Dr. Rick Blum

02/17/2023

Do you ever feel like your childhood protection mechanisms are still calling the shots in your adult life? It's common! Fortunately, noticing these patterns is the first step in overcoming them. Pay attention to what triggers these responses to work on developing healthier strategies

02/09/2023

Do you ever snap at someone you love and instantly regret it? Here's how using the "one-minute amnesty" strategy can free your unintended words from unintended consequences:

http://www.dr-rick.com/2023/02/08/one-minute-amnesty/

We’ve been unknowingly practicing this strategy since we were children every time we called for a “do-over” during a game.

02/06/2023

Some of us have trouble speaking up and others of us have trouble keeping quiet. Which one are you? Pay attention to how you act in meetings and conversations to know which direction would be progress.

02/01/2023

Guilt is sometimes helpful. Here's how to keep it that way:

I’m not the kind of psychologist who thinks that people should try to avoid any feelings of guilt.

When we could do better, we should do better.

(That’s what classical psychoanalyst Carl Jung described as healthy guilt.)

But guilt is like fear: essential for brief periods and paralyzing when chronic.

Long-lasting guilt about our deficiencies robs the opportunity for vigorous change.

Guilt, at best, is a brief slap in one’s own face – sharp enough to get our attention to the need to do better, but followed by a prod on the back in the right direction.

Once we correct our course, the prod is best followed by a pat on the back.

The regret for missed opportunities to be kind, to grow, or to help never really disappears.

The guilt becomes a shadow along the path, gently aching but giving meaning to the brightly shining change in your life’s course.

Guilt, at best, is a brief slap in one’s own face – sharp enough to get our attention to the need to do better, but followed by a prod on the back in the right direction.

11/18/2016

"The Bitter Pill"

Have you ever taken the bitter pill?

There is a big difference between the inevitable pain in life and optional bitterness about life.

Emotional pain is specific and localized to particular events, while bitterness generalizes pain, changing our overall opinion about life.

We can take as big a bitter pill as we want.

We can dislike all men, or women, or ethnic groups, or bosses, or police, or people in suits, or rich people, or poor people.

If we decide to make it even bigger, we can dislike life, the entire world, or God.

Such bitterness takes pain and weaves it throughout one’s world.

As a result, the course of many people’s lives travels from blind-eyed optimism to blind-eyed pessimism.

Why would someone decide to broadcast wider than necessary the expectation of pain?

It makes some sense as a (futile) attempt to protect us from further hurt.

Yet, it is a big mistake, because it becomes self-fulfilling, bringing us more hurt.

When we begin to expect only pain, our guarded attitudes bring pain to others, even those who mean well toward us.

In AA, they express this phenomenon as “Hurt people hurt people.”

When we hurt others, prompting their own defenses, they often hurt us back, proving our worries to be true.

The other way that bitterness is self-fulfilling is that we will miss the opportunity to be loved and healed, thinking such redemptive experiences to be non-existent.

Fortunately, we have better alternatives.

One solution is to keep our eyes open for the diverse variety among people as well as the dual mix of selfish and loving urges in most everyone.

You can prove the first part of this (the variety) to yourself, gradually, by focusing careful attention on the world around you.

You can prove the second part of this (the duality) to yourself immediately.

Just look at yourself.

Notice the evidence of the mix of giving and taking in yourself and how elusive the balance between them can be.

For example, have you ever failed in your attempt to rise above a selfish concern?

On the other hand, if you did not have love to give and potential to express, then you would not be disappointed when stifled from expressing it.

Of course, after being hurt, you become cautious.

So, does everyone else.

That means that other people are also afraid of you.

In this reciprocal fear lies a hint to your own power to begin making the world safer for love.

Healing the world, one loving moment at a time, is much better than being bitter.

[This post is my first book excerpt, page 10, from The Recipe: Love Made Simple. For more see link below:]

https://www.amazon.com/Recipe-Love-Made-Simple/dp/0985565896/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479430718&sr=8-1&keywords=dr+rick+blum

Love is a choice. In this guide, you will learn precisely how to find the right person and how to get over the wrong one. Then, you will discover the easy-to-follow recipe, including simple steps, showing how to build the love of your life and how to keep that relationship nourished forever.

09/16/2016

The story of your life: The forest and the lake:

I’m going to tell you a story about your life, a story that may be secret even from you.

