Systemic Family Therapy Quotes

In contrast, EMDR, as well as the treatments discussed in subsequent chapters—internal family systems, yoga, neurofeedback, psychomotor therapy, and theater—focus not only on regulating the intense memories activated by trauma but also on restoring a sense of agency, engagement, and commitment through ownership of body and mind.

Imbalanced systems,whether internal or external, will tend to polarize.

A part is not just a temporary emotional state or habitual thought pattern. Instead, it is a discrete and autonomous mental system that has an idiosyncratic range of emotion, style of expression, set of abilities, desires, and view of the world. In other words, it is as if we each contain a society of people, each of whom is at a different age and has different interests, talents, and temperaments. In

Family systems theory offers therapists an invaluable way of understanding their clients’ strengths and problems—clarifying the familial rules, roles, myths, communication patterns, and boundary issues that defined their clients’ development.

I consider rugged individualism to be an exaggerated pretend posture of a person struggling against emotional fusion. The differentiated person is always aware of others and the relationship system around him.

No matter how much pain or dysfunction you have to deal with in your life, every part of your psyche is doing its best to help you

I recently consulted to a therapist who felt he had accomplished something by getting his dissociative client to remain in her ANP throughout her sessions with him. His view reflects the fundamental mistake that untrained therapists tend to make with DID and DDNOS. Although his client was properly diagnosed, he assumed that the ANP should be encouraged to take charge of the other parts at all times. He also expected her to speak for them—in other words, to do their therapy. This denied the other parts the opportunity to reveal their secrets, heal their pain, or correct their childhood-based beliefs about the world. If you were doing family therapy, would it be a good idea to only meet with the father, especially if he had not talked with his children or his spouse in years? Would the other family members feel as if their experiences and feelings mattered? Would they be able to improve their relationships? You must work with the parts who are inside of the system. Directly.

...there's this idea in family systems therapy that when something changes in a system, family members make "change back bids" trying to undo whatever is different.

When we are told what is healthy we are being told what is right to think and feel. When we are told what is mentally ill we are being told what ideas, behaviour, and fantasies are wrong. [...] The avenues of escape are blocked by the professioal abuse of pathologizing. To refuse the mental health approach confirms one's 'sickness'. One needs 'therapy', [...] How can we take back therapy [...] from a system which must find illness in order to promote health and which, in order to increase the range of its helping, is obliged to extend the area of sickness. Ever deeper pockets of pathology to be analyzed, ever earlier traumata: primal, prenatal, into my astral body; ever more people into the ritual: the family, the office force, community mental health, analysis for everyone. [...] Its practice may differ [...] but the premise is the same. The work of making soul requires professional help. Soul-making has become restricted by therapy and to therapy. And psychopathology has become restricted to therapy's negative definition of it, reduced to its role in the therapy game.

I'm not a particularly good daughter, but I sat through a month of therapy for my parents' sake. I'd like to think they got more out of it than I did. Couldn't have been too hard. Any system that requires the patient's family to pay someone else to care about her is fundamentally flawed.

need to listen to my anger to know that I’ve had a boundary violated. I need to listen to my loneliness to know that I need to invest in deep relationships. I need to listen to my anxiety to know that I have an unresolved trauma that needs to heal. I need to listen to my depression to know that I need care for my heart’s deepest wounds. I need to listen to my fear to know that I may need to create safety. I need to listen to my stress and irritability to know that I’m out of balance and need rest or reprioritization. One common experience, however, keeps us all stuck. Instead of moving toward our pain and listening to the valuable messages it has for us, the vast majority of us move against or away from it. We ignore it, deny it, feel ashamed for feeling it, resent it, or attempt to numb, deflect, or dismiss it. We’ve been well taught to not listen to, or even feel, those yucky, hard feelings. Suck it up, buttercup. Be a man. Big girls don’t cry. Stop your whining or I’ll give you something to whine about! You can see why I believe we suffer from a very serious leprosy of the heart. And it’s killing us.

theory and science are: 1. From the cradle to the grave, human beings are hardwired to seek not just social contact, but also physical and emotional proximity to special others who are deemed irreplaceable. The longing for a “felt sense” of connection to key others is primary in terms of the hierarchy of human goals and needs. Humans are most acutely aware of this innate need for connection at times of threat, risk, pain, or uncertainty. Threats that trigger the attachment system may be from the outside or the inside, for example, troubling construals of rejection by loved ones, negative images or concrete reminders of one’s own mortality (Mikulincer, Birnbaum, Woddis, & Nachmias, 2000; Mikulincer & Florian, 2000). In relationships, shared vulnerability builds bonds, precisely because it brings attachment needs for a felt sense of connection and comfort to the fore and encourages reaching for others. 2. Predictable physical and/or emotional connection with an attachment figure, often a parent, sibling, longtime close friend, mate, or spiritual figure, calms the nervous system and shapes a physical and mental sense of a safe haven where comfort and reassurance can be reliably obtained and emotional balance can be restored or enhanced.

