Keep your child's school updated if the cyberbully is someone from school

We struggled to find a place to hold it, as May is the time for graduations and weddings and there were very few suitable options available. We needed a venue large enough to accommodate our friends, co-workers and acquaintances, as well as those listeners with whom Lauren had a relationship. Eventually it was suggested we try Koerner Hall, an acoustically acclaimed concert venue with seating for a thousand or so and a wide, deep stage. Fortunately for us, the woman who was in charge of the hall just happened to have worked with me twelve years earlier in a production of Cinderella. She remembered Lauren coming often to rehearsals and performances, enthralled with the musical comedy as well as the backstage workings of a professional show--and more than a little in love with the actor who embodied Prince Charming. Limiting and expanding thus go together. Alfred Adler proposed that civilization arose out of our physical limitations, or what Adler called inferiority. Tooth for tooth and claw for claw, men and women were inferior to the wild animals. In the struggle against these limitations for their survival, human beings evolved their intelligence. Heraclitus said, Conflict is both king of all and father of all. The limits are as necessary as those provided by the banks of a river, without which the water would be dispersed on the earth and there would be no river--that is, the river is constituted by the tension between the flowing water and the banks. Art in the same way requires limits as a necessary factor in its birth. Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. Again listen to Heraclitus: unwise people do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre. It's good to have limits, he remarked. NIH-supported studies in 2012 and 2014 showed that essential oils helped reverse cognitive decline in rats treated with iron--known for triggering memory loss and present in the brains of both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's sufferers. It also helped clean out accumulated proteins and other particles that can trigger cell death. And Parkinson's patients in a 2014 trial reported improved quality of life and relief of tremors and other symptoms after a course of essential oils. Finally, in a four-week trial, essential oils showed promise for arresting Parkinson's-related psychosis. As of 2018, research using the potential new drug Sativex--a combination of essential oils and caffeine--and other cannabinoid combinations shows promise for taming uncontrollable movements in Huntington's patients.

As with inflammation, there are two kinds of pain: acute (specific) or neuropathic (chronic). Both kinds not only bring discomfort, but they also compromise quality of life and damage tissue, leading to deeper illness. For many people, pain is an occasional and discrete event: a cut or broken arm in an accident while playing, a finger closed in a door, a sunburn. You may feel pain during an illness or after surgery. As we age, simple wear and tear may bring us chronic back and muscle aches or fingers swollen with arthritis. And, in turn, they defended her methods. Fragile bullies often nurture insiders, doling out benefits in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. Protecting the Bully Coach Barb was not only an aggressor. She was easily hurt and regarded herself as a victim. Her vulnerability further confused the picture for her players and pulled them in when they might have protested. This provides a kind of compromised intimacy to her players: If she won't care for me, at least I can take care of her. The times they received the most care were the times she was also misusing them--venting about how burdened she was when she was supposed to be coaching them, asking them to betray teammates, expecting them to advocate for her at their own expense. Suddenly, the aggressor needed their support, and that felt good. While it lures with the prospect of closeness, the bully's fragility also inspires forgetting. Other qualities we might possess, such as a penchant for visual forms of thinking, represent other possible strengths, not weaknesses. The problem is that we humans are deep conformists. Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others, or criticized by teachers. People with a high visual sense are often labeled as dyslexic, for example. Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in.

But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery. Mastery is like swimming--it is too difficult to move forward when we are creating our own resistance or swimming against the current. Know your strengths and move with them. Transform yourself through practice--The Fingertip Feel As narrated in article 2 (here), after graduating from the Citadel in 1981, Cesar Rodriguez decided to enter the pilot training program for the United States Air Force. We were grateful for this connection to help walk us through planning our event and to have found what looked to be the perfect setting. Clearly, this memorial was going to be less casual than the first. Being in production mode and planning for another gathering was really a saving grace, and Rob and I were both grateful for the diversion: an opportunity to focus not on the totality of our suffering but on making this the best tribute to our daughter's brief but shining life that we could. We spent many hours during those ten days between memorials scouring through and choosing photos to go along with lyrics to songs that were to be performed live, as well as for Lauren's own recording of Dream a Little Dream. We enlisted the help of our friend Allan Bell to aid us put this together. An event planner and professional hospital and charity fundraiser, Allan had turned Lauren's wedding in an otherwise unremarkable hotel ballroom into a sheer white and sparkling setting. His love for our family and sense of--for lack of a better word--show would come in very handy for the May 29 event. As had been the case at her all-too-recent wedding, Lauren's goodbye celebration featured several Beatles songs. Our friend and fellow Cinderella performer, musician, director and writer David Warrack, took his seat at the shiny black grand piano under a spotlight at centre stage. Near him stood solo artist and lead singer of the band Lighthouse, Dan Clancy, also a family acquaintance; True, in our age there is occurring a new valuation of spontaneity and a strong reaction against rigidity. This goes along with a rediscovery of the values of the childlike capacity to play. In modern art, as we all know, there has evolved a new interest in children's painting as well as in peasant and primitive art, and these kinds of spontaneity often are used as models for adult art work. This is especially true in psychotherapy. The great majority of patients experience themselves as stifled and inhibited by the excessive and rigid limits insisted on by their parents.

