O'Grady Psychology Associates

Psychotherapy, Marriage Counseling, Neuropsychological Assessment

By 1 Comment

Maintaining Composure as a Parent and Householder

Parenting require finding balance and composureMaintaining a graceful composure when performing life’s demanding household and child-raising chores can take a toll, leaving us feeling depleted and out of balance. But practicing the postures and meditation of hatha yoga can restore that equilibrium. Yoga practice connects us to our bodies, and thus to our bodily wisdom if it is done mindfully.

Remember: If we don’t give to ourselves by taking care of our well-being, then we cannot take care of others.

One lovely pose (asana) to try is called lalitsana, the pose of royal ease. You can see this pose in statues of Yogini Hayagriva. Yogini translates as female practitioner of yoga. In Hinduism, the god Vishnu is one of three supreme deities, called the Preserver. One of his avatars (manifestations or incarnations) is the goddess Hayagriva, which means the “horse-necked one.” She is depicted sitting on an animal in a graceful posture, lalitasana, supporting her child with one arm. Both mother and child have horse’s heads. Hayagriva is considered to embody knowledge and wisdom. In this mythology, the horse pulls the sun’s cart into the sky every day, shedding light on the world. Symbolically, Hayagriva represents the triumph of pure knowledge, guided by God, over the forces of passion and darkness.

To assume the lalitasana pose, sit on a low stool, chair, bench, or firm ottoman with your left leg bent so that the sole of your left foot rests on your right inner thigh. Allow your right leg to extend, half bent, to the floor. You may notice a sense of ease and grace as your spine becomes aligned in this pose. This asana is similar to a half lotus pose, but sitting on a chair or bench allows the right leg and foot to drape down, without the strain that sitting in lotus pose can have on the knees.

Take this pose throughout the day when you feel restless and distracted. Even a few moments will help ground you so you can return to the tasks at hand with a bit more calmness. A few minutes of mindful breathing in this pose will enhance the experience. May all mothers and fathers feel this sense of comfort!

The horse head on the voluptuous human body reminds me that our being is composed of many aspects. Being a loving parent will look different at different times and stages of your life. Practicing yoga and meditation on a regular basis will help keep you limber and supple in mind, body, and spirit. We need this suppleness to stay open to the many ways life brings us into contact with our own darker natures.

By 11 Comments

Better Sex through Non-Sexual Touching

Sexual Intimacy isn't just about the sex.
Artwork by Peter Berkowitz

Two people rarely have the exact same sex drive. One person might be happy with daily sex, another with monthly. Besides differences in basic libido, life events (illness, job stress, childcare) can cause a desire discrepancy in couples. A large desire discrepancy will eventually cause conflict, likely eroding other aspects of the relationship as well.

 Why Non-sexual Touching is So Important for Sex

While couples don’t need to be conflict-free for happiness, we know that couples do need more positive interactions than negative ones. Dr. John Gottman’s research on this shows that the magic ratio is 5 to 1. That is, we need to have five times as much positive feeling and behavior with our partners as negative. Couples can increase positive interactions in many ways: by expressing fondness, appreciation, and admiration; regularly connecting by checking in with each other and staying in touch with your partner’s daily life events; and, of course, through physical intimacy.

For an amusing illustration of what goes wrong in many relationships, check out this performance by Flight of the Conchords. Miscommunication about sexual interest, lack of foreplay or after-sex cuddling, and showing little sensitivity to partner’s needs all leads to no sex or to perfunctory sex. And when couples rarely touch, embrace, or kiss except as a prelude to the bedroom, passion can dry up altogether.

But it’s important to remember that intimacy doesn’t necessarily mean sex. in fact, non-sexual touch is vitally important, both in itself and to improve sex lives. For each sexual encounter, it’s important that couples have at least five episodes of non-sexual touch. I use “five” loosely; a 15-1 ratio would be wise. Touching your partner several times a day allows closeness and intimacy to grow in a natural way.

