Claire from the movie Elizabethtown

In reviewing the movie Angus, Roger Ebert remarked that if you watch movies long enough, eventually you’ll see your life up on the screen. I’ve had a few movies that did that for me. Some silly like Old School, and some that hit close to home such as Sideways. But this exchange from the movie Elizabethtown truly hit me like a ton of Bricks. This was it. This captured a feeling I’ve had my whole life. I was a substitute person. A second choice. Someone people “settled” for.

How did this happen? In many ways I’ve lived a spectacular life. I’ve been a comedian on some of the most popular stages in the world, I’ve written books, had wonderful adventures, gotten degrees, and been, generally speaking an outgoing, kind, generous, and compassionate person.

And yet……… I’ve always felt second best. Always been the guy in the bar walking out with the cleaning crew. The shoulder to cry on, the “friend”, the third wheel, the seat filler, the loner, the single, the guy by himself at the dinner table.

How does one become a substitute person? Is a substitute person made or are we born? In my case a through examination of my past held some clues, and I know as a psychotherapist that much of this had to do with the way I thought about myself. We’re second best because we’ve slowly grown into these roles and now it’s what we think we must deserve. As with many types of pervasive personality patterns, this likely starts in childhood.

My guess is many substitute people are often middle children of some type. Middle children are often the ones who get the hand me downs, the used cars, and the leftovers, and this is something we simply learn to live with. Many psychologists are middle children, having learned to make peace in their families from their unique perches in the middle of the debate. Middle children make good diplomats. They are the Mary Anns to their older and younger siblings Gingers. They are the sidekicks, the loyal friends, the fans, and the men and women behind the scenes.

So the focus of this blog will be to examine why it is we substitute people feel second best. What happened and what can we do about it? The fact is that many exceptional people conceptualize themselves as substitute people and don’t reach their real potential. Personally I consider myself a recovering substitute person, having learned through many hard-earned years of struggle that I don’t have to be anybody’s second choice. Some of these reflections will describe people who I have seen in therapy who were comfortable with me sharing their stories in this book. It is my hope that people will write and share their own stories, as this is how nearly all of my books have developed. I look forward to discussing this subject with you all..

Ever known a beautiful woman who had no idea she was beautiful? If so you know a woman like Anna. When she walked into my office for the first time she was biting her nails and shuffling her feet back and forth, but clearly behind the nervous façade there was a truly beautiful woman. Still, as a therapist it wasn’t my job to worry about what she looked like, and I asked her to sit down so we could se what it is she wanted to accomplish.

She immediately told me that she didn’t think this was going to work. I felt like I was on a first date, and she had rejected me after just one look. Wow, my own substitute feelings were getting activated here, and I reminded myself to calm down and remain in therapist mode.

Eventually we did settle into a comfortable conversation, and she told me she had to constantly fight feelings of inadequacy. She felt she was ugly, overweight, not smart enough, and that people were constantly looking at her and judging her.

This is not an uncommon sort of therapy problem, and my training immediately started filling in pieces of her background. Probably an overbearing, perfectionistic mother in this story, who had stripped away at her daughter’s self-esteem for most of her life. Most likely she constantly talked to herself in a negative matter, and thoughts became feelings which then affected her behavior as well as her perception of the world around her. Boom, I has solved the case, I was the therapist of the year….

But I was wrong.

Her description of her childhood was pretty normal. She was an only child of parents who had doted on her a bit, but what she described was far from a standard overbearing childhood. Her parents were a bit older, and she had always wanted brothers and sisters growing up, but really what she described was far from what I expected.

No what she described was a kind of longing. She described walking past people’s houses at Christmastime and feeling a kind of penetrating sadness about something she thought she was missing out on. It was sad, sweet, and very touching.

So I could immediately go to the idea that perhaps being an only child filled Anna with a kind of pervasive loneliness that cast a long shadow over her entire life. This was partially correct, and Anna did have a kind of private internal world that was very difficult to penetrate. This is not uncommon with only children, as the lack of siblings often makes them turn inward, as they miss out on a lot of the socialization that comes from kicking, screaming, and laughing with brothers and sisters who are fighting for the same space.

But this wasn’t the whole story either.

I told Anna about the substitute theory and she immediately felt like it described her perfectly. She knew on some level that she was a perfectly attractive person, but emotionally she just never quite felt like she belonged. The idea of belonging is so powerful in psychotherapy, and finding out how someone belongs in the world is often one of the most important pieces of the therapeutic puzzle.

But substitute people often belong only partially. All the facts of their lives usually look just fine. They went to prom, weren’t picked last for the team, and fit in just fine with nearly everyone. This was true with Anna as well, everything she described about her life seemed remarkably normal.

So we kept coming back to how she felt about herself. One would have thought just from her sheer beauty she would have been reinforced over and over again in her life, but that wasn’t her experience at all. I walked a fine line with her in therapy. I could tell her she was beautiful, but really, if that didn’t match with her experience, than that’s a poor therapeutic intervention. No it was more important for me to try and feel how she felt and perhaps help her find her way towards her best self. And in the meantime,

Do it for myself as well…..

So as time passed we talked a lot about this feeling. I told her a little about my own personal journey, but was also careful not to make the sessions about me, although I was I’m sure learning as much from her as she was from me. Maybe more. We explored this topic together, and I asked me to teach me about her inner world, which she agreed to do with great relish. Somehow teaching someone who understood was very empowering to her, and she walked me through some of the earliest memories of her life right up to the present day.

They key to our relationship was that after many months of talking, she began to feel understood, which is not only a goal of therapy, but an important consideration in any human interaction. Eventually, through telling me her story, something slowly started to change. There was more of a strut in her step, and even the way she walked across a room seemed to be different. She had found her confidence by talking about how unconfident she was, and paradoxically left therapy a much more self-assured woman.

Although I would like to take credit for this wonderful therapeutic accomplishment, it was actually me who was in a sense getting therapy from her. I had watched her transformation, and contributed when I could by empathizing and listening and trying to understand. When therapy works best this is what it is, a process of watching someone find their way back to themselves. It was incredibly powerful, and a perfect example of how truly listening is often the best tool a therapist really has.

Marianne Williamson

David was a prisoner. That was the way he described himself anyway. A neatly-dressed Black man in his 30’s, he was new to therapy and was admittedly a little uncomfortable about the process. He described himself as a prisoner of his own weight, and how it had kept him from being happy for as long as he could remember.

Again a client of mine had hit on a sensitive subject. I had also felt like this from time to time, and could definitely empathize with David’s struggles. The funny thing was he was no more than 15 pounds overweight, and in his well-tailored suit it was hard to tell he was overweight at all.

But I knew that wasn’t my job to tell him that, although that was certainly my first instinct. When I first became a therapist this was a mistake I made often, correcting people’s opinion about themselves and in many ways being a cheerleader.

My training however taught me that this can actually be counter-productive. What someone is looking for is confirmation of their experience. The desire to be understood is one of the strongest wishes we have. That’s not to say that you don’t help people examine their own self-sabotaging ways of talking to themselves, but our first job is always to try and understand a person’s worldview. If you correct someone to fast, or deny some aspect of a person’s experience, you have missed on an empathic level, and this is something I always try to keep in mind.

So David told me about his life as a prisoner. He described being overweight for most of his life, and how he was always the “fat kid” growing up for as long as he could remember. Through High School he described having a lot of female friends, but very few romantic partnerships. This pattern continued on through college, and now into his professional life as well.

Although I am single, and often find the dating world a hazy and confusing mystery, I did think there were ways I could be of service to David. I knew that if he could begin to feel understood, that over time he may develop more confidence which would then seep into other areas of his life. I know how this works because I have been in therapy myself. It was an extremely important piece of my own development as a therapist, and I often left the sessions feeling a lot more confident when I was on the other side of the proverbial couch.

I told David about my ideas on substitute people, and he was immediately taken with the idea. He described being the guy who girls would take to the dance when no one else had asked them out, and how we was always kind of a second tier kind of guy when it came to dating. He described how now as an adult he had experienced so much of this kind of thing that he had in a sense given up on the dating world, as he knew that people were simply not that interested in him.

One of the first steps in therapy is to actually examine the evidence of what people are saying and see if it holds up to scrutiny. I asked David to think about a college educated, well-dressed, polite and kind man, who had a good job and was financially responsible. I then asked him if I described that man to his female friends, how many of them would feel like that kind of man was extremely difficult, if not impossible to find.

He agreed this hypothetical man sounded great, and his female friends often did complain to him that there were no good men around. Still, although he was able to give this imaginary version of David the benefit of the doubt, he could not extend the same courtesy to himself. This is unfortunately a very common trait in people that struggle with depression, and it takes a lot of hard work and time to begin to undo the roots of this self-defeating way of approaching the world.

Something occurred to me with David however, and at about 6 weeks into therapy I decided to take a chance. Although we talked a lot about his childhood, his self-defeating ways of talking to himself, and engaged in a lot of the standard therapeutic conversations, he kept coming back to being a prisoner of his weight.

So, with a very deep breath, I asked him, as gently as I could, if it was possible that he was overweight because he wanted to be overweight. This is a dangerous kind of question for a therapist to ask, as it can be perceived as blaming the victim. On the other hand a large part of your goal is also to promote personal responsibility, and it was in this vein that I decided to ask the question.

