Category Archives: Mental Health

Lincoln visits Mardi Gras

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

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Why these holidays are getting me confused.

My calendar shows that this year Lincoln’s Birthday and Mardi Gras fall on the same day. The juxtaposition has me wondering more than ever about holidays, what they mean anymore, and why they keep changing.

This getting old has its disadvantages, one of which is that I am in a perpetual state of confusion. I might get even more confused if I keep trying to make sense of all this instead of just observing and reflecting on this occurrence.

Do Lincoln’s birthday and Mardi Gras have any connection? Why are they together and the president’s birthday a full seven days later?

One connection clearly is the occurrence of hallucinations. In that way, the two days have something in common. They both also remind us that the modern idea of hallucinations and delusions and the ancient belief in spirits and demons are not all that far apart.

There has been some debate over the years about the state of President Lincoln’s mental health. Clearly, he presided over our country at a very perilous and traumatic time. No war in our history from the colonial days till now has resulted in such universal military service and such horrific loss of life as that war which was fought to keep the union of states together despite unresolvable, for the times, differences.

Lincoln has been described as Melancholy, an old name for what we now call Major Depressive Disorder. Some accounts report he would stay up late at night and believed he saw spirits. Having to make the sort of decisions he did that resulted in such massive suffering, no doubt could drive most any man insane.

So a reasonable case could be made that this President whose policy’s made such profound changes in so many aspects of American life, could easily have suffered from depression with psychotic features, or Bipolar disorder, some have even suggested a more pronounced psychosis. Still, with or without a mental illness, this president was in touch with massive sadness and the mental images of the spirits of those who died in that war.

Personally, from this distance of 150 years, I can tell you that the number of family members on my tree who fought in that great war is too many to count. I also know, though in a more fragmentary manner that many of those ancestors and their offspring developed an addiction to drugs, alcoholism, and a wide variety of serious mental illnesses in the years following that war.

I am not sure we can blame all the insanity in the family tree on that one war, like all families we had black sheep and bizarre behavior before and after that war. But the connections are too specific and close in time for me to not take notice that the effects a horrific war play on the psyche of individuals, families, and countries for a long time after a war officially ends.

As for Mardi Gras, the costumes involved look to me like a tangible representation of a Jungian dream analysis on Hallucinogenic drugs.

My understanding of Mardi Gras is of course imperfect. The most vivid description of this day I recall must have come from a person who had consumed several bottles of high-proof liquor. It is hard sometimes to tell the descriptive part from the current hallucinations.

I am told that his Mardi Gras falls on “Fat Tuesday.” This is the last Tuesday before Lent. Those of the Catholic Influence seem particularly inclined towards lent. I am told that the objective is to get as much sinning done on Fat Tuesday as possible so that you have the pleasure to carry you through the deprivations of Lent.

This did not sound right to me but my highly intoxicated source swears that this is true. He also swears that extraterrestrial aliens have taken over the bodies of our Congress and are passing pro-alien laws.

I found the part about congressmen being possessed by extraterrestrials easier to believe than his account of Mardi Gras, so much for drunken sources.

Participants in Mari Gras wear odd costumes that make them look like, demons, spirits, and assorted creatures. Creecy as quoted in Wikipedia, a customarily sober if not totally reliable source, describes the Mardi Gras costumes as:

grotesque, quizzical, diabolic, horrible, strange masks, and disguises. Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds, beasts and birds with human heads; demi-beasts, demi-fishes, snakes’ heads and bodies with arms of apes; man-bats from the moon; mermaids; satyrs, beggars, monks, and robbers parade and march on foot, on horseback, in wagons, carts, coaches, cars, &c., in rich confusion, up and down the streets, wildly shouting, singing, laughing, drumming, fiddling, fifeing, and all throwing flour broadcast as they wend their reckless way.

Somehow this time of year seems perfect for the strange, bizarre, and the supernatural. Only a short time ago we were watching a groundhog for our weather predictions. Now we are all hoping to get in one last round of sinning before we try giving up our old ways for another brief hiatus. This only days after discarding our New Year’s resolutions.

Which raises the question, “Can you still see the bare breasts, bizarre behavior, and debauchery if you are sober?”

As to the connection between Mardi Gras and Lincoln?

I am inclined to think that Lincoln would have preferred to see this menagerie traipsing through the white house over the specter of the war dead and wounded he had to view in his melancholy nights.

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

Where have all the neurotics gone? – Looking for your neurosis?

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

Confused brain

Mental illness.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Do people still get treated for being neurotic?

