Two's a Crowd: The Stress of the Other

The only thing worse than

the egoic me is the egoic us.
Eckhart Tolle


I’m going to go out on a very sturdy limb and suggest that if you were to follow the trail of your stress to its source, more often than not there will be another human being at the end of that trail. Sartre’s famous comment that "hell is other people," might as well be our generation’s theme song. We rub shoulders daily with our fellow citizens and that rubbing often leads to sparks and maybe even a three-alarm fire.

I know from my work with teenagers in residential treatment centers that this experience begins very early in life. Many kids, no matter how awful their upbringing, no matter how traumatic their early years, will do relatively okay when left to themselves. Throw them in with a peer group and you will immediately see the divisions arising, gangs forming, and the inevitable "us against them" mentality taking form. Watch the news on any given day, and the state of the world will show you that these youngsters are simply imitating what their elders have taught them—life needs enemies. The stress that this social dysfunction creates is felt around the world.

Why are we so bad at something that is supposedly wired into our DNA? Why do we spend our lives trolling the waters for that one other person to make us feel complete and then work so hard to cast off all of the other fish that have accidentally landed in our nets? How much more enjoyable would life be if our brothers and sisters were no longer seen as proof that God should have created either Adam or Eve, but not both? While it would be stretching it to suggest that I can help you love your enemies as yourself, I would like to suggest that with the healing power of stress comes the ability to better navigate the social waters you find yourself in. I want to assure you that once you begin to see that stress is within you, your interactions with others will take on new flavor. The hell of the other is none other than the hell that you have made. To move out of this hell takes only a minimal amount of awareness on your part.

This awareness begins by realizing that our social interactions are filled with stress because we are each a mini stress factory, and when we gather together we fuel each other’s fires. Want to keep this fire from burning out your relationships? Remove the fuel inside of you that gives it life. Take away the mind-kindling that catches whatever spark it can and turns the casual passing comment into a personal attack on your integrity.

Finally, we are going to have to come terms with the advice of sages past and present that all good relationships start with the one we have with ourselves. Narcissism and ego mania aside, most people need to work at learning to get along with themselves. Years of self-loathing, self-deception and even down-right abuse leave many people feeling like they should have walked out on themselves a long time ago.

Since no discourse on relationships would be complete without some unsolicited advice, I want to give you a list of tips to help you fall back in love with yourself.

1. Leave your mind out of it. Over-analyze anything and it dies.
2. Give yourself space. Stop trying to fill yourself up with things (this includes thoughts) and give yourself time to be really alone. Put down the books, turn off the television, log off the internet and take the blue tooth out of your ear and simply be still.
3. Surprise yourself. Nothing kills relationships like boredom and predictability. Do something different. Set a goal to do something that scares you at least once a week. Feel free to check with a close friend just in case your "what scares me list" includes things that could get you arrested or a prime spot on Youtube.
4. Forgive yourself. Practice telling yourself that it is ok that you never became the top executive of a fortune 500 company. If you are a top executive of a fortune 500 company, forgive yourself for having to crush so many people in order to get there.
5. Don’t go to bed mad. Anger is the jack hammer that grinds relationships into specs of human dust. Stop beating yourself up, that’s abuse without the benefit of the make-up flowers or candy.
6. . Let go of your need to have the admiration and adoration of every person who happens to stumble onto the stage that is your life and you will find that your exasperation and desperation goes with it. Change the theme song in your mind and watch to see if others don’t start whistling a different tune. Then just sit back and enjoy the music.

Role Playing

The only problem with not castrating
a gigantic ego is that it will surely become amorous and father a hundred screaming ideas and kids who will then all quickly grow up and skillfully proceed to run up every imaginable debt and complication of which your brain can conceive.—Hafiz

In order to fully appreciate the healing power of stress you are going to have to come to terms with the fantastic trick you have played on yourself by creating the illusion that is the ego. When you entered the world in your skin suit you became a member of an actor’s guild of epic proportions. If we peek behind the curtain to see that big bad ego wizard, we find that he is afraid you will find out that it is all just smoke and mirrors.

Alan Watts stated that ego is nothing more than "futility married to an illusion." He suggests that the feeling created by this illusion is that of chronic tension in the body as we contract ourselves against the world around us. It gives us a sense of being in control. This tension is our stress Seeing through this illusion is the key to unlocking the healing power of stress.

