It’s taken me a really long time to grow up. 

As a creative, I come from a sector of the Boomer generation wherein many of us finally buy our first homes at 70-something by using our dead parent’s money: The Boomer Creative Entrepreneur. 

This is because, in response to the profound transgenerational trauma passed down by our holocaust-surviving, complex PTSD-riddled WWII veteran parents, we were told to ‘do what you love, kid’ and subsequently spat out into the world with few to no psychological tools. And a bunch of really unhealthy beliefs. 

In all fairness, many of my generation’s parents, buying into the post-war American Dream and propped up by pure survival adrenaline fueled by the newly formed fiscal safety net of The New Deal, really didn’t have those tools to give us. Please note: I am not taking into account systemic racism here. I acknowledge my priviledge in that regard although anti-semitism didn’t help in my original choice of career as an actress. I’m coming from the POV of a child of the Holocaust generation, and as the product of early to mid-20th Century immigration. My parents were able surpass their parents given the constructs of the times, and in their children saw an opportunity to offer what they had never had…the opportunity to do things out of passion and love, not basic survival. 

My father spent his late afternoons ‘self-medicated’ and napping after running his veterinary practice all day. He earned a Purple Heart on Iwo Jima and wasn’t diagnosed with PTSD until his mid 70s. (This is why I believe veterans benefits should extend to surviviing family members in many instances. We had to relive the war over and over through his untreated condition.)  

Meanwhile, my mother spent four years as a Jew undercover in a house occupied by German soldiers in Normandy. The house belonged to her Catholic father, the town veterinarian. The town was Haras du Pin, where the primary industry was horse racing. The Nazis took over the nicest home available, which to this day belongs to the most valued member of the community…the horse doctor. 

Mom passed as Catholic because Grandpere got drunk, stormed the mayor’s office and threatened his life if anyone squealed the fact that my mother was a Jew, which was common knowlege amongst the citizens of the town. Her parents were divorced, and her Jewish mother was somehow living undercover in Marseille.

Fast-forward twenty years later, when she arrived state-side, her eyeballs reeling to the back of her head with repressed trama, having married an American GI whose eyeballs also reeled to the back of his head with repressed trauma. On the GI Bill, he was able to apprentice under her father as part of his veterinary training. Dad brought Mom back here and started a family. Then, long story short, a lot of tragic wackiness ensued. 

As a creative I was encouraged to ‘follow my passion’ into theatre as a performer and writer. The upside of my childhood is that I had survived the grist of it with some really great stories to tell.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to make a living at that, in part due to a lack of luck (which I will argue with anyone is a real and present factor particularly in show business), but primarily because I was too damaged to know how to effectively engage with the world.

Now, many years later, my survival instincts have happily steered me toward applying my creativity into becoming the person my parents could never be. That is, the person I needed in my life upon leaving home when I was seventeen: Someone who could listen because she had worked through her own trauma enough to empathize with those in her charge and guide them constructively. 

For me, that healing journey was the key to finally building a livelihood, albeit later in life than I would have liked.  My livelihood is that of helping others cultivate the tools of psycho-emotional agency in order to prevail as creative entrepreneurs. Through the course of my lived experiences, many years of psychoanalysis and successful training as a professionally certified ADHD coach, I have ascertained that our self-destructive tendencies manifest professionally through five categories of emotion: Shame, Grandiosity, Envy, Boredom and Fear. 

These five emotions are like primary colors, the combination of which create many variations of negative emotion (and corresponding beliefs) such as contempt, anger, rage, compliance, obsession, outrage and sadomasochistic enjoyment (which can, if consciously and consensually, be satisfied via sexual behavior…otherwise I contend sadomasochism in society is the cause of a majority of the world’s problems. But I digress…others with more knowledge in that area have written eloquently about it in a manner for which I am not equipped.)

