Nicholas James

Codependency, a pattern of unhealthy relationships where one person’s needs are prioritized over their own, can significantly impact our emotional well-being. If you’ve found yourself constantly seeking approval, feeling responsible for others’ happiness, or struggling with low self-esteem, you likely feel trapped by these behaviors and struggle to change.

Understanding Codependency in Men

Codependency in men often manifests as:

1. Overly protective behavior: Constantly watching over and taking care of others to the point of smothering them. This can involve controlling their actions, making decisions for them, or rescuing them from perceived difficulties.
2. People-pleasing: Going out of your way to make others happy, even if it means sacrificing your own needs, wants, or desires. This can lead to feelings of resentment, exhaustion, and a loss of identity.
3. Difficulty saying no: Struggling to set boundaries and assert your needs, often out of fear of rejection or conflict. This can result in feeling overwhelmed, taken advantage of, and resentful.
4. Fear of abandonment: Intense anxiety about being alone or losing important relationships. This can lead to clingy behavior, excessive reassurance-seeking, and a constant need for validation.
5. Low self-esteem: Feeling inadequate and unworthy of love and respect. This can manifest as self-doubt, perfectionism, and a constant need for external approval.

Breaking Free from Codependency

1. Self-Awareness:
   • Recognize the patterns: Identify the specific behaviors and thought patterns that contribute to your codependency. Pay attention to how you feel in relationships, what triggers your codependent behaviors, and the consequences of these behaviors.
   • Accept negative beliefs: Notice thoughts of low self worth and your tendency to validate yourself through others. Recognize that these thoughts and behaviors don’t define you and allow them to be there without avoiding or reacting to them.
2. Setting Boundaries:
   • Communicate your needs: Clearly express your boundaries and expectations to others in a respectful and assertive manner. Use “I” statements to communicate your feelings and needs without blaming or accusing others.
   • Learn to say no: Practice saying no without feeling guilty or obligated. Remember that it’s okay to prioritize your own needs and well-being.
3. Building Self-Esteem:
   • Positive affirmations: Repeat positive statements about yourself to boost your self-confidence. Focus on your strengths, accomplishments, and qualities that you admire.
   • Personal growth: Engage in activities that nurture your interests and passions. This can help you develop a sense of purpose and self-worth.
4. Developing Healthy Relationships:
   • Seek support: Connect with friends, family, or a therapist who can offer understanding and support. Having a strong support system can help you navigate challenges and develop healthier relationships.
   • Practice healthy communication: Learn effective communication skills to express your needs and feelings in a clear, honest, and respectful manner. Avoid blaming, criticizing, or making assumptions.
5. Seeking Professional Help:
   • Therapy: Consider therapy to explore the underlying causes of your codependency and develop coping strategies. A therapist can provide guidance, support, and tools to help you break free from unhealthy patterns.
   • Support groups: Join support groups for codependents to connect with others who understand your experiences. Sharing your struggles and experiences with others can be a powerful source of support and validation.

Remember, breaking free from codependency takes time and effort. Be patient with yourself and celebrate your progress along the way.

By understanding codependency, setting boundaries, and building self-esteem, you can create healthier relationships and live a more fulfilling life.

Most of the time, Anxiety is the last thing any of us want to feel. The buzzing, tightness, dizzy, heart-pounding, hands’ sweaty emotion that typically signals the need to escape or avoid some kind of threat is experienced by everyone at some point in their lives, and reported as a “problem” by 19.1% of adults in the past year, and 31.8% of adolescents (https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder). Anxiety evolved as a bodily response to get us away from danger by making it very uncomfortable to be where we are. Its the urge to move, to act, to solve a problem, and contributed to the overall success of the human race up to this point. It served us well in the constantly dangerous world our early human ancestors navigated, helping us spot lions in the bush, scan for wildfires at a distance, and anticipate life threatening social exclusion from the tribe.

These days however, if we are lucky enough to live in a first world country, we rarely experience constant threat like this; yet we retain the same nervous system, meaning our ability to spot dangers far exceeds the current need most of the time. This results in a tendency to see danger in things that aren’t necessarily there, and even when there is acute danger present, we modern humans tend to worry about it far longer than is helpful. At its worst, anxiety begins to keep us away from the lives we want to live. We start to worry about what others think about us and to avoid that worry we begin to isolate ourselves. We notice our heart racing during a test and begin to panic about passing out, leading us to drop out of classes to avoid that fearful situation. We can even start to have anxiety about having anxiety itself, leading to painful vicious circles of fear that seems to come from nowhere. Our lives can become smaller and smaller as we try harder to avoid feeling this way. 

