http://www.evolutioncounseling.com/

Evolution Counseling, Seattle, WA (2025)

07/08/2019

What happens with so many distressed couples is that partners start to experience a lot of doubt about the long-term prospects of the relationship and they feel compelled to voice this doubt. They rationalize their behavior on the grounds that they’re just trying to be honest about how they’re feeling.

But look, feelings come and feelings go. How you feel about certain subjects today, including your relationship, probably won’t be the same as how you feel tomorrow or next week or next month or how you felt yesterday or last week or last month. Feelings certainly play an essential role in life but they can also be tricksters, and they often lead us astray from the choices that would be best for our growth and happiness long-term.

People in relationships who are having doubts should forget about that suddenly noble desire to be completely honest and instead focus on what’s really important, which is giving the relationship a fair shake by working to increase their partners’ sense of security rather than chipping away at those foundations. A sense of security is the bedrock of any healthy relationship. That sense of security really boils down to the firmly held belief that in good times and in bad your partner is going to have your back and isn’t going anywhere. When you really believe this you feel free to be yourself, to let your hair down, to let go the painful anxiety produced from the threat of rupture constantly hanging over your head. You can relax, be playful, take more risks, show your soft emotional underbelly. Do all the things that tend to increase intimacy in relationships.

When people start constantly wondering when the other shoe is going to drop their behavior changes in ways small and big as a result, and it’s usually this changed behavior that their partners use as final justification for actually leaving the relationship. But that behavior was produced in large part by the threat of dissolution! This is a trick all abusers have up their sleeves actually. Their abuse produces certain changes in their victims, and then abusers turn around and use these changes as a rationale for their abusive behavior.

Now we aren’t calling people who threaten to break up with their partners abusers. But we are qualifying that threatening to break up behavior as abusive in that it instills doubt in order to maintain control. It’s usually not purposefully abusive of course, and like we said, from the perspectives of the people making the threat it’s the exact opposite of abuse, it’s noble, shining honesty.

But if you think your relationship has the slightest chance of making it, if you still believe there’s something there and that it’s worth fighting for, then one of your primary goals has got to be to make your partner feel secure in the relationship so that conditions can be fostered where you get to see and interact with the best in your partner rather than the worst, where you get to interact with he fun loving, carefree side rather than the anxiety ridden, suspicious side. We all have those two sides to us, and it’s environmental conditions just as much as our own intentions that that pull them out of us.

So you’ve got to resolve to never say those words again, even if you’re thinking them, because once they’re said they can’t be unsaid and they’re a slow poison that seeps into the fabric of the relationship. Deciding you want to give your relationship ‘a chance’ but holding that threat of leaving over your partner’s head in the meantime isn’t really giving it a chance at all. You’re backing your partner into an untenable corner, you’re putting your partner off balance. Cornered animals act a lot differently, as we all know. Giving your relationship a chance is actively working to build up your partner’s sense of security and through various relationship affirming behaviors not chopping your partner’s sense of security off at the knees.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/help-partner-feel-secure-relationship/

What happens with so many distressed couples is that partners start to experience a lot of doubt about the long-term prospects of the relationship and they feel compelled to voice this doubt. They rationalize their behavior on the grounds that they’re just trying to be honest about how they’re f...

07/03/2019

https://evolutioncounseling.com/breaking-a-bad-habit-the-buddha-way/

A Bad Habit is Like Bait The Buddha uses the image of bait to help us break those bad habits that spring from our unhealthy, destructive drives and motivations. Once we recognize that there’s a hook in there the bait ceases to tempt us, even though its outside appearance remains unchanged. When we...

06/28/2019

Many of us carry around our unfinished grief our whole lives. We don’t give ourselves permission to grieve because we’re afraid of what letting down our guard might do to us. Grief is a dark, unknown abyss and the secret fear is that if we allow ourselves to sink into it we’ll never find our way back out.

