Author Archives: David Joel Miller

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About David Joel Miller

David Miller is a California Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Clinical Counselor, faculty member at a local college, certified trainer and writer.

What really causes Mental illness?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Could you be mentally ill?

What Causes Mental Illness?

Why do some people get a mental illness and not others?

We have had a lot of theories of mental illness, over the years, most of which have not panned out. So what do we know or think we know at this point? Some things that were suggested as causes of mental illness in the past turned out to be only a little right and a lot wrong. Check past posts for the discussion of that part if you missed it.

Recent studies of the brain have added a lot to our knowledge of how the brain works and what is causing those processes. The picture while having more lines drawn in is far from clear.

Some people would like to think most of what we call mental health issues are the result of something wrong with the brain. Other people will argue that mental illness is caused by a person’s thinking or life experiences. Let’s try to sort this out.I believe the truth is yes to all three possible causes.

Is Mental illness a “brain disease?”

In some ways yes mental illness is a disease of the brain. But in other ways no, there is more to getting a mental illness than just something chemically wrong with the brain.

We believe that mental illness is a real illness. The principle impairments are in the area of the nervous system. So this is not something the person chooses to have or can just snap out of. Mental illness is, I think more complicated than just that statement.

Saying mental illness is a brain disease should not be taken to mean that the person was born with a defective brain. They are not subject to recall or reassignment because of some sort of human lemon law. Yes, some brains are born different, right from the start. Unfortunately thinking that abnormalities in the brain are the one and only cause of mental illness is way too simplistic.

Let’s look at how the brain works, in a grossly oversimplified way, by comparing it to something most of us use every day.

How is your brain like a car?

You call the mechanic and tell him your car is not running, it no-goes.  He tells you to bring it in. You get it towed into the garage. The mechanic checks it, you’re right, it does not start. He tells you it is a lemon, worthless car, get a new one.

Wait a second, you drove this care in the past, it went then, why not now? The analogy here is why does someone seem normal at 12 and at 20 hear voices? Was there a brain bad all that time? Or did something change? How come someone who used to be happy gets depressed? Bad brain? I do not think so.

So the mechanic notices your tires are low, puts air in them, still, the car no-goes.  You check for gas, fill up the tank, but the car still does not run. With people, we do all the stuff that is supposed to make them stop being sad, but they still are depressed.

So the mechanic changes the battery, then the starter, finally the engine turns over. You get in the car and put her in gear and – the car goes nowhere. It still no-goes.

Down the line, you find that there is somewhere in the transmission and it slips or the rear end or drive shaft is bad. It could be lots of things.

The point is that the car has lots of parts – So does your brain.

So your brain has lots of parts and problems in one part may look sort of like problems in another part. Genetics may affect the structure or the functioning of various parts of your brain.

To date, we have identified over one hundred genetic mutations that appear to contribute to schizophrenia. No one mutation explains it and you can have varying amounts of these genes and still not get it. Take these 100 genetic mutations that may relate to schizophrenia and multiply that by 400 to 800 other mental health conditions and you see where this could go.

This is not, 100 times 400 by the way, but 100 times 399, times 398, and so on. One of you math guys can run the numbers if you want but you can see this is a HUGE number.

So a portion of the brain works too fast, too slow, is too large or small, or has wires connected incorrectly. This can all increase the risks that your brain will give results that are different from the results others get.

This may mean a mental illness or it could mean creativity or novel abilities. Sometimes the symptoms we call a mental illness can be connected to something else we call a talent. All very confusing.  Some of these personal differences, like fast thinking speed, may have been adaptive when your ancestors lived in the jungle and had to run from tigers but can get you in trouble if you jump to conclusions and hit someone who was just joking with you.

There are some skill differences in driving a stick shift and an automatic. You can learn to drive both but the skills are slightly different. Unfortunately, our educational system and a lot of the rest of our society is set up as if every brain ran the same way. (Read that as a possible cause of higher rates of ADHD in some schools and not in others.)