What I propose in this book is a hard sell in Western culture. We are primarily oriented toward getting from our partners what we need to feel good and don’t believe we can get much from ourselves. We want to transform the source of pain in the outside world rather than the source within us. That external focus—and the therapies of accommodation that subscribe to it—will only provide temporary relief at best from the inner and outer storms that gradually erode the fertile topsoil of our relationships. There is another way, and we will explore it in this book. Before we do, however, let’s further examine the problems with this accommodation premise.

There were inquiries, Congressional hearings, books, exposés and documentaries. However, despite all this attention, it was still only a few short months before interest in these children dropped away. There were criminal trials, civil trials, lots of sound and fury. All of the systems—CPS, the FBI, the Rangers, our group in Houston—returned, in most ways, to our old models and our ways of doing things. But while little changed in our practice, a lot had changed in our thinking. We learned that some of the most therapeutic experiences do not take place in “therapy,” but in naturally occurring healthy relationships, whether between a professional like myself and a child, between an aunt and a scared little girl, or between a calm Texas Ranger and an excitable boy. The children who did best after the Davidian apocalypse were not those who experienced the least stress or those who participated most enthusiastically in talking with us at the cottage. They were the ones who were released afterwards into the healthiest and most loving worlds, whether it was with family who still believed in the Davidian ways or with loved ones who rejected Koresh entirely. In fact, the research on the most effective treatments to help child trauma victims might be accurately summed up this way: what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child’s life.

In our society today, much is made of treating children as persons, human beings who have a right to be heard. But many family leaders today bend so far in the direction of consensus, in order to avoid the stigma of being authoritarian, that clarity of values and the positive, often crucial benefits of the leader's self-differentiation are almost totally missing from the system. One of the most prevalent characteristics of families with disturbed children is the absence or the involution of the relational hierarchy. While schools of family therapy have different ways of conceptualizing this condition, which may also be viewed as a political phenomenon regarding congregations, it is so diffuse among families troubled by their troubled children that its importance cannot be underestimated. What happens in any type of family system regarding leadership is paradoxical. The same interdependency that creates a need for leadership makes the followers anxious and reactive precisely when the leader is functioning best.

When one of my early teachers, for instance, recognized that many ritually abused clients were still being abused while in treatment, she insisted that they could not be treated on an outpatient basis, but should be hospitalized and kept from their families. She was targeted with a series of court cases involving false accusations that she had allegedly abused clients in hospital. The experience was devastating to her. And she was not alone. Many others faced persistent attempts to discredit their professional expertise, or legal assaults that robbed them of time, energy, and even the courage to continue to treat clients, write, or teach. Therapy professionals in both direct services and policy making, members of the criminal and civil justice systems, and the general public were systematically indoctrinated via the media. Many now share the view that people who disclose ritual abuse or mind control content suffer from "false memories” induced by "over-zealous therapists," and that dissociative disorders are iatrogenic (or else they do not exist at all).

Q. How can I be certain that what I fear will happen will never really happen? A. Sadly, the answer is you can't be certain! If you suffer from OCD you probably want a 100 percent guarantee that you will never do anything dangerous or that no harm will ever come to you or your family members. Unfortunately, life does not work like this. If I think about it, I know that there is no guarantee that I won't be hit by a car coming home from work today - but somehow my brain automatically accepts the very small chance of this happening and so permits me to go on living my life. More than two thousand years ago the Buddha (a great psychologist besides being a religious teacher) warned that one of the key things that makes us suffer is that we always want more than we will actually get - whether what we want is material like gold and jewels, or (my addition) in the case of OCD, more certainty than you will ever achieve. Thus the solution the Buddha might have offered you in northern India those thousands of years ago might have been something like this: "To stop suffering you must learn to accept that you will never achieve as much certainty as you want, no matter how much you pursue it; so it is up to you to choose: Either accept this truth and live your life happily, or fight against this truth and continue to suffer." Let me say it again for emphasis: you will never be certain that you won't act on the urges you have, or that the terrible things you fear will happen will not actually happen - but I can assure you that the odds of these things actually happening are small enough that it is not worth wasting your life trying (in vain) to get 100 percent certainty. Better to trust in yourself, your religious beliefs, or in evolution having prepared us well for surviving in this world. If evidence from brain studies better helps to convince you this is true, brain imaging studies of OCD sufferers now suggest that there really is something wrong with their "certainty system"; whatever automatically lets someone without OCD feel that things are OK does not function correctly in the OCD sufferer's brain (who then tries to convince himself that everything is OK, eventually becoming tired and frustrated when he cannot use other brain functions to achieve 100 percent certainty).

