“What is going on in me, and why can’t I Stop Reacting” by Diane Renz, LPC.

When we are triggered emotionally, it can all feel sort of choiceless; like we have lost control of ourselves. Even if we have the awareness of our reaction, it is difficult to stop our emotional response, because the nervous system, the brain, the memory centers are all interacting.

Our learned style of relating
Most often our emotional language relationally stems from our earliest attachment styles. If you have had a fairly consistent caregiver who was attuned to your needs, you have what is termed “secure attachment.” When struggles occur in your relationships as an adult, you are able to remain in connection and work through the difficulty. If, however, your early caregiver was inconsistent, either too intrusive or unavailable, your attachment style might be “anxious” or “avoidant” as a child and termed “preoccupied” or “dismissive” as an adult.

People with a dismissive style have a withdrawing quality that implies the lack of trust that anyone will be there for them; they do it themselves, it’s not that big a deal anyway. This person has hard time forming and keeping relationships. Dismissive style relies on the thinking brain and logic.

People with a preoccupied style go toward relationships all the time out of anxiety and uncertainty, anxious to talk and make sure everything is okay. They look for validation and feel they can’t do anything on their own; they are nothing without someone. Preoccupied style relies on the emotional brain.

There is another attachment style category, called “unresolved.” This is relative to traumatic events occurring during childhood, which could be a complicated death or direct physical abuse, incest, etc., and lead to very erratic and chaotic interactions with others. Unresolved style relies on the primal brain, relative to assessing for safety in the environment, a survivalistic hyperarousal of the fight or  flight mechanism.

How our brains respond
Our “M.O.,” our consistent fallback approach when stress or conflict arise in a relationship, happens in rapid-fire motion. We are “reacting” versus “responding,” and the basic difference between the two has to do with two different areas of our brains. Reactivity arising out of the emotional center (Limbic), and responsiveness, from our reasoning center (cortex). When we get triggered, our brains lose connection, go offline so to speak in our higher functioning reasoning cortex. The task is to reconnect the lines between the limbic/emotional and the executive/cortex.

That process begins with awareness of body sensation apart from the story content of “he said, she said.” By attuning to your internal somatic senses, “I notice my racing heart, the tightening in my stomach, I can feel my rapid breath…,” focal attention redirects the brain and allows the pause necessary to bring forth the possibility of changing the repeated past pattern of always doing such and such. The interactive loop between body sensation, nervous system, brain, emotion, thoughts/beliefs, behavior is constantly occurring, and we can learn how to intercede on any level to form new memory and thus, new reaction.

The past is not in the past if we have not integrated the memory. The memory center of our brain includes Explicit and Implicit Memory. Explicit memory is the awareness of the facts and reality of an event as it happened in the past. However, implicit memory involves the activation of our sensations, feelings, perceptions, bodily actions, mental models at the time of the event (generalized frame of understanding experience), as well as our priming to react (nervous system ready to respond to similar experience). Implicit memory enters our nervous system without our even being aware of it. It is the first layer of memory processing, and is all we have until the age of 18 months. To integrate an implicit memory into the conscious, factual past of explicit memory requires an area of the limbic/emotional brain called the hippocampus.

Learning to react differently when triggered Our emotional responses, or “language,” when we are relating, points toward our implicit memory triggers. We need to begin to intercede from a somatic or body level, which can then re-inform the emotion, then re-inform the thought perception, and then change the need to act on the urge toward old patterns of behavior.

When we get triggered and are reminded of the past unresolved issues, our body signals to us the experience of the past as if it is happening now. Take the example of a partner not responding to us; it reminds us of how our father didn’t listen and ignored us; we feel the same sinking feeling in the stomach, the same feelings of anxiety, frustration and hurt rise, the negative self perception of worthlessness begins the loop of negative self talk. Our bodily action or behavior might be to get angry and yell. Our mental model might look like: men = abandonment, and our priming might be to utilize past information to ready us to take action to protect ourselves. However, if we resist these familiar reactions, and “re-inform” with a new mental model and new sensory experience, the new relational interaction, both externally and internally, will create new a memory.

Once we begin to understand the sanity of our insanity, that our brain/bodies, mind/hearts, are trying to keep us safe, we can then inquire into the data in our memory banks, find out how relevant they are, and begin the slow journey back to a more compassionate, conscious interaction with our reactiveness. By learning how to cultivate awareness beyond  basic memory and survival, we can expand the possibility to relate to our inherent safety, belonging, and connectedness.

Diane Renz, a licensed psychotherapist, founder of Your Gateway to Healing, writer, workshop facilitator, utilizes both her academic background and personal experiences to explore how pain can become our possibility. She currently studies with Dr. Dan Siegel integrating the latest scientific understandings on neuroscience and Mindfulness within her work. For more information feel free to visit www.yourgatewaytohealing.com.

Copyright 2011 Diane Renz, L.P.C., Your Gateway to Healing, Inc.

To read more from this author, visit her bio page:

Share

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Plata on May 23 ordering the state of California to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 (from more than 140,000 to 110,000 inmates) over the next two years has received headlines, editorials and letters to the editor in newspapers around the country, as it should have. But since both the reasons for this decision, and its likely consequences, are easily misunderstood, and its historical implications are not widely appreciated, many fallacious comments about it are already widespread, both among the general public and even in the dissents penned by the four Supreme Court Justices who disagreed with the majority opinion. For that reason, as a psychiatrist with more than forty years’ experience in developing methods of violence prevention both in prisons and following the release of prisoners to the community, and whose testimony as an expert witness in this case was in agreement with what turned out to be the majority opinion of the Court, I would like to explain why this Supreme Court decision is a major, and very positive, historical event.

The main effect of this decision is to begin the process of undoing two of the most damaging and destructive mistakes that have been made in American life in the past half century, one in our criminal justice system, and the other in our mental health system. The mistake in our criminal justice system is the failed experiment in social engineering called “mass incarceration,” as a result of which the U.S. now has a higher rate of imprisonment than we have ever had before in our history, and more than any other country on earth, with rates ten times higher than any European country’s, and even higher than the most repressive police states, such as Iran, Syria, Russia and China. The mistake in our mental health system has been our failed “de-institutionalization” of the mentally ill in America, which would more appropriately be called “trans-institutionalization,” since a majority of the mentally ill have merely been transferred from the failed mental hospitals of the past into the even worse prisons of the present.

But let me first emphasize that the Supreme Court did not justify its decision on the ground that its purpose was to undo those two mistakes, which only legislatures can do. Rather, they ordered the state of California to reduce the overcrowding in its prisons because that was an urgent matter of life and death that violated the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” The severity and consequences of the overcrowding in California’s prisons had caused not merely a problem in living conditions; it had caused a problem in dying conditions. Even as the litigation was going on, solid documentation from the prisons showed that one California prisoner was dying every five to six days from preventable but untreated medical and psychiatric causes, and that the provision of adequate medical and mental health care was impossible when the prisons were so overcrowded that even the doctors’ offices and infirmaries had to be used as bedrooms. This failure to provide necessary medical care amounted to inflicting a de facto death penalty on each prisoner who died as a result.

