Wise Counsel Podcasts

Dr. Zylowska, a UCLA-affiliated psychiatrist with a private practice in West Los Angeles, discusses mindfulness practice as a clinical intervention for adult ADHD. She describes mindfulness as the cultivation of heightened awareness, and points out that this can occur for anyone as a spontaneous state of mind, but that it can also be cultivated through regular practice of various forms of meditation so that a person's experience of mindfulness becomes more frequent and trait-like. She describes the history of mindfulness practice as a psychotherapy intervention, noting that Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program was the first application, followed on by Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). Both intervention protcols involve an eight week training period. In her own pilot research she has adapted mindfulness practices from the MBSR model for use treating adults and teens diagnosed with ADHD. Modifications including making practice sessions shorter, and encouraging walking meditation as opposed to sitting meditation. Her results, published in the Journal of Attention Disorders in 2007, showed that patients generally liked the intervention and that their ability to sustain attention under distracting circumstances was improved at the conclusion of mindfulness training. Together with Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D., she has co-authored a CD of mindfulness practices for ADHD. The summary of the exercises used in the research study is available for download from her website.

An Interview with Holli Kenley, MA on Surviving Betrayal. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Ms. Kenley became highly attuned to the idea of betrayal after noting it as a common theme in multiple clients and dealing with it in her own life. Her efforts to understand what people refer to when they say "betrayed" resulted in her identification of three common experiences or states of being: confusion, worthlessness, and powerlessness, which she describes as stages that occur in that order, respectively. The difficulty a person will have in processing a betrayal and moving through these stages is affected by multiple factors, including one's personality or ego strength, the degree to which the betrayal affects identity investments in particular social roles, and the chronicity of the betrayal (whether it is a single event or a recurring theme). People who have experienced multiple and chronic betrayals may find that they are dealing with a pool of residual betrayal, in that they have come to identify themselves as a victim and self-effiacy is low. Such stored or institutionalized betrayal must be addressed and worked through in therapy or the client's progress may stall. An important componant of this work involves helping the client move from a passive/victim core sense of self to a more active and empowered persona capable of self-authorship and able to right herself. This shift from passive victim identity to a self-authoring identity opens up the possibility of anger and blame, which must also be worked through so as not to become the new basis for the client's identity, as this is also a trap.

An Interview with Leslie Greenberg, Ph.D. on Emotion-Focused Therapy. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Dr. Van Nuys interviews Leslie Greenberg, Ph.D. with regard to Dr. Greenberg's Emotion-Focused Psychotherapy. Dr. Greenberg is not so interested in promoting yet another name brand psychotherapy but has felt complelled to package his work in this fashion so as to get it out there, in the face of the dominant cognitive-behavioral mode of therapy which deemphasizes the importance of what he wants to talk about. His therapy is focused squarely on helping patients to experience and comprehend their emotional process through the communication of an intellectual framework for understanding emotion, and the direct experience of emotion in the therapy. It is the conceptual framework and the large base of research it sits upon that differentiates this therapy from older emotion-focused therapies such as gestalt therapy, Rogerian client centered therapy, and (shudder) Janov's primal scream. The approach recognizes emotions as action-tendencies motivating behavior, and as people's most fundamental synthesis of their understanding of their situation. It seeks to put people back in touch with avoided fundamental emotions as without awareness of avoided emotions, people are rudderless and disoriented. Multiple research studies of this Emotion-Focused therapy have been conducted, resulting in firm support for the efficacy of the approach.

An Interview with Steven Richfield, Psy.D. on Parents as Coaches. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Drs. Van Nuys and Richfield discuss Richfield's coaching cards, a deck of cards designed to be used by pre-teen children and parents so as to help children understand, in a concrete and developmentally approprite manner, methods for coping that might otherwise be just above their understanding. For instance, the cantaloupe skin card shows the image of a child putting on a cantaloupe skin. This is a concrete representation of the idea that some people have thin skins (e.g., are sensitive and vulnerable) while others have thicker skins, and that thinner skinned children have the option to metaphorically choose to put on a thicker skin by focusing their minds on success experiences which help shore up their fragile self-concepts. The cards offer key concepts to children that enable them to cope better, helping to advance their development of social maturity. Richfield sees this approach as offering parents a way to fundamentally better understand what their children are going through and therefore respond in a developmentally sensitive manner promoting maturation (in the manner of an athletic coach) rather than as simple rule setters and enforcers.

Interview: Bruce Ecker, MA, LMFT on Memory Reconsolidation and Psychotherapy Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. In this episode of the Wise Counsel Podcast, Bruce Ecker describes the core treatment method of Coherence Therapy. Ecker relates this method to emerging neuropsychological research on memory reconsolidation, a naturally occurring phenomena through which emotional memories can be dissolved and erased. Reconsolidation studies by brain scientists have shown that under special circumstances, the physical storage of emotional memories is unlocked by reactivation of the stored knowledge and is then reconsolidated back into a stable condition after a few hours. During that window, it is possible for new learnings to revise and even erase the existing emotional knowledge and the behavioral responses that it drives. Ecker maintains that the same reconsolidation process demonstrated in contemporary neuroscience research seems to be at work in coherence therapy and accounts for clinical observations of profound change and lasting relief from longstanding symptoms of many kinds.

