MY WORK ... MY PASSION

• Certified Transpersonal Hypnotherapist ; Past experiences: Dream Analysis /10 Years Experience •Psychotherapist / Use of Gestalt, Jungian, Zen, Reality and Energy Therapies /10 Years Experience •EMDR • Men and Their Journey: the neuroscience of the male brain, and the implications in sexuality, education and relationship • Women: Their Transformation and Empowerment ATOD (Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs) / 21 years experience •Ordained Interfaith Minister & Official Celebrant • Social Justice Advocate • Child and Human Rights Advocate • Spiritual Guide and Intuitive • Certified Reiki Practitioner • Mediation / Conflict Resolution • “Intentional Love” Parenting Strategy Groups • Parenting Workshops • Coaching for parents of Indigo, Crystal, and Rainbow Children • International Training: Israel & England • Critical Incident Stress Debriefing • Post-911 and Post-Katrina volunteer

MSW - UNC Chapel Hill

BSW - UNC Greensboro


With immense love I wish Happy Birthday to my three grandchildren!

May 22: Brannock

May 30: Brinkley

June 12: Brogan

All three have birthdays in the same 22 days of the year ....what a busy time for the family!

"An Unending Love"

This blog and video is devoted and dedicated to my precious daughter Jennifer, my grand daughters Brogan and Brinkley, and my grand son Brannock. They are hearts of my heart. Our connection through many lives..... is utterly infinite.




The Definition of Genius

"THRIVE"

https://youtu.be/Lr-RoQ24lLg

"ONLY LOVE PREVAILS" ...."I've loved you for a thousand years; I'll love you for a thousand more....."


As we are in the winter of our lives, I dedicate this to Andrew, Dr. John J.C. Jr. and Gary W., MD, (who has gone on before us). My love and admiration is unfathomable for each of you..........and what you have brought into this world.....so profoundly to me.
The metaphors are rich and provocative; we're in them now. This world is indeed disappearing, and the richest eternal world awaits us!
The intensity, as was in each of the three of us, is in yellow!
In my heart forever.........

Slowly the truth is loading
I'm weighted down with love
Snow lying deep and even
Strung out and dreaming of
Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world

We're threading hope like fire

Down through the desperate blood
Down through the trailing wire
Into the leafless wood

Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This disappearing world


I'll be sticking right there with it
I'll be by y
our side
Sailing like a silver bullet
Hit 'em 'tween the eyes
Through the smoke and rising water
Cross the great divide
Baby till it all feels right

Night falling on the city
Sparkling red and gold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This
disappearing world
This disappearing world
This disappearing world


TECHNOLOGY..........

In “Conversations with God”, by Neale Donald Walsch, there is a warning I think of. I refer to it as the Atlantis passage, and I've quoted it a few times before." As I have said, this isn't the first time your civilization has been at this brink,"

God tells Walsch. "I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself."

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

"Does Mueller Have A Doomsday Machine?" ~ by Blue Tsunami

  Trump’s flat denial that he is considering ways to get rid of Special Counsel Mueller is about as believable as an NFL owner proclaiming full confidence in his winless head coach.  You know it’s the kiss of death.
   So, allow me to speculate and talk about Saturday Night Massacres.  We now know that Mueller’s investigators have been pouring over thousands of emails from the Trump Transition Team since early September.  Those emails put several folks in Trump’s circle in the barrel and widened the cast of characters in this mystery considerably...to include several Republican congress members.   Trump will also get the bad news this week that Mueller’s investigation will drag on well into 2018.  And,  Faux Noos has the president drooling for a confrontation.   The perfect shit storm.  
   So, I’m speculating that Mueller sees all this and is building a firewall, a sort of “doomsday machine” to be activated in case Trump goes SNM.  Mueller has a full set of prosecutorial tools and the experience to use them to his advantage.   Sealed indictments for instance.  Sealed indictments would be a spectacular way to “reach out from the grave.”  Who knows how many transition staffers have already cracked under questioning or perjured themselves based on evidence those emails provided?  What have Michael  Flynn and George Papadapolos and perhaps James Comey been telling the grand jury?  What parts of the Steele Dossier have investigators been able to confirm?  Mueller has the answers to those questions and many more.  He also has the savvy needed to play a winning hand correctly even if his opponent throws the table over and tries to end the game.