Nevertheless, even though the express purpose of the Supreme Court’s decision was not to remedy the mistakes I summarized above, I think it is important to recognize that the effects and implications of this decision — its side-effects, if you will — could be to begin the process of correcting the historic errors to which I will devote the remainder of this article.

To deal with the criminal justice and penal systems first: During the first three quarters of the twentieth century the rate of imprisonment in the United States was essentially unchanged, at roughly 100 prisoners (plus or minus twenty) per 100,000 population. Beginning in the mid-1970s, after President Nixon declared wars on both “Crime” and “Drugs,” we began for the first time in our history escalating our incarceration rate uninterruptedly from year to year, so that we now have a rate of more than 700 per 100,000 population.

For the first three quarters of the twentieth century, before we began increasing the rate at which we put people into prison and kept them there, the rate of violent crime in our society increased and decreased from one time period to another, completely independently of the imprisonment rate.

For example, before we began the orgy of mass incarceration, murder rates in America increased to epidemic levels on two occasions, beginning in 1904 and 1921, and then decreased back to normal (endemic) levels without our making any changes in the incarceration rate.

Many people have had the mistaken impression that the era of “mass incarceration” that began after Nixon declared his “war on crime” was responsible for the ending of a third murder epidemic that began in 1970, Nixon’s second year in office, and did not end until 1997, Clinton’s fifth year in office (by which time the majority of new prisoners had for many years been men who had never committed a violent crime in their lives, let alone one as serious as murder). But even a cursory review of the relationship between imprisonment and murder will suffice to show that the theory that the increase in imprisonment led to the decrease in murder is contradicted by the facts. Let me explain.

In 1970, when our imprisonment rate was still about 100 per 100,000 Americans, exactly where it had been for the first three quarters of the century, our age-adjusted murder rate was 8.3. By 1985 our imprisonment rate had doubled, to about 200 per 100,000. What was our murder rate then? Still 8.3 per 100,000. By 1996 our imprisonment rate had doubled again, to about 400 per 100,000. What was our murder rate then? Absolutely unchanged, at 8.3 per 100,000.

In other words, the doubling and even re-doubling of our imprisonment rate did not make the slightest dent in our murder rate. As the National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1994, after reviewing the relationship between the imprisonment rate and the murder rate, these figures are inconsistent with the claim that increased imprisonment has any demonstrable effect in reducing the murder rate. In fact, as the Supreme Court commented in the majority opinion in Plata v. Brown, there is considerable evidence that the over-use and overcrowding of our prisons may do more to increase the rate of violence, both in our prisons and our communities, than to reduce it. For prisons have been known for centuries as “schools for crime” — I would call them “graduate schools.” And my own first-hand observations of prisons and prisoners over the past 40 years has convinced me that the most effective way to turn a non-violent man into a violent one is to send him to prison – which is exactly what we have been doing for the past 35 years.

Between 1993 and 2000 the murder rate in America underwent a sudden, steep and uninterrupted reduction from 10.5 per 100,000 to 6.4, which ended the murder epidemic from which we had been suffering since 1970. What changes in our society could have had such a dramatic and rapid effect on the murder rate? It was not the mass incarceration policy, since we had been following that approach since the mid-1970s with not a single year’s decrease below epidemic levels of 8 to 11. Beginning in 1993, however, Clinton’s first year in office, the murder rate for the first time since 1933 began a steep and uninterrupted year by year decline, beginning at 10.5 in 1993, falling below 8 by 1997, and bottoming out at 6.4 by 2000, his last year in office (following which, under Bush Jr., it began once again increasing).

To explain why this occurred, we need to know what changes in society have been shown to increase or decrease the murder rate. The three best-documented ones are these: the rate and duration of unemployment; the frequency, depth and duration of recessions and depressions; and the degree of social and economic inequality in income and wealth, i.e., the size of the gap between the rich and the poor, or in other words, the degree of relative poverty. Clearly, these three groups of socio-economic variables are closely related to each other, they tend to vary together and reinforce each other. When any one of them has increased, the U.S. murder rate has increased, and when any of them has decreased, the murder rate has decreased – from 1900, when the U.S. first began measuring death rates by cause each year, to 2007, the last year for which we have comparable data.

Thus we have an answer to our mystery. The murder rate reached the lowest level in thirty years by Clinton’s last years in office not because of mass incarceration, but because that is when the rate and duration of unemployment reached the lowest levels in thirty years; both minimum and median wages increased in real terms for the first time in thirty years; the “negative income tax,” the Earned Income Tax Credit, which many economists have cited as the most rapid and effective method of reducing poverty and inequality that we have yet invented, was much increased by Clinton, who defeated Republican efforts to abolish it entirely; the nation experienced the longest uninterrupted economic expansion in its history, with not a single month of recession; and the percentage of families in the demographic groups most vulnerable to homicide (African-Americans and Latinos) whose incomes were below the poverty line reached the lowest level since those figures first began being measured .

In other words, if we want to be safe from the most serious forms of violent crime, mass imprisonment is unnecessary, ineffective and a huge waste of taxpayers’ money, not to mention that it threatens to turn us into a police state rather than the “land of the free” that we like to advertise ourselves as to the rest of the world. And to the extent that it has any effect at all on murder rates, that may only be to increase and prolong the epidemics of murder by subjecting the millions of men who are sent to prison (90 per cent of whom will return to the community within a few years) to the most powerful causes of violence, namely, the humiliation, degradation and brutalization to which prison life exposes them.

If mass imprisonment is so ineffective and even counter-productive as a means of reducing the level of violence in our society (which is ostensibly its main purpose), why did we institute it? And why only in the mid-1970s? The answers are distressingly clear. It was not because our murder rate had increased to unprecedented heights. Our murder rate had been as high or higher than it was in 1970 (8.3 per 100,000) during almost every year between 1904 and 1935, and yet we did not increase our imprisonment rate during those years, and in fact brought the murder rate down again to sub-epidemic levels every time we improved economic equality and well-being — as we did during the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. So an elevated murder rate is neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about an elevated imprisonment rate, and an elevated imprisonment rate is neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about a decline in the murder rate.

The same is true of the serious “index” crimes in general. Mass incarceration is not the result of, or a response to, an increase in violent crime, for such crimes had increased before 1975 without eliciting any increase in imprisonment, and had decreased without any need for increased imprisonment. But what is true is that the rate of incarceration per crime increased. During the last quarter of the twentieth century the rate of incarceration per crime in state and federal prisons increased five-fold, from 21 per 10,000 index crimes in 1975 to 105 in 1999. In other words, the penal system became five times as punitive, even when we hold the crime rate constant.

