While traveling north on the railroad from New York City, we were seated comfortably by a window seat watching the east river slowly move past us back out to sea.

My husband and I spoke quietly to each other about nothing terribly important but we were happily enjoying each other's company, watching boats and seagulls float by. There were several passengers nearby, one of whom was starting to nod off. We figured he had a way to go and didn’t mind missing a few stops.

At about the tip of Manhattan, a crew of 10 people, including 5 kids under the age of 10 got on the train. It felt like we had been suddenly dropped into Disneyland. Squealing, yelling, jumping up and down, hitting, and crying filled the passenger car, bouncing off every hard surface they could find.

The fella who was sweetly asleep, was jarred awake. He nuzzled back down into his seat, but finally gave up and leaned against the window, frowning.

The conversation between my husband and I was over.

The adults in the group did absolutely nothing to either calm or correct their children. Nothing.

Worse. They encouraged them, high-fiving every jump that enabled them to touch the ceiling and every song they sang at the top of their lungs.

Does anyone else see anything wrong with this scenario?

My husband, who is a 4^th-generation Montanan, was brought up in a restrained culture in which guns usually spoke louder than words and politeness, respect, and manners was absolutely expected. Once again, he became not only fairly irritated by the behavior of both the children and the adults, but confused and a bit shocked.

Mostly it was the adults that confused him because he couldn't understand how the parents allowed what was going on. Even though I was born andraised in NY and people screaming out of tenement windows to gather their kids for dinner is not alien to me,  I think this situation was different. It was an utter absence of authority and true adulthood. If children can't count on their parents or other grown ups in their world for guidance in new situations—social or otherwise–who are they supposed to learn from?

Restricting a child’s behavior in public does not have to mean they are joy assassins, which I believe a large number of parents are scared of being. They often explain to me that they want their children to be free to express themselves and be happy.

Do manners preclude that? Does setting limits preclude that?

I don’t think so. I think that consideration for the happiness and comfort of others is actually a prerequisite for real joy. You cannot be selfish and entitled and ever find peace or true love.

As my husband said after we left the train, relieved to be away from them, “They were having a good time and they thought everyone else should know exactly how good a time they were having and how cool they were.”

Parents are so worried about how they’re perceived now, that they sometimes forget to be parents. One of the basic tenets of Verbal First Aid is the ability to take a position of benevolent authority and lead a person who is scared, confused, sick, or shocked to a more healing mind-set. Without this foundation–this authority–that says, "I know what I'm doing. I know where I'm going. Follow me." there is no way to establish rapport and guide a person through a crisis so he or she comes out whole.

Authority has gotten a bad rap–often with good reason–in this and other countries. But we ought not throw out the baby with the bath water.  A true king, a true healer, a true parent must always have a measure of authority.

The other night a neighbor’s son had a party in the middle of the night in his parent’s garage. The floods were on, the music was blaring, the giggles, the beer, the smoking—all of it for everyone’s enjoyment, whether they were sleeping or not.

Finally, we had to call them and bring the party to the parents’ “attention.” My husband believes they had to know what was going on, but I think people can be unaware of the most obvious things, if it serves them on some level.

Good parenting still includes good limits. Limits and love are not mutually exclusive. Love and limits relate to one another the way bones and flesh do. The structure is necessary for its proper expression in the world.

I recently met a man whose wife cheated on him repeatedly. As he told me the long and circuitous story of suspicion, denial and revelation, he moved through a snake pit of emotional confusion—anger, hurt, longing, disbelief, shock. And as I watched him weep, rant, deflate in despair only to bound back in self-reproach (“how could I have been so stupid?!”), I saw that he was still in shock, in the trance of his own disappointment. He was only bodily in the office with me. Most of him was lost in the torment of his recent past and his fear about the future.

Those shock states can continue for moments, for months, for years or a lifetime. And while they have good reason for being there to start with, after the moment is past, they can become huge impediments in a person’s life.

The question I am faced with when I meet people with any kind of trauma is two-fold:

One, how to bring them out of the trance they are in and two, how to work through the suffering and move to healing.

For more on this topic, please go to Huffingtonpost.com and search Trauma, Judith Acosta.

