This video will be part of my 3-hour seminar on March 19 entitled, “Know Thyself: Using Archetypes to Understand and Heal Children.” Be there if you want to know how Strong Bad, Strong Sad, and Homestarrunner can help us know our archetypes!
Category Archives: Psychology
This Will Save You Some Money
Three women in Florida are charged with taking advantage of troubled souls.
Three women are accused in Florida with scamming people out of thousands of dollars by promising to cleanse them of evil spirits.
Federal prosecutors in Fort Lauderdale say 36-year-old Polly Evans, 32-year-old Bridgette Evans, and 22-year-old Olivia Evans are facing federal fraud charges.
Having experienced exorcism myself, as a Catholic Charismatic, and a Pentecostal, I’m not unsympathetic to their victims.
Our mental health system is not adequate to meet the needs of even the middle class and well-insured. The writer, David Foster Wallace took his own life, despite having a loving family, success and access to the best psychiatric care money can buy. How much more difficult life is for the poor and unprotected. That’s something I see often in dealing with suffering clients and harassed case managers.
It’s not only pills, docs and clinics either. There’s much in modern life that works against mental health for everyone. There’s no golden age in the past, perhaps in the future we will be more merciful.
I wish the scammers could be made to repay every penny they extorted from vulnerable people. It would be more satisfying than having the taxpayers house and feed them– I hope for such a Judgment Day.
Spiritual healing doesn’t have to cost anything and is easy enough to be a do-it-yourself project. There’s some effective home remedies that can be mixed up in your kitchen.
For removing curses– First of all, why is someone cursing you? If you have wronged them, consider how to make amends. Without making things worse. Twelve Step Programs have some experiential wisdom to offer on that.
If you don’t know where the curse if coming from, don’t worry– the answer is the same. ‘Bless them that curse you.’ It works great. It’s from the New Testament, words of Jesus.
If lots of people are cursing you all the time, follow the above link to Step 8, and maybe have a heart to heart with whichever friend or family member is still speaking to you.
For banishing ghosts– Make some noise– bells, banging on pans, Bob Marley- whatever you like, and sprinkle all the corners of all the rooms with salt water. Make sure to leave the windows open so the ghosts can fly out. Soon you’ll be dealing with irate neighbors which will put the ghost problem in perspective. Fortunately you only have to do this once, it works.
For things that haunt you in the night– One woman (cited in Z.Budapest, I think– don’t have time to look that up) got good results from squirting them with ant spray. I imagine that the humiliation caused the spirits to retreat back into the underworld. Since insecticide is hazardous in the material world, I’d recommend salt water in a spray bottle, mixed with a little citrus or vanilla.
There’s also the fact that the material world is full of dangers– many of us live in close proximity to countless hazards– violent neighbors, biting dogs, rabid raccoons, deer ticks. I’d rather face a ghost than find a deer tick on my neck, wouldn’t you? It’s all relative.
Meditate on how brave you are to make it through the day alive, and sleep well.
A final word. Experts agree that the true practice of magic forbids charging money. You can weed out the scammers pretty fast with this test. And banishing bad spirits is such a D.I.Y. there’s no need to consult an expert most of the time. If you do need to see someone, make non-greediness your standard. This applies to psychiatry as well as religion.
Thanks to Starhawk, whose books are an invaluable resource in these matters, and whose events are always offered on a sliding-fee scale.
HAUNTED: Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson and alma mater of Monica Goodling (hatchet woman of the Bush Justice Department) has possessed my computer. I dabbled in visits to the Regent site, just to get some source material for a post, and now Regent ads are popping up every five minutes. Is it possible to banish pop-up ads? Anyone know the formula for that?
The Warrior in All of Us
Oh, the warriors within us! Longfellow said it eloquently: ”If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s … suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” Indeed. And yet, we do find many things to argue about. Usually it’s not so much about the subject as it is about someone being on your turf.
