Psychology Articles

Would you want to take part in research that assessed the state of your mental health? Would you want to answer questions about child abuse or other traumatic experiences?

Most research in the mental health area will ask participants about their current or past mental health, or experiences that are related to mental health. These questions may be intrusive or cover sensitive topics, and intuitively may seem distressing to answer.

It’s worth keeping in mind though that all research conducted by organizations such as universities and hospitals will have undergone an independent ethical approval process. This process checks things like whether the research has benefits that outweigh the risks to participants, that participants must give consent before they can take part, and that they are informed of what the study is about, what will happen to the data they give, how to drop out of the study if they wish, and so on.

Many studies are also required to provide resources where participants can seek emotional support, if needed. The old days where participants were easily deceived or given painful shocks are long gone!

Researchers have studied whether taking part in psychiatric research is distressing to participants, and results may be surprising to some. There have been over 40 of these studies. Most of these studies used interviews to ask about mental health, or sometimes paper-and-pencil questionnaires. They show that a minority of participants (usually less than 10%) do report some distress after taking part in psychiatric research. This was most common in studies that researched traumatic experiences (e.g. having a still-born child). Participants reported emotions such as stress, embarrassment, depression, anxiety, and discomfort. However, this distress did not seem to last long. For example, one study showed that 1-2 weeks later, most participants said that they felt better than immediately after the research interview and more than half said they even felt better than before they had taken part in the study. The studies also showed that participants more commonly experienced positive reactions to the research, such as finding it enjoyable, helpful, interesting, or a positive experience. Interestingly, many participants who found it distressing still thought their participation was helpful or worthwhile.

So to summarize, taking part in psychiatric research may be upsetting for a minority, but many also find it a positive experience. Researchers aim to minimize the risk of harm or discomfort to their participants, and are usually very grateful for their help!

Amy Morgan is a PhD candidate from the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published 20 peer-reviewed papers in mental health and is the creator of Mood Memos http://www.moodmemos.com, amy@moodmemos.com. Mood Memos are free emails with info and advice to help improve mild depression symptoms. Visit the website today to start receiving Mood Memos.

What is meant by a representational sense of reality? How is it formed, and how does it affect you? In following we will find answers to these questions, including how to consciously use this for own benefit.

Every stimulus our senses are able to translate into neural impulses are possible sources of information that are experienced in the conscious mind. But there exists phases, intervals between the information we receive of our environment and senses, a content generative cycle that is solely in the hands of our sub-conscious brain functions that combine individual data to macro-level representations that emerge to consciousness. In fact and as a summarizing sentence, what you perceive as the environment is the representational content produced by your sub-consciousness after the content generative cycle.

Mental map is a common term given for the phenomenon of us being able to for example navigate in our minds to places we are not at present. The store nearby, the route you visualize of using, the people you expect to meet there, what you can purchase from there, all those predictive actions are made in this representational space.

Every person has a representational model of the reality and how it causates. It does not matter is it in perfect correlation with what actually happens in the phenomenal world, it still is the exact model the individual uses to cope with reality. The Japanese pride, the Finnish cold judgment and the U.S. drive for freedom are all a part of collectively shared values in the representational space, values the citizens of these nations can liken themselves with.

The phenomenal world exists as valueless group of agents, the values are always given to phenomena by consciousness and sub-consciousness, and as everything has the given value, everything is as you think. Thus, if you think good things about yourself, you will probably feel good, and the other way around. If you produce representational models that seek the possible, the possibilities open and the other way around. They who seek wisdom will find it, and they who think their way through to achievements have better probabilities of receiving them than those who do not. The vastness of the representational space is baffling, and when it manifests the possible, and when there is no unreal, but only natural phenomena, although every living human has false interpretations of the reality, all the life the representational reality can give is endless in combination.

The author of The Art of Perception: An Introduction to Information Reality (2008), Path of the Eternal Truth: The Practical Science and Contemporary Philosophy of What Buddha Himself Taught of the Path of the Enlightened in Dhammapada (2009), Enlightened Life of Buddhism: A Workbook for Interpreting the 423 Teachings of Enlightenment in Dhammapada (2009), The Transcendental Awareness of Buddha: A Workbook for Interpreting the Teachings in Lankavatara Sutra and Diamond Sutra (2010), The Divine Krishna: A Workbook for Interpreting the Teachings in the Bhagavad Gita (2010), The Undivided Wisdom of Confucius: A Workbook for Interpreting the Teachings in the Analects of Confucius (2010), My Tao Te Ching: A Workbook for Interpreting the Teachings and Poems in Tao Te Ching (2010), Divinity: A Portrait of Human Spirituality (2010). You can find my published works from b&n: Henry M. Piironen

The Inner Critic is the part of you that judges you, demeans you, and pushes you to do things. It lowers your self-esteem and makes you feel bad about yourself. This is one of the most difficult and tenacious issues that people face. The Inner Critic is actually not a single part of you; there can be a number of critical parts that judge you in different ways or for different reasons. In our study of the Inner Critic, we have identified seven types of Inner Critics that people are troubled by.