So what was unique about 1970-71, when the “wars” on crime and drugs were declared, was not an unprecedented spike in the murder rate. What was unique about it was that this was the era in which the Republican party realized that there was a “white backlash” against the most far-reaching civil rights bills (of 1964 and 1965) since the constitutional amendments that ended slavery after the Civil War, and that they could benefit from that politically if they could find some way to diminish the degree of racial equality those bills promised, and re-institute white supremacy. As Loic Wacquant, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out, this was hardly a new development in the history of American racism. After the Civil War and its aftermath ended slavery, the South re-instituted racial hierarchy and white supremacy by means of a whole series of tactics: poll taxes and “literacy tests” to limit the black vote; tenant-farming systems, to limit black land-ownership and economic equality; “Jim Crow” laws and segregation to end any possibility of social equality; segregated schools, to end any possibility of educational equality; and regular lynching “parties” — and they were parties, celebrated with picnics by whole families, including young children, who sent postcards with photographs of the murders to their friends and relatives – in which blacks were tortured, castrated, burned alive and hanged, with the full knowledge and collusion of local “law enforcement” authorities, in order to terrorize the black population into abandoning any hope of equality with whites.

I mention these distasteful details in order to remind you that it would be almost impossible to exaggerate the emotional power of racism in American history. As the Civil War demonstrated, white southerners by the millions were so driven by this fever that they did not hesitate to kill as many Yankees as possible, and even to sacrifice their own lives by the hundreds of thousands in their zeal to defend slavery and white supremacy. By the late 1950s racists in the South and the North, from governors and sheriffs and policemen to ordinary citizens, were still so blinded by race hatred that they risked the death penalty and life imprisonment in order to terrorize and kill as many black children and civil rights workers as possible. For millions of Americans, racial prejudice was not just an “attitude,” it was a holy cause that they valued more than their own lives or those of others, both of which they were more than willing to sacrifice in that cause. To speak of this as a kind of “mass psychosis” is hardly an exaggeration.

The modern Democratic party first began fighting against these forms of racial discrimination when President Truman integrated the armed services in the late 1940s. This prompted the beginning of a renewed white backlash against racial equality, leading the Southern Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond to leave that party and form a third one, the “Dixiecrat” party, and run for president against Truman, in an attempt to prevent him from gaining the white southern Democratic vote. (Thurmond, like virtually the entire southern congressional delegation, which had been uniformly Democratic ever since the South lost the Civil War to a Republican president, eventually became a Republican, in reaction against the modern Democratic party’s support of racial equality.)

The racists failed to defeat Truman, however, and suffered another defeat when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agreed on the 1954 de-segregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education (which was enforced, to his credit, by a Republican president, Eisenhower, and indeed was written by a Republican former governor of California, Earl Warren, who had been appointed Chief Justice by Eisenhower). But the last straw, for white supremacists, appeared to be Lyndon Johnson’s two landmark Civil Rights bills of 1964 and 1965 that outlawed segregation and guaranteed equal voting rights for blacks. This stimulated even more of a white backlash from politicians like George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, and in 1966 the Republicans made huge electoral gains in Congress and in governorships and state legislatures throughout the country (on such a large scale that some analysts described that election as the end of Johnson’s presidency). And in fact the Republicans, and the remaining Southern Democrats, were able to prevent any significant civil rights legislation from that time on.

When Nixon ran for President in 1968, he succeeded quite consciously in exploiting the anti-black (and hence anti-Democratic) sentiment in the country by means of coded language: as everyone knew, the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs,” on which he campaigned and which he and his political allies throughout the country succeeded in turning into law after his election, were code words for “War on Blacks” (and, I should add, for “War on the Poor” generally, including poor whites — although blacks, being even poorer and less powerful than poor whites, were actually the most deeply injured by these political strategies). And it was those “Wars” that led directly to the era of mass incarceration, as the only way to re-institute white supremacy after the previous ones — slavery, lynching, segregation, poll taxes, etc. — had been declared illegal.

Many facts about the history of mass incarceration are consistent with that interpretation. First, the proportion of blacks admitted to our state and federal prisons has nearly doubled since the incarceration rate began increasing from the mid-1970s on. For the first time in our history, more than half of the men being sent to our prisons are blacks, even though black men make up less than seven per cent of our adult population. In fact, the ethnic composition of our prisons has exactly reversed itself, from 70 percent white at mid-century to 70 percent black and Latino in 2000, even though there has not been any fundamental change in the patterns of criminal activity among those different ethnic groups.

Second, as the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out earlier this month, “despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites. …The racial disparities are staggering.” Since non-violent violations of the drug laws are the main “crimes” for which most people have been imprisoned for the past few decades, this clearly contributes to the disproportionate imprisonment of blacks.

Third, now that poll taxes, literacy tests and other means of disenfranchising blacks have been prevented by civil rights laws, the mass incarceration of blacks has made it possible for many states to deprive them of the right to vote, often for life, on the grounds that they are now convicted felons (even when the so-called “felony” is a non-violent and victimless violation of the drug laws, as it most often is) and that felons should not be allowed to vote. The result is that in any given year one black man in every seven is prevented from voting. Counting blacks and poor whites together, nearly four million Americans are legally forbidden to vote. Since blacks and the poor vote overwhelmingly more frequently for Democrats, it is clear which party benefits from this strategy.

Fourth, since a prison inmate cannot work at a job, and a former inmate often cannot find a job, the mass incarceration of blacks removes millions of blacks as potential competitors with whites for the jobs that are increasingly scarce for the members of both ethnic groups.

These are among the reasons that I agree with the many prominent social scientists, such as Loic Wacquant of Berkeley and Michelle Alexander of Ohio State (author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Imprisonment), that the main political function and purpose, and the only obvious reason, for the introduction of mass incarceration since the mid-1970s has to been to re-institute white supremacy, in a white (and Republican-supported) backlash against the success of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

Many political scientists and historians have commented that the political transformation of the Southern states from Democratic to Republican was the most important political change in American politics in the twentieth century. It certainly was the main change that made it possible for Republican presidents to terminate the New Deal Consensus which since Roosevelt’s election in 1932 had kept Democrats in the White House for the next twenty years, and indeed for 28 of the next 36 years (1932-1968), and led to the most bi-partisan period in American political history. Even the one Republican president during that era, Eisenhower, supported the New Deal, with major expansions of social security and unemployment insurance. In fact, he did so enthusiastically and proudly, and commented that anyone, Republican or Democrat, who would not do the same was “stupid”.

