Tag Archive - limitations

Restlessness: Not Acknowleding Our Limits Can Keep Us From Focusing On Anything Permanent

April 29, 2010 in Ministry-Theology, Therapy-Psychology with 12 Comments


[image by izzymunchted]


Coming to Grips With Our Limits
Something that I have noticed in our culture, and in my own life, is a certain restlessness that often keeps us from truly putting all our energy and focus towards one thing. Instead, we find ourselves with our hands in all sorts of things, and spread way too thin.

I think we do this for a couple of reasons: 1) We are afraid to commit to one thing. Even two things. What if this doesn’t pan out? What if I miss out on what is happening over there? This is often driven by fear. 2) We never truly acknowledge our limitations. We think/and are told we can do anything and everything. But that is not true. We have limits.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself feeling spread way too thin, and at the end of each day, always feeling like there was more I should have done. I sat down to my computer and decided to open up Excel and make a more scheduled calendar for myself so that I could accomplish all that I wanted to do each day. But I kept running into a problem. There were not enough hours in the day. I had hit a limit, and no matter how creatively I arranged the excel sheet, that limit wasn’t budging. Something was going to have to give. It was a humbling experience to come up to my own limits (not the first, nor last time), and I realized I needed to acknowledge them, make changes, and become more focused on a couple of things, rather than a million things.

Unfulfilled Desires
In Ronald Rolheiser’s phenomenal book, The Restless Heart, he says this:

“The Hebrew scriptures, for the main part, understand human nature to be so fashioned that it can never come to full satisfaction because human desires always outstrip a person’s actual accomplishment in this life….

Again, this hints at a reason for our loneliness, namely, our potentialities and desires are much greater than we can ever fulfill in a lifetime. Thus, we always feel somewhat unfulfilled because there are always spots inside of us that are empty….

Much of our rootlessness is caused by a lack of commitment and fidelity. Our lives are too much characterized by our refusal to commit ourselves permanently to anything, whether it be another person, a marriage, a religious vocation, or even just a certain job, a certain neighborhood, or a certain set of values. We all want to hang loose! and consequently our lives are too characterized by infidelity, broken promises, broken words, cheap commitments, and hastily drawn loyalties. It is not surprising we suffer from acute loneliness. (pp. 82, 83, 173)”

When Our Desires Come Into Conflict With Our Limitations
This is where the rubber meets the road. Each one of us has lots of things we want to do with our lives. There are lots of things we want to accomplish each day…but those desires, and our passions can often hit limits. Last year I wrote a post, Limits and Potential: Living Free Within That Tension, which was a reflection on this issue as formulated by Parker Palmer in the book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. Palmer puts it this way:

“Everything in the universe has a nature, which means limits as well as potentials, a truth well known by people who work daily with the things of the world. Making pottery, for example, involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter’s hands, telling her what it can and cannot do–and if she fails to listen, the outcome will be both frail and ungainly. Engineering involves more than telling materials what they must do. If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his failure will go beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.

The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail.”

God has created us with many desires and passions for our lives, but the reality is, is that on this side of heaven, many of them will not come to fruition. That feeling can leave us in a constant state of restlessness, unable to truly commit to anything permanent, therefore, leaving us constantly in a state of not acknowledging our limits, and with an inability to focus on anything for a long period of time.

Disciplining Our Focus

Most of us in fact, never “get it together!” We never get ourselves together. Instead we go through life frustrated and dissipated, letting our restless energies push us in one direction, then in another, never quite able to settle down, to figure out what we want to do, and never quite able to discipline ourselves enough to achieve the ends we were meant to attain.

In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa wrote about this inability of the human person to “get it together.” He compares the restless and lonely energies in our heart to a current in a stream:

Let us imagine a stream flowing from a spring and branching out at random into different channels. Now so long as it flows this way it will be entirely useless for the cultivation of the soul. Its waters are spread out too much; each single channel is small and meagre, and the water, because of this, hardly moves. But if we could collect these wanderings and widely scattered channels into one single stream, we would have a full and compact waterflow which would be useful for the many needs of life.

So too, I think of the human mind. If it spreads itself out in all directions, constantly flowing out and dispersing to whatever pleases the senses, it will never have any notable force in its progress towards the true Good. (Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart, pp. 19-20)

Does Therapy Need to be Face to Face, In Person to be Beneficial?

September 3, 2009 in Technology-Social Media, Therapy-Psychology with 2 Comments

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[image by Wrote]

It was inevitable that with the emergence of more and more of our lives online that the field of therapy would see more and more benefit from doing therapy online, but even still, lots of questions remain for both practitioners and clients. In an article from Monday (thanks to John Saddington for pointing me to the article) the title says it all, Therapy online: Good as face to face? The article begins by talking about a study on the topic of depression:

Participants were randomly assigned to either receive online cognitive behavioral therapy in addition to usual physician care — which may include antidepressant medication — or to continue their usual care and be placed on a waiting list. The intervention consisted of up to 10 55-minute sessions, five of which were expected to be completed by the four-month follow-up.

