Month: September 2010

by

Freud Did Not Know

Bad dreams.  Just woke up from one.  There’s a lot out there on dreams in mental health.  After all, they come from the brain.  When Freud was looking at things, he saw dreams as “unconscious wish fulfillments.”  However since Freud rocked our world, we’ve learned so much more about brain biology and Freud was wrong.  Oochie ouchie.  Just saying that makes me feel like his still very much alive reputation will come at me like an angry ghost and be mean!

Dreams are just that, dreams.  Sometimes they are good, but often they are scary, bad, and even terrifying.  Why?  According to Dr. Quijada ;), yours truly, they are commonly symptoms of emotional disease or side effects of medications, etc….  In anxious states, we dream.  After going through life threatening events to  ourselves or witnessing it in another, we get nightmares.  When there is a disconnection is our sleep architecture, we can get “parasomnias” such as night terrors.  Some medication such as Trazodone can cause vivid dreaming where people say they dream “in color.”  And on and on.

Freud didn’t know this, so no offense taken.  However, we do.  Enough with the hocus pocus moral dilemmas that are discussed in our own thoughts and among some ongoing therapies.  First look to biology to give us the answer. Even after having a nasty scream-your-lungs-out dream, remember that your brain is mortal, human, made up of carbon and not aura.

Sometimes even that much information can help people sleep better.

Self Care Tip # 43 – Don’t make too much out of your dreams.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  Do you agree or disagree?  Did this help you in any way?  Please tell me your story.

by

Get in Someone’s Space

The woman writes, but only for herself, she says.  “Why?”  I can’t remember her answer.  My thoughts stayed on the question, wondering why we don’t connect with our community.

Dropping off my children at school this morning, I noticed the pubescent girl with blunted face, guarded eyes, crossed arms, standing alone even surrounded by other kids.  Ouch!  I wanted to hover over her.  Guard her from what ever it is that’s scaring her.  Touch her arms and hair and make her understand that she is important to the universe on a small-scale and large-scale.  Of course I might have been arrested if I did, so I just walked on to safety.

Jeff Wise, author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger, writes

A feeling of connection to others is nature’s Xanax.

Some of my families with disabled children struggle hard to take care of their own.  They often wait until at cliffs edge emotionally, financially, physically to consider placement for their disabled child.  When helping them get past their barriers to placement, we find guilt, fear and shame in the way.  These children often do better physically and emotionally when they are in group homes and away from the emotional burdens in their nuclear family homes.  We need community and community needs us.  Each of us.  Joana Johnson, neuroscientist, says that placement, is in fact a way families can connect with their community and with their child.

Some skeptic personalities struggle to trust the links between us, not out of paranoia, but rather because it is the hard-wiring in their nature

to question things. There is also the introvert, who is often alone not because they don’t like people, but because that is how they get energy.  However, regardless of genetic predispositions, we are all designed to have community.

Mary Shelley tells us through her Frankenstein, that we are better people in the company of others.  We see forces that keep us from sharing ourselves.  But let us not believe those forces.  Break past.  Let us believe our own better Creator who tells us, connect.  Tell our stories.  Stick a finger out and get in someone’s space.  Do what we must to let them into ours.

Self Care Tip #42 – Share yourself and get community.  Be a friend to yourself.

by

Something Decadently Enticing

Oh rotten orange!  I found one stinking up my pantry.  Little fruit flies netting the air above.  Green fur staining my basket below.  The fruit touching it changing colors for no reason other than proximity.

Stay healthy.  Staying healthy is one of the best things we can do for ourselves and for those we “share space” with, those we love.  It is a gift any way you look at it.

Exercise helps, including with emotional health.  Yet, how many of us do?  About 30%.  Some of us use negative self talk to get ourselves out there.  “I’m fat.”  “I’m going to have a heart attack if I don’t.”  “I won’t qualify for that insurance if I don’t.”  All of which may be true.  However, does it work for us?  Apparently 1/3 of the time.

We use the negative feedback to motivate ourselves.  But just as in children, we know it doesn’t work.

If a child lives with approval, he learns to live with himself

-Dorothy Law Nolte

Positive reinforcement is helpful in any context.  Who knows!  Maybe that rotten orange would have tried harder to stay fresh with emotional perks?!

Each of us needs to find our own positive feedback that works.  Our interests are different so it’s not universal.  However, we can be our own behavioral therapist in this.

I have found for myself that I never exercised consistently until I turned exercise into something decadently enticing.  I load up 3 large glasses of water and take them to my bike.   My bike is in an alone place.  In front of my stationary bike is our only television.  There I watch whatever I want!  I don’t allow myself to watch TV at any other time.  It is special.  Reserved for my exercise.  I can’t wait to get back to my show or movie almost every morning!

When I want to hit the streets with a walk or a jog, I listen to audio books that I only listen to when I’m exercising.

I have to set aside some persuasive treats that are now linked in my mind to exercising.  Now when I think of exercising, I am nothing but happy about it.  It is behavioral modification at it’s best.  Hopefully this is helping me and those I touch in life.