However, all that changed with the elections of 1966 and, especially, 1968, when Nixon became the first Republican president in what became a quarter century of Republicans (with the single one-term exception of Carter, who did not interrupt the Republican juggernaut). In fact, from Nixon’s election to Obama’s, Republicans led the country for 28 of the following 40 years (1968-2008). So the policy of mass incarceration, and the white supremacy movement that it supported and was supported by, proved to be a politically effective strategy for those who felt mortally threatened by social, economic and racial equality. Only now that mass incarceration itself is threatening every state in the country with bankruptcy (for few social practices are more expensive than imprisoning people; as someone said, a year in jail would pay for a year in Yale), are we beginning to be able to reconsider whether we really want to spend so much money just to keep blacks and the poor “in their place.” Even the Supreme Court decision I am writing about here would not result in any decrease in the imprisonment rate if the state of California had sufficient money to build enough more prisons that the overcrowding in them could be diminished without reducing the prison population.

Now let us turn to the mistake we have made in the mental health system. Beginning in the 1960s the U.S. began a laudable endeavor to close down the gargantuan, overcrowded, understaffed, geographically isolated and anti-therapeutic state mental hospitals that had appropriately been nick-named “snake pits” (after a muck-raking novel and movie of the same name that exposed how horrific those travesties of treatment really were). Our mistake was that instead of replacing those madhouses with a comprehensive, humane and well-staffed network of group homes, half-way houses and mental health clinics and day-care centers, supplemented by the flexible use of small general and mental hospitals for those in need of briefer or more prolonged in-patient care, respectively, located near the families and in the neighborhoods from which the patients had come, as advocated by the original exponents of “de-institutionalization,” we simply closed down the so-called mental hospitals and discharged the patients to fend for themselves. As a result, most wound up either homeless, dead, an overwhelming burden to families unequipped to cope with them, or incarcerated in jails and prisons, often for eccentric but non-violent behaviors caused by their mental illnesses that were nevertheless unacceptable and disturbing enough to their neighbors to provoke judges to remove them from the community into the only available alternatives – prisons and jails.

As a result, our prisons and jails, which were originally intended for the punishment of criminals who had knowingly and intentionally harmed their neighbors, became our de facto mental health care system. As the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey put it, the largest mental hospital in the country is now the Los Angeles Jail. And he is right: there are more mentally ill people there than in any mental hospital in the country (among the few that still exist). This is part of a phenomenon that another psychiatrist, Alan Stone of the Harvard Law and Medical Schools, has called the “expanding balloon” theory of deviance, namely, that in any given society there will be a certain number of people whose behavior makes them unacceptable to their neighbors, so they will be removed from the community into isolated institutions. Thus, if you close down enough mental hospitals and do not replace them with acceptable substitutes, the public may respond — and in the United States, has responded — to the eccentric behavior of some of those who are mentally ill by placing them in prisons and jails instead. One of the most shocking statistics about this phenomenon is that half a century ago the overall rate of removal from the community was almost exactly the same as it is today, except that then about 75 per cent of the institutionalized were in mental hospitals and only about 25 per cent in prisons and jails; whereas nowadays almost 95 per cent are in prisons and jails, and only 5 per cent in mental hospitals. One does not need to be a psychiatrist to realize that prisons are the worst possible places for the mentally ill, for reasons too obvious to need to be enumerated.

Thus the most wonderful consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision in Plata v. Brown may be that it will constitute the first step toward swinging the pendulum back from mass incarceration to the vastly more limited use of prisons as our last resort for protecting the community from the small number of truly violent and dangerous of our fellow citizens; and also that it will begin the job of swinging the pendulum back from the criminalization of mental illness by returning the mentally ill from prisons and jails back to the mental health system, where they belong. This could be our wake-up call, to remind us that we still have not built enough alternatives to the rightfully abandoned “snake pits.”

As we do that, it will also be appropriate, in my opinion, for us to recognize that among the mistakes we made when we got carried away by the “de-institutionalization” movement was to be overly optimistic about our ability to treat some of those with severe and intractable mental illnesses effectively enough that they can live, in a manner that is humane and safe both for them and for those among whom they live, outside of long-term in-patient mental hospitals. Clearly, such institutions should not become reincarnations of the old “snake pits.” They should be much smaller, and located as close as possible to the neighborhoods from which the patients come. But there are a few individuals — a small minority among those who are mentally ill, but each of whom is nevertheless a real human being whom we cannot in good conscience abandon to the tender mercies of the streets or the prisons — who are genuinely dangerous to themselves and/or others, and who can only manage to live in a manner that is safe both for them and for those around them when they are given round-the-clock care, supervision and treatment in a locked, secure in-patient hospital, and not just for a month at a time, as is all too often our current practice, but in some cases for years, which may in some cases constitute a lifetime — at least until our methods of treatment become more successful. But that is a reform that will need to take place within the mental health system itself, and while it may be stimulated by Plata v. Brown, it is at most implicit, not explicit, in the Supreme Court’s decision.

I realize that some people may wonder whether, among the California prisoners who will be returned to the community as a result of Plata v. Brown, aren’t those who suffer from major mental illnesses likely to be more dangerous than the “sane” prisoners? Fortunately, as I testified in my deposition, my “expert witness” report, and in my trial testimony, there is good evidence from a number of studies of this issue that lead to three relevant conclusions: First, that the mentally ill prisoners are actually less likely to commit violent offenses when they are returned to the community than those who are not mentally ill. Second, they are more likely to harm themselves, or to be harmed by someone else, than they are to harm others (both in prison and in the community). Third, that they are little more likely to harm anyone else than are their neighbors in the community who are not mentally ill. That of course does not mean that there are not some mentally ill prisoners (and non-prisoners) who are indeed very dangerous and who should remain in a maximum-security institutional setting, though preferably one that is a mental hospital, not a prison. Some mentally ill people commit homicides, just as some who are not mentally ill do. But that is no reason to discriminate against mentally ill prisoners as a class, or to fear them more than, or even as much as, those who are, according to our current diagnostic criteria, not mentally ill.

The Supreme Court’s decision acknowledges explicitly that the California prison system should make every effort to discriminate between those prisoners who are more dangerous and those who are less so as it makes its decisions concerning which prisoners to release to the community. But making those judgments is part of the every-day responsibilities of any prison system, even among those who remain in the prison, who are routinely and systematically classified as to their perceived level of dangerousness according to a whole set of established criteria.

Some years ago I wrote a psychiatric journal article called “The Last Mental Hospital.” It was about prisons, which had indeed become our last mental hospitals. In it I made the point that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” What I meant was that in the early nineteenth century one of the greatest social reformers in our history, Dorothea Dix, toured the nation’s jails and found to her distress that the inmates included a large proportion of people who were mentally ill, not criminals. This inspired her, and she in turn inspired the nation, to remove the mentally ill from the jails, and to place them in small, humane mental hospitals. This resulted in what has been called the “moral treatment” era, which was the most successful and effective mental health system we have ever had. Unfortunately, by the late nineteenth century, after one wave of (non-Anglo-Saxon) immigrants after another provoked an ethnocentric, xenophobic reaction from the WASP majority, the moral treatment era was replaced by the “snake pit” era, which was in turn replaced by the “trans-institutionalization” era in which prisons have become, as I said above, the de facto mental health system. In other words, we have returned to exactly the same social pathology that Dorothea Dix diagnosed and cured, with most of the mentally ill members of our society in jails and prisons rather than in mental hospitals or reasonable alternatives in the community.

