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Thursday, January 31, 2013
Musical Interlude: Moody Blues, "Land of Make-Believe"
Moody Blues, "Land of Make-Believe"
- http://
For the Dreamers, still believing and hoping for a better world,
may you never stop dreaming...
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moody blues
"A Look to the Heavens"
"The delightful Dark Doodad Nebula drifts through southern skies, a tantalizing target for binoculars in the constellation Musca, The Fly. The dusty cosmic cloud is seen against rich starfields just south of the prominent Coalsack Nebula and the Southern Cross. Stretching for about 3 degrees across this scene the Dark Doodad seems punctuated at its southern tip (lower left) by globular star cluster NGC 4372.
Click image for larger size.
Of course NGC 4372 roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy, a background object some 20,000 light-years away and only by chance along our line-of-sight to the Dark Doodad. The Dark Doodad's well defined silhouette belongs to the Musca molecular cloud, but its better known alliterative moniker was first coined by astro-imager and writer Dennis di Cicco in 1986 while observing comet Halley from the Australian outback. The Dark Doodad is around 700 light-years distant and over 30 light-years long."
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astronomy stars galaxies universe
Chet Raymo, "Stretching The Imagination"
"Stretching The Imagination"
by Chet Raymo
"Professor, that stuff you spoke of in class this morning- about the beginning of the universe..."
"Well, you know how you said that the universe began 14 billion years ago as an infinitely small point...?"
Yes, that appears to be the case. An explosion from a point of infinite energy. Space and time expanding from nothing. Matter coalescing from cooling radiation. Stars, galaxies...
"To tell the truth, I'm having a hard time believing it. I mean, the idea that everything that exists today, the billions and billions of galaxies, stars and planets, life, everything, was contained within something no bigger than a pinprick. I mean, come on...do you really expect me to swallow that?"
You will recall that I listed some pretty convincing evidence: The galaxies are racing apart, as from a primordial explosion; the amount of hydrogen and helium in the universe is just what theory predicts for a Big Bang beginning; and, not least, we see the flash of the Big Bang in every direction of space, with precisely the predicted spectrum.
"Yeah, I know. I understand most of that stuff. But I keep coming back to the idea of the whole universe contained within a pinprick. I mean, it's impossible to imagine."
It is difficult to imagine, I'll grant you. But not impossible. Mathematically, it can be described exactly. Mathematics is a big help to the imagination.
"It sounds impossible."
Let me tell you a story. More than 2,000 years ago in Alexandria, Egypt, there were two fellows, named Eratosthenes and Aristarchus. They were excellent mathematicians. Eratosthenes was a geographer. He imagined that the Earth was a sphere. He figured out how to measure the size of the sphere by using shadows cast by the Sun at Alexandria and another place down the valley of the Nile. He used some mathematics that at the time was pretty advanced stuff- geometry, trig.
He calculated the size of the Earth and got it nearly dead-on, without ever leaving Alexandria. That's what I mean about mathematics being an aid to the imagination. Then Aristarchus used the size of the Earth to figure out the sizes and distances of the Sun and the Moon. He observed eclipses of the Moon, and measured the time it takes the moon to move through the shadow of the Earth. Then he did some high-powered mathematics with circles and triangles. According to his calculations, the Sun is many times bigger than the Earth.
Aristarchus told his fellow Alexandrians about his discovery. If the Earth is the size of a grape, he may have said, then the Sun is the size of a melon. They laughed. Any fool can see that the Sun is tiny compared to the vast, wide Earth. Why, for heaven's sake, one can cover up the Sun with the tip of one's little finger, but travel across the Earth for weeks without ever leaving Egypt. The Sun bigger than the Earth? No way, it was simply impossible to imagine.
"But. .."
And Aristarchus got one crucial observation wrong, through no fault of his own. In fact, the relative sizes of the Earth and Sun are more like a grape and a washing machine, something every school child accepts today. The moral of the story is- the "impossible" can turn out to be true.
"But the whole universe contained within a pinprick? It violates common sense."
Einstein once said that common sense is the collection of prejudices we acquire by age 18. I'm not telling you to believe the Big Bang if you don't want to, but keep your options open. One generation's impossibility often turns out to be the next generation's common sense.
"You're asking me to take it on faith?"