If the symbolic father is often lurking behind the boss--which is why one speaks of 'paternalism' in various kinds of enterprises--there also often is, in a most concrete fashion, a boss or hierarchic superior behind the real father. In the unconscious, paternal functions are inseparable from the socio-professional and cultural involvements which sustain them. Behind the mother, whether real or symbolic, a certain type of feminine condition exists, in a socially defined imaginary context. Must I point out that children do not grow up cut off from the world, even within the family womb? The family is permeable to environmental forces and exterior influences. Collective infrastructures, like the media and advertising, never cease to interfere with the most intimate levels of subjective life. The unconscious is not something that exists by itself to be gotten hold of through intimate discourse. In fact, it is only a rhizome of machinic interactions, a link to power systems and power relations that surround us. As such, unconscious processes cannot be analyzed in terms of specific content or structural syntax, but rather in terms of enunciation, of collective enunciative arrangements, which, by definition, correspond neither to biological individuals nor to structural paradigms... The customary psychoanalytical family-based reductions of the unconscious are not 'errors.' They correspond to a particular kind of collective enunciative arrangement. In relation to unconscious formation, they proceed from the particular micropolitics of capitalistic societal organization. An overly diversified, overly creative machinic unconscious would exceed the limits of 'good behavior' within the relations of production founded upon social exploitation and segregation. This is why our societies grant a special position to those who specialize in recentering the unconscious onto the individuated subject, onto partially reified objects, where methods of containment prevent its expansion beyond dominant realities and significations. The impact of the scientific aspirations of techniques like psychoanalysis and family therapy should be considered as a gigantic industry for the normalization, adaption and organized division of the socius. The workings of the social division of labor, the assignment of individuals to particular productive tasks, no longer depend solely on means of direct coercion, or capitalistic systems of semiotization (the monetary remuneration based on profit, etc.). They depend just as fundamentally on techniques modeling the unconscious through social infrastructures, the mass media, and different psychological and behavioral devices...Even the outcome of the class struggle of the oppressed--the fact that they constantly risk being sucked into relations of domination--appears to be linked to such a perspective.

• No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We will talk about almost anyone about our physical health, even our sex lives, but bring depression, anxiety or grief , and the expression on the other person would probably be "get me out of this conversation" • We can distract our feelings with too much wine, food or surfing the internet, • Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Everyday patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves, • "The only way out is through" the only way to get out of the tunnel is to go through, not around it • Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt" • Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in peoples relationships too, influencing the kind of partners they pick, (stable or less stable), how they behave in a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile) and how the relationship tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with an explosion) • The presenting problem, the issue somebody comes with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely. • "Help me understand more about the relationship" Here, here's trying to establish what’s known as a therapeutic alliance, trust that has to develop before any work can get done. • In early sessions is always more important for patients to feel understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make changes. • We can complain for free with a friend or family member, People make faulty narratives to make themselves feel better or look better in the moment, even thought it makes them feel worse over time, and that sometimes they need somebody else to read between the lines. • Here-and-now, it is when we work on what’s happening in the room, rather than focusing on patient's stories. • She didn't call him on his bullshit, which this makes patients feel unsafe, like children's whose parent's don’t hold them accountable • What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? • Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons, that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous system and help them stay present • Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth. • The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at • How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to. • The purpose on inquiring about people's parent s is not to join them in blaming, judging or criticizing their parents. In fact it is not about their parents at all. It is solely about understanding how their early experiences informed who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits) • But personality disorders lie on a spectrum. People with borderline personality disorder are terrified of abandonment, but for some that might mean feeling anxious when their partners don’t respond to texts right away; for others that may mean choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone. • In therapy we aim for self compassion (am I a human?) versus self esteem (Am I good or bad: a judgment) • The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure, as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: can you feel this? can you say this words? They are constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back up so as not to damage it.

It has been a long road for us as family therapists to reach an understanding of just this phenomenon-the sense of the whole, the family system. While we could have explained the theory of meeting with the whole family to the Brices, at that anxious moment it would not have touched them. There are situations where, in the words of Franz Alexander, the woice of the intellent is too soft. The family needed to test us. They needed the experience of our being firm. As unpleasant as it was, our response must have reassured them. They knew, and we sensed, how difficult their situation was and how tumultuous it could become. They simply has to know that we could withstand the stress if they dared open it up.

Awakening is the first glimpse that “things” or “reality” are not what we thought. Awakening is an ongoing process throughout recovery. To begin, we generally require an entry point or trigger—anything that shakes up our old understanding or belief system of reality, of the way that we thought things were (Ferguson 1980; Whitfield 1985; 2003). Because our True Self is so hidden, and because our false self is so prominent, awakening may not come easily. Nonetheless, it often happens. I have witnessed this process in hundreds of children of trauma. The entry point or trigger may range across a wide spectrum. It may start with hearing or reading someone describe their own recovery or own True Self, or being “sick and tired” of our suffering, or beginning to work seriously on another life problem in counseling or therapy. For others, it may be attending a self-help meeting or an educational experience, reading a book or hearing about it from a friend.