On my bookshelves are a whole lot of older books on mental health and mental illness. Many of them talk about neurosis. A couple even has the word Neurotic or neuroses in the title. I mentioned “Be glad you are Neurotic,” by Bisch in a previous post. With all the literature on Neuroses, where have all the neurotics gone?

Neurosis was a pretty inclusive term. In the older psychological literature, you could get three diagnoses, Neurosis, psychosis and that group that seemed to move back and forth across the line got called “Borderline” because they appeared to live at the border between Psychosis and Neurosis.

Today our understanding of the possible mental illnesses is getting much more complicated. For example, one new piece of research from the University of Buffalo seems to suggest to me that over a hundred different genes may be causing schizophrenia because of their effect on one structure in the brain. Eventually, we may diagnose and or treat dozens or even hundreds of different types of psychoses.

The word Neurosis has leaked from psychiatry into the popular vocabulary. It like so many other words mean different things to different people.

Some dictionary definitions include “relating to, involving, affected by, or characteristic of a mild psychiatric disorder characterized by depression, anxiety, or hypochondria” and “overanxious, oversensitive, or obsessive about everyday things.”

So by this definition of neurosis, most of the things that today we break out into anxiety, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a few other disorders would all be thrown into the category neuroses.

Neuroses have been completely dropped from modern psychiatric diagnosis, largely because neuroses were based on theories of what is going on inside the person like dreams and the unconscious. The current preference is to primarily use symptoms that are visible to others or can be described by the client, like lack of sleep, loss of pleasure, or similar characteristics as the basis of diagnosis.

This older term, neurosis, also included most of the currently recognized personality disorders.

One effect of this move from the simple classifications system, you either had a psychosis or a neurosis, has been that people with many symptoms now may get a number of diagnoses.

Neurosis used to include symptoms of both depression and anxiety. Now that the two are separated and further separated into many types of anxiety disorders and mood disorders, many people qualify for both a depressive diagnosis and an anxiety diagnosis. The overlap is so large that a combined depression and anxiety disorder was considered for the new DSM-5. (It did not become a separate diagnosis but there are specifiers for this.)

All the neurotics now get to have dozens or more of new diseases and disorders that are the result of refining our system of classification rather than in any real change in human behavior or the way in which mental illnesses affect people.

So you can go on feeling you are neurotic if you chose. You can say others are acting neurotic, but the diagnoses that the clinician will give you will have one of the newer disorder names.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

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

Did we lose another war? How many wars has America lost? What is a war anyway?

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

Child crying

Why can’t we forget the painful past?
Photo courtesy of Pixabay

When is a war not a war?

We have fought a war on poverty, a war on illiteracy, and a war on drugs while sending troops all over the globe to fight “police actions” and provide “military advisers.” When is a war a war and when is it not?

The word “WAR” has been applied to so many efforts that it is beginning to lose its meaning. I am getting confused about which actions are wars and which are not.

Have we lost count of how many wars we have lost?

Does it occur to politicians that by calling every effort to right a social ill a war, while removing that label from actual military combat we are somehow trying to sanitize our news and as a result, we are debasing the service of our military?

I will defer judgment on foreign military combat and leave those evaluations to the historians.

What I am reasonably sure of is that when it comes to these domestic “wars” while we have won a few battles we have clearly lost all these wars.

The war on poverty ended without so much as an armistice. I am not sure if there was ever an official end, but we seem to have recalled all out troops and left the spoils of riches to the robber barons that are now colonizing the big banks and the insider trading battalions.

Clearly, the platoons of the homeless are growing. In the ultimate irony, many military veterans have been enlisted in the armies of the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally ill.

Of all these lost wars the cruelest defeats have come in the wars on addiction and mental illness.

Rather than a frontal attack on the diseases of addiction and mental illness we have attached the addicts, alcoholics, and the mentally ill.

Millions for arrest and incarceration but not one penny for treatment has been our leader’s slogan. What money there has been for the mentally ill has largely gone for systems and staff to manage their lives and keep them trapped in their illness rather than efforts to return them, to functional lives.

It is easy to get room and board in a jail or prison or medical insurance and a poverty-level wage on disability but it is hard to get into programs that allow the mentally ill to work part-time without losing their medical coverage.

Our prisons are full and overflowing, our disability rolls are swelling, but we refuse to believe in recovery and rehabilitation that might allow the mentally ill and the addicted to recover and return to a useful role in society.

After every horrific crime, the shootings, the violence, we hear calls to find those “bad” people, round them up, and put them away.

This false belief that there are two kinds of people, the good and the bad, has kept us looking for an easy solution to make us feel safe while avoiding the hard work of identifying the causes of violence and designing programs to prevent people from resorting to violent acts.

