Therapist Takes His Own Advice: Confronts Perfectionism, Faces Fears

Find M Brady’s music on Spotify and Apple Music. Learn more about Michael Brady here and here and here.

TRANSCRIPT

Flow State

When Michael Brady was young and stepped onto a tennis court, everything clicked into place. 

I was a very visual person, so the tennis court almost became like a puzzle of geometric possibilities in my mind. 

He had discovered a natural gift. But unlike some of his competitors, who played year-round with their parents dragging them to practice several times a week, Michael only played in the summers when he felt like it. And in high school he felt like it more and more.

I had a certain innocence about playing, and it was really a... I sort of lived in this state of consciousness on the court where I was immersed in the present. I was absorbed in my senses, sort of trusted shots to happen rather than try to control them. 5:45 I played in those early years in a state of consciousness that sports psychologists might call the flow state. What I didn't realize until later was that I actually was playing in that flow state … I realized that that's actually kind of a rare thing to fall into.

Sports psychologists say the flow state is a mental state that allows athletes to perform at their best while feeling focused and relaxed. 

It’s the kind of thing we witnessed in this year’s Olympics when we watched Simone Biles do a double layout half twist and win gold. But she had to work to master her overthinking brain that forced her to withdraw from the Tokyo games. 

For Michael he didn’t know what he had until he lost it.

 It was really kind of a place that I didn't realize what I had… I spent many years kind of chasing to find it again.

This is a story about how Michael found that elusive flow state again, and what he learned about himself along the way.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

A Legacy Of Achievers

Michael Brady grew up in the 1960s in Reston, Virginia, a planned community, a kind of urban utopia. It was one of the first post-World War II new towns developed outside Washington, D.C. 

There's pathways everywhere to walk, and tennis courts every half mile to a mile in any given community, so you could bike everywhere.

His mother was a school social worker who was famous for saying that she had the courage to be imperfect, while his dad came from a long line of over achievers. 

My grandfather was the starting quarterback for Notre Dame under Knute Rockne, and my great grandfather was a senator and governor from Idaho…I don’t want to sound braggadocious but there's a way that you grow up in a sort of family of achieving men, and there's almost by osmosis, there's this sort of internal notion of like, oh, okay, this is what we do in this family. 

Still Michael’s parents didn’t push him to be the best. But at 15 he started winning.

I don't think I really realized that I had any significant talent until I started traveling and playing tournaments and suddenly I sort of found myself doing quite well. For starting late and really not playing much, it was a little surprising to win the Virginia State Championships at age 16 and qualify for the national championships.

So he committed to tennis and started taking it seriously. This is when that flow state kicked in and he became one of the top tennis players in the region.

The goal of any junior is to qualify for the national championships. And sure, you know, I had fantasies of a scholarship and playing professional tennis.

At 16 Michael qualified for the national junior championships held in Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

And there are 120 people in the country invited to that event. And you know, it was a big deal, honestly, and it's what I aspired to and had been lucky enough to qualify.

His parents had given him the responsibility of registering and making his own arrangements. So he looked up the date in World Tennis Magazine and scheduled his flight.

On the day of the event his family came to the airport to send him off.

We were at the airport and my father called the tournament director and said, ‘I just want to let you know my son will be arriving this afternoon. I want to make sure someone there is to pick him up.’ And the tournament director responded by saying, ‘we've been calling your son's name for the last two hours. He was just defaulted from the tournament.’ 

It turned out Michael had gotten the date wrong. The magazine had misprinted it.

It was quite a moment to be in this airport and my dad broke down in tears. Yeah, it was very emotional for him and my mom and, you know, the whole family was there to send me off to this event. 

It was, you know, that classic first stage that you hear about in, in sort of loss events of shock and disbelief. Um, I didn't really feel much of anything. I kind of was quite numb and I think I barely spoke for the next several days. 

Small ‘t’ trauma

Michael couldn’t believe it.

I wasn't eligible to have a national ranking unless I played in the tournament. And so very likely based on results earlier in the year, I'm very likely would have had a national ranking, maybe top 50 or 60 in the country, which then means scholarships, it means coaches, it means sort of taking my game really seriously. But that didn't happen. I really didn't have the emotional bandwidth to know how to process it. 

So he didn’t. Instead he found ways to escape.

A lot of dominoes fell from that moment. I started drinking, smoking cigarettes, running around late at night…This was kind of my way, I think, of sort of dealing with disappointment and avoiding being hurt again, you know, which I think we sort of instinctively make choices to find ways not to get hurt again.

After two years he went back to tennis but now it was associated with this shameful thing that had happened.

Once you've had a disappointment, it creates really just a different state of consciousness. It's just hard to go back and just snap your fingers and create it. And believe me, I tried. I tried all sorts of things. I do think there was a way that I was trying to make up for what felt like throwing away two crucial years of my tennis career. And so I think that created a certain striving to reclaim what I might have been. So I think it creates an over-attachment to winning. And my game became much more mechanical. It became more rigid. I became more cautious. 

I kept playing tennis but had lost something.

Michael says this moment of regret was a pivotal point in his life. 

