NLPhilia Blog

The Freakonomics Blog points to a recent article (Net Gains for Mental Health) in the London Times:

Type “online counsellor” into any internet search engine and hundreds of thousands of results will appear: with a click of the mouse, and a glance at a screen, you, too, can be cured of your depression, phobias and eating disorders, go the claims. Unbelieveable? Perhaps not. A growing body of research has found that when – and this is crucial – it is carried out responsibly, and kept specific, online therapy is one of the most effective ways of dealing with the rising levels of mental ill-health.

Some of us have been doing this sort of thing for a while. I’ve coached people via e-mail, Instant Messaging, and phone. I’m always careful to test — even more often than while face-to-face — and I’m far more likely to be explicit and overt. I can’t say I like doing it as much as face-to-face, but it can work.

I wouldn’t want an inexperienced or poorly-trained person doing it, though.

What do you think?

By way of Lifehacker I found a really cool article on how to exercise your mind:

You can find strong powers of concentration in yourself. When you are decisive and sincerely want to excel in your studies, pass an important exam, or playing one of your favorite games; the power of concentration becomes available to you. This kind of concentration is raised because of some need, or desire. Increasing it in a systematic way, brings it under your control, and grants you the ability to use it easily, with no exertion whenever you need it. Real and good concentration is developed slowly, through daily work, and with special exercises. It has to be approached in a reasonable and practical way.

Read more at the EgoDevelopment blog, and see also my recent reference to a great DVD on the subject.

Andy Smith’s Practical EQ blog points to an interesting article in The Guardian:

Focusing on depression in a purely clinical way is preventing us understanding our susceptibility to it and ignores the good it can bring, argues psychiatrist Paul Keedwell

This goes pretty well with one of my own beliefs about pain.

So often I find people who claim they “have depression”. I ask them a few questions and find they don’t “have depression”; they are perfectly normal and well-adjusted and they are having some bad stuff happening to them.

When did it become a bad thing to feel sad when, say, Mom dies, or “rightsizing” strikes, or the bank forecloses? What dipstick came up with the idea that we should be happy all the time and that we’re somehow broken if we respond appropriately to difficult times?

I find the whole thing depressing. Maybe I should take a pill. Wait, what?

Over at Violent Acres I found an interesting article on depression. The author’s grandmother is the star of this article, and I’d have loved to have met her:

I learned that I wasn’t sad because there was something wrong with my brain. I learned that I was sad because my life sucked.

Go read the rest of the article at Most People Are Depressed For a Very Good Reason.

Anyway… it might be my Buddhist leanings, but I see pain as a part of life. It’s our unconscious’ way of letting us know there’s something injured. The reason a person with leprosy finds their body parts rotting away and falling off is that leprosy destroys their ability to feel pain, so they injure themselves and never notice it.

I remember a good friend a few years ago telling me that she stopped taking antidepressants because she’d “rather feel bad than feel nothing at all”. I worked with her a bit but haven’t seen her since, so I don’t know how she’s doing. Smart lady, though.

I’m not so quick to take a person’s pain away. It might be just what they need to keep.

Update: Powells Books hosts a New Replublic review of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz. (Thanks to Adrian Reynolds’ recent post on NLP Connections.)

I’ve long questioned the value of pursuing and cultivating “self-esteeeeeeem”. My take on it is pretty much the same as that of author Jane Haddam: “In my day, we didn’t have self-esteem. We had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.”

I’d expand on this, but the blog “Violent Acres” recently did a much better job:

Remember when the hippy dippy girl with the dreads was the only one dashing off to Indonesia to ‘find herself?’ Now everyone under 30 is off searching for themselves in some misguided attempt to discover inner peace and the results are nothing to write home about. Usually, when people ‘find themselves,’ the only thing they really discover is more things to hate.

The reason for this is simple: If you’re spending all your time focusing inward, it’s pretty impossible to make a positive impact anywhere else. Self fulfillment never comes after looking in the mirror and finally realizing you’re a raging narcissist.