As parents we spend a certain amount of energy interacting with our warrior children — hopefully this is only a small part of your relationship, but sometimes it can go on for too long, and it might be worth further exploring your internal warrior — the part of you that engages quickly in conflict, the part that escalates even as you know it isn’t good, not right or healthy or even sane.
Same holds true for marriages. Hopefully you are not spending the majority of your time interacting with your partner’s warrior, but we’ve all been there, and when it gets really ugly, it’s no fun. John Gottman talks about the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse and one of them is “contempt.” When the conflict gets to the point that you genuinely begin to feel contempt for your partner, it’s time to get help.
I enjoy helping clients explore the parts of them that get in the way of harmonious relationships, the parts that bring more conflict into their lives than they need or want. Sometimes what lies beneath the fightin’ mad part of us is a very interesting part — a creator or a fool or an innocent — who wants to enjoy life or work at something more important. But with the warrior always being in conflict, these other archetypes don’t get the time and attention that they deserve.
(cross-posted from my private practice site.)
Long Road to Healing
Neurological researcher Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke twelve years ago and became her own experimental subject as she fought her way to recovery. She documents her journey in a book, ‘My Stroke of Insight’.
Although the sporadically discontinuous flow of normal cognition was virtually incapacitating, somehow I managed to keep my body on task. Stepping out of the shower, my brain felt inebriated. My body was unsteady, felt heavy, and exerted itself in very slow motion. What is it I’m trying to do? Dress, dress for work. I’m dressing for work. I labored mechanically to choose my clothes and by 8:15 am, I was ready for my commute. Pacing my apartment, I thought, Okay, I’m going to work. I’m going to work. Do I know how to get to work? Can I drive? As I visualized the road to McLean Hospital, I was literally thrown off balance when my right arm dropped completely paralyzed against my side. In that moment I knew. Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke! And in the next instant, the thought flashed through my mind, Wow, this is so cool!
I felt as though I was suspended in a peculiar euphoric stupor, and I was strangely elated when I understood that this unexpected pilgrimage into the intricate functions of my brain actually had a physiological basis and explanation. I kept thinking, Wow, how many scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain function and mental deterioration from the inside out? My entire life had been dedicated to my own understanding of how the human brain creates our perception of reality. And now I was experiencing this most remarkable stroke of insight!
When my right arm became paralyzed, I felt the life force inside the limb explode. When it dropped dead against my body, it clubbed my torso. It was the strangest sensation. I felt as if my arm had been guillotined off!
I understood neuroanatomically that my motor cortex had been affected and I was fortunate that within a few minutes, the deadness of my right arm subtly abated. As the limb began to reclaim its life, it throbbed with a formidable tingling pain. I felt weak and wounded. My arm felt completely depleted of its intrinsic strength, yet I could wield it like a stub. I wondered if it would ever be normal again.
In a recent interview with reporter, Cassandra M. Bellatoni, Professor Bolte Taylor was asked what advice she would give to the family of Gabrielle Giffords…
CB: What is the most important thing you would tell her family and friends?
JBT: Let her sleep. Speak softly and leave your emotional baggage at the door. They must not bring fear, pity, anger or worry into the room. From my experience with left hemisphere brain damage, I was very much aware of body language, tone of voice, anxiety — these are the abilities of the right hemisphere and these were very active for me. They should think of Gabrielle as a vessel that they need to fill up with their love and caring.
CB: Why is sleep so important? I noticed the doctors said they are waking her regularly.
JBT: This is necessary at first but sleep is the most important thing needed for the brain to heal itself. Sleep is when the body repairs itself including and especially brain connections.
…
CB: Obviously you have a pretty complex job as a neuro-anatomist. How long did it take you to begin working again?JBT: At about 4 months after the stroke. I was able to perform simple tasks for about 30-minutes per day — computer database kinds of things. Like I mentioned before, everybody has to let go of who you used to be and embrace who you are now, including Gabrielle.
While it is almost miraculous, and a victory of courage and caring over destruction, that Gabby Giffords can reach out and touch her husband, I am wary of the Great American Heartwarming Recovery Story. Recovery is a credit to the survivor and friends, it does not make the injury ok.
