Doctor of Osteopathy & Holistic Psychiatry
The Owner's Manual to your Mind
"We are what we think, all that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we create our world."
It has been suggested this was the first quote that came out of the Buddha's mouth after he first became enlightened. If this enlightened man was correct, our thoughts are the key to whether we have happiness and mental health or mental illness. In meditation, thoughts are THE MOST difficult object of awareness to pay attention to and work with because our egos are so identified with the thinking process. Since our educational system is rooted in an old paradigm, most of us have not been taught the basics of managing our mind nor how to become the master of our minds. In working with me, you will begin a process of discovering the "owner's manual" to your own mind. This, in essence, requires developing awareness of the thinking mind through using a Daily Practice outlined at the beginning of treatment that has its basis in the highly research validated school of psychotherapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Because thinking is so deeply ingrained, so much is subconscious and unconscious, I ask my patients to, as best as possible, work a Daily Practice of paying attention to their thoughts and their emotional experiences using the CBT tool called a Thought Record. I hold my patients accountable to this practice with a Daily Text Message Check-in in the early stages of treatment. In doing this, I offer a supportive and encouraging RELATIONSHIP (and sometimes, when needed, my committee member I call coach whipcracker enters the game) to help get you going on the path to self healing. I recognize after 27 years in psychiatric practice, not every patient is ready for this kind of intensity right out of the gates so we build this daily practice together as we go supporting it with lifestyle medicine practices to the extent one is able in our busy lives.
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There are 2 sides of every coin: you set the pace of your healing journey and at the same time please know I jokingly call myself “The Impatient Therapist” who says there is no time to waste, life is short, therapy can be expensive with a psychiatrist and there is no time to waste in becoming emotionally intelligent!
Ridding the weeds (bad mental habits) from the garden of your mind
What I am NOT is a mind reader. What I AM is a Mind Weeder. My first job in life was as a janitor of the grade school that I attended. When I look back on all the jobs I did working at this school, my favorite was when my boss would tell me to weed the flowerbeds. As I look back on this job I loved it. I am aware now this was my first experience with meditation, weeding mediation. I would put on my headphones and weed for hours at a time. I loved pulling out what didn't belong in the garden, the entanglements of weeds robbing nutrients and energy gone and space given for growth. The mind weeding portion of therapy is as important as the seed (ideas and beliefs from Positive Psychology) planting portion. One big weed is the resistance we all have to fully, mindfully feeling negative emotions. The seed planting portion comes with planting new thought forms, new core beliefs. Tending to newly planted ideas requires a Constant Gardener who waters, fertilizes and weeds. We weed out bad habits of mind, root out negative core beliefs and plant in our circle of the future the seeds of possibilities we wish to create for ourselves.
You and your path to healing is a complex jigsaw puzzle
Every individual's journey to healing is like a complex jigsaw puzzle that comes without the puzzle box to look at. Putting together the pieces of that puzzle is to see clearly the path towards healing and self actualization. This requires paying attention, daily, to a number of different threads of consciousness/developmental lines or trajectories. We will identify these puzzle pieces as they show up on your daily CBT Thought Records. I will train you to be your own " field researcher" collecting, with your growing awareness, data on how your mind and body is operating. We use the data gathered to divine your path towards self-healing, hopefully without psychiatric medications. As the puzzle begins to come together, you will see how you can handle life on its own terms without psychiatric medications.
Beyond victim archetype to warrior archetype
To mature beyond unconsciousness and the use of primitive or immature unconscious mental defenses mechanisms one needs their warrior archetype to step to the front of the stage to be able to face fully the experiences and challenges of this human life. I'm happy to listen to you and your story but I am even more interested in seeing you move beyond the story that the victim archetype wants to tell over and over. Storytelling from this perspective is a defense against fully feeling the unresolved emotions that are key to unlocking repressed/suppressed/denied energies. I will ask you to fully feel your emotions in your body because it is key to resolving the drivers of the repetition compulsion-the need to repeat your lessons or experiences over and over again. Freud and Jung both understood that through the unconscious repetition compulsion our past wounds and stories tend to repeat themselves over and over again in our circle of the future. It's often said in business that the best predictor to future outcomes is past performance. We study history in school, in hopes to learn from our forefathers and foremother's past mistakes and not to repeat them.
Intense Depth Work
My prescribed program for healing is demanding and working with me is not for everyone. As much as I can accept and be with your issues I want to move you towards healing as quickly as possible. Being with and accepting that we all have issues and problems is wonderful but the path towards healing requires a heroic effort of stepping out of our dysfunctional habit patterns and conditioning. I will ask you to enter the mind gym and the emotion gym and work out daily. In the gym you will learn to use and sharpen skills so I don't have to prescribe you pills. The vast majority of my patients face their unfoldning karmas with minimal or no psychiatric medication. In addition the vast majority of the people who enter with psychmeds leave without them. This is no small task. We live in a culture and society moving so fast that we need psychmeds and partysubstances to numb our feelings and not feel our wounds. To step out of this cultural conditioning takes a heroic deed performed by your warrior archetype.