Mindful Indulgence:
“I should have never had those three desserts! NO DESSERT for the rest of my life!”

"R&B for Two" by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

Where’s the enjoyment when we swing between gluttony and self-denial?

Self-Discipline or Self-Denial?

Self-discipline and controlling your impulses are two of the keys to a balanced and happy life. Yet, self-deprivation can cause undue suffering and a grim existence.

Excessive abstinence can also lead to a rebound effect. Strong desires can be suppressed for only so long, and then their overpowering force can cause you to succumb. Remember the movie “Chocolat!” and the priest who passed out from over-indulgence in the chocolate store after forbidding everyone to put a foot into the store?

Enjoyment or Gluttony?

Pleasure and enjoyment of the senses, such as eating and drinking, are the spice of life. Yet, the attempt to have escalating amounts of gratification by increasing your consumption can cause discomfort, displeasure, and dire consequences to your health. Gluttony can also lead to self-loathing, anxiety, and insatiable craving.

Moderation

Pleasure and enjoyment live in a narrow zone of moderation, though we should also take heed of Julia Child’s notion: “Everything in moderation… including moderation.” Note that for people dealing with alcoholism and drug abuse, abstinence does give the best chance of avoiding further harm. For most people, however, mindful indulgence eliminates the need to make an unpleasant vow of abstinence OR to give in to every temptation.

Mindful Indulgence

Mindful indulgence is an effective way to reduce the unwholesome swing from gluttony and guilt to self-loathing and abstinence. Mindful enjoyment means being present, aware, and engaged.

For instance, eating mindfully entails that you eat slowly and consciously, enjoying the flavors as well as the company you are with. It means that in addition to enjoying the flavor, you take notice of the subtle changes in your body, such as feelings of satiation, well-being, or anxiety. Also important is to notice and remember how you feel hours later and the next day.

This kind of mindfulness and patience will allow you to maximize pleasure and enjoyment by honing your ability to gauge how much you will eat and drink. Mindfulness includes being aware of what kind of situations trigger you to lose awareness of your actions, sensations, and long-term pleasure. Regaining awareness will help you to avoid falling into auto-pilot and mindless consumption without appreciation, awareness, or true enjoyment.

One of the delights of life is eating with friends, second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.

~Laurie Colwin ‘Home Cooking’

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read Dr. Sharada Hall’s “Mindful Indulging: Having What You Want Without Guilt.”

Read “Order vs. Chaos; Responsibility vs. Spontaneity.”

Read “Live in the now, not in the future!”

Impatience: “It drives me crazy to wait in long lines and deal with slow, incompetent people.”

"Soothing Sax" by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

Most everyone experiences impatience when waiting in long lines, listening to someone’s long, boring story, and enduring other frustrating situations. However, impatience is magnified in people who have developed a strong preference for doing at the expense of being. Such people can enjoy the moment when it is fascinating, fruitful, or fun-filled, but get frustrated easily otherwise.

Impatience is not bad in itself. In moderation, it indicates that your time could be better spent. But when impatience is excessive or when a situation is beyond our control, our frustration turns into an unnecessary waste of time and energy. While stimulating activities, achievement, and productivity are necessary as well as fulfilling in themselves, excessive impatience can indicate that action is emphasized to the detriment of being in the present.

Impatient people have a sense that if they’re not getting something done, whether working, buying groceries, reading a book, getting somewhere quickly, or enjoying an event, then they’re wasting their time or missing out on something.

Impatience not only doesn’t help the situation, it harms our state of mind, our relationships, and our health. Therefore, it is important and beneficial to find a balance between being goal oriented and being able to be at peace in an ordinary moment. Such balance allows us to experience and enjoy the moment even while waiting in a long line at the DMV.

Here are some alternative ways of enjoying the moment rather than silently cursing that deliberately-slow bureaucrat who’s holding up the line:

1. Take time to relax your body and your mind. Breathe slowly and deeply, relax your face and shoulders, and think pleasant thoughts.

2. Find humor in the situation. If you’re the mental type, then challenge yourself to describe the scene in a humorous way.

3. Find something interesting about the surroundings and the people around you, no matter how unappealing they may seem.

4. Strike up a conversation with someone in line. No-strings-attached banter with a complete stranger can be pleasant or at least intriguing in a socio-psychological way. Who knows — you might meet somebody interesting or hear an amazing story.

5. Do some planning on how to improve your life. Design an activity, dinner, or adventure that you would enjoy. Or think about how you can become a better person.

6. Mentally list all the things you are grateful for. Research shows that this simple process makes a person happier.

If the line is really long, you can do everything on the list and beyond, and gain that desired sense of achievement.

People are more enjoyable to be with when they are not frustrated, rushing about, and impatient. They can get just as much done, AND they are able to make the most of those unproductive moments, despite the pressure of time. We all enjoy being with people who balance action with serenity, because they don’t exude that unpleasant fidgety desire to get moving.

