The study of physics celebrates the grandeur and infinity of God. All possibilities exist in God. Man has limited His miracles and capabilities always reducing His possibilities to the limits of his imagination. The truth is much more. God is all and everything and everyone. We exist in and of God, our creator. We are made in the image of God;in God’s imagination we exist. Life is a dream in God’s Dream and we are co dreamers in His infinite expanse of fluctuating energy, slow and fast, mass, matter, energy. Oscillating, interacting, interfacing. We encounter God with every thought we have of God.
The linear progression of time is illusory for reality expands from the centre, goes off in every direction from each moment with countless opportunities. Choice abounds. There is one consciousness attuned to God. A forward motion of the individual psyche. A thought that rides a wave of infinite waves and infinite thoughts. Each action begets unnumbered possibilities. Each thought and each action and each feeling expands like ripples. A pebble dropped in an ocean creates circles upon circles of motion. Out from the centre the brain prunes the past possibilities as every path reduces the dwindling number of choices. The wee small voice becomes quieter as another voice expands in volume and waves intersect with waves. There is still has a literal cacophony of sound in the wee small voice, in the ultimate praise to God, the soundless silience, the paradox of paradoxes, God of God.
Everyone everywhere is reincarnating. God is always birth and death and renewal. The telescope shows expanding universe and the microscope begets electron microscope. The aha of child looking into the pond and the wonder of the shepherd looking at the stars of the night sky. Stories upon stories. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Out of the stuff of miracles are countless futures made. Miracles are the norm and the norm is sacred. The dance is everywhere and everything. The music is there always to be heard. The Love is ever near.
St. Theresa of Avila in Inner Castle points to distractions. The light calls. There is always the light and we walk towards the light. There are many castles. There are many doorways. Distractions. Proceed to the light.
As Plato said, there are projection of life on the shadows on the wall but the projector is God.
Parallel universes and every possibility expand out from a centre of now. Practicing the presence of God as Brother Lawrence said, God is only in the now. Time as we know it, is an illusion. History as we know is manufacture. Saving the appearance. The Holy Bible is the holy in deepening awareness with every encounter. Each day begins fresh. It is we who cling to the residues of yesterday. It is our fear and resentment that limit the divine possibilities of tomorrow. God's is a god of infinite gifts. We have but to pray and believe. If we have faith the size of a mustard seed we can move mountains. Jesus says, “ye of little faith’. He is speaking directly to me.
The collective reality of today is the ‘norm’ , the ‘least possible’, the ‘lowest denomination’ , the materialist jungle. Only gravity pulls down our imagination. We fear to let go of the past. We cling to our memories and deny Revival.
We fear. Jesus commands, "Do not be afraid." Still we fear. We fear death. We fear change. We fear and Satan is fear. The opposite of evil is life. The collective fear is gravity, so grave. We are pulled down from soaring like eagles by the gravity of fear. Death does not conquer. Jesus rose again. Jesus called, "Follow me" And we shall rise again.
Shout Halleljujah. Sing psalms of deliverance. Give thanks unto the lord. Soar as on Eagles wings. He lives. He is Risen. And so are we. The Good News. The Gospel.
Friday, November 4, 2016
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Gratitude List
I am grateful for my stocked refrigerator. I have bread and peanut butter, ice cream, cream, butter, venison steaks, veggies, apples and yoghurt and cheese. I’m really grateful for this.
I’m grateful for the warmth and dryness in my home. I’m grateful for the sound of rain on the roof.
I’m grateful for my clothing.
I’m grateful for my dog. I love gilbert. He’s a source of joy daily.
I’m especially grateful for my couch.
I’m grateful for my sailboat.
I’m grateful for my family.
I’m grateful for my friends.
I’m grateful for the sun. i’m grateful for the ocean. I’m grateful for the forest. I’m grateful for my glasses. I’m grateful for my computer. I’mg grateful for churches. I’m grateful for the Bible. I’m grateful for the Big Book. I’m grateful for Merck and Epocrates. I’m grateful for the anatomy atlas. I’m grateful for my stethoscope. I’m grateful for my truck and car and motorcycle. I’m grateful for my indoor plumbing and indoor running water and electricity and back up generator and propane heating and stove and back up refrigerator.
I’m grateful for my computer and NCIS and Star Trek TV , netflix and I tunes. . I’m grateful for my Ipad and books I read from Amazon. I’m grateful for fresh air.
I’m grateful that most of my teeth are well. I’m grateful that most of my joints are well. I’m grateful that most of my body is well. I’m grateful that most of my mind is well. I’m grateful that most of my heart is well.
I’m grateful for sound and hearing.
I’m grateful for sight and smell. I’m thankful that I have smell left and my taste is unaffected and I can taste most things still.
I’m grateful for my bow and rifles and my having shot a deer this year and the rabbits and grouse and the freezer stocked with healthy food.
I’m grateful for the curry stew I made.
I’m grateful for the market bread and Starbucks coffee.
I’m grateful that my negative moods are usually surmountable with all the tools and training I’ve had in facing negatives and overcoming the natural tendencies to scream hysterically and throw myself on the ground and start biting my own limbs.
I’m thankful for meditation and prayer.
I’m thankful for learning.
I’m thankful for underwear that fits smoothly and doesn’t bunch up. I’m thankful for dress pants with expandable waistes.
I’m thankful for trains and planes. I’m thankful for plants and fish and animals and insects. I’m thankful for God and Jesus and Saints. I’m thankful for hospitals and doctors, and nurses and medicines and Iv’s and ox and ctscns and X-ray and labs and police and the military and stealth jet fighters and spaceships. I’d like a personal spaceship with hyperdrive and a ticket to ride and force shields and a license to kill and superior fire power and inside trader information and a trust fund and a pretty face and the ability to lie and not feel badly and the ability to steal from innocent people and sell drugs and do abortions and murder and everything and not have conscience and the ability to be in government and abdicate from personal responsibility for the despair and destruction caused by the government.
I’d like Buffy St. Marie to get off her old rich ass and write a song
Universal Beaurocrat or Universal Banker or Universal Billionaire or Universal Politician or Universal United Nations Dictator or Universal Arms Dealer or Universal Citizen
Rather than blaming the Universal Soldier
I’d like the 60’s singers and musicians to apologize for their lyrics of youth and naivety. That would be the PC thing to do and I think all actors and producers should give have their income to the third world because there are no more ‘privileged people’ in the world than those in Hollywood.
I’m thankful that I have the ability to see my own self pity, fear and resentment and hopefully pray for a better attitude and see that god’s grace is all. I’m so thankful for life even today with the dark clouds and dreary month of wet and chill
Thank you for all my teachers and thank you for all the opportunities.
thank you for my brother, Lord.
I’m grateful for the warmth and dryness in my home. I’m grateful for the sound of rain on the roof.
I’m grateful for my clothing.
I’m grateful for my dog. I love gilbert. He’s a source of joy daily.
I’m especially grateful for my couch.
I’m grateful for my sailboat.
I’m grateful for my family.
I’m grateful for my friends.
I’m grateful for the sun. i’m grateful for the ocean. I’m grateful for the forest. I’m grateful for my glasses. I’m grateful for my computer. I’mg grateful for churches. I’m grateful for the Bible. I’m grateful for the Big Book. I’m grateful for Merck and Epocrates. I’m grateful for the anatomy atlas. I’m grateful for my stethoscope. I’m grateful for my truck and car and motorcycle. I’m grateful for my indoor plumbing and indoor running water and electricity and back up generator and propane heating and stove and back up refrigerator.
I’m grateful for my computer and NCIS and Star Trek TV , netflix and I tunes. . I’m grateful for my Ipad and books I read from Amazon. I’m grateful for fresh air.
I’m grateful that most of my teeth are well. I’m grateful that most of my joints are well. I’m grateful that most of my body is well. I’m grateful that most of my mind is well. I’m grateful that most of my heart is well.
I’m grateful for sound and hearing.
I’m grateful for sight and smell. I’m thankful that I have smell left and my taste is unaffected and I can taste most things still.
I’m grateful for my bow and rifles and my having shot a deer this year and the rabbits and grouse and the freezer stocked with healthy food.
I’m grateful for the curry stew I made.
I’m grateful for the market bread and Starbucks coffee.
I’m grateful that my negative moods are usually surmountable with all the tools and training I’ve had in facing negatives and overcoming the natural tendencies to scream hysterically and throw myself on the ground and start biting my own limbs.
I’m thankful for meditation and prayer.
I’m thankful for learning.
I’m thankful for underwear that fits smoothly and doesn’t bunch up. I’m thankful for dress pants with expandable waistes.