Self Care Tip #42 – Turn exercise into something decadently enticing!  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What positive reinforcement works for you?

by

In The Days of Our Youth

We have many chances to start and restart taking care of ourselves.  Lots.

When things get so bad though, sometimes we have to stop everything and declutter our lives to make room for self-care.  It might be dramatic.  It might represent many missed opportunities of self-care that accumulated into a heap of messy angry resentment.  However, we can hope that those times in life are few. The majority of our moments and days we hope are not extreme renovations.

It reminds me of the verse from Ecclesiastes 12:1

Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw near, when you shall say, I have no pleasure in them.”

Even our relationship with God is developed by the little choices along the way.   In personal relationships with God or with man, they hold beauty, they bring pleasure because we did what was right for ourselves “in the days of our youth.”   Because we did, we don’t have much to resent them for.  We are available emotionally to connect with our “Other.”  We can see them. We can be present.

And when the stressors hit, the “evil days,” as they do come inevitably to every relationship, we can say that we remember the good times.  There is bank there to get us through the bad.

As said to me today by the Australian Labradoodles breeder, Tiffany Aveling, taking care of ourselves along the way avoids “death-bed conversions.” Those big swings.  Those, “I’m changing everything about my life,” type of changes. They might be necessary.  However, they usually hurt a lot.

In the film, Avatar, directed by James Cameron, we hear over and over the lovely quote,

I see you.

That is a gift we can give better when we can give the gift of a healthy self.

Self Care Tip #41 – Take the little chances.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What did you think?  Do you see this in action in your life?

by

Get to Know Yourself to Be A Friend to Yourself.

On the Threshold of Eternity

Image via Wikipedia

Let us put our efforts toward becoming who we can become, who we were wired to be, who we want to be, what gives us pleasure.

We can get beaten up by wanting.  Wanting to be someone who gets energy from being with people rather than from being alone.  Wanting to be someone who is a finisher rather than grazer.  Wanting to blend and lead and be chosen.

Some of this filters out as we age.  Aging fills our lives up with so many responsibilities that wanting to be anything more than someone who gets solid sleep hasn’t crossed our minds in a very long time.  Children get more of it right than us in this regard.  They have space to want more openly.  Our wanting muffles and cramps when we turn away from who we were genetically designed to be.

My patient came in depressed again.  Depression was familiar for him.  A psychiatrist works with a specific area of medicine.  So I get to see people after multiple medication trials before their primary physician refers them to me.  Well this patient hadn’t found lasting help from medications. He came to me with doubt.  I wish I could say we worked it out.  I can say that we are still trying.

What we are working on influences the way his genes express themselves.  We can’t change the genes but we can affect some of how and when they are activated.   We can do this by choices, such as medication therapy, sleep hygiene and exercise.  Choices are more effective when we know what and who we were wired to be.  What are our natural talents?  What are we interested in?  Feeling inner congruence when we are doing something points the way for this.

In Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says

“the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work.”

I don’t know if Mr. Gladwell recognized how closely his thoughts harmonized with Carl Jung‘s regarding temperaments.  Doing what is natural for us recruits our best through the path of least resistance – our interest, our attention, our creativity.  Rather than forced effort, drudgery and dragging feet, time looses some heaviness as we get caught up in inner and outer congruence.

Intuitively, we all surmise that when this happens, we have less stress inside and outside of us.  Ah.  What a relief.  This is what my patient is working on and when he is able to say he is doing what he wants to in life, he is less hopeless and panicked.

Self Care Tip #40 – Get to know yourself to be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Have you been using these tools?  Have they made a difference for you?

by

Enjoy Life.

This morning my children have a wanting that seems to draw energy from lithium batteries.  They are creative in their persistence and for that I suppose I should congratulate someone.  When they are all petitioning, they find harmonics I never knew existed.  What to do?

It’s like stacking blocks.  All the blocks on top depend on their base.  Oh the lessons we can learn from our children’s toys!  There is the swing that pivots from the hinge.  The potential energy in a ball turned active only by the hand that throws it.  The, …well, we get it.  Our kids need us, parents and care-givers, in good working order, dependable, secure and safe.

Further, we show them by example.  It is not about getting more of what we want, but by pleasuring in what we have.  Such as 3 kids that scream a lot and demand for more, shouldn’t turn my subconscious into wanting a 4th fantasy child who looks like me but doesn’t holler as much.  Right?  Er…

So what do we do?  Take care of ourselves.  Appreciate what we have.  Live by example.  Get taught by circumstance.  Choose and then choose and keep on choosing what we chose to appreciate, live, and learn again.

The Gallup Organization has done many sociological studies on happiness.  In one Gallup World Poll more than 136,000 people in 132 countries were surveyed in 2005-2006.  To measure this, they used questions about emotions, perceived respect, family and friends to count on, and freedom to choose their daily activities, learn new things or do what they do best.  (By the way these are questions worth asking ourselves too.)

As Quoted in Bloomberg Businessweek about the results from this study,

The public always wonders: Does money make you happy? This study shows that it all depends on how you define happiness because, if you

look at life satisfaction, how you evaluate your life as a whole, you see a pretty strong correlation around the world between income and happiness… On the other hand, it’s pretty shocking how small the correlation is with positive feelings and enjoying yourself.

