Shades of Depression: Anhedonia, Anxiety, Anger, and Alienation

            Depression has been described in many ways. Through my experiences and my reading and discussions with others, I think that while there are some common experiences, the details of each person’s experience with depression are unique, and vary even among multiple experiences of depression for the same individual. I’ve felt terrible sadness, apathy, hopelessness, helplessness, and these things I thought were all normal. Yet I’ve also had other experiences less well-associated with depression, and I’m not alone.

Anhedonia

            “Anhedonia is defined as a loss of capacity to experience pleasure. This inability to enjoy pleasurable things is associated with a number of mental health problems including depression. The word anhedonia comes from ancient Greek and means without delight. The individual who is experiencing this condition will find that their life is emotionally empty.

            “…A world without pleasure is a grey place indeed. Without this emotion, life become monotonous, and there doesn’t seem to be much point in doing anything. Day to day living becomes an endurance race, and there is no motivation to try to improve things. The inability to experience pleasure means that life can feel pointless, and that is not a satisfying form of existence. It is a particularly dangerous way to feel if people are trying to recover from an addiction.

            “…Pleasure is a vital component of the internal reward system – it helps people grow and learn. If the individual is unable to experience rewards they will fail to make any progress.” —‘Anhedonia in Recovery’

            Anhedonia sucks. It sucks away your motivation to recovery, to do anything at all. “What’s the point?” you may think.

            “I know nothing. I can do nothing. I understand nothing. I know nothing. Nothing. And all this misery does not even make me particularly unhappy.” —Gerhard Richter

            I go through the motions, but get no pleasure, and soon may not have the energy or motivation to go through the motions. I wander through a twilight fog where everything has lost its color.

            In this state, anytime I feel a glimmer of feeling for anything, I grab it, fiercely, and hold on as long as I can, until that fleeting joy is gone. I feel as though I am hopping from melting ice floe to melting ice floe over a killing-cold lake, and I wonder if they will sink, or get too far apart, or run out before I reach the other side I’m hoping is there.

            “I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.” —Andrew Solomon

Anxiety

            “If you told me that I’d have to be depressed for the next month, I would say, “As long as I know it’ll be over in November, I can do it.” But if you said to me, you have to have acute anxiety for the next month,” I would rather slit my wrist than go through it. It was the feeling all the time like that feeling you have if you’re walking and you slip or trip and the ground is rushing up at you, but instead of lasting half a second, the way that does, it lasted for six months.” —Andrew Solomon, ‘Depression, the secret we share’ TED Talk

            Living in terror or panic for a prolonged time affects your body. Your adrenal glands wear out. You’re hypervigilant. You can’t sleep, and your body doesn’t recharge. The cortisol soup your whole system is swimming in takes its toll. Your brain rewires. Your sense of the future becomes foreshortened. Anything can trigger you to fight, flight, or freeze. It can become too much to leave the house, into a world of unknown variables and overwhelming stimulation. It can feel like having no skin.

            You develop learned helplessness when nothing you can do stops the source of fear and panic. It wears you out when you feel you have to keep this vulnerability hidden, which if you are living with someone or something that is threatening to you and more powerful than you, is highly likely. You feel small, disempowered. You are liable to lash out at the smallest trigger. It is as though the gain has been turned up on everything—a whisper is a shout, a simple word is a hammer blow.

            It is hard for me to tell, having lived with terror all my life, what is a genuine assessment of a threat, what is a childhood flashback, what is either causing or a result of depression. What I do know is, regardless of cause and effect, terror is the most debilitating of all. With anhedonia, even at its worst, I still can connect to the idea that I haven’t experienced absolutely everything, and perhaps there is something out there in which I can take pleasure. Anger, even frustrated and helpless anger, urges me to action against that which is intolerable and unjust.

            Fear chases me into a corner, binds my chest with invisible iron bands so I cannot even dare breathe or make a noise, lest someone notice I am here and take more from me when I have nothing to give, or beat down someone so beaten down by life I feel paralyzed.