I’m thankful for trains and planes. I’m thankful for plants and fish and animals and insects. I’m thankful for God and Jesus and Saints. I’m thankful for hospitals and doctors, and nurses and medicines and Iv’s and ox and ctscns and X-ray and labs and police and the military and stealth jet fighters and spaceships. I’d like a personal spaceship with hyperdrive and a ticket to ride and force shields and a license to kill and superior fire power and inside trader information and a trust fund and a pretty face and the ability to lie and not feel badly and the ability to steal from innocent people and sell drugs and do abortions and murder and everything and not have conscience and the ability to be in government and abdicate from personal responsibility for the despair and destruction caused by the government.
I’d like Buffy St. Marie to get off her old rich ass and write a song
Universal Beaurocrat or Universal Banker or Universal Billionaire or Universal Politician or Universal United Nations Dictator or Universal Arms Dealer or Universal Citizen
Rather than blaming the Universal Soldier
I’d like the 60’s singers and musicians to apologize for their lyrics of youth and naivety. That would be the PC thing to do and I think all actors and producers should give have their income to the third world because there are no more ‘privileged people’ in the world than those in Hollywood.
I’m thankful that I have the ability to see my own self pity, fear and resentment and hopefully pray for a better attitude and see that god’s grace is all. I’m so thankful for life even today with the dark clouds and dreary month of wet and chill
Thank you for all my teachers and thank you for all the opportunities.
thank you for my brother, Lord.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
All Soul's Day and my brother, Ron
My brother has left this world and is now a saint in heaven. I woke suddenly in the night and was up for a while. I learned next day this time coincided with his death. I remember years before hearing my mother’s voice and seeing my mother and father reunited when I closed my eyes in the taxi, on the way to the plane. I'd been called to come to Ottawa as my father was on his last legs. When I had arrived there, I learned then that the time of my ‘vision?’ and “hallucination?”, in the taxi on the way to the airport, was the exact time that he ‘passed’.
I remember long ago my ex wife, an identical twin, collapsing with pain at the same instant her sister took ill thousands of miles away.
My brother was a believer, all his life, once a powerful Christian involved Baptist youth groups and the Billy Graham movement. Later he rejected organized religion because of church politics. He nonetheless maintained a faith in something more. Today, he would be called ‘spiritual but not religious’. Before he died he did not know what awaited him. Yet when I spoke to him of my transcendent dreams of our father at a river leaning against a tree waiting for him to cross, he said that he too had many dreams like that of Dad these last few days.
I loved reading the neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander’s recent book, Proof of Heaven. Dr. Moody’s studies of people who had near death experiences was particularly illuminating. I’ve always liked the bardot idea of the Tibetan Book of the Dead with a cast of characters agreeing to play a life together each of us taking different roles, explaining that uncanny sense of deja due and the feeling sometimes that I’ve known a person before but in a different role. Reincarnation is the norm of the Old Testament and remains present in the New Testament of the Holy Bible. When Constantine made Christianity a state religion the references to reincarnation were played down but they still remain, not in a backwards sense but in a forward developmental way. Life seems to have this learning aspect for me like the kindergarten analogy so poignantly made by Dr. Scott Peck
My native friends believe that their relatives are living alongside them in a parallel world. Certainly String Theory allows for both God and the Multiverse. I have no sense of finite. My consciousness is dynamic. I might well be ‘saving the appearances’ but its equally consistent to posit infinity. I loved Hamlet’s soliloquy in which he says “To Dream that is the Rub”. For death seems to the external observer little different from sleep yet the questions arise in the subjective sense. It comforts me to know my brother has not ‘ended’ but rather ‘passed’.
He remains alive in the fondest memories I have of him. He was my protector as a child , my best friend and through out his life my greatest inspiration. As a child I remember him making me grilled cheese sandwiches, I thought him so very smart and wise and mature being able to manage the magic of hot food. He was like my mother and father when I was young. I couldn't even operate the stove. Later I watched as my brother faced and surmounted the greatest of challenges. Always he kept his sense of humor.
He had an amazing curiosity about the world around him. He was a scientist too and a businessman. His eye for nature and sense of timing was unsurpassed. I will always cherish that about him as it helped him capture the best of birds and animals and flowers and outdoor scenes in photographs. He was happiest with his family and next to that with forest, lakes and streams.
I feel him near as I ‘ve so often felt the nearness of those I’ve loved and lost. They are lost to me for now but I pray and hope that we will be reunited in heaven. I loved the Robin Williams movie," What Dreams May Come" and Mark Twain's,"Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven." My mother taught my brother and I to pray on our knees to Jesus. As we slept in the same room as children, I heard his prayers to Jesus as he heard mine.
Loving my pets who have died, wonderful dogs and cats, I believe too in Rainbow Bridge. I imagine my brothers dogs, Tartan and Rain, bounding towards him as Dad takes him in his arms and hugs the great man his son has become. My mother, humble and kind hearted would wait for Ron to turn to her and then the two would hug, mom's eyes tearing as they did when she was brimming over with joy. Mom and Dad and Ron and dogs barking and bounding around them in circles.That's what I see. It’s what I have to look forward to too. That, and the glowing brighter than bright light of Jesus.
And we walk to the light. My aunt and grandmother and grandfather and uncles and friends and all of us reunited moving as a family and community into the arms of the Great Shepherd.
Today is All Soul’s Day. Samhein is the time of Celtic Festival when the harvest is done and the cattle are brought down from the summer pastures. It’s a liminal time when the worlds of this life and the after life are closest and souls pass easily between.
We thought my brother would die earlier this fall as family gathered a couple of times in uncertainty. Now I know my very smart brother uncannily chose the easiest passage. Canoeing together he’d time the crossing for the safest shortest passage. Other canoes would be floundering in wind and waves but he’d bring us to shore safely. He was a consumate boatman as my father was before him. No wonder I ended up a blue water sailor with such examples. I have no doubt he will journey across the space between. Alternatively the time was chosen for him. This meeting of letting go and coming together.
A friend called me the night he died and invited us to attend Compline with her and her son. So there I was again in the most beautiful Christ Church Cathedral, where I was once baptized by Dean Peter and Bishop Michael and where I had so many times prayed on my knees. This time I listened to the chanting and recited the Lord’s Prayer in community. To myself I talked quietly to Jesus about my brother Ron. I prayed for his peace.
His loving wife Adell, that day, had told me that he was sleeping mostly. He was taking more morphine for the pain. We all knew the end was very near. I’d been with him the week before when he told me all he wanted was his family near. I watched hold the hand of his one true love, Adell. They had known and a life time of the deepest love. Their love was a Song of Songs/ I remember when Ron met Adell he was transformed and the two together radiated. His life took on meaning then. I remember Adell as a beautiful but very strong girl and the two of them as inseparable from the beginning as they were at the end.
My nephews, his sons, Graeme, Andrew, and Alan, are the very finest of men. I can only admire them. I wonder at the power of genes seeing so much in them I've seen in cousins from Canada, the US and from Scotland. They were born with this innateness but the love, education and examples of Ron and Adell have brought out the best. I love them dearly.
When last I visitted brother and I talked for hours in the night of things we’d not spoken of since adolescence or younger. Always woven through the fabric of his very existence was his love of Adell and his love of family.
It’s All Soul’s Day today. How fitting. Again, typical of my brother’s exquisite sense of timing, the skill that allowed him to capture just the right moment in a bird’s landing with his camera. All Soul’s Day is the Christian festival that commemorates the faithful departed. I look forward to church tonight. Tonight I will sing hymns of praise and give thanks for the greatest of gifts, my loving brother Ron who was so kind, so good, so wise. Thank you Lord Jesus.
I remember long ago my ex wife, an identical twin, collapsing with pain at the same instant her sister took ill thousands of miles away.
My brother was a believer, all his life, once a powerful Christian involved Baptist youth groups and the Billy Graham movement. Later he rejected organized religion because of church politics. He nonetheless maintained a faith in something more. Today, he would be called ‘spiritual but not religious’. Before he died he did not know what awaited him. Yet when I spoke to him of my transcendent dreams of our father at a river leaning against a tree waiting for him to cross, he said that he too had many dreams like that of Dad these last few days.
