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One of the most difficult symptoms to treat has always been repeating nightmares.  Insight therapy never did get a whole lot of traction on them, and my own personal track record as a therapist was pretty lame.  But along come two terrific psychologists and traumatic stress experts at the Louis Stokes Cleveland V.A. Medical Center, Drs. Edgardo Padin-Rivera and Beverly Donovan, who’ve managed to cobble together an ingenious, idiot-proof, quick and 90% effective protocol (a combination of Lucid Dreaming, EMDR and guided imagery) that drives those nasty, tenacious suckers clean out of your head.
 
I decided to tell the world about it on Huffington Post, which is proving to be a very fine vehicle for getting the word out (thank you very much, Huffpo!).  So all you frustrated therapists and nightmare sufferers, find your cheat sheet here.

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Exciting news, people!!  At long last, a gigundo batch of guided imagery audios is winging its way to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Several hundred Healthful Sleep and an equal number of Relieve Stress guided imagery recordings will be in the ears of our service people, thanks to the efforts of the DoD - extremely open to research-tested mind-body tools these days - and a new, durable, preloaded audio player with high quality sound that works in any environment, called Playaway.

Every month the Playaway people send mounds of spoken word audiobooks to our troops - fiction, self-help, the Bible, language lessons - to distract, entertain, teach and support them downrange.  Now, added to the mix, will be a big, blessed mess o’ calming, sleep-inducing, de-stressing and emotionally balancing guided imagery.

Hello, everyone.

I’ve been carefully going over over 170 responses to my question, “What should we make next?”  I’m shocked, dismayed and embarrassed to say I asked it nearly a year ago - it’s been that long, being as how we got seriously diverted by the job of getting our audios to more of our sleep-deprived, over-adrenergized, trauma-impacted troops and vets.  So I apologize for the delay (although I’m not sorry about what we’ve been doing that caused it). But the good news is, at least I saved all the suggestions.  I’ve been combing through them, looking for common themes for what’s most needed.  

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We’re pleased to add Dr. Charlotte Reznick’s new book to our list:  The Power of Your Child's Imagination: How to Transform Stress & Anxiety into Joy & Success.  This is a terrific resource for parents, teachers and anyone who spends time with kids, offering simple, accessible, well-tested advice and expert guided imagery tools to help kids with all kinds of struggles and quandaries. 

Charlotte knows kids and she knows the challenges they face, and she’s got practical, empowering, fully vetted guided imagery solutions for them.  There are techniques for everything from bed-wetting to coping with divorce to test anxiety to managing anger…. and a lot more.  And even though her methods are simple, clear and easy to follow, make no mistake: they’re based on a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of the complex issues involved.

Hello, All.

The piece comparing our Vietnam vets to our current crop of troops coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan has gotten some great conversations going, both here and on Huffington Post.

I stand corrected on the matter of draftees - only a third of our Vietnam troops were drafted - the majority was volunteer.  Many related points about current needs were highlighted by postings from various vets and their families under the original article, and it’s worth having a second look, just for the comments. 

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I was talking with some V.A. colleagues, and they were telling me how the new vets coming back from Iraq & Afghanistan are a very different breed from the Vietnam vets they saw decades ago.  

Of course, it’s a different situation in many ways.  With Vietnam, the country was totally divided and we took our anger out on each other, and on the vets, who came back.  The vets were very angry about being sent out to kill people and then getting castigated for it once they got home.  We traumatized them all over again.  

On the other hand, this new group of soldiers are appreciated by society at large, for putting themselves at risk – even by people who aren’t particularly happy about the wars. That’s one lesson we sure learned the hard way: not to take the politics of war out on the troops who fight them.

Of course, most of our Vietnam troops were draftees.  Nowadays we have an all-volunteer army. (But then again, a lot of the reservists and National Guardsmen thought they were signing up to get some extra money and help out in national emergencies.  Little did they know they’d be away from their families and careers, on their fourth rotation, fighting real people on foreign soil. So this is a complicated point and not as straightforward as it looks.)

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Last week, Beliefnet posted a terrific little piece on migraine triggers and how to avoid or mitigate them.  So for those who suffer from this heinous condition, check out the bulleted points, courtesy of Beliefnet, and if you want to see the fleshed out original, click here.

OK, listen up, any weary person in search of a break!

Just got back from my third annual visit to Rio Caliente – a ridiculously low-cost, hot springs spa getaway in the mountains outside of Guadalajara.  It’s a small place – only holds about 80 guests or so – and lends itself to wonderful conversations with truly interesting, accomplished and unpretentious guests – that may be the thing I like best about this place: the other people.  (And the same friendly, capable, easy-going staff has been there forever.)

It’s a very easy place to go to alone, and many people do.  It’s also friendly to couples of all ages (straight or gay) and families with adult kids (no squeezers, though). People come in from all over the U.S. and Canada, and Europe, too. And lots of training teams hold their annual retreats there too. 

Once again a new study shows that an online podcasting program can help with behavioral change – in this case, weight loss.  This time it was a 12-week podcasting program, designed by the researchers themselves.

The literature is definitely stacking up in favor of web-based programs for mental health (all those successful depression studies from Australia, for instance) and for behavioral change (smoking cessation and weight loss, for instance).  It’s good to know that people will have more access to help when they need it, even if they live far away from a professional or don’t have the financial wherewithal for weekly therapy sessions. 

Hello, Everyone.

Reading that line, “How wonderful to be free at last from smoking!” in this week’s Inspiring Story, brought me back to my own monster addiction to cigarettes 40 years ago.

I used to smoke two and a half packs of unfiltered Camels a day.  I wasn’t enjoying them, beyond the first smoke of the day with my first cup of coffee – the other 49 cigarettes were unsatisfying – just something I did to maintain comfort.  In other words, I was an addict.

Horrid to think of it now, but each psychotherapy session (55 minutes) that I conducted in my tiny, windowless, completely enclosed cubicle of an office at the Charles F. Read Zone Center in northwest Chicago was a three cigarette affair. And that was just me. Sometimes my client smoked too. Can you imagine??  There I was, poisoning the lungs of the people I was presumably “healing”.