Like the magician pointing to one thing to keep people’s eyes off the real action, our society looks in the wrong places for the roots of violence.

The majority of molestations are perpetrated by family members, not strangers. The person just fired or served with divorce papers is more likely to bring a gun to work and shoot people than the seriously mentally ill. More children die at home each year, shot by a parent then will die in school shootings.

Among the poor and the unemployed mental illness is common. If you weren’t depressed before you lost your job a few years of trying to live on government handouts will make you doubt your sanity.

If we want to make any real progress in the “wars” on addiction and mental illness we need to get serious about providing timely treatment for anyone who wants and needs treatment.

Treatment of at-risk children in the third grade is a lot less expensive than building more prison cells. Providing treatment on request for addicted people is cheaper than arrest and incarceration.

So far we seem to be losing the war on action and mental illness but we shouldn’t give up. The efforts need not be over.

A war is not a war when we shrink from the challenge.

Related articles

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

How to turn anxiety into paranoia

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By David Joel Miller.

Grim Reaper

Paranoia.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

Some days it is a short trip from anxiety to paranoia.

The higher the volume is turned up on your anxiety control the greater the risk that this could lead to paranoia.

Some caveats here. In this context, I am not talking about one of the paranoia’s that are currently diagnosable as a mental illness. Most people say Paranoid-schizophrenia as if it was all one word. There are lots of people with schizophrenia that are not paranoid. There are also people who suffer from paranoid personality disorder who do not have schizophrenia.

This discussion is about people without those two diagnosable illnesses who have some feeling that looks like paranoia during the course of another illness or even without meeting the criteria for a diagnosis. In other words, this is about the dictionary definition of paranoia not the DSM definition of a paranoid mental illness.

Yes, in my opinion, you can have paranoid thoughts and not have a mental illness with the word paranoia in it.

One definition of Paranoia is an unfounded, exaggerated, or unreasonable distrust of others not based on facts. This is fear-based and makes you question other’s motives.

Here is how a case of paranoia might begin.

You are very fearful, sensitive, and worried about what others think of you. You have “trust issues” and are not sure if people are really your friends or might want to harm you.

People who have been victimized in the past are especially at risk for these kinds of trust issues and for good reason. They have been harmed by someone in the past and may feel that they were too trusting.

One day this anxious person, let’s call her Annid. This is one of those made-up names contracted from her mother’s name Ann and her father’s name, David. I don’t know an Annid or an Ann and David combination so I think I am safe here.

One day Annid is walking down the street and she hears footsteps behind her. She walks faster but the footsteps are still there. She looks over her shoulder and there is someone there. Let’s make this person a man. She is afraid of men because she was attacked by a man in an alley. This would be even worse if the man who attacked her was a member of a particular race and the man behind her was the same race.

At the corner, she decides to cross the street to get away from this man. She notices out of the corner of her eye he stops at the corner to talk to another man. She is becoming more anxious.

When the light changes the second man turns and follows her across the street. She walks faster but every time she looks back there is a man back there. She is not sure if this is either of the two men she saw before but there is always one behind her.

Eventually, she ducks into a coffee place and has some coffee. She decides to wait a bit to get rid of those men who are following her. But when she leaves the coffee place there across the street are 5 or 6, men all standing together and one of them looks like that man who was following her. Same sports team shirt and everything.

At this point, convinced she is being followed by a gang of men she ducks back into the coffee place and calls a friend who comes to pick her up and take her home.

Unchecked this fear that men are following her can grow until she is unable to leave the house.

One problem for this woman is that no matter where in this town she may walk there may be a man walking behind her.

Is this an irrational fear? Maybe, maybe not. Having been the victim of an assault once there is proof that a man could assault her. Is this fear excessive? Probably. The chances that every man on the street is following her and plans to assault her are very low, most of the time.

The challenge for this person and other people with paranoid symptoms is to reasonably evaluate the situation, assess for danger, and still keep this fear of another assault from keeping her a prisoner in her home.

Now so far in this example, I have said that Annid has a history of being a victim. What if she has never been victimized?

She might have had a friend who was assaulted or heard a story on T. V. about assaults in her town. If she had a preexisting anxiety disorder even if nothing had ever happened to her she might keep looking over her shoulder believing that constant vigilance will keep her safe. And if you keep looking for something you will begin to see it.

See how easy it is to turn fear in your mind into a belief that there is a real danger. We have even had cases where someone believes they were in danger pulled out a gun and shot a person who just happened to be going in the same direction they were. Family members have killed other family members in the mistaken belief that there was an intruder in the house.

High levels of fear can create a situation in which everything becomes scary.

