443: I'm angry! Live Work with Sunny, Part 1

I’m angry! A Once-Undocumented
Immigrant Speaks from the Heart--

Live Work with Sunny, Part 1

Sunny Choi is a beloved member of the TEAM community. He grew up in Hong Kong before emigrating with his family to the United States when he was 11 years old. He graduated from UCLA with a major in engineering, completed a master’s degree in Engineering Management at Stanford, and developed a successful career in high tech Silicon Valley companies. However, he left his work to pursue additional graduate training in clinical social work because he discovered that his strongest call was to help individuals who were being marginalized by American culture and suffering. He then obtained an MSW degree with a specialty in Community Mental Health from California State University. We were fortunate when Sunny discovered and joined our free Stanford TEAM CBT training group, and blossomed into an expert TEAM therapist and beloved colleague and friend.

Today, Dr. Jill Levitt and I worked with Sunny because he requested a session to work on his own troubled feelings concerning the recent political developments. He emphasized that he wanted to do personal work, rather than focusing too heavily on the current political controversies and battles.

You can find the Daily Mood Log (DML) that Sunny prepared just prior to his session if you

click here

As you can see, at the top of his DML, he described the upsetting event as tearing up when he was teaching a class and discussing a case of a transgender Mexican American man, and he began reflecting on his own memories of growing up as a gay male and undocumented immigrant. Sadness and anger were the two strongest negative feelings (rated 70 and 80, respectively on a scale from 0 to 100), although he was also moderately anxious, guilty, rejected, hopeless, and frustrated.

You can also see the ten negative thoughts he recorded on his DML, and how strongly he believed each one, on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 1000 (completely.).

During the session he added three more thoughts:

11.  I (shouldn’t be) living such a happy and pleasurable life when others are suffering. 70%

12.  I should be helping others more. 80%

13.  I have to figure out the correct way to be thinking and feeling. 50%

At the start of the session, he said that he felt vulnerable and nervous discussing such personal feelings, memories, and thoughts. He also said that after doing much personal and professional work, he was generally happy and loving, but felt profoundly disturbed when he thought about so many people who are suffering. He said,

“Many of my clients are being deported. And those who are gay are worried that they’ll lose access to their medications.”

These were the kinds of thoughts that triggered his feelings of guilt.

During the empathy phase, Jill mentioned that she felt honored to be talking to Sunny today and proud to be a member of a community where you can reach out when you’re suffering. She added that she felt torn, as I did, because it seemed to us that many of his negative thoughts were realistic, and not distorted, and that it makes sense to feel sad, anxious, worried, and angry. For example, his first negative thought on his DML was, “The world is much more unstable and dangerous now.”

Sunny emphasized that most of the time he does feel happy, especially when involved with friends and family, and doing the things he loves. But then he gets confused and guilty, wondering if it is right to feel happy when things are looking so dark for so many people.

It certainly makes sense to feel unhappy whe