This morning I woke up and it was snowing! I don’t usually watch the news (morning or evening) because it is so filled with madness and fear, but today I wanted to hear what was going on with the weather. Unfortunately, I first had to hear all about the gruesome BP oil spill in the Gulf, the Goldman Sachs debacle and finally an insane, unpredicted, and vicious attack on nursery children in China.

I have been teaching Verbal First Aid s since 1994. And somehow it always comes down to this:

What do you say when a parent loses a kid? What do you say when it seems like there’s nothing to say?

For the full-length article, please go to http://www.opednews.com/articles/Verbal-First-Aid-in-the-Fa-by-Judith-Acosta-100629-585.html

For more information on verbal first aid with children, go to: www.verbalfirstaidthebook.com and www.radicalparenting.com.

Be still…It’s really such a simple request and such an impossibly difficult task for so many of us as we get older and more acculturated.  It certainly has been for me. I can barely talk on the phone for 15 minutes without washing the dishes or multi-tasking in some other way. America is a culture of action.  We do. We don’t sit.

The problem is that with constant busy-ness comes chronic spiritual insensibility. We can build things, accumulate things, and get from one point on a line to another faster than any other group of people on Earth. We are the cleverest, quickest, and most acquisitive culture in our planet’s history. But we see, feel, and understand less. We have collected data and sacrificed wisdom. We have built colossal glass cities and relinquished our sight.

By the time we are in high school, probably earlier, most of us are set into a rhythm of living. Our eyes are focused ahead and our peripheral vision shrinks with each passing year until we can barely see the tips on our own noses. And unless we can see not only ourselves but ourselves in context, the truth is that we can know very little. It becomes more and more difficult to see any evidence of God, no less know Him. Unless, of course, we’re in deep trouble and a sense of urgency is dramatically renewed.  As one Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has said, “Unless there is thunder, people don’t make the sign of the cross.” The American equivalent: “Everyone believes in God in the trenches.”

Yet, we are continually surrounded by the evidence. We are in a world filled with miracles. Clues are in every corner of our lives. Amma, the Hugging Saint of India, exclaimed that God is everywhere: “If you ask me who is God, I tell you, you are my god. The lion is god. The flowers are god.” Yet most of us don’t see it. Or don’t recognize these clues as such if we do see them. Some of us just forget to look.  But miracles are not empirical. They do not present themselves in the linear, organized manner of double-blind studies. We try but we cannot collect miracle data to analyze. Most people think they will believe it when they see it, but the truth is that we see it when we believe it or are at least willing to entertain the possibility. This is what is meant in Mathew and why we must be as little children to see the truth in the evidence that is all around us.

Two experiences have illustrated to me the urgency of keeping my eyes and mind open.

The first experience occurred when I was 12 years old and I was allowed to take an after-school art class. It was a small, unpretentious event held in the backroom of an old woman’s apartment in the Bronx but it changed the way I saw everything. Instead of looking at a thing and seeing its function first (how it pertained to me, how I could use it, eat it, play with it), it now had a life and a charge all its own. I saw light, form, color, shade, placement in its surroundings. If I tilted my head this way or that, the thing—and all those aspects of it—also tilted. I was suddenly in relationship with the world in a new way.

The second was studying for nearly five years to become a homeopath after already being a psychotherapist for about ten years. Classes would not start until we had all closed our eyes and sat still for a period of time, sometimes for as much as a half-hour. Even as I write this some years later, it hardly sounds like much—what’s a half-hour? But for me sitting still and letting myself be quiet so that I could receive impressions from my patients without actually collecting them, without any judgment or interference on my part was initially as easy as teaching a puppy not to run after a rabbit.  But by my last year (and it was a struggle every time) I began to notice something odd—I started to see more. Information was not just more available, it was clearer and more understandable. This, I began to understand, was where the miracles were to be found.

But understanding was far from enough for me. Humans are a complex and mixed bag of needs, desires and defects. Poised precariously between good and evil, heaven and hell, life and death, dangling between light and dark, the human heart is by nature a busy place, a shifting ground where there is both endless dance and relentless battle.

Stillness does not come easy for me.

I do not sit with much grace.

