This week I was interviewed for the second time by Michael Carroll on his quirky, funny, and intelligent alternative radio show, The Mikie Show. Mikie constructs the whole show himself and it sounds wonderful. I think I get to say some good stuff, too. Give it a listen. I hope you enjoy. The Mikie Show Episode 20 featuring Glenn Berger
March 4, 2010
The FOESEA Continuum: A New Way of Understanding ADD
Posted by Glenn Berger, PhD under ADD, Solutions | Tags: ADD and ADHD, Add new tag, attention, Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, authentic being, creativity, fables, Health, Mental Health, pychotherapist, self-confidence |[6] Comments
Why can my son play video-games forever but can’t focus on his homework for a minute? Why do I hate myself whenever I try to write a paper? Why does my daughter do the same dumb things over and over again?
As a psychotherapist, I hear these kinds of questions all the time from parents and young people. The answer that most professionals give is to diagnose the sufferer with ADD, short for Attention Deficit Disorder.
I have a new and different way of thinking about, and dealing with, these problems. I call this model The FOESEA Continuum Method. I have had great success in using this approach to help people with these issues lead productive, successful, and fulfilling lives.
What is the FOESEA continuum? FOESEA is an acronym for the six areas of functioning that can be difficult for people diagnosed with ADD. These six attributes are:
• Focus the ability to stay on task for sustained periods of time.
• Organization the ability to manage time and space.
• Executive function the ability to make the best decisions and learn from experience.
• Social interaction the ability to read social cues and get along with others.
• Esteem regulation the ability to feel good about yourself most of the time.
• Affect regulation the ability to maintain an optimal emotional range.
How is FOESEA different from ADD? One problem with the idea of ADD is that this diagnosis suggests you either have “it” or you don’t have “it.” Most people don’t like to be categorized like this and they are right to feel this way. This is not the way humans work. Instead, in each of the six categories we all lay somewhere along a continuum. Each person is unique and has their individual combination of attributes that make up who they are. A person’s chart might look something like this:
Focus ———————————————————————— * —————————–
Org. ———————————————————————————- * ——————-
Exec. Func. ——————————————————– * ———————————————
Social ———————— * —————————————————————————–
Esteem —————————————————————— * ———————————–
Affect ——————————————————————————————– * ———-
In the FOESEA Continuum Method:
• The therapist and client collaborate in continuous detective work. They gather clues to create an ever-developing, unique profile of that person.
• Once this unique picture is created, the therapist and client figure out what works and what doesn’t work for that person.
• Once an individual understands themselves in this way, they can become empowered to get the supports they need to accomplish their goals.
• The method sets high expectations, knowing that with appropriate help, almost anything is possible.
When a person is seen as unique instead of as a diagnosis, they experience their one-of-a-kind personality as a strength instead of a weakness. Once they are recognized for their special value, they naturally blossom. The FOESEA Continuum Method focusses on an individual’s intelligence, imagination, passion, beauty, goodness and love rather than buying into the view that they have a problem that dooms them. This is the beginning of helping them become the best they can be.
August 24, 2009
Why Do We Act Like Morons?
Posted by Glenn Berger, PhD under emotional wounding, emotions, Featured, Finding The Lost Heart, happy children, harmony, healing, love, psychotherapy, raising good, self-cultivation, spirituality, strength, truth, wisdom | Tags: Ann Coulter, authentic being, courage, devotion, Dick Cheney, emotion, family, fear, Health, heart, Home, Kids and Teens, laws of the universe, love, Oscar Wilde, rediscovery, self-confidence, strength, success, therapy, thinking, wisdom |1 Comment
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Why do people act so stupid? Why do people believe absolute absurdities like the drivel spouted by the likes of Ann Coulter? Why do people believe that Obama is a Nazi? Why do Medicare recipients, who receive medical care through a government program fear health care given through a government program? Are humans that dumb?
Clearly, it is not simply in these areas of politics or public policy that we see humans behaving in ridiculous ways. People act against their self interest all the time. We believe lies and shun the truth. We move towards what is bad for us and avoid the good. We smoke cigarettes, go out with jerks, and invest with Bernie Madoff. As Oscar Wilde said, the only thing we learn from experience is that we never learn from experience. What the hell is wrong with us? Are we selfish, evil morons at root? If we were left unchecked, without the threat of Dick Cheney’s punishment, would we all be ravaging each other? The answer is no.
