Me: So Doctor. What do you think about the concept of God and psychiatry? (I was speaking with a palliative care physician. We’ll label his answers as “P”, for palliative care physician.) P: I’m not sure what you’re asking. Me: Well some of us find it hard to think about emotions and behaviors as anything […]
Delicious rocky road Baskin and Robins chocolate cake was staining Fred’s teeth bright vampire red from the frosting. It mesmerized me as we bantered. Though, not enough to completely distract from the trigger setting off my sympathetic tone. “So, you are writing about God and psychiatry?” (Ba-boom!) Fred is an enormous genius, well published and […]
Finished the CME talk I did last week and thought, you might find some use for it. I’ve received bad press many times for not being, in so many words, legit or academic enough. Check out the comments on my ECT book on Amazon.com for examples :). Maybe this one leaning into that bosom of greatness […]
Bernice flushed. A pink perfused her face and neck. Her eyes looked away. Why don’t I feel better? Bernice was one of those fortunate lasses who flushed and blushed no matter what emotion she experienced. When I first met her and she told me some of her story, she was also a-flame. I’ll do anything […]
What is psychiatry? Components intersecting at cross-point where stands Psychiatry: The practice of medicine The practice of business The practice of one’s personal life The doctor-patient relationship The pursuit of Quality of Life Who should go into psychiatry? Consider temperament There are areas of medicine that are more procedural based versus more weighted toward patient-doctor […]
Mental illness, diseases of the mind, behavioral disorders or however our community allows it to be named, it is all inadequate. Mental illness, is a stale description. It has sat in the open community air, over the many years when our awareness grew too slowly, when stigma and ignorance gave it the old cold frost-bite. […]
I had an interesting comment a couple of days ago on the concept of Life-ers. If you have a weed in your garden, you pull it. If there’s something wrong in your life, you don’t fall in love with it. You get to weeding. However, there are Life-ers that are both weeds to pull and […]
So many of us don’t get much to speak of as a chance at life until we are older. Raped with penetration by age five and following, traded for favors, fear and more fear, isolated, escaping from one to other places of objectification. We don’t like closets. We avoid reminders but since there is no […]
Fred didn’t remember his panic. He thought his main problem was his sleep. His so-called “main problem” changed with his symptomatology. Fortunately or unfortunately he didn’t know it was happening. Fred reminded me of a paper doll. Now I’m a veterinarian, now I’m a clerk. Of course there are all the stories that accompany each […]
In becoming a friend to yourself, we all use tools; a hoe, a shovel, a bottle of medications, friends and lots of floss. Not all in the same moment or we might get hurt. None of the tools we use are meant to been seen, when looked at, alone as a weapon to box us […]
This is the skeleton of what we reviewed over three days of 1-2 hour workshop sessions (which ended last week.) We named these the unchanging premises of being a friend to yourself. Everything starts and ends with Me. Freedom to choose is here. I can see Me using various paradigms such as the Jungian Typology […]
Even car accidents happen for “good reasons!” Wanda didn’t want to hear the reasons. Anything could sound like a good reason for bad performance. It is what it is. Just own it! And Wanda was out. And just as quickly as she concluded, I flashed back to the quivering resident who messed up on internal […]
Manifesto, by Sana Johnson-Quijada MD 1. Taking care of Me is often not intuitive. It feels like we are alone even though we are not. We feel like strangers even though we are in familiar company. 2. Being a friend to yourself means being a friend. It’s that simple or that hard. 3. We want […]
Self-Care Tip – To be our own friend, be accountable for the service we do. Bree was someone who was into details. The moment of now was her reality. She didn’t naturally consider the, “What if’s,” of tomorrows – but she did for the now. And in her moments, if she slowed her day down […]
We are doing a narrative series on understanding where emotions and behaviors come from: Emotions Are Contagious Our own Emotional Junk Positive Emotions and Behaviors are Contagious Too Our Conscious Self is Our Board and Paddle at Sea (today’s post) What we’ve covered so far in our series is that we know emotions are contagious. […]
Hello Friends. Tonight ends our pilot run of the self-care workshop series. Whoop! Thank you for your support. Very much. The growing process, when in the company that we have here, shifts the experience form one of fear and shame to one of …well this: friendship, with you and with our own selves. One of […]
It never hurts to ask and what I learned from Honda… I am a believer in Honda. They’ve won me over with their automatic doors, convenience in just about any way they can, but mostly because of their Starbucks coffee, fresh-baked cookies and 10% discounts. “Ten percent?,” you ask. Well, not so easy as that. We […]
Thomas didn’t want to organize his life. It wasn’t fun when things were predictable. Lately however, that was the problem. He wasn’t having fun anyways. Thank God for work. It was the one firm construct in his life. Wake up, shower, drive and work until he drove home. It was like Harold and his purple […]
Going back to basics is one of the best tours of life. It is exactly how to supercharge our life purpose. Truth is, we’ve been in this polite exchange between serving others and serving ourselves for the past year. It’s been nice but we are smarter now. We all agree that “living to serve Me” […]
Yesterday we spoke about the emotion, happiness, as it connects to and does not connect to spirituality. Traditional western religions squirm or more, disagree when they hear this. Everything is spiritual in their school of thought. However, as our understanding of where emotions and behaviors come from, we have happily disentangled ourselves from the stigma and […]
Friend to Yourself 