Gros Ventre Slide Lake, Wyoming
My Writings
I have often found myself presenting ideas to patients that are unique to my particular way of thinking. I am currently writing them down here for reference. I will be adding pieces as I finish them.
Through the years of practicing psychiatry I have noticed an emotional dynamic that predominates in most of my patients. My first label for it is shame but shame is a word laden with so many different variations in meaning that I want to be more specific. I'm really referring to an emotion, specifically the emotion that you feel when someone says something negative about you. It's the emotion that you feel when someone sneers at you and shuns you. It's the emotion that you feel when you are left out, especially when you are left out on purpose. Sometimes I think of it as socially generated fear. I experience it as largely fear but I also experience it as a little more than fear. I use the word shame because that word comes close.
What I really noticed about shame (and fear itself) is that under the right conditions it will grow out of control. That's not a particularly new observation but understanding how that growth happens in a brain really helps both understand painful depressive and anxiety states but also provides insight into how one can deal with them.
That is the subject of the slide presentation Healing Shame Feedback Loops . It is a series of images and diagrams that are pretty self explanatory. (It is in PDF form so if you don't have a pdf viewer you'll have to download one. Adobe website)
Healing Shame With Hypnosis was written for a talk I prepared for a Southern California Society for Clinical Hypnosis meeting in 2008. It covers the same material in lecture form with the addition of some ideas on how to use hypnotic trance techniques to help heal the shame.
In Finding Captain Kirk: Breaking the Cycle of Anger and Resentment in Personal Relationships I cover some of the dangerous dynamics of angry and fearful emotional states that feed back on themselves. While I have written it in reference to a relationship it can just as easily apply to the dynamics within an individual.
If you would like to comment please email me at the location listed in 'Contact'. I do appreciate comments but I may not be able to reply back.
All of the people described in these written pieces are entirely fictional. The characters and actions described are derived from seeing many cases with the same or similar dynamics.