Artistic Mindsets for Success

07/03/2024

Typically what originates from my keyboard are efforts to unearth meaningful lessons from unpacking the common ground of experience we share. today I make an exception for a someone dear to my heart. Joe Bartell was my first serious songwriting collaborator. We met as participants in a Manhattan based workshop in 1986. I met my first wife, went to graduate school and ceased writing songs for decades. Joe has enjoyed an impressive quota of commercial success as a songwriter.

"Not Today Billy," a song Joe wrote and sings resulted in a collaboration with Ed Kessel to produce and film Joe's first music video. The music video chronicles the plight of a homeless war veteran. Billy may not bear the physical scars of the horrors of war, but he is highly representative of the mind, heart and soul fracturing destructiveness of untreated PTSD. Many of us have never taken up arms for our country. Yet, one of the reasons we employ "emotional numbing" to walk past The Billy's of our urban landscapes, is because we know deep down in our souls, "if not for the grace of God," many of us who are flourishing in life might suffer a similar fate due to overwhelming acute, and unrelenting chronic stress. It can be horrifying to take in that perhaps the degrees of separation between ourselves and folks like Billy, are fewer than we would ever want to admit.

It is in my estimation a terrible "spiritual black eye" on society that folks like Billy continue to fall through the cracks in our social service support systems. Maybe, after watching this video we may all take pause and reflect on the adage: If the moral arc of the universe is to bend towards justice, perhaps we have to collectively bend it in that direction and lift folks like Billy up and off the sidewalks where they beg us daily to show them mercy.
Here is the YouTube link to the music video, "Not Today Billy," that just premiered:

Please consider donating to help veterans: Not Today Billy Official Wounded Warriors Donation Page:https://communityfundraising.woundedwarriorproject.org/cam...

06/20/2024

Although the post below was written to be shared with my Christian brothers and sisters, I do believe that no matter what faith position you hold close to your heart, there are some points in this post worth reflecting on.

UNTETHERED FROM A FALSE IDOL
By Mitchell Milch

In Luke 16:13, Jesus teaches us a profound truth: we cannot serve both God and money. This lesson resonated deeply with me as I journeyed through life, wrestling with the false allure of wealth. Despite my limited income, I found immense richness in God's kingdom. Through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I broke free from the chains of materialism and embraced a life of simplicity and contentment.
Reflecting on my father's relationship with money, I witnessed the pitfalls of equating wealth with security. His relentless pursuit of financial stability left him spiritually impoverished, unable to recognize the true treasures of love and faith. In my own journey, I struggled with similar anxieties and insecurities, until I surrendered to God's love and found true abundance in Him.
Now, as I live out my days in humble retirement, I am liberated from the grip of money. My heart overflows with gratitude as I joyfully give back to others and experience the boundless love of God. I have come to realize that true wealth lies not in the size of our bank accounts, but in the richness of our relationships and the depth of our faith. Let us choose to untether ourselves from the false idol of money and find true fulfillment in serving God with all our hearts.

04/25/2024

This post was disseminated electronically
by West Side Presbyterian Church as a daily devotional on 4/24/24.

Before I found faith in Christ, getting older scared me. It felt like a constant threat to my sense of self, always reminding me of my mortality. If I had kept holding onto false beliefs and idols, I would have ended up feeling hopeless. I used to think my spiritual experiences were only occasional moments of insight when I wrote creatively and felt connected to something bigger.
During the recent pandemic, I realized I'd been giving myself too much credit for temporary qualities like emotional intelligence and physical health. These things were fading as I got older, but I hadn't accepted it. Instead, I hoped to overcome my anxiety by controlling habits like nail-biting and overeating. I couldn't grasp the idea of enjoying God's blessings.

When I surrendered to God, I learned that humility isn't about being humiliated but about accepting God's will. I had to let go of my selfish desires and the people and things I loved. I realized that suffering and love for others weren't opposites. Understanding that I'm made in God's image shifted my focus from myself to serving others. Feeling the Holy Spirit's presence was transformative, showing me the value of God's mercy and grace.

Now, as I near 70, I know that challenges like cognitive decline and illness may be ahead. But I'm grateful for the life I've had and the ability to walk with God. I've learned to appreciate the losses I've faced because they've helped me fulfill my purpose in spreading God's message and helping others. Despite any hardships, I find comfort in knowing I have a place in Heaven.

