"That really pisses me off."
"I can't stand it when you do that."
We often think of anger as a powerful emotion--anger makes us red in the face, we feel a surge of power, our voices get loud. What we fail to notice is that the perception of power is vastly different from the experience of power. When you are angry, you are not in control. You are powerless over what you feel, and often feel powerless over your reactions. This is not power, but its opposite, powerlessness, loss of control, and weakness. When you are not in control of your reaction to a situation, you are indeed weak. The presentation of anger may serve to decoy the person or situation about which you are angry, it presents a loud and blustery front, but it takes away your power to regain control of the most important variable: yourself.
Ah, but since it appears that people, things, and situations MAKE us angry, how do we avoid becoming angry and thus maintain control? By following the famous ABCs of Rational Emotive Therapy. A is an Activating event--it is what we complain about that has "made" us angry--a fact of experience. C is the Consequence we create--behavior(s) and/or emotion(s). Which leaves B out of its place between A and C. B is the Belief or set of beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, that is the true cause of C. Generally the beliefs that cause anger are irrational.
To illustrate: a man tromps your toes quite hard in a crowded elevator. Your initial reaction of pain is a normal, automatic one. The next reaction (emotional C), anger, and possibly the shout (behavioral C) "hey, look where you are going", is mediated by your beliefs that "he should be more careful", "he should look where he is going", "he should have waited for the next car", etc. Then you notice the white-tipped cane--the man is blind. Your anger is replaced by compassion, perhaps a lingering annoyance that no one in front helped him enter safely, a touch of shame for being angry at a blind man, etc. Thus the anger was NOT caused by your toes having been stepped on, but by the thoughts generated by your related beliefs. The anger, thus created, can be eliminated once the belief system is altered either by new knowledge ("he is blind"), or by a conscious choice as in this next example:
Your daughter is very late getting home one Saturday evening. You are frustrated that she is missing her curfew once again. You are getting angry, and thinking about how you will discipline her when she finally shows up. You feel yourself coming to a boil, and the words "grounded for life" and "never go out with those people again" bounce around in your brain. Eventually, you realize that losing sleep, pacing the floor, and planning the expected late-night ambush will do little to solve the problem of her frequent tardiness, but will result in her becoming correspondingly angry at you and creating a stalemate on the issue of improved behavior. You create a plan to deal with her in the morning, and head off to bed, your anger having turned to disappointment, and your self-control reasserted. You even manage to get some sleep, which your worried daughter, having created her own defensive, angry stance, ("where is the expected, unreasonable parental ambush?") is not able to achieve.
Success--you have managed your irrational thoughts ("that girl must respect the house rules", "I can't stand having a child who disobeys", "what a bad daughter I have"). By changing your thoughts into calmer ones ("it is a shame she has made another poor choice", "I need a plan to help her understand that if she is living here, there are rules she must follow", "children test the patience of parents; I remember that from when I was her age, but it will make for a happier household if she learns to cooperate".), you regained control over your emotions and behaviors. Changing your thoughts from demands and name-calling into preferences and facts helped you to calm yourself and create a plan. You put yourself back in control of both you and the situation.
Getting from anger to calm is a process. It begins, in the language of RET, with D, a Dispute: "Is it really true that she must respect the rules, or is that just my unreasonable demand of a teenager?", "It is not true that I cannot stand her behavior", "She can be unruly, but she is not all bad"). Following your dispute, you arrive at a new approach, the reasonable beliefs that will allow you to sleep, as in the example above. E is that Effective new belief or philosophy. And F is your new behavior and emotions: getting a night of good sleep and dealing calmly with the teen in the morning ("Honey, we need to talk about your curfew"). You win and so does she. Having a calm parent helps her to remain open to learning and improving.
Whenever you find yourself thinking "(he/she/that)makes me sooo mad", you have given away your personal power. To maintain power and control, change your thoughts so that you can be understandably upset, disappointed, concerned, confused, etc., without losing control over your reactions and thus, the situation. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, can help you learn to prevent anger and maintain control. Empower yourself!
When you seek to lose weight, it is important to think of the long term. You might be losing weight for a special event, but the idea is to maintain your new shape, not bounce back to the old one the very next week. If you go on some sort of special "diet" in which you deprive your body of nutrients to lose pounds fast, you may indeed succeed at losing those pounds, but as soon as you return to eating adequately, you will likely put them back on.
The same, of course, applies to exercise. If you exercise fanatically to lose some weight, adding increased calorie burn to your reduced caloric intake, you are likely to lose weight. ...and likely to put it back on when you return to a more sustainable lifestyle.
Ideally, to lose weight and keep it off, we need to eat enough to sustain a slightly reduced body size. We need to exercise more, both to increase the metabolism and build muscle, not just to burn calories. Burning calories makes you hungry and less likely to continue your fat loss program. We have all been there, surrendering to starvation before we reach our goal and, feeling defeated, giving up the whole project in disgust.
So how do we do this? Create a diet plan for life--learn to eat for your body's needs: eat adequately to sustain your body and watch those nutrients--we tend to be hungry when we are not getting enough nutrition even if we ARE getting adequate calories! Which is why we seem to be able to consume enormous quantities of non-nutritive treats, but rather less of life-sustaining foods. It is harder to overeat steak than chips. It is also the case that a starving body craves fat, sugar, and salt--the nutrients that are scarce in nature. If your body feels starved, you will find yourself drawn to exactly the things you ought to avoid to lose weight! It turns out this is not a failure of will, but a built-in mechanism to avoid starvation in times of famine. Thus, consuming a nourishing diet is the first key to long-term fat loss.
