Blog – Falls Therapy

Relationships Are Like Cars

admin — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 02:13:12 +0000

Relationships are like cars. When they are new, they are exciting. They look good from every angle, absorb bumps easily, are smooth and fun to drive, and often produce intense bursts of excitement and pleasure. They take you to places you never thought you’d go; places you’d only dreamed about.

But over time, your once precious car begins to take the backseat to your daily hustle and bustle. The regular maintenance that you swore you’d attend to starts to slip.
Occasionally you get back to properly caring for it but with longer and longer intervals in between.

Before long you find yourself noticing other, newer, cars on the road and wonder what it would be like to take them for a spin. But you quickly come back to your senses and think about all you’ve invested and the hassle it would be to find another car. Resigned but disappointed, you decide to stay with what you’ve got.

Then one day your car won’t start. You coax it, you promise it things, you sweet talk it and even yell at it and call it names; but nothing works. You remember you haven’t changed the oil since, well, forever and that the check engine light has been on for months, but “come on, start!”

There you are stuck with a broken car. You wonder about trading it in but you know the same thing will probably happen with your next car. You’ll end up taking it for granted too.

So you pop open the hood and inspect inside and to your surprise it looks like nothing a little time and elbow grease can’t fix. Every day you fix one thing. When the job is too complicated you take it to the shop and let the experts take a look.

Pretty soon your car is purring again. You give it a wash and a wax and notice how good it still looks. The dings and dents that once bothered you don’t as much. In an
odd way you find yourself kind of proud of them. They remind you of the journeys you and your car have taken together and to your surprise and delight you find yourself falling in love with it all over again.

Relationships are like cars.
When they work they are easy to not notice.
When they don’t, they will stop you dead in your tracks.
Don’t risk it; do the maintenance.

Happy Motoring!

Living In Relational Integrity

admin — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 02:04:29 +0000

8 RELATIONSHIP CORE VALUES

To be Honest: telling your truth in non-hurtful ways
To have Empathy: understanding your partner’s feelings
To show Respect: admiring your partner’s abilities and qualities
To be Disciplined: behaving in controlled and predictable ways
To be Present: interacting with friendly and focused attention
To be Patient: slowing down and monitoring your reaction to your partner
To be Kind: exhibiting soft and warmheartedness in manner and action
To be Accepting: being tolerant of and open to ways your partner is different than you

Acting in ways that violate your CORE VALUES results in:

5 PAINFUL EMOTIONS

Anger
Anxiety
Resentment
Guilt
Depression

Good? Bad? Who Knows?

admin — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 01:10:40 +0000

An old Chinese story of unknown origin tells of a farmer who used an old horse in his fields. One day, the horse escaped into the hills and when the farmer’s neighbors sympathized with the old man over his bad luck, the farmer replied, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”

A week later, the horse returned with a herd of wild horses from the hills, and the neighbors congratulated the farmer on his good luck. He replied, “Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?”

Then, when the farmer’s son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses he fell off its back and broke his leg. Everyone again sympathized with the farmer over his bad luck. But the farmer’s reaction was, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”

Some weeks later, the army marched into the village and drafted every able-bodied youth they found. When they saw the farmer’s son with his broken leg, they let him stay.

Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?

Anxiety Reduction Plan

admin — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 01:03:48 +0000

We’d like to offer you a plan to get your anxiety level down to something that is more manageable for you. Here’s what we’d like you to do; It will help.

Meditation 2 times a day for 5 minutes each; you can find 5 minute guided meditations on youtube (you can just use the audio part with your eyes closed) or down load this app on you phone: HEADSPACE, its free for 10 sessions. These are guided meditations primarily.

On your phone, go to alarms and set 6 alarms for different times throughout the day. When you hear an alarm I want to take 5 deep, cleansing breaths; in through your nose, hold it briefly at the top then exhale through your month so that you can hear your breath come out. Do the 5 in succession, slowly.

Find either book; START WHERE YOU ARE or WHEN THINGS FALL APART, both by Pema Chodren and read for 10 minutes 2 times per day.

Get sweaty; I know workouts can be tough but try to get your cardio up, 20 minutes or more at least 3 times per week.

There it is; do it like a soldier. Don’t worry about whether you think it will help or whether you want to do it; just do it. Work, money, family, relationship, health; Lots of stress to go around. Got to lessen it. This plan will help.