04/22/2024

To all of my friends and family honoring The Passover holiday, may your gatherings be meaningful, and spiritually uplifting.

03/20/2024

The Anatomy Of A Racist And His Road To Redemption
By Mitchell Milch

A guilty conscience is a funny thing. For some it triggers a closer examination into one’s accountability for alleged sins which in turn may fuel efforts to make amends. Others may take exception to and resent feeling guilty so as to shape a defensive posture that disclaims wrongdoing. Finally, others may routinely and repeatedly get tied up in conflictual knots and/or oscillate between the horns of a dilemma over what to do if anything penance-wise.

In my case when opportunity knocked for me to speak on the subject of racial reconciliation between Whites and Blacks, I framed what I trusted to be a Christ-like response in simple terms. If I am not part of the solution, then I am part of the problem. Why has it taken me so long to be an agent of righteousness to stand up for my Black Christian brothers is both a simple and complex answer. The simple answer is I did not embrace Christ as my Savior until three years ago. In the culture of moral relativism where I hung my hat for 66 years, my “inertia” was easily laundered of sinfulness. The complex answer is that there is a timeless, unconscious part of me that I had not mindfully co-opted and reformed that was still pulling my strings. This dynamic speaks to my resistance all these years of owning, accepting and bringing to trial my identity as a racist forged in the crucible of being raised by a racist father. So, I devote myself today to examining the anatomy of my racist attitudes hopeful that for those of my White Christian brothers who resonate to my story, perhaps it will present an avenue for you too to free yourselves from the shackles that bind you to withholding love from your Black brothers.

My grandmother in alliance with her daughters committed psychological and spiritual crimes against my father that left him his entire life in a state of indentured servitude to them. Raised during The Great Depression with the specter of starvation on the immediate horizon in a home where my grandfather was too ill to work, my father was bullied and demeaned to the point of being convinced that any autonomous aspirations on his part beyond supporting this household were shameful and wrong. I’d say that my father’s adoption of Black racial stereotypes was a desperate effort on his part to externalize and divorce himself from aspects of his being that crushed his self-respect and self-esteem. Blacks were convenient scapegoats who were the collateral damage of my father’s failure to launch and failure to develop a separate identity from how the women of his household saw and treated him. As my father never sought treatment for his childhood traumas, he never developed an autonomous self capable of transcending his victim status. He remained for the rest of his life a closet racist who spewed racist drivel in the like minded company of friends and family. De-humanizing Blacks and in particular Black men was a form of hostile competitiveness. Dad self-aggrandized himself at their expense when he was feeling particularly useless and worthless. He was quick to dismiss anyone one who would insinuate that he was a white man of privilege relative to his Black counterparts. The implication was the problem was not racism but their constitutional shiftless, immoral and primitive ways.

What was quite ironic is that my father tore me down in the same manner his mother tore him down. The difference was that my father truly believed that by putting food on the table and by eventually helping me pay for my college education, that he deserved to be unceasingly celebrated. This was in spite of his emotional abuse and neglect. I too learned to adopt racial stereotypes and make narcissistic comparisons to combat feelings of uselessness and worthlessness. The anatomy of my racist beginnings was forged by the coalescence of two psychological defenses; identification with the aggressor and blaming the victim. Simply put, most bullies present histories of being bullied and bully those most susceptible to being at the mercy of their shared weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and vengeful hatred and rage. I recoiled from my fears of standing up for myself and provoking mortal combat. My grandmother’s identity was very much an extension of my grandfather’s feeble, and infirm condition and she abused my father for not restoring pride and security to the family. She in all likelihood secretly envied my father as sexism and chauvinism foreclosed opportunities for her to save the family from starvation.

My father secretly envied me for the advantages I possessed and he was denied. In what was classic example of the Oedipal drama gone of the rails, Dad engaged in a hostile competitive dynamic with me my entire childhood. He felt devalued by my modest academic success and my superior emotional intelligence. He made certain that he received little credit from me for my achievements especially because I could never measure up to his perfectionism which in turn resulted in him resorting to tearing me down to artificially lift his self-regard. As long as I failed to stand up for myself to redraw ego boundaries between us, my father was able to offload to me what he disowned, disavowed, projected and induced in me. These were the shameful and guilty attributes that he found otherwise to be inescapable and a wellspring of negative self-judgments.

