Coloring Therapy Quotes

Trying to reason with whiteness is akin to reasoning with a clinical narcissist who refuses to go to therapy: frustratingly impossible because the untreated narcissist simply does not have the requisite tools to see themselves as anything other than “good,

Through mirror neurons and resonance circuitry, we are taking in each other's bodily state, feelings and intention in each emerging moment (Iacoboni, 2009). This gives us an approximate empathic sense of what is happening in the other person, but it is important to be aware that the information is also being filtered through our implicit lens. This filtering colors our perceptions and pretty much guarantees there will be ruptures that invite repairs, as our offers of empathy will sometimes not reflect what the other person is experiencing.

To the extent that you actually realize that you are not, for example, your anxieties, then your anxieties no longer threaten you. Even if anxiety is present, it no longer overwhelms you because you are no longer exclusively tied to it. You are no longer courting it, fighting it, resisting it, or running from it. In the most radical fashion, anxiety is thoroughly accepted as it is and allowed to move as it will. You have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, by its presence or absence, for you are simply watching it pass by. Thus, any emotion, sensation, thought, memory, or experience that disturbs you is simply one with which you have exclusively identified yourself, and the ultimate resolution of the disturbance is simply to dis-identify with it. You cleanly let all of them drop away by realizing that they are not you--since you can see them, they cannot be the true Seer and Subject. Since they are not your real self, there is no reason whatsoever for you to identify with them, hold on to them, or allow your self to be bound by them. Slowly, gently, as you pursue this dis-identification "therapy," you may find that your entire individual self (persona, ego, centaur), which heretofore you have fought to defend and protect, begins to go transparent and drop away. Not that it literally falls off and you find yourself floating, disembodied, through space. Rather, you begin to feel that what happens to your personal self—your wishes, hopes, desires, hurts—is not a matter of life-or-death seriousness, because there is within you a deeper and more basic self which is not touched by these peripheral fluctuations, these surface waves of grand commotion but feeble substance. Thus, your personal mind-and-body may be in pain, or humiliation, or fear, but as long as you abide as the witness of these affairs, as if from on high, they no longer threaten you, and thus you are no longer moved to manipulate them, wrestle with them, or subdue them. Because you are willing to witness them, to look at them impartially, you are able to transcend them. As St. Thomas put it, "Whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature." Thus, if the eye were colored red, it wouldn't be able to perceive red objects. It can see red because it is clear, or "redless." Likewise, if we can but watch or witness our distresses, we prove ourselves thereby to be "distress-less," free of the witnessed turmoil. That within which feels pain is itself pain-less; that which feels fear is fear-less; that which perceives tension is tensionless. To witness these states is to transcend them. They no longer seize you from behind because you look at them up front.

They didn’t live anymore in a world where life was to be colorful and celebrated. Life had become something you clung to, that you bit down hard on against the pain, like the rubber block in a session of electroshock therapy.

Every addiction story wants a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals, whether addiction is an illness or a crime. So we relieve the pressure of cognitive dissonance with various provisions of psychic labor - some addicts got pitied, others get blamed - that keep overlapping and evolving to suit our purposes: Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get hard time. Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than cocaine. In her seminal account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about 'who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not.' They aren't incidental discrepancies - between black and white addicts, drinkers and drug users - but casualties of our need to vilify some people under the guise of protecting others.

Therapy is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign that you want to live a healthier and happier life.

Two days after the tragic events of 9/11, I found myself anxious, upset, and desperately in need of the color green.

Color is simply energy, energy made visible. Colors stimulate or inhibit the functioning of different parts of our body. Treatment with the appropriate color can restore balance and normal functioning.

Choose a color that reflects how you’re feeling today. 2.Draw a circle with that color. 3.In that circle, use lines and shapes to draw an image or images to identify how you’re feeling today. 4.Name your art.