As a coach, I have managed to merge my professional training, psychoanalysis and life experience into an original methodology of self-management. This system is grounded in the antidotes to what I call the Big Five. 

What follows is a brief summary of my methodology:

The antidote to Shame: Separation. 

Shame is the root of all evil and kicks off the other Big 5 emotions, because it is what causes us to identify our least favorable self-perceptions as empirical truth. 

If our self-perceptions are a lie, then what are we really? We can only ascertain that by separating from our emotionally-generated thoughts through developing ‘witness conciousness’. This is why I teach a very practical form of abbreviated sensory-based meditation to all my clients developed by Shirzad Chamin. His system is called Positive Intelligence and his technique are the ‘PQ Reps’.  I recommend PQ as a very fast and practical baseline to regrounding in our true selves, especially for those who have tried and failed at traditional meditation. 

The antidote to Grandiosity: Humility

Grandiosity is the flip side of shame: a sense of isolated exceptionalism so fragile that when challenged in the slightest causes us to spiral down into shame.  My inability to accept criticism as a young professional was a symptom of my grandiosity.  Depending on the severity of the challenge, Grandiosity can result in everything from rage-based retaliatory behavior to suicidal ideation. We just can’t afford it. It is a chronically self-focused mindset best countered by CS Lewis’s definition of humility: not thinking less of oneself, but thinking about oneself less in the service of a larger purpose. Healthy ambition is characterized by humility. Grandiosity is not.

The antidote to Envy: Enoughness

First of all, I consider there to be two forms of Envy: Comparative and Erotic. We are all familiar with the former: ‘Hey! I’ve thought of that! Why are they making money at it?”  “Why are they getting recognition for something I’m so good at?!!”  

Erotic Envy is more of an adaptation than a grievance.  It is a way of living vicariously through someone elses success. Superfans, to my mind, are exhibiting Erotic Envy. Sometimes people sublimate their own ambitions in the service of a more successful or renowned spouse, which is another manifestation of Erotic Envy. Erotic Envy is what defines what Julia Cameron calls “The Shadow Artist”

The antidote to Boredom: Becoming

Boredom is a very insidious and dangerous state of mind for the entrepreneur or creative professional. It is a loss of motivation ignited by amnesia around our clarity of purpose. When the initial epiphanic moment of a new idea wears off, we then have the monumental task of manifesting our realization into the world.  That ‘new idea’ is the why of a thing. We need a lot of scaffolding to pass through the almost-inevitable grip of boredom as we go deeper into our work in order to continually remember and return to that why. In order to disrupt boredom-induced restlessness and pleasure-seeking we need to become re-grounded in our being-ness. Only then can we reconnect with our why and come back to the work at hand.

The antidote to Fear: the Pause

Finally, Fear brings us full circle back to Shame. In the Talmud, it is said that to shame a man in public is akin to murduring him. I’ve heard that more people fear public speaking than death. That is because living in shame is the proverbial “fate worse than death”. Most of us will do anything to avoid it. 

The antidote when in the throes of Fear is to Pause. You may notice that it is the only non-aliterative antidote, because unfortunately to freeze is not a positive response to fear, but rather a reaction to it. To pause however, is different. It is what allows us to come back to ourselves and survey a situation objectively so that we can choose our next steps with conscious awareness. The Pause allows us take in and recognize a need to break something down into smaller steps, get outside support, obtain more needed funding or training in a deficient but required skill.

Broadly speaking, I have just given you an outline of my 5 Emotions methodology. It takes guidance and practice to implement this system consistently because our brains are literally set in their ways from as far back as our earliest childhood experiences and even earlier than that, thanks to the inevitable imprints left by the lives of our ancestors both known and unknown.  

Happily, neuroscientific research has shown that with regular practice, in most cases we can change our neurocircuitry pretty quickly in the service of our personal and professional success! Doing so does take tremendous tenacity through repetition and patience however, so be very kind to yourself, and don’t hesitate to reach out to me.