Unconscious Mutterings Week 96

A little late...
I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Limited time only:: sale or marketing come on
   
2. Voluptuous:: ample curves
   
3. Nutritionist:: expert knowledge of healthy eating
   
4. Belt:: tighten
   
5. Star crossed:: bad luck
   
6. Snakeskin:: patterns
   
7. Athlete’s foot:: yucky
   
8. Boom:: increase
   
9. Freezer:: food
   
10. Store hours:: closed on holidays in good years; open on holidays in lean years

Want to play? Go to Unconscious Mutterings.

Unconscious Mutterings Week 96

A little late...
I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Limited time only:: sale or marketing come on
   
2. Voluptuous:: ample curves
   
3. Nutritionist:: expert knowledge of healthy eating
   
4. Belt:: tighten
   
5. Star crossed:: bad luck
   
6. Snakeskin:: patterns
   
7. Athlete’s foot:: yucky
   
8. Boom:: increase
   
9. Freezer:: food
   
10. Store hours:: closed on holidays in good years; open on holidays in lean years

Want to play? Go to Unconscious Mutterings.

Thanksgiving Weekend in the U.S.

"Love wholeheartedly, be surprised, give thanks and praise--then you will discover the fullness of your life."
-Brother David Steindl-Rast (from Belief net inspiration mailing)

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving full of laughter and love.

We got back from Fallbrook on Friday night. I confess to needing to reframe things. From a purely selfish mode, I am still wondering (only for a few moments) if the gathering together was worth the recovery time for the severe sleep deficits I incurred. Some new strange twists were added to the traditional aspects. But from a people observational mode, it was interesting to watch the dynamics and I always enjoy visiting with my sister. In some ways we grow more alike as we age. In others, we might as well have been raised on other planets.
;-)

Counseling Goals

I especially liked this definition and counseling goals from my practicum class.

"COUNSELING DEFINED: Counseling can be defined as an interaction in which the counselor focuses on client experience, client feeling, client thought and client behavior with the intentional responses to acknowledge, to explore, or to challenge.

COUNSELING GOALS: Counseling has specific goals, the first of which is to facilitate awareness. This is achieved by keeping the focus on the client, acknowledging feelings, experience and behavior. By exploring feelings and behavior and future options, the second counseling goal, healthy decision making, can be maximized. Further exploration and challenging can lead to the third goal of counseling, appropriate action, resulting in more fulfilling personal and social functioning."

From Basic Counseling Responses, 1999, James Hutchinson Haney and Jacqueline Leibsohn (Seattle University), Brooks/Cole Publishing.

Facilitate awareness
Maximize healthy decision making
Leading to appropriate action
Resulting in more fulfilling personal and social functioning

Of course they gloss over and almost avoid the part where I believe the client's values and goals should determine what constitutes appropriate action and fulfilling personal and social functioning. I don't have the answers, only sometimes I see a way to assist someone else in finding their answers or maybe at least help in finding and clarifying their questions. And those two things go a long way towards "maximizing healthy decision making leading to appropriate action" which can result in "more fulfilling personal and social functioning".

Re-reading Berne

I've been re-reading my Berne books (Transactional Analysis, Eric Berne, M.D). In "What do you say after you say hello", I am in the section where he is talking about programming- where we get the scripts, script controls and the counterscripts, etc. According to Berne, we usually get our script patterns from the parent of the same sex and the script controls from the parent of the opposite sex. There are a lot of other things of course, including that you can get scripts and counterscripts from the same parent, and there are more dynamics to this including which parts of which parent are giving us the scripts, controls and counterscripts, but before he goes into more detail he says this:

"The Fortune Cookie Theory of human living says that each child gets to pull two cookies from the family bowl: one square and one jagged. The square one is a slogan, such as "Work hard!" or "Stick with it!" while the jagged one is a scripty joker, such as "Forget your homework," "Act clumsy," or "Drop dead." Between the two, unless he throws them away, his life style and his final destiny are written."

I'm for throwing away those cookies and choosing ones of our own. But I am wondering if we are ever sure we got rid of all the crumbs?

and a Monday comes

"Service is the rent you pay for room on this planet." -Shirley Chisholm

"Memory is a child walking along the seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things." -Pierce Harris

from Belief net mailings

No time for a full post, but these two quotes caught my eye as I was trying to get through some of my email.