Mental health experts call this process “experiential avoidance” (https://stevenchayes.com/hard-won-wisdom-in-dealing-with-anxiety/). It makes sense, if you don’t like a thing, find a way to avoid it or get rid of it. Unfortunately, this process backfires when we try to apply it to things inside us, like thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories and urges. Where can you go where the possibility of fear isn’t present? What could you remove from yourself to get rid of a painful memory? What works on the outside just doesn’t work on the inside, it usually just makes things worse.

Luckily, we’re not stuck and the situation isn’t hopeless, and the answer is closer than you probably think. Rather than avoiding and turning away from our painfully anxious thoughts and feelings, we in fact need to turn toward them. We stop trying to feel better and instead focus on feeling better. We adopt a stance of willingness to our experience, essentially telling our anxiety “hey, I see you, I may not know why you’re here, but I’m going to feel you as you are, at least for right now”. Think of it this way, when you were a kid and were fearful of the monster in your closet, did it help to keep the door closed or to hide away from it, or did growth and change come from being willing to take a look, to open the door and step inside, facing the fear that had built up inside you, helping you realize that maybe it’s not so bad after all? You likely felt empowered, and if you’re parents helped, they probably encouraged you as a result. You showed you were bigger than the fear. In this same way, we throw open the door to our anxiety and shed light on the fear so we can see it for what it is. 

This can definitely still be painful, and it often is especially at the beginning. But that’s why the kind of relationship that we develop with anxiety matters. Here are some metaphors to demonstrate the relationship kind of relationship that reverses experiential avoidance and helps us open up to what was previously intolerable:

• Throwing open the curtains and letting the light into a dark room 
• Holding your anxiety/pain like you would a cactus, lightly and with care
• Laying back in the ocean and letting yourself float, rather than trying so hard to tread water
• Casually refocusing on your work at the coffee shop while an annoying patron at the other table blabs on about a political viewpoint different than yours, allowing their voice to become background noise
• Continuing to gently and lovingly hold a baby even after it spits up on your shoulder 
• Watching a game of chess play itself out without getting too hung up on one side or the other winning
• Allowing the pendulum of our emotions to swing back and forth without trying to keep it on one side. 
• Imagine anxiety like a big, inflatable beach ball, instead of trying to hold it under the water away from us, we let it just float around us at the surface
• Allowing a butterfly to undergo the painful transformation from a caterpillar without trying to speed it up or hurry things along. 
• To feel your feelings much as you might literally feel the texture of a textile sweater
• To remember your memories like you might take a friend to see a movie you’ve already seen
• To respond to your bodily sensations by sensing them like you might do during an all-over stretch in the morning

In this way, we experience our anxiety without holding on too tightly, without taking it too literally, without believing it too fully. We stop our struggle fighting with our feelings, and instead use that energy to move more completely toward what matters to us. To have thoughts of what are my friends thinking of me, I feel like such a loser and to go to the party with them anyway, to feel sweaty palms and a racing heart during a test and to simply notice them as sensations you’re having right now instead of getting caught up in the story about the sensations. 

When we get close, open up, and move in to anxiety, we come to find we are bigger than our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and we can get back to what means most in life.

Our nervous system is wired to help us get through threatening situations by activating survival strategies. You’re probably pretty familiar by now with the phrase “fight or flight”, which refers to our body’s ability to trigger hormones and behavioral responses when distressed. 

We can tell a “fight” response by the presence of anger, frustration, rage, or a sense of injustice, where our inhibitions are lowered, our heart rate is elevated, and we tend to speak in a louder tone of voice and posture/position ourselves in a way that increases our size. 

We can also react with physical aggression or defense when the fight response is activated, as this is one of the dominant ways that animals (humans included) protect themselves when endangered. The “flight response” can be seen when we notice feelings of fear or wanting to avoid something, an elevated heart rate and shortness of breath might be present, and we get a strong urge to run away and escape. 