If we respond to the Supreme Court’s recent decision with good judgment, we will use it as an opportunity to further a new transition to the kind of mental health system that was originally envisioned and recommended by the original leaders of the deinstitutionalization movement that closed down the old snake pits. And that we will end the era of mass incarceration, and thereby move our country back from the brink of becoming one of the most repressive police states in human history. Our prison system is by no means as cruel and destructive as the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, but it is alarmingly similar to the system of apartheid in the pre-Mandela South Africa. For example, the incarceration rate of blacks in the US today is higher than it was in South Africa during the apartheid era. And it is also uncomfortably similar to the “Gulag Archipelago” of the former Soviet Union. That is why the great Norwegian criminologist, Nils Christie, sub-titled his book about America’s mass incarceration system, and the “prison-industrial complex” that both supports and is supported by it, as “Towards GULAGS, Western Style.” My hope is that this historic but narrowly divided five-to-four decision by the Supreme Court will remind us all how fragile and easily overwhelmed democracy, compassion, rationality and non-violence are, and will strengthen our determination to support those bedrock foundations of our lives together in this country.

James Gilligan, M.D., is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, Adjunct Professor in the School of Law, and Collegiate Professor in the School of Arts and Science at New York University. He is a former president of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. He is the author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, Preventing Violence: Prospects for Tomorrow, and the forthcoming Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others. As a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School for many years, he headed the Institute of Law and Psychiatry, and directed mental health services for the Massachusetts prisons and prison mental hospital. He served as an expert witness in the litigation that was the subject of the Supreme Court decision in Plata V. Brown, to which this article is devoted.

Share

There is a misconception in our culture concerning the reason why intimate relationships deteriorate and end. The typical relationship cycle is depicted as follows: Two people meet. They fall in love. They enjoy a certain portion of exhilarating time together. Then, reality sets in. The spark fades. Routine takes over. Fights begin. And love ends. A common conclusion surrounding the downfall of relationships is based on the distorted notion that falling in love has more to do with living in fantasy, and falling out of love has more to do with facing reality. The truth, however, is almost always just the opposite.

When two people fall in love, they’re very often the most simultaneously open, vulnerable, interested, and independent versions of themselves. They are on their own side, going after what they want, and consequently showing the best aspects of themselves. In this respect, one might say people are the most themselves when falling in love. In the early stages of a relationship, people are interested in getting to know someone for who they are separate from their relationship to them. Thus, when a couple meets, they are typically more independent and respectful of each other than they will be as their relationship develops.

In letting down their guard down and getting close to someone else, people let go of long engrained defenses that have held them back throughout their lives. Examples of this can be found in almost every “how we got together” story you’ve ever heard. Whether it’s overcoming a fear of getting involved, breaking a pattern of only dating one’s polar opposite, or finally being willing to open up to someone else, these are the personal tipping points that often send people tumbling into love, and this feeling of love is inarguably real to those who experience it.

So what then destroys this unbridled sense of adoration? Once people start to form an illusion of coming together as one, they begin to lose the sense of being together as two. This process soon diminishes the excitement that first drew them together. Over time, people forego the spontaneity and openness they had when they first met and replace the sense of adventure and uncertainty with routine and security. In other words, a couple shifts their reality from being two free people in love to being two dependent people in a “Fantasy Bond.”

A Fantasy Bond is a concept developed by my father, psychologist and author Robert Firestone, to describe an illusion of connection people form to create a sense of safety and security. As a relationship becomes more intimate and more important to us, we start to feel vulnerable and afraid that things will change. Our worry that we will be hurt or rejected is often apparent to us. But there is another element that threatens us of which we are often less aware: being seen as truly lovable by someone else. This view of us challenges the negative aspects of our old familiar self-image. Even though we don’t like our old identity, we are reluctant to part with it because it’s how we’ve always known ourselves. We grew up believing certain negative things about ourselves, and therefore we’ve grown comfortable accepting these things as truth. In an effort to preserve this familiar identity and to protect ourselves from potentially painful outcomes, we often form a Fantasy Bond. In this process we hold on to a fantasy of being in love while retreating from our partners. We become increasingly inward and withdraw from being vulnerable and open to those we care for.

For example, when a couple first gets together, they may enjoy feeling romantic, looking into each other’s eyes, exchanging compliments and outwardly expressing affection. However, as time passes and one’s defenses kick in, they may start to feel less comfortable with eye contact, more disbelieving of compliments, and less open to affection. Qualities they once adored become traits they are guarded against, and quite often, even critical of.

When a friend of mine described how she had fallen madly in love with her partner, she emphasized how taken she was with his outward expressions of love. She found his openness and acknowledgment to be romantic and sincere. However, after a few months of dating, she noticed herself feeling slightly annoyed by his attentions. She started to alternate between seeing herself as unworthy and him as needy. When she thought more about it objectively, she realized that her reactions seemed off, and neither observation was true of herself nor of her partner. What then was causing her discomfort?

A few weeks after posing this question, my friend flew out to visit her family for the weekend. She noticed that none of the couples in her family showed outward affection toward each other or paid each other a compliment. She began to realize that this was reflective of her childhood, as her father didn’t believe in “patting anyone on the back,” preferring to correct minor flaws than to acknowledge major achievements. She also noticed that her mother rarely hugged or showed affection to her husband or her children. Though my friend didn’t like the way her family members interacted, once her own relationship got serious, she started acting out the very same negative behaviors she’d observed throughout her childhood. By making this connection in her mind, my friend was able to break this pattern in her behavior. She began to consciously act against the critical inner voices in her head telling her to keep a distance and to resist affection.

Relationship milestones like moving in together, getting married, having children, or even simply acknowledging affection for each other can lead a couple to feel a certain amount of anxiety. When people identify the emotional baggage they bring to a relationship that causes them to react in these ways, they can resist the lure of falling into a Fantasy Bond. My friend, for example, could easily have never caught on to her defensive patterns and believed the thoughts telling her that she “didn’t deserve love” and that her partner was “too nice to her” or “too needy.” Had she done so, she would likely have found herself pushing him away. She would have taken actions that inhibited much of the spontaneous affection between them and fallen into a pattern of controlling his responses to her.

These shifting dynamics may seem subtle at first, but little controlling behaviors, small criticisms, and minor outbursts can escalate into full-blown destroyers of a relationship. The more we indulge in the nagging critical thoughts toward our self and our partner, the farther we distance ourselves from the real feelings of enjoyment and love that we feel for each other. To avoid this negative outcome, we must continuously maintain an interest and investigation into ourselves. What are our defenses? Are we pushing away someone because of our own fear of intimacy? Are we acting out patterns from our past? Are we controlling our relationship so as to avoid our own feelings of jealousy, insecurity, or shame?