David was very offended at first, and got angry which is what I expected. We spent that hour in a kind of uncomfortable silence as I tried to explain what I meant by this, but it was clear his emotions had become aroused, and it was therefore very difficult to continue the conversation. Still, I thought it was important. I provide him with this quote from Marianne Williamson at the beginning of this story to think about when he returned the next week, and asked him to please think about it until I saw him again.

It was a tense week waiting for that next session, but when David did return it was with a smile on his face. He reported he had been up half the night thinking about what I had said, and how that quote had in fact summed up his feelings, which is what I had hoped for. Personally he thought he was capable of a lot of great things, and described how he spent hours daydreaming and visualizing the life that he thought he was capable of living. But he was also afraid, and he wondered aloud if maintaining the little extra weight he carried was his way of keeping himself safe from having to risk rejection if he did chose to follow his dreams.

This blew me away, and reminded me that people are often much more insightful about themselves than we often give them credit for.  It has been my experience that really people often have the answers to their own questions if we just give them time and space to explore these questions. David knew on an intellectual level that he could lose 15 pounds easily enough, he was an athlete in High School and had been thinking of joining a gym for years. What he had done however is make a connection between a surface level symptom (being overweight) and a deep-seated fear he had of living the life he was capable of living.

What happens next after such a revelation is reached is always interesting to observe. Some will tell you that insight in therapy is essentially useless, as it simply reveals the problem without providing any tools to change the problem. Regardless of the particular debate, it is always important to take action. A therapist can provide all of the insight in the world, but ultimately it is the client who has to do the heavy lifting.

So in David’s case we set some goals. Along with joining a gym and losing the weight, he had an idea for a small business he wanted to start, so we also set some goals around that. He became a man on a mission, working out and researching, and generally finding a whole new gear in his life that he never knew he had. It was wonderful to observe, and within a month David had his business up and running and was doing well.

Obviously not every case in therapy goes this well, but I wanted to think seriously about what had happened. Somehow having someone actually become interested in his life had made David interested in his life again, and he had tapped into some kind of long dormant desire he had about the kind of life he wanted to live. Somehow as he got older he had moved farther and farther away from this life force, and became content to simply exist on this planet, in his case literally as a “prisoner” in his own body.

I have seen David for over a year now, and yes, he has begun dating again over the period with a lot of mixed results. He told me one of the women he had dated thought he was too “cocky”, and this was really kind of amusing considering where we had started out just a few months before. Over the course of this year we talked a lot about how this “substitute” pattern happened in the first place, and I think it is an important question that I very much wanted to figure out.

P.S. I joined a gym yesterday myself. Physician heal thyself is I think the proper expression.

I include both of these stories to demonstrate how closely our own issues can overlap with the people that come into therapy. I know that I am effective sometimes because I have stumbled into a lot of the same dark rooms as my clients and fallen down a lot of the same stairs.

This idea in psychology was explored by Carl Jung who said that it “was only the wounded healer who can heal.” Essentially what he was saying was that the therapist has been hurt in a lot of the same ways as the people he sees, but has hopefully learned to recognize and identify these hurts, and draw on memories of how he personally coped with this hurt to assist his clients. This is particularly relevant to me in considering the idea of substitute people, and I wanted to share some personal reflections about this.

My guess is I am not a typical substitute person, and I’m not really sure there is such a thing. The common traits seem to be more about feeling that you are just not quite anyone’s first choice, and personally I know exploring my childhood holds some clues as to how this happens.

As the second oldest in a family of four kids very close in age, the problem was not really with attention. My parents divorced at a very young age, and, although my mother was seriously overworked, she always had enough time for me, maybe even more than my share. The next logical thing you might go to is sibling rivalry. Often a second-born kid becomes rebellious, as the role of the responsible one has been taken by the eldest. Ok, this one was definitely true in my family. My sister was a high achiever and I definitely kind of went the other way. Still, I wouldn’t frame the relationship in terms of jealousy, so this doesn’t really seem to be a great explanation either.

One thing that did affect me personally was growing up kind of poor. Seeing other kids with nicer things was kind of hard, and I think a part of me always thought I was missing out on something. Hard to describe exactly, but really it is a kind of feeling that something is going on just out of your grasp that is a lot more hip than what you’re doing. I’ve felt like that my whole life, and heard similar sentiments from a number of different people I’ve seen in therapy.

It was funny because even when I went on vacation I often thought I might be missing something. I would anticipate and anticipate, and when I got there it wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be.

Over time, when you feel second best for long enough, you begin to make choices that confirm your ideas about yourself, and wake up one day with a second rate life. This is an exceedingly difficult pattern to break out of, and for me it truly took reinventing myself by moving to another place.

So when I was about 21 or so I hit the road, working in a number of our National Parks, I found that for summer at least I was far from a substitute person, and for a time truly felt the beam of a very imaginary spotlight as I met new people from all over the country. Dating was easy in these days, as we were all young, free, and adventurous. I went out with some beautiful women during these years of my life, and seemed to be on my way to a happy and prosperous life with any number of them.

But eventually the summer would end and I would have to return to my life, which was always in disarray. I would return home and all of the old substitute patterns would begin to creep in again. Somehow familiar surrounding always brought back those old feelings of being second best.

So I hit the road over and over again. Somehow a change of place was always a remedy for these feelings, and each time I landed in a new place I found I was able to reinvent myself. In many ways these were the best years of my life, as I met thousand of people, had a number of wonderful relationships, and got to see a big chunk of the world.

Eventually I moved to Chicago to become a comedian, where strangely, I met a number of people who had found a wonderful way to deal with being substitute people, by learning to laugh about it. I became one of these people too. These were hedonistic years for me, and I fell into the very familiar pattern of joking about myself in the evening, while suffering the consequences of feeling second best during the day. Eventually I truly had to hold my life up to a microscope when my comic idol and extreme substitute personality Chris Farley overdosed on drugs just a few short blocks from my house.

So I had my dark night of the soul. I realized that continuing on the path I was on would likely result in an early demise, and I wasn’t quite ready to check out just yet. I started to study Psychology. First I got a Bachelor’s degree, than a Master’s degree and then another Master’s degree. There, I had done it. I had so many degrees I couldn’t possibly feel second best anymore, right?

Wrong…

The crucial moment for me was actually getting into counseling. That is where I first came to realize that changes in your external world have very little to do with the day to day operation of your internal machinery. No, small, internal changes were what occurred as I continued with therapy, and one day I just woke up and realized I felt differently. The best way I can describe it was an ability to laugh with myself rather than at myself. Gradually I learned that virtually everyone, from the hottest celebrity, to the prom queen, to the richest industrialists, feels like a substitute person at one time or another. This was reinforced for me again and again in my work as a therapist. I found that if you looked behind the lives that seemed like they were using a bit too much effort to exude superiority, there was usually a case of crippling self-loathing and insecurity.

So I again try and return to the idea of humor in therapy, because that was my personal path to wellness, although I also recognize there may be others. I constantly see people who struggle with inferiority, and in one way or another it seeps into every aspect of their lives. Shared absurdity, that’s become my mantra. I mean what the hell are we really doing here anyway? I remember watching a video called “The power of ten” a few years back that kept zooming away from the earth by a power of ten. Looking at our tiny speck of dust fade into the distance, I suddenly realized not going to some dance seemed a little less important, and it is a lesson I try and remember. We all have an idea about what it is we are doing here, but all we really know for sure is that we are on this tiny blue speck of stardust together. For better or for worse we’re stuck here together, and personally I think there’s got to be something better than trying to make each other feel bad about what we don’t have. When we can learn to laugh about our shared experience it truly does become a shared experience, and sometimes that makes it pretty bearable.

A River Runs Through It

Got word from my sister today that her best friend, who was also a friend of mine, had died. She had just turned 40. When you hear news like this a million questions go through your mind. How did it happen? What happened? Was it an accident? Suicide? We want some explanation as to how this happens because it doesn’t make sense to us. Young people aren’t supposed to die, and when they do, we also for a second consider our own mortality.

So in talking with my sister I learned that her friend had essentially drank herself to death. She had been drinking secretly for years, and finally her organs had shut down and her heart had eventually stopped.

This was devastating news for my sister in more ways than one. Losing your best friend at such a young age is awful enough, but losing them to something that could have been prevented hurts even worse. You wonder, what could I have done? Did I miss a sign? A cry for help? You think constantly of all of the things you might have said or done to help, but it’s simply just too late.

Which leads me to the quote at the beginning of this entry. Why is it that we are so often unable to lend assistance to the people closest to us who seem to be in so much pain? Does our fear of intrusion prevent us from asking the right questions? Should we be able to intuit people’s internal pain and find these things?

Ultimately I think the answer is no to all of these things. Often a great deal of guilt comes along when someone close to us self-destructs, but ultimately we are all responsible for our own lives. I think so much of our external problems start with some internal disruption going on inside our troubled hearts and minds. Many of us can fake our way through a day, and yes I speak from a great deal of experience on this. But ultimately we have to resolve these inner conflicts if we want to live the life we know we’re capable of.

So I think a lot about my friend who died today. The stories in this book have all been success stories so far, but it would be unrealistic to suggest that everyone gets over feeling second best in their lives. Some of us need to escape this feeling, and drift towards addictive behavior. We need a respite from these feelings, and often something like alcohol or overeating provides some temporary relief.