            “Suicide is really more of an anxiety response than a depression solution: it is not the action of a null mind but of a tortured one. The physical symptoms of anxiety are so acute that they seem to demand a physical response: not simply the mental suicide of silence and sleep, but the physical one of self-slaughter.” —Andrew Solomon, ‘The Noonday Demon’

Anger

            “First, you are faced with an experience that seems wrong or unfair. Second, you don’t feel able to calmly correct it. And yet, in order for you to feel okay, the situation must be successfully resolved because leaving it as it is does not feel like an acceptable option (the third factor). You feel a strong desire to right a situation that seems wrong, yet you also believe that, at least for now, you are unable to do so. When this set of circumstances occurs, your normal, built-in, human response is anger.”
—Marcia Cannon, ‘The Gift of Anger’

            “A lot of painful things happened to me, and I just wanted to forget. I would wake up in the mornings and just be angry that I woke up. I felt like there wasn’t any help for me, ’cause I was just on this earth wasting space. I lived to use drugs and used drugs to live, and since drugs made me even more depressed, I just wanted to be dead.” —Sheila Hernandez

             “It’s like a hurt. It’s just like they raking your heart out your body, and it won’t stop, it’s just like somebody’s taking a knife and keep stabbing you all the time.” — Danquille Stetson

            It’s been said that depression is anger turned inward. I think depression can have in it anger both turned inward and outward. In depression what I have felt is helpless anger.

            I’ve been angry at hurt I could not prevent or defend against, angry both at the source of the hurt and at myself for my impotence or weakness.

            All this anger is exhausting and demoralizing, and without effective ways to express all this anger non-abusively and feel heard, it becomes a hopeless, angry despair. Loneliness is not just the absence of people but the absence of compassionate understanding.

            “I meet people and I know that they don’t have the level of experience that I have.” —Bill Stein

            Despite a lifetime of painful interpersonal traumas, I have come to believe there are some out there who aren’t habitually, mindlessly hurtful. Yet the absence of a flaw doesn’t indicate the presence of a virtue.

            We humans are rarely comfortable with the expression of emotions like anger and fear and shame, even when we are only bystanders. It takes awareness, effort, investment, and a willingness to learn from inevitable failures to practice empathy, compassion, validation, and humility in the face of these things; with emotional boundaries that don’t trend to self-protective insensitivity. Too often we rely on comparison and pity in the face of others’ pain; or unwanted and inappropriate judgment, advice, and humor. Intellectual understanding blocks empathy.

            “Generosity and love demand great expenditure of energy and effort and will.” —Andrew Solomon, ‘The Noonday Demon’

            Prolonged anger can also have physical health consequences—heart attacks, hardening of the arteries, strokes, hypertension, high blood pressure, heart rate and metabolism changes, muscle and respiratory problems (Dr. Herbert Benson, The Relaxation Response, 1975).

Alienation and the Struggle to Overcome it

            Depression is an alienating experience. Anhedonia, acute anxiety, and anger are alienating experiences.

            “You can’t measure in objective terms how sick people are or what their symptoms are. You can only listen to what people say and accept that that’s how it feels to them.” —Deborah Christie
 

            “There is an interaction between illness and personality; some people can tolerate symptoms that would destroy others; some people can tolerate hardly anything. Some people seem to give in to their depression; others seem to battle it. Since depression is highly demotivating, it takes a certain survivor impulse to keep going through the depression, not to cave in to it.” —Andrew Solomon, ‘The Noonday Demon’

            Compassionate understanding isn’t something we’re automatically good at, nor empathy, nor non-judgment, listening skills. Capacities for these are there, unless you’re a sociopath, but it takes mindful work and perseverance, and humility, to build and practice these skills. It’s not easy, it’s not always fun, and it requires uncomfortable self-examination and self-honesty and a willingness to fail and try again.

            Becoming a brain surgeon is hard work and you would (I hope) not presume to try brain surgery without that work. Yet many people try to offer support who have underdeveloped humility, awareness, and trustworthiness necessary to be effective. We do this because we don’t know what we don’t know. We also do this because shame shuts down genuine human connection and vulnerability (see Brené Brown’s work for more on overcoming these issues).

            I’ve been there. I’ve not only bought the t-shirt but run the t-shirt stand. But having had the experiences I’ve had, I can never return to not-knowing. Sooner or later I think most everyone is touched by tragedy or trauma, and ignorance is no longer an option. The choice is, what do you do then?

