Tian Dayton

Dear Dr. Dayton
I think I got scammed by the whole acai berry weight loss thing. I am always trying to lose those ten extra pounds that everyone tries to lose and the ten more I gained since I was let go from my job due to cutbacks. So I signed up for a couple of free offers and suddenly I seem to be nearly a thousand dollars in debt. My husband is furious with me and I am feeling like a real idiot. Please share my story to protect other people.
-Feeling Stupid in Wisconsin

Dear FSIW
I will start by printing your story and then respond to the deeper layers of self medicating emotional stress with food. Thanks for sharing this, hopefully it will help all of those who are also feeling stupid somewhere or another, you can bet you are not alone.

FSIW writes:
“This is basically how it went. I saw all of these adds for how you could lose weight the natural way by cleaning out your system with something called “Power Flush” and then taking “Acai Berry” . They made a free offer for $5.95 for each one and they used Dr. Oz and Oprah in their adds so it looked like a legit kind of thing. Anyway here’s how I got caught and I think it’s really wrong. They sent me the free offer of each then I started getting these pills in the mail and my card was being charged like $65.00 for each. They sent three of each acai berri AND Power Flush which cost almost $400.00 in total and there wasn’t any phone number or web site or anything that I could call in the envelop. I tried to get their phone number from information but they had no listing at all. Finally in the next batch I got a number. I called it and got someone in India who said I was too late to cancel the first batches and maybe I could close the account for the next ones. I am so confused and feel so frustrated and now I have spent at least $400.00 that I can’t get back and don’t even really have to spend and maybe twice that much. I feel kind of ashamed that I didn’t figure this out. They said I didn’t read the fine print but honestly the add made it sound like this came with no strings attached, the fine print must have been at the very bottom of the longest page I have ever well never scrolled down and using Oprah and Dr. Oz made it all seem like they were involved in it and it was OK. Please share my story so people will know what they are getting into when they sign up for this stuff.”

Dear FSIW
Thank you for getting past enough of your shame to be brave enough to share this. Try not to beat yourself up, we all get taken sometimes. Let’s see if we can find the silver lining here for you and use it as a wake up call to make some positive life style changes that are really long lasting, empowering and really are FREE!

The recession has put a lot of people under a lot of stress. It’s a common thing to manage emotional and psychological stress with self medicating behaviors. I am seeing a lot of this in my work in the addictions field. People are reaching for their “go to” medicator whether it be food, alcohol, drugs, sex or even spending. Tough times sometimes require extra discipline. Because of all of the stress you’re experiencing it’s easy to reach for your “go to” way of soothing yourself and calming down. I think you’ll feel a lot better about yourself if you can take some positive actions to turn your eating around.

This week instead of self medicating with food try cutting food portions down by a large percent, making healthier food choices and taking a brisk walk for thirty minutes each day. Look for an Overeaters Anonymous OA meeting in your area so that you can share about your feelings of frustration and anxiety rather than “feeding your feelings”. I think you will feel a lot better about yourself in a week if you take these actions. This is a positive way to use the extra time you have now and these are actions that will be much more beneficial to you in the long run. Sometimes the “quick fix” isn’t quick at all and the slow but steady solution, which in this case actually is FREE is what really wins the race. Good luck and thanks again for sharing this!

Question:
“A brief period of closeness with a man who might have mattered to me, has caused me to open up to my long-buried pain, and recognize that my uber-independent stance is an adaptive mechanism that doesn’t really work for me that well anymore since for the first time in my life I find myself longing for closeness – but I equate closeness with pain – how should I proceed? I want to run away from the pain of being close but I need some closeness and comfort, too.”

Signed,
Smart but confused in Minnesota

Dear Smart But Confused in Minnesota,

With your permission I will share with the Huffington Post reader more of your history that you shared with me. It paints a clear picture of how the coping mechanisms that we developed in childhood to help us to get through and even thrive can actually become a source of limitation in adulthood trapping us in our own immature coping strategies and propelling us to recreate the very pain and in this case deep longing and loneliness, that we experienced as children.