Twenty years after working with Mary, I met Richard Schwartz, the developer of internal family systems therapy (IFS). It was through his work that Minsky’s “family” metaphor truly came to life for me and offered a systematic way to work with the split-off parts that result from trauma. At the core of IFS is the notion that the mind of each of us is like a family in which the members have different levels of maturity, excitability, wisdom, and pain. The parts form a network or system in which change in any one part will affect all the others.

Self-led individuals have the great pleasure of recapturing all the energy their protectors used to expend on inhibition, containment, distraction, and rebellion.

Instead of talking about their feelings, EI people express themselves nonverbally through emotional contagion (Hatfield, Rapson, and Le 2009), coming across your boundaries and getting you as upset as they are. In family systems theory, this absence of healthy boundaries is called emotional fusion (Bowen 1985), while in structural family therapy it is called enmeshment (Minuchin 1974). This is the process by which EI family members get absorbed into each other’s emotions and psychological issues.

The shibboleth “family values,” expressed by catchphrases like “bad mothering” and “absent fathering,” trickles down into “family systems therapy,” which has become the single most important set of ideas determining the theory of societal dysfunction and the practice of mental health. Yet all along a little elf whispers another tale: “You are different; you’re not like anyone in the family; you don’t really belong.

The personal case histories were the most encouraging. A prominent Los Angeles public relations executive has been living with MM for fourteen years, rides horses, and has an altogether active life on drug maintenance. An Arizona man survived MM and with his wife set up a foundation and website for other families bewildered by the diagnosis. I learned, for the first time, that Frank McGee, host of the Today show from 1971 to 1974, suffered from MM and kept it from everyone despite his ever more gaunt appearance. When he died after putting in another full week on the air his producers and friends were stunned. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was another MM casualty, which led many to believe that he had established the high-profile multiple myeloma treatment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a full-immersion process in which MM is the singular target under the commanding title of Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. There is a Walton auditorium on the institute’s University of Arkansas medical school campus, but the institute itself was founded by Bart Barlogie, a renowned MM specialist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The institute has an impressive record, running well ahead of the national average for survival for those who are dealing with MM. One number is especially notable. The institute has followed 1,070 patients for more than ten years, and 783 have never had a relapse of the disease. Sam Walton was treated by Dr. Barlogie at MD Anderson before the Little Rock institute was founded, but the connection ended there. Walton, who’d had an earlier struggle with leukemia, didn’t survive his encounter with multiple myeloma, dying in April 1992, a time when life expectancy for a man his age with this cancer was short. I was unaware of all of this when I was diagnosed. I took comfort in the repeated reassurances of specialists that great progress in treating MM with a new class of drugs, your own body’s reengineered immunology system, was rapidly improving chances of a longer survival than the published five to ten years. As I began to respond to treatment the favored and welcome line was, “You’re gonna die but from something else.

Interlocking pathology in family relationships. In S. Rado and G. Daniels (Eds.), Changing concepts of psychoanalytic medicine (pp. 135–150). New York: Grune and Stratton. Ackerman, N. W. (1958). The psychodynamics of family life. New York: Basic Books. Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J. (1956). Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science, 1, 251–164. Bowen, M. (1972). Toward the differentiation of self in one’s family of origin. In Georgetown Family Symposia: A collection of selected papers (Vol.1, 1971–1972). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Family Center. Bowen, M. (1976). Family theory in the practice of psychotherapy. In P. Guerin (Ed.), Family therapy: Theory and practice (pp. 335–348). New York: Gardner Press. Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy

This chapter explores how interpersonal trauma can unleash the destructive force of shame into both external and internal relationships, morphing a dangerous event into a dangerous identity, which psychiatric symptoms—the behaviors of parts—are attempting to handle. Chapter

by coaching individual family members to change themselves in the context of their nuclear and parental family systems (McGoldrick

Mills, R. S. L. (2005). Taking stock of the developmental literature on shame. Developmental Review, 25, 26–63. Schore,