"Preschool twins take a stand against descrimination"


 Said Jia’s mother Ashley, “Their ability to look past their skin color can be attributed to the fact that we live in a diverse neighborhood.
 I think that’s one of the nice things about growing up in a multicultural, melting pot city. They don’t see color. We’ve never talked to them about it, period."
 Added Zuri’s mother Valencia, “You’re happy ... and then you become sad … because they have to grow up. And society takes over.”
 Alas.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

"Major Depressive Disorder May Be Linked to Early Childhood Stress"

Major Depressive Disorder May Be Linked to Early Childhood Stress

OCTOBER 11, 2017
Dava Stewart
Yogesh Dwivedi, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Alabama BirminghamStrong evidence purposes interactions between early life stress and FKBP5 genotypes could lead to significant risk of developing major depressive disorder (MDD) or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to the results of a recent systematic review and meta-analysis of the existing literature.

“The present study provides a comprehensive evaluation whether FKBP5 gene, which is a critical regulator of stress activity axis in the brain, confers a genetic risk factor for PTSD and MDD in the event of early life adversity,” Yogesh Dwivedi, PhD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Alabama in Birmingham, and co-author of the review and analysis said. “This is very important given that these 2 disorders are impacted heavily on early life stress.”

Previous research has shown evidence of early childhood stresses such as abuse, parental death or divorce and neglect is strongly associated with the development of MDD, PTSD, and a higher risk of suicide.

The authors write that while prior research investigated the effects of FKBP5 variants in relation to MDD, PTSD, and other disorders, there is currently no systematic review and meta-analysis examining whether variants of FKBP5 actually increase the risk of stress-related disorders.

The research team examined specific single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and included studies that included FKBP5 rs1360780, rs3800373, or rs9470080. The authors write that those particular SNPs were chosen because they were the most frequently studied for gene-environment interaction. A total of 14 studies were identified that fit the criteria.

The meta-analysis revealed that individuals who carry specific alleles for FKBP5 exposed to early-life trauma had high risks for depression or PTSD, and provided strong evidence in support of an interaction between early-life stress and FKBP5 genotype in these disorders.

The results were not especially surprising to the researchers, as they were expecting similar results based on previous studies, however, the meta-analysis confirmed these findings in a large, combined study.

The meta-analysis does have some limitations. For example, the sample size is relatively small, because there was limited data available, additionally, there were some confounding variables that the researchers could not fully exclude, and the 3 SNPs make up a haplotype block which is associated with several susceptible common variants.

“In the future, some potential and causative functional mutation or allele needs to be identified with fine mapping or targeted sequence analysis,” write the authors.

In describing the next steps of this research, Dwivedi says the team is working toward being able to use the 3 SNPs as biomarkers to predict stress-related disorders. Such a breakthrough would be a great stride toward the goal of providing individualized treatment.

“Personalized medicine is becoming reality in treating many disorders,” says Dwivedi. “Psychiatric disorders are no exception. Thus, finding genetic basis of these disorders may help diagnose and treat patients effectively.”

The full review and meta-analysis, titled “Interaction between early-life stress and FKBP5 gene variants in major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis,”  can be found in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Greatest Drummers of All Time

https://www.thetoptens.com/drummers/

Snow Patrol - Chasing Cars



Well, okay, it's NO secret.  I LOVE music...LOVE...LOVE...LOVE!

When I was in my younger years, I remember so many doing weed, and other drugs. Not this girl!  Music did it all the way!  First, it was free, always accessible, and reverberated in my brain.  Even NOW in my winter years, it has the same effect. So, if you don't like music, this is not the blog for you!  Oh, sure, I love all kinds, but this is what speaks to me to rev up spirit in one way or another.

While I played piano the longest, I also had a lingering, light love affair with the guitar.  My former husband and I fell in love with Ludwig drums, and for awhile our house was rocking! Drums are now my "drug of choice". At a certain time in my life, all the instruments "went away", due to varying circumstances. I was somewhat empty for a bit, but finally figured out how to make the best of that, and music once again beat in my heart, mind and space! I especially love Brit performers, and Italian opera!

Oh, and don't forget Ed Sheeran!
England’s Ed Sheeran rocketed to stardom on the strength of hit singles such as 2010’s “The A Team” and 2014’s Grammy-winning “Thinking Out Loud.” Redheaded and boyish, Sheeran also showed a facility for having celebrity friends, from Elton John and Jamie Foxx to Pharrell Williams and Taylor Swift. A singer/songwriter who left school to pursue his dream, Sheeran began recording in 2005, and in 2008 moved to London to try for stardom. It worked out. A prolific songwriter with a penchant for R&B influenced pop and sentimental ballads, his first hit, “The A Team,” was nominated for a Grammy as song of the year, and his first album went to the top of the charts in the U.K. and the U.S. His second album, x, won 2014’s Brit Award for album of the year, and was nominated for a 2015 Grammy as album of the year. He’s written songs for off-stage friend Taylor Swift, as well as for One Direction and Christina Aguilera. His other songs include “Don’t,” “Bloodstream” and “Sing.”

