I’ve loved these words of Keith Richards ever since I first read them over ten years ago. And, ever since I first read them, I’ve wondered why I love them.

Is it because I listen for a living? Do I feel my work is validated by a great musician’s belief in the importance of listening?
I love listening to music but I gave up playing guitar many years ago when I realized I would never be good at it. Do I feel Keith is saying that I can have just as deep and rich an experience of music by listening to it as a more musically talented person can have by playing it?

In the last few months, I’ve been  learning to sing bluegrass harmony. Each time I move on to the next song on the instructional CD, I find I can’t hear the notes of the harmony line. Each time, I’m ready to give up because I feel like I’m never going to hear them. I tell myself  I should be content with appreciating the elements of music I hear easily–melody, rhythm and timbre–and give up on trying to hear the harmony.
But it’s not in my nature to give up on things. So, each time I become discouraged, I decide to just listen to whatever track I’m working on over and over again and to keep listening even when I’m not making any progress. I just listen.  I don’t strain to try to hear the harmony notes. I just listen and hear whatever I hear.
Eventually, I start to  hear some of the harmony notes. At first, I hear only a few of them. With repeated listening, I hear all of them.

Through this process, I’ve discovered two things.  I’ve found that, as soon as I can hear the harmony line, I can sing it. No further effort is required.
And, once I can hear the harmony, I don’t have to listen for it anymore. I just hear it. It’s just there.
No matter how many times I experience it, this process seems magical to me. Something that wasn’t there is suddenly, unexpectedly there. The fact that it actually was there all along but that I couldn’t hear it and that then, suddenly and inexplicably,  I could, makes it feel even more magical to me.

In a recent New York Times article (Jonathan Alpert, “In Therapy Forever? Enough Already”, April 21, 2012) the author, a psychotherapist,  writes, “If a patient comes to me and tells me she’s been unhappy with her boyfriend for the past year, I don’t ask, as some might, ‘How do you feel about that?’ I already know how she feels about that. She just told me. She’s unhappy….My aim is to give patients the skills needed to confront their fear of change, rather than to ask how they feel”.

Sometimes, this straightforward, uncomplicated  approach to emotions is exactly what a person needs. She’s singing a familiar melody and just needs help learning a few  of the words. More  often than not, however, it’s really important to listen for the harmony line.  What, exactly, is this woman’s unhappiness with her boyfriend? Is she bored, disappointed, hurt, angry? If she’s angry, what is she angry about? Why does she get angry when her boyfriend is late but not when he doesn’t return her texts? Why does her anger contain a tinge of sadness?

Keith Richards’ reverence for the musicians who influenced him–Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Chuck Berry– is well known. A Keith Richards psychotherapy treats each individual with reverence by listening and listening and listening until we hear.

Bruce Springsteen, “The Ties That Bind”

These lyrics from Bruce Springsteen describe the aching ambivalence that many people feel about romantic relationships. To me, they also describe how many people feel about finding their life purpose. On the one hand, they’re looking for the ties that bind—the commitments that will define them and give their life direction, the ones that they can’t break away from because to do so would be to  break with themselves. On the other hand, they can’t break the ties that bind them to whatever keeps them from finding their life purpose. As Springsteen describes so eloquently, they can’t break the tie to their fear. Sometimes, as I discussed in my recent blog posts, the fear is fear of humiliation, “of being somebody’s fool”. But sometimes the fear is a fear of not being cool enough.

In my last post, I talked about how you may have come to feel that there is something wrong with you,that you are somehow “bad” and need to fix yourself before you can find your life purpose. As I said in that post, there are many ways that people can feel bad about themselves. Often, these have to do with very specific qualities that, they believe, make them inadequate. They’re too fat. They’re not good looking enough. They’re not successful enough.

However, there is another way of feeling bad that, in my experience, is just as common as the belief that some specific quality they have or lack makes them bad. This is the belief that what’s most wrong with them is their own feelings.

This belief can take many forms. Among people in their 20’s and 30’s, one of the main forms it takes is the belief that their feelings mean they’re not “cool”.

I once worked with a man who really wanted to be an English professor.* Instead, he worked in financial services. When we first started talking about his career choice, he explained that the money in business was simply too good to walk away from. He had fully intended to go back to graduate school once he felt he had made enough money to feel financially secure. But, as his thirties began to turn into his forties, he felt increasingly that it was too late to make this change—that he had become too accustomed to the money and the lifestyle to give them up.