Is late-night eating your nemesis? It is probable that you are starved for nutrients and your body is driving you to distraction when your sales-resistance is lowest. And late at night, what do we seek? Fast foods that are full of sugar, salt, and fat, of course. Eat right all day and you can win the fight against late-night eating.
Here is another fact: Modern humans exist in the first time in history when people can be malnourished and obese simultaneously. This is because we consume manufactured treats that reverse the trend of the natural scarcity of sugar, salt, and fat. These items, while inexpensive, are not nourishing, and lead to overconsuming and obesity. Even so-called "diet" products with artificial fats and sweeteners fail to help us trim down because they are non-nutritive and thus continue the tendency of the body to crave the real thing. The food industry knows what your body craves and generously manufactures a wide variety of such items to capitalize on your natural scarcity eating tendencies. Think before you consume.
In your new diet plan, arrange to eat FOR your day, not after. As with a machine, the human body works most efficiently when it is fed FOR what is has to do, not as you are winding down for the night. Research demonstrates that consuming the same number of calories per day late in the day versus early leads to weight gain. This means your mother was right--you need a good breakfast to start your day. It also means that eating a large, late dinner makes it tougher to lose weight and easier to gain. Additionally, breakfast cereals are better for livestock than humans. Humans do not do well on very high-carbohydrate starters. We need to train our bodies to use protein for sustained energy rather than carbs for high, short bursts of energy. Remember that high-carb consumption, after that nice burst of energy, leads to high insulin output and fat storage as well as the tendency to stress the pancreas and develop diabetes as we age.
When you begin to plan your exercise program, think about exercising both to raise your metabolism and to build muscle, a higher-calorie burning tissue than fat. This means do both aerobic and resistance exercises. See a trainer is you need help planning this program. Remember that exercise must be consistent to work--choose a program that you can sustain for the long haul, not one that you will become bored of after a week. And particularly not one that you hate! It is not a failure of will when you stop doing something you hate. You will stop exercising at some point unless you find a way to have fun at it.
Now you have some ideas of how to create a sustainable weight-control lifestyle. If you need a boost to get you started or to get you past a plateau or just to help you stay on track, clinical hypnosis might be the key. Clinical hypnosis has been shown to help individuals break bad eating habits, learn to control portion size, and maintain the motivation to change. Many of us who know what we should be doing to lose weight need some support and guidance to stay on track. Clinical hypnosis offers a self-empowering way to help you break through those barriers and lose that extra fat once and for all. When you come in for hypnosis, you are learning to tap into inner resources to find your own motivation and make long-lasting changes.
Some, of course are the lucky ones who are biologically unaffected by cold, shorter days, and less sunlight. Others love winter sports enough to be thrilled by the coming snows. Many, however, have to work to maintain a good mood and an active life as winter's chill pushes them into hibernation.
While calling your winter blues "SAD" (season affective disorder) and writing you a prescription is one way to attempt to alleviate your impending depressed mood, if we study biology, we can find others. After all, you are human and can make choices a bear cannot, so even though your body may be trying to get a long winter's nap, if you give it warmth and light and fresh foods and activity, you can stay happy and fit all year long.
Problem: Less sunlight--help yourself--use daylight-imitating lights in your home. Turn them on when you need to waken and keep them on until after your last meal of the day. Do not sleep more--use light and fresh foods to keep yourself in a more active mode.
Problem: Cold temperatures--help yourself--stay warm. Surrender to reality and bundle up. Wear those unfashionable hats and mittens. Keep your home comfortable, not freezing to save energy.
Problem: Warm, heavy foods help us feel better when it is cold--help yourself--Avoid eating the typical winter high-starch diet--maintain your good summer eating habits (or start now and create new habits) with leafy greens and lots of fresh foods now so abundant in stores even in the off season.
Problem: Less fun things to do outdoors--help yourself--find a new hobby or sport that involves physical movement, whether indoors or outdoors--take up yoga or rock climbing or dancing or cross-country skiing.
Fight back! Do not let winter blues make you into a hibernating bear.
In addition to working on your biology, work on your psychology. Avoid telling yourself and everyone around you how much you hate winter/snow/slush, etc. Do remind yourself how cozy a warm fire can be. Enjoy your comfy sweaters. Play in the snow while you are digging out your car for the 57th time. See more movies, and explore new indoor activities. Get outside on sunny days, even just to stroll around and sungaze. Enjoy a cool winter's night under a full moon. Trite as it sounds, keeping a positive attitude will make the winter seem less harsh and your life more joyous.
Certainly, this will not make winter perfect for sunlight-driven beings, but you can help yourself enjoy it more and feel better with a few good choices.
There already exists a system that has the potential to solve the problem--once and for all. How do we educate the bodies of our kids? Martial arts, swimming, gymnastics, ice skating, and many other opportunities that life offers. And not one of those is organized the way classrooms of the mind are organized. We do not expect all seven-year-olds to have the same skill at swimming or achieve the same belt in karate. We do not expect all eleven-year-olds to be able to do a giant swing on high bar. But somehow we have created an expectation that all six-year-olds ought to be able to sit in a chair for six hours a day listening to an adult talk to them, and read at a certain level.
