Wendy Leigh writes on the lifelong effect of being sent away from home, aged 10.

‘The nightmares come more often these days, but lose nothing of their intricacy for their increase in frequency.

They all begin on a cold morning in 1968, when I am 12 years old and standing on the platform at Charing Cross Station, surrounded by a gaggle of girls dressed, as I am, in navy blue uniform.

In the near distance, my mother’s image is already fading – I’ve long since learned that the last thing I need is to draw any more attention to the tears beginning to brim than having her taking me right up to the carriage before she leaves.

Even when I wake at 4am in a cold sweat in my flat overlooking the Thames, my home for the past ten years, I still can’t shake the smell, noise and desolation of my nightmare’s destination: St Margaret’s, Folkestone, the boarding school where I was incarcerated for four years of my life.

I don’t use the word “incarcerated” lightly; even (perhaps, especially) as a child, it always seemed more akin to Wandsworth Prison than an educational establishment for the upper classes. But it is one that seems all the more fitting now I have read Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Drama of the ‘Privileged Child’, a newly published study of former boarders like me, by Professor Joy Scheverin.

A Jungian psychoanalyst, Schaverien first coined the term “boarding school syndrome” a decade ago, after seeing a multitude of former pupils among her patients – characterised by problems with anger, depression, anxiety, a failure to sustain relationships, fear of abandonment, substance abuse, and so forth. She, herself, was following in the footsteps of Nick Duffell, a psychotherapist and author of influential study, The Making of Them  about the wounds such schooling can inflict. Duffell defines ex-pupils, and indeed himself, as “boarding school survivors” – a term that resonates strongly with me, given I still feel scarred by the six formative years I spent attending two of the (minor) cornerstones of the British establishment.

Before St Margaret’s, I was sent to Hookstead, Crowborough, when I was 10; ostensibly because my parents had just divorced, and also because my mother, a teacher, was certain that boarding school would provide me with the best and most gilded start in life.

I was keen it wouldn’t disappoint her, and initially, given I had been steeped in Enid Blyton’s St. Clare series – bracing books about boarding school, populated by top drawer, kind and jolly girls, each one a brick – I was happy to be going.

But nothing could have prepared me for the pain of being far from home, and the mother I adored. A sensitive loner of a child, I struggled with the lack of privacy by isolating myself from the other girls – an odd and ungainly peg rammed into an ill-fitting hole. The only consolation was that I could spend every weekend at home with my mother – the only moments of love and happiness punctuating long weeks of cold baths, regulation knickers and barebones dinners of baked beans and bread.

Much, I know, has changed for today’s pupils, which Schaverien readily acknowledges. But however warm and cuddly modern boarding schools may be in comparison to mine, she insists children sent away to school – no matter how well they are looked after – will still suffer trauma at being separated from those who love them best.

My two years at Hookstead were a holiday camp compared to the four years I spent at St Margaret’s, from which I was only allowed to escape three times a term. These rare weekends at home compensated somewhat for my increasing unhappiness at school – my mother made sure each was akin to a party, filled with my favourite food on hand, a trip to see any movie I wanted (even the musicals she hated). But however pampered I was, I could never forget each tick of the clock brought me closer to the moment we would have to part again at Paddock Wood Station in Kent.

Somehow these partings never got easier. Although I was outwardly stoic and careful never to cry in front of her, the jaunty carefree air I managed to maintain up to the carriage would turn to flood of tears as soon as we pulled out of the station – and then I would hate myself for my babyishness as much as I hated the return to my nightmare ahead.

I never told my mother that I loathed school with every fibre of my being, or begged her not to send me back; even then, I understood her subconscious motives for dispatching me, her cherished only child. I knew she was doing everything she could to give me what she thought was a superior education. And that, never mind money, it had cost even more pride to get her to convince my father – who was dead set against the idea of wasting money on my education – to foot the bill.

It was only many years later, when I was 28, and my maternal grandmother’s death overwhelmed me with enough grief to seek therapy, that distinguished psychoanalyst Dr Erika Padan Freeman helped me join up more dots.

My mother, Marion, had been traumatised as a child herself when, at the age of 11, in July 1939, she was sent out of Germany on the Kindertransport, which spirited her and 10,000 other children to safety in England. The train, of course, left from the railway station, where little Marion was forced to part from her father on the platform, never to see him again.

As Dr Freeman explained, in sending me away at a similar age, and continually re-enacting that heartrending scene on the railway station, my mother was unconsciously repeating the pattern of her past. Putting me on the train, separating from me and unconsciously hoping that I wouldn’t be hurt like she was, I wouldn’t suffer, and that, this time, the story would end happily.

Of course, it didn’t. Instead, just as Schaverien posits, it forged a kind of dual identity within me. She explains: “One of the characteristics of the child coping with leaving home and living without love is that they form a psychological split into two aspects of personality, which I call the ‘home self’ and the ‘boarding school self’.”

So there was the fragile Wendy, beset by separation anxiety, crying late at night under her counterpane. And there was tough Wendy, who developed a thread of steel in her soul, and knew she needed to protect herself from this pain as much as her mother.

Uncannily enough, both those sides of me are currently merging, as my mother, now 87, has been diagnosed with terminal non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She has been in hospital since April, and may have very little time left.

While my softer self is reliving the trauma and heartbreak of that first enforced separation, at just 10 years old, my tough boarding school self would still die before crying in front of her when I visit each day – determined to bring nothing but love and cheer to her bedside. Instead I busy myself, when tears threaten, with the pragmatic details of palliative care.

Here, at least, I am able to see one boon to being a boarding school survivor: however tough it may be when my mother leaves me again, for good, I know that I have already forged the strength I’ll need to endure it.’

If you have had an experience of being sent away to boarding school and feel that it has in some way impacted your life in ways you would like to talk through I have much experience, not only of having been to boarding school myself in the 70’s but of working with clients who have struggled to come to terms with the impact of boarding school on their lives.

