Pacific Healing and Creating Calm

One blog - One group
 

Swimming in the Pacific

The Pacific Ocean is something that has risen to the status of passion for me.  This interest started about four years ago.  It emerged after a considerable effort toward getting back to a regular work out routine “post-baby".  She might have been 6 by then, but who's counting?  Reconnecting to the long-ago athlete I knew lived somewhere deep inside me was quite a process.  I’ve never written about being an active, athletic person here and I fear doing so may give you the impression that I am trying to be your personal trainer, which I’m not. 

What I am is a counselor/therapist, and soon to be certified Person-Centered Expressive Arts Facilitator.  I believe in the mind/body connection and all of the ideas I share here on this blog try to support this personal truth. If we tap into our minds and our bodies we will heal what has troubled us and we work toward a deeper understanding of ourselves.  I have just completed my fourth week of intensive training toward a certificate in Person-Centered Expressive Arts and I feel more empowered than ever to share this little part of how I stay motivated in life.

A few weeks before I headed back to this fourth expressive arts training I swam through the San Francisco Bay. Under the Golden Gate Bridge to be exact.  I’ve come to realize that finding a passion in “mid-life” is vital to mental health and well being.  If you have been in the self-help/psychology world you may be acquainted with Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development.  Those of us who find ourselves on the other side of forty are in the midst of Erikson’s 7th stage: generativity versus stagnation. Let's not stagnate!  I love this stage so deeply because it's very existential.  One of my many orientations in working with clients is humanistic existentialism.  

I find my passion for life in many places, one of them is through weekly exercise.  I am sure many of you can connect?  I would love to hear your story too!  I wonder if you too need a goal, an event to keep you motivated?  Or maybe it's just an "accountability partner"?  I have clients who make working out a regular part of life by involving another friend or even their kids.  I imagine for you, like me at times it's not been an easy road to get the passion for life (including exercise) going.  Whether it be with exercise or other types of enlivenment.  It can feel like an uphill battle.  Research tells us that exercise is intrinsically related to mental health (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1424736/pdf/pubhealthrep00100-0085.pdf).  If we know this is true, then why do so many of us have a hard time sticking to an exercise regimen?  For me personally, it comes back to passion.  I have a passion for water, a passion for being active and a renewed passion for art!

I was immersed in water from six weeks of age on. Water is a part of who I am. When surrounded by water, I felt at home.  Whether it’s chlorine in a pool or salt in the ocean, the water calms me.  You can let so much go when you are at the beach!  Even dipping your toes in our cold Pacific ocean might be healing for you?  The warm air and the cool water of the Pacific frees me of my worries.  The cold Pacific, particularly this last jaunt under the Golden Gate bridge was a huge adventure.  I felt twinges of anxiety.  I met new people.  I had to ask for support, someone to have that towel ready!  I trained alone because I have not found too many people who want to join me, weird!?  Though I reach out to many of those who work out on a regular basis and I find support there.  

I am not at all suggesting you need to swim under the Golden Gate bridge but what is your next adventure?  What is your next physical health goal?  How about your mental health goals?  Create your own study and see, how you feel now, how will you feel after four weeks of moderate exercise four to five times per week?  

It does not take as much time or effort as you think if you have some background in committed exercise/activity.  Hey, parking at the back of the grocery store parking lot counts!  Even if you have no history of working out call me for an appointment and we can talk about your goals around fitness and mental health.  

Here are some blogs and podcasts that have inspired me back into physical activity:  zenhabits.com with Leo Babauta and the Rich Roll podcast (www.richroll.com). Lastly, this amazing story is about Kim Chambers, @kimswims on Instagram and https://www.kimswims.com


Copyright © 2018 Bridget Bertrand 

Neuroscience talk by Francine Lapides, LMFT

On November 13th, 2015 SCV-CAMFT (a group of Bay Area therapists) gathered for a wonderful lunch and an extremely thoughtful presentation by Francine Lapides, LMFT. If you are just learning of Ms. Lapides, as I did in November, I recommend you seek out a training with her.  Or perhaps therapy with her if you are in the Santa Cruz area.  She has a training group coming up in the new year focused on psychoneurology.  The group will help you deeply explore how knowing more about the brain can help you be a better therapist.  One could call Francine our local Dan Siegel. She has studied with him for years and additionally has been a part of Allan Schore's Berkeley study group. Francine Lapides has been a licensed MFT since 1974. She is a decades-long member of SCV-CAMFT and she is in private practice in San Jose and Santa Cruz, California.