I loved reading the neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander’s recent book, Proof of Heaven. Dr. Moody’s studies of people who had near death experiences was particularly illuminating. I’ve always liked the bardot idea of the Tibetan Book of the Dead with a cast of characters agreeing to play a life together each of us taking different roles, explaining that uncanny sense of deja due and the feeling sometimes that I’ve known a person before but in a different role. Reincarnation is the norm of the Old Testament and remains present in the New Testament of the Holy Bible. When Constantine made Christianity a state religion the references to reincarnation were played down but they still remain, not in a backwards sense but in a forward developmental way. Life seems to have this learning aspect for me like the kindergarten analogy so poignantly made by Dr. Scott Peck
My native friends believe that their relatives are living alongside them in a parallel world. Certainly String Theory allows for both God and the Multiverse. I have no sense of finite. My consciousness is dynamic. I might well be ‘saving the appearances’ but its equally consistent to posit infinity. I loved Hamlet’s soliloquy in which he says “To Dream that is the Rub”. For death seems to the external observer little different from sleep yet the questions arise in the subjective sense. It comforts me to know my brother has not ‘ended’ but rather ‘passed’.
He remains alive in the fondest memories I have of him. He was my protector as a child , my best friend and through out his life my greatest inspiration. As a child I remember him making me grilled cheese sandwiches, I thought him so very smart and wise and mature being able to manage the magic of hot food. He was like my mother and father when I was young. I couldn't even operate the stove. Later I watched as my brother faced and surmounted the greatest of challenges. Always he kept his sense of humor.
He had an amazing curiosity about the world around him. He was a scientist too and a businessman. His eye for nature and sense of timing was unsurpassed. I will always cherish that about him as it helped him capture the best of birds and animals and flowers and outdoor scenes in photographs. He was happiest with his family and next to that with forest, lakes and streams.
I feel him near as I ‘ve so often felt the nearness of those I’ve loved and lost. They are lost to me for now but I pray and hope that we will be reunited in heaven. I loved the Robin Williams movie," What Dreams May Come" and Mark Twain's,"Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven." My mother taught my brother and I to pray on our knees to Jesus. As we slept in the same room as children, I heard his prayers to Jesus as he heard mine.
Loving my pets who have died, wonderful dogs and cats, I believe too in Rainbow Bridge. I imagine my brothers dogs, Tartan and Rain, bounding towards him as Dad takes him in his arms and hugs the great man his son has become. My mother, humble and kind hearted would wait for Ron to turn to her and then the two would hug, mom's eyes tearing as they did when she was brimming over with joy. Mom and Dad and Ron and dogs barking and bounding around them in circles.That's what I see. It’s what I have to look forward to too. That, and the glowing brighter than bright light of Jesus.
And we walk to the light. My aunt and grandmother and grandfather and uncles and friends and all of us reunited moving as a family and community into the arms of the Great Shepherd.
Today is All Soul’s Day. Samhein is the time of Celtic Festival when the harvest is done and the cattle are brought down from the summer pastures. It’s a liminal time when the worlds of this life and the after life are closest and souls pass easily between.
We thought my brother would die earlier this fall as family gathered a couple of times in uncertainty. Now I know my very smart brother uncannily chose the easiest passage. Canoeing together he’d time the crossing for the safest shortest passage. Other canoes would be floundering in wind and waves but he’d bring us to shore safely. He was a consumate boatman as my father was before him. No wonder I ended up a blue water sailor with such examples. I have no doubt he will journey across the space between. Alternatively the time was chosen for him. This meeting of letting go and coming together.
A friend called me the night he died and invited us to attend Compline with her and her son. So there I was again in the most beautiful Christ Church Cathedral, where I was once baptized by Dean Peter and Bishop Michael and where I had so many times prayed on my knees. This time I listened to the chanting and recited the Lord’s Prayer in community. To myself I talked quietly to Jesus about my brother Ron. I prayed for his peace.
His loving wife Adell, that day, had told me that he was sleeping mostly. He was taking more morphine for the pain. We all knew the end was very near. I’d been with him the week before when he told me all he wanted was his family near. I watched hold the hand of his one true love, Adell. They had known and a life time of the deepest love. Their love was a Song of Songs/ I remember when Ron met Adell he was transformed and the two together radiated. His life took on meaning then. I remember Adell as a beautiful but very strong girl and the two of them as inseparable from the beginning as they were at the end.
My nephews, his sons, Graeme, Andrew, and Alan, are the very finest of men. I can only admire them. I wonder at the power of genes seeing so much in them I've seen in cousins from Canada, the US and from Scotland. They were born with this innateness but the love, education and examples of Ron and Adell have brought out the best. I love them dearly.
When last I visitted brother and I talked for hours in the night of things we’d not spoken of since adolescence or younger. Always woven through the fabric of his very existence was his love of Adell and his love of family.
It’s All Soul’s Day today. How fitting. Again, typical of my brother’s exquisite sense of timing, the skill that allowed him to capture just the right moment in a bird’s landing with his camera. All Soul’s Day is the Christian festival that commemorates the faithful departed. I look forward to church tonight. Tonight I will sing hymns of praise and give thanks for the greatest of gifts, my loving brother Ron who was so kind, so good, so wise. Thank you Lord Jesus.
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
Tricky Dicky Nixon not so Tricky Today
With all the DNA reviews of prisoners in jails for crimes they haven't done being released on new evidence.
And with the re writing of history with new inclusion criteria and new ideas about the winners writing history so history should be more inclusive.
With this 2016 American election I think it's time to have Richard Nixon's legacy reviewed. By present day electoral standards the man is a veritable saint.
Today it turns out that there have been a couple of million dead democrats voting in the elections. Countless naer do wells are bused from poll to poll sometimes voting countless times and we don't know if this is being done by Republicans or Democrats or whether the buses just go pub to voting station to pub with a mix of Republican/Democrat outcomes. Apparently anyone can vote in the US or rather anyone does vote in the US. Voting machines have been found in several states that are tampered with and now Fraction Magic is a mathematical voting algorithm that allows manipulation of the votes once they go from individual site to central site. Wow!!!
Richard Nixon is simply not the scoundrel he was once portrayed as judged by today's standards.
Richard Nixon for American Sainthood.
Or where are you now Woodrow?
Has American journalism fallen so far or has the presidential candidate stooped so low?
Or were we all just that much more naive and idealistic years ago?
Or Deep Throat played Woodrow and today Madonna offers blow jobs if you vote Democrat.
Wow!
All I can say is at least American Politics as strange as they may seem aren't nearly as sordid and shallow as Canadian politics today. People in Glass Houses shouldn't throw stones.
Nixon doesn't look so bad by comparison.
And with the re writing of history with new inclusion criteria and new ideas about the winners writing history so history should be more inclusive.
With this 2016 American election I think it's time to have Richard Nixon's legacy reviewed. By present day electoral standards the man is a veritable saint.
Today it turns out that there have been a couple of million dead democrats voting in the elections. Countless naer do wells are bused from poll to poll sometimes voting countless times and we don't know if this is being done by Republicans or Democrats or whether the buses just go pub to voting station to pub with a mix of Republican/Democrat outcomes. Apparently anyone can vote in the US or rather anyone does vote in the US. Voting machines have been found in several states that are tampered with and now Fraction Magic is a mathematical voting algorithm that allows manipulation of the votes once they go from individual site to central site. Wow!!!
Richard Nixon is simply not the scoundrel he was once portrayed as judged by today's standards.
Richard Nixon for American Sainthood.
Or where are you now Woodrow?
Has American journalism fallen so far or has the presidential candidate stooped so low?
Or were we all just that much more naive and idealistic years ago?
Or Deep Throat played Woodrow and today Madonna offers blow jobs if you vote Democrat.
Wow!
All I can say is at least American Politics as strange as they may seem aren't nearly as sordid and shallow as Canadian politics today. People in Glass Houses shouldn't throw stones.
Nixon doesn't look so bad by comparison.
Sunday, October 30, 2016
Church, Prayers, and my brother Ron
I was in Napanee at Hay Bay with my brother Ron and his family, Adell, Graeme, Andrew, Alan. Tanya, Andrew’s wife has been there and Alan brought his friend Meagan. Eva and Pepper the cockapoos are the going concern always. Gilbert came out on my trip at the end of September when we took the SV Giri sailing. I was able to ride the Yamaha 250 motorcycle around the backwoods. Ron had been in Kingston Hospital where his doctor, Dr. Tomiak has provided such thoughtful, loving care. We’d been able to get him back home after that last visit. His wife Adell is a real trooper.
Ron loves Hay Bay. It’s so reminiscent for me of their home on the Red River by the University of Manitoba. He was to my mind so happy there and again so at Hay Bay Beautiful wife. Proud father. University graduate. Hard worker. Haybay to me is just more acres and more square feet. There’s something so similar for me in these homes. Ron acknowledged the similarities himself. Getting home was so important to him. He’s planted so many flowers this last year. It’s been a while since he could kayak or bicycle. We did plant fruit trees together. He has his salt water aquarium and guitars. The wood burning fireplace created such a lovely fragrance at night. Adell is such a remarkable cooks. The dogs and boys are always on the go.