When we start to use a relationship to serve an inner purpose rather than to get to know someone and appreciate what that person adds to our life, we run the risk of forming a Fantasy Bond. Warning signs of a Fantasy Bond can include behaviors that subtly limit us and our partners. These patterns can include speaking as a “we,” (i.e. We don’t like to travel. We prefer to stay in for dinner.) Another sign of a Fantasy Bond involves defining each other in terms of roles like “the bread-winner,” “the better driver,” or “the talkative one.” We may also start critiquing each other with terms like “always” or “never” (i.e. She is always telling me what to do. He never helps out around the house.) We might also notice that we’ve started pulling away from someone we love and listening to critical coaching that tells us things like, “She is trying to humiliate you.” “He doesn’t care about you.” “What he is doing is so embarrassing. What will people think?”

These behaviors deny the innate separateness of two individuals in a relationship, yet at the same time they create a real distance by breeding resentment and a desire to be free from the roles and restrictions imposed by a forced sensed of connection. It is important to be cautious of times we are no longer relating to our partner as the person he or she is but are merely making a connection to support our own sense of security.

When we choose someone who we’re lucky enough to fall in love with, it is likely that we’ve let our guard down long enough to be vulnerable and truly ourselves. However, it is wise to be wary of our defenses creeping in. They may feel familiar and self-protective, but ultimately they lead us further from our self and further from the one we love. The more we challenge ourselves and deal with our own limitations, the better able we are to be fully present in our relationship. By resisting the lures of a Fantasy Bond, we can even be among the few who elude the fairy tale, yet manage to find true and lasting love.

Dr. Lisa Firestone, PhD, is the Director of Research and Education for The Glendon Association. Since 1987, she has been involved in clinical training and applied research in suicide and violence. In collaboration with Dr. Robert Firestone, her studies resulted in the development of the Firestone Assessment of Self-Destructive Thoughts (FAST) and the Firestone Assessment of Violent Thoughts (FAVT). Dr. Firestone has published numerous professional articles, and most recently was the co-author of the books: Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships (APA Books, 2006),Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice(New Harbinger, 2002), and Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion: The Wisdom of Psychotherapy (APA Books, 2003).

Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships

by Robert W. Firestone, Lisa A. Firestone, Joyce Catlett

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Revolutionary Program to Counter Negative Thoughts and Live Free from Imagined Limitations
by Robert W. Firestone, Lisa Firestone, Joyce Catlett, Pat Love

Share

But for those times when we can legitimately say, “I am depressed,” the weight of our emotional state feels as if it might swallow us whole. We can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel and aren’t particularly interested in trying to move in that direction anyway. Some see depression as a punishment for some prior action, or an affliction from which to be cured as quickly as possible. And while medication has its place in alleviating some emotional pain, it often acts as a Band-Aid to quickly cover the pain, without really looking at the nature of the wound. This is when depression returns again and again, or simply stays with us, always just beneath the surface, threatening to leak out and expose the darkness that swirls within.

And yet there is a unique gift that only depression can offer. The catch is, we must spend time with it, get to know it, understand why it has chosen to show up at this time, and why it insists on sticking around. This is completely contrary to our instincts, when all we want is relief and escape from the abyss.

Philip Martin writes about depression’s gifts in his book, The Zen Path Through Depression, encouraging a somewhat paradoxical approach to this emotional state:

“Depression is in many ways like suffering from a broken heart. Indeed, when you slow down and begin to pay closer attention to the depression, the physical symptoms themselves may often center in the chest. Anxiety is the fast-beating heart. Hopelessness is the tired heart. Sadness and grief are the pained heart…

For many of us in these times, mind and thought are considered to be useful and valued, while heart and emotions are seen as obstacles. We don’t really know how to grieve and feel pain, but we definitely know how to think…

In the experience of depression, this mind we have depended on so much fails us. It is difficult to make simple decisions, to remember small matters. We feel slow and stupid. Depression in fact magnifies many aspects of our personality and our thought process. Our mind becomes preoccupied with judgments and comparisons…

Meditation helps with this, as it can foster real detachment from these thoughts and moods. We can then begin to disentangle ourselves from our pain. We can begin to move away from what Zen teachers call small mind. We begin to be less impressed with our thoughts.

As the grip of this small mind is lessened, the feelings and emotions of the heart are increased. For a person who has ignored the heart, its calling is persistent and unfamiliar. There are sadness and grief over the past, over all the fleeting moments behind us. We feel all the mistakes we have made, all the hurts we have caused. Depression can be a door into an exploration of our grief. This may be the first time we have faced our grief and honored it, rather than running from it…

Our hope is to practice compassion and kindness toward all. We must practice in this way toward ourselves and our own uncomfortable emotions as well…

In the strong and sometimes overwhelming sadness of depression lies the opportunity to face these difficult feelings with tenderness and compassion, rather than turning away from them.

Another new opportunity can be the experience of empathy. In the depths of depression, a woman I know found she could not watch television, because she wept at almost everything… Opening ourselves into the greater world, we may be feeling for the first time the grief of that world. In that feeling, we can find a compassion within ourselves that is as natural as breathing, a compassion that is always there….

The experience of grief and sadness in depression can be our hearts calling us to listen to suffering and impermanence in our lives…

The open heart sees that there is nothing to protect itself against, that safety is an illusion. In this seeing lies true fearlessness. For as we may find when faced with a physical danger, sometimes the safest place to be is as close as possible to what we fear.”

About the Author
Meredith Watkins, M.A. is a CA licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with years of experience working with women, teenagers, couples and families. She has worked in many settings, including an outpatient psychiatric clinic and a residential eating disorder treatment center. She is currently in private practice in Carlsbad, CA, specializing in individual therapy, Christian therapy, parenting, relationship, and women’s issues. Ultimately, her desire is to equip her clients with the tools they need to manage their own feelings and issues more effectively, creating space for joy and fulfilment in their relationships and lives. Learn more at www.meredithwatkins.net.

Other Posts by This Author:
Peace on Earth Begins with Peace of Heart
Making Peace with Our Bodies
More

Share

It’s tough when a friend or family member is going through a depression. No matter how much you love the people in your life who are struggling, appreciate their company or value their friendship, it can feel impossible to get through to them at times when they are depressed. While you may feel like yelling at them to snap out of it and stop indulging in negative thoughts and feelings, you may also sense their resistance to doing things that could make them feel better. This is because the symptoms of depression can turn people against themselves, making it all the more difficult for them to complete the actions that would help eliminate their symptoms. The important message to get across to people at these times is that depression is not only treatable but temporary. There are ways to get over their depression, and you are there for them to help them through it. Learn more about “caring for a depressed person” by visiting Health.com. There you can get detailed information on what you can do to help someone who is depressed. Click here to continue

Related Articles:
Eight Ways to Actively Fight Depression
Suicide Prevention Advice
Isolation and Loneliness
Critical Inner Voice
Identify Your Critical Inner Voice

Share

It seems everyone, from financial experts to real estate agents, has offered practical advice on how to survive the recent economic downturn. But what about psychological advice? Even as the economy takes a turn for the better, there are few answers on how to cope with the fear and frustration that many of us are still living with everyday. For those of us, the most vital advice is also the simplest: do not isolate yourself.

