Posts Tagged ‘mental illness’

Author, Life Coach, BPD and Mental Health Coach, A.J. Mahari will be interviewing Dr. Judith P. Siegel, Ph.D., LCSW, on Wednesday September 1, 2010 at 6pm EST on her Psyche Whisperer Radio Show Do you overreact to many things emotionally? Do you feel easily triggered or easily angered? Are you unaware of what you are actually feeling? Are you sensitive to rejection or criticism? Do you withdraw often due to overwhelming emotions? Would you benefit from discovering a new way of processing impulsive feelings and thoughts and understand how overreacting emotionally can undermine your ability to think rationally in moment of crisis or stress? Well, in her book, Stop Overreacting – Effective Strategies For Calming Your Emotions, Dr. Siegel will give you practical information and and strategies to more effectively calm your emotions.

For more: Psyche Whisperer Radio Blog about the interview

 

You can also read more about this interview at: Psyche Whisperer Show Blog The archived show (after the interview takes place live) will be available on the above link as well.

For more: Psyche Whisperer Radio Blog about the interview

 

Searching stored memory for lessons we may have learned activates the higher areas of the brain which we use to be calculative in our actions.

For more: Psyche Whisperer Radio Blog about the interview

 

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 © Dr. Judith Siegel 2010 – All rights reserved.

A.J. Mahari, an author and Life Coach, talks about the importance of now and how each moment is like a raindrop. What is, is now. Goals and dreams are important but what is it that keeps people blocked from their goals and dreams in ways that take them out of the now?

Do you separate out your goals and dreams and your experience in the here-and-now of your life? This can be a major contributor to being blocked and/or feeling stuck. What you aren’t aware of, in the here-and-now, can help you so much in further understanding yourself in ways that can and will help you get unblocked and unstuck – into action – and be the catalyst that propels you forward into to taking necessary action-steps to achieve and realize your goals and dreams.

• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
• Self Help for Change – Healing and Recovery
• Loneliness is a Teacher
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation
• Achieve Your Goals
• Law of Attraction – Thoughts Determine Destiny

© A.J. Mahari, July 14 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Author and Life Coach, A.J. Mahari, in her Life Coach Zen series of videos, asks the question, “Where is there?” Is there some “there” you are trying to get to that you think is the destination that once arrived at will make everything okay? Do  you think that what you are needing or wanting, desiring, and looking for is out “there” somewhere?

Will make you better? Will make you happier? Will mean you finding the place at which all your goals and dreams are realized?

• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
• Self Help for Change – Healing and Recovery
• Loneliness is a Teacher
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation
• Achieve Your Goals
• Law of Attraction – Thoughts Determine Destiny

© A.J. Mahari, July 14, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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I have a new radio show. I am looking for guests too if you’re intersted. The show is called Psyche Whisperer. In many ways that what I do. In many ways, that’s what people have called me. In a sense this goes deeper than my life coaching work, however, the journey that I have taken from the brokenness of my childhood to where I am today has in fact given me a very profound understanding of many aspects of the human psyche. I have been told by many who know me and many who have appreciated my work, over the years, that I am somewhat of a whisperer.

However, that’s that. It’s a meaningful title to me. I hope it will be a meaningful title to listeners. At first it may be somewhat confusing, I don’t know. Time will tell.

I believe that everyone has the potential to be a psyche whisperer of sorts when there is willingness, openness, and awareness. So much of everything we experience in life, so much of what we focus on in life, all, at some point or other, in some way or other, does have to do with our individual and collective psyches.  This makes any and all topics relevant to this show.

If you’d like to be a guest on my show please email me at psychewhisperer(at)yahoo.ca and tell me about yourself and what you’d like to talk about. Perhaps you’ve written a book. Perhaps you have an active blog. Maybe you offer an interesting service. Perhaps you’ve had an interesting journey in your life thus far.

