Tag Archives: Psychology

Relaxation for Nerds Part One: A Carbon-Thawing-Based Stress Reducer

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Ideally, therapy will involve a component of providing clients with new tactics for addressing everyday difficulties. For example, one way to get clients to develop skills in the area of anxiety management is to walk them through a relaxation exercise, maybe even aiding them in creating or recording one that works well for them. While doing my practicum, my supervisor had me create a stress-reduction ‘scenario’ of my own and present it to a very high-anxiety client.

Now, while the relaxation exercise I actually used in session had to do with the client feeling warmth spread through his body, thawing ice/tension in his veins, it actually came to me first as a relaxation exercise that I didn’t dare do. For the original relaxation exercise involved a certain space pirate emerging from a block of carbonite, inside a desert palace (carefully avoiding overly-specific references that might result in cease-and-desist letters from the lawyers of a certain film director who is still apparently cheesed off about those pirated copies of a certain 1978 ‘Life Day’ Holiday Special that frequently pop up on eBay). And, hey, for any of you overly-ambitious types who want to turn this into a full-blown relaxation video production suitable for YouTube, I’ve been told I have a voice that’s made for radio…or was that a face for radio? Both?

Anyway, it goes a little bit like this…

Close your eyes.

(We start with deep breathing, so sit comfortably in an upright position feet flat on the floor, arms resting on your lap or the arms of the chair. Now breathe in slowly through your nose. Take in a deep breath, all the way into the trunk of your body. You want your trunk to expand. You want to breathe from your diaphragm. You want to do some belly breathing. When your diaphragm has expanded with the air to its maximum stretching point, pause for a few seconds, then breathe out through your mouth, slowly and deliberately. Try to make the count of your breath out match the count of your breath in. Do a slow count as you take in air through your nose, expanding your belly…four, five, six, seven. Your breathing is at capacity. Pause, two, three four. Now breathe out…four, five, six, seven. Continue your breathing in this fashion, aware of the feeling of calm it brings.)

Everything is darkness, and silence, and immobility. In fact, you cannot remember the last time you saw daylight, the last time you heard anything other than the faintest, muffled sounds. You cannot remember the last time you were able to move, to stretch. You realize that this lifelessness, along with the negative feelings it brings, the fear and anxiety, are all the result of your inability to move, to experience the world around you. But you still feel your calm, measured breathing. You still feel a sense of hope…a new hope?

You have a vague sensation that you are in an awkward, standing position, as with your hands up in front of your chest. But you cannot move. Still, this realization of frozenness brings awareness, and this awareness brings with it the possibility of movement.

You have the briefest sensation that you are falling, and feel a slight, jarring in the solid material around you. And then all is silence and darkness again, but you feel a change.

As you continue your deliberate, measured breathing, a slow warmth starts to expand near your forehead. The warmth spreads slowly down your face. You feel as though your head is no longer pinned in one place, that you can move it ever-so-slightly. You feel the stiffness begin to fade from your head and neck. Along with the warmth, you begin to take in other sensations. Your eyes are registering light, even if only a little. There is a reddish light to the transformation that is freeing you. The confined space begins to give way to open air.

Another wave of warmth begins in your fingertips and spreads over your hands, up your arms, to your elbows, your biceps. The warmth moving down from your forehead meets the warmth climbing up your arms at your shoulders. You feel the tension melting out of your facial muscles, out of your neck, out of your shoulders, arms, and hands.

The warmth spreads down your chest and your breathing becomes easier, deeper. The warmth envelops your torso, trunk, your hips, your buttocks, your groin, your thighs.

Your senses are still overwhelmed by the chemical changes, and mechanical whirring around you. But soon, smells other than the faint chemical burning start to reach your nose, smells of desert air, of stale but fragrant smoke, exotic fruits, odd beasts.