Notice that, to belabor this analogy, fluids do not work the same way in all parts of your car. Water is good in the radiator but may be bad if it is in your electrical system or your oil. Same with your brain.

Serotonin or Dopamine or other neurotransmitters may behave differently in various parts of the brain. So saying that the brain has too much or too little dopamine, may be wrong. Saying that there is too much or too little in a particular part of the brain might be closer to the truth but not there yet.

Thoughts change the brain.

Thoughts are moved from one nerve cell to another by chemicals we call neurotransmitters. Since thoughts are carried by chemicals, what you think changes your brain chemistry. That is a major factor behind the effectiveness of talk therapies.

Experiences can change the wiring of the brain. And of course, genetics can affect the shape, size, and efficiency of any number of thousands of parts of the brain.

So your genetics can predispose you to a particular mental illness, your environment can alter those neural circuits and your thoughts can add to or reduce the problems. No one thing is the whole answer but cumulatively they add up to a lot of ways the brain can be different in one way or another. Some of these differences we define as good and some we call mental illnesses.

Someone who has parents with a particular “high risk” gene who is under stress as a child, say abuse or neglect, or who does drugs or has tragedies in their life, all those things can add up to more than this particular brain can handle.

Conclusion:

There is no one thing that causes all cars to no go. There is also no one thing that causes the conditions that we are calling mental, emotional, and behavioral illness. Genetics, at birth and as the genes express themselves across the lifespan, coupled with life experiences and learning and add in beliefs about things or attitude and all together in varying amounts may be the cause of what we are calling mental illness.

Next stop, after a few other things get talked about,  coming soon – What is complex trauma and how does it rewire the brain?

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

What causes Mental, Emotional or Behavioral illness? We have been wrong.

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Sad child

Sad.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Looks like a lot of the theories about what caused mental illness are wrong.

What causes mental illness? What do we know and what do we think we know?

Many of the things we thought were causing mental illness turns out to not be causes. In the process, we missed a lot of things that are impairing the mental health of our society.

There have always been people who were clearly mentally different from others. We have seen explanations for what causes mental illness to come and go. Today we know more than ever before about the human brain, how it works and some of the problems it may develop, still we are less sure than before about what is causing that thing we call mental illness.

There is hardly a day now when you can turn on the T. V. or read the news online and not hear about someone with a “mental illness” and some terrible thing they have done. This media coverage is leaving more out than they put in and the result is less, not more, understanding about mental illness.

The mentally ill and violence.

As an aside here, the mentally ill, those with serious long-term illnesses, are more likely to be victims of crime than the perpetrators. They get beat up and robbed on a daily basis. This rarely gets on the news unless the perpetrator is a police officer, and even then the sense is that the mentally ill somehow deserved it.

Personally, experience has taught me that I have more to fear from the person who was just served with divorce papers or found out their spouse is cheating and has shown up at a worksite with a gun, than from someone who has a long-term mental illness.

Emotional problems in someone who has not been identified as having a serious and persistent meant illness are the larger threat. It is easy to see in retrospect that there “had to be” something wrong with the person who came to a school with a gun. But if you follow all the people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia, for example, very few of them ever get a gun and shoot up someplace.

Parents and gun violence.

Gun violence at schools and public sites is a huge problem. We need to do something about this. but for the record, for every child killed at a school site by a gunman, 25 to 50 children will be shot and killed at home by a biological parent with a gun. The cure seems simple. Do not let bio parents raise children or own guns. See how simple solutions turn into complex problems and do not always work the way they were intended?

There have been a lot of theories, most of them very simplistic, over the years about the causes of mental illness. Some people continue to cling to the over-simplistic views despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But then the flat earth society and those who doubt that some form of evolution has occurred are also still in existence.

In this post let’s look at some of the things that have been suggested as causes for mental illness in a necessarily oversimplified way.

First, the things we now doubt are true about or are not causes of mental illness.

1. Are there are two kinds of people, normal and the mentally ill?

We used to separate emotional problems into two categories, Neurosis and Psychosis. That was it. So people were seen as having a psychosis, they were in effect “crazy” or they had neurosis, problems of living that might respond to talk therapy.

