Things were not all good between my client and me, but I had no idea. She showed up promptly and consistently, seemed to like me, at times even told me how much the therapy was helping her. Yet she often seemed uncomfortable, preferring to fill the session with detailed accounts of her life rather than engage in the directly experiential way I like to invite. My role became that of a witness, a compassionate listener for sure, but rather a passive one. I thought, okay, this is our dance-step.
Then she brought the following dream: I was cleaning her house and had done rather a cursory job of it. The house was still so incredibly unkempt she had rolled up her sleeves and was tackling the lion’s share of the job herself. Later I show up with a flashlight and am opening up rooms she never visits, illuminating darkened corners.
The metaphors here are pretty darn obvious, so I won’t belabor them. If we read the dream as a commentary on the therapeutic relationship, I am clearly getting a mixed review – leaving her to clean up her own house because I’ve done such a bad job of it, but also encouraging her to look into areas (inside herself or in her life) that she would otherwise not visit.
What I love about this example is that the dream becomes the vehicle for the client to comment on the therapy process in a way that she would never have done otherwise. I try hard to level the playing field, be open and immediate with my clients, invitational, friendly, casual – in all ways endeavor to make the therapy relationship feel safe enough for clients to say anything. But often it’s only through dreams that I hear truly honest commentary on the things that don’t sit right with them about my job as their therapist.
This argument for listening to dreams extends further. In my personal experience as a client, I have found dreams open up avenues I would otherwise not walk down. The unflinching honesty of dreams at times makes me cringe – they are like that good friend who will tell you when you have spinach in your teeth or have behaved badly.
The most profound therapy session of my life was precipitated by a dream. I was born very premature and in the germ-phobic mid-60s, so I was kept sealed off in an incubator, touched only as needed for the first six weeks of my life. I had another near-death experience as an adolescent, when, convinced I was invincible, dove under a waterfall and then got carried deep underwater by the powerful current, nearly drowning before I resurfaced.
I had a powerfully scary dream that wove these two events together, and because I was seeing a Jungian analyst at the time, naturally I brought the dream to our session. We revisited the dream material, re-entered the dream, sketched it… but all this did was underscore the profound sense of aloneness contained in the dream. Then my therapist asked me to re-enact a part of the dream where I reach out and no one is there. In that moment, he grabbed my outstretched hand firmly and looked me right in the eye, reaching back across the years to provide a firm supportive presence to that lonely baby and that teenager. It was so unexpected it sent a kind of shock wave through my body.
This profound moment had ripple effects that ultimately shifted my sense of self and relationship. Yet I would not have brought the topic up had I not had that dream. I have now been working with dreams, my own and those of others, for more than 20 years. Sadly in that time, I have seen dreamwork fall out of fashion. I am hoping the examples offered here show that dreamwork is not just some quaint antiquated practice but one that has current relevance: we all dream about things that are deeply authentic and that are too often left out of the therapeutic conversation.
from http://www.psychotherapy.net/blog/title/when-your-client-dreams-about-you
Tuesday, 5 June 2018
Can Mental Health Conditions and Medications Be Blamed for Racist Comments?
Here is a controversial question: What do you think of people using mental health diagnoses, medications or other substances as a rationale for making racist or otherwise hateful statements or endorsing violent action?
If someone has underlying beliefs that emerge when under the influence, it doesn’t let them off the hook. Perhaps substances diminish inhibitions, but they are not a free pass to spew vitriol. It is like Flip Wilson’s famous line, “The devil made me do it.”
How can we, as a society, get people to accept responsibility for prejudice?
Amidst a media storm, comedian Roseanne Barr’s foot-in-mouth tweet cost her a hit television show. From 1988 to 1997, her weekly view into a blue collar, working class family appealed to audiences across the political and socio-economic spectrum. But the 2018 reboot had a new flavor — Barr’s outspoken support of the current administration was made clear in the show as well. Two months later, in a late night tweet Barr compared Valeria Jarrett, former special adviser to President Barack Obama, to an ape and ABC quickly cancelled the series.