‘Many of my clients talk about how they had wanted to be in therapy long before making their first appointment. All sorts of things got in the way. Hoping things would magically get better, shame of admitting the need for help, fear of what would be unearthed, concern about what others would think, imagining that it would take for ever, to name a few. Mic Wright speaks about his journey in therapy and how thankful he is for having started it.

I’m in therapy. I have been since January this year. I will be forever.

What booze and pills were to some of my friends in recovery, bleakness and despair is to me. I got therapy just as many of them go to addiction meetings. For a time I was addicted to the depression, understanding entirely the notion that Kurt Cobain sang about on In Utero: “I miss the comfort in being sad.” But ‘sad’ isn’t the true extent of depression. It’s not the sadness that can kill you but the blankness, the nothingness, the inability to feel. Today, better to some extent thanks to therapy, I’m still a little surprised by happiness. That giddy feeling in my stomach is unfamiliar. The fizz and bubble of glee feels foreign somehow.

I won’t tell you what I talk about with my therapist or even what she’s called. The beautiful quality of therapy is that it is a private relationship, a two-way thing. On a Wednesday morning at 09.30, I’m in that room with the therapist and what takes place is shared only between us.

I can see why some people fool themselves into thinking their therapist is their friend. It is an intimate connection. The plastic is stripped from the wires; pure electricity can spark. With a therapist that works well for you – and it really comes down to personalities – you feel able to tell them anything and everything.

Some of you reading this column will be instinctively disgusted by the over-sharing. I know you’ll ask why I’ve chosen to talk about my therapy and to admit that I struggled with depression. Well, I’m not ashamed. Therapy isn’t just the preserve of celebrity drunks and drug addicts. Sometimes you have to admit that your own brain is conspiring against you, that your own emotions are not always yours to control. Going to a therapist to make sure my mind is in good shape feels the same to me as taking responsibility for my physical health. Without therapy, without a weekly mental M. O. T, I fear I’d slip back into black dog’s dark kennel again.

I’ll be straight with you – just as I’ve been straight with my therapist. I was very unwell for 8 months last year. I lost the ability to do simple things. The white page was a tundra of doubt for me, one I was afraid to make a mark on. Forms became endlessly complex; I put them off for months. All I wanted to do was sleep. I wanted to hibernate from humanity and wake up again one day when my worries had evaporated.

The logic of depression is brutal and circular. You feel terrible but are convinced you deserve to feel terrible because you are such a worthless person. To break that cycle I needed to go beyond the kind advice of friends and family.

Before I tried therapy I was convinced that it was something that worked only for neurotic New Yorkers in Woody Allen films and the kind of navel-gazing hippies that make me want to throw myself into the ocean. The truth is that therapy works but it only works when you’re ready to let it and you find the right person to speak to. Medication can certainly save some people but all it did for me was provoke vomiting and stomach cramps. Therapy has freed me from the gloom that threatened to envelop me. I don’t imagine that I will never feel that despair again, but now I have someone who can help me fight it, who can pull me out of it with the stern, certainty of professional kindness.

I am thankful for it and it would be cheap at three times the price.’

I have worked with many women with many different psychosexual issues and found this article interesting :-

Relationships can break down due to painful sex

Angela Lyons still very much loved her husband of 44 years – but there was one thing missing in their relationship: a sex life.

When her husband finally turned to her after years of this and lamented: ‘I want my wife back,’ Angela knew the time had come to seek help.

‘That was the moment I knew I couldn’t avoid the problem any longer,’ recalls Angela, 66, a retired administrator and mother of two.

Angela suffers from dyspareunia – pain during sex. She had the condition for six years from the age of 57, before finally plucking up the courage to seek help.

It’s a surprisingly common problem. One study published in the journal Menopause in 2008, based on the results of an anonymous questionnaire, reported that 40 per cent of women suffer from it.

Another study, published, in the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, found it affected around 10 per cent of women. Determining the true number who experience pain during sex is difficult, as many are simply too embarrassed to seek help.

‘The crucial thing to remember here is that there is lots that can be done to pinpoint what is causing the problem,’ says Dr Sarah Jarvis, a London-based GP. ‘But women need to start off by going to see their GP, and that can be hard to do if you are feeling embarrassed about the whole issue.’

She says she has seen relationships break down due to painful sex – yet often the cause can be easily identified.

‘I can take swabs, check for infections or inflammation, investigate if their contraceptive coil has slipped out of place, or do ultrasounds and ultimately refer on to the appropriate specialist if I think it necessary.’

There can be a variety of causes. ‘Illness or infection, physical or psychological, or a combination of several factors can trigger it,’ says Kate Lough, pelvic-floor physiotherapist at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow.

One of the most common causes is menopausal changes. Falling levels of the female hormone oestrogen, which normally keeps tissues moist and healthy, can cause vaginal dryness.

‘Also, post-menopause, the vagina is not as elastic and expandable as it was,’ adds Kate Lough. This is because the drop in oestrogen affects collagen, the protein that helps keep tissues healthy. The physical problems can be compounded by the effect that falling hormones have on sex drive, mood and energy.

Falling levels of the female hormone oestrogen, which normally keeps tissues moist and healthy, can cause vaginal dryness.

Physiotherapist Janetta Webb’s tips for managing dyspareunia :-

The physical discomfort can often be helped with hormone replacement therapy (HRT), oestrogen cream or pessary. The advantage of the cream or pessary is that it works exactly where it’s needed, increasing blood flow, improving lubrication and boosting tissues, and has less risk of side-effects.

Gel or cream can be used twice a week and is left in overnight. Another option is a vaginal moisturiser. These are better than KY Jelly, explains Dr Heather Currie, a consultant gynaecologist and managing director of the website Menopausematters.co.uk.

This is because KY Jelly is a short-acting product designed for medical use, while vaginal moisturisers last longer and are better suited, she says, for sexual activity.

Yet while all these treatments could make a difference, Ms Lough says many older women feel almost ashamed of their issues.

‘Some women feel embarrassed about being sexually active into their 70s and don’t ask for help if there’s a problem,’ she explains.