Then in March 1993, everything changed. My one-year-old son, Charlie, had his first seizure. There’s absolutely nothing funny about being the parent of a child with uncontrolled epilepsy. Nothing. After a year of daily seizures, drugs, and a brain surgery, I learned that the cure for Charlie’s epilepsy, the ketogenic diet—a high fat, no sugar, limited protein diet—had been hiding in plain sight for, by then, over seventy years. And despite the diet’s being well documented in medical texts, none of the half-dozen pediatric neurologists we had taken Charlie to see had mentioned a word about it. I found out on my own at a medical library. It was life altering—not just for Charlie and my family, but for tens of thousands like us. Turns out there are powerful forces at work within our health care system that don’t necessarily prioritize good health. For decades, physicians have barely been taught diet therapy or even nutrition in medical school. The pharmaceutical, medical device, and sugar industries make hundreds of billions every year on anti-epileptic drugs and processed foods—but not a nickel if we change what we eat. The cardiology community and American Heart Association demonize fat based on flawed science. Hospitals profit from tests and procedures, but again no money from diet therapy. There is a world epilepsy population of over sixty million people. Most of those people begin having their seizures as children, and only a minuscule percentage ever find out about ketogenic diet therapies. When I realized that 99 percent of what had happened to Charlie and my family was unnecessary, and that there were millions of families worldwide in the same situation, I needed to try to do something. Nancy and I began the Charlie Foundation (charliefoundation.org) in 1994 in order to facilitate research and get the word directly to those who would benefit. Among the high points were countless articles, a couple appearances of Charlie’s story on Dateline NBC, and a movie I produced and directed about another family whose child’s epilepsy had been cured by the ketogenic diet starring Meryl Streep titled First Do No Harm (1997). Today, of course, the diet permeates social media. When we started, there was one hospital in the world offering ketogenic diet therapy. Today, there are 250. Equally important, word about the efficacy of the ketogenic diet for epilepsy spread within the scientific community. In 1995, we hosted the first of many scientific global symposia focused on the diet. As research into its mechanisms and applications has spiked, incredibly the professional communities have found the same metabolic pathway that is triggered by the ketogenic diet to reduce seizures has also been found to benefit Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, severe psychiatric disorders, traumatic brain injury, and even some cancers. I

Yin yoga can be viewed as a somatic form of IFS therapy, enabling compassionate self-attunement and insight through "conversations" with the body's innate wisdom.

The resonant space of nondual therapy allows client and practitioner to remain distinct yet ultimately inseparable through their shared being. This is intimacy and compassion at the deepest level, transcending subject/object division while not denying individuality, sensations, feelings or boundaries. As Rumi expressed, 'We are the mirror as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

As we approach parts with curiosity and compassion, they may spontaneously release burdens and polarities, returning to the wholeness of the Self, no longer believing in separateness. The conceptual framework surrounding parts may dissolve, and the very label "part" may become superfluous. This aligns with Schwartz’s belief that in a healthy, integrated, or never-burdened system, you "hardly notice your parts." As inner harmony is achieved through this work, the practices themselves may naturally fade away, including any mindfulness or self-inquiry techniques, as our direct knowing of the unified Self stabilizes. What remains is unmediated experiencing—perception without an internal judge or narrator imposing layers of meaning. Like a bird feeling the fresh raindrop, we awaken to the pure isness of the present moment. We recognize that diversity was never truly separate—all parts reside within the vastness of the Self and feel its illuminating presence infusing life with wholeness. Self-realization does not conflict with the experience of inner multiplicity. Rather, it provides the foundation for embracing our diverse parts with love and understanding. Just as clouds naturally arise within the vast expanse of the sky, the many facets of our psyche emerge from the same unitary source of consciousness. By recognizing our fundamental oneness, we can openly accept all inner voices and perspectives as inseparable expressions of our true nature. Parts work therapies like Jungian analysis, psychosynthesis, and IFS rest on the realization that our multiplicity arises from and returns to an underlying unity. Healing separation unveils the intrinsic connectedness shining through our diversity. The many are seen to be expressions of the one infinite consciousness from which we all emerge. Awakening to our true nature does not erase our finite human form but allows us to live as embodiments of the infinite while navigating the relative world. We can embrace relationships, experiences, and inner parts as manifestations of the vast depths of being itself. Our very capacity for a richly textured existence arises from the fecundity of the source—celebrating the unlimited creativity that gives rise to all multiplicities within its all-encompassing embrace. When we unravel the tendency to view parts as separate from Self, ourselves as separate from the collective, and the collective as separate from the universe, we find interconnected wholeness underneath it all, like pieces of the same puzzle fitting perfectly together. Though each piece may seem distinct, together they form a complete picture. Just as a puzzle is not whole without all its pieces, so too are we fragments without our connections to others and the greater whole. All pieces big and small fit together to create the fullness of life. From the vantage point of the infinite, life appears as a seamless whole. Yet seen through the finite lens of the mind, it fragments into countless shapes and forms. To insist that only oneness or multiplicity is real leads to a fragmented perspective, caught between mutually exclusive extremes. With curiosity and compassion, we can integrate these views into a unified vision. Like the beads in a kaleidoscope, Self appears in endless configurations—now as particle, now as wave. Though the patterns change, the beads remain the same. All possibilities are held safely within the kaleidoscope's luminous field. The essence lies in remembering that no bead stands alone. Parts require the presence of an overarching whole that encompasses them. The individual Self necessitates the existence of a vaster, universal SELF. The love that binds all parts infuses the inside and outside alike. This unifying love can be likened to the Tao, the very fabric from which life is woven.