This last time though he wasn’t able to stand. Adell had to take him in to the Napanee palliative care unit where "Dr. Tom” was caring and kind. The nurses were terrific too. Ron hadn’t wanted to stay. But his cancer had progressed. We considered options. Acceptance comes. It was so sad to watch him wanting his body, and willing his body to move but seeing that no matter, the message was no longer getting through. His mind was fine and he was alert for long times, fully compis mantis and able to be with family. He enjoyed the company. He didn’t want to go. Not afraid of dying but somehow not quite willing to leave the party. Like a child yawning.
Always his family was there. Graeme sat by him all night, or Alan or Andrew. Adell was with him most of the time, day and night, a wonderful love story. . Days and nights I'd come by and find them holding hands. I came and went too. My brother and I talked of childhood and family. I felt a bit like the one with the watch. Time ticking. .
Sunday Adell and I went to church. I took her to the St. Mary Magdalene Anglican church in Napanee. I’m now Anglican. We’d all begun as Baptists. Ron and Adell courted in the Trinity Baptist Church in Winnipeg. Adell and I have been to the Baptist church and the United Church in Napanee and enjoyed them. I’d passed St. Mary Magdalene on the way to the Napanee Hospital. I’d brought egg mcmuffins and coffee from McDonalds for our breakfasts. Ron was able to enjoy a bite but I drank his coffee and mine. He did like the red bull I brought him. It counteracted the morphine.
The church service was lovely. The church itself so British. The people so friendly. Adell liked the music. I love her voice. She is a soprano and I’ve always loved the heavenly sound she makes when she sings. Ron and her sang together. The Anglican music is more traditional. I listen to Praise music on the radio and love it. But this music just worked for me. The kind of Christian songs my mother and aunt sung years ago. The newer songs haven’t the same history, even though I so enjoy them. I liked the priest. I missed communion though. . Holy Communion service was early at 8 am. I like those services.
We went back to the palliative care unit. I talked more with Ron. We have had a lot of conversations this last year, mostly about family and childhood. I think of the songline, “there’s never enough time to say all the things you want to."
I like churches. I like worship in community. I pray.
Back home this last week Tom called. He was on his way to the Chinese Anglican Church, the Anglican Network of the Good Shepherd, near Ontario and 11th Avenue. He said it was the opening of synod and there were celebrating Eucharist. The Archbishop of the Anglican Church of North America was there presiding. I liked the Chinese church immediately. It had what my friends in the Christian Medical and Dental Society called ‘bible based’ feeling. So many of the Chinese like the Orthodox Russians I met in Moscow and St. Petersburg were persecuted for their faith and now take religion very very seriously. It’s not an accoutrement but the centre of their lives. Miracles happen in these places. The Gospel is truly the good news.
The joy was palpable.
I told Tom I’d been to St. Mary’s Magdalene in Napanee but missed eucharist so was glad he called.
The North American Anglican Synod was different from the Canadian Anglican Synod. When Bishop Michael had been here the Anglican church split with the traditional congregations losing their churches and leaving the more modern Diocese of New Westminster, to which I belong. The Bishop divorced too. I didn’t like that the diocese took the Christians to court but in the end the split created two churches, something going on since Martin Luther and certainly well established in Anglican tradition by Good King Henry.
I like eucharist. I believe in the body of Christ and the Blood of Christ. I believe in Jesus. I believe in Christ in the very fabric of existence which is essentially energy and matter is slow energy. The idea of Christ and the Holy Spirit and the historical Jesus and soul are all central for my life. I struggle with the faith and courage and congregation but God has always been with me. I like churches because I know that the majority of people there are spiritual seekers and somehow the meaning of that and the feeling of that lingers in this space for me. I feel edgy where wars have taken place though in general I like graveyards. I used to lunch in graveyards when I worked in Toronto and there was no other nearby green spaces. I like hockey rinks, playgrounds, nature, mountains, oceans and forests but I also like churches and temples and holy places of worship.
Now I’ve just come from St. James Anglican Church where I’ve attended for years since I left Christ Church Cathedral because of their anti dog policy. Gilbert’s a therapy dog and was blessed by Dean Peter Elliott and Bishop Michael but he has other dog friends at St. James and he likes the kids there. His god brothers and sister are there and they all have group hugs. I like the people too. We missed Kevin and Anna today but expect the unexpected sunshine and heat of this day had them out with the kids. Laura said she expected Kevin would put up his incredible pictures of their morning with nature.
I say I’m a ‘winter Christian’. When the weather is good I’m so often out sailing or hiking or hunting, I miss a lot of days at church then. When winter comes I’m more likely to be in church because we’re in town on the weekend.
I’ve been praying for my brother, praying for his comfort, praying for peace. I’m praying for my family too.
Ron loves Hay Bay. It’s so reminiscent for me of their home on the Red River by the University of Manitoba. He was to my mind so happy there and again so at Hay Bay Beautiful wife. Proud father. University graduate. Hard worker. Haybay to me is just more acres and more square feet. There’s something so similar for me in these homes. Ron acknowledged the similarities himself. Getting home was so important to him. He’s planted so many flowers this last year. It’s been a while since he could kayak or bicycle. We did plant fruit trees together. He has his salt water aquarium and guitars. The wood burning fireplace created such a lovely fragrance at night. Adell is such a remarkable cooks. The dogs and boys are always on the go.
This last time though he wasn’t able to stand. Adell had to take him in to the Napanee palliative care unit where "Dr. Tom” was caring and kind. The nurses were terrific too. Ron hadn’t wanted to stay. But his cancer had progressed. We considered options. Acceptance comes. It was so sad to watch him wanting his body, and willing his body to move but seeing that no matter, the message was no longer getting through. His mind was fine and he was alert for long times, fully compis mantis and able to be with family. He enjoyed the company. He didn’t want to go. Not afraid of dying but somehow not quite willing to leave the party. Like a child yawning.
Always his family was there. Graeme sat by him all night, or Alan or Andrew. Adell was with him most of the time, day and night, a wonderful love story. . Days and nights I'd come by and find them holding hands. I came and went too. My brother and I talked of childhood and family. I felt a bit like the one with the watch. Time ticking. .
Sunday Adell and I went to church. I took her to the St. Mary Magdalene Anglican church in Napanee. I’m now Anglican. We’d all begun as Baptists. Ron and Adell courted in the Trinity Baptist Church in Winnipeg. Adell and I have been to the Baptist church and the United Church in Napanee and enjoyed them. I’d passed St. Mary Magdalene on the way to the Napanee Hospital. I’d brought egg mcmuffins and coffee from McDonalds for our breakfasts. Ron was able to enjoy a bite but I drank his coffee and mine. He did like the red bull I brought him. It counteracted the morphine.
The church service was lovely. The church itself so British. The people so friendly. Adell liked the music. I love her voice. She is a soprano and I’ve always loved the heavenly sound she makes when she sings. Ron and her sang together. The Anglican music is more traditional. I listen to Praise music on the radio and love it. But this music just worked for me. The kind of Christian songs my mother and aunt sung years ago. The newer songs haven’t the same history, even though I so enjoy them. I liked the priest. I missed communion though. . Holy Communion service was early at 8 am. I like those services.
We went back to the palliative care unit. I talked more with Ron. We have had a lot of conversations this last year, mostly about family and childhood. I think of the songline, “there’s never enough time to say all the things you want to."
I like churches. I like worship in community. I pray.
Back home this last week Tom called. He was on his way to the Chinese Anglican Church, the Anglican Network of the Good Shepherd, near Ontario and 11th Avenue. He said it was the opening of synod and there were celebrating Eucharist. The Archbishop of the Anglican Church of North America was there presiding. I liked the Chinese church immediately. It had what my friends in the Christian Medical and Dental Society called ‘bible based’ feeling. So many of the Chinese like the Orthodox Russians I met in Moscow and St. Petersburg were persecuted for their faith and now take religion very very seriously. It’s not an accoutrement but the centre of their lives. Miracles happen in these places. The Gospel is truly the good news.
The joy was palpable.
I told Tom I’d been to St. Mary’s Magdalene in Napanee but missed eucharist so was glad he called.
The North American Anglican Synod was different from the Canadian Anglican Synod. When Bishop Michael had been here the Anglican church split with the traditional congregations losing their churches and leaving the more modern Diocese of New Westminster, to which I belong. The Bishop divorced too. I didn’t like that the diocese took the Christians to court but in the end the split created two churches, something going on since Martin Luther and certainly well established in Anglican tradition by Good King Henry.
