Am I Crazy?

By Lissa Carter, LCMHCS

He sat very quiet and still on the couch, as far from me as his body could go.  His face was drawn.  In a whisper he said “it’s going to sound so crazy what I am about to say. And it might be hard to hear.”

 And then he proceeded to say something so human, so relatable, that I could not keep my head from nodding along.  When, after a few moments of silence, his eyes rose and clocked me nodding, his face registered shock.

“You understand what I’m talking about?” he asked.

“As a counselor and as a human:  yes. Extremely relatable,” I responded. His shock melted slowly into laughter.  

Why do we do this to ourselves?  Why do we believe that our behavior, our feelings, our thoughts, hold us apart and unwanted from the greater river of humanity?  Why do we so unerringly believe that everyone --except for, specifically, us --was given the manual for life?

Most of us have learned, through trial and error, that trying to control others does not end well. We’ve learned, through relational pain, to attune and connect to those we love, even when we don’t understand why they are behaving the way they are.

(And sometimes we forget, and try to control, and remember why it doesn’t work, and start again.  Yes, I’m looking at you, Self.)

Yet relatively few of us seem to turn that knowing back on ourselves.  Rather than attune inside, rather than treat ourselves with love and curiosity when we are struggling or unsure, we berate, discipline, and control ourselves. And, slowly, that inner relationship deteriorates until we think of ourselves as little more than a set of actions and products. 

 Over time, if there is no space between who we are –our innate value as a human being—and the outcomes of our actions and products, something even more dire occurs.  Because if I AM my actions and products, then any criticism, any feedback at all, about those actions or their products is intolerable.  Because it feels like criticism of my selfhood. So I must defend against feedback in any way possible, must resolutely avoid either feedback itself or any truth it may contain.  Which, then, in a terrible spiral, begins to deteriorate my relationship with others.

But what if we were to reverse that spiral?

 What if my response to the feedback of someone I love is –once I’ve fed it through my psychological boundary to ensure the feedback is accurate and coming from a trustworthy source—to take in the parts that are true and helpful?

This builds the trust between me and the person I love.  Now, through the feeling of attunement with this person, I remember my innate goodness.  Rather than punishing myself for having “gotten something wrong”, I can feel compassion for the way in which I continue to try, and for the aspects of myself that were perhaps misunderstood in this encounter. 

From here, I begin slowly to build a space between who I am and the roles I play, the actions I perform, the results I get.  And I can take refuge in that space when others offer me constructive feedback—refuge enough that I can hear the impact my presence has on others, and allow it to inform and grow me, without feeling personally attacked.

Of course it’s never that graceful, continuous, or easy, but there is such a direct connection between the way we treat ourselves and the way we treat others that no matter which side you start with—the way you talk to yourself or the way you take in the feedback of others—transformation will flow in this circle, self to other, other to self.

And this might—eventually—call me crazy—be the way we stop waging war. On ourselves, on other people, species, countries.


After my client and I had processed a little, I asked him if I could share an impression with him.  He consented, and I told him “when I hear you say to me that I might think you are crazy, my impression is that’s not about me.  My impression is that somewhere inside, you are saying to yourself ‘this is crazy. I’m crazy.”  He nodded.  “So—if that’s true—what happens next?”

 “What do you mean?”

 “When you hear yourself saying ‘I’m crazy’—what happens next?”

 “I feel sad, I guess.  Or I tell myself something to do—go to the gym usually, something a normal sane person would do.”

 “So there’s no response?”

 “I don’t get it.”

 “When you said to me—I might think you are crazy—I responded.  I said ‘that’s very relatable actually.’”

 “I see what you mean.  Yeah, no, there’s no response.  Or the response is “okay, crazy, go the gym and act normal!”

 “What if we shoehorn in something between the “I’m crazy” and “go to the gym like a sane person.”  What if we put in there something like what I said—a response.  Something like “it’s frightening to feel crazy—is there anything you need?” or “I bet a lot of people go through this, is there someone you’d like to talk to?” Something that expresses care and connection.”

 “I mean I could, but I don’t think it would help.”

 “It might not.  But I am noticing that when you came in here, you were sitting way over there and your face looked scared.  And now your voice is more relaxed and you’re leaning in and coming up with ideas and conversation.  And that happened because there was some connection around this thing that was making you feel crazy. I’m just saying that can be available inside when it’s not available from other people.”

 “Interesting.” 


If I protect myself no matter what the world throws at me, I’m safe but I’m an island.  If I go unprotected out into the world, I can be utterly devastated by what I hear from others.  Self-attunement is a little bubble of safety within which we can take refuge, that allows us to be both protected and connected at the same time. It’s a little bit of sanity each of us can create within ourselves. To protect the world from our crazy, and to protect ourselves from the crazy of the world.