I have had to find a way to be still of heart and let my body move as it will. So, I do yoga. I walk in meditation and I pray as I hike. Sometimes on those hikes I talk. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I’m hurt and fearful. Sometimes I’m grateful and delighted. All I can do is bring myself—all of me—to Him, assuming that He can handle it, the awe, the anger, the confusion, the good, the indifferent, all of it, all of me, from the loftiest impulses to the darkest corners of my soul. And what I found was unexpectedly simple: Finding God was like being married. You have to show up for the relationship. All of you. Build it and they will come. The same is true of God.

Be there and He will come.

No one over ten years of age would be terribly surprised by that sort of turn on a dramatic television show.

But Sweets, a psychiatrist whose job it is to support the people who face the most gruesome deaths on a regular basis, is utterly shocked and rattled.

And that interested me even though it was a droll stretch in the script. Because the truth is we are utterly unnerved by the Irony of the Universe. We come unhinged when someone we know has died. “He’s dead? What do you mean?!” we want to know.

Why are we so shocked by death? Why are we so stunned by suffering when it comes, finally knocking on our door? Why does the death of a young man unhinge us when we have lived in the world (in Sweet’s case for a few decades) and seen what the world is made of? Why—when we know there are NO exceptions to the bruising life gives us—do we still think happiness, good endings, and success is some sort of birthright?

I pondered this for a few hours and then it dawned on me: We forget the world is fallen. And it is fallen, all of it…all the time. I don't much like it and apparently I'd rather forget, too, but I keep getting reminders.

Once I had the misfortune of seeing a large hawk pick at a dying, but still-breathing rabbit underneath a juniper to the side of my garage. It was horrifying, but the deed was done and there was nothing I could do except weep as I walked away.

Sometimes, even years later, that image–that most intimate suffering–will pop up unbidden and unwanted while I’m driving or walking or resting. Every time, even now as I write this, I wince in pain.

As a psychotherapist and homeopath, I work with people whose lives are filled with undeserved misery, whose suffering sometimes boggles the mind and keeps me up at night. I have seen enough to know and it should be enough for me to remember what life is really like.

Yet, I’m no different than Dr. Sweets. I forget because I live in America where I can enjoy long periods of relative ease and comfort. I forget that things are fallen when all seems to be going well, the dogs are healthy, my husband is happy, and my family is at peace. I forget because I've been damned lucky.

Up until not too long ago (it embarrasses me to think just how not so long ago that was), I operated under the delusion that somehow everyone else would die, but I would just keep going. And that if I “just did this” or “just avoided that” or “just avoided flying” that somehow my ticket would never get punched. One can get very wrapped up (knotted, really) by this sort of thinking.

I know I’m not the only one, though. I think most of America operates under this delusion and because of it many, many people spend a great deal of their lives anxious—fearful, to be more accurate—and trying desperately yet vainly to control as much of their environment as they can.

Acknowledging the fallen nature of the universe does not mean we stop lamenting suffering, or stop praying for the recovery of a loved one, or ignore injustice or walk away from a wounded animal.

To the contrary.

At least for me, finally coming to terms with the nature of existence and my own mortality has set me free. I no longer have to struggle against the way it is. I no longer worry about “what ifs.” I no longer try to control the things that are uncontrollable. I know that there is little I can do about suffering (though I will never learn to shrug it off) and I accept its inevitability.

What I can do, though, is be truly present to those who are in its grip and I can give more of myself to the things I really can do something about. For instance, the other day my husband and I stopped by a wild bird supply store to pick up some seed. We got to talking with the shopkeeper and we asked her about the sudden disappearance of all the smaller song birds in the area. Where we used to get flocks of robins, finches, titmice, bluebirds and juncos, now we saw absolutely nothing. Not a one in the birdbath. No one on the feeder.

She said, “That’s odd. Maybe you have a predator?” I hadn’t seen anything, but I yielded the possibility. We are, after all, in the foothills of a large mountain and federal land.

The next day while driving home I saw something bizarre: a young hawk standing in front of our house by the edge of the road. I thought it was a hawk, anyway. I stopped the car and the bird looked at me with utter indignation and tried to fly away.

Instead he flopped. His wing was broken. I ran into the house, yelled for my husband to come out with a towel and leather gloves. I said, “Don’t ask, just hurry.”