On another night, in a different dream I was asking a question. “How is it that you say all are equal, yet the obvious contradictions smack us in the face: inequalities in virtues, temperances, finances, rights, abilities and talents, intelligence, mathematical aptitude, ad infinitum?” The answer was a metaphor. “It is as if a large diamond were to be found inside each person. Picture a diamond a foot long. The diamond has a thousand facets, but the facets are covered with dirt and tar. It is the job of the soul to clean each facet until the surface is brilliant and can reflect a rainbow of colors. “Now, some have cleaned many facets and gleam brightly. Others have only managed to clean a few; they do not sparkle so. Yet, underneath the dirt, each person possesses within his or her breast a brilliant diamond with a thousand gleaming facets. The diamond is perfect, not one flaw. The only differences among people are the number of facets cleaned. But each diamond is the same, and each is perfect. “When all the facets are cleaned and shining forth in a spectrum of lights, the diamond returns to the pure energy that it was originally. The lights remain. It is as if the process that goes into making the diamond is reversed, all that pressure released. The pure energy exists in the rainbow of lights, and the lights possess consciousness and knowledge. “And all of the diamonds are perfect.” Sometimes

With our increased sensitivity and awareness, we might notice small shifts in breathing or coloring, a little greater tension around the eyes. We might feel our muscles tense a bit or our stomach tighten, perhaps in tandem with theirs, perhaps not. As best we can, we just receive and hold without too much speculation about what it means, and also with awareness of our own human limitations as our perceptions are colored by our own implicit memory. Our availability to deeply listen, even when we get it wrong, is also like the beginning of a ... reparative experience.

When we look more deeply into emotional life, we will see that it does, indeed, color our view of reality. It does sometimes lead to delusions that project onto and distort our experience of reality. It also stimulates a huge amount of discursive conceptual chatter that can be extremely disturbing. However, as we become more familiar with the different ingredients of our emotional life, what will become very obvious is the complexity of our emotional patterning and its influence over us. It is this complexity that leads many of us either to go into therapy or to embark upon some kind of meditation practice, or both.

On another night, in a different dream I was asking a question. “How is it that you say all are equal, yet the obvious contradictions smack us in the face: inequalities in virtues, temperances, finances, rights, abilities and talents, intelligence, mathematical aptitude, ad infinitum?” The answer was a metaphor. “It is as if a large diamond were to be found inside each person. Picture a diamond a foot long. The diamond has a thousand facets, but the facets are covered with dirt and tar. It is the job of the soul to clean each facet until the surface is brilliant and can reflect a rainbow of colors. “Now, some have cleaned many facets and gleam brightly. Others have only managed to clean a few; they do not sparkle so. Yet, underneath the dirt, each person possesses within his or her breast a brilliant diamond with a thousand gleaming facets. The diamond is perfect, not one flaw. The only differences among people are the number of facets cleaned. But each diamond is the same, and each is perfect.

It is time,my darling." "Oh,Frankie,no-" "You chose dare," he reminded her. "I did," she agreed sadly, stepping up. "You're right." It hadn't been entirely fair of him, starting the game in the middle of Neiman Marcus. The King of Prussia Mall, a zillion acres of retail-and-food-in-a-box, is many people's idea of perfect therapy. Me? If given the choice, I might opt for swimming with sharks instead. But today was about Frankie. "So," he told her, "I pick out three outfits,head to toe. You put them on." "Fine." Sadie pulled her jacket closer around her.This one was a muddy pruple, and had a third sleeve stitched tot he back. "But if you pick anything like that"- she pointed to a tiny tartan dress that seemed to be missing its entire back- "I will cry." "Have faith," he replied with a slightly twisted smile, and dragged her toward women's sportswear. "What our sport is," he said apropos of very little save the sign on the wall, "I have no idea." Ten minutes later, Sadie was heading into the dressing room with an armful of autumn color and a look like she was on her way off a cliff.

In one of the notebooks he carried with him, Nietzsche wrote, "We have art lest we perish from the truth." For those leading afterlives, the unadorned facts of what's happened to them can be brutish to bear on their own terms. Contextualizing that hardship through our intellects and imaginations is a critical salve, an act of transforming our perception that can guide and color how we experience our lives. We can knead our experiences into a larger arc, providing the cohesion that helps us form new narrative identities. Or we can look deeper into our afterlives until we ferret out a way of construing them that rouses our spirits or points them toward salvation. In her essay collection The White Album, Joan Didion delivered a pronouncement that was a natural descendants to Nietzsche's line, an admission of how desperately we rely on the subjective fictions we construct: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Those stories--whether they take the form of redemption narratives, personal parables, or the pearlescent beliefs we kneel before each day like shrines offering eternal grace--can elevate our lives and serve as the vessels of private deliverance.