The more this has been studied the less reliable it has become. First, we found that there were people who sort-of had both. They got the label of “Borderlines” then we found there were a whole lot of different kinds of neurosis, like anxiety and depression and OCD. And people with psychosis can also get depressed. You can have two or more problems.

From that two problem view, we continued to study symptoms and the result in the DSM-4 was over 400 recognized mental illnesses.  Even more, possibly another 400 disorders were proposed (the DSM-5 was supposed to simplify this but we still know way less than we would like.) Today we are seeing that some of this splitting up is the result of people moving on a continuum from one level of symptoms to another. People’s illnesses can change over time and they can have more than one illness.

2. For a while we blamed the victim, some people still do.

There was that belief that mental illness was from God or the gods. Some thought that God had caused the mental illness as a punishment for the person’s sins, or the sins of the father or grandfather.

There are still people who take this approach, avoiding the mentally ill or insisting that they should just snap out of it as if being ill was a choice.

We do know that this fallacy like every good lie has some grains of truth embedded in it.

Parents provide both the environment and the heredity. Some life events, like age and use of drugs or alcohol, may increase the risk of a gene mutation. But a risk factor is not a cause, and so we find that some very poor home environments produce some mentally healthy people while “normal” homes produce some very dysfunctional people.

More on the environment versus heredity issues to come.

If the problem is that God is punishing this person somehow then the cure should be a religious conversion. The prescription for mental illness used to be, and in some circles still is, prayer, fasting, self-control or self-abuse, and the like.

Some of the evidence to challenge the “its Gods will” concept of mental illnesses comes from the sudden miraculous improvement in some mental illnesses that medication produces; that and the cases where a person lives a good part of life, often in a “Godly way,” and is suddenly struck by a mental illness. Some of these appear to be the result of the changes our bodies undergo as we age.

3. People said, “It is the mother’s fault.” Occasionally this is read “it is the father’s fault.”

This was popular for a while under the guise that the cause of psychosis was “refrigerator mothers.” We found that there was some truth to emotional problems that resulted from early life experience; we now refer to this as attachment theory.

The idea that a lack of love or poor mothering skills was primarily the cause of serious mental illness has been largely discarded. We now think that there is such a thing as “good enough” parenting. Do a halfway good job and your child should turn out fine. Abuse or neglect can increase the risk of mental or emotional problems but risk is not result.

One new area of study is the role of “complex trauma.” A number of traumas or ongoing trauma change the brain in ways that are different from what we were looking for in the past. This complex trauma can cause more problems than the sum of its parts.  More on Complex Trauma in some upcoming posts.

4. It is just the way they are

There was a school of thought, back when the psychologists seem to offer us answers to all these issues, that mental illness was the result of “personality factors.” Again some truth here, but in my view, not nearly the whole story.

Some children are born “fussy” they are hard to soothe, cry a lot, and get on their parent’s nerves. Those kids may have a fussy temperament or they may have a physical illness. Either way, fussy kids get less care or upset the parents. Maybe the stressed parents yell at the child more. Their life experiences are different from the “naturally happy child.”

Personality can and does change over the lifetime. We can debate how much or why but the fussy child may grow into a contented child and the good child may at the onset of puberty suddenly become the problem child.

All these factors, to me, argue against the idea that mental illness is caused solely by personality.  It points in the direction of gene expression, genes act differently at different points in our lifetime. It also points out the ability of all of us to learn from life and as a result our personality shifts.

Sorry, this ran long. More on the causes and by implication the cures for our mental emotional and behavioral illnesses in some upcoming posts.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Will the therapist say I am crazy and lock me up?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Psychiatric hospital.
Photo courtesy of pixabay.

Being locked up is a fear of some people coming to therapy.

The chances of this happening are very close to zero. The fact that you came in on your own means this is highly unlikely for many reasons.

This idea of the upset person who gets “put away” in a mental hospital, usually called an insane asylum, makes for great T. V or a good novel, but in real life that does not happen, at least not very much and particularly not here in the United States.