As the warmth reaches down past your knees, releasing the tension in your calves, your ankles, your feet, you feel a sense of being freed. And you recognize in amongst the smells reaching you, something familiar, intimately familiar. As the tension, and the binding solidness melts away, you feel no fear, even as you realize you begin to fall. For that familiar smell that reaches you is the smell of security, the smell of one who will not let you fall, of one who will catch you, the smell, the words, the touch all grip you at the same time…the smell, and clutch, and declaration of “someone who loves you.”

About the New Letters

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So, last week I was able to officially add to that string of letters that follows my name when I’m feeling professionally pretentious enough to attach it (like on the main pages of this blog).  The new letters: ASOTP.  I am loath to spell out what exactly it means, as that revelation is usually followed by one of a small number of responses, most of which can be boiled down to either a prurient curiosity or an “Ewww!” reaction—if those are really different things.  Different sides of a two-headed coin, I suppose.

Deep breath, throw it out there, let it sink in.

The letters stand for Affiliate Srrm Orrherrm Treatment Provider.

Ahem.  Let me try that again.

The new letters stand for “Affiliate Sex Offender Treatment Provider.”  In other words, I’m now officially allowed to provide therapy specific to the, uh, needs of convicted sex offenders, generally those who are involved in particular sentencing programs that I won’t detail here, apart from saying that they involve community supervision.  And, more accurately, the “Affiliate” portion of that title means that I am allowed to provide such treatment so long as I have a supervisor who is a Certified SOTP (having a contract with such a supervisor being one of the elements necessary to be granted said letters).

While this particular status is new, my involvement in the treatment of sex offenders is not. I’ve been working in one capacity or another with both juvenile and adult sex offenders for a little over six years now—which sounds like both an insanely long and an unimaginably short period of time to me.

So, why, may you ask, would I want to work with sex offenders?  Everybody asks.  And my answer is usually rather vague and abbreviated, dodging the real heft of the answer.  Let me attempt to present the most straight line formulation of this reason that I can, and please follow closely or you may get a lot of incorrect impressions…

My father was a pastor in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, “stationed” in the Midwest for that part of my life when we were both alive.  My father was killed by a reckless driver exactly one week before my third birthday (which is where a lot of that attachment and blankie business comes in).  My mother, my siblings, and I then moved out to the West Coast, where we soon joined a(n) LCMS church with two pastors.

One of those pastors turned out to be a sex offender, of the hands-on, child molesting type, including incestuous molestation.  For the record, I had always been very wary of this pastor and kept my distance, despite his apparent popularity with other kids/teens in the church.  (Someone call Oprah—or whoever has usurped her throne—to see if we can suss out whether this has to do with repressed memories, supernaturalish intuition, or guardian angels).

The information about the SO pastor became public knowledge during my first year of college, when I was already pretty deep into a crisis of faith.

Bye-bye, faith.

Now if you want something to piss out the flame of your faith, there’s nothing quite like having one of the pastors most responsible for your religious education turn out to be a child molester.  This is particularly dousing when it follows that whole bit about God letting your dad, one of His faithful servants, get killed in a totally senseless accident—all while driving a Pacer, nonetheless (my dad was the one driving the Pacer, not God).

I don’t know how common it is for PKs (preacher’s kids, not Penalty Kicks or Player Kills or Purple Kush{es?} you sporty stoner nerds) to feel some sort of obligation to follow in their father’s (or mother’s in some churches that don’t include the LCMS) footsteps.  But for this kid, who never really even had a conversation with his dad, yet was enthralled by the idea of someone devoting his/her life to faith, there was a perceived pressure to aim, or perhaps a desire to feel at least the smallest inclination to lean, in that direction.  There was a weird, but unfulfilled, sense that there should be a calling—that God should be reaching out a hand, or tugging a leash, or kicking a butt.  I mean, if God could go to the trouble of getting that Jonah guy swallowed up and barfed out at exactly the right times and places, why not at least lay out something more profound than watery eyes during the candlelit singing of “Silent Night” at the Christmas Eve service?