In Ms. Lapides talk, “Working Implicitly in Psychotherapy: What Decades of Neuroscience Study Has Taught Me About Being a Psychotherapist” she started by reminding us that infants are primarily right brained and this right brain development continues for the first two to three years of life. Attachment templates are stored in the right brain.  The take away is; in order to heal trauma we need to address both the unconscious and conscious areas of the brain. As therapists we see first hand how these early traumas can shape a person. Some of these traumas leave us with resiliency while others leave us more rigid.  Francine took us through some basic neuroscience during the first portion of the talk. This time acted as our “infancy” in neuroscience (if we did not already have that knowledge). Even if you did have prior neuroscience knowledge her information was a great review. She shared the Winnicott quote, “There is no such thing as a baby ... if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.'' (Winnicott, 1947).  The relationship heals because we are relational human beings.  We can help our clients make meaning of early trauma.  This healing rooted in the physiology of neuroscience is more helpful if done with a bottom up (or body to head direction).  The limbic system and attachment theory dominate .  As stated on Mrs. Lapides slides: “Early life experiences create potent affective “knowing” in implicit, non-verbal, unconscious memory which underlie and have a profound influence on personality, dominate mood, symptoms and relationships throughout life.”  

As we transitioned to the second section of the talk Mrs. Lapides invited someone to come up to the front of the room and summarize what they had just learned about neuroscience. There were crickets.  We all behaved as though we were glued to our seats. She let the perfect amount of silence play out before she joked that she was just getting our heart rates up so we could feel our prefrontal cortex at work. As many of you likely know the prefrontal cortex is the part of our brains that helps us regulate emotion. Francine’s "experiment" was perfectly set up as a process experiential learning exercise. We have the basics of neuroscience, we are asked to come talk about it in front of the group, and then upon finding out we actually don’t have to, we can then re-regulate. 

Just like intherapy (week after week), we invite our clients to talk, or draw, or move through their way through trauma.  They might turn us down but as the relationship and trust grows we can begin to help them heal. This ability to manage activation helps us access our unconscious beliefs. There are, as Francine shared, “implicit relational schemas” or unconscious beliefs that all of us have. For example, we may unconsciously believe that, “If I try to perform and fail, people will think less of me." These are, of course, the thoughts and feelings we want to target in therapy. The question of how this can be done while integrating neuroscience will be address in the intensive study group Francine will offer.  She will address the clinical skills of: “trusting your intuition, somatic transference, intimacy and self disclosure, rupture and repair,” and much more. I wish I lived closer to Santa Cruz! This group will surely be helpful.

She stated, “While the overwhelming bias in western psychotherapy has been a top down primarily left brain model of conscious and verbal attempts at change, neuroscience is increasingly confirming that we must work in this right brain, unconscious, body-based arena as well.”  When she spoke of the “bottom up” way of working with our clients she mentioned poetry because it has more of a right brain connection. She mention prosody or “the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry” according to Webster’s online dictionary. Using poetry or other right brain activities with our clients can help them access and heal their trauma. I also found the interventions Francine offered at the end of her talk to be helpful. Instead of asking left brained questions we can shift statements more into a right brain experience. For example, instead of: “Your father’s anger was uncontrolled and made you feel unsafe” the right brain is more able to hear, “When you father exploded in range, you felt terrified and small.” Instead of offering, “It will be important for you to know I’m hear,” clinicians can try a more right-brained approach such as asking, “Can you look at me, can you feel me here with you”? If you were at the luncheon you heard Francine’s calm seasoned voice. It was healing in a room of almost 100 colleagues. I hope you get a sense of her way of being from this short description.

http://www.francinelapides.com/

Three Talks

I am excited to offer you these three talks via the links below.  I love speaking on positive discipline, parenting and how therapy can support this process.  I hope this will give you a sense of what I can offer.  There are many experiential exercises I lead that will support your parenting!  I can come speak at your work place, play group or church.  Please reach out and hear about the exciting new groups I will offer in the new year!  Please reach out with questions and comments at bridget@bridgetbertrand.com 

Managing BIG  emotions the power point

Managing BIG emotions handout

Discipline 101 the power point

Discipline 101 the handout

Mindful Parenting the power point

Mindful Parenting the handout

and last but not least "the mistaken goal chart" a great parenting tool!