The problem with this solution is that the thing that provides relief is also what keeps the door locked on our self-awareness. Addictive behavior also leads to self-loathing, which then further reinforces the original feelings of inferiority. This is a vicious cycle that becomes deeply habituated and very difficult to extract yourself from.

So I think about my friend and how she must have felt as she continued to drink massive amounts of liquor even as her body was failing. She was one of the funniest, sweetest, women I’ve ever met, but somehow what was going on in her internal world was just too difficult to face. Sometimes this looks like boredom, but I also think it can be deeply rooted in the substitute pattern. Our idle time is painful in part because we haven’t found a sufficient level of challenge in our lives to induce creative solutions. We have in a sense “settled’ for a life that is less than we were capable of, and this is very difficult to face. So we fashion an escape. For some it can be wandering the world, while others find they can find the same journey is available in a bottle of Vodka in the comfort of their own living rooms.

So perhaps there are levels of inferiority that vary widely from person to person. That has been my experience as a therapist. The psychologist Alfred Adler said ‘The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.” This also seems relevant to a discussion of addiction, as the emotional agitation in some cases becomes too difficult to bear for even short periods of time.

So in my overwhelming sadness for my friend, I think about what could have possibly happened to alter her life course. My wish was she could have gotten into some kind of therapy, and at least begun a dialogue about what her inner world was like. Hopefully she may have found a gentle and supportive therapist to work with her on this. I know therapy works because I have personally experienced it. All of us, every one of, at times feels very alone in this world, and therapy can be one place where you have someone unequivocally and totally devoted to you. In a sense this is more intimate than a marriage, a parental relationship, perhaps even the relationship between a person and their clergy. If you feel like my friend did, or if aspects of her story seem familiar to you, please think about making that call. Sometimes even a glimmer of hope is enough of a catalyst to begin the process of change, and any good therapist will help you in your journey to find and develop this sense of hope.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good Morning!” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine — we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

For a long time I thought it was money that was at the root of the substitute pattern, as it was something from my own background that often made me feel left out. Working as a therapist however, has convinced me that money has very little to do with feeling true belonging with others, and in some cases it can even be a terrible hindrance.

I remember reading this poem about Richard Cory when I first started college, and being a little confused by it. Richard seemed like he had a lot going for him. What I hadn’t considered was how much Richard felt left out of what was going on around him, and this feeling of being left out is often at the root of the substitute pattern.

Which brings me to case of Thomas, a well-dressed man in his 40’s, who came into my office a year or so ago wanting to talk about how he could stop yelling at his kids so much. Thomas was a wealthy man who worked in the financial industry in Chicago, and had reached his 40’s having accomplished all of the things he had envisioned foe himself. He had a beautiful wife, two great kids, and had made his first million already. He had a big house, nice cars, and the country club membership to go along with it.

But he was miserable.

I remember reading a book years ago by Joseph Heller called “Something Happened”. The book described a man much like Thomas, who thought that if he just painted the numbers like he was supposed to, happiness would follow shortly afterwards.

But something happened.

And so it was with Thomas, he described feeling this internal pressure all of the time, yet he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. So we began a dialogue about this, and I asked him to describe what his life would look like if I could wave a magic wand and take him to the life that he imagined for himself.

His answer surprised me. Most people, when asked this question will orient their answer to the present or the future, but in this case Thomas went back to the past. He recalled,

“I remember back when I was about 10 watching the Irish boys from my neighborhood play football in the park. I wasn’t allowed to play with them, so I would sometimes just sneak down and watch from a distance. I would study how they teased each other, how they laughed, the jokes they told, and I would go home and practice talking like they talked. I always thought they were having some kind of wonderful fun that I would never know about, and that thought has stayed with me for as long as I can remember. I guess then, to answer your question, I would go back and be able to fit in perfectly with that group of boys.”

The honesty and depth of his recollection moved me a great deal, and I could clearly see that Thomas had struggled his whole life to find a sense of belonging in this world. Somehow he had glimpsed the nature of belonging as a child, but was always the outsider looking in from a distance.

And now Thomas again lived high upon a hill looking down at the working-class people of his town. It was in a sense a perfect metaphor for the course his life had taken, and as therapy progressed we talked a lot about how this reinforced a pattern he had been stuck in his entire life.

So as we continued to have this discussion, Thomas made an important revelation. What if he was yelling at his kids because he saw them repeating the same pattern that he himself had fallen victim to? What if he was resentful of them, trying to live vicariously through them, and trying to reinvent a youth through them that he never had access to?

Thomas made all of these associations himself, which once again reinforced the idea for me that people are almost always their own best clinicians. What they often lack is encouragement to pursue these ideas. There is perhaps nothing more disheartening than to come to some kind of deeply insightful personal revelation, only to find that when you try to share this revelation, people don’t understand. The difference with a therapist is, if they are any good at their job, they will give you every ounce of their concentration to try and understand these insights.

In any case working with Thomas on these associations had really started to make him rethink the way he was parenting his children. He eventually came to the conclusion that he couldn’t make his wish come true, not exactly, but what he could do was provide his children with choices that would increase their sense of belonging.

In Thomas’ case most of the restrictions he placed on himself and his family came from the voice inside of his head. Looking a little further, this voice had its roots in the way he was raised by his parents. His mother was judgmental and condescending while he was growing up, and she literally had become a part of an imaginary audience that Thomas always felt accountable to. There is actually an entire school of psychology based on this idea called Object Relations, and these visions we have of our parents that influence our present day lives is one of its most important tenets.

In any case we started talking about how he could identify and answer this voice in his head, and as he became more mindful of this voice, he even began to develop a sense of humor about it.

As we continued to talk, he began to blossom into a very funny person,. He described how he and his kids had begun to do more things together, including playing football and basketball and a number of other things they had never done together before. It was very nice to hear. Often times parents who did not gratify their own desires in childhood literally make their children instruments of their own ego, but this wasn’t the case with Thomas at all. Most people describe wanting to give their children the things they never had, referring to material things, but in his case he was able to give them a sense of playfulness. He was in essence letting them be children, and in doing this became a child himself again, and this made Thomas one of the most fun people I’ve ever worked with.

This is a potential gift we have when we become parents. If we are mindful enough we can learn from the mistakes of our own childhoods and try and make sure patterns don’t get handed down for generations. In the case of Thomas he was able to reinvent himself by thinking of how important of a job being a parent was. When he came into my office he wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong, but knew that something had to change. His parental instincts had led him to therapy, where with just a little listening and encouragement, he was able to make important changes in both he and his children’s lives.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself.

- Mary Schmich

There is an interesting history behind the idea of keeping up with the Joneses here in America. As the industrial revolution progressed, and people began moving from farms into cities, everyone began living a lot closer together. With this newfound closeness also came a little more nosiness. Now people were more and more interested in what their neighbors did with their money, and soon this arrangement increased competition.

World War 2 changed a lot however, as the able-bodied men went off to war, and the women went to work doing their jobs. Perhaps more than any other time in our history, the people in America embraced cooperation, and banded together to fight the war at home while the soldiers did battle overseas. I remember reading a very poignant essay on similar occurrences in England, where people reported feelings of euphoria despite the war raging around them. Social psychologists attributed these feelings to the breakdown of the social classes, and how being freed from these restraints seemed to dramatically increase feelings of happiness despite the horrific nature of the war itself

A strange thing happened after the war ended however, as Americans in particular were now more prosperous then ever. The advertising industry seized on this newfound sense of prosperity, and began convincing people to buy things they didn’t need, often pairing products with famous celebrities to accentuate the point. With the proliferation of new media became more and more advertisements. Suddenly all of our newfound motion picture heroes were being paired with things to buy. It was effective.

And so the die was cast. America crossed the Rubicon in the 40’s and 50’s and we haven’t been back since. The early seeds of equating our value with what we owed were planted during these years, and it is a pattern that had become even more deeply entrenched in the decades since World War 2.

So we’ve come to measure our personal value on how well we fit in. That is the essence of the idea of belonging. and in America belonging is often measured by the quantity of a person’s possessions, and also how many of these possessions are also owned and appreciated by our neighbors. It’s a vicious circular game without a clear beginning, middle, and end.

In a nutshell then, advertisers have seized on one of the most basic and primal human needs, which is the need to feel a sense of belonging. This is problematic in many ways, and has caused a gulf in our society that often is demoralizing to a person’s self-esteem, when they have neither the means nor the opportunity to purchase the things required for membership.

So what is the solution? In working with a number of families over the years I have discovered that parents are often in a seemingly no-win situation. They try to instill in their children the idea that they are not defined by their possessions, but meanwhile the pressure to have what the other kids have is a powerful force instilled in children from a very early age. To often the guilt a parent feels with the idea that they are contributing to their kid being different makes them give in and play the game.

Somewhere along the way, if we are to get out of this trap, we have to wander off this path onto the road less traveled. This is a difficult fork in the road, as most of us are socialized in a million different ways to associate success with the acquisition of possessions. In a fascinating article entitled “Why the self is empty” Phillip Cushman makes the argument that we fill up our empty selves by buying things. Who among us has not relieved some temporary bit of suffering by purchasing something we didn’t really need? My guess is almost all of us. This is a pattern that helps us avoid dealing with legitimate suffering, which Cushman argues is an important piece of individual growth.