Of course we usually rationalize away the fear as just needing to remain strong for ourselves and our loved ones, or as having too many pressing duties and responsibilities, or as not wanting to be sissies. We might tell ourselves we should just be able to get over it, or that other people out there have things far worse than we do. Whatever the rationalization may be the real reason we don’t walk through the door of grief is that we’re afraid, afraid to let ourselves be vulnerable, afraid to unleash those profoundly powerful thoughts and emotions, afraid to say goodbye.

The fear is understandable but the truth is that grief is the universal human response to loss, it’s something all of us must confront at various times throughout the lifespan. The abnormal state of affairs is not sinking into grief, the abnormal state of affairs is trying to put a lid on the grief experience. We fear that letting ourselves grieve will result in dysfunction but just the opposite is true. Dysfunction arises from carrying that unfinished grief around for months or years or our whole lives. The dysfunction resulting from unfinished grief might be a little harder to spot than some of the severe and persistent mental health disorders but it’s there, it affects the quality of our relationships, it affects how we see and respond to the world, it affects our sense of Self, it affects our ability to derive joy out of our experiences, it affects the projects we undertake or the projects we don’t undertake.

It takes courage to push through the rationalizations to just let ourselves grieve without censure or judgment in order to finally get to a place where we can say goodbye to how things were and move forward with our changed circumstances as they are. We worry that we’ll drown in our grief but refusing to grieve is itself a prolonged drowning. Only by submerging ourselves fully in our grief can we make it back to the shore.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/give-yourself-permission-to-grieve/

Many of us carry around our unfinished grief our whole lives. We don’t give ourselves permission to grieve because we’re afraid of what letting down our guard might do to us. Grief is a dark, unknown abyss and the secret fear is that if we allow ourselves to sink into it we’ll never find our ....

06/27/2019

The standard Western strategy for dealing with feeling unlovable is to try to banish the feeling and then replace it with self-love through various external channels like popularity, achievement, power, or money. But there are two huge problems with this strategy.

The first huge problem is that ‘banishing’ the feeling usually means recurring to the psychological defense mechanisms of repression, projection, or both. With repression a discomfiting thought or feeling is buried in the unconscious. With projection a discomfiting thought or feeling is transferred to a person or structure in the external world. But when it comes to the psyche, that which is buried or transferred is never really lost, never really forgotten. While repression and projection do provide some temporary relief through disowning that which seems too painful to own, these thoughts and feelings never truly go away they simply become less accessible to conscious awareness. They operate from the shadows, they do their work under cover of darkness.

The second huge problem is that self-love needs to be generated from the inside out not the outside in. It can’t start with the desperate need for or scrambling after external validation in its various forms. Because whether conscious or not, even when external validation that could increase self-love is achieved it bumps up against and is easily repelled by those deep seated feelings of unlovability, feelings that have a firm, unwavering hold over the psyche. After all, they’ve never been adequately dealt with since they’re constantly repressed or projected precisely so that they don’t have to be dealt with.

So the paradox is that the path to increasing self-love is not trying to banish the feeling of unlovability but rather starting from a place of radical acceptance and non-judgment where those discomfiting thoughts and feelings are invited into conscious awareness rather than booted out of conscious awareness. It all starts with people giving themselves permission to admit how they feel about themselves. It all starts with having the courage to embrace that brokenness rather than recurring to those tempting psychological defense mechanisms. From a place of radical acceptance and non-judgment people tend to get really curious about how and why those feelings of unlovability were instilled. They start to look for the deeper sources of those deep seated feelings. They start challenging the authenticity of the unlovable narrative. We have found that increasing self-love is a natural outgrowth of that fearless journey of self-discovery.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/increasing-self-love/

The standard Western strategy for dealing with feeling unlovable is to try to banish the feeling and then replace it with self-love through various external channels like popularity, achievement, power, or money. But there are two huge problems with this strategy. The first huge problem is that ‘b...

