3 Life Lessons on Connection I learned From My Mentor Dr. John Tarr

I was taught by Dr. John Tarr as a resident physician and now co-teach with Dr. Tarr on Thursdays.  We teach psychotherapy classes and review video with residents on their therapy sessions.  Dr. John Tarr’s passionate portrayal of the inner workings of the mind have inspired me and informed many of my ideas on how to connect with people.  Although I am sure Dr. Tarr could fill volumes with his knowledge, and likely most of my posts are influenced by him, I will try to summarize some of the things I hear most often.  

1.  You are entitled to your emotions.  

Entitled here means that your subjective and unique emotional experiences have value.  You have an experience which is unique and different and often comes with emotions (anger, sadness, fear, happiness, suprise).  Shame and guilt will only send your emotions into your unconscious and cause psychological defenses to pop up.  

Let me explain this deep but profound idea.  If you have anger over someone cutting you off in line, and the anger is intense

Emotions-> Shame/Guilt-> Defenses

Some common defenses:

Intellectualization of anger: “I am NOT ANGRY… I just am following the truth of the situation and have studied legal”

  Commonly happens when loosing a loved one, the sadness is so intense, and has no place, that the person dissociates it and feels disconnected.  A defense against the sadness felt might be the person pours themselves into busy activity, binges on food, or drinks alcohol.  What if we were to create a space for such emotion and not need to disconnect from it?

I can imagine if you are a spiritual person, being entitled to your emotions might sound off.  

Therefore to connect with our own experiences, our emotions have value, meaning and we should be allowed to feel them.  

Someone shares their frustration to b”she is entitled to feel angry, 

2.