Here are the reasons why you are not going to get locked up just for going to see a counselor.

Professionals just do not think of mental illness that way anymore.

The old notion was that there were two kinds of people, normal and crazy. If that were true we would need to lock everyone up because I do not see any normal people in my world. Some people may be more normal or less normal than others, normal being a statistical concept. Being different does not make you crazy.

Mental illness is not the same thing as being crazy.

Mental illness is on a continuum, people get unwell, then they get sick, then they move back in the other direction as they recover. Most people have times in their life when they are anxious or depressed. If someone is shooting at you please get anxious. If a family member dies, I hope you get sad. Do not let that anxiety or depression control you for the rest of your life.

People we call mentally ill get stuck at that “too sad” or “too anxious” and do not seem to get back to a better place without help.

There is a big argument about why. Watch for an upcoming post on the causes of mental illness as I see them.

The therapist expects you to have some problems, so no they are not likely to think you are over the edge just because you came for a little emotional help.

There are only three special reasons you can be confined to a psychiatric hospital against your will.

Holds for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in this area are only written if the client is a danger to themselves, a danger to others or they are so disabled they can’t feed themselves or clothe themselves. Being poor, or homeless, does not count. I hand you a cookie and you eat it, I offer you a sweater and you put it on, you pass this test.

If you say you are planning to kill yourself then you may be detained until those thoughts pass and you recant that thought. Professionals are suspicious if you were saying you would kill yourself to the police just a few minutes ago and now you are saying that you won’t.

Saying you have thoughts, usually will not get it. You need to also have a plan for when and how you will do it or a history of attempts or some other reason for the official placing you on an involuntary hold to believe this is something you might do.

Being under the influence of drugs or alcohol is a risk factor. People who binge drink or are drunk are 55 times more likely to attempt suicide than sober people. So if when drunk you say you are going to kill yourself and the police are called you may end up in a psychiatric hospital for a very short stay.

Say you are planning to kill someone else, say you also have a gun and you may end up in a hospital or a jail for a while longer. Even then the law just does not let the police or the psych hospital keep people who might someday hurt someone else all that long.

Once the person sobers up or changes their mind, the chances are that they will have to be released even if the police still think that this person may in the future hurt someone.

While this lets some people out who may harm others it also keeps a lot of people from being locked up just because they scare someone else.

The psych hospitals are pretty full and they charge a lot of money.

The hospitals do not want to keep anyone there one minute longer than they have too. The days of years in an asylum are over and gone. Most stays now are a week or less. Stays beyond 30 days are rare.

In crisis units, the stay around here is most often less than a day.

Yes, I know the involuntary hold says 72 hours, but in practice, not many people stay that long. That 72 hours or 3 days is a maximum, not a for-sure.

Most of the complaints I hear are that people were discharged from the hospital before they felt ready, not that they were kept too long.

As soon as someone appears able to cope with life they get let out even if they will need meds or therapy to be able to cope in the future.

Counselors, in most places, are not authorized to write involuntary holds.

Even if a counselor works for the government and writes holds in their day job, they are not able to write them in their private practice. So unless your treating professional is a psychiatrist with treating privileges at the hospital there is a low chance they have that little card that lets them write holds, especially one that would let them write the hold in their private office.

What could happen is if you said you were going to kill yourself or others and you convinced the therapist that you were serious about this, he or she might call the police and get you detained until you change your mind.

There you have it. The things that bring most people to counseling are miles away from the things that might get you locked up in a psych hospital. Stop worrying about this and go get the help you need before you have to live your life in the place of unhappiness.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Why people avoid the doctor and the therapist

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

What are your reasons for avoiding getting your problems treated?

Therapist

Therapist.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

The scenario is the same only the problems and the treating professional change. You have a problem, a sore that does not heal, a physical or emotional pain that won’t go away, or a troubled relationship, but you avoid getting help.

Why do people so often avoid treatment for a problem?

We see a lot of couples who come for marriage counseling, they have talked about seeing a counselor off and on for a long time. Now when they come to our offices one or both have decided it is over, past the point of repair. They say they can’t stand the pain one day longer.

