Swing shift

Even though your depression is strong, you're still getting up every day? You're getting dressed and taking care of your basic needs? You're going to your grandsons' games and helping your cousin? LENNY: Yeah, I guess so. PAULINE: And as you recover, you'll be able to act more and more competently and productively. CLINICAL TIPS When clients can't express their former adaptive beliefs, you mentally devise a new, more realistic, and functional belief and guide clients toward it. This belief should be balanced. They might be labeled loners, socially inappropriate, or disinterested in learning. The noisy ones may be impossible to overlook, because they are disorderly and disruptive. Teachers or counselors might suspect these children of having attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Following these children into adulthood, we would likely see them in difficult or unfulfilling relationships. Recent developments in brain-imaging technology offer new explanations for these behaviors, allowing us to actually see and understand how experiences with other human beings affect the flow and function of information within our brains. Disruptions or changes in brain activity have been revealed through the use of electroencephalograms (EEGs), quantitative EEGs (QEEGs), positron emission tomography (PET) scans, single photon emission computed tomographies (SPECTs), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Fieldwork using still frames taken from videos set up in thousands of homes in many parts of the world has captured continuous, spontaneous interactions between infants and caretakers, validating the influence of the attachment bond on the nervous system and uncovering the secrets of the attachment bond. Universally accepted by the scientific community, these advances have led to the conclusion that the attachment relationship plays a dominant role in the development of the brain, the individual, and his or her connection to others in the world. The security, or insecurity, of a child's early attachment relationship establishes the basis for: The Anatomy of a Relationship I learnt many new things, put a lot of preconceptions to rest. I used to go to gyms and would often see people running on treadmills without stretching.

If I did weight training, I was told I'd beef up like a man. There was so much false information floating around that I took it upon myself to set the record straight. I would observe people in gyms and write about it. When a new fitness trend hit India, I would be the first to try it. Boxing, spinning, Pilates. Then around fifteen years ago, I got into yoga. During my very first class, I felt different and knew I had stumbled on something huge, though back then no one else seemed to agree with me. By 1999, fitness had finally picked up in a big way. When we make a mistake, or things go wrong, it's important to assess our actions; This is step 3 of the Confidence Cycle: `assess the results'. We want to take a good, honest look at what we did, and assess it in terms of `workability'. Assessing our actions is workable. Judging ourselves is not. Here's an example to draw out the difference. Assessing my actions: `When I got caught up in worrying about the shot, and lost my focus on the ball, I threw poorly and missed the basket. Judging myself: `I am such a lousy basketball player. So self-acceptance does not mean that we pay no attention to the way we behave and the impact of our actions; Why would we do this? For example: Old core belief

New core belief I'm (completely) unlovable. I'm generally a likable person. I'm powerless. I have control over a lot of things. I'm defective. I'm normal, with both strengths and weaknesses. IDENTIFYING MALADAPTIVE CORE BELIEFS What role does the attachment bond play in our adult relationships? Let's look in detail at a situation typical of many relationships that start out looking and feeling good, but fall apart in spite of their promising beginnings. As you read this story about Stephanie and Steven, notice your reactions: Do you have judgments about the people? Do you think one is right and the other is wrong? Has anything like this happened to you or anyone you know? If so, how did each person react? Why do you think these behaviors occurred on both sides? Stephanie and Steven: How Good Relationships Become Bad Relationships The Miss India articleant approached me to train contestants. It was a bit unnerving to take on such a high profile job, but I accepted.

By now, the floodgates had burst open, and I found myself answering fitness queries on a minute-to-minute basis. Once my kids entered school, I took on my first client. Like me, she was a mother of two children, but unlike me, she had found it impossible to lose weight. I took her on, on the strict understanding that this arrangement would be our little secret. In a single month, she lost so much weight that her friends and family started calling her Mrs India! Word soon spread about my one-on-one fitness training sessions and I got more offers. People would demand that I make their bodies look like mine. I turned down a lot of offers as I wanted to do things my way. Because judging ourselves does not help us in any way; Of course, knowing this intellectually won't stop it from happening. Our minds started judging us in early childhood; But what we can do is unhook ourselves from those self-judgements. And I invite you to start doing this, as of now. Practise getting unhooked from all your self-judgements - both the negative and the positive. Let them float by like leaves on a stream. If your mind's telling you how crap you are, notice it and name it: `Judgement. Also, feel free to be light-hearted with your naming. For example when you notice a positive self-judgement, you might playfully say to yourself, `That's a lovely bit of flattery. Several strategies are useful in eliciting clients' negative core beliefs, including Looking for Central Themes in Automatic Thoughts

Whenever clients present data (problems, automatic thoughts, emotions, behavior, history), you listen for the category of core belief whose schema seems to have been activated. For example, when LENNY expresses negative thoughts about being unable to apply for jobs, about wasting his time by watching television, and about making mistakes in paying bills, I hypothesize that a core belief in the helpless category has been operating. When ELSIE expresses anxiety about calling a friend, when she consistently expresses thoughts of others not caring about her, and when she fears there's something wrong with her and so she won't be able to sustain a relationship, I hypothesize that a core belief in the unlovable category has been activated. Early in treatment, you may hypothesize just to yourself. Sharing your hypotheses about clients' core beliefs may evoke strong emotion, and they may begin to feel unsafe. Later in treatment, you might review with clients related automatic thoughts they've had in a variety of situations and then ask them to draw a conclusion as to an underlying pattern (LENNY, do you see a common theme in these automatic thoughts? When confirming a hypothesis you've made with clients, it's important to figure out which category a core belief falls into and which word or words clients themselves use. It's also important to ascertain whether the client is using different words to express the same belief. The first time Stephanie saw Steven was in her office elevator. She was immediately attracted to him, loving the way his eyes crinkled when he joked with the man standing next to him. She learned from a friend that he worked in a different division within the corporation. When she saw him a week later at a company dinner, she got up the courage to ask him out. To her delight, within the week they were dating. Stephanie felt that this one was different. He's so right for me, she thought. They had romantic dinners, held hands at the movies, and went for long walks in the park. Together they laughed about their names: both had been called Stevie as children. It became their private term of endearment. I wanted to educate people and make them aware of what their bodies can and cannot do. As my children grew up, I started to focus more on my work.