Perfectionist

This Critic tries to get you to do things perfectly. It has very high standards for behavior, performance, and production. Sometimes it prevents you from creating anything for fear it won’t be good enough. Sometimes it makes you work forever trying to perfect something.

Inner Controller

This Critic tries to control impulsive behavior that might not be good for you or others, or might be dangerous. It tends to be harsh and shaming when you slip up.

Taskmaster

This Critic tries to get you to work hard or be disciplined in order to be successful or to avoid being mediocre. It can cause over-striving and workaholism.

Underminer

This Critic tries to undermine your self-confidence and self-esteem so you won’t take risks that might be dangerous, or so you won’t try and fail, or so you won’t get to big or powerful or visible and therefore be attacked or rejected. It makes you feel worthless.

Destroyer

This Critic makes pervasive attacks on your fundamental self-worth. It shames you deeply. It believes you shouldn’t exist.

Guilt-Tripper

This Critic attacks you for some specific action you have taken or not taken in the past or for repeated behavior that has been harmful to others or violates a deeply-help value. It makes you feel guilty and will never forgive you.

Molder

This Critic tries to get you to fit a certain mold or be a certain way that comes from your family or culture-e.g. caring, aggressive, polite. It attacks you when you aren’t and praises you when you are. If the mold doesn’t fit who you are, it constantly makes you feel inadequate.

Despite the pain they cause, each type of Inner Critic is actually trying to help you or protect you from pain, in its own distorted way. By determining which types of Inner Critics you have, you can more easily get to know them and find out what they are trying to do for you. This makes it possible to develop a cooperative relationship with the Critic and transform it into a positive resource for you.

Jay Earley, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice who teaches classes and workshops on the Inner Critic and IFS. He is the author of Self-Therapy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Inner Wholeness Using IFS. See his website http://www.personal-growth-programs.com. There you can take a questionnaire to determine which types of Critics may be a problem for you and read reports on them.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a new form of therapy that is compassionate, inclusive, spiritual, powerfully healing, and deeply respectful of our inner life. It recognizes that our psyches are made up of different parts, sometimes called subpersonalities. You can think of them as little people inside us. Each has its own perspective, feelings, memories, goals, and motivations. For example, one part of you might be trying to lose weight and another part might want to eat whatever you want. We all have parts like the inner critic, the abandoned child, the pleaser, the angry part, and the loving caretaker.

IFS has discovered that every part has a positive intent for you, no matter how problematic it might be. For example, Bill has a part that is judgmental and competitive with other people in a way that is not consistent with his true values. However, when he really got to know that part, he discovered that it was just trying to help him feel OK about himself in the only way it knew-by feeling superior to others.

When you understand that a part has a positive intent, it doesn’t mean that you give the part power. Bill doesn’t want his part to act out being judgmental and competitive. However, using the IFS approach, Bill can relate to his parts with understanding and appreciation while taking the steps to heal it. This is fundamentally different from the way we ordinarily relate to our parts. Usually when we become aware of a part, the first thing we do is evaluate it. Is it good or bad for us? If we decide it is good, we embrace it and give it power. If we decide it is bad, we try to suppress it or get rid of it. However, you can’t get rid of a part. You can only push it into your unconscious, where it will continue to affect you, but without your awareness.

In IFS, we do something altogether different and radical. We welcome all our parts with curiosity and compassion. We seek to understand them and appreciate their efforts to help us. We develop a relationship of caring and trust with each part, and then take the steps to release it from its burdens so it can function in a healthy way.

In the IFS system, “protectors” are the parts you usually encounter first in exploring yourself. Their job is to handle the world and protect against the pain of the exiles. “Exiles” are young child parts that are in pain from the past. In the above example Bill had a protector who was competitive and judgmental toward others. It was trying to help Bill feel superior to protect against an exile part that felt inadequate.

Parts take on these dysfunctional roles because of what has happened to them in the past. Exiles take on pain and burdens from what they experienced as children. Protectors take on roles in order to protect you from the pain of the exiles.

Jay Earley, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice and an IFS teacher. He is the author of Self-Therapy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Inner Wholeness Using IFS. See his website http://www.personal-growth-programs.com

The human heart cuts both ways. It’s spontaneous… but also very obligated and loyal to tradition – both simultaneously. These are the traditions our habits have built into our life as we grew up, forming our particular perceptions, attitudes and beliefs. The impetuous heart’s first impressions make it the most reliable of truth-verifiers – a quick read. And yet those very truth-impressions are bound partly to secret promises built, to a greater or lesser extent, upon censorship and concealment (explained below).