Exactly how many survival responses there are is up for debate, but professionals commonly agree to the presence of a “freeze” and “submit” response as well (you can find more information about survival strategies here: https://www.simplypsychology.org/fight-flight-freeze-fawn.html

Sometimes these survival strategies activate when its not necessary or helpful, such as feeling an intense urge to escape when taking a stressful exam, or wanting to pull over and confront someone who cut you off in traffic. In these situations, it is important to know how to remind our nervous systems that we don’t need to run or fight in these situations in order to survive the moment. We can do this through grounding. Grounding refers to increasing our connection to the present moment, and to our surroundings so we can better assess what actual threats are present and what resources we have at our disposal. 

There are three key elements to grounding to make it effective in helping us focus on the actions we want to take vs. what our nervous systems want us to do:

1. Awareness: We need to know what is currently happening to us on the inside in order to respond effectively to it. We can do this by noticing what we are thinking or feeling. Intentionally using the phrase “I am having a feeling of____________, or I am having a thought about_____________, or I am having the urge to______________” can help us focus on what is going on and name the problem. This is an important step so that we can learn how our bodies and minds respond to triggers in our environment and act more effectively. 
2. Connection: We need to establish connection to our bodies to regain control over our actions. If we don’t have control over what we are doing or saying, we are letting our survival strategies dictate how we move through the world and how we show up for ourselves and others, which can often lead to bigger and bigger problems (i.e. responding to stress through substance use, avoiding work, yelling at loved ones). To establish connection we can pick a movement, such as opening and closing your hands, tapping your leg, stretching, etc. It isn’t important which movement you chose to do, but what is important is the conscious effort you are using to make that movement. Not tapping your leg mindlessly, but intentionally moving it up and down in full control of what is happening. In this way we show our bodies and our minds that we are in control of our actions, making it easier to pick how we want to react, vs letting our survival strategies do it for us. 
3. Engagement: In order to fully assess the safety of a situation, the actual threats in our environment, and the resources we have to solve problems, we need to be in touch with our surroundings. Our survival strategies often narrow our focus down to a small detail that it finds threatening, which is really helpful when we truly do need to run or defend ourselves! But by widening our focus, we can better understand what is happening and how we can take the best action. Start by noticing 5 things you can see, then notice 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can feel (tactile sensation), 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. In this way, you will have engaged with many more elements of your current surroundings and should know much better about the actual threats present if any, and the resources you have available to better respond to the situation. 

By implementing these three elements, you can make sure your grounding techniques are effective. There are many ways you can go about grounding yourself, using mindful breathing, taking a walk, talking with others, meditating; all of these are helpful so long as they include the elements above. Crisis mode is never comfortable, and it can be hard to apply these strategies regularly each time. At its worst, crisis mode can lead us to make choices and take actions that we regret, developing bad habits and patterns that only make things more difficult. With patience and practice you can learn how to better respond to your surroundings and stay connected to the actions you truly want to take when your survival strategies are activated. 

When you hear the word “acceptance”, what comes to mind? Take note of the first impression that hits you as you read that word. Be aware of your conscious or unconscious perspectives as we open up this topic and I’ll encourage you to take what I say lightly and pay more attention to your direct experience.

Acceptance is used in many contexts in our language. We accept gifts, apologies, bad weather, the mail, invitations, a hug, and each of these implies a different set of actions and attitudes we may have while we’re doing the accepting. When it comes to the idea of acceptance in a psychological sense, we’re often asked to accept our feelings, or our past, or even the way things are now. After a breakup, we just have to “accept” the ending of the relationship and move on. When we’re feeling anxious, we just have to “accept” that our skin is crawling and our heart is pounding like a drum. When we’re talking about past traumas or disappointments, we just have to “accept” that bad things happened to us. If you’re feeling any sense of resistance to these ideas or have balked at these suggestions from others in the past, I don’t blame you! At face value, each of these ideas contain the Three Myths of Acceptance: 

1. Acceptance= Giving up 
2. Acceptance= Laziness
3. Acceptance= Agreement 

Taken this way, no one would ever sign up for acceptance if it meant they gave up, were just lazy, or condoned whatever bad situation occurred. Using the word acceptance certainly can mean these things; but the kind of acceptance advocated by spiritual teachers for millenia, and by therapists for decades means something far more specific, valuable, and practical.