What can we learn from the model that works? Kids progress through the ranks of a martial arts program or a Red Cross swimming program or a standardized gymnastics program according to their skill level, regardless of age. If an adult wishes to learn one of these skills, he, too, enters at the appropriate level. Why do we attempt to force all children to learn a standardized selection of intellectual material at a standardized pace? Granted, at some point, we begin to regroup them into levels of intellect, but it is with judgment--you are in the basic (not good enough), the regular (normal), or the advanced (too good) level, not at the white belt, the yellow, or the orange.....fact-based--you have a certain set of skills to a certain degree of proficiency, and without value-judgment--you are a better swimmer when you achieve a higher level, but you are not a BAD swimmer if you have not yet passed your test. Goodbye test anxiety.
Worse still, regardless of the appropriateness of placement, schools assume that each student ought to learn a given amount of material in a set number of lessons which take place over a set number of weeks. Gymnastics academies do not. In the various physical activities, students may be tested for skills every certain number of weeks, but not all are expected to pass--and there is no stigma attached to not passing; a student simply remains in her correct level until the skill set is learned and the test passed. Students can even drop out without penalty--find a level beyond which they are not capable of progressing or have no desire to surpass.
When students compete at gymnastics events, this competition is not part of the basic skills learning process--students compete with other students who have achieved the same level. Age groupings may be superimposed so that ten-year-olds are not competing with nineteen-year-olds, but it is not considered necessary for each competitor to be the same age. Skill matters more than age. Thus, skaters practice with those of similar skill levels, and compete on a larger scale with similarly graded skaters. Ranks are not graded on a curve; thus in daily education, students compete only with themselves to master higher levels of skills, not with one another to master them better. Goodbye back-stabbing competition.
And, last but surely not least, a skating program is chosen only partly by location--I may lean toward a more convenient program over a less convenient program, but my final choice will be made by how the program matches my young person's needs. This also helps assure a grouping of students who mesh well--their parents select a program based upon their own criteria, above and beyond geography.
There are many lessons to be learned from this model. Children in a karate class tend to cheer one another on at test time since they are competing against a skill set, not one another. Children can master skills quickly or slowly or even not at all. A given swimming instructor is good for your kid, but not as good for mine--I can switch schools regardless of where we live, if I am willing to be inconvenienced by a longer trip. Competition between students can be healthy--a way to demonstrate mastery, but not as a primary motivator. If it were to occur that students leave in droves due to a certain teacher, the administration would be free to reconsider his employment and competent educators could be recognized for their skills as dictated by the profit motive.
The conclusion to be drawn is simple. There exists a model for education that is proven, widely practiced, easy to administer, highly successful, and avoids all the labeling pitfalls of modern schooling. Why do we use a less effective method for educating our children's minds?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/this-is-your-brain-on-metaphors/
Fascinating, thought I, and no surprise. Clients have been speaking to me in metaphors for as long as I have had clients, and I have been teaching them to heal in metaphors. And I did not invent this concept....it long predates me.
"It is a pain in the neck." Client had a difficult work situation AND a pain....in his neck.
"I am all off balance." Client could not walk AND had a stressful housing situation.
"I can't catch my breath." Client held her breath tightly AND felt overwhelmed.
"I have a knot in my stomach." Client feels tightness in the gut AND is anxious.
"I can't walk away." Client has pain in the foot AND a conflict at home she feels trapped by.
Sometimes we call this "organ language," and it reminds us that the symptom speaks to the problem as well as its solution. Irritable bowel, chronic pain, headache, chest pains often speak volumes about the conflicts and overwhelming, seemingly unresolvable stressors in our lives. And given the penchant of the brain for creating these metaphors, with metaphors they can often be resolved.
Symptoms such as these are often in a gray area between medical and psychological. We call them psychosomatic, except that term has become a pejorative that means to clients "It is all in your head." Then, when they are referred to me, it tends to be with a certain sense of resentment as well, perhaps, as shame. After all, the highly paid specialist cannot help and if there is no medical fix, then are you indeed making up or imagining your agony?
NO! Not at all. The mind and body, inseparable expressions of the same entity--YOU--are communicating a need--a problem seeking a better solution. Medical doctors struggle with ailments that relate to such complex needs because the cure is not medical, it is psychological. Resolve the conflict, reduce the stress, relieve the perception of overwhelm, heal the trauma, and the organismic equilibrium is restored and then, voila, so are health and comfort.
Hypnosis and therapeutic imagery are valuable tools for unlocking these complicated disorders born of the overwhelming complexity of being human. Combined with Rational Emotive Therapy to attain better understanding of the task of being you, the entire treatment package results in a healthier, more resilient being.
Medical interventions such as pills and surgery often are the key to feeling better, and certainly often are essential to survival in a world full of biological challenges. But being in balance with the environment in which you exist and with your internal world are the keys to thriving. Beyond feeling better there is often healing--a true cure for disorders that represent disequilibrium--a self out of balance with its existence.
Call the Center for Conscious Living to learn more. It IS all in your head because help is within--and you can learn to unlock it.
http://www.centerforconsciousliving.com/allergies
One of the first things I want to know from all clients is how they eat. Now this might seem rather odd for a psychologist to ask, but I have a purpose. If depression is biological. because after all, you are a biological entity, then it has biological causes and effects. In fact, I liken depression to hibernation. A hibernating bear eats a lot before going into that log for the winter. He eats a lot now and then when the sun comes out. He puts on a lot of fat and wakes up rather thinner one sunny morning. He is not discriminating about what he eats when nature instructs him to fatten up or when he is skinny and starved (ask those folks who think they can outsmart bears and hang out in Alaska prior to hibernation season!) .
When you are depressed, your eating patterns change--some of us eat too much, others too little, but few of us eat well when our mood is slumping. We may eat lazily as well, choosing faster, less nourishing items over slower, healthier foods.
