Claudia Puig writes in USA TODAY about Williams’ “bravura performance.”

Roger Ebert thinks “What happens during the famous week [in the movie] hardly matters. What matters is the performance by Michelle Williams.”

A number of those reviewers refer to her exceptional performance as “channeling Marilyn Monroe.”

But I think that idea discounts Williams’ intense emotional and intellectual work in realizing such a complex and powerful performance; Williams is not a passive “channel” – she is a very actively engaged artist.

Continued (with trailer video):

Michelle Williams on Interpreting Marilyn Monroe

~ ~

She also develops her awareness through reading, such as the book The Four Agreements.

Hudgens sometimes visits Venice Beach: “I love going to the drum circle down there. Every now and then someone will let me join in and bang on their drums, and I just love people who are completely free. Even if they’re drug addicts, who sometimes freak me out.

“I’m figuring out how to be a better person while observing other people.”

She is striving to be more aware and “present-oriented” – and strong – and has been studying the book The Four Agreements, by don Miguel Ruiz.

“It has honestly changed me, almost. You really have to stay strong, because times get tough. Especially in this business. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. There’s so many amazing actresses who got taken advantage of.”

Continued: Vanessa Hudgens on striving to be strong and aware.

Both Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth of “The King’s Speech” have talked about suffering from it (see the article Celebrities with anxiety and panic attacks for their quotes).

Barbra Streisand also used to experience performance anxiety.

After forgetting the lyrics to a song in 1967, she was unable to perform in public for about three decades, according to an article, which also quotes her more recently:

“During my last tour, when I kicked off my shoes and said whatever I wanted, I actually enjoyed myself. Performing is not about perfection. I could never perform live if it were. For me, it’s about raising the money to do good in the world. It’s about self-acceptance. It’s about believing that I am enough.”

Those quotes are ones I added to an article on the topic by Jon Hershfield of the OCD Center of Los Angeles) – who explains that Social Anxiety and Social Phobia are “terms used to describe a cluster of symptoms that center around the fear of being negatively evaluated by others.

“This is often confused with being shy or introverted, or even schizoid.  An introvert may genuinely prefer the quiet solitude of turning inwards to the self rather than outwards to other people, while someone with schizoid personality disorder may simply not find the presence of other people to be pleasing.

“In other words, those who are truly introverted or schizoid genuinely prefer to be alone.”

But, in contrast, he says, “A person suffering from Social Anxiety is burdened by unwanted intrusive thoughts about being judged, rejected, and/or and humiliated by others.”

Continued in his article Social Anxiety: Alone With Witnesses.

The OCD Center uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as a treatment for Social Anxiety. This is a powerful approach for many other mood disorders such as depression.

In my grad program in counseling psychology, I worked as a counselor in a psych hospital program for depression treatment using CBT, and took a course from The Center for Cognitive Therapy, with Christine Padesky, author of Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think.

Morty Lefkoe has a series of programs using a related approach (The Lefkoe Method) for overcoming self-limiting beliefs, as a way to enhance health and personal development. His programs include these:

Undo Public Speaking Fear
Natural Confidence Program [see testimonial by Jack Canfield]

Also see more articles on Social Anxiety

“But I was a highly sensitive child, and the last thing my parents wanted was for their child to go in and get hurt…

“Most actors are highly sensitive people, but you have this incredible scrutiny. You have to develop a thick skin, but you can’t have a thick skin in your work. So it’s that constant push-pull…”

Continued in Inner Actor post Nicole Kidman on fame and actors as highly sensitive people

By Janet Esposito, MSW

It seems like quite a stretch to think that our fear of public speaking and performing can actually be a blessing in our lives.

That sounds like a big dose of positive thinking—an attempt to be the eternal optimist trying to find the silver lining in a difficult and often painful experience of personal suffering.

I am the last person to deny how challenging and agonizing this fear can be for those who suffer from it, having been there myself and having heard the stories of hundreds of fellow sufferers over the years.

At the same time, there is a hidden side to this fear, which you can only discover when you stop running from it and finally face the “monster in the closet.”

Continued in article Getting Over Stage Fright: Introduction.

