Naperville Family Counseling

Why do we worry? The De-fault position of our mind may be worry, anxiety and concern which does have survival value. I like listening to pod casts when I work out. Recently, I listened to a podcast, Sounds True, Voices From The Edge. The researcher Kelley McGonigal, PhD was talking about her findings regarding religious and spiritual practices. Most of these practices lead toward grateful, humanistic feelings in which the individual experienced more attunement to self and an awareness of also being connected to the rest of humanity. This is the sort of feeling that ancient religious persons experienced and wrote about as well as many of us who practice prayer and mindfulness training. When we look at Christian writers and the words of Jesus in Aramaic, this message shines through. It is even more prominent when we look at his words as re-interpreted in the language of the time. This ancient language is not Hebrew or Arabic. Jesus thought and spoke in Aramaic, the language of the common people. I bring this up to stress a point, which is that when most of us awaken each day; our experience is not characterized as spiritual gratefulness. Rather it is full of ruminating thoughts reminding us to finish up what we need to pay attention to. How do I prepare myself for today, or have worry, concern, and negative feelings about any sort of baggage that does not have an easy answer? Dr. McGonigal notes that our minds function by more primitive rules geared toward individual survival. We are trying to find ways of protecting ourselves. Feeling loved, secure and safe is a prominent theme. Perhaps this position of self-safety lies at the bottom of our returning army vets with PTSD. There is a lot of anxiety, rage, depression because the so-called normal rules of society don’t address the breech in the feeling states of the soldier who is a trained  killing machine. The soldier comes home and is supposed to use other pathways of mind that are in oppositions to those dealing with survival. Coming home should mean being thankful for family, being alive and having relaxed optimism for each new day.  The subconscious mind says that you don’t feel safe, because it is operating in survival mode. Consciously you want to accept your family’s love, but another part of your mind says, no deal.  The ancient primitive survival part says be on alert, beware, be on guard. This is subconscious and much more powerful than conscious reasoning.  A good soldier never lets his guard down, it’s embedded into his very being.  It’s Groundhog’s Day in survival again and again and again and it doesn’t match the conscious  return home-expected reality. Same old shit, just another day. That’s how stuck people live each day. It is depressing, exhausting, and could turn anyone toward an addiction just to get a change in how they feel. To get support we need to get the family involved with everyone one the same page. This is a miserable state but it is treatable. We need to get to the root cause of this misery and  we use hypnosis and hypnanalysis to facilitate medical psychotherapy. Why not use medication? I choose to not use it anymore because it does not get down to the root cause of the problem. If booze helped, why not keep drinking? After all, alcohol is a great anti anxiety drug. Antidepressants do not make the permanent changes we look for, although in emergencies, they can be life saving. What we need to see is that this survival mode is exactly an attempt to try and stay alive. It is just outmoded. If you have a question, call. 630-527-1631. Thanks for taking the time to read.