Another reason to increase non-sexual touching is that many partners with a lower sex drive end up avoiding any touch for fear it’ll be interpreted as an invitation to sex. Sometimes partners are exhausted, sleepy, or just planning to go to bed with a book; they would enjoy physical closeness, but sex is the last thing on their minds. Sometimes the lower-drive partner pulls away, avoiding opportunities for physical closeness (cuddling on the sofa, kissing, or spooning in bed in the morning)—or even creates additional distance, for example by making critical comments. Over time, the higher drive partner will make fewer gestures of closeness out of frustration and feelings of rejection.

Another consideration is that partners must still be sensitive to appropriate moments for non-sexual touching. A common dynamic is when men come up behind a partner, often when she’s standing and working in the kitchen, and grab her from behind or grope her. This may be meant as playful (and can be just that); it’s also low-risk because a brush-off doesn’t mean as much if you’re “just messing around.” However, most women report that this gesture feels intrusive and disrespectful as if they’re property. It’s better to invite or ask for touch when a partner isn’t busy.

While the partner with a higher sex drive has a responsibility, so does the lower-libido partner. If partners with higher sex drives start feeling unappreciated, they may drift away and start getting sexual needs met outside of their relationships through online activities, finding sex in other venues, or beginning an affair, without having exactly intended to slide into infidelity.

Non-sexual but physically intimate ways to show your appreciation for a partner include:

  • Caressing your partner’s cheek
  • Cuddling with one another
  • Tickling the inside of your spouse’s arm
  • Walking with your arms around each other’s waist
  • Sitting close enough so that you are physically touching legs or arms
  • Holding hands
  • Briefly rubbing your partner’s back while watching TV or standing at the kitchen counter
  • Playing footsie with each other
  • Kissing or nibbling your partner’s ear

Intimacy doesn’t have to be through direct physical touch, either. Eye contact is also very important. Many couples will go for days without looking directly into each other’s eyes. I confess that when I was in the thick of raising our twins and working many hours a week, that I neglected to notice that my husband had shaved his mustache. He didn’t mention it, waiting to see how long it would take me to notice. That was a wake-up call for me. And we work in the same office!

Of course, while non-sexual touching is important to help create intimacy, so is sex! In my next post, I talk about romance and how to re-ignite it after years of neglect.

By 8 Comments

Parenting: Playing the Hand You’re Dealt

Parenting takes time and love.As parents, most of us make terrible fortune-tellers. When my daughter Eileen was a first-grader, she was sent to the principal’s office for fighting with her friend Eric. Apparently, he’d put a rock in the way of ants marching on the sidewalk, and Eileen felt bad for them “because they are so little it made it hard for them to do their work.” When Eric refused to move the rock, Eileen kicked him in the shins.

At the time, I interpreted Eileen’s motivations as tender-heartedness (toward the ants, anyway), but I never would have imagined that this foreshadowed an interest in workers’ rights. Today, Eileen researches and writes about working conditions in Latin America for a D.C. think tank.

We know from experience that we don’t know how our lives will unfold, and that we often see our own life events more clearly in retrospect. Looking back, we can see how seemingly random events make up the stones in our life’s pathway toward individuation. It’s all the more difficult, then, to look ahead and see how our children’s sense of identity is deepening, especially when that journey doesn’t match with what we’ve mapped out for them.

From Childcare to College: Joys,  Disappointments and Worries

As prospective parents, we tell ourselves stories about what our child will be like, entertaining idealized images of family life. As parents, we need to be respectful of the way our child’s life will coalesce—but staying out of it is tough. We want to help and to shape them; isn’t that our job? But for most parents, those idealized imaginings will be replaced with realistic understanding that comes from experience. From childcare to college, there will be joys, but also disappointments and worries.

The Haggadah (the book of readings for a Seder service) refers to four types of children who, viewing the Seder in different ways, ask different questions about Passover. One child is wise, one wicked, one simple, and one doesn’t know how to ask. Why four types? According to artist David Moss, “Every child is unique and the Torah embraces them all. . . . Diversity, how we deal with it, and how we can discover the blessing within it, is perhaps the theme of the midrash of the Four Children.” For good reason, Moss represents the four children as playing cards: “As in a game of chance, we have no control over the children dealt us. It is our task as parents, as educators, to play our hand based on the attributes of the children we are given.”

