Have you ever felt like success is just around the corner, however you just couldn’t get there. Find out how to get out of your own way.
Oct 24 2013
So Your Thought Your Migraine Was Due to What?
Migraine Barbie has Snapped! (Photo credit: Deborah Leigh (Migraine Chick))
So Your Thought Your Migraine Was Due to What? – Vol. 222, October 24, 2013
I would find it amusing if people weren’t hurting so bad, to hear the medical professionals blame migraines, back issues and many other soft tissue problems on physiological issues, medicating the symptoms, never handling the real issue. How can I say this? Good question. Because I have so many clients who come to see me who have aches and pains, that have zero to do with anything physiological.
Last month I was sitting in my office with one of my clients who has been fighting migraine headaches for the past 10 years. Her headaches were horrifically debilitating for a day and a half at a stretch. What this meant was that she felt lousy, was in bed unable to be present with her children, unable to do her work, and definitely poor company for her husband.
Like too many of my clients, her parents have been unable to validate the emotional pain that she has endured for most of her life growing up in their home. There were some very difficult situations that my client has come through that her parents refuse to validate, saying that nothing like that ever occurred. On top of this issue, her parents are self-involved wanting what they want when they want it, without a thought as to how it will effect my client and her family. This according to my client’s reportage. After spending many years working on her relationship with her parents, always getting hurt as she extended herself to them, she has come to the sad realization that her parents are toxic to her. But, this is a complex problem in the sense that she really doesn’t want her children to have to go without knowing their grandparents. The situation puts her into a bind which brings on all sorts of emotional stress and physical pains making her life much more challenging then if she didn’t have to contend with all of these negative effects of the relationship with her parents.
I gave her some homework to do, homework that she really felt very uncomfortable doing, yet, she knew that she had to set some boundaries with her parents during the time they visit with her family. She wrote an email to them telling them what was going to happen during their visit and why. A month after writing the email she finds herself free of her migraine headaches. Headaches for which she has taken so many medications to relieve over the years without ever getting to the root cause of the problem. She questions what all those chemicals have done to her body.
I have other clients who come in with various aches and pains, and the thing that I can tell you is that regardless of what the x-rays and MRIs say, if after the suggested surgery is performed, the pain is still there, maybe, just maybe it isn’t a physiological issue. Maybe it is as Dr. John E. Sarno explains in his book, The Divided Mind has much more to do with anger and anxiety that your unconscious mind has helped you to contend with. It does this by decreasing the amount of oxygen to your affected body parts creating the pain that takes your mind off of the emotional issues you are not ready to deal with at the point when the aches and pains began.
All the surgeries and all the pain medications will never take away emotional pain. The only way to do this is to create effective boundaries with those with whom you interact claiming your life back instead of being a “victim” to others whom you allowed to walk all over you. For effective ways to do this, read the previous blog posting Vol. 220 called:
Are You Triggered By Others: Learn How to Stop It! With the strategies in that blog posting in place you are well on your way to feeling much better.
Oct 17 2013
At What Cost Do We Help Another? – Vol. 123, October 20, 2011
There are times in our life when we need to ask some serious questions as health care providers. I had a situation that occurred recently which really hit me where I live. You all know that the economics of today are difficult for many, my self included. However, there are times when one must consider the larger question of why it is that we do what we do.
I was given a referral for a smoking cessation case. To give you a better understanding of this whole situation you need to know that my usual and customary price for the one session treatment that I do with an excellent rate of success is $300.
I called the referral who was at home to get the details of her situation to find out if she would even be a viable case. As a hypnotist I am looking for clients who are able and willing to do the work that is required for them to get their results. In this case I needed to know that this client was wanting to stop smoking of her own accord and was ready to do so during our session. To be more honest about how this all works, the decision to become a non-smoker needs to happen before the client ever enters my office.
What I heard on the phone was a woman who could barely breathe, with a very significant wheeze in her voice as she struggled to breathe. I asked her why she wanted to stop smoking and was told that three days previous that she was diagnosed with COPD also known as emphysema. She hadn’t shared this diagnosis with any of her family or friends feeling a failure for not stopping smoking right after her heart attack about a year ago. She had a stent put in an artery of hers that was 95% blocked.
I asked her if she was ever hypnotized before and she answered “yes”. She was pregnant with her first child and was smoke free for seven years after as a result of a group hypnosis program where she felt it shouldn’t have worked and yet it did.