It was getting dark and I knew if we let him stay there, by morning the coyotes would have found him. Or he would soon die of the pain, an infection or starvation.

We ran after him a little while and finally managed to throw the towel over him. My husband picked him up and we held him in one of the dog crates, covered, until we got in touch with a friend who’s not only a medic but a top-notch expert on raising birds of prey. When we brought the bird to him, he looked at it and exclaimed, “It’s not a hawk. It’s a kestrel. He’s a full grown falcon!”

It was a joyous relief to learn the next day that he’d been handed over to a rehab, Talking Talons, for surgery and hopefully release back into the wild. So, the birds have started returning.

But it is all such a frail thing; it all hangs in so precarious a balance. For them to come back, one kestrel had to be severely wounded.

I am no great mystic. I understand relatively little about how things are the way they are. But I have learned a few things that help me to observe truly and keep my center. The most important one is the simple knowing that if the world is indeed fallen, there was a fall. And if there was a fall, there was a place, a higher place from which it fell. That means that it was created to be quite different than the way it actually is and that it can—and will—be restored to its proper condition, as God intended.

This I do believe—we all, the falcon, the small birds, the Boy on the Train, and all that suffer will one day be redeemed and made new. There will be no balance beam to totter along, no “ironies” of natural law, no struggle to make palatable that which is intrinsically intolerable, no need for philosophical pockets big enough to hold the suffering of the innocent.

One day, the debate will be over. The train will be made to set right on the tracks again. In my mind I hear some of the last words of the last book of the Narnia series when the battles are all over and Lucy, Edmund and Peter stand at the end of all they have known, before all they have ever hoped to know: “Welcome, in the Lion’s name. Come further up and further in!”

It happens with Hummers, with houses, with degrees of “handsome” and with holiness. People will even huddle around their own humility, if you can wrap your mind around that one. I know at least one person who not only announces how humble she is, but attests to the humility of all those she associates with.

When we “huddle” like that or use a quality or item as a source of pride and superiority, we are simultaneously shaming others, whether we intend to or not, whether we are even conscious of it or not. When I googled "snob" I was rather surprised to see how many websites (millions) were snob sites. There were cigar snobs, brew snobs, bag snobs, pot snobs, coffee snobs, and beauty snobs. There were snob snobs, which I took to mean people who were snobs about being snobs. There were so many levels of elitism, I lost count.

But the essence of it goes like this:

I have a Hummer. Hummers mean success. Success means I’m favored. Being favored means I’m better. Better than who? Better than you. Why? Because you don’t have a Hummer. (And if you do, I’ll find a way to make my Hummer bigger, better, and badder.) This can be done alone or in a group. Just take out the “I” and substitute a “We.” It’s the way most problems are started in the world as much as in the playground.

So…speaking of playgrounds…

My colleague came in to the office the other day shocked and dismayed by what he heard transpire between his young granddaughter and an older, obviously way more sophisticated nine-year-old girl.

“Look at what my grandpa got me,” the little one said, happy to be in her soft, fuzz-lined boots.

The nine-year old looked her up and down. (Can nine-year-olds watch Desperate Housewives?)

“My grandpa got it for me for Christmas!!!” Her joy was palpable. There was no pride, just a fuzzy delight. “They’re UGGS!”

The nine-year-old pursed her lips in disapproval and said, “Those aren’t real UGGS. I’ve got real UGGS. Yours are fakes.”

Then she pivoted and walked away, leaving a little girl confused and deflated.

Why did the nine-year-old do that? Because someone had shown her how important it was to have the “right” label. Someone had instructed her already—by the ripe old age of nine—how to have pride in a thing that meant literally nothing. Someone had given her the ability to attach her sense of self to an article of clothing, a pair of boots, to make her image more important than her integrity, rightness of being, her compassion, or her relationships.

My husband is a musician and he sees a fair cross-section of people when he plays in clubs and public forums. Recently, after a gig in another state, he told me about a group of 20-something men and women who had paid fairly good money to be seated at a table near the stage. Every single one of them had their face lit up green by their palm pilots (or whatever they’re calling them this week). Not one of them was listening to the music. Not one of them was in actual communion with anyone else.