This show will be fairly ecclectic. So, really, no topic is out of bounds. What shapes my individual psyche and your individual psyche plays a part in shaping what Jung termed the “collective psyche”. In that way, I see many different topics as being much more related than perhaps many people think at first glance.

© The Psyche Whisperer – A.J. Mahari July 6, 2010 – All rights reserved.

In all the world there is only one you. You unique and worthy. Unique because you are who you are, just as you are right now. You do not have to fit anyone else’s mold or expectation for you to be who you really are. The only person that you truly need to understand is yourself. From there profound understanding of others and life itself will flow. You are unique. Unique if you succeed. Unique when  you fail. Unique when you are happy. Unique when you are sad. You are unique. You are worthy.

© A.J. Mahari, June 24, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Gratitude is a way of being. Gratitude is an action undertaken. Gratitude is a both a blessing given and a blessing recieved. Gratitude is a love-boom-a-rang. What you have and give, share and set free – what you give will come back.  An attitude of gratitude is cultivated and nurtured when you accept yourself and when you are truly grateful for every thought, feeling, and experience, mindfully without judgment. Gratitude isn’t just about what you deem to be wanted or good. Be thankful and grateful for everything. Gratitude is a humble self-nurturing and lovingkind attitude that is your love in action to self and outward to others. Gratitude is possibility. Gratitude is mindful. Gratitude teaches. Gratitude heals.

© A.J. Mahari, June 17, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Many people might be wondering what life coaching is all about. You may be wondering, why would I want to work with a life coach? What would actually be the point of life coaching? Life coach A.J. Mahari talks about how life coaching can play a central role in many facets of people’s lives, self help, personal growth, self improvement, mental health and wellness. Life coaching helps people to gain more awareness about what they need and/or want to change in their lives to have more peace, balance, and happiness. Life coaching with A.J. Mahari is client-centered and based in humanistic positive psychology. It is a sacred process between coach and client.

A.J. stresses the importance of her role as a compassionate, supportive, and non-judgmental listener. Life coaching supports the client and validates the client’s experience and concerns. A.J. sees her role as being a touchstone for her client’s personal growth. She reflects back to each clients what she hears them saying. She gives feedback and is also an educator. Life coaching is about living an examined life and learning new tools and skills to help you live a more authentic life. Life coaching also supports the client’s quest to identify goals, map out strategy to achieve those goals.

If you are asking yourself, what is life coaching, and or why life coaching? This just might mean you are interested. That you see potential to gain valuable insight and awareness into the kind of change you need and want to introduce into your life to achieve your goals and dreams. Asking about what life coaching is and why life coaching is a great beginning to taking the next step. An action step. Booking a session and finding out how A.J.’s life coaching can be helpful to you.

Coaching Sessions

1 Session $80.00 2 Sessions $160.00 6 Sessions $450.00 10 Sessions $750.00

© A.J. Mahari and Touchstone Life Coaching, June 11, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Life Coach A.J. Mahari invites you to think about any illusions you may be operating from in your life and to awaken from them. Do you have doubts about choices or decisions that you’ve made? Are you feeling stuck and trapped in situations, circumstances, or relationships, feeling victimized because perhaps you aren’t as aware as you will benefit from being about the fact that you have indeed made choices. Choices that maybe aren’t serving you well. Are you stuck with these choices? Do you want to remain attached to that illusion? Or do you want to awaken to a more authentic way of living your life?

You can set yourself free from illusions about love, illusions about your past, illusions based upon how others may have defined you. Illusions are the inauthentic stories that we tell ourselves based upon negative experience or negative perception of ourselves through the ideas, statements, and opinions of others. Are you aware of your illusions? Are you kidding yourself about something? Are you choosing to remain trapped in painful denial of something? Your authentic self awaits your setting it free from any and all of your illusions.