I went off to college a self-pitying young man who believed that if anyone needed to be lifted up, it was myself. My racial stereotypes fell apart as I lived and studied and played with Blacks. My caricatures of them understandably fell apart when reality tested. Yet, there remained buried in my shadow side. what was largely an unconscious voice that sounded like someone you might meet today at a white supremacist rally.

Unlike my father, I obtained treatment and eventually gave birth to a mindful self able to free myself from my identification with my father. My father never accepted that he was a white man of privilege while his Black neighbors remained disenfranchised folks. I too was not inclined to make amends by working for reforms to level the playing field for as long as I felt inadequate as a family provider and enjoyed little success as a husband if not as a father. Once I emerged from my fathers’ shadow to rewrite my early narratives and reject being bound to internalizing what he and others were responsible for, only then did I emerge from his shadow and enjoy vocational and marital success to embrace my identity as a white man of privilege.

Four years ago in what was my first public protest of racism I wrote and performed a song titled” People Of Color Can’t Run Or Hide From The Color Of their Skin. This song featured on my Youtube channel now results in an invite to speak at a forum of Christian Black brothers and do my part in the service of racial reconciliation. Why it took so long for me to make amends is open for speculation however, at this juncture it amount to nothing more than excuse making. I’ll chalk my reformed ways to the regenerative blessings of The Holy Spirit.

02/07/2024

The God of My Obsessions is Not My Lord and Savior:
Reveries on the Challenges of Retirement
By Mitchell Milch

For the majority of my life I bowed to the shrine of my obsessions, treating them like deities who inhabited my imagination. In this virtual boxing ring, I was a pugilist fighting phantom persecutors past and present, in the futile and relentless pursuit of respect and appreciation denied me many times over. There was a time I might have been able to say with a straight face that such slights were unforgivable. I have since spent too much time mindfully exposing and rewriting my false narratives to continue to believe that someone had damned me in perpetuity as insufficient or inadequate. However, I can still get amped up by feelings that co-opt my reasoning and judgment. These emotional time warps can suck me up like a vortex, despite my sacred oath to God to devote my life to not letting others’ trespasses interfere with loving them.
This journey has been very daunting, as I have not been very charitable relating to the man in the mirror. Relinquishing my professional life as an organizing structure, which kept my mind focused on helping others focus in the here and now, was a cause for concern. Whether like me, you tend to obsess, I believe such concerns are universal, and therefore this article will hopefully be useful to those contemplating retirement or struggling to make an adaptive transition.
Once upon a time, I kowtowed to the men of my natal family, who, opportunistically, took advantage of my dependence on them for nurturance to act out their envy of the prized position I held in my mother’s life. I never completely got beyond feeling guilty over my mother holding my solicitous nature up to them as a yardstick that measured them as failing her. Until this day, my fear of capitulating to others can activate desires to settle old scores. But as acting on them is inadvisable and cringeworthy, I tend to blame myself for the persistence of my victim mentality. Anytime the rising tide of these emotions renders me unable to observe them and put them in perspective – to balance such suffering with the manifold blessings abounding in my life – I get lost in search of a fall guy (often the man in the mirror) to take a vindictive hit for the timeless humiliations I have not lived down.
It stands to reason that I would make it a superordinate priority to harness my mindful capacities in retirement to not allow such emotions to exceed my window of tolerance. In truth, it was much easier done than I ever imagined it to be once I discovered an anchor in the present for my motivation to do so. It lay with my efforts to unravel the mystery that was my progressive insomnia.
Insomnia, a prevalent affliction among the aged, bridged my working life and retired life. For a while I tackled the problem in a half-hearted manner, hoping that with reduced stress in retirement, the problem would abate. Unfortunately, it did not. No one who knew me at this juncture of my life was particularly surprised by the proactive vigor I now applied to solving this mystery once it reached an annoying and persistent threshold. The end-game for me was to recognize that the answer to my interrupted sleep pattern lay with my poorly-regulated, obsession-driven autonomic nervous system. To master my insomnia, I needed to reframe my obsessive chatter and lovingly exercise my free will to modulate my autonomic nervous system.
I had over-learned by rote to ramp up into a state of hypervigilant excitation to stand up for myself should anyone behave in a passive, aggressive, disrespectful, or inconsiderate manner. I feared that I would take the path of least resistance and run the risk of being victimized by people and circumstances. I continued to pick fights with real and imagined persecutors, past, present, and future, to ensure that I did not get caught with my guard down. I was like Forest Gump who feared that if he stopped running he might never be able to begin again.
This training strategy of mine was highly unfortunate. God most certainly did not have in mind that I use my imagination to relate to uncertainties in this undignified manner. Fortunately, I sufficiently slowed down each day in prayer to begin recording what I believed to be dialogues with the Holy Spirit. One day the lightbulb turned on. I recognized that the adrenaline and the residual cortisol in my system created by becoming overwrought during my waking hours left me waking up several times at night and struggling to fall back asleep.
A few sessions of hypnotherapy clued me into the understanding that I could kill several birds with one stone by doing a better job regulating my autonomic nervous system. Instead of passively indulging my grievous reveries because I had the luxury of time in retirement to do so, I now prayed and meditated and gave myself new-found auto suggestions to handle my obsessions. Suddenly I noticed that my phantom persecutions took a holiday.
You can imagine how much better I felt. The futility of these obsessions, which ultimately left me feeling useless and worthless, dissipated, and I felt less compelled to stay busy in order to generate evidence that my life had value. With the chip on my shoulder shrinking in size, I was no longer reprising Clint Eastwood’s role as Dirty Harry. Purged in no small measure of the sin of vengeful energy, I was more inclined to gift myself time in the middle of a slow day to read or even watch Netflix. It was a lot easier to love myself rather than feel guilty over my musclebound impulses for vigilante justice. These days, in addition to sleeping more fitfully, I spend time luxuriating in the many sensory blessings that affirm God’s abiding love.
I hope this article has a struck chord that will allow you to identify and strategize how you might adapt to the challenges of transitioning to retirement or better adapting to your current retired lives. I am so grateful that my faith in God opened my eyes to transforming multiple thorns into loving gifts.

