Reading Temple Grandin Offers a New Perspective on REBT!

I have long agreed with Albert Ellis that his Rational Emotive Therapy (modernized to Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy), is a simple, elegant method for helping clients to learn how to improve their mood and live more comfortably. It is also a derivative of the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. I have worked with individuals and groups for many years, and most people to whom I have introduced REBT easily learn and use this technique for calming their unruly emotions and feeling better. It is not instant. It is not magic. But it really works. As with anything, using REBT well requires practice. 

One of my long-standing puzzles as a therapist has been how CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) has gained more popularity than REBT as the go-to therapy. There are indeed many books by many authors on each technique. Does CBT work better? Does it have better press? Are there more practitioners? is it easier to teach to therapists in training? Is it easier to teach to clients? 

My take on the above questions is  quite the opposite. I find REBT to be easier to learn, easier to teach, and more effective than CBT. I am trained in both, and, while I learned CBT in school and learned it first, when I studied REBT (Albert Ellis was one of my instructors), I was immediately stuck by how easy it was to learn, to teach, and to put into effect in my own life not to mention those of my clients. So is it the press? Perhaps.

Is a Psychiatric Diagnosis Just Another Name for What You're Feeling? A Rose by Any Other Name.....

The concept of mental illness is at its core about control. When someone is labeled mentally ill, a system including physicians, social workers, and government authorities begins to gain access to her life. People have problems. People have mental or psychological problems. The practice of calling these problems by names reflecting illness and thus putting them into the purview of physicians has been doing harm for decades. It is also demeaning, taking ultimate control from the individual and placing it within their genes or their parents.

I have said it many times and shall say it for as long as I can: there is not a pill for that. Make no mistake, your brain is a biological entity--YOU are a biological entity--thus distress of the mind and emotions are also biological entities, but this does not imply that the only or even the best or even a viable way to solve problems of the mind and emotions is with a pill. The overused "chemical imbalance" theory is dead. On the contrary, psychoactive pills cause chemical imbalances--they change your brain in ways science does not understand, sometimes they alleviate symptoms, but they do not CURE distress.

Thus one danger of calling mental distress a "disease" is that it is then treated as such--you become a patient and you look to a doctor to fix something. This works with appendicitis and broken legs and cancer. It is a fact, however, that not all things clearly within the realm of medical disorders are treatable by medical doctors. In general, there is no treatment for the flu or even the common cold, and physicians are stymied by irritable bowel and migraine. Medical science certainly does not work with depression, anxiety, phobia, PTSD, and the many variations of psychological distress delineated in the various manuals of disease such as the DSM and the ICD, because these are not diseases in the once-commonly understood meaning of the term. These problems do not show demonstrable tissue damage such as a cancer or a stroke, nor do they have symptoms that represent the body fighting a foreign invader, such as cough, fever, runny nose. Rather they have emotions and behaviors as their hallmarks.

Hello, Ashland

Goodbye to Bend and all the great people, clients, professionals, and friends and acquaintances, I met and helped or was helped by. It is time to move on, though. While we felt as if, after 3 growing seasons, we had finally mastered small greenhouse gardening in an  inhospitable climate with no soil,  what we really wanted was a place to grow food and watch nature thrive.

Hello Ashland! Up here in the woods, amazingly only 15 minutes from town, clients will be invited to see me in a private space, with the sounds of nature to add to the ambiance. It was gratifying to see our garden immediately begin to thrive as it never had in Bend, and I know the beautiful environment will enhance the healing that occurs for my clients. In-person sessions will begin Sept. 1 in this new space.

I also welcome intensive clients starting Sept. 1: Medford is 30 minutes away and Ashland less than 15, and both have a variety of hotels, motels, B&Bs, and hostels, as well as a fine selection of eateries and groceries. We are 30 minutes from the Medford airport. While a therapy intensive is hardly a vacation, traveling to a beautiful spot far from your daily environment offers a unique opportunity to break old patterns and create new ones. Follow-up in person or via video-chat assists you in maintaining your new learnings in your home environment. 

It has been stressful to move many miles for the second time in 2 years, and perhaps I have learned some new things about managing stress and the ways in which change affects me and others as well. Stress is always both good and bad: it forces new ways of seeing things and behaving, but it can cause strain on the system. Moving changes one's relationship to others, to resources, and to oneself. Out with the old, in with the new, to coin a phrase!

