.”

If you encounter your parents at a family event, then just listen, and ask for more info. Don’t reply, don’t argue, don’t get drawn into a discussion. Half agree with everything they say. Soothe them.
  • “I can see your point.”
  • “I can understand you saying that.”
  • “I will think about that.”
  • “I can understand your point of view.”
  • “Interesting!”
This is called “fogging”. It doesn’t give them anything to argue with. There is no toe hold to climb with. They cannot escalate the argument and create drama. All they can do is keep throwing out the baited hook. You have to not take the bait.
This takes lots of practice. Practice with a friend who can imitate your parents. Your parents will say insulting things that are half true or completely untrue:
  • “We raised you and now look how you repay us. You’re ungrateful.”
  • “You’re just so dramatic! Nobody can deal with you!”
  • “You think we are toxic? You’re the toxic one.”
  • “You’re just bitter. You never forgive anyone.”
  • “It’s always somebody else’s fault. Never your fault.”
Don’t take the bait. Just say, “Well, I’m aware that’s your opinion. I can understand your point of view.” And leave it at that. They will think they have won, but they haven’t. You won, because you didn’t give them a toe hold to escalate it into a nasty drama scene. You won because you get to not have contact with them at all until the next family gathering.
Another way they will bait you is to send you messages through your relatives. The messages with have assumptions behind them that accuse you of untrue or half true things that they may have convinced your relatives of. This is bigger bait, and more toxic drama, than a face to face encounter. Again, stay out of it. Say, “Well, I can understand my parents’ viewpoint. That’s the kind of accusation I expect from them. You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. You will feel much better if you stay out of it, and ask them to just communicate with me directly. Otherwise you’re going to get swept up into a painful conflict. Or I could avoid you, too. It’s your choice.”
Focus on older people who have breathed life into you. Focus on them instead of on your parents. This takes a long time. Don’t give up.

Picture
Arnold Arboretum Fog Sculpture
0 Comments
<<Previous

    Author

    Mark Williams is a Mental Health Counselor in Vermont. 

    Archives

    January 2023
    September 2020
    May 2020
    January 2020
    June 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    March 2018
    November 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.