In making this deviation from consumerism, we often have a dark night of the soul. When we for a minute shed our materialistic coping methods we are left looking into a strange abyss, and this is where we have an opportunity for self-exploration. In many cases we have to unlearn a lifetime of programming that has led us to measure our happiness against our friends and neighbors. Ultimately this is a rope we have to let go of to truly journey down the road of self-exploration.

I include this essay in this book because through my work with people of every socio-economic class, I have noticed that a great deal of what makes someone feel like a substitute person originates with deeply conditioned ideas about how we compare to the people around us. Virtually everyone had felt they were missing something everyone else seemed to be getting, but for substitute people this is a feeling that can rest on their shoulders for a lifetime.

This can be a difficult moment in therapy, as we are taught that finding belonging is an important piece of feeling socially interested in others. As we individuate we must balance this need to belong while also weighing what this belonging may cost us. Perhaps before we can come back to others we have to truly spend some time alone with ourselves and emerge from this alienation with a more secure sense of self. We often mistake being alone with loneliness, and combat this loneliness by buying things to make us feel closer to the imaginary herd.

I would like to close this essay by sharing a story that happened to me last Christmas, while I was barricaded for two solid days in the Seattle airport due to extreme weather conditions. I hadn’t been home for Christmas in years, and this was the year I decided to break the streak. I avoided coming home in part because Christmas stirred up a number of my own substitute feelings, and, like I suspect happens in many households over the holidays, I dreaded playing the “let’s compare our lives” game with friends, family, and everyone else.

But this year things were going well, I was a therapist, had written books, and was scheduled to appear on Television later that month to talk about one of my books. A part of me wanted to go home again as a successful guy with good things to say about my life. I put on a nice suit and flew out of a freezing cold Chicago evening into what I hoped were greener pastures.

But I was wrong.

It so happened Seattle was having one of their worst snowstorms in a century. As I got off my plane, I heard the announcement that all the planes that night had been grounded for the evening. We were told to return to the lobby and check back in with the counter to figure out when our next flights would be leaving.

What I saw when I exited the terminal was a sea of humanity unlike any I had ever seen. There before me were thousands of people lying all over the place of every shape, size age, race, and creed. I was demoralized. I looked at the line and it went on for hundreds of yards, snaking around over and over again. I reluctantly lugged my very large bag to the end of the line. I was in that line for nearly 24 hours, which, taken at face value, would appear to be one of the most torturous things a traveler could ever experience. It wasn’t. What occurred next was one of the most interesting sociological developments that I have ever had the pleasure of observing.

I sized up the people next to me in line. A family of hillbillies with plastic bags. A couple of dorks that looked like insurance salesmen. A lady that looked like she had just got out of a Honky Tonk after drinking for 3 straight days. Jesus. This was going to be the longest day of my life.

No one spoke for the first hour as we all began to get a sense of what we were in for. Finally I broke the ice and made a small joke, and everyone seemed eager to do a little venting. I busted out a bottle of wine I was bringing home for Christmas, thinking that somehow we needed it more now. Someone else produced some snacks, and soon we had a regular little party going on.

And all those judgments that went through my head? They were wrong. These people seemed to be incredibly nice and I had clearly misjudged them. What had happened here? How and why had a bunch of strangers decided to become some fast friends? What was the psychology behind this?

As I pondered these questions I came to the conclusion that most of it had to do with the fact that in this time, in this place, none of us were any more important than the other. We were all simply wayward travelers stranded together in the middle of a snowstorm, and for those 24 hours all hints of difference in social class had been dissolved. It was one of the greatest 24 hours I ever spent actually, as I truly got to know dozens of people in line as we continued to laugh and tell stories about our shared predicament. It never came up that I was a therapist, to them I was simply, “suit guy”, who was every bit as stranded as they were. I don’t think I’ve ever continuously laughed more than I did that day, and as we finally got to the front of the line, a kind of melancholy seemed to settle over our entire group.

The silence was broken by a young Goth-looking girl who was traveling with her mother. From talking to her I found out her parents were divorced and that she was going home to see her grandparents for the first time in many years. She was about 13, and talked to me about how she didn’t fit in very well at school, and also about her sense of relief about having a few weeks away from the kids who teased her.

“I have a question”, she asked. “What’s going to happen when we all have to go back home?”

It was a brilliant question that ran much deeper in my mind than the obvious answer regarding exchanging emails and phone numbers. We had become our own little Breakfast Club here in this airport, and as we got to the end of the line, it was clear she was feeling particularly sad that life was simply going to return to normal when we parted company. How had we created this belonging, and why was it so fleeting? Why did it take a 12 inch snowstorm in Seattle for this little girl to feel a true sense of belonging for perhaps the first time in her entire life?

These were questions I couldn’t totally answer, but now nearly a year later it is still a question I ask myself nearly every day. Why do we maintain our distance from people through social status when it seems to make everyone so unhappy? How do we unshackle ourselves from these conventions? In thinking about this question, I did in fact get everyone’s contact information, and have kept in touch with them faithfully ever since. On the night of my big TV appearance I emailed my teenaged friend and told her I wanted to say hello, and asked her how I looked on the big screen. Although we all said goodbye that evening, we have kept this feeling alive with a little extra work. It is a lesson that will stay with me forever.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.
Shel Silverstein

I came home from this Christmas experience thinking about how I could use what I had learned in my work as a therapist. Part of being a good therapist is continually taking stock of your own life, and how your own state of mind impacts the people who trust you to counsel them about their lives. I thought about how my life had changed since I had officially become a therapist, and how I had lost touch with some of my old friends as I was surrounded with a new group of people. I had been feeling very “grown up” as I made this transition to a new life, and thought that this would also be a gateway to a new state of mind free from the substitute pattern. Then following story explains how I made sense of dealing with this transition, and lessons I learned about the choices I made about how I was going to spend the rest of the time that I had been given.
My mom was a teacher when I was little, and so books were a part of my life for as long as I can remember. The poem at the beginning of this vignette was my favorite poem growing up, and when I was a kid I used to literally search and search for the place where the sidewalk ends.

I never found it growing up, but I did have to analyze my 20 favorite poems when I was first in college, and I chose this as one of them. To me it was about trying to find that childlike sense of wonder in your heart, even as the responsibilities of life begin to creep in as you get older. And I had gotten older, and life didn’t seem as simple as it did when I was a kid. Shortly after that I just kind of forgot about the poem altogether.

Life takes funny turns sometimes though, and cut to many years later I was living in Chicago and had improbably become an avid bike rider. On one particular evening I had found a trail that seemed like it was leading to a beautiful view of the city. I had gone careening down the path, and then, looking up, saw nothing but Lake Michigan and the Chicago Skyline behind it. I slammed on my brakes and nearly went into the water, getting pretty scratched up in the process. And then, strangely, this poem popped back into my head again. This was it!! This was, quite literally, the place where the sidewalk ends.

As I dusted myself off I began to laugh. I was in such a hurry that I had almost died, but here before me lay an incredible gift. I had found it, finally after years of forgetting about it, and I vowed to give this moment its due. I visit this spot a couple of times a week now, usually right around dusk as the sun sets on Chicago and the lights of the city begin to shine.

I think about a lot of things in these moments. Usually it begins with taking a kind of inventory. What are you doing? I often think to myself. Are you a therapist? A writer? A comedian? An imposter? A Buffoon? Some strange hybrid of all of these things? Usually though a quiet kind of calm comes over me, and I sit and enjoy the city from a distance. I think of all of the things I’ve done here, all the adventures, all the people, and I begin to settle down. When I’m particularly stressed I take out a copy of this poem and read it, and think about those last couple of lines, and usually I find my answer to whatever particular worry is on my mind.

The answer is right there. See the world like a child sees the world, and suddenly everything doesn’t seem so bad. That’s how I want to live my life. How I do live my life most of the time. Sometimes the undertow of various pressures threatens to drag me under with it, and in these moments I have to remember to stay true to myself. I will not be a grownup because someone tells me to be. It hasn’t worked for me, and really I’m not sure it works for anybody.

Oscar Wilde said “The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. The body is born young and grows old. That is the tragedy of life. That describes it so well for me. Sometimes I look in the mirror and wonder how the hell this happened. I feel younger than I have ever felt, but clearly that’s not what everyone sees. It has really been my experience that one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to judge anyone simply on their chronological age, as this is just not a good barometer of the size of a person’s spirit. Some of the oldest people I know are 25 or so, and some of the youngest are in their 70’s. Age is a dangerous fixation we have in our culture and it is one that never fails to irritate me.

So for me, as I get ready to enter a new phase of my life, I try to remember that really it doesn’t matter what I am. My only real goal is to continue to emphasize how I’m going to choose to live, and I will hope it will always be with the eyes of a child. It took me many years to find the place where the sidewalk ends, and it is a lesson I am not ready to relinquish so easily.

John Lennon & Paul McCartney

Perhaps more than any case I’ve ever had, Sarah made me truly examine what it is I hoped to accomplish by being a therapist, and what this title really means. I met her during a period of my life when I had just come out a difficult relationship, and was in one of those interpersonal vortexes where I just couldn’t seem to connect with another person. This became particularly clear to me on a drive back to Chicago on a long, rainy night, where there was not another car in site for miles. I turned on the radio and heard,

“Never gonna fall in love again
I don’t wanna start with someone new
Cause I couldn’t bear to see it end
Just like me and you
No I never wanna feel the pain
Of rememberin’ how it used to be
Never gonna fall in love again
Just like you and me”

It was a song by a man named Erik Carmen that I remembered from my youth. It was one of those songs that had the double bonus of being both grating as well as terribly depressing. I pulled over to the side of the road and looked into the mirror. I needed to gather myself for a minute. How had I gotten here, on the side of the road next to an Indiana wheat field with rain pounding down and not another person in site? Where had I gone wrong?