The new incarnation of the Center for Conscious Living will offer individual and family therapy, Rational Emotive Therapy, which is the elegant, effective precursor to CBT,  Sensorimotor Trauma Therapy, and clinical hypnosis. I will continue to focus on physical symptoms that bridge the mind-body gap such as gut issues (irritable bowel, cyclic vomiting), headache (migraine, cluster headache), and chronic pain (RSD, CRPS 1, fibromyalgia); those difficult-to-treat issues that often defy medical treatment. Call for a free phone consultation.

Meanwhile, I shall be learning about my new environment and preparing a new space for seeing clients.

Is there a Pill for That?

I'll start by admitting something; medications scare me. Not all medications and not in all cases, but many. Perhaps this diminishes my credibility as a psychologist who fancies herself quite scientific, but there are reasons for my atypical stance. Allow me to state for the record that I am not a prescribing physician, and what follows is my opinion, which mostly consists of: "Buyer beware".

 In the years since I have been practicing psychology, I have seen a startling number of serious, damaging reactions to medications. In addition, I have also seen no small number of similarly bad reactions to street drugs. Years of observing and reading have thus led me to a very conservative stance regarding attempts to pharmaceutically solve health problems, both physical and psychological, as well as the ones sitting on the border thereof. Some examples follow, after which I'll provide some details about how I work with my clients in light of my observations.

Memory Again

Today is a snow day, so between bouts of shoveling in 5 degree weather, I am perusing the web. Coincidentally, today's hot topic in the places I read is memory. How accurate is memory?, how easily can memory be falsified?, is there such a thing as recovered memory?, what does memory research teach us?

For me professionally, understanding memory is important in the process of doing psychotherapy. After all, it is with people's memories that I work all day.  Early in my career, I learned that with psychotherapy the validity of a memory is less important than its impact. A client might recall an event as a painful experience, and that memory can have a present-day effect on his mood. That effect does not affirm the accuracy of the memory, just its impact. The impact is what I work with, as I can never know, minus sources of corroboration, whether my client's memory is precise.

When should you see a psychologist for a physical illness?

I have been writing on the topic of mind/body medicine for over 20 years, and I continue to learn and be amazed by the human mind/brain. Long years ago, a brilliant scholar named Ernest Rossi began to write about hypnosis and neuroplasticity. He was, of course, not alone in this, but he was my first formal contact with the fascinating world of brain changing body. Despite my psychological training, I began to see the mindbody connection everywhere. A client with diabetes who suffered from severe psychological distress after an amputation presented with uncontrollable vomiting and raging fevers rather than diagnosible psychological problems. People with intransigent chronic pain ran from doctor to doctor and were accused of faking or drug-seeking, but with good psychological exploration and insight, their trauma could be found and they could heal themselves. Clients with autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis found improvement, often dramatic, with the application of psychological techniques. A client who had attempted suicide with a .38 to the head showed NO brain damage on MRI, demonstrated no physical disabilities from the shot, but had significant amnesia for his entire life prior to the incident! The amnesia remitted with psychological treatment.

These extreme examples of the intricate mindbody connection led me to view my clients with a much more open mind. Things I had diligently learned in graduate school held less sway versus the real experiences of my clients. Medications did not appear to work miracles despite being used in ways even our textbooks said were dangerous. Diagnostic criteria and diagnosible disorders from the _DSM_ changed over time, which confused me if those listed problems were diseases. Does the definition of influenza or diabetes change with each new edition of a manual? Do they sometimes disappear from the text? And despite modern times labeling many problems as diseases in what appeared to be both an attempt to put them in the bailiwick of physicians and to remove the stigma of causality from patients and their families, suffering seemed to be getting worse, not better, and reliance on medications increasing as well. Additionally, the number of clients coming to me already taking three or more psychoactive medications appalled me. Why, after all, were they still suffering if these medications work? I began to wonder about many things I had been taught and to question common treatment practices of people seeking mental health treatment as well as physical medical treatment.

FREE Rational Emotive / Cognitive Therapy Workshop

The Medicalizing of Depression

What is depression? Is it a mood? Is it a disease? Is it a disease of mood? What do you do about it? Take medicine? Use willpower? Get therapy?