Many factors will play a role in who our child becomes. When we try too hard to control who our child becomes (social butterfly, academic striver, sports hero) we risk ignoring their own preferences and their ability to develop according to a rhythm of their own. That is not all we risk. As Carl Jung wrote, “Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.” (“Paracelsus,” 1929. The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, tr. R. F. C. Hull, 1966.) Pushing our child to be the best at something they don’t feel engaged with is too often our way to living our lives through our child, rather than allowing them to grow in ways they would choose.

Knowing When to Step In and When to Let Go

IMG_0014 - Version 2Kids have inborn abilities that we can support and encourage, respecting the differences between them, their siblings, and their peers. The way the Army and Air Force train bomb-sniffing dogs illustrates this concept. All dogs have olfactory acuity, but for a dog to do well in training, it must be willing to go to the target repeatedly without fetching (which would have disastrous results) and without losing interest, instead being motivated by the dog handler’s praise and rewards. So, even in such an important and dangerous job, the factors of individual traits (good nose, persistence), and environmental (the handler’s praise and rewards) play a role in which dogs will succeed at their job. Labs and German shepherds make great bomb sniffers, but my Tibetan terrier would never have been good at this job. If I throw a stick for her to fetch, she just stares at me. But she’s a great help in alerting me with her shrill bark (in the middle of the night) to the raccoons in the trees. The point is, I love her even if she’ll never be a good retriever; she’s a fantastic Tibetan terrier.

We don’t know who our children will become. There is no way to predict or to order up the perfect offspring. They are shaped by many factors. Our role as parents is to provide the best environment for their growth, knowing when to step in and when to let go.

 

 

By 2 Comments

We Fear What We Cannot Control: Acknowledging Pain and Suffering

Learning to live with the things we have no control over.The German airplane crash by a suicidal pilot, the Florida shootings, the Boston bombings. Every week, we read about innocent people getting hurt or killed. We try to avoid pain and suffering; we teach children to look both ways before crossing the street, wash their hands after using the bathroom, and not to get into strangers’ cars. Even as we reassure our kids that no monsters live under their beds, we know that in the apartment down the street, there lives a convicted sex offender. How do we cope with life’s uncertainty and fear?

 

The Monster Under the Bed

We are saturated with information. Not long ago, we’d read a morning or evening newspaper and maybe watch the evening news; today, the news cycle is 24/7. And, because dramatically scary stories get our attention, the media makes sure to foreground them—not just what’s happening locally, but world-wide. We end up perceiving fearful threats all around us. The truth is, though, that we tend to overestimate certain kinds of risk while underestimating others. For example, as the Vancouver Sun notes, “We warn our kids not to talk to strangers even though 90 per cent of sexual abuse is committed by someone a child knows. And we freak out about plane crashes despite the fact driving is about 65 times more dangerous.” (“How much risk do you live with?”)

Studying how people evaluate threats, or “risk perception,” helps show why this is so. Psychologist Paul Slovic has studied the subject for many years; here, blogger Sara Gorman sums up his findings: “People tend to be intolerant of risks that they perceive as being uncontrollable, having catastrophic potential, having fatal consequences, or bearing an inequitable distribution of risks and benefits.” Plane crashes feel more uncontrollable than car crashes; strangers feel scarier than people we know. But control is an illusion. Life is full of uncontrollable things, people, and events, so how do we handle risk?

We cope by using reason and denial. Reasonably, we know that life always involves some risk and that we have a natural tendency to inflate threats. You can probably think of one thing you tend to worry about needlessly or unproductively. Can you really do anything about it? Needless worry robs us of a sense well-being; straining to control things beyond our reach only creates tension. But wait—denial? Isn’t that supposed to be a bad thing? Yes, denial is counterproductive when it keeps you from acknowledging harm that you’re doing to yourself or others, like smoking, cheating on a spouse, or abusing your child. But psychologists recognize that the use of denial can be advantageous in many situations. According to the Mayo Clinic, “A short period of denial can be helpful. Being in denial gives your mind the opportunity to unconsciously absorb shocking or distressing information . . . . For example, after a traumatic event, you might need several days or weeks to process what’s happened and come to grips with the challenges ahead.” Be patient and gentle with yourself in the wake of trauma.