            “You cannot draw a depressed person out of his misery with love (though you can sometimes distract a depressed person). You can, sometimes, manage to join someone in the place where he resides. It is not pleasant to sit still in the darkness of another person’s mind, though it is almost worse to watch the decay of the mind from the outside. You can fret from a distance or you can come close and closer and closest. Sometimes the way to be close is to be silent, or even distant. It is not up to you, from the outside, to decide; it is up to you to discern. Depression is lonely above all else, but it can breed the opposite of loneliness. …So many people have asked me what to do for depressed friends and relatives, and my answer is actually simple: blunt their isolation. Do it with cups of tea or with long talks or by sitting in a room nearby and staying silent or in whatever way suits the circumstances, but do that. And do it willingly.” —Andrew Solomon, ‘The Noonday Demon’

            “Our needs are our greatest assets. I am able to just be there with people because of the stuff I’ve needed from people. I guess I’ve learned to give all the things I need.” —Maggie Robbins

Sources and further reading:

            ‘Anhedonia in Recovery’ article

            Hyperbole and a Half: Adventures in Depression by Allie Brosh

            Hyperbole and a Half: Depression Part Two by Allie Brosh

            ‘Depression, the secret we share’ TED Talk by Andrew Solomon

            ‘The Noonday Demon’ by Andrew Solomon

            ‘The Gift of Anger’ by Marcia Cannon

            ‘Honor Your Anger’ by Beverly Engel

            ‘Healing Through the Dark Emotions:The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair’ by Marcia Greenspan

            ‘The power of vulnerability’ TED Talk by Brené Brown

            ‘Listening to shame’ TED Talk by Brené Brown

            ‘Suicide: Read This First’ on metanoia.org

            ‘What can I do to help someone who may be suicidal?’ on metanoia.org

            Emotional Intelligence information on EQI.org

            ‘EQ for Everybody: A Practical Guide to Developing and Using One’s Emotional Intelligence’ free PDF by Steve Hein

Encouragement and Criticism

Why is criticism a dangerous habit?

“Perfection is the enemy of done.” —Andrea Scher

            Criticism has many pitfalls. What we do to others, we do to ourselves, and vice versa. Criticism encourages judgment, shame, inflexibility, externalization or projecting, persistent negativity, perfectionism, lack of distinction between opinion and objective reality, and intolerance of discomfort or imperfections.

            Whatever you feed will grow. The more we criticize, and the more mindlessly we indulge this very human propensity, the more it becomes a default way of interacting with and viewing other people and the world. It is hard, if not impossible, to have a positive life experience with a negative outlook.

         This is not to say that setting boundaries and expressing dislike or dissatisfaction are not important. I will address how to assertively set boundaries at another time, and speak on the gift and importance of anger. Speaking up is important, particularly if you have otherwise been silenced.
         I want to add to our natural skills for criticism and judgment, to give us the option of cultivating encouragement of what is creative and additive in ourselves and one another. It is important to own our own point of view, and to have the capacity to focus on encouraging what we enjoy and want to increase.

               Any time we provide feedback with the goal of getting someone to better meet our needs, rather than being responsive to theirs, it’s unlikely to prompt the desired outcome.
             …The second mistake we make in giving feedback is failing to hold the other person’s value in the process. Even the most well-intentioned criticism will, more often than not, prompt us to feel our value is at risk, and under attack.
               The third mistake we make is to assume that we’re right about whatever it is we’re inclined to say. Like lawyers, we take a series of facts and weave them together into a story that supports and justifies the case we’re seeking to make.
             The problem is that our stories aren’t necessarily true. They’re simply one interpretation of the facts. It makes much more sense to think about offering feedback in a spirit of humble exploration rather than declaration, dialogue rather than monologue, curiosity rather than certainty. Humility is the recognition that we don’t know, even when we think we know. As Steven Covey says, “Seek first to understand.”
           Ultimately, we’d be better off eliminating concepts like “feedback” and “constructive criticism” from our lexicons altogether. They’re polarizing, and mostly destructive. We need to think of these interchanges instead as opportunities for honest inquiry and genuine learning.
            “Here’s the story I’m telling myself about what just happened,” we might say. “Have I got that right, or am I missing something?” —Tony Schwartz, ‘There'sNo Such Thing as Constructive Criticism’

            There is nothing more off-putting than having someone, even someone you love, continually telling you that you should be handling things or doing things differently.

       Do your loved ones one more favor. Remove the word “should” from your vocabulary. “Should” almost always comes with an undertone of criticism, and since it usually references a situation that has passed and cannot be changed, the word does nothing but breed resentment. 

           Trust that people will ask for advice when they need it. Ask them if they’d like a thought when you feel you need to step in, and always allow them the courtesy of saying no. —‘Unsolicited Advice is Criticism in Disguise’

            The Writing Monster should be flexible, able to handle the editing of any kind of writing, whether it’s a little blog post, a speech, a short story or a screenplay.