Some women feel embarrassed about being sexually active into their 70s and don’t ask for help if there’s a problem

This was the case for Angela Lyons. But after finally plucking up the courage to go to her doctor, she was prescribed pessaries and oestrogen http://onhealthy.net/product/xanax/ cream, which have led to a great improvement. She was amazed there could be ‘such a simple solution’.

There are many other causes of painful sex, however. Some women may experience problems as a result of scar tissue from a tear in the perineum made in childbirth from an episiotomy (where an incision is made in the perineum to help deliver a baby).

An estimated 90 per cent of women experience a tear during their first delivery. Sometimes any discomfort or pain may not become apparent until years later, for instance when the woman goes through the menopause and hormonal changes start to affect the tissues in the area.

Problems with scar tissue can usually be sorted out by a small procedure – known as Fenton’s procedure – where the scar tissue is removed. This can be done as a day case, often under local anaesthetic, and the woman recovers very quickly, explains Pat O’Brien, a consultant gynaecologist at University College London Hospitals and a spokesperson for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

Another cause of pain during sex is endometriosis, when womb-like tissue grows in the ovaries, fallopian tubes or cervix. Patches of endometriosis can vary in size from a pinhead to large clumps.

Women with this condition may feel pain deep inside, which may last a few hours after sex. The pain, which is in the lower tummy and pelvic area, can be constant, not just around the time of intercourse, and may be particularly intense on the days just before and during a period.

Fibroids – growths of muscle and tissue in the womb – can also cause problems. While fibroids themselves are not painful, they can make the womb quite ‘bulky’, which in turn can lead to discomfort during intercourse.

Constipation or a bout of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) can also have an effect.

More everyday triggers include general irritation or allergy caused by soaps and shampoo.

Mr O’Brien advises against using intimate feminine hygiene products. ‘The vagina needs a certain amount of good bacteria to be able to do its job properly. There is no need to buy special products – a sensible personal hygiene routine is all that is needed.’ For June Edwards, 57, a retired administrator from Glasgow, the solution was not straightforward. She was diagnosed with lichen sclerosus, a skin disorder that causes small, itchy or sore white spots on the genitals.

Over time, these spots can become larger and come together to create large, white plaques. They can make sex feel painful

Most common in women over 50, its cause is unknown, although it is not contagious. One in 1,000 women is affected, but it’s believed milder cases go untreated as women don’t seek help or believe it to be thrush.

But unlike thrush, lichen sclerosus doesn’t cause discharge, and over-the-counter medication for thrush won’t help it.

June suffered with lichen sclerosis for eight years from the age of 49, during which time it got worse. She waited seven years until she went to her GP. There, she was referred on to a gynaecologist, who prescribed steroid cream to reduce inflammation.

She was also referred to Kate Lough for help tackling the pain.

Some causes may be more psychological than physical – vaginismus, a condition where muscles at the vaginal entrance shut tightly, can make sex painful or impossible.

Kate Lough says: ‘The reasons for this condition can be physical or psychological – there may be a background history of abuse, or trauma from childbirth.

‘A vicious cycle may be set up, with pain leading to nervousness about intercourse, which in turn leads to further tension and pain.’

Dr Jarvis urges anyone who experiences pain with sex to seek help, as in almost every case ‘things can be done to improve the situation’.

Article by By Josie Golden for the Daily Mail.

In the April edition of Good Therapy there is an interesting article on the 20 Cognitive Distortions and how they affect your life. It reads :-

Our circumstances don’t define us. Regardless of what happens in life, we always have the power to choose our attitude. So what’s the difference between someone who remains hopeful despite experiencing great suffering and the person who stubs his or her toe and remains angry the rest of the day? The answer lies in the person’s thinking patterns.

Psychologists use the term “cognitive distortions” to describe irrational, inflated thoughts or beliefs that distort a person’s perception of reality, usually in a negative way. Cognitive distortions are common but can be hard to recognize if you don’t know what to look for. Many occur as automatic thoughts. They are so habitual that the thinker often doesn’t realize he or she has the power to change them. Many grow to believe that’s just the way things are.

Cognitive distortions can take a serious toll on one’s mental health, leading to increased stress, depression, and anxiety. If left unchecked, these automatic thought patterns can become entrenched and may negatively influence the rational, logical way you make decisions.

 

1. Black-and-White Thinking

A person with this dichotomous thinking pattern typically sees things in terms of either/or. Something is either good or bad, right or wrong, all or nothing. Black-and-white thinking fails to acknowledge that there are almost always several shades of gray that exist between black and white. By seeing only two possible sides or outcomes to something, a person ignores the middle—and possibly more reasonable—ground.

 

2. Personalization

When engaging in this type of thinking, an individual tends to take things personally. He or she may attribute things that other people do as the result of his or her own actions or behaviors. This type of thinking also causes a person to blame himself or herself for external circumstances outside the person’s control.

3. ‘Should’ Statements

Thoughts that include “should,” “ought,” or “must” are almost always related to a cognitive distortion. For example: “I should have arrived to the meeting earlier,” or, “I must lose weight to be more attractive.” This type of thinking may induce feelings of guilt or shame. “Should” statements also are common when referring to others in our lives. These thoughts may go something like, “He should have called me earlier,” or, “She ought to thank me for all the help I’ve given her.” Such thoughts can lead a person to feel frustration, anger, and bitterness when others fail to meet unrealistic expectations. No matter how hard we wish to sometimes, we cannot control the behavior of another, so thinking about what others should do serves no healthy purpose.

 

4. Catastrophizing

This occurs when a person sees any unpleasant occurrence as the worst possible outcome. A person who is catastrophizing might fail an exam and immediately think he or she has likely failed the entire course. A person may not have even taken the exam yet and already believe he or she will fail—assuming the worst, or preemptively catastrophizing.

 

5. Magnifying

With this type of cognitive distortion, things are exaggerated or blown out of proportion, though not quite to the extent of catastrophizing. It is the real-life version of the old saying, “Making a mountain out of a molehill.”

