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Monday, August 03, 2009

Praise or Shame?

Excerpt from What’s Right With Me: Positive Ways to Celebrate Your Strengths, Build Self-Esteem, and Reach Your Potential

If we look back at our lives with curiosity and kindness, we might be startled at our bravery. Often, we are taken aback by our natural propensity as children to explore what we truly enjoyed.... We are still as brave, creative, and determined.

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Monday, August 03, 2009

Friday, July 24, 2009

How to Choose the Right Therapist for Your Situation

Adapted from Therapy 101: A Brief Look at Modern Psychotherapy Techniques & How They Can Help by Jeffrey C. Wood, Psy.D. and Minnie Wood, NP

We wish we could say that choosing the right therapist for your problem was going to be simple, but the truth is, it’s going to take some effort on your part. After reading the descriptions of the therapies, hopefully, you’ll have a better idea about the type of treatment you’re looking for, which is the treatment that works best for your problems. Then, if you don’t already have a recommendation for a therapist who offers that type of treatment, here are ways you can get a referral:

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Friday, July 24, 2009

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Cultivate Patience

Excerpt from Daily Meditations for Calming Your Anxious Mind by Jeffrey Brantley, MD, and Wendy Millstine, NC

.... Cultivating patience involves being tolerant of life’s temporary, unsolved predicaments and uncertainties while you wait for a solution or opportunity to emerge. Patience requires trust. You nurture your ability to trust that the natural flow of life has moments that cannot be controlled or easily fixed. Life has an uncanny way of working itself out, with or without you.

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Thursday, July 02, 2009

Friday, June 19, 2009

The C Word

Change, like death and taxes, is unavoidable and scary. The essence of change is giving up something old and familiar in favor of something new and unfamiliar. Even if you retire willingly from a job you hate, with enough money and good health and a loving spouse, the change can be stressful. The stress can become overwhelming if you are forced to retire from a job you like, with little money or bad health or a relationship on the rocks. It’s like being dumped from a warm bed into icy, sharkinfested water .Too much C word can make you cycle from fear, to anger, to depression, to fear, to anger, to depression, and so on—like a hamster on a wheel going flat-out and getting nowhere. At those times, I’ve found that the best thing to do is to pause and literally take a breath. Lie down, close your eyes, and take long, slow breaths. Tell yourself:It’s just change.These feelings will pass,and I will remaina good little hamster—I mean person.Strange as it seems, when you’re in hamster mode, at...

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Friday, June 19, 2009

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Let's Dispel Some Sleep Myths

Now that you’ve learned some of the basics about sleep, let’s take a look at some common myths about sleep that may be contributing to your sleep problems. MYTH 1: Spending more time in bed at night will give me a better chance of falling asleep. Actually, the opposite is true. The longer you spend in bed without sleeping, the more your mind and body will associate your wakeful state with your bed, thus making it harder for you to fall asleep. So instead of feeling more relaxed and sleepy when you get into bed each night, you’re actually conditioning yourself to think of the bed as a place where you don’t get good sleep. This simply leads to more frustration. MYTH 2: I need at least eight hours of sleep each night to be healthy. This is not necessarily true, but it’s easy to see why you may believe this. The media often misinterprets research data, or reports on only one finding of a study. Many different factors affect your health, and blaming lack of sleep as t...

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Monday, June 15, 2009

There's Such a Thing as Healthy Narcissism

Narcissism sounds like a disaster, doesn’t it? But is narcissism always bad? Actually, it’s not. Healthy narcissism contains the seeds of assertiveness and self-respect. While “healthy narcissism” sounds like an oxymoron, in reality narcissism occurs along a spectrum within the human condition. Embodied in human nature itself is a tendency for narcissistic expression. And that isn’t all bad. Healthy Childhood Narcissism When you delve into the literature on childhood development, you are reminded that nearly every child comes into the world with the capacity to be impulsive, angry, and demanding (as well as joyful, playful, and curious). These qualities are simply elements of the broad spectrum of emotions linked to a child’s natural vulnerability and innate temperament. Narcissism has robust value for children. It helps them express their physical and emotional discomfort, especially in the preverbal years. The child becomes angry, cries, and demands attention in order to obta...

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Monday, June 15, 2009

Friday, June 12, 2009

The Many Faces of the Distancer

The Many Faces of the Distancer “Distancing” is a big category. Distancers come in many shapes and sizes. They can be single or in long-term couple relationships, gay or straight, women or men, young or old. Here are a few brief glimpses of typical distancers: Distancer Categories There are three broad and encompassing distancer categories: the Disappearing Distancer, the Defended Distancer, and the Distracted Distancer. Within each of these categories, there are predictable variations. The Disappearing Distancer Disappearing distancers are the easiest category of distancers to identify. You may recognize yourself as the disappearing distancer who completely avoids getting into relationships. Or you may be the type of disappearing distancer who occasionally approaches courtship but is too afraid of being trapped or smothered to stick around for long. The Defended Distancer The second category is crowded, so if you are a defended dista...

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Friday, June 12, 2009

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

"But It's Not Sex!" What is an Emotional Affair?

Emotional affairs are amazingly complex relationships that come in many varieties, which means that no single definition can hope to completely describe them all. Nevertheless, it’s possible to define emotional affairs based upon their most general characteristics. Here is our definition: an emotional affair is an intense, primarily emotional, nonsexual relationship that diminishes at least one person’s emotional connection with his or her committed partner. Now let’s pull this definition apart to look at its major components. The Intensity of the Emotional Affair One way emotional affairs differ from mere friendships is that the people involved in them become “positively charged.” By that, we mean that people like May and Brad are strongly attracted toward each other. They look forward with great anticipation to their meetings. And when they do get together, whether face to face, by phone, or even by e-mail, they become engrossed with each other. Time flies so fast that ...

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Monday, June 08, 2009

Rescuing Yourself from Your Need to Rescue Others

In legends and folklore, the white knight rescues the damsel in distress, falls in love, and saves the day. Real-life white knights are men and women who enter into romantic relationships with damaged and vulnerable partners, hoping that love will transform their partner's behavior or lives; a relationship pattern that seldom leads to a storybook ending. White knights can be any age, race, sexual orientation, culture, or socioeconomic status, but all have the inclination and the need to rescue. Although white knights can exist in a wide range of relationships, such as in a business or a friendship, we will limit our focus to the white knight in intimate relationships. Take a few moments to consider the various relationships you know about or those in which you've been involved. It's likely you know of relationships that include people who have found partners in need of rescuing-the rescue could have been from anything-unhappiness, financial chaos, substance abuse, depression, an abu...

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Monday, June 08, 2009

Friday, June 05, 2009

Seeds of Service

In 1983, I [author Dr. Stewart] visited India for the first time. There I had the privilege of working at the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, an institution that is the result of the pioneering work of Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy. From that time forward, my life as both a surgeon and a human being was permanently transformed. After his retirement in 1976 as the chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at the nearby medical school, Dr. V, as he was lovingly called, was moved by a desire to serve his community with a higher standard of ophthalmic care, regardless of caste or capacity to pay. He opened a small eye hospital in a converted house with two operating rooms and twelve beds. From this humble beginning, and with the help of Dr. V’s dedicated family, the organization has become the world’s largest eye care system. Presently more than 1.5 million patients are cared for and more than 250,000 surgeries are performed annually at five hospitals. What makes this even more remarka...

Posted By / 12:00 AM / Friday, June 05, 2009

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