Drawing and other forms of visual art can be an amazingly powerful tool for inner child healing. Drawing, painting, and playing with clay are things that children do spontaneously, happily, and naturally. We only lose our artistic inclinations as adults, when we are made to feel ashamed of something that we've created. Drawing is so ingrained in our natural human development that it comes well before writing. Art therapy is often used with children who refuse to speak or who feel they cannot verbalize their feelings. Inviting your inner child to color and draw can give you the freedom to finally say thins you were never able to put into words. If you are artistically inclined as an adults, you know that the process of creating visual art breaks you out of rational, analytical mental states. If you suffered with very restrictive parents or an education that prioritized verbal logic, drawing can help you reconnect with your natural, childlike creative impulses. Everyone is capable of making art. It's a natural, necessary part of our development. The stifling of creativity through shame or criticism leaves very real wounds on the inner child. Drawing through our self-doubts, self-criticisms allows us to speak with the child in its own language.

More or less the same can be said for Art Therapy, which is organized infantilism. Our class was run by a delirious young woman with a fixed, indefatigable smile, who was plainly trained at a school offering courses in Teaching Art to the Mentally Ill; not even a teacher of very young retarded children could have been compelled to bestow, without deliberate instruction, such orchestrated chuckles and coos. Unwinding long rolls of slippery mural paper, she would tell us to take our crayons and make drawings illustrative of themes that we ourselves had chosen. For example: My House. In humiliated rage I obeyed, drawing a square, with a door and four cross-eyed windows, a chimney on top issuing forth a curlicue of smoke. She showered me with praise, and as the weeks advanced and my health improved so did my sense of comedy. I began to dabble happily in colored modeling clay, sculpting at first a horrid little green skull with bared teeth, which our teacher pronounced a splendid replica of my depression. I then proceeded through intermediate stages of recuperation to a rosy and cherubic head with a “Have-a- Nice-Day” smile. Coinciding as it did with the time of my release, this creation truly overjoyed my instructress (whom I’d become fond of in spite of myself), since, as she told me, it was emblematic of my recovery and therefore but one more example of the triumph over disease by Art Therapy.

In a therapy session, the only labels the horses get are the ones the client gives them.” “So you wouldn’t want me to notice that the Palomino horse, the one with the white mane and the tan body, looks like you and that she’s always making a nuisance of herself?” “Sackett?” I was outraged on Sackett’s behalf more than my own. “Sackett isn’t annoying! And Sackett’s a he, which just proves my point about pre-conceived ideas. If you knew he was a he and not a she, you wouldn’t be able to label him as Georgia and say mean things. Sackett is wise! Whenever things get really deep, you can always count on Sackett being right in the thick of things.” I heard the affront in my voice and I glowered at Moses for a moment before launching my own attack. “And Lucky is just like you!” I said. Moses just stared at me blandly, but I could tell he was enjoying himself. “Because he’s black?” “No, stupid. Because he’s in love with me, and he tries to pretend every day like he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me,” I shot back. Moses choked, and I punched him hard in the stomach, making him gasp and grab for my hands. “So you want the clients to not pay any attention to the color of the horse. That’s not even human nature, you know.” Moses pinned my hands over my head and stared down into my flushed face. When he could see I wasn’t going to continue punching he relaxed his hold, but he looked back toward the horses and continued talking.

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water. 4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. 5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. 6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.” 7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” 8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. 9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. 10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as me cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

Maldijo a Dylan Reeves, a sus ojos de dos colores y a su piel caliente. Maldijo a su sonrisa y a su dulzura, porque eso, eso era lo que la había metido en ese problema.

And, for seniors, chart art is a type of cognitive therapy for concentration, it's good for dexterity, and it's just plain fun. Plus, the books make great gifts for grandchildren!

The Just Therapy Team’s discussions involved an outline of how othered marginalized groups desired a genuine alternative therapeutic dialogue. Marginalized groups (e.g., women, people of color, persons living in poverty, and persons struggling with mental health issues, disabilities) no longer wanted to be dictated to or told who they actually were as persons, as defined by the dominant class of Western psychological thinking (T. K. Tamasese and C. Waldegrave, personal communication, 1991, 1996, 2004, 2008).