06/26/2019

Whatever we place under the microscope gets larger. Or at least it seems to get larger; in actuality it remains the exact same size it always was. What this has to do with narrative therapy is that when people are in the process of constructing and living out new, more desirable, more productive life narratives they’re pretty much guaranteed to falter once in a while, to slide back into the old ways of doing things, the unwanted ways they’re trying to leave behind.

It’s all too easy for various members in the community to zero in on a bad data point and sort of blow it out of proportion, to use it as confirmation that the old narrative is the real narrative and to simultaneously ignore or minimize all of those good data points that have been occurring.

So the goal, whether you’re the person attempting to live out a new preferred life narrative or you’re in a supporting role helping someone bring about that new preferred life narrative, has got to be to refuse to let one bad data point infect the new narrative. You’ve got to refuse that compelling siren song, to categorize what goes wrong as an exception to the new rule not as further proof of the old rule.

Because setbacks are inevitable. We’re asking the impossible of ourselves or others to demand a flawless, perfect transition where none of those old unwanted behaviors ever show up again. That’s wishful thinking, not reality. The reality is that we’re all flawed human beings who screw up sometimes. Often those of us who get away with it have a community that considers setbacks to be exceptions not rules and those of us who don’t get away with it have a community that considers setbacks to be rules not exceptions. As long as we or others are working hard and tending towards growth and positive change the best way to support that growth process is to notice and encourage all of the good not to harp on the mistakes.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/not-let-one-bad-data-point-ruin-new-narrative/

Whatever we place under the microscope gets larger. Or at least it seems to get larger; in actuality it remains the exact same size it always was. What this has to do with narrative therapy is that when people are in the process of constructing and living out new, more desirable, more productive lif...

06/21/2019

Any worthwhile undertaking is going to be a long, challenging road and you’ll probably be tempted to quit many, many times during the journey. It’s useful to remember that success in the worthwhile undertakings isn’t supposed to come easily or most everyone would succeed in them and there’d be little to remark upon in the first place.

One of the best ways to steel yourself for the long road ahead is to understand the behavioral reality that most of the time our continued behavior is the result of the external application of positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements and that, in the absence of these reinforcements, our behavior is likely to die out. Your undertaking will of course require myriad behaviors and depending on your situation you might find yourself more or less alone much of the time, with no one to positively reinforce your behavior through rewards like encouragement and praise or to negatively reinforce your behavior through aversives like nagging and threats.

In our Western world where popularity, fame, recognition, etc. are prized commodities we often start out in some discipline daydreaming about the accolades, imagining ourselves as conquering heroes. We get caught up in illusions of grandeur though in reality we’re less than novices. But the daydreams are themselves positive reinforcements and act as powerful motivators at the get go. Usually those daydreams run into the concrete wall of reality before long. We find that what we’re doing is really hard, that we fail often, and maybe worst of all that very few people if any are even paying attention to what we’re doing, let alone supplying us with the desired reinforcements at the correct times to spur our behavior on.

This is why if you want to keep at the worthwhile undertakings you’ve got to make sure that your focus starts with and remains on the undertaking itself, on your evolving relationship with it, rather than on the external reinforcements associated with that undertaking. The reinforcements might start appearing with greater regularity and they might not. You might achieve a skill level where rewards like encouragement, praise, and money are frequent but the reinforcements shouldn’t be the focus of what you’re doing or you’ll always remain in the precarious position where your continued journey depends not on your intrinsic love for and relationship with your undertaking but on the presence or absence of behavioral reinforcements.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/keeping-at-the-worthwhile-undertakings/

Any worthwhile undertaking is going to be a long, challenging road and you’ll probably be tempted to quit many, many times during the journey. It’s useful to remember that success in the worthwhile undertakings isn’t supposed to come easily or most everyone would succeed in them and there’d ...

06/20/2019

Many Western psychologists perpetuate the same cognitive bias in the therapeutic situation that the general population perpetuates in the wider sphere of life, and this is not only that minimizing the various problems responsible for dysfunction should be the focus of time effort but that upon the minimization of those problems the therapeutic alliance should come to an end since cure has been effected.

