Reading the news these days, I keep wavering between conflicting feelings.

On the one hand, I'm outraged at what our government has been perpetrating against human beings—many of which have been revealed to be innocent victims of an inane bounty system that encouraged the unscrupulous to hand over anyone, just to get their hands on a pile of dollars. It's not hard to see how such a program would lead to abuse. It's hard to see how it wouldn't.

On the other hand, I'm dismayed that so many Americans accept the premise of the current outrage, which is that this reprehensible behavior and these abusive policies are new and without precedent in American foreign policy. This is simply false.

In fact, any serious student of American history knows that the United States has routinely engaged in every imaginable sort of crime against humanity—from the illegal campaigns against American Indian tribes who'd been granted legal rights to their lands by the government that then ignored those treaties in favor of massacre and robbery, to the illegal funding of central American death squads in the 1980s. To spare you, I've left out scores of examples of CIA complicity in the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants between those two historical bookends, ranging from Iran to Southeast Asia to Chile. 

Though plenty of readers in the United States will be confused and/or incensed to read the preceeding paragraph, they'd be hard-pressed to find an educated Chilean, Guatemalan, Iranian, or Argentinian who is unaware of the deep and very dirty presence of the CIA in their domestic turmoil.

In fact, the United States has not just been guilty of these crimes against humanity, we've been teaching foreign soldiers and police how to abuse their own citizens in the so-called "School of the Americas":

Since 1946, the SOA has trained over 64,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins.

On the third hand, I see a glimmer of hope—a very faint and distant glimmer—in the fact that this report (or, at least a summary) has been made public, albeit against the wishes of most of the American government, including the Obama administration. One or two stubborn senators can still do what's right, against the wishes of the powers that be. That's something. Not much more than a raindrop in the Sahara, but it's something.

There is a story told of an old man who lost a coin one day at breakfast. When a friend came by later, he found him in the yard searching the ground.

“What are you doing?” the friend asked.

“Looking for the coin I dropped,” the old man answered.

“Where did you lose it?”

“In the house.”

“Then why are you out here?”

“Because,” the old man replied, “the light is better out here.”

Whether we know it or not, we are all on a psychological journey. But, just like the man from this story who is trying very hard, we often go about it all wrong. We take the easier way even though it doesn’t work. We avoid the better way because it is, at least at first, the harder way. So we stay outside where it is light rather than searching in the darkness inside.

The writer and preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, recently published her book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark.” It is an evocative, counter-cultural exploration of the value of embracing the darkness—both outside and within. When Oprah Winfrey interviewed Barbara on Super Soul Sunday, it was clear that Oprah was puzzled as the rest of us would be, even as she earnestly struggled to make sense of Barbara’s approach. So many psychological and spiritual traditions teach us to go toward the light, the positive energy, and the unlimited potential that we are. How could it be that the path to deeper growth is into the darkness?

While seemingly counter-intuitive, approaches which take us inward and into the dark offer a way that is much more likely to lead to lasting change. The change is more likely to be lasting because it is at a deeper level. It gets at the root, where real transformation happens. Psychoanalysis is one such approach, but there are other ways such as meditation, spiritual practices, good books, mindful communities, intimate relationships, and personal reflection of many kinds.

Find a good guide who can take you deep, inward, and into the dark and you will find yourself on a useful path. It is not an easy path but it will help you grow, as I like to say, from the inside out. To my mind, that is the secret to making changes that last.

Copyright 2014 Jennifer Kunst, Ph.D.

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This is just a taste of Jennifer's model for personal growth. To read more check out: Wisdom from the Couch: Knowing and Growing Yourself from the Inside Out.

The case against college. 

Let’s look at the case against college. The insistence that every child can and should attend college has created a bottleneck that hurts those who are qualified for college and an even greater barrier for those who are not qualified for abstract academics –– kids who should be turning their many talents in other directions. 

So why this love affair with college? Many Americans think college equals success and they naturally want the very best for their children. Similar to infatuation, this love affair may not last long.

 Most children should not go to college.

 Substantial numbers don’t complete college in four years and are not successful financially. This misperception may go back to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite that ran our country in the 1800s. They have supposedly been replaced by a meritocratic system which is based on talent, but many still strive, consciously or subconsciously, for the Yale, Harvard, Princeton community, and the contacts that maintain the old establishment. 

Bruce McCall, a successful writer who was a high school dropout, commented on his doubts about succeeding in New York City. “Everybody knew that everybody connected with the smart magazines came from old money; went to Harvard, or at least Yale, summered on the Cape, married a deb; recited Horace while playing squash; and mixed with literary royalty at chic dinner parties in Manhattan penthouses. From graduation day onward, this superior breed trod an endless red carpet to various forms of glory.” Bruce McCall, “Confessions of a High School Dropout,” Town & Country Magazine, August 2013. 

Social snobbery.

The cultural critic, Camille Paglia, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying that what’s driving the push toward universal college graduation is “social snobbery on the part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in their car window.” Bari Weiss, “A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues,” The Wall Street Journal, December 28 – 29 2013. That’s being a little harsh on parents who just want the best for their kids, but it is time to take a fresh look at these core prejudices. 

According to Joseph Epstein, the merit in our meritocracy may not be genuine. “The only thing that normal undergraduate schooling prepares a person for is –– more schooling. Having been a good student, in other words, means nothing more than that. One was good at school. One had the discipline to do what one was told, learned the skill of quick response to oral and written questions, figured out what professors wanted, and gave it to them.” “The late, great American WASP,” Joseph Epstein, The Wall Street Journal, December 21 – 22, 2013. 

This perception of college as the preferred goal for all students is the most difficult single problem that must be overcome if we are to allow individuals to flow naturally toward their own inclinations and abilities. 

Most parents, especially middle-class parents, have one question when visiting friends they haven’t seen for a while. “How’s Janie; where’s she going to college?” Of course, it is assumed that she is going to college. If she isn’t, the friends might see Janie’s parents as failures and the parents themselves would feel embarrassed. Some high schools have debate teams that debate other schools, and sometimes this competition is advertised not as a debate between high schools but as a “college bowl.” Other high schools in wealthy areas are given names such as “University High School.” 

If we accept the college-for-everyone concept, these reactions would be understandable, but there are two underlying assumptions to this position that are not valid. The first assumption is that student failure has to do with parents not pushing their kids hard enough, rather than students’ ability level or motivation. The second assumption is that with concerted effort all students can be helped. Helped to do what? It’s always a nice idea to give students extra help in anything, but fattening them up to satisfy the voracious appetite of state achievement tests? Maybe not. And maybe the failing students are trying to tell us something. 

The only way to counteract this misperception is success in the real world success of advanced career studies. This will take time because of built-in stereotypes and prejudices against these students. After all, left-brain academicians make up a large share of our country’s cultural critics and writers. 

These folks believe they are the best and brightest –– and even the happiest. This carries over to newspaper and television programming as well. But psychological research has consistently shown that after people acquire a solid but modest income, additional monies do not create sustained happiness.

 In some ways the university world is a non-real world. It’s a think tank, a finishing school, and a self-congratulatory system that feeds the ego. But it is also an incubator of professional classes such as professors, physicians, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and scientists. From this system, our country expects leadership and the discovery of things that presently don’t exist. These innovations will come from the top 1%-10% of our academic strivers.

The International Humanist and Ethical Union has just published its 2014 Global Report on Freedom of Thought (e.g., the right to openly express one’s self as an atheist, secularist, or humanist; the right to renounce the religion of one’s parents). By analyzing existing laws and institutional decrees within a country, the authors classified a broad list of countries into one of five possible ratings: “Grave Violations,” “Severe Discrimination,” “Systemic Discrimination,” “Mostly Satisfactory,” and “Free and Equal.”

I conducted a search of the 542-page report using “Grave Violations” as the search term so that I might identify all of the countries that received this lowest of ratings and came up with thirty-one countries in total. They are:

Comoros, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Swaziland, Gambia, Mauritania, Nigeria, China, North Korea, Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Maldives, Pakistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

In looking at the latter list, one wonders if there is a common theme that runs through the great majority of included nations. Perhaps Ben Affleck can help us elucidate this mystery (see my earlier Psychology Today article on the Sam Harris-Ben Affleck incident on Real Time With Bill Maher). Or better yet, we might look to the religion scholar Reza Aslan to guide us away from making any “gross and racist” suppositions.

On a related note, see my two earlier Psychology Today articles (here and here) wherein I discuss studies that have examined people’s negative perceptions of atheists in the United States (see also THE SAAD TRUTH_19 on my YouTube channel). So even the supposed bastion of freedom of thought (the United States) exhibits negative stereotypes with regard to those heathen non-believers! Perhaps some readers might also be interested in my earlier Psychology Today articles on the right to criticize religion (see also my YouTube clip THE SAAD TRUTH_10), on blasphemy laws, and on the need to be thankful for our Western liberties and freedoms.

Please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel, liking my Facebook page, and following me on Twitter (@GadSaad).

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Jeff Hobbs has written a beautiful and compelling memoir. Even though it is not about adoption it speaks to issues I have raised in previous posts here, especially the biological and environmental components of addiction and the difficulties in crossing race and class boundaries. Hobbs, a White writer, relates the life and death of Rob Peace, his Black roommate at Yale from 1998 until their graduation in 2002, and their continuing relationship until Peace’s murder in 2011. Robert Peace grew up in East Orange, New Jersey, bordering on Newark. Although his parent’s didn’t live together and the father was a drug dealer, Rob’s father was heavily involved with his only child, especially with tutoring the boy who had inherited his razor sharp mind. His mother’s family, with whom Rob lived, was a supportive and stable force, as his mother worked long hours at low paying jobs. She skimped and saved enough to later send Rob to private Catholic middle and high schools. When Rob was seven, his father was arrested and charged with murder (perhaps falsely), convicted and incarcerated. Rob visited him often in prison, starting as a child and continuing until his father’s death in prison when Rob was in his mid twenties.

Rob loved his high school, with it’s primarily minority student body and white friars as supportive mentors. Rob made four close male friends in high school, who did not have his intelligence and success, but to whom he remained close during and after college. When Rob was accepted at Yale, a white benefactor at the high school offered to pay all Rob’s expenses not covered by his Yale scholarship.

Based on his own experience and interviews he does with others, Hobbs documents how Peace became the major marijuana dealer at Yale, despite or because of being a very popular man on campus and a member of one of the most prestigious of Yale’s secret societies. Hobbs shows that Peace himself was a heavy marijuana user and drank a lot too. Perhaps because drinking and marijuana use were common among Yale undergraduates in those years, and because Peace was able to graduate in four years with a double major in biochemistry and biophysics, Hobbs, a nonuser, does not investigate the impact of daily marijuana use, especially on someone, like Rob, who started using at an early age. Hobbs merely accepts Peace’s justification:

"Rob was self-aware enough to understand his own relationship with marijuana, which wasn’t complicated to him. He knew the science behind it. H e knew what it cost him. Though he was addicted to it by all definitions regarding frequency of use, he was intelligent enough to control that addiction. ‘High functioning,’ he called himself."

Reports that summarize research and are written to be accessible to a general public present a much more alarming view of heavy marijuana use that undermines Rob’s rationalization that he could control his use. By 2000, THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, was almost nine times stronger than in 1965, going from 1% THC to 8.8%. By 2013, the THC content was on average 13%, but in designer brands of marijuana, going up to 70%. Hobbs could have found conclusive evidence that heavy marijuana use leads to amotivaional syndrome characterized by apathy, declining motivation and decreasing ability to master new problems. Heavy marijuana use can permanently affect the brain especially in the parts that influence memory, thinking, concentration, sensory and time perception, and coordinated movement. However, journalist David Sheff, in Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy reports on research that indicates that addicts’ brains are different from birth, before they use drugs.