Clinicians have only one obligation: to do whatever they can to help their patients get better. Because of this, clinical practice has always been a hotbed for experimentation. Some experiments fail, some succeed, and some, like EMDR, dialectical behavior therapy, and internal family systems therapy, go on to change the way therapy is practiced. Validating all these treatments takes decades and is hampered by the fact that research support generally goes to methods that have already been proven to work. I am much comforted by considering the history of penicillin: Almost four decades passed between the discovery of its antibiotic properties by Alexander Fleming in 1928 and the final elucidation of its mechanisms in 1965.

Among other modalities, he practiced Internal Family Systems, or IFS, a form of therapy that asks patients to break up their mind into subpersonalities—a kind of internal family unit. Let’s say you’re an alcoholic. You might consider that drinking is not your entire identity. There is just one part of your personality that wants you to drink all the time. IFS practitioners call it your “firefighter,” because firefighters react to triggers and try to put out the fire by comforting you—often with unhealthy habits like drinking, binge eating, or doing drugs. This framework allows you to see your firefighter as part of your “family unit” and to subsequently forgive him for his tendency to throw beer on everything. He’s just trying to calm you, after all, and maybe you needed him for a time. But also, maybe you can retire him from service now and use another, healthier part of your “family” to care for yourself.

Internal Family Systems Therapy,

ChiroCynergy - Dr. Matthew Bradshaw - Chiropractic in Leland, NC CHIROPRACTIC “NO CRACKING” MANIPULATION Chiropractic is a health care profession that focuses on disorders of the musculoskeletal system and the nervous system, and the effects of these disorders on general health. Chiropractic care is used most often to treat neuromusculoskeletal complaints, including but not limited to back pain, neck pain, pain in the joints of the arms or legs, and headaches. Doctors of Chiropractic – often referred to as chiropractors or chiropractic physicians – practice a drug-free, hands-on approach to health care that includes patient examination, diagnosis and treatment. Chiropractors have broad diagnostic skills and are also trained to recommend therapeutic and rehabilitative exercises, as well as to provide nutritional, dietary and lifestyle counseling. Call us: (910) 368-1528 #chiropractor_Leland_nc #best_chiropractor_Leland_nc #chiropractor_near_ Leland_nc #chiropractic_in_Leland_nc #best_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #chiropractic_near_me #chiropractor_near_me #family_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #female_chiropractors_in_Leland_nc #physical_therapy_in_Leland_nc #sports_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #pregnancy_chiropractor in_Leland_nc #sciatica_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #car_accident_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #Active_Release_Technique_in_Leland_nc #Cold_Laser_Therapy_in_Leland_nc #Spinal_Decompression_in_Leland_nc

What is sensory integration therapy? This form of occupational therapy helps children and adults with SPD (sensory processing disorder) use all their senses together. These are the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. Sensory integration therapy is claimed to help people with SPD respond to sensory inputs such as light, sound, touch, and others; and change challenging or repetitive behaviours. Someone in the family may have trouble receiving and responding to information through their senses. This is a condition called sensory processing disorder (SPD). These people are over-sensitive to things in their surroundings. This disorder is commonly identified in children and with conditions like autism spectrum disorder. The exact cause of sensory processing disorder is yet to be identified. However, previous studies have proven that over-sensitivity to light and sound has a strong genetic component. Other studies say that those with sensory processing conditions have abnormal brain activity when exposed simultaneously to light and sound. Treatment for sensory processing disorder in children and adults is called sensory integration therapy. Therapy sessions are play-oriented for children, so they should be fun and playful. This may include the use of swings, slides, and trampolines and may be able to calm an anxious child. In addition, children can make appropriate responses. They can also perform more normally. SPD can also affect adults Someone who struggles with SPD should consider receiving occupational therapy, which has an important role in identifying and treating sensory integration issues. Occupational therapists are health professionals using different therapeutic approaches so that people can do every work they need to do, inside and outside their homes. Through occupational therapy, affected individuals are helped to manage their immediate and long-term sensory symptoms. Sensory integration therapy for adults, especially for people living with dementia or Alzheimer's disease, may use everyday sounds, objects, foods, and other items to rouse their feelings and elicit positive responses. Suppose an adult is experiencing agitation or anxiety. In that case, soothing music can calm them, or smelling a scent familiar to them can help lessen their nervous excitement and encourage relaxation, as these things can stimulate their senses. Seniors with Alzheimer's/Dementia can regain their ability to connect with the world around them. This can help improve their well-being overall and quality of life. What Are The Benefits of Sensory Integration Therapy Sensory integration treatment offers several benefits to people with SPD: * efficient organisation of sensory information. These are the things the brain collects from one's senses - smell, touch, sight, etc. * Active involvement in an exploration of the environment. * Maximised ability to function in recreational and other daily activities. * Improved independence with daily living activities. * Improved performance in the home, school, and community. * self-regulations. Affected individuals get the ability to understand and manage their behaviours and understand their feelings about things that happen around them. * Sensory systems modulation. If you are searching for an occupational therapist to work with for a family with a sensory processing disorder, check out the Mission Walk Therapy & Rehabilitation Centre. The occupational therapy team of Mission Walk uses individualised care plans, along with the most advanced techniques, so that patients can perform games, school tasks, and other day-to-day activities with their best functional skills. Call Mission Walk today for more information or a free consultation on sensory integration therapy. Our customer service staff will be happy to help.