Depression is a common and debilitating affliction amongst humans, which makes it tragic that we know so little about it. We know that depression can arrive seemingly out of nowhere. We know that it can be driven by hormone shifts or brain injury or nutrient deficiencies. We know that medicine really does very little to help it, despite the millions of people taking such medicines. What do we know that is helpful to you when you feel depressed?

On one level, I admit we know next to nothing about depression. It is one thing to try medications, perform brain scans, and test your blood. It is quite another to really understand the human condition called depression.

I like things simple. I like the utter simplicity of Rational Emotive Therapy, for example. I also like simple explanations for human problems. What follows is my very simple, though speculative, explanation.

First the obvious: Humans are mammals. We have more complex brains and more complex emotions. We can think. Thinking is a great advancement in the evolution of animal life. It is also a burden. Humans are uniquely able to think themselves into a tailspin in the light of uncomfortable realities. So how do these facts fit together for me when I treat depression?

What if depression is a defense mechanism? Powerful animals such as bears hibernate in the deep of winter to stay safe from the elements. They fatten up first. Their vital signs depress, and they basically sleep off the inhospitable conditions, consuming all that stored fat.

Hibernation saves the lives of mammals. It is a healthy defense against the rigors of winter.

Does School Cause Anxiety?

Most of the young people I see suffer in one way or another from school anxiety.

Whether they actually perceive themselves to be anxious, or have headache, stomach ache, or hives, many school-aged children are nervous about school.

In the language of Rational Emotive Therapy, it is not an external thing or event that causes anxiety, as anxiety arises from how we THINK about that external thing or event. However, in the case of the modern classroom, a case can be made that the way in which classes are managed is so stressful for the average young person, that it is rather difficult to avoid school-driven anxiety. Whether your student is scared of tests, a given teacher, big projects, group projects, or speaking in front of the class, there are things about modern education that essentially create situations too stressful for the average young person to manage easily. And, even more unfortunately, parents are often made into unwilling assistants in the creation of school anxiety.

Let's begin with a question: What is the root cause of school anxiety? In short, the basic assumption of intellectual education that all children ought to learn on the same schedule. Granted, we now have gifted classrooms and special education classrooms to accommodate variations from the average, but the basic premise remains that the mind can be educated on a fixed schedule, a schedule that is determined by bureaucrats.

Really, this ought to give us all pause. We send our children for swimming lessons and karate lessons and ice skating lessons, all of which operate based upon skills testing. A child works on a set of skills as long as she needs to, and when she passes them, she may proceed to another set of skills. Why does the mind of your child get less consideration than the body?

Unconditional Self-Acceptance vs Self-Esteem: Which one do you want?

"Can you help me to raise my self-esteem?" is one of the most common questions I am asked. The answer I offer is "No, but I can help you to achieve Unconditional Self-Acceptance." While this may sound as if I am being difficult, indeed I am not. The self-esteem movement has not taken humanity in a good direction. Self-esteem is dependent upon achievement, and perhaps just now you are not achieving what you would like to see yourself achieve. This is a trap, because if you are not entirely please with your current performance and this therefore lowers your self-esteem, then how do you raise your self-esteem to encourage yourself to achieve more to your own standards?

Unconditional Self-Acceptance (USA) is not achievement-dependent. USA depends only upon taking a realistic look at yourself and accepting that this is where you are right here, right now in your life, without judgment. Having thus accepted yourself for all of your current traits, good, bad, and neutral, you are in a position to realistically assess what you would like to change about your current behavior. Acceptance is not complacency. Accepting yourself as you are does not mean stopping there, but it allows you to comfortably re-assess without putting yourself down for this lack or that failure. It is what it is, and accepting that without negatively judging yourself, versus judging a given behavior, is what gives you the motivation to alter it.

Unconditional self-acceptance provides you with power; the power to change. The reverse of USA is NOT self-hatred; it is simply denial. Thus, if you have not yet achieved USA, this simply means you have not yet given yourself a good, hard look and accepted each and every part of you: looks, behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. Some of these are malleable, and some are fixed. You cannot change your height, but you can change your mood or how you react to your failure to make that golf shot or your tendency to eat late in the evening. You begin with completely accepting that unfavored behavior and examining the thoughts that drive it. With this non-judgmental approach, it is much easier to take on the challenge of making difficult changes.