Go read Learning to Love Yourself is a Pointless Waste of Time at the very funny and insightful blog, Violent Acres.

Incidentally, some years back I developed a process for improving one’s self-respect. It’s really a method by which it’s discovered… that is to say, we’ve earned it and don’t realize it. I really must write it down sometime.

I always want to know when a victim of assault and/or battery is in my Emergency Department. It’s not unheard-of for an assailant to come to a hospital to try to finish the job they started. One night, a nurse called me about a woman whose live-in boyfriend had tried to run her over with his car. He’d missed, but had caught her arm with a side mirror or something.

I went to her room to chat with her, mostly to find out how likely she thought it was that he’d show. I try my best to appear “soft on the outside, hard on the inside” with victims of domestic violence because I never know what sort of generalizations they’ve made about men. I want them to know that I’m no threat to them, but that if the guy shows up, I’ll definitely be a threat to him. I found out what I needed to know, but I didn’t leave. She had the look about her of someone who wanted to talk. So I let her.

Before I go any further, you should probably see something. I got the following image from a Web page of the State’s Attorney’s Office in Harford County, Maryland. It’s a decent visual representation of the pattern that couples follow when they do the domestic violence thing.

Essentially, things get tense over a period of time, then he beats her up. After he beats her up, he starts to think about what might happen if someone finds out, so he treats her really nice for a while. Then the whole thing starts over.

Now, this definitely isn’t politically correct, but I’ve never been accused of such atrocities as political correctness, so here we go: much of the time, when someone is a victim of a crime, it’s likely that they have participated in some way in their own victimization. That is not to say that they wanted it or asked for it or that it’s their fault in any way; it’s only to say that something they did, whether or not they realized it, contributed in some way to the problem. Most people will correct those behaviors if someone cares enough to point out the problem to them, and we NLPers know that if we interrupt a pattern it’s far more likely that we’ll get a different result.

I’ve never known a woman to say, “I stay with him because he beats me.” (There may be such women but I’ve never met one.) Usually they tell me they’re staying because they “have to”. What I think is unfortunate is when a woman does get up the courage (and other resources) required to leave the bum and then goes and hooks up with another guy who treats her the same way. It’s a pattern, and one that cries out for interruption.

The lady to whom I was speaking told me what had happened that evening, and then she told me he said he was sorry and that she was going to go back.

My first reaction was visceral. I won’t tell you what I thought, because I want this to be a reasonably friendly blog, but I imagine you can guess. But then I thought, you know, she’s talking to me about it, so she probably wants feedback.

There are three things I’ve observed about women who are in this “battered” pattern:

• They isolate each incident of battering within its own little time capsule, and therefore never notice the pattern;
• They have two distinct aspects of their personality — we might call them “parts” if we were so inclined — and each of those “parts” deals with one of the spokes on the above-referenced image; and
• They don’t have “boundaries”, i.e., they allow most anyone to treat them like a doormat.

So I said to her, “He said he was sorry.” I pointed to a spot in the air right in front of her.

“Yes”, she responded.

“I’m curious. Isn’t that what he said last time?” I pointed to a spot a little to my right, her left, of the spot I had just pointed to.

It took her a second or two, but she remembered. “Yeah.”

“What about the time before that?”

“Yeah, then too.”

“And the time before that?”

With each question I’m pointing to a little spot on a horizontal line in the air in front of me, farther and farther to her left. I didn’t have to ask very many times before her face got grim and her jaw set tight. I let it sink in for a couple of heartbeats, looked off to her left, and asked, “Just how long has this been going on?”

A little angrily, she said, “…A long time.” Then, after another pause, a little quieter: “Too long.”

“You know,” I said, “I’ve noticed something about women in that situation. I’ve noticed that they talk to themselves differently depending on how the guy is treating them.”

She looked at me quizzically.

