Thoughts about contemporary psychotherapy and personal growth from Karen Carnabucci, MSS, LCSW, TEP, non-traditional psychotherapist, coach, educator and psychodramatist at Lake House Health & Learning Center at 932 Lake Ave., Racine, Wis.
In the last post, we discussed food as an important healer with cancer, as well as healthy eating as a way to prevent cancer.
Today we discuss guided imagery, a type of relaxation exercise designed to engage your mind, body and spirit, which many people have found extremely helpful for reducing stress and pain, acclerating healing and changing negative thoughts. I like the Health Journeys imageries by Belleruth Naparstak (shown at left) which you can order as CDs or downloads from her site.
However, there are a number of quality imagery sessions online that you can listen to and download for free that the Kaiser Permanente health site. When you click on the link, scroll down to look for topics of radiation, healthy immune system and successful surgery.
If you don't have cancer, you'll notice many other topics that are helpful for stress reduction, pain relief, healthy sleep and many other health issues.
Nearly 2,000 people walked Racine's Relay For Life route the weekend of June 12 to call attention to the disease of cancer and raise funds for research, as The Racine Post reported here. The good news is that this local fund raiser gathered a whopping $205,000 to research cancer.
But there's other news, too. Cancer devastates many families. Friends and coworkers suffer as they helplessly watch the illness progress. In my circle of friends, family and acquaintances, I've counted more than enough sad events where people suffered with cancer; some died, despite giving the illness their best fight. Within my therapy practice, I often hear of the emotional toll that cancer brings to patients and families as they try to find a pathway out of pain to health.
In a recent Huffington Post article, How Diet Affects Cancer, medical doctor Keith Block questioned some of the common instructions that Western medicine gives to patients, including directions to eat "well," including many fats and meats. He notes, instead, that:
Diets high in fat and refined carbohydrates make you more likely to become overweight, which in turn increases your risk of tumor recurrences. Obese men are at significantly greater risk of developing more aggressive prostate cancer.
Dietary fats can impair the body's anti-cancer defenses by depressing the activity of natural killer (NK) cells, while a low-fat diet markedly increases NK activity. Natural killer cells play a key role in preventing metastasis.
Obese breast cancer patients are two to four times more likely to experience a recurrence than women of normal weight.
A new book, Anticancer, by another medical doctor David Servan-Schreiber -- who experienced cancer not once but twice -- discusses the standard American diet -- with its meats, fats, oils and processed foods -- that appears to stimulate and feed cancer cells. He also provides thoughts about how psychotherapy, especially experiential therapies, offers another dimension of healing.
Mercedes Dzindzeleta, a local massage therapist and health educator, has been researching cancer and legitmate health care alternaties for some time; an earlier blog listed two attractive cookbooks that she found useful. Today we bring more research, including what appears to be the well known "FOCC" dish, which blends flaxseed oil and cottage cheese. The two ingredients appear to make the the mixture more powerful and more able to be metabolized in the body.
Here is a video which shows how this simple recipe is constructed:
FOCC comes from what is known as the Budwig Protocol, which is based on studies from Dr. Johanna Budwig, a German biochemist and expert on fats and oils. Dr. Budwig, who died in 2003, held a Ph.D. in Natural Science and was schooled in pharmaceutical science, physics, medicine, botany and biology. She is best known for her research on the benefits of flaxseed oil combined with sulphurated proteins in the diet, and published several books on the subject, including "Cancer--A Fat Problem," "The Death of the Tumor," and "True Health Against Arteriosclerosis, Heart Infarction & Cancer."
Dr. Budwig had a 90 percent-plus success rate with this protocol with cancer patients during a 50-year period. A vegetarian, she continued to work with patients in Germany from the 1950s through 2002, while in her nineties. She was healthy and mentally sharp, writing and lecturing. One letter from a patient who met with her in October 2000, commented on her energy and vitality, saying she looked and seemed much younger than her age.
The Budwig diet is a health supplement that is best incorporated in a general diet plan. Flaxseed oil should be purchased from the refrigerated section of a health food store, never in capsule form and never from the shelves. Since degradation begins as soon as the container is opened, the oil should be kept refrigerated and used within the recommended time of eight weeks.
Her ideas are discused in detail on the Cancer Cure Foundation's website and on her own site here. There's also a Yahoo discussion list, an online support group, where posters share experiences and questions. Proponents say her diet -- which involves more than just the cottage cheese mixture -- also helps with arthritis, multiple sclerosis and other serious ailments.
When you change the way you look at things, things change.” – Wayne Dyer.
Conventional wisdom says that we have to “fight” illnesses like depression, cancer, heart diseases and drug addition to become healthy.
There’s a story that Louis Pasteur, the famous French scientist who developed pasteurization to protect milk form germs, admitted on his death bed that he agreed with another prominent scientist who said that our body isn’t attacked from outside by germs; rather, our cells are changed within by what we eat, our thoughts, our emotions and what we create inside ourselves
More recently, Candace Pert, a researcher and innovator acclaimed for her pioneering work in the area of psychoneuroimmunology, has concluded that our thoughts and emotions change the body’s molecules and affect our health. She is more popularly known for appeared in the 2004 film “What the Bleep Do We Know,” speaking as a serious scientist to the notion that we create our own reality
Her book, “Molecules of Emotion” contends that the brain, glands, and immune system are in constant communication which gives us real reason to observe our thoughts, notice our environment and wonder what we are feeding ourselves.