© A.J. Mahari, June 10, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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How You Relate To Yourself Affects How You Relate To Others

Relationships are complicated. Relationships are often thought of as being vehicles to meet needs, share things with others, and more importantly for so many people, to not be alone. Relationships are often thought of by many as being central to what defines them. What happens if your relationship is defining you, whether you have been aware of that or not, and then your relationships is chaotic or troubled and/or fails or ruptures? The answer to that question will hinge upon how well you know yourself – who  you are really are. It will also hinge upon the degree to which you know how to be there for yourself – to soothe yourself, be kind to yourself, and to nurture yourself.

How can you know and experience healthy love with and from someone else if it isn’t a part of how you relate to yourself first?

Before you can really successfully address relationships difficulties with others you will first benefit from understanding much more about yourself. What is the state of your relationship with and to yourself? This is an essential question to pose that many benefit from exploring in the life coaching process. Seeking to answer this question can help you to identify and clarify your goals. In life coaching, I help people to not only identify and clarify their goals but also to then do the work necessary in how they feel and think about themselves that will help them to not be trying to relate to others as a means of avoiding Self.

Coaching Sessions

1 Session $80.00 2 Sessions $160.00 6 Sessions $450.00 10 Sessions $750.00

The understanding of love so many live with can be more of an illusion than it is reality. This creates toxicity in many relationships. Fighting harder through discord and distress and often even abuse will not make healthy love become reality. Life coaching can help you to understand how to unravel the nature of the patterns of relating you have become involved with that leave you looking for love in all the wrong places.

Relating to others as a means of avoiding who you really are, or as a way of trying to have someone else meet you needs for you, or you meet needs for someone else, is at the heart of so much codependence. Codependence is a not a healthy relationship model. It is not a recipe for happiness or contentment. It is a breeding ground for anger, hurt, frustratation, pain, chaos and turmoil – not to mention distrust, alientation and getting stuck. Unhealthy relating that can become toxic tears away at the fibre or who you really are. People lose themselves more and more to these relational dynamics.

• How To Identify a Toxic Relationship
• Break Free of the BPD Maze – Recovery For Non Borderlines
• Dilemma on The Other Side of BPD – Overcoming Denial about BPD and Love – Loved Ones of BPD
• Inside The Borderline Mind For Loved Ones of BPD
• Loneliness Is a Teacher
• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life
• Thoughts Determine Your Destiny
• Achieve Your Goals
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation

I life coach many people who, in the process of our work together, find their way out of this maze of trying to be filled up, understood, and/or validated by other people. I also work with many who are the person trying to fill up, validate, or understand the illogical in trying to meet needs for others that they need to meet for themselves.

This relational dynamic - this way of relating does not make room for healthy love. The fact that the struggle and the issues may feel familiar often gives people an illusion of being loved or of loving.

Can you relate to this? If so, do you want to free yourself from this painful way of  relating and having relationships? Do you want to be able to love yourself and meet your own needs? If you can relate to this and you are answering yes to these questions I hope you will purchase life coaching sessions with me so that I can support you in learning more about the lessons that relationships are trying to teach you and the many reasons why you haven’t been able, thus far, to find the relational peace and happiness you really want.

© A.J. Mahari, June 5, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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A.J. Mahari is a Life Coach who also understands that strategy is important to the client’s work. Developing strategy is part of the journey between the client and the coach as the client searches to identify what he or she needs. This means that as part of the coaching process I assist you in not only identifying your needs, goals, desires, and your dreams, but I also help you to plan a personal strategy that will work for you as the individual that you are. Strategy that works for you, that feels natural for you, that has meaning to and for you and that can help you to implement and design your strategy going forward.

In the life coaching process it can be very important to work with a coach, like A.J. Mahari, who is very skilled in the reality that change takes strategy to identify, implement, and support. Strategy involves the action steps that will drive your process of self-improvement, personal growth, coping more effectively, change, and/or recovery, moving forward.

“Water is never tired of flowing” You need not tire of growing. Believe in yourself and in what you know you want/need to change. Strategy is but one method of learning skills and of learning to use your strengths as tools to help you unblock yourself, and like water, that’s never tired of flowing, navigate your way effectively around the rock-like obstacles that are blocking you at this juncture of your journey.