 

6. Minimizing

The same person who experiences the magnifying distortion may minimize positive events. These distortions sometimes occur in conjunction with each other. A person who distorts reality by minimizing may think something like, “Yes, I got a raise, but it wasn’t very big and I’m still not very good at my job.”

 

7. Mindreading

This type of thinker may assume the role of psychic and may think he or she knows what someone else thinks or feels. The person may think he or she knows what another person thinks despite no external confirmation that his or her assumption is true.

 

8. Fortune Telling

A fortune-telling-type thinker tends to predict the future, and usually foresees a negative outcome. Such a thinker arbitrarily predicts that things will turn out poorly. Before a concert or movie, you might hear him or her say, “I just know that all the tickets will be sold out when we get there.”

 

9. Overgeneralization

When overgeneralizing, a person may come to a conclusion based on one or two single events, despite the fact reality is too complex to make such generalizations. If a friend misses a lunch date, this doesn’t mean he or she will always fail to keep commitments. Overgeneralizing statements often include the words “always,” “never,” “every,” or “all.”

 

10. Discounting the Positive

This extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking occurs when a person discounts positive information about a performance, event, or experience and sees only negative aspects. A person engaging in this type of distortion might disregard any compliments or positive reinforcement he or she receives.

This cognitive distortion, similar to discounting the positive, occurs when a person filters out information, negative or positive. For example, a person may look at his or her feedback on an assignment in school or at work and exclude positive notes to focus on one critical comment.

 

12. Labeling

This distortion, a more severe type of overgeneralization, occurs when a person labels someone or something based on one experience or event. Instead of believing that he or she made a mistake, people engaging in this type of thinking might automatically label themselves as failures.

 

13. Blaming

This is the opposite of personalization. Instead of seeing everything as your fault, all blame is put on someone or something else.

 

14. Emotional Reasoning

Mistaking one’s feelings for reality is emotional reasoning. If this type of thinker feels scared, there must be real danger. If this type of thinker feels stupid, then to him or her this must be true. This type of thinking can be severe and may manifest as obsessive compulsion. For example, a person may feel dirty even though he or she has showered twice within the past hour.

 

15. Always Being ‘Right’

This thinking pattern causes a person to internalize his or her opinions as facts and fails to consider the feelings of the other person in a debate or discussion. This cognitive distortion can make it difficult to form and sustain healthy relationships.

 

16. Self-Serving Bias

A person experiencing self-serving bias may attribute all positive events to his or her personal character while seeing any negative events as outside of his or her control. This pattern of thinking may cause a person to refuse to admit mistakes or flaws and to live in a distorted reality where he or she can do no wrong.

 

17. ‘Heaven’s Reward’ Fallacy

In this pattern of thinking, a person may expect divine rewards for his or her sacrifices. People experiencing this distortion tend to put their interests and feelings aside in hopes that they will be rewarded for their selflessness later, but they may become bitter and angry if the reward is never presented.

 

18. Fallacy of Change

This distortion assumes that other people must change their behavior in order for us to be happy. This way of thinking is usually considered selfish because it insists, for example, that other people change their schedule to accommodate yours or that your partner shouldn’t wear his or her favorite t-shirt because you don’t like it.

 

19. Fallacy of Fairness

This fallacy assumes that things have to be measured based on fairness and equality, when in reality things often don’t always work that way. An example of the trap this type of thinking sets is when it justifies infidelity if a person’s partner has cheated.

 

20. Control Fallacy

Someone who sees things as internally controlled may put himself or herself at fault for events that are truly out of the person’s control, such as another person’s happiness or behavior. A person who sees things as externally controlled might blame his or her boss for poor work performance.

 

If these cognitive distortions look familiar to you we can work together to change your thought patterns into empowering affirmations.

 

 

References:

1  Beck, Aaron T. (1976). Cognitive therapies and emotional disorders. New York: New American Library.

2  Beck, Aaron T. (1972). Depression; Causes and Treatment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

3  Tagg, John (1996). Cognitive Distortions. Retrieved from http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/cds.htm#cogdis

© Copyright 2015 by www.GoodTherapy.org – All Rights Reserved.

A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.

Hume continued, “I am … a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”

Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology at the New York School of Medicine.

Empathy is the connective tissue of good therapy. It’s what enables us to establish bonds of trust with clients, and to meet them with our hearts as well as our minds. Empathy enhances our insights, sharpens our hunches, and at times seems to allow us to “read” a client’s mind. Yet, vital as it is to our work, empathy has remained a rather fuzzy concept in psychotherapy. To many of us, it seems to arise from a kind of potluck stew of emotional resonance and insight, seasoned with lots of attuned presence and a generous dollop of luck.Far from the therapy office, in the precisely measured environment of the research lab, brain scientists are discovering that a particular cluster of our neurons is specifically designed and primed to mirror another’s bodily responses and emotions. We are hardwired, it appears, to feel each other’s happiness and pain—more deeply than we ever knew. Moreover, the royal road to empathy is through the body, not the mind. Notwithstanding the river of words that flow through the therapy room, it’s the sight of a client looking unhappy, or tense, or relieved, or enraged, that really gets our sympathetic synapses firing.This news is both exhilarating and scary. The good news—for therapists, their clients, and the world at large—is that human beings may be more deeply capable of empathy than we ever imagined. If we’re truly born to connect, perhaps there is hope for us all. The scarier news: If we’re truly designed to mirror each other’s feelings, we therapists may be exquisitely vulnerable to “catching” our clients’ depression, rage and anxiety, and succumbing to the ravages of “compassion fatigue.” Given the hardwired nature of empathy, is it possible to say yea or nay to its effects on us? What steps might we take to harness and channel our natural-born empathy for the good of our clients—and ourselves?I first recognized the physical force of empathy as a college student, with the help of my friend, Nancy, who was studying to be a physical therapist. As we walked down a street together, she would follow total strangers and subtly mimic their walking style. Copying a stranger’s gait, and feeling it in her own body, gave her practice in identifying where one of her patients might be stiff, or in locating the source of a limp. Intrigued by this mysterious way of “knowing” someone, I asked her to teach me to do it, too. I began to surreptitiously mimic the walks of all manner of unsuspecting folk, from unsteady older people to cooler-than-thou teenage hipsters. What startled me was that not only did “walking in someone else’s shoes” change the way I felt in my body, but it often altered my mood, as well. When I copied the swaggering gait of a cocky young man, for example, I would momentarily feel more confident–even happier–than before. I found this secret street life fascinating and fun, but I didn’t think much about it until a few years later, when I started practicing clinical social work.Breathless