You won’t recognize it at first, because it didn’t literally happen.

It your story nonetheless, because it explains why you may sometimes act in a way you don’t want to.

A long time ago, you had to make your way through a forest, and you had to reach a lake.

Finding the lake was easy – you just had to keep moving ahead.

Getting through the forest was the problem, because stones from somewhere were hitting you.

They may or may not have been aimed at you, but they were hitting you, and they hurt.

They seemed dangerous.

You ducked behind a tree, but this was not a permanent solution in terms of reaching the lake.

Yet, you were very resourceful and noticed you could strip some thick bark off the tree and lash it to yourself with vines you found around the same tree.

It worked: you emerged and the stones still hurt but a lot less, and they couldn’t cut or damage you because of the protection of your bark-armor.

In this way you reached the lake and gratefully entered, happily swimming away from the shore and having the new option of ducking under the water where the stones would have even less effect.

Then, you started to sink.

At first, you didn’t know why, but the same armor that protected you had become waterlogged in the lake, dragging you down.

Once you realize this, you can remove the bark at will.

How is this your story?

The forest is childhood, and the lake is adult life, while the armor consists of what you learned to do to protect yourself from whatever hurt back then.

What protected you as a kid gets in your way now, and once you know where it belongs and where it doesn’t, you can learn to loosen its hold on your choices.

In this way, this secret story is also the secret to personal freedom.

Another secret: this is my story too, and the story of everyone you know.

05/20/2016

Dr. Rick Blum's second book -- new on Amazon.com. Excerpts to come in future posts!

05/20/2016

The More You Give the More You Get:

Have you noticed how some people seem to have naturally joyful hearts?

Perhaps you are one of them; or perhaps you would like to be.

They may not be well-off or even have easy lives.

Sometimes, they may even be surrounded by hardships.

Freedom from trouble has nothing to do with it, because the source isn’t pleasure, as sweet as that can be.

So, where does it come from?

Usually these people were either born or learned to become givers.

They enjoy being helpful, making other people’s days better, and it makes them smile to get the chance.

They do not impose their help on others, but pay attention to the cues and opportunities to show up helpfully.

This is clearly laudable, but what is the connection to joy?

First, our brains include a special switch that turns on brain-body surge of happiness when we express caring toward others.

Most parents and pet-owners are familiar with this already, but there’s more.

It turns out that those who seek to contribute themselves to others can receive a special gift: gratitude.

By this, I am not referring to the gratitude of others, although that’s nice too.

Rather, there is a profound connection between giving to others and inner gratitude.

The connection of gratitude to giving is as follows:

Gratitude makes giving possible, bringing the confidence that there’s enough of yourself to give away.

Giving to others makes gratitude obvious, that is, if you gratefully notice who you are and what you have to give.

Is this too simple – what about the good-natured, giving people who seem to lack joyfulness?

One pitfall is self-martyrdom: giving to others not so much for them but to ingratiate them.

We commonly call that a “guilt trip.”

Another pitfall is self-sacrifice: depriving from others the opportunity to give back.

Part of being a joyful giver is saying “Yes, thank you,” when others want to make us happy.

Directed these ways, being an active giver is a self-renewing fountain of joy.

It brings no guarantee of an easy life, but does provide a psychological life-preserver.

It results in resilient joy: the innate ability to bounce back from the downswings of life and the wise perspective not to get carried away by the upswings.

07/30/2014

Finding the Courage to Change:

In the last post, I wrote that it’s often hardest to be at our best when it matters most.

The good news, as we saw, is that we can change the old responses that come up during stress.

But, it’s easier to make such changes if you believe that your are just changing some response pattern, not your entire personality.

Otherwise, we can feel too discouraged or too guilty.

The key point is to understand is that we often regress to outdated responses during demanding situations, when it matters most.

Rather than sorting through our best options, we perform this behavior automatically.

This is why we often cannot recall, let alone apply, new insights when it most counts.

In fact, this is the main reason that many of us do not believe that anyone can really change themselves and therefore see little value in trying.

This difficulty is not a fault in our brains – it’s just an automatic and instant switch into superfast habits for the purpose of emergency reactions.

Terrifying emergencies leave us no time to think, and we are wired not to do so.

The wrinkle is that having no time for thinking also means we don’t have any time to ask ourselves if this is physical danger or social stress.