SBCIM writes:
…….”I am reading your book on emotional sobriety. I hardly recall my childhood after my mother became mentally ill and left, but my adulthood was spent being uber-competent. I built resilience, set goals and met them, raised a child, got a master’s degree, and have exciting (and even important) work as an environmental consultant. I took a conscious vow of celibacy while raising my child (since I had been raised in an unsteady and dangerous household – I wanted to give my girl stability). One consequence is that I have not been dating, though I have many close male friends in environmental consulting (a male dominated field).”……

Dr. Dayton:
OK, SBCIM and reader, so here are our first clues. Clue #1 “I hardly recall my childhood after my mother became mentally ill and left”

Dr. Dayton: Clearly SBCIM’s mother’s illness and subsequent departure were traumatizing, loss of memory often accompanies a traumatic event or period in one’s life.

SBCIM Clue #2 “I became ubercompetant”

Dr. Dayton:: In the absence of reliable adults to depend upon children often become little adults to soon. While they may be able to do this and keep going, even thrive, the price they often pay is a loss of ability to depend, to be vulnerable and to trust love; all of these are necessary for intimacy to take place. But feeling vulnerable and dependent can unconsciously make the child who has been traumatized feel at risk of being so deeply hurt again that they can feel they may not be able to survive the pain were they to love and be rejected. Keep in mind, the child depends upon the parent for survival and this sort of abrupt and premature loss of a parent can shake a child’s trust and faith in an orderly universe.Even as an adult they can carry this unconcious fear into their marriages and partnerships.

SBCIM “I took a conscious vow of celibacy”

Dr. Dayton: Trauma tends to send us to emotional extremes. Because her fear of repeating the pain she’d experienced in her childhood with her own daughter was so extreme, SBCIM guarded against it with the same sort of solution in adulthood that she had figured out in childhood. Her chid like reasoning may have gone something like this, “I will depend on no one, I will do everything myself, people you need desperately only let you down. I will not need anything nor ask for help from anyone and that’s how I will keep from getting hurt.”

SBCIM “Eight months ago, I started to date (and sleep) with Joe. He was great. I was great. We were great together. But I was miserable. I spent all my time watching, waiting, worrying, and wondering. I was “hyper vigilant,” to use your word. Four months in, during a full-body massage at the clinic that treats my fractured sternum, I cried and cried and cried and cried for about one hour: “no, no, no, no, no, I don’t love him, I won’t love him, I will never love him. . . ”

Dr. Dayton: When her heart became open to love again all of the unprocessed pain that SBCIM had buried so long ago resurfaced. This is where so many make a mistake. They make their childhood pain about the relationship they are in rather than realizing its possible earlier source. And they become hypervigilant, constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, constantly waiting to be hurt all over again. This causes them to over react to relationship problems that others might be able to roll with. Their very over reaction eventually exacerbates and even creates problems that wind up “proving” their original thesis that love just isn’t worth it and intimacy is just too difficult and painful.

An example of her hypervigilance and her creating the very rejection she feared can be seen in
SBCIM’s next quote.

SBCIM “I was still miserably watching, waiting, worrying, and wondering for the next shoe to drop: do I matter? does our connection matter? will he lose interest? I told him a dozen times, “you are not interested in me” and he told me over and over that he was – that he is intrigued by me), since I’d recollected so thoroughly how much losing love hurts.”

Dr. Dayton: My advice to you Dear Minnesota girl is first of all, don’t try to do this alone; get yourself to either a twelve step program (there are so many of them one is likely to fit) or to a professional or preferably to both. Separate the past from the present. It’s critical that you see the relationship as the TRIGGER event not the source of all of your pain. Entering an intimate relationship as an adult when you’ve been deeply hurt as a child can feel like terra incognita, unknown territory. It can be scary as well as exiting; threatening as well as reassuring. This is true for all of us, giving our hearts is risky business, we never know quite how we’ll get it back. But for the heart that has been broken in childhood, it can feel like a slow walk to the guillotine. Try to take life as a series of lessons and look at the gift in a relationship that allows you to see more of you and become more who you can be. Life is nothing if not a journey and part of the journey is losing and finding the self. You tell me that this is over now and if that is still the case it may be your moment to grieve the loss of your Mother and of the yeaqrs of childhood that were somewhat taken from you. If you can let yourself go through this giref process, which will hurt horribly to be sure, you may find that you increase your capacity to feel more feelings and feel them more deeply and that you are somehow more trusting of life and of yourself. Becuase what you ultimately need to be able to trust is that you can love and be hurt and survive. But again, don’t do it alone, now is your moment to reach out in a way that you were never able to do before, not just to a man, reach out for help. Bless you and good luck.