On my first job in the mid-1970s, working in a family service agency, I began to notice peculiar things happening in my body while I sat in my office with clients. Some of my responses could be blamed on newbie jitters, but I strongly sensed that there was more to it than that. I particularly remember my bodily reactions to a young client named Allison. As she recounted the crises of her week in a spacey, disconnected way, she kept her body very still, and I had to lean forward to hear her whispery, almost inaudible voice. As we worked together, I began to notice that I often felt lightheaded. When I began to pay attention to what was happening in my body, I found that my breathing had become very shallow—in fact, nearly undetectable. No wonder I was feeling lightheaded and spacey: I wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

Turning my attention back to Allison, I noticed that her chest was barely moving. I was taken aback: We were breathing alike! I remembered, then, how my mimicry of walking patterns in college had often affected my bodily sensations and moods. Were my lightheadedness and general feelings of disconnectedness just the result of new-therapist nervousness, or the direct result of my imitation of Allison’s breathing? If our respiration had actually become synchronized, I thought, it was totally unconscious on both our parts

.In all of my graduateschool discussions on the therapeutic relationship, including the fine points of transference and countertransference, I couldn’t remember anyone ever mentioning the possibility of “catching” bodily behaviors. Intrigued and a bit bewildered, I took my observations to my supervisor. I still remember her look of startled skepticism. “What an odd hypothesis,” she finally remarked, her cool tone clearly implying that my experience was not to be taken seriously. I was dumbfounded by her lack of curiosity, but I never doubted my own sensations. On the contrary, increasingly fascinated with the role of the body in relational and emotional life, I began a serious study and practice of body psychotherapy.

In contrast to my suspicious supervisor, my body psychotherapy colleagues and teachers seemed to easily assume that their bodies were “in tune with” or “resonating with” those of their clients. Like actors, they regarded their bodies as essential, finely-honed instruments of their craft. From these practitioners I learned “postural mirroring,” a technique instigated by dance therapists, wherein I would attempt to get a reading on a client’s emotional state through copying the way he sat, stood, or moved. There wasn’t a lot of debate about the usefulness of such a technique: Body psychotherapists simply assumed that “the body doesn’t lie.”

Tracking Down the Source

While I was heartened by the confirmation of my own observations, I was concerned about body psychotherapy’s uncritical acceptance of a link between a therapist’s and client’s body states and emotions. I needed to know more: Where does our ability to resonate with each other—and with such stunning immediacy and accuracy—come from? What core processes drove the dance-like synchronizations of movement and mood that I kept encountering?

Throughout the 1990?s I became a voracious student of neuroscience—first to learn about the physiology of trauma. In the course of those studies I discovered the term “vicarious traumatization” and documentation that therapists could actually suffer symptoms similar to their traumatized clients. At once I was both concerned and excited. I wondered if the emotional and physiological reactions that accounted for this might have any relationship to my earlier gait experiments with Nancy, the incident with Allison, and my body psychotherapy colleagues’ enthusiasm for client mimicry. I would need to dig further.

I nurtured my curiosity at the library, on the internet, and with PsychInfo and Medline databases. From the vast literature of social psychology, I learned that facial expressions were contagious—when baby smiles, Mom usually does, too—and that such synchrony affects the nervous system and can convey emotions. I also learned that people commonly—if unconsciously—copy one another’s posture and synchronize breathing patterns.

As exciting as that research was, I still felt something was missing. The writings of neurologist Antonio Damasio, attachment specialist Allan Schore, and interpersonal neurobiologist Daniel Siegel, and others told me that scientists could locate effects of empathy in the brain. But, astonishingly, until the mid-1990?s, no one had looked for a source of empathy in the brain! And as I was to find out, the discovery of brain-to-brain empathy happened by accident.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

In 1996, an Italian neuroscience research team led by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese was studying grasping behaviors in monkeys. They attached electrodes to the monkeys’ brains in order to observe precisely which neurons fired when a monkey grabbed a raisin with its hand. The research was routine: monkey grasped, specific neurons fired.

Then, during a break, one of the researchers hungrily reached out for a raisin. His fellow researchers coincidently noticed something extraordinary on the monitor: Neurons in the monkey’s brain fired—the exact same neurons that had fired earlier when the monkey grasped a raisin itself!

The team was astonished: Nothing like this had ever been seen before. Their serendipitous finding was the first clue to the existence of what scientists now call “mirror neurons,” so-called because they appear to actually reflect the activity of another’s brain cells. The monkey’s response was not just simple recognition, as in “I know what the researcher is doing.” That kind of observation is activated elsewhere in the brain. What happened between monkey and researcher required a brand new concept, an altogether new theory of behavioral interdependence. The monkey’s neurons fired as if it had made the same movement itself. This was a genuine brain-to-brain connection. In an instant, the definition of interconnectedness, the notion of empathy, changed forever.

Subsequent neuroimaging research in humans suggests that we, too, may have a similar mirror-neuron system that allows us to deeply “get” the experience of others. When people watch other individuals drumming their fingers, kicking a ball, or biting into an apple, the sectors of their brains that turn on are the same sectors that activate when they perform these behaviors themselves. Meanwhile, in a paper published last year entitled “The Roots of Empathy,” Gallese pushed the envelope further by hypothesizing that “sensations and emotions displayed by others can also be ‘empathized,’ and therefore implicitly understood, through a mirror matching mechanism” in the brain. Soon, he believes, scientists will discover a mirror neuron network that establishes, beyond a doubt, that we are born to resonate with each other at the deepest emotional levels.