In danger, speed is so important that it’s best to respond instantly, despite the considerable risk of doing the wrong thing.

In contrast, during interpersonal stress, it is almost always better to think through what we are going to do before we do it.

Our brains react the same in both types of situations.

We just do what we learned to do in a situation that was either similar or at least familiar.

No time for thinking also means that people are unaware of this move into old, predictable, and automatic patterns.

Afterwards, we may judge ourselves as less capable than we thought we were.

Others, too, may become impatient with us if they don’t understand this.

The distressed behavior seems unpredictable and erratic to others, although it is really the opposite: the responses are rigid and predictable.

Of course, if they happen to fit the situation, they seem ingenious.

If they don’t, they seem misplaced, maybe stupid.

In either case, they reflect whatever we learned to do rather than our personality.

This is equally true whether the response is angry or fearful, avoiding problems or dwelling on them, hiding in distractions/addictions or overworking.

In other words, it’s not about who you really are as much as where you were when you learned the reactions.

They may be troublesome now, but they worked before.

Knowing this motivates change.

It gives us the strength to know that we can be much more than we have been.

05/09/2014

Why is it hardest to be yourself when it matters most?

Ever notice that you’re more likely to react in a the way you don’t want to when you care the most about what happens?

Seems unfair, doesn’t it?

Let’s say you’re single and you meet someone who might really be right for you, but you aren’t being yourself.

It’s a job interview for a position that fits you like a glove, but you freeze up.

You’re with your child and start becoming impatient.

You’re married and things are beginning to grind down.

Some would say that our reactions are our “true colors” showing in stress, that we aren’t ready to be successful at these situations.

If that were true, then we would never respond better than we are acting in the stressful situation, and we wouldn’t notice the disturbing difference.

It is something else entirely: these are the effects of high stress.

Researchers can see it happening in the brain, and it’s not our fault.

In dangerous emergencies, our brains are wired to shift to rapid, automatic reactions for the advantage of speed.

Whether the stress is physical danger or emotional pressure, the same brain-switch happens.

This is why the mistakes we make in the social situations are so repetitive and frustrating.

It is also why we can learn to change.

The arithmetic of the brain is that we cannot subtract but we can add.

The same old responses are going to pop up every time – we can’t erase them.

But we can learn to add a new step to the dance.

Suppose you’re the single person and you want to show sincere interest in the attractive, new person rather than struggling to act interesting.

Similarly, you want to focus on what you have learned that impresses you about the new company where you are interviewing.

Imagine being with your child and reacting more the way you fantasized you would as a good parent.

What if you go home to your spouse and aim to make him or her feel loved tonight, rather than gauging how much you’re getting out of the evening?

You can if you take three steps toward stress-proof change.

First, rehearse the new way you want to act until you become familiar with it.

Once you’re good at it, recall past times that you could have used this and keep practicing moving to the better choice.

If you do this enough, you are neurologically attaching the new response onto the old reaction.

Finally, imagine a new event that hasn’t yet happened and rehearse the new steps.

Now, go give it a new try.

03/28/2014

How to become a psychological self-healer:

The ability to deal with emotional pain is essential to courage, and courage is essential to having a full, free, and fantastic life.

If we do not learn how to heal, we are done trying after the first time we fall.

By the way, everybody falls.

Yet, some people never fall in love again, after the first heartbreak.

Other people settle for a relationship that is wrong for them in order to avoid that first heartbreak.

Almost any adventure can fail, or else it was probably not a worthy adventure.

Indeed, the most important goals we could have are those that we will sometimes feel like quitting.

In this way, the expression “no pain – no gain” applies to more than sports.

No dream becomes birthed without labor pains along the way.

Bottom line: if you want to freedom to seek your ambitions, whatever they are, learn to become a psychological self-healer.

It is simpler than it seems.

As babies, we are born with three varieties of emotional pain, each with its own distinctive cry: loss (grief), anger, and fear.

Painful events trigger one or more of these.

Our innate emotional equipment allows us to feel the particular response, and then we are done with it.

Pain is the worst that life can give us psychologically, but life also supplies us with a brain with the psychological ability to heal.

What goes wrong?

While still children, we start to learn the social rules around us, which is when the situation becomes more complicated.

Often, we learn which feelings we should suppress.

Otherwise, we may court negative judgments from the people around us.