I have been a psychotherapist treating trauma and anxiety for more than 25 years. I have been teaching Verbal First Aid and therapeutic communication for almost 20. I have seen many forms of emotional fragmentation. I have seen pained children and lost parents, angry spouses and lonely ones. The world is no stranger to suffering.

But something that is happening now has not happened before. While we are physically closer in proximity than ever before, we are less—far less—connected to one another. The trend is a disturbing one: It is as if our own manifest destiny were a version of a microcosmic “big bang.” Post-boom, western culture is moving out like a speeding centrifuge, pushing itself further out to the edges, farther away from each part of itself, leaving its center empty.

If, as it’s said, nature abhors a vacuum, that emptiness has to be filled by something. If we are wise, that emptiness gets filled by God and we are released back into communion, re-centered, and freed. If we are unwise, we buy more and more Uggs so we can lord it over little girls who wear other-than-Uggs and buy into the delusion that it somehow makes us better. We are then pulled by those forces farther and farther away from the only things that really will make us better. Each other and God.

Psychology and fundamentalism at best have been polite opponents. In recent history, say the last 50 years, this opposition has become vigorous and often less than polite. Many churches, such as Calvary, completely eschew all mental health practitioners (whether social workers, psychiatrists or counselors) and staunchly maintain that all healing comes directly from God or prayer and that all you need in order to develop and maintain a robust mental health may be found in Scripture or a prayer session.

This rejection of psychotherapy may have been a reaction to the “I’m okay, you’re okay” generation of therapists who did very little for most people except to allay the anxieties of narcissists and sociopaths by telling them “if it feels good, it is good.”  In the eyes of both Orthodox Jews and Christians, the field of humanistic psychology took the whole program of self-improvement one giant step too far, putting man in the center of the universe, particularly his own.

Their objections were not wrong. And I say this as a holistic psychotherapist with almost 25 years of experience in the field.

I have seen far too many well-meaning therapists do little more for their patients than make them feel better about being sick. They are loath to challenge or confront negative behavior or unhealthy thinking because they fear being seen as judgmental. As a result of their tentative relationships with the truth, they fail in their relationships with their patients. They do not see what needs to be healed so the patient is left unhealed. This is truly a disservice to the patient because what it ultimately does is feed the pathology and starve the essence of the person.

I think all good and true healing flows from the same Source which means that there can be an alliance—and an important one—between the Biblical and Mental Health communities.

But only if we have an understanding of our terms and are actually seeking the same results.

(More on this topic to come.)

It's axiomatic that you get what you pay for. On observation, however, I believe that there are times we get more than we bargain for, not all of it good. In the case of current media-incitements, we get much more and we are rarely aware of it.

Viral fear, that generalized anxiety induced and spread by the media in all its forms, is evident not only in advertising but in most television programming. There's the famous It Could Happen Tomorrow series on the Weather Channel and that important reminder Armageddon Week on the History Channel. For the thoroughly inured and brain-injured there's also a 24-7 fear channel on cable in case someone needs to scare themselves to sleep. Of course, it's not enough to watch horrifying dramatizations of our last days on earth. Advertisers do their duty when they alert us to the more imminent dangers to life and limb if we don't buy their ________ (insert one or all of the following: security system, flu vaccine, dietary supplement, colon cleanser, or SUV).

There are statistics that suggest that while our diets are no good (by in large, they're awful), they're not the sole culprits in our poor health. While our intake of alcohol is high, that too is not the bullet that hit the artery. Same with cigarettes.

The Europeans eat and drink and smoke and suffer fewer heart attacks and less cancer. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us but the Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.The Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of  sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

Something else is at work, then.

I've been a psychotherapist for 25 years. Licensed in five states at one point. Seen hundreds, if not thousands of people. The one thing that seems to be the most prevalent and devastating to the most people is the constant fear, the unrelenting stress to perform to some impossible standard, and the agonizing inability to meet those standards and resulting inadequacy. This is just observation, not analysis.

But I did have a question or a thought on the topic. Is it possible that part of our cultural nature as adventurers and conquerers has something to do with it? When we are not scaling sheer cliffs, jumping out of planes, or conquering the west, where does that energy go?

There's a truism in Homeopathy that a remedy exists on a polar spectrum. It can be bright red (for instance) with heat or appear to be so white it looks cold. It can be enraged or as silent and coiled as a snake. It can be delighted or deranged. Each one existing within the same remedy state.

