Way To Go, Godot!

I’m pulling back the curtain on the brand new psychology community site that I’ve been working really hard to put together. You can find it here: Chicago Psychology.

The idea is to provide a place for mental health professionals and psychology researchers to:

1. Promote their practices and promote themselves to potential employers
2. Share information about new research and clinical insights
3. Network with like-minded psychology professionals in order to build up a good professional reputation and get good jobs

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On a psychodiagnostic residency, where your job is just to understand people, one of the tools you use is the famous Rorschach Inkblot Test. In this test, the patient is shown a standard series of pictures created by squirting ink onto a page and then folding the page over. They are then asked to describe what they see in the blots. The answers contain all the keys to the patient’s perception. You may not see, at first, how an explanation of this technique can be of any practical value to you unless you are training to be a psychologist, but if you’ll read on I can promise you there is a payoff for us wayward seekers of personal growth.

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Rose writes:

Can I get treated for depression? I’ve just been prescribed new antidepressants and sedatives and I’m really frightened but feel I have no alternative as I can’t function normally.

Thanks for writing in, Rose. Your question touches on an issue that has stirred up a great deal of controversy over the last hundred years: the “talking cure,” as Freud called psychotherapy, versus pharmacological intervention. Personally, I think that both can be very useful if applied appropriately.

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In my recent article on hypnosis, I mentioned fairly casually that we don’t live in the present moment. We live in memories and dreams.

This is an idea that will not be unfamiliar to those with a mystic bent, but the rest of you may suspect that there is some craziness going on here. In fact, there is! But it is a craziness that is supported by a lot of very good neurological and psychological research.

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People communicate with each other constantly, and in ways we hardly ever even realize. You heard that right: even a truly prolific writer is unlikely to ever match in written words the sheer volume of information that is constantly transmitted to the people around them, in the form of body language, expressions, small gestures, barely detectable fluctuations in muscle tone, in vocal cadence. Beyond these measurable types of physical communication, there’s another level of communication buried under and between the language itself. It occurs just as automatically as body language and just as pervasively. And, like body language, we usually don’t even realize we’re doing it.

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When you’re considering psychotherapy, you should remember that the most important aspect of the treatment, in terms of predicting whether it will be effective for you, is the relationship itself. A deeply trusting and cooperative relationship with your therapist must be developed in order for all the other things that need to happen to happen. So, first of all, find a therapist you like and feel understood by. That means calling up a few different therapists and speaking with them over the phone, maybe even going in for consultations, until you find someone who you feel like you can relate to.

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On some level, most people recognize that psychological factors affect physical health. People basically seem to know, for example, that a stressful career or a ‘Type A’ personality might give them a heart attack, or that an abrasive colleague can give them a headache.

What most people aren’t fully aware of is the profound interconnection between the mind and the body. The past twenty or thirty years have seen an explosion of research on the ways that the mind and the body relate to each other. The further the research goes, in fact, the less it looks like there is a mind apart from the body, or a body apart from the mind. Everything that happens to your body has an effect on your thoughts and feelings, and every emotional or intellectual event has effects on your body.

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