What this has led me to conclude over years of observing clients is that if I can help them to eat better, at least some portion of that depression will lift without me ever applying all those brilliant psychotherapeutic techniques I learned in school. Simple, elegant, and cheap. (Well, except for the cost of real food over chips.)
I have also discovered that most of my clients are like I was when I first got out of college: they know a lot of stuff from TV and government ads and high school health class about food, but not really very much about actual nutrition. Hence, I have taken numerous classes in nutrition and obtained a certification in fitness nutrition so that I can better serve clients who are confused about food. Learn to make better choices in eating as well as better choices in living as YOU overcome depression now.
There is joy after depression. And there is an after........
The concept of living consciously means slightly different things in different contexts, but to Dr. Lloyd, my co-founder, and I, it meant getting away from the idea that our customers were "patients". When this business was conceived, the idea was to teach people rather than to fix them. We wanted to offer skills and ideas that our clients could take with them and use for the rest of their lives. You, our customers, have been since this business opened, clients who pay for a service. That service is not "me doctor, you patient," but a collaborative process where you and I discuss the symptom or distress that has brought you to me and whatever history is necessary for me to understand it well. We then work together to formulate a plan using tools that I have learned to teach to you, for you to overcome that difficulty and maintain the improvement long-term. These tools must necessarily include some form of homework, as what you do when you are not in my office is as important as what you do when you are in it.
Now this is not to say that you learn this skill once and for all and that no one ever relapses or develops a related problem. In fact, a very wise man, Dr. David Burns, author of Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
, teaches that a relapse is actually a very good thing. If you get over your depression or headache and never relapse, how will you know what actually made it go away? If, however, you have a small relapse and make it go away AGAIN, then you are pretty certain that you have caused yourself to get better using your new skills, rather than that a remarkable coincidence had once occurred. Then you not only are once again rid of your original problem, you have the security of knowing that you have the tools to keep it away and tackle new problems that will certainly arise!So, when I think of "Conscious Living" I am thinking of each client developing a new self-awareness that allows him or her the ability to get rid not only of the problem they first brought to me, but also to overcome later obstacles that life puts forth, and avoid some sorts of life problems altogether. I hope that each client who enters my office leaves one day very soon with new skills for tackling the mundane and not-so-mundane challenges of daily life.
The way I learned it in school, non-psychiatric MDs should NEVER prescribe psychotropic medications, because 1) they are not trained to diagnose psychiatric issues and 2) they are not versed in any other approach to such problems. I also learned how to do psychotherapy in school, which MDs do not. And it turns out that study after study demonstrates that psychiatric problems are responsive to good psychotherapy, but rarely to drugs. It also turns out that a good number of medical problems are more responsive to good psychotherapy than to drugs. Hypnosis works better for IBS and WARTS (yes, you read right) than anything else out there!
The following references will help you get over the drug-company driven belief that anti-depressants are so great we should put them in our drinking water!
Oh, and it is important to note that the side effects as well as the withdrawal effects from various antidepressants include anxiety and insomnia!
Be a skeptical consumer.
Efficacy and Effectiveness of Antidepressants: Current Status of Research.
H. Edmund Pigott, Allan M. Leventhal, Gregory S. Alter, John J. Boren,
NeuroAdvantage, LLC, Clarksville, Md. , Department of Psychology, American University,
Washington, D.C. , USA
"Meta-analyses of FDA trials suggest that antidepressants are only marginally efficacious compared to placebos and document profound publication bias that inflates their apparent efficacy."
http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ArtikelNr=318293&Ausgabe=254424&ProduktNr=223864&filename=318293.pdf
STAR*D Wars:
The Corruption of the National Institute of Mental Health and the Failure of Antidepressants
"While the FDA’s trust of flawed and fraudulent pharmaceutical company data has long been a problem, NIMH’s STAR*D study is a kind of “boot on the face” for Americans. In STAR*D, U.S. taxpayers paid for a methodologically substandard study done by drug-company connected researchers, who drew unjustifiably positive conclusions about antidepressants. "
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0606/S00351.htm#a
So what is hypnosis? In simplest terms, it is a narrowing of the focus of attention. So that person on stage is attending only to the hypnotist. By choice--or else why did she raise her hand, right? A stage hypnotist carefully selects volunteers from those with raised hands by observing their degree of attentiveness as he speaks.
In the clinic this translates into a way to tap into powers of your mind that you do not use to their fullest potential. The power to change bad habits, to project a happier future, to reframe an unpleasant past event, to calm your immune or nervous system. Hypnosis is not magic and it is NOT me controlling you. It is you being guided to learn to use that deeper potential of you mind to help yourself.
In my office, hypnosis is most often taught in conjunction with rational-emotive or cognitive therapy for overcoming phobias, depression, anxiety, or bad eating habits.
Learn self-hypnosis as a way to carry the new learning with you always.
Can clinical hypnosis help you?
Call the Center at 630-249-1983 for a free consultation.
http://www.centerforconsciousliving.com/hypnosis
Many approaches to mental health rely upon what we call reductionism--the idea that the mind and the body are separate and can be treated separately. The whole idea that mental distress is cured by a pill falls into this category. In contrast, the holistic approach says that each individual is an indivisible whole and must be treated as such. Thus, a mental health issue such as depression is not a "mental illness", but an adaptation of some sort to the individual's current reality, and a whole picture needs to be formed of the individual in order to adequately treat the problem.