Could the same be true for Americans? That when we're not engaged in the extremes of conquest, we're trapped by our televisions? That the kissing cousin of adventure–fear–grabs us as soon as we stop leaping off of cliffs. And one thing I DO know is that fear kills us faster than anything else I've seen.

Just a thought to consider.

]]> http://www.wordsaremedicine.com/2010/01/10/the-wages-of-fear/feed/ 1 http://www.wordsaremedicine.com/2009/12/29/new-article/ http://www.wordsaremedicine.com/2009/12/29/new-article/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:59:05 +0000 Judith Acosta http://www.wordsaremedicine.com/?p=852 http://ezinearticles.com/?Christianity-and-Verbal-First-Aid&id=3436498

For those interested in how faith can be allied with Verbal First Aid and hypnotherapy.

Traditional or fundamental Christians have had issues with hypnosis before. Verbal First Aid is a form of hypnotic communication. Can they be true to their faith and use Verbal First Aid?

I believe Christians can use Verbal First Aid to benefit their own health and the health of their loved ones and stay faithful to scripture and spirit.

One of Christianity’s great fears about hypnosis as they've understood it through television and mass media is that it is used by malevolent people to induce a moral laxity and make the prohibited permissible.

The truth, however, is that clinical hypnosis cannot make anyone do anything that would undermine their moral or ethical resolve.

There's a simple and true story to demonstrate this:

One day Dr. Erickson, the greatest psychiatrist and hypnotherapist of the last century,  went to his secretary and told her he was tired and wanted to rest. If anyone called, he told her, she was to say that he was out of the office. She agreed to do this for him. A few days later he put her in a hypnotic trance and then asked her the same thing: to tell people he was out of the office when he was in fact taking a break. While still in a formally induced trance, she refused outright. “Why?” he wanted to know.

"Because,” she said, “it would be a lie.”

Ironically, in hypnosis she had a stronger moral resolve than in her normal waking state.

Hypnosis is not “brainwashing" even though it's been portrayed that way. Verbal First Aid–as a form of hypnotic communication in acute situations–is similarly not a form of "mind control."

Here is the critical difference between the way Christians have been taught to see hypnotherapy and its clinical reality in the hands of ethical practitioners:
Hypnosis only utilizes a state of consciousness that is already natural and normal. Trance is not something that is artificially induced in a person. It is simply a state of awareness in which we are more focused on an internal process (breathing, thoughts) and most importantly it is something all of us move in and out of all day.

This normal shift of awareness is even more common when we are frightened, hurt, or ill, which is why Verbal First Aid works so well to help stop bleeding, reduce an inflammatory response, and lower blood pressure. We can see it even more dramatically when it is used with children who enter fairly easily and frequently into “trance."

How Verbal First Aid Works in Alliance with Faith and the Faithful

If the definitions of trance as clinicians use it are accurate (and I believe they are) and the dangers are real as Christians see them (and I believe they certainly can be), how can the healing use of imagery work together with the faithful so that as Jesus said in John 10:10, “I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.”

In the beginning was the word.

That words are powerful is a familiar concept to those who read the Bible.

Words have a prominent position in the Bible from the third sentence: And GOD SAID LET THERE BE LIGHT. He did not create with His “hands”. He spoke—“By the word of the Lord were the heavens made (Ps. 33).” To speak is to WILL into existence. What we say and how we say it is a co-creative act. What we say hangs somewhere between heaven and earth.

Words matter. The mystics have always known this. Only now is science catching up.

Why? Because they create images in the mind of the person to whom we are speaking. Those images and the thoughts that flow with them generate cascades of chemistry that dictate not only how we feel emotionally, but how fast or slow our hearts beat, how high our blood pressure goes, how profoundly we feel the pain of an injury, even the way our livers function.

We all use words all the time. And they have the power to help or to harm. Isn’t it our obligation to make what we say as healing as possible?

The therapeutic use of words (psychotherapy/hypnosis) is no different than a good conversation, a sermon, a lecture, a television show or a good book. It is the use of words to move us to see things in a different way, to uplift and help us. When used in the right way with a proper intention, those words can help us heal.