I like eucharist. I believe in the body of Christ and the Blood of Christ. I believe in Jesus. I believe in Christ in the very fabric of existence which is essentially energy and matter is slow energy. The idea of Christ and the Holy Spirit and the historical Jesus and soul are all central for my life. I struggle with the faith and courage and congregation but God has always been with me. I like churches because I know that the majority of people there are spiritual seekers and somehow the meaning of that and the feeling of that lingers in this space for me. I feel edgy where wars have taken place though in general I like graveyards. I used to lunch in graveyards when I worked in Toronto and there was no other nearby green spaces. I like hockey rinks, playgrounds, nature, mountains, oceans and forests but I also like churches and temples and holy places of worship.
Now I’ve just come from St. James Anglican Church where I’ve attended for years since I left Christ Church Cathedral because of their anti dog policy. Gilbert’s a therapy dog and was blessed by Dean Peter Elliott and Bishop Michael but he has other dog friends at St. James and he likes the kids there. His god brothers and sister are there and they all have group hugs. I like the people too. We missed Kevin and Anna today but expect the unexpected sunshine and heat of this day had them out with the kids. Laura said she expected Kevin would put up his incredible pictures of their morning with nature.
I say I’m a ‘winter Christian’. When the weather is good I’m so often out sailing or hiking or hunting, I miss a lot of days at church then. When winter comes I’m more likely to be in church because we’re in town on the weekend.
I’ve been praying for my brother, praying for his comfort, praying for peace. I’m praying for my family too.
Persuasion and Behaviour Change
All behaviour is considered to have been innate or learned. Having a dog is a real lesson in ‘innate’ behaviour, seeing how the lessons of breeding herding and hunting behaviours pass on ‘genetically’ so to speak.
In addition behaviour is learned. You can influence all behaviour. This was the work of Skinner with conditioning and work with lab rats and mazes. Complex human behaviours changed and are understood in a variety of ways. Social sciences in general focus on understanding behaviour with a view to changing behaviour.
Naturally there are judgement calls. A behaviour is described as positive or negative, healthy or unhealthy, useful or unuseful. Each of these words is ‘packed’ with meaning. It’s a window to understanding the ‘meaning’ of a behaviour for an individual. It’s a way of finding a handle into ‘changing’ the behaviour as well.
Freud said there was a life and death wish. It’s paraphrased today as ‘You’re on the up elevator or down elevator’. “You’re going forward or backwards’. Barack Obama said you are on the right side or the wrong side of history.
My friend who was in a concentration camp said the most potent behaviour change device was hunger and food. My patient who was tortured described pain and stopping of pain as the most significant behaviour change he had known. Quantanamo was a study in ‘behaviour change’.
Administrators, employers, police, jailers have a whole slew of options others don’t. Working with adolescents one sees the power of money. Kids will do a whole lot of things for money but once the money stops they stop the behaviour. They are not stupid. The relationship are conceptualized in regards to ‘power’ and at the most basic derive developmentally from childhood with the ‘parent/child’ construct.
But as every parent knows one can ‘teach’ a child to do a behaviour but to have the child maintain that behaviour against distraction is a different matter. In the ‘good old days’ a medieval parent ‘owned’ a child, like a master might own a slave. There was the full range of choices for how to go about changing a behaviour. It was frowned upon if you killed the child, or slave or horse for that matter. Doystoyevsky has a marvellous story about killing a horse and the whole discussion that follows is elucidating.
Behaviour change is also tied to the concept of ‘internalization’. Can a learned behaviour change persist without the presence of the rewarding agent or the torturer.
To understand a behaviour such as ‘tidiness’ there is a need to grasp that each behaviour is not obviously superior in and of itself. The nature of ‘culture’ is that there have been thousands of different ways found by humans over the length of our time here finding ways of doing things and after tens of thousands of years there remains preferred and not preferred ways by culture to achieving the same end. Human behaviour is complex.
Changing behaviour in therapy begins with the idea of the least harm and least invasion.
In therapy with a psychiatrist in the community there is no ‘master/slave’ relationship and there is no ‘parent/child’ relationship. The power politics of the relationship can be conceptualized in many ways and commonly a truth for a ‘group comparison’ is extrapolated to the individual context. For instance aboriginals in a certain area of Canada are poorer relative to others so their power is diminished but in another area they are commonly richer and more powerful than most so that the power dynamics change. This is lost in modern political correctness politics with their fixed debates. The fact remains a female empress is more powerful individually than a male sharecropper just as a black president is more powerful than a white janitor. It’s hard for people to see these distinctions because of their own inherent biases.
When a person comes for therapy they may see that the therapists is there ‘servant’, a kind of glorified ‘cabana boy’ who does their bidding. A princess has many servants and the doctor and therapists are just another one. Her relationship with them all is ‘master/slave’ , ‘parent/child’, ‘employer/employee’.
The professional is in an interesting position because he is a ‘servant’ but he has obligations to the ‘profession’ and this is seen specifically in the complex arrangements for ships doctors relative to ships captains. The whole dynamics of physical health are exploded to a whole other level when it comes to mental health. I do a whole lot of competency assessments for mental health and dearly miss the simplicity of the assessment from a physical health perspective.
Where you have real power everything is relatively easier. The rich can buy good behaviour. The physically threatening can bully good behaviour.
In therapy there is a ‘schtick’ a relatively naive and frankly ignorant notion that the therapist has ‘power’ as if the world is 1950 and ‘authority’ is respected and police are never questioned and children do as they are told. I am daily aware that the world is mad and individually I hear of teachers who are only able to spout dribble because they are never in the field. I talk with my military friends and we laugh at ‘academics’ because it’s all so easy when you are not in the thick of it. It’s so obvious to anyone who is a Monday morning quarterback and our society is brimming over with everyone wanting to be a ‘consultant’ or an ‘analyst’ or a ‘judge’. No one wants to be in the ‘fog of war’ or actually do the hands on face to face work. It’s the least paid. The soldier in the line is the least paid. The most paid is the ‘oversight committee member’ who ‘reviews’ the behaviour.
Therapy can be about change or ‘collusion’.
The rich paid for psychologists to agree with them. Today a fortune is made by divorcing people who hire counsellors who agree with them that their ex is a toad.
There is a fortune to be made in ‘agreement’ with tyranny. There are countless tales of the deaths of advisors to kings who told the truth but didn’t live to see their genius. The emperor has no clothes is the most eloquent of all the tales.
As long as a person is doing something having another discuss and talk about that behaviour indefinitely is not unpleasant. The problem arises when there is an expectation of ‘stopping’ one behaviour and starting another.
One conceptualization of behaviour change that has served me well is to see a person on a mountain clinging to a couple of crevices and to move forward having to let go of their temporary safety and risk reaching for another hand hold. I love watching goats traverse such perpendicular surfaces.
I treated a hundred cutters. These are people who have learned that ‘cutting’ themselves with razor blades is rewarding experience. It’s been likened to masturbation in the literature. A slow crescendo to the ultimate release of blood flow. It’s controlling and rewarding and attention seeking or secretive. It’s just one of thousand ‘behaviours’ I’ve treated over the years. The words “I’ve treated’ don’t do justice to the experience. Encounter is better.
Right now I more often have recurrent encounters with people who stick needles in their arms with unknown powders in the hope that the substance is heroin and not fentanyl. They know people who have died. Their motivation to change despite the risk of imminent death is little.
The cutter is a whole lot easier to treat. Acutely suicidal people and violent people , perverts and such were more challenging.
The first step is always , in medicine, ‘observe’. To this end I ask a whole lot of questions about the behaviour. When did it begin. What’s it like. What are the pros and cons. What would it be like without the behaviour. Generally we talk about the behaviour more than anyone ever before has. I remember days of sitting in the stink of rooms smeared with faces asking an endless number of questions about the shit smearing behaviour.
Adolescents, borderline personality disorders, psychopaths, sociopaths, schizophrenics and rich and powerful people and people in jails and prisons will commonly stonewall you.
The term ‘therapeutic alliance’ is critical to therapy. The patient and the doctor agree not just overtly but at the deepest level to work together to change the behaviour.
However if the person is in the office because of the police, or employer or insurance agent or because the wife or husband wants them there, the therapeutic alliance might well never occur. Duplicitous behaviour is common. Malingering is common. Factitious behaviour is common. In general a whole lot of people are happy to ‘go through the motions’. They will do anything ‘but change’. Alcoholics were happy to spend an hour a day with a therapist as long as they could have their drink after the session. Workers sit daily or weekly in a therapists office to remain off work or collect their pay.
