Howard Brockman, LCSW is one of the top psychotherapists and counselors in Salem Oregon for over 32 years. Howard has authored two popular books: Dynamic Energetic Healing and Essential Self-Care for Caregivers and Helpers. To learn more about Howard Brockman, please visit the full bio.
There are researchers that have been investigating the mass murders of late and one of the most disturbing patterns has been that nearly all of the shooters had been taking psychoactive drugs for depression or anxiety. The following article highlights… Read More »Are Antidepressants the Hidden Cause of Violence?
The flu viruses of 2013 are getting quite a bit of press lately, what with Boston and New York declaring health emergencies and using the word epidemic! Are you anxious yet? Hoping to find a clinic or a pharmacy with some flu vaccine for a flu shot? Wondering if you will fall victim to this nasty bug that is reputed to be highly contagious? Carrying around your bottle of alcohol gel? Worried about whether or not to mingle in public or just quarantine yourself? I have a few thoughts about this year’s flu epidemic.
First off, “catching the flu” is allowing yourself to become vulnerable to being invaded by a foreign intruder, in this case a virus. The entire concern thus becomes a boundary issue for if your energetic boundaries are too porous or insubstantial that a virus invades your body, you have a big problem. It’s no fun lying in bed with the flu and a nasty fever and cough for days on end. As someone recently characterized this experience, it’s just misery. People who are codependent allow other people to invade them in different ways. Sometimes it is verbal, sometimes physical or sexual. Codependents are overly accommodating to others’ wishes and desires and often end up becoming victims of other peoples’ selfish needs and habits. Their codependency is itself a habit wherein one simply is insubstantial and is either unwilling or unable to protect themself by saying NO to others.
But stress is bad for you in far more basic ways. The hormones that are released in the body’s stress response, such as cortisol and adrenaline, are meant to be temporary. Their effect is to galvanize the fight-or-flight response, which is triggered in a primitive area of the brain, because fight-or-flight is an inheritance from our pre-human past. In the stress response, a privileged pathway is opened for dealing with emergencies, while at the same time the brain’s higher responses are temporarily suppressed.
http://www.utne.com/mind-body/raiding-consciousness.aspx This is a wonderful essay on our drive to alter our consciousness with intoxicants that has persisted throughout our history. It is a commentary on human nature and worth the time to read and consider. Howard Brockman, LCSW Posted… Read More »Human Nature and Altered States
If you are like me, you’ve probably already enjoyed a number of holiday parties and all the accompanying holiday treats. If you are lucky, you can look forward to many more over the coming weeks. Typically, holiday gatherings offer lots… Read More »Holiday Season Self-Care Tip for 2012
My mother died on December 1st at the age of eighty five after struggling with Alzheimer’s disease that was first diagnosed in 2005. Prior to becoming affected by the disease, she was a remarkably energetic and enthusiastic woman, frequently traveling… Read More »Postscript on my mother’s life and death
The purview of the shaman is the realm of soul. This is regarded as the spiritual essence of a human being or animal that is usually regarded as immortal. Different paradigms offer different explanations of “reality” that are underpinned by assumptions about what composes “reality.” Philosophers assert that reality can only be known through our faculty of reason via our intellect. The scientific method determines that reality can be known through a systematized study of the natural and physical world through observation and experiment. It is curious to me how some people are naturally drawn to any one of these orientations as a way to know reality. Perhaps it is a matter of temperament. Maybe it is the influence of karma or the influence of intergenerational family beliefs. However I try to understand this, in the end I suspect it really does not matter because in a sense, these different orientations are all competing with one another while at the same time crossing over and to some degree, complementing each other. The question they all seek answers to is “How can I “know reality?” or “What is truly real and ultimately meaningful?”
Read More »Shamanic Practice and Constructive Altered States of Consciousness
What is stress? What is YOUR stress? People identify all kinds of reasons for why they feel stressed. They attribute their stress to financial instability to family related issues to unhappy work environments. In my practice, I see many clients who are stressed because of interpersonal disharmony. This can be caused from their primary relationship, their co-workers at their job or general dissatisfaction with their job that they may characterize as unstimulating or even overstimulating with a workload that is too big. The reasons go on and on but current social research reflects that 3/4s of Americans seeking medical care experience stress-related symptoms that are the cause of their complaints. The breakdown of stress symptoms is the following:
Common complaints include fatigue, insomnia, headaches, anxiety and chronic physical aches and pains. Stress keeps doctors and the large pharmaceutical corporations thriving because it is the doctor who usually first sees the patient complaining of these stress-related symptoms. Most doctors prescribe medication and some might even suggest lifestyle changes, knowing fully well that only some patients will change the way they live their lives.
Food is such an interesting topic. It’s an integral part of our lives and we keep hearing about how it affects our health and well-being. It seems to me that there are always diets touting particular health benefits that all have convincing arguments for embracing that diet. I remember the time I decided to become vegetarian. I was in college and went off campus to have a burger with a friend. The burgers were big—at least a half of a pound and with all the other stuff under the bun, it was a huge sandwich. In fact, when I was finished, I got a terrible stomachache that lasted well into the night. This was an unusual experience for me and soon afterwards, I swore off of meat completely. I just couldn’t bear having that experience again. This was during the time when Frances Moore Lappe had just published Diet for a Small Planet and I was learning the value of fully blended amino acids from eating beans and rice (instead of meat).
Curiously, I have noticed that over the years I have continued to seek out information about the relationship between diet and health. Perhaps not all that unusual, I ended up relinquishing my vegetarian diet. After cooking vegetarian recipes for years, I needed new guidance for cooking non-vegetarian. I tried a number of diet approaches among them being the Zone Diet by Barry Sears. Since cholesterol runs high in my family, this seemed like a good choice and while it was OK, it never did lower my cholesterol. I then pursued the Mediterranean diet with the benefits of seafood, good olive oil and red wine containing resveratrol. I liked that diet but it too was not achieving a reduction in cholesterol for me. For many years I was always leery of eating too many eggs because of the fear they would clog up my arteries (that was and still is believed by many today to be true, even by many mainstream doctors).
My how technology for the masses has evolved. When did it all start? I don’t mean TV from the early 50’s and radio before that. I am referring to computers and what has evolved since. I remember buying my first computer in the late 1980’s that had a CP/M operating system and a four inch green monochrome phosphor screen. It was called a Kaypro-II and cost about $1800. It was all metal and weighed 26-pounds. It folded up and had a handle to carry but it was heavy to haul around. But it came with its own word processor and the 5.25 disks really were floppy, but it had a great keyboard and got me through grad school. On 6 August 1991, the World Wide Web went live to the world but it took time for the public to really catch on. We managed just fine without all the interconnectively we have today but there is no looking back now. The first iPhone was released in June of 2007 and the first iPad in April of 2010. Read More »Self-Care Tip #7: Establish Boundaries With the Media