In the same way, physical ills are influenced by a variety of factors we call stressors. stressors can be internal or external, mental or physical. temporary or permanent. Even a cold is influenced by the weather and the state of your immune system, not just the exposure to a virus. Some illnesses are more multi-determined that others. Irritable bowel is more a disease of response to stressors than the flu, for example.
The holistic approach requires individual treatment planning and a collaborative relationship between professional and client, rather than a traditional doctor-patient relationship. In this regard, I often refer to myself as a teacher or even a tour guide. The client cures him- or herself--I lead the way. With this approach, you have a sense of control over your fate and gain mastery over the problem that was vexing you.
Wow--what a frightening thought. Probably everyone wonders this at one time or another. And when they are wondering, they are scared. We all count upon our brains to be reliable. We need for the things we see and hear to be really there and the thoughts we think to have some connection to the world around us. Our minds are our interface with reality--what we call "consciousness"--and if we cannot trust that, then there is nothing to trust. So when you are feeling a bit crazy, which we all feel at one time or another, it is particularly frightening.
The truth is, while you may feel "crazy" at times, what we really consider crazy is a rather extreme state where your mind is indeed not a reliable source of sensory input and your thoughts are disconnected from the world around you. Technically, we call that state "psychosis". In true psychosis an individual is not getting valid information from his or her mind about reality or is somehow unable to use the information she is getting to interact with reality. A momentary whacky thought ("I wonder what would happen if I ran this stop light?"), or even a brief false perception ("I could swear I saw a man standing there"), or the occasional inability to recall if something really happened ("I could swear I fed the dog, but her dish is empty") does not qualify as crazy. Even a momentary loss of emotional control in an extreme situation does not qualify as crazy.
Sometimes stress causes the mind to run a bit haywire momentarily, and while frightening, if it is fleeting, then you can calm down and regroup and work at reducing your stress. The mere fact that you are wondering if you are crazy means you are testing your thoughts and perceptions against reality, and indeed is a good sign. But if the stress becomes too much, please do consider psychotherapy to help you manage your stress and get back on the right track. You need your mind to be reliable and your emotions to accurately reflect the state of your reality.
Daily in my office, depressed clients tell me about the mental illness in their families or describe what is wrong with them as a "disease". Personally and professionally I am uncomfortable with this notion for many reasons. In physical medicine, a disease is something caused by a germ or pathogen, such as a cold or flu, or a foreign process such as a tumor, or a degenerative process such as arthritis. In physical medicine, a disease is not defined primarily by its symptoms, but by its cause--the process of disruption of the physical body. And there are tests that demonstrate the presence of such diseases. When we try to apply this to mental health, it causes misconceptions.
What, exactly causes depression? In truth, we do not know. What we do know is that there is not just one cause. Some depressions are influenced by hormomal imbalances, others by brain injury, still others by upsetting situations combined with non-productive thinking. And even this is too simplistic--for example, is just a hormonal imbalance enough to cause a major depression or are there also purely psychological causes that interact with the physiological issues? In any case, the disease model does not help us to understand what causes depression.
Additionally, the disease model ought to help us to arrive at a treatment. While with viruses the treatment is mostly rest and good self-care, for other medical illnesses there are specific treatments informed by the diagnosis. Mental conditions are different, Regardless of television ads, medication is not a cure for depression--it may or may not alleviate symptoms, but what it is not is a cure. Psychotherapy, on the other hand, has the potential to creat a cure. Both change the brain, but in the case of medication, the change is not specific to YOUR depression, while in the case of psychotherapy, you are volitionally making changes in how you think, act, and feel, with the guidance of a therapist, which at some point, if the therapy is valid, will lead you to stop being depressed. AND if you relapse YOU will have the tools at your immediate disposal to repeat the process and cure yourself again. In many cases this process becomes permanent--that is to say one or two times of relieving yourself of depression often retrains your brain not to go there.
To take another approach to this question, we all agree that humans are biological entities--mammals to be precise, and that what happens to us is a result of biological changes. Depression is indeed more than just a bad mood--it is a combination of emotional and physiological changes that resemble another mammalian behavior--hibernation--essentially the organism is declaring that is it going to go back in that cave and hide until conditions are safe to come out! Hibernating animals eat more food less often, are sluggish, sleep most of the time, do not play. In the case of actual hibernation it is because conditions are physically not safe and the animal has biological mechanisms to compensate. In the case of depression, it is often psychologically unsafe conditions that lead us to seek shelter from everyday life by reducing our involvement. So rather than calling depression a disease, I prefer to call it an adaptation to unsafe conditions and treat it that way. When we learn how to make ourselves feel safe, we interact differently with the world.
Depression is not a life sentence; it is not a disease; and it is not YOUR FAULT. Neither are you helpless in the face of depression. Take control. Get help. Rational Emotive Therapy (the precursor to cognitive behavioral therapies) combined with clinical hypnosis is a particularly effective way to tackle depression. Call today to see how this can help you.
Did you ever stop to ponder the odd modern phenomenon we call "working out"? When did it begin? Why? When did it become ubiquitous? Once the only specific fitness activities kids did were gym classes in school and swim or gym at the local YMCA and various sports. But they walked or biked to school, ran around for hours after, did chores inside and out, and walked or biked nearly anywhere they needed to go. Adults did sports, worked physically at jobs or housework, and did a remarkable amount of walking or biking as well. And the only guys who lifted weights were body builders. Then it began to change.