Then she went on to tell me that she really wanted and needed this service and yet money was an issue for her. She really didn’t have any and yet she knew that without the hypnosis she would most certainly die. This woman is all of 52 years of age and has a business she wants to build and yet without the energy required it was never going to be.
I asked her how much she could afford. She said $100. I felt in my heart of hearts that I could not in good conscious send her away for not having the full funds. I knew after 10 years of being in practice and never taking a sliding fee for a smoking cessation case that this one felt different then all the others who claim to not have the money and yet in the back of my mind I know they do. I also realized that with so many people who have called in during the years, some attached to an oxygen machine already, unwilling to pay the money or most likely not interested in giving up their habit maybe because they felt they had a life sentence anyway, that this woman was different. It is just a feeling one gets.
I gently told her I would take on her case. Upon hearing the news she broke down in tears as she thanked me for taking her on for without my help she would surely be dead in a fairly short period of time.
What I want you all to understand is that as a business person I can’t very well make my own bills if I am going to cut my fees. On the other hand I want you to understand that there are indeed those cases when you realize that you have a skill that could save a person’s life. With that in mind one needs to make a decision that one can live with.
I remember many years ago when I worked in my father’s dental office his doing a similar thing for people who truly needed his skill set. He told me as we sat in his office after a long day of work, that one who has a skill that can make a difference in somebody else’s life needs to use that skill to create hope for those who we can. It is a matter of being a creator of good in our community. I also realize that through out my life I have been given many chances to move forward in my life that would not have been possible without the kindness of others. I count my own mental health treatment at a very reasonable $10/session when we didn’t have any health insurance and my health insurance being willing to cover about $300,000 in proton therapy treatment for the brain tumor to be treated a couple of years ago. My life was not in danger though my mind was.
I bring this up because it seems to me that people have gotten very greedy and nasty in this economic climate that we find ourselves in. Too many of us in this world are all for themselves forgetting that without the love and care of others we too would be alone and lost. It is a reminder for those of us who may be having a difficult time currently, that we can still share our heart with another and at the same time bring some humanity back to the living. Perhaps we can even bring another chance at life back to someone who deserves it as my client who had spent 28 years of her life treating addicts in a non-profit mental health program till they had to let her go for lack of funding. We must always remember that we create the world that we are in based on our own actions.
Oct 17 2013
Krokodil: 3X More Addictive Than Heroin: Causing Gangrene – Addicts Bodies Decomposing As They Continue to Shoot Up! Watch OUT!!
Krokodil: 3K More Addictive Than Heroin: Causing Gangrene
– Addicts Bodies Decomposing As They Continue to Shoot Up! Watch OUT!! – Vol. 221, October 17, 2013
With our government currently in stagnation, unwilling to constructively deal with the U.S.’s economic crisis, distraction techniques are being employed to get the public’s mind off the immediate lack of trust the rest of the world has in our monetary system, rightfully so in my opinion. Now, as important as it is to have the financial means to do the government’s work, I would have to say that there is another concern that is even more scary than the financial crisis. It has to do with the newest drug that is being pushed on the streets usually unknowingly to heroin addicts, and even worse able to be made in the addicts own home for the destructive properties of the chemicals made in its manufacture.
It wasn’t that long ago when the U.S. Government was calling the governments in Africa ignorant and damaging to their populous when they refused to admit to the huge problem they had with the transmission of AIDS. Millions of needless deaths occurred because of the public statements by their government officials flatly denying AIDS existed. When those in power refuse to see and deal with the truth, education of protective measures is never done, allowing for the death of millions of people in a long and painful struggle that had to be.
Our very own DEA has thrown a blind eye toward this emerging problem of Kroodil addiction as cases are springing up in Arizona and Illinois. Their lack of proactive action to educate the public as to its danger is reprehensible given the fact that people can find the method of making this drug on the internet. For those who are already using heroin, their dealers may sell them this much cheaper alternative, never telling the unsuspecting addict what they are about to put into their bodies is going to decay their muscles and skin as they painfully watch their bones being exposed.
I would have to say that the lack of understanding, compassion and medical judgment on the part of the surgeon general of these United States is going to cause a worse situation than that which we saw with the lack of education on AIDS. Because as we all know, those who were afflicted were the gay men and who really cares about gays, right? Except that they were infecting their wives who didn’t know their husbands were gay then reaching into infect the babies developing in the mother’s womb, but who cares about those folks? And who cares about junkies either?