I eventually came out of this funk and made it back to Chicago, determined to commit myself to my work as a therapist, where I could focus on other people, something that had always been a wonderful recipe for alleviating my own feelings of loneliness.

An interesting thing that happens when you work as a therapist is that whatever your own personal issues are at the time, you can almost guarantee that one of your clients will have a problem that will pull these feelings out of you even more. This is the strange, synchronistic, dance of energy that takes place between two people in a therapeutic relationship. This dynamic was especially apparent in my work with Sarah, a 35 year-old woman who had found our office in the phone book and innocently scheduled an appointment with me on the Monday following the ride home I just described.

Sarah showed up to her appointment dressed very nicely and laughing and joking in a way that made me wonder what exactly I could help her with. We spent the whole first session engaging in this good-natured repartee, and when she left I couldn’t help but think I had just been on a first date rather than a therapy session.

Careful here, I thought to myself, this woman clearly has some of the exact issues that you do in your life, and this could be a tricky road to walk down. I thought about this a bit when I got home. One technique that is often pretty effective in therapy is to ask a person what advice they would give someone close to them if they described a similar issue that the person has presented. They are often able to come up with effective and creative solutions to this problem, which they are inexplicably unable to apply to themselves. This then can create a kind of cognitive dissonance, where a person becomes uncomfortable with their own illogical thinking, and slowly begin to incorporate changes into their lives.

From a psychological standpoint, I wanted to keep in mind Jung’s idea that “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” My own hope for transformation was secondary in this case, as it was my first priority to see Sarah through her difficulties, and help her feel understood and perhaps even reach a new understanding about how she could create more intimate interpersonal relationships.

Sarah came in complaining about exactly that. She was, in her own words, “too picky” about the men she dated, and would often look for the slightest abnormality in a man and then use it as an excuse to cut her ties with them. For ten years she had been going on like this, and now, as she got into her mid-thirties, she had come to believe that she would never find a husband and be a mother, which had created significant feelings of sadness and loss.

All of this took weeks to get to however, as she masked this sadness by making jokes, laughing at herself, and generally changing the subject whenever the conversation would get uncomfortable or hit too close to home. It was a difficult dance, as these were all of my own compensatory patterns, and I had personally used all of them to change the subject when someone asked me about my own single lifestyle.

But this was my job, and, despite any personal shortcomings, I knew I could not allow her to continue to distract me from the issue she had come in seeking help for. I learned to stop laughing at all of her jokes and playing along with the witty banter, as it was a trap we had fallen into too often. I acknowledged that had we met under different circumstances, I would love to sit and talk with her like this, but she had come in with a problem, and that this kind of conversation wasn’t helping us solve the problem.

So over time we began to talk more seriously. She attributed many of her problems with intimacy back to her parent’s divorce when she was 16, which had “blindsided” her and made her distrust the outward appearances of happy couples. Her parent’s relationship had seemed perfect to her, and when they hadn’t made it she had begun to question who could. It wasn’t an altogether uncommon response to divorce, and in particular a divorce that occurred at the age of 16, which is an important time in a  woman’s life to begin to make sense of dating, relationships, and romance. Our parents are our templates for these relationships, and when their relationship dissolves, it is natural to wonder how one should proceed when their own model has been destroyed.

Over time our therapeutic relationship deepened, and we were in uncharted waters for me in terms of therapeutic intimacy. A companion to me while I thought about Sarah’s case was Irv Yalom’s book The Gift of Therapy, where he made the point over and over again that it was “the relationship that heals” in therapy. I knew that if she could continue to disclose the deepest and most vulnerable parts of herself in the sessions, that it was likely she could learn to develop this same kind of trust outside of the therapeutic office.

So on we went. Her talking all the time about the doubts she felt about herself and whether she would be any good to someone in a relationship given the insecurities she worked so hard to cover up. She made a number of important insights throughout our work together, and as the weeks turned into months, I was pleased at the progress we had made, and patted myself on the back about how neutral I had been able to stay as a therapist, despite struggling with a number of the same problems that Sarah had.

But I was in for a rude awakening. One Saturday about 6 months into our work together, I was out with some friends at an Irish bar, listening to music and having a beer with at least some notion of improving my own social situation. I felt a buzzing in my pocket and looked down. It was Sarah. What was she doing calling me now? I wondered if she had dialed me by mistake, or sat on her phone, or if there was some other such explanation, but when I listened to her message I knew this wasn’t the case.

She had called me sobbing and sounded very desperate, and I knew that I immediately had to snap back into therapist mode for a moment, despite the fact that it was a Saturday night and I was on my own time. I called her back and she explained that she was feeling suicidal and didn’t know if she could make it through the night. I asked her if she had a plan or the means to commit suicide, and she said she did not, but that she was also very desperate and wondered if it was possible if I could come out and talk to her.

This proved to be a serious test of my clinical judgment. I had had a couple of drinks, and knew that driving was not an option. I could call 911, but that didn’t seem to be a great solution either. She seemed to just need to talk to me at this moment, and I began the long and arduous trip on Chicago’s public transportation to go and see her.

When I got there it was midnight and she was sitting in her car. I unlocked the door and we went inside. Her eyes were red from crying and when we got to my office she let it all out.

“I needed you to know.. That for months I have been lying to you.. I have come in here, pretended to be Ok, and that I was making progress. But I’m not” I never told you about Eleanor Rigby. You know the song? The song about the woman who dies alone? It has been in my head for months, and it just keeps getting louder. Tonight it got so loud I couldn’t get it to stop. And you know what the funny part is? The only thing that makes it quiet down is coming here. Coming to talk to you. So I guess I wanted to say fuck you.. Fuck you for making me care so much about you and not being available to me. That’s what I wanted to say to you.”

I took a deep breath and thought very carefully about what I was going to say next. Should I tell her about the songs that played in MY head? Tell her about my own dark night of the soul next to an Indiana farm? We were at a very important crossroads here and I wanted to show her how much she meant to me without making it appear like a romantic overture. What I did say is this;

“I care very much about you Sarah. The things you describe are things I have felt myself. A number of times. I became a therapist because I hate to see people in pain. I will give you everything I have as therapist to help you figure out how to get past your own loneliness. That’s how I think we get through pain, by giving what we have to give to others. From what I know you are an amazing, exceptional woman with an incredible amount of this to give to the rest of the world. Maybe we can keep trying to figure this out together.”

She took this all in with a kind of wonder, and slowly but surely stopped crying and began to think. I wasn’t quite sure if I was being tested in that moment, but what I did know is that for that moment at least, the crisis had been averted. We talked a little more and I hopped back onto the train on another rainy Chicago night to go back home. The soundtrack in my own head was playing “Eleanor Rigby”, but I knew it wouldn’t last forever. I had found a way to deal with my own loneliness, and this night had proven to me that I had made the right choice in becoming a therapist.

So Sarah and I continued our sessions, but after that night there seemed to be a whole new level of honesty between us that allowed for some real progress as we worked on the things that Sarah felt were holding her back. The idea of giving love to get love intrigued her, and, to my great surprise and pleasure, one day she marched into my office and told me how she had decided to become a therapist. That was over a year ago now, and I am happy to report that Sarah has now been in grad school for a year, and has also begun dating again.

I include this story because no other therapy case has truly made me think to this extent about why it is I am a therapist, and what it really means to create a healing relationship with someone in this context. When I began my work with Sarah I often felt like an impostor, as the insecurities, doubts, and failures she had experienced were no different than my own. One of my favorite Psychologists, Rudolph Dreikurs, talked about having “the courage to be imperfect” and in this case I found this courage, despite my own substitute feelings that threatened to undermine my confidence and render me ineffective as a therapist. It was a tremendous learning experience, and I have no doubt Sarah will “pay it forward” when it comes to passing on this lesson.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In one of my previous books, The Tragic Clowns, I wrote about one of my favorite comedians, Chris Farley. Some my find it odd that a person so well known and famous could be a substitute person, but in Chris’ case this pattern was actually quite pervasive. It’s an important point, as many of us make the assumption that the rich and famous have lives that are free from everyday feelings of doubt and insecurity. We assign qualities to others based on actions we see in movies and television. One of my clients was amazed for instance that a man like Owen Wilson could attempt suicide. My research into the inner worlds of several comedians, including Chris Farley’s, led me to believe that a substitute pattern is often at the very core of what drives many of our most well known comedians.

In Chris’ case this started at a very young age, as problems with his weight made him in immediate target of abuse from the other children. His weight clearly created for Chris a self image where he was separate and different than the other kids. In many cases a child will do anything to be like the other kids, but in Chris’ case he took the exact opposite strategy. Realizing that the other kids found his weight to be a source of amusement, Chris decided to make jokes about it before the other kids got the chance. He in fact got so good at it, that his act made him the star in virtually every environment he was ever subjected to.

But the validation, admiration, and even adoration Chris received for making fun of his weight caused a split inside of him that made him terribly uncomfortable in his own skin. We want belonging, all of us, and Chris had found belonging with the richest and most famous people in the world, but the price tag for this sense of belonging was one that cost him his life.

