Everyone is different when it comes to their addictions.

There was one woman who needed surgery.

Se was in her 80's when he went to see a colleague of mine for an unrelated ailment. She had been beaten and cut by her husband for years. To deal with it, she took up drinking. She took it up so well, that she forgot about the abuse but became physically ill. She finally succumbed to the alcohol and had to go in for surgery for her gall bladder.

"They told me my liver was so soft, they almost couldn't do the surgery at all. So, I said to myself, 'Barbara Ann [name changed], you may not be very smart, but you ain't dumb enough to drink yourself to death neither.' So I just quit."

That was in 1981. She's been sober since.

Fear, as they say, can be a great motivator.

Hi Jude,

Your point about children tending to "interpret things literally, think magically, and respond viscerally" to heal right away, I observed when my daughter, known then as the "Little Princess", crawled atop a chair and "unintentionally" dove into the edge of a coffee table. Contact point: right eyebrow, which accommodated her explosion of kinetic energy with a half inch gash.

I am an easy-going parent, but watching your kid simulate bungee-jumping sans bungee, even for two feet, heightens your terror alert meter… For those who don't know, small head wounds produce volumes of blood. I remained calm and said, "Wow, I've done that, boom, you hit your head!" then I told her bleeding was a good thing, cleaning the wound and all, and that it would stop soon because of the magic ice. There was more, but the really interesting part occurred at the hospital, she chatted with the nurses and doctors about her situation, never cried (even while they stitched the wound), and the amount of blood was comparatively small. It was a non-event to her.

Did I contribute to her self-healing attitude and actions? Looking back and comparing elements of what I did to your Verbal First Aid… I believe I may have, and if it worked on the "Little Princess" it will work on other kids too.

The best part is that you are modeling beneficial behavior for your kids – how to react to your grandchildren.

Good thoughts!
Lawson M.

That's precisely how it's supposed to work. Words lead to thoughts lead to images lead to chemistry which in turn leads to images and reinforces thoughts about ourselves–how we handle stress, healing etc…

Thanks, Lawson.

Through their work, they attained great status as healers. They were revered as the “anargyroi,” the Unmercenary physician,s because they decided to stop charging for their services and to offer the gift of healing purely out of their devotion to God.

They never starved or lacked for anything, although they were brutally tortured and beheaded in 287AD   during the persecution under Diocletian for not recanting their beliefs.

After I heard their story–despite their unfortunate ending–I made a decision about my practice as a holistic psychotherapist. From that point on, I would slide my fee scale and that if someone truly wanted help and I could honestly help them, I would. Period. No forms. No hidden agendas. God gave me the tools. I give them to you.

This is not easy in a world where standards of care are generated by committees composed of people from pharmaceutical conglomerates and insurance companies. Or where doctors get sued for malpractice when diabetics won't stop drinking alcohol. The tort laws in NM have scared most medical practitioners to Texas.

When I was being interviewed and had a site visit conducted by NM medicaid, in order to become a provider I had to post exit signs over what were clearly doors AND have a map of my house drawn according to scale and post it where patients could see it. It had to have a "YOU ARE HERE" mark and show them the way out.

Mind you, my private office is in my home and the office has a separate entrance. There's no mistaking it.

At one point in the interview, the insurance rep was so adamant about it I had to ask, "If there's a fire, do you think I'm going to run out and leave my patient here?" He, by the way, was sitting right next to the door!

He just shrugged, "Those are the rules."

I shrugged, too, and decided after two months that I wanted the exit signs off my walls and that I would not leave my patients to burn.

So, now to a more pointed story of modern medicine under the thumb of big business:

Someone I know who was injured on the job was sent by the Worker’s Compensation insurance underwriter to one of their approved rehabilitation physicians.

The patient was examined and at first it revealed nothing, so they said it was a muscle injury and pushed pain killers, particularly vicodin, which is a known hazard  (tendency for addiction, narcotic bowel syndrome, irritability and mood disturbance, motor function disturbance and so on and so forth). The patient  refused all of their suggestions but took a bottle of ibuprofen.

Finally, after much complaining and only after the 90 days for a lawsuit had passed, the insurance company begrudgingly ordered an MRI which found several bulging discs including an impinged S1. They also found moderate to severe neuropathy along one leg, hip and buttock.

Nothing worked to help except one thing: physical therapy. So what did the modern doctors do?

They discontinued treatment, declared the patient MMI (at “maximum medical improvement”) and told him he really should "reconsider the vicodin because it was never going to get better." He was told he was permanently disabled.

The patient couldn't believe what he'd heard. They were taking away the only treatment that had helped? “But that was the only thing that worked. How can you do this?”

“Yeah,” the doctor said, “but you had your 8 weeks.”