When we get scared, our thinking mind gets smaller and our feeling mind gets bigger. Evolution has made it this way so that we will get flooded with feelings of fear when danger lurks and beat a straight path toward safety, unhampered by any random thoughts that might get in our way. Our feelings of fear are placed in us to keep us safe. We have to avoid poisonous snakes, spiders and charging wooly mammoths so we don’t get killed.
Because nature has so finely tuned our fear response in order to assure safety and survival, it doesn’t take much to condition us to be afraid of some experience that feels threatening. Evolution didn’t leave much room for error on this one because it is so crucial to our safety and survival that we avoid what feels frightening and might be dangerous.
But we can fear more than woolly mammoths. For instance, if we grow up around emotional or physical chaos our fear response can become equally well honed. We may come to associate the expression of intense emotion with fear and danger and wish to avoid it. Repeated experiences of chaos or abuse at home, which can, by the way, include frozen chaos, the kind of withheld yelling that’s so thick you can cut it with a knife, can easily condition us to fear, say loud shouting, rage, emotional tension, or even threatening facial cues whether or not we’re conscious of being scared. It can set us up to shake inside or feel immobilized when we’re around intense emotion whether in the workplace or at home. The conditioning is fast and long lasting. But not inevitable.

How Fear is Conditioned and De-Conditioned
Numerous studies have been done on lab rats both conditioning and de-conditioning fear. For example, experimenters set up a situation in which cheese is offered to a rat. But each time the rat eats the cheese the experimenters apply an electrical shock to the rat’s hind quarters. Soon the rat avoids the cheese all together, even if they’re hungry, because eating cheese is now associated with pain. That’s how fear gets conditioned and it can happen very quickly, nature couldn’t allow for many second chances.
But if the experimenters allow the rat to eat the cheese and receive no painful shock, pretty soon the rat will forget about his fear of cheese and eat it voraciously again. He will stop associating cheese with the fear of being painfully shocked. People can also de-condition their fear responses through this sort of “exposure” technique if they are aware of what they are doing and what they want to accomplish.
Let’s go back to our previous example of growing up around a lot of anger. Say we have a fear of angry people because we grew up around a lot of anger that could erupt, at a moment’s notice, into rage, chaos and pain. As a result we learned to cope in one of two ways. One, we avoid anger, we become conflict avoidant. So angry feelings just build up inside of us because we have no working model for simply expressing them or working them through with someone. Our past has conditioned us to think that expressing them will quickly devolve into hurt, rejection and more anger. Or worse, will make us the target for getting all the anger in the room made about us. That’s the avoidant reaction. Then there’s the opposite counter intuitive reaction, we head straight for what is scaring us.Sitting with the potential of an angry outburst makes us feel too anxious so we actually provoke it so we can get it over with. We yearn to get over our fear and master the situation somehow so we can feel big and empowered instead of small and disempowered. Our fear propels us toward rather than away from what’s scaring us.
But if we can back up, witness our own fear reactions without getting tangled up in or acting on them, we can begin to work them through and to de-condition them. We can “expose” ourselves to the feeling but do something productive with it and get a different result. One way might be to find a constructive way to express dissatisfaction in a manner that moves a situation forward rather than tears it apart; to use our anger to inform us of what isn’t working for us and then find a way to address it. Note: If we’re one of those people who constantly finds fault, this won’t work because our anger has deeper roots and we need to get some help with finding out where it’s all coming from and why we’re forever looking for places to dump it or leak it. Or if we’re someone who thinks we’re always right and we’e entitled to shove our point of view down someone else’s throat without listening to their side of the equation, it also won’t work. But if we’re basically a team player, we may be surprised that what is bothering us is bothering others as well and our ability to express it clearly and without attack can actually help a situation to move in a positive direction. Eventually our fear of confrontation and even of our own feelings of anger or frustration lessen because we no longer associate them only with pain and rejection, we have learned to also associate them with clearing the air and working things out. And our fear of another person’s anger might lessen as well because we don’t feel as powerless and immobilized in the face of intense, potentially difficult emotions.

