We have been blessed to work with many very, very intelligent people over the years. It always stimulates us to have smart people ask challenging questions about the work that we do. One of the common complaints of smart people in therapy is: my therapist isn’t telling me anything I don’t already know. We used to try to point out …
Appreciating Depression?
We are indebted to Tom Wootton for his observation that the key to living creatively with bipolar is accepting and making use of depression. Tom wrote a book about depression (The Depression Advantage) that was one of the first things he wrote about bipolar (for more, see his website, Bipolar Advantage). He noted that it was a difficult book to …
Comments Box Is Up and Functional Again!
Comments box works again! One of our astute blog followers just pointed out that our “comments” section was not working. The problem is now fixed. This is an opportunity to point out that we love comments and questions. In fact one of the two things that you can do if you like the site is to post a comment. And …
Knowledge is Power
We spent some time this morning trying to summarize the things that we would like to know about someone with mood cycles before coming up with a plan for moodsurfing. We would like to know the answers to these questions about their moods – Are there any seasonal patterns? Many people have characteristic shifts in mood at different times of …
Partners
This past week we had a chance to meet with a number of people who were very distressed when they first came to see us, and who made huge progress in creating lives worth living…. in living creatively with moods. It got us to thinking about why they succeeded. There are a number of reasons for their success – they …
Healthy Pleasures
Sometimes we can be so overwhelmed, or so depressed, that we forget what it is that gives, or used to give, us pleasure. This list is adapted from Peter Lewinsohn’s Pleasant Events Schedule. You won’t enjoy many of these things, but you should find a number that are somewhat pleasurable (or would have been if you were not depressed) and …
Therapists Can Be So Annoying: Feeling Like You’re On Celebrity Roast
Therapists Have you ever found yourself all of a sudden the guest of honor at celebrity roast special. Sometimes that is what it is like being a therapist…. or husband… or wife… employee… boss…. or you name it… What do you do? You probably know that being defensive is not going to work. But how can you sit there and listen …
Chronic Anger Kills
Anger is a necessary emotion. It can motivate to change things for the better, to protect ourselves from evil, to re-shape our lives in better and more satisfying ways. But chronic anger, especially chronic anger about things that can’t be changed because they are in the distant past, is a life-destroying emotion. Occasionally we meet with people who are out …
Imperfect Bodies
In his book, “The Heart of Man,” Erich Fromm wrote about two modes of being – one he called biophilia (the love of life and living things) and the other he called necrophilia (a love of order, control, and, ultimately of death). Fromm was very much affected by the experience of Nazi Germany. And much of his understanding of the …
Sick of Vacation
Hard working professionals go on vacation and immediately get sick. This doesn’t happen just once, it is regular and reliable. What is going on? If this has happened to you, you are getting a crash course on the physiology of the body’s stress response system, and some of its flaws. It was developed to deal with very different problems than …
Magic
It’s hard not to believe in magic when you have the experience of mood shifts. What can be more extraordinary and more magical than waking up one day, after a long stretch of struggles and pain, and seeing the world transformed all of a sudden into something positive and hopeful and vibrant and alive. This is about as close to …
Ordinary Change
The process of change often makes us think of the shape of a parabola. Imagine, if you will, a graph in which time is along the horizontal axis and successful living is along the vertical axis (the higher you are on the vertical axis the better you are doing). Often, when people come to see us for a consultation they …
Fire of Anxiety: Stop, Drop and Roll
Remember those Public Service Announcements about how to protect yourself in a fire? I can hear it in my head now–STOP, DROP, AND ROLL. That PSA must have been on heavy rotation when I was a child because any time I even see a hint of a fire, I can hear the narrator’s voice in my head telling me what …
The Uncertainty Principle
In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle is the principle that there is a fundamental limit to our ability to know things about a particle. If you know precisely where it is, you can’t know how fast it is moving, and if you know how fast it is moving you can’t know exactly where it is, and so on. The original …
Performance Anxiety
Fear of public speaking and performance anxiety are very common things. Probably almost all of us have had the experience of desperately wishing to relax before a presentation. This may be a situation where you should be careful of what you wish for. When I was younger I had a terrible fear of speaking in public. And my first job …
When the Pressure Builds
We all have stress. It is a natural part of life. The level of stress in your life may vary from moment to moment. Some folks are more sensitive to stress and others may shrug it off, choosing to find contentment with whatever hand they are dealt in a happy-go-lucky fashion. Whatever your stress management style, it’s important to just …
Therapy and Curling
Therapists are like the sweepers in the winter olympic sport of curling. Curling, for those who are not intrigued by the sport, involves hurling a heavy sphere down an icy lane (like a frozen bowling lane) with the goal of landing in a particular spot. What really makes the sport odd is the addition of two people who use brooms …
Insomnia: Counting Sheep
Maybe Grandma was right. After all of the years of research and development trying to find medications to help with insomnia, we ran across a recently published paper which suggested that a single session devoted to teaching people with chronic insomnia to focus their attention on some idea, image, song, memory, that was not associated with strong emotions (especially negative …
Self Confirming Beliefs
There are dangerous ideas that can shape an entire life. Ideas that suggest that “no one will ever really love me” or “if I tell someone what I want they will leave me” or even “I can’t trust anyone.” These ideas may not have much basis in fact, they may have been handed to us as children from our parents, …
Codependent no more
We have never been big fans of the way the term “codependent” evolved in the non-professional world into a way of describing almost any show of compassion for someone with difficult problems. On the other hand, after years of struggle (and, yes, our own therapy) we finally came up with our own rules of thumb for when to back away …