How does this happen? As is the case with many substitute people, he turned to drugs and alcohol to ease the pain that he felt from being forever just outside the circle of the other human beings. The difficulty in confronting this pattern is that to really be able to find this sense of belonging, we first have to make peace with ourselves, and this is something Chris never came close to doing. Literally sitting alone with himself was something that was uncomfortable for Chris, and he often turned to drugs and alcohol to create a temporary cease fire in the war that was going on inside him.

Chris’ inner turmoil brings to mind a quote from Alfred Adler, “The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.” So although Chris was able to combat his inferiority by compensating with a wonderfully entertaining self-deprecating sense of humor, it was clear that this emotional agitation was a powerful and destructive force in his tragic, abbreviated life.

What lesson can we as substitute people take from Chris’ life, after all his case seems to be an unusual and extreme example of this pattern. Having researched and written a couple of books on the nature of humor and how it may be used for both healthy and unhealthy adaptation, I think it is an important question. This pattern of attacking one’s self before others have a chance to is prevalent in many people with the substitute pattern, and is especially common with people who are overweight and often struggling with this problem very publicly.

Kurt Vonnegut said, “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” Although this is a sentiment I certainly agree with, it is also important to note that laughter can be turned excessively against the self, as was the case with Chris Farley. Somewhere along the laughter continuum we have to find the ability to laugh at our shared absurdity as human beings while also balancing our need to take care of ourselves.

A great deal of taking care of ourselves begins with our inner dialogue. Those little things we say audible only in our own heads that judge, criticize, and compare have a tremendous influence on the choices we eventually make, as these thoughts become feelings that then become actions. Over time prolonged negative judgments we make about ourselves take a huge toll, and not only do we begin to believe our self-fulfilling prophecies, we convince others to believe them as well. My guess is we all know someone who seems like they should be in a different station on life, rather it be with a partner who appreciates them or a career that challenges them, who has simply been unable to grasp that those are things they deserve. Perhaps you have been one of these people. I have been as well.

One quote that was of tremendous value to me in confronting this pattern comes from Marianne Williamson, whose books have been an inspiration to many who have struggled to overcome substitute feelings. She says, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Very powerful words that might hold tremendous meaning in the struggle to overcome feelings of inferiority. But if we reflect thoughtfully enough, and think about our tendency to judge and compare, and make a thorough and honest assessment of how  the way we talk to ourselves contributes to these feelings, it is my believe that we can begin to find our light.

In Chris’ case he reflected a tremendous amount of this light, but ultimately he couldn’t see himself the way the rest of the world experienced him on a daily basis. My guess is that many of us fit into this pattern as well. All of us have gifts to offer, every one of us. Fear seems to be the central thing that prevents us from sharing these gifts, and we have to stare this fear down if we are going to truly have a chance to share the lives we were born to lead. My hope is that by sharing Chris’ story I have shown that all of us, from the wealthiest celebrity to the loneliest recluses, have at times felt like they didn’t belong with the rest of the parade. By talking about and accepting that a part of this is a natural human tendency, we can perhaps diminish its power and begin to reconnect with each other.

Celine’ Journey to the end of the night

I’m dancing as fast as I can

Barbara Jordan

Sonia was a 45-year old woman who had a couple of tapes that wouldn’t stop playing in her head. That’s what she came in discussing anyway, and she wanted to know if I could hypnotize her and make these tapes stop playing.

From my initial impressions of Sonia, I knew immediately that this was going to be a fascinating case. I have always found that these “tapes”, these little songs and phrases that get stuck in our heads, often provide amazing insight into a person’s inner world. I have had many such tapes playing I my own head, and thinking about where they came from and what message my subconscious was trying to convey to me has always provided me with amazingly instructive information.

To back up for a second, Sonia was a college professor at a local community college who described feeling a “half step behind” her life at all times. She was divorced, had 2 kids, and had arrived at this period having accomplished a lot of what she had set out to do. Yet she was harried and she was frazzled and she couldn’t quite get caught up on all of her various projects and obligations.

In these cases, the therapeutic description might be to help Sonia organize her life a little better. Journaling, short-term goal setting, some work on the issue of time-management and mindful living, these were all things that I knew could be of use to Sonia, but I also knew there was more. The difficulty with Sonia is the she wanted a quick fix, and discussed how she really didn’t have time to do more than 10 sessions with me at this time in her life.

So I had to find out about the tapes, and the relevance they may have to the things that were holding her back from living the life she wanted. She was a professor of sociology, a close cousin of psychology, and I hoped that I could help her reach a deeper level of understanding by appealing to her knowledge about people and their inherent need to find belonging.

So we talked about the tapes. The first one, at the beginning of this story, comes from Celine, a French writer known for his book Journey to the end of the night. In this book, a young boy becomes filled with a sense of dread after watching and reflecting on the frenetic pace of the city in which he lived. He had an urge to scream, “Make them stop” at the top of his lungs. It was literally a desire to stop time and make everyone slow down and pay attention to how fast life was passing them by. It was a short little passage in this book, but one that had gotten stuck in Sonia’s head and that she couldn’t seem to shake.

So we talked about what it was she wanted to make stop, and this question released a floodgate of emotion in Sonia that she hadn’t expected. She wanted her kids to stop getting older so fast, she wanted the wrinkles on her face to stop getting deeper and deeper each day, she wanted birthdays to stop reappearing on her calendar so fast, students to stop coming in and out of her life so quickly, and most of all she missed the things that she never got to experience in her rapidly fleeting youth.

Here at last was the key. It wasn’t just that she missed her own life, it was that she also felt a kind of longing for all of the things she never got to do. This is a particularly painful kind of nostalgia, as we wistfully miss an imaginary life that we are sure everyone else has experienced besides us. This can create a dangerous kind of personal isolation, as we have assigned superior memories to people that we don’t even know to be true. In comparison our own lives look incomplete.

I wanted to know more. What about the other portion of the tape in Sonia’s head? In this case it was a single phrase “I’m dancing as fast as I can” which was a book from the 70s later made into a movie about a career woman struggling with an addiction to valium and her deteriorating mental health.

So now I had two extremely powerful insights to work with regarding the state of Sonia’s inner world. She was in deep pain about getting older, missing a life that never was, while all the while fearing she was going a little crazy in the process. These were powerful pieces of a puzzle that weren’t in her immediate awareness, and weren’t at all visible to the people in her life, who simply viewed her as a successful professor and an amazing woman.

So we began a deep and comprehensive dialogue about what it was that made her feel like this, and the root of it all came back to unfinished business from her childhood. She had been the child of a divorce, felt a tremendous amount of shame from this, and became in effect the “smart’ girl who always had her nose in a book. Meanwhile she missed out on several rites of passage growing up, and had an amazing amount of regret that she never went to her High School prom. Now, with kids who were getting to this age, she was also divorced, and seeing them go through some of the same things she had stirred up some long forgotten feelings of inferiority.

So we began a discussion about this. These long forgotten feelings had somehow surfaced just to the level of her preconscious mind, and sent a message “make them stop, make them stop.” It was kind of fascinating actually, and as we began to explore this issue, Sonia was able to add a number of her own insights as we continued. What was perhaps the most interesting thing, was this woman, who had not been able to find belonging as a child, chose to dedicate her life to the sociology and in particular the study of group behavior. It was a fascinating compensation that had for the most part served her well. She was very well liked by her students, respected by her peers, and was doing very well financially and professionally.

But as is the case with many things we don’t deal with from our pasts, feelings of inferiority from childhood had arisen to cause Sonia a significant amount of distress. The “I’m dancing as fast as I can” tape seemed to indicate a fear that she was slowly losing her own sanity, which Sonia eventually confirmed. Another part of this particular phrase was that she was, quite, literally, intimated by the word “dance.” Seeing her sons navigate the minefields of dances and proms was very anxiety provoking for her, but there was also something in her own life that was provoking this anxiety.

It seemed that once a year her college had a major party for the faculty to drink wine, dress up, and generally rub elbows outside of the school environment. For years Sonia had avoided these things, but this year was a little different. An attractive economics professor had hinted around at taking her to the party, and had mentioned dancing to her a few times as well. The tape in her head got much louder when he was around, and she even found that repeating “I’m dancing as fast as I can” helped quell her anxiety in these situations.

So we broke this down. In her life, quite literally, she was working very hard to simply maintain her home, and her career, with very little time for anything else. She was doing the best she could, sacrificing for her kids, but still dreamed about a life filled with love, adventure, and romance. Yet this was just a fantasy at this point in her life, and now a man had come along and hinted that this life that she had never had could be a reality. It was a recipe for distress, but yet, just out of her immediate awareness. As we continued to talk, Sonia was able to laugh heartily at her own life, and by our 4^th month together had made real progress in putting to rest some of her long-forgotten feelings of inferiority.

I’m pleased to report that this story has a happy ending. Finally, and improbably, Sonia got to have her prom experience at the faculty party, where she and her new boyfriend tripped the light fantastic on the dance floor and were the hits of the faculty party. I even saw them as a couple recently, where we all talked about the pressure of balancing dating, raising kinds, work, etc.

“By the way,” he said at the end of the session, “I have this song, I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll, playing in my head, do you think you can help me with this?”

But he already had his answer.

