metaforestlife

Therapist reflecting on peace, growth, love, purpose, and living fully.
My full long-form videos are on YouTube.
🌲❄️🗻🪿🍄☀️

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

“Don't judge me.”
“You're being judgmental.”
“This is a judgment-free zone.”

We bristle at the word “judgment” and being judgmental, because we intuitively and reflexively sense real danger there. But in truth, every day we’re continuously making decisions and distinctions in order to live the lives that we want. X is better than Y. We choose this and not that. We let someone in, and keep another out.

What really IS the difference between harmful/immoral/defensive judgment vs squarely looking at reality in order to decide what we include and what we exclude based on qualities that we determine are good for us or not?

Just labeling it something else like "discernment" only goes so far. Separating the light and dark sides of judgment with semantics doesn't do the work of explaining what the difference actually is. The Tarot deck doesn’t shy away from the word “judgment”, including a card by that name which actually points at healthy discernment. And in our society we give someone the title of “judge” when we entrust them to make good and fair decisions.

So what really is the difference between the light side and the shadow side of judgment?

In this brief video, I relate this important distinction to the drama triangle, which I think is a complex of the dark side of interpersonal judgment.
~~~
The Subtle Art Of Taking It Personally 3.2
https://t.co/jH6I9QuTHf
~~~
#dramatriangle #judgment #discernment #psychologicalshadow #shadowwork #compassion #selflove #personalgrowth #innerwork #tarot #selfawareness #archetypes

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Our Steller’s Jay fledglings finished launching from their nest a few days ago. It was bittersweet to see them leave.

We think that they hatched on April 25th, the same morning that our dog died. Life began as decisively as it ended, around the same time, at the same backyard deck. We like to think that the timing was a compassionate gift from some unseen benevolent force, to ease our grief a little.

For the first couple of weeks of their lives, we just enjoyed hearing their little cries when their parents would visit the nest. They must have been so tiny; we couldn’t even see them. But we could feel a little vortex of delightful baby bird energy emanating from their nest when we were outside.

Eventually they grew enough for us to start seeing their little heads pop up above the top of their twig crib. Kira took a short video with her camera, and I got hooked on video documenting their growth from then on. They didn’t seem to mind me quietly setting up a camera to capture a couple of hours of their activity each day.

This footage was taken May 13 through May 17, once I found the best camera angle available. It’s amazing how much they developed in just 4 days.

One day Kira and I were looking at it and laughing at their adorable shenanigans. She said it was way better than TV. I noticed the thought: “This is therapy.”

Later when I was lying in bed to go to sleep, I closed my eyes, and in my mind’s eye I saw little fluffy baby birds hopping over each other, curiously looking around, and practice-flapping their wings. It struck me how true it is that we wind up thinking about whatever we focus on during the day. And I was happy with that mental inertia I was experiencing.

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

It’s crucial to know the difference between partner incompatibility and our unhealed wounds, because it informs whether you simply need to find a more compatible partner, or need to turn your attention toward yourself for a while to address the wounds that don’t go away when a relationship ends.

Sometimes after a breakup, it's clear that no path with that person would have served you. The differences were too great. Staying would have meant betraying your essential nature, suppressing vital parts of yourself, and giving up non-negotiable dreams.

When you find this truth, you don't tend to question the choice. You feel peace and empowerment, mixed with grief. You take comfort in knowing yourself and your needs more fully.

But other relationship endings are different. You may have an intuition that you were already limiting yourself before the relationship even started. And that that suppression kept you from rising to the occasion, from being who you really are. Fear of authenticity and intimacy kept you from showing up fully. You sense that you self-sabotaged for emotional protection.

When this happens, it happens on both sides, because commitment is a joint act. You can sense when someone says "I'm in" but their heart isn't fully there. And that makes you close off too. Fear of investing is mutually reciprocal, like two ships drifting apart from one another.
~~~
Incompatibility vs unhealed wounds
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.3.4)
~~~
#Relationships #Breakups #SelfAwareness #Commitment #Love #Healing #PersonalGrowth #RelationshipPatterns #LifePhilosophy #AttachmentTheory

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

We’ve been delighted and honored to host this very cute Steller's Jay couple, as they decided to build a little home and raise a family on top of our light. They’ve both been very hard at work for many weeks, collecting food and keeping their eggs and now four hatchlings warm during some cold, late spring storms. Happy Mother’s Day to all the loving and dedicated moms out there, human and animal, who create and nurture life all over our big beautiful Mother Earth.

