Down To Earth Newsletter
Volume 5 – Issue 5 – July, 2006
Art of Recovery Expo II – Mark your calendar now for the return of the ground-breaking event in Phoenix – The Art of Recovery Expo – Saturday September 16th. This FREE event is open to the public and is designed to be a joyful celebration of recovery from addictions. Celebrate sobriety and serenity at the Civic Center. Jon & Dr. Marlo will be there with our “Return to Wellness” roomarangs and our wildly popular temporary tattoos!
Debunking Myths – Mirror, Mirror
Myth: Oklahoma reader Denise F. asks: My mother always says that if someone really irritates you, that means that they’re just showing you a part of yourself that you don’t like. She says that every time I complain about stupid stuff that other people do. To me, it’s stupid stuff other people are doing, not what I’m doing.
Fact: Sorry, Denise, you mother is probably right. It’s not always the case, 100% of the time, but it is quite common that when someone really bothers you, it’s probably more about you than it is about them. Let’s look at why…
We all have strengths and weaknesses, that’s just a part of being human. There are some things that each of us do well and there are some things at which each of us is not particularly skilled. It is best to focus on our strengths and put most of our energy towards using our strengths. It is also helpful to identify our weaknesses, accept them lovingly, and compensate for them in whatever way we have to in order to live a satisfying life.
Whenever parents help children identify, focus on, and maximize their strengths as well as to identify, accept, and compensate for their weaknesses, they generally raise children who can continue to do that into adulthood. The bad news is that a lot of parents don’t really know how to do that themselves and they certainly don’t know how to teach that to their children.
Therefore, some parents basically ignore a child’s strengths as nothing to worry about and spend all their time and energy on the child’s weaknesses, trying desperately to erase, eradicate, and eliminate the weaknesses, which may be basically impossible in some cases. When this happens, children learn to hate their own weaknesses and be extremely shameful and guilty about their weaknesses. Those weaknesses really bother them.
In the future, when they meet others who have those same weaknesses, even if they’ve learned to compensate for those weaknesses in themselves, the other person’s behavior can trigger the childhood memories of self-hatred, shame, guilt, and of being judged as not good enough. Those memories are so painful that we find them highly irritating and will then be very disturbed by someone who triggers those memories for us.
So, when you find that someone really bugs you, ask yourself how you exhibit that same behavior or used to exhibit that behavior in the past. If you still have that behavior yourself, worry about ridding yourself of it rather than trying to change other people. If you have learned how to stop that behavior yourself, you may consider compassionately helping the bothersome individual to come to the same satisfying discovery. Or not. If not, at least leave them alone about it and stop wasting your time on their issues. Focus your energy on your strengths, not their weaknesses.
May Discussion Question: What thing frightens you most about growing older?
Jana R, a local reader in Arizona, remarks : Having enough money to retire. I keep hearing Social Security won’t be around for people in my generation, so I know I need to plan for the future now.
Great idea, Jana! As part of our work with individual adults and couples, we often refer them to financial planners to help them achieve the type of future they’d like to have. Since you included your mailing address, your Dr. Marlo prizes are on their way!
July Discussion Question: In a romantic relationship, what behavior can you simply not tolerate – that is, what do you consider a ‘deal breaker’?
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 a BRAND NEW Down To Earth PRIZE as well as temporary tattoos until supplies are exhausted.
Thought For The Day: Sharp words cut deeper than any knife.
NEW FEATURE – PERSONAL GROWTH EXERCISE
To promote our E-Coaching services, our newsletter will now include a personal growth exercise each month. These exercises will illustrate the kinds of activities you may be asked to complete if you were using our E-Coaching services. The exercises printed here will be quite general in nature, but the exercises sent to our E-Coaching clients are individualized to meet each client’s specific needs. We are currently offering 10 E-Coaching Sessions at the Introductory price of $100 total.
Create Your Day
The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate the proactive power the brain can exhibit when you allow yourself to actively design your day, rather than just passively accept what others have created for you.
Find a quiet time in the morning to sit alone for a few minutes with a pen and paper. Think about what events face you during the day. Ask yourself to write down 10 things that you’d really like to see happen during the day. Think of where you will need to go, the people with whom you’ll interact, any challenges that face you and any opportunities that may arise. Allow yourself to be truly creative and write down whatever comes to mind, even if you think of things that are seemingly impossible. Once you have written down the 10 things, read the list to yourself 3 times, then put it aside until evening.
In the evening, before you go to bed, take out your list for a very quick review. Simply read each item and ask yourself whether or not that thing happened that day. If it happened, circle it and congratulate yourself for proactively creating your day. If it didn’t happen, do nothing. Don’t worry about it, just move to the next item. If even one item on your list happened, you actively participated in creating your day.
You can do this exercise every day, religiously, or only when approaching difficult days or only on weekdays or only on weekends, or once a week, whatever feels right for you.
For a FREE 10-Session Trial of E-Coaching, send us a report of how this activity worked for you! Send to FreeSessions@drmarlo.com. (Offer Expires 8-16-06)
E-Coaching! Introductory Price – Only $100 for Ten Sessions
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 currently offering the 10-Session package for the introductory price of $100. Begin by using PayPal to send a $100 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 & Education
Dr. Marlo’s Movie Madness has now moved to FRIDAY MORNINGS to try to accommodate clinicians’ schedules. 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. Upcoming Features: July 21 – Walk the Line. August 18 – Matchstick Men. September 15 – Marnie. October 13 – Save The Date. November 10 – Derailed. Networking at 9:00am, Movie at 9:15am, Discussion until 11:30am. December 8 – Special All-Day Star Wars Movie Marathon. 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. Send creative contributions to: articles@drmarlo.com.
Dr. Marlo in the Media – Reporters continue to turn to Dr. Archer for advice or comment about current events.
6-7-06 – Channel 10 Refutes Road Rage Excuses – Dr. Marlo is interviewed regarding controversial research results on Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) and it’s relation to Road Rage.
The Psychology Session – Internet Radio Show – On Hiatus – Our First Season is complete and we are currently on hiatus! The show will return again in the fall. Watch for the announcement. In the meantime, go to the archives and download any of our shows you may have missed. We will, however, be accepting show suggestions and making advertising sales during the hiatus. E-mail suggestions or inquiries to PsychologySession@drmarlo.com. Order SEASON ONE ON CD! Only $10. Send requests to PsychologySession@drmarlo.com.
How did I get on this Mailing List? – This mailing list started with all of my family and friends and colleagues, about 6 years ago. Since then, I have added just about any e-mail address I come across as well as people who request to join the mailing list. If you do not want to be on this list, you can unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe link below. I continue to subscribe people upon receiving their e-mail addresses because I get positive feedback for doing so from many of those I subscribe. My apologies if you are not one of them.
Thanks to all my long-term readers, I really do appreciate your loyalty! –Marlo J. Archer, Ph.D.
If someone forwarded you this newsletter and you want your own subscription, click here.
We never sell or publish e-mail addresses of our subscribers.
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!