Yes, on faith. But not on blind faith. As we saw this morning in class, there is impressive observational evidence. The calculations are based on Einstein's general theory of relativity, which has many important successes to its credit. Then there's the record of success by the successors of Eratosthenes and Aristarchus. Just think of all the scientific discoveries that were thought to be nonsense in their time. The Earth going around the Sun. The evolution of life over bilions of years. Continents drifting and colliding. A chemical blueprint for a human being in the DNA of a single microscopic cell. And besides, it's a wonderful, wonderful story- a universe unfolding from a mathematical point!
"Yeah, it's an wonderful story, all right. But..."
"But I still don't believe it."
- http://
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Chet Raymo
The Daily "Near You?"
Bronx, New York, USA. Thanks for stopping by.
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"Incestuous Amplification, Economics Edition"
"Incestuous Amplification, Economics Edition"
by Paul Krugman
"It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble,
it's what we
that ain't so."
- Will Rogers
"Back during the early days of the Iraq debacle, I learned that the military has a term for how highly dubious ideas become not just accepted, but viewed as certainties. "Incestuous amplification" happen when a closed group of people repeat the same things to each other – and when accepting the group's preconceptions itself becomes a necessary ticket to being in the in-group. A fundamentally flawed notion – say, that the Germans can't possibly attack though the Ardennes – becomes part of what everyone knows, where "everyone" means by definition only people who accept the flawed notion. We saw that in the run-up to Iraq, where perfectly obvious propositions – the case for invading is very weak, the occupation may well be a nightmare – weren't so much rejected as ruled out of discussion altogether; if you even considered those possibilities, you weren't a serious person, no matter what your credentials.
Which brings me to the fiscal debate, characterized by the particular form of incestuous amplification
Greg Sargent
calls the Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop.
I've already blogged
about my Morning Joe appearance and
Scarborough's reaction
, which was to insist that almost no mainstream economists share my view that deficit fear is vastly overblown.
As Joe Weisenthal points out
, the reality is that among those who have expressed views very similar to mine are the chief economist of Goldman Sachs; the former Treasury secretary and head of the National Economic Council; the former deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve; and the economics editor of the Financial Times. The point isn't that these people are necessarily right (although they are), it is that Scarborough's attempt at argument through authority is easily refuted by even a casual stroll through recent economic punditry.
But these people aren't part of the in-group, and if they do make it into the in-group's conversation at all, it's only by
blurring their message
sufficiently that the in-group doesn't understand it. And at this point, of course, all the Very Serious People have committed their reputations so thoroughly to the official doctrine that they almost literally can't hear any contrary evidence."
- http://
Related: "Incestuous Amplification and the Beltway Feedback Loop",
- http://
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Paul Krugman
Climate Change: "Humans Have Already Set In Motion 69 Feet Of Sea Level Rise"
"Humans Have Already Set In Motion 69 Feet Of Sea Level Rise"
by Chris Mooney
"Last week, a much discussed
new paper
in the journal "Nature" seemed to suggest to some that we needn't worry too much about the melting of Greenland, the mile-thick mass of ice at the top of the globe. The research found that the Greenland ice sheet seems to have survived a previous warm period in Earth's history -
the Eemian period
, some 126,000 years ago - without vanishing (although it did melt considerably).
But Ohio State glaciologist Jason Box isn't buying it. At Monday's
Climate Desk Live briefing
in Washington, D.C., Box, who has visited Greenland 23 times to track its changing climate, explained that we've already pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide 40 percent beyond Eemian levels. What's more, levels of atmospheric methane are a dramatic 240 percent higher - both with no signs of stopping. "There is no analogue for that in the ice record," said Box.
And that's not all. The present mass scale human burning of trees and vegetation for clearing land and building fires, plus our pumping of aerosols into the atmosphere from human pollution, weren't happening during the Eemian. These human activities are darkening Greenland's icy surface, and weakening its ability to bounce incoming sunlight back away from the planet. Instead, more light is absorbed, leading to more melting, in a classic feedback process that is hard to slow down.
"These giants are awake," said Box of Greenland's rumbling glaciers, "and they seem to have a bit of a hangover." Box also provided a large-scale perspective on how much sea level rise humanity has already probably set in motion from the burning of fossil fuels. The answer is staggering: 69 feet, including water from both Greenland and Antarctica, as well as other glaciers based on land from around the world. To make matters worse, there's also Antarctica, the other great planetary ice sheet, which contains 10 times as much total water as Greenland - much of which could also someday be translated into rising sea level. While Greenland is currently contributing twice as much water to sea level rise as Antarctica,
that situation could change
in the future. It's kind of as though we're in a situation of "ice sheet roulette" right now, wondering which one of the big ones will go first.