So I had this real fall from grace where I went from being the top tennis players in my region and potentially top 50 or 60 in the country if I had played in the national championships to really being unranked and really sort of, quote unquote, ‘a has-been,’ if you will, in the period of about a year, year and a half. In retrospect, there's a lot of shame that settled in. It's like, ‘wow, how did I throw that away?’ 

Reinvention

Michael decided he’d try to walk on the tennis team at the University of Florida.

It was frankly delusional at that point to think that I could compete at that level, but I was so attached to that when I made this decision, like, okay, I'm just going to walk on, I'm going to make this happen. And I quickly realized I was in over my head at that point.

So at 18 he decided to reinvent himself. He studied Buddhism, existential philosophy, and sports psychology.

I realized that this wasn't just about, you know, discipline, training, and finding good coaching and all that, but it was really about sort of psychologically trying to find my way back into that state of consciousness that I had as a young person.  And at one point, even sort of desperate to live in my senses and not in my monkey brain head, I strapped a Walkman to the back of my chest and turned the music up to 10 and tried to play tennis with this Walkman. So I was literally putting this metal box on my back and running around a tennis court. Within about three points, it crashed to the ground and that was that.

Then he discovered the book “Zen and the Art of Archery.” 

This gentleman, Eugene Harigal, went to Japan to study with a master of Zen archery. But interestingly, the focus had nothing to do with hitting the bullseye, but actually trying to avoid being attached to hitting the bullseye, being attached to the outcome. And what he came to learn was that the striving for perfection actually was destined to result in failure because it moved your attention into the future rather than the present.

LAUREL:And so once you were practicing non-attachment, were you able to achieve that flow state again?

MICHAEL: I had moments. As will happen, sort of like meditation, you're sort of there and then, oh, wait, I'm gone again. 

He eventually gained enough confidence and trust in himself that he earned a full scholarship to a Division One college and toured Europe for several years playing semi-professional tennis. But, more importantly, this study of the flow state introduced him to the healing power of psychology and a career as a psychotherapist.

At one point I thought I might want to be a sports psychologist and actually when I was in graduate school, one of the reasons I went to graduate school was actually to write a model of performance enhancement based on Buddhist and Eastern Zen principles.

Anxiety Attack

At 25 he was recovering from a tennis injury and living in Charlottesville, Virginia with his brother who played in an indie rock band. Now Michael had always loved the guitar ever since he heard Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.

But you know, in my family, my kind of identity was the tennis player and my brother's identity was the musician. And even though I love music, I just almost didn't really consider it as sort of my domain, you know, as sort of like, well, I'm going to be the tennis pro.

But Michael was at a crossroads in his life. He was deciding whether to go back to the tennis tour or go to grad school.

And about that time, the bass player announced he was leaving in four months. And I dabbled with guitar for a number of years. But truth be told, I had not played the bass. And I thought to myself, ‘you know, how hard can this be?’ And so I obsessively practiced for the next four months to the point that I could actually play every note on the song to a cassette recording. I felt confident as I was driving to the audition that day. I was listening to the radio and the old Byrd song, ‘So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star’ came on the radio and I thought, ah, this is an omen from the gods, portending my success later that day sort of smiling to myself… I was in a state of mind that was really confident and comfortable. So I, you know, I pulled into the the ramshackled garage that served as the audition space for my brother's band and they were rehearsing. I walked into the room and immediately saw the space for the bass player that I was about to walk into. 

And at that moment I had this wave of anxiety sort of come over my body and I thought, ‘oh, you know what, this is normal.’ I remember being nervous before tennis matches. ‘This'll pass.’ Well, it didn't pass and the anxiety actually turned into a full on panic attack. 

At the moment I thought, gosh, am I having an epileptic seizure? My legs were literally shaking to the point that I couldn't stand. I had to sit down. My right arm was shaking. 

And so I left that audition without ever playing a note. And so, you know, as you can imagine, I was ashamed. I was embarrassed. 38 Something about seeing that open space that was waiting for me to play the guitar was paralyzing and my body responded with this trembling and shaking. And I can only imagine that I was terrified of failure…And I can only assume that some of that tracks back to historical wounds and the decision that my protective system in me made that said, don't be vulnerable, that's dangerous.

Cognitive Dissonance

So Michael put down the bass and closed the door to music for the next 20 years. Instead he got curious about what happened at the audition.

Why this reaction? It was one panic attack…And so I started getting really interested in why. 

He recovered from his injury and decided to go back to tennis because it was what he knew.

Something registered in my emotional DNA that said, ‘no, don't be vulnerable, don't leave yourself exposed.’ And I kind of overcame that in tennis, but I had the experience and some expertise that I think it was easier to sort of become resilient learn from losses and tolerate, but music I didn't have that same kind of experience and expertise. And so really my coping strategy is avoidance.

Eventually he did go to graduate school to become a psycho-therapist. He also went to therapy for himself. 