For some clients it will take a little more time to awaken to actually strategizing – to be ready to do the work necessary to actually map out strategy. Some people really need to further explore where they are right now gaining more insight and awareness in the here and now. Your first action step is to purchase a coaching session. From there we can explore your next steps together.

Life coaching supports the client’s self-affirming strategy while also mirroring back to the client any negative or self-destructive and goal-blocking patterns, habits, ways of thinking that block the client’s ability to more clearly and productively implement an effective strategy to meet his or her goals.

© A.J. Mahari – All rights reserved.

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Mental Health Coaching Services

Mental Health Coaching is a more specialized niche within over-all Life Coaching. A.J. Mahari has been working in this area of coaching for many years now. Her expertize comes from her own life challenges and experience, as well as some College and University education. A.J. is not a mental health professional, hwoever. A.J. is an excellent, compassionate, and validating listener. She provides her clients with support, information, feedback, well-informed questions, and helps clients to identify goals and strategize to meet those goals. Often for those with any form or type of mental illness, even where recovery is possible, the over-all framework of mental health coaching is one that stresses coping and education about the client’s mental illness and empowering the client to make choices that can produce positive change in their quality of life and ability to cope.

You may benefit from A.J. Mahari’s Mental Health Coaching if you feel out of balance in your emotional and/or relational life. Talking things over with A.J. can help you to clarify what you want and need in your life and what you can do to empower yourself toward identifying, meeting, and accomplishing those goals. Perhaps you aren’t happy in a current relationship and you want to get clarity. Perhaps you have identified some pattern in your relationships that is blocking you from living a more balanced, peaceful, and happy life. Maybe you want to become more interdependent. Many people are involved in relating in ways that are codependent and resultingly very painful and they don’t often realize this. Perhaps you still need to discover more about who you really are.

A.J. Mahari is an advocate for helping others to help and empower themselves by fostering and nurturing the liberation of each client’s authentic inner self. It is important to identify the path of change for each individual that is the way toward choosing and creating the change that they hunger for. It is the change that will further reveal each individual’s own personal path of ever-increasing authenticity. Change is a constant in life. We are always learning, growing, healing, and changing. Developing a personal style of mastery with one’s own change is not only a way to recover, heal, or grow, but it is the sacred path of spiritual change. It is the path upon which each soul seeks to leave its footprint in the ever-shifting sands of authentic self-actualization.

A.J. also works extensively with many clients with mental health challenges. Mental health coaching involves support for those diagnosed with a mental illness and/or their loved ones and actively involves exploring and identifying coping strategies. With an emphasis on the client finding his or her way forward in life through identifying goals, planning appropriate and needed action, and then supporting each client in following through on planned exercises and strategies to attain his or her goals. I support the client’s own determined choice and making of decisions that are the foundation of needed and/or desired change in coping, functioning, and living.

Each individual client I coach determines the pace and style of his or her own coaching process and experience. I offer mental health coaching services that are relevant for people with very different life experiences and mental health needs.

As a life coach I provide a caring, compassionate, safe, confidential, non judgemental, validating and supportive relationship within which clients can feel empowered to explore their present-day needs. I essentially act as a human mirror for my clients. I share with my clients an outside and unbiased perspective as to what I observe in listening to their feelings, experiences, and concerns.

 © Touchstone Life Coaching Services and A.J. Mahari 2002-2010 – All rights reserved.

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The following is an excerpt from the book The Untethered Soul
by Michael A. Singer
Published by New Harbinger Publications; October 2007;$16.95US; 978-1-57224-537-2
Copyright © 2007 Michael A. Singer

Chapter 17 – Contemplating Death

It is truly a great cosmic paradox that one of the best teachers in all of life turns out to be death. No person or situation could ever teach you as much as death has to teach you. While someone could tell you that you are not your body, death shows you. While someone could remind you of the insignificance of the things that you cling to, death takes them all away in a second. While people can teach you that men and women of all races are equal and that there is no difference between the rich and the poor, death instantly makes us all the same.