12/30/2023

Doubt’s Pivotal Role in Christians’ Roads to Spiritual Maturity
By Mitchell Milch

My appreciation of doubt’s pivotal role in psycho-spiritual growth presaged my embrace of Christianity. My principal objective in writing this article is to underscore doubt’s significance as a catalyst that drives the maturation of Christian faith. In my mind’s eye this growth takes place in a crucible of regeneration formed and mediated by a synergy between pre-existing mindful attitudes and the workings of the Holy Spirit. Doubt about matters of faith, when held in awareness and juxtaposed to faith beliefs (perhaps previously held to be inviolable), precipitates transcendent growth under conditions of optimal dialectical tension. The new, regenerated whole is wiser in the ways of God than the previous sum of its parts.
All forms of human growth upset the status quo to precipitate mini-episodes of controlled chaos. Spiritual growth is no exception. One metric of our spiritual growth potential is our willingness and ability to tolerate feeling discombobulated as we dismantle overly simplistic, truth-confounding, and falsely-dichotomous remnants of less evolved faith-based systems. We do so in favor of rebuilding more complex, resilient and reality-tested infrastructures of faith. We are rewarded by a growing appreciation of enhanced sensory capacities to discern our Creator’s nature, His will and plans for us. An earmark of our net gains is that we become more tolerant of, and freer to curiously hunger for and step into, the unknowns and uncertainties of our spiritual conundrums. God remains to one degree or another an inscrutable presence. Our insatiable longings as God’s children to close the intimacy gap between ourselves and our Savior will succeed, while paradoxically for our lifetimes, be an angst-producing bridge too far to cross.
There are shepherds of many stripes inside and outside of our church communities who are equipped to coax into being and grow our semi-autonomous, executive capacities that co-determine the process of spiritual maturation conceptualized in my opening paragraphs. For all but the last year of my decades-long tenure as a psychotherapist, I did not identify myself as a Christian counselor/facilitator of growth. Yet indeed, for the entirety of my career, I unwittingly cultivated my patients’ expressions of innate potential as sentient beings made in God’s image. If they arrived at my office not as yet able to simultaneously hold in awareness and relate to self and others as subjective exercisers of free will, I was their shepherd who fertilized, co-incubated, and ultimately, acted as a mid-wife to deliver their semi-autonomous agencies of mind into being.
Prior to God calling me to serve Him, I never classified my patients’ maturation into more sophisticated interpreters of experience, both past and present, as pilgrims of growing faith. These pilgrims, as those of traditional faiths, progressively exhibited a humble confidence in their abilities to unpack the mysteries of God’s realm, tempered by doubt-suffused skepticism. Nothing could be verified with certainty. Looking back, despite the absence of God and faith in my conversations with patients as they grew, they behaved as if they knew intuitively God had sewn loving linings into their evolving narrative constructions.
The following observations grew out of over three years of reflection on interactions with members of two Christian congregations who struck me as models of spiritual growth mindsets. 1) Their avowed choices to give their lives to Christ were authentic expressions of their developmental achievements of giving birth to semi-autonomous selves, and 2) To the last, they distinguished themselves as earnest practitioners of spiritual discipline. The Holy Spirit alone may be capable of birthing autonomous exercisers of free will into being. However, I admit to classifying such an outcome as a miracle. I dare say that mature Christians do not wake up each morning banking on miracles to grace their lives. Short of a Holy Spirit-engineered miracle, I contend that we Christians do not mature short of developing a synergy between our pilgrim and our empirical scientist natures. I am faithful to the idea that the Holy Spirt officiates this marriage of the two. This collaboration is indispensable to our capacities to hold the centers together on our womb-like crucibles of transformative growth when forces in combative conflict or repulsion of each other threaten to fracture the integrity of these womb-like structures. My good news/bad news headline is that the turbulent nature of this dialectical tension, will like a bucking bronco, from time to time throw our mindful agencies right out of their saddles.
