Addiction can simply be defined as making short-term choices that have long-term negative consequences. It stands to reason, then, that continuously living life immersed in overdrive could reasonably be considered addictive behavior.

In today’s world, more and more people are doing just that, and regularly confess to me that they are totally stressed out. Yet, they continue to pile on the excesses of information, obligations, over-commitments, and instant gratifications at the expense of their physical, emotional and spiritual health.

Current scientific information reveals that inflammation of the brain and nervous system is highly correlated with emotional and physical illness. Trauma, viruses, or bacteria, stress is the most obvious culprit. Stressing the human body beyond its capacity to heal interferes with its capacity to rebound. Stress is caused by overloading the body, mind, and spirit with too much for it to handle. In short, there are not enough resources to handle what is demanded.

The grandfather of stress research was the innovative Canadian physician, Hans Selye.  His seminal work, published in l936, provided us with what we know happens to the human body and spirit when it is exposed to extended stress of any kind. He clearly demonstrated that overwhelming demands on the body’s capacity to respond to challenge will eventually break it down.

The sheer amount of data infiltrating our every moment of every day can hardly be absorbed by a normal body or mind. There are multiple choices for each decision, as well as competing and rapidly-changing resources that may or may not provide us with the best answers. We are bombarded with conflicting challenges and the ever-newest way to do the ever-newest thing.

Whether using rapid-dating sites like Tinder, shopping for medical advice, or creating multiple spread sheets, you are likely spending most of your day multi-tasking and multi-deciding under pressure. And, when you are at the end of your rope, you push yourself to work hard at refurbishing through your Yoga class, your transcendental meditation, or your work-out regimen as you desperately try to compensate for the damage you’ve done to your body and soul.

Here’s what too much pressure looks like in your body. There is a crisis looming in front of you that requires you to adapt to the incoming challenge. Your body produces cortisol and adrenaline, taking nutrients and energy from other organs to prepare you for fight or flight. Your sympathetic nervous system is in full military gear, ready to take on the demand for action.

Liken yourself to a fire engine. You’re prepared and ready to efficiently respond to the next alarm. The bell goes off and you’re out the door. You are adrenalized, focused, tooled, and efficient. When the fire is out, and the necessary arrangements are made for damage control, you come back into the station where you are washed, refurbished, gassed up, and rested until the next alarm goes off. You’re not only at peak efficiency; you are being constantly updated, retooled, and improved.

After you put out the symbolic fire, your body drops into a parasympathetic state, your place to rest and rebalance. All your internal machinery’s millions of “Santa’s helpers” are running around like crazy putting everything back where it belongs, and getting you ready for the next crisis.

But what if another challenge is immediately in store? And then, another? Now your body is filled with stress hormones, you’ve lost the ability to comfortably weigh alternatives, and you are limited in what’s left of your resources. You’re making too much stomach acid, your adrenals are enlarging, and you’re badly sabotaging your immune system. By this time, you’re having trouble sleeping at night, breathing too rapidly during the day, forgetting things you never would have before, and feel a panic attack lurking.

But the demands keep coming because you can’t let anything go and you feel that no one can do it as well or as correctly as you can. So you continue to pile up the counter-attack repository. A tranquilizer to calm down. Ambien to sleep. Maybe an anti-depressant to balance out your Serotonin. Starbucks on retainer. Perhaps a stimulant to counteract the ADHD that you’ve enervated by too much hyper-focus. Alcohol to stay in the moment and let the past and future artificially disappear for a while, then do damage control when you’re sober. You’re going down for the count, and it’s only a matter of time that your weakest link will go.

You are now officially experiencing battle fatigue. You are a soldier on your own front lines who has probably forgotten why you are there, and are in danger of mistaking your enemies for your allies. Your best friends are beginning to avoid you, your boss has started waking you up after your coffee break, and your intimate partner is making plans to hang out with calmer and less dangerous people who are actually happy.

You have become an addict to excess.

In my forty-one years of practice, I’ve watched many quality people of both genders put this kind of wear and tear on their bodies and minds. We now have legitimately established that this level of extended pressure not only precedes and causes illness, but also accelerates aging. Unfortunately, some of my patients have experienced actual traumas like heart attacks, severe auto-immune responses, or emotional breakdowns. Every one of them told me they saw it coming. They just thought they could outrun the odds.

If you’re one of those normally sane and clear-thinking people who have fallen into the trap of entangled and extreme intertwinement with the demands of the modern world, you can change some of your behaviors and take better care of yourself, without needing to escape to a remote island. In lieu of the absence of an “excess anonymous” group, they may keep you from burning out.

1)      Get rid of all energy drains. Those are behaviors that take a great deal of your time but rarely change your life in a positive direction. For instance, don’t waste physical or emotional fuel dealing with unresolvable conflicts or fussing over something that is going to stay stuck. Outrage makes people physically and emotionally sick and the person causing you to feel that way is probably not upset. Defensiveness is exhausting and rarely resolves any disagreement. The most confounding and energy wasting behavior of all is being attached to an improbable outcome.

2)      Lose your lists. You don’t want on your tombstone, “I got that one crossed off, too.”  Post-It-Notes are wonderful reminders of things you’d like to do but can become “obligation wallpaper” when you have more to do than you can possibly accomplish.

3)      If at all possible, disconnect from anything, anyone, or any concerns that cost more in the long run than what you get in return. Sacrificing for something deeply meaningful is good for you, but martyrdom and resentment feed and sustain tortured souls.

4)       Adopt the maxim, “Don’t put energy into anything you cannot change.” Feeling responsible for someone or something when you cannot affect the outcome will drain your resources with no tangible result. Try to emotionally step back from offering time or energy to situations over which you have no control. You can be concerned, but not involved.

5)      Dump unnecessary drama. We often unknowingly and unwittingly make small things too big, and use up resources we need for other things.

6)      Get your priorities straight. It is as important to say “no thank you,” as it is to be fully able to embrace what you choose to do.

7)      Don’t try to balance your excesses with escapes. For many, that is the overuse of alcohol or drugs, but can refer to anything you do that tries to compensate for overdoing it. Intense attempts to heal what should never have been broken in the first place can mask the damage that is still occurring.

8)      Pay attention to daily miracles. Like, for instance, the fact that your body will separate out nutrients from waste automatically for you. You’d be pretty busy if you had to do that manually and it wouldn’t be a job you’d look forward to. Breathing is another miracle we take for granted. Yet, most of us take that process for granted. Think about what happens every day of your life you would be terribly sad without. Keep a running list that you can refer to every day.

9)      Move. Your body needs to metabolize efficiently so that it keeps a perfect balance between taking in nutrients and getting rid of waste products. Moving keeps you in touch with your body and helps it to run more efficiently. Think never driving your car and expecting it to start when you need it. 

10)   Meditate or pray regularly. Current scientific evidence shows that you can actually remodel your brain when you take the time to go inward and remember why you are on the planet.

Reprinted from Huffington Post

As the summer is closing out I am reflecting back on my own personal experiences of the last few months as well as what happened in the landscape beyond. Heart-wrenching wars, rising new waves of terrorism, terrible and tragic signs that racism is alive and well in our own country. But perhaps because I am a psychologist, or simply one of millions of adoring fans, I keep going back to the suicide of Robin Williams. 

To me, Robin Williams was a celebrity who felt like a friend, a dear friend, a beloved family member. I know that I am not alone in that. Maybe it was the “Helloooooo!” from Mrs. Doubtfire and every other line from that movie—his Porky Pig kiss off from his job: “P-pp-pp-piss off Lou” or the sarcasm to his surly new boss at his subsequent menial job in the film mail room after he did piss-off Lou and was fired from his voice-over job: “Wait, first you pack them, then you ship them?” he mocks, or the promise to his younger daughter that he wouldn’t wish upon his ex-wife to have “amoebic dysentery,” he’ll try, really hard he says smiling that genie smile. All of these lines have worked their way into our family’s own jokes. Robin Williams’ inside jokes, well, these he shared with all of us.

Meanwhile, he was suffering.

Robin Williams leaves us with a legacy of his work and a challenge. How do we help the millions of people who suffer from depression? Recent estimates suggest that at least one in ten adults are suffering at any given time. Look around your world, at the faces of those around you and consider the human impact of that statistic. Yes, the pharmaceutical companies and psychologists have their charge to pursue, but we as individuals, as families, as friends, as work colleagues, as neighbors, it rests on our shoulders, too.

And we want to help. And we’re afraid to. We’re afraid of not knowing what to say. We’re afraid of looking too closely into the deep and bottomless well of someone else’s unhappiness, afraid of how those dark waters may beckon to us.  

But we must be brave. Yes, we who are healthy must be very brave. To endure that imagined possibility of losing our balance which we can easily right ourselves from, so that our friends and loved ones who can’t, know that they have our support.

How do we do this? How do we show our support? Turning to ideas from others, I came to this wonderful piece from my friend and colleague and courageous emotional deep-sea diver, Therese Borchard, author of a powerful memoir, Beyond Blue, who regularly, strenuously and graciously swims like heck back up from the depths to the surface to share her findings with us. The piece she wrote following Robin Williams’ death tells us just what we need to know about how to be there for someone with depression.  These words really spoke to me:

I wish people would offer those who struggle with depression the same compassion they offer to friends with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, breast cancer, or any other socially acceptable illness, that they’d question those discriminations and judgments reserved for disorders that fall under the umbrella of “mental illness.”

I wish people knew that depression wasn’t something that can be cured by participating in a 21-day meditation series with Deepak Chopra or Eckhart Tolle on Oprah.com, and that although mindfulness efforts can certainly help, it’s possible to have consistent, chronic death thoughts even after years of developing a meditation practice.

I wish people knew you could be grateful and depressed at the same time, that gratitude can coexist with a mood disorder.

I wish people knew that, despite impressive research on neuroplasticity and our brain’s capability of changing, it is unfair to expect a person to undo depression by merely thinking happy thoughts, that the science is new and while a person can be mindful of forming new neural passageways, he can’t change a lamp into an elephant overnight, just as he can’t un-think a tumor from happening.

--Therese Borchard, from: What I Wish People Knew About Depression www.thereseborchard.com

 Please click here to continue reading her thoughtful and inspiring piece.

Therese Borchard’s piece is exactly what we need, an insider’s field guide so that we—who perhaps have dipped our toes in depression’s waves or have gone in up to our knees and are afraid of slipping back in, or we don’t know those waters at all and the fear of the unknown keeps us away, can see—this is what depression is and isn’t, and here’s what you can do.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal tells us that what people with depression want is not to be talked at (especially to be told well-meaning but unhelpful advice that they likely have already tried and hasn’t worked) but really to be listened to. What depressed people want is to be accepted, not questioned, and often just to be distracted and have a break from the clutches of what William Styron so aptly called—darkness visible.

