March 2012 Newsletter
February 28, 2012
Stress is a term used to describe the wear and tear the body experiences in reaction to everyday tensions and pressures. Change, illness, injury, or career and lifestyle changes are common causes of stress. However, it’s the emotional pressure and tension we feel in response to the little everyday hassles —rush hour traffic, waiting in line and too many emails—that do the most damage.
How does stress affect health?
According to the American Institute of Stress, up to 90% of all health problems are related to stress. Too much stress can contribute to and agitate many health problems including heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, depression and sleep disorders.
What can I do about it?
The first step is to understand how stress works. It’s not the events or situations that do the harm; it’s how you respond to those events. More precisely, it’s how you feel about them that determine whether you are stressed or not.
Emotions, or feelings, have a powerful impact on the human body. Positive emotions like appreciation, care and love not only feel good, they are good for you. They help your body’s systems synchronize and work better, like a well-tuned car.
HeartMath’s research has shown when you intentionally shift to a positive emotion, your heart rhythm immediately changes. This shift in heart rhythms creates a favorable cascade of neural, hormonal and biochemical events that benefit the entire body. The effects are both immediate and long lasting.
How does it work?
When you’re stressed, your body is out of sync. Typical negative emotions we feel when stressed—like anger, frustration, anxiety and worry—lead to increased disorder in the heart’s rhythms and in the nervous system. In contrast, positive emotions like joy, appreciation, care and kindness create synchronization in the heart’s rhythms and the nervous system. Other bodily systems sync up to this rhythm creating a state which scientists call coherence. Because coherence leads to more mental clarity, creativity and better problem-solving abilities, it’s easier to find solutions and better ways of handling the stressful situation.
How can I create and practice coherence?
The HeartMath approach to stress management introduces tools to help you increase physiological coherence: Use the Quick Coherence® Technique in daily life to reduce the effects of stress and the emWave® technology products to accelerate learning and enhance your practice.
Quick Coherence® Technique
The Quick Coherence Technique is a simple, easy way to interrupt the stress response and quickly bring your system into coherence. Practice this technique 4-5 times a day, every day for a minimum of 3 weeks. Use it prior to or during events or situations that provide emotional challenges – a quick stress manager. Good times to practice are first thing in the morning, before going to sleep at night, break time in the middle of the day, whenever a stressful event occurs or anytime you want to rebalance or get an energy boost. It is suggested you read through the steps first before practicing them.
The Steps of the Quick Coherence Technique
Step 1 – Heart Focus: Focus your attention on the area around your heart.
Step 2 – Heart Focused Breathing: Maintain your heart focus and, while breathing, imagine that your breath is flowing in and out through the heart area. Breathe casually, just a little deeper than normal.
Step 3 – Heart Feeling: Recall a positive feeling and make a sincere attempt to relive that feeling. You can recall a time when you felt appreciation or care for someone or something and attempt to re-experience that feeling. Once you have found a positive feeling—sustain this feeling by continuing with the Quick Coherence steps: heart focus, heart focused breathing, heart feeling.
Once you have completed the steps, ask yourself, “How could I handle this in a better way?” With practice, you’ll find you have more intuitive choices or options for what you might do next—even in the middle of a challenging or high-pressure situation.
The emWave2 is a portable and convenient way to reduce stress, balance emotions, and increase performance. Used just a few minutes a day, this simple-to-use technology helps you transform feelings of anger, anxiety or frustration into more peace, ease and clarity. As you practice on the go or at your computer you increase your coherence baseline and your ability to take charge of your emotional reactions. Health, communication, relationships and quality of life improve.
emWave Desktop helps you achieve coherence through simple-to-learn exercises and games. Using a pulse sensor plugged into your USB port, emWave Desktop collects and translates HRV (heart rate variability) data into user-friendly graphics. Through coherence techniques, interactive exercises and playing games, emWave Desktop helps you create a coherent state, build resilience, increase energy, and promote focus, mental clarity and emotional balance.
