We have finally gotten started with our online forum. This is a place where frequent visitors and subscribers can ask questions, make suggestions, offer advice, share wisdom, etcetera, related to living creatively with moods. We want this forum to be lively, positive, candid and meaningful. To that end we can promise that we will give top priority to answering questions …
Loneliness
This seems to have been the week for discussions about loneliness. We have been talking about the experience of loneliness with a number of people in different situations: A married woman whose husband is away on business, A widowed professional man, A woman who recently ended a two year relationship. What has been interesting in these conversations is that they start …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Bad Memories
Unstable moods and bad memories seem to go together. In the clinic where many of us work we have noticed how often it is that folks who we see with bipolar have had traumatic experiences in childhood. Why that happens is speculation. But we do know that dealing with those experiences can be very, very hard, and, potentially, life transforming. …
Productivity: Hiding Things You Have to Do
The key to being productive (and managing anxiety) is using tools to keep track of things that you have to do… and, most important, hiding things that you will have to do at some future time but don’t need to do now. We think that one of the reasons we have this state called “anxiety” is because in human history …
The Heart of Evil
We have had the experience of feeling that we were in the presence of evil. A sense of foreboding, a shiver that involuntarily runs down the spine. An awareness that our expectations of rational behavior in others may be misplaced. As we have experienced it evil may be clever, but it is not creative. At its heart lies fear. Fear …
Negative Emotions
We’ve all been there. Maybe we’ve noticed feeling impatient while driving in traffic, or expressing anger towards the barista who didn’t leave you room for milk in your coffee. Whenever we express our dissatisfaction towards the mundane events that don’t go our way, we are more than likely misplacing anxiety, fear, anger, or hurt that stems from one of the …
Money: Having Enough
These are hard times for many people. And the future doesn’t look all that bright. Naturally this leads to anxiety. Will we have enough? Perhaps because we live in a world that constantly sends us confusing messages about what “enough” is, and confusing messages about how to achieve happiness (the entire advertising industry is more or less based on telling …
Francine Shapiro: EMDR – A Crazy Idea that Works
As a young psychiatrist I was interested in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD – psychological reactions to severe traumatic events) and did a research fellowship on the subject with Charles Marmar at the San Francisco VA Hospital. One Thursday morning, during our regular clinical case conference, we had a woman come in to tell us about her recently discovered technique for …