Why have they waited so long? What made them think they needed to endure that pain at all? Here are some of the faulty beliefs that cause people to avoid therapy.

Talking about problems will make them worse.

Despite this fear’s prevalence, there are plenty of reasons to think just the opposite. Problems caught in the early stage may need small corrections; wait too long and they need major changes.

Admitting you have problems or challenges does not mean giving in to them. Recognizing your challenges gives you something you can work on to improve your life.

Asking for help means I am weak.

It is easy to delude yourself, think you are, or should be superman or superwoman, able to handle everything by yourself. That is just not the way life works. Even experts consult with other experts. Two heads are better than one. Recovering people have sponsors, and in the sphere of emotional problems, counselors and therapists frequently see other professionals when they experience life problems.

People will think I am crazy or incompetent if I go for help.

No one should think that, especially not the therapist.

First off, therapy is confidential. Your counselor is not going to tell and you have the choice of telling or not telling your family and friends.

We all have times in our lives when we need to see a professional or specialist. You see a mechanic for your car repair and you see a lawyer if you have legal issues. Hopefully, you saw one or more teachers that taught you how to read.

Some people are able to do some of these things for themselves, but not many people are doctors, lawyers, and tax accountants. Everyone needs some advice now and then.

Counselors can do several things that are helpful, Give you perspective, no you are not crazy, lots of people in your circumstance would have that issue. They also can help you learn the skills you need to manage or regulate emotions.

Lots of people spend their whole life working at jobs they hate or that are low paying because they did not use the services of a career counselor to help them plan the right career for them.

People also do not seem to come in to learn how to be good parents or good spouses. They do however see their therapist when the child has problems or the marriage is in trouble.

A little early skills training or education can help you reduce life problems or navigate the things that will come along in any life.

Once I lose control, start crying or get angry I will never be able to stop.

This idea is simply not true. Given enough time people regain control. People cry and then they get “cried out” we laugh and then the laughter fades. The problem is not that a feeling will take control of you and you will never return. The issue is that you need to learn to regulate your feelings.

Regulate does not mean destroy them or eradicate them. It means learning to be able to control them, work with them, learn from them, and play with them.

Want proof that you will not be transported to crazyland if you start to cry?

Create some crying time!

Have some sadness you are afraid will overwhelm you? Set aside a time each day, 15 to 30 minutes. At this same time, each day go in a room by yourself and set a timer. For the entire time cry nonstop. Cry as hard as you can. Get that crying out!

What people find is that they are usually not able to keep up the crying for the full-time. They just do not have 30 minutes’ worth of tears in them every day, especially not every day for a week or a month.

You will also find that if you can make yourself cry on schedule, then you will be able to make yourself not cry when you want to do that.

Practice crying when you want to and not crying when you wish to not cry and you will have gone a long way towards learning to “regulate” your emotions.

If you find that regulating emotions is a special challenge for you, this does not mean that there is something wrong with you. It means that there is a skill, “Emotional Regulations Skill” that you still need to learn. A therapist, especially one trained in DBT, can help you learn to regulate your emotions.

For more on “behavioral experiments” like crying at will see the work of Milton Erickson.

I won’t be able to take the pain.

People sometimes think that if they talk about their pain then they will not be able to bear it. You will be able to take the pain of treatment a whole lot better than the pain of staying ill.

One place this fear comes from is the image of the old psychoanalyst making you go through all the sordid details of your life.

While I may be old, I do not think we need to dig up the whole garden of your life to find the weeds that are causing your pain today. A good therapist can help you work on the problem that brought you into treatment and then if you decide you can move on to working on past issues.

Working on our issues may be painful at times but once you face your demons and learn the skills to tame them they shrink like scared little kids.

The Therapist will spill my secrets.

Not likely to happen. Therapists and most counselors have a requirement to keep your secrets, that comes close to that old religious practice of things told under the seal of the confessional is not repeated by the priest.

The law protects most client-therapist conversations. The counselor can lose their license for telling even if you committed a crime.