Sometimes, certain feelings become dangerous to have, for example, anger in a child experiencing abuse.

Boys (and sometimes girls) learn that tears function as “blood to the sharks” in the schoolyard.

Girls (and sometimes boys) learn that anger gets someone called “bossy,” which may comprise the kiss of social death.

Other times, we may decide not of have one or more of these three feelings ourselves, for example, in order to not be similar to a particular person or to not give someone else the power to hurt us.

The result of all this is that we cover one feeling with another.

In other words, we may become angrier instead of feeling hurt, or we may become sadder to avoid the experience of anger.

This is costly.

It takes a lot of rage to express a few tears and a lot of tears to express “liquid anger.”

Other times we imitate or construct complicated emotions, like anxiety and depression, in order to accomplish the same goal of hiding from feelings we do not accept.

Remember our first point: accepting the actual emotion allows us to heal and get over it.

So, how do you know which is the actual emotion?

Now, it gets simple.

The healing is a good clue.

Our expressing the right feeling at the right time brings relief.

As a result, we have the phrase “a good cry” for a healing experience of loss or “getting that off my chest” for a healing experience of anger.

If you are experiencing/expressing a feeling and you do not experience relief, this is a hint that you may be covering up the true emotion.

Which one?

It is not difficult to find it – there are only three. Move away from the one that just increases and choose the one that diminishes when you allow it.

Knowing how to heal, you become free to seek your cherished aspirations.

02/07/2014

How not to get sidetracked:

My previous post (on becoming “unstoppable”) prompted one thoughtful reader to notice that becoming distracted from ones goals is a common challenge.

I have been thinking about that since reading her post.

A man in his 90s once wrote that, if every day is a precious opportunity when one’s last days are in view, then it was just as precious in the early days, just unnoticed at the time.

Forgetting this insight, people tend to kill time, as if it is a cheap commodity.

Those individuals in harm’s way sometimes promise themselves that, if only they might survive, they will never forget the gift of living.

Later, they may tell you that this proved impossible to maintain.

Maybe it is less that we forget about the gift of time, but more that we are distracted from it.

When we become distracted, where do we go, and how can we return?

If I count attention-traps, I come up with three, all of them addictive – thus the trap: addictive self-stories (beliefs about one’s life), addictive self-pity, and addictive pleasures.

Self-stories, the narratives I tell myself about my life, can be addictive because they justify my mistakes.

They are “if only” stories; in other words, I could grow and change, if only my circumstances were different.

They are addictive because my narrative explains how it is not at all my fault.

The price I pay is that I have to keep making the story come true, or else I was wrong in the first place.

One solution: learn to love being wrong – it means you can reach higher.

Second, addictive self-pity, the pull of bad moods, can become surprisingly addictive because it makes you feel helpless, like a child.

Why is helplessness addictive?

Even if your childhood was neglectful or terrible, someone had to take care of you sometime and somehow for you to be here.

Feeling like a child can be addictive because it is oddly comforting, associated with feeling nurtured.

The price one pays for too much self-pity is becoming stuck in life.

One solution: make the urge to regress aware and choose consciously how much time to spend there.

Third, physical pleasures are addictive because of a strange quality of the physical experience.

To paraphrase AA, whatever a person likes best, if pursued, can become overpowering and make one’s life unmanageable.

For example, people who don’t much love to drink can drink freely on the occasions they wish.

Substitute any pleasure: eating highly caloric foods, playing video or other games, or sexual/romantic interactions.

It seems almost cruel of nature or God (whichever is your personal metaphor).

Whatever you most like to do tends to become addictive; meanwhile, people who do not care so much can feel free to indulge.

Maybe this curse is also a blessing.

At least, this is a theory of mine.

It corrects for the tendency to miss the other (non-physical) dimensions of experience.

Naturally, the physical dimension of life is the most tangible element of experience, thus the most distracting.

The addictive nature of physical pleasures painfully pushes people to expand their experiences, bringing us to the other joys of intellectual pursuits, spiritual connections, and loving contributions.

The next time you find yourself distracted from your goals, ask yourself whether the trap is your story, excessive self-pity, or addictive pleasures.

Then, start to change direction.

12/20/2013

How to Become Unstoppable:

Every experience you have can become useful.

You can insist on this, as a promise to yourself.

Enjoy the pleasure and use the pain.