So much for that straight-line formulation.

Anyway, while it took the overcoming of numerous mental blocks and bad habits (okay, the habits are still there) to get to the point where the idea of a ‘life of service’ was even a possibility, the calling wasn’t really perceived until it was time to sign up for final projects in the ‘Abnormal Psych’ course of my Master’s Program.  The list went around.  And while I immediately knew to sign up for a presentation on Pedophilia, I found myself choosing Conversion Disorder (‘hysterical blindness’ and the like) instead.  A sense of guilt immediately began eating away at me, until, a short time later, bothered by what I felt was cowardice at steering clear of the topic I really wanted to study, I tracked down the clipboard with the list, erased my name from the line next to Conversion Disorder, and instead, wrote it next to Pedophilia.

An explosion of anxiety and purpose, roughly on the order of the destruction of the first Death Star, or perhaps equal to the magnitude of the reaction of a normal human digestive system to a Jack-in-the-Box meal, tipped my world forever in the direction I had been looking for…or kind of looking for…or at least in some damn direction for the time being while I decided if this was really what I wanted to involve myself in.

At any rate, it was momentous enough to stick in my brain as some kind of pivotal event that all that previous junk had led up to…or to which all that previous junk had led.

More on that later.

Therapists’ Therapists

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It’s a well known fact that a majority of people who go into the field of psychology do so because we—I mean they—are self-absorbed and trying to figure out why they are such human train-wrecks.  They self-diagnose, bolster their negative behaviors with justifications born from that self-diagnosis and then set about diagnosing everyone else and recommending therapy, all while avoiding engaging in therapy for themselves.

To help compound the failure of future mental health professionals to seek much-needed help, grad school programs for such people often fail to require that students engage in even a minimal amount of therapy.  There are roughly 12 billion reasons why this should be a requirement, and essentially only one reason why would-be-therapists reject the idea that they should get therapy: “I don’t need it.”

But therapists and would-be-therapists arguing that they don’t need therapy, is like meth-heads arguing that they don’t need dental care.   It’s the voice of fear, not confidence.  Or if it is confidence, it’s confidence born of meth—at least for most of the meth-heads, and a few of the therapists.  It’s saying ‘I’ve messed around in my stuff enough, and don’t need anybody else poking around in there, because Lord knows it could all come crumbling apart like that bust of Martha Plimpton I made out of things I picked off my scalp, after I forgot to mist it for four days running.’

And, really, if a student is going through a Master’s program to become a therapist, and doesn’t have at least one or two experiences that frighten/disturb that student into recognizing her/his need for therapy, that student is either the most together person ever, or has built up such impenetrable defenses around his/her frail psyche that she/he is probably in danger of eventually dismembering, freezing, and eating his/her clients bit by bit—either metaphorically or for reals.  (Or else the student is just in a really shitty program where he/she never actually gets challenged to explore much of anything about her/himself beyond early childhood experiences that contributed to his/her preference for natural fibers over synthetics or vice versa).

A large number of mental health professionals, and people in what are dubbed the ‘helping professions’ have a sense that they need to exude confidence, avoid negativity and doubt, and just generally have, or appear to have, their crap together across the full range of life activities.  Any admission that such is not the case can be looked on as an admission that one is not fit to help others.  The big twist, of course, is that if one can’t admit when one needs help, and stop trying to fix everything for everyone else, one really does start to lose the ability to be effective at providing help for anyone, oneself included.

As a confession of sorts, I am not currently seeing a therapist—not because I feel I wouldn’t benefit from it, but because I like to pretend I’m together enough to recognize when I need to seek help, and also because I kind of like the idea of seeing what would happen if I let everything just completely go to hell.  On top of that, I am what I would call ‘therapy-resistant.’  I approach therapy like a jealous magician watching another magician’s show—noting the ‘re-directions,’ and countering with an extra helping of defense mechanisms—‘Just try and abracadabra your way out of that underwater straitjacket, before my Buick hits your milk can, buddy.’  Okay, I don’t really own a Buick.