Thursday, November 23, 2017

Adele - When We Were Young (Live at The Church Studios) ~ For J.J.C.


Everybody loves the things you do
From the way you talk
To the way you move
Everybody here is watching you
'Cause you feel like home
You're like a dream come true
But if by chance you're here alone
Can I have a moment
Before I go?
'Cause I've been by myself all night long
Hoping you're someone I used to know
You look like a movie
You sound like a song
My God, this reminds me
Of when we were young
Let me photograph you in this light
In case it is the last time
That we might be exactly like we were
Before we realized
We were sad of getting old
It made us restless
It was just like a movie
It was just like a song
I was so scared to face my fears
Nobody told me that you'd be here
And I swore you moved overseas
That's what you said, when you left me
You still look like a movie
You still sound like a song
My God, this reminds me
Of when we were young
Let me photograph you in this light
In case it is the last time
That we might be exactly like we were
Before we realized
We were sad of getting old
It made us restless
It was just like a movie
It was just like a song
When we were young
When we were young
When we were young
When we were young
It's hard to win me back
Everything just takes me back
To when you were there
To when you were there
And a part of me keeps holding on
Just in case it hasn't gone
I guess I still care
Do you still care?
It was just like a movie
It was just like a song
My God, this reminds me
Of when we were young
When we were young
When we were young
When we were young
When we were young
Let me photograph you in this light
In case it is the last time
That we might be exactly like we were
Before we realized
We were sad of getting old
It made us restless
Oh, I'm so mad I'm getting old
It makes me reckless
It was just like a movie
It was just like a song
When we were young


Ed Sheeran - "Perfect" (Official Music Video)-Thanksgiving Memories





   For Gary, Keith and John ... three old boyfriends, whom I will simply love forever, and especially everytime it snows, or I talk about Lake Placid, or the Poconos, laughter and giggling, cozy warmth, and "Frozen"! All of you made me laugh the very deepest of my laughter....I remember that to this very minute.  We were "just kids" then! We had such crazy, incredible fun! One story after another passes through my mind, and I realize I am sitting here with the biggest grin on my face, and with tears in my eyes, and on my cheeks. Gary is not with us.... but in my belief system he can go right into my heart, and know exactly the words I struggle for. Some days, when I wake up - times he comes into my dreams I am so sad he, and all of us, aren't right there together again!
   Some of my most treasured youthful memories of you are like icy, shiny and glittery silver threads woven into the fabric  (!joy!) of my life. On this Thanksgiving day, you flood my very best memories. There is such profound thankfulness that it almost makes my heart burst! This video just fits, too - snowballs, dancing in the snow, snow angels, frozen wet wool socks, unending laughter echoing in the valley, strong passionate loving !
   Thank you for these solid, young-ish memories, and who you each were as men. There were special stars over my meeting each of you at different times.  Each of you always called me "angel". Of course, I was not .... but each of you brought me to my core and inspired my womanhood........and inspired my loving into the future. And, wow, did I love to hear you say it! Just exhilarating joy!

On my very much later honeymoon, I had forgotten most of what I learned in that icy snow with you guys. Or at least I thought I had.  It took me a more time to realize I had not at all forgotten my essence. Even starting over, I felt more carefree about it!  I think it was because of your support and memories.
Watching this video takes me back to you all...and puts tear in my eyes!!! I am so grateful that I lived this long to realize all that ... aging is imperfect physically at times, but it is simply stellar ... remembering everything ... side by side.  The heart breaking moments are all right beside all the best moments of my life....well, actually they all break hearts, just in different ways!

(Thanks SO much for the call when you had seen this, John!  That was an extra added delight!! "Just dive right in, and follow my lead" ... I gulped, kiddo!)

Ed Sheeran "Supermarket Flowers" ~ Thankgiving for Moms



I took the supermarket flowers from the windowsill
I threw the day old tea from the cup
Packed up the photo album Matthew had made
Memories of a life that's been loved
Took the get well soon cards and stuffed animals
Poured the old ginger beer down the sink
Dad always told me, "don't you cry when you're down"
But mum, there's a tear every time that I blink
Oh I'm in pieces, it's tearing me up, but I know
A heart that's broke is a heart that's been loved
So I'll sing Hallelujah
You were an angel in the shape of my mum
When I fell down you'd be there holding me up
Spread your wings as you go
And when God takes you back we'll say Hallelujah
You're home
I fluffed the pillows, made the beds, stacked the chairs up
Folded your nightgowns neatly in a case
John says he'd drive then put his hand on my cheek
And wiped a tear from the side of my face
I hope that I see the world as you did cause I know
A life with love is a life that's been lived
So I'll sing Hallelujah
You were an angel in the shape of my mum
When I fell down you'd be there holding me up
Spread your wings as you go
And when God takes you back we'll say Hallelujah
You're home
Hallelujah
You were an angel in the shape of my mum
You got to see the person that I have become
Spread your wing
And I know that when God took you back he said Hallelujah
You're home

