Workings of the Mind: July 2011

Friday, July 29, 2011

DIABETES

The National Institute of Health is predicting a huge increase in Diabetes because of folks overeating and not living an active physical life. There are many causes for the overeating, I think psychological causes are major factors. The feeling of emptiness, especially for older folks, is a very significant one. How to understand and solve the feeling of emptiness begs psychological work be done.
A very interesting study which holds promise for some can be found at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jun/24/low-calorie-diet-hope-cure-diabetes

Thursday, July 28, 2011

HELP

Why is it so hard to ask for help. The Beatles sang of the need for Help, and that feelings drive the need for help. To own I need someone, is to publish, to declare "I am dependent". A problem for any relationship is how to be both dependent and independent within the connection.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

REGRETS

Regrets are part of living a life. Making choices grounds us in reality. We make mistakes and also we can't have it all. As we review the arc of our lives, learning from our mistakes can help lessen the pain of our regrets. Yet, tolerating the pain of regrets allows our minds (our consciousness) to stay more open. Of course each of us has a finite amount of time to come to terms with the effects of choices.

HAPPINESS

The absence of unhappiness is not the same as happiness.

Many relationships are caught in unhappiness, even solving some of the causes of the unhappiness will not get you to happiness.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

MOSS HART

“All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say ‘No’ and said ‘Yes".

Often saying "no" is an act of defining something about the self, about making real a difference between self and other. Sometimes saying "no" is propelled by a defensive defiance because the self is experiencing the situation as one framed by demanding compliance. The task for the self (the "I") is to correctly assess whether the situation is really one of power, compliance and submission OR is a situation where differences are real and not arbitrary.

Sometimes the difficulty with saying no is that the person feels that they will be "hurting" the other. In some of these situations the person harbors a wish or yearning that there are no differences between the self and other and hence no conflicts of desire or intentions. This yearning that there are no differences is a kind of magical thinking. If someone doesn't get their "way" (their desire or intention), they may feel hurt (especially, if they have bought into the agreement that we have no conflict of interests). This hurt, although it may be experienced, is rooted in an un-realness.

DAVID BYRNE

You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? Letting the days go by....
from "Once in a Life Time", the Talking Heads

JIM MORRISON

People are strange when you're a stranger. ...
from the DOORS in their album "Strange Days"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awi14wDTxNw

Frank Zappa

The Mind is like a parachute, it needs to be open to work.

Workings of the Mind - Love

Love trumps entropy (at least in the short term - say a billion years)

Entropy is a concept meant to describe a process in which higher levels of organization decline to lower levels of organization. Certainly when we look at birth and the gift of life each of us knows that the beauty and organization of the body and mind will return to dust. So what stands against this bitter knowledge?
Momentary pleasure? Genetic continuity? Spirituality? These "things" help the self in the moment. But if we take moments in which we experience being loved, or acting in a loving way and if we use these experiences as a "road sign" indicating a direction and a destination, then, I think, we have something to sustain us in the chill of the night. When we hope that our children will do "better" than us, avoid our painful mistakes, these kind of hopes are expressions of our implicit belief that love trumps entropy. Each of us has witnessed some of the beautiful consequences of love. What is even more true, is that we are not able to fully see or know the unfolding consequences of love. How the effects of love ripple through unmet people both in our present time and into the future.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

On the Workings of the Mind - EFFORT

Without motivation all organisms fall away from effort .

Essentially psychology has grouped the set of possible motivations into two broad categories: Approach vectors and Avoidance vectors. Approach vectors can range from pleasurable sensation to satisfaction experiences such as a hard earned achievment. Avoidance vectors can range from unpleasurable sensation to some noxious experience such as humiliation. Rarely is experience propelled by a single motivation, rather experience and behavior are resultants of a profound blending of motives. Early psychologists such as Henry Murray put forward categories of motives such as "need for achievement" and "harm avoidance". The individual was said to have a high or strong motive (a kind of loading or weight concept). At times this categorization works but many times the notion of motive (s) is more usefully understood in terms of dynamic scenes very much like a Shakespearian scene. In these scenes motives take on meaning, are born in the relationships and what is happening between the persons.