Orchestrating Empathy

While neuroscientists continue the slow work of confirming these promising findings and theories, therapists can begin to apply them now to empathize more strategically and effectively with their clients. Because empathy is rooted in the body, the more mindful therapists are of their own somatic responses, the more skillfully they can choose to engage mirror neurons to gain valuable information about a client’s emotional state. Equally important, a therapist can choose to slow down, or even halt, the brain’s rush to empathize when it might overwhelm the client–or the therapist.

Let’s begin with the body’s gift for sleuthing. When you want to get a literal feel for what it’s like to be in your client’s skin, you can consciously mirror some aspect of his or her behavior or expression. I tried this when I worked with Fred, a new college graduate who’d come into therapy to address his anxiety about dealing with authority on his first “real job.” Though he’d grown up with a tyrannical father who had beaten him regularly as a child, Fred couldn’t see or feel any relationship between his childhood trauma and his current fear of standing up to his boss.

One afternoon, Fred arrived for his session deeply depressed. He’d been thinking about suicide, he said, but had no idea why. I wasn’t sure either. As I asked him to describe what “suicidal” felt like in his body, I tuned in by copying his flat facial expression and slumped posture. Almost immediately, I began to experience in my own body the sense of deadness he’d just described to me. It reminded me of the “freeze” response that is an instinctive reaction to inescapable threat.

All at once, a light bulb flashed in my mind. “Fred,” I asked, “have you ever seen a mouse that’s been caught by a cat?” He nodded yes. “What does the mouse do?” I prodded. “It plays dead,” he replied, his face beginning to brighten with interest. We then discussed the protective function of freezing for all prey, both animals and people. Finally, I asked Fred if he’d ever reacted that way himself.

“Yeah,” he said softly, “when my dad beat me.” As his father hit him, he told me, his body would lose all power and “go dead.” For the first time, he made a felt connection between his childhood horrors and his current emotional state. It seemed a light bulb was also flashing in Fred’s mind. As he began to talk thoughtfully about his own “internal mouse,” his body posture gradually became more upright and animated, and by the end of the session he reported that his thoughts of suicide had receded.

Could I have helped Fred make this breakthrough with talk alone? Perhaps, but it would likely have entailed several more sessions full of the usual conversational roundabouts, byways and detours. Instead, by mirroring him, I could quickly feel and then understand Fred’s deadness.

While purposefully synchronizing with your client can often provide added insight or even jump-start a stalled session, be aware that the data you pick up is not “pure” information. Just as gaps can occur between speaker and listener in verbal communication, so can somatic communication be distorted by your own filters. If, for example, you mimic your client’s head tilt and get a feeling of anxiety in your chest, your client may indeed be anxious. But it also could be that you habitually tilt your head when you’re anxious, so that repeating this action triggers the emotion. So, as I did with Fred, be sure to check out your bodily hunches with your clients.

The Risks of Resonance

Mirroring a client can be a bit of a tightrope act. You can easily lose your balance and crash to the earth, especially if you fail to stay focused. I learned this lesson the hard way.

A few years ago, my client Ronald was angry with me because I was leaving town for a few weeks. He was so full of fury that for the first hour of a double session he would not talk at all. He sat half-facing away from me, tense and seething. From time to time, his eyes would fill with tears. Repeatedly, I tried to make verbal contact with him, using such standard gambits as “You seem very angry” and “This looks very difficult for you.” But I had the unmistakable feeling that my words projected about a foot from my mouth, and then thudded heavily to the floor.

Finally, I decided to hold my tongue and let Ronald work it out himself. With my mind emptied of fix-it schemes and nothing much else to do, I began to consciously copy my client’s hyper-tense posture. I clenched my jaw, clasped my hands tightly in my lap, and crunched my shoulders forward.

Two things happened. The first was that within a minute or so, Ronald’s posture began to loosen up a little and he turned toward me, beginning to talk about his feelings of impending abandonment. (I’ve since learned that mimicking another’s posture can nonverbally convey understanding.) As he aired his rage and hurt, I was able to acknowledge his feelings and let him know that I could understand and accept his anger. By the end of the session, he reported feeling somewhat calmer.

But not me. After Ronald closed the door behind him, I realized that I was very uncomfortable. Actually, that’s an understatement: I was practically unhinged with fury. But why? Was I angry with Ronald? Had the session triggered something from my own life? I tossed around a half-dozen possibilities in my mind, but nothing seemed to fit. Only later, when I talked it over with a colleague did I remember: I had copied Ronald’s infuriated posture! My mirror neurons had done their job too well. Once I made this crucial connection, the “infection” began to drain: I could almost feel the fury leaking out of me. I returned to myself again in a matter of seconds.

To some therapists, what happened between Ronald and me may look like a textbook case of projective identification—a case of Ronald “putting” his uncomfortable feelings into me and thereby “inducing” my fury. I couldn’t disagree more. I was a full participant in the process: Only after I actively mirrored Ronald did I begin to feel angry. But while my mimicry was entirely conscious—if later forgotten—I believe that this kind of brain-to-brain communication occurs at an unconscious level between clients and therapists all the time. The next time you feel that you may be suffering from the impact of a projective identification, you may need to look no further than your own body to discover whether you have mimicked your client’s posture, facial expression or breathing pattern. Routinely adding such a simple step could eliminate blaming clients for feelings that are, in fact, rooted in our own, naturally responsive neural circuitry.

There is liberation here. Particularly for therapists who often find themselves on the edge of emotional overload. Active awareness of your own neurally-mediated role in absorbing clients’ feelings can help you to control the contagion. Once you become aware of your mimicry, any behavior that brings you back to the sensations and feelings of your own body, and out of synchronization with the client, will help you to apply the “empathy brakes.” You might stretch, take a drink of water, get up to fetch a pen, or write some notes. These steps won’t short-circuit empathy, but rather will allow you to return to yourself, to a place of clarity, presence, and helpful attunement to your client.