Too much patience is the support of weakness; too much impatience the ruin of strength.

~Charles Caleb Colton, paraphrased

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read “Road Rage: ‘That blankety-blank cut me off! I’ll show him!!’”

Read “Rushing: I’m only five minutes late and got so much done.’”

Guest Author Sam Vaknin, PhD:
“I feel bad even though the abuse has stopped.”

"Purple Heart" by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

So, you have mustered courage and left the abusive relationship. Why do you still feel so bad, so down, and so sick at heart? Repeated abuse has long lasting pernicious and traumatic effects such as panic attacks, hypervigilance, sleep disturbances, flashbacks (intrusive memories), and suicidal ideation.

Victims and survivors experience psychosomatic and “real” bodily symptoms, some of them induced by the secretion of stress hormones such as cortisol: increased blood pressure, racing pulse, headaches, excessive sweating and myriad self-imputed diseases. The victims endures shame, depression, anxiety, embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, abandonment, and an enhanced sense of vulnerability.

Surprisingly, verbal, psychological, and emotional abuse have the same effects as the physical variety [Psychology Today, September/October 2000 issue, p.24]. Abuse of all kinds also interferes with the victim’s ability to work. Still, it is hard to generalise. Victims are not a uniform lot. In some cultures, abuse is commonplace and accepted as a legitimate mode of communication, a sign of love and caring, and a boost to the abuser’s self-image. In such circumstances, the victim is likely to adopt the norms of society and avoid serious trauma.

Deliberate, cold-blooded, and premeditated torture has worse and longer-lasting effects than abuse meted out by the abuser in rage and loss of self-control. The existence of a loving and accepting social support network is another mitigating factor. Finally, the ability to express negative emotions safely and to cope with them constructively is crucial to healing.

Typically, by the time the abuse reaches critical and all-pervasive proportions, the abuser had already, spider-like, isolated his victim from family, friends, and colleagues. She is catapulted into a nether land, where reality itself dissolves into a continuing nightmare.

When she emerges on the other end of this wormhole, the abused woman (or, more rarely, man) feels helpless, self-doubting, worthless, stupid, and a guilty failure for having botched her relationship and “abandoned” her “family”. In an effort to regain perspective and avoid embarrassment, the victim denies the abuse or minimizes it.

No wonder that survivors of abuse tend to be clinically depressed, neglect their health and personal appearance, and succumb to boredom, rage, and impatience. Many end up abusing prescription drugs or drinking or otherwise behaving recklessly.

Dr. Judith Herman of Harvard University has proposed a new mental health diagnosis to account for the impact of extended periods of trauma and abuse: C-PTSD (Complex PTSD).

The first phase of PTSD involves incapacitating and overwhelming fear. The victim feels like she has been thrust into a nightmare or a horror movie. She is rendered helpless by her own terror. She keeps re-living the experience through recurrent and intrusive visual and auditory hallucinations (“flashbacks”) or dreams. In some flashbacks, the victim completely lapses into a dissociative state and physically re-enacts the event while being thoroughly oblivious to her whereabouts.

In an attempt to suppress this constant playback and the attendant exaggerated startle response (jumpiness), the victim tries to avoid all stimuli associated, however indirectly, with the traumatic event. Many develop full-scale phobias (agoraphobia, claustrophobia, fear of heights, aversion to specific animals, objects, modes of transportation, neighbourhoods, buildings, occupations, weather, and so on).

Most PTSD victims are especially vulnerable on the anniversaries of their abuse. They try to avoid thoughts, feelings, conversations, activities, situations, or people who remind them of the traumatic occurrence (“triggers”).

This constant hypervigilance and arousal, sleep disorders (mainly insomnia), the irritability (“short fuse”), and the inability to concentrate and complete even relatively simple tasks erode the victim’s resilience. Utterly fatigued, most patients manifest protracted periods of numbness, automatism, and, in radical cases, near-catatonic posture. Response times to verbal cues increase dramatically. Awareness of the environment decreases, sometimes dangerously so. The victims are described by their nearest and dearest as “zombies”, “machines”, or “automata”.

The victims appear to be sleepwalking, depressed, dysphoric, anhedonic (not interested in anything and find pleasure in nothing). They report feeling detached, emotionally absent, estranged, and alienated. Many victims say that their “life is over” and expect to have no career, family, or otherwise meaningful future.

The victim’s family and friends complain that she is no longer capable of showing intimacy, tenderness, compassion, empathy, and of having sex (due to her post-traumatic “frigidity”). Many victims become paranoid, impulsive, reckless, and self-destructive. Others somatize their mental problems and complain of numerous physical ailments. They all feel guilty, shameful, humiliated, desperate, hopeless, and hostile.

PTSD need not appear immediately after the harrowing experience. It can – and often is – delayed by days or even months. It lasts more than one month (usually much longer). Sufferers of PTSD report subjective distress (the manifestations of PTSD are ego-dystonic). Their functioning in various settings – job performance, grades at school, sociability – deteriorates markedly.