For more information about how you can learn to effectively stop the negative effects stress is having on your life with the emWave Desktop, emWave2 and other simple-to-use tools and techniques from HeartMath contact: Cheryle Jones Andrews, LMFT, LCPC, who has trained as a 1:1 Provider with HeartMath, or visit www.heartmath.com.
February 2012 Newsletter
January 30, 2012
The Happiest Life is the Meaningful Life
Are you happy?
Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. The answer to such a question is never so simple.
Think about different parts of your life. Maybe you are happy at work but not satisfied with your marriage. Or perhaps you are happy with your spouse, but most unhappy with your inlaws. If I ask, “Are you happy,” and you answer with a resounding “no”, I suspect you may overlook delightful parts of your life.
I might ask a few more questions. Is happiness what you want most in life? What is happiness anyway? How does it differ from contentment or satisfaction?
Existential philosophers tell us we need to find meaning in our lives. Does happiness come if we lead meaningful lives? What creates a meaningful life?
These are the existential questions . . . the same questions deep thinkers, philosophers, psychologists, religious leaders, (and teenagers) have posed forever. We have not found answers to these quintessential questions because there are no right answers. The answers are personal and idiosyncratic – they differ for every single person.
We need to talk specifics. Here’s an experiment to try with a friend, your counselor, or in a journal: “If we video-tape your happy life, what will we see?” Hopefully you begin to put words to how you want to live your life – some current realities and some of your dreams. Maybe you see yourself changing careers – training as a police officer or studying gourmet cooking. On the other hand, you may find meaning in raising your children, fostering homeless pets, or simply being a good neighbor. Maybe you want to serve your country in the National Guard or as a precinct chairperson. Whatever your answer, you are offering clues to your meaningful life. Again, I stress the point: there is no formula for meaning or happiness or contentment. The only certainty is this: The person who sees no meaning in their life always feels discontented.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist, endured mental and physical torture as a prisoner at Auschwitz during World War II. He observes that people are drawn toward personal growth – learning new things, improving and simply “doing better.” (If you know someone who is not, that person is profoundly discouraged.) Because we are programmed to grow psychologically as well as physically, people often question if there is more in life? More to do . . . more to learn? In other words, we ask what Peggy Lee sang about in 1969, “Is That All There Is?” In response to this question, Frankl stresses that meaning can be found in every moment of living. Even in suffering as extreme as a concentration camp, even in death we can find meaning.
Through his own horrendous experiences, Frankl came to understand that regardless of what is happening, we always have the right to decide how we will react. Although no one would ever suggest that being imprisoned by the enemy is a happy situation, nor that keeping one’s attitude was easy, Frankl insists we are free to choose . . . free to find meaning . . . be it bitter, resigned, hopeful, or something else.
Years after the War, I heard Viktor Frankl speak to an appreciative crowd in Anaheim, Ca. His key point was this: If we are chasing happiness, we may drive it away. Happiness and contentment come through the backdoor when we stop worrying about being happy and seek a meaningful life instead. Contentment happens when make something meaningful out of whatever is happening . . . when we are true to ourselves, when are kind to others, when we go after our own dreams, and when we make the most out of whatever we are given.
(The latest printing of Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning (2006) is available through Amazon.com and bookstores.)
December 2011 Newsletter
November 30, 2011
Size Really Does Not Matter
Take the case of our therapy partner in EAP (Equine Assisted Psychotherapy). She is an eight month old miniature horse, but comes fully equipped with all the intution and reflective insight to be a perfect mirror in the arena. Already in the arena she has been described as “bratty,” “sweet,” “patient,” “petulant,” “ornary,” “curious,” “caring,” “connecting,” “loving,” “standoffish,” “shy,” “funny,” and “uncaring.” In other words, she has been a powerful reflection of what the two-legged folks project or perceive in this horse and in people and reality.