3. Develop a personal learning style Having known your personal profile, you can pick the learning style that can give you the most benefits. There are three common types of learning styles; Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. By identifying the learning style that best suit your profile, you will be able to maximize your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. Visual Learning – If your dyslexia isn’t anything related to your visual processing or any visual dyslexia, this learning type may just suit you. Visual learners like to see things with the eyes. They likely think in pictures and uses different illustrations, diagrams, charts, graphs, videos and mind maps when they study. If you are a visual learner it will be useful to rewrite notes, put information on post-it notes and stick it everywhere, and to re-create images in the mind. Auditory Learning – Auditory learners, on the other hand, think in verbal words rather than in pictures. The best they can do to learn is to tape the information and replay it. It also helps if they discuss the materials that must be learned with others by participating in class discussions, asking questions to their teachers and even trying teaching others. It is also helpful to use audio books and read aloud when trying to memorize information. Kinesthetic Learning – Kinesthetic learners are those who are better to learn with direct exposure to the activity. They are the ‘hands-on’ people and learn best when they actually do something. For them, wiring a circuit board would be much more informative than listening to a lecture about circuits or reading a text book or about it. However, it may also help to underline important terms and meanings and highlight them with bright colors, write notes in the margin when learning from text and repeat information while walking. 4. Don’t force your mind Don’t force your mind to do something beyond your ability. Don’t force yourself to enter a library and finish reading a shelf of books in one day. Be patient on yourself. Take everything slowly and learn step by step. Do not also push yourself if you are not in the mood to read, it will just cause you unnecessary stress. 5.

No…” I shook my head with tears running down my cheeks. “I saw the ad, the listing. I applied for this job. Raina…” I paused, thinking about how Raina just so happened to be driving exactly where I was. “Raina dropped that paper off to your motel room in hopes that’d make the process easier for you. Raina was paid to follow you and pick you up. Raina is basically the Ivory’s adoptive daughter, and her husband Jax once worked here.” “How’d they escape? How did they manage to not tell anyone about what’s happening here?” “Demi, you just don’t get it.” Bradley rubbed his forehead as if it were aching. “It’s not white-therapy; it’s white-torture. We all went through it. You’re the first they haven’t done it to in years. For two years, we all lived in those sound-proof rooms, eating nothing but plain white food. No sounds, no color, no stimulation. It stripped us of emotion. It made us completely submissive and devoted to this family.” “But you don’t seem submissive. You seem like you’re just pretending so you could be here for Daisy?” “I can’t imagine leaving this place. I’m messed up, Demi. I wanted to help Daisy escape, but thought I’d probably stay here and work for the family. Because if they caught me, they’d put me back into a cage. No one speaks to you, you hear no noise, no sounds, you see no color or anything. They shave your head and put you in all-white. You stare at four white walls all day and eat white food so your senses are depleted.” Fear churned inside of me as my legs trembled and I forced myself to sit down. “Why do they do this?” “Because they need staff. Loyal staff who will help them with their business. They sell these women as mail-order brides essentially, and their wait list is filled with the world’s richest men. Each woman is guaranteed to be completely obedient, subservient, and designed to be exactly what that man wants. Each woman sells for one to three million dollars.

Color therapy is based on the ways in which the visible color spectrum improves a person’s mood. Because color transmits at different frequencies and vibrations, practitioners are able to use a color’s specific properties to shift the energy—and frequencies—within our bodies. Violet has the shortest frequency of all colors, while red has the longest.

She did not want to be one of those people who went to therapy for the rest of their lives, blathering on about what "my therapist said" or "what we uncovered in therapy." It struck Marjorie that those people never got any better; they just used longer and more complicated phrases to say things.

She knew that she should feel discontentment, connected to a large chain of disenfranchisement or systemic persecution--it's not that black death and the news of the world didn't touch her spirit--but she was somewhat ashamed to say, in therapy or publicly, that the bulk of her discontentment came from having very little about which to be discontented.

The artist is the master of his universe, often choosing his own themes, colors, shapes, materials, and images. The art therapist encourages individuals not to judge themselves, to let their work flow. Participants learn that self-expression becomes the most important aspect of creative work. The art doesn’t have to be perfect; each person’s designs are unique. The concept, that we are allowed to experiment and make mistakes, is crucial in the development of self-esteem. When individuals acknowledge that they don’t have to be perfect, they are better able to accept their perceived flaws and “themselves as a whole.” They are often able to identify and focus on strengths instead of weaknesses.

