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TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's "How to Live" newsletter so you don't miss a thing.
AUGUST 2024
Every Wednesday I offer a free, highly-comprehensive, hopefully helpful, psychological map to help make your life easier.
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WHAT DO YOU THINK? |
August 7th, 2024 Was a Dispatch From the Past about Philippe Petit, Educational Films from the 1950s, and Home Videos of Freud.
Fifty years ago this morning, a 24 year old French high-wire artist named Philippe Petit walked three-quarters of a mile across a tight rope, 1350 feet over the sidewalks of NYC.
No net.
He spent 45 minutes walking and playing, across the sky, waving to the weather, to the birds. He laid down and breathed it all in.
Never say the dentist’s office doesn’t inspire feats of imagination, because it was there, in the waiting room he saw the 1968 drawing of the proposed twin towers, and an idea took shape.
If I see two towers, I have to walk.
August 14th, 2024 Piece Asked Are You Really Free? The Silent Struggle That Might Be Holding You Back.
Childhood Separation Anxiety is a standard and expected developmental stage. In The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—the handbook of criteria that clinicians use to diagnose mental health disorders and establish a consistent and common language—it’s marked by a loose start and end date: appearing around age 1 and disappearing around the age of 3.
If it doesn’t disappear by age 3, and lasts for longer than 4 weeks, it’s considered a disorder, which should then be treated.
But what happens if it doesn’t disappear and is never treated?
What happens if it stays with you your entire life?
Or maybe it does end, but then it returns when you’re 23.
Until the early-aughts, Adult Separation Anxiety Disorder (ASAD) didn’t exist; it was a diagnostic orphan, existing in a liminal space between patient testimonials and clinical reality.
But, in 2015, the DSM dropped the age criterion for Separation Anxiety et Voila, millions of silent sufferers found themselves visible.
Yet, despite being a “new field of study” it is not, in fact, only nine years old.
It’s as old as time; it’s simply under-recognized, leaving countless adults to remain undiagnosed and untreated; to suffer silently. ASAD significantly impacts a person’s quality of life, relationships, educational achievements, career prospects and life goals.
I have it.
You might have it too.
August 21, 2024 Was a Piece About Why Saying I Love You is Not Enough
Never telling anyone what they mean to you will haunt you when that person isn’t there any more.
A relationship expands when we nourish it, and it collapses when we deprive it. We take “I love you” for granted, often expecting it to do the work we’re not doing.
What (I love you) is valuable; of course, it is. But why holds the what of love aloft, enriching and deepening one's experience of themselves in relationship to another.
Not once do we get to experience ourselves in the third person.
We’ll never know what we look like walking toward a loved one; we can’t know the energy others absorb being around us. We can guess. We can assume.
But being told by someone we love, why we’re lovable, helps prop up and fill out our identity, adding dimension to our lived experience of being a self.
Being a human is often a lonely business.
The world around us filters through one lens; we rely on a single mind our entire lives; we look out from behind the same half-inch wide windows; we are stuck inside one body; our gestures always mediated through the same intrinsic set of idiosyncrasies, and no matter how much we long to look or act or talk or sing or be like someone else, we will never be anyone but ourselves.
What (I love you) is valuable; of course, it is. But why holds the what of love aloft, enriching and deepening one's experience of themselves.
What enriches our monologic experience of being a single human being is learning how we impact others, hearing the myriad ways our humanity sings itself into another’s.
When we tell our friends and loved ones how they impact us and why, we open up portals inside them they never realized existed, which stretches both our worlds.
August 25th, Was a Bonus Piece for Paying Members About My Personal Struggles with Adult Separation Anxiety Disorder.
Today's bonus for premium members is the most personal How to Live piece I've written. Not because I am typically withholding—I’m not—but because I’m exposing a struggle that, until a decade ago, wasn’t clinically recognized in adults, leading sufferers to struggle with feelings of shame and discomposure for existing outside the realm of other peoples’ possibilities.
Yet, adult separation anxiety disorder isn't just possible, it's prevalent.
This piece is about adult separation anxiety as I experience it still, to this day, although to a lesser degree than I did in childhood.
I reveal the impact it has on my friendships and romantic relationships and how it makes things most people take for granted incredibly challenging for me.
On August 28th, 2024, I Wrote About Brainspotting, in Where You Look Affects How You Feel.
Today’s piece is about a therapeutic technique called “Brainspotting (BSP),” a modernized version of Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR).
In 1993, David Grand was a young psychologist in training, learning EMDR from Francine Shapiro.
He found the method exciting and effective. When he learned Somatic Experiencing Therapy in 1999, he decided to integrate psychoanalysis, somatic experiencing, and EMDR, using eye movements of varying speeds and directions, healing sounds, and different tactile innovations. He called this Natural Flow EMDR.
But the events of 9/11 took Dr. Grand’s work in a new direction, leading to his eventual discovery of what he would call Brainspotting (BSP). Working with first responders, family members, and survivors forced him to relive the experience over and over again, allowing him to stumble upon a much more targeted approach to trauma.
Because Dr. Grand was constantly tuned in to the heightened state of his clients, he consciously and unconsciously absorbed their cues, anticipating what was coming before it occurred.
This attunement created the opening he needed to discover the power of Brainspotting.
And, if you’re into this kind of a thing…
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Amanda
VITAL INFO:
Nope, I am not a licensed therapist or medical professional. I am simply a person who struggled with undiagnosed mental health issues for over two decades and spent 23 years in therapy learning how to live. Now, I'm sharing the greatest hits of what I learned to spare others from needless suffering.
Most, but not all, links are affiliate, which means I receive a small percentage of the price at no cost to you, which goes straight back into the newsletter.
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