The question is, are you going to wait until that last moment to let death be your teacher? The mere possibility of death has the power to teach us at any moment. A wise person realizes that at any moment they may breathe out, and the breath may not come back in. It could happen any time, in any place, and your last breath is gone. You have to learn from this. A wise being completely and totally embraces the reality, the inevitability, and the unpredictability of death.

Any time you’re having trouble with something, think of death. Let’s say you’re the jealous type, and you can’t stand anyone being close to your mate. Think about what will happen when you’re no longer here. Is it really all that romantic that your loved one should live alone with no one to care for them? If you can get past your personal issues, you’ll find that you want the person you love to be happy and to have a full and beautiful life. Since that is what you want for them, why are you bothering them now just for talking to someone?

It shouldn’t take death to challenge you to live at your highest level. Why wait until everything is taken from you before you learn to dig down deep inside yourself to reach your highest potential? A wise person affirms, “If with one breath all of this can change, then I want to live at the highest level while I’m alive. I’m going to stop bothering the people I love. I’m going to live life from the deepest part of my being.”

This is the consciousness necessary for deep and meaningful relationships. Look how callous we get with our loved ones. We take it for granted that they’re there and that they’ll continue to be there for us. What if they died? What if you died? What if you knew that this evening would be the last time you’d get to see them? Imagine that an angel comes down and tells you, “Straighten up your affairs. You will not awake from your sleep tonight. You’re coming to me.” Then you’d know that every person you see that day, you’d be seeing for the last time. How would you feel? How would you interact with them? Would you even bother with the little grudges and complaints you’ve been carrying around? How much love could you give the ones you love, knowing it would be the last time you’d get to be with them? Think about what it would be like if you lived like that every moment with everyone. Your life would be really different. You should contemplate this. Death is not a morbid thought. Death is the greatest teacher in all of life.

Take a moment to look at the things you think you need. Look at how much time and energy you put into various activities. Imagine if you knew you were going to die within a week or a month. How would that change things? How would your priorities change? How would your thoughts change? Think honestly about what you would do with your last week. What a wonderful thought to contemplate. Then ponder this question: If that’s really what you would do with your last week, what are you doing with the rest of your time? Wasting it? Throwing it away? Treating it like it’s not something precious? What are you doing with life? That is what death asks you.

Let’s say you’re living life without the thought of death, and the Angel of Death comes to you and says, “Come, it’s time to go.” You say, “But no. You’re supposed to give me a warning so I can decide what I want to do with my last week. I’m supposed to get one more week.” Do you know what Death will say to you? He’ll say, “My God! I gave you fifty-two weeks this past year alone. And look at all the other weeks I’ve given you. Why would you need one more? What did you do with all those?” If asked that, what are you going to say? How will you answer? “I wasn’t paying attention . . . I didn’t think it mattered.” That’s a pretty amazing thing to say about your life.

Death is a great teacher. But who lives with that level of awareness? It doesn’t matter what age you are; at any time you could take a breath and there may never be another. It happens all the time — to babies, to teenagers, to people in mid-life — not just to the aged. One breath and they’re gone. No one knows when their time will be. That’s not how it works.

So why not be bold enough to regularly reflect on how you would live that last week? If you were to ask this question of people who are truly awakened, they wouldn’t have any problem answering you. Not a thing would change inside of them. Not a thought would cross their minds. If death were to come in an hour, if death were to come in a week, or if death were to come in a year, they would live exactly the same way as they’re living now. There is not a single thing they carry inside of their hearts that they would rather be doing. In other words, they are living their lives fully and are not making compromises or playing games with themselves.