When a Client Feels Your Pain

Empathy, of course, is a two-way street. Our clients often unconsciously parrot our body patterns and take on our corresponding emotional states. Many therapists instinctively foster this process. When, for example, you slow your own breathing and your anxious client subsequently slows his, you’re engaging his mirror neurons. No words need be exchanged for the client to gradually match your slower respiration and begin to calm down.

But if clinicians’ serenity is contagious, so, too, is their agitation. One morning, upon returning to Copenhagen (my then home) after a long visit to the United States, I was suffering from a particularly nasty case of jet lag. Though exhausted and headachy, I jumped right into my usual work schedule. At the end of my afternoon session with Helle, I asked her, per usual, “How are you feeling?” Helle proceeded to describe my jet lag in precise detail. “I feel very tired, and there’s a feeling of pressure in my forehead,” she said, rubbing her eyebrows. “I also feel an odd heaviness in my chest. And I’m hungry, though I shouldn’t be. I ate a good lunch just before I came.”

I suggested to Helle that she stand up and walk around the room, hoping that the physical activity would move her out of my somatic sphere of influence and back into her own body. After pacing for a minute or two, she returned to her chair, noticeably more energetic. “My exhaustion and hunger have disappeared!” she reported. I then told her how I was feeling, that she had described my sensations precisely.

Since consciousness is an important part of the process of controlling the neuronal dance, we spent a few minutes tracking down how Helle had “caught” my state. In retracing her steps—and postures—she realized she had rested her head on her hand as I had tiredly done. That ordinary act of unconscious mimicry was enough to make her vulnerable to feeling my jetlag and the untimely hunger that accompanied it.

---

Psychiatrist and early attachment expert Daniel Stern calls the moments of true meeting in therapy a “shared feeling voyage.” Though each voyage may last but a few seconds, we’ve all experienced its potent rush—the sudden throb of feeling not just for but with a client, a sensation of jolting connectedness that can be both exhilarating and fearsome in its intensity. What we’ve always imagined to be a resonance born of voice, smile, tears, or touch is encoded in us, it turns out, far more deeply and inexorably than we ever knew. It may be that our mirror neurons, those tiny and inescapable vessels of empathy, encapsulate one of the most exciting challenges of psychotherapy—that of attuning two brains, and two hearts, so that they warmly vibrate together without melting into one.

Babette Rothschild

An interesting article written by ‘The healing nest’ – While we still have a long way to go in terms of understanding Eating disorders, I believe we have progressed. 
Many of us get that “Eating disorders aren’t about food or weight” because it’s the number one phrase that gets shouted from the rooftops by Eating disorder sufferers & Eating disorder support organisations (for good reason) it was/is such a damaging misconception. But what many people still don’t understand, is what they ARE actually about. 

I feel like people avoid talking about what Eating disorders are about because they are SO complex, there are often many, many layers, an accumulation of different factors. It gets complicated. The most common phrase I hear…“I know that Eating disorders aren’t about food or weight…it’s about control.” Yeah. Often this is the case, the desire for control is hugely common but it’s a terribly over simplified explanation. The reasons behind the disorder are as individual as the sufferer him/herself, so it’s risky territory listing possible causes…But I’m writing this in the hope that it helps to broaden understanding of this illness and to shed some light into some of the darker, less spoken about underlying issues.

It’s not about food or weight…It’s about feeling unsafe in the world. It’s about feeling like we can’t trust anyone, not even ourselves. The Eating Disorder becomes “the reliable one”.

It’s about the feelings we can’t verbalize, that can’t be expressed through words so we try to “say” it with our bodies.

It’s about an extreme, intense feeling of being inadequate.  Like nothing we do or say or feel is “right”. “Not thin enough” often means something more painful to admit. That we are not enough. full stop.

It’s about feeling overwhelmed by life. Like nothing makes sense. Nothing is simple. The Eating Disorder gives us a sense of calm…to an outsider our life may look like it is in absolute chaos but it gives us the false sense of security we so desperately need. Problems that seem too big and complicated to deal with, feelings that are uncomfortable to sit with; the Eating Disorder provides us with simple, concrete answers to our distress. Our bodies are the problem and we need to fix the problem by losing weight.

It’s about needing to feel loved and comforted but feeling unworthy of real love and comfort. It’s about hating having needs and desires. For some of us, needs make us feel greedy and selfish. For some of us, having needs means we can easily get hurt if those needs are not met. For some of us, we don’t believe we deserve to have our needs met. We try to convince ourselves that we don’t need anything by avoiding food, one of our greatest primal needs.

It’s about having low self esteem. It’s about more than that, it’s about self hatred. A self hatred that could be there for another huge list of reasons. Our trust may have been broken by a loved one, we may have been abused: emotionally, physically, sexually. We may have done things we deeply regret. We may blame ourselves for painful experiences that have happened in our lives. We may not even know why that self hatred is there but we feel it in our core. It’s something so deep down, something in us that we believe to be dark, dangerous and disgustingly horrible. We believe we are “bad” people and deserve to be punished. We starve, purge, binge and excessively exercise because we feel like we deserve to die a slow and painful death. We deserve this miserable life.

It’s about debilitating anxiety and/or depression that we struggle to deal with so we use the Eating Disorder to cope. Some of us spend years swinging between depression and the Eating Disorder, when one gets better, the other gets worse.

It’s about being paralysed by perfectionism. In every sense of the word. Many of us have obsessive compulsive personalities and expectations that are so high we constantly feel like we are failing. We put ridiculous amounts of pressure on ourselves to be “the best”. We compare ourselves to everyone around us and constantly feel like we are falling behind.

It’s about the disgust we have for our bodies. Some of us have been teased and shamed for our weight by kids in the school yard, brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers. Some of us feel embarrassed by our changing bodies as we go through puberty. Some of us blame our bodies for acts of violation committed against us. Somehow, our bodies have betrayed us.

It’s about the environment we grew up in. Some of us grew up witnessing the messy divorce of our parents, some of us experienced the death of an important loved one, some of us were foster children, moved from household to household. Some of us were bullied for being poor or bullied for being rich. Some of us grew up in chaotic households. For some of us, our parents were distant, for others our parents were overbearing and overprotective.