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

"How to LOve Someone Again After Infidelity"

But what are the chances of being happy again, after an affair? Or for rebuilding trust? For that matter, what does it even mean to rebuild trust after infidelity?  
The Erotic Equation
In 2006, couples therapist Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity caused a stir among sex and relationship therapists (and their clients) by suggesting that married sex was more difficult than most people realized. Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell,3 she saw a fundamental contradiction at the heart of erotic marriage. 
Modern couples, she noted, were driven to satisfy two fundamentally opposite impulses—the yearning for safety and the longing for adventure. As she put it, “Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage." Perhaps the reason conventional couples therapy is often helpless to revive sexless relationships is because the project to unite the erotic and the domestic was flawed from the start.
What saved Mating in Captivity from being a far gloomier book was the sheer force of Perel’s personality — exuberant, playful, with a European-born feel for the ironic. Hearing Perel speak was often so much fun that people tended to overlook the seriousness of her message. 
The advice she gave to people in erotically frustrated marriages was challenging: Allow yourself to feel more deeply the otherness of your partner. You never really possess each other. You just think you do.
That’s a difficult thing to keep in mind, but for some people, it can be more erotic. As she says, how can you desire what you already possess? Give up the illusion of possessing the other person, and eros might have a better chance.   
After the Affair
It's not surprising that Perel’s next book, The State of Affairs, would be about marital infidelity. Nothing makes you realize you don’t fully possess someone like finding out they’ve been sleeping with someone else. Infidelity surely ranks high on anyone’s list of the major causes of human misery. In the book, Perel herself makes an analogy to cancer. 
In recent years, she tells us, her practice has been exclusively devoted to couples affected by infidelity. So I was eager to hear what she had to say about whether and how couples can find happiness after an affair, or whether and how couples might learn to trust again.
 Karen Harms
Source: photo credit: Karen Harms
Since her previous book so often suggested acknowledging the “otherness” of your partner, I wondered what she might recommend to couples trying to heal from this ultimate act of otherness.
After an affair, according to Perel, couples that stay together fall into three categories: sufferers, builders, andexplorers.
For sufferers, the affair remains a black hole permanently fixed at the center of the relationship. What follows can be a lifetime of emotional pain.
Builders, relieved to have put it in the past, simply soldier on. The affair is sealed over, and nobody goes there again.
It’s the third category, the explorers, that most interests Perel. If I understand her correctly, they’re like the couples in Mating in Captivity who learned to draw erotic inspiration from each other’s "otherness," only more so, since there's no otherness quite like that of an unfaithful partner. 
It’s not easy, she notes, to be an explorer: You have to realize that every marriage is built on shifting sand, and that no relationship is entirely safe from jealousy or betrayal. But it’s the explorers, she contends, who emerge from the trauma most fully alive.
This is a challenging perspective, darker than I think most American readers will feel comfortable with. But she argues it with exceptional clarity, humor, and grace.
A Most Dangerous Game
The State of Affairs is full of stories of people who became more fully human as the result of an affair: The over-responsible married woman who discovers her inner rebellious child when she falls head over heels for a tattooed landscaper. The husband who is a dutiful provider both in and out of the bedroom, but finds that having paid a stripper for a lap dance, he can for the first time in his life simply receive.  
I think most readers would find all this to be well and good, as long as these people’s emotional growth left them better able to tolerate ordinary monogamy, but Perel has never been comfortable accepting such limits. Instead, she leaves her subjects free to figure out for themselves how to live their lives. We hear from all three points of the triangle: those who’ve secretly introduced a third person into the relationship; those who’ve later discovered the existence of a third; and, in one especially poignant chapter, those who have been the third.
Erotic love, she seems to say, is a dangerous game — and always will be. Accept that fact, and you’ll be more likely to recover from infidelity with your faith intact.
How much help will this book provide, for couples trying to find their way back together after an affair? Many readers will find it frustrating, since it contains no easy answers. But anyone affected by infidelity — i.e. most of us, in one way or another — will surely recognize themselves in it.
References
1. Parnass S: The Impact of Extramarital Relationships on the Continuation of Marriages. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 21: 100-115, 1995. 
2. Haltzman S: The Secrets of Surviving Infidelity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 
3. Mitchell S A: Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. 