The heart’s spontaneity gives it the impression that it’s free of all obligations and encumbrances. Yet its quick responses to experience are possible because the heart’s judgment obeys well-established attitudes, anchoring it to the bedrock of our beliefs about what things mean when we interact with life.

For most of us our common assumption is that our life has been built upon positive emotional experiences, which we try and reinforce and repeat every day. When in fact all human life is built upon a relatively even mixture of positive and negative occurrence – though some people’s negatives are much bigger than others. Yet until very recently in human history we have not been able to manage negative incidents that conflict with our deeply yearned-for participation in happiness. We have fundamentally denied and projected the authorship of negative events upon other forces, entities and other people, making of our world a profoundly dangerous and violent place – which is only now being modified in a very significant way.

These psychic strategies of denial and projection are normally discussed as “mental illness”, meaning only the wackiest do it, when their use is universal. No completely sane person, for instance, would ever wage war, except to put an ethnic-annihilating tyrant out of business, a very recent motivation for war. For centuries, well into the 20th century, we’ve spent well over 90% of our time killing for profit – rape pillage, spoils and the acquisition of conquered land.

So what do censorship and concealment have to do with the evolution of our habitual attitudes of experience-perception? We like to pretend in this modern age that children are capable of being emotionally independent of their parents, so, among other things, they can teach us their wisdom. Nothing could be farther than the truth. If we suffer, so will they suffer, and be unable to do anything about it – except perhaps with other very involved adults who offer them a viable and intimate alternative model. But even with this help, children can’t mess with the basic model of life their families have provided, or failed to… for better or worse.

The reason is very simple. To begin with only children can love unconditionally, though we pretend otherwise. To love unconditionally is a pretty good imitation of slavery; meaning the sacrifice of personal needs to render our responses perfectly suited to another person. Children know that; they consider it normal to be enslaved to the limitations of their families, unless as adults they choose to sort out and change their life on their own terms. Contrary to popular opinion character-change, the only kind that really does much is very difficult to achieve because it’s very fearful and disruptive to the very habits and attitudes in which we have believed all our life. To change significantly means to break basic taboos.

So what do children do instead of what we pretend is possible? They enslave themselves to what their families can see, admit and believe in, willing to sacrifice all of themselves if necessary in order to protect their basic connection to those who ensure their survival. They adapt themselves to believe only what their families believe. Nothing less would make them capable of comfort. If family attitudes and perceptions defy what they, in their innocence, perceive, they censor their contradictory perceptions, concealing them even from themselves behind attitudes and beliefs about their life that prevent any awareness of this dissonance from ever surfacing in their conscious mind. As the prayer says, sinning can occur not just in “deed”, but also in “thought” and “word”.

These attitudes about their life usually produce negative beliefs about themselves that may prevent them from ever contradicting anyone important in life. If children have been significantly hurt by their parents they will subsequently their whole life suffer great hurt on the unconscious premise they don’t deserve to be protected from it. They may complain about it; but they will still suffer it. Shame and guilt are always funded by this kind of undeserved and concealed self-censure.

When the human heart is reacting mostly out of spontaneous perceptions with no serious encumbrances of self-censure, or accusation of others, it deserves our delighted support. But when it runs into negative implications – for either the feeling person or their companion – instead of support it needs to be carefully explored with whatever thoroughness frees the emotion from its bonds of loyalty to false premises of shame, guilt and their repetitive daily accusations.

My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com

Have you ever wished you could read peoples’ minds? I guess that’s a silly question in a way; we’ve all wished we could do this in the past. Just imagine having the power to read them like a book. You’d know what they think about you or a subject in conversation; you’d know their feelings too. Just imagine – if you will for a second or two – what you could do with this insight. Many people dream of being telepathic. Scientists spend years researching ESP and the like. I say, forget all that stuff, there’s a much more reliable way right under your nose and anyone can do it…

I’m talking about ‘nonverbal communication’, better known as body language. Body language allows us to gain valuable insight into peoples’ thoughts and feelings simply by noting their posture and movements. It’s that easy I promise you. Humans (like many animals) seem to conform to a certain code of movements that are consistent with there current frame of mind. When understood, this has all kinds of applications, including courtship, sales interviewing (any kind of face to face selling), beating other people at card games, conducting business meetings, job interview skills and many more.

In this Bodyspy series of articles, we’ll be taking a closer look at peoples’ body language in given situations and relating it to what might be on their minds. Each time we decode a body gesture we build on a mental image of that person’s frame of mind (a mental jigsaw puzzle would be a good analogy). We need to continually note each gesture to build a reliable image; noting solitary gestures is hazardous and simply will not do. This is because one gesture may contradict the next or the previous gesture. We must fit each gesture’s meaning into the puzzle and stick with the meanings that run consistent and trash the misfits. A reliable image can only be found by basing each assumption we make on the previous assumption in this way. This may seem tough at first, but you’ll get the hang of it as we continue through each situation.