Scientists like Box aren't sure precisely when, or how fast, all that water will flow into the seas. They only know that in past periods of Earth's history, levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases and sea levels have
followed one another closely
, allowing an inference about where sea level is headed as it, in effect, catches up with the greenhouse gases we've unleashed. To be sure, the process will play out over vast time periods - but it has already begun, and sea level is starting to show a curve upward that
looks a lot like
...well, the semi-notorious "
hockey stick
So what can we do? For Box, any bit of policy helps. "The more we can cool climate, the slower Greenland's loss will be," he explained. Cutting greenhouse gases slows the planet's heating, and with it, the pace of ice sheet losses. In the meantime, to better understand where we're headed, Box has launched a scientific project called "Dark Snow," which seeks to fund a Greenland expedition to help determine just how much our darkening of the great ice sheet in this unprecedented "
Anthropocene" era
will push us well beyond Eemian territory. The video for that project is below. If the remote, dangerous science of ice sheets intrigues you enough (or scares you enough), then you definitely will want this research to succeed:
- http://
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"How It Really Is"
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"Tearing Down to Rebuild: Rethinking Complaining"
"Tearing Down to Rebuild: Rethinking Complaining"
by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOM
"When we spend all of our time complaining, we are in essence in constant destroy mode rather than building mode. We all know someone who has elevated the process of complaining to a high art. Sometimes funny, sometimes exhausting, these people have the ability to find a problem just about anywhere. In its more evolved form, complaining is simply the ability to see what's not working, in one's own life or in the external world, and it can be quite useful if followed to its natural conclusion—finding a solution and applying it. However, many of us don't get that far, and we find that complaining has become an end in itself. In small doses, this is not a big problem, but if complaining has become a huge part of our identities, it may be time to take a good look at how we are spending our energy.
Complaining is a person's way of acknowledging that they are not happy with the way things are. In a metaphorical way, when we complain or criticize, we are tearing down an undesirable structure in order to make room for something new. But if all we do is tear down, never bothering to summon the creative energy required to create something new, we are not fulfilling the process. In fact, we are at risk for becoming a stagnant and destructive force in our own lives and in the lives of the people we love. Another issue with complaining is that we sometimes tend to focus on other people, whom we can't change, as a way of deflecting attention from the one person we can change—ourselves. So transforming complaining into something useful is a twofold process that begins with turning our critical eye to look at things we can actually do something about, and then taking positive action.
When we find ourselves complaining, the last thing we need to do is get down on ourselves. Instead, we can begin by noticing that we are in the mode of wanting to make some changes. But rather than lashing out at somebody or an organization, we can look for an appropriate place to channel this energy—not our neighbor's house, but possibly parts of our own. Finally, we can ask ourselves the positive question of what we would like to create in the place of whatever it is we want to tear down. When we do this, we channel a negative habit into a creative process, thus using our energy to change the world around us in a positive way."
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Madisyn Taylor
The DailyOm
Kahlil Gibran, "The Madman"
"The Madman"
by Kahlil Gibran
"It was in the garden of a madhouse that I met a youth with a face pale and lovely and full of wonder. And I sat beside him upon the bench, and I said, "Why are you here?" And he looked at me in astonishment, and he said, "It is an unseemly question, yet I will answer you. My father would make of me a reproduction of himself; so also would my uncle. My mother would have me the image of her seafaring husband as the perfect example for me to follow. My brother thinks I should be like him, a fine athlete. And my teachers also, the doctor of philosophy, and the music-master, and the logician, they too were determined, and each would have me but a reflection of his own face in a mirror. Therefore I came to this place. I find it more sane here. At least, I can be myself."
Then of a sudden he turned to me and he said, "But tell me, were you also driven to this place by education and good counsel?"
And I answered, "No, I am a visitor."
And he answered, "Oh, you are one of those who live in the madhouse on the other side of the wall..."
