New Ways of Seeing: The Art of Therapeutic Reframing

Monopoly

We've talked about looking for the big personal or family theme, a generalization that feeds a person's history and worldview, a belief that might hold the patient, maybe the whole family, back.  A well-placed reframe, usually with a metaphor, teases away the old way of thinking. No turning back. 

Board games are making a comeback, but Monopoly never did go away.

I stopped playing for a third of a century, but on a visit to hang out with my grandkids (their parents trusted us to take care of them while they took a work vacation) revisited the game again.

Is there anything worse than losing at this?  Losing fair and square? To a six-year old? Early in the game there is a sinking feeling that the outcome is obvious, the game is over. For the very first time you learn the true meaning of Connecticut Avenue. You never valued it before. Now, landing on a hotel, you are shelling out six hundred Monopoly dollars. He has shattered your world view about how to win (buy everything). Three out of four railroads is meaningless in the big picture when you keep landing on his stinking hotels.

How do play therapists do it? They must not play Monopoly.

This is a metaphor, you tell yourself, for losing in life. Over half your patients think they are losers. Although you think you are, too, in random moments, now you relate in a different way. Being a loser is a hopeless place to be, a self-loathing, self-blaming place, and when we lose at a game it is so obvious. We have been outplayed. This time.

Losing at a game we have a sinking, negative feeling of inevitability. But the good news is that you have a new metaphor, and the metaphor by its very nature has the power to paradox, to tweak thinking in a direction that is not hopeless. Laughing at ourselves, it turns out, is the best medicine.

You think you're a loser? Have you ever lost at Monopoly, lost to a person who has yet to graduate kindergarten? Huh?

It has to make a person laugh, which is one of the more curative features of good therapy.

Mark Tyrrell would second that opinion. I had the pleasure of meeting him (via Skype, which is aggravating but does the job, unless you keep trying to move the tablet as far away as possible to look better but your arms don't stretch that far).

By Mark Tyrrell, MD

New Ways of Seeing

Mark is shirt-sleeved, and from the accent, British. His publicist sent me the book and it cost ten pounds to mail it from the United Kingdom, so I'm especially flattered. I had automatically assumed him to be older, because his book has so much wisdom packed into these short blurbs of hypnotic suggestion.

That is what a metaphor really is, a hypnotic suggestion. It reaches into our head and we find it either funny, or calming, or more sensible than the negative ideas we've had about things that are sometimes remotely related.

Many of us understand, for example, the idea of learned helplessness. A woman endures various hardships in life, foster homes, abusive relationships, and is wired to be anxious all the time, unhappy. She finally meets a kind, gentle man and knows he will be good to her, but she is terrified that the future will surely end up wrong, as if she doesn't deserve to be happy.

Her therapist has her imagine a young bird, set free for the first few days of life, then captured and locked up in a cage. The bird is beautiful and has a wonderful song but cannot sing or fly free. Then one day, through sheer hard work and some luck, the cage door is open. At last she can fly and sing as much as she wishes. But she won't. She just stays in the cage.

The doctor then asks the patient: If you could speak to the bird, what would you say?"

The patient answers: "Well, I would tell it to fly free, of course. . .because now it can, only it just doesn't know it."

Dozens of gems like this in New Ways of Seeing.

"Must one study hypnosis to do this?" I ask Mark, knowing full well that at the Chicago Family Institute we learned about the metaphor and that have been using it for thirty years, but most of us don't consider ourselves hypnotists.

"No, but it helps.  It is really the relationship that makes the difference, the trust in the doctor is key. We relax automatically when we are in a trusting relationship, and what is hypnosis if not deep relaxation?"

Thanks Mark.