What can you do about it?

The short and long of it is: seek professional help. You cannot cope with the aftermath of harrowing abuse all by yourself. The prognosis in case of treatment – even brief treatment – is good: PTSD can be alleviated and eliminated.

Second: re-connect with friends and family. Make amends where necessary. Re-establish your network of emotional support and share, share, share. The more you share, the easier the burden.


by Sam Vaknin, PhD, the author of “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited” – an excellent, comprehensive book about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and abusive behavior – and other books about personality disorders.

Read “Traumas as Social Interactions” by Dr. Sam Vaknin.

Read “I Attract Abusers Like a Magnet” by Dr. Sam Vaknin.

Watch “Self-Respect: How to Avoid becoming a Doormat” by Alison Poulsen, PhD.

Rejecting the mind, Romanticizing the body:
“People in other cultures don’t get so caught up in being cerebral and logical. We should stop thinking all the time and live in the moment they way they do.”

"Island Drumbeat" by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

Often we romanticize particular people or cultures who have personality traits we lack. However, by idealizing them we tend to disown our own values and set ourselves up for disappointment.

Overly-cerebral types sometimes romanticize sensual people who exude erotic, tribal, and earth-bound energy. As a reaction to their life of logic and reason, they are drawn to those who embody physicality, desire, and sensuality. After years of working in a job requiring a lot of thinking, they might fantasize and in fact move to an island to relax and enjoy the easy sensuality of the beaches and its people. Or an older mental type may fall in love with a young seductive type, even though they have nothing to talk about.

In either case, the enchantment usually does not last very long if it involves disregarding a primary part of themselves. They generally regret abandoning their well-developed capabilities all together in search of the opposite. If in their new quest they reject the mind, they will encounter new problems arising from the other side of the split — all sensuality and physicality and little intelligence and planning.

To free ourselves from the split between the sensual and the cerebral, we cannot disavow either side by swinging like a pendulum from one side to the other. Yet, the differences between the mind and the body are stark. So how can we preserve something of our own values when opening to new and contrasting values?

Perhaps we can achieve this apparent paradox by relating to these new qualities with wonder while remaining grounded in the familiar. Instead of casting aside rational thinking, we could aim to become more whole with the realization that all personality types have their own strengths and weaknesses. We have to be willing to face the ambiguity of appreciating opposing sets of qualities.

In other words, we can be cerebral and physical. We can be intellectual and sensual. We can plan for the future and live in the now.

Wholeness requires an ability to dance with the paradox of being open to that which we’re comfortable with and that which is different. Living with the positive tension of polarity creates psychic energy, which makes us grow and feel more alive. It is this wrestling with the inconsistency of integrating counterbalancing qualities that sets the stage for becoming a more complete individual.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

~Carl Jung

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read “Sensuality: ‘I’m just not a sensual person.’”

Read “Positive Projection: ‘He is so amazingly intelligent and articulate!’”

Read “Enantiadromia: ‘It drives my partner crazy that I’m ‘too’ polite. I think he is too blunt.’”

Jealousy of Others:
“I feel bad about myself when I’m around him.”

"Competitive Edge"—Juliana Furtado by Mimi Stuart©
Live the Life you Desire

It’s natural to compare ourselves to others — to see how we are doing and how we could do better. We can learn by observing — whether it’s a job, a sport, or how someone relates to others. Comparing ourselves to others can provide great constructive insight into how we can improve.

Yet, comparisons can be detrimental when we become jealous, that is, when we feel hostile toward others whom we perceive as being better, happier, or more successful. We harm ourselves in several ways.

1. We choose to feel miserable.

2. We show others that we feel inadequate and insecure.

3. We become unpleasant to be with.

4. We are less likely to learn how to improve.

5. We miss out on being inspired by others.

People who feel frequent pangs of jealousy tend to feel worthwhile or happy only when they stand out as being special or the best. Yet, self-worth and happiness do not come from being Number One, although they may result from being the best we can be, without regard to others.

People who are jealous of others’ happiness, accomplishments, or skills often lack a strong sense of self and of power over their lives. Rather than being energized, they merely resent the other person as a reminder of what they themselves seem to be lacking. They don’t feel they have control over improving their attitude, relationships, skills, and situations.

Yet, one way to improve your life is to appreciate other people’s high skill-level or happiness; you will actually feel more enjoyment and happiness yourself through such appreciation. Therefore, it’s better to be around people whose joy and talents inspire you rather than around those whose lack of passion leave you feeling better than, but also uninspired.

If the goal is to be happy or the best we can be, then it’s best to stop focusing resentfully on what others have and can do. We’re better off admiring and enjoying the blessings of others, and focusing with gratitude on what we have and what we want to accomplish. In fact, relishing others’ blessings with delight has an inspirational effect on the body and soul.

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read “Resentment.”


Read “No money: ‘I get really unhappy not to be able to buy clothes when I see all my friends shopping.’”