Other EAP Notes
(As reported by Lynn Thomas in EAGALA in Practice Magazine, Vol. 4 No. 1)
Much of the difference in understanding as to how horses can actually help people put their finger on how they are feeling is related to the fact that horses do not respond to people in the same way that people do. Horses are said to be much more intuitive to human defense mechanisms, and are not easily bluffed. Where another person may not recognize the projection of a troubled other, the horse will indeed have a response that is reflective of the very emotion from which the person is trying to defend….
For example… A person who projects his anger onto the horse, proclaiming that the horse is actually the angry one, will not necessarily produce an angry horse. Rather, the horse will respond to the person’s hidden anger by attempting to bring it to the surface. This can be done in several ways. The horse may “haze” the client, circling around him in progressively smaller circles in an attempt to dominate space. The horse may also repeatedly move into the person’s space, nuding him/her out of the way.
By using his/her body, the horse essentially places the person in a position where anger would be a healthy response. This is all done to draw the anger to the surface, out of the unconscious, thereby making the person “readable” to the horse, and a viable herd member. In order to understand this, it is important to remember that herd animals relate predominantly through physiological responses, and [these] unconscious drives, emotions, and motives have physiological traces.
For horses, hidden emotions are like hidden physiological responses, making communication, and the establishment of the horses’s safety, through a congruent and connected herd, impossible. So in order to preserve his/her own safety then, the horse must make the person, his/her current herd member, more congruent, through evoking [the person’s] hidden unconscious material. For while people can operate with closeted emotion, horses cannot, and, therefore, identifying any emotion that is covert and responding to it is an automatic process for the horse.


October 2011 Newsletter
October 20, 2011
AA A— ?
Cheryle Jones Andrews
No, AAA does not equal the Automobile Association of America! Rather AAA stands for three steps that individuals can use to support and sustain greater mental health.
Simply put, AAA means:
Step 1: Acknowledge feelings.
Step 2: Accept that they just are.
Step 3: Act in response to feelings.
We are blessed with the neurological wiring to experience feelings that will guide us to make healthy choices in life’s circumstances. Pia Mellody, author of Facing Codependence, identifies very specific benefits or gifts that result when we attend to our feelings and use them to forge our lives. Too often we avoid or stuff feelings and end up feeling paralyzed on our life journeys.
The problem for most folks struggling with depression or anxiety is that the ability to tolerate a wide range of feelings has become limited, in part because adult caregivers in their lives did not model or perhaps even know how to handle their own feelings. Such parents did not know how to encourage and support their children to feel and to learn the language of feelings. Ultimately they limited their children’s ability to experience the richness of life. So, Step 1 is to simply notice and acknowledge feelings, basically notice the physical sensations.
Acceptance, Step 2, is to remember that all feelings have purpose and to accept that feelings are just a part of life. Acceptance does mean withholding judgment and not dismissing them as good or bad—it simply means to take an attitude of curiosity about why these feelings are occurring at this time.
Acceptance then makes room for Step 3: Act. We are empowered to choose how we want to act on our feelings through acceptance of them. The choice may be anything from doing something to doing nothing. Consider the feeling anger, a feeling that leaves many squeamish. However, anger can be on a continuum from mild irritation to rage. If we can acknowledge anger and the sensations we experience in our bodies, if we can accept that it’s OK to feel anger, then we can act on the reasons for feeling anger that curiosity reveals.
Mellody identifies energy, strength and assertiveness as the gifts of anger. Whether we choose to state our anger and our wants or we re-evaluate the thinking behind our anger and let it go or we simply explore it further, we are acting on our feelings. Only through acknowledgement and acceptance of our feelings can we be intentional about acting on our own behalf.
When we ignore our feelings, they burrow into our being, like worms into our computers. They don’t go away but cause undue stress that complicates our health, relationships and lives. Not only is it OK to feel our feelings, it’s the healthy, proactive thing to do. AAA takes practice and patience with ourselves, but it works!