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Committing too fast to an incompatible or uncommitted partner can be an attempt to protect the wound of abandonment or neglect.
Withholding commitment too long, even from great partners, can attempt to protect the wound of engulfment or loss of autonomy.
These commitment defenses correspond to anxious and avoidant attachment styles, which are ironically often drawn toward one another, because both the ability to commit and the wisdom to be discerning can be lost parts of ourselves. Each ability is one half of the art and skill of commitment. We can be simultaneously attracted to and repelled by either of those abilities that we've disowned in order to avoid pain and heartbreak in our pasts.
~~~
Commitment Defenses
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.3.3)
~~~
#Love #Relationships #Dating #AttachmentTheory #Healing #PersonalGrowth #Commitment #SelfAwareness #AnxiousAttachment #AvoidantAttachment #RelationshipPatterns #AttachmentWounds

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Most people thrive with a secure attachment. When they adore and are adored. Cherish and are cherished. Ambivalence for too long prevents that security.

Choosing a restaurant meal is low stakes, so we only need 10 or 15 minutes to decide. But for choosing to commit (emotionally) to a partner, the relevant unit of time is months or years. A few weeks isn't enough to know someone well enough to let our heart fully open. But two years of significant ambivalence is probably too long. Life is too short to spend years holding back our love or being with someone who is holding back theirs.

The direction of a relationship commitment also matters. If it’s increasing at the 2 year mark that is very different than if it’s decreasing. Commitment isn’t all-or-nothing and it doesn’t happen all at once. It’s also a risk, but with greater reward when it lasts.
~~~
How Long Should Commitment Take?
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.3.2)
~~~
#Relationships #Commitment #SecureAttachment #Dating #Love #LifePhilosophy

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Every path we choose excludes all others. That's the existential given of relationship commitment.

Staying at the commitment fork in the road is also a choice. If we stay there too long, we miss the adventure of deep, nourishing intimacy.

Two people can share a lease, a last name, and even kids, and still not be fully committed to each other in their hearts.

Commitment is like ordering off a restaurant menu instead of staring at it forever and not eating.

~~~
The Ambivalence Trap
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.3.1)
~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #SelfAwareness #InnerWork #Psychotherapy #Attachment #PersonalGrowth #ExistentialTherapy

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

As human beings, we’re blessed with the incredible capacity to imagine. We can create entire alternate worlds, futures, and past lives, and all it costs us is a few calories to fuel some neuronal firing. Imagination has virtually no budget.

But imagination’s power is also what can hurt us if we don’t wield it skillfully. We can conjure up a fantasy about how our lives would have unfolded, if only hindsight were not 20/20, and then negatively compare our priceless, actual life the with the hypothetical one that we spun out of thin air.

To counter that mistake, we might resolve to have “no regrets” -- as if we could, or should, turn away from our natural ability to become wiser by simulating other possible outcomes of different choices that we might have made, which inevitably comes with the toll of evoking some challenging emotions. “No regrets” can be a denial of our full human potential, and a way to avoid our authentic experience.

This video is about a healthy, third alternative between “no regrets” and “woulda coulda shoulda” -- the nuance of using regret skillfully for growth. It is an appeal against devaluing our actual lived life by comparing it to mental holodeck simulations and mind play doh, while simultaneously using the power of imagination to make gradual course adjustments, as we navigate our grand hero’s journey that we call our life.

https://t.co/DGUW8yCf2y

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Ever notice how after a breakup, people sometimes pick up each other's hobbies or habits? What bothered you about your partner might have been a part of yourself you shut down long ago. The discomfort they triggered can be worth following.
~~~
When a partner lives what we forbid
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.6)
~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #SelfAwareness #InnerWork #Psychotherapy #Attachment #PersonalGrowth