Parenting

It’s amazing how much parenting is talked about, written about, and stressed over.  My understanding in the last eight years of parenting (since the birth of our daughter) and the twenty before (working with kids as a teacher) has undergone many shifts.  I hope some of these insights might help you come to terms with your parenting and maybe make a shift that could benefit your family.  When we take this time to understand our parenting and why we do what we do I think we get a chance to more deeply understand ourselves.  Happy exploring!

Many of us just had Monday off.  Labor Day was first celebrated on September 5th, 1882.   The Fair Labor Standards Act came much later in 1938.  This act assures that when young people work that the work is safe (dol.gov).  It was less than a century ago the main job of a parent was to keep the arms of their children from being caught in machinery (as if they could even control that, since they were not with their child at the time).  Our worries over  “helicopter parenting,” feeding our children only organic food, and making sure they are able to get into the “right” college beginning in preschool are a far cry from the worries of parents 100 years ago in the U.S.  Of course, there are still children in our world that are not safe, yet on a whole the trend is toward letting children have their childhood.

The psychologists that created the foundation of Positive Discipline (Dreikurs and Adler) worked around the turn of the century and understood the plight families faced.  If we delve into the difference between sending a kid to a factory and sending a kid to school, we see our parenting approaches have to make huge shifts.  I used to wrestle more with these shifts.  When we parent from a democratic and positive stance it’s not always pretty.  Why can’t I get my child to “behave”?  Why does she tantrum in public?  Why does he talk back at home?  Why can’t I control this kid?  I think to myself "I would have never acted like this".  Why?  In part because my parents came out of depression era families, in part because I lived in a authoritarian culture. 

This shift is a slow one and I think our generation has a real opportunity to make a change.  While there are so many ways to redirect these unwanted behaviors, more and more I think it’s positive that we let children have their emotions.  Let go of the control and let them be.  This does not mean we let the limits go.  There are rules and we must show and teach children how to be a part of society.  As our world has evolved so has our focus with how to guide children though childhood.   Of course there are different ways of parenting and your house is just that, your house, yet I see this shift toward a more positive and disciplined approach to be just that...positive! 

How does this related to what you do right now?  First, if you are already on the path toward a more democratic form of parenting and you are feeling under supported in your peer group you are not alone.  I find this all the time.  In our house we aim not punish or reward.  We deal with misbehavior and treat it as and “misguided behavior”.  We look at the belief behind the behavior.  See my linked resource of the “Mistaken Goal Chart”.  My husband had gotten increasingly good at this, which at times can frustrate me, as a most devoted advocate of positive discipline.  Sometimes, when our daughter misbehaves, I do want to hurt back because I feel hurt, yet that is not the most skillful adult choice.

So what do we do? #1 we have a weekly family meeting.  We have been doing this on and off for four years and I can say it’s made a huge difference.  See more guidelines at this link.  #2 we talk a LOT:  What happened today?  What were the highs and the lows?  Oh, you seem quite upset right now maybe we all need to have some time to relax.  #3 we try not over schedule (for the most part).  We respect that our kid needs a lot of down time “just” to do Legos.  I am very inspired by blog posts and parents who also walk this path like Rachel Macy Stafford, Dr. Laura Markhman and  Glennon Doyle Melton.  In short I reach out for help on the Internet or with my friends.  If you want to deepen your parenting goals reach out.  If you have a question for me reach out.  Or if you are so inclined to pass this blog along to a friend I would appreciate your support.  And lastly something to say to our selves from Rachel Macy Stafford: 

“Be kind to yourself.  You are doing the best you can”.