It’s naive to assume everyone wants to change. Most people don’t want to change.
Whatever they are doing worked for them at some time and would work now if you just got out their face.
A whole lot of people have given up hope that they can change. A whole lot more don’t see what the problem is.
The question is therapy is always ‘whose problem is this’. It’s like who wants the bed made in the whole and who benefits from a made bed and even if both people benefit who can win the war and get the other person to be the one to make the bed. Commonly the only person who has a problem is the therapist.
Increasingly therapy is parallel behaviour in which the therapist is doing an academic procedure and the patient is going through the motions. The two collude to get paid or rewarded for this unusual dance interaction. If the therapist doesn’t ‘test’ if there is change then with endless resources this dance can go on indefinitely.
I will never forget a psychiatry resident in our psychotherapy training treating a psychopath thief who they saw for 3 years weekly all the while the theif continued to steal and amass a fortune all the while the therapy ‘interpreted’ their behaviour and discussed their ‘behaviour’. I thought of the psychiatrist seeing the mob member and considered that was okay since the mob member was paying for her ‘services’. He continued to ‘whack’ people but his marriage improved. MAD comics once put out a funny issue describing the therapy of therapist and Hitler, and therapist and Stalin. But therapy is medicine and a ISIS jihadi executionist beheading people might get a head ache doing his job. No one would fault the pharmaceutical industry or pharmacist or the local doctor for giving him as aspirin so he could continue his work with less of a headache. So Tony whacked people and the psychiatrist paid by Tony helped him with his relationship with his wife and the other mob leaders. He gained ‘insight’ into what he was doing and his sleep improved.
When I work in the jails I’m working first for the jailer.
When I work in the government health care services, since the person I’m seeing pays taxes, I’m working for them but the Minister of Health and Medical Service Plan is paying. When I’m working for a person seeing them for that but they have ‘private’ or insurance from another source I am working for them plus the government and always for my profession and responsibly for the community. Commonly someone else wants my patient to do something they don’t want to do so they use therapy appearances to procrastinate.
A lovely lady didn’t want to get women to have sex with her husband . She didn’t mind threesomes per se but she drew the line at going out to bars to find willing women to bring home. He was rich and powerful and she felt a whole lot of humiliation with this position. After a bout six months of him paying me cash with the hope of treating her ‘depression’ she told him she didn’t want to do that. He stopped paying me and kicked her out and got a woman who apparently was more willing to provide this service. “My” patient got over her depression and may or may not in future get women for the next man.
In the US I was paid directly for services. It was a lot clearer who I was working for.
When I was on salary to an organization it was a lot clearer who I was working for.
Increasingly as a therapist I’m being paid by several different people with competing designs and I’m already managed by a half dozen beaurocrats and others with competing plans. The government is always confused.
The patients are confused. Do I really want to change. Is it worth it. Should I give up picking my skin.
I use morbidity and mortality statistics to judge myself whether I’m doing anything. Increasingly I’m going through the motions like so many others. I used to really work at change but l was taught always to question who was doing more work you or the patient. Increasingly the third party is doing the least work. They don’t care. They fume and have temper tantrums and cut off funding or services but there’s just a whole lot of bullshit in the system these days that no one seems to want to change. Everyone wants to talk the talk but no one wants to walk the walk.
Harm reduction is the craze.
Divorce facilitation is marriage therapy.
I don’t want to go on and on about this but it’s the reality.
I rarely see a person who really really really really wants to change. Those people change when they discuss the matter with there family, friends, or gp. By the time a person gets to me they have ‘failed’ in ‘changing’ for years and for dozens of therapists. Commonly the come to me and they are already seeing at least two or three other healers who are hoping that they can all blame me for their collectively not having changed anything in anywhere for five to twenty years. I see really chronic negative behaviours.
And all I can do is ‘persuade’.
In contrast the administrator or employer can ‘punish’ by taking away their job. I can’t even ‘fire’ a person without getting in trouble with some authority. Look at the difficulty landlords have with eviction. It’s no different than a ‘seat’ in an office. Once that person is allowed to ‘sit down’ hell can freeze over before you can move them or you can move them but at risk to your life and livelihood.
I used to be able to do things like talk about things, but today “I don’t want to talk about that’ is quickly followed by ‘If you insist upon talking about that I’m going to make your life miserable for years and cost you millions.”
Really.
People pull out guns and show me where they want the discussion to go. Others pull out knives. More and more people tell me the name of their lawyer.
Change my behaviour at peril.
Truly there are more who are truly perplexed by their inability to change a behaviour. “I thought I could stop cutting myself but I can’t. I used to be able to hide it, cutting under my clothing but now I’m cutting my hands”.
Education doesn’t work. But we all do it. “Have you tried…."
Insight - this is ‘why'
What is the benefit , when and where,
Drugs are marvellous. Prozac in combination with therapy is twice as effective as therapy alone. When prozac didn’t work and a dozen other as like drugs didn’t work one could punish the patient with ECT which would at least cause the patient to forget whatever it was that they were thinking about when they are cutting or it might well have not punished them but simply increased the serotonin which seems low in people who cut themselves. But what happens when all the pharmacopeia has been used and they’ve had ECT and they’re still cutting.
That’s what’s happening today.
I see people who have tried ‘everything’ to stop their drinking, their cutting, their wife beating, their child fucking, their refusal to leave their homes, their inability to get on planes, their inability to work, to have sex, to eat, whatever.
All of what used to be seen in the hospital where the doctor had power and status and a ‘team’ is now seen in the community by an isolated practitioner who lives in fear about what the next angry person is going to do when you suggest, ask, hope they will change their bullying behaviour.
Patients take pleasure in ‘proving’ they can’t change. “See I told you no one could change me."
People said I should see you but I know you’re not going to help me."
No one listens to me.
No one helps me.
You’re just another stuck up asshole who thinks you know so much , well you don’t know me and no one is going to change me.
The world is full of toddlers and everyone with a connection to the internet is having a temper tantrum on the floor of the supermarket and getting a gang of other people who like doing whatever they do, including not going to work, including getting everyone else to pay for the, including being physically incapable of getting out of bed, including wanting their arms cut off, including having sex with animals and really thinking everyone else has a problem because all they need is more money and to be left alone and not judged and if you judge them you are just like everyone else.
The world is having a pout.
We’re on the verge of war.
War is a failure of diplomacy. No one seems diplomatic these days. Increasingly they bully and lie. Deceit in my experience is at an all time high. People say one thing then do another and I’m always wondering do they know that. We need cameras and recordings and I have done that, I’ve recorded every session and played back what people said and did but it’s just upset them and made them angry. You’re bullying me they say when I record what they say and play it back.
Borderlines are the norm.
Everywhere I look I see the fear in peoples eyes.
Somedays I miss sitting in locked rooms with people who smear shit on the walls.
I’ve always understood that behaviour.
In addition behaviour is learned. You can influence all behaviour. This was the work of Skinner with conditioning and work with lab rats and mazes. Complex human behaviours changed and are understood in a variety of ways. Social sciences in general focus on understanding behaviour with a view to changing behaviour.
Naturally there are judgement calls. A behaviour is described as positive or negative, healthy or unhealthy, useful or unuseful. Each of these words is ‘packed’ with meaning. It’s a window to understanding the ‘meaning’ of a behaviour for an individual. It’s a way of finding a handle into ‘changing’ the behaviour as well.
Freud said there was a life and death wish. It’s paraphrased today as ‘You’re on the up elevator or down elevator’. “You’re going forward or backwards’. Barack Obama said you are on the right side or the wrong side of history.
My friend who was in a concentration camp said the most potent behaviour change device was hunger and food. My patient who was tortured described pain and stopping of pain as the most significant behaviour change he had known. Quantanamo was a study in ‘behaviour change’.
Administrators, employers, police, jailers have a whole slew of options others don’t. Working with adolescents one sees the power of money. Kids will do a whole lot of things for money but once the money stops they stop the behaviour. They are not stupid. The relationship are conceptualized in regards to ‘power’ and at the most basic derive developmentally from childhood with the ‘parent/child’ construct.
But as every parent knows one can ‘teach’ a child to do a behaviour but to have the child maintain that behaviour against distraction is a different matter. In the ‘good old days’ a medieval parent ‘owned’ a child, like a master might own a slave. There was the full range of choices for how to go about changing a behaviour. It was frowned upon if you killed the child, or slave or horse for that matter. Doystoyevsky has a marvellous story about killing a horse and the whole discussion that follows is elucidating.