This was the first study to differentiate between life satisfaction and day-to-day positive or negative feelings that people experience.  Getting richer may not be the only thing we can do to enjoy life.

This prompts us to understand our own agendas. (A discussion for another blog-post.)

But how do we take care of ourselves?  Per the positive psychology movement, founded in part by Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD – do things that build self-confidence, strengthen character and develop interpersonal skills.

Well that’s a lot to process for today folks ;).  I’ll shut it down for now.  But before you go…

Question!  What do you think?  Does any of this stand out for you in your life?

Self Care Tip #39 – Do things that build self-confidence, strengthen character and interpersonal skills.  Be a friend to yourself.

by

Choose Your Prophesy

A woman today with a frank quick smile found out I wrote FriendtoYourself.com.  She swung open the door to her story.  People like her never bore me.  In brief, she was sad after many life losses.  Then when she made some changes in her life she got better.  “I didn’t know how bad I felt!”  (And who does?)  Now every day has activity she loves.  She gets tearful just telling me about all the gratitude that took her by surprise.

In psychiatry, the way she felt when she was sad is called an Adjustment Reaction.  An Adjustment Reaction doesn’t last long, it is in response to stress, and it goes away when the stressor is removed.

Stress is dangerous to us.  It can affect us for different amounts of time, like measuring cups.  During that time, it can affect us to different depths within ourselves, like a scuba diver exploring a coral reef.  If the sad time in this woman’s life went longer, and if she had gotten more sick, it might have become a Major Depressive Episode.  In that case, medication therapy would be appropriate.

Stress affects different intersecting paradigms that make us into who we are, like storm water over farmland.  It crosses over our biology, our genes, what is done to us in life, what we do to ourselves, what is put in our bodies, and how we cope.

Stress can pass over us like a Jewish holiday or it can stay, working, changing, reshaping, adding and taking away bits, always active and busy.  Ants in the walls of our house.  Most often we don’t know what it is doing, for how long, or where it is at work in us.  Stress mutates our cells, turns sleeping genes into loud cancer, depression, anxiety, heart attacks, dementia, old and wasted faces.

But what to do?  Do we avoid stress?  Do we end it?  Do we cure it?  All of that, of course.  My dad told me, “Everyone has problems.  The difference between you and somebody else, is what you do with your problems.”  Not the number of them.

No.  This woman’s story didn’t bore me at all.  The opposite does.

In the film directed by Adam Shankman, “Bedtime Stories,” the character played by Adam Sandler thinks choices have little effect on inevitable negative outcomes. “Life has no happy endings.”  He lives consistent with that belief, until love finds him.  A happy life story can be chosen.  His fantasies are freed to cross the boundary from imagination into the material world where love was waiting, in the shape of family and strangers.  Love showed him that his life had been a self-fulfilling prophecy.  He hadn’t even realized how unhappy he was.  (And who does?)

Self Care Tip #38 – Choose to go towards your fantasies.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  What is your story?

by

Yell and Someone Will Hear

Today a reader responded to the blog posted on August 30, 2010, “Own It.  Our Life’s Work.”

Al-Anon, a great program. I really feel blessed to have found a 12 step program that is so gentle yet so encouraging with wonderful results for me personally.  It has taught me how to quiet my mind, live in the moment, live and let live, and let go and let God.  All principles I apply daily and the pleasure I get from living this way has enhanced all aspects of my life.  This program is not only for the loved ones of alcoholics but for anyone who has a family member suffering from addiction or if you were raised in a home with perfectionistic standards.  These standards stunt emotional growth and the results emotionally are no different than growing up in a home with addiction.  From the outside the perfectionistic home may look functional whereas the alcoholics home looks chaotic, but the emotional impact is the same.  Growing up this way may result in other acceptable addictions like workaholic, churchaholic, perfectionism, eating disorders etc… …It got me thinking about how thankful I am for Al-Anon.

She said it well.  First hand this woman of courage tells us bits of her story.  She demystified some of the suspicions about a group like Al-Anon.  She invites all of us, by her testimony, to also have courage.  To also share.  To also work on our own battered selves.  She unclosets getting treatment.  She tells us we need each other.  Al-Anon is a group meeting.  There is healing.  Healing is not a condition of stalemate.  She tells us about healing and progress.  We can choose.

In the Wizard of Oz

Tin Woodsman: Help! Help!
Scarecrow: It’s no use screaming at a time like this. Nobody will hear you. Help! Help!

Self Care Tip #37 – Yell and someone will hear you!  Be a friend to yourself.

Question: What do you think?  Please tell me your story.


by

Do Your Best and Then Get Some Rest!

Well instead of blogging, I’ve spent the last 2 hours surfing the blogging web-world.  Although bummed I wasn’t writing, I’m rather proud for finding myself neck-deep in a world of stories, research, ideas – unstructured time floating around me like Dandelion hair.  Truly not in-character for me.

So now, I’m going to close the bag of nuts I’ve almost polished off, take a shower and go to bed.  I’ve done my best and hope you did too.  Sleep well friends.

Self Care Tip #37 – Do your best and then get some rest!  Be a friend to yourself.