Barr blamed her social media comments on Ambien which she claims loosened her tongue. Not likely, according to a New York Times article. Ambien manufacturer Sanofi also issued a statement denying her claim. “People of all races, religions and nationalities work at Sanofi every day to improve the lives of people around the world. While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
Although it does not carry a DSM-5 diagnosis, entrenched bigotry can be a catalyst for hateful acts. As I was driving along a highway in Warrington, Pennsylvania (a suburb of Philadelphia) on the first day of June, the sun shone brightly, and a light breeze blew. I pulled up next to a convertible piloted by a young man. Next to him perched on the headrest was a gorilla mask. Its rubber face was surrounded by a flurry of black hair. I rolled down my window and asked him about it, laughing. The laughter turned to shock when he told me, “That’s my girlfriend Shaniqua.”
Shocked, I said, “Not cool, dude.”
He didn’t get it.
I explained that it was vile to refer to this mask using the name of what is typically that of an African American woman.
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. He likely thought I was being overly sensitive. I watched through my rear-view mirror as the man in the car behind me engaged in conversation with him as well, laughing along with him.
Who taught this young man to be racist and sexist? If I had the opportunity, I would have had a conversation with him about this. I’m not certain that I would make any headway, in terms of changing his mind, but it would have been a worthwhile endeavor to at least plant seeds of understanding what fed his actions.
I asked others what they thought about Barr’s claim that Ambien made her do it and whether they think person should be held accountable for racist statements like these. Here are a few of their responses:
“What do I think? No. Cop out, blamer.”
“Ambien put me to sleep, not tweet racist comments!”
“She is also now DENYING that she is a racist. Say what??? One thing seems certain — she is in SERIOUS need of professional help.”
“I was on Ambien for a week once. It didn’t make me racist.”
“I am my own responsibility.”
“In vino veritas.”
“They say whenever you’re drunk, your real personality comes out… seems our current president has given carte blanch for all those folks that had their Dark side hidden away for so long, to stand out and be a**holes again…”
“Not all of them but a lot… self-made victims.”
“It’s spineless! If it’s in your heart, your mouth will speak it, so just own it!!”
“I call bullshit on Barr’s lazy excuse. This is WHO. SHE. IS. She needs to OWN. IT.”
“I own my sh*t. Period.”
“Medications, diagnoses, and side effects don’t make you anything. And to blame anything other than yourself for what you say and do is cowardly, especially when you are doing something in public than you already do in private. Giving real consequences is a start. Rebuking those public figures that do this is another start.”
“It seems that since it appears that 45 isn’t getting consequences that others think they can do the same thing and without consequences. The media is playing a post on this too by backing off and not being 100% truthful. Don’t dance around it when 45 lies, call it out!”
“If one is prone to behaving badly while drunk, one should not get drunk. Same with drugs or other substances, including foods.””
“I know many who identify as ‘Spiritual’ who have great excuses for their bad behavior, such as their Chart, or genetically pre-disposed illness, everyone else, etcetera. I rarely buy into their conveniently making themselves the ‘victim’ and call their BS. There are cases where I sense something other, or deeper that I do not understand, and will give them a ‘pass’.”
from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/can-mental-health-conditions-and-medications-be-blamed-for-racist-comments/
Best of Our Blogs: June 5, 2018
A life coach told me once we’d never go to the hardware store for milk. Yet, we constantly look for love, attention and affection from the people who are incapable of giving it.
Does that sound like you?
If so, you may be climbing up the wrong tree. Asking your critical mother for validation or searching for compassion from a narcissistic partner, for example, will deplete you. It will also keep you on a constant loop of disappointment, pain and unhappiness.
The only way to change that is to heal from our past wounds and rebuild our relationships with others and ourselves.