Gabrielle Giffords has been robbed of part of her brain. If she is able to return to Congress, she will be pushing uphill, struggling with tasks that would have been easy before the assault.
We have been robbed of her representation. Hers was a unique voice, she voted her conscience, she is not replaceable. She should be serving in Congress now. Arizona has been robbed of a representative.
It’s a long road to healing for the survivors of the shooting, and for our country.
Nonviolence With the Pros
NPR’s Dave Davies interviews author Bruce Weber about the life of an umpire. What jumps out from all the other fascinating facts (whole transcript here) is the umpire’s technique for conflict resolution…
Mr. WEBER: Well, the thing about umpires and arguments is that an umpire goes against his instincts as a human being. Most people, they get in an argument, and they try to win it, but an umpire’s job is not to win the argument, it’s to end the argument.
If the guy just wants to come out and yell and scream, you fold your arms, and you let him yell and scream a little bit, and then you say okay, okay, you’ve had your say. That’s enough. If he keeps going – you know, you sort of have to read your opponent.
If he starts kicking dirt on you, well you know, get off the dirt and onto the grass where there isn’t any dirt to kick. If he wants to go nose to nose with you and start yelling and screaming, don’t let him do it if he’s chewing tobacco.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. WEBER: Don’t let him get his don’t let him get the bill of his cap underneath the bill of yours because as he bobs his head, he’ll be knocking you in the forehead with it. I mean, these are – and in the end, don’t do things like bait him. Don’t try to get the last word in. Don’t insult him. You know, don’t do anything that is going to perpetuate the argument.
I’m impressed with the combination of nonviolence and subtle physical self-defense moves. Ever had to talk someone down? I have. The best fight is the one that doesn’t happen.
Ehrenreich Argues for Better Thinking, Not Positive Thinking
I will definitely need to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s newest book. Not only is she one of my favorite political writers, but now she is delving into cultural criticism related to the mental health field’s relentless pursuit of “positive thinking.”
Newsweek’s Julia Baird provides a short review:
[...] In her new book, Bright-Sided: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich calls positive thinking a “mass delusion.” She argues that an unrelenting drive to train our brains to overlook problems and blame ourselves for failures has blinded us to inequality, incompetence, and stupidity.
The philosophy of positive thinking, she argues, developed both as a reaction to the negativity of Calvinism and a salve for the sick and anxious, but has, over time, been turned into a kind of blind optimism. At the heart of positive thinking is a belief that you can will anything you like into happening: recovering from cancer, getting a promotion, becoming a millionaire. Often, the worse things are, the more vehemently people are encouraged to be sunny. The more companies downsized and restructured in the ’80s and ’90s, the more popular affirmation-chanting, team-building consultants became. And all the while, as the country’s wealth shot up, the gap between rich and poor ballooned.
Fiction is Good for the Brain
Here’s some news I feel like I’ve always known intuitively: writing fiction fine-tunes the brain.
For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for you. Aristotle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now call fiction—is a more serious business than history. History, he argued, tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch our moral imaginations and give us insights into ourselves and other people. This is a strong argument for schools to continue to focus on the literary arts, not just history, science, and social studies.
But is the idea of fiction being good for you merely wishful thinking? The members of a small research group in Toronto—Maja Djikic, Raymond Mar, and I—have been working on the problem. We have turned the idea into questions. In what ways might reading fiction be good for you? If it is good for you, why would this be? And what is the psychological function of art generally?
Through a series of studies, we have discovered that fiction at its best isn’t just enjoyable. It measurably enhances our abilities to empathize with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves.
