Archive for the ‘Psych’ Category
Positive Change Works in New York!
It looks like the Brits are invading New York City this Spring. Nick Kemp will be doing a Provocative Therapy workshop in May!
Attayn Group in association with the NLP Center of New York, Positive NLP and the Creative Pier are extremely excited to bring Nick Kemp to New York for amazing 3 days of training. If you are not familiar with Nick Kemp or Provocative Therapy please go to the event webpage for more about Nick. Not only do you get a chance to train directly with Nick during this event but you also get a copy of his 2 Disc DVD Provocative Change Works for Phobias (a $100 value) as part of the training cost.
I got to study with Frank Farrelly some time back. It’ll be good to study Nick’s unique take on the topic, and it’ll be great to meet him in person!
Lessons from the Cuckoo’s Nest
Doug O’Brien sent me some AMAZING news: Andy Austin is coming to New York City!
IMPROV!: The Use of Improvisation and Drama in Slightly Crazy Environments
April 17th, 2009:
This introductory presentation will outline the “rules” and formula for successful and comedic improvisation.
As readers of The Rainbow Machine — Tales From a Neurolinguist’s Journal will be aware, I often like to utilize the building of humour, tension and drama into his change work sessions and rarely do I rely on any pre-set or rehearsed routines and scripts. Given my client group, often the client will bring their own drama and unique humour to the session and a high level of flexibility and responsivity is needed in such situations.
No previous acting experience is required and no one will be expected to perform in front of the group. Book early and hold on to your hats, because this will be a fun and fast paced evening.
LESSONS FROM THE CUCKOO’S NEST: Further Tales From a Neurolinguist’s Journal.
April 18 & 19th, 2009:
Working with other people’s madness isn’t always easy, and it isn’t always fun - but it can be. Psychological and emotional pain is rarely ever funny but I often question if change really needs to be serious. Far from joking at another person’s expense, during this weekend workshop you will be introduced to, and will explore, some therapeutic patterns and algorithms that I have found useful when working with challenging clientèle and serious mental illnesses.
I’ve learned a lot from Andy over the years, both in e-mail and on Usenet. Now I get to meet him and train with him. If I’m alive in April, I’ll be there!
Update: Here’s the link to sign up! There are discounts for signing up early, so go!
Helping People Coping with Illness
I can tell you that there are people who tell me they’ve noticed a difference in me since my heart attack almost two years ago. I have noticed it myself. Even though there’s nothing structurally wrong with my heart that hasn’t been wrong with it since before I was born (according to two separate stress tests, the heart attack caused zero damage), I’m a different guy for having experienced it. Those changes are coming to a head now, and I am looking for ways to make myself more like what I was before. I’m getting some guidance from people close to me: one is an NLP Practitioner, and the other is a psychologist who specializes in trauma. I need this guidance because it’s so easy for a person to kid themselves.
The economy is stressing lots of people to the point of strain now, and because strain is a leading cause of various illnesses, the opportunity for we people-helpers to help the physically ill with their emotional and mental challenges is likely to present itself more and more often. You never know when you might have a friend, relative, or co-worker who’s suddenly faced with something bigger than they’re equipped to handle alone.
The Psych Central blog has featured several “coping with illness” articles over the past couple of months. I’d like to draw your attention to three of them.
Breast Cancer Coping Styles refers to a Temple University study on responses to a diagnosis of breast cancer.
Ericksen set out to explore how women respond to a diagnosis of breast cancer shortly after receiving her own diagnosis. She discovered there are four types of responders, including the “take charge” type, each valuable for different women.
And, because breasts are one of the most important Western symbols of femininity and breast cancer receives more attention in the media than other forms of cancer, Ericksen also investigated how the cultural messages women receive about breast cancer inform their journeys.
PTSD Among ICU Survivors references an article from HBNS which reports that one in five ICU survivors experiences PTSD Symptoms.
PTSD can occur in people who have experienced or witnessed life-threatening events, such as serious accidents, violent personal assaults or natural disasters. Symptoms — which include nightmares and problems sleeping, flashbacks, irritability, anger and feelings of emotional detachment or numbness — often extend for months or years after the traumatic event, and affect about 6.8 percent of the general U.S. population, according to National Center for PTSD figures.
The trauma of an ICU stay triggers PTSD symptoms in many survivors and negatively can affect a person’s quality of life after leaving the hospital, the authors discovered.
Family Members Experience PTSD highlights a University of Pittsburgh study on how families of ICU survivors also experience PTSD.
Researchers found that symptoms of anxiety and depression in family members of ICU patients diminished over time, but high rates of post-traumatic stress and complicated grief remained.
“Our findings suggest that family members of patients in the intensive care unit are at risk for serious psychological disorders that may require treatment,” said Cindy L. Bryce, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and health policy and management at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
One more thing I want to mention is a book which forever changed the way I think about working with people who are facing life-changing events: When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Harold S. Kushner. If you haven’t read it yet, believe me, it’s worth the time and effort. I keep having to buy new copies because whenever I loan mine, it doesn’t come back.
So keep your eyes, ears, and heart open to those in pain, and remember those close to them as well.