I have written a lot of posts about what things the counselor must report (If you are suicidal, homicidal, or talk about abuse of a child, elderly person, or disabled person.)

If you have specific concerns look at those posts and if in doubt ask the counselor to tell you about confidentiality before you tell them your secrets.

They will think I am crazy and lock me up.

Extremely, I repeat an extremely low chance of this. See this post: Will they lock me up?

For more on these “therapy interfering beliefs” See the writings of the following: Aaron Beck, Judith Beck, Marsha Linehan, and Milton Erickson, to whom I am indebted for much of the inspiration for this post. Let’s hope I have not distorted their views in the retelling.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Why are we so afraid of feelings?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Man with feelings

Managing feelings.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Fear of feelings?

You would think that feelings were on the banned substance list. So many people are avoiding them. Failure to feel what we feel is at the root of a lot of mental health problems. Still, people go to great lengths to not feel those feelings.

We hear lots of advice about ways to avoid feelings, think logically, pull yourself together don’t let yourself feel that. The forces of logic have won the day and henceforth feelings are banned.

But we know in our gut that sometimes feelings are telling us the truth when our head wants to mislead us.

Some people grew up in homes where their feelings were invalidated. You said you were sad and you were told you are not sad, you don’t even know what sad is. If you feel that way you are being weak or selfish or some other terrible thing.

Numbing out the feelings.

So you avoided feelings, any and all feelings, and eventually, you became numb, chronically unhappy, or unable to feel any real joy. In your flight from feelings, you may have left a lot of love, friendship, and compassion behind. You may have resorted to drugs or alcohol or other addictions to avoid feeling what you were feeling.

Feelings have been blackballed, put on the most wanted list, and hunted down and exterminated whenever possible. We have become so very afraid that someone will get angry, depressed, or anxious and then something bad will happen. So we tell them to pull themselves together, forget that feeling and think logically.

Logical thinking, the scientific method has resulted in a lot of technological advances. We have more stuff than ever before in the history of the world. Stuff exists now that science fiction writers fantasized about just a few short years ago.

What we haven’t accomplished is any real reduction in pain or unhappiness. We have more pain-killing drugs but no less pain. We have more antidepressants but we have more depression than ever. We teach people to be more rational and there are crimes of passion on every corner.

In this process of avoiding being carried away with excesses of feelings, we have lost the ability to use feelings for the intended purpose.

Your feelings brain.

When we talk about using our brains, what is left out of the equation is just how much of our nervous system lies outside our heads. All those nerve cells, the ones surrounding your stomach, and the ones in your neck, they are trying to tell you things also.

Those expressions, someone is a pain in the neck, or that makes me sick to my stomach, those expressions are full of truth. Those bodily sensations are conveying information to the rest of our beings that we just may need to know.

Those other “thoughts” the ones in our feeling systems ought to get more attention. That skill we call intuition may just be those emotional memories of things in the past that are useful for actions in the present.

By avoiding our feelings for so long we have lost the ability to regulate those emotions. When we do feel something, like sadness, we can easily become overwhelmed.

When feelings are strangers we come to fear their presence. So many of us will do anything, drink, drug, numb out to avoid feeling what it is we are feeling. We become afraid that feelings are enemies out to destroy us rather than old friends here to tell us something.

One huge step in recovery is to learn that we can feel feelings, happiness or sadness, excitement, or anxiety without becoming overwhelmed and carried away. Having a feeling is not the same thing as being taken over by that feeling. Joy does not have to lead to an excessive celebration and sadness or anxiety need not lead to another relapse or flight.

One group of therapists talks about the need to learn distress tolerance. I can feel bad some of the time and that is OK. I will not cease to exist because I feel sad or anxious. It is possible to feel unpleasant feelings, ask what that feeling has to tell us, and then, like so many other thoughts, let that feeling move on.

Not every happy feeling calls for action, a celebration of excess that might lead to a relapse into drug use, overspending or inappropriate sexual activities.

It is possible to feel feelings and let them serve and inform us rather than being controlled by what we feel.