“But you’re a DOCTOR!” the patient leaned forward, raising his voice.

“I know. But that’s the system."

The patient was furious. He pointed his finger, “No. YOU’RE the system.”

The doctor went on to earn a lot of money and live very comfortably.  So far he has not been beheaded.

For the rest of this article on the choices involved in becoming a healer, on the amazing healers I have known, and what insurance companies have done to the practice of medicine, please take just a short click to: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Modern-Medicine-Healing-o-by-Judith-Acosta-100715-534.html. It's worth the trip. We have some serious thinking to do about medicine and what we expect from our physicians. And, practitioners: we have some serious, serious work ahead of us if we're going to get back to the real business of healing.

In one of my talks on Verbal First Aid™, I make a point of bringing up the stethoscope as one of the inventions that truly changed medicine and the art of healing. Because where once the physician had to lay his or her ear on the patient’s chest to hear the heart beating, now there was over a foot of distance between them. We need to rethink this.

According to a growing number of experts, a human's need–and search–for safety starts at conception. Studies have shown that mothers who do not want or are overwhelmed by their pregnancies induce the production of stress hormones in their newly forming babies.

Gary Sibcy, Ph.D.,co-author with Tim Clinton, of Attachments: Why You Love, Feel, and Act the Way You Do, states unequivocally that relationships–how we speak, relate, and respond to our children–are crucial to brain development. Furthermore, he emphasizes, the earlier we engage children properly in life, the more likely they are to be healthy, adaptable, and happy.

In the field of Interpersonal Neurobiology, it is becoming axiomatic that the brain is a social organ and that the relationships we experience at an early age change not only the way the brain functions but its very structure and its future function. The brain changes and forms with experience and our interpretation of those experiences based on what we see, hear, and feel around us. This particular and important feature of childhood is what experts callplasticity.

A child is not born with a fixed set of resources, not even genetically. The only thing that comes in ready to go is the brain stem, which allows us to breathe and sleep and blink without thinking. The rest of the synaptic and neural nets are wired, rewired, and wired again throughout our early lives. Eventually, those networks can become hard-wired, which is why knowing how to speak to our children is so vitally important.

For the full article, please go to:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Kid-Whispering–Keeping-by-Judith-Acosta-100706-621.html

Babies come into the world crying, cooing and clinging. They need—food, warmth, love, and safety.

They are born with the innate capacity to feel fully, scream for us, hold onto us.

They are born with the potential to develop and think.

But they are not born with the ability to feel and think at the same time.

That is what we—as grown-ups, parents, caretakers—are there to teach them to do.

This is a formidable task, hopefully made easier with Verbal First Aid.

When kids are left to their own devices—or worse, are taught they are unloved and are made to feel unsafe—they do not develop normally. And that holds true in both the cognitive and emotional arenas.

At a Christian Counseling Convention, Gary Sibcy, in exploring the effect of the emotional environment on development, talked about a study that was done with monkeys. Interestingly, monkeys have the gene for alcoholism though it remains dormant unless activated.

Not only are our relationships important in the moment in terms of how we make others “feel,” but as the research is leading us to conclude, it is pivotal in our development on every level—mental, emotional, and genetic. What we say and do with others matters in ways we are only just beginning to appreciate.

The Verbal First Aid Relationship

According to many experts in the field of interpersonal neurobiology, there are certain types of relationships that are healing, nurturing and developmentally pivotal. They can even help a child who has been repeatedly abused and hurt to rewire those learnings so he can go on to have good relationships in his life.

In Verbal First Aid with children, there are three essential principles that are utilized to both facilitate physical healing in the moment as well as long-term wellness and proper development:

1. Recognizing The Healing Zone
2. Developing and Utilizing Rapport:  Centering and the ABC’s of Rapport
3. Leadership: Healing Suggestion

For the full article, please go to http://www.opednews.com/articles/Verbal-First-Aid-and-Attac-by-Judith-Acosta-100629-216.html

She understood. She said, "It sounds like you're talking about Cesar Milan's way of handling dogs."

I was so excited. "YES! It's a form of kid-whispering but with a very specific intended outcome–healing."

I thought about her comment and this idea of kid-whispering all day and then suddenly remembered an article I'd written when I first started rescuing dogs back in the 90's. I didn't get puppies that were easily trained or could be sent to puppy class for simple socialization. They were big, hurt, and aggressive. And my learning curve was steep. I had to get it fast or lose them.

So, I learned.

And I compiled the following ideas back then to help the parents and kids I was working with at the local school system. This article was probably written several years ago. 

This is it:

Leading With Love. What Training My Dogs Taught Me About Working With Children.