For those with fibromyalgia ~~ from 2003


This is research from 2003. 

Cognitive Function & Fibromyalgia

Monday, April 28, 2003

By: Jennifer Glass, Ph.D Denise Park, Ph.D,

Reprinted from FMresearch from 2003Online


“I can deal with the pain, but the memory and thinking problems really worry me.”
“The physical symptoms weren’t as frightening as the memory problems.”
“The most devastating effect for me has been the cognitive impairment.”

If you have fibromyalgia (FM), then these quotes may describe what you have felt as well. Many FM patients complain of cognitive (or mental) symptoms such as memory failures (both long-term and short-term), difficulties with attention, and with finding the right words. Our research focuses on these cognitive problems in FM patients.
Our research shows that there really is cognitive dysfunction in FM patients. This is important because even though FM patients report cognitive symptoms, physicians and scientists must consider the possibility that because FM patients experience many symptoms, there may be a tendency to mistake normal, everyday lapses on cognition as something more serious. However, we have found that FM patients perform more poorly than age- and education-matched controls on tests of several different types of cognitive function. For example, FM patients could recall fewer words when given a list of words to remember and recall later. FM patients also performed more poorly on a test of working memory. Working memory refers to your ability to hold something in mind briefly while you use that information for some other mental process. It is your mental desktop. Multiplying large numbers in your head is a good example of a task that uses working memory. In addition, FM patients had lower scores on vocabulary tests, and had lower scores on a verbal fluency test. In the verbal fluency task, people are shown a letter and are asked to write down as many words as they can think of that start with that letter. It tests how quickly you can access your stored knowledge of words. Thus, our results show that FM patients do indeed have some cognitive dysfunction.
In fact, the cognitive performance of FM patients was equivalent to that of adults who were twenty years older than the FM patients on several of our tests. Moreover, the FM performance and that of the older adults was worse when compared to control subjects the same age, gender, and education level as the FM patients. Our research on aging shows that memory declines reliably every decade, and our results with FM patients suggest that FM patients were cognitively twenty years older in their performance on some tasks.
However, there was one key difference between the FM patients and the older controls. Older adults are typically slower than young adults on cognitive tests that measure how rapidly they process information. This slow processing explains many other symptoms of cognitive aging. But the FM patients were faster than the older adults, and in fact, were just as fast as the younger, age-matched controls. So although FM patients may perform similarly to older adults on some cognitive tasks, the underlying cause is not likely the same.
An important question is whether the cognitive dysfunction seen in FM patients can be related to other symptoms of FM. For example, FM patients are often also depressed, and cognitive dysfunction occurs in people who are depressed. Maybe the cognitive dysfunction in FM is simply due to depression. Our results show that this is not the case. All of the patients in our study were carefully selected so that no one with major, clinical depression was included, but we were still able to demonstrate cognitive problems in our sample. Moreover, depressed patients are often slow and are FM patients were as fast as the age-matched controls in their ability to process information rapidly. In addition, we measured depressive symptoms in our study. FM patients, even though they were not clinically depressed, reported more depressive symptoms than the control groups. This isn’t surprising since the other symptoms of FM are themselves depressing and discouraging. Even though the patients reported more depression symptoms, those symptoms were not related to cognitive problems. In other words, the patients with the worst cognitive performance were not necessarily the patients with the most depression symptoms. We also did not find any relationship between anxiety and performance on the cognitive tests.
Yet another symptom that might be related to cognitive function is sleep disturbance. Perhaps the patients who have the most disrupted sleep have the lowest cognitive scores. We looked at this by having patients wear activity monitors. The monitors were worn on the wrist like a watch and measured how much a person moved around. During the night, most people don’t move much, unless they wake up. By looking at the data collected from the activity monitors, we could tell how often a person woke up during the night and could calculate the percentage of time a person spent asleep during the period where they were trying to sleep. We found that FM patients had lower percentages of time asleep during the night; yet, this measure of sleep was not related to cognitive performance. Also, self-reported fatigue was not related to cognitive performance.
Actually, the only symptom we found to be related to cognitive performance was pain, particularly the impact of pain on a patient. We hope to conduct further research to learn more about how pain and cognitive function are related in FM patients. For example, managing chronic pain may take some cognitive effort and this may interfere with performance on cognitive tasks. Alternatively, higher pain may be an indicator of more severe FM, but at this time we don’t know which of these is true.
Another area of our research is focused on subjective awareness of cognitive ability–memory in particular. For example, how well do you think you do at everyday memory tasks? How much do you know about the way that memory functions? Do you use strategies to help you remember things? Is it important for you to have a good memory? Do you worry about having a good memory? Has your memory ability changed in the last few years? Do you feel you have any control over how well you can remember something?
We measured people’s responses to a questionnaire designed to answer these questions. We found that FM patients felt they had less memory ability than age-matched controls; they felt they had experienced more decline in their memory; good memory was more important to FM patients; and they were more anxious about performing well on memory tests. FM patients knew just as much about how memory works and used more strategies to help them remember than non-FM research participants. We found that FM patients’ rating of their memory ability was related to their actual memory performance, showing that the patients’ assessment of memory problems was accurate. In contrast, the control groups did not show this same relationship.
In conclusion, our research has shown that patients’ complaints about their cognitive problems are accurate: there is cognitive dysfunction in FM patients and this is not due solely to psychiatric disorders such as depression, or to other symptoms of FM such as sleep disturbance, anxiety or fatigue. On the other hand, cognitive dysfunction in FM is related to pain. Our future research will focus on the relationship of pain and cognitive function, as well as on some other types of cognitive tasks. Since many patients complain of difficulty focusing on one task, we plan to study attention in FM. Finally, we are planning some neuroimaging studies where we can see which parts of the brain are active during a cognitive task. We hope to find differences between the FM patients and healthy controls that will give us more information about this disorder.