Each month we’ll look at a different situation through a fictional story that concentrates mainly on the body language of the characters within the story. This month’s story is slightly shorter as I’ve had to include some explanation, though over the next six months or so we’ll be looking at full-length stories depicting all kinds of situations. We’ll discuss many topics including courtship and job interviews. In this month’s story we join Sid, an insurance salesman who’s going to sell one of his policies to Mr and Mrs Jackson. Like many sales people, Sid has researched body language as it is a highly valued sales tool in face to face selling. We will assume Sid to be of Bodyspy statues; the Jacksons are not. In fact, the Jacksons know zilch about body language and could not possibly conceive how someone – like Sid – could use their body language to his advantage…

The door swung open and Mr Jackson stepped forward into the doorway of his home. “Sid Samuel from Small Print Insurance,” said Sid. “Pleased to meet you,” said Mr Jackson and offered his hand for Sid to shake. The palm was face down. Better accept graciously Sid thought – after all, it’s all money in the pot! Sid was then ushered into the living room by Mr Jackson. Mrs Jackson was waiting inside, sitting on the sofa. The room was large, extravagantly decorated and well furnished. Sid quickly observed the seats as he walked across to greet Mrs Jackson; she was already being introduced by her husband. “This is my wife, Jane, bla, bla, bla…” Sid had heard it all many times before. She stood and offered her hand. Sid grasped it and pumped. It was limp! Another dead fish thought Sid, ‘if I get another today I’ll puke.’ Many amateurs in body language think that dead fish handshakes denote weakness of character, but Sid knew better than to take this at face value. These people are book browsers and generally slip up when practising their randomly gleaned knowledge.

“Take a seat,” Mr Jackson said. “Which seat should I sit in?” asked Sid, (an important question for a sales person to ask when in someone’s home). Mr Jackson gestured to a seat across the room with his right hand – which was palm down – and retorted, “That one.” The gesture was dominant; the handshake had been too. Now Mr Jackson was giving the impression of being territorial. He obviously didn’t want an insurance salesman sitting in his seat. In his mind, Sid was wagering that this man would have the ego to match.

Sid sat down; as he did so the Jacksons followed. He had been called to the house after his office had received a ‘phone call from Mr Jackson regarding home insurance. He began by briefly talking about his company, their products and the benefits of doing business with him. As he spoke he watched the couple – who were sitting on the sofa – like a hawk.

On the face of it, Mr Jackson certainly seemed dominant, so it seemed that he could make the decisions – maybe? The couple’s seating posture was a match (copied); crossed legs, hands lightly clenched in lap. Both were defensive, but most people sit in a defensive posture. Sid needed more input. Who was the key person? Who writes the cheques?

Sid finished his spiel and began to rustle through his portfolio of papers. He pulled out a copy of the policy that he had in mind for the couple. He twisted the papers around so that the couple could see them and lent forward at the same time. He did not take his eyes off the Jacksons. Mrs Jackson was the first to break her defensive posture and leaning forward to look closer at the policy. She was followed by Mr Jackson, who shifted his focus from Sid to the papers; matching his wife’s posture as he did so. Interesting Sid mused: this was the stuff he was watching for!

Sid explained the policy; he used a pen to point at the various figures and criteria. His eyes flicked backwards and forwards between his clients and the paperwork. Mr Jackson was doing most of the talking, but it was mostly hot air. Mrs Jackson was listening intently; Sid noted her slightly tilted head. In contrast, Mr Jackson’s head was stuck in neutral; he was more concerned with his image and most likely regarded the policy with indifference.

Sid twisted one leg slightly so that both the knee and his foot pointed directly at the wife. As he spoke each sentence, he began by looking at Mrs Jackson, then at Mr Jackson. By the time he finished each sentence, his eyes were fixed on the wife. From time to time, she’d ask the odd question, gesturing with open palms as she spoke. Each time Sid answered he copied her hand gestures, being sure to expose his palms to her. It was all too easy really – after all he’d played a similar hand five times today already! It’s like reeling out a fishing line with bate on the hook to catch a big fish, Sid thought. Ten minutes later, the sale was made. Sid had been right: the wife writes the cheques.

SUMMARY

In many households there is usually one member who takes the lead in business responsibilities. Things are seldom equal in business, and Sid’s presentation would be most effective when aimed at the right person, as long as the husband was not ignored. Sid made it look like he was being included. That was the cleaver point; the sales pitch was aimed at the wife, but the husband had to feel included. Sid needed him on side if the sale was to be made. Sid had surmised that she was his key figure by watching the nonverbal communication. Speech only adds up to 7% of the communication in a face to face encounter. As for the husband, his dominant attitude (or front) served to make him feel good when the wife really had control. Providing he wasn’t agitated, he’d roll over and go “Woof!”.

