Conscious Intention

One essential element of meaningful living is that of intention.  Each one of us develops our own patterns of day to day, year-to-year living; these patterns are essentially habitual ways of seeing and relating to the world.  For example, we take the same route to work every day without really thinking about it. We dress with whatever is clean and available that day with little thought. We brush our teeth before bed, perhaps even floss every day, because that’s what we’ve always done.

A certain amount of habitual patterns is healthy and adaptive way to operate in the world. But it is also easy for these ways of interacting in the world to become stale, automatic…in a sense thought-less ways of living. Dressing without much forethought is a different experience that thinking intentionally about how you want to present to the world for that day or occasion. Brushing and flossing are great habits, but brushing and flossing because you always have feels very different from brushing and flossing as an act of caring and love to your body.

And while driving to work on the same route might be useful, relating to relationship partners or our children in an automated way is similarly disconnected in impact. It takes us away from the moment that is unfolding; the thought-less experience allows us to “be here” and yet not be present. Perhaps you can think of experiences you have had of going through the motions at work, in a relationship, with a hobby.

To shift out of habitual patterns of living and re-engage in your life experience from the driver’s seat, the concept of intention is absolutely key. Operating from intention is about being in yourself –like flying manually, not on autopilot. Living with and from intention is worth doing on a micro-scale—in a sentence by sentence exchange in conversation—and also on a grander scale of planning for the kind of life you value over the coming months and years ahead.  Intentional living is essential for creating a preferred future. Here's how you can do it!

Self-Soothing

When life happens in a way that is overwhelming on a large scale, or when we are experiencing the usual ups and downs of day to day living, it is so important to have strategies for staying grounded. Today I want to highlight a psychological concept that is key in this regard: self-soothing. The importance of soothing goes back to our childhood days and the need for a kind of warm, caring, and protected experience when we encountered the unpredictabilities and stressors of the world.

Soothing is as much about attitude as it is activity

While soothing might be an ideal response toward children when they are distressed, what we each experienced (or not) as responses at home may not always have been ideal. In part, this is why many people do not really know how to go about self-soothing—it may simply not have been modeled. In addition, as children develop and grow (unfortunately, especially so for boys), they may get social messages that equate soothing to being infantile. But soothing is a normal and healthy response to distress and has nothing to do with gender or age. In fact, it is just as essential to have this strategy in our toolbox as adults!

In therapy, some clients will comment that they soothe themselves by doing something like exercise or watching T.V., or using alcohol or drugs; as such, they are confusing soothing with distraction. Distraction can indeed be a useful strategy for some situations, but soothing involves a connection with the self, whereas distraction takes us away from ourselves. As such, it tends to be of limited usefulness, particularly in the longer run. Often, we rely primarily on distraction as a means to cope with distress, we will end up feeling like we have to keep running from part of ourselves.

So, how can you go about incorporating soothing into your life? First, consider all the different ways you can be gentle and nurturing to yourself. Soothing is not just about “doing something”—like having a warm bath. It is equally about the attitude you pair with the activity. Soothing requires that you tune into what you are saying to yourself and ease away from being critical. Now is the time for permission and easing up any restrictive self-talk. Acknowledge the sense of distress—move away from blaming yourself to being more responsive to yourself. 

Second, consider some possible activities you could try—going for a walk, visiting a place you feel safe and positive associations with, brewing hot tea, talking with a trusted friend, asking for and receiving hugs, and writing in a journal are a few ideas to consider. See if you can come up with a list of things you already do and add a few new ones in! Experiment and practice building your self-soothing capacity.

Building Intimacy

Building intimacy is an ongoing process!

Developing connected relationships with those around us is a critical part of having a meaningful life. As much as many of us might like the idea of emotional intimacy, it isn’t always easy to create. One reason for this is that intimacy is all about being known—and that entails some vulnerability through sharing about who we are, how we feel. Intimacy is also about knowing the other person, hearing and seeing another’s perceptions, experiences, places of commonality and those of major differences, including perhaps things that are hard to hear.

Intimacy can also be challenging because people are not static beings—we are ever changing and having more life experiences. So in a sense, intimacy is not just about getting to know another and be known by him/her, but about the ongoing process of knowing ourselves, knowing others, and the sharing of that experience relationally.

So how do we go about building greater intimacy in relationships with those around us? Courage and curiosity are essential qualities you need to call upon. Have the courage to risk some sharing of yourself, and have the curiosity to reach for the other person’s experience through your questions. Ulitmately, you want to ask questions and listen to what it is like to be the other person, and help them to know what it is like to be you in the world.

When couples in my counselling practice are looking to build their intimacy, here are some examples of questions I might give for homework. The questions should be asked of and shared by each partner about how they see things in a back and forth dialogue together.