Jeremy Mohler

Writer, meditation teacher, and therapist-in-training

Don’t wait until your partner forces you to go therapy

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She didn’t mean it as an ultimatum—but it might as well have been. Years ago, a girlfriend all but forced me to go to therapy.

“Maybe you should talk to someone about that,” she said, after I’d complained about a recent visit with my parents. Looking back, what she really meant was: Maybe you should talk to someone about us.

After hesitating for a few months, I saw a therapist, but it was too late. We broke up weeks later. “I’m going through some uncertainty in my relationship with my girlfriend and need some help,” I emailed the therapist the night of the breakup. The relationship never rekindled. But within a few sessions, I was hooked on therapy.

Hollywood had been my only window into what therapy was like. The Sopranos. Seinfeld. Mad Men. Opening up to a total stranger seemed like it was for “crazy” people. Something had to be “wrong” with you. Or you had enough money to waste on making up problems that weren’t really there.

Growing up, my parents didn’t talk much about emotions. There was plenty of laughter, sure, and occasional angry flare-ups. But expressing “softer” feelings like sadness or fear was usually met with an eyeroll. Or at most, “Everything’s going to be fine.”

To my surprise, the therapist didn’t think I was crazy. In fact, she made me feel completely normal. After I ranted for what felt like an entire hour-long session about my parents’ focus on their jobs, she said, “Sounds like your family values hard work and success.” Yes, I thought, exactly. I hadn’t thought about it that clearly before. I’d been too caught up in the emotions—sadness, loneliness, resentment—to see the plain truth.

When I talked about missing my ex-girlfriend, my therapist said it made sense—I’d lived with her for three years. This made me feel a little less alone, like it was simply human to feel the way I did. She also gave me practical advice, recommending a book—David Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man—which I still turn to for guidance today.

I’m not sharing all of this for a pity party. My issues then were small and manageable compared to what life can throw at us in challenging times. I’m sharing it to convince you of the value of therapy—even if doesn’t feel like you’re in crisis.

Maybe you’re bored at work and unsure what to do about it. Maybe you’re struggling to connect with your teenager. Maybe you’re navigating the dating scene for the first time in years. Maybe you and your partner aren’t having sex as much as you’d like. Maybe your partner just outright said that you should talk to a therapist. 

Underneath these and other issues are emotions and ways of thinking that we rarely slow down enough to notice. Or we feel stuck in them, unable to make changes that we know we need to make.

Talking to a trained professional who won’t judge you for what you’ve done or how you feel might be exactly what you need to get unstuck. Therapy is different from friendship. A therapist listens to your thoughts, feelings, and experiences without any requirement for you to listen to theirs. They also have zero agenda—because they have no relationship with you outside of therapy sessions.

Using their training, a therapist can help you in many ways: increasing resilience, managing stress, showing up more authentically with others, noticing and expressing emotions, navigating life/family/career transitions, getting clearer about your life’s purpose. They can also teach you skills to use between sessions in your everyday life, like mindfulness, ways to regulate emotions, and communication skills.

The truth is, we all suffer from time to time. There are the obvious challenges that blindside us: experiencing a breakup, the passing of a loved one, getting fired. Then there are the areas of our lives that just feel “off”—that never get much attention because we’re racing from one thing to the next. 

All of us have experienced some level of trauma, particularly when we were young, before we had the understanding and emotional tools that come with being an adult. Some of us may have gone through the acute pain of sexual assault, a car accident, or a natural disaster. Some of us might have simply lost connection with our parents and other adults in moments that felt overwhelming.

“You can have childhoods where no overt trauma occurs,” says the physician and addiction expert Gabor Maté. “But when the parents are just too distracted, too stressed to provide the necessary responsiveness, that can also traumatize the child.” We’ve all been overwhelmed at times, unable to process our emotions, feeling as though we didn’t have enough attention and support to do so.