“You can turn me into a woman, give me some heels, I can do that. I can find the voice, etc.

“But just sit me on the sofa? If I’m acting at all in those scenes, it unravels the movie that she wants to make. So it was trying to find this unconscious quality.”

[About working in Sofia Coppola's movie "Somewhere."]

Continued in The Inner Actor post Stephen Dorff on working with less “cheats” and more raw

See the post Kristen Stewart and shyness and sensitivity for one example.

In her article Jesse Eisenberg on playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in ‘The Social Network’ (Los Angeles Times, Sept 27, 2010), Amy Kaufman described the actor as showing up for the interview irritated from accidentally seeing the last 30 seconds of the movie, that he had been avoiding it because he doesn’t like to watch his own performances.

“I’ve been so furious this whole morning about what I did in that scene,” Eisenberg said. “It’s just uncomfortable to watch me. Not in the same way that it’s uncomfortable to listen to your voice on an answering machine. I just felt that I didn’t get the scene right.”

Kaufman adds, “Given that the 26-year-old’s portrayal of an aloof, socially awkward Zuckerberg during the founding years of Facebook has already sparked some award buzz, Eisenberg’s self-critique may sound like typical false Hollywood modesty. Yet Eisenberg genuinely seems more panicked than excited by any acclaim.

“It feels like — and again, this is just the way my mind works, which is why I go to therapy twice a week — I immediately think that there could be nothing worse than getting that kind of attention,” he said.

“Because, how can you maintain that kind of level of interest and attention? And I really have worked hard and done well in other things that have gotten no attention. So it makes you feel like those kind of things are inconsistent.”

“It wasn’t important to us that Jesse do an impersonation of Mark Zuckerberg,” [screenwriter Aaron] Sorkin said in an e-mail. “Jesse came to work knowing the scene he had to do that day, and how he prepared — whether it was listening to Mark’s voice, fencing or standing on his head — was entirely up to him.”

But Eisenberg was exacting. During one scene in which his character is being deposed and has a notepad, he jotted down which takes he considered best.

For the 18 days of rehearsals and 72 days of shooting, [director David] Fincher said, Eisenberg was hyper-aware of his performance.

“He kept asking me, ‘Am I doing OK? Am I doing OK?’ And I was like, ‘Dude, ask anybody, if you’re not doing OK, I will let you know,’” Fincher said, laughing.

“I think he wouldn’t be as good as he is if he wasn’t hard on himself. But I hope he’ll get to enjoy it…. He got the very thing that we discussed time and time again about the film, which is: I want you to figure out a way to remain an enigma, and that’s a really hard thing.”

For more on the psychology and personality of acting and actors, see The Inner Actor.

Or you don’t even attempt something like introducing a speaker at a business event, or auditioning for a community theater role – both of which could not only be downright fun, but enhance your confidence.

Even talented and accomplished performers sometimes feel disrupting or disabling anxiety.

Laurence Olivier – “The man often considered the greatest actor of the 20th century didn’t face the dreaded affliction until late middle age, but then it hit him hard. In one run at London’s National Theatre, Olivier had to have the stage manager push him onstage every night.” [From Even stars get stage fright, Patrick Enright, msnbc.]

Emma Roberts, besides acting, also expresses herself creatively through painting, collage, writing and singing (she released an album in 2005), but a news article reported she’s uncomfortable performing in public.

“And doing a music video is so embarrassing,” Roberts said. “I don’t think I’ll be doing [another] album unless I write it for someone else. I have stage fright. I can’t ever do theater because I would pee my pants,” she says, laughing.

“It’s way too nerve-racking. There’s a comfort in being able to mess up when you’re on a movie set.”

In a 2005 interview, at age 14, she talked about part of what caused her anxiety: “Singing, I’m still getting used to, and it’s kind of embarrassing just because everyone’s watching, either going, I love you or I hate you.”

Another dynamic may be perfectionism

Cherry Jones earned a Tony nomination for her acting in a play, but said she was “nearly paralyzed by a profound case of stage fright” from trying to live up to the “greatest performance” she had ever seen in the role, that of Colleen Dewhurst.