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water. 4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. 5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. 9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. 10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as me cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

Natural Ways to Help Depression Depression is not one illness. Like anxiety, the pandemic spawned a whole new level of people being diagnosed with depression and placed on antidepressant medication, without ever getting a proper evaluation or trying simple fixes. Here are nine common things I do for patients before prescribing antidepressant medication. 1. Check for and (if necessary) correct thyroid hormone abnormalities. 2. Work with a nutritionally informed physician to optimize your folate, vitamin B12, vitamin D, homocysteine, and omega-3 fatty acids. I’m convinced that without doing these nutritional fixes, patients are less likely to respond to the medications. 3. Try an elimination diet for three weeks. 4. Add colorful fruits and vegetables into your diet. 5. Eliminate the ANTs (automatic negative thoughts). See days 22, 116–117. 6. Exercise—walk like you are late for 45 minutes four times a week. This has been found to be as effective as antidepressant medication.[1] 7. Add one of the following supplements to your daily routine: Saffron 30 mg/day; curcumin, not as turmeric root but as Longvida, which is much more efficiently absorbed; zinc as citrate or glycinate 30 mg (tolerable upper level is 40 mg/day for adults, 34 mg/day for adolescents, less for younger kids); or magnesium glycinate, citrate, or malate, 100–500 mg with 30 mg of vitamin B6. 8. Consume probiotics daily. 9. Try morning bright light therapy with a therapeutic lamp of 10,000 lux for 20–30 minutes. If someone comes to me with depression, I order screening labs, teach them not to believe every negative thought they have, give them basic supplements (saffron, zinc, curcumins, and omega-3s), and encourage them to exercise. Many people never need medication if they follow through with the program. If the above interventions are ineffective, I’ll try other nutraceuticals or medications targeted to their specific type of depression (take the test at brainhealthassessment.com).

I can sit down for hours and read a book straight through; forgo sleep and even snacks if a romance book has the right balance of steam and anticipation for that happily ever after. And a great upside-down latte, or my new favorite, a Hungry Eye. Iced is always preferred. I can escape with caffeine and dirty words. It’s so simple and it can act as such a source of therapy for me.

The tensions that accompany the impulse to control subside, and the energies of our mental/emotional life are more directed and devoted to listening rather than speaking... We may be able to more easily attend to our people's communications that often remain below conscious awareness: subtle changes in breath, coloring, eye tension, prosody of voice, small movements towards or away, changes in the quality of eye contact. Receptivity means that we don't grasp what we notice for assessment. Instead, we are simply present to those implicit communications in the spirit of holding a tender space in which they can reveal themselves to whatever extent our 'patient's' system feels safe to be vulnerable in the moment.

Meals, laundry, housekeeping, salon, exercise room, activities.” Alex ticked off the benefits as if Astrid didn’t comprehend the concept of “all included.” Astrid wondered what, if she didn’t have to cook, clean, or do laundry, she was supposed to do all day. With no car. “And physical therapy,” Alex said.

Safe spaces were especially prominent after the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President. As college and university administrators went into crisis mode, they sought to provide students with spaces to relieve their post-electoral anxiety and distress. Safe spaces have been supplied with coloring books, crayons, therapy pets, and even pacifiers. They have come to most resemble hospital pediatric units.

Adults with ADHD as a group have often experienced more than their fair share of disappointments and frustrations associated with the symptoms of ADHD, in many cases not realizing the impact of ADHD has had on them. When you reflect on a history of low grades, forgetting or not keeping promises made to others, repeated exhortations from others about your unfulfilled potential and the need to work harder, you may be left with a self-view that “I’m not good enough,” “I’m lazy,” or “I cannot expect much from myself and neither can anyone else.” The end result of these repeated frustrations can be the erosion of your sense of self, what is often called low self-esteem. These deep-seated, enduring self-views, or “core beliefs” about who you are can be thought of as a lens through which you see yourself, the world, and your place in the world. Adverse developmental experiences associated with ADHD may unfairly color your lens and result in a skewed pessimistic view of yourself, at least in some situations. When facing situations in the here-and-now that activate these negative beliefs, you experience strong emotions, negative thoughts, and a propensity to fall into self-defeating behaviors, most often resignation and escape. These core beliefs might only be activated in limited, specific situations for some people with ADHD; in other cases, these beliefs color one’s perception in most situations. It should be noted that many adults with ADHD, despite feeling flummoxed by their symptoms in many situations, possess a healthy self-view, though there may be many situations that briefly shake their confidence. These core beliefs or “schema” develop over the course of time from childhood through adulthood and reflect our efforts to figure out the “rules for life” (Beck, 1976; Young & Klosko, 1994). They can be thought of as mental categories that let us impose order on the world and make sense of it. Thus, as we grow up and face different situations, people, and challenges, we make sense of our situations and relationships and learn the rubrics for how the world works. The capacity to form schemas and to organize experience in this way is very adaptive. For the most part, these processes help us figure out, adapt to, and navigate through different situations encountered in life. In some cases, people develop beliefs and strategies that help them get through unusually difficult life circumstances, what are sometimes called survival strategies. These old strategies may be left behind as people settle into new, healthier settings and adopt and rely on “healthy rules.” In other cases, however, maladaptive beliefs persist, are not adjusted by later experiences (or difficult circumstances persist), and these schema interfere with efforts to thrive in adulthood. In our work with ADHD adults, particularly for those who were undiagnosed in childhood, we have heard accounts of negative labels or hurtful attributions affixed to past problems that become internalized, toughened, and have had a lasting impact. In many cases, however, many ADHD adults report that they arrived at negative conclusions about themselves based on their experiences (e.g., “None of my friends had to go to summer school.”). Negative schema may lay dormant, akin to a hibernating bear, but are easily reactivated in adulthood when facing similar gaffes or difficulties, including when there is even a hint of possible disappointment or failure. The function of these beliefs is self-protective—shock me once, shame on you; shock me twice, shame on me. However, these maladaptive beliefs insidiously trigger self-defeating behaviors that represent an attempt to cope with situations, but that end up worsening the problem and thereby strengthening the negative belief in a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle. Returning to the invisible fences metaphor, these beliefs keep you stuck in a yard that is too confining in order to avoid possible “shocks.