              It should also expose people to new ideas and new ways of looking at writing, and inspire us to rip the pages out of stupid pretentious books. 

             And it should expose us to different types of writers and editors, not just fellow writers who have the same exact skills and writerly prejudices.” —Guy Bergstrom, ‘Why Critique Groups MUST DIE’

Why cultivate encouragement?

            “The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.” —Brenda Ueland

            Encouragement leads to openness, flexibility, curiosity, surprise, collaboration, connection, invention, imagination, creativity, diversity, discovery, exploration, acceptance, imperfections, mistakes, successes, comedy, happy accidents, serendipity, appreciation.

            Rufolf Dreikurs state that all maladaptive behaviors primarily result from discouragement, and Wexberg (1969) stated that education for the most part consists of encouragement. Presuming that these statements are valid, we can conclude that there is no more important task than to be a model of encouragement and teach others the techniques of encouragement. —Theo Shoenaker, ‘Encouragement Makes Good Things Happen’

            Some imperfection is not bad. You don’t need to be ashamed. It’s a way to stay in touch with reality and with all the imperfections, like me.
            A little imperfection is good. You need a little imperfection to be perfect enough. This way, your feet stay firmly planted to the ground, and you can allow others to be as they are—imperfect like you.
            A little imperfection makes life easier, and helps all of us to forge ahead. Don’t be sad that you are not perfect. This way you stay connected to all imperfect people—with you and with me.
            A little imperfection allows yourself to be who you are, spontaneous and creative. You will not need to hide, you will make mistakes, and you will demonstrate that you are an imperfect human, just like me.
            I hope that one day you will meet a partner who is imperfect like you—and that both of you can find it amusing, so that you can love and not only admire him. —source unknown

            I think the dilemma exists because art, among all the other tidy categories, most closely resembles what it is like to be human. To be alive. It is our nature to be imperfect. To have uncategorized feelings and emotions. To make or do things that don’t sometimes necessarily make sense.
             Art is all just perfectly imperfect.
          Once the word Art enters the description of what you’re up to, it is almost like getting a hall pass from perfection. It thankfully releases us from any expectation of perfection.
            In relation to my own work not being perfect, I just always point to the tattered box behind the couch and mention the word Art, and people seem to understand and let you off the hook about being perfect and go back to their business. —Nicholas Wilton 

Six ways to encourage

1. “I really loved what you were trying to do.”

            Here’s how Jim Henson encouraged:

            Most of us think that we need negative feedback to know what to do better next time. But as [Dave] Goelz said, [Jim] Henson himself used to delight in the positive aspects of his work to make the next one better. He didn’t need shame, and he didn’t give it to others. When he met Caroll Spinney for the first time, Spinney had just bombed on stage at a puppetry festival. Goelz recalled: “Jim said, “I really loved what you were trying to do.” And he was absolutely sincere about it.”
           Henson appreciated Spinneys performance on the level of concept, even if the execution was terrible. An artist has his own internal judge of quality, and it’s not necessary, Henson knew, to point out his mistakes to him.
            This  radical abstention from criticism can be seen as weak. Duncan Kenworthy explained: “He would never ever say, and this was actually to a fault, if he didn’t like something, if he thought something hadn’t been done well, he would never ever say that, and he’d say, “Hey, I wonder if we just should try…” and somehow he would turn the corner and it would be a positive. “Let’s try it a different way.” He would never say, “God, that doesn’t work.””
            …Perhaps a better way to improve is to stop criticizing ourselves and simply appreciate what is good about our work, so that the next take will be better. As an artist, it is essential to first treat one’s own talent humanely. From there, it is easy to treat others this same way. —Elizabeth Hyde Stevens, ‘Make Art Make Money’

            Wil Wheaton once said, “We applaud the wrong things.” When we successfully achieve something, we already feel the positive reinforcement of that success. When we most need encouragement is when we are struggling, and most especially, when we have experienced failure and our feelings of worth and agency may be low. While you can’t always appreciate the results, appreciating and reinforcing the effort made is vital to making the effort again.

