"Emotion regulation — the processes by which individuals influence their emotions — has been the subject of a wealth of psychological research. These processes may be automatic and without our awareness (closing our eyes while watching scary movies), or they can require our conscious efforts (forcing a smile before a talk, despite feeling nervous). While there is a myriad of methods we regularly employ to manage our emotions, researchers have identified a few defining features of emotion regulation. These include having a goal (for example, watching an uplifting comedy to alleviate sadness), as well as influencing the dynamics and trajectory of an emotion (for example, lessening the intensity of worry by distraction)."
Lost touch: how a year without hugs affects our mental health →
As the pandemic continues, many of us will be trying to cope with profound stress without the comfort of touch. We all have different needs and boundaries (McGlone says “not everyone suffers from a lack of touch; I don’t really like being cuddled, and drive my poor wife nuts”), but the total absence of touch, particularly when emotions are high, contravenes the hardwiring that regulates us from our preverbal years.
The Therapeutic Power of Gardening
A lovely story about a British psychotherapist and her husband, a landscape designer, and how they find peace in the life cycle of their garden…
People Have The Power
Here’s a lift for anyone who needs it, courtesy of Patti Smith..
“what we wanted to do was remind the listener of their individual power but also of the collective power of the people, how we can do anything. That’s why at the end it goes, “I believe everything we dream can come to pass, through our union we can turn the world around, we can turn the earth’s revolution.” We wrote it consciously together to inspire people, to inspire people to come together." P. Smith.
https://youtu.be/y6Wz3i_BYUc
Source: https://youtu.be/y6Wz3i_BYUc
Election Distractor
Some very practical help for all of that Election Day angst:
How To Show Kids the Joy of Reading
CAMILO HUINCA
Deloris Fowler had seen educational reforms come and go. Then one of them surprised her.
Editor’s Note: In the next five years, most of America’s most experienced teachers will retire. The Baby Boomers are leaving behind a nation of more novice educators. In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. Less than three decades later, that number had fallen to just three years leading a classroom. The Atlantic’s “On Teaching” project is crisscrossing the country to talk to veteran educators. This story is the 20th in our series.
“Look at this cloud,” Deloris Fowler coaxed her third graders during a science lesson about different types of clouds last year. “What shape do you think it is?”
A student I’ll call Abby raised her hand. “That cloud is shaped like an anvil,” she volunteered.
Fowler was impressed. Anvil isn’t a word most 21st-century third graders would know. Abby came from a family with little formal education and was particularly unlikely to have picked up vocabulary like that at home.
In fact, Abby remembered the word from a story Fowler had read to the class weeks before, about a Viking boy whose father was a blacksmith—a story all the kids had followed with rapt attention. Abby had a reading disability, but Fowler had seen her confidence grow over the course of the school year. She often contributed some of the most insightful comments during class discussions. While she still had some trouble sounding out words, her score on a reading-comprehension test had zoomed from the 10th percentile at the beginning of the school year to just below average by mid-December.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2020/08/how-show-kids-joy-reading/615109/
What Makes Some People More Resilient Than Others
In this article, author Eileen Zimmerman writes:
How to Build Resilience
Interviews with large numbers of highly resilient individuals — those who have experienced a great deal of adversity and have come through it successfully — show they share the following characteristics.
They have a positive, realistic outlook. They don’t dwell on negative information and instead look for opportunities in bleak situations, striving to find the positive within the negative.
They have a moral compass. Highly resilient people have a solid sense of what they consider right and wrong, and it tends to guide their decisions.
They have a belief in something greater than themselves. This is often found through religious or spiritual practices. The community support that comes from being part of a religion also enhances resilience.
They are altruistic; they have a concern for others and a degree of selflessness. They are often dedicated to causes they find meaningful and that give them a sense of purpose.
They accept what they cannot change and focus energy on what they can change. Dr. Southwick says resilient people reappraise a difficult situation and look for meaningful opportunities within it.