Modern jobs are averagely more sedentary, as are modern lives. How many folks walk to the market? To the movies? How many kids walk to school these days? Modern schools give out more homework, and modern kids have more after-school actiivties, not all of which are sports. The result of all of this modernization is a more sedentary populace.
Add to that mix modern diets in America with lots of fat and sugar, and you have more obesity and more people struggling to stay fit. Enter the modern gym. Or an epidemic of gyms in all sizes and shapes. But sometimes it is even tough to schedule the gym in on a weekday. Not everyone can afford a membership. Some people hate fitness centers. And unless you go most days, it is not enough. What to do?
Taking a lesson from history, a couple of things come to mind. The first has been written about here before: eat a more natural diet with a more natural proportion of fat and sugar and a lot more plant foods. The second is even more obvious. Move more. Not JUST at the gym, but all day long. I know you have heard this a zillion times, but take the stairs instead of the elevator. Think about how often you park as close to the door as you can, avoid carrying your own purchases, and otherwise rely upon wondrous modern conveniences to save time. The problem is that when we save time this way, we also save energy, and mathematically, if you consume more energy than you expend, you will gain weight. So down with saving energy--walk to work, climb those stairs, park far away, walk around at lunch, and take a few short work breaks to do something physical (that's right--breaks are NOT just for smokers). Regular expenditure of energy in addition to weekend sports and trips to a gym will help you stay healthy and keep those extra pounds at bay.
Some time in the last few years, kids stopped coming to my door to offer to shovel my snow in the winter or rake the leaves in the fall--bad for them, good for me; these chores are a crucial part of my work-out routine. I hope to never own a snow blower or a leaf blower.
But there can be too much of a good thing. We are consuming too much medical care. It has become common knowledge that over-reliance on antibiotics has led to the existence of drug-resistant bacteria. How often do we look to other means to cure an earache or chest cold? I am not talking about lying there hoping you get better, but there are indeed other means than prescription medication to help your body fight off infections. And when you must take that antibiotic, does your physician discuss the fact that it kills off the bacteria that help you digest carbohydrates, prevent the overgrowth of harmful organisms in your gut, and make vitamin K?
Many of the ills of modern society have more natural cures than pills and surgery. Certainly not all, but quite a few. Now some folks prefer medicine versus changing their lifestyles, and this is a valid choice, but for the undeniable fact that medications have side effects. So in health care, as in all things, there is no free lunch, so to speak. When you take a pill, do you read that long list of potential side effects? Most people don't; which can be a good idea--no need to worry about things that hardly ever happen. Additionally, some side effects of medications do not appear in those leaflets. And others sneak up on you after you are no longer taking the prescription, like those stomach cramps that signal a lack of intestinal flora or the miserable constipation, sending you to the doctor for yet another pill to get rid of the new symptom that might just be a side effect from pill number one! Human bodies are self-healing organisms--in many cases your physician or a natural health care practitioner can guide you to an alternative treatment with fewer side effects.
The same situation exists with psychiatric medications. While many have a desireable effect, the side effect profile is often mistaken for a new symptom rather than a drug effect. Additionally, many psychiatric medications have rather severe discontinuation symptoms. New evidence suggests that psychotherapy alone is often more effective than medication. Again, psychotherapy requires the client to do something different and is more of a commitment than taking medication. It can be difficult to make such a commitment when you are feeling miserable. However, the results of psychotherapy can last a lifetime, and give you a personal mastery over that problem, while the drug approach often requires you to be medicated on and off for a lifetime.
You can take charge of your health. Be an informed consumer of health care.
Suggested readings:
Gut Flora
Medicine Safety and You: Understanding Side Effects
Harmful Effects of Medication on the Digestive System
Unexpected Side Effects
GERD Drugs May Cause Unexpected Side Effects
Unexpected Psychotropic Medication Reactions
Shakespeare's Hamlet asserted that, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Perhaps on the face of it, this seems ridiculous, but let's analyze. You get tripped and fall. Angrily, you look for the offending root or rock. Is the root bad? Did it volitionally attack you? Clearly, that root has no moral agency--it did nothing but be a root, growing where you chose to walk. We'll label the tripping "A"--the activating event (these labels are part of the Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy paradigm). Now tripping is hardly a preferred activity--we do not awaken in the morning and decide this will be an auspicious day to spend tripping on roots, but it is also not in itself a BAD THING. We'll label the consequence of tripping "C" --physically, you might get a stubbed toe or a twisted wrist from falling. Emotionally, you might become angry at the root, the world, your toe, your boots. The anger is the part you can change, sprained ankle or no. How did you make yourself angry? We'll call that part "iB"--your irrational beliefs. You are telling yourself (here is where Shakespeare comes in) that it is terrible that that root spoiled your walk, how dare it be in your way, what a terrible klutz you are, or that you cannot stand this inconvenience. Now these are irratonal beliefs because they involve overstatements, assumptions, generalizations, demands, globalizations, and other distortions that are the actual cause of your anger, rather than the root or the tripping. If we add "D", the dispute, you can tell yourself, as above, that the root is an inanimate object with no agenda to harm you, that it is unfortunate, but not a total disaster that you have tripped, that while your walk may be curtailed, it is a fine day to read a book, etc. In this way, you may remain dismayed about the outcome of your walk, but can be undisturbed as you salvage a reasonable outcome. "E" is your effective new philosophy--"I would vastly prefer that things not interfere with my walk and that I were a rather more graceful walker, but sometimes things do not go as I prefer." Now, you are not going to be ecstatic about that hurt ankle, but you can be undisturbed and remain contented in the aftermath of unfortunate events.