Acceptance= Giving up

One of the strongest values we have in America and throughout many other first world countries is perseverance. Qualities like Resilience and Grit are even promoted in the world of psychology as hallmarks of mental well-being. The message is clear, you have to fight and struggle with your problems or else you’re not doing it right. The feeling is “if I’m not doing something about it, nothing’s going to change”. Thinking about just accepting a difficulty can trigger our societal influences and make us feel shame.

Some things in life work well when we fight and struggle! Deciding to hand in your test incomplete because it’s just too hard, quitting halfway through a race after you committed to the whole thing are both examples of where struggle would have helped you accomplish your goal. You can increase your chances of success through pushing past your difficulties. But when it comes to difficulties that exist inside the skin, such as anxieties we can’t control, grief over a loss, painful childhood memories, the struggle strategy often doesn’t work, especially in the long term.

Acceptance is not the experience of doing nothing about our problems. Acceptance is the recognition of the unworkability of the way we’ve always tried to do things in the past, and the willingness to go in a different direction! If you’re trying to wiggle a cork out of a wine bottle and you’ve only been pushing it in one direction to no avail, accepting that this one direction won’t work isn’t giving up, it’s a necessary prerequisite to know you need to try pushing the other way. Acceptance is what allows us to do something different in our lives, to recognize the patterns that keep us stuck and to explore other options.

Acceptance= Laziness

If you Google image search “acceptance” you’ll see people sitting cross legged with their eyes closed, lying in corpse pose, staring off into the sunset. Passivity and stillness, rather than the vitality and engagement we often want to have in our lives. A common worry I hear goes something like: “if I accept my depression, I’ll just lie in bed all day and not move.” The idea being, that if they were to accept their situation, then they would stop trying, there would be no effort, and they would succumb to a kind of psychological paralysis. Again, no wonder the idea of acceptance is difficult if that’s all we would have to look forward to.

Real, lived acceptance is a very engaging process. It consists of things you’re actively doing in relation to your struggles, as opposed to just being pushed around by them. In fact, the less accepting we are of our psychological struggles, the more control they have of us, the less choices we are authentically making because we are constantly trying to fight and get rid of our struggle. If you’re living your life to avoid, fix, or solve your anxiety, anger, depression, whose life are you really living? Yours or your struggles? 

Acceptance is an action, it’s turning toward your pain, rather than ignoring it or running from it. It’s moving in the direction of the things you want in life, rather than just away from the things you don’t want. Acceptance looks like acknowledging the anxiety you feel when you’re invited to a party, and choosing to go anyway, taking your anxiety with you rather than trying to leave it at home, numb it with alcohol, or avoiding your friends altogether. Acceptance is throwing open the blinds in your heart and letting the sunlight in, holding your pain tenderly like you would a baby bird, looking at yourself kindly like you would a friend who is struggling. These are all actions, activities, behaviors that model what acceptance truly is in relation to your difficulties. 

Acceptance= Agreement

There’s a notion that if you accept something, you’re a co-conspirator. It’s the reverse of the movie phrase “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. If you’re not against your memories of abuse, you’re with them. “I can’t accept what they did to me, it was wrong and shouldn’t have happened”. In order to cope with overwhelming experiences, we can develop a strong anger or fear, emotions that serve to keep us away from situations like that happening again. This often leads things like to trying not to think about the difficulty (ignoring it), avoiding any external reminders or situations that might trigger it, or distracting with overworking or substance use. These all can work just fine in the short term, and in fact can be positive and helpful ways of dealing in the immediate aftermath. 

However, these strategies can be harmful, especially in the long run. Imagine you’re late for work and on your way out the door you stub your toe. It hurts a heck of a lot, but you don’t want to be late, so you grin and bear it and make it to work on time. As the day goes on you start to notice the pain doesn’t go away, your toe swells up, but you still tell yourself “I’ve stubbed my toe a million times, it’ll be fine”. You get home later that night and see that it is turning purple. Would you still try and talk yourself out of it or ignore the pain? The previously helpful strategies that enabled you to make it to work and get through the day may be the very things preventing you from going and seeking the help you need. Accepting you may have broken your toe as just the way things are in your life right now allows you to see things clearly and open up to the support you need. 