Experts now tell us that about 10% of marijuana users become addicted. But for those who start marijuana use when young, 17% become addicted, and for those who use daily, 25 - 50% are addicts, people with a complex disease having biological, psychological and social roots that results in compulsive drug use. New research reported by the Society for the Study of Addiction has found a genetic link to marijuana dependence. Vulnerability to addiction runs in families, but a genetic predisposition to addiction needs to be accompanied by other personality and environmental factors.

This information helped me to explain some of Peace’s behavior that Hobbs merely presents as mysterious.

Why didn’t Rob in his senior year take the exams necessary to apply to medical or graduate school, despite good grades and experience as a research assistant? When asked, he said he was going to Rio and would figure it out later. Hobbs in writing the book discovered that Rob had made more than $100,000 selling marijuana while at Yale and so could afford not to be worried. Yet the motivated student, whose brain had not been affected by marijuana addiction, would have taken the MCAT and GRE to insure that he could go on with his education after a year off.

Other behavior that Hobbs documents but can’t explain is why a Yale graduate would continue and expand his marijuana dealing after graduating and returning to Newark, now operating in a more competitive and dangerous environment that the protected one at Yale. Peace continued his dealing as he taught biology for four years at his old Catholic High School. He talked about returning to graduate school and becoming a college professor but never did anything to accomplish this. Why did Rob resign from teaching to start and become a baggage handler for Continental Airlines at Newark International airport? Rob told friends he did so because of the free travel that was a benefit. He flew often to to Rio and to Amsterdam to party, two of the best-known drug spots on the globe, and started to transport marijuana from Miami, activities that to me indicated addition.

Addiction could explain why he made a mistake with a cargo hauling machine, damaged a plane, and got fired from his job. The impact of heavy marijuana use on the brain offers a plausible explanation of why the brilliant Rob Peace in his mid twenties failed a test for a realtor’s license when he had never failed a test in his life. Hobbs documents Rob’s heavy drinking but never considers whether he was an alcoholic and whether he used harder drugs, a likely possibility given the international partying set in which he moved and by research finding links between marijuana use and increased risk for other drug use. Hobbs mentions only in passing that some of his white girl friends from the larger New York area used cocaine and heroin. Hobbs quotes one of Rob’s girl friends as saying:

"Rob didn’t seem capable of seeing the big picture, the way he had when they’d first met. He trafficked almost exclusively in the day-to-day: this shift at work, this flight, this city, this transaction, this chunk of money."

This strikes me as classic behavior of an addict, but Hobbs seems to never have asked this friend, or anyone, whether they thought Rob was an addict. In the nine years between graduation from Yale and his murder, I can’t believe that the large number of Rob’s friends and family members, many of whom were worried about him, never suggested a rehab program.

Hobbs attributes Robb’s murder when he was in his late twenties to the dangerous world in which he operated as a marijuana dealer and at the end, someone who was using his knowledge of chemistry to enhance the potency of the drug and sell it for more. This is undoubtedly true, but it seems plausible to me that he never would have gotten there if he were not an addict himself.

In neglecting to consider the biology of marijuana use and addiction, Hobbs indirectly blames Rob’s “short and tragic life” solely on his fatherless upbringing and on the impact of ghetto culture, a stereotyped and incomplete analysis.

If you were on your deathbed and you had to offer a single bit of wisdom to your child, what would it be? 

At the ripe old age of 66, I worry how long I’ll be around to advise my 10-year-old son as he negotiates life’s trials and opportunities.  So I asked several of my sage friends and colleagues to share two or three kernels of wisdom I could pass on to him.  The folks I asked have all lived rich and fulfilling lives, and most of them have already raised children of their own.  My sample included several prominent positive psychologists, a few people who have written well-known books on human behavior, a couple of especially insightful clinicians, a handful of pioneering researchers who have pondered human behavior in light of evolutionary biology, and several non-academic friends whose personalities and sense of humor have had an inspiring and positive effect on those around them.   

In a recent blog, I promised to pass on their wisdom, but I first invited readers to guess what gem of wisdom my sage advisors mentioned most frequently.  And I further invited readers to pass along any advice they might have gotten from someone such as their grandmother in the old country, who was not a modern urban hipster intellectual.  Several folks were kind enough to pass on thoughtful advice from their elders who’d grown up in places as scattered as Bulgaria, Ireland, New Zealand, and the rural American heartland (see the comments on: What are the 3 most useful bits of wisdom for life: Part 1)

All in all, this search netted well over 100 gems of sagacity from these diverse experts on the game of life.  The advice covered a wide range of topics, including friendship, love, work, moral choices, coping, play, learning, and self-care.  Besides the diversity of advice, I was also struck by the fact that one bit of simple wisdom came up again and again, in one form or another. 

The most frequently mentioned gem of wisdom was simply this: “Be kind.” 

There were several variations on the be kind theme.  Here are two comments on my recent blog post:

• My grandfather (who emigrated to Long Island after a childhood in rural Ireland) always used to say, "it's nice to be nice."…. choosing to be nice (or kind, or polite, or generally pleasant to another person) takes very little effort on your part, but can make a world of difference in how people receive you, and how you are treated in return.” (from Coral). 
• The one that seems to stick out always is "Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you". It seems to encapsulate everything that is the basis of being a social being in a social environment. (from Neil)

UBC professor Mark Schaller expressed it slightly differently, and spelled out the rational for being kind:

• Try to do things to other people, and for other people, that make those other people happy.  (Because:  Doing so will usually lead those people to like you, and to want you for a friend, and stuff like that; which will have all kinds of benefits--in ways you can't even imagine right now--throughout your whole life.)

As Schaller points out, there are numerous payoffs that follow from making other people feel good.  The golden rule cuts both ways: If you treat people as you would like them to treat you, they are in fact likely to treat you as you’d like to be treated in return.  Conversely, there are severe costs for treating others unkindly.  My amigo Luis Gomez Jacinto (from the University of Malaga) noted that economists have a term called “social capital” which can be very roughly translated into: “friendship is money.”  I know from personal experience that both Schaller and Gomez-Jacinto practice what they preach in the generosity department: each of them has put me up in their own homes when I have visited their universities (in fact, I described Prof. Jacinto’s heartwarming hospitality in an earlier blog on Spanish versus American culture).

Not only do other people want to work and play with you when you are nice, but our own nervous systems are wired to make us feel good when we are nice to others. I’ve previously described Liz Dunn’s research showing that although most of us think we will be happy spending money on ourselves, we are actually happier when we spend money on other people (see Are you spending your money in ways that makes you unhappy?)  

So Be Nice.  Sounds painfully simple and obvious, right.  It feels so good to be nice, and it is obviously a great formula for success.  End of story?

Alas, proverbial wisdom always sounds great, but the devil is in the details, or in this case in the detours. As my son Dave observed about proverbs like the Golden Rule: They are often the equivalent of saying to a baseball player: “Get a lot of home runs.”  Indeed, one of Raquel D’Apice’s “13 Pieces of Good Advice Written on the Skins of Bananas” is “Be kind to people” but her bananagram adds a qualification: “(this is harder than it sounds).” 

Why is it so hard to be nice?

Devilish Detours 

1. Other people aren’t always nice to you.  As Ms. D’Apice notes: “sometimes people are really really mean, either to me or to a person I care about.”  She also observes that it can feel good just to put a mean person down with a Dorothy Parker-like snide comment.  But it’s more than just an issue of emotional retaliation.  There’s also:

2.  Some people will exploit your cooperative spirit.  If you are repeatedly kind to a psychopath, without regard to how they treat you in return, the psychopath will keep right on taking advantage of you.  And this problem may apply not only to clinical psychopaths.  Many economists see life as a series of repeated prisoner’s dilemma games, in which cooperative sweetness fails to yield the biggest possible payoff in a world of selfish actors (everyone is a sort of psychopath on that model).  This problem is perhaps especially relevant in business contexts, where you are dealing with a stranger who stands to gain a big profit from taking advantage of your good nature.

3.  Our cognitive biases lead us all to overvalue our own contributions, and underestimate those of other people.  When Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly asked people what percentage of the housework they did, the totals came in at well over 100 percent for most couples, so someone is overestimating their contribution there.  It seems that I selectively remember the times I took out the trash or washed the dishes, but do not as clearly recollect those times when my wife was doing it all (since I wasn’t around to observe her hard at work).   In dealing with people outside our immediate households, we are biased to see ourselves as driven by higher moral principles, and to presume that those who disagree with us are either evil or negligently ignorant (see Why are THEIR political views so blatantly self-interested?). 

4.  There are often costs to being nice.  Even if you are dealing with a pleasant non-psychopath, being nice isn’t always free.  Other nice people often make perfectly reasonable requests for some of your time, labor, or money.

5. Some people are simply better at being nice. Even when we have the time and the inclination to want to get along with another person, we’re not all equally good at knowing how to pull it off.  Coming from a rough neighborhood in New York, my idea of being friendly was to make a teasing wisecrack like: “Whoa, who did you steal those orange shoes from!!?”  In my old neighborhood, teasing was usually taken to mean someone is interested in playing with you.  But when I moved out West I learned (from an occasional painfully hurt look on someone’s face) that my style of being friendly wasn’t always having the intended effect.  Another part of my Big City background involved talking loudly and boisterously, often over other people who were talking at the same time.  In a neighborhood full of fast-talking Italians and Irishmen, you’d never get a word in edgewise if you didn’t jump into the fray.  But oddly enough, when I later met polite people from Minnesota and Montana, they thought that style of conversation was rude.  (You may notice that I attribute my obnoxious loud-mouthed traits to external causes, as in my culture, ignoring the fact that many New Yorkers are perfectly polite and socially sensitive).

There are solutions for each of these problems. 

For the first two problems (not everyone is nice, and some people will exploit you) game theorists have come up the “tit-for-tat” strategy.  Tit-for-tat works like this: if we have repeated interactions, I am always nice when you are nice, but if you are nasty or uncooperative, I immediately come back with a nasty uncooperative response.  But critically: then I switch back to being nice, and repeat that until the other person understands the contingency.  That strategy tends to promote prolonged cooperative relationships, which are a lot more rewarding than prolonged competitive hostilities.  For number 3 (self-serving biases), there is Linus Pauling’s correction factor: “Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you..… The twenty-five percent is for error.”  Dealing with the real costs of kindness is a bit more of a trick, but even if you are busy and not in the market for new social interactions, it still helps to smile pleasantly and respect another person as you clearly say when you can’t come out to play, or join a new project at work.  Indeed, saying yes when you really wanted, or needed, to say no, may lead to interactions down the line that are not so nice.

With regard to the problem that not all of us are as naturally nice, I’ll list below a couple of bits of advice I got from some of the nicer people I know.

Idiot’s mini-guide to being nice.

1.  ASU’s psychology department chair Keith Crnic does a  job that includes listening to an endless stream of complaints that could lead a Zen master to start screaming and throwing furniture. Keith, who is a naturally laid-back guy from California, nevertheless manages to keep smiling, and he tends to win the affection and admiration of the people who complain to him.  Keith’s advice is: “Give people reasons to like you.”  He goes on to observe that: “This is a complex thing though, as it must be genuine, not ingratiating or disingenuous. There are a number of behavioral corollaries …. the key premise is to be interested in and thoughtful about others.”  Along the same lines, UC Riverside’s Sonja Lyubomirsky (who wrote The How of Happiness) tries to teach her children: “The importance of being kind to others and admiring, respecting, supporting, and appreciating rather than judging or criticizing.” 

2. My ex-wife Melanie Trost is one of those do-gooders who left the security of a tenured academic job to work as a social worker with dying people.  She is someone who even gets along with her ex-husband, and brings gifts from Montana every time she comes to visit her extensive network of friends in Arizona.  In keeping with her life choices, she advises: “Volunteer to benefit others with no expectation of benefit for yourself  (it takes a person out of his/her self absorption, does something good for the universe, and really feels good, which (our grad school advisor) Bob Cialdini would argue is a benefit to oneself, but what the hell...).”  Her advice is corroborated by the research on giving and happiness.