If you have anxiety issues or feel threatened and unsafe, consider getting professional assistance both in determining if this is a real threat and in learning to manage your anxiety or other issues before that emotional problem turns you into a paranoid person.

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 Controlling Anger does not work

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

Angry person

Anger.
Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

Some anger management programs make things worse.

Some common prescriptions for anger management do not work and can make things worse. There are things that work quickly and efficiently to eliminate anger but we try to wait till you have used up all your insurance and savings before we teach you these techniques.

Counting to ten is a prescription for disaster.

I do not know about you, but for me trying to count to ten when I am angry is a really bad idea. By the time I get to ten, I will have thought of ten new ways to dispose of your body. Counting to ten just gives me the time to leave my anger on the heat long enough to let it explode.

The trick here is not to learn to control your anger. The key is to learn techniques to not anger yourself in the first place. No anger – nothing to control. You think this sounds crazy, don’t you?

Albert Ellis one of the founders of REBT and CBT therapies wrote about this in a book titled “Anger: Living with it and living without it.”  It is in plenty of other books by Ellis and others. This formulation is so simple that once you get it, you almost instantly stop getting angry unless you chose to do so.

This model sometimes referred to as the A-B-C-D-E method has even made its way into an official government publication. This anger workbook is available free from the SAMHSA website. A free self-help book that also works? What a deal.

Here is my brief example of a way I use this model.

One night while teaching a class at the local college, a student in the very front row suddenly slams her books shut, grabs her stuff, and goes running for the door. No phone call, no explanation, she just runs from my class. We had a break coming up, couldn’t she wait till then?

This is clearly very rude. I feel disrespected. She has really made me angry. I vow that next week before I start class I am going to have a talk with this impolite person.

What she did, running out of my class, has disrespected me and made me angry.

A = activating event.

Which is what she did. She did it and she made me angry.

C = is the consequence, my anger.

So A caused C. Her action made me angry. With me so far? In class when I explain this, the students usually argue with me as we go along, trying to make me angrier. I am hoping you will hang in to the end.

The following week this same student is waiting at the door for me to unlock the classroom. Before I can read her the riot act she begins apologizing. She explains that she is so sorry that she ran from the room last week. She ate some food she bought from a street vendor on the way to class last week and she had a sudden attack of diarrhea.

Am I still angry at her? Probably not. See in between the “A” the Activating event, in this case, her running from the classroom and the “C” my anger, there is this other thing a “B.”

B = Belief as in “my belief about why people do things.”

If I believe that the reason people do things is to be mean and disrespectful to me then I will be angry. If I think that they did it because of some problem they have, then I do not take it personally.

Note that it does not matter whether it is true or not. I do not need to know if she is telling the truth to either become angry or feel sorry for her. If she really just was bored and chose to leave the class and make a scene but later decided to apologize and make up a story, I will still not get angry if “I believe” that she was not being rude.

Also if I chose to not believe her, even if she did have an attack of food poisoning, I will be mad at her despite the apology and the excuse.

The key to my anger is not in her actions or her apology. It is in what I chose to believe.

So anytime I feel myself getting angry I can –

D = dispute that belief.

If I can think of other reasons that people do things, then I can come up with alternative feelings. The result of this revelation is that I can disconnect those buttons and thereafter no one can ever “make me angry” by what they do.

The result of all this D (Disputing) is that I can choose to believe what I want and create an:

E = Effective new belief.

Now there may still be times that people do things that I find unacceptable and I will allow myself to get angry even if they did those things out of an acceptable reason. Or I can choose to never anger myself about what people do because if I anger myself I am likely to be the one who reacts out of anger and gets in trouble.

Now some of you are resisting this idea. You would like to hang onto your belief that other people make you angry because they don’t do things they “should do.” Or they refuse to do things they “must” do. Ellis had a lot to say about the dangers of “shoulding on yourself” and “Musterbation.”  I will let you read him for that.

Consider that there are evil people in the world and they do evil things. There are “stupid people” and they, of course, do “stupid” things. I do not need to like those things. I may even resist or oppose those things, but I do not need to anger myself when stupid people do stupid things. That is, after all, what they are supposed to be doing right?

Once you grasp this principle you do not ever need to allow anyone to make you feel any way other than the one way you chose. You may, however, need to cut some stupid or inconsiderate people out of your life because you choose not to put up with their behavior towards you.

If your ex continues to make you angry then you are choosing to continue to be in a dysfunctional relationship with them.

Consider this idea and maybe check out the SAMHSA anger management book or one of Albert Ellis’s books. If this idea makes sense to you let me know. If this post made you angry because you continue to believe that other people control your emotions and you chose to comment and tell me so, I may choose to delete your comment so I do not anger or upset myself over hostile comments.