“When he’s hurting them,”, I say, holding my left hand palm-up, “they’re saying to themselves, ‘If only I’d had dinner on the table on time’ or ‘If only I hadn’t spent money on that new pair of shoes’ or whatever.” She nodded in recognition. “And when he’s saying he’s sorry,” I continued, holding my right hand palm-up, “they’re saying to themselves, ‘Oh, he’s sorry, he bought me flowers, he really loves me, he’ll never do it again.'” She nodded again in recognition. “So over here (shaking my left hand) they’re blaming themselves, and over here (shaking my right hand) they’re blaming him.” Again she agreed.

Bringing my hands together, I said, “I have no idea why these two so rarely get together and talk this thing out.”

She got quiet, as you can well imagine, and very still. I waited until I saw some signs of remembering where she was, told her I’d be around if she needed anything, and took my leave.

A few months later, I saw her again. This time, she was visiting someone who was a patient. She had to remind me who she was because I didn’t recognize her. She looked really different. Happy. At peace. I asked her how things were going.

“Good,” she said. “Really, really good.”

“How’s the guy who tried to run you over?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t talked to him since that night.”

I had to smile. She looked so incredibly good when she said that.

“Are you with anyone now?” I asked.

“Yep!” A little perk in her tone and her facial expression.

“How does he treat you?”

“Good. Really, really good. Like a queen. I’ll never again be with a guy who hurts me.”

I couldn’t have felt better.

Psych Central News is finally helping the rest of the world catch up to a little something NLPers have known for bloody ages:

A NIMH-funded research study discovers a behavioral therapy program designed to treat children diagnosed with social phobia helped them overcome more of their symptoms than the antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac). The study is published in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Go to Psych Central and read more of Therapy More Effective than Medication for Kids with Social Phobia.

Here’s some cool research on subliminals:

Subliminal messages–messages that are processed by our brains but never reach our consciousness–really do influence attitudes and behavior, according to a new study.

However, some subliminal messages may have an opposite effect than expected. For example, exposing people to a subliminal image of a national flag moderates rather than intensifies their political attitudes.

Go check out the rest of The Influence of Subliminal Messages at Psych Central News.

Psych Central News writes about some interesting research showing a link between being depressed and a lack of olfactory sensitivity:

Can’t smell the roses? Maybe you’re depressed, say researchers from Tel Aviv University. Scientists recently linked depression to a biological mechanism that affects the olfactory glands.

It might explain why some women, without realizing it, wear too much perfume.

I used to know a woman who was rather severely depressed (she had good reason!) and she’d leave a scent trail one could follow for several minutes. She used a lot of perfume. When someone mentioned it to her, she was surprised; she really had no idea.

I wonder how this might affect the way I approach people who tell me they want help with depression. Maybe I’ll make sure to add in some hallucinated “aromatherapy” during the session.

The thing I just posted on color and perception reminded me of some work I did with a friend while I was doing my first Prac training back in ’97.

She told me she hated salad because it was “just so green“, saying the word “green” with a tone of disgust and a visible shudder. I said, “There’s got to be at least one green food you like.” She thought for a second and got a look of lust in her eyes. “Key lime pie,” she said, making the words sound like phone sex.

(Now, I know, key lime pie isn’t so very green per se. Except when someone tints it. But it’s green enough to be considered green, especially by guys like me, who only see in primary and secondary colors anyway. 😉 )

All I did was help her change her submodalities of salad to those of key lime pie. Just a simple textbook swish pattern, a basic Prac skill. It took all of two minutes, including asking her for the differences between the pictures.

I’ve kept in touch with her since then, have gone out to eat with her many times, and have even taken her grocery shopping. In restaurants she frequently orders a salad, always finishes the salad even if she has to take her entree home, and tends to comment on how good they are; in the grocery store, salad fixings are always on her list. Here it is, over ten years later, and that simple swish is still doing its job.