Of the 113 people who did online therapy, 38 percent recovered from depression after four months, compared with 24 percent of people in the control group. The benefits were maintained at eight months, with 42 percent of the online therapy group and 26 percent of the control group having recovered.

The level of benefit shown in the study is about the same as could be expected from traditional therapy, although the researchers did not compare the two as part of the experiment, said Dr. Gregory Simon, a psychiatrist and researcher at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, Washington, who wrote the editorial that accompanied the study.

Benefits of Online Therapy
This article and a slew of other articles out there talk about the many benefits of doing therapy online. Things such as:

  1. Providing therapy to those with limited/no access to see a therapist.
  2. Some studies show that therapy over the internet allows clients to put down their guard, be more open and vulnerable than in person.
  3. Often the stigma of going into see a therapist is removed.
  4. According to some studies, like the one above, the benefit of therapy online is similar to that in person.

These are just a few of the more common benefits.

What other benefits can you think of?

Limitations of Online Therapy

  1. Some experts say that online therapy limits some of the visual cues in gesture, as well as “speech intonations.”
  2. Some see a limitation in rapport building when not done in person. Continue Reading…

Pushing Beyond the Limits of Your Pie

August 6, 2009 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments

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[image by net_efekt's]


Marathon Training
In the Spring of 2006 I had this deep yearning to run a marathon, something I had never done before, yet something I always wanted to do. Training for this marathon was going to require some shifting of things in my schedule, because 3 days a week of running, over a 16 week time frame didn’t fit into my schedule too easily. I was a full-time college pastor, a graduate student, newly married, and I had lots of interests. So I made the decision that some things in my life had to go if I wanted to add that much running to it. So what eventually went was teaching myself guitar, extra tv watching, as well as fast food and late, late nights.

Now don’t get me wrong, I actually tried to add that much running to my life without getting rid of anything else, but I kept coming up against my personal limitations as well as natural limitations. Primarily, energy and time. I didn’t have the energy to do everything I wanted to do, and the days were created in such a way that I could not add more time to them than God had already allotted. I pushed and pushed, but I couldn’t make it all fit.

Looking at our Limitations
I think we often do this in our lives. If you can imagine your day in terms of a pie graph, how do you visually break up the different elements of your day? Work, sleep, eating, relaxation, relationships, etc. The pie graph has limits because you can’t add something to that graph without shrinking one of the other elements, or all of the elements, or eliminating one or some of them. It is impossible. Yet, we try to hard to add things to our lives without acknowledging our limitations. We think we are super human and can do it all. But really, that just leads us to exhaustion and poor boundaries eventually.

For example, when I work with clients there are 3 things that I tell them they must have in their pie graph if they are going to maintain some proper mental health. Exercise, Diet, Sleep. When a client can have healthy habits in those three areas it’s actually quite amazing how that can enhance one’s life. And then we add things like relationships (time with wife, kids, family, etc.). And work of course. What about play? Hobbies?

I ended up running two marathons in 6 months (Chicago in October of 2006 and Los Angeles in March of 2007), but I had to make sacrifices and put some things in my life on hold as I mentioned above. I signed up for other marathons in 2007 and 2008, but we had our first baby that summer. I tried to go out and run, but the combination of late, late nights, and no sleep just took their toll and I ran into my limits again. Marathons could not fit into my life. Now it’s 2009 and my daughter sleeps well and I have once again decided to run a marathon this December but I have had to make some choices because I’ve learned that God has created me to live within certain limits. Limits that cannot be overcome…even with the latest technology.

So as I enter into a new season of marathon training I have decided that certain pieces of my pie are going to have to shrink if I am going to add the marathon training to it. I’m definitely not decreasing family relationships, or work, so I have decided that I have to shrink my technology use if I’m going to make room in that pie for more running, as well as more sleep to run well.

“Everything in the universe has a nature, which means limits as well as potentials, a truth well known by people who work daily with the things of the world. Making pottery, for example, involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter’s hands, telling her what it can and cannot do–and if she fails to listen, the outcome will be both frail and ungainly. Engineering involves more than telling materials what they must do. If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his failure will go beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.

The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail.

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks–we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’” (Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer, pp. 15-16)

Limits and Potential: Living Free Within That Tension

March 16, 2009 in Ministry-Theology, Therapy-Psychology with 5 Comments

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“Everything in the universe has a nature, which means limits as well as potentials, a truth well known by people who work daily with the things of the world. Making pottery, for example, involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter’s hands, telling her what it can and cannot do–and if she fails to listen, the outcome will be both frail and ungainly. Engineering involves more than telling materials what they must do. If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his failure will go beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.

The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail.
Continue Reading…