2. Appreciate and Receive Appreciation

            The effect of praise and applause is temporary. The following may be a familiar experience—you were successful one evening and received either recognition or applause, but by the time you went to bed that night, or at the latest at breakfast the next morning, you began to doubt your own worth again.
            The desire to be successful, to be the best, to be the most beautiful, to deliver perfect and praiseworthy accomplishments, leaves us susceptible to criticism. The acknowledgement of others becomes the measure of our own worth.
            …Praise can also turn into pressure because the next time, less laudatory performance is not acceptable.
            …Others rebel against praise because they sense in it either the superiority of the person doing the praising or the pressure to have to live according to the expectations of others. —Theo Shoenaker, ‘Encouragement Makes Good Things Happen’

3. Affirmation and Noticing

            In InterPlay practice, there are two skills we use to give words of encouragement to one another, by describing (using ‘I’ statements or just descriptive words) our own positive reactions to what we liked about another’s performance:

            Affirmation: to seek out, notice, and name the good in others and the world.
            Noticing: the ability to perceive and reflect on our experience. —Cynthia Winton-Henry with Phil Porter, ‘What the Body Wants’

            We’re encouraged to notice what we had in our own bodies, in our own emotions, what we experienced, as we were watching whatever performance just took place. This can be applied not just to performance art but anything we are evaluating, and it’s even more important as a place to start if we’re looking to suggest areas of improvement.

4. Direct and Indirect Encouragement

            A direct encouragement would be, for example, if I recognized your initial attempts as valid and supported them with an enthusiastic “Yes.” …I could also say, “Yes, it seems logical to me to do it this way,” or “This was a great idea on your part.” I could also smile while watching you or express my support of your effort by winking at you. That would also be a direct encouragement because it is an action on my part that directly focuses on your activity. I could also indicate a thumbs-up or other signal of agreement or approval.
            An indirect encouragement provides the proper emotional atmosphere in which human beings can flourish. You will feel this atmosphere particularly when you meet people who possess inner peace, who believe that they are okay the way they are, and with whom you have the feeling that you may be just as you are; they are patient, and they are interested in you. Such people convey that they trust that you can manage the tasks you may encounter. They do not talk much about these matters, they do not have unreasonable expectations, and they do not overemphasize the importance of mistakes.
—Theo Shoenaker, ‘Encouragement Makes Good Things Happen’

5. Cultivate the Qualities that Encourage Encouragement

         Here are the 10 most important desirable qualities for an encouraging and encouraged person:
            • Interest in others
            • Attentive listening
            • Enthusiasm
            • Patience
            • A friendly look
            • A friendly voice
            • Recognizing what is good
            • Acknowledging attempts and progress made
            • Being responsible for one’s self
            • Creating approximate physical proximity
—Theo Shoenaker, ‘Encouragement Makes Good Things Happen’

6. Find What Works and Practice, Practice, Practice

            Self-encouragement and encouraging others lead to one another. If it’s too challenging now to encourage yourself, find others you can encourage; and vice versa. Practicing skills and habits of encouragement will build them.

            Be gentle with yourself if it doesn’t always have the desired result. The goal is more to practice the skill than elicit a particular response. Appreciate your effort—every failure is another opportunity to practice encouragement with yourself.

Compassion

Self-Compassion as Shame Resilience

“Self-compassion is key because when we’re able to be gentle with ourselves in the midst of shame, we’re more likely to reach out, connect, and experience empathy.” — Brené Brown, ‘Daring Greatly’

Shame is painful and visceral. We go to great lengths to avoid and defend against experiences of shame. Often we put on masks and avoid being honest and authentic out of shame. This can set up an endless cycle of not feeling good enough, and judging others.

In ‘Daring Greatly’ Brené Brown talks about cultivating experiences of empathy with others as a balm to answer shame. However, that requires the participation of someone who can engage empathetically, and with people run rampant with unaddressed shame of their own, it’s a rare thing to find. Also, while empathy requires two participants, shame does not:

“Shame started as a two-person experience, but as I got older I learned how to do shame all by myself.” —Robert Hilliker

Compassion is something we can practice on our own—and I’ll describe how I do it in the next two sections. The great thing is that building compassion with ourselves and with others are linked. The more compassion I feel for me, the more I can feel for others. Like mindfulness, it’s not a state that once achieved is just there, always, absolute. Compassion is a skill, and there are many ways to practice it.

“In her new book, Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind, [Dr. Kristen Neff] defines each of these elements:

• Self-kindness: Being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.
• Common humanity: Common humanity recognizes that suffering and feelings of personal inadequacy are part of the shared human experience—something we all go through rather than something that happens to “me” alone.
• Mindfulness: Taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time. Mindfulness requires that we not “overidentify” with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negativity.”

