Join me at the Langhorne Writers Group

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being yourself, change, control, dreams coming true, express feelings, friends, friendship, goals, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, mentors, passion, psychotherapy, trust, words, writing

Next week I’ll be talking to a writers group in Bucks County about the lengthy path I have taken as a writer. Meet me at the Sheraton on Oxford Valley Road in Langhorne, PA at 6:30pm to join in the conversation about This Writer’s Journey.

I knew I had a story to tell when I realized I’d reached adulthood unwilling to trust anyone. Back then I knew to take things seriously. Not to say out loud anything that mattered to me. Not to expect anyone’s help. To be leery of people who wanted to help. To leave my body if I needed to. That is all different now and it has been eighteen years since starting my project.

I’ll be using Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work “a best-selling guide to getting your work discovered,” to help me describe my own path. I’ll be using his points to make my points. He says that work, or in our case, writing, “is about process not product and that by being open and freely sharing your process you can gain a following that you can then use for fellowship, feedback or patronage.”

My own process has been slow for good reason, and I’ll talk about the hurdles we all face in trying to move forward in the seemingly solitary pursuit of “being an author.”

 

If you notice that you are unloading all of your issues on your fellow humans on a day-to-day basis, maybe you should talk to someone

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being yourself, change, control, express feelings, fear, goals, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, listening, psychotherapy, relationship, security, teacher, trust, writing

 

I love the title of the book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb. It’s a phrase we hear often, but the subtext is a serious one that is easy to ignore. So by making it the title she highlights the notion that no, really, maybe you should talk to someone.

Lori Gottlieb shows us in her informed examination of the psychotherapeutic process, that making contact is the primary goal when a patient shows up on the therapist’s couch. She gives us a sense of what a therapist might experience as they go about their work day attempting to assist those who come to them seeking help. Meanwhile, as she tells us about her various patients and what they talk about in her office, she herself is struggling with her own crisis. This comes in the form of jilted love that derails the life she had been planning, and for which she also seeks the help of a therapist.

It’s a bit of genius to open up the role that is traditionally held secret, that of the therapist but also that of the patient, to demystify the process and therefore welcome us all into what some may see as the scary world of psychotherapy. By positioning herself as both therapist and patient she shows us that it is not that easy to get the job done. That it is not just a matter of showing up and paying the money and claiming you were there, no matter which role you take. Both must engage. Both must make contact.

I know this firsthand for having wandered into a psychotherapist’s office when I was 27 and then staying for about another twenty years. A good therapist can open up their office as a symbol of what it means to be real. I went in believing that psychotherapy was a place to “learn more about oneself” whatever that means, rather than to work on any problems. I actually believed I had no problems, except at some level I must have realized the benefits because I went willingly and openly. A capable therapist, as Lori shows herself to be, has the power to help people make huge changes in their lives if they are able to welcome the opportunity. You must give yourself over to their leadings, trust in their training, their intuition, and their humanity, to guide you where you need to go. And a talented therapist can do it.

Lori Gottlieb is not afraid to show us how this works as she offers both the details and the outlines to the processes undergone by her patients and herself. Each of us at our own pace and in the therapy office, must let down the very useful defenses that keep us from unloading all our issues onto our fellow humans in our day-to-day lives, and Lori shows us that in this engaging book.

 

 

 

Introduction to Meathead Therapy

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being yourself, express feelings, forgiveness, friends, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, listening, love, marriage, parents, psychotherapy, relationship

This month I am featured in Psychology Today’s Healthy Connections blog by Maryann Karinch where she tells the story of what she calls my introduction to “meathead therapy.”

When my husband and I were young and first married we went to his Aunt Maureen and Uncle Meathead’s on Christmas Eve. Theirs was a modest gathering, but I loved it because the one thing that was not modest was the connection I saw between the people who came and went. Folks arrived at the door and each was welcomed like a king. They were offered a drink, some food, a seat, and all the time in the world, crowding onto the attic stairs when room at the table ran out.

The goal was to entertain, to tell funny stories even at each other’s expense, even as it exposed each other’s bullheadedness, ignorance or misery.

And I was spellbound.

These folks cared for each other. I’d go so far as to say they loved each other. My family didn’t sit around the kitchen table on Christmas Eve welcoming one another in with drinks and smiles and all the time in the world because of our handicap of taking life seriously and rejecting one another for our human foibles.