And so the combination of really the learning about psychology and being in therapy myself resulted in really being able to sort of organize what happened. And what I learned is that there's a part of our brain that the scientists call the reptilian brain, but what I call the emotional brain, and really its job is to protect us, is to keep us safe. And one of the ways it does that is it stores negative memories. And it stores those memories so that we develop a scanning system so they don't happen again…we're scanning the world to not have that old, worn, bad thing happen again... the other thing that folks do is they create what I call a compensatory strategy to not let the wound happen again.

One of the ways I think I healed was just learning to sort of make friends with that part of me that says, look, we're going to keep you safe by doing things you're good at. You know, you can teach tennis, you can become a therapist. Um, these things you're good at, man, I'm going to protect you. And we're not, here's what we're not going to do. We're not going to share music. We're not going to expose you.

In graduate school he learned about PTSD but it wasn’t until years later in his own practice that he learned about small t traumas. 

Having a panic attack is not really a PTSD experience, but it's sort of a small t trauma. One of the things I see in my practice frequently is people come to therapy and they often avoid coming for many years because they really feel ashamed even to come to therapy. They're like, I don't understand why I'm struggling with depression or anxiety or whatever they’re struggling with. So this becomes an unprocessed loss. And really what we're learning is if you can just label a loss like that and process it, it's really not a big deal. The bigger deal comes from simply not dealing with it. So for me, I think that one of the ways my system tried to protect myself from being re-wounded again was to say, you know what, I'm going to avoid vulnerability. I'm going to avoid being uncomfortable. I'm not going to put myself out there, particularly with music.

He finally in his mid 40s picked up a guitar and even wrote some songs. 

But really for the next 10, 12 years after that, I didn't show them to anybody. I was really just unwilling to be that exposed to share them.

In recent years as he was telling his clients to face their fears, he knew he needed to follow his own advice.

I began to feel this intense cognitive dissonance and feeling frankly like a bit of a hypocrite that I was encouraging my clients to be vulnerable, to take risks. The truth was I was avoiding the skeletons in my own musical closet. This cognitive dissonance just kept growing increasingly uncomfortable until I did hit a moment, it was like, okay, that's it. 

Overcoming Perfectionism

Around this time as he listened to his clients’ experiences, he began to write songs inspired by them.

I came to conclude that what I witnessed in therapy every day was much more compelling and inspiring about experiences that not my clients were having, because of course I don't write ever about my clients. These are all fictional stories based on universal themes and therapy, but certainly influenced by what I witnessed in my office every day. 

He collected 11 portraits of people taking on different experiences and made them into an album called “Second Skin.”

[“PLAY SECOND SKIN”]

It's very symbolic.   It's about someone basically choosing to act even in the face of doubt and fear and really trying to access their best self to do so. The process of making the album really was my second life.

He enlisted his brother Kevin Brady to help him record the album, put it on Spotify, and market it.

The album was the place where I really took on and challenged old fears, old beliefs. And, you know, one of the first things I bumped up against in my decision to be vulnerable was perfectionism, right? I mean, it's sort of like my system said, ‘okay, cool, man, that's great. Let's be vulnerable. But here's the terms. It's got to be perfect.’ And so I would do things like record a track of a song 75 times when the fifth track sounded the same as the 75th track. And that's kind of what my perfectionist mind wanted me to do. I mean, it was insane. 

And I had this voice that was kind of relentless and would say, ‘oh, your songs are too dark, they're too moody.’ And those voices receded, you know, and were replaced really with some pride, really, honestly, about the music and the record. 

[PLAY “SIX DEGREES”]

And then finally, I just kept working with that and just finally surrendered. And when that happened, a lot of things were released. So it became honestly one of the most transformational experiences of my life.

Michael said he turned to Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability for help.

You know one of her quotes was, ‘the willingness to show up changes us. It makes us a little braver each time.’ And indeed, that was really true for me.

He created an artist name he would record under — M. Brady. This name allowed him to step into an alternate musical identity that was confident and willing to be vulnerable. 

Michael Brady of three or four years ago would not been able to probably really sink everything into a song, there'd be an editor voice on my shoulder. M Brady became sort of the personification of a kind of an evolved version of my musical self that was willing to sort of be fully all in and it allowed me I think to really let go and not censor 

Michael says the next challenge for him is performing live.

MICHAEL: There have been a few attempts where I've attempted to perform live that have been frankly disastrous. Literally my vocals chords seized up and I sounded closer to Mickey Mouse than the baritone that I am. These were pretty horrifying moments as you can imagine. But I'm sort of not done being vulnerable yet in the sense that I sort of feel like that's kind of left for me to see if I might conquer that fear. I'm sort of curious if I can bring M. Brady, if you will, into an open mic night at some point, and maybe beyond that because I really want to stare down fear and see if I can calm down my nervous system enough and say, ‘hey, it's okay. It's all right to be here.’ 

LAUREL: And when you're asking clients now to do something that might be scary for them, you have your own personal experience to draw from. It must feel better for you to be able to speak from an authentic place.

MICHAEL: Yeah, that's exactly right. I do feel like I'm able to speak from a really authentic place, particularly when I'm encouraging people to be vulnerable and take risks. And also, you know, I've really discovered the power of creativity in addition to vulnerability to really heal. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.