The Entrance

The Gallery and Doors to My Office

Office Left

Office Right

Do you think there is any connection between anti-depressants and violence?

Take a look at the evidence yourself and then decide. It is compelling.

http://www.ssristories.net

I am not an early riser. There are Larks and there are Owls in this world. I love the creative quiet time of night. Sometimes I do wake early and recently I did. I grabbed my camera and went to the living room window that overlooks a pond. The colors were so beautiful that I would like to share them with you.

You and I have been there, we have had periods of time where we would not change.  It is not that we could not, we would not.  We had a skill and were competent at applying that skill to holding in place a particular view of the past, present, and future.  For some people it is first experienced in early childhood, we might refuse to stop sucking our thumb.  For others it starts in the teens and for a very long time they might smoke. Rigidity in thinking begins early in life.

We create a mental universe and we live in it.  We defend it from change and opinions.  And even when we know something is not quite right with our universe and seek help we are often too buttressed in our fortress universe. Thankfully, we have our vast subconscious storehouse of learning to draw upon.My mentor in Hypnotherapy is Milton Erickson.  (Milton has been dead for decades but his work lives on.)   I have a great collection of worn and underlined books dissecting the minutia of his work. I particularly like his view of the subconscious: he says,  “Now, the unconscious mind is a vast storehouse of memories, your learnings.  It has to be a storehouse because you cannot keep consciously in mind all the things you know.  Your unconscious mind acts as a storehouse.  Considering all the learning you have acquired in a lifetime, you use the vast majority of them automatically in order to function.”

Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was always listening and that, whether or not the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found resonance at the unconscious level. The patient could be aware of this or could be completely oblivious that something was happening. Erickson would see if the patient would respond to one or another kind of indirect suggestion and allow the unconscious mind to participate actively in the therapeutic process. In this way, what seemed like a normal conversation might induce a hypnotic trance, or a therapeutic change in the subject. According to Weitzenhoffer, “[Erickson’s] conception of the unconscious is definitely not the one held by Freud.”

Psychosomatic medicine is an interdisciplinary medical field studying the relationships of social, psychological, and behavioral factors on bodily processes and well-being in humans and animals. A illness that has physical symptoms, but has the mind and emotions as its origin is called a psychosomatic illness. Although you may be told that it’s “all in your head”, these illnesses are not imaginary. The aches and pains are very real, but because your doctor is looking for an actual physical cause, they are very tricky to diagnose and treat. The key is to look for a source of stress in the person’s life that the person is not coping with. By treating the underlying stress and depression, it may be possible to heal the physical problems as well.

The seven most common causes of psychosomatic illnesses are. Conflict (conflict between what we want to do and feel we ought to do) Organ Language (use of language such as pain in the butt) Motivation (e.g.; creating illness to avoid public speaking) Past Experience (an event, remembered or not, which immediately or later, creates a symptom) Identification (e.g.; smoking now because long ago smoked with mom and enjoyed her company) Self-Punishment (from real or imagined guilt) Suggestion (at a vulnerable time an idea is accepted by the subconscious as correct)

It is possible to have more than one cause connected to a symptom.

What an interesting week thus far. I heard a wonderful story from a wonderful woman. She was pregnant and working at the time at a large retail store. Her baby had been trying to come several times way too early, and she was very worried.

One day as she was working a woman wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt came to her, talked with her, and assured her the baby would be fine. They spoke for awhile. Later on two people who worked security and watched video cameras asked her why she had been having a conversation with herself in the store. The security people and the security cameras did not “see” the woman in the Hawaiian shirt at all. They thought this woman was going crazy.

She had “forgotten” this experience for some time. There was no validation for such a mystical event. Such wonderful events are sometimes not talked about because of the social stigma of seeming to be crazy. In time, and a little early, she had her baby and it was fine.

99% of the photos in this blog I took. I imagine the life of the nature photographer as very good karma. Nature often takes my breath away.