3.  Here’s a good piece of advice from my friend David Funder, who is likeable enough to have been elected department chair at UC Riverside, as well as President of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology: Keep promises. (again, that can sometimes be harder than it sounds). 

4.  Don’t be a complainer.  Certainly there are often problems that need to be addressed, and we all sometimes need social support or actual material help.  Asking someone to help you can cement a stronger friendship, especially if you are not demanding, show your appreciation, and later go out of your way to reciprocate the aid.  But you should do your best not to become a whiner.  First, don’t vent about your problems to everyone you run into, most of them can’t do anything about it.  Second, even when you are talking to someone who is in a position to help, like the department chairperson or your boss, explain your problem with a smile.  There is classic research on the cycle of depression showing that people who talk about their personal problems initially elicit sympathy and support from those around them, but sadly, people begin to avoid you if you are chronically expressing your negative feelings (Joiner, Alfano, & Metalsky, 1992; Segrin & Dillard, 1992).  The same holds, and is probably even more pronounced, when the whining is expressed in an angry rather than a depressed tone of voice.

5.  David Myers is a prominent positive psychologist as well as a notoriously positive human being, who wrote The Pursuit of Happiness.  He advises: “Spend more time asking people about themselves than talking about yourself.” He connects that to point 1 above, noting that “every person is, in some way, your superior” and pointing out that by taking an interest in everyone you meet, you can learn from a lot.

Even if you’re not naturally warm and Mother Theresa-like, then, there are a few rules you can follow to be nicer.  And even if you don’t want to be nicer to unpleasant people or total strangers, most of us could go a long way towards a more fulfilling life if we simply remind ourselves, every day, to be a little bit kinder to our family, friends, and coworkers.

• Douglas Kenrick is author of The rational animal: How evolution made us smarter than we think.  and of Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life:A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature.

Related blogs:

10 gems of wisdom for life on earth.  My two cents (actually a dime) on how to survive as a hominid

Are you spending money in ways that make you unhappy?  A short video describing the eye-opening research by Liz Dunn and her colleagues.  

References:

Dunn, E. W., Aknin, L. B., & Norton, M. I. (2008, March 21). Spending money on others promotes happiness. Science, 319, 1687–1688. doi:10.1126/science.1150952.

Joiner, T. E., Alfano, M. S., & Metalsky, G. I. (1992). When depression breeds contempt: reassurance seeking, self-esteem, and rejection of depressed college students by their roommates. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 101(1), 165.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. NY: Penguin.

Myers, D. G. (1992). The pursuit of happiness. Discovering pathways to fulfilment, well-being and enduring personal joy. NY: Avon.

Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of personality and social psychology, 37, 322-336.

Segrin, C., & Dillard, J. P. (1992). The interactional theory of depression: A meta-analysis of the research literature. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 11(1), 43-70.

No matter what stage we’re in in a relationship, we tend to wonder what the future holds. No two people, or two couples for that matter, are the same, so how can we predict where the road will take us?  The truth is we can’t. Relationships are complicated and uncertain territory. Yet, in my years of working with all kinds of individuals and couples, I’ve noticed certain patterns that inevitably seem to creep in at some point in a relationship. Being close to someone and maintaining a deep level of intimacy is a precious but fragile thing. It can bring us our greatest sense of pleasure and fulfillment and our deepest feelings of vulnerability, fear and even anger. So what can we do to give ourselves our best chance of maintaining that loving feeling we have when we first realize we are falling for another person? Here are five resolutions I believe all couples would truly benefit from taking on.

1)      Focus on small acts of kindness

If there is an easy answer to what makes people happy, it would be generosity. It is a natural mood booster, a scientifically proven method of living a longer and more satisfying life. Being generous with our partner isn’t about a tit-for-tat exchange of commodities or favors. It’s an ongoing feeling we foster within ourselves that (if we stay attuned) allows us to remain connected to what lights our partner up. It’s about being giving of ourselves in small, meaningful ways, offering a kind look, a supportive smile or a gesture of acknowledgment.

Over time, couples can become increasingly tight and stingy with each other. They can punish each other by withholding interest or affection. It’s important to stay in touch with our own desire to be giving toward our partners and the pleasure it can bring us. If we truly love them, it should be reflected in our behavior. We can do this by consistently engaging in acts that they would perceive as loving. This means offering something that matters to them, not just on our own time or with any strings attached. When we do this, we can feel a sense of satisfaction that is deeply rewarding. Plus, we ignite a spirit of generosity in our partner that creates a more natural give and take in the relationship.

2)      Pay attention to the inner voice that creates distance.

Every person harbors an internal enemy whose sole purpose seems to be to undermine our happiness. This “critical inner voice” can even sabotage our relationships. It’s there to warn us not to trust or to remind us to be jealous and suspicious. It can put us down, letting us know that we are too fat, thin, ugly, boring or unsuccessful to find and maintain a loving relationship.

Our critical inner voice feeds on all of our negative life experiences from the day we are born to form a destructive perception of who we are. Because its negative point of view is so entrenched in us, it can be hard to shake. Try to notice how this inner critic creeps into your relationship. It may sound friendly when it says, “Don’t let her get to you. You are just fine on your own. She will only wind up hurting you.” It may also sound vicious, bombarding you with thoughts like, “He doesn’t love you. No one could ever care about you.”

This voice should be seen as an enemy. It’s there to drive a wedge between us and our partner. It can turn us off or shut us down in ways that push us further from what we want. Try to differentiate this “voice” from your own, real point of view. Don’t let it convince you that you’re foolish to be open and vulnerable to another person or that you’re unworthy of love.

3)      Be aware of fantasies you may form.

A “Fantasy Bond” is a term coined by my father, psychologist and author, Robert Firestone. It describes an illusion of fusion that couples form that replaces real love. When two people start to fall in love, they see each other as independent individuals. They appreciate and respect the other person for who they are, separate from themselves. As time passes, however, they may replace these feelings of love for a sense of safety and security by starting to relate as a single unit. They may form routines or start making rules for each other that they believe will protect their fantasy bond. However, these forces actually serve to deflate their attraction to each other and suffocate the relationship. Their worlds, which at first grew bigger with the addition of each other, now seem to shrink.

It’s so important for couples to be aware of the threats this fantasy can pose and to break patterns that will ultimately hurt the relationship. Be wary of routines. Notice if you’ve started relating as a “we” instead of “you” and “me.” Ask yourself if you’ve started to rely too much on your partner. The degree to which we see our partner as a savior or an extension of ourselves is a degree to which we aren’t having an honest relationship with the real person who exists right next to us. When we regard our partner as a separate person, we appreciate and enjoy them much more for who they are. It’s only when we see someone as themselves that we can really share something meaningful with them. In this way, not getting into a fantasy bond will actually keep us closer to our partner and lead to a lasting, loving connection.

4)      Help your partner feel secure.

Often, our focus in a relationship can be too much on ourselves. What am I getting or not getting from my partner? How is he or she making me feel? Failing to see things from the other person’s perspective can get us into trouble, leading to breakdowns in communication or a lack of empathy and understanding. Instead of focusing on ourselves, we should try to think of ways we could be more outwardly loving. How could we make our partner feel happy or secure? Maybe that will mean putting our arm around them more often or agreeing to keep our cell-phones out of bed. These little acts of kindness and affection can go a long way.

Unlike in a fantasy bond, this practice isn’t about giving in to manipulation or sacrificing ourselves as independent people. If someone is overly jealous or demanding something unreasonable of us, we shouldn’t necessarily give in. However, we can always reflect how they’re feeling back to them to make sure they feel heard. We can also express our own feelings toward them.

For instance, a friend of mine noticed his wife feeling more and more insecure after they got married. She started to become possessive and worried when he left the house or did things with friends. His response wasn’t to put a halt to his social life. Instead, he asked her what was going on. He showed compassion for the mean thoughts she was having toward herself. He made sure to acknowledge all the positive ways he saw her that were different from how she saw herself. He told her he loved spending time with her and that her feelings mattered, but his friendships were also an important part of who he was and what makes him happy. In the end, they both wanted the same simple thing, to feel understood and valued. They wound up feeling closer than ever, just from talking honestly each day.

The simple exercise of being consistently attuned and kind will usually spark reciprocal attitudes and actions in our partner. We are more likely to get a loving response when we approach someone from a warm and vulnerable stance. This leaves a relationship with a solid foundation, where both people feel seen, safe, soothed and secure, what Dr. Daniel Siegel refers to as the 4 S's of a secure attachment.

5)      Be willing to be vulnerable.

A loving relationship may sound like what we want, but most of us actually have a lower tolerance for love than we think. We aren’t always used to being treated kindly or with affection. Valuing another person brings up a lot of sadness about the preciousness of life. As psychologist and author Pat Love has said, getting what we want can actually remind us of the emptiness we once felt in not getting it in the past. In order to grow our capacity and tolerance for loving feelings, we have to be willing to feel our sadness and stay vulnerable. It’s almost instinctive to want to harden or defend ourselves the moment we feel threatened, but the more resilient we can be in actually softening ourselves and staying open, the more love we can expect to both feel and receive.

Great joy comes with great sadness. Having something precious often reminds us it will one day be lost. Protecting ourselves by giving in to our fears will leave us much lonelier and less satisfied in our romantic lives. Being vulnerable, we will inevitably experience hurts or losses, but we will also have experienced much deeper levels of love and joy. And what better to wish for in the coming year than a fuller capacity for love and a richer experience of joy?

Read more from Dr Lisa Firestone at PsychAlive.org

Many women experience scary thoughts during the postpartum period. In fact, it has been estimated that as many as 91 percent of ALL postpartum women experience negative, unwanted, intrusive thoughts about their baby (Abramowitz, 2003). That’s almost ALL women who have a baby!

Due to the extremely high degree of distress associated with scary thoughts, it’s hard for many women to do know how to get some relief.

Start with these eight principles:

1. Denying the feelings and thoughts will not make them go away.
2. Panicking will make it worse.
3. Resistance creates persistence.
4. Distraction will help for a while.
5. Enhancing awareness might feel counterintuitive, but it is meaningful.
6. Acceptance is hard but essential.
7. Letting others know can ease the burden.

What Won’t Help

Denial

One of the first responses reported by postpartum women with scary thoughts is denial.  Maybe if I just pretend it isn’t happening it will go away.  Denial serves to emotionally protect people.  In some instances, it can be temporarily adaptive, as when someone is forced to deal with the reality of unbearable news.  Likewise, this common psychological defense seems to soften the blow of scary thoughts.  However, if over time, when someone refuses to or simply cannot accept the certainty of a situation, denial is viewed as maladaptive.  Because scary thoughts are so often accompanied by feelings of shame and the belief that one is damaged in some way, they often are wished away with fierce determination.  Many women who are having scary thoughts believe it would feel better to pretend they weren’t there.  However, this doesn’t work.

Thought Suppression

Most postpartum women will admit that their initial instinct is to suppress the thought; quite simply, they want to make the bad thought go away by trying not to think about it. The notion that it is unhealthy, and even dangerous, to stifle emotions and bottle them up inside is not a new one.  But the message here is important: The instinctive response to control a scary thought by holding it in or concealing it, typically backfires and makes things feel worse. Persistence creates resistance; the more you try to push thoughts out, the bigger they get.

Panic

Panic and negative thoughts have a reciprocal relationship; that is, one often leads to the other. Knowing this can promote both awareness and management of the scary thoughts. If a postpartum woman is in treatment for anxiety or depression, she will notice that as her anxiety is successfully managed, her scary thoughts will likewise decrease in degree and or severity. This is because it is not the content of the scary thought that is noteworthy; rather, it is the level of distress it causes. Thus, even though a woman may be preoccupied with the content, Why would I have a picture in my head of my baby tumbling down the stairs?– trained clinicians will focus their intervention away from the specific content and toward treatment of the anxiety. 