Wednesday, November 8, 2017

My favorite quote from Roosevelt

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

It happens to be the one thing women find hard to give.


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How many times have we heard the phrase, “All men want is sex?” When I was 17 years old I was sure it was true. When I was 37 years old, I suspected it might not be true. And now that I’m 73 years old, I know it’s not true. Now don’t get me wrong, sex can be wonderful at any age, but there’s something that is more important than sex, but it’s something that men have difficulty admitting and women have difficulty giving.

This understanding has dawned on me slowly and became most evident to me in my men’s group. I’ve been meeting regularly with six other guys for thirty-eight years and sex has been a topic that has run through our discussions over the years. Like all guys we are somewhat competitive and we all want to be seen as successful, but we also have learned to be honest with each other. We not only talk about our sexual successes, but also our failures, fears, and confusions.
Getting taken into her body gives us a sense of peace and homecoming that goes way beyond simple sexual pleasure.
From the time I was a young I learned that wanting sex was synonymous with being a man. In high school I remember overhearing a girl I liked talking about a guy we both knew. She wasn’t complaining that he was preoccupied with sex, but that he “didn’t come on to me like other guys do.” She went on to tell her girlfriend, “He’s not being very manly.” The message was clear, “real men” want sex and if you don’t “come on” to a girl, you’re not a real man.
This early lesson was validated through the years: Always wanting sex is the mark of manliness for many. It’s better to be turned down again and again and be seen as a jerk who is totally preoccupied with sex than to want something more than sex and be seen as “less than a man.”
So, what do men want more than sex? We’ve all heard that women need to feel loved to have sex, but men need to have sex to feel loved. Let’s look more deeply at what it is exactly that men are getting when they get sex. Sure, there is the physical pleasure, but there is a deeper need that is being satisfied. I call it the need for a safe harbor.
The world of men is a world of competition. On the most basic level, males compete with other males for access to the most desirable females. Males make the advances and females decide which males they will accept. Sure, in modern times these roles are less rigid than they once were, but for the most part, whether we’re peacocks or people, we strut our stuff and hope it’s good enough to get us chosen by the woman we go after.
Getting taken into her body gives us a sense of peace and homecoming that goes way beyond simple sexual pleasure. Of course, I’m talking about heterosexual men here. There’s a similar dynamic in the gay world, but here I’ll focus on men and women.
“Always wanting sex” is part of the male persona we wear to show we’re manly.
Many of us remember the early school dances we attended. If you wanted to hold a girl in your arms, you had to make the long walk across the room with everyone watching and ask the girl to dance. If she accepted, you were in heaven. If she refused you were in hell. The key here is that you must make yourself vulnerable to rejection to hold and be held by a girl.
By the time we become adults, we’ve already been battered and bruised by the world of competition and rejection. We long for that safe harbor where we don’t have to pretend to be something we’re not in order to be chosen. We long for someone who sees us for who we are and wants us anyway, who can hold us and touch, not just our body, but our hearts and souls.
“Always wanting sex” is part of the male persona we wear to show we’re manly. What we really want is a safe harbor where we can take refuge, relax, and be cared for. In other words, we want the feeling of being nurtured that most of us didn’t get enough of when we were children. But admitting these needs makes us feel like little boys, not big strong men. Better to be manly with our sexual desire and then once we’re inside her body, we can relax, be ourselves, and be infused with love. That’s the hidden desire we have when we have sex.
One of the things I love getting from my wife, Carlin, is to lay in her lap and have my scalp rubbed. This is one, wonderful, safe harbor. I don’t need to have sex in order to have this need satisfied. I just have to ask for it. Here, I’m being touched deeply, accepted completely. I don’t have to perform or prove myself. I just must be willing to be deeply vulnerable.
◊♦◊
Just as it’s difficult for men to ask to be held, nurtured, and touched; it’s often difficult for women to give that kind of intimacy. There are three main reasons, which are often subconscious:
  • First, women have their own conditioning about men being men. If he doesn’t want sex, they worry that they may not be attractive enough.
  • Second, a man wanting to be held and nurtured, triggers feelings that they are dealing with a boy, not a man. I can’t tell you how many clients I have who say things like “It’s like I’ve got three children in the house. There’s our two sons, and then there’s my husband.” Women want a man, but worry they have another little boy.
  • Third, women fear men who don’t feel manly. They know that the most violent men are men who feel weak and powerless. They’ve often had experiences of men allowing themselves to be gentle and vulnerable, only to have them respond with anger and rage later.
It takes a lot of time and maturity for men to admit to themselves that they need a safe harbor where they can be nurtured and embraced by a woman. It takes a lot of courage to let his woman know he may want sex, but more important is his need for security, love, and nurture. It requires a level of wisdom to know that allowing ourselves to be as vulnerable as a child may be the manliest thing a man can do.
For a woman, she must also go beyond her own conditioning and be open to a man who is making himself vulnerable in new ways. She must have a great deal of self-love and self-confidence to accept being a safe harbor. She must also have the strength to protect herself, when his shame at being vulnerable turns to anxietyanger, or depression. It isn’t easy for men and women to take these kinds of risks, but the payoff is a life-time of deepening love and intimacy.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Van Morrison - "Days Like This"