We can’t see the darkness. We don’t feel the clutches, but we need to take on faith that they are very much real for our loved ones who suffer from depression. We don’t have to feel the same things or even understand them. But by trusting in the existence of that dark and murky reality, and leaning in to those who see it, perhaps we can offer a life-line, a connection, a glimpse of another way that life can feel, that even temporarily those who suffer may just be able to grab hold of, or at least to know-- we are here, saving their spot.  

1. The Emotional Brain is a Vicarious Learner

The brain learns through the heart’s experiences. Experiences, both positive and negative, create an indelible imprint in the neural pathways. When students encounter, or even simply observe, emotional actions and reactions, they well remember what they saw, heard, and felt. Positive teaching and learning is permanent learning. The story of young Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces and the Trail of Tears is illustrative.

One 8^th grade teacher I observed focused on the facts, details, and mechanics of the narrative presented in the social science textbook. The other teacher prompted a deeper, emotional discussion: Do you understand why the men returned to the land to fight and die? How many of you have lived in the same place since you were born? Is affiliation influenced by mobility? Do you know your own ancestors? What is worth dying for?

2. There are Two Brains: The Thinking Brain and the Feeling Brain

The two brains are not separate compartments. Rather, they are intertwined throughout the brain creating a mutual reciprocity: each affecting the other. Cognition and emotion comingles in all areas of the brain and cannot be bifurcated in the teaching-learning process. Effective teaching requires cognitive filtering of the content and emotional attachment to the content. There is a wonderful video, To the Moon, about a teacher who always wanted to travel to the moon. She is full of joy and gladness for space exploration and, instead of going to the moon herself, she shares her emotional connection and inspired strength with her students creating conjoint affinity, meaning, and accomplishment. The teacher finds and teaches the emotional component that can be found in every lesson.

 3. The Brain Seeks the State of Flow

The brain is always constructing and deconstructing experience in ways intended to achieve homeostasis of thought and feeling. When the cognitive brain is committed to the challenge of the task and the emotional brain is fully absorbed in it, learning is balanced and effortless. However, balancing cognition and emotion requires exquisite brain synchronicity. There are very simple emotional reactions that balance easily like smiling. And, then there are complex emotional competencies - like courage or empathy - that require complex, coordinated processing and response. The difference is comparable to levels of differentiated motor skill: the difference between clapping hands and riding a bicycle. To ride a bicycle, the whole brain must be fully engaged in the task until it becomes coordinated and automatic…and flows. There is a wonderful video, Key Learning Community, that suggests creating a “flow” period in schools where students can choose to engage in any learning task that they choose such as reading, writing, chess, or even ukulele practice. (Watch the updated video Key Learning Community Follow Up).

Your students will forget what you said but never how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou

 Web Resources

Annenberg Unity of Emotion, Thinking and Learning

Kevin Washburn from the Learning and Brain Conference

Learning and the Brain

Video Resources

Born to Learn

Ode to the Brain

The Story of the Brain

READ MORE IN MY BOOK: Positive Psychology in the Elementary School Classroom (W.W. Norton, 2013) is intended to help teachers build positive psychology classrooms consistent with affective neuroscience. 

Have you ever stolen anything? Most of us as small children or even as adults have done so. The child, of course, is usually unaware of the crime until the parent forces him/her to take back the candy or whatever bright object was picked up in the store or the change that was scooped off the mantelpiece and slipped into a pocket.

As adults we sometimes casually take a box of Kleenex from a hotel room, and some might even purloin a towel or a bathrobe, thinking most probably: I’m paying enough for this hotel room. They could give me a few extra Kleenex for the price.

And, of course, people faced by huge hardships are sometimes forced to steal when hungry to save their lives, or when their children are in dire need in wartime or other times and places of dire poverty.

A wonderful example of this is young Pip in “Great Expectations” who steals some bread and a file for the convict who terrifies him with the imaginary man who will tear our his heart and liver if he does not comply.

Socrates says that no one knowingly commits an evil action, evil is turned into good in the mind. The thief, like the pedophile, who convinces himself the child really wants to make love to him, convinces himself that he has a right to the object he desires. He needs it more than the other does. It is rightfully his.

It is easier to steal from an anonymous, large organization, than from an individual, easier to steal from someone who seems well-endowed, has so much more. He wont even notice, he has so much money anyway, the dishonest shopkeeper probably thinks stealing from people he considers have much more than he has or are too stupid to notice. I have seen this happen in the Hamptons at a fancy grocery store where the cashier simply tacked on the previous person’s bill with my own, imagining I would not notice or perhaps not even care.

It is true that the thought of great wealth, someone, for example, who had so many houses she had forgotten how many she had, seems almost a legitimate prey.

But what about someone who has all they need and steals anyway? There is an example of this in Jennifer Egan’s “Visit from the Goon squad” where Sasha finds a wallet left by the basin in the lady’s room by a woman who is in one of the stalls peeing.

She thinks: “ It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that at, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand — it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously ("I get it," Coz, her therapist, said), and take the [expletive] thing.”

So she steals out of a need for excitement, for the thrill of it. One wonders if the large thefts of money in the stock market, insider trading by people who probably already have large amounts of money are motivated by thinking of this kind.

Sheila Kohler is the author of many books including Becoming Jane Eyre and the recent Dreaming for Freud.

She will teach a class at the Center for Fiction on The Writer in Fiction. Sign up for the first class on September 17. 

Becoming Jane Eyre: A Novel (Penguin Original) by Sheila Kohler Penguin Books click here

Dreaming for Freud: A Novel by Sheila Kohler Penguin Books click here

I’m writing my next book, Better Than Before, about how we make and break habits– an issue very relevant to happiness. Each week, I post a before-and-after story submitted by a reader, about how he or she successfully changed a habit. We can all learn from each other. If you’d like to share your story, contact me here.

To hear when Better Than Before goes on sale, sign up here.

This week’s story comes from Nyssa Hattaway.

I am a devout member of my church. All of my life I have been taught to develop the habits of church attendance, tithing, daily prayer and daily Scripture study. I have easily been able to practice all of them except the Scripture study. I am an avid reader, but for some reason I just hadn’t found my groove on this one.

My cohorts had given lots of advice informally and from the pulpit. Read a chapter a day. Just read a verse a day. Study by topic not chronologically. Set a time for 10 minutes and read what you can in that time, and so forth. You can imagine in my 20+ years of adulthood how many unsuccessful starts and stops I have had, and you can probably guess the guilt that accompanies it.

Somewhere along the way, someone gave me booklet with a 40 day reading plan. Assignments are made daily and by the end of the 40 days, the entire volume of Scripture is complete. I decided to try it. Instead of just giving a little, this program requires 5-6 chapters daily, somewhere between 45-60 minutes of reading. Instead of feeling that I’m never going to finish and that I’m slowing plowing through the book, I can see large chunks of it getting done. I am already half way through the volume! I never thought that by committing to MORE I would have more success, but it demands planning, time and commitment, and that is where I was falling short in previous attempts. I think this strategy could be applied to many habits and wondered if you have encountered it? I will continue to study the Scriptures in this way even after the 40 days as I finally have a habit that works for me.

This example illustrates one of the most important things I’ve learned about habits — actually, the most important thing I’ve learned. The secret to good habits is to know what works for you.

Using the Strategy of Distinctions allows us to figure out how we’re different from other people, how we might tackle habits in a way that suits our particular idiosyncrasies. It’s a Secret of Adulthood: we’re more like other people, and less like other people, than we suppose.

One distinction is: Do you prefer to aim big or aim small?

Some people have better success changing a habit when they start small. A series of small but real accomplishments gives them the energy and confidence to continue. For instance, a person who wants to write a novel might resolve to write one sentence each day. Or a person who wants to start running might resolve to run for one minute.

This approach is often emphasized as the best way to form a habit. But in fact, as the example above illustrates, some people do better when they’re more ambitious.

Sometimes, counter-intuitively, it’s easier to make a major change than a minor change. When a habit is changing very gradually, we may lose interest, give way under stress, or dismiss the change as insignificant. A big transformation creates excitement and energy and a sense of progress, and that helps to create a habit.

As Steve Jobs reflected, “I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why.”

How about you? Do you do better with small changes or big changes?

Also ...

As I mentioned, I working on my next book, Better Than Before, about how we make and break habits. The most fascinating subject ever. Sign up here to be notified when it goes on sale. Or if you want to read the whole book condensed into 21 sentences, read here.

Other posts you might be interested in...

Before And After: Use The Accountability Of Weight Watchers And A Personal Trainer.

Story: Use A Short Phrase To Sum Up A Large Idea.

How The Strategy Of Scheduling Helped Me Make A Habit.

Before And After: “I Struggled For Years With Getting Myself To Ring My Grandfather.”

Video: For Habits, The Strategy Of First Steps.

Authoritarian parenting, as in "my way or the highway," and its opposite, permissive parenting with lack of limit setting, may be linked with difficulty with emotional regulation in children. In contrast, an "authoritative" parenting style is associated with an enhanced capacity for emotional regulation, flexible thinking and social competence. An authoritative parenting stance encompasses respect for and curiosity about a child, together with containment of intense feelings and limits on behavior.

Parental authority is something that in ideal circumstances comes naturally with the job. It is not something that needs to be learned in books from "experts." In fact our culture of "advice" and "parent training" may unintentionally undermine that natural authority.

But what might cause a parent to lose that natural authority? Stress is far and away the most common culprit. That stress might be in part coming from the child himself, if, for example, he is a particularly "fussy" or "dysregulated" baby. It might come from the everyday challenges of managing a family and work in today's fast-paced culture, often without the support of extended family. It may come from more complex relational issues between parents, between siblings, between generations.

In my behavioral pediatrics practice, I work with families of young children with the aim of helping parents reconnect with their natural authority. By offering space and time to listen to their story, including addressing the wide range of stresses in their lives, my hope is that together we will make sense of, or find meaning in, their child's behavior. Armed with this understanding, "what to do" usually follows naturally.

I have learned that it is important to be explicit about this approach. As I write on my website:

 

 

Parents often come to a pediatrician with expectation of advice and judgment. Our culture may support this expectation by our reliance on “behavior management” and increasingly on medication to treat “behavior problems” in children.