If this sounds like you, I encourage you to go straight to our top post this week. You’ll learn one of the key ways to get what you want in life by ending what you’ve been conditioned to do-neglect yourself.
Are You Prone To One-Down Relationships?
(Childhood Emotional Neglect) – It’s the reason why you never get what you want in relationships and what you can do to change that for good.
Anxious at Work? 33 Simple Techniques Guaranteed to Help You Feel More Grounded
(Success in the Workplace) – Keep this list on hand to ease your stress and anxiety at work.
The Loneliness of Being High-Functioning with Severe Mental Illness
(Counseling Confidential) – Even those with severe mental illness can have a happy, and seemingly normal life. But for those struggling to keep it together, it can feel incredibly lonely and isolating.
Summer Self-Help Reading List
(Happily Imperfect) – Wouldn’t it be great if there was a summer reading list specifically for those struggling with things like codependency, perfectionism, self-worth, and healthy relationships? Well there is.
When Negative Emotions Lead You to Self-Sabotage
(Weightless) – Here’s how to transform problematic negative emotions into positive, and helpful action.
from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/best-of-our-blogs-june-5-2018/
Monday, 4 June 2018
Anxiety Is Not the Enemy
Anxiety sucks. It can make even a slow, chill weekend miserable with stressful worries about the future and all the tension that goes with it.
Even worse, if anxiety is nothing new for you, it can call in its close cousin — shame. Shame and anxiety can then start to bully with thoughts like: Why can’t you just relax? How come everyone is more laid back than you? You’re such a [fill in the blank with your mind’s favorite name it calls you to make you feel bad about yourself].
Trying to stop or avoid this pattern is what most people do, only to feel frustrated and self-critical that they can’t conquer or resolve their anxiety. The pattern is bound to repeat, accumulating more and more frustration and a lessening of confidence of being able to work through anxiety.
If anxiety is seen as the enemy, as something to get rid of or something to overcome, then this will only produce more of it. The more you don’t want anxiety, the more you have it. Fighting it only binds you to it.
If you can relate to this then I invite you to consider a different way of looking at anxiety.
Anxiety is not a problem to be solved. Anxiety IS the attempt to problem solve.
Anxiety is, in part, the natural and useful ability to scan for threat and forecast an imagined future taken to an extreme. These two abilities (scanning and forecasting) are an attempt to address problems now or in the near future and are very handy skills. However, things can start to become stuck when the looking for problems becomes the problem itself. Like the old adage says, if you’re a hammer then everything’s a nail. Anxiety will always find issues with now and the near future to label as a problem, it’s just its nature.
It’s unskillful to stop a child from yelling by yelling at them. It’s unskillful to stop someone from criticizing you by criticizing them. Examples like these show that it will just cause more of it to happen sooner or later in response. It’s unskillful to try to stop problem solving by seeing it as a problem to be fixed.
Anxiety is not something to be controlled. Anxiety IS the attempt to control.
Anxiety scans and imagines the future in the attempt to control it. Whenever you find yourself imaging what you’ll say to X when they Y is your mind doing its best to try to keep you safe. Our minds think that we always need to be more prepared, fully anticipating potential negative future scenarios along with their outcomes. The mind loves to control, it’s also just part of its nature.
It would be expected for someone to feel uneasy, if they perceive their boss is annoyed with them for taking too much time off. They may start to be concerned that maybe they’ll get a negative performance review in the future. This might guide them to take the action of talking to the boss to clear things up or talking to the boss before taking more time off. The uneasiness or concern might have led to a useful response.
However, in this same scenario the same uneasiness can take a dark turn if control enters the picture. Worry thoughts about the boss’s opinion of them can start to loop and loop, becoming obsessive and causing more and more anxiety. Soon the worry thoughts turn into catastrophic thoughts that they’re going to get fired. The replaying and replaying of these future-based thoughts and scenarios are all based on trying to prevent something negative happening in the future. Unfortunately, obsessive worrying often does little to help someone in the future and just leads to exhaustion and a degrading of self-confidence.