NLP ahead of its time: phobias
Psych Central has some recent research that shows that mainstream psychology is finally catching up to thirty-year-old NLP:
According to a new study by University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross, the best way to move ahead emotionally is to analyze one’s feelings from a psychologically distanced perspective.
Go check out the article titled Analyze Emotions From a Distance and wonder what else we’re ahead of the curve on.
Persuasive stuff from Psychology Today
I don’t ordinarily pay much attention to Psychology Today magazine, but their RSS feed pointed me to a couple of articles on the basics of persuasion.:
Persuasion: Battle on the Car Lot:
How does a car salesman get you behind the wheel? By being a keen observer of human behavior—and not letting you say “no.”
Data Mine: From Persuasion to Impotence:
Bargaining techniques and making bad decisions: why smart women don’t want sugar daddies and how to avoid erectile dysfunction.
The second article is only partially about persuasion, but it has some good stuff about paraverbal and nonverbal framing. The rest of the article has to do with other good stuff. I especially appreciated the idea of group therapy for impotence (woohoo!) helping a man “hold his head up” <adolescent snicker> .
Cialdini has a new book!
Over at Presentation Zen is a review of Robert Cialdini’s new book, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive:
The book is designed for anyone in business who is interested in becoming better at understanding how to persuade or influence isn’t that just about everyone?. The book may also help you understand why you decide to do the things you do. Even if you are a researcher or teacher or a medical doctor, and so on, and not a business person, it’s still important to understand how people are or can be influenced and persuaded by your words and behaviors. Each chapter focuses on a single question and is no more than 3-5 pages long.
Sounds like another real winner from Dr. Cialdini. It’s on my wish list. Go get 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive for yourself! (Note: this is an amazon link with Presentation Zen’s referral code intact. When you buy, you’ll be thanking Garr for the review and the referral.)
Sentences saturated with similar sounds seem to stimulate synapses
Alliteration is the way English poetry used to be done. If you read Old English or Middle English poetry (even if you don’t understand it) you won’t find rhyming; you’ll find alliteration. If I recall correctly, rhyme didn’t come into English poetry until after the Norman Conquest.
I find alliteration to be rather hypnotic, and I’ve noticed Richard Bandler uses it sometimes in his presentations. (I’ve heard him use rhyme as well.) A recent bit of research, outlined at Cognitive Daily, indicates that it may stimulate memory as well:
Some scholars have suggested that alliteration makes a poem easier to remember: an important skill back in the days when books were so expensive that it might be cheaper to pay a bard to recite a poem than buy a written copy. But there has been little research about whether alliteration actually acts as a way to spur memory. More to the point, alliteration is rarely used throughout a poem: some of the words have to start with different letters. So alliteration might help you remember some of the poem, but it can’t help you remember the parts that aren’t alliterative. Or can it?
Go read more at Cognitive Daily: Alliteration improves memory performance
Previous posts of this particular persuasion:
Those Wacky Psychiatrists!
Wow. Thorazine is magic!
Hate parenting? Here ya go!
Ladies, can’t make your man happy? Now you can!
Too healthy? Medicine has the answer!
And here’s scientific proof that money can buy happiness.
(I’m delighted to have found the Bonkers Institute for Nearly Genuine Research.)
You’ve just got one of those faces
This article at the Mind Hacks Blog summarizes some research being done in the area of how we decide to trust (or mistrust) a person based on the shape of their face. It starts with an article at the Boston Globe, with an accompanying graphic illustration of the pertinent facial characteristics:
behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone’s reliability. Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone’s trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we’ve grown close.
Here’s something else I found interesting:
Another set of cues, and a particularly powerful one, is body language. Mimicry, in particular, seems to put us at our ease. Recent work by Tanya Chartrand, a psychology professor at Duke, and work by Jeremy Bailenson and Nick Yee, media scholars at Stanford, have shown that if a person, or even a computer-animated figure, mimics our movements while talking to us, we will find our interlocutor significantly more persuasive and honest.
Cute, eh? Go read the Globe article; it’s great.
If you love academic writing, or even more detail, here’s a PDF of a Princeton University study on the subject.
Psychedelics and Therapy
An August 19 article in The Guardian, written by psychotherapist Andrew Feldmár, talks about the benefits of using hallucinogenic drugs alongside conventional treatment:
After three LSD sessions, a patient emerged from what was labelled chronic psychotic depression (she had attempted suicide three times, had been hospitalised, and given several courses of ECT, major antipsychotics and antidepressants), and was able to hold a job, derive pleasure from her days, and look forward to cultivating a varied garden of delights. She moved from cursing me for not letting her die to blessing me for the surprising freedom that opened up for her as a result of her LSD experiences. Psychotherapy, without LSD, would not have been enough, I’m afraid.
I’ve been curious about such methods ever since reading Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception. (Not curious enough to try the stuff, though.) I’m wondering what it is, exactly, that helps the mentally ill get better so much faster with such drugs than without them. If we could determine that, we could determine how to duplicate the results more safely and consistently… perhaps even without the drugs.
Go read Psychedelic Drugs Could Heal Thousands.
(Thanks, BoingBoing, for the pointer.)