Not one of us hasn’t felt the weight of the recent economic crisis – not only the practical but the emotional impact. While, in low moments, we may feel alone in this, alone is the last thing we should be. When someone is suffering from emotional depression, therapists will tell them not to isolate themselves, and the same advice holds true when faced with a financial depression. The key in keeping yourself out of the darker corners of your mind is to seek out the friendship and companionship of others.

A natural response when negative emotions are aroused is to become inward. Most of us have learned that when we feel bad, we are supposed to be strong and not bother anyone else with our problems. But this solution never works. Being all alone inside your head is not a good place to be. Pretty soon your negative feelings start working on you. Your fear can turn into torturous, compulsive thinking. Your frustration can turn into feelings of being victimized and powerless. You can begin viewing yourself as a failure, which then triggers shame, guilt and depression. The longer you isolate yourself, the deeper and deeper you will spiral into a negative, self-destructive way of thinking.

However, if you resist the tendency to isolate yourself and reach out to other people, you will find that you are not alone. Others feel like you do; others are going through what you are. And you will find that you aren’t as hard on them as you are on yourself. Your compassionate attitude toward them will influence you to have a friendlier view of yourself. And their benevolent attitude toward you will counteract your negative self-attacks. So for your mental health, and for the mental health of your friends, counteract the impulse to go inward and reach out to others.

Research has proven that being social can help target depression and improve people’s mental health. When you avoid an isolated, self-critical way of thinking, you are far more able to think logically and behave pro-actively. Friends remind you that your worth is not determined by how much you make or defined by what you do. They offer a crucial perspective that counteracts your own critical point of view.

Even if you’re not comfortable turning to your friends for sound psychological advice, the simple distraction of being in another’s presence can take you out of your head. Something as simple as taking a walk in the park, chatting with a stranger or connecting online with an old friend can help free your mind of negative thoughts. When a college classmate of mine was laid off after only a few months at a job she adored, she found solace talking on Facebook with friends who’d undergone a similar fate.

In a recent issue of Newsweek magazine, a reader wrote about a group of people who have met for dinner every Friday night for several years. She spoke of the hardships the various participants have endured over this past year and of how the friendship and concern that have developed among these “dinner guests” is supporting each of them through these hard times. She wrote, “What will save us? I don’t know, but the one thing that helps, from week to week, is dinner with friends…We try to believe that, somehow, we’ll survive this present crisis. But for now, dinner together feels like our last best hope.”

Newsweek, Nov 24, 2008 Just before Thanksgiving, Alicia S Rapp, Melbourne Fla. “My Turn, Dinner for Eight “(myturn.Newsweek.com)

Related Articles:
Isolation and Loneliness Why Layoffs Lead to New Lows in Self-Esteem
Eight Ways to Actively Fight Depression

Share

When you’re depressed, it often feels like nothing in the world can make you feel better. Depression is a  devious disorder, because the symptoms it creates can discourage you from completing the very actions or seeking the help that would get rid of the affliction once and for all. Lack of energy, low self-esteem and dwindling excitement are some of the symptoms that make it hard to get out of a depressed state. For anyone experiencing this stuckness, it’s important to remember that depression is a very common and highly treatable disorder. By treating it like any other physical disease and taking the actions that will destroy the parasites infecting your mental state, you can conquer your depression. Here are eight steps to doing just that.

Recognize and Conquer Your Critical Self Attacks

 Depression is often accompanied by a critical, self-destructive mentality that interferes with and distracts us from our daily lives. When depressed, people tend to accept this negative identity as a true representation of who they are. Many people fail to recognize that this sadistic point of view is actually the voice of a well-hidden enemy within, what psychologist Dr. Robert Firestone refers to as the critical inner voice. Internalized early in live, this inner voice functions like an over-disciplinary parent holding us back and keeping us in our place. Think of these thoughts as being like the parasites that keep you in bed when you’re sick with the flu. Don’t listen to these attacks when they tell you not to pursue your goals or to forego an activity you enjoy. This gives the voice even more power over you. Instead, when you notice these thoughts and attitudes starting to intensify and take precedence over your more realistic, positive ways of thinking, it is essential to identify them as an alien point of view. Ask yourself if you would you think such cruel thoughts about a friend or family member? By having compassion for yourself and responding to this inner voice as an irrational enemy, you can begin to see who you really are more clearly and positively.

Think About What You Could Be Angry At

While some experience depression as a continual state of sadness or increased emotion, some depression can come in the form of a state of numbness – a lack of feeling that weakens all excitement and smothers your potential to feel joy. Cutting off to these emotions could be a defense against something you aren’t comfortable feeling. Many people who suffer from depression are actually masking a feeling of anger. Anger can be a hard thing to accept, as from a very young age we are told to behave, not to throw tantrums or get in fights. While acting abusive is never acceptable, feeling anger is a natural part of our everyday lives. By acknowledging and accepting or discussing your angry feelings, you are much less likely to turn these feelings against yourself or allow them to lead you into a depressed state.

Be Active

 When you’re depressed your energy levels can drop drastically, but the last thing you want to do when feeling down is to keep yourself from getting up. It’s a physiological fact that activity fights depression. Get your heart rate up 20 minutes a day, five days a week, and it has been scientifically proven that you will feel better emotionally. Exercising increases the neuro-plasticity of your brain and releases natural chemicals called endorphins, which help to elevate your mood. Even just getting out of the house for a walk, a game of catch with your kids or a trip to the gym is a medically proven method of improving the way you feel mentally.

Don’t Isolate Yourself

When depressed, you may hear thoughts telling you to be alone, keep quiet and not to bother people with your problems. Again, these thoughts should be treated like parasites that try to keep your body from getting healthy. Do not listen to them. When you feel bad, even if you feel embarrassed, confiding in a friend or voicing your struggles can help free you from some of your isolated feelings of unhappiness. Talking about your problems or worries is not a self-centered or self-pitying endeavor. Friends and family, especially those who worry about you, will appreciate knowing what’s going on. Even the simple act of putting yourself in a social atmosphere can lift your spirit. Go someplace where there are people who may have similar interests as you, or even to a public place like a museum, park or a mall where you could enjoy being amongst people. Never allow yourself to indulge in the thought that you are different from or less than anyone else. Everyone struggles at times, and your depression does not define who you are or single you out from others.