The more we discussed his choices, however, the more it became clear that there was another fear in the room and that this fear was at least as powerful as the fear of taking a pay cut. “Dan”, as I’ll call him, had loved books and reading from the time he was in elementary school. He was also good looking and a good athlete. When he started to be included in the activities of the “cool” kids, he came to feel that showing that he cared about reading and intellectual pursuits in general could rapidly banish him to the ranks of the uncool. He started to pretend that he didn’t care. He continued to do well in school but he no longer felt or displayed the passion for learning that he had had when he was younger.

When Dan went to college, he allowed himself to major in English and to recover his passion for literature. However, as he neared graduation, he applied for jobs on Wall Street instead of to graduate school. Consciously, he feared that he would never get an acacemic job. But unconsciously, we discovered, his deeper fear was that being a professor would consign him to the ranks of the permanently uncool.

I don’t want to deny that there are realistic limitations to pursuing your life path. Sometimes people have to find a way of supporting themselves before they can turn their attention to what they really want to do. But I think it’s important to know when realistic concerns are keeping you from doing what you’d love to do and when you’re being driven by fear, including the fear of not being cool. In the end, our lives are poorer if we forsake the ties that bind.

*I want to repeat here what I say on my home page:  I would never write about an actual person I’ve worked with in these pages. Therapy relationships are confidential. These vignettes are meant to illustrate issues I’ve encountered in my work. They are not descriptions of specific people.

In my last post, I talked about how depression caused by lack of adequate mirroring can forestall the process of finding your life purpose. If you don’t expect to be positively responded to by the people who matter to you, it is extremely difficult to feel that you matter and that you can make a difference in the world.

But there is a second, even more insidious, way that inadequate responses from parents and other caregivers can interfere with the process of finding your life path. It was described most eloquently by the British psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn who said, “It’s better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God that to live in a world ruled by the devil”.

Fairbairn was reflecting on the fact that, as young children, we are completely dependent upon our caregivers for our survival. If the people upon whom we are so dependent are abusive or neglectful, we have no control over them. This thought is simply too frightening to entertain.

The only way to maintain a sense of control–albeit an illusory one–is to believe that we are being treated badly because we are bad. So, when we don’ t get the responses from our caregivers that we need, we conclude there must be something wrong with us. We tell ourselves that we’re too needy, too selfish, too sensitive, too difficult–anything that shifts the responsibility for our suffering from our caregivers to us. As one of my favorite psychological thinkers, Robert Stolorow, puts it, we “blame [our] own reactive states for the injuries that produced them”.

I’m not encouraging you to stop blaming yourself for the things in your life that cause you suffering and to blame your parents instead. Therapy is not about assigning blame. Believing that there’s something seriously wrong with you, however, can be a major obstacle to finding your life path. Indeed, in my experience, it is the most serious obstacle people confront. It turns your attention away from finding a meaningful life purpose to trying to figure out and fix what’s wrong with you.

In future posts, I’ll discuss the many ways you might come to feel that there is something wrong with you and how you might change these feelings. Here I simply want to encourage you to consider the idea that your feeling that there is something wrong with you might have less to do with your actual shortcomings than with beliefs about yourself that you had to develop for the sake of your own emotional survival. While you needed those beliefs when you were completely dependent on others for your survival , you don’t need them now. Release from paralyzing self-blame is a crucial step in the process of finding your life purpose.

Don’t ever treat me unkind

‘Cause I had that trouble already

And it left me with a dark turn of mind.”  Gillian Welch, “Dark Turn of Mind”

In my last post, I talked about how all of us need people in our lives who “mirror” us–who see and admire us for who we are.  I also talked about how a  lack of  mirroring can lead to an inability to develop sustaining ambitions. Without some sense of ambition–of the feeling that we’re important enough to have goals that we want to accomplish in our lives–it’s very difficult to develop a sense of life purpose.

I want to be clear about what I mean by being ambitious. Ambitiousness is often confused with grandiosity or selfishness. But when I talk about having ambitions, I’m not talking about being grandiose, about being full of yourself and believing that you’re better than other people. I’m also not talking about selfishness. I don’t believe that the only thing you should care about in life is your own success. Our ambitions always need to be tempered by our concerns for other people and by our ethical values.  I do believe, however, that, without some sense of ambition, it’s very difficult to believe in ourselves enough to feel that our life purpose is important and that we can realize it in the world.