Everclear- I will buy you a new life

King Moonraiser: Come closer. What do you desire?
Rudolph: Well, we’re a couple of misfits from Christmastown, and we’d like to live here.
King Moonraiser: No. That would not be possible. This island is for toys alone.
Yukon Cornelius: How do you like that? Even among misfits you’re a misfit.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

The Island of misfit toys.

Nearly every person I have ever spoken to in therapy has strong feelings about Christmas. There really is nothing like the holidays to reopen old wounds, stir up feelings of jealousy, resentment, loss, and sometimes even joy. This sounds cynical, I know, but it is also something I’m sure most therapists can confirm.

The substitute pattern seems to thrive during this season, as it becomes very easy to compare and contrast our lives with virtually everyone we come into contact with, as people strive to put their best foot forward when describing their own Christmas experience.

Why do we lie? What is it that makes us put on the plastic smiles and wax nostalgic about the holidays? Here in America, the forces of consumerism are at their most powerful during this season, and financial posturing and social comparison always create feelings that send a lot of people straight to therapy during the festive holiday season.

One family I saw touched off a number of my own substitute patterns, and really got me thinking about how much Christmas really separates the haves and the have nots in our contemporary American society.

The family in question had a lot of strikes against them. The father had been in a construction accident, and had lost a great deal of his cognitive functioning as a result. The mother had never worked, and seemed overwhelmed and lost trying to keep the family together as a result of her husband’s problems.

They came to me after being referred from the insurance company, and were very unfamiliar with the therapeutic process. The family had a number of problems, but the one that was currently causing them the most distress came from the 12 year-old daughter, who had been throwing terrible tantrums around the house, ostensibly because her parents wouldn’t provide her with a cell phone.

Our first meeting was comical. She laid down on the couch facing the opposite way from me, and waited for me to say something. When I asked her why she was laying like that, she explained that she saw that on TV and thought that was the way she was supposed to do it. I explained to her that she could just sit up and talk to me, and not to be worried or afraid and she begrudgingly fidgeted and squirmed her way into sitting up.

Our first session was awkward. She clearly didn’t want to be there and I couldn’t say that I blamed her. So we played a little Uno and talked about some of her favorite music. I was amazed to find she was a Beatles fan, and when I found that out I knew we had something to talk about. She told me she also liked to read, and particularly liked Tales of a 4^th Grade Nothing which was also a favorite of mine growing up. As the hour progressed we made a real connection, and I could scarcely believe this was the same little girl I had heard described as such a terror.

So we saw each other a couple more times and continued to play cards and talk. I found she was quite bright and articulate, and it was actually a real pleasure to spend time with her. Even still, I knew I had to go a little deeper and at least start to try and understand what it is that was making her so angry. It is dangerous to rush children in therapy before you have built rapport, so as we were wrapping up, I simply asked her what she would change in her life if I could wave a magic wand and make things different.

Her reaction was not what I expected. A tear fell down her face and she looked up at me with sad eyes.

“I just want a normal life and a normal family,” she said sadly. “and maybe a dad like you.’

Wow. She had totally stunned me. I was trained and prepared for what is known as the “doorknob confession,” something that occurs in therapy where a person drops a bombshell on their way out the door as opposed to dealing with it during the session. This was a little different however, as I was the one who had asked the question. Meanwhile her parents were waiting in the lobby and I needed to wrap things up, while also giving her a response to such a powerful revelation.

“Listen Katie,” I explained. “I really enjoy talking to you and hearing a little more about your life. If it’s helpful to you we can set it up so we can talk once a week about whatever it is you want. I can and will be your friend, but I can’t be your dad. Do you still think you might like to come back and talk again?”

Not the greatest intervention I’d ever dreamed up, but it seemed to reach its mark. She agreed that she would like to come back, and after speaking with the parents for a few minutes, we all agreed that this was something we could make happen.

I stayed up half the night thinking about what had just transpired. As happens so often in therapy, Katie had made me think about something in my life that was very much weighing on my mind. I had just returned home from an extended vacation with my family, and spending time with my nieces and nephews had made me seriously question why I had reached this point in my own life without having children. In general I was happy with my choices, but also wondered very much about what the road less traveled might have had in mind. Would I have been a good father? Was I missing an important part of life? Was all this still ahead of me?

All of these thoughts were important to consider, but first and foremost I also had to try and understand how I could be of the most help to Katie. Clearly she longed for a kind of normalcy in her life that was simply not possible right now, and she seemed to be taking out her frustration about this on her immediate family. They described violent tantrums where she would run into the street screaming and crying. Other times she would curl up in the room and not talk to anyone. I knew that if she couldn’t begin to develop ways to soothe herself and find more effective coping methods she was headed for potentially serious trouble.

So what was the best way to go here? I knew that if I could continue to build a trusting relationship with her she would likely continue to open up to me, but on the other hand I didn’t want her to get so attached that she became completely dependent on me and on coming to therapy. It was kind of a tricky road to walk actually, and meanwhile I didn’t want my own pangs of regret over lost fatherhood to interfere with how I conducted myself here.

Was any of the completely possible? I didn’t really know. All we really have as therapists is ourselves, and I had to figure out how to use myself, flaws and regrets notwithstanding, and hopefully find a way for this girl to begin to quiet the distress that was going on inside of her.

So we continued to meet regularly and play cards and talk. I found out that she was being made fun of by the other kids at school because of her clothes, her “weird” family, and the fact that she didn’t even own a cell phone. This broke my heart to hear about, and I continued to think about what it was I could do to help her with the very real problems she had as a result of the realities of her life. She seemed to look forward to coming to therapy, however and, per her parents report, her anger and tantrums were decreasing

But still there was this sadness about her, and in particular she was dreading Christmas, which was an amazingly heartbreaking thing to hear from a child. Again her story had struck a chord with me, as I too was not excited about Christmas this year, having decided to forgo going home and instead stay in Chicago and celebrate the season essentially by myself. Again, I didn’t want to mix up my problems with hers, but I also thought a lot about how I could use what I felt about the holidays to be of assistance to her. My first instinct was to simply give her a cell phone, but I knew that was not an appropriate ethical solution. Sadly the family’s financial problems were not something I could help with.

So I went home that night and watched It’s a Wonderful Life, and thought about something special I could do for Katie over this holiday. Even as a kid I loved watching Christmas movies, and every year I anticipated getting lost in these stories almost as much as I did the actual Christmas day experience. Somewhere around the time George Bailey was jumping in to save Clarence I got an idea.

What I did decide on was to throw a little holiday party just for Katie and me. I got this idea from thinking about the show Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and in particular the scenes that took place on the island of misfit toys. For those who remember that part of the show, it was where all of the toys that were slightly broken or damaged in some way went to live, and this part of the show had always had a special kind of meaning for me.

I had always felt like a bit of a misshaped toy myself, never fitting quite right with everyone else around me. I was quite sure from our conversation that Katie was feeling something very similar, and I thought if we could watch this show together, that maybe we could talk about some of the things that were bothering her. I also wanted to create something special for her on this holiday, but knew that buying her something wasn’t exactly appropriate.

So I told her about the idea and she was thrilled, feeling that there was finally something unique for her that she didn’t have to share with her brothers (they shared a room), or that she could be made fun of for by the other kids.

So when the day arrived I bought some popcorn and her favorite drink, (Orange pop) and we had ourselves a little movie night. Was I getting some of my own needs met through this interaction? Absolutely. But I also knew that this may be an important way to get her to talk about some of the things that were bothering her. When we got to the part about the misfit toys, I told her how I always felt like that, she shook her head and smiled in a knowing way, both of us communicating a kind of understanding that didn’t need elaboration in that moment.

So we continued to meet after that, and she opened up in a completely new way about how hard it was to endure the comments from the other kids about her family, and how angry this made her at the other kids as well as her own parents. Therapy gave her a chance to explore these feelings, and we also began a discussion about ignoring what other people thought, which was admittedly a difficult thing for a 12 year-old girl to comprehend. Still, she was a Beatles fan, and I knew there was something special about her that might begin to get a grasp on this idea.

I saw her for another year after this, and watched her blossom into a beautiful young woman with her own sense of style and confidence. It was a wonderful transformation that was actually kind of startling to watch, and when it came time to part company I was confident she was on her way to becoming a remarkable young woman.

This case was proof to me that therapy can sometimes have an amazing impact on both the client as well as the therapist, but also spoke to me very deeply about the power and resiliency of the human spirit. Someone in Katie’s situation had a great deal working against her, but something inside of her found a way to hold on and rise above some very difficult circumstances. I don’t know how her story ends, but I very much look forward to hearing all about it.

Ruth Rendell

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.

Jenny Joseph

Men die before women do. That’s a fact. As someone who has worked in a couple of nursing homes it is also something I’ve observed firsthand, as the ratio of women to men in these places is often about five to one. I’ve also worked with a number of widows as a therapist, and was particularly struck by a woman named Susan, who became a widow at the age of 53 and came in complaining that she was invisible.

When I first heard this I wondered if she actually meant she thought she was invisible, and if I was going to have to call for the guys in the white coats. Upon talking to her I learned that she was referring to the fact that she honestly felt that she didn’t even exist in the minds of most people she encountered on a daily basis.

One fortuitous byproduct of working with Susan was that she turned me on to the wonderful show Six Feet Under, which follows a family that owns a funeral parlor through all of life’s triumphs and tragedies. In particular she felt a kinship with Ruth, the widowed mother on the show who struggled with dating, connecting with her adult children, and facing her own impending mortality. In one scene in particular. Ruth’s friend Bettina informs her that women their age are invisible, and that therefore they could get away with murder.