REBT is a remarkably effective way to make long-lasting changes in your mood and attitude and make yourself calmer and more contented. Dr. Low has recieved advanced training in REBT and is happy to assist you in learning the ABCs of making yourself calmer and less disturbable.
Suggested readings:
A Guide to Rational Living
How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything: Yes, Anything
How to Make Yourself Happy and Remarkably Less Disturbable
That said, research and experience demonstrate some things that work with kids better than others. Authoritatian "do it because I said so" parenting does not work as well as authoritative "there is a reason for you to do it this way" parenting. Nor does permissive "do it however you like" parenting! Logical consequences work better as a concept than punishments: if the ball is thrown at the window, we take away the ball and bring the child indoors rather than taking away the computer. Threats never work--amazingly, kid tend to hear threats as a dare: "If you throw that ball at that window one more time, I will ground you for life" is heard as "I dare you to throw that ball again," and they do! Labels are scary for kids. "Good girl" said when she is putting her toys away, gives her little mind the notion that she is a BAD GIRL when she is not. "Thank you for cleaning up your things" avoids the label problem.
Kids are easily overwhelmed with feelings. Teaching them how to change their frightening or upsetting thoughts for calming ones will get their feelings under control. They will be calmer and happier, and you will have a happier household.
Strange as it seems, there is a sort of logic to understanding your children, but it is not adult logic. The readings below are a start at understanding how kids tick. Feel free to phone for an appointment if you need further guidance over a rough spot with your children.
Suggested readings:
Between Parent and Child: The Bestselling Classic That Revolutionized Parent-Child Communication
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk
Rough Spot Training: A Manual for Helping Children Develop Emotional Self-Control, Self-Soothing, and Behavioral Management
How To Raise An Amazing Child the Montessori Way
You are heading out for your daily run. Are you worried about how you look? Are you wondering if that cute guy or gal will be running today as well? Are you worried about how fast your time will be or whether you will do better than that fellow over there? Or are you focused on the joy of moving your body with grace and efficiency? Are you in the moment learning to improve your personal performance? It is your ego who feeds those earlier and not very useful thoughts and takes your focus away from the joy of the moment and the learning that every moment can contain.
Your ego has another insidious trick--making excuses. When it does not like your performance, it tries to disavow responsibilty--"Well, it was too cold to run today anyway," "He is taller so it is easy for him to run faster," "She got started a little sooner," "I am stil not quite over that virus." What if you ignore your ego and focus on feeling good that you got yourself out in the cold to give it a go? Or that you are running more smoothly than before your injury last summer? When you focus on the games of the ego, your behavior will suffer. In fact, we most often end up looking and feeling foolish when, instead of focusing on the positive aspects of the moment, we are struggling to placate our tricky ego.
There are many ways to achieve the peace of mind that comes with living in the moment and refusing to get caught in ego traps. Some use mindfulness meditation; others simply choose to refocus their energies in the present rather than the past or future. Rational Emotive Therapy is a great tool for learning to stop judging yourself and others and develop unconditional acceptance for them and you; which gives you more personal power to change your behavior rather than getting stuck in self-criticism. Stop getting stuck in ego traps!
Suggested readings:
The Myth of Self-esteem: How Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Can Change Your Life Forever
. I am in love. What a great title. Wish I had thought of it. Whatever can he mean? Well, as in that old joke about insanity (you know: "Insanity is hereditary, we get it from our kids"), depression is hereditary in much the same way! We get it from our environment. We either learn to cope with adversity or we don't. We either learn to see things in a positive light or we don't. We either gather social resources in our lives or we don't. We either exercise or we don't. And we learn those things from others when we are quite young. What this means is that there is hope for your depression, and the hope comes from learning new ways to take care of yourself, deal with adversity and stress, and form and maintain relationships. Techniques that have existed for quite a while--rational emotive therapy, cognitive therapy, and clinical hypnosis are demonstrated to help you learn new ways of handling things that come up, and if needed, looking backward at how the patterns that you need to unlearn evolved. Fight back. If depression is contagious, there is a vaccine, and the vaccine is to change how you think and act.
It is time for Veggie Fest in Naperville--two days of fun and informaton and food. Please join us August 8-9 at the Science of Spirituality Center, 45 175N Naperville-Wheaton Rd, Naperville, IL. Hope to see you there!
Even worse, if that pain does not have a traceable source, such as pain from migraine, complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS-1 or RSD), or fibromyalgia (FMS), those standard pain medications are unlikely to help.
Back to the original question--when is the pain "all in your head"? Pretty much always! Remember, pain is a perception--the translation by your brain of a series of signals from your body that things are not right. When we treat pain, we are treating your brain. Pain medications work on pain receptors in the brain, which is where that complication of physicians having to be concerned about the addictive potential of effective pain medications comes in. Now people in pain rarely abuse their medications, but it can happen, and we all know the government has no tolerance for that margin of error.
With the sorts of pain that do not have a specific source of origin, the brain is already flooded with chemicals that block the efficacy of medicine, and the pain signals are actually a result of the distortion of brain-body communication, so other treatments are needed. Just because it is all in your head, does not mean you are crazy or pretending, though. Nor does it mean you do not deserve to be comfortable.
Regardless of which kind of chronic pain you suffer with, hypnosis is often quite effective at controlling it. The first type of pain has been shown to repond directly to hypnosis--brain scans actually demonstrate the effectiveness of hypnosis at reducing the pain signals. The second type of pain is more complex, because the pain signals are providing misinformation about the condition of the body--in these cases hypnosis as part of an integrated treatment program to re-educate the nervous system can be quite effective!