Derek Pell is author of Bodyspy, a body language training manual presented with over 170 illustrations which will help in your understanding of this series (and understanding of those you interact with in your own life). To obtain your copy, please go to http://www.bodyspyteachings.com/ and complete the online process. This will take only a few moments of your time and costs just $19.70USD (Approx £12.50GBP). Guarantee: in the unlikely event that you do not find Bodyspy outstanding value for money, you may contact us at the address given on the site and receive a full refund within 60 days of purchase.

This month we’re going to see how an awareness of body language can enhance your love life. But don’t worry, I’m not going to get too slushy. We’re going to take a look at the silent ‘words’ that really do the talking when boy chases girl. I am of course referring to courtship gestures; these tell us so much more than the words exchanged when we sit-up and pay attention. Once again, we must string our observations together to form a reliable insight. Our Bodyspy this month is Emma, and she’s going to use her nonverbal skills to influence the guys too. Now don’t go getting the wrong idea, she’s attractive (and choosy) so guy’s heads are going to turn!

We catch up with Emma in her room while getting ready for a night out at Colonel Steamy’s, a local nightclub in her home town. As she puts on her eye liner, she reflects on the shy person she used to be. Sometimes she still is. This was before she’d overheard two guys talking about ‘trapping’ in the Old Trumpet and Thump It. (Her friend Sue always did seem to pick the bum pubs…) They were discussing how women stroked or flicked back their hair, and that their knees/feet often pointed to the men they liked the look of. Hmmm… ‘Body language,’ Emma had thought. This set her thinking; she had some research to do. This was a tough task: she couldn’t find a book that would give it to her straight. So she read many in quick succession. (What a shame those libraries never stocked Bodyspy.) Anyway, her book worming boosted her confidence – she knew what was ticking away in those men’s minds now…

The nightclub had sprung to life pretty damn quick – Emma and Sue were standing by the dance floor. Strobe lights pulsated from above onto a crowed of bodies; their limbs moving in time to the music like robots in a Ford factory. A merging row of men propped up the bar near by, keeping the maids company as they pumped beer into one glass after another. It was from this drink sloshing line up that Emma had noticed a man eye her up and down. Now he looked to be approaching her.

He’d given her an intimate gaze that blew the gaff wide open. His body had been positioned to form a pointer to her as he leaned against the bar. A territorial pose with legs slightly open forcing his crutch to bulge. His hands formed central indicators as he casually tucked both thumbs into his trouser pockets. His mesmerised mind wrenched itself back to reality having realised Emma had seen him; his head spun back to his mate. ‘Not very subtle!’ mused Emma.

“Hi ya’,” he uttered – in Emma’s direction – as he stopped walking. The three of them stood in an open triangle formation. “Hello!” Emma retorted. “Do you come ‘ere often then?” he was saying as Emma tried not to scowl (or laugh). Emma’s mind whizzed round like a cyclone. She decided to be polite whilst thinking of a way out; she made conversation back. His conversation soon progressed to the ‘importance’ of his job and the fact that he drove a silver Porsche. ‘An ego tripper’ mused Emma… ‘these guys can be sods to get rid of’. His body language matched her observation; legs slightly apart as before, his hands were now inside his trouser pockets with thumbs protruding from the tops.

Emma’s mind raced to find a way to shift him. She decided to use a mixture of body language and talk.

“Small world.”

“Sorry?” he answered.

“You owing a Porsche, Sue’s boyfriend has one too!”

Emma turned her body so it pointed directly at Sue. Sue gulped back, then realised Emma’s ploy. She shifted her position to match. “Yeah, but I prefer your boyfriend’s Ferrari!” Sue answered. The three now continued to talk; Emma and Sue turned only their heads to talk to him – he was being excluded from the group. He began to feel rejected as his mind struggled for conversation. Finally, he sloped off with tail between legs. “You’re learning the ‘nonverbals’ quick.” complimented Emma to Sue.

It was latter now; the nightclub was packed tight. The music blasted out from a speaker nearby. The evening had spanned through a mishmash of Rap, Dance and a few chart hits thrown in for good measure. Suddenly Emma saw a man approaching from the direction of the entrance. He was good looking and well dressed; she estimated him to be in his mid twenties. He was about to walk past them when Emma shone a smile in his direction. She kept looking straight ahead without shifting her focus. He returned the smile and casually came to a halt inside the girl’s personal spheres.

“Hello,” he said to both girls. Emma and Sue returned the greeting; both looked surprised that he had stopped right in front of them. He smiled and said, “I’ve never been here before and I’m on my own.”

“You came here by yourself?” asked Emma.

