Archive for the 'Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid' Category
You may say, “I already suffer enough pain. What good can it do to inflict more pain?” I have asked you to go along with me in these ideas, and I must ask you to go along with me in this. Yes, you are suffering pain. In suffering pain in the way that you do, you are having an experience of suffering uncontrolled pain, pain that you can do nothing about. Perhaps it is better to say that your mind is having an experience of pain which it can do nothing about. Now, what I want to do is to give your mind a different kind of experience—an experience of pain which it can do something about, of pain which it can control. This new experience will give your mind a basis from which to work. In this first experiment it does not matter if the pain is very slight. The thing that matters is the new experience of the mind in being able to control it.
Inflicting Pain on Oneself-There is no doubt that these exercises in pain would be easier if I were there to inflict the painful stimulus on you for the first time, rather than you having to do it to yourself. But if you will just make a start, you will find that you can do it quite easily.
Instead of inflicting pain on the patient, I sometimes do it to myself while the patient is watching, and then ask him to do it to himself. So now, although I am not there with you, you can let yourself feel that I have just done it, quite easily and naturally. I was completely relaxed. There was nothing complicated about it. Now it is your turn.
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Some particular event may motivate us to do something. At another time we may do the same thing from quite different motivation. Just now, when you were looking at TV, were you doing so for entertainment, for enlightenment or simply as an escape?
The housewife has got her husband off to work, and the children off to school. It was all a bit of a rush. And the little one has been complaining of a pain in his tummy. ‘I suppose it was his nerves. But it could be something else.’ She is stressed. Makes a cup of tea, turns on the TV just to help her settle out of it. Her thoughts are taken away from the little one’s tummy, and her husband being in such a rush that there was no kiss goodbye. In a little while her stress is reduced, and she gets on with the chores of housework.
So in this way TV becomes an effective and rather harmless means of relieving minor stress. Her husband comes home. He is stressed by the problems of the day. She wants to discuss household events; she needs to talk to relieve the emotional isolation of being alone in the house. But because of his own tension, he immediately turns on the TV. His tension is reduced and hers rises! Of course, the real answer to this situation lies in the fact that the simple ‘being with’ of man and woman reduces the tension of both parties.
The danger is that TV can become the major stress-reducing mechanism for all and sundry in the household. Anyone who feels a little tense or restless from minor stress turns on the TV. It does not matter what the programme is, it is only the distraction that is wanted. This kind of escape from stress becomes socially destructive from the time that is wasted. If the individual can learn simple, biologically effective ways of managing stress, he is free to use this wasted time in productive leisure that will improve the quality of his life.
The individual may become aware that he is in fact hooked on TV in just the same way as others are hooked on alcohol, drugs or tranquillizers. This awareness itself may be quite upsetting, and will compound with other factors to increase still further the stress situation.
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«Do men get silly as they get older? He is drinking too much. Not much. But enough to be too much. We go to a party. He gobbles up two or three whiskies as soon as he can get them. Then wanders off. Flirts with the younger women. Some of them are flattered. After all, he is a distinguished man. But I am sure some of them would like to give him the slip, and talk with men of their own age. I am just left to my own devices. I don’t like it. Feel embarrassed. Spoke to him about it. All he said was, “You are all right. You can talk to people”, and left it at that. But it is not all that easy for a woman. Besides, I am basically a shy person. I think people notice that the evening goes by and he hardly says a word to me.
‘It’s really the drink. If we go where there is not much drink we stay together, and I quite enjoy it, but he feels it rather a bore.
‘Worse than this, I am frightened he will be caught driving with too high a blood alcohol level. That would be awful for a man in his position. »
She needs to enlist the help of one of his friends. Someone of equal professional status, who can speak to him as man to man on an equal footing.
When we warn someone who is acting foolishly, we want to warn them in areas which are socially acceptable for discussion. In this case his friend should warn him about the dangers of drinking and driving, but should leave the effect of his drinking on his wife alone, as it is much more difficult to tolerate advice in this other area. The effect of the advice, if it is heeded, covers both areas.
It is much better for the advice to be given by a third party, rather than the woman herself. If she gives it, there is a likelihood that it will cause further tension between them.
There is another point. In dealing with stress situations, counseling and the giving of advice is usually not much help, because the type of understanding needed to be effective is something deeper and more biologically significant than the logical understanding of our intellect. But in this case, the consequences of drinking and driving are so simple, and so well acknowledged, that direct counseling may well be effective.
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