Some guidance about "what to do" may naturally enter in to the conversation. But I have found that premature "advice," without full understanding of the complexity of the situation, can often lead to frustration and failure. In contrast, when a parent has that "aha" moment of insight, the joy and pleasure that comes from recognition and reconnection, for both parent and child, can be exhilarating.

The importance of diagnosing depression has been highlighted in the wake of Robin Williams’ suicide. While most discussions, articles, and media outlets focus on the value of diagnosis, there are two sides when considering mental health diagnosis – one that sees it as “the answer” and another that questions the mainstream paradigm in terms of its usefulness, effectiveness, and the harm it may cause. Both of these sides are critical; both sides together create a whole picture. Here are the pros and cons of diagnosis:

Pros: The Light Side of Mental Health Diagnosis

Being able to name and diagnose symptoms may be the first step in healing; for some, it can save their lives. From the perspective of mainstream psychology and psychiatry, as with most medicine, there is no possibility of proper treatment and symptom relief without categorizing symptoms in a way that helps understand the underlying pathology and that allows clinical research to determine the effectiveness of various treatments.

Several individuals I spoke with highlighted the value of diagnosis. One said, “For me a formal diagnosis was a godsend really. It provided an explanation for what was happening to me and opened up opportunities for treatment and medication that are just not available without a psychological diagnosis.” Another said, “For me, getting diagnosed with and medicated for depression and anxiety probably saved my life.” Clearly, the value of diagnosis is not to be taken lightly. 

Diagnosis can protect people from ignorant criticism, projection, and shame. According to Professor Richard Bentall, Ph.D., and Nick Craddock, M.D. a diagnosis “can reduce stigma by explicitly acknowledging the presence of illness (and, thus, that the feelings or behavior cannot be dismissed as character weakness or bloody-mindedness).” 

In the words of one woman I spoke with, “It let people know that I was not lazy, stupid, bizarre, etc.” A diagnosis can be akin to saying “There is nothing wrong with you as a person morally or intellectually. I see you’re not simply resisting acting functionally or appropriately.”

Diagnosis can legitimize peoples’ symptoms, pain, and suffering. When people “know what is wrong” by having a diagnosis, they often experience significant relief, understanding, and compassion for themselves. A diagnosis removes the mystery of their symptoms, encourages them to take themselves seriously, and lets them know that they are not alone – others suffer similarly.

In the words of one person I spoke with, “Diagnosis in a way legitimized my struggles. It was a real thing!” Another person said, “Finally, I understood so many of my behaviors that have always made me feel misunderstood my whole life.” A third person told me, that her brother’s diagnosis was freeing “because of identifying that there are a lot of other people like him: weird, awesome and sometimes hurting, too.”

Cons: The Shadow Side of Mental Health Diagnosis

Labels marginalize people, treating them like they are broken or not normal. In addition, these labels get internalized in a way that injures the way people see themselves over time. Diagnosis creates labels that can stigmatize individuals. Stigmas are hurtful stereotypes causing people to be viewed as different from others in ways that are undesirable and shameful, reducing them from a whole and worthy person to a tainted, discounted one.” [1] Research tells us that these stigmas also lead to separation, status loss, and discrimination. [2] Specifically, being labeled “depressed” causes some people to think we are unreliable, unstable, untrustworthy, and even dangerous. Further, research by the National Institute of Health found that diagnostic labels get internalized leading people to see themselves in these same negative ways.

Making matters worse, Jerry Kennard, Ph.D. warns that, “The label itself becomes self-fulfilling and can bias the way clinicians and the public see the person. Ordinary aches and pains, grumbles or personal setbacks, may seen as symptoms of the disease. Even the patient can fall into the trap of behaving in ways they think are expected of them.”

Diagnosing individuals creates an “identified patient” to be treated and fixed dismissing the significant family, group, and cultural conditions that are also responsible for the symptoms and require treatment. Most healing paradigms focus on diagnosing, understanding, and treating individuals. However, while some individuals suffer certain symptoms more than others and need more care, this approach can dismiss the role played by other people, communities, or cultures. For example, individuals who are more sensitive to being affected by abuse, toxic atmospheres, or hurtful cultural biases are more readily viewed and labeled as sick while the families, organizations, or cultures they are reacting to are more likely to be viewed as healthy and remain untreated.

Salvador Minuchin, founder of Family Systems therapy, enlightened a generation of therapists finding that the children he saw were symptomatic not because they were sick but because they were more apt to express their family's problems. While those children were the "identified patients"– seen as sick and sent for treatment – actually it was the whole family that was ill. [3] Identifying one person as the "patient" not only marginalizes them, causing them to feel responsible for the family's troubles, but it ignores a more complete understanding of the illness and how to treat it.

Similarly, some indigenous cultures consider the individual who expresses a symptom to have a special gift or sensitivity for expressing something that belongs to the tribe. From this perspective, folks who suffer mental illness are bearers of information and even healing for their families as well as for the larger culture and the planet. From this point of view, we are responsible for treating those who bear these symptoms as teachers, healers, and messengers of the early warning signs about a collective illnesses requiring treatment in all of us. This could lead us to not only think "How could we have helped them? What were they hiding? What was wrong with them?” but also ask these questions of ourselves.

African shaman Malidoma Somé, Ph.D. puts it this way: “What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm.”

Diagnosis supports a “fix” mentality that ignores deeper processes in the background, a process that often leads to the discovery of gifts, life changes, and the uniqueness of the person.  When we look at a person as if their symptoms indicate that something is wrong with them we can neglect to see what is “right” or intelligent about their symptoms.For example,Somé noted that a person was sent to a mental institute for “nervous depression” was exhibiting the same symptoms he saw in his village. What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself, “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss!”

Not all depressions are the same; treating them as such could be ineffective at best or harmful at worst. While the label “depression” creates the sense that depression is one kind of difficulty requiring anti-depressants as the treatment, not all depressions are the same and thus, "anti-depressing" may not be the most effective form of treatment. For example, many people describe depression as a feeling or energy of going down. That person may slump in their chair, their tone of voice my trail off, their head my hang a bit downward or to one side or the other. In these cases, it is sometimes helpful to support a person to “go down” – relax further, surrender, let go, or even lie down and close their eyes. When they do this, some people find deeper feelings that they were unaware of (e.g., resentments, a sense of floating and ease, tiredness for living the life they are living) or values that are being unlived as they try to cope with a more “normal” life.  Treating this kind of person as if they need lifting up or anti-depressing, can miss the meaning behind the depression and the direction they need to go in order to get sustainable relief. On the other hand, some people describe depression with anger in their voice. They sound pissed off at themselves and their lack of energy. In some cases these people are putting themselves down or are being put down by others, a cultural norm, or a group. Unlike the example above, these people may be more served by accessing their “angry energy” in order to fight against this kind of bullying. In this way their “angry energy” is an attempt to anti-depress.

While drug treatment for mental illness can be healing and save lives, it can also be ineffective and unsafe for patients. Research in the field of psychoactive drugs, including those used to treat depression, is regularly tainted by the financial conflict of interests of those who benefit from the pharmaceutical industry. The Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice asserts that, “Individual and institutional financial interests may unduly influence professional judgments... Such conflicts of interest threaten the integrity of scientific investigations, the objectivity of medical education, the quality of patient care, and the public’s trust in medicine.” 

For example, we know that data for drugs prescribed for depression are skewed because unfavorable results regularly don’t get published. Research findings are withheld so frequently that while certain drugs are deemed safe and effective, a more thorough review of the research found the risks outweighed the benefits for almost all antidepressants studied. “Not publishing negative results undermines evidence-based medicine and puts millions of patients at risk for using ineffective or unsafe drugs.” [4] Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine made similar findings; they assert, “Selective reporting of clinical trial results may have adverse consequences for researchers, study participants, health care professionals, and patients.

Conclusion: Both Sides! Now! 

A more fair-minded dialogue is needed regarding the diagnosis of mental illness, in particular depression. While some are for and some against diagnosis and medical treatment, neither point of view ought to be dismissed. The diversity in people’s experience of depression as well as the situations, families, and cultures in which they live calls for a diversity of understandings and treatments. Some lives are saved by diagnosis and psychopharmaca. Some people find healing by discovering meaning in their symptoms. Some find relief and change in the healing hand of a friend or healer. And many are assisted by others’ efforts to make changes in their families, communities and cultures. And, of course, some symptoms are best address by the blending of these and other approaches.

[1] Goffman E. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity, p.3. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall; 1963.

[2] Link & Phelan, Annual Review of Sociology. Link BG, Phelan JC. Conceptualizing stigma. Annual Review of Sociology. 2001; 27: 363–385.

[3] Minuchin, Salvador, Families and Family Therapy, Harvard University Press (1974).

[4] Whittington CJ., Kendall T. Fonagy P., Cottrell D., Cotgrove A., Boddington E. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in childhood depression: systematic review of published versus unpublished data. Lancet. 2004; 363 (9418): 1341–1345.

********************************

You might also like:

Into the Dark: A Psychology of Soul, Shadow, and Diversity

Love Based Psychology

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I am the author of Talking Back to Dr. Phil: Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology. Signed copies of the book are for sale on my website: www.talkingbacktodrphil.com.

Author Photo by Lisa Blair Photography.

I asked a number of friends to help me with this 17-syllable exercise, using the traditional 3-line, 5-7-5 syllable haiku form to describe our feelings about beginning a new semester. Working inside a strong structure permits freedom, recognition, realization and a special kind of awakening to language and image. Because more people responded than I imagined, I've thrown (with permission) everybody into one batch. What started out as a way to playfully welcome the new term became far more than that, and ended up making more sense than nonsense-- as so often happens when we play.

Wake with teeth grinding

Broken printers in my dreams

Is it due today?

…

Wonderfully does

The cheating kid sit beside

The foreign student.

…

Capture my fresh thought

Embrace the joy of learning

Oops! There is no place to park.

…

Why teach before dawn?

The schedule I have now

Might kill me outright.

…

Happy instructor!

Brilliant students come to learn!

Brooklyn Bridge for Sale!

…

Cynical teachers

Make empty nests of classrooms

No one fills the blanks.

…

See the patient desk

Where no writer sits today.

Teaching interferes.

…

My boyfriend is back

But my new colleague is cute.

Fulbright time again?

…

Yesterday’s lessons

Drawn from your grad school notebooks

Will not work today.

…

How can we have lunch?

I teach five classes a day.

Remember? Adjunct!

…

Anybody here?

A fly buzzes in reply.

Wrong room once again.

…

Professor X smells

Of Axe spray and baby poop.

Contradictory.

…

Canadian schools

Give faculty more support.