Two of the most common feelings that prevent people from developing their ambitions are anxiety and depression. These feelings can take many forms and I’ll talk about them in other posts. But, in this post, I want to focus on how a lack of mirroring can lead to the kind of depression that can undermine your ambitions and keep your from realizing your life purpose.

When I was a psychology intern, I worked with a severely depressed mother and her one year old daughter. When I first started working with this family, the daughter was a bright, engaging infant. She would smile when she first saw me and immediately try to engage me. Soon, however, the mother would put her daughter down for a nap before I came to the house. I felt that she didn’t want to have to share our  time with  her daughter.

Often, the daughter would wake up before I left the house. She would cry and then whimper, trying to get her mother to come to her, but her mother wouldn’t respond. Eventually, the little girl would give up trying to get her mother to come and would wait silently in her crib until, I assume, her mother came to her after I left the house.

Over the course of the several years I worked with this family–and, unfortunately, despite all of my efforts to help this mother enjoy and respond to her child–I saw the daughter become progressively less enthusiastic and willing to engage. I feared she was on the course to becoming a depressed child.

Though this is an example of an extreme situation, I hope it illustrates how a lack of mirroring can contribute to the kind of depression that undermines our sense of initiative and purpose. In this situation, the lack of mirroring was caused by the mother’s depression. In other situations, it can be caused by a parent’s anxiety or by things that are going on in parents’ lives that make it impossible for them to respond to their children in the ways the children need. The crucial point is that, as with the little girl I worked with, a lack of sufficient mirroring can lead to a feeling that it’s not worth it to try, that nothing you do will produce the results you want.

Though it may seem that I’ve described a hopeless situation, I want to emphasize that history is not destiny. A good therapy relationship can both help you understand the causes of the depression that is keeping you from finding your life purpose. And, while no therapy relationship can make up for what a parent was unable to provide, a good one can give you experiences of mirroring that can help relieve your depression and set you back on course to realizing your ambitions and finding your life path.

And introduced as friends

Please don’t let on that you knew me when

I was hungry and it was your world.” Bob Dylan, “Just Like A Woman”

In this verse from “Just Like A Woman”, Bob Dylan  describes a situation most of us have experienced at some time in our lives. We feel an intense desire for someone, wear our hearts on our sleeves and then feel humiliated when we’re rejected. Though Dylan describes this situation with particular eloquence, the world of popular music is filled with songs that express all the variations on the feelings of humiliation we can feel when we put ourselves out there in personal relationships only to be ignored or actively rejected.

Much less common in popular music–in fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of any examples at the moment, though I’m sure they exist–is any description of the very similar feelings of humiliation we can experience when we passionately pursue our life purpose. What are  these feelings of humiliation and why do they come up so often when we commit ourselves to taking a particular life path?

An example from everyday life might help to begin to answer this question. I had a friend who would never honk her car horn under any circumstances. She certainly wouldn’t do it if she felt that the car ahead of her was going too slowly or if she was feeling impatient. But she wouldn’t even do it when someone walked into the crosswalk as she was turning a corner. When we would talk about it, she would always describe the same feeling. She felt that, if she honked the horn, everyone would look at her and this made her so uncomfortable that she couldn’t do it.

Fortunately, my friend was a very good driver and I never felt that she was endangering anyone by refusing to honk. But she herself felt that she was being  ”irrational” and that she should just get over her fear of having people notice her. She knew that, in fact, it was highly unlikely that anyone  would actually pay attention to her because she honked her horn and, even if they did, she didn’t know why it should matter to her. It wasn’t as if she was doing anything wrong. Nonetheless, it was a short step from maligning herself for being irrational to telling herself she should just  get over it, to not getting over it and, finally,to feeling bad about herself for not getting over it.

In my work, I have seen many people struggle with similar feelings when they’re looking for or trying to express their life’s passion. One obvious way people can experience this is when the thing they want to do requires them to be the center of attention–being a performer, for example, or, for some people, standing up in front of a classroom or some other audience. Often people are afraid to be noticed in these situations because they’re afraid of performing badly and being ridiculed.

But this feeling also comes up for people whose passions don’t require them to be out in front of people on a regular basis. And it often comes up more intensely when they’re doing well than when they’re doing badly.  These are the situations where the fear of humiliation, ridicule–shame, really–  can seem most irrational and inexplicable.