– Dana Falls, MFT

– Mark Falls, PhD

Surviving the Burn

admin — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:07:39 +0000

Amazing how your life can change in a moment. As I write this, it’s been six weeks since the wildfires began, six weeks since my family and I fled Glen Ellen at 2 a.m., six weeks since we learned that our home, and nearly everything we owned, had gone up in flames. Sadly, it’s a story that thousands of us share. What was once unimaginable has become a new life chapter, one that might be called “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

Coping with this catastrophe and recovering from it began the moment we heard the sheriff’s bullhorn telling us to evacuate. In my confusion, I put on shoes, got the dog into the car, grabbed clothes and a few photos. My wife Jill, our 17-year-old son Larkin and I spontaneously prioritized and coordinated with each other, calling out – “I’ve got some photo albums,” “I grabbed important papers,” “I’m taking the cat out to the car,” etc. We had about 15 minutes before the bullhorns grew even more urgent, “You need to evacuate immediately!” That’s when we fled.

Since that night, all things considered, we have had a surprisingly soft landing. For the first six weeks, various friends in Sonoma and Marin welcomed us without hesitation. Countless other friends and community members got in touch to offer material and emotional support. The generosity we have experienced has been deeply touching and humbling and has brought us closer to many people. In the face of such loss, the strength and resilience of the community revealed itself. In the midst of the devastation, our connections with each other shone through. I have always prided myself on being pretty self-reliant; but right now my lesson is about gracefully receiving. I feel strangely lucky, while keenly aware that for many people the wildfires brought much more tragic and difficult consequences.

Which isn’t to say it’s been easy for us. I describe my emotional state as “up and down.” There have been tears and times when the smallest decision seems overwhelming. Many nights I’ve awoken despondent over the mountain of things that need to be done – filing insurance claims, making a decision about whether to allow the Army Corps to do the debris removal, finding a contractor to rebuild… At such moments I just want to go home. Somehow when dawn arrives, I find a willingness to begin putting one foot in front of the other again. It is a journey into the dark guided by a star of hope.

I’ve always enjoyed stories about people finding a way through seemingly hopeless situations – like Apollo 13 or Ernest Shackelton’s Antarctic expedition in which his ship Endurance was lost to the ice. Somehow they had just enough resources to make it through. And while they had to be impressively clever with their outer resources, it’s the inner resources that draw me to these tales.

About the time we were able to return to Sonoma Valley, I realized that I had experienced a trauma. So has nearly everyone in the county. I knew that to avoid long-term effects, trauma should be treated as early as possible. I was experiencing “disaster brain,” having a hard time remembering things and getting motivated. I made an appointment with a counselor who specializes in trauma. As she describes it, during a traumatic event, the right side of your brain takes over and initiates the fight or flight response. The left side goes dark. In a life or death situation, this is appropriate. But once the situation has passed, the left side is needed to provide narrative and context. Without it, you are left with a raw, unintegrated experience. If this imbalance persists, as it does in PTSD, the brain undergoes physical changes that can be hard to treat and lead to long-term disability.

The treatment is designed to connect the right and left brain. As I told her my fire story, I held a small device in each palm that alternately vibrated, left, right, left right. Then I was told to imagine the whole experience as a movie. At the first emotionally charged moment – which for me was hearing the bullhorns – I held that memory and followed a horizontal bank of lights with my eyes as it moved back and forth. I could feel the emotion of that moment as a physical sensation that rose from my gut and passed through me like a long, almost unbearable wave. When it finally subsided, there was a profound sense of relief. By the time we finished our first session, I could feel something inside had shifted. The warped quality that the world seemed to have taken on since the disaster was diminished. Things felt more familiar.

Telling our stories may be the most important thing we are doing right now. It’s the way we’re all getting our bearings back, finding ways to make sense and learn from what happened. It’s also been important for me to not tell my story when I didn’t feel like it. It’s important that we each follow our inner promptings to recovery. It is going to be a long process and each of us has a unique path to follow. It seems essential to give ourselves, and each other, the time and the space to heal. In the end, we will be stronger as individuals and as a community. We already are.