A major difference between someone that excessively worries in this situation and someone who doesn’t is their relationship with uncertainty.
Neither person knows for sure what the boss thinks or will do. Neither has any control over that. The person who has the skill to make space for uncertainty does not need worry to try and control what is not able to be controlled. By contrast, someone without the skill of knowing how to work with uncertainty will be forced into the only strategy they know — trying to control that uncertain situation using anxiety, even if it doesn’t work and it makes them miserable.
Going to the Root
A weed in a garden can be pruned or it can be addressed at the root. Pruning anxiety is trying to fix or control the symptoms of anxiety. It will inevitable come back, perhaps with more strength later.
Behind all worries there is a felt sense that drives it. The worries of today will be similar to the worries of tomorrow by a different name or mask. They will all have the same root. Until someone can peel back the protections, defenses, and controls around it, it will continue to sprout and interfere.
The good news is anxiety is workable. When you go to the root you can begin to form a relationship with the source of all this suffering. You can learn to live better, develop skills and build resiliency so that anxiety has less and less influence over you. Heck, people often tend to learn a lot about themselves and experience large amounts of personal growth when they take a break on fighting anxiety and start to learn to work with it.
from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/anxiety-is-not-the-enemy/
A Felt Sense of What’s Important
Thoughts and feelings can argue with each other forever, but the 'felt sense' can reveal some of the wisdom to be found in our complex of thoughts, feelings, histories and relationships.
from Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life https://counsellingresource.com/features/2018/06/04/felt-sense/
Ep 12: 4 people, 3 mental illnesses, 2 hosts, 1 advocacy goal
After having way too much fun at the HealtheVoices conference, Gabe (bipolar) and Michelle (schizophrenic) welcomed two of their fellow advocate conference-goers to join them on the show to continue talking about the ups and downs of their advocacy efforts. They recount some of the unusual methods they use to spread the word, from riding around in Herbie the Love Bug, to airing YouTube videos of being set on fire, to standing in the streets of New York City selling clothing. Listen in as they share stories of encounters with the public, both appallingly rude and amazingly heartfelt. You won’t regret it.
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“Let’s stop making people feel bad for feeling different.”
– Michelle Hammer
Highlights From ‘3 Mental Illnesses’ Episode
[0:30] Gabriel Nathan of the OC87RecoveryDiaries.com and Rachel Star Withers The Schizo Stunt-girl join us on the show.
[7:00] Gabe explains what platform he uses for his mental health advocacy
[8:30] Rachel explains why she became a YouTube sensation (hint: She sets herself on fire)
[12:50] Gabriel owns a Herbie The Love Bug – is it the real one?
[19:10] Michelle’s advocacy is completely different from Gabe, Gabriel, and Rachel – find out how.
[26:00] Gabriel speaks about professionals and mental health care.
Meet The Hosts of #BSPodcast
GABE HOWARD was formally diagnosed with bipolar and anxiety disorders after being committed to a psychiatric hospital in 2003. Now in recovery, Gabe is a prominent mental health activist and host of the award-winning Psych Central Show podcast. He is also an award-winning writer and speaker, traveling nationally to share the humorous, yet educational, story of his bipolar life. To work with Gabe, visit gabehoward.com.
MICHELLE HAMMER was officially diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 22, but incorrectly diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 18. Michelle is an award-winning mental health advocate who has been featured in press all over the world. In May 2015, Michelle founded the company Schizophrenic.NYC, a mental health clothing line, with the mission of reducing stigma by starting conversations about mental health. She is a firm believer that confidence can get you anywhere. To work with Michelle, visit Schizophrenic.NYC.