One of my favorite  psychological thinkers is the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. One of Kohut’s many important contributions to our understanding of human experience was his belief that human beings have lifelong needs for experiences of what he called “mirroring”. All of us need to be seen accurately by others and to have the qualities we value in ourselves recognized by other people. Kohut thought that no one needs or can receive perfect mirroring throughout their lives. But if we receive mirroring that is good enough, if we’ve had a consistent enough experience of what he called “the gleam in the mother’s eye”,  we develop confidence in ourselves and our abilities to be successful in the world. We develop ambitions for ourselves that are both sturdy and realistic.

But what happens if we don’t receive adequate mirroring in childhood or later in our lives? This is a more complicated story. We certainly don’t develop a resilient sense of self-confidence or sustaining ambitions. But something more insidious also occurs. If we consistently experience ourselves as not being mirrored by the people who matter to us,  we don’t tend to fault those other people. Especially when we’re children and we don’t receive adequate mirroring from our parents, we don’t blame our parents. It simply feels too dangerous to think that the people we depend on could be so incapable of meeting our basic emotional needs. So, instead, we blame ourselves.

Once we start down this road of self-blame, we can feel very exposed any time we show that we really care about something. Unconsciously, we’re expecting to be met with the same indifference or rejection that we experienced as children. And since the self-blame we experience when our needs for mirroring aren’t met is so painful, we decide that it’s easier to just not let things matter so much. We deny our ambitions and, with them, our life purpose.

As I hope you can tell from this brief description, these issues of ambition, shame and life purpose often play themselves out without our realizing what’s going on. You can end up having feelings of depression, flatness, lack of motivation, insecurity and frustration and have very little idea of how to feel better. A good therapy relationship can help you to understand that these feelings are not your fault and help to get you back on the road to realizing your ambitions and your life purpose.

In my previous blog posts, I’ve talked about how you can know if you’re on the right track to finding your life path. I’ve talked about the importance of doing what matters to you and not just what you’re good at. And I’ve talked about how you can know that something really matters to you.

I’ve also talked about some of the obstacles you may confront when you decide you want to do something that matters to you. These include 1) feeling like a failure when you’re doing something that isn’t a good fit for you; 2) feeling that life doesn’t afford you enough opportunities to do something that matters to you; 3) feeling that you won’t be good at what you’ve chosen to do; 4) protecting yourself from taking emotional risks and  5) feeling afraid to feel good.

This is not an inclusive list. There are many obstacles that people confront when they’re trying to find their life purpose. But what all of these obstacles have in common is that they involve a sense of emotional danger. All of these dangers, including the fear of feeling glad you’re alive, are really subsets on of one overarching danger–the fear of being passionate, of really caring about something.

In my upcoming posts, I’m going to talk about each of these dangers in detail. Here I want to give you a preview of what I’m going to talk about by describing some of the most common emotional obstacles you can face when you’re trying to find your life purpose.

Emotional obstacles to finding your life purpose:

1. You may be afraid that being passionate about something means that you’re “too big”– that you’re too ambitious, that you want too much, that you want more than your fair share of what the world has to offer. If you feel this way, you may think that, rather than feeling passionate about something, you need to take yourself down a notch.

2. Conversely, you may feel that you‘re too small. You may feel that you’re not important enough to have a life  purpose of your own. Or you may feel that you don’t matter enough to other people to be able to get the support you need to be able to pursue your life purpose. You may be very good at taking care of other people’s emotional needs but  feel unworthy of having your own. If that’s the case, you may end up convincing yourself to accept your life as it is, even if it’s not what you really want.

3. You may have a fear of intolerable disappointment. If you allow yourself to hope for more from life, what will you do when the inevitable disappointments occur? Will you be able to handle them? If you’re convinced that you won’t be able to deal with setbacks, you may convince yourself that it’s not worth trying.

4.You might be afraid  that really caring about something will make you too anxious. If you or other people become invested in what matters to you, you might worry too much about how you’re doing to be able to actually enjoy it. You might conclude that it’s better to be cool and not let anything matter that much than to run the risk of experiencing what feels like intolerable anxiety.

In my upcoming posts, I’ll talk about each of these fears and some strategies for addressing them so that they don’t become overwhelming obstacles to finding your life purpose.

