[humanser] The patient ran away!

Sun Jul 14 20:08:17 UTC 2013

Jd, I just loved this article.  Now, I'd like to belong to that email list.
Is it exclusively for your inters?  Boy, that's a "put on the spot" question
isn't it?

You baited and hooked me with the article!

-----Original Message-----
From: humanser [mailto:humanser-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of JD Townsend
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 2013 3:48 PM
To: Human Services Mailing List
Subject: Re: [humanser] The patient ran away!

Hello:

Oh yes (smile).  This happens frequently with resistant patients, especially
if they were brought to psychotherapy against their will or brought in by
pretense, having been lied to about the purpose of the visit by a parent.

Below is an article from an email list I provide to psychotherapists I
supervise that I thought might interest you:

from the NEW YORK TIMES, Sunday Magazine

The Morality of Meditation.
By DAVID DeSTENO.  David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at
Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group.  He is
the author of the forthcoming book 'The Truth About
Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and M.
MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind.
With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity,
memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its
practical benefits is growing.  A number of 'mindfulness' training programs,
like that developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and
conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees
insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance,
leadership and productivity.
This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there's a bit
of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these
benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended.
Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business
weren't of the utmost concern to Buddha and other early meditation teachers.
As Buddha himself said, 'I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering
and the end of suffering.  For Buddha, as for many modern spiritual leaders,
the goal of meditation was as simple as that.
The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to
help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way,
allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other)
that commonly divide people from one another..
But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended effect -
the reduction of suffering - empirically demonstrable?
To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by the
psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaélle Desbordes
and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an experiment whose
publication is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.  We
recruited 39 people from the Boston area who were willing to take part in an
eight-week course on meditation (and who had never taken any such course
before).  We then randomly assigned 20 of them to take part in weekly
meditation classes, which also required them to practice at home using
guided recordings.  The remaining 19 were told that they had been placed on
a waiting list for a future course.
After the eight-week period of instruction, we invited the participants to
the lab for an experiment that purported to examine their memory, attention
and related cognitive abilities.
But as you might anticipate, what actually interested us was whether those
who had been meditating would exhibit greater compassion in the face of
suffering.  To find out, we staged a situation designed to test the
participants' behavior before they were aware that the experiment had begun.
WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or
she) found three chairs, two of which were already oc'cup'ied.
Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair.  As he waited, a fourth person,
using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot, entered the room and
audibly sighed in pain as she leaned uncomfortably against a wall.  The
other two people in the room - who, like the woman on crutches, secretly
worked for us - ignored the woman, thus confronting the participant with a
moral quandary.  Would he act compassionately, giving up his chair for her,
or selfishly ignore her plight?
The results were striking.  Although only 16 percent of the nonmeditators
gave up their seats - an admittedly disheartening fact - the proportion rose
to 50 percent among those who had meditated.  This increase is impressive
not solely because it occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but
also because it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit
considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in distress - what
psychologists call the bystander effect - reduces the odds that any single
individual will help.  Nonetheless, the meditation increased the
compassionate response threefold.
Although we don't yet know why meditation has this effect, one of two
explanations seems likely.  The first rests on meditation's documented
ability to enhance attention, which might in turn increase the odds of
noticing someone in pain (as opposed to being lost in one's own thoughts).
My favored explanation, though, derives from a different aspect of
meditation: its ability to foster a view that all beings are interconnected.
The psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I have found that any marker of
affiliation between two people, even something as subtle as tapping their
hands together in synchrony, causes them to feel more compassion for each
other when distressed.  The increased compassion of meditators, then, might
stem directly from meditation's ability to dissolve the artificial social
distinctions - ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like - that divide us.
Supporting this view, recent findings by the neuroscientists Helen Weng,
Richard Davidson and colleagues confirm that even relatively brief training
in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas
associated with empathic understanding of others' distress - areas whose
responsiveness is also modulated by a person's degree of felt associations
with others.
So take heart.  The next time you meditate, know that you're not just
benefiting yourself, you're also benefiting your neighbors, community
members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you'll feel
their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well..

JD

-----Original Message-----
From: Gerardo Corripio
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 2013 10:47 AM
To: Human Services Mailing List
Subject: [humanser] The patient ran away!

  HI guys
An experience I'll never forget during private practice is the
following: It was a Monday here in Mexico; a holiday that one wants to stay
at home, or go out. Anyway just starting to eat breakfast when a call came
about a patient wanting to see me. There I go to reach the appointment; the
patient waits outside while my mother takes her basic info (she's my
secretary);the patient is a teenager whose probably wanted to commit suicide
(my mother told me later she had an arm in a sleen and looked very very
scared); we later found out her mother was the one who called to make the
appointment. Anyhow I found it easy to go outside quickly and get a drink of
water since that's my usual routine.
One minute I was hearing the mother give the info to my mother, and the next
suddenly the door closed, the mother said we'll see if we come back later
and everybody left! How did I feel? You can imagine! Have any of this
happened to you before?

--
Gera
Saludos desde Tampico, Tamaulipas México
acseso+subscribe-ios at googlegroups.com Foro/lista donde tomando en cuenta 
acseso+las
capacidades de cada miembro, aprenderémos entretodos el uso, y sacarémos el
máximo de nuestros Iphones! Los espero!

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JD Townsend LCSW
Helping the light dependent to see.
Daytona Beach, Earth, Sol System 

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