Well, its a gray day here in NC ... my favorite kind of day for production at home.  In every way it is moderate. But I am on fire, for some reason, and loving it!!  I am posting this song because ... well, just because it fits!!

Also just cruising through with Rihanna, David Gray, Adele, and Ray LaMontagne........what a combo of sounds!

25 Ways to Wear a Scarf in 4.5 Minutes!



If you LOVE scarves as much as I do, this is a great video!!!!

Thursday, November 2, 2017

"Why successful people with ADHD refuse to take their medicine"- Richard Orange

They sat on the media panel at the Maudsley Hospital — a journalist and historian, a BBC producer and a distinguished psychiatrist — thrashing out ways to make newspapers and television in Britain take adult ADHD seriously. It was the first conference the London psychiatric hospital had hosted on adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — the downsides of which include inattention, disorganisation, and impulsiveness. Plans were hatched to letter-bomb journalists who suggest (as they do all too often) that it does not exist, or that it is an condition invented to justify drugging up naughty schoolchildren.
Philip Asherson, professor in molecular psychiatry at King’s College London, argued that what was really needed to remove the stigma about treating adults with drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta and Adderall was for one of the famous people who have outed themselves as sufferers — people like Olympic gymnast Louis Smith, judo gold medallist Ashley McKenzie or Will.i.am, the -singer and coach on the BBC talent show The Voice, to talk about how medication had helped them. The problem (although the professor didn’t say it outright) is that none of them seem to take any.
Professor Asherson, who has worked as a consultant for the company that makes Concerta, the first-line treatment for UK adults with ADHD, knows this better than anyone. In 2013 he scanned Smith’s brain for a Channel 5 documentary. Louis Smith: Living with ADHD was a breakthrough in his decade-long push to hammer through to the public that a condition still wrongly believed by many to affect only children more often than not continues into adulthood. But when Smith was asked about Ritalin (like Concerta, a preparation of the stimulant drug methylphenidate) he said he had hated it and refused to take it from the age of 13.
‘It wasn’t a nice tablet,’ he wrote in his auto-biography. ‘It made me feel a bit like a zombie… anything that makes you feel “zombified” surely can’t be good for you.’
It is striking that, while methylphenidate has been recommended by Nice guidelines as the first-line treatment for adult ADHD since 2008, just about every high-profile person who has gone public with a diagnosis seems hostile to it. ‘It reduced my energy and made me tired all the time,’ judo medallist Ashley McKenzie told the Daily Mirror. ‘It wasn’t a long-term solution.’ Will.i.am told the same paper: ‘Music is my therapy,’ ‘Music keeps me sane and keeps my mind on something.’ David Neeleman, a US airline founder who credits his own ADHD for his success, told specialist website Additude: ‘I’m afraid of taking drugs once, blowing a circuit, and then being like the rest of you.’
Even the pop star Justin Bieber, who told GQ in February that he had been on Adderall ‘for about a year’, didn’t seem happy about it. ‘I think I’m about to get off of it because I feel like it’s giving me anxiety,’ he said.
There is little doubt that the very real stigma attached to ADHD holds famous people back from revealing their diagnoses. Comedian Rory Bremner —who has tirelessly campaigned to raise awareness since realising that he has it — described at the Maudsley conference how he had raised the link between ADHD and celebrity with his agent, who also represents comics such as Eddie Izzard, Rowan Atkinson, Noel Fielding and Mark Gatiss.
‘I said, “How many of your clients do you think have ADHD?” She said, “Do you know what? I think… all of them.” ’ This doesn’t mean any of them actually have been or would be diagnosed with ADHD, but it may suggest that comedy is one of those fields where people with the condition can thrive.