Count your blessings, eh?

…

No, you can’t get in.

The class is already full.

Yeah, well, tell it to the Dean.

…

Library closes

When you most need to go in.

You buy a Kindle.

…

Fine colleague retires.

Her absence makes you wonder:

Have you allies left?

…

See the pretty girl!

She is way too young for you.

Better believe it.

…

Twenty years teaching

And still no health insurance.

Too late for law school?

…

Submit the novel

Wait for the agent’s reply.

Is this a way out?

…

Turn your laptop off

And watch the sun cross the sky

Time has no cursor.

 --

a version of this piece was first printed in The Chronicle of Higher Education

You’ve heard “To thine own self be true.” But what happens when you don’t know your true self? This is part II in a series of free self-tests aimed at helping you discover the real you.

Part I illuminated a few potential wake-up calls for areas in your life that may need refining. Wake-up calls are normal stages of life that precede change and growth. It is not failure to identify a wake-up call. It is a healthy sign of honest self-awareness and growth. Part II is going to look at more traditional personality typing. Before we begin, let’s take a quick look at some of the origins of personality typing.

One of the first attempts at categorizing human behavior came in 450 B.C. when Hippocrates, the Father of Medical Science, lumped personalities into four broad anatomical categories. These divisions were based on the concept of having an imbalance of “humors” or secretions of the heart, liver, lungs, or kidneys. In his theory, a person could be assessed as a Sanguine (heart – upbeat, optimistic), Choleric (liver – hot-tempered), Phlegmatic (lungs – stoic, apathetic), or a Melancholic (kidneys - depressed).

Paracelsus revamped these four types into Earth, Air, Water, and Fire in the 16th century (okay, astrology did that first, yet Paracelsus’s typologies were more accepted in the scientific community).

After the birth of psychology a couple hundred years later, Carl G. Jung developed a temperament framework not unlike Hippocrates’ humors typology. Jung’s temperaments are a bit more elaborate as they consist of four main temperament continuums, resulting in 16 personality combinations. These form the basis of today’s popular Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Keirsey-Bates tests.

These temperament tests continue to amaze me as they reveal how people think and see the world. They also shed light on communication styles and relationship compatibility and why some ‘personality clashes’ occur.

 Following are the four main temperament continuum descriptions so that you can find your dominant temperament type. We’ll then wrap up part II with some of the conflicts, compatibilities and issues among the types.

1. People

How do you feel after being with other people? Do you leave a large party or any large gathering of people and generally feel buzzed with excitement afterward? Are you a social butterfly at gatherings, flitting from one person to the next to catch up with everyone? Or do you tend to go to a safe spot away from everyone and engage in conversation with one or two people the whole time? Does being alone for long periods of time charge you up or drain you?

All of these questions relate to the continuum of introversion to extraversion.

Extraverts get their energy from being around others. They are sociable and tend to be social butterflies. They often know lots of people and are comfortable talking to anyone. Standing out in a crowd, they often help to stir up energy in group settings. Being alone for long periods of time can be draining for an extravert and the more extraverted they are, the more they want to go, go, go.

Introverts will get drained after being in large groups of people and need down time alone to recharge. They tend to have fewer friendships that are deeper. They can be more introspective and quiet in group settings, taking more of an observer view and processing everything they are witnessing. Many introverts can speak well in front of a large group or in a one-to-one basis, yet have most discomfort participating in group situations with light shallow talk.

→Rating– Write “E” if you more closely identify with extravert and “I” if the introvert is a better description of you. If you are having a hard time because you identify with both, write down what fits you more of the time even if it’s just slightly more. Still vacillating? You can put “X”. (Note: We may be born with one dominant trait and move to the other side of the continuum as we age or as we go through major life transitions.)

2. Relate

This section addresses how you relate to the world, ideas, concepts, and information. The continuum ranges from sensing to intuitive.

A sensing person receives information through his/her senses. What does it tangibly look, see, smell, and sound like? A sensing person wants details and has a “just give me the facts” type of mentality. A sensing person can easily categorize information and deal with what is right in front of them and is good at seeing facts and figures.

An intuitive person receives information from their intuition (almost like in a sixth sense fashion or a hyper sense). Because the intuition is dominant, they are more apt to see the big picture and are drawn to complex and abstract ideas. Intuitive people tend to ‘just know’ and can easily synthesize multiple concepts and theories and see the interconnections. They are good at spotting trends and having long-sighted vision. Sensing people can often get baffled by an intuitive communicator and will just want them to stick to the facts or get their head out of the clouds.

→Rating—Write an “S” for sensing or an “I” for intuitive. If you are having a hard time because you identify with both, write down what fits you more of the time even if it’s just slightly more. Still vacillating? You can put “X”. (Note: We may be born with one dominant trait and move to the other side of the continuum as we age or as we go through major life transitions.)

3. Emotion

We all feel. There’s a continuum to how we feel. This section addresses temperament and is not addressing psychological defenses of denial or repression. This continuum ranges from thinking to feeling.

Thinking is exactly how it sounds. Think academia and research. The goal is to be objective. Principles trump values. Justice, analysis, standards, and being impersonal are a way thinkers feel. They feel, yet detach from feelings in order to observe things logically. These are not the touch-feely types.

Feeling people bask in the subjective realm of feelings. Values are important. Subjectivity is understood because a feeler recognizes that feelings change and are different in everybody. They are motivated by humane conditions over justice. Intimacy, sympathy and devotion reign. They are heartfelt and often seek to help others feel better.

→Rating—Write a “T” for thinking and “F” for feeling. If you are having a hard time because you identify with both, write down what fits you more of the time even if it’s just slightly more. Still vacillating? You can put “X”. (Note: We may be born with one dominant trait and move to the other side of the continuum as we age or as we go through major life transitions.)

4. Organization

How do you organize your day and relate to time? This continuum involves judging through perceiving.

Judging as dominant means a person highly organizes their life in a planned fashion and according to the clock. Thus, they are punctual, decisive, and fixed. A judging temperament likes structure and activities to be scheduled in a calendar. If going on a trip, everything will be planned and ordered ahead of time. They tend to be impatient and frustrated when others do not commit or are indecisive.

Perceiving is more in the moment and has a pending relation with plans. Perceivers prefer to gather more data before settling on a decision—which can lead to a level of indecisiveness. They are flexible and take life with an adapt as you go attitude. There is a tendency to resist schedules and prefer to keep things open ended and spontaneous. Trips are taken with an adventurous treasure-hunting mindset and many judgers often discover surprises they would have missed when traveling with a perceiver.

→Rating—Write “J” for judging and “P” for perceiving. If you are having a hard time because you identify with both, write down what fits you more of the time even if it’s just slightly more. Still vacillating? You can put “X”. (Note: We may be born with one dominant trait and move to the other side of the continuum as we age or as we go through major life transitions.)

Your Type: Write each letter of your score in order as presented. So, you might have ESTJ or INFP or XSXP or some variation. That is your type. Now you have an answer when when someone asks you your Meyers-Briggs type. Plus you will have an understanding of their type when they tell you theirs. The next section shares how the temperaments relate to each other.

Conflicts and Compatibility

If you were to guess which ends of temperament continuum has the most conflict with each other, which would you pick?

Extravert and introvert?

Sometimes an extravert can get frustrated when an introvert doesn’t want to go out and play and an introvert can get fed up and exhausted when they don’t get their needed down time, yet this is not a major source of friction in a relationship. However, understanding someone’s dominant people type can be extremely helpful as it promotes empathy and how not to take a behavior personally.

How about judging versus perceiving?

Ahh, you can see where some battles occur with these two sides of the continuum. One person is ready on time and the other runs perpetually late. One is flexible and adaptable and the other is rigid and unyielding. One wants to schedule a vacation ahead of time in order to get best deals and the other feels forced and prefers last minute adventure weekends. Yes these two sides have challenges and yet it’s not the toughest incompatibility as they can complement each other as well.

Then it must be thinkers and feelers, right?

Somehow there seems to be a mass understanding of the feeling – thinking continuum. While the stereotype is that women are feelers and men are thinkers, it’s not always true. It does a hurt a feeler when a thinker cannot empathize with their feelings and it can frustrate a thinker when a feeler prioritizes subjectivity over objectivity. What’s worse is when a human experiences a battle over this continuum within themselves. Still, this is not temperament with the biggest incompatibility.

Sensing versus intuition, really?

This continuum is how we organize the world, information and shapes how we communicate. Sensing individuals represent around 75% of the population with intuitive types at 25%. Misunderstandings and frustrations abound here as intuitives get frustrated trying to communicate a big picture perspective only to have it knocked down as irrelevant. It’s like someone witnessing a tornado that will hit a town in 3 hours and everyone in the town doesn’t believe it because they can’t see it, so they keep going about business as usual. For the sensing folks, it’s like watching a crazed chicken little screaming the sky is falling. They just don’t make sense and too bad they can’t come back down to earth and get back to business as usual.

Challenges facing each type 

An NT (intuitive thinker) can see the big picture and appeals to logic. Because they can see details in a unique way and represent a smaller portion of the population, the NT runs the risk of assuming they know more than everyone and that others cannot fully comprehend the nuances and complexity of his/her knowledge. The challenge for the NT is superiority, which can lead to rejection from others and isolation.

The NF (intuitive feeler) out of all of the types is actually the most understood. All of the other types, while not agreeing with each other, can easily understand each other’s perspective, yet all of them have difficulty understanding the NF. Conversely, the NF, an empathic feeler, can understand all of the other types. The risk is loneliness and depression. Many NFs saturate the writing and art fields and seem to be able to most effectively share their experience through story, art and with other NFs.

The SP (sensing perceiver) is almost alchemical in their ability to motivate people and change. They have an uncanny knack for reading people and tend to be steps ahead of the game. The challenge for this type is hedonism, which can lead to addictions and escapism.

The SJ (sensing judger) is like a strong foundation that runs the world. They are organized and on top of details others dismiss, including history. They relish in hard work and receive great satisfaction from a job well done. The challenge for the SJ is overworking and not being recognized for their contributions and taken advantage of by others, which can lead to exhaustion and staying in unhealthy relationships.

I hope this helps shed some light on the real you so that you can be true to you. Remember we have all of these characteristics within us. No one is better than anyone else. What is dominant today may change tomorrow. The important thing is to understand the continuum exists. And when we become stressed, we tend to respond from our opposite sides. If that happens, now you have a little more description of what that means and how you might be experiencing and relating to the world at that time. 

Check back next week for the final part in our self-test series when we will discuss the 9 main fear-driven personality styles.