One index of our maturity as Christian believers is a growing flexibility of our autonomic nervous systems. God hard-wired our agencies of executive oversight to yield to faster-acting, more reflexive primitive agencies of mind that, when triggered by anxious apprehensions of existential threats, err on the side of caution to mobilize reflexive survival modes: fight, flight or freeze. This emergency state of preparedness persists until our mindful executives can get back in their saddles to lower our emotional temperatures. Such fragmenting processes are for their duration, inevitably unnerving. The past, present and future can bleed together so as to shape harrowing apprehensions that seem to vacate our capacities to mindfully exercise free will, such that we may take seriously the hypothesis that God has ripped up His covenant to bless us with His mercy, grace and providence.
Such capsules of doubt and confusion can be slow to dissolve for those among us whose unconscious minds are hideouts for traces of traumatic recollections. We unconsciously defend our previous identifications to justify resisting God’s desire that we embrace as a matter of faith, unavoidable risks we are not prepared to take. However, without taking risks, these doubts inhibit us from growing love for ourselves, our neighbors, and our Lord and Savior. Those of us who do not trust ourselves to keep our leaps of faith within manageable bounds will remain tethered to these wishfully-guarded artifacts of our and others’ callow self-organizations. An an example, one outcome may be to champion variations on the theme that science is the enemy of religion.
In truth, however, trust in our autonomous selves and mature faith in God are indivisible. When the majority of us are able, we establish conditions to grow with a fused trust in ourselves and faith in the Holy Spirit. As maturing Christians, we learn to raise the thresholds that trip unnecessary survival alarms, turning them off in a timely manner to learn from and embrace doubt.

05/20/2023

This is an article I am re-posting to my new page. It is an article published recently by the magazine "Sharing."

Here is the link to my website where you can find the article.

05/05/2023

Dear facebook family,

It's overdue for me to have my facebook presence reflect my retired status. So, moving forward the name of my sole facebook platform will be "Artistic Mindsets for Success." As I have taken a break from writing songs in all genres to focus on writing articles, I am closing down my singer/songwriter page. Consequently, some content that failed to appear on both pages may be absent on this new page that I am in the process of giving a facelift.

If you are interested in browsing or reading articles I have written for secular and Christian audiences you can visit my website: www.artisticmindsets.com. My revamped website also includes many song videos produced and recorded by a very talented man of high character, Todd Urban of Urban Sound Studio.

Likewise, All of the highlights of my songwriting labors over the past 8 years can be found on my Youtube channel-https://www.youtube.com/channel/UComxcB7WAl8OVosBMZmKO9A

Happy Cinco De Mayo!

Ridgewood, New Jersey Counseling for Couples Dealing with Divorce, Couples Counseling, Addiction Recovery, Stress Anger Management, Parent Education, Ridgewo...

08/11/2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFd6LWgoNn8&feature=youtu.be

One day at the height of the covid-19 pandemic in the northeast I returned from a visit to my local supermarket feeling angry, shaken, powerless and alone. I...