We can think of the above framework as a deficit based psychology rather than a growth based psychology. It’s a psychology with the implicit message that reaching a baseline level of functioning, a state more or less equivalent with the level of functioning of a typical member of a given society, is the endgame, the goal, as good of an outcome as can be reasonably hoped for. And embedded in this message is the rather sinister belief that mental health and well-being are defined as adjustment to the norms and values of a particular society. Conformity is praised, deviation looked upon with wariness.

It can’t be refuted that certain deviations from the norm are objectively dysfunctional and cause an undue degree of distress and suffering. It also can’t be refuted that problems of living are almost always what compel people to look hard at their lives and make changes on their own or seek professional help. Tweaking or adding to the psychological, emotional, and behavioral toolkit in order to more effectively manage these problems of living usually leads to a marked diminution of distress and suffering, and that’s a good thing.

But our point here is that whether in the therapy hour or in the world at large reaching a baseline level of functioning, reaching that sense of adjustment, should not be the end of the road but rather the true starting point from which one’s unique growth and self-actualization can begin, a growth and self-actualization that necessarily cause the individual to deviate from the norm once again. This second deviation is the definition of mental health and wellness not its antithesis. It’s a striving outward towards people and the world in the effort to unfold unique potentialities that end up creating a personal destiny that could only ever be fulfilled by that one unique individual.

Of course there’s comfort in fitting in and painful existential anxiety at the thought of sticking out, and this is probably why so many people on the journey from dysfunction to self-actualization grow complacent when they reach the middle stage of development we call the baseline, a stage that they take to be the endgame. They remember the stigma of sticking out all too well and aren’t in any hurry to suffer through that situation again. And of course depending on the situation reaching a baseline level of functioning might just be as far as the individual can reasonably be expected to go and in these cases that level can be celebrated as the accomplishment it is.

But for many deficit psychology and growth psychology could be considered two sides of the same developmental coin. It’s too bad that most people instinctively focus on the deficit side and then settle into a sort of happy complacency upon reaching a state of functioning in the world that various authority figures call well-adjusted. If they could only come to see their newly acquired adjustment as a safe and secure jumping off point for taking more risks, for reaching ever outwards, for pursuing interests and following passions, for connecting more intimately and authentically with the world, their self-actualization would kick into high gear. If people trying to improve their lives spent as much time and energy on moving from the baseline towards growth and self-actualization as they did on moving from dysfunction to the baseline they’d soon find themselves in a heightened state of functioning they never could have imagined.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/deficit-psychology-versus-growth-psychology/

Many Western psychologists perpetuate the same cognitive bias in the therapeutic situation that the general population perpetuates in the wider sphere of life, and this is not only that minimizing the various problems responsible for dysfunction should be the focus of time effort but that upon the m...

06/19/2019

You don’t understand addictions unless you understand the powerful role that denial plays, assisting people in continuing to use drugs despite severe consequences by ignoring or minimizing these consequences. Regardless of your problem, help can never be effective unless you admit you have that problem to begin with, something the Buddha was aware of when he crafted his four noble truths, the second of which was that we recognize the origin of our ill-being.

Denial comes in many different forms, but the one we want to discuss here is what we call denial through association. The basic idea is that by being part of a social group that engages in similar behavior you normalize your behavior, not considering yourself out of the ordinary but as just a person doing what everyone else does.

Often an addict will cite a friend who he believes has a worse problem, as if this somehow lets him off the hook for his own problem. This type of comparison is an effective form of denial because it insulates him from taking an objective look at where he falls on the continuum of substance abuse.

One of the criteria for addiction I really like for cutting through this clever denial strategy is that if you often consume more of the substance than you were planning on consuming, it’s a clear warning sign. This one doesn’t let you off the hook for the fact that the people around you are consuming a lot too, because the volume is not what matters per se. What matters is the fact that the volume is more than you planned, pointing to an inability to control your habit.

