Down To Earth Newsletter
Volume 6 – Issue 5 – June, 2007
Strike the JACKPOT on 7-7-7 – Free screening and referrals for Gambling Addiction at Down To Earth Enterprises. Call 480-705-5007 for your FREE screening. We do not specialize in the treatment of Gambling Addiction and you will be referred to community resources if necessary.
Debunking Myths – Trapped in a Marriage
Myth: A dynamic that comes up routinely in my practice is that of a dissatisfied husband or wife who wants to leave the marriage, but feels like they can’t because of financial reasons. It is more often a woman who wants to leave a man, but that is not always the case.
Fact: Anyone can leave at any time, but frequently the dissatisfied party is not willing to leave because of the decrease in quality of life that would result.
Two people can live more cheaply than one. There is one rent or mortgage payment, one electric bill, one cable bill, and one water bill. Two people can share groceries more efficiently than singles who frequently experience half a gallon of milk spoiling or half a loaf of bread growing mold. Two people who travel together share one hotel room, two people can buy a big screen T.V. together, and two people may be able to afford a boat or a quad whereas singles may not be able to purchase or store pricey luxury items.
Dissatisfied spouses often look around at what they have amassed during the course of a many-year marriage and they are simply unwilling to give up their possessions, their lifestyle, their property, their space, or their various comforts. That is understandable.
However, how comfortable are the “comforts” if you are miserable in your relationship? Do you really enjoy your jet skis when you and your spouse haven’t spoken to each other in weeks? Is it really worth it to have that half-million dollar house where the two of you try not to end up in the same room as each other? Is it really enjoyable to play the state-of-the-art music system when there is no one to dance with?
Some folks get to the point where they are disgusted enough with the relationship that they do stop caring about what they’ll lose and they decide they must leave. However, when they really look at what they will all lose, they get angry and they feel like the other person in the relationship is the one that deserves to lose. Most people who are very disgusted with their relationships are pretty convinced that it’s the other person’s fault, whatever it is. Not the case.
Marriage is a two-way street. It takes two people to make a good one and two people to make a bad one. No one person can truly destroy a marriage all by him or herself without some help from the partner. If the marriage is a mess, each party has a shared responsibility in the mess. If you are the one that’s deciding to walk out and quit trying to fix it, you aren’t automatically entitled to take anything with you. If you go, you may need to go empty-handed. Stuff is just stuff. Money is just money. You can always get more, but your mental health and your happiness are priceless. If it’s time to go, you need to go. Don’t stay and make yourself and your partner miserable worrying about who’s gonna get the DVD collection.
May Discussion Question: What is the hardest thing you ever had to give up?
Bill W. in CO cits SMOKING as the hardest thing he ever gave up. I agree!
Wendy K. in AZ states that her MARRIAGE was the hardest thing she ever had to give up. Ouch!
Thanks for sharing! Your Dr. Marlo prizes are on their way!
June Discussion Question: If you could change careers without penalty, what would you most enjoy?
E-mail answers to: discussion@drmarlo.com and answers will appear next month. Your state of residence, your first name and last initial will be used unless you tell us not to use them. Anyone who responds and also includes a mailing address will receive one of the “Return to Wellness” Roomerangs as well as our NEW INFORMATION CARDS! The temporary tattoos are GONE, but we have ordered more and we’ll have NEW DESIGNS.
Thought For The Day: Most anger is relieved by forgiving oneself.
PERSONAL GROWTH EXERCISE
To spotlight our E-Coaching services, our newsletter includes a personal growth exercise each month. These exercises illustrate the kinds of activities our clients are asked to complete when they are using our E-Coaching services. The exercises printed here are quite general in nature, but the exercises sent to our E-Coaching clients are individualized to meet each client’s specific needs. We currently offer a package of 10 E-Coaching Sessions for $500.
Slow Down
We are a very intense society, we go, go, go. We multi-task, network, telecommute, brainstorm, touch base, downsize, move laterally, invest, facilitate, study, compete, and speculate. There is always something going on – another task, another event, another e-mail, another sale, another crisis, another opportunity. It’s enough to make you crazy! In fact, having too many things going on can actually make you sick. Stress, even when it’s “good” stress, or welcomed stress, pounds on the immune system and opens the doors for opportunistic illnesses and weakens the organs and tissues, making disease development more likely than in less-stressed individuals.