You have to be willing to look at what it would be like if death was staring you in the face. Then you have to come to peace within yourself so that it doesn’t make any difference whether it is or not. There is a story of a great yogi who said that every moment of his life he felt as though a sword were suspended above his head by a spiderweb. He lived his life with the awareness that he was that close to death. You are that close to death. Every time you get in the car, every time you walk across the street, and every time you eat something, it could be the last thing you do. Do you realize that what you’re doing at any moment is something that someone was doing when they died? “He died eating dinner . . . He died in a car accident, two miles from his home . . . She died in a plane wreck on a trip to New York . . . He went to bed and never woke up . . .” At some point, this is how it happened to somebody. No matter what you’re doing, you can be sure somebody died that way.

You must not be afraid to discuss death. Don’t get upright about it. Instead, let this knowledge help you to live every moment of your life fully, because every moment matters. Thar’s what happens when somebody knows they only have a week left. You can be certain that they would tell you that the most important week they ever had was that last week. Everything is a million times more meaningful in that final week. What if you were to live every week that way?

Copyright © 2007 Reprinted with permission by New Harbinger Publications, Inc. From the book Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer http://www.newharbinger.com/productdetails.cfm?SKU=5372

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By Tal Ben Shahar,
Author of The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life

“I am a human being: nothing human is foreign to me.”
-Terentius

It was when I welcomed unhappiness, that I became happier. My most significant psychological breakthrough came when I realized, truly internalized the notion, that it was OK for me to be sad, that there was nothing wrong with feeling dispirited, stressed, lonely, or anxious — that it was just fine to be human. Allowing myself to freely experience negative emotions did not only weaken these sentiments, it also intensified the positive ones.

Acceptance is a prerequisite for a healthy emotional life. When we accept ourselves, when we welcome everything that is human about us, we open up a space within which we can act, and feel. If we repress an emotional reaction and refuse to accept it — whether anger or disappointment or joy — we create a knot in the channels that make up our emotional system. The same system is used for the flow of all emotions — positive and negative — and if we block the flow of one emotion it affects our ability to experience other emotions. For example, if I do not accept my agitation after having made a mistake I will hinder my ability to experience joy when something good happens to me.

At the onset of negative emotions we have a choice — to stifle and reject or to accept and experience. What we choose to do at that moment affects our emotional life in general because the emotional system as a whole is affected. Closing off the emotional valve to the flow of negative emotions inevitably restricts future flow of positive emotions. We cannot eat the cake (deny the free flow of negative emotions) and leave it whole (enjoy the free flow of positive emotions). Pain and joy are two sides of the same coin and there is a symmetry between our capacity to experience one and the other. In the words of psychologist Abraham Maslow: “By protecting himself against the hell within himself, he also cuts himself off from the heaven within.”

We can’t have it both ways — stifling negative emotions while expecting a free flow of positive ones. We have to choose whether or not to allow ourselves to fully experience our humanity — its sorrows, at times, but also its joys.

To accept ourselves is not necessarily to like what we did or to approve of it, but rather to forgive ourselves. To forgive, in Sanskrit, is to untie — when we forgive we untie an emotional knot and unclog the emotional system. And it is when we allow our emotions to flow freely — when we experience the lows and the highs, the pain and the pleasure, the sorrows and joys — that we are, as we can and ought to be, fully human.
 

©2009 Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D, author of The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life

Author Bio
Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D., author of The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life, is the New York Times bestselling author of Happier. He taught one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history, and he currently consults and lectures around the world to multinational organizations, the general public, and at-risk populations. He obtained his Ph.D. in organizations behavior and his B.A. in philosophy and psychology from Harvard.

For more information, visit www.talbenshahar.com

By Paul C. Holinger, M.D., M.P.H., author of What Babies Say Before They Can Talk

Human beings appear to have approximately nine built-in feelings at birth. These findings are based on the work of researchers such as Darwin, Demos, Ekman, Izard, Nathanson, and, especially, Tomkins. These feelings later combine with each other and experience to form our complex emotional life. Understanding these feelings and how they work can make a world of difference for you and your baby.