If you believe you’re not an addict, prove it by setting an amount for how much of the substance you will consume the next ten times you use it and then see if you can quit on the spot when you have reached that threshold. A non-addict would have no problem accomplishing this task of self-limiting but the addict usually finds it impossible.

Denial through association is a potent way to rationalize your problematic behavior. But it doesn’t matter what those around you are doing, because obviously you’re going to be attracted to and surround yourself with people who share your interests. Their addiction or lack thereof is not your primary concern, yours is.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/denial-association/

One of the most clever strategies drug and alcohol addicts use to deny that they have a problem.

06/18/2019

The number one fallacy taken as fact in the minds of victims of sadistic abuse is that they’re disposable to their abusers, that they don’t hold any special significance, that they’re more or less worthless afterthoughts. This shouldn’t be surprising since the content of sadistic abuse is usually rife with phrases like ‘you’re worthless’ ‘you’re nothing’ ‘you’re disposable’ and with actions that communicate the same basic message.

But actually nothing could be further from the truth and victims of sadistic abuse who finally gain the courage to leave the relationship find that out firsthand. Suddenly it’s ‘I can’t live without you’ ‘I need you’ ‘I’ll do anything to get you back’ or in darker cases ‘I’ll hurt you if you leave’. All the pleas and threats amount to the same desperate need to keep a relationship on the verge of collapse intact.

UNDERSTANDING THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SA**SM
When we get into the psychology of sa**sm what we come to see is that at the deeper, barely accessible level of awareness it’s sadists who feel like they’re nothing, who feel worthless and unlovable, who feel weak, who feel generally impotent, who feel lost, who feel deficient. Their solution for obliterating those feelings and propping themselves up instead is to find some weaker object to look up to them, to worship them, and to simultaneously become receptacles for the projection of all their unwanted qualities. In this sense sadists need their victims and would feel like nothing without them. They secretly already do feel like nothing, but having their victims around gives them the psychological means to bury that uncomfortable feeling and instead luxuriate in the sense of power and control, to bask in a sense of superiority over the other, which again counteracts the inferiority always lurking at the edge of conscious awareness.

PASSING THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY TO THE VICTIM
This is the special role a victim in a relationship defined by sadistic abuse plays, to become the conscious bearer of all those unwanted, unfavorable characterizations which all amount to ‘inferiority’. The victim is ‘inferior’ and the sadistic abuser ‘superior’ in the minds of both. Together they form a ‘whole’. When the victim tries to leave the ‘whole’ is fragmented and suddenly all those repressed, painful feelings come rushing into the sadist’s conscious awareness. Anxiety skyrockets as the repressed inferiority complex comes back out into the open and the sadist panics.

So we see that rather than being ‘worthless’ or ‘disposable’ a victim of sadistic abuse is absolutely vital to the continued smooth functioning of the sadistic abuser’s psyche. Of course an abuser’s psyche is not functioning smoothly to begin with but what we mean is that losing the object of abuse threatens to make the psychic system, with its glut of defense mechanisms and rationalizations, deteriorate to the point of collapse.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/sadists-need-their-victims-and-would-feel-like-nothing-without-them/

Supposedly ‘Worthless’ Victims Hold Great Significance The number one fallacy taken as fact in the minds of victims of sadistic abuse is that they’re disposable to their abusers, that they don’t hold any special significance, that they’re more or less worthless afterthoughts. This shouldn....

06/15/2019

The critical mistake most of us make when people experiencing life conflicts come to us for help is that we think what they want is our advice. Of course they often think what they want is our advice too. But more often than not our supposedly well-intentioned advice is actually a cover for the chance to derive feelings of efficacy and superiority out of the situation.

When we jump straight to giving advice we’re seeing things from our points of view, from what we’d do in similar circumstances, which means we’re not really listening, we’re not really creating a space for the other to feel heard or to explore possibilities. Instead we project our own hidden values and biases onto that person, all under the rubric of providing help.