It's never too early to start lecture kids about race and racism. The following pointers will assist you in getting the conversation started. Sara D. Lee, MSW, LCSW, shares her tips for talking about race with our youngsters. Inspect her website Pacific Burnout Therapy or on Facebook. Conversations about race are always happening around us. Always. Of media, and each person participates in the least times. A bit like during a painting, where the filled and blank spaces close to doing the whole work, both what's said and what's left unsaid matter. For instance, I adore Mr. Rodgers. Still, the absence of 1 or more celebrated paternal figures of color in children's media is an example of racism shaping the children's conversation on race. An Asian-American, Latinx, Native-American, or African-American father figure could have filled that role if it didn't require a singular blend of access and privilege that our society exclusively extends to the White race.

The Sedative Garden atop the Therapy Building was a triumph of therapeutic planning. Every perspective, every color, every contour had been designed to placate hostility, soothe resistance, melt anger, evaporate hysteria, shore up melancholia and depression.

I’m just in therapy to help me figure out how to cope with you!

I’ve learned that the beast of C-PTSD is a wily shape-shifter. Just when I believe I can see the ghoul for exactly what it is, it dissipates like a puff of smoke, then slithers into another crevice in the back of my mind. I know now it will emerge again in another form in a month or a week or two hours from now. Because loss is the one guaranteed constant in life, and since my trauma reliably resurfaces with grief, C-PTSD will be a constant, too. Rage will always coat the tip of my tongue. I will always walk with a steel plate around my heart. My smile will always waver among strangers and my feet will always be ready to run. In the past few years, my joints have continued to rust and swell. I cannot transfuse the violence out of my blood. Every time the beast returns, I have to fight it slightly differently. The wars are shorter now, and often, the old tools work well. Counting colors and curiosity and conversations with my child-self muzzle the beast and shove it back into its hovel. Sometimes the beast requires new weapons—new forms of IFS or CBT, new mantras, new boundaries. Sometimes the beast bites a chunk out of me and gives a relationship a decent thrashing before I can get it in check again. Sometimes I fall into familiar pits of catastrophizing or dissociation, sometimes I find new, unpleasant swamps to wade through. Each episode is its own odyssey through past, present, and future, requiring new bursts of courage and new therapy sessions. But there are two main differences now: I have hope, and I have agency. I know my feelings, no matter how disconsolate they are, are temporary. I know that regardless of how unruly it is, I am the beast’s master, and at the end of each battle I stand strong and plant my flag: I am alive, I am proud, I am joyful, still. So this is healing, then, the opposite of the ambiguous dread: fullness. I am full of anger, pain, peace, love, of horrible shards and exquisite beauty, and the lifelong challenge will be to balance all of those things, while keeping them in the circle. Healing is never final. It is never perfection. But along with the losses are the triumphs. I accept the lifelong battle and its limitations now. Even though I must always carry the weight of grief on my back, I have become strong. My legs and shoulders are long, hard bundles of muscle. The burden is lighter than it was. I no longer cower and crawl my way through this world. Now, I hitch my pack up. And as I wait for the beast to come, I dance.