“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” is one of my favorite lines from any song I know. I often quote it to people I see in my psychotherapy practice because it so accurately captures their struggle to find happiness and their life purpose.

For many people, one of the biggest obstacles to finding their life purpose is that they become uncomfortable when they feel happy. I know this sounds strange. Isn’t happiness what we all want? It is. But for many people, feeling the happiness that goes along with finding their life path–feeling joy, contentment, a sense of expansiveness– can also feel very dangerous. Usually, they’re not aware of the danger. Instead, they find themselves sabotaging their goals without knowing why. Just when they’ve finished creating something that they think is great– a song, an essay, a piece of art– they decide that it’s terrible and throw it away. Just when they complete a graduate degree, they decide they’ve chosen the wrong field. Just when they’ve accomplished something that’s important to them, they decide it doesn’t matter and give it up.

What I love about “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” is that people who struggle to hold onto a feeling of happiness often feel that it IS a sin to be happy. Without being aware of it, they feel that their happiness threatens important relationships in their lives. They may have had a depressed parent who felt abandoned when they began to pursue their own interests. They may have had an anxious parent who conveyed the idea that the world is a dangerous place where pursuing your goals will only get you in trouble. Every person’s experience is different. But if you are having trouble finding your life purpose, the issue may not be that you just haven’t found the right thing to do with your life. It may be that you feel that it’s wrong to feel good. If that’s the case, your life path may be right in front of you but you can’t see it because it feels dangerous to feel the happiness that goes along with pursuing your life purpose.

If you think this is true for you, I encourage you to consider psychotherapy. Because feeling that it’s a sin to be glad you’re alive is often unconscious- and because the sources of this feeling are even more unconscious– having someone who can help you identify the things that are keeping you stuck can be invaluable in helping you get on the path to finding happiness in your life purpose. It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive. Really.

1) You’re willing to put in a lot more work than is actually required;

2) You’re willing to give up other things that are important to you—time with my friends, going out, free time—in order to do what matters to you;

3) You’re motivated primarily by internal satisfactions , not external ones;

4)   You’re willing to take risks;

5) You choose to do something that you would  not choose to do in another context .

At the end of the post, I briefly mentioned that many people who are searching for their purpose in life wish they could have this kind of experience but haven’t had it and don’t know how to go about getting it. If you’re one of those people, you may feel

Confused—why don’t you have it when other people do?

Hopeless—if you haven’t figured it out by now, why should you expect that you’ll be able to figure it out at all?

Wrong—you must have done something wrong. What other explanation is there?

You may be feeling confused and hopeless but you’re not wrong. If anything, my experience is that you’ve been doing something right—namely, protecting yourself from experiences that you feel could be very dangerous.

I’m not talking about physical danger—e.g., that you haven’t become a NASCAR driver because you’re afraid of crashing. I’m talking about emotional danger—most likely, the danger of feeling shamed and humiliated.

Have you ever worked really hard on something only to get a critical or indifferent response?

Do you ever make sacrifices and feel unappreciated?

Were you discouraged from knowing what you really liked and encouraged to do what was expected—make money, please a parent, etc?

Were you ever shamed for taking risks?

All of these experiences can make you feel that it’s too risky to do what really matters to you. One way of protecting yourself from doing it is to not even let yourself know what you care about. In order to find what matters to you, then, you need to feel safe. Since, as the examples above show, these feelings of lack of safety begin in relationships—with parents, siblings, teachers, coaches, etc.—it usually takes having a different kind of relationship to allow you to feel safe enough to let things matter. Sometimes you can get this from a partner or a friend but it is also what a good therapy relationship provides. Unfortunately, people often avoid therapy because they’re afraid of experiencing the very same shame and humiliation they experienced in other relationships. So, if you want to have a life that matters but you’re afraid of taking the risk of therapy, how can you know whether a therapy relationship will be safe for you? I’ll talk about this in a future post.

No matter how many roads you’ve gone down in search of your life path, I believe you can find the one that’s right for you. But, when you’re feeling stuck, it can be very hard to have the faith that any of the roads you’ve taken is ever going to lead anywhere.

In earlier blogs, I alluded to some ways that you might get stuck when you’re trying to find your life path. You might feel conflicted about making the decision that you know is right for you. You might never have experienced the kind of passion that would lead you to your life path. You might feel like a failure even though you’re really doing something that’s just not a good fit for you.