Two weeks are left in the quarter and then final exams to finish up. I am slowly drowning in papers to revise, projects to finish up and a sudden increase in actual paid work, along with reading that I am behind on, which must be done very soon. This post is more like a little cry in the dark- I am still here, don't forget me. Or maybe it is a plea for sympathy. ;-)

Sympathy is one of those things that seems smarmy for me to ask for or even hint at, yet usually makes me feel better when received. I wonder if the feelings (mine) associated with asking for sympathy or complaining "too much" have anything to do with a cultural or even familial sort of "suck it up" or "people are starving in_ fill in the blank_' attitude instilled early on?

Memories, even those negative ones, or maybe especially those negative ones, encoded with a child's special twist of interpretation- are powerful.

edited to make it more clear that it is my feelings about complaining and asking for sympathy that I am talking about, not others. I have always found it easier to concentrate on, sympathize with and even empathize with others, rather than to give myself the same consideration.

Unconscious Mutterings Week 94

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Reconnect:: with nature; with a special person; with friends from the past; join again
   
2. Gearshiift:: small car, with a four or five speed manual transmission, rack and pinion steering, driving a nicely paved mountain road with S curves and turns... ah, yes... woman and machine as one unit; big smiles. The Camry's nice, but sometimes I miss my Opel. She had slightly better gas mileage too.
   
3. Mania:: crazed response
   
4. Manhattan:: never been... recovered?
   
5. First date:: long ago, parents drove us
   
6. District:: of Columbia
   
7. Yearbook:: ughhhhhh... my picture was horrible
   
8. Breakup:: had a few
   
9. Episode:: one of a series of events
   
10. Costume:: something some people put on every day along with a persona, as in work costume, play costume, exercise costume, etc.

Want to play? Go to Unconscious Mutterings.

Rat in an exercise wheel

Ever have days where everything seemed to require attention at once and everything you fixed would pop up again with a new twist?

I am having a series of those days.

I know that it feels that way in large part, because I am not noticing the things that are going right. But even knowing that it is my perception, doesn't seem to stop those new twists on the old problems coming from all directions. It feels a bit like a rat in an exercise wheel going no place fast.

When things are like this, my first impulse isn't to keep running in circles. My first impulse is to go to sleep and hope that it is all different when I wake up. But the rational part of me knows that none of it will go away that easily, and so I keep plugging away, hoping that the next turn will be one that leads to some progress, instead of spinning around again.

;-)

Unconscious Mutterings Week 93

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Childhood:: not long enough
   
2. Ransom:: King's
   
3. Melissa:: know a couple
   
4. Trust me:: two responses come to mind. The second is that I don't recall anyone who was trustworthy ever saying that to me.
   
5. Report:: factual account
   
6. Give up:: different than let go.
   
7. Nightgown:: hmmm.. nothing PG-13 comes to mind
   
8. Smokes:: pipe
   
9. Cookies & cream:: ice cream? These two things aren't really linked in my mind; cookies makes me think of peanut butter cookies and milk or chocolate chip cookies and milk; cream only makes me think of baking pies or of whipped cream.
   
10. Gameshow:: dislike them all, not quite as much as reality shows but a very close second

Want to play? Go to Unconscious Mutterings.

Time

"Now my journey has been long and filled with many experiences. My future in this body form grows shorter. The pace of time moves very quickly, and I want to make the most of it. When I was a child, the milestones I counted were the number of years that I had lived, and the future seemed boundless. Now that the limits draw near, I reckon time by how much is left.

Yes, time is all I have, and yet I do not have it either. I cannot possess this moment because it is mercurial and constantly in motion. It is as Einstein said: "For us believing physicists, this separation between past, present, and future has the value of mere illusion, however tenacious."

It is easy to become a time miser or a time squanderer, but I am warned by the words of Thoreau: "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." I do not wish to be like the man Kierkegaard told of, who was so busy all of his life that he did not know he was alive until he died. I want to "use" my time wisely. That hour of play that my mother gave me as a child seemed endless. Now, the hours go before I know it. The months, years, decades go by. The young can afford to waste time; the old hold on to it. I want only to savor it - to move in its flow both carefully and trustingly."

From Flying Without Wings. Arnold R. Beisser, M.D. (1988) (pg 13, special reprint edition, permission of Doubleday) (ISBN: 0385247702)