Deep gratitude to my client who gave me permission to share their story—details have been changed to protect their privacy. And thank you to brilliant behavior analyst Shannon Fee for sharpening my thinking on this topic.


 One way I build the skill of self-attunement with my clients is through storytelling.

 This works in two ways:  one, understanding an emotion or psychological dynamic is far easier when amplified through characters in a story than when dissected minutely in your life.  Bigger things = easier to see.

 Two, getting a little distance through metaphor always helps clarify what we are working with because we don’t get defensive about metaphors or characters in a story. And hearing that a character in a story that has been handed down for hundreds of years is acting exactly the way that you just did?  That’s incredibly normalizing.

 If any of this intrigues you, you might be interested in a storytelling project I’m engaged in this year to give back to the community and to the causes that are close to my heart. The next story I’ll be telling is about boundaries and self-attunement—all the things I’ve been writing about here.  It’s called Boinn and the River of Inspiration and you can learn how to join in here.

Defeated by ever larger things

By Lissa Carter, LCMHC

A century ago, poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: "The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."

THANK YOU, RILKE! What a profoundly helpful reframe for the cultural message we so often receive, the message that the purpose of life is to constantly improve, to be ever more productive, to become better and better versions of ourselves, to gain ever more success and develop an ever increasing quantity and quality of skills.

I feel exhausted even writing these words down, and yet I know these messages play their way across my own mind thousands of times per day. And they certainly play across the minds of my clients—-sometimes, therapy even gets enlisted as one of the self-improvement projects on the to-do list!

But if—as Rilke suggests— the meaning in these impermanent, flawed, frustrating lives of ours is not to constantly improve, not to heap success upon success—but, instead, to dare the defeat, to allow the transcendent beauty and awful tragedy of life to utterly overwhelm us—then, perhaps, therapy can be less about self-improvement and more about meaning-making.

“Wait just one ever-loving minute!” I hear you cry, “Isn’t the whole point of therapy to STOP feeling so utterly overwhelmed? To become more functional?”

Certainly, we don’t want to walk around overwhelmed all the time. And yet, if our “answer” to the pain of life is to constrict ourselves, to narrow the comfort zone until our lives are bound by only certain successes, that narrowness does not limit only our defeats. Our sense of joy is diminished, our playfulness, meaning itself is narrowed. We can’t pick and choose what grows smaller when we restrict our lives to include only successes and comfortable feelings. Everything shrinks.

So, as I often tell my clients: the goal here isn’t to feel better. It’s to FEEL better. To allow oneself to expand, to feel more, to dare the realms of human experience that are less comfortable, less sure. Because when we expand the circle to include those realms, the circle widens all the way around and our joy—our sense of meaning and purpose—increases too.

And if we look at the way the brain works to retain information, there’s more data to back up Rilke’s assertion. Try as we might, we can’t subtract information from the brain. There are around two large “pruning” events in the brain that happen in a human lifetime, and we are not in charge of what makes the cut. Other than these events, if we want to modify information our brain holds, we can’t simply subtract the things we no longer believe. We have to add. We have to grow ever larger.

Much as I might wish I could, I can’t subtract the core belief, forged in early childhood, “I am a misfit, I do not belong.” But over the years I can add to this belief: “And there are people who love me.” “And there are places I feel at home.” “And there are contributions that I can make.” Over time, although the primary and painful belief does not go away, the many additions we make modify it so profoundly that it not longer impacts us in the same way.

When we are completely honest with ourselves, much of this “self-improvement” we are engaged in is actually avoidance of some kind. I don’t want to feel judged as unintelligent, so I listen to psychology podcasts instead of music. I hate the feeling of anxiety, so I go for a run to try and escape it. I’m not moving toward the person I want to become—I am running from the feelings I am afraid of. Yet if I try to subtract the belief “I am a misfit, I do not belong” by avoiding the arenas of life that trigger this uncomfortable thought or feeling, life won’t get better. It will just get smaller.

At any given moment we have a choice: to move toward the person we want to be, or to move away from discomfort. When we choose to move away from discomfort, it’s so often because we don’t want to be defeated. We don’t want to risk the pain of rejection or imperfection in the pursuit of our dreams.

But if the goal is not perfection, or even success—if the goal is to be defeated today by something that is incrementally larger than the thing that defeated you yesterday—doesn’t that make it a little bit easier to turn toward the person you long to become?

One final thought on this—often my clients speak of the work they do in therapy as “self-discipline”. The discipline to practice their values, the discipline to choose relationality over fear, the discipline to keep their commitments. When this happens, I like to draw their attention to the etymology of the word discipline—-it shares a root with “disciple”.

What are you a disciple of? What matters enough to you that you put yourself in discipleship to that quality, no matter how uncomfortable it might get?

As for me, I want to be in discipleship to compassion, to generosity, to kindness, to equity. Often these qualities lead me into uncomfortable conversations and thorny dilemmas. And yet—they are beautifully large things to be defeated by.


