I like to think of myself as very open to change, yet there are times when I find myself stubbornly clinging to the comfort of old and familiar ways.  If you recognize this in yourself, let me suggest a solution.  Plant a garden.

I was reluctant to take a plot in my neighborhood community garden because I don’t like bugs, worms or dirt under my fingernails.  I still don’t, but I have come to love my garden.  Gardens are all about change.  An empty plot becomes green and lush and then empty again.  I feel sad when I look at my once bright and healthy tomato plants, now devoid of fruit, withered and dying.  But the tomatoes that grew have morphed into a slow simmered pasta sauce residing in my freezer that will give us a taste of summer deep into the winter.

The pepper plants that looked so puny all summer next to the glorious tomatoes have come into their own.  Bright red, green, yellow and orange peppers in various shapes and sizes decorate the branches and demand admiration.  Some of them will also morph into wonderful sauces that will bring us a touch of summer mid-winter.  You can’t avoid appreciating change when you grow a garden.  I’ve been so impressed with the majesty of the peppers that I’ve chosen the word “Mariachi,” the name of a beautifully shaped, bright red, spicy-sweet pepper, to serve as my cue to remind me to be more open to new experiences and change.

GPSCH’s lineup of programs this year will give us all a splendid array of new experiences and new approaches to our work.  In November an all-day workshop with Molley Delaney,Psy.D. on “Problems as Solutions” will challenge us all to think outside the box.  December will bring Peter Bloom, M.D. and Julie Linden, Ph.D. teaching us about “Learning from Mistakes – An Essential Ingredient of Continuing Education.”  In January, David Weiman, Ph.D. will  offer us “The Three Keys to Building Your Hypnotherapy Practice.”  In February, Bernardo Merizalde, M.D. will discuss “Adaptive and Integrative Human Development.”  It just keeps getting better and better.

I encourage you all to join us at these wonderful programs.  Please bring your sense of curiosity and openness to change with you.  And if you find yourself being just the littlest bit resistant to learning or trying a new approach, think “Mariachi” – and plunge ahead.

MEMBER NEWS

This section is for you.  Let us know what you are doing or have written, presented, taught, or if you have been honored in some way.  Share the good news!  Please submit Member News and items of interest for You’ve Got Mail to Stephen.Glass@crozer.org.

"You've Got Mail"

Wednesday evening, October 22 through Sunday, October 26, 2008:   
SCEH – 59th Annual Workshops and Scientific Program Conference at the Sheraton Park Ridge Hotel & Conference Center, King of Prussia, PA. Workshop Chairs – Max Shapiro, Ph.D. and Claire Frederick, M.D.
Scientific Chairs – Edward Frischholz, Ph.D. and Ron Pekala, Ph.D.
Contacts for overall matters:  SCEH Executive Director Dean Abby
( dabby@MSPP.EDU ) or SCEH President Rick Kluft ( rpkluft@aol.com ).

Saturday, May 9, 2009:  ½ Day Workshop on Healing and Humor presented by Bernie S. Siegel, M.D. – Save the Date, details to follow.

FROM THE EDITOR - Stephen G. Glass, ED.M.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

 Giving and Getting, Love, Loss and Continuation

Our psychotherapist members represent diverse training and theoretical orientations as does my own training as a psychologist and marriage and family therapist.  My psychotherapeutic interventions vary in response to my patients’ needs at the time of their presentation, and may be offered from a framework at variance with my theoretical context employed for problem formulation.  While an observer might say that some of my interventions are spontaneous, I would suggest that they reflect cognition without awareness.  As a professional artist I have known quite well ( my wife ) told me years ago, “When I am working at my best, I am painting from the wrist down.”  Such is the creative process and trusting one’s unconscious. 

At times I may be “present” with a patient, engaged with intensely focused attention reflecting simultaneous alternating intertwined concentrative and opening-up modes, such as described in mindfulness meditation.   But what I ultimately do as a therapeutic response may appear as though it is coming out of left field. Or was that right brain? 

As some of you may have done, I have given to some of my patients, baby  sprouts growing from the spider plants I have in my office.  They are quite pleased to be given something physical, and by their psychologist.    Physicians have the unique ability to do this, as well as physically touch their patients as part of their healing procedure and relationship process.  The transitional objects that my patients now proudly possess are frequently admired by their family and friends who are pleased by being given babies from my patients’ spider plants, which have transcended my office and are now part of second order behavior.  The recipient of the therapeutic gift becomes the giver of gifts to significant others in their social network.   Change.

In response to patients’ presented knotty problems, challenges and impasse, I have engaged patients in discussion of food, dishes usually eaten and food preparation.  I have provided the notion that “Most things in life are more than 90% preparation and less than 10% execution,” and “Culinary recipes you use all the time adjust to what you have on hand.”   These are usually casual, albeit enthusiastic offerings, none of which is presented in context of formal trance induction. 

At times, I may have a song lyric come to mind which I may convey, for example, “But, I have learned that all you give is all you get.  So, give it all you’ve got.”   I have given patients printed travel directions I get from the internet in my psychotherapist’s role and as qua automobile club trip ticketer and travel guide.  I similarly provide internet derived weather reports to discuss rain as just water and not some onerous life circumstance.  On occasion, I have discussed the themes and characters of films and I have given printed copies of short literary pieces.  Donne’s conceit is an apt example:

A Valediction:  Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
( Whose soul is sense ) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it. 

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th’other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Dedicated In Loving Memory To Marianna Shaw Glass