The two positive feelings are interest and enjoyment; the feeling which resets the nervous system and gets it ready for other stimuli is called surprise; and the six negative feelings are distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust (a reaction to bad taste) and dissmell (a reaction to bad odors). Each of these feelings is signaled by a specific facial expression in your baby. These facial expressions provide the signals which help you understand what your baby is feeling. These nine feelings operate on a scale from low to high: interest-to-excitement, enjoyment-to-joy, surprise-to-startle, distress-to-anguish, anger-to-rage, fear-to-terror, shame-to-humiliation, and varying levels of disgust and dissmell.

There are some easy ways to use this information productively for you and your child. We call it the five keys in infant and child development. These keys can help enhance potential and prevent problems.

Key #1 – Allow the Full, Reasonable Expression of All Feelings
Allowing – and encouraging – the expression of these feelings is one of the most important aspects of establishing good communication with your child and nurturing healthy emotional development. By encouraging the baby’s interest, you learn what your baby has passion for. Interest – or curiosity – is at the root of all our exploratory, learning, discovering processes. Understanding where his/her passions and interests lie will enable your child later to make decisions about education, career, and spouse much easier with much more self-awareness.

We also want the child to express the so-called negative feelings – distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust, and dissmell. These signals are like an S.O.S. They tell us when a baby or child – or adult – is in trouble and needs help. If we somehow tell the baby or child not to express these feelings, the feelings will get bottled up and cause mischief inside, possibly resulting in a chronic sense of being misunderstood, not heard, not being able to trust the environment, angry, and despairing.

Key #2– Maximize the Signals of Interest and Enjoyment
It is especially helpful to recognize and support a child’s interest. In this way, you learn about your child, and your child learns about herself. Supporting a child’s curiosity enhances his/her exploratory and learning activities. Even if the child is interested in doing something disruptive – like noisily pulling out pots and pans and playing with them – there is usually a way to redirect the behavior to fit the child’s interest and the parent’s sanity. Remember, a child’s “misbehavior” may simply be the interest feeling at work.

Key #3 – Remove the Triggers for the Negative Feelings
The negative signals – distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust, dissmell – are simply S.O.S. cries that something is wrong… “please help!” By responding reasonably to these signals, you show your baby you understand him/her and that help is near at hand. This enhances tension-regulation. The major triggers of the negative signals in babies are hunger, fatigue, and pain (e.g., dirty diaper, illness, etc.).

Key #4 – Use Words, Even with Newborns, to Express Signals
By using words early to label feelings, you give your child a head start on the important process of putting words to action. This allows for greater awareness and thoughtfulness and decreases impulsivity. “That car horn surprised you, didn’t it?” “You are angry, aren’t you?” “You sure are interested in this.”

Key #5 – “Be Aware Your Child’s Desire to Be Like You”
Infants and young children are eager to be like Mom and Dad. This is a powerful tool in helping your child with tension regulation and polite conduct. Speaking and acting calmly, putting feelings into words, not hitting or spanking under any condition, saying “thank you,” “please” and “I apologize” to your child – all this will result in your child following your lead.

These are the five keys of infant and child development. They are based on the nine signals. These easy keys will help enhance your child’s potential and prevent problems.

Copyright ©2005 Paul C. Holinger, M.D.

Author:
Paul C. Holinger, M.D., M.P.H., is the author of What Babies Say Before They Can Talk (Published by Fireside/Simon & Schuster; August 2003; $14.00US/$22.00CAN; 0-7434-0667-2) Dr. Holinger is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has been working with children and adults for the last twenty-five years. He is Professor of Psychiatry at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center and is Training and Supervising Analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He earned a Masters of Public Health from Harvard University School of Public Health and has held fellowships in both Psychiatric and Psychosocial Epidemiology. He is a reviewer for the American Journal of Psychiatry, Pediatrics, Psychoanalytical Psychology, along with the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, to name a few. Dr. Holinger resides in the Chicago, IL area.

For more information, please visit the author’s Web site www.paulcholinger.com