One of our goals with this book is to recruit new participants for what we call the Index: A “cultural reactor” that catalogs intentionally constructed family cultures and monitors their outcomes intergenerationally while distributing said information in a way that allows all participating cultures to improve at a faster rate than that of a non-cultivated society. We want to make it possible for cultures in the network to improve faster than normal intergenerational memetic evolutionary powers would allow through a system analogous to horizontal gene transfer in gene therapy or lateral gene transfer in bacteria.

Having a family or normal life of any kind was out of the question. Jesus had great compassion for people with leprosy.29 He understood that their suffering was rooted in a strange condition. They didn’t feel pain. Now, normally we are all in favor of not feeling pain. We take pills. We drink and drug and act out sexually to escape it. We lose ourselves in TV and volunteering and staying busy. We do not like pain. It turns out that leprosy deadens pain. The disease does that by killing nerve endings, and as a result people get hurt. They lose parts of their body and suffer disfigurement and ugly discoloration from burns and other injuries. Because if you can’t feel pain, you don’t know when something is wrong. You don’t want to miss this. For most of the world, leprosy is not a thing anymore, at least for our bodies. But in our hearts, I’d say we suffer from a virtual epidemic. We do not want to feel pain. Or discomfort. Or any type of negative emotion at all. Somewhere along the line, we’ve missed the reality that our negative emotions are among the most important guides to our inner health—if we listen to them.

When we have full access to our God Image, we will spontaneously (with no effort) experience what Schwartz calls the Eight Cs: curiosity, compassion, courage, connection, clarity, calm, confidence, and creativity. In Galatians 5, scripture refers to these qualities as the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Whatever we call it, when we are fully connected to the God Image within, we are attuned to the presence and nature of God, and better resourced to move toward healing.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a relatively new form of therapy that is compassionate, inclusive, spiritual, powerfully healing, and deeply respectful of our inner life.

At the opposite end of the scale (to which we are all closer) is a couple diagrammed as though they were fused to the ends of a stick (A'-B'). Whatever either does automatically moves the other. There is no thinking of self, only we and us and the blaming you. The nature of the relationship might appear close. They might appear to be together, but they are really stuck together. They will wind up either perpetually in conflict, because they are so reactive to one another, or they will have a homey togetherness achieved through the total sacrifice of their own selves. In the latter case, their marriage might last 50 years, but their kids are likely to dysfunction all over America because, coming out of such an ill-defined system, they carry with them little capacity for autonomy in any emotional system.

He watched me grieve and he didn’t try to make things more comfortable by interrupting or analyzing the issue. He let me tell the story in whatever way I needed to say" "Of course, there are times when something just isn't right between therapists, and patient, when the therapist's countertransference is getting in the way. One sign: having negative feelings about the patient". "Our experiences with this person are important because we're probably feeling something very similar to what everyone else in these patients' life feels." "If you expect an hour of sympathetic head nodding, you've come to the wrong place. Therapist will be supportive, but our support is for your growth, not for our low opinion of your partner (our role is to understand your perspective but not necessarily endorse it)" "A therapist will hold up the mirror in the most compassionate way possible, to stare back at it and say "oh isn’t that interesting? Now what instead of turning away?" "The therapist explained that often-different parts of ourselves want different things and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable they'll find other ways to be heard." "So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out of something to fill it." "Whenever one person in the family system starts to make changes, even if the changes are healthy or positive, it's not unusual for other members in this family to do everything they can do to maintain the status quo and bring things back to homeostasis." "Once we know what we are feeling we can make choices about where we want to go with them. But if we push them away the second they appear, often we end up veering off in the wrong direction, getting lost yet again in the land of chaos." "I know that therapy won't make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from coming, or ensure that Ill always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. Therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknown yourself- let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are, so that you aren’t trap by them, so that you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life." "The noonday demon: "The opposite of depression isn't happiness but vitality" "We marry our unfinished business" "Babies can die from lack of touch, and so can adults (adults who are touched regularly live longer). There is even a name for this condition: skin hunger" "What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person's type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity, It is not coincidence that people who had angry parents, often end up choosing angry partners.