Thank you to the client who inspired this post by saying “these ideas need to be on the internet!” You know who you are <3


Want to dip a toe into Expressive Arts? Join Julie King Murphy for the Midday Makers series…an opportunity to dedicate your lunch break to creative exploration!


As always, please feel free to comment below or reach out directly to innerlightasheville@gmail.com.

There is no easy way to set a boundary.

By Lissa Carter, LCMHC

If there is one word I hear from nearly every client I work with, this is it: Boundary.

We all know we need them, we all know we need to honor them, and we all know that they are vital in maintaining healthy relationships with ourselves and with others. At the same time, it is rare to encounter anyone who has a clear definition of what, exactly, a boundary is.

So let’s establish some terms.

What is a boundary?

My definition of boundary is an ecological one.  When I think of a boundary, I think of ecotones---those liminal spaces that are not quite woodland, not quite meadow, but incorporate elements of both and, as a result, are incredibly fertile.  Boundaries are the tidal zone between ocean and shore where two distinct communities engage with each other. I think of hedges, too, as used in permaculture design—carefully designed multispecies systems that provide food, habitat, fodder, and nutrition.

Imagine a hedgerow planted around a garden in which tender seeds are sprouting. Perhaps there is hawthorn at the outer edges of the hedge, so that any deer encountering it will nibble their way around, thwarted by thorns but finding nutrition in the tender buds, while being guided away from the center of the garden. Maybe birds shelter within to feed on berries and problematic insects, and nitrogen-fixing plants like locust and comfrey enrich the ground on both sides while crowding out any grass. This is a very different concept of a boundary than, say, a cement wall.

A well-designed boundary is as much about creating a fertile environment to protect a tender new element in the garden as it is about shutting something out.  This time of year, many of us go out into the cold nights to put blankets around blooming trees to protect them against a hard freeze.  That blanket is a boundary.  It’s protective.

But there are unhealthy boundaries, too.

Terry Real, founder of the Relational Life Therapy that I am currently studying, has a saying: “Under patriarchy you can be powerful or connected, but you can’t be both.”

 So, in order to stay safe in an unhealthy system, some of us trade our power for connection.  Others trade our relationality for power.  If we set a relational boundary in an attempt to control another person, that is a power consolidation move, and the price is connection. Equally, if we are afraid to set boundaries, or disregard others’ boundaries out of fear that boundaries will interrupt our sense of attachment, we are trading away power in an attempt to stay connected. That’s not helpful either.

So how do we create healthy boundaries?

Did I mention that boundaries are hard? Oh yeah, it’s in the title. But it bears repeating. Boundaries are HARD. If you need any proof, look at the myths and stories we humans have inherited—so many are warnings about how boundaries can go wrong.

Sleeping Beauty, dissociated and numb at the center of a thicket of thorns.

Bluebeard, engaging in power consolidation that mimics boundary-setting, telling his latest victim not to use the tiny key that opens the last door.

Psyche, violating an unspoken boundary by looking at Cupid in the dead of the night and setting her world on fire as result.

St. Patrick, driving entire species and modes of being out of the system in the name of keeping it safe.

I could go on, and on, and on, and I suspect you could too.

Still, if you dig, there are some stories that have been passed down that are not warning tales, but instruction manuals. I have found two in particular that I lean on heavily when I am doing boundary work. One walks us through the steps of setting and keeping a boundary. The other describes each form of relational pushback we can expect to encounter, and how to navigate those relational costs without giving up on ourselves.

I won’t get into the stories here, though I am working on making them available as standalone courses. But their very existence gives us hope that there IS a way to do this complicated thing well! And there is a concept, centered in both stories, that can serve as a touchstone in this hard, expensive work. That concept is sovereignty.

Maintaining Boundaries through Sovereignty

In the old days, one of the tests of sovereignty was to place a candidate for kingship on a cart driven by two horses.  Each horse would pull powerfully in a different direction.  If the candidate could ride the tension of the opposites and find a way forward through that tension, that person could be sovereign.

Unfortunately, for some of us the word Sovereignty has been infected with ideas of individualism and autocracy.  When we view sovereignty as an individualistic or autocratic stance, we are back in the territory of boundaries built to consolidate power.  That’s not a healthy position.

Sovereignty is, and always was, a relational proposition.  It has to do with relationship to the self, relationship to the land, and achieving a healthy balance of all elements within the system. In the Celtic tradition, Sovereignty was visualized as a wheel. Elements of winter, summer, autumn, and spring—-elements of east, west, north, and south—elements of air, fire, earth, and water—were all carefully considered and brought into balance. A person, in this view, approaches sovereignty when they bring water into a fiery system, maturity into a naive system, a sense of spring into an autumnal system. Sovereignty is a balancing of the wheel.

