For some people new to the group, looking in, this may not seem like the right approach. A common reaction is to say: "I have real problems, these 'trivialities' aren't an issue for me..." or "The things that these guys complain about are unreal? Who cares about these little problems?"
Why Trivialities? Why Everyday Frustration?
Appreciating this choice of format for the meetings is important for understanding how you can change your thinking. Abraham Low's ideas regarding the focus on everyday situations are more accepted now than they were when he first wrote his books. If you've seen movies that feature a classical psychoanalyst talking to patients lying on a couch Low's ideas may seem unusual or overly simplistic. If you know anything about Sigmund Freud, who described the id, ego, and superego, the subconscious, and neuroses like the Oedipus and Electra complexes, you may think that "talk" therapies necessarily involve a complex exploration of your past and subconscious. Carl Jung and many of Freud's students and associates focused on examining ideas expressed through dreams that identify subconscious conflicts that a patient may not be aware of. While this is where psychoanalysis and talk therapies started, there are a number of limits to this approach.
Abraham Low was originally trained in the classical school of psychoanalysis, although he became frustrated with the approach early in his practice. He found that not only was it an exceptionally long procedure, but he also questioned its effectiveness. This is partly where his ideas for developing group counselling procedures came from and why he does not make any references to Freudian ideas, except that he generally disagrees with the effectiveness of the approach.
Low argues for the importance of examining simple scenarios, which he refers to as trivialities, because if average people are going to get well, they need a method that is easy to remember and understand. This doesn't necessarily mean that Low's books pander to simplistic ideas, or unsophisticated readers. Instead he emphasizes techniques that do not require degrees in literature, a grounding in the abstract operations of metaphor, archetypes, collective unconscious, transference theory, or the many other complex notions that Freud or Jung might have used as part of explaining a person's neurosis. There may be a place for these ideas, but they are too complex to discuss at a self-help meeting run by volunteers. Abraham Low argued that if these psychoanalytic ideas are too hard for a layperson to easily understand, or require extensive explanations, then they can't be of much use in dealing with practical problems in the lives of average people.
Step 1. Report a single situation or event that occurred- an everyday event when you began to work yourself up.
At meetings experienced members present examples of how they used self help tools in their everyday lives. The first step of presenting an example focuses on several details. We begin with a "report" of a single situation. Part of managing the anxiety or frustration that occurs in a situation involves maintaining a certain amount of objectivity, so we report the situation the way a security guard, scientist, lawyer, or police officer might. We try to be objective in our description of the scenario. The situation being described is small, and self contained, like a disagreement about who should deliver a letter. When reporting a situation we also acknowledge that "...you began to work yourself up." This detail is important, the person arguing with me about the letter didn't "make" me angry, and I didn't "get worked up", rather, as the disagreement happened, "I worked myself up." Taking ownership of our responses gives us the power to change our response.
The language used in this first step encourages you to be neutral in the description of the event, to keep the event self contained, and to acknowledge that you are the source of your feelings about the event. Our feelings may be heavily influenced by the details of what happened. It is of course quite natural to be receptive, reactive, and responsive to others, but the specific form of the actions we take in response to the scenarios we find ourselves in are up to us.
Learning is Easiest When We Remain Objective
Because our goal is to learn a method, its important to focus on simple events. When we are talking about the small and potentially manageable frustrations that we experienced when arguing about an inconsequential decision, like who should mail a letter, we can begin to recognize objectively that the negative feelings that we experience come from us. The other person does not control our mind, or inject thoughts, or create frustration within us. It might seem that the other person is the root of the problem, but by changing the way we describe the scenario we can begin to see that our response comes from within. In Low's terminology, the other person is the outer environment, our thoughts and responses are experienced as part of our inner environment.
It may be the case that the other person's behaviour towards us is unreasonable, abusive, or unfair. That is a reality of this world, sometimes people make absurd demands. When we practice with a simple situation like a disagreement about who should mail a letter, our investment in the situation is hopefully low, and we can reflect on how our feelings arose, and what we decided to do about them. This reflection on our initial response to the situation, and what we chose to do to address it, is where we can look for patterns in our own behaviour. We note our temperament, dispositions, and tendencies to situations and people. This helps to inform us of what sort of scenarios create issues for us. Family, and social situations represent common difficult scenarios, for example. Understanding our dispositions helps us to be prepared for our own reactions and not to be surprised when we feel our temper rise.
