Sep 16 2012

10 Signs of workplace harassment and the 8 things you can do about it.

Workplace harassment

Workplace harassment

Vol. 166, Sept. 16, 2012

The numbers of people being targeted by workplace bullying are exploding according to the Workplace Bullying Institute’s report “Effectiveness of Bullied Target Resolution Strategies, April, 2012”. According to their research 58% of the 1,604 employees surveyed say they are being bullied currently and 39% said they have been bullied. Of those being bullied 79.2% are women and 20.8% are male. Interestingly enough 62.8% of those doing the bullying are female and 37.2% were male. Regardless of what was done to stop the mistreatment 54% of all respondents said that the interventions were ineffective with the bullying continuing. Forty-one percent of women targeted for bullying quit and another 25% were terminated which includes those who were forced out of their jobs. Sadly the effectiveness of telling a boss or going to human resources was as ineffective as doing nothing stopping the bullying 3% of the time. Sadly 75% of those being bullied are of higher rank, 18% are of the same rank and 7% are of a lesser rank.

The largest part of the problem is that unless you are the one being targeted it is difficult to realize. This is a terrible situation for employees to be put into sinking them into a very low emotional state decreasing the job performance, killing moral at work and worse of all creating health issues such as: cardiovascular problems, an impaired immune system, debilitating anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. This means higher absenteeism. Forty-five percent of those being bullied suffer some sort stress related health problem. Bullying is a larger problem than sexual harassment.

For the company it means difficulty with moral and recruitment as word gets around that people are leaving in droves. Less workplace commitment along with increased workers’ comp claims increase cost to companies.

How do you know if you are being bullied? 10 Signs You are being bullied from Forbes Magazine:

1) You will feel anxious, maybe feeling like throwing up the night before your workweek starts.

2) Being constantly criticized by your boss or co-worker despite your history of competence at your job.

3 )Many instances where the bully is frequently yelling at you or insulting and humiliating you in front of others.

4 )Your boss or co-worker constantly refers to prior mistakes of yours without and constructive reason.

5) Spreading destructive gossip and lies about you.

6) You feel singled out by your boss or co-workers by having your desk moved or not being invited to meetings or even lunch.

7) All your time off is being spent on mental health days or your days off feeling lifeless or your family members showing frustration with you obsessing about work.

8) Having your work sabotaged by changing the rules, or performing task not critical to your success.

9) A boss that is changing your schedule knowing that it will conflict with your out of work activities making your life more difficult.

10) Your boss or co-worker stealing credit for your work

The first thing you need to do is stay calm because the bully is looking to get a reaction from you. Document the actions that the bully is taking against you so you can report it. If the bully is really impacting you negatively tell them that you have no interest in interacting with them and that they are on a strictly work based relationship.

For your own mental health journal about your feelings to get them out. Spend time with people who love and care about you. Focus you attention on them. And by all means, do those things that bring you joy and contentment. Tell you co-workers bosses and human resources your story while managing your emotions.

If things are getting out of hand and your employer seems to condone this sort of negative behavior the best response may be to leave your job for your own health and sanity.

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Sep 08 2012

Wake Up Doc! You May Be Killing your Patients By Not Hearing them! – Vol. 165, Sept. 8, 2012

I wonder how many of you who have a mental health history needing health care for a physiological problem have been treated like a child. That mental health diagnosis getting in the way of the treatment you may need because the doctor sitting in front of you can’t see your “whole self” – all that is seen is the psych history.
The sad truth is that it is very difficult to get an unbiased diagnosis when one has a psych history even when one has a an infection, broken bone and hardest of all fighting fatigue which can be caused by a multitude of issues from sleep apnea, to malnourishment from being unable to metabolize the nutrients from the foods you are eating, conditions that cause a lot of physical pain, to dealing with a loss of some sort. Too many doctors think it is all in your head and it many times is not.

You know that you are a victim of this poor treatment when you are finding yourself complaining of the same symptoms over and over again from never finding the “cause” of your problem.