I liked that second part, and wondered if that portion of the statement might hold a key to our future treatment, but in the meantime I wanted to learn more about what it was like to be invisible. Ruth had been a widow for a little over a year when she originally came to therapy, and had suffered from feelings of depression from both her original grief as well as the events that followed her husband’s death, which made her feel that she was increasingly of no importance to people.

The first step in cognitive-behavioral therapy is to see if a person’s thoughts actually match up with their experience in the world, but in Susan’s case I wondered if this would be a dangerous exercise. I knew from working with several members of this age group that there was in fact some validity to her invisibility hypotheses, and that the situational events of her life would in fact induce depressing feelings in almost anybody.

So how to proceed? Some people in therapy don’t need you to make earth-shattering interpretations about their childhood, but instead just need a supportive, encouraging person to listen to them. This can help people slowly find their confidence again and start to reconnect with the bigger world around them.

Sounds good, right? In theory yes, but Susan had almost totally lost her hope, and that is a very dangerous thing. As a married woman her every action had been based on doing things as a married couple, and now that she was alone she found her social circle no longer welcomed her.

What Susan did have going for her was a wonderful sense of humor, and it has been my experience, (and very personal bias), that if someone has this quality than they can survive nearly any circumstance life has to offer. Still, she was in therapy and she was in pain, and we had to come up with some kind of plan to deal with her invisibility.

Susan had never been in therapy, but took to it very quickly, as she was both an avid reader, and eager to try any suggestions that would make people start paying attention to her again. We discovered that Susan had for the most part of her life gotten validation from being the kind of wife that people expected her to be, and in the process she had never really explored all of her individual dreams, goals, and desires.

People have an ideas sometimes that therapy is just about exploring things that are wrong in a person’s life, and how all this started with some significant piece of their childhood. This is not true. In some cases, really in all cases, it is also important to find what a person’s strengths are, and then encourage these strengths and collaborate with them on how to maximize the things that are going right in their lives.

So in Susan’s case it was clear that, although she was depressed, she was also open to trying new things, and in this sense I knew she had the kind of resilience that would make her an excellent candidate for therapy. About 6 weeks in to the sessions I got an idea about how she might begin to feel a little less invisible.

When I was young I remember my mother told me quite often that when she was an old woman she would wear purple. The idea comes from a poem by Jenny Joseph, enclosed here,

When I Am an Old Woman

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

And satin sandals and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick flowers in other people's gardens

And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

And eat three pounds of sausages at a go

Or only bread and a pickle for a week

And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

And pay our rent and not swear in the street

And set a good example for the children.

We will have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprise

I have a very interesting history with this poem beginning obviously with my mother who recited the idea often and purchased the book for us to look at as well. I was always intrigued by the idea of an eccentric old woman with mismatched clothes who reeked of brandy, and I actually really liked the idea of my mom becoming this very woman as she got older.

Cut to years later and I am a waiter on sunny Mackinac Island up on the upper peninsula of Michigan. It is a wonderfully fun place, with no cars, dozens of bars, and nothing to do but enjoy the scenery and drink Rum Runners.

One afternoon I was waiting tables and a bit bored with the tourist crowd, when I suddenly saw a thundering heard walking towards me. I looked up and saw a sea of red hats and was told that they were members of the infamous Red Hat Society. I made some inquiries and found that they visited Mackinac Island every summer, and the result was the herd marching down the street directly towards me.

As a relatively new waiter at this establishment, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Soon everyone on the waitstaff began bitching about the “old ladies” who came in and acted like fools, and arguments ensued about who was going to actually have to wait on them. I knew a little bit about the Red Hat society, and in particular that they were a group of women over 50 who got together to eat drink, travel, and generally beat back the rigors of getting older by having a lot of fun.

I told them to give them all to me. All of them. Every last one of them. I knew immediately that there was something special about these ladies, and soon there were about 40 of them all sitting in my section grabbing my ass and ordering drinks like it was their last day on earth. And you know what? It was one of the funniest afternoons I could ever recall. I talked to a number of the ladies that afternoon, and heard several stories about widowhood, loss, resiliency, adventure, and even romance. It was incredibly insightful actually, and I knew that the events of that afternoon would one day prove to be useful to me at some future incarnation of my life.

So cut to years later and I’m a therapist with a funny, open-minded widow in my office, and the light bulbs started clicking like you wouldn’t believe. I had actually stayed in touch with several of the women I met on that fateful afternoon all those years ago, and I put Susan in touch with them with the hopes that they could share with her what they knew about overcoming invisibility, as it was my experience that these women were anything but invisible.

Susan eventually found that there was a wild, uninhibited woman waiting to get out inside of her, and finding the Red Hat Society helped her begin to develop this long dormant side of her personality. In finding this new gear in her life, Susan eventually became a mentor to a number of other widows that also felt like life had left them behind, and in doing so became empowered in a way that was truly remarkable.

I would like to say that therapy was responsible for helping Susan make this transformation in her life, but it just wasn’t true. She had some amazingly creative potential inside of her that was just dying to come out under the right circumstances, and the one thing I did was share information with her about how to find these circumstances. The Red Hat society speaks to the power of community as an antidote to substitute feelings in such a wonderfully creative way, that I can scarcely do it justice in writing. The sense of fun, adventure and camaraderie that I found these women possessed convinced me that as long as we are drawing breath we have a chance to stand up and give notice that we are here. It’s kind of wonderful actually.

Kurt Vonnegut Cat’s Cradle

Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.

The Catcher in the Rye

The more I talk to people about the substitute pattern, the more I learn that, at one time other another, all of us have been the substitute person. When we can talk about this, share our stories, and even perhaps laugh about this, we can perhaps begin to free ourselves from the shame that threatens to swallow us when we don’t have the chance to share these feelings.

In considering this idea, I though about Yalom’s description of one of his group therapy exercises. In a nutshell he would ask everyone in a group to write down their deepest fears and insecurities, and then he would read them anonymously aloud to the group. You know what he found? That essentially these fears were all the same. All of us have felt unlovable, inadequate, and inferior at some point in our lives. Rather than look at this as a curse of the human condition, perhaps we can see it as a kind of strength. Because these feelings are so universal, they can also be something that helps bring us closer together.

This idea was why I included the quote at the beginning of this essay from Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful book Cat’s Cradle. Some of the greatest human interactions I’ve ever had with other people came from strange and seemingly coincidental meetings with people that I wouldn’t normally cross paths with. Each time this has happened I stop and ask myself, is this person a member of my Karass? It always makes me smile, and usually I make a note to point this out to the person, and more often than not they are also familiar with Kurt Vonnegut and have actually heard the term before.

I point this out because our tendency is to surround ourselves with other people who look like we do, but in doing so we may miss some wonderful opportunities for understanding. Perhaps if we all challenge ourselves to meet at least one strange and new person each day, we would be much richer for the experience.

My hopes in writing this book would be that substitute people from all walks of life would begin to band together and shout from the rooftops that we are here, we are surviving, and that we matter. Is this going to happen? Probably not. Still, I firmly believe that if we can talk about and explore where these feelings come in our lives, we can diffuse a great deal of the inadequacy that comes from beings a substitute person. In my perfect world there would be support groups and meetups for substitute people to talk and laugh and drink and dance together, but again maybe I’m being too optimistic.

So what can we do? Although I hated to advocate therapy in each and every case, I do feel like it can be a wonderful start in rebuilding one’s sense of worth. You might think I say this because I am a therapist, but that is not the truth. I have been in therapy myself and personally undergone this rebuilding process. Probably the most important thing I emerged with was an ability to laugh at myself and my problems, without it being mean-spirited and hurtful. There is a significant difference between self-deprecating and self-attacking, and it a line I’ve found through many years of personal exploration.

We can read. A few recommendations I would suggest, are The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck, I’m Ok, You’re Ok by Thomas Harris, and Living, Loving, and Learning by Leo Buscalgia. These are all older books that I return to again and again when my own substitute pattern flares up. There are dozens of others, several of which have been mentioned throughout this book that might help.

Most of all though I think we can stick together. It has been my experience that is at least as exhausting to try and pretend we are without feelings of inferiority as it is to constantly remind ourselves of them and silently live with them, but really, neither is a good option. As Terrence said thousands of years ago, “I am human, therefore nothing human is strange to me.” Let’s not pretend anymore that we are above each other and exist on some kind of higher plane because of the quality of our clothes, cars, appearance, or any of the other thousands of things we use to categorize ourselves as different from one another. It doesn’t work. Not really. Not in terms of self-worth and feeling a sense of belonging.

In conclusion, if you have ever felt like a substitute person and wondered if you were the only one, please be assured you are not. Rich, poor, black, white, men, women, it truly doesn’t matter. As a therapist I can assure you people from all walks of life feel like this and they are just as hurt, lonely, and eager to meet someone who feels like this as you are. Give them a call. Ask them out for coffee. Get a group together and go do something fun and silly. We are all a little miswired and broken. Have all anguished about not fitting in, and have all wondered if we somehow were missing the parade everyone else was marching in. To feel like this is to feel human. To connect with others who feel like this is and to share this vulnerability is a scary and frightening journey, but it is also a major key in maximizing this short and strange trip we are on, and living it with a shared sense of purpose.