If we tried to practice with a very difficult situation, like a boyfriend who we catch having dinner with his ex-girlfriend on a night that he told us he had to work, its very difficult to observe the details of our response. In difficult situations, when we don't have access to self-help tools, we are easily overwhelmed. These situations are also infrequent, and while it might seem that the boyfriend who lied, or the friend who passed away, or the job that we were fired from is the root of our misery, it can be very difficult to use this kind of situation as a starting point. These very difficult situations are really the end point, once you learn a number of tools, you can begin to apply them to these hard situations. Just like learning to drive a car, we start with simple situations in a parking lot, not hard scenarios, like taking curves at 170 kph at the race track.
Our Lives are Filled with Trivial Events
When I was very depressed, every single thing I did seemed exceptionally difficult, in some ways this was my depression. Getting up in the morning was hard, so I didn't do it- I stayed in bed until noon or later. Doing my dishes was hard, so I avoided it and let them pile up. Going to school or work was unpleasant, so I stopped. Everything was unpleasant, everything was frustrating, nothing was going well. Of course I wanted all of it to get better, that is how everyone feels- they want all their problems to go away. However, if you have developed a lot of unproductive habits in part as a result of not feeling well, and are stuck in certain negative cycles, you may find the totality of your life exceptionally difficult and want everything fixed but have no clue where to start.
I used to believe that there was probably some fundamental misunderstanding, a puzzle piece which if I could just drop it in place these things would go away. Perhaps the right job, girlfriend, insight into my past, new place to live... I didn't know what was missing, but if I found it, things would go smoothly. Maybe, but guessing the ingredients for a good dinner is probably easier than guessing the ingredients for a good life. I've made a lot of bad meals when I didn't use a recipe, so the idea that I will just stumble upon the missing piece in my life through trial and error isn't a plan I have much faith in.
The self-help-tools described by Low ask us to start with small events, things that we can easily identify, and recognize that our life is filled with them. We focus on scenarios where we worked-ourselves-up. If we aren't handling simple things well, like phone calls, dishes, taking public transit, requests from family, talking to strangers at a shop, keeping our home organized, doing mundane chores, and the many other small things in our lives, our world can become a big mess. If every thing we do seems fraught with danger, and has an emergency quality to it, then our existence can become a horror show.
Big Events are Rare, and May Require the Assistance of a Professional
Coming to meetings and learning self-help-tools ought to be just one of the strategies that you use to understand difficult feelings. We also recognize that many members who are suffering may be experiencing intrusive thoughts related to difficult situations, or alternately may have numbed themselves out so they feel very little of anything at all. There are many professionals who can speak to you privately about intensely difficult situations or extremely upsetting emotions that you may be experiencing. In our self-help meetings we are not able to address certain non-trivial events; things like a death in the family, dealing with an abusive spouse or parent, suicidal feelings, traumatic horrors from your childhood, or the many other real and difficult situations that members struggle with. There is space to talk about these events, and we don't advocate suppressing your feelings, or pretending that things are okay when they are not okay, but there are certain limits to what we can discuss in our group forum.
Many of our members have struggled with serious traumas in their past. These members will attest to their ability to apply the techniques learned in meetings and practiced through everyday scenarios as the same tools that helped them through their most difficult times. Changing how you think takes work, and we approach it through an incremental process focused on everyday average events. Start small, think of the last thing that happened today that was frustrating, that you wanted to avoid, or that left you feeling down. We accept our initial responses to these situations, and apply simple rules of thumb, like being group minded, keeping our expectations reasonable, and when possible not taking ourselves too seriously. While we can't always control our initial response, we can control what we think, say and do, and we start at the beginning with something trivial.
In "Manage your Fears Manage your Anger", Lecture 13, Dr. Low says:
Well, do you understand now that this matter of being average, or this matter of averageness, is not merely a phrase. And if anybody wants to look down his nose on Recovery and say, "Look here, they talk trivialities," then I’ll agree with him. We talk trivialities, and it is these trivialities which touch on averageness, and it is the principle of averageness that makes you human and healthy. And I will advise you, don’t expect that your condition, being as complex as it is— and I don't deny that—requires complex methods to check it and to conquer it. That’s not so. The simple method is always the superior procedure.
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