Big Heart Healing
« Previous Entries Next Entries »Facing Any Challenge in Life
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012Facing any challenge in life confers upon people the experience to empathize with others like them and help them to cope. Self help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous depend on this principle to bolster the self esteem of participants as they succeed and go on to help others stay on the safe […]
Positive Reframing
Thursday, April 5th, 2012The second example of an existential response that can be game-changing in the treatment of any patient involves reframing the presenting problem by naming the gifts that illness and recovery bestow upon the sufferer. Most psychiatric patients feel like loathsome cripples in our society, emotional lepers who suffer from character […]
The Case of Tommy Continued
Thursday, March 29th, 2012The subtext behind the stories I told Tommy had to do with the power of conscious awareness to hold all the inner voices in a single embrace and call upon each as appropriate and needed, appreciating all parts of the self without judgment. He was intrigued with the possibility of exploring […]
The Case of Tommy Continued
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012Sensing that Tommy was now taking charge of his fate in a more mature and aware way, I found myself telling him some humorous stories about my misadventures with mind-altering substances in the early days, like the time I inadvertently ate a marijuana brownie someone had brought to an office lunch […]
The Case of Tommy Continued
Tuesday, March 20th, 2012I had suggested earlier that Tommy write a dialogue between Good Tommy and Bad Tommy, but he had done something more daring and skillful than that. He deliberately let Bad Tommy take over for a whole week without opposition from Good Tommy and then let Good Tommy have full control during […]
The Case of Tommy Continued
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012Four months into Tommy’s treatment, he had been revealing the extreme polarization between the soft spoken public face of Good Tommy, who obeys all the rules and reads scripture, and the secret Bad Tommy, who drinks at parties and makes lascivious
passes at girls, masturbates and watches porn – all forbidden behaviors […]
Important Decisions and Profound Issues that Adolescent Patients Face
Thursday, March 1st, 2012Adolescent patients need a mentor who understands their struggle and can help them sort it out on their own terms. Many are already grappling with important decisions and profound issues that they may not face ever again or not until decades later during a midlife crisis – like discovering the meaning […]
Mentoring Youthful Patients
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012One example is developmentally determined: therapy with depressed and anxious patients in late adolescence and early adulthood. Creating a viable independent identity for oneself is the task of this life stage. Identity formation involves reworking identifications with parents and other important adults from childhood, rejecting unwanted traits and synthesizing others […]
Existential Issues in the Healing Process
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012Beyond neurobiology and psychopathology, over and above hardware malfunctions in the brain and software programming problems in the mind, it is often vital to address existential issues in the healing process, sometimes starting at the very beginning of the therapeutic relationship. I make an effort to include this aspect of […]
Unresolved Issues
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012Unresolved issues at various stages of life influence the patterns of symptoms, perceptions, and unmet needs that must be taken into account to offer an optimal therapeutic environment for healing in each case. The descriptive diagnostic categories we use today based on symptom lists do not help us to make the […]
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