Drilling Down into the Fear
While this formula sounds pretty simple it is oftentimes easier said than done. Why? Well, human beings have a very sophisticated thinking process and we’re capable of giving ourselves all sorts of “good” reasons or even dysfunctional, maladaptive reasons why it’s fine to eat cheese and be shocked. Perhaps we cope with our feelings of fear by building increasingly complex rationalizations around what makes us feel anxious or scared; in an attempt to minimize fear we deny or distort reality to make it less threatening. Our ability to think, in other words, can be our own worst enemy when it comes to de-conditioning fear. Being a dumb rat can be a real advantage when it comes to letting go of fear, for them it’ simple, no shock, no more fear, the cheese is in the open. For us no shock and we ask ourselves a line of questions that create fear even when it isn’t there like where did the shock go? Shouldn’t it be here? If the shock is gone shouldn’t I still try to remember it so I can stay out of trouble? Are shocks there for me to grow from? Whose fault is it that I am being shocked? Who can I blame, resent or punish? Do shocks build character, should I face and work through them? And on and on. The thinking mind can be a real liability; we get caught in our own circular reasoning, tangled up in our own webs of rationalization. So when this happens just go back to basics and ask yourself a few questions:
• What is triggering fear in me?
• Where specifically did I get triggered?
• What do I associate with that particular behavior, look or circumstance from my past that has made me associate it with pain?
Then talk about it, journal about and think about it. Breathe and just feel it rather than act on it. You may be surprised to find out just how much is under there driving that response that you’ve “forgotten” all about.
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“Do that thing that only you can do, that’s how to be successful as an artist,” says, Steven Lavine, president of California Institute of the Arts. “Especially in today’s economy it’s important to be entrepreneurial with your skill set and adapt to the environment in which you find yourself.”

Earlier this week I helped to host an event that welcomes new students to Cal Arts. I heard some things that I felt both moved by and motivated to pass along. It was inspiring to realize that this delicate balance between the freedom and passion an artist needs in order to create along with the discipline and self confidence to push projects through the myriad of obstacles any creative effort inevitably encounters, had actually been intentionally nourished and nurtured at my alma mater, all these years I thought I’d come upon it through my own trial and error!

Artists have long been confronted with the harsh reality that what they love passionately, doesn’t necessarily pay the bills, so they have had to learn to adapt their skills to what the market place might be looking for. Maybe the rest of us can take a page out of their books this year; if ever we needed to be creative and adaptive it’s now! Visioning and mobilizing a creative vision and hving the confidence to actualize it ,is what Cal Arts has long had to train its artists to do in order to survive in the workplace. As examples of this form of entraneurship, Lavine cited musicians who started a ring tone company and actors who use their performance skills to train business people in speaking and self presentation so that they can do their art freely on the side. He challenged other young artists to do the same, to think creatively and to be willing to adapt and reinvent themselves.

Daily we see actors appearing in add campaigns or moving from the silver screen to TV and stage. Or artists who apply their drawing skills to advertising events, imitating Toulouse Lautrec’s approach to keeping the wolf from the door by creating popular posters (now our art) advertising the goings on in Parisien society. Or writers who write what businesses need written so that they can work on their novels on the side. Film makers are working in the industry filming and editing so that they can produce their own original work and graphic artists design the trendy, arty imagery that floods our unconscious shaping and defining how we may see a product, person or event. This is how artists pay the rent and keep their creative spirits alive.

The inspiring thing about this is not only in the message that we can learn to use creativity to adapt but that there is, in fact, something inherently creative in the adapting process itself. Actualizing an inner vision is deeply satisfying whether that vision be a delicious dinner, a painting or a film. Creativity and actualization can even be their own reward. Taking this adaptive approach allows us to enter what Jane Austin referred to as “the healing waters of action.” Sometimes just getting up and getting going has a curative power. Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, has spent years researching what he calls the “flow state” one that we enter when we are fully engaged in activity that is challenging enough to keep us engaged and manageable enough to enjoy. Athletes, artists, cooks, seamstresses and kids alike, anyone who enters this state in fact, can experience this deep sense of pleasure and integration taking place within them. After a flow” session, Csíkszentmihályi has found that people emerge feeling calmed, soothed, integrated and with a strengthened sense of self. Applying the principles of creativity, entrapreneurship and engagement can help us to, as they say, “grow from adversity”.
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