That sort of perfectionism can drive anxiety and insecurity. Trying to be “perfect” can be energizing and inspiring up to a point, but too much concern can lead to a drop in performance.

[From my post Actors and Anxiety – Get Help For Your Stage Fright.]

Managing stage fright or fear of public speaking

Also in that post is a mention of energy psychiatrist Judith Orloff, M.D., who works with many actors and says she sometimes prescribes a beta blocker such as Inderal, a medication to reduce the fight or flight sensations of anxiety such as muscle tension and increased heart rate.

But in her book “Emotional Freedom” she details what she says is a better way than drugs – a three minute mini-meditation that includes learning how to breathe, center and let thoughts flow by.

A program is available from CTRN – a company serving clients “with Public Speaking, Flying and many other fears & phobias” – see the article How to Conquer America’s Greatest Fear: The Fear of Public Speaking.

Morty Lefkoe has developed a method to deal with performance anxiety – see a video with Paul Scheele of Learning Strategies describing how the program helped him on the page: Undo Public Speaking Fear – The Lefkoe Method

- or go directly to the Undo Public Speaking Fear site.

dealing with stage fright, performance anxiety, help for audition anxiety, relieving fear of public speaking

A diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for instance, can deeply affect our sense of identity and change the course of our life.

The decision to take medications to treat a mental illness may also have a long-range impact on our physical and emotional well-being.

Meg Hutchinson

In An Interview with Meg Hutchinson on Music and living with Bipolar Disorder, the folk music singer-songwriter talks about her own diagnosis, and her choice to take medication.

[T]hat feeling that you’re just – that nothing can stop you. Before I realized what I was dealing with, I just found those spells of kind of a lightning and electricity and creativity to be so intoxicating. And so that song ["The Living Side"] talks about how, even now, sometimes I miss the extremes of that ride, and yet there’s a lot in the song that says I promise to stay on the living side…

[Medication] has been…a core part of my treatment and something that’s been really challenging. I grew up in a very homeopathic, natural, organic kind of household. We didn’t medicate very much. We didn’t even get all of our vaccinations. These are hippie parents who had a really kind of holistic approach to our health and something I value a lot. So this is a real paradigm shift for me, to get to a place where I went, wow, I need help, and to realize that it was severe, that it was as dangerous as not treating cancer or diabetes or something.

It’s also been something that I’ve been very – you know, paid a lot of attention to to make sure that I wasn’t over-medicated, and to make sure that I made med changes with professional supervision, and that I did it slowly and carefully, and that before I made any changes I looked at my lifestyle and said, “What do I need to do before I’m ready for the next change here?”

And for me that’s been starting a meditation practice, changing my relationship with alcohol, you know, many things that all factor in to my health. So, yes, it’s still a very important part of treatment. It’s not the only part, and I think that’s something that we get pretty confused about in our country, that we just treat the symptom and we don’t look at the underlying causes or the person as a whole and figure out how can we adjust all of these other things towards their health.

But, yes, I feel grateful that there’s medication. I feel grateful that there are mood stabilizers on the market now that have fewer side effects and that we’ve come a long way in the last 30 years, a real long way, as far as treatment options. And I’m glad to be bipolar in this generation, you know. It’s a little bit easier I think.

You know I needed to be in the hospital when I was, but I also knew that the things that would heal me would come outside of that setting, and I needed to return to them. So if you have those things already, go back to them and use them as a way to heal yourself. And if you don’t have them prior to the breakdown, find friends that will help you get to those things that treat you on the deeper levels that I think we need to heal.

Clearly, Hutchinson has been thoughtful in making her treatment decisions. But in spite of an orientation toward natural health instead of drugs, she chose to take psychiatric medications, along with making other changes in her life.

In Giftedness, sensitivity and psychiatric drugs: why do we take them and why do we quit? I take a look at some of the influences that might lead us to take drugs to cope with extreme states and the pressures of high sensitivity and giftedness.

What’s ‘normal’?

Hutchinson’s story is one of apparently severe distress, perhaps outside the range of ‘normal.’ But who decides what’s ‘normal’? Where does hypomania end and mania begin, and who decides what we should do to cope with or eliminate it?