Being able to talk about these experiences, thoughts, and feelings with someone who won’t judge you for any of it—and who has been trained to help you—can be incredibly refreshing and healing. 

This is especially true for those of us who were raised as boys. Many boys are shamed for showing “softer” emotions. We’re told to “man up” and stop acting “like a girl.” We’re encouraged to take action rather than share feelings. We’re praised for solving math problems and ignored (or worse, teased) when they talk about emotions.

A while back, walking through a block party in my neighborhood, I witnessed a sad example of this unfortunate socialization. A smiling boy, all of six or seven years old, asked a face painter to turn him into a blue and purple butterfly.

“No, you’re not going to be a butterfly,” his mother said from behind him.

“Why?” the boy asked, his smile fading into confusion.

“Because…” she said. “Why don’t you be a tiger or a pirate?”

Many boys are taught by our parents and other adults about what it means (and what it doesn’t mean) to be a “real” man. Likely, the mother thought her son should want to be fierce and aggressive rather than radiant, harmless, and feminine, like a butterfly. She probably feared being judged by other parents for having a boy who expresses himself outside of masculine norms.

Even if your upbringing was different from this, you still received messages from our culture. Movies often feature tough, stoic men and warm, relational women. Male musical artists often sing or rap about women as objects rather than human beings. Our individualized society encourages competition rather than collaboration. Some of these things are changing for the better, but boys and men (and girls and women) are still bombarded by messages about how to be.

What’s more, men have been socialized to avoid asking for help. Men seek out therapy far less than women. So much so that there’s a popular Twitter meme about it. Men also tend to have fewer close friends than women do. And with the friends that men do have, we’re more likely to watch sports or throw back some beers rather than confide in each other about emotional issues.

Whatever your gender, it’s almost impossible to escape our society’s stigma against getting help with emotional and mental health. People who seek out therapy are often characterized as “weak,” “crazy,” “whiny,” “neurotic,” and all kinds of other judgments. Who wants to be any of that?

You might also be wondering, how do I know therapy will work? The answer is, you don’t until you try it. There’s tons of data showing its benefits—research shows over and over again that therapy has significant and lasting effects on mental health. It literally improves the structure of the brain. 

But here’s an analogy: If your car’s engine was making noises, wouldn’t you take a look under the hood? You’d probably take it to a mechanic if you couldn’t fix it yourself, right? Why not do the same with your mental and emotional health? You can always buy a new car, but you only get—in the words of the poet Mary Oliver—“one wild and precious life.”

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, therapist-in-training, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Photo by Rawpixel Ltd.

Learn these mindfulness skills now before a lonely winter

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I’ll always remember my dad warning me about yellow jackets. I was 7, maybe 8, and he’d just swatted one away as we threw a football in the front yard. “They get more aggressive in the fall,” he said. “They’re about to die.”

It turns out, he was half right. According to a Washington Post interview with an expert beekeeper, yellow jackets become more aggressive because they’re hungrier. Their food sources — other insects — begin dying off as the weather cools. In other words, they’re hangry.

I can relate to the little yellow and black flying monsters. The other day I went for a walk and noticed a familiar feeling this time of year. The temperature was perfect — 75 degrees with no humidity. I was excited about the coming fall — with its sweater weather and football.

But there was also a touch of dread. My chest fluttered as my heartbeat sped up. My mind churned anxious thoughts: I’m going to feel so alone this winter. I need to get some things on the calendar. I’m so bad at making friends.

Summer turning into fall always makes me crave connection. Like yellow jackets, I get more aggressive about booking camping trips and planning dinner parties. At times, it feels like I’m going to die if I don’t have enough things on my calendar. That’s how afraid I am of being alone in the winter.

In years past, when not in a romantic relationship I would succumb to what’s become known as “cuffing season” — the urge to couple-up as the weather turns. I’d find myself going on more dates anxiously trying to find a partner for the coming lonely nights of Netflix and chilly air.