Since that night with Maureen and Meathead, and with my steadfast husband next to me, I have worked hard in psychotherapy and have learned about the healthy attitudes of accepting one another for who we are and learning to celebrate one another no matter how goofy we get.

I think the healthy connections we make are born of the dedicated showing up at each other’s kitchen tables no matter what the circumstance.

 Check out my story in Psychology Today.

 

 

Maybe the purpose is to just keep trying

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being yourself, fear, Jane Butler, psychotherapy, relationship, writing

It is a crazy long and slow process of getting myself out of the cloistered existence I am so good at living. I have lots of excuses for staying hidden away, but psychotherapy has been my way out.

So of course you’ll understand that even though it may sound terrible to you, I gladly went to a group therapy weekend last year. A whole weekend of working out issues, with the help of strangers.

I spent my time that weekend trying to figure out why I wrote what I think is a very good book and have not tried very hard to get it published. We talked at length about what was holding me back from taking the next steps since I clearly care about this project and have worked hard to make it as good as I can. The large underlying problem is that secrets were the mainstay of my childhood so telling anything that might be secret to the world feels wrong. But an entire memoir seems pretty deliberate doesn’t it? I kept telling myself that sharing my ideas was somehow going to hurt people including myself and so I couldn’t possibly publish my book. Also there was the problem that the people who’d read it so far knew me and therefore their rave reviews were probably because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, or liked it because they knew me personally. So people I was meeting for the first time that weekend agreed to read it to help dispel some of those fears.

I shipped three copies out into the mail to people I’d just met. And then yesterday, months later, a package arrived back to me. It was the manuscript and these words, I finished your book… I cried at the end and I can’t remember crying at a book before. I was so touched by the continual effort you extended to connect with your family and the love you did and did not share. Guess I’m being selfish applying your experience to my own life but I have been at a point where it’s been easier not to connect with certain family members than to risk continually coming away hurt and crying! But you have planted the idea that perhaps the purpose of life is to keep trying.”

Planting seeds of hope for building or rebuilding relationships is exactly what I wanted to do and I thank this reader I barely know for spelling it out, and sharing it so I can see better why I am so engaged in this labor of love, and that I AM able to convey this important message.

It is corny to say I felt the love at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference?

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change, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, love, Philadelphia Writer's Conference, psychotherapy, writing

Here’s something I don’t understand so help me out and tell me. I know how I got out of being an unhappy person unable to connect and engage rationally with others, it was psychotherapy and lots of it. I have often thought that it is a form of love, sold for those who can pay and whose hearts are not clamped shut so tight they cannot be methodically and incrementally pried open by a professional. In general, in life, I’ve noticed other people who seem to know, claim that love is the power that matters.

It is the most powerful force on earth. I don’t understand how the prolific writer Jonathan Maberry got out of his issues, and he mentions a few, to share love freely as he does today. Or how anyone changes for the better. A profound transformation has to occur. It’s not casual, you don’t just think, oh I’ll embrace the concept of love now. Something more provocative has to occur. It must have for him, and for the others at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference last month, because love is indeed what I felt there. The leaders were tossing it out so I snagged some and carried it home.

It is a powerful thing that finds its way to hurt and injured folks and changes them into people who extend themselves and who care and who try to make love grow. Maybe I am always just in the mood for love, but whatever it is I am struck by the power of the idea that benevolence, generosity, kindness, patience, understanding and the like can move mountains in me.

May I air our dirty laundry?

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being yourself, change, dreams coming true, express feelings, fear, goals, higher power, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, listening, mentors, parents, psychotherapy, relationship, teacher, trust

I wish I could have been aware when my children were little, just what it was that we were doing and saying with them that has led to this moment today. This moment today I am sure is connected, because my grown little boy is telling me that others see him in a way that is, I know, so similar to the way others have seen me. I am pretty sure that it is not genetics since change is a real thing and I have certainly made changes in how I act that defy genetics.

So just because he was told on his job evaluation this week, that he is capable and a valued team member but should own that and show less deference to the others, as I had been told many times on my own job evaluations, does not mean that that cannot change.

I have just learned that the very definition of functional includes being able to hear feedback, consider it, and adjust. So when my adult son tells me his story I encourage the possibility of change. I tell him that I paid a professional to help me make changes of this very nature, and that I struggle with the same issue of not recognizing my own abilities still, yet I see progress as I get help and actively work on it. In telling him this I am doing what I urge of my piano students all the time when I say, go home and teach your parents everything I just taught you and get a two-for-one sale on your purchase. What I learn by working with a psychotherapist to face my issues and face my fears about life, I go home and tell my kid so he can NOT be just like me, and instead he can be better.