All this gives pause to consider how we change and what influences changes within us.
In a recent blog, we explored the challenges of experience and how we can interpret experiences to advance our personal development.
Now, there is a little bit of caution here. Sometimes we interpret an experience so narrowlly that is not to our benefit. In other words, the story that we made for ourselves ends up diminishing ourselves and our lives rather than enhancing our understanding of ourselves and our world.
An example:
I know a woman who lived in a small town and decided to leave the town and her family to move across five states to find a good job in a big city.
Her family was important to her. She tried to stay in touch with the family members who lived more than 500 miles away, but it wasn’t easy to make that long drive on a regular basis, especially after children arrived and the travels became more complicated. She always was the one to visit and very few members of her family traveled to visit her.
She came to the conclusion that they didn’t care about her and that their lives and families were more important than her and her family. Many years passed, and her contact with them diminished to the bare minimum – exchanging cards at Christmas with barely a note inside, just the names.
But I saw a different conclusion, a different story. She was the adventurous one – the one who bravely left home and hearth for a new life in a strange town -- full of courage. The ones who were left behind were hardly adventurous at all. They preferred to play it safe and stay in their hometown, even though opportunities were very limited.
The truth is the woman loved her family members and missed them. Rather than “experiencing” the sadness and the yearning to connect more with her family, she quickly made up a story that they were self-centered and too interested in their own lives to pay attention to her.
What might happen if you look at one of your experiences with new eyes and a different way of thinking? Ho might you change?
I can talk for an hour about the challenges of change. In our conversation, we might admit that change is often difficult and scary -- although sometimes exhilarating and necessary.
But anything that I say will not give you the full experience of change. So, let's have an experience that will allow you to experience change that will lead to understanding yourself and an idea much more deeply than I can ever explain.
First, let’s put our hands on our laps. Then give attention to our hands on our laps. Without looking, interlace the fingers on your right hand with the fingers on your left hand.
Good. Now take a moment to glance at your hands and notice how your hands look, how your fingers are laced and where your thumbs are placed.
Notice if your right thumb is placed over your left thumb – or vice versa. It’s OK – whatever way your thumbs have intersected is just fine. We just want to notice what happens and we want to notice how this feels.
Now, slowly and with awareness, lift the thumb that’s on the top. Move your other thumb to allow the top thumb to go underneath and then put the remaining thumb on top.
Now, let’s take a moment to notice what your experience is like.
Odd? Strange? Different? Uncomfortable? Awkward? Or something else?
This is an experience – admittedly, a very simple experience – about change. Notice that one way is not right and the other way is not wrong. They are just different. And in just a few minutes you have an experience about change that goes much more deeply into your being than I could ever explain, even if I talked about change for the next 100 days.
Now, we also want to notice what you DO with the experience. Do you decide, without thinking very hard, that the second way is much too difficult and that you want to quickly return to the old comfortable way?
Do you notice that you are intrigued by the difference of the two experiences and start overlapping your thumbs in various configurations to learn more about how this feels?
Are you able to consider that change involves some level of discomfort and are you willing to figure out how to tolerate the discomfort while you are approaching or in the midst of change?
Notice that the experience comes first. Once we have the experience, we can begin to find the context about how the experience fits in our lives.
Long before I was a psychotherapist, I decided it was never too late to have a happy childhood.
A personal experience:
I never attended my high school prom. I was too nerdy, too shy and too lacking in social graces to enjoy this highlight milestone of high school.
Later, when I was in my 30s, I had the good luck to work as a reporter and editor for the morning newspaper in Lancaster, Pa. I decided to assign myself to attend a high school prom and write an article about the experience.
I had girlfriends who went “prom dress” shopping with me, giggling and waiting patiently as I finally picked a filmy gown with a peach colored sash and pearl buttons. I found Jerry, a wise-cracking and adventurous male friend who agreed to be my date, resplendent in a borrowed black tuxedo. My good friends, Patti and Joe, lent their house for the big evening. Other friends bought their children for pictures and silliness. An elderly neighbor man showed up to play the kind grandfather role.
Everyone cheered and clapped as I dramatically descended the staircase and – YES! – took pictures of me and my companion in front of the fireplace, my fluffy and flowery wrist corsage in full view. Friend Joe, in his role as "Dad," mock-sternly asked my date what time he would return me to home.
Then we went off to the prom, finishing the evening with an early morning breakfast at a local diner. It was a wonderful evening, and I love the warm memories that I hold within me today, more than 20 years later.
In my psychotherapy sessions, I sometimes challenge my clients to identify an experience that they did not have the opportunity to have in their own lives, something that shadows their days with the sad feeling of "missing out." Then we explore how we can consciously create that experience in safe, positive and healthy way so that it becomes a part of their lives.
What have you missed? What ideas do you have to repair that experience?
, by another medical doctor David Servan-Schreiber -- who experienced cancer not once but twice -- discusses the standard American diet -- with its meats, fats, oils and processed foods -- that appears to stimulate and feed cancer cells. He also provides thoughts about how psychotherapy, especially experiential therapies, offers another dimension of healing.
When you change the way you look at things, things change.” – Wayne Dyer.