Hope you have a happy and anger free day.

Give this process a try and see if you don’t find that you can anger yourself or not anger yourself depending on what you chose to do.

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

If you go to the psychiatric hospital are you crazy? Involuntary holds

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

Former psychiatric hospital

Psychiatric hospital.
Photo courtesy of pixabay.

Why do people get hospitalized? Can I send my child or partner there?

There are a lot of misconceptions about going to a psychiatric hospital, who goes and why. In this post, I want to talk with you about some general information about what it means to be in or be sent to a psychiatric hospital.

This may vary from hospital to hospital and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction so for legal information check with the laws or a lawyer in your area.

It is not the people with the most serious mental illnesses that end up in the hospital. Our policies around this have changed a lot over the last century.

There was a time when people were sent to psychiatric hospitals for long periods of time. Stays of a year or more used to be common in the days before medication. Today most hospital stays are as short as possible. The use of medications has shortened stays considerable and so have patient rights laws.

There was a time when a man could put his wife away in a hospital and then get to spend more time with his girlfriend. Families would try to put away people who had a lot of money or were eccentric, to get control of their assets. There were a lot of abuses as a result of having others in the family say you were crazy and then hospitalizing you. Once people got into the hospital it used to be hard to get out. Not anymore.

There are two ways that you might get hospitalized, voluntary, and involuntary.

Voluntary psychiatric hospitalization.

If you go in voluntarily you need a lot of money. A single day could cost thousands of dollars. But just saying you want in will not get you a bed in most hospitals. A doctor needs to say that you have a psychiatric issue that would benefit from hospitalization.  Beds in psychiatric hospitals are at such a premium that you don’t get to stay just because you want to be in the hospital.

If you enter on a voluntary status you are entitled to leave anytime you want regardless of what the doctor says. There may be legal ways for the doctor to keep you by moving you to an involuntary hold but those laws get complicated.

Involuntary psychiatric hospitalization.

People are placed in the hospital involuntarily because they are in a crisis that cannot be resolved on an outpatient basis.

Involuntary holds vary from place to place. In most jurisdictions, there are three reasons you might be placed on an involuntary hold.

1. If you are suicidal.

If you are a danger to yourself, suicidal, you can be put on a hold and kept in the hospital in most places. You stay there until the thoughts of suicide are reduced enough that the treating psychiatrist no longer feels you are a serious threat to take your own life.

2. Are you Homicidal?

The second reason to involuntarily hospitalize you would be if you have a plan to kill a specific person and you will not back down on this. You will stay in the hospital as long as the staff thinks you still plan to kill someone.

This is sometimes referred to as a “danger to others.” This is easily misunderstood.

3. Are you gravely disabled?

If you have food, clothing, and shelter but can’t figure out how to use these things, we might need to hospitalize you to protect you. This person would be referred to as gravely disabled.

Someone may have a serious and persistent mental illness, they are very impaired, but if they can be maintained on an outpatient basis with meds or therapy. They may never end up in the hospital.

Someone who was just laid off or served with divorce papers may end up in the hospital because while upset or angry they think of hurting themselves or others. After a few days in the hospital they change their mind and are sent home. They may never experience a recurrence of these feelings. We still recommend therapy for a while just to make sure they are OK.

The conclusions about involuntary commitments.

1. It is not always the most severely mentally ill that goes to the hospital. It is the people who need to be protected from themselves and others that spend time on an involuntary hold.

2. Just because someone has a severe mental illness does not allow professionals to lock them away. They need to also be currently a danger to themselves or others or gravely disabled.

3. There are currently not many other options for monitoring someone who is mentally ill. They either meet criteria to be hospitalized or they don’t. If they do meet the criteria they stay till they stop being a risk to themselves and others. If they don’t they can’t usually go to the hospital even if they want to.

4. Other options to make help more available to the mentally ill short of a return to full hospitalization are urgently needed.

There is so much more that needs to be said on this topic but I will close for now, but there will be more to follow.

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

Sleep and Mental Illness connection

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

sleep

Child sleeping.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Does poor sleep cause mental illness or does mental illness keep you from sleeping?

There is a huge connection between mental health issues and insomnia. This fact has been recognized for a long time and its recognition has been built into most of the diagnostic codes.

Some recent studies are making mental health professionals question if have gotten the connections right. Could be there are more connections between sleep and good mental health than we thought.