The Amazon link to New Ways of Seeing: The Art of Therapeutic Reframe

To read other things about this prolific therapydoc check out his website.

therapydoc

Carnival of All Sustances: Revived

The thing on the left is a cookie, and the thing below it to your right is a gragger, a noise-maker. We eat the three-cornered cookie, a symbol of the hat of an enemy, Haman, who tried to influence a king to wipe out a nation (the Jews, who else). We make noise with the gragger when we read Haman's name when we read the story of Esther (the real heroine in the story) on the Jewish holiday coming right up. Purim

It's a holiday with permission to drink, ironically. Some feel we're commanded to drink, which is so strange, since as people of The Book, we tend not to get into that very much. The website Judaism 101 tells the story much better than I ever could. There you'll learn that on this holiday, we read the Book of Esther and are commanded to eat, drink and be merry. J-101 writes

According to the Talmud, a person is required to drink until he cannot tell the difference between "cursed be Haman" and "blessed be Mordecai," though opinions differ as to exactly how drunk that is. A person certainly should not become so drunk that he might violate other commandments or get seriously ill. In addition, recovering alcoholics or others who might suffer serious harm from alcohol are exempt from this obligation.

Thanks for the pics, 101.

I think you should know that FD uses chocolate, raspberry, and peanutbutter fillings in his hamentashen. And that I don't bake them. Too hard.

But.

I do eat them.

Also, it's my responsibility to tell you that although this is a holiday, Jewish or not, you have no excuse for getting into a car and driving while drunk, for saying things that are harmful while drunk, for messing anything up for that matter, while drunk, even in the name of Mordechai, a heroic Yid. Maybe getting drunk doesn't have to mean being drunk on alcohol or other substances.

Be creative. Drunk with happiness?

Well, no more lectures. We have until Friday for the get drunk loophole to kick in. Once again, many submissions, most just not on topic, sorry, so you won't read them here. But there were a few posts that I liked, so let's take a look.

Let's start by plugging this blog, Great New Books that are a Must Read. Great New Books discusses The Sky Has Fallen, and it sounds pretty great. Maybe I'll check it out.

Carol Gold McKay at Gold Post It, rips into our feel-no-pain culture and why pain medications seem so easy to access, and the potential damage, ala Keith Ledger. I have a feeling it's all much more complicated, CGM.

Stanimir writes about hangovers. I'm not giving any commentary here. Don't drink. Don't get hungover. How's that for an idea?

Celebrity News and Gossip is about Celeb Rehab. is exactly that.

Best yet, someone's quit smoking!

A surgeon lends his personal take on smoking, too, fantastic.

And as long as we're talking tobacco, Charles Philips wrote this poem:
Daddy

Back from sixty I'm nine

Daddy's at the back door coughing that cough,

you know,

stopped short by wince of stretched stitches on a scar
from recent repair

with my nine eyes I look up at him and ask my whys

tap tap tap on the pack face of a salty sailor

he answers while
stained thumb and finger lifts to light a smoke muffling reply

wisping
words spell 'I can't quit'

he spits untipped bits and takes another
drag.

Not so cheery, I feel.

Maybe the carnival of obsessions will be more fun.

Happy Purim, btw

therapydoc

The 2nd Carnival of All Substances

Now, you may know I'm into recovery stories, and that's why I started this carnival, but I'll post everyone else, too, as long as the post or the blog host is not offensive (to me).


THE best post I've seen in ages was a post about CHOCOLATE. The carnival submission had these incredible pics of a candy display case full of chocolates, dozens upon dozens of them, you keep scrolling, and scrolling, virutally drooling.

At the very end the blogger tells you how many calories you've just consumed.

I was all set to make this THE pick of the month, but decided to take a look at his other posts. The blogger's very, very smart, and funny, but he's cavalier about serious subjects, like. . .rape. So I'm sorry, friends, I can't link to anyone who is cavalier about that. And I'm sorry, too, since this blogger's picture was so much better than the ones above. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, though, right?

THAT SAID, WE DO HAVE SOME TERRIFIC POSTS FOR YOU TODAY!

Let's start with one of my favorite recovery bloggers, ERIN, the author of Twenty-four Hours A Day at What Winners Do. Erin says, "The out-patient program taught me one of the fundamentals of addiction recovery…stay in the day."

You think that's easy? Try it. Try not looking back and not looking forward. Good luck.

