Counseling in Chicago with Bill Martin, LCSW

It’s pretty simple. The research shows us that when people feel discouraged and helpless, they are more likely to become depressed. There are several landmark studies conducted by Martin Seligman and Steven Maier describing the phenomenon of learned helplessness using dogs and the effect of exposing the dogs to unpleasant electrical shocks while in a harness.
Ouch! While it does seem unpleasant to expose dogs to electric shocks,

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How do you spell relief? D-I-S-C-L-O-S-U-R-E

Therapists and clients alike understand the relief provided by the disclosure of sad, angry, fearful memories. Therapy is a place where people should feel safe enough to disclose anything they choose, significant or insignificant.

In dysfunctional families or organizations, people are often exposed to behavior which shocks
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The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for triggering the “fight, flight, or freeze” reaction in human beings.

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Examining the religious right wing activism defending catholic clergy sex abusers and the response of the church, it’s pretty easy to understand why Joe Paterno didn’t do anything to protect the children being raped by Jerry Sandusky.

He’s Joe Paterno and probably feels entitled to do whatever he wants, just like Bill Donohue, Bishop Finn of Kansas City, the catholic pope, and the entire catholic church hierarchy.
Bill Donohue, Executive Director of Catholic League Center for Religious and Civil Rights,

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One only needs to examine the work of Freud to see the origins of the recovered memory debate.In 1896, Freud wrote of a pattern of sexual abuse of women in eighteen consecutive cases.

Robert Dewey quotes Freud in his “Introduction to Psychology”:

“The event of which the subject has retained an unconscious memory is a precocious [unusually early] experience of sexual relations with actual excitement of the genitals,

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We all make many, many mistakes in the way we communicate.

Unless these mistakes are corrected, we can go through life fighting all the time,or avoiding and ignoring each other.

Either way, it can be pretty unpleasant.

In the next series of posts,  I will begin to explain all the
mistakes we make so anyone who is willing to spend a few minutes each
week can become more knowledgeable and effective in helping their
relationship be a little warmer, friendly and fun.

The amygdala is the part of our brain’s limbic system responsible for the processing and memory of emotional reactions and triggering the fight, fight, or freeze process for human beings.

In the image below, the amygdala (dark red color) can be seen as part of the limbic system, just below the thalamus (also dark red).

The amygdala has been called the “emotional sentinel” of the human brain because it is primarily responsible for helping us to know when it is safe and unsafe.

The amygdala receives signals from our senses which it quickly evaluates. If the signal is safe, all is good.  However, if the amygdala determines the signal to be a threat, it sends a message to the hypthalamus to produce dopamine, epinephrine and norepenephrine which provide the chemical fuel for us to fight, flee or freeze.

The studies related to the amygdala have demonstrated that damage to the amygdala or negative personal experiences can result in such things as an inability to determine safe or unsafe facial expressions, hyperarousal, exaggerated fear responses or absence of fear responses.

So, if you grew up in an abusive, dangerous household, it is likely your amygdala has processed and stored those memories in a way which may keep you hyperaroused and unsure about the intentions of your partner.

Any tension or conflict with your spouse may easily result in a yelling match leaving you both depleted and demoralized.

Biology mixes with personal history, with disastrous results for personal and intimate relationships.

Read an absolutely fascinating (if you’re interested in mirror neurons! article about the importance of mirror neurons.

Read the article here.

A Columbia University research project using functional MRI scanning has mapped the two brain systems responsible for empathic accuracy, the parietal and premotor cortex.

These two brain systems help humans understand the intentions of simple gestures, interpret the meaning of those gestures and place them into context.

The researchers used a group of volunteers (objects) to talk about emotional events in their lives while being videotaped. Later, these volunteers watched themselves on video and evaluated whether they felt positively or negatively while talking about these live events.

Then, a second group of volunteers (perceivers) watched the same videotapes and were asked to evaluate the positive or negative experience of the initial volunteers as they described their life events while also hooked up to functional MRI scanning devices to measure which brain systems were activated.
When the perceivers were accurate about the emotional experience, the same brain systems, the parietal and premotor cortex were activated.

Interestingly, when the perceivers were wrong, a third brain system was activated that involves the control and management of one’s own feelings.

This suggested to the researchers that a persons attention to their own feelings may cause them to miss the gestures and other behaviors linked to the feelings of others.

Read the summary of the study here.

Monkeys like to eat and drink like the rest of us, but the research results about the power of empathy are fascinating.

The monkeys starve themselves rather than subject other monkeys to experience the pain of electric shock.

Pretty remarkable and says a lot about why children go to great lengths to “please” their parents and families so early in life, especially if the parent is in some type of pain.

In their article, pubished online here, “Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases,” Stephanie Preston and Frans De Wall describe the research detailing the biological basis for empathy.

Humans, like other mammals, are hardwired to respond to other conspecific’s (same species) pain.

The authors offer a biological explanation of empathy, called the Perception-Action Model (p4), which states that “the attended perception of the object’s (person/entity) being observed) state automatically primes or generates the autonomic or somatic responses, unless unhibited.”

So, the monkey or human infant (subject) after about one years of age, has a biologically driven response to viewing the pain or emotional experiences of others (object).

Think about what this means to children growing up in very vulnerable families with mentally ill,  substance abusing or just plain unhappy parents…