So, for better health, both mentally and physically, this month’s exercise is an encouragement to SLOW DOWN.
Take something OUT of your schedule. Cancel something. Decline an invitation. Refuse an offer. Refrain from joining a group or activity. Get rid of something you don’t need rather than maintaining it. Take wasted energy away from unsatisfying tasks and let yourself ‘waste’ some time relaxing or doing things that truly revitalize you. You may enjoy scrapbooking, but if you have 7 boxes of disorganized photos, that is not going to be a relaxing task.
Each week this month, get rid of something that allows you to slow yourself down slightly. Then notice how you feel without that thing. Do you feel better – or worse? More or less relaxed? Is it hardly even noticeable that it’s missing? Do yourself the favor this week of just slowing down.
For a FREE 5-Session Trial of E-Coaching, send us a report of how this activity worked for you! We will share your report in our next newsletter with your name, last initial, and state of residence (unless you tell us not to). Send to FreeSessions@drmarlo.com. (Offer Expires 7-16-07)
E-Coaching! Try it Now!
Not every problem is a mental illness. Not every issue is a trauma. Not every botherment is an emotional disorder. For life’s daily issues and for personal growth, now there is E-Coaching! Dr. Marlo Archer offers a 10-session consultation package for people who are not diagnosed with any mental illness who would just like some coaching, some guidance, or some personal growth. We are offering the 10-Session package for $500. Begin by using PayPal to send a $500 payment to DrMarlo@drmarlo.com, then send an e-mail to that same e-mail address, expressing your specific area of concern to begin!
Dr. Marlo’s Movie Madness – Entertainment and Education
Each month we show a free movie with a mental health theme. Interested parties can stay after the movie for a discussion about the movie. One credit informal CE awarded for a $10 fee. Networking 7:15-7:30pm, Movie at 7:30pm, Discussion until 10pm. Upcoming Features: Thursday, June 21 – Kinky Boots (Suggested by Kory Kranz), Thursday, July 19 – Little Miss Sunshine, Thursday, August 30 – The Devil Wears Prada, Thursday, September 13 – Radio (Suggested by Duane Brickner), Thursday, October 18 – Harold & Maude, Thursday, November 8 – Chocolat (Suggested by Dr. Michelle May, of Am I Hungry? book and workshops). Suggest movies for December 13, January 17, or February 21. If your selection is chosen and you have included your mailing address, we will send you a FREE DVD MOVIE from previous years’ Dr. Marlo’s Movie Madness. Sign up for Movie Madness updates by sending a blank e-mail with ‘subscribe’ in the subject line to MovieMadness@drmarlo.com.
Publish Your Work – Promote your Practice – Two ways to publish – for free as a semi-anonymous author (your state of residence, your first name and last initial will be used), or, for $10, as a professional promoting a mental health practice (your full name, with credentials, address, phone number, and e-mail address will be included). We reserve the right to decline to publish any submissions. New subscribers this month = 175. Send creative contributions to: articles@drmarlo.com.
Dr. Marlo in the Media
We write a monthly column about teenagers for Arizona Together Newspaper, Arizona’s Good News “Newspaper,” Established 1991. Read June’s article, “Brushing Up on the Birds and the Bees” online. Arizona Together currently reaches 50,000 readers monthly who are interested in recovery from addictions of all kinds.
We are teaming up with Adventures 2000, Arizona’s #1 Singles Activity Club, to offer relationship advice to singles in a new feature entitled, “Real Advice for Real People.” Read the first installment online on their recently redesigned website.
The Psychology Session – Internet Radio Show – On Hiatus – Go to our archives to download any of our shows. We welcome show suggestions and advertising sales. E-mail suggestions or inquiries to PsychologySession@drmarlo.com. Order SEASON ONE AND TWO ON CD! Only $20. Send requests to PsychologySession@drmarlo.com.
Please join us in praying for J.R. in IA with whom we had a car accident. –Marlo J. Archer, Ph.D.
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TO PODCATCH THE PSYCHOLOGY SESSION:
This is an introduction to the podcatching process, by Techie Jon Archer, translated into English (but very poorly understood) by Dr. Marlo Archer.
Podcasting is the process of broadcasting over the internet and Podcatching is the process of receiving, or subscribing to, such broadcasts. Although these procedures were popularized by the Apple iPod devices, you do not need to own an iPod to have fun with Podcasting and Podcatching.
