Parke is a Licensed Professional Counselor based in Richmond, Virginia. He runs Therapy for Men RVA, a small private practice of male therapists working with men dealing with anxiety, stress, pressure, and feeling stuck. The practice offers walk-and-talk therapy along the James River and virtual sessions throughout Virginia. Learn more at www.therapyformenrva.com.

Dude Breathe: one idea. A few minutes to read. Once a week.

“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

— From a meditation poster featuring Swami Satchidananda

“I’m not sure I’m cured.”

Said the man who had stepped back from several destructive habits, stopped using work as an escape and for the first time in years, felt genuinely connected with his wife and kids.

I was puzzled. He seemed happier and he was definitely living more in line with his values.

“What would being cured look like?” I asked.

“I probably wouldn’t have these fucked-up thoughts anymore,” he said.

I then realized we had missed something important early on in our work.

It wasn’t that I had failed to teach him some esoteric technique for eliminating unwanted thoughts.

It was that I had failed to help him understand the difference between inside the skin and outside the skin.

Like many concepts in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that have stuck with me, I first learned this one from ACT trainer Dr. D.J. Moran.

It goes like this.

For eons, humans have used the same process to take care of problems out there, in the external world. We identify, evaluate and then problem-solve.

There’s a saber-toothed tiger (identify). Those things are bad (evaluate). I’m going to kill it or run from it (problem-solve).

That process has worked beautifully for a very long time.

But apply that same logic to what happens inside the skin, meaning our thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations, and it all goes sideways fast.

Here’s anxiety (identify). It feels bad and wrong (evaluate). I’m going to over-control everything, numb out or run from something I care about to make it stop (problem-solve).

Here’s a craving. It’s uncomfortable as hell. I’m going to scratch this itch to make it go away.

Those strategies work in the short term. They relieve the pain. But over time, we can either start to avoid more of life or grow dependent on whatever temporarily feels good.

A lot of people enter therapy assuming others are better at controlling what happens inside the skin. Like it’s a skill they somehow missed along the way.

I wish that skill existed. I wish I knew how to use it.

If there were two switches on this body and mind, I’d flip them in an instant. I’d switch off anxiety, depression and jealousy and switch on joy, love and gratitude. I’d just leave them flipped.

But if we pay close attention to our own experience, we see clearly that’s not how it works.

The nondual teacher Joan Tollifson calls it our inner weather. Just like we look out the window to see what kind of weather the day brought, we peek inside each day to see what kind of inner weather we’re working with.

Some days there’s a sense of calm and joy. Other days it’s overcast and rainy.

And sure, there are things we can do to tilt the emotional odds in our favor. Some are healthy. The ones that work fastest often aren’t.

But tilting the odds isn’t the same as controlling the outcome. Just like the weather outside, we still never know exactly what’s going to show up.

When we miss this, we can convince ourselves we need to stay in therapy endlessly, trying to get our thoughts and feelings to line up the way we think they should. Or we may walk away feeling like failures and believing therapy doesn’t work.

But often, good therapy isn’t about rearranging the inner weather. It’s about helping us learn to ride the waves more skillfully.

Then we are free to focus on what we can control. As far as I can tell, that consists of our intentions, our actions and our response to the situations life puts us in.

We can show up for our kid’s recorder concert even though no one has ever enjoyed a recorder concert, including the kids performing in it.

We can walk up to the lectern with our hands literally shaking while our mind tells us it’s the perfect time to fake a heart attack.

We can board the plane to visit family even while our mind replays scenes from Cast Away over and over again.

In DJ’s words, this is our response-ability: our ability to respond to whatever shows up inside the skin.

Once we see that’s the only part we’re truly on the hook for, the question changes altogether.

It’s no longer, “How do I eliminate unpleasant thoughts and feelings?”

The question becomes, “How do I carry what I’m thinking and feeling and still show up as the person I want to be, especially when things are hard and especially when no one’s looking?”

Then we just get a little better at that each year while having some patience and forgiveness for ourselves when we inevitably screw it up.

And that’s about as cured as any of us needs to be.

Try This

This week, notice the difference between inside the skin and outside the skin.

When an unpleasant thought, feeling, urge or sensation shows up, notice whether you immediately try to fix it, get rid of it or run from it.

Instead of asking, “How do I want to think and feel?” notice what’s there, accept its presence and ask:

“Who do I want to be in this moment?”

Then choose the action more aligned with the man you want to be, even with all that inner weather swirling around.