“Yes, I’m here for a week on company business. I didn’t feel like staying in my room alone tonight, so here I am!”

“Oh, what do you then?”

“I’m a sales rep for Mr. Big’s Rubbers Plc,” he said with a smile. The girls giggled.

“Really I am – I’m here for a four day seminar on our new Hot ‘n’ Spicy condoms.” Both Emma and Sue struggled to keep a straight face.

“What’s your name?” Emma asked, not knowing whether to believe him or not.

Richard Dangle……,”

As he continued Emma decided to put him under the microscope and analyse his body language – that never tells porkies.

Richard was standing straight with one hand embracing a pint of lager, the other was placed in his pocket; no thumbs protruded. His left foot was twisted slightly, pointing towards Emma; the other was straight. This is no good, Emma thought, I need to get his hands free to stimulate his body language. To the left there was an empty seat against the wall, Emma gestured towards it, “Lets sit down,” she said. Sue excused herself and wondered off in the direction of the bar, Emma and Richard sat down. His arms now rested open on the table; he wasn’t defensive. A quick glance towards the floor added impact to his open posture when Emma saw his legs remained uncrossed.

“So tell me more about your work?” said Emma, watching for his posture to become closed and defensive. It didn’t. Instead, Richard began to explain how he’d recently visited the local manufacturing centre and watched the new range being put through the quality tests. He used open palm gestures as he explained how thorough the quality tests were. Hmmm… looks like he’s being straight with me Emma mused. The depth of his conversation further supported her observation.

“I had no idea condom manufacturing was so interesting,” Emma said while leaning forward to show her cleavage. She was becoming more interested in Richard than the gist of the conversation. She’d decided to use her body language to stimulate him further. Emma flashed the smooth skin of her wrists in Richard’s direction as she spoke. Occasionally she ran one hand through her long brown hair; anything more will give the game away thought Emma.

Richard was warming to Emma’s flirting and began to preen from time to time. No doubt about it, she’d succeeded in grabbing his attention alright. His pupils were large – larger than before – and angled into an intimate gaze, which she returned. Just then Sue came walking towards them with a man trailing on the end of her arm. She lent over close to Emma and said, “You remember Justin from high school don’t you?”

Emma looked closely. “Yeah, I remember, how ya’ doing Justin?”

“Fine thanks!”

“This is Richard – we’ve just met tonight.”

Justin extended his hand to shake – Emma noted the palm was face down towards the ground. Richard stood to shake hands. He took his hand and stepped forward with the left foot. Then brought his right foot across into Justin’s intimate sphere and twisted his hand straight before shaking it. Neat, thought Emma. Justin wasn’t so impressed – more disconcerted Emma thought – as he withdrew his hand after a few pumps and stepped back to maintain his personal space. The four continued to talk for a short while. A moments silence followed…

“I’m going to the bar to get a refill,” Justin said.

“Are you coming Sue?”

“OK – see you two’ latter…”

“That was a neat trick you pulled on Justin,” Emma exclaimed.

“How do you mean?” Richard said trying to play it down.

“How you managed to tackle his dominant handshake without being obvious, that’s not easy you know.

“Dominant handshake?”

“Yes, don’t play dumb with me Richard!”

“OK, I’ve been studying body language, but I like to keep quiet about it ’cause it makes some people uneasy.”

“I know,” said Emma, “I keep shtum too.”

“So I take it the leaning forward an’ flashing of your wrists was an attempt to bait me then?”

“Yeah.” Emma said with a giggle. “It worked too – didn’t it?”

“Yeah it did.” said Richard with a smile. They both laughed.

“About those new rubbers – do you think we should…??”

Derek Pell is author of Bodyspy, a body language training manual presented with over 170 illustrations which will help in your understanding of this series (and understanding of those you interact with in your own life). To obtain your copy, please go to http://bodyspyteachings.com and complete the online process. This will take only a few moments of your time and costs just $19.70USD (Approx £12.50GBP). Guarantee: in the unlikely event that you do not find Bodyspy outstanding value for money, you may contact us at the address given on the site and receive a full refund within 60 days of purchase.

If you have heard about neurofeedback therapy and what it can do to help solve problems related to brain function, such as ADHD, or ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’, epilepsy, anxiety, or any other issue you are dealing with, you may have heard the suggestion that you do a brain mapping session before you start neurofeedback treatment. There are a few reasons you might want to consider a brain mapping, or Quantitative EEG session.

Quantitative EEG uses the same type of equipment that is used for neurofeedback sessions. The QEEG device will simply read your brain’s signals to gather information about how your brain is working. Most of the time, a QEEG session will involve your doing a few different things that cause your brain to function in different ways. You might read aloud or complete math problems in your head, or you may simply have a conversation. Your brain waves will send out signals that the technician can read on the display.