This year is different. I have a partner, and I sort of know what to expect from another pandemic winter. But there I was circling my neighborhood like a hungry yellow jacket.

I reminded myself that I’m in a great relationship, that I have plenty of friends, that I often enjoy alone time. But logically reasoning with myself didn’t work. My mind wouldn’t stop worrying about the future.

Instead, what worked was mindfulness. I remembered a fall meditation retreat years ago that had made me feel terrifyingly lonely. I remembered the silent hours meditating in the cold retreat center and walking outside under the browning trees. I remembered those same anxious thoughts: I’m going to be so alone this winter. I need to get some things on the calendar. I’m so bad at making friends.

But I also remembered a moment with a meditation teacher that had made me feel a little better.

“Where is it showing up?” she asked, motioning towards my body.

I’d just told her I felt so alone that I might leave the retreat early. I closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths, and noticed what the interior of my body felt like.

“My hands — they’re so heavy. It feels like they can’t move,” I said.

Normally, my hands feeling like 1,000-pound boulders would’ve scared me even more. But instead, I laughed. Happy tears welled up in my eyes. Hours of meditation and my teacher’s compassion had helped me see that my heavy hands were just a fact. Not good, not bad — just what was happening in the moment.

My loneliness was just a fact too. I didn’t have to make it go away or wrong or a sign that I’m not good at making friends or anything at all. I didn’t have to resist it — I could let it just be, and eventually it would pass.

Having remembered the retreat, I stopped walking and stood still. I closed my eyes and breathed slower and deeper. I felt the air in my nose and throat. I noticed the softness of the socks on my feet and the solidity of the concrete below. I listened to the breeze wafting through the maple tree’s leaves above me.

After a few breaths, I realized I was yet again thinking, worrying about the weekend, figuring out which friends might be free to get together. It was like I was standing back looking at my thoughts — like watching a movie.

I let go of the thoughts and brought my attention back to my breath. I noticed my stomach was tight, so I let go there too. Opening my eyes to keep walking, I spotted a beautiful bright blue door on a house I’d never noticed before.

That’s what mindfulness is — ”awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally,” as the pioneering scientist who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it.

Our shoulder itches, we hear a bird chirping, we think about that email we need to send, we start worrying about being lonely. Sensations, sounds, thoughts, whatever — if we slow down and watch, all of them come and go like clouds in the sky.

If we stay present, we’re less caught up in worries about the future or judgments about the past. We’re more here, now.

Sometimes it might seem like the loneliness, anger, anxiety, sadness will last forever. When we’re in the middle of an emotional storm cloud, we lose sight of all the good things in our lives.

But sooner or later, just like a real storm, the clouds pass and the sun comes back out again. Mindfulness skills — like pausing and noticing the breath or softening tension in the body — can often help the storm pass a little quicker and easier.

That last word in Kabat-Zinn’s definition — “non-judgmentally” — is significant. It’s important to not let our judgements keep us stuck in the storm’s chaos.

When we’re caught up in an emotion, we usually feel some sort of way about it. Walking the other day, I beat myself up inside about feeling lonely. I turned it into evidence that I’m no good at making friends. All that did was add fuel to the fire. It made me feel even worse and took me even further away from the present moment’s richness — the breeze, the birds, the bright blue door.

When we’re mindful, we accept any and everything, even our unconscious, snap judgements about whether something is good or bad, right or wrong. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

This doesn’t mean we should try to be some Zen meditation master with no expectations or opinions. I should probably spend some time intentionally thinking about what I can do this fall and winter to stay connected with friends and family. I should make some plans and let people know I want to see them.

It just doesn’t have to be so urgent and intense. It doesn’t have to feel like I’m going to be alone forever if I don’t have plans this weekend. And if it does, I can use mindfulness skills to calm the intensity.

In fact, mindfulness can help us make better decisions. Research shows that mindfulness meditation can make us less emotionally reactive and more intentional with our thought processes.