My first serious novel was about a teenage girl who unwittingly conspires with her boyfriend to knock off her mother, manipulating him into thinking he is rescuing her from her terrible family. My second novel, The Pyramid of Human Growth, is a sort of romance between an introverted technocrat social worker (and lifelong procrastinator) guy and a lovable but difficult social worker gal trudging through the early years of her career, still trying to get over her early life trauma and move to the ultimate stage of marrying and childbearing. Currently I am at work on a novel about a woman’s death by overdose. It’s something we social workers get to have intimate knowledge about, for better (when we help prevent it) and for worse (when despite all the efforts made toward prevention it happens anyways). The working title (forgive the sarcasm, but it helps to keep the demons of writer’s block away) is “Twelve Easy Steps to Suicide.”
Hopefully someday all of my labors at fiction will result in some more published works. Earlier in my career I made a point of sending out my fiction and getting it published, both online and in smaller literary journals, but since having two children, I had to give up some of my goals (as I write this, I am being pestered for snacks). Anyway, even if they are not published, I take pride in working these things out in fiction — and believe that doing so helps me both personally and professionally. Viva the writing life!
Myths About Marriage and The Need to Talk
This headline in MSN jumped out at me — “How To Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About it” — because I recently talked with a couple about needing to talk to each other less. That’s right — to make their relationship work better, talk less. The corollary for their situation was: do more. Talk less, do more. Show your love in other ways — by being on time, by following through on promised projects, by nourishing each other with good food.
It looks like Patricia Love and Steven Stosny, the co-authors who wrote the new self-help marriage shocker, How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It, have some compelling research to present about how men and women differ in communication patterns. From MSN:
[...] According to Stosny’s analysis of several hundred human and animal studies, male and female responses to stress are distinct from birth. “When a baby girl hears a loud noise or gets anxious, she wants to make eye contact with someone, but a baby boy will react to the same sound by looking around, in a fight-or-flight response,” he says. What’s more, while newborn girls are much more easily frightened, boys have five times as many “startle” reactions, which are emotionally neutral but pump up adrenaline. Boys need to intermittently withdraw into themselves to keep from becoming overstimulated. These differences hold true for most social animals and correlate with our biological roles: The female’s fear response is an early warning system that serves to detect threats and alert the males of the pack to danger.
As girls grow, they go beyond needing eye contact and refine a coping strategy identified by UCLA psychologists as “tend and befriend.” If there’s a conflict, girls and women want to talk about it. Boys and men, however, need to pull away. A man’s greatest suffering, Stosny says, comes from the shame he feels when he doesn’t measure up—which is why discussing relationship problems (i.e., what he’s doing wrong) offers about as much comfort as sleeping on a bed of nails.
Similar to Stosny and Love’s approach is the idea of the diversity of ways to express love described in The Five Love Languages. For many couples, there is a much greater need for showing their partner that they care about the relationship by attending to the children, or doing chores, or being on top of finances — by what Gary Chapman calls “Acts of Service.” For others, gifts and quality time are more important, and still others are primarily concerned with physical touch. Finding out which of the love languages is primary for you and your partner can help you reflect and build a better relationship. And sometimes what you might learn is that you want to talk less.
Cross-posted at my private practice site, kierstenmarek.com
Reactive Attachment and Closeness with Children
Over the years I have treated many children with reactive attachment issues and, while sometimes heartbreaking, there is also a great deal of joy in the work. Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) is a cluster of behavioral and emotional issues that are believed to relate to a child’s lack of appropriate early bonding with a primary caregiver. RAD is often what is going on when a child asks if I can be his mommy during the first session, or when a child makes little or no eye contact and behaves as if he doesn’t want to interact with me. Usually with RAD, there are clear markers in the child’s history — sometimes in utero, sometimes after birth in the first three years — when there was no stable primary caregiver.
It happens a lot with foster children, naturally, if they have been moved around a lot, or if their reunification plans with bio family keeps falling through. I also think there is an argument to be made that reactive attachment can start off in utero, when a child is exposed to high levels of stress hormones. Mark Brady, PhD, has a great post in which he describes the developmental problems resulting from neglect and early stress. He quotes Dr. Bruce Perry, author of The Boy Who Was Raised by a Dog, talking about how the human brain responds to childhood neglect:
“As you grow, the brain is essentially like a sponge. It’s absorbing all kinds of experiences. So if a child is not held, touched, talked to, interacted with, loved, literally neurons do not make those connections, and many of them actually will die.”