Often when people discover that the self they have invested so much in is nothing but a mental phantom, they turn to self-loathing in order to try and shake themselves free from their pain. This is merely the ego taking on the role of victim, and only increases stress as you try to run away from yourself. The wiser course is to make friends with it and use the advice of Arjuna Gargh, to look at it as the "crazy uncle" who often gives you really bad advice. This makes perfect sense if you think about it. Has anyone talked you into anything even close to the insane things you have convinced yourself you should do? Be honest; you know that it was you who told you that eating nothing but cheeseburgers would help you lose weight. You know you were behind the decision to seek inner peace by having the word "om" tatooed on your forehead. And surely you remember the time that you convinced yourself that no one would notice the comb-over.

If you find that you have grown weary of yourself and your efforts to "act right," you might want to take a look at the roles you are playing in life and take a break from those that are causing you the most pain. Don’t worry about losing yourself should you drop the robe of the ego, it is because of the ego that you feel disguised in the first place. Once you step out of character you immediately step into the truth; you are nothing less than a divine essence pretending to be human. Oh, and by the way, I read the reviews and you were "marvelous, darling, simply marvelous!"

What, me worry?

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
- -Leo Buscaglia

If stress has a flag-bearer, then that title has to go to the mind phenomenon that is worry. Interestingly, the word itself means "to strangle or constrict." This is a great image to keep in mind when you think about worry, as it is the mind that has you in a strangle-hold, constricting any positive flow of energy. Worry has its roots deep within the habitual thought patterns of the brain. It seems that the mind, in an attempt to prove its worth, creates problems and then sets out to solve those problems. This is relatively harmless when struggling over a crossword puzzle or trying to complete your taxes, but when it comes to life problems, such as what to do about one’s past or future, then it moves into the category best verbalized by parents at one time or another, "You’re going to worry me to death."

The ego needs worry to sustain itself—it has formed a conspiratorial relationship with the mind. This relationship has a "you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours" quality, that leaves many of us scratching our heads. Put your worries to the simple test of "Why is this so important to me?" and you will realize how seductive worry is. Try to stop worrying and you will realize how deep its tentacles penetrate—how truly insidious this form of stress can be.

One of the age-old psychological methods for taming the worry beast is to go ahead and have a worry-fest. Set some time aside and worry like there is no tomorrow—you can even worry that there won’t be a tomorrow. Use this time to give in to all of your deepest fears—"my dream of being the next American Idol is never going to be realized, the mole is really skin cancer, the headache is a brain tumor, and my children will grow up to be game show hosts," Doing this, "forced," worrying will have multiple benefits. When you feel a worry cropping up in the middle of the day you can tell yourself to save it for "worry time" and go on about your business.

A mindful approach to worry would be to feel it in your body without the mental commentary—picture CNN with the sound off and the "breaking news" crawl at the bottom of the screen no longer running. Take your attention to the places in your body that worry seems to be lighting up. Whether it is butterflies in the stomach, tension in your neck, or a nervous twitch of the eyelids, go there and observe your body. In the absence of an inner dialogue, you will be amazed at how many of your worries simply dissolve like an Alka-Seltzer in a CEO’s glass of water. When you tune into the music in your body, rather than the voice in your head, you will find that many of the sad songs you have been singing have a new ring to them.

It was Marshall McLuhan who said that the age of anxiety was a result of "trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools." This is true for your stress. You have been trying to solve the problem with the same mind that created it. Worrying about your worries only drives the anxiety to deeper levels of your consciousness. In essence, you have been using a hammer when you really need a pair of pliers, a screwdriver where you need to use a saw.

If you stay mindful when worry shows up, you will see it for what it is—a mind cloud that has temporarily obscured the shining of your light. If you are feeling particularly playful, you can even become the weather forecaster who maps out the passing front and seems delighted every time conditions seem favorable for the "perfect storm"--
"Today’s forecast calls for early optimism followed by a heart-warming trend. However, if you look just to the west of this band of bliss you can see doubt building up, and right behind that there seems to be some very high pressure in the form of a deadline. We will probably see some tears by this afternoon followed by some rumblings as dinner approaches."

