I was able to catch Dr. Amen’s PBS special about his newest book, “A Magnificent Mind at Any Age” last night, and it reminded me of some things that I’d learned from reading his prior books, but had forgotten about.  These are skill building exercises that have helped me a lot, and it occurred to me while watching that I could greatly benefit by doing these exercises daily again.  Duh.  I can’t help but laugh at myself when I have these amazingly sensible thoughts. 

Growing up in a very tense, sometimes eerily silent, and oftentimes verbally volatile environment, I oftentimes wished there was physical violence so I could have some sort of tangible evidence that something was really wrong.  I could feel the damage being done, but I didn’t have the knowledge or the skills to do anything about it, for myself or others.  So while I vehemently rejected the situations, I had no foundation to work from to escape from the automatic learning processes that occur in child development.  My worst nightmares were that I would become that which I knew intuitively was wrong, and spent much of my life living that nightmare – from all sides. 

I don’t necessarily understand the science of the brain, so I can’t explain it, but I do know from experience and experimentation a few things for sure.  Behavioral modification techniques are much more gratifying to the one attempting to modify another’s behavior than they are to the recipient.  Think Pavlov’s dogs….  What a discovery that we can be Pavlov, and manipulate others, but what about the human beings who are being treated like dogs?  So pop psychology sold us a toxic bill of goods with this whole theory that if we “let it out” it will go away.  We will be “empowered”.  Even worse, there’s this confrontation theory that doesn’t work either.  At best, we alienate those who are different than we are, and we find others with the same illnesses we have….  I explain this conceptually more clearly in my blog on my other profile called, Conflicts of Interests….

So what DO we do?  For me, the damage was severe enough that in order to be myself again, I needed to take medication.  It helps a LOT but medication alone only allows the brain to become chemically balanced so that our true potential can have a cleaner slate to work with.  It doesn’t solve the problems that poor emotional education, traumatic experiences, and lack of healthy life skills created.  For some, just learning new skills is enough without medication, but we first have to accept that our behavior is, in fact, a symptom of mental illness and WANT to get better.  We have to WANT to become human again, rather than control freaks like Pavlov, or victims who continually feel like we’re nothing more than dogs… sometimes helpless, sometimes vicious, and oftentimes both.

Dr. Amen goes into much greater detail about the science than I possibly can, but I want to share a few of his skill building exercises that can help even if you don’t understand your own brain and how it functions yet.  I’ll be posting these exercises in separate blogs over the next couple of days, so please check back.  These exercises include:

One-Page Miracle - Auxiliary Prefrontal Cortex

Killing the ANTS (Automatic Negative Thoughts) – General
Killing the ANTS (Automatic Negative Thoughts) – Different Types of ANTS

I hope these materials will be useful to you in starting to get a handle on conflict in your life, and that you’ll continue to educate yourself about the brain and it’s correlation to all aspects of your life through Dr. Amen’s sensible learning tools. 

Be well my friends,
~Barbara