How do you feel about your feelings?

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Love

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Child and adult on beach

Love.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Thoughts about Love.

There are lots of description for love but despite all the meanings we humans never seem to get enough of this precious stuff.

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
―The Complete Works of Lao Tzu: Tao Teh Ching & Hua Hu Ching

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Stranger in a Strange Land

“You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.”
― Jody Picoult  My Sister’s Keeper: A Novel

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss’s Beginner Book Collection (Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish, Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, Fox in Socks)

Quotes from GoodReads.

Hope you have enough love today to be able to spread some around.

What is an Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) meeting like?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

AA big book

Alcoholics Anonymous big book.

What happens at an A. A. Meeting?

This should be an easy question. It’s not. Let me explain what an A. A. meeting is and how very different these meetings can be.

While most people think of Alcoholics Anonymous as meetings you go to, it all started with a book titled aptly enough “Alcoholics Anonymous.” Back then there were few A. A. meetings. Most people learned about Alcoholics Anonymous from buying and reading the book.

Reading the book “Alcoholics Anonymous.”

I continue to recommend that people read the book whether or not they elect to attend meetings.

Over time more and more meetings have sprung up, mostly meetings of people who had read the book and wanted to learn more or get help in participating in the A. A. program of recovery.

With all these groups starting up, they each had to develop their own set of rules. There got to be so many rules that at one point Bill W. one of the two co-founders, said if they followed all those rules, even he could not be a member. The result was that each group or meeting could figure out their own way of doing things as long as their rules did not conflict with the 12 Steps and the Twelve Traditions.

Today there are a whole lot of very different A. A. meetings. Most groups have their meeting times listed and included in schedules and you can find those schedules online or in print form.

Meetings can be categorized by what the program for a meeting will be, who is able to attend, where the meeting is held, and so on. There are also designations for rules for particular meetings.

Types of A. A. meetings.

They can also be categorized by what is on the program at that particular meeting. First the rule types and then the program types.

Smoking and non-smoking meetings.

In the old days, most meetings were smoking allowed. Back then you could tell a good meeting by the full ashtrays. Nowadays more meetings are non-smoking. They may be held in a place that does not allow smoking or the members may have decided to make their meeting a non-smoking one.

Open and closed meetings

There used to be more prejudice about people admitting they had a drinking problem, let alone saying they were alcoholics, so some meetings became closed meetings, meaning that they asked that only alcoholics attend those meetings.

The majority of meetings, especially the large ones, are open meetings that anyone who wants to go can attend. They do ask that if you share, you only talk about alcohol problems and your recovery from alcoholism. Sorry, no commercial pitches or religious and political solicitations are part of this program.

Men’s only or Women’s only meetings

I recommend to female clients that whenever possible they attend a few women’s only meetings. The point of meetings is to work on your recovery not to find a new partner.

Meetings and fellowships

Meetings customarily meet once per week at a particular time and place. They may use any room available; say a church meeting hall, a room at a school, or business. The meeting rents the room from the place and then has its own meeting. The A. A. group may meet at say the Methodist church on Friday night, but it is an A.A. meeting, not a Methodist meeting, so any faith, or those with no faith, are welcome to attend.

A fellowship is a group of meetings that goes in together and rents a room so that there are primarily A. A. meetings in that place. A fellowship might have a morning meeting each day, a noon meeting each day, and one or more evening meetings each day all in the same place.

Go to a fellowship for a few weeks and you will develop a group of clean and sober friends. I encourage clients to try out a fellowship as soon as possible. I also encourage them to try a number of meetings until they find the one that is right for them.

Different A. A. meetings will have different formats.

Speaker meetings

At a speaker meeting, one or a couple of people will get up and talk about their experiences in recovery.

Book studies

At a book study, a portion of the book is read and they people discuss what this means and how they might apply it to their recovery. Books would include the A. A. Big Book, 12 and 12; As Bill sees it, and so on. These meetings do not include reading from any religious books like the Bible or the Koran as that would make the meeting a religious meeting not an A. A. meeting.