What Will Help

Distraction

Although it may sound psychologically unsound, distraction has actually been shown to be an effective intervention and has been associated with the reduction of a distressed mood.  At first glance it may seem similar to denial and thus, be counterproductive; however, distraction has been shown to temporarily interrupt the loop of negative thinking. This is not the same thing as avoiding its presence.  Rather, it is a way for you to remain in the stressful situation by coping with it.

If you are terrified of your own scary thoughts, can you really distract yourself from this uncomfortable mental state?  Yes! When you feel fear taking hold, do something that feels manageable. When you engage in work or activity that feels manageable in the present, you minimize your involvement with anxiety-generating thoughts and images and keep the mind actively focused.   Your body is then able to settle down a bit and you will feel more in control.

Here are just a few examples:

It can be pleasing:

• Flipping through a magazine
• Listening to music
• Making a phone call to a friend

It can be absorbing:

• Engaging in work-related projects
• Planting in the garden
• Helping a neighbor
• Making a scrapbook
• Playing computer games

It can be detailed-oriented:

• Doing puzzles or playing games
• Counting the tiles in the ceiling
• Writing
• Organizing
• Counting backward by threess from 100

It can be physica/bodily:

• Snapping a rubber band on your wrist
• Visualizing and repeating the word STOP
• Splashing cold water on face
• Gently slapping your cheek
• Talking or reading aloud

It can be energizing:

• Exercising
• Taking a brisk walk in the sunshine
• Dancing

Breathing, Relaxation and Mindfulness

When the mind is anxious, the rest of the body kicks into high gear.  The heart starts pounding, breathing becomes rapid and shallow, muscles tighten, and one can feel dizzy or disoriented. In addition to the emotional strain and impact on negative thoughts processes, anxiety can deplete energy reserves and cause a host of physical, emotional, and cognitive problems, such as: restlessness, irritability, fatigue, achiness, sleep problems and difficulty concentrating.  It follows then, when one is a chronic worrier, her body remains in a fixed state of tension. This is why so many anti-anxiety strategies emphasize relaxation techniques.  They reverse these reactions.  When in a relaxed state, the heart rate slows down, breathing becomes deeper and slower, muscles loosen, and blood pressure stabilizes.  Learning to breathe in a controlled manner and refine your relaxation response takes time and practice, but it can pay off both in the short and long run.

Journaling. Another self-help strategy that has proven to be useful is writing things down or journaling. Journaling can be a good tool for self-examination and expression.

Support Groups. Support groups for women with postpartum anxiety or depression can help by reducing the debilitating isolation of suffering alone.  It can be enormously comforting to find others sharing common anxieties who can relate to the concerns you are having.

 And finally, since scary thoughts are a symptom of acute anxiety, remember to take care of your S.E.L.F.

Listen to those who tell you to take care of yourself.  Things that seem way to obvious to be helpful can make the difference between a good or bad day.  Keep the S.E.L.F. acronym in mind to help you remember the important elements of self-care:

S LEEP: Lack of sleep will make anxiety and depression worse. You might need to rearrange things or ask for help, but insuring that you get a good night’s sleep is essential to the management of anxiety symptoms. It goes without saying that the baby’s sleep is intricately connected to your ability to get a good nights rest. Studies have shown that when infant sleep is problematic, sleep intervention strategies can benefit both baby and mother.

E XERCISE: Moving your body, even when you don’t feel like it can make a significant difference in the way you feel. Exercise can help diffuse the adrenalin produced by anxiety, ease muscle tension and promote better sleep.   It also enhances well-being by the releasing of endorphins, the chemicals in our brains that are associated with feeling good. It has also been shown to make a significant difference for women with postpartum depression and anxiety.  Even though it is not easy to do when you are overwhelmed and overloaded, small steps can make a difference.  A little bit of exercise is better than none.  Much of the research focuses on exercise and the improvement of depression levels during the postpartum period, but given that exercise works to combat anxiety in general, it makes sense that it could be a advantageous distraction from scary thoughts

L AUGH:  It feels good to laugh. Laughter exercises the abdominal muscles and lungs. During a hearty belly laugh, the heart rate increases quickly. A pioneer in the research of laughter, Dr. William Fry observed in his own experience that after one minute of hearty laughter, his heart rate was equal to the rate he achieved after 10 minutes on a rowing machine. Several studies have demonstrated a significant and physiologic impact on the body’s immune system. Laughter has been shown to lower levels of adrenaline and cortisol – hormones that are released in times of stress – and to raise levels of endorphins. Dr. Fry, claimed it took ten to fifteen strenuous minutes on a rowing machine or stationary bike for his heart rate to reach the aerobic equivalent of just one minute of vigorous laughter!  If you find that laughter is difficult for you, try a “half-smile,” such that you curve the corners of your mouth upward. Your facial expressions are hard-wired to your brain, so turning to corners of your mouth upward sends signals to the brain to feel good.

F OOD: Modifying your diet can help reduce anxiety symptoms:

• Eat more frequent small meals. This can help stabilize blood sugar. Swings in blood sugar can cause symptoms that mimic anxiety, such as lightheadedness.
• Drink lots of water. It has been shown that dehydration can affect your mood.
  
• Complex carbohydrates (whole grains) can increase serotonin, which is associated with feelings of calmness.
• Restrict simple carbohydrates (sugar).
• Consumption of processed foods and high-fat dairy has been linked with higher levels of depression and anxiety.  The recommendation is for an increase of fruit, vegetables and fish.
• Avoid alcohol.
• Avoid caffeine.Caffeine can exacerbate anxiety and interfere with sleep.

If your symptoms of anxiety cause significant distress and interference in your life, then a professional treatment approach might be a better choice for relief of your symptoms. 

Adapted from “Dropping the Baby and Other Scary Thoughts" by K. Kleiman & A. Wenzel (Routledge, 2010)

Confidence is one of those things that can either propel you forward to achieve your dreams, or hold you back for fear of failure. Everyone faces this issue to some extent, at some point in their lives. The questions become, how confident are you, when do you feel the most confident, and how can you build that confidence in times when you need it?

Confidence is really important for most people in most situations. If you’re lacking confidence, it can be difficult to get up the courage to go after what you want, whether it’s giving a presentation at work, asking someone to be your mentor or volunteer for a committee at your child’s school. It impacts people everywhere.

There are two main elements that make up confidence: self-efficacy and self-esteem. When we have a sense of self-efficacy, we have the belief that if we work hard in a certain area we will be able to achieve our goals. This belief helps us take on difficult tasks and keep working through obstacles when we face them. When we have high self-efficacy we are working in what Stanford Professor Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, calls our growth mindset.

Self-esteem is essentially what we think and feel about ourselves, a judgment of our own self-worthiness. Our esteem of ourselves is a predictor of relevant outcomes such as job performance, academic achievements or personal habits. Expert Nathaniel Branden defines self-esteem as “the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness.”

Some people have such healthy levels of confidence that they are bordering on arrogance. Others have a cripplingly low level, which impacts every aspect of their lives. And research tells us that women are prone to lower levels of confidence than men. In the recent The Atlantic cover story The Confidence Gap, highly respected journalists and authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman reported that ‘under qualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in. Overqualified and over prepared, too many women still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect. Or practically perfect.’

And even those who are brimming with confidence in some areas of their lives can be much less so in others. Take Oprah Winfrey for example. Most people would look at Oprah with her commanding presence and global platform and think that such a woman would never have a crisis of confidence. But even Oprah herself has stated that while she thrives being on stage in front of thousands speaking on matters of the heart, emotions, and finding your purpose, give her a problem of a mathematical or technical nature and her confidence goes straight out the window.

The important point to remember is that it’s not an all or nothing game. And the good news is that you can build confidence, both in yourself and in others. Here are five areas you can start working on today to help establish and build your confidence so that it can have a positive flow on effect to every area of your life. 

1. Take stock

Often when we lack confidence we have forgotten about our achievements, the great things we have accomplished, and skills we have developed that make us who we are. Our brains are wired for negativity, meaning that we have a bias to focus on the problems in our lives and what can go wrong. This is great when we need to run away from danger, like that bear in the woods, but not so helpful when we are about to give a major presentation or a speech at the local school. When you feel less than confident about your abilities, take some time to write down a list of your recent wins, things you have done that you are really proud of, or that other people have commented on. It could be anything, from the dinner party you hosted on Saturday night, to finishing your book or PhD. It is also helpful to write down a list of your skills so that you can reflect on them next time you feel that wave of negativity crashing down on you. 

2. Focus on your strengths

Just like we are wired for negativity, we are also geared toward looking at our weaknesses rather than our strengths. There has been significant work done over the past twenty years, pioneered by the Gallup organization, around what happens when we focus on and use our strengths instead of our weaknesses. Our strengths are those things that we are good at and enjoy doing. They give us a rush of energy and take us into the state of flow, where we lose time because we are so absorbed in what we are doing. When we use our strengths our wellbeing, happiness, productivity and engagement at work all increase. When we feel less than confident it can be all too easy to start honing in on our weaknesses. When you need a boost of confidence, try instead to pick one of your strengths and use that to propel you forward. The more you can use your strengths in your days, the greater your confidence will be and the more it will build over time. There is a great free character strengths test you can take through the VIA Institute at viacharacter.org.

3. Watch for your triggers

Often when we feel our confidence waning, or when it just disappears altogether, there is usually a trigger that sets us off. By trying to pinpoint those moments where we feel undermined, we can learn to short-circuit them at the gate. Think of these situations as examples: it’s Monday morning and you have over slept, raced out the door without breakfast and you barely had time to run a brush through your hair let alone find the right jacket for your suit. You arrive feeling less than fabulous when your boss calls a meeting where you need to update her on your latest project. Not feeling great about yourself, you do a less than stellar job and walk out feeling dejected. The trigger here was being rushed and not being physically put together in a way that instilled confidence in yourself (and in others no doubt). Or think about this one: you have that friend that always seems to make a comment about you that gets under your skin just the right amount to leave you feeling undermined and less than sure of yourself. This is another trigger that can zap your confidence. Work out what your triggers are, then set strategies in place to either ensure they don’t happen, or to fast track your way past them.

4. Change your story

A few interrelated things that dramatically impact our confidence is our negative self-talk, our self-limiting beliefs and the stories we tell ourselves.  We have somewhere between 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day. When you really start to tune into them, it can be astonishing to notice just how many of those thoughts are negative stories about ourselves that we would be just horrified if anyone actually heard articulated. Yet we allow these stories to ramble around inside our heads, impacting everything we do. When we can start to tune in to our negative self talk, understand where our self limiting beliefs are coming from, really hear the story and learn to change it when it is not helpful, we can radically impact our confidence levels, and even change our lives. Build quiet time into your days through meditation or mindfulness practice, so that you can really tune in and start to discern the voices. When you here a story or a belief coming up, the first and most helpful question to ask yourself is ‘is this true?’ If it is true and it’s helpful, then there’s no problem. But if it’s not, think about what a more helpful and confidence raising story could be and go with that instead. By doing this over time, you will create new stories that will help you, not harm you.

5. Build your support network.

Who do you have in your corner, who is your best cheerleader? Who in your workplace is your greatest advocate? And which of your friends or family do you love spending time with because they make you feel so great about yourself? Hopefully you have someone in your life that makes you feel like the very best version of yourself. You just feel that little bit taller, brighter and shinier when you are around them. These are the type of people you want to surround yourself with as much as possible, and certainly they are the people you want to call when you need a boost of confidence. Think about who in your life can play the role of cheerleader and supporter. It could be your best friend, your boss, your mum or even your child. When you need that little extra boost before a job interview, a big meeting or perhaps even a date, your support team can be invaluable to help get you through. If you don’t have someone you can call on, or they aren’t available at your critical moment then build yourself a confidence toolkit. Your toolkit could include a favorite song that you blast as loud as you can and dance around your living room. It could be a favorite piece of clothing or pair of shoes that make you feel great. Or it could be that fabulous red lipstick or spicy aftershave. Have these things ready and on hand when you need them. And even if you do have your best friend on speed dial, having your favorite things ready to go can only add to your confidence inducing state. The more tools the merrier.