 Which brings us back to the garden: maintaining sovereignty, at times, requires balancing the elements within the system quite sharply.  For example, if there is an invasive element like bamboo in the system, you might need to place it on an island with a deep moat of water all around, to prevent it from compromising the entire garden.  This does not mean that I judge the bamboo or find it any less valuable. It only means I need to be savvy and realistic about the placement of this element if I want to maintain sovereignty in the system.

Remember that your boundaries, just like your sovereignty, are entirely your responsibility. We have to place them and we have to maintain them; we cannot impose them on others.

In fact, this is one of the ways we can get boundaries wrong. We ask the bamboo not to spread instead of digging a moat. Bamboo is bamboo. It is going to spread. Telling it not to is just giving your power away: an exercise in futility.

On the other hand, sometimes we need to balance the system by welcoming missing elements in. I once saw a gardener in Canada get a banana tree to grow by placing it against a wall that absorbed the southern sun and protected it from the wind, with a small pond dug in front to reflect even more light and warmth.

What tender new aspects of your life are emerging that need to be protected with this kind of boundary? How might you welcome emerging new identities or ideas by placing boundaries around your time, for example? How might you reflect light and warmth back onto these tender areas in your life to encourage them to grow? And how might your sovereignty be brought into balance by welcoming missing experiences—are the thorns getting too thick in places?

The internal price of boundaries

Very often, when my clients first get started in therapy, things get worse before they get better.  They may feel more anxiety, more grief, more relational turmoil.  This is a very confusing experience, but it is to be expected: we are medicinally re-introducing, into the client’s system, elements that have been anesthetized away. This is part of bringing the system into balance, part of introducing healthy boundaries and welcoming missing elements in. But even though it was the lack of these elements and boundaries that was causing the imbalance in the first place, the reintroduction is turbulent. Why? Because it interrupts a strategy that was almost working.

For example, if a client who values connection had used the strategy of avoidance (walls of thorns) to keep from feeling rejected, once that client starts digging up those thorns and opening herself up to relationships, she will feel all of the uncomfortable, unwanted feelings that avoidance once protected her from.  And, simultaneously, she will be moving closer toward her value of connection. There are always two horses to ride on the sovereignty path.  We have to find a way forward anyway.

The relational price of boundaries

As organisms, we love homeostasis.  Change frightens us, so when systems are stable, even if they are unhealthy, that stability feels reassuring. If you are introducing change into your relational system by, say, digging a moat around the bamboo or throwing a blanket over your tenderest new blossoming ideas, the system is going to react. The people around you—even the ones that love you—may not respond well to the change.

You may encounter defensiveness, rejection, accusation, withdrawal, abandonment, vilification-- all of the most dreaded experiences a human can imagine. “Sovereignty”, as my favorite storyteller Martin Shaw once put it, “Is ugly in the getting but lovely in the keeping”.  Boundary setting and boundary maintenance is hard, hard work. Have I said that already?

If you encounter withdrawal, abandonment, or vilification in the course of building a healthy and balanced garden, notice the price you are paying. If the life you are building is worth the cost, welcome these feelings in.  They are the horribly uncomfortable breadcrumbs on the trail to sovereignty.

That said, never hesitate to find help and community if you are facing violent pushback on your boundaries. Friends, family, mediators, or therapists can be valuable allies in this work. Never endanger yourself by setting boundaries alone with a person who exhibits abusive behavior.

 If, on the other hand, these dreaded experiences are encountered in trying to plant a wall of thorns around the kingdom, or riding roughshod over someone else’s boundary wall to let the cows into the corn—they are a warning sign.  In this case, the pushback you are getting could be a sign of the degradation of your own relational integrity. The key discerning question to ask—whether it is a boundary of your own, or another’s that you have encountered— is:

 What is this boundary in service to?

If the boundary in service to avoidance, escape, defensiveness, or power consolidation, revisit your boundary strategy.  If the boundary is in service to sovereignty, relational integrity, or self-compassion, take care of yourself and keep going.

In closing, if you are struggling to set and maintain healthy boundaries, or if you are experiencing painful relational pushback around the boundaries you set, you just might be a human being. When I was growing up, I was told in school that humans only use 5% of their brains and that 95% was still, basically, up for grabs. That was so exciting to me—I used to daydream about those unused parts of the brain holding, say, the ability to fly.

Later in life, I learned that this 95% of the brain is far from unutilized. That 95% is the percentage of the brain devoted to analyzing and understanding human signalling and social relationships. It’s that complex, and that important.

So be gentle with yourself. The garden is never complete, it’s a work in progress. And you deserve a garden surrounded by hedgerows that are fertile, live-giving, and protective.


If you are longing to more clearly understand boundaries, join Lissa for a Boundary Clinic on Saturdays in January. Learn more and register below.