Most of us don’t have time to practice meditation for hours on end. But that doesn’t mean we can’t cultivate a little mindfulness here and there throughout the day.

The next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, tense, or stuck, try pausing and taking a few deep breaths. Feel the air in your throat and chest. Notice your feet on the ground. Listen to the sounds around you.

When your mind wanders to what to make for dinner or that text message you need to send — which it inevitably will — let go of the thoughts and come back to feeling, smelling, hearing, and tasting the moment. Make sure to be easy on yourself. The storm will pass — it always does.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, therapist-in-training, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Photo by Niq Scott.

How to know if you’re experiencing burnout

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In my early 20s, I was hospitalized with what my doctor called a “complicated migraine.” I wasn’t in pain—but I’d lost vision in one eye and feeling on the right side of my body.

A magnetic resonance angiogram (MRA) test showed nothing abnormal about my brain. The hospital sent me home saying that I just needed to rest.

There had been warning signs for years—bouts of frantic anxiety, exhaustion, and overwhelming urges to drink alcohol.

But I was too busy to truly rest. Too caught up in the grind of working hard and partying harder. Too worried about making other people happy. In a word, I was too numb.

I now know that I was suffering from what’s known as “burnout.”

There’s the stress of everyday life—the cracks and potholes in the road while trying to live a decent, meaningful life. Then there’s the stress that just won’t leave. The chronic tension and ruminating thoughts that stretch for days or even years.

Burnout, explained

Burnout, according to Herbert Freudenberger—the psychologist who coined the term in the 1970s—has three main symptoms. Emotional exhaustion—being drained from caring too much. Alienation—cynicism about things that used to be meaningful. And a decreased sense of accomplishment—as the sisters Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski write in their book Burnout, “the feeling that nothing you do makes a difference.”

Physical symptoms can include extreme fatigue, frequent headaches, and gastrointestinal problems. Mentally, burnout can show up as restlessness, an inability to pay attention, increased anger, and (literally) over 100 other ways. One of the most prominent symptoms is a near-constant feeling of numbness, that decreased sense of accomplishment. A nagging feeling that there’s more to do, yet you’re too exhausted to do it. Or at least do it as well as you’d like or are expected to.

It wasn’t until I started seeing a new therapist that I recognized many of these symptoms not only at work but also at home and in my relationships. In one of our first sessions, she introduced me to a type of therapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS), also known as “parts work.” I’d been talking in circles about how stressed I was about work, my parents, and dating.

“Where do you feel that stress in your body right now?” she asked. I took a few deep breaths and felt around internally. My neck and shoulders were tense, as though all my body’s energy was being squeezed up into my head.

“Is there a memory attached to that stress?” she asked. “What do you remember?” I remembered sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet a few feet from the television. (My parents had yet to figure out I needed glasses.) My mom was talking on the phone behind me in the kitchen. My dad’s lawnmower was buzzing outside. I could tell my mom was stressed about something, but I felt free, content, safe. She hung up the phone and walked over to me.

“They wanted to hold you back from first grade,” she said. “But I told them no. You can handle it.”

It felt like an alarm rang inside my body. My neck and shoulders tightened. My mom walked back into the kitchen, leaving me with all kinds of confusing questions. What did I do wrong? Why did they want to hold me back? Is Mom mad at me?

Looking back, at the core of my questions was shame. My mom wasn’t being mean. If anything, she was defending me. She believed in me, which should’ve felt empowering. But my little developing brain didn’t take it in that way. I got the opposite message: that I wasn’t enough. I felt ashamed that my teacher had been evaluating me from afar. From then on, I was going to at least appear as though I was on task and working hard. I didn’t want to feel that pain ever again

How therapy has helped me

Over the next few therapy sessions, we explored how this and other early experiences were shaping my behaviors as an adult. Using IFS, we identified a “part” of me that felt like I constantly had to prove that I was a hard worker. This striving part gives me a nagging sense that there’s something I should be doing right now. It guilts me for relaxing, even if I’m tired. It’s almost always whispering in my ear: “You should be checking email. You should be working on your house. You should be making more money. You should be lifting weights. You should be doing something, anything. You should be hustling, improving, grinding.”