Confidence is a muscle you can build. It doesn’t matter where you are starting from, just that you move forward with positive intention and know the direction in which you are going. Start small. Little successes in increasing your confidence can make a big difference over time, and you will grow as you go. Use the strategies here and you may find that over time your confidence blooms like a beautiful rose, and it will be a magical sight to behold for all around you.

Follow these 8 steps to enhance your confidence levels:

1. When you feel most confident, what are you doing?

2. When you feel you lack confidence, what are the triggers? Try and pin point the moments or situations that undermine your confidence and write them down.

3. Our confidence often suffers due to stories we tell ourselves. What are your stories that come up when you are lacking confidence?

4. When you have identified your story, ask yourself ‘is this true’ and write down your answers. Do this for each story that you have identified as a confidence robber.

5. What are the new stories you need to create for yourself that will replace the old limiting beliefs?

6. Write down a list of your achievements, skills and key wins over the past 12 months. Use this as a source of strength when you need a confidence boost.

7. Who in your support system sees you as the best version of yourself? How can you utilize these people as a resource when you need a confidence boost?

8. What are some of the small things you can integrate into your day to give yourself a boost? Think about things that add to your confidence like getting your hair or makeup done, a particular outfit, a lucky bracelet, or a certain way you give a presentation. 

This has been an excerpt from my new ebook Rise and Shine: Creating the Career and Life You Love. Get your copy here.

In the age of social media, allegations that had been swept under the rug for decades have come out blazing, and it seems that every week, a new woman—and more than one celebrity figure—has come out and disclosed that she, too, was a victim of Bill Cosby. I think the tally to date is somewhere in the ballpark of at least 20 women coming forward. It appears that a core feature of his M.O. included drugging his victims, targeting youthful women who were starting out in the entertainment industry, and using his clout to silence them in the aftermath of his sexual assaults.

While I am uninterested in discussing these revelations from the perspective of what this means for Bill Cosby’s legacy (tarnished and over much?) or the merit behind the every burgeoning list of victims (if you still think he is innocent, it is called denial, folks), I do think, for a lack of a better expression, this could be a “teachable moment” regarding how many sexual predators operate.

The most recent headline has been particularly stunning for the African American community, as one of the most prominent early models in the industry, Beverly Johnson, has shared a striking account of an encounter with Cosby where he drugged her and likely would have done more had she not reacted so swiftly upon realizing his scheme (her recent first person account in Vanity Fair is devastating). Her description brings to the forefront the role power plays for sexual predators, and in particular, for repeat offenders.

If ever there was a question as to the motives behind rape, the Cosby case brings to the forefront that sexual assault and rape is not about sex, it is first and foremost about power, and specifically for the perpetrators, about using force, both physical and psychological, to dominate their targets.

Interestingly, in the account that Johnson relays, it is her swift reaction to Cosby once she realizes he has drugged her coffee and her incessant repeating of “you are a motherfucker” that appeared to stop him from actually assaulting her once she became compromised (Johnson, 2014). In other words, she overturns the script by making it clear to Cosby before she loses consciousness that she knows what he is up to, and that she will go down fighting. Despite her being spared from assault, after attempting to confront Cosby once after their encounter, in the aftermath she ultimately remained silent. Johnson (2014) shares:

Still I struggled with how to reveal my big secret, and more importantly, what would people think when and if I did? Would they dismiss me as an angry black woman intent on ruining the image of one of the most revered men in the African American community over the last 40 years? Or would they see my open and honest account of being betrayed by one of the country’s most powerful, influential, and beloved entertainers? (page 2)

Her doubts in the aftermath of the drugging incident sadly forecasts that accusers of rape are the ones who are questioned and oftentimes harshly scrutinized after allegations surface, and if the suspect is someone as powerful and beloved as Cosby was, an even larger likelihood of victim blaming could prevail. The story may have ended there, but thankfully, as the floodgates have opened, she is finally able to share her story. Sadly, Johnson joins the growing list of Cosby’s victims who continue to be questioned and dissected by the media and there persists those voices that remain vigilant in protecting his fall from grace. Johnson (2014) continues with:

Finally, I reached the conclusion that the current attack on African American men has absolutely nothing to do at all with Bill Cosby. He brought this on himself when he decided he had the right to have his way with who knows how many women over the last four decades. If anything, Cosby is distinguished from the majority of black men in this country because he could depend on the powers that be for support and protection. (p.2)

Indeed, it was Cosby’s role as America’s sweetheart and his enduring power in Hollywood for decades that enabled the silence of so many women to persist for way too long. How ironic that it finally took a comedian to stand up and call Cosby for what he was, and then, of course, the swift tide of social media did the rest.

But I digress-to return to the original point of repeat offenders, for those of you still shocked by the ever growing list of women alleging Cosby’s brutality, rest assured that unfortunately, this is an all too common finding regarding sexual assault and rape in particular. Sexual predators are often repeat offenders—particularly those with the power (and often arrogance) to continue to commit these heinous acts without detection. The very type of disposition that facilitates such violence oftentimes includes a sense of entitlement, and that feature does not typically go away, particularly when perpetrators get away with their crimes against women. Indeed, in reflecting on research related to another timely headline (that of sexual assaults against women on college campuses), 9 out of 10 of these assaults is committed by serial rapists (Gustafson, 2014). Similar findings have emerged regarding sexual assaults and rapes in the armed forces (see: The Invisible War).

So no, naysayers, it isn’t a “female conspiracy” when after allegations against a suspect regarding sexual assault become public that other accusers break their silence and join the ranks—it just means that other women who have been victimized feel safety in numbers and the support to come forward and share their similar experiences being targeted by the same man. While allegations by one or two women may be discarded based on “character deficiencies” of the accusers, it is harder to discount an entire chorus of women who report similar assaults and can corroborate other testimony given by victims. Indeed, “troubling stories of sexual predators committing multiple assaults are actually not that unusual...[researchers] say the overwhelming majority of rapes on college campuses are committed by repeat offenders” (Gustafson, 2014, para 20).

In other words, those who commit sexual assault and get away with it—particularly when academic institutions sweep allegations under the rug or for other reasons like celebrity, those in the know remain complicit in these crimes—raise the likelihood that the perpetrators will be repeat offenders. If there was ever an argument for harsh sentencing against sexual predators, this would be it.

Johnson, B. (2014, December 11). Bill Cosby Drugged Me. This Is My Story. Vanity Fair. Retrieved on December 11, 2014 from: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/12/bill-cosby-beverly-john...

Gustafson, D. (2014, October 28). Serial rapists commit 9 of 10 campus sexual assaults, research finds. Aljazeera America: Flagship Blog. Retrieved on December 11, 2014 from: http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-...

For more information about sexual assaults against men and women in the armed forces, consider viewing The Invisible War. For more information, visit: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/invisible-war/

Copyright Azadeh Aalai 2014

"We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare."

— William Butler Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War”

I’ve never made it through an entire episode of “24.” Just a couple of minutes of Jack Bauer’s sneering snarl is enough to break my resolve. Everyone breaks eventually, you know. The unabashed celebration of torturing foreign “terrorists” feels too much like brain-washing to me.

One of the show’s co-creators, Cyrus Nowrasteh, whose father was an advisor to the torture-happy Shah of Iran,[1] explained the show’s Cheney-esque rationale to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker: “Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. . . .  It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.”

But of course, this isn’t a “fantasy” so much as an irrational, yet emotionally satisfying justification for a reality that was, until very recently, considered criminal by all “civilized” nations. In this, as in so many other parts of American life, the televised fantasy prepares the public to accept radical reconfigurations of reality. And accept it, they do. Researchers have found that public acceptance of torture has increased since they started polling on the issue in 2004. Mayer points out that before the attacks of September 11^th, “fewer than four acts of torture appeared on prime-time television each year,” but that, “now there are more than a hundred.” Perhaps even more significant is the fact that pre-9/11, the torturers were almost always the bad guys. But these days, it’s the “good guys” who are pulling out fingernails.

Ubiquitous Fox commenter and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham cites the popularity of “24” as indicating political assent to America’s discarding of decades of international law prohibiting torture, noting that “[People] love Jack Bauer. In my mind, that’s as close to a national referendum that it’s O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.” Personally, she said, she found it “soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists.”

What sort of trauma must one have suffered to find watching torture “soothing?”

[1] The Shah was installed by the CIA in 1953 after Iran’s first democratically elected government was overthrown in “Operation Ajax.” The Shah’s U.S. trained secret police, the SAVAK, were notorious for their brutal torture of citizens, which propelled the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which propelled the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, which fueled anti-American sentiment, and so on, all the way back around to “24.”

* Adapted from an essay I wrote a few years ago called, "Being Dexter Morgan."

Community Colleges are charged with training the future workforce yet; many see its primary role as that of transferring students to four-year colleges and universities. That is but one focus of the community colleges, the other equally important responsibility is Career Technical Education (CTE).

In its initiative, Putting America to Work, The American Association of Community Colleges recognizes that if our country is going to maintain its economic competitiveness in the global marketplace, America needs to address the talent shortage and skill gaps of our workforce. Through CTE, community colleges are the proven solution to help American industry fill those gaps. In response, some colleges are now recruiting some students still in high school to begin training the workforce for tomorrow.

One such pioneering plan is known as the California Career Pathways Trust, established in 2013 by the California State Legislature to prepare students for the 21st century workplace. Through Putting America to Work, community colleges are now establishing working partnerships to create a pipeline of skilled workers… starting with training in high school.

The Ventura County Community College District, which includes Moorpark, Oxnard and Ventura Colleges, is engaged in a regional consortium centered on CTE. Over the next five years, seven high school districts, three adult schools, and over 50 employers/community partners in Ventura County will take part in “Ventura County Innovates” to develop 67 separate career pathways for students. Using grant dollars, the consortium is designed to better prepare our future workers and leaders for local workforce, provide work-based opportunities for students and address skill shortages in high-demand, high growth industries/occupations. Over the next five years, the project will create streamlined career “pathways” that let students begin studying for careers while still in high school and transition seamlessly into community college. The consortium will provide internships, job shadowing and other kinds of hands-on experiences to help prepare students for real-life work. The main focus of the Career Pathways Trust centers on highly skilled technical careers such as manufacturing, engineering and biotechnology where there is increasing industry demand for workers. Through this project community colleges are continuing to foster their mission by collaborating with local businesses to ensure worker skills gaps are closed by teaching students the modern skills employers are looking for. The California Pathways Project is committed to preparing and training our students for measureable success with 21st century skills and stands as a great example of Putting America to Work!

As the Nation recovers from the depressive economy of the first decade of the 21st century we are growing again and now that the economy is improving. Hopefully, the California Legislature will provide stable funding for the next three years so that we can plan properly to serve our students. Access, student success and equity in terms of serving our various constituencies is our strategy. Increasingly effective career and occupational programs are a priority for us.

We know that those who earn certificates and degrees, also earn more money leading to an enhanced standard of living. Putting America to work includes traditional students with whom we all identify. It also includes those with special needs such as foster youth, veterans, retreading adults changing careers and within these cohorts, serving those with different cultural backgrounds. Examples include Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and those with various disabilities that can benefit from various programs. Our 1200 plus community colleges, now located in almost every congressional district provide the nation a special vehicle for serving our workforce. Since I happen to be an administrator in California, I have described our state situation. The need is national and the opportunity to put America to work is nationwide.

Author

Dr. Jamillah Moore is Chancellor of the Ventura County (CA) Community College District.

Email: jmoore9096@gmail.com

We flirt and woo, mind our manners, wear our sexiest best. But once in the bedroom, it sometimes seems that our very best efforts don’t always produce quite the fireworks we’d hoped for. Despite the classic song lyrics, the love we take isn’t always equal to the love we make. Why not? 