As a patient if you feel more frustrated than when you came in, with more prescriptions than causes to your problem, you need to change doctors.

If your doc says “let’s try this” without any scientific testing to back up their ideas, you are being used as a human guinea pig. Change doctors.

If your doc is unwilling to send you for the scans that are necessary to see what is going on inside you, especially with ongoing pain, you need to change doctors.

If your doctor tells you that “nobody died of lack of sleep” and that is one of your main symptoms, you are in trouble. Your doc is taking it to lightly – Ambien IS NOT the answer! Change doctors.

If you seem to know more than your doc about what is going on with you, change doctors.

If your doctor doesn’t ask you if you have a history of drug addiction before giving your a prescription change doctors.

If you undergo a surgery and your doctor gives you over a 100 pills of addictive opiates to help with the pain, change doctors.

These are the complaints that I hear over and over again from my clients when they are looking for treatment from their medical providers. Unfortunately more times than I would like to admit, their doctors don’t take them seriously and in some cases it has caused their patients to find themselves in precarious positions.

Several have found themselves unwittingly addicted to narcotics after surgeries. Some have been unable to find out why it is that they are always tired – not depressed, just tired all of the time making it difficult to make it through their work day. Others have never been given the requisite testing or scans to find out what may be at the cause of the problem just handing over prescriptions without any thought as to what the long term consequences may be for the patient.

By far the worst is when a normal child or teen is seen as over active is placed on medications to sedate them when a conversation to find out what the real issue is would have gone a long way to clearing up the problem.

Hormones are the basis of your body being able to function. When one hormone is out of balance, it throws of the balance of other hormones creating the symptoms that are dragging down your quality of life. Few doctors really understand the science of hormones which is sad. It is probably the first place to look if you are feeling fatigued and out of sorts over a very long period and there are no other obvious causes.

One needs to check out precursor hormones which are the building blocks to the common hormones doctors check for to see what the deal is such as pregnenolone and DHEA are the precursor hormones for the sex hormones.

Food allergies and sensitivities can create great damage to the gut which is where the immune system does the majority of its work. Unfortunately many doctors fail to test for these issues as well.

Proper nutrition is the number one thing that you can do to take care of your health. If your doctor is not willing to speak to you about this, change doctors.

It is so much easier in the 7 ½ minute appointment for the doctor to stare at the computer and hand you a prescription. Ask yourself if this is the sort of treatment that you are willing to settle for.

If you have been diagnosed with a mental health issue it is a good idea to start over with a new doctor who is better able to see the “whole you” to form an unbiased diagnosis.

Don’t let insurance hassles and money issues be a reason to not get appropriate health care. See a functional or integrative doctor who will see you as a “whole person.” As you know without good health life is really not worth living. Many of these treatments that integrative (holistic practitioners) treat may not be covered under your health insurance regardless of how much you are already spending on it. Go ahead and have the work done anyway so that you can reclaim your life.

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Sep 04 2012

Who Do You Go To, To Get Your Problem Resolved? – Vol. 142, March 15, 2012

These days there are many titles that helping professionals have: therapist and hypnotist and NLP practitioners, coaches, trainers, teachers and mentors, job coaches and business coaches and life coaches. How do you know who to go to to get you issue resolved? Well, I have to tell you that if I weren’t in the business of helping people having spent too many hours to count paying for the services of many of these professionals for my own growth and development both personally and professionally I wouldn’t know the differences between them either. Now, do understand that these are my own definitions based on my own experiences so you may not totally agree. However, I am most certain that you will find my train of thought her helpful when you are making a the very important decision as to who to invest your limited resources of time and money to help you to get “unstuck” in whatever it is that may be holding you back at the moment.

First of all I being a Trainer and Master Practitioner of hypnosis and NLP I would like to clarify for you what these titles actually mean versus what a therapist is thought to be.

NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) is first and foremost a form of hypnosis, it using the bypassing of the conscious mind to work in the unconscious or subconscious mind. NLP is based on the work of Milton Erickson a psychiatrist that used hypnosis in his practice, Virginia Satir, a family therapist and Fritz Perls and his Gestalt Therapy among others. Bandler and Grinder researched the best therapists of the day to find out how they got the excellent results they got and formed the techniques that taken together are now known as NLP. Hypnosis is more often thought of as the relaxed state that one sees in the stage hypnosis volunteers who seemed to be passed out when they are merely so relaxed as to be resting on one another. Do believe me when I tell you that they are hyper aware of everything that is going on and can and do decide which skits they will participate in. It is up to the stage hypnotist to realize in seconds flat if the volunteers are in the hypnotic state or need to return to the audience not having taken to the hypnosis either through the fear of what they do not understand hypnosis to be or because they may be drunk and unable to focus or could cause distractions to the show.

Hypnosis is actually the same state that one would be in while in meditation and so as one of my teachers of hypnosis explained it: hypnosis is meditation with a purpose. That  purpose being to resolve the issues that the client has come in to hypnotist to work on. Because it is the meditative state that is being worked on, the client is in a dissociated state making it much less emotionally traumatic the client feeling lighter and brighter once emerged from the hypnotic state.

Therapy is working in the conscious state and though there are a few therapist who may have taken a hypnosis weekend of training do not generally specialize in doing hypnotic work. They have a different angle to their work with their client usually relying on the theory that they have learned in their psychology degree work, without much exposure or knowledge about the inner workings of the unconscious mind which requires a very different technique then regular therapy given the different manner in which the conscious and unconscious/subconscious mind processes the same information. If you choose to see a therapist to do hypnotic technique with you do make sure that they have made it a priority to truly understand what they are doing or they can create more harm to you without even realizing it.

A coach is a person who is hired to help people to attain goals in their lives without any real training for the most part (unless the professional has come to coaching after completing more formalized training in therapeutic or hypnotic technique) to be more of an accountability partner and objective source from which you can gain new insights and perspectives on reaching your goals. A business coach or job coach will work with you on gaining a better career for yourself (though job coaches are also known to be the people to work with disabled folks in non-competitive work environments).

Executive coaches usually work in or for businesses to help the employee to do their job better or with those who are given promotions to learn how to reach the objectives of the new position.

Life coaches will help you in every area of you life, personal and professional so these folks can be seen as the generalists of the world of coaching.

Teachers and trainers create another interesting distinction. A teacher is someone who is employed to teach you something which you may or may not be able to emulate. A trainer is someone who is employed to train you to emulate that which they have taught you usually having real life experience with which to help you learn the practical application of that which you are being trained to do.

Mentors and therapist are yet another distinction that can be made. A mentor is a person that is either hired or who offers to help another to successfully pursue one’s purpose in life usually based on their life’s mission. The basis of the relationship is the positive attainment of the goals desired by the mentored.

A therapist is hired to deal usually with psycho-pathologies of disturbed thought and destructive behaviors due to an emotionally based issue. A therapist is most often interested in helping their patient to either be rid of the negative ramifications of the pathology or help the patient to manage the issues of their diagnosis.

Each professional has their place among the needs and concerns of the general population as you can see. The question that one must ask is what is the outcome that is desired and who is the best professional to use to achieve that result.

I can tell you that for myself I would much prefer to use hypnotic technique to take care of anything in the emotional and even many physical ailments if you find one that specializes in your area of need. I will always work with a trainer to learn specific tools and techniques to add to my tool chest of knowledge to assist my clients to reach their goals. And I would use a business coach that specializes in the area of business that I am focusing on learning about to give me the marketing, publicity, writing, speaking and other business related knowledge that one needs in this day and age to be successful.

So again, ask yourself what it is that you are working to achieve and then go to the correct professional to help you to achieve that particular outcome.

