It's not you. This adult life is really hard to get right at times. Have some self-compassion. Everyone, myself included, is fighting a hard battle. We all get out of wack mentally and emotionally, and we have no idea how to get back in wack.
It's not a personal failing. The playing field is tilted against us being sane a significant bit of the time.
Consider just the challenges of the factory-installed features in our species. These are not options any of us chose from a menu.
We all have a mind that is easily distracted, tends to worry about future events which may or may not happen, and endlessly chews over the few things that go wrong on a given day. It's widely accepted by psychologists that the human mind has evolved with a negative bias, in which we're far more ready to see stuff that's a problem, often unconsciously editing positive stuff out of awareness. We all privately doubt that we're attractive, smart or 'good enough'. We humans have emotions that come out of nowhere, rising up like tidal waves, driving rationality out of the picture. We have powerful desires for things we either don't need or know we need to avoid- but desire the poison we will.
We all will eat, drink, buy, or say the thing, when what we really need to do is sit with ourselves and do nothing, just feeling what life is making us feel. Note that it's been said that the majority of the world's problems are caused by a person's inability to sit quietly in a room. Just sayin.
Why do we do the dumb and self-defeating things we sometimes do, and worry about things that are beyond our control?
Because we were born.
Born? Yes, born, that is, as a human (human = flawed) being.
Enter Transpersonal Psychology, which says that yes, part of what you're struggling with is about you and your individual choices and habits, and you're responsible to clean up your own messes; and, some of this is an existential issue- just the stuff that happens to everyone in one way or another. Existential as in it's baked into the human existence. As in, not your fault, not anybody's fault. When we can hold that perspective that all humans go through similar hard things, that we have a bunch of similar vulnerabilities- we can feel less alone, and dial back self-condemnation.
A transpersonal approach to therapy can be somewhat spiritual, in that it looks at factors beyond the individual, beyond the idiosyncratic workings of your own particular mind and body. It says, keep in mind your challenges are also simply human, and that all we humans live in a universe we can never fully understand, and we're up against many factors we'll never control or even be aware of.
Spiritual approaches to therapy suggest that this human life is magical, beautiful, fun and exciting, and also confusing, deeply challenging and mysterious- and we're given no map and no user manual. We're all thrown in the deep end without really knowing what water is, nor how exactly to swim. And then we're told to figure it out on the fly, and that the larger goal is to find or create happiness- but we're given a lot of flawed notions about how that's supposed to be done, or even what happiness actually is. Is it wealth, popularity, or peace of mind? How are we supposed to know? Welcome to the realm known as trial and error.
Transpersonal or spiritually-oriented therapy takes into account that so much is uncertain in life- and yet we all must make choices. We must choose, almost always with incomplete or flawed data. We can only understand much of life in looking backwards- but we live looking forwards. Advertising and cultural messaging tells us we can 'have it all' and 'create the life of our dreams', neglecting to mention that there are many, many things that may stand in one's way. So if you can't always get all your ducks in a row, maybe don't entirely blame yourself.
Seeing the ways that life is simply going to be hard for virtually everyone at certain points is meant to create self-compassion, not discouragement. And studies show that people who are more self-compassionate expend less time and energy in self-blame, and thus are actually more effective in striving for their goals. They're kinder to themselves when they fail, and thus tend to get back on the pony more readily. Self-compassion means we don't have to kick ourselves when we're down, so we don't add suffering to pain.
Mindfulness-based therapy can incorporate these approaches of self-acceptance and the universal or impersonal nature of many of our challenges. As we bring mindful attention to ourselves we see more clearly the built-in challenges we all face in trying to live our best, while practicing taking more skillful action. Mindfulness research robustly shows that it helps us to better manage our moods, cravings and worries more effectively, helping us handle these built-in challenges better over time. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is another evolving approach that uses psilocybin or other psychoactive compounds such as ketamine to help temporarily disable some of the built-in or learned mind patterns that can stand between us and a greater sense of wholeness. More and more research is now showing that combining mindfulness, transpersonal, and perhaps psychedelic-assisted approaches is leading some clients to delightful and empowering states of well-being and self-understanding.
In different ways, these approaches create both subtle and powerful shifts in perspective, in which we see ourselves with more compassion, and life with more possibility for joy and contentment. They can foster growing confidence that we can re-train ourselves to live our best. They hold the potential to show us a path toward appreciating the present moment and the little gifts it often brings, amidst the oh-so-human challenges.