It turns out that bouts of less-than-rollicking romping are not only quite normal in long-term relationships; they actually help keep us strongly connected to our partners – even more so than if the sex was consistently stellar. 

Think about it. Who among us doesn’t love the thrill of a crap shoot? Our nerves tingle with anticipation. The stakes feel high. We roll the dice and reap our reward – sometimes. If we win, more often than not, we roll again. And if we lose – you guessed it – we roll again anyway most of the time. 

That’s because a crap game keeps us almost irresistibly hooked by its very nature – and by ours. Payoffs are unpredictable, delivered on what is known as a variable schedule of reward. Precisely the kind of schedule that most strongly maintains any learned behavior. 

Sex works the same way, especially between committed partners. One never knows just when the lucky numbers are going to turn up. 

Not only that, but sex has another form of variability built into it as well – a variable magnitude of reinforcement – because the sensations we experience, both physical and emotional, vary as well. And widely so. 

Enough, it seems, to keep us coming back for more. Depending upon which of the many surveys one happens to be consulting, we humans enjoy sexual intimacy somewhere on the order of one to four times per week (at the higher end of the scale) or per month (at the lower end). 

We devote a good deal of mental, emotional, and cultural stock-in-trade to sex and sexuality. And yet, our sexual escapades are hardly Herculean when compared to those of other animals. 

Dolphins in the wild, for example, spend about 30 percent of their time in sexual play. That’s not bad for a carnivorous species that relies on the time-consuming vocation of hunting in order to survive. As anyone who has ever gone after a paycheck knows, we are a hunting species too and, yet, our level of sexual achievement doesn’t tally to anywhere near the 30 percent mark. 

Just think of it. 

If we were to even come close to matching the dolphin libido, we would be spending nearly four months a year in Dionysian revelry. On a two-week vacation, we’d be holed up in our hotel rooms for more than four entire days. During seven-day weeks, our weekends – all of them – would be devoted to sensual pleasure. And during a standard work week, we’d be calling in love sick for a day and a half out of every five. 

Does that mean dolphins know something we don’t about the crap shoot of love? Could be. They’ve been around for 55 million years, after all. They’re bound to have picked up a trick or two that we evolutionary upstarts have yet to discover. But so far, not a one of them has kissed and told. 

Copyright © Seth Slater, 2014

Teaser Image: Google Images/en.wikipedia.org

I’ve been wrestling with a thorny issue recently: “Why do some people persist in snatching defeat from the very jaws of victory?”

It’s a question raised by our son-in-law Jason’s recent passing. He died at the age of 43, and the cause of death was acute alcoholism. He left behind a loving wife and 7-year-old daughter, a two-story house that he paid cash for, and more money than was frankly good for him. He always said that he wouldn’t live past 45, and that became a reality this past Nov. 18.

In short, he had everything to live for, but he chose to die alone with a bottle.

At his memorial service last week in a big Catholic church in Stratford, Conn., Father Tom discarded the usual platitudes and surprised the mourners by wondering aloud why Jason couldn’t win his battle with the bottle.

While there’s undoubtedly a big genetic component to alcoholism, Father Tom said most people drink to numb the pain of abusive childhoods or conflict/wounded soul as adults. While there are avenues for their love to shine through, they’re in so much pain that it’s rare, and directed at the “innocent” – typically kids. Numb and guilt-ridden due to repeated failures, they isolate themselves and push others away.

That pretty much described our son-in-law.

He wasn’t a vet, but he was raised by alcoholic parents who neglected him. He often talked of being abused as a child, a situation later confirmed by a cousin who lived nearby. And a therapist confirmed a couple of years ago that Jason had PTSD levels that were off the chart.

After the memorial service, I visited the rectory to talk with Father Tom, who explained that men cannot fight this illness alone, but need God’s help and strength. He said we all have God’s love inside us, but that some people are in such pain that they can’t allow it to show through them.

Finally, Father Tom invited me to sit in at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that evening at the parish school. I did, and several of the men talked about relatives who needed help but wouldn’t admit that they were alcoholics.

That didn’t fit Jason. He’d been in and out of 21-day rehab programs for the past couple of years, and he admitted being an alcoholic. He also said he could quit drinking … but never wanted to.

Several people at the AA meeting mentioned that they only quit drinking when they hit the end of the line and were afraid that they would die if they continued drinking. But Jason had already been diagnosed with cardiomyopathy and had had a seizure. His doctors had advised him to quit drinking because, with a heart so severely damaged by alcohol, he would not survive the next heart attack.  Did he not care, did he not believe he would actually die, or was he just powerless over this disease?

Others at the AA meeting talked about enablers who always picked up the pieces and shielded the alcoholic from the consequences of his own actions. That fit in some ways because his father had always bought Jason’s way out of trouble. For a long time, it fit with our daughter as well, until she was forced to leave because she couldn’t watch the way alcohol was destroying him and she knew she needed to protect their daughter from witnessing the devastating and ultimately terminal effects alcohol was having on her father.

For a 43 year old man who had everything to live for, was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Was it that he didn’t feel that he deserved to be happy?

That comes close to the homeostasis theory, which holds that hormones in the body are most comfortable in the state that they’re used to. A happy person looks for reasons to be happy because his hormones are comfortable there. Ditto a depressed person. It’s possible to break out of that cycle, but it takes energy and determination to break out of a depressive cycle and people in pain usually lack that energy. It’s kind of like a chicken raised in a coop that is afraid to venture outside the barn doors when they’re suddenly opened? Was Jason so familiar with failure that he couldn’t venture out to face true happiness?

I don’t know the answer (nor does my daughter, Sarah, who helped me write this). We’d welcome any thoughts you might have.

Just like the rest of Americans, healthcare providers carry weight biases. That means that your physician, nurse, dietician, psychologist, and fitness professional may hold discriminatory attitudes about fat people. Studies consistently document weight bias in healthcare providers, including the tendency to view obese* patients as lazy, lacking in self-control, undisciplined, and noncompliant with treatment. Furthermore, they believe that these traits are the causes of obesity.

So, why should you care about your doctor’s beliefs? Because they effect your treatment. Studies reliably find an inverse relationship between body mass index (BMI) and providers’ respect for a patient; this means that the more you weigh, the less respect your doctor has for you. Less respect means worse care. Studies show that providers spend less time with obese patients. Many obese patients have stories of incorrect diagnoses in which the doctor was so focused on the patient’s weight that the doctor failed to identify the real cause of the patient’s ailment. These anecdotes include joint pain that was attributed to excess weight rather than a broken bone, shortness of breath attributed to excess weight rather than asthma, severe back pain attributed to excess weight rather than a pinched nerve from a car accident, and even missed cancer diagnoses. Most fat patients have experienced being diagnosed as “obese” at their doctor’s office, while the ailments that brought them in for treatment remain undiagnosed and untreated.

These experiences lead to perhaps an even bigger problem; when you are confronted with a judgmental shame-inducing environment every time you go to your doctor’s office, you are likely to avoid going to your doctor. Obese patients are less likely to go to the doctor for preventative care and non-emergency issues.  When you do finally get to the doctor’s office, things usually have gotten pretty bad.

Weight bias contributes to obese patients being:

• Less likely to seek preventative medical treatment
• More likely to wait until medical problems have progressed to seek treatment
• More likely to receive inadequate medical care when they finally do seek treatment

I wonder how these factors influence the poor health outcomes that are so commonly attributed to obesity? 

In writing this article, I am reminded of the following quotes: 

“First, do no harm” –Hippocrates

“The unexamined life is not worth living” –Socrates

We are all bombarded with fat-hating mesages every day. Medical providers are no more immune than anyone else to internalizing these messages and acting on these beliefs, whether they are conscious or not, intentional or not. We all need to examine our biases to avoid doing harm. 

Are providers who specialize in eating disorders any less fat-phobic than other medical professionals? For the answer, read my next post: “Is my therapist fat-phobic?” 

*I use the terms “obese” and “obesity” in this post to correspond with the language used by the authors of the study. For a discussion of language to describe weight, please read my post “Is Fat the New F-Word?”

Reference: Puhl R., & Heuer C. (2009). The stigma of obesity: A review and update. Obesity, 17: 941-64. 

To learn more about Dr. Conason and Mindful Eating, please visit www.drconason.com

Heather Boerner is an award-winning journalist and author of Positively Negative: Love, Pregnancy, and Science’s Surprising Victory Over HIV. In her generous interview with me, Heather goes into detail about HIV and parenthood and the advances in medicine that have given hope to couples in which one partner is HIV positive, as well as adoption.  Heather’s work can be found in The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere. Contact her and learn more about her work at www.heatherboerner.com.

Meredith: What should the general public understand about HIV and parenthood? How about HIV and pregnancy? 

Heather Boerner: The first thing that people need to understand about HIV and parenthood is that it’s a safe and responsible option. It used to be, before the advent of HIV medications (called highly active antiretroviral treatment or HAART), people with HIV progressed to AIDS quickly, and I think people still think that someone with HIV having a child means they will die early and abandon that child. That used to be the sad truth. I spoke to a doctor who has worked with women with HIV for decades, and she remembers women tearfully making the decision to terminate pregnancies because they knew the child would be born with HIV, and probably not live long—and they knew that they probably wouldn’t live long enough to parent that child. But that’s not the way it is today. Far from it. 

Today, it’s really possible for people with HIV to live to a normal life span, fall in love, and create a family. It’s safe and responsible.

For years, the primary option, and a good one, was adoption. But there were others, if the woman in the couple was HIV negative. They could use donor sperm so the woman could carry the child. They could take the sperm of an HIV-infected man and submit it to a process called sperm washing, which separates the sperm from the seminal fluid (which is where the HIV lives), and then use the HIV-free sperm to do any manner of reproductive technology, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) or intrauterine insemination (IUI). Or they could go one step further and do a process called IVF with ICSI, in which a doctor would inject a single sperm into a single egg. HIV-affected couples have been adopting for years, and been doing sperm washing and IVF or IUI since the 1990s. But today, some HIV-affected couples can also have unprotected sex to have a healthy, HIV free baby. That’s what my book is about.

Here’s why this is now possible: HAART can reduce the amount of virus in the body to vanishing—literally. Doctors call this an undetectable viral load. One doctor has described it this way: You put a drop of blood from an HIV-uninfected person next to the drop of blood of someone with HIV but with a suppressed viral load, and they will look the same. You won’t be able to find the virus anywhere in there. The same, roughly, goes for genital fluids. And that means that both HIV-positive women can have babies without passing the virus on to their babies, and HIV-positive men can have sex with their wives without condoms, conceive a child and not pass on the virus to mother or child. They call this treatment as prevention. There’s an additional level of protection, though, for the HIV-negative partner if they plan to have unprotected sex with their HIV-positive partner for conception. The Food and Drug Administration in 2012 approved the HIV drug Truvada for HIV prevention. The idea is that the HIV-negative partner takes the pill every day and it actually prevents any HIV she is exposed to from replicating and spreading in her system, essentially protecting her from infection. 

The important thing is that both partners need to have good health insurance and the HIV-positive partner needs to be getting good treatment, adherent to medication, and watch for things like stomach flus that can interfere with the ability of HAART to work. Only about a quarter of people with HIV have suppressed viral loads, but what’s exciting to me is that science shows this is possible. 

Meredith: How about for adoption—both for the adoptive parent and the individual placing the child for adoption?

Heather Boerner:I have talked to an HIV-affected couple that’s adopted  and their personal experience was positive and relatively simple—meaning that the husband’s HIV status had little to do with the process. Of course, we know that adoption is a very individualized process, so others experiences may vary. I do know that the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act makes discrimination against HIV-affected couples in adoption illegal. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen  though. The best bet is to talk to a network of HIV-affected couples to see what agencies are adoption-friendly. The best place to find such networks is on a site like TheBody.com, which is a well respected clearinghouse of HIV information.