Who knows, maybe then he will come back and teach me even more.

Stationary bike rides to dream locations

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being yourself, control, express feelings, friends, friendship, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, listening, physical therapy, psychotherapy, self-neglect

The best part of my day today was stopping in to see the fellow who was my physical therapist all year and from whose care I have now graduated. He cocked his head and looked a little embarrassed, incredulous maybe, when I told him on Day One that I was seeing a psychotherapist to help me identify the ways I have of neglecting my foot, so effective were they, that they were the reason I needed surgery instead of just physical therapy. I suppose few people admit to deliberately seeking professional help to understand themselves, but I am too something to hide the truth of who I am anymore. In the long run he barely batted an eye. I’d had plenty of practice neglecting myself, I told him, and having it end with this yearlong stint of twice a week foot massages with him, although possibly sounding wonderful, was disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, we had a lot of fun over the course of the year because of all the joking around with everyone from tiny old ladies who’d hurt themselves falling down stairs to the tatooed policemen injured while actually fighting crime. Silliness is the norm there with plenty of jokes about the exercises he had me doing that looked like sobriety tests, and my stationary bike rides to dream locations. Who knows what he was actually thinking when I stopped in bearing cookies today, but the look on his face told me that even after a year of listening to all my foot confusion and lack of body awareness, allegedly the result of a childhood full of denial now being teased apart through psychotherapy, we’d become friends. Seems like addressing my emotional issues head on in front of this guy was worth the risk of revealing myself, because I felt what seemed like a genuine acceptance and appreciation of Jane that I truly wish I was cultivating more often.

Real interaction with others

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fear, goals, inspire, Michael Welner, play, psychotherapy, security

A very passionate and knowledgeable forensic psychiatrist on television today said we should nurture creativity and constructive activities for children rather than destructive activities. Yeah! Take a look at this video of Michael Welner and see how he calls each of us to be responsible parents who encourage psychologically healthy activities in our children. Although he talks about video games for older kids I know we would be smart to avoid letting electronic games for our littlest children become substitutes for real interaction with others.

I had a dream my life would be

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being yourself, change, dreams coming true, express feelings, goals, higher power, inspire, isolation, joy, Les Miserables, psychotherapy, relationship, spiritual discernment

The chapter in the book on spiritual discernment I am reading (figuring out what you really want to do with your life) suggested I put the book down and imagine for a moment some dream I have ever had and whether it came true.

Well, twenty minutes later I regained consciousness and wished I’d had a way of capturing the wonderful story I had just told myself. It was the story of how I once dreamed there would be people in my life who knew me and cared about me and deliberately came to my door just to see me! What a crazy dream it was. You see, I grew up in such isolation, both physical and emotional, that that was literally the dream, that someone might seek me out because I had somehow reached them and they remembered me.

Today it is indeed true. People have called me simply to see how I am, or what I am up to, not to mention show up at the door just to see me, and this is a phenomenon of once I only dreamed.

So the story I told myself was all about how I want to share that possibility of change with other people, and tell them how I did that. How I managed to figure out how to go from someone essentially afraid of other humans to one who embraces and loves others to the point that they share that back with me. It was and continues to be a long hard road of encouraging myself to take the tiny baby steps towards change that make real things come about. I really want to share that with folks and in part because of my spiritual discernment class which I have attended only once, I am already dreaming new dreams of what I will have come true next.

Am I grown up yet?

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being yourself, change, express feelings, forgiveness, goals, inspire, joy, parents, psychotherapy, relationship

On 60 Minutes this evening Steven Spielberg said that the worst thing that happened to him in his life was his voluntary falling out with his father. The best thing that happened to him in his life was his eventual reconciliation with his father.

For me, this is all about learning and growing. I feel that even though the experiences I had as a child left me forever sorry my parent’s were not more capable, because they certainly failed me in significant ways, after a lot of work in psychotherapy questioning myself about what happened and why, I was able to accept my parents along with their shortcomings. We had a limited time here together, and so the idea of fleeing from Mom and Dad, or being angry at them, or trying to get something from them they could not possibly deliver, was a losing idea. I needed to change my way of seeing things, and recognize that I have the ability to change the way I feel. I faced painful feelings before I got there, though. Eventually I could see my parents with compassion and accept and forgive the things that happened.

Change is possible.