In the Catholic tradition hell is defined as the absence of God. This is a powerful symbol for human life. Feeling isolated and alone, bereft of community, cut off from anyone who really knows us or understands us, is hell. The unobserved life is hell. Sometimes simply knowing someone is there in the boat with us is all that’s necessary for us to summon up the courage and tenacity to weather the storm, to activate our individual powers in order to move through our life crises on our own instead of depending on someone else to do it for us.

Offering advice right away narrows possibilities. And widening possibilities is the name of the game when we realize that the anxiety and doubt embedded within conflict situations tend to create tunnel vision. Helping people move through conflict starts with the firm decision to practice compassionate listening, to be actively interested in the meaning of the other’s words, in understanding things from the other’s perspective, rather than quickly categorizing those words within the parameters of our own life constructs and spitting out a solution based on those subjective perspectives.

Two of the most effective ways to help others explore possibilities while engaged in compassionate listening are strategies therapists use with their clients all the time. These are mirroring and asking open-ended questions. Mirroring repeats back, in our own words, what the person struggling with conflict has just said to us. Open-ended questioning gets away from yes/no answers, phrasing the question in a way that allows for any number of answers and can’t simply be confirmed or denied.

In all of this what we’re really trying to do for people embroiled in conflict is help them combat the unconscious pain and isolation of the unobserved life by letting them feel truly heard and understood. In this paradigm, where seeking to really understand the other’s viewpoint and assisting in the other’s personal exploration are the primary goals, people are often able to come to their own conclusions for what they need to do, they’re able to give themselves their own advice for how to move forward. But even when they can’t figure out what to do, that feeling of trust and community that’s being generated will make our own advice, if and when we choose to give it, much more likely to land, much more likely to be earnestly considered rather than given lip service.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/helping-people-move-through-conflict/

The critical mistake most of us make when people experiencing life conflicts come to us for help is that we think what they want is our advice. Of course they often think what they want is our advice too. But more often than not our supposedly well-intentioned advice is actually a cover for the chan...

06/13/2019

Many of us feel ill-equipped when confronted by hopelessness in our lives or in the lives of people we care about. Comfort and encouragement seem like inadequate allies against despair and the firm belief that the world no longer offers and will never again offer anything worth living for.

Some common approaches are to try to see the bright side, minimize the negatives, be grateful for the gift of life, or to hold out hope for a better tomorrow. These strategies are usually pretty flimsy though. You might be able to understand them logically but they do not pe*****te the outer shell or affect present reality in any meaningful way. It’s like offering a towel to dry up a lake.

I use a philosophical approach that tends to get better results. This is that remaining hopeless is completely fine. But hopelessness has as little to do with outcomes as does hope. They are both states of readiness. These states do not predict anything. Actually people have their hopes dashed every day all over the world. Someone who is now hopeless was probably, once upon a time, quite hopeful and look how that turned out.

If you start out hopeful and end up disappointed, it follows that you can start out hopeless and end up pleasantly surprised. Hope and hopelessness are like a promise. A promise is worthless until the follow through. Hopelessness or hope certainly set different courses for a person, but nothing is determined until life comes to fruition. For any of us to believe that we can perfectly predict the future and know exactly what the world, other people, and we ourselves will throw our way is quite egocentric. Life is full of surprises, and if we use the metaphor of it being a game, the only sure way to make the prediction of hopelessness come true is to cheat by taking yourself out of it before it’s really over.

It’s not actually necessary to change one’s outlook from hopeless to hopeful. It’s only necessary to recognize that both outlooks are nothing more than predictions. They may or may not come true. No matter how full of promise or how incredibly desperate a situation might seem there are no guarantees on either side. What is necessary is to keep playing the game. Ironically, this attitude tends to automatically increase hope.
https://evolutioncounseling.com/hopelessness/

Some philosophical ideas if you have started to feel hopeless that will intrigue you and make you rethink your situation.

Evolution Counseling

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