From the other side, it’s also possible to adopt a child with HIV. I’m afraid I can’t provide a lot of detail about what that process is like from the perspective of the person placing the child for adoption, however.

Meredith:  Is their own HIV status something the adoptive parents disclose on adoption applications? Does it fall under HIPAA?

Heather Boerner: HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is really an act that pertains to doctors, not patients. The doctors aren’t allowed to give out your information without your permission. So you’d have to permit your doctor to release your information to an adoption agency. However, an adoption agency is likely to ask about your health history and may ask for a medical exam. The ACLU recommends being honest about your status on your application, and clarifying what having HIV means for you—are you in treatment? Do you have an undetectable viral load? Has it been undetectable for six months, nine months, a year or more? Because HIV stigma is still a very real thing, people may not understand how much HIV has changed. Go through the adoption process anyway. There’s no reason to hold back on your dreams just because some agencies (agencies you will not work with) won’t understand. Seek out the ones that do. 

Meredith: Where should HIV-affected couples start if they would like to adopt? Can you list some resources?

Heather Boerner: Absolutely. I’ve peppered a few recommendations throughout this discussion, but I’ll add a few more. By far, TheBody.com is the best resource for HIV-related information. The message boards are helpful, and often, the site will have doctors and researchers answer questions. The Bay Area Perinatal AIDS Center at UC San Francisco is an excellent source for information about parenthood for HIV-affected couples. Their emphasis is on biological children, but I know the staff there and they are helpful, knowledgeable and, if they don’t know, they will help you find someone who does. The Positive Women’s Network is filled with HIV-positive women who can share information and resources. And finally, I feel like I have to give a shout out to both the HIV-Negative Spouses Blog and my book Positively Negative: Love, Pregnancy, and Science’s Surprising Victory Over HIV. Both will help you understand what it’s like to have HIV today, and what it’s like to be an HIV-positive parent.

The holidays come sprinkled with promises of “brightness” and “cheer.” It’s a universally meaningful time for millions of people, and I would argue that this sense of connectedness is a large part of what makes the season seem sort of magical. Yet, for many people, the winter months don’t always live up to their heartwarming reputation. According to a study for American Psychological Association, 26 percent of people feel lonely over the holidays and 38 percent reported an increase in stress.

A lot of people aren’t able to make it home to see their loved ones. Others are enclosed by herds of relatives and still feel a sense of isolation. No matter what your situation, it is NOT uncommon to feel lonely in these months. Going home can stir up emotions we’ve swept under the rug or may not even be aware of. We’re often swung back into settings where a lot of complex memories took place. Some may be joyful but others are painful.

Many children feel lonely or outcast at some point in their development. In many homes, kids are seen by their parents or early caretakers as good, bad, sharp, slow, burdensome, worrisome, disappointing or destined for greatness. These labels and expectations can hurt us in conscious and unconscious ways throughout our development. When we’re thrown back into that childhood setting, or around people we grew up with, we sometimes feel like kids again on the inside, re-experiencing old feelings or just not feeling ourselves. Dr. Dan Siegel refers to this phenomenon as “getting lost in familiar places.” This vulnerability is all the more reason to practice self-compassion and to be wary of old familiar hurtful ways we can think about ourselves. With that in mind, here are a few strategies that can help you stay yourself at the close of your year and on into the next.

1.       Stop expecting perfection

Many of us tend to have a picture in our heads of what the ideal holiday should be. We expect it to be as perfectly polished as the shiny ornaments that surround us. The frenzied build-up inherently sets us up for a certain amount of let-down. This is particularly observable in children. After Thanksgiving, my nieces confessed to me that they actually felt a little depressed following our family’s annual festivities. Thanksgiving is a big deal in our house. We get dressed up, and our big, extended family celebrates the way one would a wedding or gala. The whole day brings a lot of happiness, but much of that is in the preparation: cooking together, setting the tables, posting a large tent in our yard. After that, the kids felt the evening itself just went by too quickly. No matter how great everything turned out, it couldn’t quite live up to the excitement they’d felt.

This is a feeling a lot of people have about everything from presents to interactions with family members. “Maybe old wounds will finally heal, and all we will feel is warmth and love.” We have a fantasy of everything going smoothly, which leaves us all the more crushed when there turn out to be bumps in the road. Try to take pleasure in the little things without attaching too much weight to things you can’t control or that don’t have that much to do with the life you’ve created for yourself in the present.

2.       Stop evaluating

The close of a year tends to be a time of reflection. We may feel a natural sadness that comes with both our losses and our gains. However, there is a fine line between self-reflection and self-evaluation. It’s one thing to look back on our year with curiosity and an interest in any changes we’d make in the future. It’s another thing to beat ourselves up over our shortcomings and to judge ourselves like a cold critic scrutinizing a performance.

With so many social gatherings, it’s easy to start comparing ourselves to others:

Everyone is in a relationship. Why are you still alone? It’s so humiliating!

Look how successful he is. You’ll never have an important career.

She is so together. You’re such a mess.

You don’t fit in anywhere. You’re just different. 

These “critical inner voices” make up an ongoing dialogue that reinforces the basic belief that we are not good enough. This inner critic makes us feel worthless and unlike others in some negative sense. It encourages us to be alone, then disparages us for being a loner. It contributes to our loneliness by constantly reminding us we are unworthy of the life we desire and by alienating us from those we care about.

Get to know this inner critic, because the more we can separate our real selves from its destructive point of view, the better off we will be. Because this inner critic started forming early in our lives based on ways we were seen in our family, expect it to get a little louder when we enter settings from our past. Stay determined in your mission to ignore this cruel coach, and don’t listen to its awful advice. Remember it is not a representation of who you really are and will only work to sabotage you.

3.       Spend time with your family of choice

During the holidays, you may feel obligated to spend time with certain people who don’t make you feel that great. Whether you choose to do that or not, it’s valuable to set aside some time to be with your family-of-choice. This can be an intimate group of friends, your kids, your partner or anyone who makes you feel good and more in touch with yourself. Carve out time for the people, places and activities that make you feel the most like you, the people who make you laugh, think or feel in ways that are meaningful to you.

4.       Volunteer

If you’re far away from the people you care about or are feeling disconnected, seek out scenes in which you’re sharing something, even with complete strangers. Volunteering is one of the best things you can do for yourself when you’re feeling down. It forces you to think outside yourself and share a project with others. Think of a cause that matters to you and take some time to be a part of it. Generosity offers a natural way for us to feel good about ourselves. Plus, being part of a team instantly creates a sense of camaraderie over a shared concern.

5.       Stay in the moment, even when it makes you sad

Sometimes, it takes being in a room full of people to make us feel our most alone. No matter how many people we pack into the car with us to take to the party, every one of us is our own unique individual person, living and breathing on our own. We all have moments, where we feel a sense of our profound aloneness. When we contemplate our existence, we can expect it to stir us up. The sense of time passing, which can be brought about by a year ending, is always a sobering realization.

Not every moment will be filled with joy, and even those that are can carry with them a certain amount of poignancy at life’s preciousness. New Year’s reminds us of years past. It shines light on the faces of those we’ve lost. It tells us we are older, maybe wiser and far more aware that time isn’t something we can grip. We don’t have to sink with this feeling. We are better off letting ourselves feel whatever we feel. Sadness can come in waves, and when it passes, we’re often left with a sense of peace and vitality. When we try to drown it out we wind up also numbing ourselves to the many pleasures life brings.

Too often, we distract ourselves from these deeper feelings by busying our minds with worries or critical inner voices. When a negative thought starts to take flight, like a balloon released from the bunch, try not to drift away with it. Gently bring yourself back to the moment. Then shift your focus outward. Think about what you could offer; this will take you out of your head.

Staying in the moment won’t spare us from any feelings of sadness or loneliness, but it encourages us to practice patience and self-compassion. It helps us to feel whatever is really going on in our lives. If we sense that our inner critic is taking over, luring us into self-destructive behaviors, we can kindly bring our attention back to what is important to us. We can take actions that reconnect us to our experiences and the people around us. We can open our eyes to possibilities and consciously create the holiday that will mean something to us.

Read more from Dr. Lisa Firestone at PsychAlive.org

There are many things that can keep us from happiness; mine is delayed gratification or “Someday I’ll…” I remember when I first started working and seeing clients, over 25 years ago, there was a financial planner who had contacted me and told me that if I saved my money and invested it wisely, when I would retire 30 to 40 years in the future I would have enough money that I wouldn’t have to worry about working anymore. I wasn’t necessarily planning on retiring, but I did like the idea of financial freedom. So I remember starting to think about ways that I could save money; putting it into an investment plan so that someday I could have all the time, freedom, and money that I needed to sustain myself and my family so I wouldn’t need to work anymore. I could work but I wouldn’t have to work. I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I’m pretty good at “delayed gratification” and putting things off for the future.

After going through high school I accomplished another 14 years of schooling (2 Masters, a PhD, and 2 years of post-doctoral work) before I even started working full-time in private practice, so I was pretty good about waiting for the future. Unfortunately I was too good at it and in the process of now waiting for retirement I wasn’t living nearly fully as much as I should have been. I was very fortunate that I was able to learn this lesson at a younger age and didn’t miss out on these past 25 years; but, I did have to learn it. I needed to learn how to live now and plan for the future.

I’d like to talk about a very easy way for all of us to do this. How do we live now and plan for the future? It’s really one of the key factors of leading a happy life. If we’re always planning for the future, as I tend to do, then we’re not living in the “now” and living in the now, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, creates a beautiful life. When we look back on our life we can say “Yes, we’re enjoying our retirement age and we enjoyed the journey getting here.”

Now I, perhaps like you, may have long to go before I retire but we don’t want to miss out on living NOW. Let’s talk about how we do that. What’s the key factor in living in the now and really enjoying the journey of life? Here’s something I think you’re going to find really helpful. What we need to do is make sure that every day is a “special” day; a day that we can look back on at the end of the day when we put our heads on our pillows and say “If I don’t wake up tomorrow morning that was a good day!” The truth is we really don’t know if we’re going to wake up tomorrow morning, so it’s important each day to make sure that there are special things throughout our day, today, that make it a beautiful day. It’s not that we don’t plan for the future, but we make sure that if today is our last day it’s a good day. It’s not that we’re going to chuck everything that we invest in and go live a crazy day and then deal with the mess tomorrow. That’s not what I’m talking about. What we are exploring here is making sure that every day is a day worth living; that we’re not counting too much on living a life of “someday I’ll…” and that instead we live each day fully.

I see all too often in so many people all around the world that they’re waiting for that day in the future when they’ll begin living. It’s very simple to do this, to live in the now and make each day worth living. At the beginning of each day and throughout the day say, “How do I make this a beautiful day?” Or have moments throughout the day that are truly wonderful and make this day, when it ends, a very rich and full day. Let me share some of my own examples here and together we’ll explore some of the things that you may do to make your day a beautiful one. Mind you these scenarios do change for me; what I’m doing now may change from what I’m doing six months from now, or even next week. Right now, pretty much every day, these are the things I do that give me pleasure and put a smile on my face so that when I put my head down at the end of the day I say, “This was a good day.”

For me, my family is very important to me.   With my children, I get the benefit of taking them to school every day which is something I really enjoy. With my daughter’s class I get to stay about 15 minutes a day and read to the kids, which is a special time for my daughter and me to share together. I schedule my day such that when I go to work I work a little later so that on my way to work I stop at Laguna Beach and I go for a walk along the beach. Laguna Beach is one of the most beautiful places in the world and I really enjoy watching the waves and ocean every day. There are many other things I do throughout my day. As you know I really enjoy meditating, so I meditate twice a day; once in the morning when I first get up and again in the evening when I go to bed. My eating habits are a little unusual in that I eat “raw” until evening time; meaning that I don’t ever eat anything cooked until evening time, so when I have my morning juice and my afternoon salad I actually really enjoy them. I spend time eating very slowly and enjoying my food.