Behaviour change is also tied to the concept of ‘internalization’. Can a learned behaviour change persist without the presence of the rewarding agent or the torturer.
To understand a behaviour such as ‘tidiness’ there is a need to grasp that each behaviour is not obviously superior in and of itself. The nature of ‘culture’ is that there have been thousands of different ways found by humans over the length of our time here finding ways of doing things and after tens of thousands of years there remains preferred and not preferred ways by culture to achieving the same end. Human behaviour is complex.
Changing behaviour in therapy begins with the idea of the least harm and least invasion.
In therapy with a psychiatrist in the community there is no ‘master/slave’ relationship and there is no ‘parent/child’ relationship. The power politics of the relationship can be conceptualized in many ways and commonly a truth for a ‘group comparison’ is extrapolated to the individual context. For instance aboriginals in a certain area of Canada are poorer relative to others so their power is diminished but in another area they are commonly richer and more powerful than most so that the power dynamics change. This is lost in modern political correctness politics with their fixed debates. The fact remains a female empress is more powerful individually than a male sharecropper just as a black president is more powerful than a white janitor. It’s hard for people to see these distinctions because of their own inherent biases.
When a person comes for therapy they may see that the therapists is there ‘servant’, a kind of glorified ‘cabana boy’ who does their bidding. A princess has many servants and the doctor and therapists are just another one. Her relationship with them all is ‘master/slave’ , ‘parent/child’, ‘employer/employee’.
The professional is in an interesting position because he is a ‘servant’ but he has obligations to the ‘profession’ and this is seen specifically in the complex arrangements for ships doctors relative to ships captains. The whole dynamics of physical health are exploded to a whole other level when it comes to mental health. I do a whole lot of competency assessments for mental health and dearly miss the simplicity of the assessment from a physical health perspective.
Where you have real power everything is relatively easier. The rich can buy good behaviour. The physically threatening can bully good behaviour.
In therapy there is a ‘schtick’ a relatively naive and frankly ignorant notion that the therapist has ‘power’ as if the world is 1950 and ‘authority’ is respected and police are never questioned and children do as they are told. I am daily aware that the world is mad and individually I hear of teachers who are only able to spout dribble because they are never in the field. I talk with my military friends and we laugh at ‘academics’ because it’s all so easy when you are not in the thick of it. It’s so obvious to anyone who is a Monday morning quarterback and our society is brimming over with everyone wanting to be a ‘consultant’ or an ‘analyst’ or a ‘judge’. No one wants to be in the ‘fog of war’ or actually do the hands on face to face work. It’s the least paid. The soldier in the line is the least paid. The most paid is the ‘oversight committee member’ who ‘reviews’ the behaviour.
Therapy can be about change or ‘collusion’.
The rich paid for psychologists to agree with them. Today a fortune is made by divorcing people who hire counsellors who agree with them that their ex is a toad.
There is a fortune to be made in ‘agreement’ with tyranny. There are countless tales of the deaths of advisors to kings who told the truth but didn’t live to see their genius. The emperor has no clothes is the most eloquent of all the tales.
As long as a person is doing something having another discuss and talk about that behaviour indefinitely is not unpleasant. The problem arises when there is an expectation of ‘stopping’ one behaviour and starting another.
One conceptualization of behaviour change that has served me well is to see a person on a mountain clinging to a couple of crevices and to move forward having to let go of their temporary safety and risk reaching for another hand hold. I love watching goats traverse such perpendicular surfaces.
I treated a hundred cutters. These are people who have learned that ‘cutting’ themselves with razor blades is rewarding experience. It’s been likened to masturbation in the literature. A slow crescendo to the ultimate release of blood flow. It’s controlling and rewarding and attention seeking or secretive. It’s just one of thousand ‘behaviours’ I’ve treated over the years. The words “I’ve treated’ don’t do justice to the experience. Encounter is better.
Right now I more often have recurrent encounters with people who stick needles in their arms with unknown powders in the hope that the substance is heroin and not fentanyl. They know people who have died. Their motivation to change despite the risk of imminent death is little.
The cutter is a whole lot easier to treat. Acutely suicidal people and violent people , perverts and such were more challenging.
The first step is always , in medicine, ‘observe’. To this end I ask a whole lot of questions about the behaviour. When did it begin. What’s it like. What are the pros and cons. What would it be like without the behaviour. Generally we talk about the behaviour more than anyone ever before has. I remember days of sitting in the stink of rooms smeared with faces asking an endless number of questions about the shit smearing behaviour.
Adolescents, borderline personality disorders, psychopaths, sociopaths, schizophrenics and rich and powerful people and people in jails and prisons will commonly stonewall you.
The term ‘therapeutic alliance’ is critical to therapy. The patient and the doctor agree not just overtly but at the deepest level to work together to change the behaviour.
However if the person is in the office because of the police, or employer or insurance agent or because the wife or husband wants them there, the therapeutic alliance might well never occur. Duplicitous behaviour is common. Malingering is common. Factitious behaviour is common. In general a whole lot of people are happy to ‘go through the motions’. They will do anything ‘but change’. Alcoholics were happy to spend an hour a day with a therapist as long as they could have their drink after the session. Workers sit daily or weekly in a therapists office to remain off work or collect their pay.
It’s naive to assume everyone wants to change. Most people don’t want to change.
Whatever they are doing worked for them at some time and would work now if you just got out their face.
A whole lot of people have given up hope that they can change. A whole lot more don’t see what the problem is.
The question is therapy is always ‘whose problem is this’. It’s like who wants the bed made in the whole and who benefits from a made bed and even if both people benefit who can win the war and get the other person to be the one to make the bed. Commonly the only person who has a problem is the therapist.
Increasingly therapy is parallel behaviour in which the therapist is doing an academic procedure and the patient is going through the motions. The two collude to get paid or rewarded for this unusual dance interaction. If the therapist doesn’t ‘test’ if there is change then with endless resources this dance can go on indefinitely.
I will never forget a psychiatry resident in our psychotherapy training treating a psychopath thief who they saw for 3 years weekly all the while the theif continued to steal and amass a fortune all the while the therapy ‘interpreted’ their behaviour and discussed their ‘behaviour’. I thought of the psychiatrist seeing the mob member and considered that was okay since the mob member was paying for her ‘services’. He continued to ‘whack’ people but his marriage improved. MAD comics once put out a funny issue describing the therapy of therapist and Hitler, and therapist and Stalin. But therapy is medicine and a ISIS jihadi executionist beheading people might get a head ache doing his job. No one would fault the pharmaceutical industry or pharmacist or the local doctor for giving him as aspirin so he could continue his work with less of a headache. So Tony whacked people and the psychiatrist paid by Tony helped him with his relationship with his wife and the other mob leaders. He gained ‘insight’ into what he was doing and his sleep improved.
When I work in the jails I’m working first for the jailer.
When I work in the government health care services, since the person I’m seeing pays taxes, I’m working for them but the Minister of Health and Medical Service Plan is paying. When I’m working for a person seeing them for that but they have ‘private’ or insurance from another source I am working for them plus the government and always for my profession and responsibly for the community. Commonly someone else wants my patient to do something they don’t want to do so they use therapy appearances to procrastinate.
A lovely lady didn’t want to get women to have sex with her husband . She didn’t mind threesomes per se but she drew the line at going out to bars to find willing women to bring home. He was rich and powerful and she felt a whole lot of humiliation with this position. After a bout six months of him paying me cash with the hope of treating her ‘depression’ she told him she didn’t want to do that. He stopped paying me and kicked her out and got a woman who apparently was more willing to provide this service. “My” patient got over her depression and may or may not in future get women for the next man.
In the US I was paid directly for services. It was a lot clearer who I was working for.
When I was on salary to an organization it was a lot clearer who I was working for.
Increasingly as a therapist I’m being paid by several different people with competing designs and I’m already managed by a half dozen beaurocrats and others with competing plans. The government is always confused.
The patients are confused. Do I really want to change. Is it worth it. Should I give up picking my skin.
I use morbidity and mortality statistics to judge myself whether I’m doing anything. Increasingly I’m going through the motions like so many others. I used to really work at change but l was taught always to question who was doing more work you or the patient. Increasingly the third party is doing the least work. They don’t care. They fume and have temper tantrums and cut off funding or services but there’s just a whole lot of bullshit in the system these days that no one seems to want to change. Everyone wants to talk the talk but no one wants to walk the walk.
Harm reduction is the craze.
Divorce facilitation is marriage therapy.
I don’t want to go on and on about this but it’s the reality.