Treat your pain where it is generated--in the brain! Hypnosis works.
Let's take weather. Weather happens. It always has, and it always will. Really. We had weather when I was a kid and when my parents' parents were kids, too. Weather varies from wonderful to dangerous on a fairly regular basis. It is great that we have modern warning systems to tell us when the weather is genuinely dangerous. But should not our common sense kick in, too? When I was little, if it was dangerously hot, we opened a fire hydrant or went to the beach. There was no air conditioning in most homes. We drank lots of "Kool-Aid" (yuck!) and sold lemonade at the corner. We knew to take it easy. We knew what to do in a thunderstorm and did it. In tornado season, we had drills and knew what to do. Sometimes we even had to do it for real. These days, every change in the weather seems to result in raised voices on the news and frantic folks everywhere.
On to the economy. It is a great hardship to lose your job, and startling when many of your neighbors do, too. But is that a national emergency? What if neighbors all pitched in to help one another when someone loses a job? How many of us would not bring a meal to the neighbor whose wages were suddenly gone? But now we assume the government should do it. This has several bad effects. The first is that fewer of us step up. Another is that we must be taxed more for the government to do so. The third is that there are now fewer tax payers to handle it. A vicious cycle is thus created, resulting in that family being in a bad way. Another bad effect seems to be massive panic resulting in even more worsening of the economy as folks wait with trepidation for the other shoe to fall.
Which brings us to what I see in my office; what may be the worst effect of all of this new idea of living in a constant state of emergency. (Is it really always "Condition Orange" at the airport?) Normal people with miserable symptoms. From anxiety to irritable bowel to hypertension, people's bodies are reacting to the constant tension to which they are subjected. Emergency rooms are flooded with people in pain. And a lot of that pain is the result of stress and tension. It is NOT "all in your head," though it does come from your response to the stress and tension all around and within you. This means you have to recalibrate your perceptions AND quiet the inner, scared voices. Modern life does have its dangers, but they are less often life-threatening than they once were. However, our bodies cannot tell life-threatening danger from the milder dangers and stresses associated with high-pressure, fast-paced modern living. What if the news really reported the news? What if, even if they continue to sensationalize everything, we could all be calmer and more comfortable? You can. Try Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy!
Let's start with that idea of a diet. Your diet should be the food you eat. Emphasis on "food". It should not be some weird aberration from a book or a TV show that you try every time you cannot get into your favorite jeans or some guy at the club can bench more than you. What is food? Real food is the veggies that grow out of the ground; it is healthy animals raised for consumption as their nature intends (note that this means cows do NOT live on corn--cows, being ruminants, should eat grass.); it is whole grains with the bran and germ attached; and fats and sugars only from real plants and animals.
Eating real food is a commitment. Choosing good, wholesome food requires knowing something about how food is produced. Then one must know how to prepare edible meals from raw materials. To shop correctly, we need to understand why our bodies crave things that are not good for us and avoid those processed items! Sugars and fats, scarce in nature, are plentiful at your supermarket. But your body was made to crave them for fuel because, being naturally scarce, they needed to be sought as precious commodities and consumed when available. Modern society has solved the scarcity problem without solving the craving problem. We all know the result of that, a host of modern diseases caused by the excessive consumption of artificially derived fats and sugars with lots of added salt: heart disease, obesity, hypertension, stroke, gut disorders, adult-onset diabetes among them. Say no to the illnesses of the modern western diet! Eat food.
When a diet becomes a plan for eating real food, and your family expects to see food that requires preparation when they open the fridge, you will be well on your way to a healthier household!
Your daughter has functional abdominal pain. It can come with or without irritable bowel, with or without diarrhea, with or without vomitting. In any form, it is not fun. There seems to be an epidemic of kids with pain these days. Modern life is complicated and stressful. Kids are under more pressure than ever to perform in school, to make tough decisions, and to do more and more. Parents are ill-prepared to help their kids navigate modern adolescence--your kids's lives make your stressful adolescence look benign in comparison.
There is help for your child and for you! All of you can learn to negotiate the stressors of modern life, and your child can return to being the happy, healthy kid you once knew. Clinical hypnosis has been shown in studies on IBS to help to return the gut (or other organ or system) to its normal function. Your child also needs professional help to explore how he reacts to his life that got him into this mess. Rational Emotive Therapy will help him or her redirect that sense of being overwhelmed and get hm or her back on track. Parents and kids are often amazed at how easy it is, with the right tour guide, to rediscover a comfortable, happy life.
Suggested readings:
Edelstein, Michael R. & Steele, David R. (1997) Three Minute Therapy: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
Ellis, Albert (2000) How To Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You
Hauck, Paul (1975) Overcoming Worry and Fear
Pharmaceutical Industry Hustlers Part I
SSRI Antidepressants Pushers
By Evelyn Pringle
"After twenty long years, it appears that the epidemic in mental disorders in America might be coming to an end. It won't happen because of any great medical breakthrough but rather because the perpetrators of the greatest healthcare fraud in history are finally being exposed. The demolition of the giant "psycho-pharmaceutical complex" appears to be on the horizon."
Pharmaceutical Industry Hustlers - Part II
Pushers of SSRI Antidepressants
by Evelyn Pringle
"To gain approval for treating children, all a drug company has to do is submit two positive studies to the FDA to prove a medication is safe and effective for kids. However, after 20 years of feeding the new generation of antidepressants to tens of thousands of kids in clinical trials, the only one ever approved is Prozac."