They have a mission, a meaning, a purpose. Feeling committed to a meaningful mission in life gives them courage and strength.
They have a social support system, and they support others. “Very few resilient people,” said Dr. Southwick, “go it alone.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/health/resilience-relationships-trauma.html
Race, Trauma, and the Covid-19 pandemic
In this article, Dr. Adaobi Anyeji offers advice for coping with racism.
"Racism has emotional consequences for many people of color that include anger, fear, shame, and hopelessness/powerlessness . The following will aid people of color in understanding and validating this constellation of emotional experience and provide several coping strategies to manage these feelings."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/race-trauma-covid-19-pandemic-adaobi-anyeji-ph-d
The pandemic is giving people vivid, unusual dreams. Here’s why. →
Image from Design For Dreaming (1956)
In this National Geographic article by Rebecca Renner, “researchers explain why withdrawal from our usual environments—due to social distancing—has left dreamers with a dearth of inspiration.”
Read moreThat Discomfort You're Feeling Is Grief:
In a time of unprecedented unknowns, there is immense power in the ability to name what we are feeling. While social distancing has us each wrestling with our own emotions, there may be an underlying experience that binds us all: grief. David Kessler, one of the world’s experts on grief, describes how we are experiencing a universal sense of loss during COVID-19, and what we may be able to do about it.
Article: https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief
-By Jason Karasev, M.A., Associate Marriage & Family Therapist www.jasonkarasev.com
Trouble Focusing? Not Sleeping? You May Be Grieving
“It’s normal and natural to not be able to just go on as usual.” Author R.O. Kwon normalizes the grief process that we’re all going through during this time of coronavirus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/opinion/coronavirus-grief-mental-health.html
Holiday Regression: How to Avoid Becoming a Teenager Again
Do you ever catch yourself feeling and acting like a teenager when you go home for the holidays? You’re a full grown adult. You just tied up some loose ends at work (and are trying to forget about the unraveled ones), used your hard-earned money to pay for a flight or gas to get home, and are ready to welcome in a tryptophan-induced coma. You have a few warm moments upon arrival home, but somehow before you know it, things spiral out of control.
It may start with a bubbling irritation – Mom’s prying about your “attitude” and your brother’s sitting and relaxing while everyone else helps out with dinner. They’re so annoying, you think quietly to yourself, but with one more poke from Mom, the internal thought turns into an explosion – you’re suddenly screaming at your brother for being a spoiled brat and storming off to your room to text friends about your crazy mom. It’s like a time warp, and just like that you’re fifteen years old again.
This process of acting like your younger self around your family at this time of year is called, “holiday regression.” Regression, or a retreat to an earlier stage of development, is a defense mechanism that is provoked by emotional stress. While defenses aim to protect us against difficult emotions, they can also impede growth and keep us stuck in old, dysfunctional ways.
If we slow down the scene above, we can illuminate some moments that acted as triggers to conflict: Maybe when you were a moody teenager, Mom became sensitive to a furrowed brow or a cold response from you; now when she asks about your mood, it takes you back to your younger self who felt ambushed and intruded on by her questions, and needed to defend against them to create space. Watching your brother sit unbothered while nobody requests his help may activate the angry, jealous part of you who felt he was “the favorite child.”
Maybe Mom’s accusation of your “attitude” makes you feel trapped in the family’s image of you as “the downer” - it feels like no matter what you do and how much you grow up, they will always perceive you this way. You become even more frustrated because you’ve now validated their flawed perception, as you lashed out at her simple, “What’s wrong?” inquiry and ruined the mood. Your misunderstood inner child took the wheel, and it was a domino effect from there.
