Communicate clearly and honestly without fear of consequences

I can't say for sure, but I believe that those feelings may have stemmed from the prevailing online attitude that it wasn't a real birth experience unless you pushed. I would remind her how truly fortunate she was to have gone through but one contraction, and how she would probably have an option to give birth naturally if she chose to have another child down the road. How much she took my words to heart, I'm not sure; You see, the moment I found out I was expecting Lauren, I asked my chuckling doctor if I could just go ahead and article my Caesarean delivery then and there, as though it was a mere matter of finishing up with a pedicure and scheduling another in a month or so. And that's why this chicken crossed the road, or at least tried. Pondering these hypotheses, I brought data to my aid from the dreams of persons in therapy. By dreaming, persons in analysis, I saw, are doing something on a level quite below that of psychodynamics. They are struggling with their world--to make sense out of nonsense, meaning out of chaos, coherence out of conflict. They are doing it by imagination, by constructing new forms and relationships in their world, and by achieving through proportion and perspective a world in which they can survive and live with some meaning. Here is a simple dream. It was related by an intelligent man who seems younger than his thirty years, coming from a culture where fathers have considerable authority. I was in the sea playing with some large porpoises. I like porpoises and wanted these to be like pets. Then I began to get afraid, thinking that the big porpoises would hurt me. I went out of the water, on the shore, and now I seem to be a cat hanging by its tail from a tree. Schizophrenia is an incurable, chronic condition that sentences a person to lifelong treatment. While symptoms can be controlled and may even go into remission over time, they always remain present below the surface. In teenagers the symptoms may be concurrent with the usual withdrawal, lack of motivation, and irritability of that age, making it harder to diagnose; Experts believe that schizophrenia is likely the result of some combination of family history, brain chemistry, environmental events, or drug use at an early age. Triggers may include birth complications, brain injury, exposure to chemicals, a neurodegenerative disease like Parkinson's, or even a father's older age at time of conception.

If someone you love appears to be suffering from schizophrenia, work with a health care professional immediately to determine treatment, which may include hospitalization. If not kept under control, symptoms may lead to depression, social isolation, health and financial problems, homelessness, and even suicide. Bipolar disorder, affects only 2 to 3 percent of the global population. According to the National Institutes of Health, its signals are clear changes in mood, energy, and activity levels--from being extremely up, or manic, to extremely down, or depressed. Mood swings can happen rarely or several times a year, triggered by high stress or trauma--like the death of a loved one--and affect sleep, activity, judgment, and behavior. My appreciation of cooking had much more to do with the process--the sensory experience of creating a meal--than it had to do with the quick and tangible results. As I politely listened, smiled, and nodded, he dominated the conversation with his views. By the time I shared my own perspective, he seemed ready to wrap up the interview. I quickly interjected some of my own thoughts and trusted he would capture my experience in his story. To my surprise and dismay, the article quoted me as saying the very thing I disagreed with--using his words! For him, my nods and smiles meant I agreed and apparently emboldened him to think he could safely attribute the thoughts to me. It was a minor story, but it left a major impression. He brazenly attached his ideas to my credentials--and I had let him. After fuming about it, I saw that a part of me was comfortable with him taking the floor, and that it was often easier for me to let others speak than to venture forth with my own words. The media interview is actually a great example of the art of managing aggression. He had gradually added more layers, each ever so slightly darker than the last. Operating in this way, and experimenting with different pigments, he had taught himself how to capture the delicate contours of human flesh. Because of the thin layers, any light hitting the painting seemed to pass through the angel's face and illuminate it from within. What this revealed was that in the six years that he had been working in the studio, he must have applied himself to an elaborate study of the various paints and perfected a style of layering that made everything seem delicate and lifelike, with a feeling of texture and depth. He must have also spent a great deal of time studying the composition of human flesh itself.

What this also revealed was the incredible patience of Leonardo, who must have felt a great deal of love for such detailed work. Over the years, after he left Verrocchio's studio and established a name for himself as an artist, Leonardo da Vinci developed a philosophy that would guide his artwork and, later, his scientific work as well. He noticed that other artists generally started with an overall image they planned to depict, one that would create a startling or spiritual effect. His mind operated differently. He would find himself beginning with a keen focus on details--the various shapes of noses, the possible turnings of the mouth to indicate a mood, the veins in a hand, the intricate knots of trees. To get out of labour, dahling! As it turns out, I needn't have worried; I sailed through pregnancy, labour and an anaesthetic-aided birth. To paraphrase the Nancy Sinatra hit, These hips were made for birthin'. Lauren put the most pressure on herself, and felt the most disappointment, where breastfeeding was concerned. Looking back, I realize now that she simply did not come from a long line of big milk producers. Who knew this was even something that can run in families? Even if this lactation limitation had dawned on me while Lauren was pregnant or nursing, I don't think I would have told her, lest it add to her feelings of discouragement. But as was the case with her blue eyes, Lauren came by this limitation naturally: her cousins, her mother, even her grandmothers (on both sides) and at least one great-grandmother struggled to provide nourishment the way nature intended. I tried to assure her that retreating from her breastfeeding battle and choosing formula was not the worst thing that could happen. The cat is curled up in a tear-drop form, but its eyes are big and seductive, one of them winking. A porpoise comes up, and, like a father cajoling a youngster out of bed with get up and get going, it hits the cat lightly. The cat then becomes afraid with a real panic and bounds off in a straight line into the higher rocks, away from the sea. Let us put aside such obvious symbols as the big porpoises being father and so on--symbols that are almost always confused with symptoms. I ask you to take the dream as an abstract painting, to look at it as pure form and motion.