Sleep disturbances are a diagnostic feature of Major Depressive Disorder. Typical depression includes the inability to sleep. Depression with atypical features is characterized by excessive sleeping. Clients might describe this as hibernating in bed. But depression is not the only mental illness in which sleep features play a role.

Bipolar disorder requires a period of mania or hypomania for diagnosis. One key feature of the “mania spectrum” is needing less or very little sleep and being able to function on reduced sleep. I don’t recall ever reading about a “mania spectrum” but the variability of the way clients report manic-like symptoms is making me think that there is a continuum of manic symptoms just like the continuum of other disorders.

There are specific sleep disorders but as a counselor and therapist, I don’t believe I have ever been called on to work in that area. Most sleep disorders are seen as more medical problems. It is only when a lack of sleep or excessive sleep begins to affect someone’s overall mental health that we counselors get to talk with them.

One health concern has become that increasing weight, the epidemic of obesity it has been called, can cause poor sleep. So we need to wonder if inactivity, excess calories, and weight gain are harming our mental as well as our physical health.

There is also a connection between poor sleep and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD.) Nightmares, as well as daytime intrusive memories, are considered symptoms of PTSD. We probably should observe a distinction between bad dreams and nightmares. With bad dreams, people do not awaken until the morning and may or may not have detailed memories of the dream. Sometimes others around them are aware they had a bad dream even if the dreamer is not aware.

Nightmares are much nastier creatures. They are characterized by strong negative emotions and frequent “awakenings” from the dream. People who have nightmares are much more likely to remember them because they keep waking up.

We also know that having nightmares will prolong the symptoms of PTSD. In a previous post, I wrote about the way in which nightmares play a role in maintaining PTSD symptoms. Nightmares and dreams, good or bad dreams are strongly connected to spiritual, religious, and cultural values. Some people also see nightmares as warnings about the future and as a source of intuition. Given that past experiences are a basis for dreams and that what happened in the past may happen again, dreaming about worries would seem to be a normal phenomenon.

What if we have this all backward? Could a sleep disruption be a cause of mental illness rather than a symptom or a maintenance factor?

One study of veterans of the Iraq war looked at the relationship between insomnia and PTSD. Now this is just one study so the results are preliminary and more studies may not get the same result, still, the results were surprising.

What they found was that for these veterans insomnia came BEFORE the PTSD symptoms. Insomnia 4 months after returning from deployment predicted the development of PTSD symptoms at 8 months post-deployment (Wright, Et al., 2011.) It seems likely that an increase in anxiety resulting from being in a risky situation could cause sleep disruptions and the result, much later, would be episodes of mental health problems.

Their suggestion and there was a lot more to this study was that sleep functioned as an emotional regulator. So insomnia may be both a symptom of, and a cause of, mental illness. An increase in insomnia predicted who would develop depression as much as three years later.

Good self-care, including a healthy diet, exercise, and good sleep hygiene has long been an integral part of relapse prevention in substance abuse. We are also seeing that relapse prevention is an important part of mental health recovery.

What if sleep changes could be an effective predictor of mental health relapse? In what ways might we be able to improve our sleep and thereby improve our mental health?

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

Drinking a little alcohol can make PTSD worse

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

Nightmare

Nightmares maintain depression and PTSD.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay

The Alcohol and PTSD connection.

Alcohol has some strong effects on people with PTSD and those effects turn out to not be what we expected.

Recently I came across a couple of studies about the interaction of alcohol and PTSD. There may be more studies about this and I will keep looking. But here are some things we think we know.

The way in which memories are stored will depend on the level of alcohol in the bloodstream when the traumatic event occurs. Alcohol consumption is related to trauma; more than one study has indicated that people who perpetrate violence are more likely to be intoxicated.

I know that this does not mean that drinking makes you violent. Millions of people have a drink every day and do not go out and perpetrate violence. But among those who do get violent, a great many are under the influence of drugs or alcohol. It is easy to see that when someone is drunk they have reduced control of their behavior and having lowered inhibitions they are more likely to engage in violent behavior.

What we also find is that victims of violence are frequently under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Being intoxicated reduces your self-protective behavior and you are more likely to put yourself in a dangerous situation, more likely to look like an easy target to someone with a violent intent and intoxicated people are more likely to “not take it anymore” and engage in argumentative and assertive behavior.

So why would drinking by someone who had been the victim of a violent trauma make the PTSD symptoms worse?

A small amount of alcohol in someone’s system may increase PTSD symptoms rather than anesthetize them for several reasons. Maintaining control of thoughts and emotions especially the intrusive memories from PTSD requires sustained effort. Alcohol reduces the ability to ward off those emotions.