Guests of #BSPodcast
RACHEL STAR WITHERS is an entertainer and has appeared in numerous TV shows including, America’s Got Talent, American Ninja Warrior, Ridiculousness, World’s Dumbest… and creates crazy stunt videos for youtube. From bikini paintball to setting herself on fire to wrestling alligators, nothing is off limits. She is a schizophrenic and grew up seeing monsters around her. She started making videos for youtube and her Amazon Prime series “Insanity With Schizophrenic Rachel Star” documenting her schizophrenia and ways to deal with the mental disorder and mental health in general. She also speaks on the various mental health subjects and wrote “Lil’ Broken Star: Understanding Schizophrenia for Children” and created “To See In The Dark: A Hallucination and Delusion Journal” for tracking symptoms of schizophrenia.
GABRIEL NATHAN is an author, editor, actor, playwright, director and a lover of commas. For five years, he worked at Montgomery County Emergency Service, Inc. (MCES), a non-profit crisis psychiatric hospital in the capacity of Allied Therapist and, later, as Development Specialist. At MCES, he created innovative programs such as a psychiatric visiting nurse program, a suicide prevention collaboration with SEPTA, and an Inpatient Concert Series that brought professional performing artists to entertain the patients and enrich their inpatient experience. While at MCES, Gabe also produced and directed a full-scale production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town with the staff of the hospital, as an exercise in teamwork, empathy-building, and creative expression. Gabe serves on the Board of Directors of the Thornton Wilder Society and is Editor of its newsletter. He lives in a suburb of Philadelphia with his wife, twins, a Herbie the Love Bug replica, and a basset hound named Tennessee.
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from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/ep-12-4-people-3-mental-illnesses-2-hosts-1-advocacy-goal/
Sunday, 3 June 2018
Frozen Grief and How It Affects Addiction and Recovery
Frozen grief can best be described as grief on hold, partial grief, suppressed grief, complicated mourning, survivor guilt, and unfinished business.
Patty was an obese binge eater who came to therapy to resolve her eating disorder. As we discussed what triggered her history of overeating and her life experiences, she mentioned in a most casual way that her father had died when she was four years old.
Her family told her, “Daddy went to Heaven. He is in a better place.” Daddy was never spoken about again.
“Tell me about him,” I asked. “There’s nothing to tell,” Patty replied. And with that, she began to cry as the accumulation of 32 years of stifled tears came surging up in a tidal wave of pain.
“Oh my God. I have never shed tears for my father before,” Patty sobbed.
With each following session, Patty cried deeply about the death of her father. Then one day she exclaimed, “I wonder if after so many years of not allowing myself to mourn my father, my fat has been like frozen grief. I think with all these tears, my grief is becoming liquid!”
Grief—frozen by fat, frozen by the numbing of overeating, drinking, drugging, or other addictions—can be held in the body for years and even decades. Patty’s description of “frozen grief” reminded me of a special moment I spent with my grandmother many years ago. Grandma was 86 at the time and was telling me about her father who had died when she was only five years old. To my astonishment, Grandma began to cry about her father’s death—a memory from 81 years ago! In that moment, I learned that grief has no timetable. Time does not necessarily heal all wounds. Unspoken loss continues to exert its power. There is no expiration date to memories or pain. I came to see how much loss and grief can play a significant part in the behaviors and histories of my clients. And I came to see how therapy for addictions needs to help people mourn the sorrows that have kept them stuck in eating disorders, drugging, drinking, and other addictive behaviors.
I began asking my patients to construct a list of losses they had suffered in their lives. I discovered that these losses did not always have to do with death, but with a myriad of ways that hurt can lodge inside us without resolution.
Unable to dislodge the “knot” in their throat by crying and grieving, many clients turn to addictive substances or behaviors…
Continue reading about how suppressed grief, complicated mourning, and other unfinished business can lead to addiction and recovery problems in the original article Frozen Grief and Addiction Recovery at The Fix.
from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/frozen-grief-and-how-it-affects-addiction-and-recovery/
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