What do these signals tell the technician? Well, they reveal certain patterns, from which the technician can tell how your brain is working. For instance, the can brain produce something called sleep spindles, which are a particular EEG pattern that is produced when you are asleep. If your brain is putting out these sleep spindles when you are awake, that can indicate a problem.

Another thing that technicians can read in your QEEG is whether you have a problem with epilepsy. In fact, if you are considering neurofeedback as a solution to your epilepsy or other types of seizure problems, you may want to have a QEEG done before you begin the process. The brain map from these sessions can help target your therapy and make it more effective.

Brain mapping can tell experienced technicians many details that will help with your therapy. In fact, it can reveal important information about your health, like whether you are sleep deprived. Your brain patterns can reveal much about how your brain works, and having a QEEG brain map done before you begin neurofeedback treatment can be very helpful to your therapist.

However, you should be aware that a QEEG is not always essential to the success of your neurofeedback treatment. A qualified therapist may be able to evaluate your brain function in ways that are less expensive than a QEEG, which can cost anywhere from $650 to $2,000 per session.

Ask the therapist or clinician you are considering whether they feel that your issue warrants a QEEG. If the cost is not a concern for you, or if you have a serious condition that calls for a preliminary assessment, such as a seizure disorder or traumatic brain injury, you might want to proceed with the brain mapping procedure.

For more information about Neurofeedback, go to http://www.NeurofeedbackBook.com Dr. Clare Albright is a psychologist (CA License PSY11660) and a Neurofeedback practitioner and can be reached at (949)454-0996

We are finally beginning to realize that human acts are as capable of producing destructive, as they are constructive outcomes. What’s more we don’t know ahead of time which alternative will dominate. Most acts are undertaken with the intent, even great passion to produce benefit – and yet in retrospect often do the opposite. Such unexpected consequence happens in both directions. For instance both Israel and opposing Arabs, when killing each other, act out of the virtue of self-determination. Yet the suffering and terror that prevails on both sides of the moral equation has become normalized – as if when in conflict these consequences are unavoidable, and must thus be suffered by all as a public duty.

Yet in spite of this newly emerging realization of ambiguity at the core of our moral perceptions, we cling tenaciously – addictively – to the notion that acts are either good or evil… but never both, which is far closer to the truth. There is no act we can commit, no matter how well conceived, that doesn’t have potentially negative consequences. Consider the daily loss of Amazonian rain forest that provides poor farmers with the opportunity of supporting their families. Indeed the consequences of this caring policy may already have contributed significantly to global warming.

We have the same trouble in dealing with our personal intimate affairs, where good or evil is unavoidably of vital importance to us. Take for instance the issue of divorce affecting the longevity of the family. In the moral ambiguity of love, two things have become very clear in the 50 years since the ’60’s when loyalty to any group, including the family, became something to be seriously reexamined.

The first revealed truth is that adults, in the successful evolution of their own life, need the flexibility of divorce, because people change, and move, at different paces, and often in very different directions in the course of a lifetime. The huge emphasis upon the sacramental sanctity of marriage for eons prevented, or at least seriously retarded that change.

But then again there is a second apparently contradictory discovery – that beyond any reasonable doubt children despise divorce, intrinsically defining it emotionally as a betrayal of their birthright to live in a stable and supportive social context until they are ready to leave it. To lose one parent is like cutting off their right arm; children in fact most likely could benefit enormously from having more than two parental figures – to model multiple options in life, instead of being bound to just one.

Emotionally, visiting parents have lost their function as “parent” by not living with their offspring. Their children will not absorb a visiting parent’s spiritual and emotional nature, depriving both children and parents from those subliminal links. And living halftime in two locations alternately is an equally dysfunctional – unstable – solution serving parents, not children. What’s more, the stronger that family solidarity is emphasized over individual differences, the more these children will have to deny the emotional truth of divorce as abandonment, suppressing their awareness of being both separate and critical of what their parents are doing.

Nature has made us both very individual and very social. How these seemingly contradictory elements are interfaced is of vital importance to our wellbeing. Our usual assumption that everybody can work it out together is a false premise… because we don’t yet have the tools and the wisdom of knowing how to do it. We’re still working on it. We still jump to highly oversimplified conclusions that something is either all good or all bad.

The good news is that our awareness of this intrinsic moral ambiguity in human understanding is increasing, enabling us to learn how to perceive our own acts as producing mixed results, sometimes even as it’s happening… not 10 or 100 years later. Unfortunately some people have taken our increasing awareness of human perfidy to an extreme, in asserting that we are the destructive unwanted species on this planet. How utterly dysfunctional are these ideas in their self-deprecation; though this extreme reaction to experiencing our limits does convey the despair we sometimes feel in figuring things out. So we see once again that even the most dysfunctional notions possess meaningful aspects. Nothing we do or imagine should ever be condemned as all good or all bad. Everything is both/and. How else could it be in a reality that’s always changing? Yet in our fearful search for security we have tried to nail the truth down with such certainty that what we believe now will last a thousand years. When wisdom would encourage us to consider changing what we know just a little every day of our lives. That achievement requires flexibility of understanding the good or bad potential of anything we commit to doing.