Why Yes, One Person Can Improve a Relationship......

All relationships can be improved. Really. Not all partners will stay together, but all relationships can be improved. And even if only one person is actively working at it, any relationship can become less contentious, more comfortable, and hopefully, even more loving. Research by John Gottman, supplemented by several clinicians such as Thomas Gordon, Brent Atkinson, and Albert Ellis, leads to some directions for successful relationship change. You can learn to adhere to several basic principles to improve your relationship.

First, avoid four major pitfalls: do not criticize your partner. You can complain, you can discuss issues, you can request he do something differently, but do not criticize. As a corollary to not criticizing, avoid becoming contemptuous and, of course, showing contempt. No matter how strongly you disagree with your partner, remain open to the fact that she has a reason for her behavior, and avoid acting superior. Stay off your high horse. Third, do not stonewall--be open to discussing issues using good communication skills. This might require taking a time-out to get yourself un-angry and prepared for a rational discussion, but do not offer a blank wall to your partner.

Finally, do not become defensive. There is a huge difference between "I am sorry I inconvenienced you" (genuine empathy for the other person) and "I was late because....." (taking care of your own ego). Defending is a natural human tendency when we screw up, but it does nothing to assuage the hurt feelings of your partner.

Now that you have seen some major don'ts, here is a huge DO: do speak kindly and appreciatively to your partner. Research shows clearly that lasting relationships contain five times as many positive statements as negative ones. Yes, five to one. Keep track and grade yourself--how close do you come to saying five nice, appreciative, positive, and/or supportive things for every complaint you utter? Many people are surprised.

The Myth of Mental Illness and the Late, Great Thomas Szasz

For those who know me, you know that I dislike diagnoses. My clients have to specially request a diagnostic code to put in the little box their insurance demands in order to reimburse them. I treat people, not diseases. I treat people, not disorders. I treat people, not symptoms. I work at treating them with respect--respect for the ultimate fact they while I guide a healing process, it is the client who cures herself. Or to use words Dr. Szasz might use, it is the client who solves her own "problem in living".

People come to me with vexing life problems. They have chronic pain that has mystified a handful of competent physicians. They have had anxiety since grade school, and it has now blossomed into panic attacks. They feel depressed and unmotivated. They have failed to lose weight despite having tried a score of conventional means. My job is to look at the individual in front of me, and learn what ails her and how it may have come to be so. I apply a kind of scientific method where I form hypotheses with the help of the individual in my office, and we challenge the hypothesis with a treatment plan--if it works, it was likely true, or at least close enough to true to solve the problem.

Dr. Szasz and I have had our differences on some delicate points--can some of this material I help to discover and interrelate be hidden in the unconscious, and my client not know about it? Can historical events cause strange symptoms today that the client has not chosen as a solution, but rather that seem to have chosen her? Can my client essentially develop symptoms that solve a problem in an unfortunate way that she is consciously, directly, unable to alter? Is there a scientific way to apply psychotherapy? Dr. Szasz was quite clear that the answer to all of these questions was no. I, on the other hand, am clear that the answer is yes.

Those minor differences aside, the legacy of Dr. Thomas Szasz is immeasurable. He championed the human mind. He fought the psychiatric state--the ability of the government to control individuals by means of their mental state. He fought the medicalization of psychology, thus attempting to empower the individual to change himself rather then being at the mercy of a physician. Dr. Szasz did not believe in "helpful coercion" --a phrase that chills the blood. For me, reestablishing or maintaining the power of my client to change is the essence of good therapy.

Center for Conscious Living.......a name with a meaning. I see my task as helping you, the client, my employer, to improve the quality of your life by guiding you to discover and use your personal power to change. Yes, I guide and you do the rest of the work. Sorry, but there is no magic pill. What there is is power--the power you discover to help yourself! The joy of my work comes from seeing clients find and utilize their power and--um--get me off the payroll (not that I would mind if they gratefully paid me forever.....). Stop therapy because you are better, not because you are bored! Contact Dr. Low at the Center via e-mail: drlow@pobox.com, or phone. 630-249-1983. I look forward to hearing from you!