One of their reasons for coming for therapy in the first place is this conviction that all of this needs to be thrown overboard. Even if it is simplistic, this urge toward spontaneity obviously should be valued by the therapist. People must recover the lost aspects of their personalities, lost under a pile of inhibitions, if they are to become integrated in any effective sense. But we must not forget that these stages in therapy, like children's art, are interim stages. Children's art is characterized by an unfinished quality. And certain conditions can take hold at any time, bringing chronic pain: migraine, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, and cancer, to name a few. It all starts with your spinal cord and brain, where the complex signaling between nerves can be interrupted by any number of daily events and conditions. In simplest terms, pain happens when a nerve ending is stimulated, perhaps by a cut and tissue damage. In more complex cases, pain results from system-wide damage to nerves, with disruption of their normal signaling--perhaps the result of an old injury or a chronic disease. Each person's experience with pain is unique. While one may take arthritis pain for granted and move through the day with a determined limp, another may be laid low by a throbbing migraine and need to lie in a dark room for 72 hours. Pain is personal, too, involving our own learning experiences and the memory of how we've reacted to pain episodes in the past. Chronic pain can bring depression and social isolation, creating more pain in a vicious cycle. The first step in treating pain is identifying how it affects you. Basic pain medications--whether over the counter or prescriptive--may well cut to the chase, but integrative practices like physical therapy, exercise, and diet are key to healing in many cases. Like the misdirection used by magicians, fragility turns our focus away from what is happening to us and fixates us on the needs of the bully. This shift is so subtle that it can look like care. Consider the dramatic expressions of guilt and remorse a serial abuser expresses following the abuse. These expressions move the victim to protect the abuser from pain by minimizing the abuse, agreeing not to tell, or impulsively offering forgiveness. At worst, the misdirection is so complete that the victim feels like the aggressor, whose truth is an unwanted weapon.

Successful misdirection and forgetting keeps the abuse cycle in motion. The fragile bully's rage can even inspire protectiveness. It took me years to recognize this shift in the dance with my father. Even as he was ranting against liberals, I sensed that they must be more powerful than him to be so threatening. Here he was doing the bullying, and I wanted to protect him from the evil conspirators he seemed to fear. But soon he had to confront a harsh reality--he was not naturally gifted for flying a jet plane. Among those in the program were some who were known as golden boys. They seemed to have a knack for flying at high speeds. They were in their element. From the very beginning Rodriguez loved to fly, and he had ambitions to become a fighter pilot, the most elite and coveted position within the air force. But he would never reach such a goal unless he somehow managed to raise himself up to the skill level of the golden boys. His problem was that he was quickly overwhelmed by the glut of information that a pilot had to process. The key was to learn how to take a scan pattern of all the instruments--a quick reading here and there--while maintaining a feel for one's overall position in the sky. Losing situational awareness could prove fatal. For him, this scanning ability could only come through endless hours of practice on the simulator and in flying, until it became relatively automatic. A large black and stainless steel urn shaped like a sleek blackbird (in honour of that favourite and familiar Beatles song that Rob had taught Lauren on guitar) sat on a table onstage next to a microphone bearing her radio station's call letters, its head bent as if in sorrow. A warm and down-to-earth minister, Susanne McKim, who had performed Lauren and Phil's wedding ceremony, oversaw our goodbyes to her. Our mutual co-worker from Ottawa, Steve Madely, spoke again, and then we heard Stop All the Clocks, this time recited live by my radio partner and our close family friend, Mike Cooper. There was also a live rendition of the traditional Celtic blessing She Does Not Leave, read by Lisa Brandt, my fellow broadcaster, my friend and a mentor to Lauren, and accompanied, quietly--perfectly--by David Warrack playing Billy Joel's Dublinesque. She does not leave, she is not gone, she looks upon us still.