Often the task of therapy is to work towards discovering the most salient of these motives and the role of these scenes in their life.

THE THERAPY PROCESS

Therapy is about talking, thinking, feeling and caring. In essence therapy is an inquiry into experience; yet, it is much more. It is about folks deciding to solve the real problems in their lives so it is about courage and love. Therapy consists of the participants creating a special kind of dialogue. The therapist asks the patient (or client) what hurts, what isn't working, what happened as a starting point. The patient begins to try to speak to the question. Sometimes he/she is clear about a specific fear or hurt or frustration, sometimes he/she is describing more a feeling or mood of despair and helplessness. These beginning answers are rooted in things we have "learned" growing up and painful experiences we have suffered along the way. Just like how the small child learns not to touch the hot plate, we learn to avoid painful "things". Learning guided by avoidance and fear and shame is the most ineffective way to learn; this kind of learning handicaps us in creating a decent life. These handicaps especially get in the way in creating realistic, loving relationships. So what does this "special kind of dialogue" sound and look like? The client often talks about "what I felt", "what I did", "what I thought", "what I said or expressed", and usually "what the other did" and "what the other said or expressed". These words are guided by the "I", the conscious self. Some New Things need to be added to this dialogue for growth to occur because guidance by the conscious "I" has lead to the problems. How to get something new added to the dialogue becomes the framework for the therapy. First, for "I" to consider something outside of "my"own thoughts requires the "I" to feel safe. Second, the "I" has to find a way to accept at least tentatively, that there is "more" to me than my conscious, focused self. And that the arrival of non-intended thoughts, memories, images, and feelings are important to share with the therapist. So, what does the therapist do to create this special dialogue. The therapist asks the patient to give voice to additional thoughts and feelings that are in the background or that arrive without having searched for them or intended them consciously. The therapist must listen and absorb what the client is expressing. Sometimes the therapist can facilitate the patient's communicating by asking questions such as "what was in your mind when you said that?" The therapist via empathy opens himself up to the kinds of interactions the patient is communicating. This empathy generates an internal presentation of experiences from the therapist's own life (these allow the therapist to "get" what the patient is describing) and also the arrival of prior articulations by the client (as the patient and therapist get to know each other these "arrivals" help to link things together to provide a sharper and better picture of the problem). The dialogue will begin to be organized by the client's unintended thoughts, feelings, images, memories, and sensations; and a sensitive sharing by the therapist of his/her empathic responses to these. Out of this inquiry into experience, the client begins to see and feel how he/she interprets the world, feels the wishes and yearnings present in the background, senses the presence and the absences of needs, and feels the propulsive forces effecting his/her choices. Through the creation of this kind of talking together, the patient gains new ways of feeling and thinking and the opportunity of choosing a different life.

A Framework for talking about the Workings of the Mind

Each of us looks out upon the world. We are centers of experience. Our "I" and "me" bring together perceptions, sensations, auditory and visual images, memories, feelings, associations and the self definitions others put out to us about who we are. The "I" and "me" are the core referents of the self . Our whole "Being" surrounds, carries, and bears the self. So our whole being is more than our conscious self. In a way this blog is an attempt to talk about the relationships between Self and Being and Actuality.

Medications

Since the 80's and especially in the 21 century, psychiatry and the the medical community have emphasized that psychological disturbance and pain are to be approached from the point of view of juggling the brain chemistry of the individual to get it to function "better". Although there is some merit in accepting that the brain's chemical functioning is somehow related to experience, as a psychotherapist I find it very inadequate and often misleading.

I will try to outline my criticism of the medical model of treatment in developing this blog.

Initially though, the reader may find value in an article written by Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books. She has a two part article called "The Illusions of Psychiatry" see: http://www.nybooks.com/issues/2011/jul/14/

Workings of the Mind

THERAPY