Patients will come in to see me with various infections that do not respond to antibiotics and when they are also treated with ozone the antibiotics suddenly work much better. The reason is that antibiotics are one dimensional. They just kill germs. But ozone works differently. It activates the immune system, prevents the free radical damage that happens with acute infections, and at the same time helps the body detoxify from the toxins that infections release. So the combination of ozone therapy plus antibiotics is a real one-two punch for infections. One day this protocol will be common place in every hospital in the world.

Addiction is the one disease that tells you that you don’t have a disease.

And since human system levels are interconnected, Self-leadership at any level helps to heal all levels. We believe that each client who unburdens helps reduce the burden load of the planet, allowing all of us to have a little more access to the Self.

ChiroCynergy - Dr. Matthew Bradshaw | Active Release Technique (A.R.T.) in Leland, NC What exactly is Active Release Technique (A.R.T.)? ART is a patented, state-of-the-art, soft tissue management system developed by Dr. Michael Leahy (an Air Force engineer/chiropractor) that treats problems occurring with: - Muscles - Tendons - Ligaments - Fascia - Nerves Injuries to these tissues can occur in 3 different ways: Acute trauma injury – a sprained ankle playing racquetball is a great example of this type of injury. Compression injury – an example of a compression injury would be back stiffness and pain and/or numbness down the leg (sciatica) caused by sitting behind a computer frequently and for long periods of time. Sitting causes reduced oxygen flow to the tissues, which in turn causes the numbness and/or pain. Overuse injuries – frequently seen in people whose jobs involve typing all day. The repetitive motion can produce wrist and hand pain (i.e. carpal tall syndrome) due to the accumulation of small tears in the tissues. Each of these changes causes your body to produce tough, dense scar tissue in the affected area. This scar tissue binds up and ties down tissues that need to move freely. As scar tissue builds up: Muscles become shorter and weaker. Tension on tendons causes tendonitis. Nerves can become trapped. This can result in reduced ranges of motion, loss of strength, and pain. With trapped nerves, you may also feel tingling, numbness, shooting pains, burning sensations, weakness, muscle atrophy and circulatory changes. Even when most doctors say medications or surgery is the only answer, ART may still be able to resolve the symptoms and put you back on the field or back to work and into your best game. ChiroCynergy can help! We offer Active Release Technique (A.R.T.) in Leland, NC. Call us: (910) 368-1528 #chiropractor_Leland_nc #best_chiropractor_Leland_nc #chiropractor_near_Leland_nc #chiropractic_in_Leland_nc #best_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #chiropractic_near_me #chiropractor_near_me #family_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #female_chiropractors_in_Leland_nc #physical_therapy_in_Leland_nc #sports_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #pregnancy_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #sciatica_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #car_accident_chiropractor_in_Leland_nc #Active_Release_Technique_in_Leland_nc #Cold_Laser_Therapy_in_Leland_nc #Spinal_Decompression_in_Leland_nc

So, what information do you want to gather during this first interview? Foremost is her description of why she is here now as opposed to six months ago or six years ago (this is known in clinical parlance as the “presenting problem”). You want the basic data if you don’t have them: name, age, marital status, occupation; with whom she lives and where; any previous experiences of therapy; and perhaps some preliminary information about her family of origin. You also want to get some sense of her support system: Does she have friends? Do her relatives live nearby? Does she have a good working relationship with colleagues at her job? Many of these answers will emerge spontaneously. If they don’t, ask for them. Toward the end of the session, you want to leave yourself enough time to ask the client if she has any questions. In addition, you want to ask whether she would like to come back again and talk further. You might help her make that decision by pointing out what you are seeing, e.g., that she seems to be struggling with her feelings about her father’s death or that it is sometimes difficult to know the right thing to do when you are having trouble with your child. The goal here is to try and arrive at a mutual definition, in language that seems right to the client, of what the presenting problem is. Under the best circumstances the client will say something like, “That’s exactly the way I would have said it.” If you do not reach a mutual definition, however, that is not a reason to despair, since you are new at this. It is perfectly alright to suggest that the client return again so you can further explore and clarify what it is she would like your help with. If

My mother didn’t believe Ollie was suffering. She always maintained that if Ollie had gone to a detention center after her arrest, she would have straightened out. All this therapy was just a way for privileged kids to avoid legal consequences for their bad actions. Ollie had been caught stealing, and we, her family, were suffering on account of it. Dr. Simon was also a proponent of family systems therapy. He believed that what happened to Ollie happened to all of us. If we wanted her to get better, we also had to examine ourselves. “How dare he!” my mother said. “How dare he pin this on us.