 —Brené Brown’s summation from ‘Daring Greatly’

Using ‘Tonglen’ for Compassion Practice

“In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves.” —Pema Chödrön

The exercise of tonglen was described to me this way:

• Settle first with breathing mindfulness
• Identify stuck thoughts or emotions
• Breathe in the emotions or thoughts gently
• Be with it as fierce protector
• Allow it to be present
• Watch the urge to push it away
• Remember that all emotions are transient and will pass
• Hold open the possibility of change
• Breathe out compassion or other opposite emotion, for:
• Yourself
• A benefactor
• A loved one
• An acquaintance
• A stranger
• An estranged one
• Settle back to basic mindfulness of breathing before finishing your practice

Breathing in the stuck emotion, validating and welcoming it fully into your consciousness, is not something we tend to do. We push away, we numb, we reject. As I mentioned in my post on validation, this can make those feelings more intense. Breathing in what hurts and what’s stuck is somewhat counterintuitive and can be quite difficult, and can be done to degrees. The important part is breathing in what you don’t want, and breathing out what you do.

“Tonglen practice is a radical departure from our usual way of going about things. It may seem threatening, and even crazy; but it strikes at a very core point—how we barricade ourselves from pain and lose our connection with one another. The irony is that the barricades we create do not help all that much; they just make things worse. We end up more fearful, less willing to extend ourselves, and stunted in our ability to express any true kindness. Tonglen pokes holes in those barricades that we create.” —Judy Lief, ‘Making Friends with Death’

What does compassion feel like? How can we practice something if we rarely experience it?

Shame was so prevalent in my life I thought I had no understanding or experience of compassion. But I did—my dog. We shared an unconditional bond. Sometimes I might be upset with her behaviors, if she peed on the floor, but I still loved her very much.

When I started practicing tonglen, that was my out-breath visual—sitting with and petting my dog, looking into her eyes. I could easily call that image to mind. It felt good to think about, which positively reinforced and strengthened that feeling. I was practicing compassion and learning what it felt like.

Even if you are not a dog person, chances are you have an experience of compassion, somewhere in your life, even if only a brief memory you can call upon. The more you call it up, and the more pleasurable it is, the easier to draw on it becomes.

Someone We Care About

 “To claim the truths about who we are, where we come from, what we believe, and the very imperfect nature of our lives, we have to be willing to give ourselves a break and appreciate the beauty of our cracks or imperfections. To be kinder and gentler with ourselves and each other. To talk to ourselves the same way we’d talk to someone we care about.” —Brené Brown, ‘Daring Greatly’

In my Dialectical Behavioral Therapy skills class I received a non-judgment worksheet, to help challenge judgmental thinking. The last question is, “If this happened to a friend, what would you say to him/her?”

We’re good at imagining other people who are important to us, pre-visualizing conversations to others, imagining what we might say to them and what they might say to us. I take the practice one step further. I imagine what others would say to me.

In Barbara Sher’s book ‘I Could Do Anything if I Only Knew What it Was,’ she describes an exercise for self-cheerleading that involves imagining all your heroes and idols around you, encouraging you. Perhaps famous people or mentors or family members whose words and deeds have inspired you. The goal of the exercise, and one of the goals of this book, was to self-encourage to dare greatly, to be vulnerable and take risks.

Having cultivated this imaginary cheerleading team for myself, it was easy to expand that practice to the comforting words I wanted to hear when I felt shame, when I felt pressured to do or be something.

By imagining in tonglen that I am being held by someone who encourages and accepts me unconditionally, imaginary though they be, I am practicing self-compassion. I have gone from only being able to imagine compassion for others to being able to imagine both giving and receiving at the same time.

I’ve also developed positive triggers by diligently practicing tonglen, even for a few moments, whenever I hear a certain audio cue with which I’ve saturated my playlists, CDs, and life. I have gotten into the habit of practicing tonglen when I am journaling through tough emotions and thoughts, as often as it occurs to me, usually at the end of a really rough thought or writing. I highly recommend the process of associating certain cues with positive practices of which you wish to make a habit. Pavlov yourself.

The more I practice, the easier it gets. I still experience shame often, but I am building resilience through compassion.

Sources and further reading:

• ‘Daring Greatly’ by Brené Brown
• ‘Self-Compassion’ by Kristen Neff
• ‘Tonglen’ by Pema Chodron
• ‘Making Friends with Death’ by Judy Lief
• ‘I Could Do Anything if I Only Knew What it Was’ by Barbara Sher with Barbara Smith
• Non-judgmentally (DBT Self Help)
• ‘The Power of Vulnerability’ TED Talk by Brené Brown