If we live in a country that stands for the “rights of all people regardless of creed, religion or sexual persuasion, than we must have a government that recognizes that people who have problems, finding themselves in what amounts to a medical situation require medical care. I would also like to add that most addicts (and I don’t care if it is drug, sex, gambling, food, anorexia, bulimia, shopping, etc.) become addicts because they have lives of trauma that were never healed – the pain that is felt is emotional pain and until that is healed in a caring and non-judgmental manner, the addictions will persist and some of the brightest and most creative people among us will be dead so young they never even knew who they were or what their lives could have been, sharing their own unique gifts.
This disgusting attitude is nothing less than blaming the victim for having the relentless pain dig so deeply into the soul that the addictions become the only sanctuary from it as the dopamine (pleasure neurotransmitter) makes it all go away. It doesn’t matter for how long, it only matter that it does…until something worse comes about in the damage the addiction does to the body and mind of the addict. All addicts pay the price of their addictions. There is a sense of living a double life, there is a sense of shame attached to it, and yet, it is the only way that they have come up with to get out of the deeply felt pain and that is why they do what they do.
It is about time we stop criminalizing and judging people for the only way of coping they were able to figure out without the appropriate treatment for the real issues that underly these destructive behaviors.
I have worked with all sorts of addicts for the past 11 years and I can tell you that none of them set out to have their problems and have their problems grow to such proportions that their lives were over taken with their addictions – this is the definition of an addiction – no longer being able to participate in normal daily activities of living with all the addicts resources (time and money) going to the fulfilling the addiction.
So, for all of you who think that you above it, guess what? Until you have found yourself in a situation that may warrant some sort of reprieve, you would do well to hold your ignorant thoughts inside your mind and take the time to learn something called “compassion.. Just because you were lucky enough to not be so engaged doesn’t make you any better than another. All it means is that you were lucky enough to not go there. But, my guess is that you have your own skeletons in your closet that you hide so well even from yourself, that you haven’t a clue until one day, it breaks out and gets to the point where you can no longer pretend that you haven’t any issues that need to be resolved. I can say this being the first in my rather large family of origin to openly discuss my own mental health diagnosis over 20 years ago, realizing that I come from a genealogy on my mother’s side of the family that is rampant with mental health issues. It runs in the family genetics so I wanted my older sisters to be aware for their own sakes and for the sakes of their children, given that many of these mental health issues don’t really show themselves till the teen years and beyond. It didn’t take long for others in my family to find themselves in worse situations than even I was in, given their mental health issues.
So, get a grip and be honest with yourself first, and then demonstrate some compassion and by all means get the help.you need as you become aware of the struggles you may be having in your own life. It is only through dealing with our own life’s challenges in a constructive manner coming out the other end healed, that we are able to learn to have compassion (instead of judgment) for those who have different struggles than our own.
Judgment is never constructive – empathy, understanding and compassion are, for those are the ingredients of love, and love is what we all need to have lives that are meaningful enough to be worth living.
Oct 10 2013
Hypnosis Stops Chewing Tobacco Habit for Giants Baseball Stars: Bruce Bochy, Bill Hayes and Mike Murphey – Vol. 118, Sept. 15th, 2011
In case you were wondering if hypnosis for addiction can last for a substantial period of time you need not look any further than the Giants baseball team out in San Francisco. With the help of hypnotherapist Dr. AlVera Paxson three of their team members have stopped their decades long addiction to chewing tobacco. Bruce Bochy has stopped since April 14th, catcher Bill Hayes since January 26th and equipment manager Mike Murphey has been clear of his habit for 2 years now. This was reported in Sporting News on August 8, 2011.
Do you have a habit that is pestering you, even an addiction. Hypnosis is certainly a viable solution. You need not ingest yet another drug to deal with the problem substance. This means you do not need to affix a nicotine patch, take a medication that supposedly stops the desire for the nicotineThis means there are no side-effects to be concerned with. One can stop these habits without withdrawal symptoms or urges that are so common with other methods of stopping the abuse of a nicotine.
In my practice I have been able to assist many people to stopping their smoking habits some who have had them for over 30 years. It is based on the idea that one need not continue to feel that they will always be addicted for contrary to the common belief, this is not the case. One can make a decision to no longer be addicted to these substances putting that addiction in the past. It is all done with the power of your own mind. If you have the desire and commitment to be nicotine free, you too can be nicotine free.
Oct 10 2013
Are You “Triggered” By Others? Learn How to Stop It!
Are You “Triggered” By Others? Learn How to Stop It! – Vol. 220, October 10, 2013
You may be like me, in the sense that you find yourself with somebody who is saying things to you that make you feel uncomfortable. Sometimes we don’t even know at the time of the occurrence why we feel so uncomfortable. However, a day or so later, it becomes crystal clear.