The most valuable lesson in generosity came to me from Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg at a retreat many years ago. She said that we often have an initial impulse to be generous, only to talk ourselves out of it. We do this whether that initial impulse is to give something away or whether it’s to contact a friend in need.

Here's an example I use in my book How to Be Sick. If someone admires a scarf of ours that we like but rarely wear, our initial thought may be to give it to the person. But then enter those second thoughts in the form of an inner dialogue that can be far-fetched and even absurd: “Hmm, if I’m ever invited to the White House, I might want to wear that scarf.”

Sharon suggests that we become mindful of this tendency and, as soon as the thought to be generous arises, resolve to follow through with it. I’ve been practicing this for twenty years now, and I’m grateful to Sharon for teaching it to me.

A recent example. A few months ago, a former colleague of mine who’d been sick for a long time died. My initial impulse was to send his wife a condolence card with a personal note. But then, the inner dialogue started: “She’ll get lots of cards; one from me won’t matter.” “In this internet age, do people even send sympathy cards anymore?” Remembering Sharon’s suggestion, I sent the card and, as has been my experience in the past, every time I follow through on that initial impulse to be generous, the person on the receiving end has told me how much the gesture was appreciated.

I’ve come to treasure generosity as a profound act of kindness. In that spirit, I offer you these twenty quotations:

“That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.” —Simone de Beauvoir

“You cannot do a kindness too soon because you never know how soon it will be too late.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.” — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

 “With gentleness, overcome anger. With generosity, overcome meanness. With truth. overcome delusion.” —The Buddha, Verse 223, The Dhammapada

“Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.” —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Gentleness, self-sacrifice, and generosity are the excusive possession of no one race or religion.” —Mahatma Gandhi

“You often say, ‘I would give, but only to the deserving.’ The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.” —Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“Generosity is the most natural outward expression of an inner attitude of compassion and loving-kindness.” —The Dalai Lama XIV

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” —Simone Weil

“I've been so bothered with my property, that I'm tired of it, and don't mean to save up any more, but give it away as I go along, and then nobody will envy me, or want to steal it, and I shan't be suspecting folks and worrying about my old cash.” —Louisa May Alcott, Little Men

“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then just feed one.” —Mother Teresa

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” —Winston Churchill

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving."—Albert Einstein

"We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers."—Seneca

“From the heart it has come, to the heart it shall go.” —Beethoven’s inscription on his Mass

“It is the heart that does the giving; the fingers only let go.” —Nigerian proverb

"The potlatch ceremonies found among many of the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest have been referred to as ‘fighting with wealth’ by anthropologists who describe them as ceremonies in which a prominent figure tries to outdo a rival by either giving away or destroying vast amounts of personal possessions. . . . It could be said that while the accumulation of personal wealth is a desirable social norm in mainstream American culture, just the opposite is true in American Indian cultures. . . . At its best, a potlatch was a way to redistribute material wealth rather than leaving it in the hands of a few."—Joseph Bruchac in Our Stories Remember

"Happiness is not made by what we own. It is what we share."—Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Because Sharon Salzberg inspired this piece, I leave the last quotation to her; it’s from her book Lovingkindness:

"The Buddha said that no true spiritual life is possible without a generous heart. Generosity allies itself with an inner feeling of abundance—the feeling that we have enough to share."

I hope this piece has started your generosity juices flowing. As Seneca said, “…there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.”

© 2014 Toni Bernhard www.tonibernhard.com

You might also like “All About Kindness: Quotations, Reflections, and Photos.”

Thank you for reading my work. My most recent book is titled How to Wake Up: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide to Navigating Joy and Sorrow.

I'm also the author of the award-winning How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and their Caregivers. 

Using the envelope icon, you can email this piece to others. You can also subscribe to my blog (see the choices below my picture). I’m active on Facebook, Pinterest, and (to a lesser extent) Twitter.

Here are some questions concerning common misconceptions.

1. Schizophrenia is:

a. Possessing multiple personalities

b. Associated with violent outbursts and huge mood swings

c. A breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior

2. Which saying best represents the research on physical attraction and dating?

a. Opposites attract

b. Birds of a feather flock together

c. My strengths compensate for your weaknesses and vice versa

3. Lie detector tests (polygraphs) are:

a. 90% accurate

b. Can only be beaten by psychopaths

c. Are prone to error, particularly innocent people who are viewed as guilty

4. When it comes to our brains:

a. Everything we experience is stored in it, but we can’t retrieve much of it.

b. We only use about 10%, much of our brain is silent

c. Research shows that there are no silent areas of the brain

5. Hypnotized people are most like:

a. Persons who are asleep

b. Persons who are awake and alert

c. Robots who are unaware of what is going on around them

True or False?

6. The best way to get rid of anger and aggression is through sports or hitting a punching bag.

7. Human memory works like a videocamera, recording everything we experience.

8. The happy worker is the productive worker.

9. The insanity defense is used in less than 1% of criminal trials.

10. Attractive people are believed to be smarter and more successful than unattractive people.

Here are the real tough questions:

11. A researcher finds a correlation between children’s TV viewing and lowered reading scores. This means that:

a. TV viewing is harmful and causes students to be lazy

b. Poor parenting is the likely explanation

c. Less intelligent children are more likely to watch TV than to read

d. The correlation does not allow us to make a causal determination.

12. Young children are often unable to distinguish other’s perspectives from their own. According to developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, this is an example of:

a. concrete-operational thinking

b. limits to short-term memory

c. poor ego development

d. pervasive egocentrism

13. A farmworker is paid for every bushel of fruit that is picked. In terms of reinforcement theory, the worker is being paid on:

a. An intermittent reinforcement schedule

b. A fixed interval schedule

c. A fixed ratio schedule

d. A variable interval schedule

14. In a darkened room a fixed pinpoint of light appears to move. This is called:

a. the Purkinje reflex

b. the Ponzo illusion

c. the autokinetic effect

d. the optic motion theory

15. A lesion in the Broca’s area of the frontal cortex of the brain will likely result in:

a. expressive aphasia

b. apraxia

c. alexia

d. visual agnosia

Answers:

1. C, 2. B, 3. C, 4. C, 5. B, 6. F, 7. F, 8. F, 9. T, 10. T, 11. D, 12. D, 13. C, 14. C, 15. A

Less than 8: Time to retake Psychology 101

8-10: Pretty good, you can take an upper-level psychology course

11-12: You are smarter than a freshman psychology major

More than 13: You are a psychology genius (of course, we’re not using “genius” in the scientific sense, right?)

Take another psychology quiz here.

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A husband-and-wife seek out a counselor after 45 years of marriage. The counselor asks them what is the problem. The wife goes into a tirade, listing every problem they have ever had and all the 45 years they've been married. She goes on and on.

Finally, the counselor gets up, embraces the woman, and kisses her passionately. She sits stupefied.

The counselor turns to the husband and says, “That is what your wife needs, at least three times a week. Can you do that?”

The husband thinks for a moment and replies, “Well, I can get her here on Mondays and Wednesdays, but on Fridays I play golf.”

As this joke suggests, we carry into each of our people encounters an opportunity to either amplify or diminish the happiness of others. Imagine the trail of happiness this husband could have left had he bothered to show his wife, everyday, how important she was to him.

But, it stretches beyond just enhancing the happiness of others. You see, people remember how we make them feel long after they forget what we say to them. By consciously and purposely leaving a trail of happiness wherever we go, we create the conditions to magnify our happiness as well. We….

Studies show that people who leave a trail of happiness are indeed more happy themselves. They keep their eyes are open to the gifts they can deliver to other people in their lives. They extend this beyond their family to people they encounter in the most ordinary of situations – the clerk at the pharmacy, the ticket agent at the airline counter, the waiter who serves their dinner. They don't do it to manipulate other people's approval, but out of an overflowing sense of generosity and gratitude. 

Like the other happiness-producing practices I have offered in this blog series, Happiness on Purpose, anyone can cultivate the trail of happiness practice. It just takes your willingness to become aware of the opportunities that exist to do so and a commitment to practice till you develop the habit. Once you habituate this practice, just watch your mood rise, your pleasures multiply, your happiness elevate.

 Live It

Here are a few things you can do to leave a trail of happiness. Start these practices today. Fake it till you make it. 

         1. Act local. I have this theory that, if everyone in the world contributing each day to the happiness of those within their immediate family, we’d transform the world. So, start at home. Make a conscious effort to compliment, affirm, or reinforce each of the people you live with, each one of them at least once each day. Observe how they react and enjoy the pleasure you give them. As a bonus, enjoy it when they start reciprocating in-kind, that is, if you sustain your practice for a couple of weeks.

         2. Thank you's. Say “thank you” as often as you can – to family members, to friends, to coworkers, to casual acquaintances, to service people, to whomever. People appreciate the recognition, and they often respond in kind, enhancing your own pleasure quotient. Moreover, be alert to the kindness and courtesies we receive from others can keep us positive, appreciative, and hopeful, all bedrock perspectives necessary to experience our own daily happiness.

         3. Stay connected. It is oh-too-easy in this busy life we lead to let relationships with friends and relatives slide. What a trail of happiness we can leave – and receive – when we make a point to keep connected with these special people. Call, email, visit these people on some regular schedule. By doing so, you not only bring happiness into their lives, but put yourself in a position to be pleasured as well.

         4. Volunteer. I remember the pleasure I got from delivering Thanksgiving turkeys to needy families when in high school. One of my close friends sponsors a 5K run each September to collect money to help educate the children of wounded vets; he practically glows that time of year despite the hard work involved. Friends, colleagues, and even patients of mine reported how rewarded they feel when they do volunteer work at soup kitchens, the SPCA, homeless shelters, and the like. In addition to the benefits these type activities give to others, there is no calculation the amount of personal satisfaction one gets as a giver.

         5. Be there. Nothing communicates love and appreciation more than just being there for another person at significant times in their lives. These can be happy times, say birthdays, weddings or anniversaries. Or, they can be times of adversity, such as the death of a parent, when one goes through a relationship break-ups, or perhaps when ill. You don't need to do more than just be there. You will be appreciated, you will most likely earn this person's loyalty, and, yes, you can feel proud of what you've done.

Going Forward

This blog concludes the group of ten I have devoted to strategies to increase your experience of happiness with the people of your life. In addition to Leave a Trail of Happiness, the other nine included:

         (1) Practice premeditated acceptance and forgiveness;

         (2) Take nothing personal;

         (3) Be generous of spirit;

         (4) Don't be needy;

         (5) Expect misbehavior;

         (6) Choose friends and lovers wisely;

         (7) Be a generous giver;

         (8) Listen, listen, listen; and

         (9) Practice win-win.