We also must learn to balance risk against what we lose by being too careful. When we’re too sensitive to fearful possibilities, we become paralyzed. Not letting your daughter walk home from school with her friends because a car could run a red light, or a vicious dog might be on the loose, may seem protective. But overprotectiveness is harmful because it deprives children of practicing the mastery and independence they need to grow up successfully. And, more subtly and unintentionally, your anxiety seeps into her without either of you knowing the source.

 

What if the monster under the bed survives because your imagination feeds it every night?

 

Kids need to find their own strength by testing themselves in the world. That can start as early as learning to sleep alone, in their own beds. (While in some cultures sharing a family bed is the norm, children may be given other opportunities to practice self-soothing and frustration tolerance.) Kids and parents often resist the stage when they need to soothe themselves to sleep. When we know our child is distressed and may be fearful, we rush to give comfort. But allowing a child to sleep between her parents can come at the expense of intimacy in the marriage. By resisting letting a child sleep alone, parents deprive them of learning to calm themselves and tolerate frustration. For a fuller explanation of this problem and how to address it, see Dr. David O’Grady’s “Help Your Child Sleep Alone: The Snoozeeasy Program For Bedtime Fears. ”The important thing is that we convey trust that our child can manage the little and big things that come their way and feel they have the ability to self-regulate their emotional reactions.

Of course, being able to manage emotions doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen. In mindfulness practices, we teach that suffering is an inevitable part of living. Sickness, accidents, money problems, frustrations, and worries: There is much in life that we have no control over, and as if worrying about the present isn’t enough, we tend to ruminate over past events or future possibilities.

Even spiritual people who actively practice mindfulness can’t escape suffering. In fact, “life is suffering” is the first Noble Truth of Buddhism. I remember listening to an audio interview with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader known for his calm serenity. He coughed and hacked his way through the interview, clearing his throat every few minutes. It was an unpleasant sound, but because I was on my treadmill, I didn’t want to stop and find another CD. I suffered along with the Dalai Lama. At the conclusion of the interview, he took questions from the audience. The question was asked; “Dalai Lama, do you suffer?” He answered, “Of course I suffer, I have been coughing this entire time and it is very uncomfortable.”

And as if present suffering isn’t enough, letting worry about the past or future take hold leads to more suffering. When we suffer from the fears we have about the dangerous, uncertain world we live in, we may think the answer is to run away somehow: shopping, clicking, using drugs or alcohol, or eating when we’re not hungry, for example. But pursuing pleasure doesn’t make our painful fears go away. Instead, our efforts backfire because we feel guilt, or dig ourselves deeper into debt, or become unhealthy—and the fear still exists.

Learning to look at our suffering and accept that it exists is a skill. Meditation or relaxation training can help us develop the skill of self-soothing, thereby enabling us to feel less afraid of both real and imagined monsters. As we do this, we also help those around us to be calmer and stronger.

 

How to Self-Soothe

 

Practice some form of deep relaxation, meditation, or yoga daily. This will change your psychophysiological baseline so that you are generally more resilient when worry or stress takes over.

  1. Accept that that suffering is part of life. We suffer, our children will suffer, and strangers we hear about in the news suffer. Acknowledging suffering helps because we are not pushing fears down, which paradoxically only makes them grow larger.
  2. Develop a spiritual practice. This helps us develop the strength to look deeply at our suffering; the insights gained about ourselves provide perspective and something to hold onto when our fears run amok.
  3. During difficult moments, use a short breathing practice (such as the Three-Minute Breathing Space or just silent focus on your breath) to stay calm during difficult moments. Being conscious of our breathing brings mindfulness to the present moment and helps pause the thought stream of rumination.
  4. Recognize your suffering without judgment. Some fears are truly awful, yet by staying in the present moment, we avoid getting trapped by our thinking. Look deeply at the source of your feelings, find their roots, and work on transforming the fears that need to be changed. This will allow space to nourish the feelings that bring peace and well-being.