I’ve spent most of my life seeking an instant when my frenetic mind will calm and the thoughts will order themselves and all the discontent and discomfort will drain out like dirty bathwater. It’s common to misinterpret seismic shifts as singular moments that “changed everything.” But this is a disservice. What we’re describing is a tipping point preceded by a million moments of slow evolution, like dinosaurs sprouting feathers until they took flight and were offered a new perspective. But it’s a frustrating process and sometimes we get stuck. Just ask an ostrich. With repeated effort, we do wake up a little different every day until hindsight reveals that we are, in fact, flying. That’s the nature of mindfulness and therapy and processes like CBT—tiny deliberate moments that lead to encompassing change. Profundity isn’t flight but the evolution toward it. Waking up every day is profound. It’s seeing moments of magic when they’re offered and following them with abandon. I won’t instantaneously stop smoking and drinking and fucking my way through life. And somewhere deep down I know this. But the idea that I can change the stories that drive me is a flickering lightbulb in the basement of me.

Because racial microaggressions are so common and frequently distressing, many clients of color will want to talk about these experiences in therapy. As such, therapists must be prepared to have honest conversations about what might be an uncomfortable topic. When clinicians fall short in this area, they may make mistakes that leave clients feeling misunderstood, invalidated, or even traumatized. As such, good clinical training based on evidence is crucial.

We showered kids with trivial freedoms (What color would you like to dye your hair? You look so cool!) and appointed middle school kids co-arbiters of the family’s values—what high school to attend, whether to attend church or synagogue, or even whether they needed to hug elderly relatives or give Grandma a call. We explained away misbehavior as a matter of human psychology. (Aiden loved your gift! He didn’t say “thank you” because he was feeling intimidated.) We believed if we controlled and monitored every square inch of their environments, we would never need to demand that kids govern themselves.

The horror the Japanese have of the unexpected and the decisions is requires. The Japanese will become the most aesthetic people in the world. Six Buddhist sects have sprung from the interpretation of the scriptures and on ceremonial days, their priests wear tunics of raspberry, saffron, pistachio or violet, which create a lovely effect on the gray-brown-green of the Japanese landscape. The cemeteries are the fish ponds for the temples. These foreign visitors demand that before they leave Japan, someone should wrap up the "soul of Japan" for them. What do they want? Suddenly, through a simple mental process, their ignorance should be transformed into knowledge, clear-cut and precise, please, so that they can discuss it when they get home. I judge them, but I too, would sometimes like to find my meal set in front of me and fast. We come to this thin and frugal country with our greedy metabolisms: the whole West is that way. The golden dishes, the maharajahs, the rubies as big as the duck eggs, that is what struck our first explorers, not the frugality that is truly one of the marks of Asia. Have you ever drunk a good bottle of wine with a connaisseur? It is a form of torture. Because of the rhythm of Noh, travel is so slow that winter always overtakes travelers en route. They travel in tiny steps across a sort of mental Tibet. Japan: a self-sustaining island, rich in gold and in solver, excellent products, a disciplined and frugal population that carries cleanliness to the point of fanaticism, an always-appropriate alternation between honesty and hypocrisy, in short, the best governed state in the world. Walking does help to support the insupportable. When things turn bad, rather than expecting too much from people, one must sharpen one's relations with things. The tao ( the philosophy of Lao-tzu, sixth century B.C ) taught that our mind is a troublemaker that interferes between life and us, that we are victims of our categories. What exactly is Zen? For some it is a religion, for others a form of therapy, a means of liberation, a guide to character, a reaction of the Chinese spirit against the Indian spirit. True saints are not always on hand for writers who are passing through, people who don't need what one knows. In the Orient, knowledge is given spoonful by spoonful to the people who are truly hungry and the word "secret" means nothing here. In old Chinese Zen it was traditional to choose the gardener who knew nothing to succeed the master rather than one who knew too much. In this style of decor, as in the food, there is an immateriality repeated again and again: make yourself small, don't hurt the air, don't would our eyes with your terrible colored shirts, don't be so restless and don't offend this slightly bloodless perfection that we have been tending for eight hundred years. A crane preening his feathers, this elegant bird, so inexpressibly white, posed in the middle of the reeds, like a Ming vase.

,Coloring is not just art—it's therapy for the soul. Escape into a world of nature, where every stroke brings peace, and every shade tells a story.