Moderation is Sexy

“It’s definitely spinal cancer,” I thought as I felt the stabbing pain radiate throughout my back as I was about to start my next session. We’ve all had this moment at some point in our lives. We have some new emergence of an unexplainable physical issue and thanks to a few quick searches on Google and WebMD come to the very unofficial but oh-so-definitive diagnosis of whichever most life threatening and rare form of cancer we now will have to deal with and potentially die from. That’s where I was at in the fall of 2016. 

I’d been working as a therapist trainee for a few months and was excitedly and nervously working with my first clients when these symptoms started to affect me. I’d start to feel this stabbing sensation in my chest and back that would pass in a few hours but was making it increasingly difficult to focus on what the person in front of me was saying.

Queue a few weeks later and my dad is flying down to be there as I receive my MRI results. I already had the scenario playing out in my mind on repeat. My dad has his hand on my shoulder as the solemn looking doctor gives me the results and starts describing my challenging journey ahead, as I stare in shock trying to process the information. I think about how I will tell the rest of my family, my friends and my clients (my mind does a really great job of being preemptively melodramatic). 

In reality, the results showed nothing. “Looks like you might have a very slight case of Scoliosis. There’s not really much you need to do about this” the doctor says nonchalantly, as she probably had much better things to do with her time. My dad flies back to Sacramento and I feel a weird mix of relief and disappointment. I’m glad I’m not going to die but what the hell is happening to me?

The answer didn’t become clear until a few months later by pure random luck. “Did you know that you have acid reflux?,” my dentist asks while her hands and tools are in my mouth, which allows me to have some sort of mumbled response of “no, how do you know?” The dentist replies “These holes in your teeth are caused by that. Try cutting back on some of the acidic foods.” It was like a giant lightbulb went off in my brain. I had recently discovered a passionate love for having pineapple and Tajin for breakfast. “What a healthy way to start my day!” I’d say. Man, I’m really taking care of myself! 

I was then told by my primary care doctor that this was incurable. “This is more of a lifestyle change,” the doctor informs me; “Try to eliminate anything that aggravates reflux, such as tomatoes, onions, garlic, citrus fruits, spicy foods, fried foods, carbonated beverages, alcohol, caffeine and chocolate.” I paused and asked the doctor with complete seriousness “Would you want to live a life without those things?” The doctor just gave me a shrug. I like to think that he considered it to be a valid question.

So I tried. 

I worked really hard to cut out going to breweries, drinking coffee, cooking with onions or garlic, eating out and what I considered to be all sources of joy (kidding, melodramatic again). But it was really hard, and I failed. Then I would relapse and go hard by drinking a beer with a spicy fried chicken sandwich saying, “fuck that doctor” and then an hour later laying on the floor in agonizing pain, throwing up and asking why I do these things to myself. Ultimately, I found a middle ground. There are some things I absolutely need to avoid, and other things that I can’t give up, and I take medication and deal with the consequences for having. I needed moderation to balance my health with my emotional contentment. 

As I entered my 30’s, I began to use the phrase “Moderation is sexy” as it applies to life. The more I thought about it, the more it felt like this phrase applied to a lot of things in my life, but also to a much deeper meaning for the clients I work with. Much of what people are coming to therapy for are related to emotional overcorrections. There is often some intensely negative experience of a series of events in our lives, and our brains swing this internal pendulum all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum in order for us to feel safe or in control. Some examples of this are: 

• I don’t want to have the angry reactions that my parent used to have, so I just shut everything down and don’t feel anything 

• I don’t want to be abandoned, so I’m not going engage in any conflicts or share if something is upsetting me

• I’m not going to ask for support because I don’t want to be perceived as incompetent or feel like something is wrong with me

We want simple, definite answers. These are the bad guys; these are the good guys. This is a good thing to do, this a bad thing to do. This feeling is bad. This thought is good. What I have found is that much of our suffering comes from overidentifying with these extremes and moderation is the key to bringing ourselves back into harmony. Most of life’s questions don’t have simple answers, and most things are some shade of gray, somewhere along the pendulum and multiple things can be true at the same time. The middle of the pendulum and moderation may look different for me than it looks for you, but I think there is some universal element of this for everyone to think about. 

Here’s some questions for self-reflection to see where you are at on the pendulum: 

• What are some strong beliefs that I have that guide my life? Do I ever reflect on these beliefs and where they came from, or how they serve me? 

• How do I manage my relationships with others? What are things that really bother me or that I am drawn to? 

• How do I manage my feelings? What are my beliefs about the importance or lack thereof of the different feelings I have? 

• How do I view myself? If I describe myself as a good or bad person in some way, what do those definitions of good and bad mean to me? Does it apply to others? 

• Are any of my actions or beliefs built upon doing the opposite of how someone else treated me, or of something that impacted me? Or do I find myself repeating something that I resent about someone else but can’t change? 

A lot of my work involves guiding folks back to some variation of moderation that feels most authentic to them, and most helpful. Sure, it’s not great to punch holes in the wall and scream at our partner, but it is important to express our anger and advocate for ourselves or our boundaries. We don’t want to be dependent on others to help us manage our feelings, but it also isn’t a good idea to completely isolate ourselves from others. We don’t want to have terrible back spasms and throw up after eating pineapple and Tajin, but I also don’t want to imagine a world in which I can never have some good pasta with tomato sauce. It’s worth a moment of reflection to think about the ways we find ourselves pulled to the extremes and how we can find some balance that works for us. In that way we can genuinely learn from our mistakes or difficult experiences without creating new problems that we have to address later on.