Just Because I Am Afraid of Heights Does Not Mean I Am Crazy!

So you have a phobia? And you FEEL crazy because you know it is not rational to be afraid to fly or afraid of dogs or afraid to go up in an elevator...... What if it turns put a phobia is part of an ancient survival mechanism you have inadvertently activated? This then means that you are not crazy, you are simply mistaken. And mistakes can be rectified.

In general, a phobia is created when something bad happens or you THINK something bad has happened and you logically avoid similar experiences in the future. You get stuck in an elevator and for a few weeks you stay away from them--your primitive brain then decides that those new-fangled things are DANGEROUS and warns you strongly away from them. Even if you did not panic the first time you got stuck, you are likely to panic the next time you get into an elevator, weeks later, having now taught your primitive brain that the only way to stay safe is to avoid elevators. You get bitten by a vicious dog and avoid all dogs for a while until you feel like testing the situation. Only now you find that you are terrified at the sight of dogs and cannot make yourself approach one! Perhaps you have a full-out panic attack with racing heart and sweating palms as soon as you get on the same side of the street at the neighbor's pup. So you continue your avoidance tactic, because at least this prevents panic.

Of course, there are downsides to such choices. Now you are stuck avoiding everyday things that you encounter all too often. AND you are afraid not only of dogs or elevators, but also of feeling panicky. And being afraid of feeling panicky seems logical whereas being afraid of elevators does not, so you now can justify your irrational behavior on the grounds that if you panic, you will get hurt or hurt someone else (What if I run into the street to get away from a dog? What if I drive into a tree in my state of panic? What if I faint?) Of course, it has not ever occurred to you that you have been injured or injured another in a state of panic,but again, the primitive protective mechanisms work hard to convince you to stay safe.

So now you have a panic problem---essentially a panic-phobia, though others would label it "panic disorder") along with your phobia, and you find yourself more and more restricted in things that feel safe to do. The fun begins to drain out of your life. You go to the doctor and are told you have a panic disorder. Perhaps you are given an anxiety drug, but more likely, you are given and anti-depressant, because anxiety drugs are quite addictive and MDs do not like to prescribe them. The result of this is that you feel defective because you have this disorder. The drug might work to a small extent and decrease your overall anxiety, but it is NOT a cure for panic AND it has many unsavory side-effects. Besides which, you have not learned anything to help yourself, so you also feel helpless, a feeling that can lead to more and more anxiety and even depressed feelings.

So, you ask, what on earth can help you if drugs and your favorite MD cannot? The answer is to take control. You and that first dog/elevator/germ/airplane created this problem and you can uncreate it. First you must stop all avoidance behaviors--that's right--hair of the dog, so to speak--go into the situations you fear, and you begin to retrain that primitive brain mechanism that dogs were NOT the terrible danger they seemed. But this is too hard, you exclaim--after all, a panic attack is nothing to sneeze at--people go to emergency rooms every day thinking they are actually going to die from the miserable feelings involved in a panic attack. Correct you are--this is no small feat, but it is an achievable one.

Thus comes the inevitable offer--if you need help to conquer your phobia or panic WITHOUT being accused of being crazy or diseased or defective, without being drugged, please phone the Center fro Conscious Living and Dr. Low can teach you the steps to regaining control of your brain! Call 630-249-1983 today.

How Worry is like a Hamster Wheel........

Sometimes you just have to worry, right? Wrong! Worrying about something that might go wrong, is going wrong, or has already gone wrong is not going to change things, right? Right. So all the energy you expend worrying is not being spent productively on problem-solving. What it is doing is using energy and preventing you from focusing on the real problem. If your daughter is out too late, worrying about her is not going to get her home safely. If your boss is on a tear, and you fear for you job, worrying about his erratic behavior is not going to save your job. If a tornado is bearing down on your neighborhood, worrying is not going to save it.

Worry is a distraction--we take up mental space worrying, and we feel occupied, so we are less focused on hunting for that elusive solution or doing something else productive. But the worry itself is exactly like running in a hamster wheel--you are moving, you are active, but you are still in the same place. You might expend some calories, but you will not get any closer to solving the problem.