This short relaxation exercise may help you to develop skills to relax in moments of anxiety and worry, as well as provide a foundation to help change the automatic, reflexive ways your mind and body respond to stress.  https://youtu.be/TCCA1kGSnB8

By 9 Comments

Psychotherapy, Love, and Healing

 

Psychotherapy takes place by holding the space for healing to occur.Nothing is more natural than the urge to be held and comforted by someone who understands our suffering. Whatever the painful situation (a relationship breakup, medical scare, financial disaster, the death of a loved one) we want to turn toward someone who will hold us and let us cry in loving arms.

Sometimes we need to seek that understanding from someone other than a lover, parent, or friend. These figures may be too close to your issues or otherwise unsuitable for receiving confidences and providing nurturance. Psychotherapy provides a safe, confidential, neutral relationship to explore what hurts.

Therapist and client sit together in a quiet space being present to whatever feelings come up. The noise of the outside world is put on hold for an hour: no ringing phones, text messages, TV, or other distractions. This environment invites opening up the parts of ourselves we keep shut down, secret, or tied up in knots. Tears are likely, but so is laughter and joy. Therapy is not only about pain but also learning to live well with the inevitable difficulties that life holds, and finding the laughter that lives alongside pain.

Good therapists with proper boundaries will not gossip about you, laugh at you, seduce you, or allow themselves to be seduced by you. At the same time, psychotherapy at its best gives room for love to be present. In fact, love is an important aspect of all good psychotherapy. In a letter to fellow psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Freud wrote that “Psychoanalysis is, in essence, a cure through love” (1906). In the client–therapist relationship, love, and gratitude are healthy human emotions just as they are in the world outside of the therapist’s office, although the client expresses his or her feelings while the therapist experiences them privately.

Many forms of love may be possible: that of a parent toward a child, of siblings, or adults with erotic feelings, or narcissistic self-love. Discussing such feelings is sometimes difficult—in part because love is fraught with vulnerability, in part because we have all been injured in our loving feelings. In therapy, it is helpful to both respect and be curious about this range of feelings for what it reveals. Much can be learned about how one loves, about how one contends with the fears and anxieties over love, about how one chooses a person to love, and about what it is that one loves (beauty, truth, kindness.)

Ultimately, the therapeutic process will lead to reclaiming the self that became lost, whether through years of living inauthentically, practicing unhealthy behavior or through emotions such as depression and fear that hold us back from living fully. Another way of putting it is that therapy is about putting life back together again based on a clearer understanding of ourselves.

Reconstructing identity is, as Plato wrote, a kind of remembering of what we’ve forgotten about ourselves; through therapeutic dialogue and listening to our intuition, we remember that self. Sometimes, for example, we lie about what our lives are because we need to create something to give us the comfort of that longed-for love.

When we live life that’s not in accordance with who we are, we are doomed to fall hard, cracking the veneer of the perfect life. If, like Humpty-Dumpty, we fall tumbling from perches too lofty (narcissistic) or too unstable (based on fantasy) all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not be able to put us back together again.

A successful outcome of therapy is to find comfort in your aloneness because we are never truly alone if we know ourselves. The self, or soul, is with us all along, walking beside us. Throughout life, we are given glimpses of this companion self.

As Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote in his poem “I Am Not I”:

 

I am not I.

                  I am this one

walking beside me whom I do not see,

whom at times I manage to visit,

and whom at other times I forget;

who remains calm and silent while I talk,

and forgives, gently, when I hate,

who walks where I am not,

who will remain standing when I die.

 (Juan Ramón Jiménez, “‘I Am Not I’” from Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems. Translation copyright © 1973 by Robert Bly.)

Perhaps the therapist models this companion self for the client until the client can better become his/her own companion. The best psychotherapy creatively facilitates developing the disposition for happiness by encouraging self-transformation and self-integration. Ultimately, the therapeutic relationship ends and the client moves on in life with a strengthened sense of self that can better tolerate being alone with both good and painful feelings.