Open participation meetings

At this meeting members, (remember you are a member if you decide you want to stop drinking) are encouraged to talk about what is on their mind as it applies to drinking, not drinking, and their recovery from alcoholism.

Meetings, by the way, are not therapy sessions. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference but the focus of the meeting should be on your problems with alcohol and your efforts to not drink.

The Big Book suggests that people share “in a general way,” what they used to be like, what happened and what they are like now.

So there you have the types of meetings that you might choose to attend, but what will actually happen if you chose to go to an A. A. meeting? If you need to or want to attend a meeting, consider which meeting type you might like to attend or try out several and see what is best for you.

In a future post, I want to describe what the experience of attending an A. A. meeting might be like.

The posts I write about AA are from my perspective as a therapist and clinical counselor and do not necessarily reflect the views of A.A. World Services. For more on A.A. and their program of recovery check out the “A.A. Big Book” titled Alcoholics Anonymous at the links below or contact AA World Services at their website.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

The classic text on Alcoholism, recovery this is the book that started off the whole 12 step phenomenon.

Alcoholics Anonymous from The Anonymous Press

One of the Kindle editions – At 99 cents this is such a bargain. This edition needed a separate listing. No Kindle reader? No Problem, if you have a computer you can download a free Kindle reader.

http://www.aa.org

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Why people are reading counselorssoapbox.com

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Counselorssoapbox.com

Why people are reading counselorssoapbox.com

By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

For the last 30 days here are the top posts that brought people to counselorssoapbox .com.

In case you missed some of these top posts the links are included.

How much should you tell a therapist?

Levels or types of Borderline Personality Disorder

Do therapists have to report a crime?

Do people really forget what happened when drinking? – Blackouts

Which border is Borderline Intellectual Functioning on?

Are you a Parentified Child?

Do therapists like, fall in love with their clients? Why don’t they tell them?

Reasons Counselors and Therapists Lose Licenses

About the Author – David Joel Miller

Hyperthymia, Hyperthymic Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Happy Holliday

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By David Joel Miller

Have a Happy Holiday – And be really safe out there.

Full moon.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

 

Halloween Hates Women

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Witch

Witch.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Halloween has become decidedly misogynistic.

Halloween is just not what it used to be. I suppose people start saying things like this when they get old, and I resemble that, nothing is the way it once was.  But Halloween has changed in some disturbing ways. Modern Halloween does not seem to think much of women or girls for that matter.

When I was younger Halloween was mostly a holiday for children. Today it has become the second-largest holiday. It was the warm-up for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, those required to cope with winter holidays we needed to cheer ourselves up and to affirm our connection to the rest of our culture.

Halloween is being marketed as an adult holiday. Halloween has grown older but clearly, it has not grown up.

Men are getting to choose between increasing numbers of characters to impersonate. Women are getting stereotyped in one of two roles.

A woman must choose between being a young erotic sex object and being an old ugly hag.

The portrayal of the witch, so often a standard feature of Halloween costumes, as deformed, green skin, with warts and all, implies that women who are not sex objects are despicable.

When I was a child most little boys wanted to be pirates, cowboys, or hobos. Little girls mostly wanted to be princesses. A lot of the costumes were homemade and the goal was to play dress up and pretend to be something you would never be.

Today the costumes are store-bought and the goal seems to be to dress rehearse the things you wish you were doing. Mostly these are things that you would do if you could do but can’t because you might get arrested or lose your job over them.

In the transformation of this holiday, the roles of men and women have changed.

This is not about the macabre or the horror stories. We have always had times when as a people we tried to poke fun at death and the fears of the unknown, the dance macabre, the day of the dead, those sorts of things. Today rather than skeletons people want to dress up as mass murders.

That works for the guys but have you seen the costumes being offered to the women and the little girls?

It does not hurt to sometimes dress up and play roles. We do that a lot with Renaissance Faires, Pirate fairs, and Sci-fi conventions.

I just have to wonder after all the progress on equality between the sexes, how we can continue to encourage women to fit into the dichotomy that either you are a sex object or you are worthless and despicable mold.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel