Category Archives: Religion

Practical Psychology

My second book, 31 Ways/31 Days: Practical Psychology for the Frazzled Faithful, has just been published and is available via Amazon and other retailers, in both softcover and eBook. In it, I present information from the field of psychology as clear, simple action items for normal, busy people who want to make positive changes.

I love to turn psychological research into something a non-therapist can use, right now, to make relationships and life better.

Sometimes, research sounds ridiculous by the time it hits your news feed. Gleaning the nuggets that can change your life – today – is challenging. Consider, for example, that a cluttered environment contributes to parental stress to the point where it interferes with consistent parenting styles. Of course work, chores and piles of stuff to do covering every flat surface are stressful…but who knew that the clutter added enough stress to interfere with parenting? It’s easier to reduce stress by cutting a little clutter than figuring out what other source of stress to eliminate (hmmm…change jobs? quit working? send the kids to boarding school in Antarctica?) Implementing a manageable, meaningful change makes psychology, with its seemingly arcane tidbits of scientific research, useful to you. It’s not magic or a complete overhaul, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Another useful application of psychological research: even looking at pictures of nature helps reduce stress for everyone, and can improve cognitive skills in people with dementia. Whether it’s you at work, or your beloved elderly family member at home, some photos of nature to fill the eyes from time to time can help. It’s not going to make a miserable job a happy job, or reverse dementia, but it can ease the burden a bit.

If psychology doesn’t make life better and improve our understanding and relationships, it’s not very practical…and if it’s not practical, what good is it?

 

 

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh, LMHC, LMFT, NCC

© 2017

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

When Media Lies Hurt: The Destructive Impact of Sloppy Journalism on Real People

(Originally published in USA Today Magazine, July 2016. A few updates were made for reposting to this blog)

It’s safe to say that most people have long since given up on the idea of unquestioning trust for the media. Walter Cronkite died in 2009. Despite vague mistrust, people are vulnerable to the effect that repeatedly hearing things has. Hearing something over and over engrains it in our brains, even if it’s not true. The repeated lie tends to rise to the top when a related topic comes up. This is one reason so many people believe that, for example, violent crime is up all over the country (it’s not) or that we know for sure exactly what schizophrenia is, or what it’s caused by (we don’t).

As a psychotherapist, I see the pain that sloppy journalism creates for real people on a regular basis. I don’t mean transient worry; I mean the possibility of a lifetime of unnecessary anguish inflicted upon people who believe that the information hurled at them by media must be based in truth.

Three examples will suffice to illustrate; you can no doubt generate plenty of examples of your own.

Media Misrepresentation: People considering suicide always give clues about their intention, and thus friends and family have an opportunity to see it coming and intervene.

According to A. Dadoly in the Harvard Health Newsletter (2011), professional estimates are that 30-80% of suicides are impulsive acts, with little or no planning beyond the immediacy of the moment. That means family members could usually not have read the signs, and could not possibly have intervened. Yet, most people believe, because they’ve been told repeatedly, that warning signs are just about always there and thus are tormented with guilt and self-reproach for failing to see something that was, tragically, probably not there.

Media Misrepresentation: Depression is a medical illness that is a lifelong condition. You’ll be on medication forever because there is something wrong with your brain.

The truth is, depression, or “major depressive disorder,” as it is currently labeled, is a construct. It is diagnosed off a checklist of symptoms. Meet enough of the symptoms for a two-week period of time and, bingo, you can be diagnosed, whether that sadness, poor sleep, lack of energy, poor concentration, etc., is due to grief because someone you love has died, or to some other life circumstance…or, perhaps, something medical. Some research indicates that most cases of depression will improve within 7 weeks whether you do anything to treat it or not. Plenty of evidence shows that lifestyle changes such as proper sleep, diet and exercise, plus social supports and a bit of emotional support via therapy, will create improvement in less time and leave you more resilient the next time life throws you a challenge (which, of course, it will). You can find a wealth of scientific research as well as specific steps to apply that research to real life in Stephen Ilardi, MD, Ph.D.’s wonderful 2009 book, The Depression Cure. There’s plenty of other research out there, of course, but for busy readers, Dr. Ilardi has done a masterful job of tying together many researchers’ work and working out a useful process.

Yet millions of people have been sold the lie that their symptoms are evidence of a brain disorder that requires lifelong medication. The medications change the brain, cause all sorts of unpleasant side effects, such as weight gain, loss of sexual interest and/or function, and general apathy towards others, and often cause terrible withdrawal symptoms. They also carry a risk for impulsive acts of self-harm, including suicide, and violence against others. Almost every adolescent and young adult mass killer in the US in the past couple of decades, with the exception of avowed Islamist terrorists, has been on one or more psychiatric drugs, including many antidepressants.

Do these medications help some people? Apparently so, according to them and their doctors. That does not, however, prove that everyone who is sad for more than two weeks has an incurable but manageable brain disease and is “mentally ill.”

Media Misrepresentation: Your gay son or daughter is going to burn in hell just because he/she is LGBT.

This lie is a criticism of many religions, and recently has been part of the background of a television show called “The Real O’Neals.” One part of the plot involves a gay young man whose supposedly Catholic mother is consumed with despair because “her religion teaches her that her son is going to burn in hell because he is gay.” That’s a paraphrase from interviews I’ve read with a star of the show. I have seen many families suffer under this belief. Parents are alienated from their children; children believe that their parents are condemning them; parents and children alike reject their faith. I will address this from my Catholic perspective; you can do the homework on your faith.

The Catholic Church has an international apostolate (a fancy term for an approved special ministry) called Courage, focused entirely on providing spiritual, emotional and social support for LGBT Catholics. Its intention is not to “make them straight,” but to help them live Catholic lives with the orientation they experience. The official Catechism of the Catholic Church isn’t exactly politically correct: like the psychiatrists of just one generation ago, it considers homosexual behavior disordered – but you could say Catholicism (and all orthodox Christianity) says about the same about any sexual activity outside of marriage.

However, the Catechism of the Catholic Church also says: (paragraph 2358):

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible…They must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter… (that “uniting to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross, is of course, what all Catholics do when, faced with challenges, we talk about “offering it up” – this is not a unique imposition upon GLBT persons).

Paragraph 2359 ends with, “They can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.” Hmmm. No ineluctable path to hell and damnation there.

One can, however, imagine the pain of a parent who imagines their child is immediately rejected by God. One wishes they were bold enough to seek right guidance.

Our Responsibility

It’s easy, of course, to blame the media. Journalists go to college and seem to take pride in getting the “real story,” or whatever they imagine they’re doing. So why don’t they do their homework? Why present the easy, available tale? Psychologically, they appear to indulge in confirmation bias: the tendency to seek out and focus on things that verify what they already “know.” We consumers of media need to check the facts.

Bad information creates pain and suffering. Don’t assume what you read is the whole truth. Do your research, and turn to people who might have access to information you don’t have. Someone’s peace of mind may be at stake.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh, LMHC, LMFT, NCC

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Cut Them Some Slack

Doing unto others as we would have done for ourselves…well, there is one thing that most people tend to do for themselves that they are often slow, reluctant and resistant to do for others: cut them some slack. Consider the historical narrative on this:

Jesus of Nazareth: “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye but not perceive the wooden beam in your own?” (Luke, 6:41, NAB)

Soren Kierkegaard: “Most people are subjective towards themselves and objective towards others, frightfully objective sometimes – but the task is precisely to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.” (Works of Love)

CS Lewis: “…It is no good passing this over with some vague, general admission such as, ‘of course, I know I have my faults.’ It is important to realize that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives the others just that same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don’t know about…” (Essay: The Trouble with “X”, from God in the Dock)

Psychologically, of course, it makes sense: we, after all, know what we intend to do/say; we have deep awareness of all the people and events that obstruct our good intentions. Meanwhile, we have no clue – or concertedly avoid taking notice of clues we trip over – about whatever obstacles and heartaches might underlie others’ disappointing and often frustrating behaviors. We cannot know what it is like to have the particular limitations that someone else has –anymore than they can understand the particular limitations we tote around with us.

Sometimes someone will say to me in the context of therapy how badly they feel that they are struggling with some particular issue – anxiety, or depression, for example – when (from their perspective) other people all seem to be going around, carefree and without this sort of anguish. In a country in which 20% of women and 10% of men are prescribed antidepressant medications each year, and who knows how many various prescriptions for anxiety, it hardly seems fair, to oneself or others, to assume that everyone is skipping along as carefree as they often very deliberately attempt to appear. Then there are physical pains and illnesses; the sufferings of loved ones; the anxiety for a loved one in a danger zone; grief; loneliness. These are so often invisible except for the side effects of passing crankiness or thoughtlessness or scatterbrained-ness that annoy other people who are, to quote Kierkegaard, being “objective” about others.

For the person who is suffering and, unable to see evidence of suffering in others, believes s/he is alone, it is disheartening. To be so alone in suffering…! But no one is alone in their suffering.

Not all the objective/subjective dichotomy concerns suffering. Sometimes it is about unseen limitations or differences. No doubt you have something you are not naturally good at doing. Perhaps it’s spelling, or “being handy,” or math. If you are a grownup who is doing well in life, you may have turned this into a kind of joke, or perhaps you use this as exhibit A, the evidence that you know you’re not perfect: “Oh, I know I’m far from perfect…you should see the disaster my checkbook is,” but in fact you have a certain secret pride that you do not have to bother with this, or that your flaw is so small and even borders on not being a real defect at all…and, after all, at least you are not “stupid/lazy/arrogant/whatever you perceive in someone else.” Yet unless you are in that experience, you cannot understand the frustration of someone with a brain injury who on the one hand knows that a certain skill set used to come naturally but is now a fuzzy memory and source of perpetual struggle. You cannot know what it is really like for someone with an IQ thirty points below yours to struggle through a complex and fast-paced world, when their processing speeds are so much slower, and you likewise cannot know what it might be like for someone with an IQ thirty points higher than yours to bear patiently with you.

Part of good psychotherapy, like good spiritual growth, is becoming aware of one’s flaws – not for the purpose of self-recrimination and useless shame, but as opportunities for growth of oneself as well as a growth in compassion for other people. The process, once begun, is the work of a lifetime.

 

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh, LMHC, LMFT, NCC

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Thoughts on Lent…

It’s Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian 40-day period of spiritual boot camp. For a few weeks, the normal, daily practices of various forms of prayer, fasting/self-denial and almsgiving are supposed to be kicked up a notch. The point of such actions, as Thomas Merton wrote, is not to become a “spiritual athlete” but to push aside trivial things and focus on Who, and what, ultimately matters.

For Christians, the increased on focus on prayer highlights our need to grow in faith. Fasting and other forms of self-denial teach us to trust God – to have hope, rather than an inflated notion of self-reliance. Almsgiving pushes us to love others without conditions or recognition.

All pretty hard stuff, actually.

What if you’re not Christian, or a Christian from a denomination that isn’t particularly engaged in the Lenten season? What about you? Is it still useful to have some sort of extended period of intensive work on bettering yourself in whatever areas you could use a little boost? No doubt a loved one, or perhaps your coworkers, physician, or dental hygienist have suggestions for your improvement. Odds are, the answer for most of us is, yes – sometimes ramping things up for a set period of time is enough to break a bad habit, start a good habit, and have a target date in mind for a shift in perspective to take hold.

Have a Lent that is a season of growth or, if not Lent – have a personal boot camp.

 

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Way 27/Day 27: Make it a great year: Realize that sometimes it really is “you” and not “them”

This is a trait to which we’re all susceptible. It’s someone else’s fault.

Eve blamed the serpent.

Adam blamed Eve and God (That woman that YOU put here…)

So, apparently, it’s human nature to have difficulties and look outside for the fault.

That’s often the case. We do indeed all live surrounded by difficult people. We each just happen to be one of them for everyone else.

If you have a pattern – or two, or three – of difficulties that crop up across places and people, yup, maybe that has more than a little something to do with you. Have a look at those and discern where you have a habit of behavior that is contributing to those problems. No doubt someone (or several someones) have tried, often unsuccessfully and perhaps at risk of being counter-attacked, to point these out to you.

Take some time to simmer on this and see if what emerges helps you make it a great year for you (and the people around you).

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Way 19/Day 19: Be creative

Not the “creative type?” Not “artistic?”

Well, if you believe you were created in the image and likeness of God, then you must believe that you also have a small, human version of God’s infinite capacity to create.

Creativity requires skill, freedom to express that skill, and the ability to think outside the box and then narrow those options down to select the one(s) to use. A landscape painter views the landscape: so many choices in terms of perspective, detail, what to emphasize, what to change, what to omit. It takes skill and mental flexibility to narrow those choices and begin executing a landscape painting.

Not everyone’s creativity expresses itself in art. Maybe yours is in cooking, or developing tactical plans, or training programs, or solving engineering problems. All these pursuits require skill, flexibility and the freedom to execute your decisions.

Sometimes people develop a creative block. This can be from fatigue, severe stress, and/or becoming afraid of making a mistake. In the latter, the person has become so focused on the final result being perfect that it’s impossible to move forward because every step might be “wrong.” In these cases, I have often recommended to clients that they indulge in creative play in an area outside their expertise. This way their ego is not invested in the end result. Seriously, even if you are an accomplished professional, can you really take making a sock puppet (or clay animal, or finger-painting or decorating cookies – whatever you might choose) seriously? It’s an old sock, for crying out loud…have fun. Allowing creativity to flourish in one area can lead to it spreading to others.

Have fun!

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

 

Way 18/Day 18: Realize that sometimes YOU know better

In the film Love and Mercy, based on portions of Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s life, it is apparent that early in the Beach Boys’ success, when the stress of performing, producing, writing – and a history of abuse – were weighing heavily on Brian, that he knew what he needed. He knew and struggled to express to those around him that he needed to pull back – to reduce external stressors and focus on what was most critical. The pressures from others – his family, investors, hangers-on, his manipulative and exploitative father, and, later, the unethical therapist who became a sort of Svengali/mooch, all professed to “know better” what he needed – led to increasingly intense psychological suffering.

(I don’t know how accurately the film represents any of the characters and am describing the characters as portrayed in Love and Mercy, not on the real people)

Sometimes we know better than other people. It’s hard to discern, sometimes, the voices of those who really have our best interest at heart and those who have their own agendas foremost. Too, some people are well-intentioned and, knowing what would be best for them, presume that it must also be best for others.

Seek wise guidance. Perhaps the greatness of the year comes from careful discernment on what is actually right for you.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Way 10/Day 10: Make it a great year – give stuff away.

Most people in the US are blessed with having more than we need. Much more. So much more that we invest in fancy containers to hold it in new ways, rent special places away from our home to use as vacation homes for our extra stuff – and yet many of the people who do these things also continue to shop as a form of recreation.

Consider adopting, at least for a while, one or more of these approaches to your surfeit stuff:

  1. For each new non-perishable item you bring home, select something else to give to charity. You may start considering purchases carefully in light of figuring out what goes into the pile for AmVets when you put the new thing away.
  2. Try to select one item per day for a set number of days to give away. One author did this for a year; you might practice it for the 40 days of Lent.
  3. Have a 30-day list. If a non-essential still seems like a very good idea in a month, then you can decide to make the purchase.

If, on the other hand, your problem is an addiction to shopping, recognize that shopping is meeting one or more emotional needs in an unhealthy way, and find a better way to meet those needs. If you are in debt and out of space because of a shopping addiction, consider seeking professional guidance. You may be struggling to sedate emotional pain with the short-term rush of attention and gratification that shopping can provide.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Way 8/Day 8: Make it a great year – express gratitude again.

Is there someone who had a powerful influence on you – and you haven’t really acknowledged that? Taking the time to express gratitude – in a letter is great – is important for you and could be very helpful and encouraging to the recipient. I had this experience last year. After the term was over and final grades were in, a former student sent me a very brief, thoughtful note, letting me know how much that student had enjoyed being in class and how much she’d personally gained from being in two courses with me. It was private between the two of us, not a public commendation, and for me, that made it very significant. It was a morale-booster. If you have people who have helped you, please send a note or make a call; it will make your year better and will probably improve their year, too!

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

31 Days/31 Ways: Make it a great year!

Day 5: Eat something healthy each day.

A lot of people make resolutions that sound like this: “I’m going to give up junk food!” “I’m not going to eat any carbs!” or some such extreme commitment. Then they fail by eating carbs (which we need) or eat something assigned to the “junk” category. It’s a lot easier to achieve success by doing rather than not-doing. Action is empowering; the punitive, goodie-removing approach sets you up for resentment. So turn it around: instead of some sort of mean-parent, “That’s it! No treats for YOU!” in the mirror, promise yourself to eat one healthy snack each day: a piece of fresh fruit, some raw veggies, a handful of nuts – whatever is appropriate for you and your allergies/dietary restrictions. It’s easier and more encouraging to experience success – and the encouragement to keep it going that success engenders – by DOING rather than not-doing.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.