Worry is a uniquely human activity. And as with other activities in which humans engage, we tend to defend this one. After all, if it were not important, it would not worry me, right? I ought to worry about my daughter/job/house, right? The truth is that it is not the worry that is going to help you resolve the issue. Worry represents thinking things you have already thought rather than arriving at new ideas. Worry stresses your system, causes you to lose sleep, and generally moves you away from creativity into a rut. The issue at hand may indeed be serious, but worrying is not the answer.

Take that daughter--she is late, and you are rightly concerned that something has gone awry. You can actively search for her if you have some leads; you can call the authorities if it has been a seriously long wait and she is not answering her phone, or, if it is really the usual Saturday night teenager misbehaving, you can get some sleep and let her worry all night over the consequence her well-rested parents will impose. The point is that the actual process of worrying is not what gets her safe nor you closer to a resolution.

Your job is on the line; you have a moody boss, and today is one of those days. Recognize this for what it is and get to work--the hours you spend worrying that you are next for his wrath will not help you to avoid it. In fact, there is some chance that your worry makes you flustered and ineffectual that day and indeed puts you right in the spotlight you had hoped to avoid. Yes, your job is important. The point is not that it is no cause for concern if your boss is unpredictable, just that the actual process of worrying is not what is going to resolve the issue.

A tornado is reported in your area. Batten down the hatches and find the safest place to wait it out. Worrying and fretting will not keep you safe without action. Alternatively, it is tornado weather and you sit frantically by the radio listening to the reports--you lose a day of productivity, and nothing comes of it. Better to have a preparation plan for this season and know how to implement it, then have your ducks in a row come the actual threat.

The thing about worry is that we do it all the time. We worry about our kids. We worry about our jobs, our houses, our health, the economy, our weight, and whatever else we can find to fret over. This is a bad habit. It wastes resources, stresses our immune system, and achieves nothing. Humans get attached to the thoughts that run around in our brains. We hear that subliminal chatter and assume it is meaningful and important. In reality, our minds tend to run in the same ruts they always run in, and this limits creative problem solving. The problem is that we become so accustomed to the chatter in our heads, we never question its validity.

Time to get off the hamster wheel. Learn new habits of thought and reduce your stress instantly. Yes, it sounds easy, and with practice, it is. And the new habits you learn will help you for a lifetime.

The Powerlessness of Getting Angry

"He makes me sooo mad."
"That really pisses me off."
"I can't stand it when you do that."

We often think of anger as a powerful emotion--anger makes us red in the face, we feel a surge of power, our voices get loud. What we fail to notice is that the perception of power is vastly different from the experience of power. When you are angry, you are not in control. You are powerless over what you feel, and often feel powerless over your reactions. This is not power, but its opposite, powerlessness, loss of control, and weakness. When you are not in control of your reaction to a situation, you are indeed weak. The presentation of anger may serve to decoy the person or situation about which you are angry, it presents a loud and blustery front, but it takes away your power to regain control of the most important variable: yourself.

Ah, but since it appears that people, things, and situations MAKE us angry, how do we avoid becoming angry and thus maintain control? By following the famous ABCs of Rational Emotive Therapy. A is an Activating event--it is what we complain about that has "made" us angry--a fact of experience. C is the Consequence we create--behavior(s) and/or emotion(s). Which leaves B out of its place between A and C. B is the Belief or set of beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, that is the true cause of C. Generally the beliefs that cause anger are irrational.

To illustrate: a man tromps your toes quite hard in a crowded elevator. Your initial reaction of pain is a normal, automatic one. The next reaction (emotional C), anger, and possibly the shout (behavioral C) "hey, look where you are going", is mediated by your beliefs that "he should be more careful", "he should look where he is going", "he should have waited for the next car", etc. Then you notice the white-tipped cane--the man is blind. Your anger is replaced by compassion, perhaps a lingering annoyance that no one in front helped him enter safely, a touch of shame for being angry at a blind man, etc. Thus the anger was NOT caused by your toes having been stepped on, but by the thoughts generated by your related beliefs. The anger, thus created, can be eliminated once the belief system is altered either by new knowledge ("he is blind"), or by a conscious choice as in this next example:

Your daughter is very late getting home one Saturday evening. You are frustrated that she is missing her curfew once again. You are getting angry, and thinking about how you will discipline her when she finally shows up. You feel yourself coming to a boil, and the words "grounded for life" and "never go out with those people again" bounce around in your brain. Eventually, you realize that losing sleep, pacing the floor, and planning the expected late-night ambush will do little to solve the problem of her frequent tardiness, but will result in her becoming correspondingly angry at you and creating a stalemate on the issue of improved behavior. You create a plan to deal with her in the morning, and head off to bed, your anger having turned to disappointment, and your self-control reasserted. You even manage to get some sleep, which your worried daughter, having created her own defensive, angry stance, ("where is the expected, unreasonable parental ambush?") is not able to achieve.