Do Things You Once Liked to Do … even if you don’t feel like it

Depression is one of the hardest emotional states to endure, because the symptoms themselves can destroy one’s will and energy to resurface in a happy state. Giving in to this lethargic state can give your depression even more power, whereas staying active in your life, pursuing anything and everything you may find of interest will re-ignite your spark and keep you on your own side. Though harder said then done, the times you feel most like laying on the couch are those you should force yourself to take a walk, cook a meal or call a friend. If you’ve ever been depressed before, do whatever it was that helped you feel better: bake brownies, take a bath, listen to music. Act against the critical inner voice that tells you this won’t help. Remember its only purpose is to keep you from feeling better.

Watch a Funny Show

It may seem silly or all too simple, but anything that makes you laugh or smile can actually help convince your brain to be happy again. you look at depression as your critical inner voice having tricked you into feeling bad, then you can have your own tricks ready to fight depression. Play your favorite sitcom, watch a funny movie or read a comical writer. Don’t think of this exercise as merely a distraction, but as an effective tool in reminding your brain that you can feel good again.

Don’t Punish Yourself for Feeling Bad

Feeling embarrassed or self-hating over your depression will only increase your symptoms and discourage you from seeking help. Your critical thoughts toward yourself will try to keep you down any way they can, including by attacking you for feeling down. It’s important to take your feelings seriously. Remember, depression is a very common and highly treatable disease. It’s just a matter of recognizing you’re feeling bad and finding the treatment that works for you.

See a Therapist

Talking is a powerful way of combating your depression. If you feel bad, don’t let anyone tell you it’s no big deal or that you’ll just get over it. There is nothing shameful about recognizing you have a problem you alone cannot seem to resolve and to seek the help of a therapist. Asking for help is a brave act and speaking to a therapist is a healthy, productive endeavor from which every individual would benefit. Learning about the source of your pain can truly help alleviate its impact on your life, and help is very much available. Low-cost or sliding scale therapy, which bases its fee on your specific financial abilities, is available.

Do you think you may suffer from depression? Take this quiz to help you find out. http://www.depression-screening.org

Suicide Prevention Resources:

IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS IN CRISIS OR IN NEED OF IMMEDIATE HELP, CALL 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
This is a free hotline available 24 hours a day to anyone in emotional distress or suicidal crisis. 

* Download the Brochure:
“Save a Life”

* Helpful Websites:
http://www.glendon.org/index.php?pageid=118
www.suicidology.org

* Read
“Something to Lose”
Dr. Lisa Firestone’s blog, The Warning Signs of Suicide
Dr. Lisa Firestone’s blog, Suicide: How Can You Help Someone at Risk

Related Articles:
Depression
Isolation and Loneliness
Critical Inner Voice
Identify Your Critical Inner Voice

Human beings are naturally social animals. When we find ourselves becoming isolated, we should take that as a warning sign that we are turned against ourselves in some basic way. If not already there, we are on a path toward feeling bad, lonely, introverted or even depressed.

When we are isolated, we may have thoughts of not belonging or of feeling rejected by others. What we overlook, however, is that when we are alone, we are often in the company of our worst enemy- the one within ourselves. An isolated space is the perfect breeding ground for negative, self-critical thoughts. These thought patterns make up the “critical inner voice (CIV),” an internalized enemy that leads to self-destructive thought processes and behaviors.

Feeling lonely can trigger voices that we are unloved or unlikeable. These reflect a hostile and unfriendly point of view toward yourself. Treat these voices like they were coming from an external enemy, and do not tolerate them. Literally tell them to go away and that you refuse to buy into their destructive message. It is important to always act against any thoughts that people don’t like you. Are there ways you act that are based on what your voices tell you? For example, do you attack yourself for being “awkward” or “creepy” and then act quiet in a group of people? Then does your voice turn around and criticize you for acting that way?

Your critical inner voice can generate self-fulfilling prophecies. It will try to keep you from challenging yourself, then stab you in the back for avoiding taking action. Your CIV will almost always try to prevent you from struggling through uncomfortable situations and ultimately feeling at ease with yourself. When you challenge your voices, don’t be surprised if they temporarily become stronger. Remember that if you are persistent in countering your attacks, they will ultimately become weaker and even go away altogether.  You may still hear them, but they will feel less intimidating and have less power over you.

When it comes to isolation, the voice can be an especially complicated and strategic enemy. Sometimes, it will lure us into being alone with comforting-seeming thoughts (“Just go home and spend some time by yourself. You enjoy being on your own.”). At other times, it will viciously attack us (“No one wants you around. They don’t like you. Just stay away from everyone!”) These cruel directives are not based on reality, but on the agenda of a self-destructive point of view we’ve taken on based on early life experiences. Think about how much of your negative feelings about yourself came from how you felt as kid?  Did you often feel isolated or rejected, unseen or misunderstood?

No matter what their source, voices that you are unlikeable are much harder to accept around people who like you. When we hear these attacks, it is vital that we do not allow them to manipulate our behavior. Don’t put yourself in an isolated situation. Go out in public. Our brains do not respond positively to seclusion. Place yourself in social settings and interactions, even if you are among strangers. If you feel shy in public, try going online. Interacting on the internet may be a good first step in giving you the confidence to express yourself.

Society can breed a lot of loneliness. Separations, divorces along with the loss of our jobs, our social networks and loved ones can leave any one of us feeling alone. Even shuffling through a crowded street or scrunched together on a subway, one can feel completely alone – with no one making eye contact or exchanging a smile. Still it is better for us on every level to get out and be among people and to never allow our voices to make us cynical toward ourselves or others.

One of the best actions we can take to counteract the hopelessness we may feel is to think outside of ourselves. Believe beyond all doubt that you have something to offer. Volunteering is a great exercise in thinking outside yourself and often gives you the opportunity to connect with new people. Even little acts of generosity can have a significant impact. Generosity, as a principle, can lead to stronger self-esteem, which then leads to more social behavior.

If you are feeling isolated and may be experiencing symptoms of depression, here are some helpful resources:
National Institute of Mental Health – Depression
Depression.com
WebMD – Depression
Helpguide.org – Depression
Depression-Screening.org

GET HELP:
IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS IN CRISIS OR IN NEED OF IMMEDIATE HELP, CALL 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
This is a free hotline available 24 hours a day to anyone in emotional distress or suicidal crisis.

Suicide Prevention Resources:

If someone you know is at risk for suicide, call your local suicide hotline or 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

Download the Brochure:
“Save a Life” or “Como Prevenir el Suicidio

Helpful Websites:http://www.glendon.org/index.php?pageid=118www.suicidology.org

Read:
“Something to Lose”
Dr. Lisa Firestone’s blog, Suicide: The Warning Signs
Dr. Lisa Firestone’s blog, Suicide: How Can You Help Someone at Risk
Related Articles:
Eight Ways to Actively Fight Depression
Get By With a Little Help From Your Friends

Share