Neuroscience and evolutionary theory are now proving what the wise among of us have understood since humans started trimming their nose hairs. We are essentially good. Historically, people who have believed this were called humanists. Many people use the word humanist as an insult to instill fear. Watch out, they say, there goes a humanist! Isn’t it odd that people would think so badly of folks who believe that human beings are intrinsically good? There’s that stupidity again. As it turns out, the humanists were right. We have everything we need inside of us to be wise, good, and loving.
The truth is, we are built to love. We come out of the womb this way. We all have brains that are meant to continuously grow and develop in order to optimize our ability to think, feel, act and connect. As Allan N. Schore brilliantly demonstrates in his deeply researched work, “Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self,” what we need early in life to get our brains to develop is someone else’s optimal brain. We become what we are meant to be through relationship. That means we need an optimally loving mom. Moms regulate the growth of their baby’s brains and nervous systems. If mom is in a good mood, she’s pumping luscious levels of happy brain chemicals through her own brain. When baby sees mommy’s happy mood, baby starts squirting happy brain chemicals in its own brain. When the baby’s brain gets showered with this yummy chemical soup, the brain grows. It grows the stuff inside of it that we need to be smart and good. When the baby looks at mom and mom looks at the baby with love, the baby gets high. The baby wants more of the good feeling and so becomes very attached to mom, because mom is the source of those good feelings. The baby’s ability to form this attachment bond with mom becomes the template for the baby to form attachments throughout life. Babies are predisposed to attach; that is, they are predisposed to love. When they get the right kind of love from mom, they become loving.
Now if Mom is not happy, and baby doesn’t get those loving gazes from mommy or anyone else, then the baby’s brain makes nasty neurochemicals. The baby gets stressed. Instead of growing neurons, neurons die. Instead of developing the ability over the course of time to be wise, motivated, courageous, self-confident and compassionate, we become dumb, bored, frightened, self-loathing and self-centered. People who are smart enough to realize that there is no threat of death panels were simply happier babies!
Now why wouldn’t mom give her baby everything that child needed? Why wouldn’t she be happy? Well, moms and dads who don’t parent in the best way do so because they didn’t get what they needed when they were young and so they didn’t grow the ultimate brain connections when they were growing up. As a result they can’t give their kids what they need. Wounded parents make wounded kids.
We find the same kinds of problems in people who have been traumatized as those who didn’t get the proper nurturing as infants. Adults who live through wars and other catastrophes can end up screwed up. As Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s authorities on trauma, noted in his classic, “Traumatic Stress,” the earlier and more ongoing the trauma, especially if abuse came from a loved one, the worse we get messed up and the less we grow in our natural capacities for learning, growth, emotional development, and love. So science shows us that whether you had a mom who wasn’t there for you in the right ways when you were a baby, or you went through some really bad stuff in your life, you have a much stronger likelihood of being cognitively and emotionally dumb.
Now some of you might say that you had a good childhood, you had a nice mom and you were never traumatized. But you still do really stupid things all the time. How could that be? I see this all the time in my psychotherapy practice. People who seem to have grown up in at least average households end up with a great deal of the same kinds of emotional suffering and problems that I see in those clients who went through obvious trauma or neglect. Some of this is because certain people are genetically predisposed to certain brain problems. But genes are never expressed in a vacuum. As Robert Sopolsky, a noted researcher on stress pointed out, human behavior is always a consequence of the interaction between genes and environment. I got a clue for the explanation for the mysterious reality of dumb behavior when I read about an experiment done in the late 1960’s by a guy named Goddard. He gave rats repeated low level electrical impulses into their brains. No single stimulation was strong enough to promote an obvious effect, but over time these impulses appeared to build on themselves and eventually the rats started having epileptic seizures as if they were receiving massive doses of electrical stimulation. After a while, the rats no longer needed any external stimulation and their seizures continued unabated. The researchers named this the “kindling effect.” By lighting a bunch of little sticks, eventually this would ignite the big log, and lead to a roaring fire. I believe the same thing happens psychologically. When we go through enough repeated, low level emotional wounds, we get what I call critical mass trauma or the rain-barrel effect. This is just like the kindling phenomenon. Enough small wounds build on themselves and eventually result in the same kinds of brain effects and dysfunction that we find with significantly poor attachment experiences in infancy or in trauma. In this way, many people who did not go through what could be considered really bad stuff can still end up with bad symptoms.
