NLPhilia Blog

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.)

“The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.” — Frank Herbert (Author of Dune and its sequels)

Once I was more interested in the Java programming language than I am now. I joined the Java Lobby so as to keep up with developments. I never learned to write Java code, but I still keep my Java Lobby newsletter coming. Sometimes there is something powerful in it. Like this past issue, which pointed me to The Philosophical Geek‘s article on the Top 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Programmers:

• Humility
• Love of Learning
• Detail-orientedness
• Adaptability
• Passion

Please don’t just read the list and think you’re done. The article is wonderful. I especially enjoyed the part about humility… what it is and is not. Go read it all.

BoingBoing.net points us to this National Geographic tutorial on brain anatomy and physiology.

The Emergency Department called me because there was an aggressive and intoxicated psychiatric patient causing some problems. When I got there, I heard him yelling at the staff. He was demanding to be allowed to leave so he could go somewhere and kill himself. His wife was leaving him for someone else, he said, so he had nothing to live for. Of course, the staff was shouting at him too, but only so they could be heard above his shouting.

Before I got to the room, I met his wife, with whom I happened to be acquainted. (No, I wasn’t the guy for whom she was leaving her husband.) She was concerned for him and embarrassed. I asked her if what he was saying was true, and she said it was. I don’t think she foresaw how he would react when she dropped that bomb on him. I’d never met the guy, but I could have told her what he’d do.

The more I heard of the shouting — both from him and from the staff — the more it sounded like an argument. He refused to listen to anyone, and the staff refused to let him leave. “Let me out of here!” he’d say, and they’d respond with “Mister Johnson, we can’t do that, we’re here to help you!” (His name wasn’t Johnson, but let’s call him Robert Johnson for the sake of this article.)

I turned to his wife and asked, “What did his mother used to call him?”

“Huh?” she said. “Why do you need to know that?”

“I want to try something,” I told her.

“She called him ‘Bobby'”.

I walked into the room and adopted the demeanor of someone who was surprised to see an old friend in a hospital. “Bobby!” I said. “What’s going on?”

The transformation actually shocked me. He changed instantly from a drunk guy spoiling for a fight to a ten-year-old kid leveling with his best buddy. He started telling me all about what was going on, and I said, “Hey, while we’re talking, let these good folks do their jobs. Now, go on. You were at home, minding your own business, and then what?”

He sat there and told me the whole story, and the staff got what they needed (blood samples, IV line started, and so on) without a problem. Anything I wanted him to do, he did it. Anyone else tried to get him to do something, he’d look at me and ask me if he should do it. And when it came time for me to leave the room, he was calm and grateful that someone heard him out.

This was several years ago. I still don’t know him, and wouldn’t recognize him today. He probably wouldn’t recognize me, either, because he was pretty drunk at the time. But we were childhood buddies for a little while.

Did you know about Jamie Smart’s Real World NLP & Hypnosis Blog? I didn’t until just now.

I admit it. I like martial arts movies. Even the cheesy ones from China. But I can stop any time I want to.

No wonder there’s so much violence in the world. Scientists have found evidence that aggression rewards the brain in much the same way as sex, food and drugs.

Brain Views Aggression As A Reward

By way of Boing Boing we find an article in Science Daily which explains how it’s possible to “prime” people with compelling scents.

Exposure to something that whets the appetite, such as a picture of a mouthwatering dessert, can make a person more impulsive with unrelated purchases, finds a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. For example, the researchers reveal in one experiment that the aroma of chocolate chip cookies can prompt women on a tight budget to splurge on a new item of clothing.

I’ve wondered for years why women like to wear food-scented lotions. Now I know… it’s a trap! 😉

Aroma Of Chocolate Chip Cookies Prompts Splurging On Expensive Sweaters

Scott Adams, over in The Dilbert Blog, recently asked his readers for nonsense. He considered the idea that most song lyrics today are nonsense, and he wanted his readers to write a hit song.

Looks like it worked.

Next time you’re creating an induction, remember this.

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.