There are many other things I enjoy doing throughout the day to make it a beautiful day. For example, when I get a break I take a walk. On the weekends we do a lot of family activities together and go on outings. We go on family vacations fairly often. Now again, this may change in a day or it may change in a few weeks. My schedule has readjusted many, many times throughout my life and it will continue to do so. When it readjusts I just find new things to readjust to that will make each day special and beautiful. For example, some day I won’t be taking my kids to school every day. They’ll be off in college or working on their own and then I’ll be doing other things instead of that. It’s just making sure that every day is special. I like being outside, perhaps you do too, so make it a point to be outdoors every day if that works for you. It really is something wonderful for many of us. Listening to beautiful music that’s uplifting and positive can be very healthy. Connecting with friends and just stopping for a moment to talk and socialize can be a very great thing that we do to make our day special. Most things that I do don’t cost me any money at all and yet they often give me the greatest pleasure in being in the moment right now. So find those things that work for you and make sure that they’re part of your life every day.

Now there is a caveat here, something that we all have to deal with and of which we need to be aware. There are things that we do that may seem like they enrich our lives and make our day special but they’re actually very harmful. I’ll give an obvious example of this: addictions. Everyone knows that drugs are very unhealthy for us, but there are people who are addicted to drugs and they’re doing them because they want to have a good time. How we know something isn’t good for us is by their after-effects: what do we feel like after we do it? Does it uplift us? Does it uplift the people around us? Or does it tear us down and maybe even hurt other people in the process of doing our “activity”?

I think the thing that catches a lot of people is the entertainment world. We watch TV shows, movies, and listen to music that, at the end of a long day, can seem enjoyable but they don’t really add anything to our lives. These forms of entertainment may be making fun of people, cutting people down; they’re showing dark images that get planted inside our head or put words in our mind that cut people down that are harmful, that are cruel. Those are things that at the time, like drugs, may seem like something we enjoy doing but we can all tell that they’re not really good for us and they hurt us in the long run. Stay away from those types of things. You have to be the determining factor of what is or isn’t good for you, nobody else can decide for you; but look at how it affects you in the short and long term. Eating is another example. Eating food that can taste so good and so rich can later lead to gout or obesity and in the long run hurt us physically and even emotionally. Instead, finding foods that are good for us and eating them with pleasure is best.

I recall a study that I once read about kids who were put in front of a fridge and were allowed to eat whatever they wanted to. What the scientists found was that the kids ate fairly healthy as long as one particular thing wasn’t present, candy or sweets. When they didn’t have those things available to them the kids ate well. So if we’re eating healthy, then we can find healthy foods to eat and really enjoy them. But, if we are comparing these healthy foods to super rich and sweet foods that we enjoyed before then suddenly these healthy foods don’t taste as good. So readjust yourself and find things that really do have a good effect in the moment as well as a good effect later on.

Now the reverse can also be true. For example, if someone is a couch potato and they start moving around and perhaps walking outside regularly, it may initially cause some pain and soreness; however, a little bit of reasoning will tell us that stretching our bodies, getting outside, spending time in nature and moving around is really good for us. There may be a slight adjustment period but once we start doing things that are good for us, things that put a smile on our face and make us say, “This was a good day. I enjoyed today”, they are going to be beneficial to us in the long run.

Every day in our life is not going to be blissful. It’s just that if this is the last day of our life, if we don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring (which ultimately we don’t), then what we can work towards is enjoying today. Making sure that every day has beauty in it, has things that make it beautiful so when we look back on the day we can say “This was a good day”, is what our key to happiness is going to be. If we do this, if we make sure that we can rest our heads each night and say those words, then we will find happiness in the now. If we can do this daily and stop putting things off until “someday I’ll…”, what we end up doing is stringing together a wonderful life. We have a wonderful life that is created by a series of happy days that, when they are threaded together, we can look back on and say, “This was, is, and will be, a beautiful life.”

It’s in our hands whether or not we have a happy life. All we have to do is right now, today, decide on making it a good day and letting tomorrow worry about tomorrow while focusing on How do I make sure TODAY that there are pockets, there are moments throughout this day, that are beautiful and I really enjoy; that will put a smile on my face and maybe even on the faces of others around me? If we do this instead of saying “Someday I’ll live life” what we end up doing is living life now and we find that we create the happiness we are all looking for.

It’s very simple; all we have to do is actually DO IT today, and then the next day, and then the next and we will find that we’ve strung together a life that is happy. Imagine it like this: We have a bow and arrow and we have a target. The further we stand away from the target and aim at it, the harder it is to hit. So if we get right up to the target and aim at the center of that circle, which represents happiness, then we’re going to hit it! Being very close to the target represents “today” while being far away is like saying, “Someday I’ll” and we can hit that bull’s eye throughout the day. The further we move back, the harder it is to hit that happiness target; but if we stand right up to it then we’re probably going to hit it. We don’t know what the future holds. We can aim towards that target but we don’t know how often we’ll have a chance to aim at it; so each day if we stand right in front of it and aim, then we can hit the target and achieve our happiness. If we walk up to the target each and every day then we will become the grand master of archery, the grand master of hitting that target, the grand master of happiness.

Happiness is very easy to find as long as we look for it right here, right now. Let’s focus on being happy today. That is a target we can all hit. Tomorrow when we get up, we’ll do the same thing again. Happiness is something we can all have right now.

There is a fine line between thinking positive and being in denial and everyone struggles with it.

It's especially a struggle when you're also struggling with a situation in which someone needs a lot of care all the time.

Thinking positive might sound like this: We don’t need help at home. We can handle it. We want to preserve [fill in the blank’s] independence.

Being in denial might sound like this: We don’t need help at home. We can handle it. We want to preserve [fill in the blank’s] independence.

The sound the same, don’t they?

Unfortunately, for many people, the call for help or the decision to call comes very late in the game. Late as in, once they realize they need help the person likely needed help for many months prior. They were trying to think positive but in this case their denial masqueraded as thinking positive.

How can you tell the difference? In other words, how can you tell when it’s time to take action and get some help—homecare, counseling, or both?

The following are but a few clues:

1. Caregiver is resentful.
2. Caregiver talks nonstop about all the problems; caregiver is spinning.
3. Patient refuses help even though patient’s needs are too much for caregiver (see #1 and #2). If this is the case, caregiver likely needs encouragement to get support for him/herself to figure out how to get his/her needs met and continue to care for the patient.
4. Caregiver’s health is getting worse as a result of the stress.
5. People say to caregiver: “You know, you really could use some help.”
6. Caregiver is constantly saying to no one in particular: “I really could use some help.”
7. Caregiver is constantly saying:  “I have no one to help me.”
8. Caregiver is constantly saying: “If only I was lucky enough to have some help.”
9. Patient is saying to caregiver: “Let’s get some help,” to which caregiver replies: “I can do it, I can handle it” (though he/she really can’t).
10. Patient’s world and caregiver’s world have narrowed so much that they only have each other. Though someone is ill or even homebound there is still a way to open up their world: have friends or neighbors visit/read books/listen to music/pray/meditate with patient/watch TV or videos while caregiver gets time to do what he or she would like to do to recharge.  

These are but a few scenarios. Any sound familiar? If help is needed, a good place to start is by calling local senior centers, hospitals or home care agencies as well as adult day healthcare centers where you can speak to a social worker or resources specialist to help figure out needs and see what is available.

Books about famed writers, or collections of conversations with them, are always seductive to writers. How open will this famous person be? What heretofore hidden thoughts or behaviors are going to be revealed?

What follows are a few creative insights from a roundup of four books consisting of conversations, letters, and a biography. The famous subject of each is someone you may think you already know from reading their creative work, but read on.

Conversations with Steve Martin, edited by Robert E. Kapsis (The University Press of Mississippi):

The following excerpt is from the chapter “The Pleasure of His Company: The Writing World of Steve Martin” by Jeff Zaleski, first published in The Publishers Weekly:

Martin professes to love the process of writing [writes Zaleski]. “I don’t want to use a sexual metaphor,” he says, “but it’s something that builds up, builds up, builds up and then it all comes out.” His face collapses into a crinkled grin. “The other thing is that I just love sentences, and I love shaping paragraphs. It’s a love of the ring and the rhythm and the sound of words.”

Martin’s novellas are composed with a jeweler’s eye, his language exact and spare. His drive for exactitude results in a book that, as he puts it, is “usually a little short. I have a show-biz instinct. Once in high school I did a show and I knew I went on too long, because people left. That is still in my head.”

“How much rewriting do you do? And when do you write?”

“I usually write in the afternoon on my computer. Sit on the bed. I take care of all of the phone calls, I don’t block out anything. Sometimes during a movie I can write, because there’s a lot of time. Then I send it out to a few friends and get some feedback, and then I start—‘rewriting’ is the wrong word because really it’s honing. I read it over and over and over and over, and then I start reading it aloud, to myself sometimes, or to my dog. I find that when you’ve read it out aloud you start to catch things that you wouldn’t catch by reading it silently.

Conversations with Edna O’Brien, edited by Alice Hughes Kersnowski (The University Press of Mississippi):

The following is from an interview by Shusha Guppy in 1984, first published in The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: When you start a play, or a novel, or a short story, do you have a basic idea? Or a sentence? Something that triggers off the process of creating the work?

O’BRIEN: I always have the first line. Even with my very first book, The Country Girls, I went around with this first sentence in my head long before I sat down to write it.

INTERVIEWER: Once you have started, do you have the whole scheme in your mind or do characters and plot take their own course and lead you, as some novelists say they do? 

O’BRIEN: I know more or less, but I don’t discuss it with myself. It is like sleepwalking; I don’t know exactly where I am going but I know I will get there. When I am writing, I am so glad to be doing it that whatever form it takes--play, novel, et cetera--I am thankful to the Fates. I keep dozens of pens by me, and exercise books.

Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985, Selected and with an Introduction by Michael Wood, translated by Martin McLaughlin (Princeton University Press):

In a letter to one of his critics, Calvino explained how to view his work:

In every piece I write, I believe, one can see parts that are more written and parts that are less written, the former where the commitment to writing is at its maximum and the latter which are like bits that have been merely drawn beside bits that are painted.  ...

The written page is not a uniform surface like a piece of plastic; it is more like the cross-section of a piece of wood, in which you can see how the lines of the fibers run, where they form a knot, where a branch goes off. 

Now in these more written parts there are some I call written very small because when writing them it happens that (I write with a pen) my handwriting becomes very small, with o’s and a’s that have no hole in the middle, and are reduced to tiny points; and there are others that I call written big because here instead my handwriting becomes broader, with o’s and a’s where you could put your finger in the loop.

These parts written very small I would say are those where I tend toward a verbal density, toward the minutely descriptive. For instance, the description of the cloud of smog (I racconti, p. 547) or the window in the boss’s office (p. 552) or the gala evening that turns into an image of destruction (p. 560), or the brasserie that contrasts with the mist outside (p. 544). . . .

The parts written big on the other hand are those which tend toward verbal rarefaction. For instance, very brief landscapes, almost lines of verse: “Era autunno; qualche albero era d’oro” (It was autumn; some of the trees were golden.)

It’s All a Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey, by Rick Dodgson (The University of Wisconsin Press):

After the huge success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey was working on a rough draft of his second novel. He showed it to his friend Ed McClanahan, who loved it, but

he had one burning question: whose amputated arm was hanging over the river in the opening scene? Kesey’s answer was typically quixotic: “Shit, I don’t know whose arm it is,” he told his friend. “[T]hat’s what I’m writing the book for, to find out.”

McClanahan was amazed by this impulsive, unstructured approach to writing. “I think it’s true,” he insisted years later. “[H]e really didn’t know what he was writing about until he wrote.”

Copyright (c) 2014 by Susan K. Perry, author of Kylie’s Heel