So how does this lead to people thinking that Obama is a nazi? When we are hurt in these ways we live in a chronic condition of anxiety or fear. Our ability to take in new information narrows. We tend to see things in the same way we’ve always seen them. We have a hard time trusting. We narrow our vision and only see the things that conform to our expectations. When we encounter something new and hopeful, instead of feeing good, we feel suspicious and frightened. We have a limited capacity for positive emotions and for tolerating and recovering from bad feelings, so we want to keep a tight control on what we feel. We fear that if we allow ourselves to hope too much we won’t be able to handle either the excitement of that feeling or the disappointment if things don’t work out. We don’t see our lives and the world as places where we can make mistakes, and grow and learn from them. If someone in the media frightens us by using bugaboos like humanism, socialism or Nazism, it triggers those parts of the brain that have been hurt, and like a reptile we want to go hide under a rock.
The name that I give to what happens to us when we suffer the consequences of these emotional wounds is having a lost heart. People who believe bullshit simply have lost hearts. They have been hurt in their lives, and so do not have the ability to distinguish truth from lies. In fact, they prefer bullshit, especially if it promises relief from their suffering without effort. One reason Ann Coulter works is because she makes it simple. It’s all the other asshole’s fault!
Does this mean that we are hopeless? Are we are all destined to live lives far beneath our potential because of the millions of tiny wounds we all suffer in this wounded world? Is there no possibility of reaching the dumb, hateful and selfish? No. Just as the brain formed in the first place through relationship, it is always in a process of self-creation. The brain is plastic, that is, it continues to grow, through relationship throughout our whole lives. We have the ability to work on ourselves, and give ourselves what we need so that we can free the brain’s natural ability to develop toward its highest functioning. The great Chinese Sage, Mencius, called this self-cultivation. He said, “The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to find the lost heart.” What this means is that if we work on ourselves, and give ourselves what we need, we can realize the potentials that nature has given to us.
In order for us to have the happiest lives, to raise good and happy children, and to fix a broken world, we all need to recognize the ways that we have lost contact with our essence and commit ourselves to doing everything we can to finding our hearts again. Maybe if enough of us do this, we won’t be so damn dumb. If we uncover the natural potential for smarts in enough people, maybe the lost-hearted media will stop giving so much space to idiots like Coulter, Limbaugh and Palin, and instead give space to those people who are the only ones considered worse than the socialists: the humanists. Now that would be wise.
June 8, 2009
Short, Bald, Middle-Aged Guy Has Great Sex Life
Posted by Glenn Berger, PhD under Featured, Finding The Lost Heart, healing, love, marriage, passion, psychotherapy, relationship, self-cultivation, sex | Tags: Art of Loving, authentic being, Brad Pitt, devotion, Erich Fromm, heart, Jennifer Connelly, love, marriage, passion, Relationships, Romance, self-confidence, Sexuality |1 Comment
In our shame-inducing consumerized culture where everyone is a commodity, all too many people believe that if you don’t look like Brad Pitt or Jennifer Connelly you are not going to get any. WRONG! And I have proof. The person I know who has the most passionate, consistent and happy sex life is short, bald and middle aged. What is his secret?
First of all, he has spent a lifetime working on his ability to love. He recognizes, as Erich Fromm said in his classic book, “The Art of Loving,” that love is not something that we feel or get, love is something that we do. He works on being a good husband. He is trustworthy, reliable and consistent. Following the wisdom of Harville Hendrix, he fosters connection through intimate dialogue. He reveals himself and listens empathically. He works on cultivating himself intellectually, emotionally, creatively and physically. He tries to be an interesting person; he doesn’t want to bore his wife. He takes good care of himself and his health; he exercises, eats well and doesn’t overindulge. He has continuously tried to heal his childhood wounds that have interfered with his ability to fully realize his potentials for passionate loving. He found a wife who shares his values and has a common interest in maintaining a passionate life. They put the lie to the belief that marriage and kids end romance. They make sure of that! Sexually, he focuses on the needs of his partner, puts himself completely into the experience and does not waste time being self-conscious.
A lifetime of great sex is not dependent on gorgeous looks. As my Dad once said,
“Look not for beauty,nor fairness of skin, but look for a heart that is pure within, for beauty may fade, and skin grow old, but a heart that is pure, will never grow cold.”
Even short, bald guys like me have a chance, by working on our hearts.