Devin Jones, M.Ed. and Dr. Marlo have been Podcasting an internet show called The Psychology Session for almost a year now. Now you can learn how to Podcatch it.
However, if you do already own and regularly use an iPod to subscribe to Podcasts, all you need to do is add the following link to your subscriptions to begin receiving our show:
http://www.drmarlo.com/currentevents/index2.php?option=com_podcast&feed=RSS2.0&no_html=1
The rest of you will first need to download a Podcatcher. That is software and we recommend one called, “Juice,” which is free. To download and install Juice:
Go to http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/index.php. Download the version of Juice that will work with your machine – either Windows, or Mac, or Linux. You will be asked to ‘select a mirror.’ All that means is that you’re selecting a website from which to download the free software. There are ‘mirrors’ all over the world. Find one that is close to your location and click the “Download” link. When a window opens to ask what you want to do with the program, select “save to disk,” then hit, ‘okay.’
When the program file is done downloading, go to where the file is and open it. That is, go to where your computer puts new downloads and open the program. It will be called something like: JuiceSetup.exe. It will probably have numbers between the words Juice and Setup (e.g. Juice22Setup.exe.), but those numbers may change between today and when you try this process, so I am not going to put exact numbers in there right now. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter, you probably don’t have anything else in your download folder that looks like JuiceSetup anyhow. It will be an ‘executable’ file and your computer may have some concerns about that, but that’s okay and you should reassure your machine that it will be alright.
The Juice Setup Wizard will then take over and help you install the program. For most common folk, all the default settings are fine, just agree with everything and keep hitting, ‘okay’ or ‘next.’ until you get through all the screens. The only thing you may want to change is that you may want for Juice to be installed into your start-up folder, meaning that it would automatically check for new broadcasts every time you power up your machine. If you specifically want that, you have to select that during the installation process. The default is to only put an icon on your desktop. For those of you who are intimidated by this process, the desktop icon alone will be fine, so don’t worry about anything I just said, just let the Wizard install Juice the way it wants to.
You may have a firewall that informs you that Juice is trying to access the internet. You should let it. You then must agree with the licensing agreement to begin using the program.
Then you can follow the ITunes Setup Assistant to configure it for your machine. It will probably inform you that Juice is not set to handle some file types and ask you if you want to set them now. You can hit ‘yes.’ and then hit ‘save’ when it goes to the ‘one-click subscription’ options. The items: .rss and podcast should already be checked, and that’s fine.
Now, to subscribe to our show, The Psychology Session, click on the little green plus sign, to add a subscription. When the window opens, cut and paste this into the URL space:
http://www.drmarlo.com/currentevents/index2.php?option=com_podcast&feed=RSS2.0&no_html=1
and then hit ‘save.’
It will instantly catalog all our past shows for you and only the most recent one will be selected to download. You can download as many or as few as you want. Select the shows you want to download by checking the little box to the left of the show titles. Then, when you are ready to download them, click on the green square button that has two yellow arrows on it. (Hovering over the button reveals the words, “Check for new podcasts”)
Once your selected shows are downloaded, a green ‘play’ button will appear next to each show you downloaded. Click on that ‘play’ button to play the show.
When you’re ready to quit listening and close the Juice program, it will ask you if you want to just leave Juice running in the background. If you do that, it will automatically download new episodes of The Psychology Session if any come out while your computer is still on. To have Juice running constantly, you would have had to let it install itself into your start-up directory during the installation process.
When you return to your computer on another day and you want to check if you have any new podcasts, click on the Juice icon (a yellow lemon) to open the Juice program.
This whole process will create a new directory in the “My Documents” directory, called “My Received Podcasts.” It will even organize each of your subscriptions into it’s own folder. There should be a folder there for The Psychology Session, if you installed it correctly and downloaded at least one show.
There may also be some sort of Adam Curry iPodder Test Channel there, and you can just ignore that. Deleting it probably won’t actually make it go away. If you really don’t want it there, then you have to go into the Juice program and unsubscribe from the Adam Curry iPodder Test Channel, then go delete the folder. Otherwise, it will just keep downloading the welcome message for you. You will also be automatically subscribed to “Juice News” which doesn’t currently have any messages in it. You can unsubscribe from that or ignore it, whichever you prefer.
That’s it. You’d be subscribed to our show and ready to Podcatch!