An Interview with Ari Tuckman, Psy.D., MBA on Adult ADHD. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Dr. Tuckman, a psychologist in private practice in West Chester, PA specializes in the treatment of adult ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), characterized in children by hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention. Most people outgrow the hyperactivity component of this disorder, but impulsivity and inattention problems may linger into adulthood, resulting in lost opportunities and poor educational, occupational and social functioning. The diagnosis is often missed in adults who are instead regarded as lazy or selfish. Functional problems associated with ADHD appear to be neurological by nature, manifesting as executive function disturbance. Aspects of executive dysfunction include impairments of prospective memory, sense of time and poor response inhibitution secondary to an impaired ability to efficiently appreciate the consequences of behavior; all types of meta-awareness which normally serve to keep people oriented regarding the responsibilities they are expected to meet. Dr. Tuckman's Integrative Treatment for Adult ADHD is comprised of four treatment componants: 1) education about the nature of deficits associated with ADHD, 2) medication (usually a stimulant) to boost executive functioning, 3) coaching (e.g., identifying distractions and removing them, and using external supports like clocks, alarms and signs to prompt behavior and stimulate awareness), and 4) psychotherapy to boost self-esteem and motivation and address mood and anxiety problems.

An Interview with Robert Fancher, Ph.D. on Cultures of Healing. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Dr. Fancher is known for his 1995 book, Cultures of Healing, which is notable for its criticism of the cognitive-behavioral school within clinical psychology, which he understands to be based on a provincial vision of the scientific enterprise; one more concerned with engineering outcomes than with understanding the natural world. Dr. Fancher finds that many psychological scientists and therapists simply swallow, unquestioningly, cultural traditions about the nature of the world and the best ways to study it that they are taught in school, and go on to simply repeat these understandings, believing them to be Facts, rather than a particular and biased understanding of the true and ultimately unknowable underlying world. Therapists embeddedness and lack of ability to criticise their own undersandings blinds them to the fact that they have worldviews (one among many), and that these worldviews both have ethical ramifications that need to be explored, and also bias their interpretations. Many therpists do not attend to their role as moral agents with values and agendas that necessarily influence their clients. Therapists are taught to be value-neutral towards their clients, but this is both an impossible and absurd stance, and also sometimes a damaging one (e.g., when therapists do not take an ethical position towards their clients unethical behavior).

An Interview with George Bonanno, Ph.D. on Bereavement, Grief and Resilience. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Dr. Bonanno describes lessons learned from his 30 year research career studying bereavement (grief in response to the death of a significant other). His findings debunk many grief myths that are widely held, including the notion that grief is always a drawn out process, and that it proceeds as a predictable series of stages. In reality, many people get over their losses fairly quickly. Rather than stages, the typical experience is more like periods of sadness that gradually get less intense. It is also the case that people normally experience intense happy emotions during bereavement as well as sad ones, moving back and forth between the two, with both emotions tending to be intensely felt but brief in duration. The more that people smile early on during bereavement, the faster they tend to recover their equilibrium. In many ways distraction and avoidance end up being better ways of managing intense grief than involved grief-focused conversations. Distressed people can become sensitized by such conversations and end up having a worse outcome than they otherwise would. Involved grief-focused discussion can be useful as a componant of psychotherapy for people displaying complicated (non-remitting) grief. Formal therapy is generally not indicated for normal grief. However, it can very useful for grieving people to have the opportunity to talk with an understanding and caring family member or friend if they desire it.

An Interview with Kirk Schneider, Ph.D. on Existential-Humanistic Psychotherapy. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Drs. Van Nuys and Schneider discuss recent developments of Existential-Humanistic Psychotherapy, an approach founded by Rollo May and developed by May and James and Elizabeth Bugental. Dr. Schneider has become a champion of the approach since the passing of the founders, and notes it has opened up to embrace the use of techniques drawn from other schools while retaining its intense focus on the existential anxieties (e.g., the fear of death and the various ways that symptoms develop to ward off awareness of death) and the development of clients' sense of here-and-now presence and freedom through the therapists' careful, client-focused empathic attention, genuineness and ability to create a safe environment.

An Interview with Mary Forsberg Weiland on Modeling, Addiction and Bipolar Disorder. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Ms. Weiland, formerly a successful fashion model and wife of rock star Scott Weiland (singer for the popular 1990s rock band Stone Temple Pilots), recounts her life growing up in in San Diego in a chaotic family environment featuring povery, frequent moves, divorce and remarriage, depression, and delinquency; her early and sudden success as a fashion model; more depression; her very intense and volitile marriage to Scott Weiland; their drug addiction problems; and her very public manic episode in which she burned her husband's clothes and damaged a hotel room. Though embarrassing, this episode resulted in her acceptance of treatment for bipolar disorder, an action which she credits with completely transforming her life and reducing her misery. Through her book, she hopes to share her experience with others so as to reduce the shame and stigma associated with addiction and bipolar disorder diagnosis and treatment.