Bisby, in his study, found that intrusive memories in PTSD were most likely to be suppressed at the extremes of blood alcohol content. So with no alcohol in the bloodstream, the memories could be shut off by the person’s effort. As the level rose they were less able to control those intrusive, memories until the blood alcohol levels reached the legally drunk point. While this study stopped with a blood-alcohol level of .08, the definition of legally drunk, it is likely that the memories would have continued to decline as the person became progressively more intoxicated (Bisby et al. 2009.)

Now, this study did find that memory for facts, the verbal memory portion, was impaired and the more alcohol in the bloodstream the less accurately the person remembered precisely what had happened.

What they did remember more of when under the influence was the emotional feelings associated with the traumatic experience.

Additionally, I suspect that some of this increased recall of trauma with a low-level of alcohol in the bloodstream is the result of state-dependent learning. The presence of alcohol in the bloodstream opened up the memories that had been stored away and sealed off when sober.

Further, this study concluded that people with small amounts of alcohol were more likely to develop PTSD as a result of a traumatic event. As I mentioned in a previous post the presence of alcohol in the bloodstream increases the storing of the emotions of the event while surprising the factual memories.

Having alcohol in the system during stressful events may not calm your nerves and improve your coping skills. It is more likely to reduce the ability to cope and increase the risk of developing a PTSD response to being the victim of trauma.

So for any number of reasons, consuming a small amount of alcohol is not a good idea for someone who has experienced a trauma. A small amount will increase traumatic memories and it will take highly intoxicating levels of alcohol to shut those memories off.

The result is that people with PTSD who drink any alcohol are at high risk to develop a severe case of alcoholism.

This is one more case where the use of chemicals to avoid pain can, in fact, result in increased pain when the chemicals drop below intoxicating levels.

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

More of what is not working – curing gun violence and the NRA

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Why don’t violent people get mental health treatment?
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

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

America does not seem to learn.

The common prescription for anything wrong in our society is to do more of whatever has not been working. Gun violence is the most recent social problem to receive this prescription.

We have of course tried this prescription before, almost universally to ill effect. No one likes to admit they are wrong and we as a society can’t seem to face the idea that our present approaches to societal problems are not working and is not likely to work. We have been down this path before to bad effect, but there are those in our society who think the prescription for gun violence is more guns.

For the record gun violence is not the only violence that has become epidemic in our society. School shootings make the news – for a while, this week we all thinking about them. Next week we will be on to concern about some other threat for which we will want out leaders to pour on more of what has not worked.

Here are some examples of problems that we have tried to solve by pouring on more of what did not work and then back to the issue of gun violence.

War on drugs.

We have been fighting the war on drugs for longer than the war in the Middle East. We still don’t have an exit strategy for the war on drugs. In this war, we have suffered a lot of casualties and taken a lot of prisoners. Our prisons are over-full and we are now letting people out just to reduce the overcrowding.

With all that expenditure on the war on drugs, we should have drug free cities by now. Is your town drug-free? Mine sure isn’t. Have you noticed that the drug “game” includes lots of violence? Usually gun violence? Most news reports of drug busts include a recitation of the number of guns seized. Has our current policy toward drugs increased or decreased the violence on our streets?

Recently we have attempted to reduce illegal immigration by building a fence along our southern border. This reminds me of the magician who points in one direction while picking your pocket with the other hand. Never mind that there are significant numbers of illegal immigrants arriving every day by plane and ship on both our coasts. Some have pointed to the increased southern border activity as the reason for a reduction in illegal immigration. Never mind we needed to have a serious recession to eliminate the jobs that were drawing people to this country.

Next, I expect to hear we need more recessions to reduce illegal immigration. Sound far-fetched? Well doesn’t this sound just like the plan to reduce school shootings by putting armed guards on school campuses?

Schools are not the most dangerous place for children.

Their own home is more dangerous! Let’s look at the numbers. So just how many children have been dying in school shootings?

I found a list of school and mass shootings on the internet and did a quick addition of the deaths on the list. Even if my math is off a little, here is what I found. (Please see “Information Please Database” from Pierson Education.) From 1996 to 2012 about 200 people have died in school or mass shootings in the United States. The rest of the world, on this list, had just over 180 deaths. This is over an approximate 17 year period. Possible some were missed on this list, but the point is that the U. S. has more mass shooting deaths than those in all the other countries of the world combined!

So how dangerous is sending your child to school? Not that even one shooting death of a child is acceptable but where else might children be shot? On our streets? In their own home?

Every year in America about 750 children are killed by their biological parent who then kills themselves. This is not a step-parent, but the biological parent who usually kills their intimate partner then kills their children and finaly kills themselves.