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Sep 04 2012

Your Boss Stressing You Out: The Cost To You Can Be Much Larger Than You Realize – Vol. 164, September 1, 2012

It isn’t in your head if you feel as if you are feeling unhappy and stressed out by your immediate boss. USA Today reported that 75% of working adults say that their immediate boss is the most stressful aspect of their job. Part of the problem is the type of personality it takes for a person to make it to top management. They are very ambitious, selfish and aggressive people. As such they can be very tough on the employees leading to poor staff moral. Many times when employees state their unhappiness to their boss they find they no longer have a job. In the great majority of cases, having a bad boss was stated as being more stressful than either money or family problems.

With the tight economy many new hires are taking jobs that are not suitable for them which also creates work related stress. This creates problems between the employee, manager and job. If an employee has taken a job that s/he doesn’t like ways will be found to not do the job or take sick time off leaving the manager in a terrible position.

According to the World Health Organization stress will cost American business $300 billion per year with the rising cost of health care.

Some things that you can do to help with the stress you are feeling on the job are by taking care of your health:

1) Eat healthy foods full of good nutrition throughout the day.
2)Take 10 minute exercise breaks every hour to help you keep your focus  while you are  working.
3) Learn to meditate or do some self-hypnosis to help to take your stress away.
4)Drink plenty of water.
5)Keep your work space clear and ready for work.

If you are starting to feel depressed or agitated or find that you have physical health issues arising it may be time for you to seek other opportunities elsewhere. Yes, it can be tough to find a job in this market but dropping dead on the job is a worse option.

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Aug 29 2012

The One Action you Must Do Now to avoid Psychosomatic Illness

A Doctor treating psychosomatic illness

A Doctor treating psychosomatic illness (The Doctor painted by Samuel Luke Fildes

What creates true health and wellbeing? Is it seeing your doctor every year? Eating healthy food? Exercising every day? Yes, taking these things into consideration is very important. There is something that is more important than all of these according to the research that Brene Brown Ph.D. and Lissa Rankin, M.D. have done on this issue.

There are many people out there who are ill with aches and pains, with feelings of anxiety and perhaps depression and yet as Dr. Rankin found out over her medical career there is no test that will show what the real problem is for it isn’t medical. It is of the mind. She states very clearly that she too had her own “perfect storm” when she lost her brother to liver failure, her father to a brain tumor and her husband cutting off two of his fingers in an accident as he was to be the “stay at home dad” to her new born baby.
What she realized after all of this was that with all the masks she was wearing she wasn’t being true to who she was. Sure she was a doctor, mom, wife, etc. She had a career and plenty of money in her retirement with all the trappings of success and yet, she was not happy in the life she was living. She was doing all the “shoulds” instead of focusing on what mattered to her most. In her career as a doctor she felt helpless in her work because the conventional medical system never taught her in her twelve years of training how to help people that were in this unhappy state of being. And, then it dawned on her to learn integrative types of treatment like acupuncture, healing with herbs. But something was still missing. Then she realized that the answers for her patients weren’t “out there” somewhere, they were in the patients’ minds. They needed to be true to who they were and do what they knew mattered to them as she had to do for herself.

Brene Brown states quite emphatically that one of the dangers that we are doing to our kids these days is telling them that they are perfect and making life easy for them. Why is this a problem? Because it leads them to believe that being less than perfect makes them feel they are unworthy of love and care. Instead what we need to teach our children is that they are imperfect and that they will have struggles and are still worthy of love and attention.

Why is this such a problem. According to Dr. Brown it has everything to do with our own issues of vulnerability. Our need to pretend to be what we feel society is asking of us to be instead of following our hearts. Being true to who we are and living our truths. She found through her research that happy people allow themselves to be vulnerable being willing to take the risks to love even if it isn’t returned. To try new things though they may not be successful knowing that they are indeed “good enough” just as they are.

Without the ability to be vulnerable Dr. Brown is quite clear that of joy, gratitude, happiness and creativity get numbed out which brings in the feelings of unhappiness and unworthiness. It’s an endless cycle.

