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.

by guest blogger Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D., author of The Gift of ADHD, The Gift of ADHD Activity Book and The Gift of Adult ADD, and Listening to Depression

The quickest way to transform your child’s problem into strengths is to ask yourself repeatedly “What is right with my child?” This will force you to find your child’s gifts. One parent whose child didn’t do as well as other children in school, was able to tell herself that her child was creative and artistic and she could foster those qualities. When she was tempted to sink into despair when she compared her own son with other kids who seemed to easily do well in school she asked herself “What’s right with my child?” It will be normal to compare your child to others. There is no way to avoid doing so in our competitive culture. I think that there is no freedom from worry when you are a parent, but you can find freedom IN your worry. That means that you recognize that worry is the work of being a parent and you channel it into productive action and stay positive.

Excerpt from Treating Depressed Children

A person’s belief system is comprised of both rational and irrational beliefs. Children and adolescents, like adults, have a particular belief system. Rational beliefs are those that usually tend to be consistent with objective reality and lead to self-enhancing emotions and goal-directed behaviors. Irrational beliefs are generally distortions of reality, are expressed automatically, and lead to negative feelings that often block goal attainment. Irrational beliefs may also remain dormant or inactive and only be activated in specific situations or stressful events.

BEA 2010 was a success. Jonathan Kaplan signed copies of his upcoming book, Urban Mindfulness and Troy Dufrene signed copies of the recently released When Things Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong. Our sales managers met with their reps. We gave away t-shirts crafted after Present Perfect and The Lotus Effect.

May is Borderline Personality Disorder Awareness Month. To recognize it, we're giving away five copies of The Buddha & the Borderline

When: Today! (May 27)

Where: Twitterverse

How to Participate:

1. Follow @NewHarbinger on Twitter.
2. Visit http://twitter.com/NewHarbinger and retweet our current post.

Selection of Winners:

1. The first 5 people who retweet the post will receive a copy of The Buddha and the Borderline.
2. We will DM the winners to let them know that they’ve won.

Prize:

• Free copy of The Buddha and the Borderline! Free shipping!

Our booth is set up and we are rolling here at BEA. If you would like to visit us, we are at booth #2942. Some NHP employees are snapping away at different things going on at BEA. You can view all of our latest photos at Facebook page.

We're giving away free t-shirts at BEA in celebration of Pavel Somov, Ph.D.'s two upcoming books, Present Perfect and The Lotus Effect. Come to Booth #2942, drop off your business card, and that's it! Winners will be notified and we'll mail your shirt to you.

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.