The more you integrate these ten Happiness With Others strategies into your life, the happier you can expect to be. Spend an hour or two reviewing all ten of these blogs. Decide which ones would be of most benefit to you. Put them into practice in your daily life. See the results in your happiness quotient.

Starting in my September, 2014 blog, I will devote the next ten months to sharing strategies to be happy with your life in general. I welcome you back, with the hope that these new blogs, plus the ones already posted, will contribute to the happiness you want and deserve in your life.

Until then, with healthy, happy, and with passion.

Russell Grieger, Ph.D. is the author of several self-help books, all designed to empower people to create a life they love to live. These include: Unrelenting Drive; Marriage On Purpose, and The Happiness Handbook (in preparation). You may contact Dr. Grieger for more information at grieger@cstone.net

Singled Out has been implicated in a marriage. I'm not bragging. That is not at all what Singled Out is about. The book is a myth-busting, consciousness-raising, totally unapologetic take on single life. It is celebratory about living single – and with data to back up the optimism, and (I would like to think) wit to take down the stereotypes and caricatures of single people.

I expected it to be the sort of book that would attract hate mail, but usually, when I hear from people who have read it, they say amazingly gracious things. Probably the most common is that it validated their own sense that single life was right for them, or that it helped them set aside the expressions of disbelief from other people as to whether anyone really could be single and happy.

It was never supposed to have anything to do with anyone getting married.

Here's how that weird occurrence unfolded. In the summer of 2008, Ann Althouse and I participated in a video discussion of singlism (the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single) which appeared in the New York Times. When Ann was preparing for that discussion, she published a blog post with a picture of herself sitting at a café, with her hand over Singled Out. (I used it as the teaser image for this post.) Then, when the discussion was published in the Times, she wrote about it here. That's where the courting began – in the comments section of that blog post.

The commenter pleading with Ann to marry him is Meade. His name doesn't show up until pretty deep into the comments. Here's how Ann describes how it all starts:

In the comments, Meade quotes something I say in the episode: (referring to my then-unshared health insurance and pension benefits) "I've often thought I should just charitably marry someone... I'd just marry them to be nice..." He says:

Gee, I'm single now, happily single, and thought I'd just remain that way.

But considering all the benefits, I guess I'd really be a fool not to take a close look if Althouse were to, just out of niceness, propose to pity-marry me.

What could I offer in return? Let's see - I could prune those redbuds, take out the garbage, trap squirrels.

I don't respond, and the next morning, Meade persists…

If you want to read the rest of Ann's brief account of how an exchange in the comments section turned into a marriage, it is here.

Now here's something else weird. This one, I actually am kind of proud of. When I was writing the title for this post, I had originally written a word that did not end up appearing in the title – "uneccentric." (Maybe it is not really a word but you can tell what it means.) My first idea for the title was, "Weirdest thing ever – at least in my uneccentric life." I think of my life as fairly ordinary and innocuous. The last several months in particular, as I have tried to finish up the first draft of a new book, have felt like Groundhog Day. I get up, write for hours, do some other stuff, write for more hours, then go to sleep and do the same thing all over again the next day.

But as many of you know, I'm also single, and at 60, I have been single all my life and I plan to stay single for the rest of my life – by choice. By joyful, unapologetic, unambivalent choice. Also, I don't have kids. That life, which would have been shameful at times in the past and is still eyebrow-raising in 21^st century America, is what strikes me as uneccentric.

[Note to new readers, and reminder to others: My collections of blog posts by topic are available at "Everything you think you know about the benefits of marrying is wrong: The evidence." The collections are mostly about ways in which getting married does not transform you – for example, with regard to happiness or health or sex. But there are other topics, too. One of them, about singles in the military, has a new entry, written by a single sailor describing singlism in the Navy. He is responding to a previous guest blogger, a Navy veteran, who believes that the Navy is a pretty good place for a single person. That blogger, in turn, was commenting on my section on singlism in the military in Singled Out. The conversation never stops, and I think that's a good thing.]

Photo credit: Ann Althouse's son, John Althouse Cohen.

Back in January, I had to come up with a name for our recent August 23-24 concert in order to secure a date on the Fort Salem Theater calendar. I was stumped. I had no idea what the show should be. I knew I wanted Geoff to play and me to dance. That was it.

A name came to mind: Earth Bound. I loved it immediately. Geoff did too. As an idea, it meant a lot to us. Earth is home, source, and destiny. Earth is where we are. Earth is who we are. Earth is where we are going. Earth is what sustains us—or not. We are bound by earth, to earth, for earth. And so we live.

It is a message I wanted our show to convey—one we humans need to hear if we care to survive--and one I believe the arts can help us remember. For art--music and dance in particular--have an awesome power to bring people together in a rousing affirmation of earthly existence. As Nietzsche writes in Birth of Tragedy, regardless of how deep our despair, art seduces us to life.

Once the name was set and our summer slot reserved, however, any ideas I had for the concert melted away as quickly as icicles in spring. What were we going to do? I had no idea how I would mount a show that would express these ideas about art, earth, and humanity. I tried not to panic.

Days and weeks and months passed. I scrawled notes. Listened to music. Imagined scenarios. Nothing was coming. Nothing. I wondered whether I had lost my ability to make dances at all. Where was my muse? I was showing up! It occurred to me that maybe I had to wait until Geoff and I could make time to work together. Then something would happen. It didn’t.

Faced with this seemingly impenetrable, immovable creative block, I finally came to the conclusion that I must be looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps Earth Bound was not a modern dance piece for Geoff and me. Perhaps it would include our kids, too—all five of them--in a family show, as we had performed the year before. I hesitated to ask the kids. I did not want to presume to gobble up their precious summer time with rehearsals.

I raised the possibility. A dam broke. Immediately, the kids started making suggestions for what songs they could sing and play. Geoff offered snippets of new ideas for piano solos that were now coming to him. His musical moments made sense in relation to the few dance ideas I had entertained. I began to breathe. The family, all together, was making it happen. The show would include solos, duets, trios, and septets; singing, dancing, and playing instruments. I couldn't do it without them.

Suddenly the name, Earth Bound, made even more sense than it had before. Of course! What relationships bind humans more strongly to earth in us and around us than those of family? What bind us more to one another and to life than the ecstatic crossings of birth and death, the milestones of a marriage, the passages of bodily becoming? Even people who reject the families into which they are born seek to create a matrix of intimate bonds that will be, for them, life-enabling.

As the members of my family made decisions about what they wanted to do, a hodgepodge of pieces appeared. I was stuck again. I had no idea how to put the pieces together. I had a general idea why our process made sense, but no way to conceive of the show as a whole. No narrative. No flow. I kept humming the song that Jordan wanted to sing—“Something’s Coming” from West Side Story—hoping that it would be true for me.

Finally, about three weeks before the show, it clicked. In our family's work together, we were living the message I wanted the show to convey about art, each other, and the earth. Earth Bound would be a show about the seven members of one family putting together a show called Earth Bound.

Earth Bound would be about a family—one family, our family—making art. It would be about one family cultivating mutually enabling relationships through a shared creative process. It would be about one family working together to create a show in which each member would support and be supported by the others in giving what he or she had to give.

I wrote the script in three days. Every scene emerged out of real interactions that had happened—and were happening—among us. I stole ruthlessly—the humor, the pathos, the resistance. As I rolled out the script, various members of the family added to it, subtracted from it, and made their lines their own. We started rehearsing. The week before the show, we moved our rehearsals to the theater. When we returned home, the kids would hang out together, wanting to play some more.

I was dazzled. This shift in focus to a family production was not a failure of my creative imagination after all. Rather, it was exactly what I had needed in order to tap the deeper currents of my own artistic and ecological commitments. The process of creating the show was itself Earth Bound—rooted in and empowered by a matrix of life-enabling relationships.

Art is more than just a product—whether that art is a show, a song, or a painting. Art is more than the objective phenomenon that exists once the creative process is over. Art is about the challenges and work of attending, rehearsing, and relating; of sensing, imagining, and realizing that make its existence possible at all. What art “expresses” is not an idea per se but the process of its own conception and birth—the relationships required to make it real. In this way, any art is—or at least can be—about tending and cultivating those sensory, kinetic ties that connect us with ourselves, each other, and the earth in mutually enlivening ways.

Art brings our senses to life. We laugh. We cry. We rant. We soar. We feel, and as we do, we know our humanity. We know our bodily connection with others. We know our sensory receptivity and responsivity. We thus know ourselves as part of a larger web that pulls on us, even as we pull on it.

Art earths us. It en-families us.

A family is an ecosystem all its own. It is a matrix of relationships within which each creature finds its own niche. A matrix in which the push and pull of tides, seasons, and cycles all find expression in the movements these creatures make in relation to one another.

In our particular family ecosystem, making art together is a practice that helps us realize our potential to function as a symbiotic unit—living in love with the land and one another; aligning our individual actions with trajectories that sustain the whole, and devoting time and attention to the well being of one another as the condition for our own. It is what we know. It is how we have fun! It is what we have to share.

Earth Bound. Earth rich. Earth free.

What is the real appeal of heroin and cocaine, or their lesser evil counterparts, alcohol/marijuana and amphetamines/speed? Are they a way for teens and young adults to escape or merely cope with their lives or is there something else going on?

When young children and pre-teens step out into the world and fall on their face, they look back to their parents to be comforted by a mom and pumped up by a dad. If the connection is done in the right way that is neither too overprotective/indulgent, critical/abusive, absent/neglectful, but is instead guiding/supportive, that child will internalize that response from what psychologists refer to as a “caring surround” and call upon it when they hit a wall later on in life.

If that child didn’t have a supportive/guiding relationship with their mom and dad and instead had either the overprotective/indulgent, critical/abusive or absent/neglectful one because their parents were divorced, self-involved, or so in need of the comforting and pumping up themselves, the child has nothing to internalize to buttress its ego against the slings and arrows and raging hormones of everyday life as an adolescent.

What if you’re an adolescent or even a pre-adolescent stepping out into the world without an internalized protective safety and resilience net? (Think of it as analogous to going out into a blazing hot sun without sunblock). What if in the midst of your uncertainty you discover uppers like cocaine or prescribed stimulants that you can borrow from friends that make you feel stronger and more confident than you actually feel? And what if like Icarus you’re flying too close to the sun on those uppers and your wax wings begin to melt throwing you into a free falling panic and you discover downers like heroin, alcohol, marijuana or prescribed downers like Xanax to ease the fall?