Acceptance involves being willing to look at our inner wounds and take care of them. They may come along with shame, fear, and anger, but those are the very feelings that need attention and love. We can take the stance that says, “I don’t agree with or condone what happened to me, but I will accept that it’s a part of the experiences I’ve had so I can finally treat this wound.”

Acceptance is a gift you give yourself and the myths around acceptance prevent us from using it wholly and fully. It’s not giving up, rather it creates openings to new ways of being, it is not lazy, rather it’s filled with action and vitality, and it’s not agreement, it honors our experiences as they are so we can do something about them. 

If you’d like to learn more about the psychological processes of acceptance and how to apply them in your life, send me an email or reach out and schedule a 15 minute consultation, I’d be happy to talk more about your experience. 

Trauma has become an important topic in the discussion of mental health over the last decade. According to Google Trends, searches for “trauma” have tripled since 2016, reflecting our growing interest and awareness of the impact of traumatic experiences. This is likely due in part to the popularity of books such as Bessel Van Der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score”, or Peter Levine’s “Waking the Tiger” which have brought these ideas to mainstream attention. It reflects a shift in mental health treatment from viewing the client themselves as the root of their problems, using terms like “disordered”, to seeing clients distress as an adaptive response to the stressors they’ve encountered throughout their life. You’re not unwell because of something broken or sick inside you, you’re struggling because of the way that your body and mind have learned to cope with broken environments or tragic circumstances. 

A traumatic event refers to any experience involving significant actual or threatened physical or psychological harm. Chronic or complex trauma involves prolonged exposure to actual or threatened physical or psychological harm. The criteria for determining what events are traumatic or not are largely up to an individual’s experience and can be inferred based on the impact it has on the person. We can look at the behaviors, thoughts, or feelings they disclose, such as avoiding being out in public, strong feelings of anger or rage when confronted, thoughts like “no one seems to care about me” and identify experiences they’ve had to explain why these are occurring. 

Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT) is an evidence based, individualized treatment focusing on identifying core processes of behaving, thinking, and reacting that are keeping someone stuck, and building patterns of openness and flexibility to become more adaptable. ACT views mental health struggles as the result of a funneling process of avoidance. We want to feel better, be more connected, be competent at what we do, and as a result we avoid feelings and thoughts that seem to get in the way of these wants. We want to feel happy and calm, so we avoid things that cause us distress, but if that distress comes from memories of a trauma we experienced, we may start to avoid things that remind us of the people who were part of the trauma, the places it occurred, the clothes we wore, etc. This process provides relief in the short term since we don’t have to experience the memories and the distress, but in the long term our life becomes more and more narrow as we encounter more parts of life that trigger these reminders. Eventually we may find ourselves cut off from much of what we find to be valuable and meaningful in life, leaving us feeling stuck at the bottom of this funnel. 

ACT addresses this funneling effect by encouraging a shift of this avoidance process in three ways:

1. Openness: we intentionally create space for difficult and painful thoughts and feelings. Engaging in practices of acceptance (willingly being with, rather than running from our experiences), and defusion (stepping back, grounding, and taking perspective to reduce the “stickiness” and intensity of our thoughts and feelings) 
2. Awareness: we build a connection to the present moment and a bigger sense of self. Engaging in practices of contacting the moment as it is, fully, redirecting our attention away from ruminating on the past and worrying about the future, and practicing experiencing your Self as the container for your experiences, rather than just the labels you put on yourself such as “broken”, “depressed”, “too much”. 
3. Activity: we find out what is most important to your life and create patterns of actions intentionally around those things. Engaging in practices of values exploration and getting to know what matters, and practicing committing and following through on the steps you know you need to take to do what is meaningful. 

These three components redirect the funnel by prioritizing long term success over short term relief and building the capacity within you to be with life as it is without avoiding it because of the things that have happened to you. ACT will not help you get better at avoiding your traumas or your triggers, it will not prioritize feeling better in this very moment, instead it will help you move toward what matters most to you. In doing so, you will find that the intensity and pain from the triggers becomes less of a dominate force in your life, replaced by the “you” that you’ve always wanted to be. 

For more information or if you want to chat about this topic, reach out to me and I’d be happy to talk!