“Big, big ventricular spaces (show up in stressed out kids), which will impact sleep, regulation of anxiety, regulation of mood, whether or not you’re very happy or sad.”
“Simple things like eye contact, touch, rocking and humming can make all the difference to a baby. It makes neurons grow, it makes them make connections. Then, it makes the brain more functional.”
One of the most impactful experiences I have had working with a RAD client was working with a little boy who had been raised for his first three years in an extremely neglectful environment — to the point where when he was moved to foster care, he did not know how to play other than to lay on his belly on the floor and put his fingers in front of his face and move them around. There were very few toys in his early home, and even less of a primary person paying attention to his needs and giving him the closeness he would need to understand the world emotionally. He had come a long way by the time I was seeing him, could play and interact with others, had probably quadrupled his vocabulary in the year he had been in a stable home, but he was still a very skinny kid with rotted teeth that had to be capped and lots of ear infections and other illnesses constantly weighing him down.
Part of my message to RAD kids is the constant reminder to them (and to their brains!) that they are growing, expanding, developing, changing, become whole, becoming strong. I say these things not only because they are true but also because they are the mantra of our shared hope — that their growth will now take place, that they will be able to make up for lost time and accelerate fast enough to get the ABC’s and color identification and some decent social skills in before kindergarten starts. And most of all, because I want them to know that I see them. I see them. They are here.
The importance of this knocked my socks off one day in session with this little guy, who I’ll call James. I was giving him the message that he was growing, asking him how old he would be turning on his next birthday, reinforcing that he would soon be in kindergarten, when suddenly James said, “When I was a baby, I was invisible. Now that I’m older, I have skin and bones.”
“Indeed,” I said, to draw out the moment. “And you have your whole body. And you’re growing bigger all the time.” When I had James create himself on “Mi” on the Wii (I did the controls as he was behind most kids on video game skills) he created a person who was as tall and big-boned as possible, with a big head of black hair. He wanted to be big. And compared to how small he had been made to feel in his birth home, he was indeed a big guy now.
We all need closeness in order to know we exist. If no one knows who you are, knows you internally, knows your needs and how to fill them, you grow up feeling invisible. Anyone who has ever been in a situation where everyone around them was deliberately ignoring them knows how awful it is to feel invisible. Imagine this being the world you are born into. Imagine how devastating that would be.
The good news is that most of us are not born into such cruel environments. Even in families where there is physical and emotional abuse, there is often still a sense of attachment for the child — that their needs are still very high on the list of things that get taken care of. It was enlightening, but also frightening, working with James — realizing just how powerfully he was experiencing the arrival of his identity, and how much catching up there was to do.
Preschoolers Store Info and Use As Needed
Here is an enlightening piece of research for those of us raising the strange little creatures known as preschoolers, and those of us providing treatment to families raising the little barbarians as well. Research by Colorado Professor Yuko Munakata suggests that three-year-olds are often listening when you give them directions — they simply choose to ignore you until there is evidence that the directions are needed. From Science Daily:
“… For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside. You might expect the child to plan for the future, think ‘OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm,’ ” said Chatham. “But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.”
Munakata doesn’t claim to be a parental expert, but she does think their new study has relevance to parents’ daily interactions with their toddlers.
“If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective,” Munakata said. “What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don’t do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like ‘I know you don’t want to take your coat now, but when you’re standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom.”
I would argue that this tendency to ignore advice until there is evidence to support its necessity extends beyond preschool — I still go through this with my nine-year-old! The point is, you can probably save your breath and a lot of extra annoyed feelings by accepting that your small child’s brain does not operate in a way that tends to accept futuristic warnings. Showing them what will happen if they don’t listen, or helping them imagine the scenario of how they will benefit if they heed your directions, will probably be more effective than just repeating yourself ad nauseum.
(cross-posted on my psychotherapy site at kierstenmarek.com)