Everyone’s future will include both joy and sorrow, no matter what we do.

Even if we make the best choices, we will become hurt sometimes.

Even when we sabotage our lives, we will occasionally come out okay.

Still, our efforts do set the odds more in our favor, just without guarantees.

So, it would be better to prepare to handle both what feels good and what feels bad.

Most of us know what we would like to do with happy occurrences – we want to enjoy them.

Sometimes this enjoyment is hindered by wondering if we deserve good times.

If fact, we may have been somewhat lucky.

So what? Lucky is good too.

If you have trouble feeling worthy when events swing your way, then use your good fortune to benefit others as well as yourself.

Make something with it that you can be proud of.

Another hindrance to feeling good is what I call “the big fist theory.”

It goes like this: there is an invisible but big fist over your head, waiting for you to enjoy yourself.

As soon as you do, it will pounce on you.

This is the result of noticing that bad things follow good things, but it is not usually because of the good things.

It is just the way of things – only part of our outcomes are in our hands.

This brings us to the subject of painful events.

The similarity between pleasure and pain is that they both result in motivation.

Motive, motivation, emotion, motion – notice how these sound alike?

Pain is even more potent than pleasure in this regard.

The solution to involuntary change is voluntary change.

I once heard, “When the pain of where I am exceeds the fear of where I am going, then I’ll move!”

Physical pain makes us move to avoid injury.

Emotional pain urges us to move to improve our lives.

For this reason, overuse of distractions robs the opportunity of the feelings they help us avoid.

Trust your emotional equipment.

A painful state in your brain is the push the prompts you to gain.

It will diminish when you heed its message that this is a time to grow.

Accordingly, if you can leverage the pain of life to extract a benefit from it, then nothing can stop you.

Realizing this does not render trouble as desirable, but it does make you unstoppable.

11/15/2013

If You Think You’re Bad, You’re Probably Good:

Goodhearted people usually think they’re not good enough.

This is not necessarily a reflection of poor self-esteem, but can instead reflect a hunger to reach their potentials.

In this way, life will contain struggle one way or another, but the question becomes whether people will struggle for the right objectives.

Givers and takers each think that they do not have enough of what they want.

People who are more selfish focus on what they do not yet possess and think they need.

People who are more loving reflect that they might have given better of themselves in the past and fault themselves for it.

This is not a problem of shame; it is not about what others think.

It is about what Carl Jung referred to as the healthy variety of guilt.

Healthy guilt compares one’s capacity to one’s performance.

If I could have done better, I have the uneasy feeling that I should have done better.

Accordingly, response-ability yields responsibility.

The key to life progress is to harness the uneasiness into aiming higher.

I can move from noticing myself falling short, into comparing my greater potential, and finally into corrective action.

Of course, such progress increases both my potential and my future expectations of myself.

Too much dissatisfaction with your failings takes you away from the task of contributing your efforts to others.

Too much satisfaction with your personal gifts leads to complacency and a lazy way of life.

Accurate self-esteem includes the right balance of challenging yourself, as you need to do, but then getting back in the game.

[This excerpt is from a draft copy of my forthcoming book “The Recipe: Relationships Made Simple.”]

08/30/2013

Don’t let your mood boss you around!

People assume that we should do what we really feel like doing.

Maybe this rule even seems obvious to you.

Accordingly, we ask ourselves if we are “in the mood” to do this or that.

This can be a very good idea, that is, if we like our current mood.

Whatever you feel like doing both fits your mood and maintains that mood.

As a result, if we dislike the mood we are in, but obey it anyway, we are being controlled by what I call “the tyranny of mood.”

Here is a different idea: first ask yourself, “Do I like the mood I’m in?”

If the answer is yes, do what you feel like doing.

It will tend to keep you in that good mood.

If the answer is no, then ask yourself another question: “What would I do next if I were in a better mood?”

In other words, do exactly what you would otherwise do, if you felt better than you do right now.

Acting in that direction, especially if sustained, will take you toward that better mood.

This is because feelings and choices produce each other in both directions.

You can reverse the equation any time you want.

For example, do you feel like smiling, like calling a friend, like taking a walk, like finishing a task, or like lending a hand?

If the answer is “no,” and you are in a down mood, that becomes the best reason to do it.

In this way, you will get a lot more done.

By giving yourself the freedom to either obey or disobey your mood, you will most enjoy your life.