Following the NRA’s logic, we should need to place an armed guard in every home in America with two biological parents. The danger from parents with guns is roughly 70 times greater than from strangers shooting a child in a school. So it is not strangers or schools that are hazardous to our children. It is us, all of us, and our attitude that more of what does not work will fix that problem.

One thing that struck me while reading this list is that in the early years there were lots of one-person shootings. Recently all over the world, but especially in the United States, the number killed in each shooting has risen.  But then so have the number of children killed by their parents in the home. We are becoming desensitized to violence.

Consider how many of these shootings in the home and in the school had two common elements. Guns that hold a lot of bullets allow for mass killings. The person who did the killing died during the event usually by killing themselves.

People who are suicidal, who have lost hope may think that resorting to violence is the solution and if they are going to kill themselves they just may decide to take their partner, their children, their schoolmates, or their fellow workers with them.

The best solution for mass killings seems to me to be reducing the lethality of weapons, fewer bullets per gun. Our strategy also needs to include identifying those who have lost hope.

More counseling for the lonely, depressed, and isolated might reduce the need to counsel victims of killings. Still, I doubt we will do much of this.

Doing more of what doesn’t work is just the American way.

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

Waiting for the Ah Ha moment

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

Insight.

Insight.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Those sudden moments of insight.

Have you had one of those times when suddenly it occurred to you that the way you had been doing things just wasn’t working? Where do those sudden insightful moments come from and why can’t I seem to get these things until I have done it wrong at least a thousand times?

There was that time when I went to register for classes. The first one on my list was trigonometry. It had come highly recommended by my school counselor. Suddenly it occurred to me that the last three times I had signed up for trig I had ended up dropping it. Then out of nowhere came the thought – maybe trig just wasn’t my thing, maybe I should consider another major?

Have you had those experiences? More than once after making a comment to someone I thought why did you say that?  Why can’t I stop saying stupid things in front of other people?

I believe I have solved that problem. Instead of saying stupid things to people one at a time, I write my thoughts here on the blog, for all to see. That way I can get the embarrassment over with all at once.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all find a way to get those mistakes of life over with and move on to be right more of the time?

In therapy, those Ah-Ha moments are the exact point when we or our clients make the greatest progress.

I am sitting with a teen talking about how unreasonable their parents are. Then I ask them about themselves. Any friends? Do you have a girlfriend or boyfriend? Think you will have kids someday? You think you will let your child go to that kind of party?

Out of nowhere that teen who was telling me, they are angry their parent does not trust them and won’t ever let them do the things their friend’s parents allow other kids to do, those kids are telling me they would never let their kids go to that kind of party cause they know what goes on there.

One thing that clients often say to me is “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” I find that one of the healthiest things I can do is reexamine things I thought I knew and see if there is another way to think about things.

That is one of the benefits of having friends, lots of friends. Now some friends are just people we work with or do a specific activity with. But we each have or should have those really close friends that we can talk with about anything. It is in those talks that suddenly we may have that flash of insight and realize that we have just never thought about it that way.

Professional helpers like counselors and therapists are specially trained that if they are going to be able to help someone it is all about the relationship. We, humans, have a hard time listening to people we don’t like or respect. But in that one trusting relationship, we can sometimes hear something that results in that Ah-Ha moment.
Ever asked yourself “What was I thinking?” Careful here – you may be about to have one of those Ah-Ha moments.

We get wrapped up in our own thinking. When it is rattling around in my mind it seems like such a good idea. Let me tell someone else and see their reaction and suddenly that brilliant idea does not sound so brilliant.

Hearing our behavior described by another, some of us are surprised at how others experience them. They describe this experience as being like “hearing about someone else.” That other point of view is so valuable in learning.

Some of you may have noticed that a few of those “What was I thinking” ideas slip by and get into these posts.” That is one of the prices we bloggers pay for trying to write a lot of posts and get them up quickly. Occasionally one of my friends assumes the role of editor and emails me about an error so I can correct it quickly. Other times it just gets by.

Now shouldn’t we all just be more careful and not make mistakes? I don’t think so. The only way you don’t make mistakes is to do nothing and that, come to think of it, would be an even grander error.

So what we all have to do as part of this human existence is to try new things and see what works and what doesn’t.  Do more of the good things and less of the things that do not work. Recognize that you, like everyone else, will have some of those Ah-Ha moments. Rather than beating yourself up and criticizing you, learn from those mistakes.

Be able to laugh at your mistakes. When you can look at something you did in the past and tell yourself that was “silly” which tells me that your way of looking at things is changing.

We all need more Ah-Ha moments in our lives and we need to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we are required to make to create those moments.

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