– ARTHUR DAWSON

[This is the first of a series of bi-monthly columns by Glen Ellen resident Arthur Dawson. As he says, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Future columns will address other aspects, including insurance, rebuilding, etc.]

http://www.kenwoodpress.com/pub/a/9708?full=1

Failure to Launch

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:02:40 +0000

Between adolescence and adulthood lies a sliver of time that we’ve all lived through, when society regards us as neither fish nor foul, when our youthful and sometimes reckless ways no longer seem appropriate but our minds regard things like responsibility, goals, work, mortgages, children and death as vague other world concepts. Like the middle child, inbetweeners, the age between 18 and 25, are often overlooked. In our culture, the eighteenth birthday has traditionally been seen as a one-way launch into adulthood with, for some, a stopover in the relative safety of 4 or 5 years of college. But what happens to those who fail to launch?

Talk to any parent who has lived through this time with their struggling in-betweener son or daughter and you will hear the envitable stories of neighborhood barbeques where other parents dutifully report that their son started his freshman year at Cal or that their daughter just accepted a position at Oracle…and then the happy group turns and inquires “what’s your son doing?”.

In the past four years I have seen more in-betweeners and their parents than in all my 25 years in practice. The typical in-betweener’s profile is male (although females don’t lag far behind), 19 to 23, living at home (still or again), no job, intentions to start taking classes at the JC, substance abusing, lonely (most friends have left for college or other adventures) and depressed. He finds himself gripped with confusion and internal conflict about needing his parents but at the same time hating them because they’re needed. However, this crazymaking bind, (i.e. being dependent on the very people you dislike), in the end, signifies a good prognosis. Beware the inbetweener who is happy to lounge all day without psychological tumult.

At home, the hallmark feature, almost without exception, is a deteriorating relationship with parents. Ninety-nine per cent of the time it is the parents who call to make the first appointment,. If the in-betweener has seized between dependence and independence, the parents are likewise frozen between a their innate drive to care for their child and the desire to get him/her launched (read: booted). Knee-deep confusion mixed with guilt makes forward movement difficult.

So where to begin? First, the parent perspective, “I want the best for my child” needs a second look. Once parents are able to accept that in-betweener parenting is a contact sport and begin steering their caring for their manchild/womanchild in the right direction, things start to happen. In most cases, in a relatively short time, caring begins to mean providing structure with timelines and consequences. Just as a parent might tell an six year old, “by the time the big hand is pointing to the twelve, you need to have your clothes picked up or no TV tonight”, the parent of the in-betweener might say “ our expectation is that you have a job in 2 months and that you have a place to move into 3 months after that. Failure to reach any of those goals will result in you being unable to continue living here”; the message being ‘I love you enough not to let you fail’. As heavy handed as that might sound, you’d be surprised how many in-betweeners report later, (sometimes much later), that that was the nudge they needed to get moving. Overcoming life’s inertia is not for wimps.

Next, its important to discover what’s underlying this failure-to-launch syndrome? Certainly one could point to our current economic situation; few jobs, high rent etc.. Or toward the redefining of the age of adulthood which seems to be inching upward. Maybe it’s the the perma-parent syndrome that sees parents emotionally unwilling to let go of capable sons/daughters to the outside world for fear of loosing a familiar parent identity to one without children? There is no question that the perplexing issues that conspire to abort the launch of an otherwise healthy young man or woman into adulthood are complicated. The families often seen in therapy have additional challenges beyond poor parent-child relationships. The stay-at-home child typically views him/herself as incapable of mastering the next phase of life. This esteem problem is clearly a chicken or egg conundrum; did the parents transmit a message to their child that he/she was incompetent through excessive cuddling or did the child demonstrate a need for extra attention and care through their struggling. In the end, the origin of the problem may not matter as much as the fix.

Low self-esteem is remedied through a sense of personal mastery. One of the goals of therapy is to help parents engineer mastery experiences for their child. Often this may mean setting easily attainable goals with rewards for success and consequences for inattention. A family I saw recently designed the following simple agreement; the parents required evidence that their son had, in fact, registered for JC classes and in exchange their son was permitted to continue living with the parents through the semester. Failure to produce passing grades at the end of the semester would result in the son needing to move out within two weeks; passing grades along with proof of next semester registration would earn another semester living at home…and so on. In another case a parent required ongoing clean drug tests and five filled out and turned in job applications in order for the daughter to be allowed to continue living at home. The formulas are developed based on a blend of what the parent can tolerate doing, how long the inbetweener has been stuck and what is most likely to motivate him or her.

Therapeutic interventions like these work but not always without a fair bit of push and pull. In the end, parents come to know that offering the launch pad is sometimes not enough, and that there are times when kids need a push to experience flight.

Written by MarkFalls,Phd (2010)