I rarely see a person who really really really really wants to change. Those people change when they discuss the matter with there family, friends, or gp. By the time a person gets to me they have ‘failed’ in ‘changing’ for years and for dozens of therapists. Commonly the come to me and they are already seeing at least two or three other healers who are hoping that they can all blame me for their collectively not having changed anything in anywhere for five to twenty years. I see really chronic negative behaviours.
And all I can do is ‘persuade’.
In contrast the administrator or employer can ‘punish’ by taking away their job. I can’t even ‘fire’ a person without getting in trouble with some authority. Look at the difficulty landlords have with eviction. It’s no different than a ‘seat’ in an office. Once that person is allowed to ‘sit down’ hell can freeze over before you can move them or you can move them but at risk to your life and livelihood.
I used to be able to do things like talk about things, but today “I don’t want to talk about that’ is quickly followed by ‘If you insist upon talking about that I’m going to make your life miserable for years and cost you millions.”
Really.
People pull out guns and show me where they want the discussion to go. Others pull out knives. More and more people tell me the name of their lawyer.
Change my behaviour at peril.
Truly there are more who are truly perplexed by their inability to change a behaviour. “I thought I could stop cutting myself but I can’t. I used to be able to hide it, cutting under my clothing but now I’m cutting my hands”.
Education doesn’t work. But we all do it. “Have you tried…."
Insight - this is ‘why'
What is the benefit , when and where,
Drugs are marvellous. Prozac in combination with therapy is twice as effective as therapy alone. When prozac didn’t work and a dozen other as like drugs didn’t work one could punish the patient with ECT which would at least cause the patient to forget whatever it was that they were thinking about when they are cutting or it might well have not punished them but simply increased the serotonin which seems low in people who cut themselves. But what happens when all the pharmacopeia has been used and they’ve had ECT and they’re still cutting.
That’s what’s happening today.
I see people who have tried ‘everything’ to stop their drinking, their cutting, their wife beating, their child fucking, their refusal to leave their homes, their inability to get on planes, their inability to work, to have sex, to eat, whatever.
All of what used to be seen in the hospital where the doctor had power and status and a ‘team’ is now seen in the community by an isolated practitioner who lives in fear about what the next angry person is going to do when you suggest, ask, hope they will change their bullying behaviour.
Patients take pleasure in ‘proving’ they can’t change. “See I told you no one could change me."
People said I should see you but I know you’re not going to help me."
No one listens to me.
No one helps me.
You’re just another stuck up asshole who thinks you know so much , well you don’t know me and no one is going to change me.
The world is full of toddlers and everyone with a connection to the internet is having a temper tantrum on the floor of the supermarket and getting a gang of other people who like doing whatever they do, including not going to work, including getting everyone else to pay for the, including being physically incapable of getting out of bed, including wanting their arms cut off, including having sex with animals and really thinking everyone else has a problem because all they need is more money and to be left alone and not judged and if you judge them you are just like everyone else.
The world is having a pout.
We’re on the verge of war.
War is a failure of diplomacy. No one seems diplomatic these days. Increasingly they bully and lie. Deceit in my experience is at an all time high. People say one thing then do another and I’m always wondering do they know that. We need cameras and recordings and I have done that, I’ve recorded every session and played back what people said and did but it’s just upset them and made them angry. You’re bullying me they say when I record what they say and play it back.
Borderlines are the norm.
Everywhere I look I see the fear in peoples eyes.
Somedays I miss sitting in locked rooms with people who smear shit on the walls.
I’ve always understood that behaviour.
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Sailing with Andrew and Tanya, Loyalist Cove Marina, Lake Ontario
I actually thought the SV GIRI motor trip and anchoring in Kerr Bay with Alan would be the last time I took working yacht out. However, Tanya who had painted the boat in the spring asked if she and Andrew might go sailing.
So off we drove from Hay Bay to Loyalist Cove Marina. We backed the sailboat out of the marina then drove into the wind to raise the sails. Once they were up I let Andrew take over. He was keen on sailing. Lots of gybing and tacking while I explained wind and sail positions. We really were doing well making quite the clip in the light winds. I even had a single reef in the main because my autopilot handles best that way. The genoa was all out.
Tanya and I liked the flatter pleasanter (hear Sailing, Sailing song in back ground) downwind sailing. But Andrew liked best heeling and racing close hauled into the wind. Gilbert loved being part of the whole affair and especially loved Tanya who recognized his importance as Admiral.
I enjoyed drinking coffee, reminiscing about off shore adventures and wanted to keep on going. We were out a few hours tacking back and forth across the strait. I just want to go on forever when I get in my sailboat and put the sails up. I’m not a day sailor but love expeditions. Pacific offshore sailing has ruined me. Sailing all day and ending up anchoring at an island then sailing all day again is okay. I loved sailing around Vancouver Island each time I did that, and sailing to the Queen Charlottes. Sailing in the Sea of Cortez with anchoring at night was also a lot of fun. I like being able to anchor at night and I love sleeping at anchor. It’s really is a whole lot more exciting though when you just continue day and night at sea. But this was just a little sail. It was a whole lot of fun even if it was a bit of tease. Next year I hope to sail island to island for days on end, getting in some fishing and swimming and forgetting about all the landlubber concerns that accumulate. These are great sailing waters and remind me a bit of the Gulf Islands and even Desolation Sound. The difference is that while they’re both protected waters, these are fresh water.
Tanya and Andrew were terrific companions. Fun and laughing and quick learners. I have the smartest fastest nephews, the oldest being Graeme who is an engineer and knows his way around boats, where as Andrew is into robotics and the youngest Alan first went boating with me as a teen and now is well on his way to being a psychologist. Tanya is into computers and web design so understood the chart plotter and electronics immediately. They’re all natural sailors and keen boaters.
It was all fun. Adell, my sister in law, had even packed a lunch we enjoyed. I was glad to get back without mishap. This was the last sail for the Girl I’d hoped my brother would have been able to get out again but he was really just glad to be out of the hospital and home at that time. He’d had a lot of fun with the family sailing in the summer when I was down earlier and he was still doing well.
Now the boat is up on land bundled in it’s winter parka, thanks to Dave at Loyalist Cove Marina. I really love the care my boat gets here.
So off we drove from Hay Bay to Loyalist Cove Marina. We backed the sailboat out of the marina then drove into the wind to raise the sails. Once they were up I let Andrew take over. He was keen on sailing. Lots of gybing and tacking while I explained wind and sail positions. We really were doing well making quite the clip in the light winds. I even had a single reef in the main because my autopilot handles best that way. The genoa was all out.
Tanya and I liked the flatter pleasanter (hear Sailing, Sailing song in back ground) downwind sailing. But Andrew liked best heeling and racing close hauled into the wind. Gilbert loved being part of the whole affair and especially loved Tanya who recognized his importance as Admiral.
I enjoyed drinking coffee, reminiscing about off shore adventures and wanted to keep on going. We were out a few hours tacking back and forth across the strait. I just want to go on forever when I get in my sailboat and put the sails up. I’m not a day sailor but love expeditions. Pacific offshore sailing has ruined me. Sailing all day and ending up anchoring at an island then sailing all day again is okay. I loved sailing around Vancouver Island each time I did that, and sailing to the Queen Charlottes. Sailing in the Sea of Cortez with anchoring at night was also a lot of fun. I like being able to anchor at night and I love sleeping at anchor. It’s really is a whole lot more exciting though when you just continue day and night at sea. But this was just a little sail. It was a whole lot of fun even if it was a bit of tease. Next year I hope to sail island to island for days on end, getting in some fishing and swimming and forgetting about all the landlubber concerns that accumulate. These are great sailing waters and remind me a bit of the Gulf Islands and even Desolation Sound. The difference is that while they’re both protected waters, these are fresh water.
Tanya and Andrew were terrific companions. Fun and laughing and quick learners. I have the smartest fastest nephews, the oldest being Graeme who is an engineer and knows his way around boats, where as Andrew is into robotics and the youngest Alan first went boating with me as a teen and now is well on his way to being a psychologist. Tanya is into computers and web design so understood the chart plotter and electronics immediately. They’re all natural sailors and keen boaters.
It was all fun. Adell, my sister in law, had even packed a lunch we enjoyed. I was glad to get back without mishap. This was the last sail for the Girl I’d hoped my brother would have been able to get out again but he was really just glad to be out of the hospital and home at that time. He’d had a lot of fun with the family sailing in the summer when I was down earlier and he was still doing well.
Now the boat is up on land bundled in it’s winter parka, thanks to Dave at Loyalist Cove Marina. I really love the care my boat gets here.
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