The brains of people with ADHD appear, among other things, to have lower levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, so an experience needs to be more stimulating for it to draw and hold their attention. This makes for tough school years — one UK businessman remembers a teacher sellotaping him to his chair — and more chance of ending up in prison or being addicted to drugs. But if someone with ADHD has talent and gets the right breaks, their impulsiveness, out-of-the-box thinking and compulsion to seek out the surprising, dramatic and unconventional can power them to success. For Dr Ellen Littman, a US clinical psychologist who is soon to publish a book on gifted people with ADHD, it is not surprising that those who do make it largely forgo drugs. ‘Medication inhibits impulses, so it can make one less spontaneous,’ she explains. ‘I’ve had artists and athletes tell me that it’s not a worthwhile trade-off.’
The same, largely, goes for entrepreneurs: people with ADHD are six times more -likely to start their own business. Littman interviewed Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, who, she says, has ‘terrible ADD’ (as it used to be known). He told her that instead of using medication, he hires people. ‘He has a fleet of people who follow him around, and no matter how he treats them, they write down things that he says, they pick up things that he drops, they dress him while he’s walking, they turn his body if he’s supposed to go in a different direction.’
Turner is not at all unusual in this. Cameron Herold, a Canadian business coach who has ADHD, says none of his ‘entrepreneurial type’ business clients uses medication. ‘Of the 16 entrepreneurs that I coach, I can pretty safely say that 15 of 16 are ADD and zero use meds,’ he says. ‘I’m not a fan of medication. The entrepreneur is not supposed to be focused. Is medication trying to make us better or is it trying to make us just like everybody else? We don’t need more people like everybody else.’ Incidentally, not one of three high-profile psychiatrists in the US who say they have ADHD (Ned Hallowell, John Ratey, and Dale Archer) take medication, although the first two recommend it for their patients.
While many successful people have ADHD, the reverse is not at all true. Many with the trait struggle to hold down any job or get any qualifications. They don’t have the luxury of a personal assistant or a stimulating profession. For them, Herold concedes, medication may help. And Dr Tony Lloyd, acting CEO of the ADHD Foundation, the UK’s leading advocacy group, points out while entrepreneurs may choose not to take the medication, the same doesn’t go for barristers, a surprisingly large number of whom appear to have ADHD. ‘I know a few, incredibly successful people in their fields, who couldn’t get by without medication,’ he says. Unlike comedians, pop stars, or maverick entrepreneurs, lawyers need to appear professional.
This also applies to the only two well-known British people brave enough to admit taking the meds — Louise Mensch, the novelist, journalist and former Tory MP, and Trudie Styler, the actress, film producer and wife of rock star Sting. Both have demanding executive roles. Mensch has said on Twitter that her medication makes ADHD ‘eminently manageable’, while Styler says she uses the stimulant Adderall (but only when she has mounds of scripts to read). Dr Lloyd suspects that many more celebrities use ADHD medication than admit to it, and is working with Rory Bremner, now the ADHD Foundation’s patron, to coax more of them into coming forward.
Many of those cited as having the condition on internet lists — including businessmen, celebrity chefs, comedians and even the US presidential hopeful Donald Trump — have never come forward themselves.
Lloyd and Bremner are also working on a documentary for the BBC in which the comedian will take ADHD medication for the first time. Indeed, part of the reason he has not taken anything until now is because he wants to record the experience on film. Could Bremner himself end up being the poster-boy for medication Professor Asherson is looking for?

"there were no words, but images flooded every cell in her being ...4 and a half decades!"

"there were no words, but images flooded every cell in her being ...4 and a half decades!"