Success--you have managed your irrational thoughts ("that girl must respect the house rules", "I can't stand having a child who disobeys", "what a bad daughter I have"). By changing your thoughts into calmer ones ("it is a shame she has made another poor choice", "I need a plan to help her understand that if she is living here, there are rules she must follow", "children test the patience of parents; I remember that from when I was her age, but it will make for a happier household if she learns to cooperate".), you regained control over your emotions and behaviors. Changing your thoughts from demands and name-calling into preferences and facts helped you to calm yourself and create a plan. You put yourself back in control of both you and the situation.

Getting from anger to calm is a process. It begins, in the language of RET, with D, a Dispute: "Is it really true that she must respect the rules, or is that just my unreasonable demand of a teenager?", "It is not true that I cannot stand her behavior", "She can be unruly, but she is not all bad"). Following your dispute, you arrive at a new approach, the reasonable beliefs that will allow you to sleep, as in the example above. E is that Effective new belief or philosophy. And F is your new behavior and emotions: getting a night of good sleep and dealing calmly with the teen in the morning ("Honey, we need to talk about your curfew"). You win and so does she. Having a calm parent helps her to remain open to learning and improving.

Whenever you find yourself thinking "(he/she/that)makes me sooo mad", you have given away your personal power. To maintain power and control, change your thoughts so that you can be understandably upset, disappointed, concerned, confused, etc., without losing control over your reactions and thus, the situation. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, can help you learn to prevent anger and maintain control. Empower yourself!

Anti?-Depressants Again

One can never overstate the danger of relying heavily upon anti-depressant medication as the first line of defense for every psychological complaint and a goodly number of physical complaints as well. Anxious? take Zoloft. Can't sleep? Try Paxil. Stressed? Take Effexor. Pain? Take Celexa. Smoking? Take Wellbutrin. IBS? Take more Wellbutrin.
The way I learned it in school, non-psychiatric MDs should NEVER prescribe psychotropic medications, because 1) they are not trained to diagnose psychiatric issues and 2) they are not versed in any other approach to such problems. I also learned how to do psychotherapy in school, which MDs do not. And it turns out that study after study demonstrates that psychiatric problems are responsive to good psychotherapy, but rarely to drugs. It also turns out that a good number of medical problems are more responsive to good psychotherapy than to drugs. Hypnosis works better for IBS and WARTS (yes, you read right) than anything else out there!
The following references will help you get over the drug-company driven belief that anti-depressants are so great we should put them in our drinking water!
Oh, and it is important to note that the side effects as well as the withdrawal effects from various antidepressants include anxiety and insomnia!
Be a skeptical consumer.

Efficacy and Effectiveness of Antidepressants: Current Status of Research.
H. Edmund Pigott, Allan M. Leventhal, Gregory S. Alter, John J. Boren,
NeuroAdvantage, LLC, Clarksville, Md. , Department of Psychology, American University,
Washington, D.C. , USA
"Meta-analyses of FDA trials suggest that antidepressants are only marginally efficacious compared to placebos and document profound publication bias that inflates their apparent efficacy."

http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ArtikelNr=318293&Ausgabe=254424&ProduktNr=223864&filename=318293.pdf

STAR*D Wars:
The Corruption of the National Institute of Mental Health and the Failure of Antidepressants

Friday, 30 June 2006, 12:33 pm
Opinion: Bruce E. Levine
"While the FDA’s trust of flawed and fraudulent pharmaceutical company data has long been a problem, NIMH’s STAR*D study is a kind of “boot on the face” for Americans. In STAR*D, U.S. taxpayers paid for a methodologically substandard study done by drug-company connected researchers, who drew unjustifiably positive conclusions about antidepressants. "

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0606/S00351.htm#a