When vulnerable adolescents (vs. the naturally resilient and determined to not let a lousy childhood deter them) who may not have the optimal connections with parents discover that they can medicate themselves and create those “parent-like” connections with drugs to pump them up at one end and soothe them at the other, they have suddenly created the emotional family they never had. Initially they feel they get to control those connections squeezing out dollops of false confidence and false comfort from those drugs upon demand, not unlike what they were able to do in the womb when their physiological wish was their mother’s command as she satisfied those needs across her placenta.

One reason the drug problem is so difficult to solve is because children who have discovered this new “family” where drugs take the place of real comfort and encouragement and where they get to feel “whole” are reluctant to go back to feeling like the emotional and vulnerable orphan they were when their pain was never responded to or made worse by abuse. Their lives feel complete as long as their drugs are available. And when they can’t get those drugs they go into withdrawal and go from complete to brittle in the blink of an eye.

How can we break the powerful attachment between teens and drugs? That fit between distress and the drug that takes it away are very strong. It’s an uphill struggle fraught with frustration on both sides. The one thing we can offer that drugs cannot is understanding the pain our children feel and a willingness to feel it with them so they don’t feel so alone in it. We may not be able to remove the intimidation of an overwhelming world, but we can reduce their aloneness in it.

To these emotional orphans who have substituted drugs for the caring they never had, we can offer understanding and hope. In order to do this, we need to create the feeling in each addicted child’s mind that someone really cares. That there is real love and deep concern for them from another human being. This will not be easy. Often what teens need most, they want least and will fight against them.

We as parents need to persevere and realize that “teens doth protest” too much when it comes to receiving guidance from us. Parents need to pick those moments when teens seek their input—and they will—rather than forcing unsolicited advice down their throats when they least want it. A caveat to keep in mind, the more you offer unsolicited advice to pre-teens and teenagers, the less they will seek input from you when they really need it.

It’s less important what you tell your children then what they tell you. And they won’t tell you anything if they experience you as ever primed to push unwanted input on them. Patience and perseverance are not easy to find in a too-busy-to-listen world, but the more parents can summon it up in interacting with their children, the greater the protective benefit later on.

And the benefit? One night when that child needs comforting or boosting, maybe they’ll call you or turn inside and hear your comforting and encouraging voice instead of calling their drug dealer.

Also:

• Hell is a Suicidal Teenager
• What Your Teenager Wants You to Know But Won’t Tell You
• About Teenage Violence – It’s the Rage
• 6 Rules Teenagers Want Parents to Know

This is the third in a series of posts about adjunct professors. The first post, about reaserch professors vs. teaching-only professors, went mostly unnoticed, but the second post, where I started to disect the rhetoric surrounding adjunct professors, generated some serious and lengthy discussion in the comments. Before I try to do more, I want to publicize some of that discussion, especially the information supplied by Ana Tamayo of Adjunct Justice and Robin Sowards of the Adjunct Faculty Association, which is affiliated with the United Steelworkers. Because we have different experiences, and likely different images of what an ideal university and an ideal faculty member look like, our approaches to the problem are different... and they should be. I have at least one more post coming in this series, but first I wanted to give a belated response about Adjunct Unions.

Robin and Ana represent good organizations. In the end, I think Robin, Ana, and I differ only a little in terms of what we think proper treatment of college instructors looks like. However, I think we differ a lot in terms of the changes we think will best get us to that point, and what we think will happen to most current adjuncts when such changes are made.

We all agree that adjuncts don't make a living wage in many parts of the country. (There are many parts of the country where $2,700 a course is a healthy living wage, but most adjuncts don't work in those parts of the country.)

In the end though, I am still stuck on an early comment from an Anonymous poster. I pointed out that if the situation is very bad, then adjuncts can find other work. Anonymous replied:

This answer isn't really even a possibility for many people who are teaching. There are people teaching in the humanities, for example, who have a passion for teaching and are not interested in (or even hirable in) industry.

I am not sure what to make of this comment. Of course doing something else is an answer! It is not a desirable option for many people, which is an important point, but a completely different point. First, hardly any Ph.D. programs train people to teach, so it is an odd tact to take expecting a guaranteed teaching job as the outcome of completing a Ph.D. Second, no one is guaranteed a job in their chosen profession. Third, we are talking about highly, nay, ridiculously trained people here, so to say they have no other options is a bit odd. 

I have had many friends who were disappointed to not find permanent academic jobs after graduate school. Many who colud not find permanent positions worked as adjuncts for a while (or did post-docs for a while) and then eventually, and sadly, left academia. After some bouncing around, all who left academia seem pretty happy, and are in rewarding jobs. One or two still carry chips on their shoulders about not getting that dream professorship, but even those ones seem to be living perfectly good and rewarding lives, including working in jobs that make use of their advanced skill sets.

The fact of the mater is that if there is a glut of people who are unwilling to do anything other than teach college classes, then Universities are in a "buyer's market", and it is completely rational for them to pay poorly. (I am NOT saying that it is morally right, but it is understandable why they do it.) That adjuncts feel trapped, and that they feel there are no other jobs they could do, and that their friends in academia do not understand that there is a perfectly good world full of alternative jobs out there, are all parts of the problem that needs to be resolved... and those particular parts of the problems are unlikely to be solved by unionization. Unions are, by design, focused on people who are in the jobs they represent, and it is not a typical priority of a Union to help people leave for greener pastures.

In any industry it is rough being a full-time part-time worker. Adjunct positions are designed to be part time, and there are many people for whom such arrangements are ideal --- people who already have, or do not neeed a full time job. For others, being an adjunct is a perfectly good, but non-ideal holding pattern to fly in for a few years. But if you are talking about people who lack an alternative sources of income, you won't find many for whom adjuncting is it a good long-term solution, and the unions will never be able to fix that completely. Those people face tough choices, but, when push comes to shove, they are mundane tough choices. They are the tough choices faced by millions of poeple who want a better job: That you can't find the job you want, in the area you want, for the pay you want, is hardly a tragedy unique to the fringes of academia.

And, the average Ph.D. should be in a much better position than the average displeased or underemployed worker. They tend to be more mobile and are used to mastering difficult tasks. Changing career trajectories is an obvious option.

So, I think Adjunct Unions are a perfectly fine idea, and I have nothing against collective bargaining. I think that if they are done right, such efforts will benefit both the adjunct instructors, the universities, and the students. I am more suspcious of large unions, and less suspicious of unions that can focus on the unique position of adjunct instructors. In the end, however, I think many adjuncts would be better served by efforts to help them do something other than adjuncting. And I think the conditions the Unions are working to improve would improve more rapidly and more naturally if there were not so many people desperate to do that work. We need to support adjunct professors, particularly those who are using adjunct work as their sole source of income. But, in the end, no amount of support will take away the tough choices of everyday life.

American psychologists designed and oversaw the brutal regime of interrogation used on detainees in U.S. military custody at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere during the U.S. war on terror.  To date, the American Psychological Association (APA) has not reprimanded or otherwise held accountable any psychologist who participated in torture.

The ties between psychologists, the American Psychological Association, and the U.S. military are longstanding. The APA directly recruited psychologists into military service during World Wars I and II, where they evaluated new recruits, assisted in the treatment of soldiers with “shell shock,” and offered advice about captured enemy soldiers in order to make interrogations more effective, among other assistance. There are many facets of their longstanding relationship, but suffice it to say that today the Department of Defense (DOD) is the single biggest provider of psychology internships in the country and that 7 percent of all psychologists are employed by the DOD.

After the involvement of health care professionals in the CIA’s abusive detention and interrogation practices came to light in 2004, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association issued statements prohibiting participation in interrogations as a violation of medical ethics. In stark contrast, when it approved a special report in 2005, the APA allowed psychologists to participate in interrogations, including those that meet the definition of torture under international law. This report was repealed last year but the APA still allows psychologists to participate in interrogations.

Why did psychologists allow a report to be passed condoning participating in torture in the first place? And why did it take eight years to rescind it?

Colleagues and I wanted to find out whether psychology graduate students were aware of their professional obligations during military service as outlined in the Geneva Conventions– the most widely cited set of international standards, so we surveyed psychology students about their knowledge on these matters. 

In surveying 185 students at 20 different graduate program, we found that 74 percent of psychology students had received less than one hour of instruction about military medical ethics. Even though 75 percent claimed to be familiar with the Geneva Conventions, the majority gave incorrect answers when tested on specific points. For example:

-               Only 37 percent could correctly identify that the Geneva Conventions apply irrespective of whether war has formally been declared.

-               43 percent did not know that the Geneva Conventions state that physicians should "treat the sickest first, regardless of nationality”

-               Half of the students did not know that the Geneva Conventions prohibit ever threatening or demeaning prisoners as well as depriving them of food or water for any length of time

-               48 percent could not state when they would be required by the Geneva Conventions to disobey an unethical order from a superior

Based on these findings, my co-authors and I surmise that not only do psychology students learn little about the professional standards that constrain unlawful and unethical practices, but they also have a false sense of complacency about their knowledge of such matters.  (The complete findings of our research were recently published in the International Journal of Health Services.) This is a troubling finding, given that psychologists lacking an understanding of their ethical obligations are less prepared to disobey, let alone protest, unethical orders, and are more likely to be compliant when told to assist interrogators in ways that violate international standards.            

Despite measures taken last year, the APA still allows psychologists to serve as adjuncts to national security by allowing them to participate in interrogations under certain circumstances. Given the APA’s lack of moral clarity and flouting of international law, it is imperative that psychology students receive more education in military medical ethics in order to prevent a repeat of psychologist participation in abusive interrogations and torture. 

The fact that the detention center at Guantánamo ever opened – much less is still in operation and continues to abuse detainees, most recently by force-feeding hunger strikers – will likely go down as one of our country’s most egregious ethical lapses. Psychologists need to be educated about the Geneva Conventions and other international codes of ethics to ensure they do not become pawns of the U.S. military establishment – inadvertently or otherwise.

APA members need to demand that their organization does not take positions that are contrary to international law and to ensure that psychologists who have committed crimes in the name of patriotism are held accountable for their actions.

Many of us were raised with the charitable notion that “it is better to give than to receive.” Recently the Biblical concept was tested scientifically to look at the world of givers and takers. First presented at the American Psychological Association by Adam Grant, Ph.D., of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, recent studies are validating his theories presented in his book: "Give and Take." While tested in a business environment, the personality of givers translates easily into personal relationships.  