In IFS, parts are internal subpersonalities we developed as children. They get “frozen in time … and keep doing whatever extreme things they did to protect [us] when [we] were young,” says Richard Schwartz, the therapist who developed IFS. Some of our parts—called “exiles” in IFS—are afraid of being hurt or feel the shame of having been hurt, so they hide. Others are like little managers trying to get us to behave. These managers are “like internalized children who are in over their heads and don’t know how else to run the whole [internal] family other than by yelling and criticizing,” says Schwartz.

My striving part is clearly a manager. It’s almost always on guard, from the moment I wake up to when I close my eyes to sleep. It’s why I have trouble truly resting, and why I often struggle to be present with others, even people I love deeply. It keeps me leaning toward the future to get to the next thing on my to-do list.

With my therapist’s help, I listened to what my striving part had to say, rather than just believing and getting caught up in its stories. I learned that it was terrified of me falling behind. It had gotten the message that if I fell behind, I’d end up a loser with no worth to anybody. Which made sense—if I’d been held back from first grade, I would’ve likely lost touch with many of my friends. At least that’s what my little kid brain thought at the time. But it was still worried about me now that I was an adult, even though I had plenty of friends and a successful career.

Then I began to notice a shift during therapy sessions. My body was more relaxed when I talked about my striving part. Even when I was stressed out about getting enough done at work—in IFS-speak, when I was “blended” with the part—there was a little less tension each time. I was able to “unblend” more often, realizing that the part’s stories were just thoughts in my mind, real but not necessarily true.

My therapist explained that the part was starting to trust me—my true “self,” not a part of me. The part saw that some of the changes I’d been making in my life were actually helping. My therapist had suggested prioritizing more creative work like writing, making sure I was getting to it first each day before doing mindless things like cleaning dishes and checking email. I’d also made a point to relax on Sundays, telling my striving part that rest would make me stronger on Mondays.

With my therapist’s help, I learned how to stop believing the extreme thoughts and beliefs my striving part wants me to believe. I’m not going to go broke if I spend a Sunday relaxing and watching football. I’m not going to die if I go for an aimless walk. I’m not going to lose everyone who matters to me if I set my to-do list to the side and give full attention to my partner at dinner—actually, it’s the opposite. In other words, after changing my relationship to my striving part, I learned how to actually, truly, finally rest.

Through the “parts work” of IFS, I’ve found more choice in how to respond when life gets challenging and my striving part takes over. Sometimes, striving, hustling, and grinding to get the next thing done is helpful and even necessary—often, though, it’s an automatic response that keeps me on the hamster wheel of my to-do list until I collapse.

This pandemic has been exhausting. As the physician Lucy McBride writes in a recent Atlantic article about burnout, “The work of living through a pandemic has been making us sick. As a primary-care doctor, I’m witnessing the physical-health toll of collective trauma.” I’m grateful that I have a new, more healthy way to relate to myself in these difficult times. I’ve found some ease amid shifting public health measures, social isolation, and the daily outpouring of bad news.

By noticing our emotions and bodily sensations related to burnout, and changing how we relate to ourselves, we can find a little ease, connect to our creativity, and better manage whatever life throws at us, even pandemics.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, therapist-in-training, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. Subscribe to my weekly email on how to be more mindful at your job, in your relationships, and when it comes to politics here.

If you’re in D.C. or Maryland, reach out for reduced-price online therapy: jeremy@jeremymohler.blog

Download my free ebook on how mindfulness can decrease your anxiety and transform your life.

Photo by D.Reichardt.