I’d just finished a particularly grueling two-hour session with a family and an 8-year-old boy who was defiant, angry and acting out with abandon. Everyone was frustrated—the parents, the children, the teachers. And by the end of the session, so was I. I left the school and went outside to sit by the ball field and clear my head. I’m missing something, I thought when I noticed a young man with a large dog in the corner of the field. The dog would sit, wait, then with a single hand motion from the young man, jump and sit down again. That dog’s eyes never left the young man as he waited for his next cue. That’s it. That’s the look in that child’s eyes…Tell me what to do. Teach me how to do it. I’m clueless. And no one was teaching him. All we were doing was talking about everything that he was doing wrong and asking him to come up with a solution.

From that point on, I was on a mission. I rescued two large dogs—both willful, strong, and quirky—and set myself to training them. What I’ve learned from them has forever changed my work and helped countless families. What it requires of us to train dogs are the same qualities we need to be effective parents.

For the full article, please see Huffingtonpost.com. You can either search under my name or in the archives.

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.

The other day a patient told a story of how she got her first kitten. It wasn’t anything like what one might expect—found a litter in the alley behind the house, or a stray wound up on their porch. Her family doctor was over for dinner with his wife and he had found a kitten.

“Your doctor came over for dinner?” I asked.

“Yeah, he always did. He was like part of our family,” she sat back.

“He was your doctor and your parents’ doctor?” I asked stupidly.

“Yeah, why?”

The last time I heard about a doctor visiting a patient’s house to celebrate a socialoccasion was the last time I watched Little House on the Prairie.

When I went to graduate school and in every agency I’ve worked since, those boundary crossings were utterly verboten. I know of one social worker (who’s really an administrator, not a therapist) who won’t even acknowledge a patient in public unless the patient comes up to him first.

There are rules and regulations about these things now, privacy laws and confidentiality acts that can put a therapist or doctor in jail for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

So, the caution is understandable.
But it’s also lamentable.

Because this past week I left the cloister and went to see a client graduate.  She invited me to do so and there was no doubt it meant the world to her. In my mind and heart it was the healing and loving thing to do. I could have said no, that the regulations strictly interpreted limit our interaction to the office setting and that leaving those four walls could pollute the therapeutic relationship. But I didn't. I went. And we both wept.

To be fair, there are some good reasons for people being careful about leaving a traditional and "safe" setting. Many “healers” have taken terrible advantage of people by forcing unprofessional relationships on them with highly improper dynamics. And I don’t just mean sexual ones. I mean ones in which the therapist is the needy one. And people like that sincerely do need lines drawn around them that read: “so far and no farther.” But I suspect that we may have gone too far in our tentativeness and become fearful. In so doing we may be losing something truly precious—the healing relationship.

My father is a doctor. He no longer practices, but he is and always will be a doctor. When I was growing up it was not unexpected for the phone to ring and it would be his answering service.  I distinctly remember more than a couple of occasions when the call came in the wee hours of the morning and he picked up his leather medical bag (just like in the Jimmy Stewart movies) and left the house not to return until 4 or 5 in the morning.

In fact, one of our family’s closest friends—Aunt Irene and Uncle Harry, we called them—were his patients.  It was winter when I was an infant and Harry had contracted a bad flu which took a turn for the worse one night. They called in, my father went to their apartment on Decatur Avenue in the Bronx, where he sat with Harry as Irene paced until the fever broke. He sat there all night. Harry lived. Irene never stopped pacing, but she was eternally grateful and thought my father walked on water.

First they came to major family events—birthdays, funerals, the like. But then they started coming over just to come over. He still took care of them medically. And they lived into their 90’s, hale and happy.

It never occurred to anyone in my family–immediate or extended–that there was anything untoward or unethical about it. In fact, if that question had even been raised, they would have heard a resounding “Are you CRAZY?” from all of us.

I think the patient who got her first cat from her family internist would have said the same.

Doctors, therapists, priests, rabbis, pastors—healers and helpers of all sorts—used to be part of the community and a part of the lives of the people whom they served. Doctors didn’t have to find different churches to attend because one of the congregants came to see them for a yeast infection. It was confidential, the relationship was sacred, yes. But there was other life to live, too. And people did.

In one of my talks on Verbal First Aid, I make a point of bringing up the stethoscope as one of the inventions that truly changed medicine and the art of healing. Because where once the physician had to lay his or her ear on the patient’s chest to hear the heart beating, now there was over a foot of distance between them.

In our zealousness and fear, we have substituted machines for people and strict rules for sensible relationships. We have literally taken the heart out of healing. I think that is something we cannot afford to do.

Hard to believe!

For more information, go to: www.verbalfirstaidthebook.com

Also go to www.radicalparenting.com. Very hip.

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.