An interesting point is that givers appear to have an inherent generous spirit, expecting nothing in return. Although it is taking a leap to suggest that those who are generous with kind words and kisses help relationships thrive, taking a closer look at the business model reveals that givers are more successful than matchers and takers. Grant’s research focuses on motivation and prosocial behaviors.  Through his unique teaching methods, his students raised close to $60,000 for Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Giving vs tit-for-tat

In further research from the University of Tübingen, givers, matchers, and takers were defined. Givers were found to share not only more important information but also resources, whereas takers keep it all to themselves. And the matchers essentially believed in tit-for-tat according to this large-scale study. Additionally it was found that givers often give more than they receive without expecting anything more in return.

How about withholders and the silent treatment?

If we apply the business model to relationships, it seems obvious.  But what about the flip side of generosity, which we see with hostility and the silent treatment?  Based on meta-analysis of 74 studies, which included some 14,000 participants, a key symptom of a distressed relationship becomes evident in the withdrawal pattern.  This pattern is created when one person in a relationship shuts down – there is no giving, there is only withdrawing.

Researchers from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth,Texas, tell us that those who cling to “the silent treatment” as a way of avoiding a confrontation walk a dangerous line.  Nonetheless it is considered one of the most common ways that couples deal with conflict.

The value of “we” might mitigate conflict

In a love relationship, learn the value of “we” to help strengthen connections as described in Positive Couple Therapy: Using We-Stories to Enhance Resilience, Jefferson A. Singer, ‎Karen Skerrett. They state that couples who create and share their mutual stories and carry them forward to family and friends, develop “a sense of mutuality” that facilities positive relationships.

References:

Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, Adam Grant, PhD

Adam M. Grant, Motivating creativity at work: The necessity of others is the mother of invention, Psychological Science Agenda | July 2011

Sonja Utz, Nicole Muscanell, Anja S. Göritz. Give, match, or take: A new personality construct predicts resource and information sharing. Personality and Individual Differences, 70 (2014) 11–16 

Paul Schrodt, Paul L. Witt, Jenna R. Shimkowski. A Meta-Analytical Review of the Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Interaction and its Associations with Individual, Relational, and Communicative Outcomes, Communication Monographs, Volume 81, Issue 1, 2014: 28-58

Copyright 2014 Rita Watson

Recently, the website Anxiety.org News announced that, “Art Help Treat Anxiety in Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia.” Because I am a strong believer in the self-regulating possibilities of art-based intervention, I am always excited to see a headline like this. It also makes good sense that pairing art therapy with a proven strategy for anxiety-related challenges like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) (Malchiodi & Loth Rozum, 2012) could result in a form of effective treatment for panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.

Okay, before those of us who believe in the capacity of art therapy to support positive change get too excited, Anxiety.org News appears to have jumped the fence a bit in its bold headline. In brief, the article (Morris, 2014) cited refers to two case studies with participants including one who was diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia (PAD) and the other with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). A seven-session program (based on Marchand, 2007) was designed to include CBT principles such as psychoeducation, breathing training, cognitive restructuring, exposure and other accepted strategies. “Art-based therapy” was designed to complement these approaches and to address the participants’ symptoms. Using an A-B, single subject design, in the case of the participant with PAD, results indicated statistically significant reductions lower levels of panic frequency. In the case of the participant with GAD, the decrease in general anxiety was marginally significant.

So with a sample size so limited, why even discuss these findings? I believe this study is worthy of discussion for several reasons. First, one of art therapy’s strongest potentials is in the area of self-regulation or affect regulation. It is known from repeated studies involving stress reduction and repeated reports from participants in art therapy that there is a self-regulating impact achieved through specific art making experiences. Additionally, studies involving a combination of interventions such as mindfulness and art therapy (Monti et al, date) support the idea that combining art-based therapy with other approaches may be make a good thing more effective. For example, research on mindfulness-based art therapy underscores that it may reduce perceptions of fatigue and increase a sense of quality of life, two aspects relevant to an individual’s ability to self-regulate.

Perhaps these sample-limited research findings highlight two other important aspects. Art therapy research continues to be a challenge to the field, with limited participants and randomized clinical trials; fortunately, the author of this current study has published the procedures used in the course of treatment, thereby making this study replicable by other researchers. Finally, on a practitioner level, I was reminded that what often makes what can be a rather dry intervention like CBT more palatable is the value-added aspect of creative self-expression. Anecdotally, I can say that it is a lot easier to get the individuals I see in therapy to comply with their “CBT homework” if I infuse some relevant art making or visual journaling into the mix. In essence, art therapy not only helps people challenged by anxiety express their experiences, but it also supports the sensory-based understanding of how both the mind and body respond to stress. To quote Carl Jung (with my additions), “The hands (creative process of art making) will often solve the mystery that the intellect (cognition) has struggled with in vain.”

Make art and stay calm, 

Cathy Malchiodi, PhD

© 2014 Cathy A. Malchiodi

Visit my website at www.cathymalchiodi.com.

For more information on Trauma-Informed Art Therapy and Trauma-Informed Expressive Arts Therapy, visit the Trauma-Informed Practices and Expressive Arts Therapy Institute at www.trauma-informedpractice.com.

References

Malchiodi, C. A., & Loth Rozum, A. (2012). Cognitive-behavioral and mind-body approaches. In C. Malchiodi (Ed.), Handbook of Art Therapy (pp. 89- 102). New York: Guilford Publications.

Marchand, A. et al. (2007) Effectiveness of a brief cognitive behavioral therapy for panic disorder with agoraphobia and impact of partner involvement. Behavioral and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 35 (5), 613-629.

Morris, F. (2014). Should art be integrated into cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders? The Arts in Psychotherapy, 41 (4), 343-352.

Monti, D. et al ( 2006). A randomized control trial of mindfulness-based art therapy program for women with cancer. Psycho-Oncology 15, 363–373.

The designs are described by media as a tic-tac-toe grid. Others see them as a "#stoneagehashtag".

Maybe those images, used to familiarize and make a little less distant newly published marks on the walls of a cave in southern Spain, explain why some media describe the size of the marked area using a novel unit of measurement: the Frisbee. Quoting the online post by Archaeology magazine,

The marks, which were covered with sediments that contained stone tools typical of those made by Neanderthals between 30,000 and 39,000 years ago, are up to a few millimeters deep and cover an area about the size of a Frisbee.

Whether the imagery came from thinking of these crossing lines in terms of a modern game, or simply was intended to humanize the scale of the marked zone, the net effect of all these articles is to take something that is far distant from contemporary experience and bring it closer to us.

And for once, that is a relatively accurate reflection of the intention of the scientist leading the team. In remarks published by Natureonline, Clive Finlayson says

“Is it art? I don’t know. I can’t get into the minds of these people. It looks geometric. It looks like criss-cross patterning,” and perhaps it represents some kind of map, says Finlayson. “What is clear is that it’s abstract, it’s deliberate, and it speaks to their cognition in a way that brings Neanderthals, once again, closer to us.”

In some ways, it is long past the time that "closer to us" should not be necessary. The research community set aside misleading images of Neanderthals as brutish, subhuman, and undeveloped a long time ago. Also speaking to Nature, archaeologist Alistair Pike notes that this adds to an existing inventory of possible symbolic media used by Neanderthals that includings red pigment and shell beads:

“It adds permanent rock engraving to the sparse but significant evidence for Neanderthal symbolic behaviour.”

But the new study isn't universally accepted in the scientific community. A US archaeologist, Harold Dibble, is quoted in the Nature article in the now familiar point/counterpoint format that tends to imply that in every issue, there are two sides between which we cannot choose. Dibble's comments, though, have some intriguing implications.

First, the quote:

“It takes more than a few scratches — deliberate or not — to identify symbolic behaviour on the part of Neanderthals.”

That seems pretty definite. "A few scratches"-- which Nature notes are known not just from this cave wall, but also from animal bones recovered in some Neanderthal sites.

But wait: if these are just "a few scratches" why are so many people seeing them as tic-tac-toe grids, or even hashtags?

In fact, as the New Scientistnotes, the research team found that to replicate exactly these marks, using the same kinds of stone tools, required purposeful, repeated actions:

Francesco d'Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France carried out experiments to determine if the scratches could have been made by accident... He needed to make in excess of 100 strokes to reproduce the pattern exactly.

Idly scratching the rock in a to-and-fro motion only scratched the surface. To get the deep, linear grooves d'Errico had to focus on the line and put his weight into the stylus. He also had to shift his body position to make the perpendicular lines. "This was not doodling," says d'Errico. "It required a lot of effort."

So. Not "a few scratches". In fact, Dibble seems to be taking two slightly different positions on these marks in his comments to Nature. The writer reports that Dibble

has misgivings about the engraving, as well as the identity of its maker. Sediments tend to shift around a cave, and it is possible that humans made the etchings, only for them to be later covered up by older sediments from prior Neanderthal occupations.

In other words, Dibble thinks the marks might have been made by early modern humans. What is unclear is if the identity of the makers of the marks would change his assessment of them as evidence of deliberate creation of abstract symbols.

If so, then art doesn't just lie in the eyes of the beholder; it lies in our understanding of the identity of the makers of marks.

Neanderthals serve as a Rorschach Test for our comfort level with the complexity of our human heritage. An array of researchers working on everything from genetics to stone tool production, and yes, potential symbolic expression, offer a revision of the idea that Neanderthals lacked a variety of characteristics common in modern human populations. Spoken language and symbolic thought become the central battlefield for maintaining that we are not them.

Why is that boundary-- which genetic researchers have pretty soundly taken apart-- so important for so many people? why do media reports continue to include the claim that it is surprising that Neanderthals are not brutish, mute, cognitive inferiors?

We know that early modern humans and Neanderthals shared territory in what became Europe for thousands of years. And that raises the question: why are they gone, and we remain?

Oxford professor Tom Higham, commenting on the new precision reached in dating the overlap of the two groups in Europe, was clear about his conclusion:

"I think most of my colleagues would agree that having modern humans around played some role in the disappearance of the Neanderthals."

Acknowledging this role in the displacement of another human population requires all of us to understand that our modern dominance came at the cost of other lives. Perhaps it is the case that, if those lives had all the same potential for thought, imagination, creativity, and its expression, then for an anthropocentric species, what was lost would be more valuable.

For me, it isn't necessary for Neanderthals to have been more like us for their extinction to be worth grieving. In this symbolic Rorschach test, I cannot imagine that the effort our human cousins expended in working steadily to create these marks was devoid of significance.

There was human effort in the works of Neanderthals. So we should care that they are gone, even if they would not have seen a game, or a symbolic statement, in these marks.