I have found in my practice that both these woman are correct in their findings. I challenge my clients to look at themselves with love and compassion for it is with the ability to love the self that one can be lovable to others. With compassion for the self, one can be compassionate for others. This too is part Dr. Brown’s message.

If you are a person whose body is telling you that perhaps you are doing all the “shoulds” in life yet leaving out all the “heart’s desires” take a deeper look at how you are living your life. It is a not just a matter of quality of life, it is a matter of your health itself.

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Aug 21 2012

Diane Keaton Battled Bulimia for Five Years – Vol. 130, Dec. 15, 2011

English: Diane Keaton

English: Diane Keaton (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 1977 film Annie Hall introduced me to the actress Diane Keaton. In her new biography Then Again Keaton tells the story of the start of her bulimic behavior, though she didn’t think of it in that way back then. It was 1968, she was 22 years old, a struggling actress just cast in the original Broadway production of Hair. She was ordered to lose 10 pounds to make her more attractive during the parts where she would be scantily clothed. Upon hearing another actress speak of throwing up the food that she ate to stay slim Keaton got the idea that she too could eat all she wanted if she would just do the same. This illness of hers lasted for five years ending after five years of daily therapy when one day she just decided she was done with the behavior.

It seems that despite Ms. Keaton’s acting abilities and great success she acknowledges that she has suffered most of her life from a fear of failure, low self-esteem along with worrying what others may think of her. Bulimia seems to have filled those emotional holes by soothing herself with huge amounts of food which she would then purge.

Unfortunately much damage to Ms. Keaton’s body was already done by the time she stopped her illness. With the daily purging of approximately 20,000 calories she managed to give herself 26 cavities in her teeth, heartburn, indigestion, irregular periods, and low blood pressure.

Bulimia is an illness that can be treated to the point where one no longer feels the need to do these behaviors. I know that my clients who have suffered from it have been able to let it go without a bulimic thought or behavior for a few years now. This has been accomplished in a matter of a few short months. If you or anyone you know is fighting this debilitating illness first send them to: http://dawningvisions.com/what-are-eating-disorder-effects-and-how-to-create-a-successful-recovery-for-bulimia-and-anorexia/

Read this article and then sign up for the ezine on the top right side of the page and you will get access to the first chapter of my new upcoming Ebook Do I Have an Eating Disorder? Now What? where you will be able to take a quiz to see if you do indeed have the symptoms of this problem.

If you do I invite you to call to get a free 30 minute consultation to see how I may be able to help you to rid yourself of this problem once and for all, hopefully before you find yourself in comparably ill health to Ms. Keaton’s.

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Aug 10 2012

Are Chemicals Taking Our Capacity to be Compassionate Away? – Volume 112, August 4, 2011

by Donna N.

With all the killings and deaths in the news lately I find myself wondering why it is that we human beings have such little to no regard for human life, or any type of life.

One case comes to mind that resulted in my wanting to write this newsletter and thereby ask this question.

The case of the Lynn, Massachusetts woman who went down the slide in a public pool, and never resurfaced. The woman was dead in the water for over two and one half days.The woman was at the bottom of a public pool used by hundreds of people during those two days. No one saw her at the bottom of this pool because according to reports the pool water was too murky. The fact that the Metropolitan District Commission that owns and runs the pool allowed users to swim in water that is murky and therefore most likely unhealthy is bothersome in itself. I have always owned pools and even in the deepest part of the pool one can clearly see the bottom, especially if there was an adult size body at the bottom. For the water to be so murky one cannot see a body at the bottom is disturbing.

An even more upsetting part of this story as the facts come out, the 9 year old that had preceded the dead woman down the slide had told not one, but two lifeguards that this woman went into the water and did not resurface. One lifeguard said she was on break and to tell another lifeguard.The other lifeguard said he’d look into it and obviously never did. How can one not locate an adult sized body especially if the boy, who at 9 years old stated she was down there? The pool should have been closed and searched thoroughly. We are talking about a human life here. I would think that the minute the 9 year old told the lifeguard there was someone in the pool who went under water and never resurfaced, he or she would have jumped in immediately. To me it would be an automatic response, like breathing.