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Characteristics that we’re attracted to in a partner can sometimes be the ones we disowned from ourselves when we were growing up. They can also be the parts we most need to reclaim.
~~~
Reclaiming lost parts of ourselves
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.5)
~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #SelfAwareness #InnerWork

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Intimate relationships are the ones most likely to abrade our core wounds, because it is within them that we allow ourselves to be the most vulnerable. That pain can make or break the relationship.
~~~~~
A relationship without defenses
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.4)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #Therapy

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

It’s in our primal human nature to perceive conflict in terms of an archetypal meta-story with a victim, a villain, and a hero. This can make for an entertaining movie but, usually, seeing the real world in this way limits our growth, connection, and freedom by turning each other into dehumanizing caricatures and escalating conflict. Fast moral certainty comes with a high price tag.

Psychologist Stephen Karpman named this pattern “the drama triangle”, and we’re so used to it that it feels normal and even inescapable. It shows up at every level of human relating, from the family to public discourse to international relations.

The first step to rising above the drama triangle is to recognize it, which is the topic of this video. I examine why the drama triangle is so psychologically addictive, and five ways that it separates us from reality.

https://t.co/UfXFcyjdcO

#DramaTriangle #Psychology #HumanBehavior #ConflictResolution #SelfAwareness #CriticalThinking #Relationships #SocialDynamics #Tribalism #Philosophy #Politics #Conflict #Understanding #FamilyTherapy #CircularCausality

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Psychological defenses from childhood are like a heavy wooden raft that we keep carrying long after the river is behind us.

Aggression, withdrawal, people-pleasing, guardedness, etc — they are the rafts that once helped us survive the river of childhood vulnerability.

But eventually they become a burden we have to learn to set down.
~~~~~
Walking with a heavy raft
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.3)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #Therapy

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

In early dating, we often create one of two black and white stories:

“They’re totally safe.”
“They’re totally unsafe.”

Both are attempts to escape the discomfort of uncertainty.

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Defenses block the flow of love in two ways: they prevent us from showing up for our partner the way they need, and they prevent us from receiving the healthy ways our partner shows up for us.

Defenses exist for a reason: to protect us from the pain of old wounds so we can keep functioning and moving through life.

But every defense comes with a cost. We tend to forget about the wound beneath it and instead become skilled at maintaining the defense itself rather than healing the wound.

Just as limping protects a broken toe but limits our ability to walk freely, emotional defenses protect us from pain while limiting our capacity to love and be loved.

~~~~~
How defenses block the flow of love
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.2)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #EmotionalWounds #Psychology #Therapy

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

Psychological wounds can be described in many ways. The simplest map is of a single “core wound”: a sense of unlovability. Another useful lens sees the two fundamental attachment injuries: abandonment and engulfment. Still other models describe core schemas (core beliefs) such as “I am unlovable”, “I am unsafe”, or “I am powerless”.

There are many classifications of emotional wounds, but they all attempt to make sense of what is underneath our protective defenses.

~~~~~
Maps of psychological injury
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.1)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Psychology #Therapy #Defenses #CoreWounds

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

A lot of psychological healing comes down to becoming aware of our core wounds, and distinguishing them from the defenses that we adopted to protect them.
Once we do that, we can give attention to the wound itself and not just the defense. Our attention is healing, so the wound underneath the defense is what most needs it.
~~~~~
Psychological wounds and defenses
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Psychology #Therapy #CoreWounds #Defenses

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

The sweetness of newer relationships can feel so good that it masks core wounds that we brought into the relationship.

When the passion fire calms to a normal sustainable burn and the pain of our wounds is felt, we can misattribute that pain to a partner’s shortcomings.

Sometimes they did make mistakes. But often the pain was revealed more than it was created.
It’s like having an already fractured food stepped on.

With distance, we may see that mutual defenses blocked love that could have potentially been given, had we worked on dissolving those defenses.

~~~~~
Breakups reveal what relationships conceal
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.1.2)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Attachment #Healing #Breakups #SelfReflection #Dating #Psychology

[metaforestlife @metaforestlife]

While we’re in relationship, pain feels like cause and effect.
They do something. We hurt.

After it ends, and the same wounds still ache,
we can see our wounds more clearly.
~~~
Perspective from a distance
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.1.1)
~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Attachment #Breakups #SelfReflection #Dating #Psychology