excerpt from Messages

Not every relationship or situation requires whole messages. Effective communication with your garage mechanic probably won’t involve a lot of deep feeling or discussion of your emotional needs. Even with intimates, the majority of messages are just informational. But partial messages, with something important left out or obscured, are always dangerous. They become relational booby traps when used to express the complex issues that are an inevitable part of closeness.

You can test whether you are giving whole or partial messages by asking yourself the following questions:

excerpt from Children of the Self-Absorbed

Creativity, as used here, includes the following:

• Developing new ways to do things and solve problems
• Perceiving things from a new perspective
• Bringing a fresh, new, or novel approach to something that already exists
• Engaging in creating something that brings you pleasure
• Learning something you did not know and making constructive use of the knowledge
• Streamlining, correcting, reducing, or eliminating barriers, constraints, and roadblocks
• Trying something different

excerpt from Children of the Self-Absorbed

Your self-absorbed parent may still expect you to be at his beck and call, even though you are an adult and have a life and responsibilities separate from him. He may make unreasonable demands on you to do things he can do for himself, to be responsible for his physical and emotional welfare, to always do what he wants you to do or to be what he wants you to be, to act on his desires and wishes, and to accept his authority without dissent. He seems to think that your responsibilities, such as a job or family time, should be secondary to whatever he thinks or wants. You may try to meet as many of his expectations and demands as you possibly can, but you can never give him enough, and trying to meet his demands may even be detrimental to other parts of your life. Both unreasonable demands and intrusive questions show a lack of understanding and respect for your boundaries. Further, both put you in a position where you run the risk of off ending if you do not immediately comply and do what is wanted or supply the desired answers. Intrusive questions are those that ask for intimate, personal, and sensitive information about yourself or others that you may not want to share. When faced with questions like these, you may need time to understand your own needs, desires, and wishes, and when engaged in an interaction, you cannot take the time you need. You are too busy interacting and reacting.

excerpt fromThe Estrogen-Depression Connection

Depression can occur in a subset of susceptible women

as a result of natural fluctuations in estrogen levels

associated with the developmental stages of a woman’s life.

Let’s break this sentence down into sections:

excerpt from The Estrogen-Depression Connection

Remember the stops along a subway system, where we can hop off to make a phone call, that is, to send a message? Imagine that estrogen has the ability to send a text message via cell phone. Estrogen helps direct the creation of the structures we mentioned earlier, and it also sends those biochemical messages. The biochemical messages, much like the text messages of our cell phone, are sent via chemicals known as neurotransmitters. Just as we need to have the right phone number to send the text message, we also need to have the correct neurotransmitter.

excerpt from Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice by Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D., Lisa Firestone, Ph.D., and Joyce Catlett, M.A.

How is it that we can be so turned against ourselves? Where did this enemy within come from? How did we end up with this critical inner voice? The answers lie in the past when, as children we were trying to cope with our lives in the best way possible.

The nature and degree of this division within ourselves depends on the parenting we received and the early environment we experienced. Parents, like all of us, have mixed feelings toward themselves; they have things they like about themselves and they have self-critical thoughts and feelings. The same negative feelings that parents have toward themselves are unfortunately often directed toward their children as well. Therefore, parents have both loving feelings toward their children as well as critical thoughts and negative feelings toward them. Mothers and fathers who feel that they are bad find it difficult to believe that something good could come from them. In addition, children, just by their presence, tend to stir up in their parents the feelings they had when they were children. If a parent has unresolved feelings from their trauma or loss in his or her past, these feelings will impact his or her reactions to his or her children.

Calming Your Anxious Mind

Anxiety, fear, and panic are indeed upsetting. A central theme in this book is that most people have not been properly educated about the nature of these feelings (they are not you and not permanent), and certainly have not been properly trained to handle them in a skillful, meditative way (using affectionate, non-judging attention to alter the old mind-body habits of struggle and reactivity). The result is that there is a tendency to identify with anxiety, fear, or panic, and to become lost in the aversion to them as it arises, fills your awareness, and drives your consciousness moment by moment.

It can be helpful to remember that your inner life—distressing or not—is worthy of attention, and so are you! In fact, your best hope for changing the distress you feel is by trusting that turning toward the experience is the way home. The processes of anxiety, fear, and panic may generate doubts and discouraging thoughts that distract you from actually turning attention toward the unfolding experience, but don’t let yourself be fooled! There is a different way to relate to the pain of anxiety, fear, or panic besides taking them as an identity, or making war on them.

Excerpt from Calming Your Anxious Mind

Worry is another way thoughts and feelings can affect health. We have seen how worry can be understood as the patterns of thinking driven by feelings of anxiety. Often, the content of the thoughts reflects a person’s attempt to cope with or eliminate the discomfort and ill ease present as part of their experience of anxiety.

• About two-thirds of Americans classify themselves as worriers.
• About half of that group classify themselves as moderate worriers who worry between 10 and 50 percent of the day.
• The rest of the worriers report that they worry more than eight hours a day.
• Worry has been related to health problems. These include cardiac arrhythmias in patients who have had heart attacks, increased blood pressure in laboratory animals, and asthma in both adults and children.
• Uncertainty as an aspect of worry is particularly potent and toxic. When people are confronted by situations of high uncertainty, when they do not know what will happen next or how they should act, they can experience destructive feelings of helplessness and frustration. Uncertainty keeps people in a constant state of semi-arousal, unable to relax, and the price of this ongoing tension and stress is high.

excerpt from Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice

All of us divided ourselves and have a basic conflict in relation to our goals and aspirations in life. On one hand, we have feelings of warm self-regard, and we have traits and behaviors that we like or feel comfortable with in ourselves. We have natural tendencies to grow and develop and to pursue our personal and vocational goals, as well as desires to be close in our relationships and to search for meaning in life. In this book, these tendencies are referred to as the real you or your real self, because they are made up of friendly, compassionate view of yourself.