Meg at You and Me are Floating on a Tidal Wave writes a fabulous post about The Little Prince (starring herself as Fox). If you haven't read the prince, you should, and if you haven't read Meg, you should read her, too. Here's the link.

Then we have an Anonymous Blogger who tells us how to overcome a pain pill addiction which has got to be valuable advice at Addiction Recovery Blog.

She has another post on the subject, adding that people who use prescription drugs will punctuate the high with alcohol (yup, tends to kill you, too).

Hueina Su thinks she can help you reconnect to your authentic self. I'm guessing she's assuming that if you're drinking and 'a drugging that you've NOT connected to your authentic self. So check it out. She might actually be in Hawaii. But I could be wrong.

Kbaggy is a new mom at Babylune and likes a very, very small drink now and then. But she's worried she'll smother the kids if she takes them into the bed and warns, Don't drink and co-sleep! Perhaps this is a British thing. Please tell me.

Anonymous blogger at Addiction Recovery Basics. tells all about being a dry drunk. Thanks. Can't be easy, we're sure, but probably even harder to live with one.

The Junky's Wife writes about the Drunky's Wife at her site, The Junky's Wife. What else? Faced with a choice between a heroin addict and an alcoholic, life's not simple. She's asking you to vote. Hmmm.

TwoDogsBlogging has a couple of great stories to share. The first one is how you really have to watch out what you pray for. Even though I'm a very rational, logical therapydoc there's a spiritual part (I know, you're just shocked) that assumes the Old Mighty is listening at all times, that He/She has nothing really more important to do, than give the nod when a person least expects it, so we may as well ask for it all, go for broke. Dogs says, Be careful.

Two Dogs has a second post about her family and how grateful she is that she straightened out her life. At AA meetings they talk about "watching the parade" which means (I think) watching people drop out of the program before they get sober, wondering why some make it and some don't. They listened to Bolero in her family--maybe that helped. (I wish I were joking-- these things matter, washing dishes with your mom while listening to Bolero matters. Oh, just read it.)

MouseTrapper at Med Journal Watch reminds us that candy cigarets are really devices to lure little children to the dangers of real cigarets. Don't buy them for your kids! Thanks, doc, for a great post.

Virginia shares her truama (dad killed mom, then himself, pretty powerful stuff) at the Centre for Emotional Well-Being. She recovered from trauma and alcoholism and shares a video interview with her son, a military officer with PTSD and alcohol on the path to recovery.

Then there's my friend Rohit over at Darpan who has words of wisdom, if nothing in particular to say about substance abuse. I like him, though, so read what he's got to say about Arthur Ashe. I think Rohit once sent me pics of the homeless in Florida, but I can't find them anymore on his blog. Maybe it was someone else.

Tracee Sioux at Go Sioux Me let's you know how easy it is to get addicted to legal medications for anxiety. She watched the second plane hit the tower on 9-11.

Tracee also tells us how she quit smoking (on her OTHER blog, Blogfabulous. She did it for the kid. Way to go.

Definitely worth a snootful is Nancy's post at the Centre for Emotional Well-Being shares an opinion piece about celebs in rehab, the "Lohan" Phenomenon. Nancy's an LISW, LICDC, an actual substance abuse counselor, and she knows what she's talking about. A pleasure, honestly, to hear the straight talk.

Phil, at Phil for Humanity (does he mean, fill???) has the Secret to Happiness, I kid you not, on his secret post. He's thinking that enthusiasm and good health are the key. But frankly, I think Phil is really smart and that makes him happy.

That's all folks. We'll do it again July 10. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks to all of you who participated. Just so you should know. When I came in from work (it's a 4 mile bike ride) I filled my glass with ice, pomegranite juice (thanks, FD) apple juice (ordinarily not my favorite, left over from Passover), a splash of lemon juice, and water. And I am in such a good place.

Oh yeah, i zapped a chocolate chip cookie in the microwave. Did you know that cookies should be served hot? There's a qualitative difference in flavor.

To your health,

Copyright 2007, therapydoc