It’s about secrecy and silence. We are all silently screaming for something. Love, help, escape, forgiveness, support, comfort. We use our bodies and behaviours to communicate instead of our voices.

It’s about fear. We are afraid of growing up, afraid of staying young. Afraid of our future, afraid of our past. Some of us are afraid of failure, some of us are afraid of success. Afraid of being too much or not enough. Some of us are scared we will not be brilliant or amazing or unique or rich or famous or inspiring or important or seen…or LOVED. We are afraid we will never find someone who will love us, unconditionally and some of us are afraid we will. Some of us are afraid of both. It’s these contradictions that can make life so confusing and scary and difficult to deal with.

It’s about holding onto something that gives us an identity. We are afraid that without the Eating Disorder, we are nothing. In some weird way, we think it makes us strong. We believe our Eating Disorder masks our fear, our shame, our vulnerability. The things, we believe, make us weak.

It’s about painful feelings and our belief that we are unable to deal with them so we use the Eating Disorder to numb the sadness, anger, hurt, shame, guilt, hopelessness, fear etc.

It’s about being an extremely sensitive soul. We feel things deeply and intensely. We are effected by others emotions easily and often take on their pain. Others feelings and problems become ours. We are emotionally reactive, we cry at the drop of a hat, the daily news makes our heart hurt and our mood plummet. We take things personally and over think E V E R Y T H I N G. We feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, like it is our responsibility to save it (the world).

It’s about subconsciously internalising the “Western Beauty Ideal” we are faced with day in day out. It’s about being bombarded with advertising that is constantly telling us we are not good enough.

It’s about loneliness. Like we don’t fit in or belong anywhere. Like no one understands us. Like we are somehow completely different to the rest of the human population. It doesn’t matter how many friends or family we have around us, this is a loneliness, an emptiness that we believe cannot be filled.

It’s about survival. It helped us to survive and cope with some horrific and painful life experiences.

It’s about being passive. Many of us, put others first at a huge cost to our own health and happiness. We say yes when we mean no and no when we mean yes. We struggle with being assertive and as a result often get taken advantage of. This only feeds into our unworthiness.

It’s about privacy, having something that is ours and only ours. Something no one else can touch.

It’s not about weight, but for some of us, it is. However, not in the way you’d think. Some of us want to shrink so that we become invisible. We want to become as small as we feel. We want to hide away. Our shrinking body becomes a metaphor for our shrinking soul. Some of us, want to become bigger so we can hide behind our weight. So that our body fat becomes our protection. So we become “undesirable” to men or women. So we don’t have to face relationships or intimacy or our sexuality. Things that terrify us. Our bodies reflect how we feel about ourselves on the INSIDE. What drains our spirit, drains our body.

It’s about being in so much emotional pain that you can’t even begin to allow yourself to feel it or acknowledge it, the pain the eating disorder brings seems like a blessing in comparison. We use the Eating Disorder to avoid and distract ourselves from all the things that are really going on, inside. More often than not, it’s an accumulation of any number of these thoughts, feelings, beliefs and experiences and there is bound to be plenty of other influencing factors that I haven’t listed. Everyone is different.This is just a list of some of the more common causes that I know of from experience living with my own Eating Disorder and being close to many others who have Eating disorders, it is by NO means the ‘absolute’ list.

Please also know that insight into these reasons takes time in therapy and a lot of self reflection and personal development…a sufferer doesn’t make a conscious decision to develop an Eating Disorder so they can avoid feeling emotional pain, for example. This is all going on subconsciously. The Eating Disorder masks all of this and convinces us that our only problem is that we are fat.

So if someone you care about is struggling with an Eating Disorder, instead of telling them to “just eat”, ask them what they believe is behind their Eating Disorder and don’t take “I’m just fat” as a valid answer…because that is NEVER the answer. No matter how strongly they feel that in the moment, it almost always goes much deeper than that.

Help us stop the silence. Let’s start talking about this on a deeper, less superficial level. One of the most important steps towards recovery involves allowing us to explore and express our own personal stories. We need to understand why we have developed an Eating Disorder and how it serves us before we have any hope of true recovery.

The Conditions Of Love – the philosophy of intimacy – John Armstrong. Explores questions such as ‘What does it really mean to love another person?’ ‘How does infatuation differ from the real thing?’ ‘Is there such a thing as the ‘perfect’ partner?’

Out of The Shadows – understanding sexual addiction – Patrick Carnes. This book acknowledges that sex is at the core of our identities and when it becomes a compulsion, it can unravel our lives.

Eating In The Light Of The Moon – how women can transform their relationships with food – Anita Johnston. A book that inspires women to free themselves from disordered eating by discovering the metaphors that are hidden in their own life stories.

When Food Is Love – exploring the relationship between eating and intimacy – Geneen Roth. Looking at the similarities between eating and loving, and the five patterns that they have in common.

Passionate Marriage – keeping love and intimacy alive in committed relationships – David Schnarch. This book covers everything from understanding love relationships to helpful ‘tools for connection’ to keeping the sparks alive years down the road.

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered – how couples http://www.healthcarewell.com/online-pharmacy/ really work – Wyn Bramley. This book, written in plain language is aimed at lay readers who wish to understand how couples consciously and unconsciously operate in successful and unsuccessful partnerships.

The New Male Sexuality – the truth about men, sex, and pleasure – Bernie Zilbergeld. This book addresses the most urgent questions of men today, deftly separating hype from the reality.

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari – Robin Sharma. An inspiring tale that shows a step by step pathway for living with greater courage, balance, abundance and joy.

Reviving Ophelia – saving the selves of adolescent girls – Mary Pipher. An eye opening look at the everyday dangers of being young and female, and how adults can help.

The Dance of Anger – a woman’s guide to changing the pattern of intimate relationships – Harriet Lerner. An exploration of how women get caught in the anger trap.

Broken Open – how difficult times can help us grow – Elizabeth Lesser. Showing how you can transform any difficult transition into a time of great strength and awakening.