My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com

In addition to all the other things emotion is – such as vivid response to the present moment – it is also, and always memory. Indeed memory is coded emotionally, not intellectually or factually, as we like to think. As we experience when we can’t remember something we want to know again very much; but it eludes us. The missing connective bridge to the memory will only appear when the feeling or feelings that originally filed it spontaneously appear. This happens because the psyche tries, whenever possible, to help our conscious desires – and usually will succeed if our consciousness will only get out of the way.

In being a vivid response to the present moment, emotion reconstructs what we already know about what just happened; which also may be new, or at least have new parts, which probably surprised us. Instantly we make it familiar, eliminating the surprise, by superimposing emotional memory, and the interpretation it arrived at in our last encounter, making the present just like the past. The most frequent example is when we perceive threat as insurmountable because it’s always felt that way, that instead of opportunity to change that dreadful pattern, we’ll most likely make a fool of ourselves.

Relying upon memory, and its traditions, we immediately orient ourselves, thereby ameliorating our fear of inevitable newness – even if doing so leaves us partly stupid about what’s really going on. We are so engrained in our habit of denying newness, and the angst it always brings, that it must hit us over the head many times before we hear the new part of what’s also old and familiar.

Our relative incompetence in dealing with newness is the result of a very simple problem – our great fear of fear. Anything new requires adaptation, which will most likely shake up – fearfully – more parts of our nature than we think have any relevancy to what we thought just happened. But that’s the subject of another article (See Fear – The Most Misused Emotion). Newness-embraced is like inviting a stranger into our home to live there… perhaps permanently.

Emotion is as much memory as it is response to something in the present. Indeed memory may be its largest part. We usually think of emotion as something free floating, spontaneous, having a will and a purpose of its own – perhaps the freest part of human nature. There is truth to this belief; emotion is spontaneous, which makes it our best judge of truthfulness. But emotion is not “free” as we like to imagine. Though definitely spontaneous and impulsive, emotion is very tied, and obedient to the habits that it originally created, throughout life derives from, and perpetually supports. In the big picture of a life, if untouched by careful exploration, feelings will permanently reproduce the emotional events of childhood, both positive and traumatic ones, superimposed upon whatever else may be happening in the present.

We do not control our fate; we just influence it. We are programmed by those who raised us, not as a villainous happening; just normally in the course of events, because of who they are and what they know, or don’t know, and what happened to them, or didn’t. We all know this in part; but we retain our belief in the conscious power of intentionality as the agency that runs our personal psychic experience. When it is emotional memory that runs it, convincing us beyond any reasonable doubt that the past is still running our life, though the characters doing it have changed; yet they’re behaving just like people have always treated us, good or bad, making the past still true in the present.

This spurious assumption is seldom examined; tragically one has to regard them selves as “mentally ill” in order to qualify for the learning opportunity of reexamining their assumptions – what we call “psychotherapy” – in order to explore, and improve upon their parent’s programming.

Intention is the big pretender in all of us, imagining itself to be the cause of everything, and in the process telling us a story in which we are the central character. Of course this is something we need to do to give our particular life meaning; but we need to learn how to do it with far less pretense. In its present form intentionality is a construct built by a child who imagines themselves omnipotent; yet who is also grown up enough to know its power isn’t valid in the world of science and objects – but convinced it remains true in personal matters.

Though psychotherapy is believed to be very incompetent, one of its remarkably simple accuracies is its ability to construct a diagram of any human character. Indeed one can predict the basic events of a person’s life by answering one simple question: what are the dominant emotions of this person’s daily experience? These will gather around two basic, but very different clusters – depression and happiness. Depending upon how severe and frequent the depression is, the attending emotions can include temporary disappointment and discouragement; or in contrast self-shame, humiliation and guilt-ridden hidden rage. And depending upon how much happiness must rely upon pretense, it will include denial of any problems, a love-conspiracy never to expose the unfinished business of each other’s life, providing a sense of relatively safe companionship. More fully funded happiness will include great personal satisfaction in career, most likely successful friendships that become the foundation of successful loving, and an ample supply of the joy of living.

Just within the last 10 years psychotherapy has finally learned how to be far more effective in treating even the most difficulty of problems to a much greater extent than most people realize. What this success has revealed is that whatever emotional experience we have as an adult is precisely the same one we had as children. Thus, present events are always a reenactment of past happiness or trauma. The one is predictive of the other in whichever direction we are looking. Emotion is like an elephant; it remembers everything in great detail.

My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com