Here is an example from my own life:
I “had” a very good friend who loved to tell me how to live my life. Shortly after my ex asked for a divorce, my friend suggested that I go on disability just like his ex-wife had already been, because, you know, I have a “disability”. Maybe in his head I had a disability, however, in my head, I worked real hard to shed any issues that would get in the way of my being able to take care of myself by clearing out my problems and learning a profession. To say I was “floored” by his “caring” suggestion is to put it mildly. I was very angry and upset with him because to my mind he was minimizing all the work that he witnessed my doing over the past 20 plus years. It was unbelievably upsetting. To his credit he did apologize and never mentioned it again.
This was a boundary break!
Now, one of the reasons that my “friend” overran my boundaries is because I had my own ways of overrunning his boundaries, most especially in not being interested in much of his complaints about everything in his life. This wasn’t as big a problem back then as it is currently, though it was large enough to make it a 50/50 chance of having a good time or a drag of a time with him. I let him know that I was getting increasingly more disgruntled about his ever lengthening time he spent complaining about every aspect of his life while we were together. Sadly he was unable to ever make a change in his attitude.
So what are boundaries? Simply speaking boundaries are composed of those things that you feel okay with on an emotional level. When your boundaries are overrun it means that someone is saying or doing something that with which you feel uncomfortable. You know that your boundaries have been overridden when you are feeling upset or resentful with something that someone has said or done. By the way, it doesn’t have to always have to be something that was said or done to you, it could be something that was said or done to someone else that you felt was inappropriate or hurtful to the other person.
Many times boundaries are a matter of feeling judged by another or while judging another. So, if you are feeling judged, it is time to think about this relationship and whether you want to be a part of it. If you are judging others, well, that may be why others are judging you in return. Stop the judgments and you may find yourself, no longer being judged.
Creating your boundaries begins by understanding what :you care about, what you believe in and what you want to spend your time doing. When you were 2 years old you had no problem saying,“no” to anything that you didn’t want to do. As we grow older we are socialized (especially if you are of the female gender) that saying, “no” is impolite. Well, I am here to tell you that by say, “yes” when you need or want to say, “no”, you are setting yourself up to be resentful of the other person. We only have so much time in a day and need to discern what is of importance to ourselves. This doesn’t mean that you don’t help people who you care about, so long as they are there for you in similar situations, that is called being a “friend” in the real sense of the word. What it does mean, is that you don’t going running to take care of everyone else’s crisis as you ignore your own needs and desires in your own life. If someone is in crisis they need professional help anyway. Help them to get professional help and all will be fine. It is also of little use to allow someone to vent their frustrations, hostilities and endless sadness onto you. It is much better to give them a few minutes to tell you their story and then move them onto something that is much more positive for mental health for both of you. The exception to this rule is if someone is dealing with a recent death of someone close to them or is dealing with a very ill family member or friend. However, even than as a friend, there is only so much that you can do if you lack the training to be able to constructively help them to come to terms with what is going on in their lives.
I do my best to teach all my clients (and my friends through sharing with them my philosophy of how I choose to live my life) about how to enforce their own boundaries while respecting others boundaries. In the end it makes for a much more happy and fulfilling lives for everyone.
Oct 07 2013
Pop a Pill or The Alternative Medicine: Hypnosis
Headache Pills (Photo credit: sacks08)
Vol. 86 March 2010 – Pop a Pill or The Alternative Medicine: Hypnosis
Article written by Donna N.
I am not sure if there are more pills to cure disease or if there are more actual diseases in the world at this point. One thing is for certain, all of us at one time or another has taken some type of pill for some sort of symptom. We don’t even have to have an actual disease or illness, merely a symptom to reach for that little pill bottle. We take pills when our head hurts, when we can’t sleep, and we feel nauseous. There are not just aspirins now, but aspirins for backache, headache, arthritis, migraine, joint pain, muscle aches and the list goes on. We even take pills to get ourselves to do what we want to do but are just unable to like: losing weight, quitting smoking, or sexual compulsiveness. We take pills when we have low energy or if we are too hyper. We even take fertility pills if we want to get pregnant or sexual enhancement pills for better sex. We take pills to control our OCD or any other undesirable condition that we may suffer from.The list is endless and I will bet for any symptom, there is a pill somewhere to make it better. And it makes sense to us for why suffer through life if we do not have to with all these annoyances. Continue reading