I feel  as a human being, and as part of the current class of humans we are really losing it as a feeling and caring species. I see and hear on a daily basis mothers killing their children, fathers killing their entire families. I am guessing they are stressed and this is the reason behind these killings.
Drunk drivers wiping out entire families, without even a thought of remorse. If they had any sense of remorse, they wouldn’t repeat the act over and over again one would think.They would do what ever it took to clear their addiction.

An interesting theory that comes to my mind as to why all this disregard for life has to do with drugs. When I mention drugs, I not only mean illegal drugs, I mean all chemical substances: prescriptions, alcohol, antidepressants, anti-anxiety, weight loss drugs, drugs to stop smoking, drugs that are put on our foods such as insecticides or in our foods such as antibiotics. All of it.

Dr. Daniel Amen has done numerous studies on brains that have been exposed to illegal substances as well as alcohol. He has shown in his studies that these substances literally cause holes in our brains. I am wondering if these holes are causing us as humans to have no feelings over the years.The feeling part of our brains just is not functioning and we are evolving into a non-caring species, without the regard for human life.

There is a drug for every human undesirable behavior one can imagine, as there is a drug for every desirable human behavior imaginable. All at our disposal.There for the asking, but do we really need them?

With all these drugs and chemicals in our bodies one wonders what is becoming of our brains over the years. What is our human body, mind and spirit morphing into from all this chemical use? The scary part is we don’t just have to go through the act of physically ingesting these drugs. We are getting “drugged” on a daily basis every time we eat or breathe. Chemicals in the air as pollution. Chemicals in our food supply from antibiotics in the chickens, to mercury in our fish, to oil in the shellfish, to radioactive iodine in our milk. Even a bag of candy M & M’s  – read the package sometime and notice all the chemicals listed for the colors.

Drugs and chemicals are for the most part unavoidable. Even if we buy all organic and eat the best meat and food available, we still need to breathe. Every time we put on bug spray or even wash our hair or bodies, we are introducing chemicals into our bodies.

I just can’t help but wonder what these chemicals are doing to us over time. How are they are affecting out thoughts and our actions? Are our thoughts and our minds being changed because our brains are being slowly altered due to the ingestion of these chemicals?

I don’t believe that people are just born killers or rapists or drug addicts. I believe that for whatever reason our environment contributes to this in some manner. I feel if one treats their body in a healthy manner, they are at least doing all they can to ensure good health. Along those same lines, one needs to do the same for their brain as well. Just as one takes care of their body, one needs to take care of their minds and their brain. I can’t help but wonder how all the chemicals and drugs are effecting one’s brains.

I once did an experiment for a high school biology course. It involved taking apart a Sudafed and painfully separating the white dots from the red ones in the capsule. I placed the red ones on a live goldfish’s tail and we looked under a microscope and saw the blood flow speed up dramatically, we did the same for the white particles and the blood flow slowed down considerably. Now keep in mind you as the human consumer are taking both white and red together in the capsule as Sudafed, a nasal decongestant. Also keep in mind that your body and brain are getting these “medications”, as a harmless capsule, telling your body and brain to speed up and slow down at the same time. It is no wonder people are it seems, going insane? Please note that no goldfish were killed during this experiment, though they were a bit dazed when put back into the tank.

I for one, having found hypnosis make it a point in my life to avoid putting any chemicals  into my body, as much as I reasonably can.
I stopped my need for antidepressants through hypnosis. I ended my addictions through hypnosis. I am eating more healthy food and working on weight control currently using hypnosis.

It just seems to me, any way I can prevent putting a drug or chemical into my body makes sense. I can’t totally keep my body free from all drugs or chemicals, but I can make a substantial reduction in the amount I choose to ingest. I just can’t help but wonder what all these chemicals might be doing to my body and my mind on a daily basis.

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