In Peter D. Kramer on normality and mental health, Kramer, author of  Listening to Prozac and Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. notes the ever-diminishing concept of ‘normal.’

I have been thinking a good deal about normality lately. It’s a concern in the medical world. The complaint is that doctors are abusing [their] privilege, to define the normal.

Ordinary sadness, critics say, has been engulfed by depression. Boyishness stands in the shadow of attention deficits. Social phobia has engineered a hostile takeover of shyness.

Anatomy of an Epidemic

Hutchinson chose to make psychiatric medication a core part of her treatment.

Are psychiatric drugs really effective, and are patients being given the facts about their long-term effects so that they can make a truly informed decision?

Are we really living in a time of better treatment options for people with mental illness?

One author whose work has illuminated my own road to better mental health is journalist Robert Whitaker. In his Huffington Post article, Anatomy Of An Epidemic’: Could Psychiatric Drugs Be Fuelling A Mental Illness Epidemic?, he takes a look at psychiatry’s track record:

The number of adults, ages 18 to 65, on the federal disability rolls due to mental illness jumped from 1.25 million in 1987 to four million in 2007. Roughly one in every 45 working-age adults is now on government disability due to mental illness.

This epidemic has now struck our nation’s children, too. The number of children who receive a federal payment because of a severe mental illness rose from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007, a 35-fold increase.

I wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic to investigate this epidemic, and this pursuit necessarily raises a very uncomfortable question. Although we, as a society, believe that psychiatric medications have “revolutionized” the treatment of mental illness, the disability numbers suggest a very different possibility. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling this epidemic?

This does not mean that antipsychotics don’t have a place in psychiatry’s toolbox. But it does mean that psychiatry’s use of these drugs needs to be rethought, and fortunately, a model of care pioneered by a Finnish group in western Lapland provides us with an example of the benefit that can come from doing so.

Twenty years ago, they began using antipsychotics in a selective, cautious manner, and today the long-term outcomes of their first-episode psychotic patients are astonishingly good. At the end of five years, 85% of their patients are either working or back in school, and only 20% are taking antipsychotics.

Life after medications

Like Hutchinson, when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a label I no longer find appropriate, I was grateful to be living today with so many drug options. Yet studies such as those discussed in CVD drives 25-year loss in life expectancy among the mentally ill reveal the health risks of medications, about which most mental health patients are never informed.

Years later, after a long process of withdrawal and recovery from the debilitating physical and emotional side-effects of psychiatric medications, I’ve come to see psychiatric drugs differently. My life after drugs is one I embrace, as I also embrace my high sensitivity and creativity.

Related:

Posts:

Giftedness, sensitivity and psychiatric drugs: why do we take them and why do we quit?

Woman interrupted: misdiagnosis and medication of sensitivity and giftedness

Misdiagnosis of the Gifted

Books:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications

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mental illness and creativity, psychology of creativity, creativity and mood swings, mental health and creativity, sensitivity and drugs, sensitivity and giftedness, high sensitivity personality, mental health books, drug books

“While I still do a little bit of acting when I have a chance, I now mainly spend my time helping other people to fulfill their creative ambitions or to just learn how to be happier.

“The interesting thing to me is how valuable my years as a performer have been in helping others with their issues.

“There were things I learned as a young actress years ago that have been incredibly helpful to me throughout my life, many of which I can pass on to my clients.

“For example, I had a wonderful voice teacher at drama school… One of the things she used to say was ‘use it, darling, use it’ whenever I was experiencing a strong emotion, particularly something uncomfortable.”

Continued in Acting, emotion and personal growth
~~~

One of the aspects of acting that fascinates me is the psychological impact that performing as different personalities must have on the identity and emotional health of actors. They can “sample” even extreme situations and emotions in the relatively safe environs of a stage or movie set.

Emily Blunt had a stammer, since age 8. Her mother took her to relaxation classes, which did not do anything. She reached a turning point at 12, when a teacher cleverly asked her to play a character with a different voice and said, “I really believe in you”.

“Blunt ended up using a northern accent, and it did the trick, her stammer disappeared.” (imdb.com)