August 2011 Newsletter
August 4, 2011
Developing Self-Compassion
“Lord, help me accept the truth about myself no matter how good it is.”
Self-compassion involves feeling forgiveness or softening toward ourselves and a decrease in the usual judgmental or critical attitude we take toward ourselves.
There is scientific evidence that self-compassion is good for you:
A study by Pargament Read more
July 2011 Newsletter
July 1, 2011
Family Vacations Without Stress (And Other Myths)
by Lorn Adkins
So, I am reading the top ten list of ways to reduce family stress on vacation (not that I am planning a vacation, but this is the season) and the list, not only would not reduce my stress; but would send me into sleepless nights of anticipatory worry. Why do family vacations, even the planning of them, create stress? I often hear in my office, Read more
June 2011 Newsletter
May 31, 2011
Summer is right around the corner, and many families will have children at home – whether they are on college vacation, school vacation, or simply coming home for a visit (often with extended families in tow). While it can be relaxing and fun to have everyone home, it can also be stressful.
Any time there is a transition, there will be stress involved. Knowing this can help you to better prepare. Working through the transition can be made easier by providing ourselves with the knowledge that we will be in an adaptive stage. Recognize that everyone will be somewhat confused at the beginning of the transition – expect to have some anxiety until everyone has adapted. Set long term goals for summer plans, as well as short term daily goals. Most young children do best with a routine. Having a set schedule of daily chores as well as activities will help young children (up to age 10) adapt better to the summer schedule. Older children should be given more freedom, but should still have established boundaries within which they operate (chores as well as check in times). Children returning from college will have a hard time getting used to new rules, as many have been operating without parental input on their day to day activities during the school year. Establishing rules and boundaries that make sense for the parents as well as respecting the returning college student’s autonomy will go far in providing a conflict free summer.
A great habit to establish over the summer is the family meeting. Set aside a time each week to check in with one another. This is a time to plan activities for the week, divide chores, and talk about issues or concerns. Everyone does the family meeting a little bit differently, but knowing that there is a time where everyone will be together to talk things out is a proactive way to alleviate problems.
Summer is a time to get to know one another. Family bonding is especially important during vacation times, as people will find it easier to connect. Make sure to plan fun family activities such as outdoor games of kickball or croquet; as well as indoor games of charades or board games. Playing together is one of the most important things we can do with our children. It is a way to bond, exercise, and work towards common goals all within the backdrop of having fun.
Our experience with the world is defined first within our families. How we learn to relate to others is developed within the context of how we form relationships within our families. Providing an environment of consistency, problem solving and fun are some of the fundamental pieces of a family.
As Leon Seltzer, Ph.D, said in his Psychology Today article “When we bond well with our parents, we’re able to feel connected, comforted and secure about our place in the family. In such cases our home is truly our sanctuary–a place to which we can regularly return (or retreat) to get the reassurance and succor that we all need as children.
Published on December 7, 2008 by Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. in Evolution of the Self
May 2011 Newsletter
May 1, 2011
Is It Possible to Create S-P-A-C-E for Oneself in Relationships?
August 2, 2010
By Cheryle Jones Andrews
In his presentation, “The Essential Humility of Marriage,” Terry D. Hargrave, PhD, author of a book by the same name, defines marriage as “a separate entity…a living, breathing relationship that is as real as the two individuals that form the bond.” This separate relationship paradoxically contains the individuals while simultaneously nurturing each person’s unique needs and those created by the union. Read more
April 2011 Newsletter
March 30, 2011
March 2011 Newsletter
March 16, 2011
The Doom-and-Gloom Fantasy
Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble. – George Washington
Ann can’t sleep. She is excited about her trip to Miami next Friday, but worry has Ann in its clutches. What if I oversleep? What if I cannot find a cab at 5 a.m.? What if I miss my plane and the wedding, and ruin the day for Jill and Mother?
What if what if what if…