Overthinkers Anonymous

To eliminate the vexation of the mind, it doesn’t help to do something; this only reinforces the mind’s mechanics. -- Lao Tzu

The professionals who work with alcoholics have created several screening tools to determine if one’s drinking has become a problem. Many of these are self tests and are very useful if you are honest. I have modified one of these questionnaires to look at thought addiction.

Are You a Thoughtaholic?

Please answer "yes" or "no" to the following:

1. Are you thinking more than you used to?
2. Has a spouse, partner, or relative, friend or coworker ever complained about your thinking?
3. Do you ever feel ashamed or guilty about your thinking?
4. Have you ever tried to stop thinking only to find that you could not?
5. Have you ever gotten into a verbal or physical altercation because of your thinking?
6. Do you start thinking as soon as you wake up?
7. Do you find yourself thinking before you go to sleep?
8. Have you ever asked anyone for help with your thinking?
9. Has your thinking ever caused problems between you and a spouse, partner, relative, friend or coworker?
10. Do you often think when you’re by yourself?
11. Do you seek out the company of other thinkers?
12. Do you continue thinking despite negative consequences due to your thinking?
13. Do you sometimes think in order to feel better?
14. Has anyone ever told you that they are worried about your thinking?
15. Have you ever lost a relationship or job because of your thinking?

Count up the number of "yes" responses and score accordingly:

0 = You are lying, take the test again and be honest.
1-2 = High degree of self-awareness with the ability to keep your thoughts from harming you or someone else.
3-5 = Problem thinker. Your thoughts are starting to get the best of you and have caused you a moderate degree of pain.
6-9 = Abusive thinker. Your thoughts are causing high levels of pain to you and those around you.
10 or more = Thinking dependence. You got it bad; your thoughts are running the show and you are just a bag of flesh being pushed around by the whims of the gray matter between your ears. You are also in the company of about 98% of humanity.

The Silent Treatment

By a quiet mind I mean a mental consciousness within which sees thoughts arrive to it and move about but does not itself feel that it is thinking or identifying itself with the thoughts or call them its own.--Sri Aurobindo

The mental noise that is stress, the whirring of the mind machine, grinds away all day and through many people’s nights as well. If you look closely, you can see how this grinding is slowly working you through the pepper mill of existence until you are left with a mere dusting of what once was a whole human being. The tragic irony has been that in an attempt to take care of our stress we send in more noise. We think about our stressful thoughts, we worry about our worries and we even complain about our complaints. Taoist teachers refer to this as putting a new head on top of the one you already have, and contrary to poplar myth, two heads are not better than one.

If you want to see progress in shifting from your old relationship with stress to a new and improved one, then practice cutting off the lifeblood of noise that stress needs to live on. Am I telling you to simply "Shut up and get over it?" Would that help you? If so, then yes, I am telling you to shut up. The getting over it part will actually take care of itself if you can get to the state that the Buddhists refer to a "noble silence." Noble silence is simply being quiet and aware at the same time. This is contrary to what most of us do when we say that we are relaxing. Hanging suspended from a rope cot, while cool summer breezes blow across the lawn is not relaxing if the whole time your mind is ruminating on all the things you should be doing, if you brain is desperately trying to figure out how to you are going to be able to retire before the age of 80 so that you can start relaxing like this in exotic places.

To experience noble silence is to give attention to the space between the noises in your head. What I am calling the silent treatment is to enter into this meditative state minus the incense, new age music and long bearded guru—not that these things are bad. When you tune into the silent moments of your life, you will discover that stress has no home there. More to the point, stress is transformed into its basic structure of a vibrational energy that, despite your effort to get it moving out of your life, is still lodged deep in your psyche. By withdrawing your inner dialogue, you immediately impact this energy charge. Without its noise juice, stress loses its story. This is the power of the silent treatment—the ability to end the narrative of a life that always has you on the losing end.

"No fight, no blame," says the Tao Te Ching, No thoughts, no stress, say I. Eventually, when you reconnect the mouth/brain cable, you will find the urge, desire and even need to say something. More than likely, however, it will not have the same urgent quality to it and you may find that on second thought—really no thought—you don’t say anything after all. This deep wisdom was beautifully summed up in the story of The Little Prince, when he tells his friend that just before he leaves him he will not say anything because "words are often the source of misunderstandings." I could go on about the silent treatment, but I think I have said enough.