What you may miss in this rapid, seemingly automatic process is how you are contributing to the regression to old family roles. By reacting to perceived threat, as you’ve known it in your past, you are confining your family members in the same way that you feel confined by them. For example, it can be tempting to imagine we know exactly what another member’s tone of voice means about their mood. While there may be some truth to that idea (after all, you’ve heard that tone before), the assumption that we know all of each other can actually keep us, and them, stuck – we can get in the way of learning about each other and encouraging growth when we anticipate old behaviors. So what might happen if you give Mom a chance to show up differently? You can interrupt the explosive cycle (of frustration met with frustration, leading to more frustration) by choosing to respond instead of react. Responses come from a thoughtful place, while reactions are emotional and often defensive. “Oh did I look off? I’m actually enjoying being home and away from work,” you might respond to Mom. Your teenage self can take a backseat while adult you attends to your need to protect yourself in a more efficient, developed way.
Try to remind yourself that you are not that powerless teenager anymore and you now have more authority over your choices. When you step out of a reactive place in response to Mom reverting to her usual family role as “the worrier,” you give her a chance to show up differently as well - your new response sends the message that she does not need to take care of you in the same way she did when you were a child, and she is invited to engage with you as an adult.
When we recognize our contribution to conflict, we actually empower ourselves to have more control. The idea is to become mindful of our triggers and learn to emotionally regulate in overly activating settings. Learning to respond from a rational place can be liberating, as other people no longer dictate our behaviors. If we’re lucky, the old cycle is disrupted and a new, healthier kind of relationship can develop.
About That 'GayGene'
Jack Drescher, MD, shares some thoughts on societies quest for a 'gay gene,' and how the issue is more complicated than it sounds:
https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.10a23
The Fallacy in "Evidence-Based" Treatment
What does evidence-based treatment really mean? Lance Dodes MD makes the case for psychodynamic therapy:
U.S. Psychoanalysts Apologize for Labeling Homosexuality an Illness
In honor of Pride month, The American Psychoanalytic Assoc. has issued an apology for their past views on homosexuality. This apology is long overdue, but it is very meaningful. Many patients sought treatment for decades only to be demeaned and in some cases damaged by their therapists prejudices. Let's hope this apology marks a new era in mental health possibilities for the LGBTQ+ community.
See Dr. Shubert's quote in the article below:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lgbt-stonewall-psychoanalysts-idUSKCN1TM169
My Friend Came Out As Gender Non-Binary! →
In this Psychology Today blog post, Dr. Shubert sorts through the confused, anxious reactions that he noticed after a friend came out as gender non-binary.
What we’re running from when we count our steps
Dr. Susie Orbach examines our relationship to apps and wearable gadgets for self-improvement. She asks the question: What might we be running from when we count our steps? “In a culture bent on targets, we create the illusion of an objective test telling us whether we are living life well enough. It is a bit like being in an exam the whole time.”
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/what-were-running-from-when-we-count-our-steps
Don’t Turn Individuals with ADHD into Neurotypicals
The implications of this new understanding are vast. The first thing to do is for coaches, doctors, and professionals to stop trying to turn people with ADHD into neurotypical people. The goal should be to intervene as early as possible, before the individual has been frustrated and demoralized by struggling in a neurotypical world, where the deck is stacked against him.”
Dodson lays out a two pronged therapeutic approach that has a chance of working, when nothing else has...
The Psychopharmacology of Everyday Life
”We do have a choice about whether to medicate and how we do so. I think we have forgotten this because of how easy it is to obtain pills, along with the pervasive idea that our problems are simply chemical or genetic. So I want to begin by recalling what the drug panacea is treating at the most basic psychological level: pain, attention, sadness, libido, anxiety, sleep. Freud was surprisingly insightful about these crucial aspects of the psyche, even from his earliest writings before the turn of the century.”
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/11/19/the-psychopharmacology-of-everyday-life/
How To Deal With Making More Money Than Your Parents →
Dr. Shubert was quoted in this recent girlboss story about how to deal with making more money than your parents, by Theresa Avila:
https://www.girlboss.com/money/how-to-deal-with-making-more-money-than-parents