But, what the hell—I was trying to say something about the problem with therapists not actually getting therapy, and then presented myself as an exhibit to bolster that argument.  But don’t worry about me. I’m completely together.   And I like cotton more than rayon.

Why Respect the Blankie?

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Among an infinite–okay, infinite minus the already-taken selection of names, why “Respect the Blankie?”

The idea for the “Blankie” title came more-or-less spontaneously, when I uttered the phrase while mock-chastising the dogs for having messed up my side of the bed (the other side belonging to my wife, not the dogs–although I don’t bother to disabuse the dogs of the notion that the bed is theirs, too.).  The blankie, after all, is very important to my tactile health–or is that the tactile component of my mental health?  Let’s just say I’m rather attached to that little satin strip along the edge of the blanket (and, no, I don’t mean that in a pervy way).  It helps me think–I think.

A quick Google search revealed that the only other reference to the specific phrase “Respect the Blankie” involved a photo on Tumblr or Imgur, or one of those other vowel-challenged sites (I would add a link here, but don’t want to imply that my site is in anyway endorsed by the photographer or the photographee–look it up if you want–like I said, it’s quick).  The Google search also turned up numerous parenting articles about when is the appropriate time to make children give up their security blankets and/or strategies for making one’s child give up his/her security blanket.  “Ah-ha!” I thought, “I’ve definitely found the name I want!”

‘But why would that be the deciding factor?’ you may ask.  And the answer is, because ‘you wouldn’t hit an instant shepherd,would you?’  (Dammit!!  Another Peanuts reference.  I’ll move on from these, I swear.  Or maybe I won’t anytime soon–I’ve got a lot of Peanuts-related stuff to work out).  At any rate, the notion that a search on that particular phrase would land on articles about making children stop being children was entirely too appealing.  Parents get caught up in the idea that they need to stop other people from thinking their kids are weirdos.  I had plenty of struggles around parenting my own weird, but wonderful, kid that centered on that same notion.  It’s incredibly difficult to get your kids aimed in the direction they really want to travel in–the one they choose for themselves–too easy to try to steer them (subtly or not) where you want them to go, or to give them too little direction so that they don’t feel they have any sense of where they’re going.  Letting them hold on to their blankie may give them the direction they need, or the option to hoist it like a sail, or tie it on like a cape, so they can change course mid-expedition, or mid-flight.

In the world of Peanuts, Linus carted his blanket around everywhere, and, for the most part, it never hindered his development.  On the contrary, it allowed him to be himself at all times and in all places.  He was a boy of conviction, but also a boy who could admit to his lapses in faith.  He could own up to his own fears while also helping alleviate the fears of others.  In short, while his older sister set up shop demanding nickels to dole out abuse, Linus just walked the earth, blanket in hand, distributing sage advice, able to call people on their negative qualities, while also demonstrating the power of love and consideration, embodying the desire to create a better world, and defending the weak (even when that included himself).

I don’t recall ever actually dragging my security blanket around all over the place (although I can’t claim definitively that I didn’t), but it did stay on my bed, and for a time ‘back at home,’ then back on the bed until it essentially crumbled to dust (perhaps more later on why it was there in the first place).  I’ll admit that in my daily life, I tilt toward Lucy-like scolding, and Charlie-Brown-like dread far too easily.  But the goal is to to be more Linus-like, and to allow others the same.  The real trick of security blankets is for those who have them to  recognize why they have them, how they are using them, if they need to throw them out, get a new one, or…whatever other solutions work out best.

Ideally, people will internalize the sense of security that a security blanket represents. But to think that we can actually be self-contained, that there will be no elements of security that we have to draw from outside ourselves is a mistake.  Respect the strength that comes from within, but also the strength that comes from the people and things around us.  Respect the blankie.