Good Medicine For Stressful Times
In crazy, unprecedented times like these it can be helpful to turn to spiritual wisdom. If we are able to rise above the din, we may be able to discover some hidden beauty.
A Therapeutic Space for Individuals, Couples, and Families
In crazy, unprecedented times like these it can be helpful to turn to spiritual wisdom. If we are able to rise above the din, we may be able to discover some hidden beauty.
We have become a nation of fixers. We want to fix stuff as soon as its broken, including our moods. We don’t have much tolerance for ambiguity, or lack of resolution. Or emotional pain. What’s the problem with that, you might ask? Because often our attempt to “fix” our moods, or our pain, ends up making the problem worse, or more long-lasting. Here’s another way to do it.
Many doctors feel under pressure to prescribe medications to patients with even moderate anxiety or depression. But it doesn’t have to be that way: Here’s a case of a physician with courage and imagination who takes an unexpected path to help her patient.
Anxiety is a common human emotion, one that we all experience at one point or other. Though most of us feel anxiety as a painful feeling that we want to “go away”, our anxiety in fact may be a helping us learn something important about ourselves.
To be a parent is to know worry. There’s no escaping it, and there’s really no cure for it. As my blogging buddy David Keith says, “If you can’t stand guilt don’t become a parent.”
Kids instinctively “worry”, that is, feel responsible for their families. Don’t forget that. Children worry about their families. They are trying to help the parents become not only better parents but better people. But their therapeutic methods get diagnosed as mental illness.
There is no chemical imbalance. At least there is none that can be measured or quantified. “Chemical Imbalance” is a persuasive metaphor used by psychiatrists, physicians and drug companies to convince people to take medication.
Lack of curiosity is a dangerous thing–in medicine, therapy, culture. Trump’s manner of speaking certainly promotes “not knowing what you don’t want to know”. He is a disturbing model for over-simplified explanations and sneering at complexity or any level of sophistication or subtlety.
In many professions now, so-called “quality measurement” is the dominant language, reducing, quantifying, and eventually, side-lining the importance of human interaction. This can not be good for us as living, breathing, multi-dimensional beings.
Here are my reflections on a rather subtle, yet insidious family pattern characterized by invisible (unconscious) demands for false togetherness, the demand that all family members pretend to think the same. This enforced “togetherness” has a formidable, unyielding tone, suggesting it is not to be questioned.