Insurance Panelling

Now accepting:

Aetna
United Behavioral Health/Optima
Triwest
Crime Victims Compensation Program

As always, I'm willing to work with insurance as a non-preferred or non-paneled clinician.

Veteran's Day

Thank you to all our servicemen and servicewomen. You've made great sacrifices for us. We wish you safety and contentment.

Healthy Eating = Healthy Feelings

The mind and body share a strong link - our mind comes out of our body's many movements, impulses, and chemical reactions. Literal movement from our muscles, to the hormones that surge through our body all play a part. Of course, how we eat impacts our thought and emotion! I always love simpler tips to healthy eating.
The Environmental Working Group has put forward its recent Good Food on a Tight Budget guide. EWG's webpage gives a number of helpful guides for healthy living all worth consideration.

There's An App For That

The mobile technology innovation continues to permeate into our lives -- like most things -- it's a double edged sword. We have information at our fingertips at the cost of unsolicited information flooding our lives and minds and a loss of privacy.
Journaling provides a great opportunity to get thoughts out of the head, on paper, no longer bouncing around in your head. Someone pointed out to me recently that there are now great apps to keep journals. When the caveat to writing a journal has always been to make sure it can be kept safe from others' eyes, apps provide even greater security for our private thoughts. Here are a few mobile apps just for journaling:

 

Journal (Nook)

myMemoir (iPad)
iJournaler (iPad)

There are many other mobile apps that provide some bona fide benefits to our mental health:

Relax: Stress & Anxiety Relief (Android)

Stress Test & CBT Self-Help (Android)
Let Panic Go (iPad/iPhone)

California bans gay-to-straight therapy - The Seattle Times

It's always aggravating when a handful of people besmudge the reputation of a profession. There's an unfortunate and necessary reality that professionals rely on regulating and credentialing organizations as well as state and national legislation. I encourage anyone looking into psychotherapy to look into their rights as a client and check the credentials of their therapist.
It's horrible to know that vulnerable young people who find themselves in already unsupporting environments, will find themselves faced with even more painful adversity by way of alleged "helpers."
California bans gay-to-straight therapy

Information Bias

Many of my posts have touched on the concept of perceiving Truth. It's an important topic to people - we rarely questions our own sense of truth and it scares a person when his sense of truth is rattled. The model that people have a set sense of Truth and all new information follows is not new to psychology. The idea of how prevalent and regular this occurs, however, has recently rattled the sense of the Psyche, however.

As psychologists developed the model of Cognitive Psychology, they regularly used the two terms Assimilation and Accommodation to describe the ways in which we retain knowledge and build our personal models of the world. Each day we're faced with a plethora of new facts, sensations, images. As we take in the information, we compare that info to our sense of the world. While our view and concept of the world may grow bigger, we are assimilating the new information into our picture of the world. If pieces of information don't seem to match our map, we find ways to adjust the picture. As one example, consider the different ways we draw flat maps of our spherical world.

 

Cartographers pinch maps one way or stretch it another in order to show a round world on a flat map -- they have to make different accommodations in their representation of the world. The more accurate a representation a person needs, however, it becomes more difficult to assimilate that info as the map is drawn. Ultimately, a person may need to accommodate their concept of the world by using a globe.

Similarly, we can take in information that matches our own perception of the world, or we can change our perception of the world. For adults, accommodating our perception is a more difficult task -- think of all the learned information we have to reevaluate! We become victims of our own preconceptions - it can be easier to accept the information that matches our perception of the world and omit/forget/ignore any information that may not match. We unconsciously choose to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste only what reasserts our image of the world. This information bias can be benign and help keep our lives efficient. The dangers, however, come in the potential to miss vital pieces of information or perpetuate troublesome patterns of suffering in our lives.
The specific information bias is called confirmation bias -- we are biased toward the facts, figures, and examples that confirm what we believe is true. Where psychologists once provided a model where people at worst ignored new information, confirmation bias, demonstrates that we're even more difficult to dissuade. We not only ignore information that might challenge our perceptions, but we assimilate information in a way that helps perpetuate any faulty beliefs and interpretations. It becomes more and more difficult to find evidence that proves us wrong because our brain often strengthens its ability to identify only what it believes to be true.
Consider this study by Victor and colleagues which demonstrates that people suffering with depression are more likely to identify sad faces even on an unconscious level. Research continues to demonstrate that the anxious brain and the depressed brain regularly practice information bias - easily identifying facts in our life that prove the rule and (often unconsciously) ignoring facts to prove the exceptions.
It takes active practice to question assumptions and identify exceptions to our preconceptions. I frequently give clients tools that help draw out the exceptions. By helping our mind find reasons for joy, hope, satisfaction and through training the brain to more readily see these examples in our life, it becomes harder to stay depressed or anxious.

Lists of 5

If there's work to be done between sessions, I often suggest to clients to write a list of 5. Lists of 5 give helpful signposts toward growth and insight. When creating a list of 5, it gives room for multiple possibilities, a choice of direction, and it is not such an overwhelming list that one gets lost. Lists of 5 can be sequential, or ranked, or simply what comes to mind first.
When faced with a complicated or long-term goal, I find it helpful to ask myself, "What are my next 5 steps?" It's not necessarily that #5 will mean mission accomplished, but it will leave me 5 steps closer to my gaol.
Lists of 5 can also be helpful in reflecting on mission and purpose. Some lists of 5 to think of:

What are my 5 passions?
Who are my 5 biggest supports?
What are 5 obstacles in life?
What are my 5 most disturbing memories?
What are my 5 strengths?

You can always lengthen the list. It's worth asking yourself, why those 5 before 6, 7, or 8.