We see first a smallish form, namely the boy, playing with the larger forms, the porpoises. Imagine the former as a small circle, and the latter as large circles. The playing movement conveys a kind of love in the dream, which we could express by lines toward each other converging in the play. In the second scene we see the smaller form (the boy in his fright) moving in a line out of the sea and away from the larger forms. The third scene shows the smaller form as a cat, now in an elliptical, tearlike, form, the coyness of the cat's eyes being seductive. As with schizophrenia, genetics often plays a part, and diagnosis in teenagers tends to be harder because the actions mirror teenage behavior. A combination of medication and counseling--and monitoring the condition for a lifetime--forms the most common treatment plan. If a child in your life is chronically angry and irritable and prone to sudden temper outbursts, he or she may be suffering from disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, or DMDD--a condition named only recently, in 2013. With some symptoms similar to attention deficit disorder, it may be treated with similar counseling and medication. essential oils may have a future with all these conditions. WHAT essential oils CAN DO: In both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, it appears that people have physical changes in the structure of their brain and nervous system. In schizophrenia, scientists believe that the ECS plays a role in releasing certain brain chemicals that may contribute to symptoms. While essential oils's inherent anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective qualities have been seen to aid brain health in general, essential oils may also play a part in the ECS release of the endocannabinoid anandamide, which in the right amounts appears to act like an antipsychotic drug. A study on schizophrenic patients published in a 2018 issue of American Journal of Psychiatry used essential oils to supplement regular antipsychotic medication and found that essential oils users improved significantly compared to a placebo group. Several other studies support essential oils's positive action: 2015 research in Neurotherapeutics touts essential oils's therapeutic potential for treating schizophrenia, saying it likely has better tolerability than antipsychotic treatments, and a 2012 study at Germany's University of Cologne found that both essential oils and a mainstream antipsychotic drug had an equal measure of improvement--while essential oils had no side effects. Through interviews that have followed, I have learned to actively disagree and correct reporter's words that might be imputed to me, to interject key points not volunteered by the reporter, and to follow up if I think a point has been misinterpreted. My interviews are better, and reporters often come back to me to comment on subsequent stories. If we stop nodding and smiling at the aggressors on social media and in our lives--if we use our own words--new and more interesting conversations will emerge. THE REASSURANCE DANCE In most of our human relationships, we spend much

My father was an excellent orator. His approach to speaking was textarticle: introduction, three main points, each supported with evidence and brought to life with colorful stories, then pulled together in a powerful conclusion. Though he indulged a rich vocabulary and well-reasoned arguments, I remember him sharing with me how important it was to appeal to the child in his listeners. His stories, in fact, often featured children. He always arrived at the pulpit prepared and confident, sermon text written out and punctuated with underlines and red ink. These details fascinated him. He had come to believe that by focusing on and understanding such details he was actually getting closer to the secret of life itself, to the work of the Creator who infused his presence into every living thing and every form of matter. The bones of the hand or the contours of human lips were as inspiring to him as any religious image. For him, painting was a quest to get at the life force that animates all things. In the process of doing so, he believed he could create work that was much more emotional and visceral. And to realize this quest, he invented a series of exercises that he followed with incredible rigor. During the day he would take endless walks through the city and countryside, his eyes taking in all of the details of the visible world. He would make himself notice something new in every familiar object that he saw. At night, before falling asleep, he would review all of these various objects and details, fixing them in his memory. He was obsessed with capturing the essence of the human face in all of its glorious diversity. She herself had arrived three weeks early, and we almost immediately began augmenting her meals with formula delivered via a tiny tube taped to her daddy's finger. If she didn't put on weight, they weren't going to let us go home together--and we wanted to leave! So we embraced what the hospital's kind nursing staff offered us as an option and gave her what we felt she needed: a combo meal to go . There was no judgment that we perceived at that time: the nurses simply offered it as a way to help our baby put on weight. And there was another benefit to that tiny tube, either taped to my breast or to Rob's pinky: the fact that her dad fed her as often as I did, even in those early days, was probably a harbinger or at least a symbol of the unusual closeness that this daddy/daughter combo would share, in large part because he was the one who woke, fed and prepared her for her day, every morning, while Mommy was on the radio.