In my next few posts, I want to talk about each of these ways of getting stuck—about where you might be in your life and how you might have gotten there. In future posts, I’ll talk about how you might find ways to move on.

Crossroads

“I got the crossroad blues this mornin’/I’m sinkin’ down.” Robert Johnson, Cross Road Blues

Are you at a place in your life where you want to change direction? Do you have a sense of where you want to go? Are you having trouble making the change, even though you’re pretty sure it’s the right thing to do?

If your answer to these questions is “yes”, you’re having what I call a “crossroads” experience. You’re standing at the intersection of your old road and your new one. The old road has taken you as far as you can go but you can’t get yourself to start down the new one.

How did you get here? Why can’t you get on the right road?

There is no general, one-size-fits all answer to this question. You are a unique individual. You’re here, at your own crossroads, for your own reasons.

But, when you’re feeling stuck, it often helps to know that you’re not alone. So, while none of these examples might perfectly describe you and your situation, here are some ways that I’ve seen people get stuck. What they have in common is that they all present a kind of self-esteem test: Can you feel good enough about yourself to make the change you want to make? These crossroads self-esteem tests take two basic forms:

1. The scarcity self-esteem test: Sometimes people can’t make the change they know is right for them because they’re afraid there isn’t enough out there. If you’re thinking of leaving your salaried job for self-employment, you might be anxious that there won’t be enough work for you. If you’re in a creative field, you might worry that there’s too much competition for the work that is available. No matter what you want to do, you worry that there won’t be enough to go around.
2. The failure self-esteem test: If worries about scarcity are rooted in the feeling that there isn’t enough to go around, fear of failure is rooted in the worry that you are not enough—that you’re not talented enough, smart enough, attractive enough, something enough—to be able to take the path you know is right for you.

If you recognize yourself in one of these descriptions, how do you change your sense of yourself? How do you move from a feeling of scarcity to the feeling that you’ll be able to get what you need? From a sense that you’re failure to a sense of self-confidence? From feeling like a fraud to feeling authentic? In future blogs, I’ll talk about ways of moving past the crossroads and down the road that’s right for you.

I experienced writer’s block for the first time when I finished graduate school and started teaching at Indiana University. When I got to Indiana, I was expected to revise my dissertation for publication. After a year and a half of work, I had revised less than half of it. By the middle of my second year at IU, my senior colleagues were expressing concern that I was falling so far behind schedule that my chances of being recommended for tenure were in jeopardy. I began to feel like a failure.

Mixed-Up Confusion

When I look back on that time now, I realize that I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I knew I was supposed to write articles. I saw my colleagues, who had been hired at the same time I was, writing and publishing all the time. But I didn’t know how to do it. I couldn’t think of topics to write about. I couldn’t figure out how to break down large topics into manageable ones. I didn’t have any sense of who my audience was. I felt like I had hit a wall and was banging my head against it over and over again.

When I started thinking about leaving my job and becoming a therapist, I decided to do some kind of volunteer work in mental health to see if I enjoyed it. I began working at a suicide prevention center. Even though I had no background or experience, I loved the work from the day I started. I loved connecting with people, learning about their lives and helping them get through the night. I loved learning new skills. I loved talking with my co-workers about our work. Even though, at that point, I was much more skilled and had much more experience as an academic, I felt trapped by academic work. On Thursday nights at the suicide prevention center, new possibilities for connection and learning were constantly opening up in front of me. Twenty-one years later, working in my own practice, I feel the same way every day.

“There’s no success like failure/And failure’s no success at all”.

Once I was working at the suicide prevention center, I no longer felt like a failure as an academic. Instead, I realized that academics was a bad fit for me. I was a misfit, not a failure.

One way to know that you’ve found your life path is that you experience a sense of possibility on a regular basis. It’s very hard to describe this experience in words. You might think of it as the experience of new horizons continually opening up or the next step on your path constantly revealing itself. One crucial aspect of this experience is that it feels effortless. It’s the opposite of banging your head against the same wall over and over again.

If you regularly experience this sense of possibility in your life, chances are good that you’re on the path that’s right for you. If you don’t, you might think about whether a change is in order. And, if you feel a change is in order but you feel confused about how to make it, psychotherapy can help you get on the right road.

As always, thanks to Bob Dylan for the song title (“Mixed-Up Confusion) and the lyrics (“Love Minus Zero/No Limit”).