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Kahlil Gibran
"Government to Dispose of Radioactive Waste By Putting It In Our SILVERWARE"
"Government to Dispose of Radioactive Waste
By Putting It In Our SILVERWARE"
by WashingtonsBlog
"The overwhelming scientific consensus is that
any amount of radiation – no matter how small – can cause cancer and other serious health effects
. (Current safety standards are based on
the ridiculous assumption
that everyone exposed is a healthy man in his 20s – and that radioactive particles ingested into the body cause no more damage than radiation hitting the outside of the body. In the real world, however,
even low doses of radiation can cause cancer
. Moreover, small particles of radiation – called "internal emitters" – which get inside the body are much more dangerous than general exposures to radiation. See
. And
radiation affects small children much more than full-grown adults
But the Department of Energy – the agency which is
responsible for the design, testing and production of all U.S. nuclear weapons
promotes nuclear energy
as one of its core functions, which has been
covering up nuclear accidents for decades
, and has
used mutant lines of human cells
to promote voodoo, anti-scientific arguments – proposes letting radiation into our silverware.
: "Even the deregulation-happy Wall St. Journal sounded shocked: "The Department of Energy is proposing to allow the sale of tons of scrap metal from government nuclear sites — an attempt to reduce waste that critics say could lead to radiation-tainted belt buckles, surgical implants and other consumer products. Having failed in the '80s and '90s to free the nuclear bomb factories and national laboratories of millions of tons of their radioactively contaminated scrap and nickel, the DOE is trying again. Its latest proposal is moving ahead without even an Environmental Impact Statement. Those messy EISs involve public hearings, so you can imagine the DOE's reluctance to face the public over adding yet more radiation to the doses we're already accumulating."
Congressman Markey
: "A Department of Energy proposal to allow up to 14,000 metric tons of its radioactive scrap metal to be recycled into consumer products was called into question today by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) due to concerns over public health. In a letter sent to DOE head Steven Chu, Rep. Markey expressed "grave concerns" over the potential of these metals becoming jewelry, cutlery, or other consumer products that could exceed healthy doses of radiation without any knowledge by the consumer. DOE made the proposal to rescind its earlier moratorium on radioactive scrap metal recycling in December, 2012.
The proposal follows an incident from 2012 involving Bed, Bath & Beyond stores in America recalling tissue holders made in India that were contaminated with the radio-isotope cobalt-60. Those products were shipped to 200 stores in 20 states. In response to that incident, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesperson advised members of the public to return the products even though the amount of contamination was not considered to be a health risk."
This is not the first time this has happened. As the Progressive
in 1998, radioactive scrap metal was ending up in everything from
silverware to frying pans and belt buckles
: "The Department of Energy has a problem: what to do with millions of tons of radioactive material. So the DOE has come up with an ingenious plan to dispose of its troublesome tons of nickel, copper, steel and aluminum. It wants to let scrap companies collect the metal, try to take the radioactivity out, and sell the metal to foundries, which would in turn sell it to manufacturers who could use it for everyday household products: pots, pans, forks, spoons, even your eyeglasses.
You may not know this, but the government already permits some companies under special licenses, to buy, reprocess and sell radioactive metal: 7,500 tons in 1996, by one industry estimate. But the amount of this reprocessing could increase drastically if the DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the burgeoning radioactive metal processing industry get their way. They are pressing for a new, lax standard that would do away with special permits and allow companies to buy and resell millions of tons of low-level radioactive metal. The standard the companies seek could cause nearly 100,000 cancer fatalities in the United States, by the NRC's own estimate." (A couple of years later, Congressman Markey successfully
most radioactive scrap … but now DOE is trying to bring it back.)
Radioactive scrap is a global problem. As Bloomberg
last year: "The major risk we face in our industry is radiation," said Paul de Bruin, radiation-safety chief for Jewometaal Stainless Processing, one of the world's biggest stainless-steel scrap yards. "You can talk about security all you want, but I've found weapons-grade uranium in scrap. Where was the security?"
More than 120 shipments of contaminated goods, including cutlery, buckles and work tools such as hammers and screwdrivers, were denied U.S. entry between 2003 and 2008 after customs and the Department of Homeland Security boosted radiation monitoring at borders. The department declined to provide updated figures or comment on how the metal tissue boxes at Bed, Bath & Beyond, tainted with cobalt-60 used in medical instruments to diagnose and treat cancer, evaded detection. "The general public basically isn't aware that they're living in a radioactive world," according to Ross Bartley, technical director for the recycling bureau, who said the contamination has led to lost sales. "Those tissue boxes are problematic because they're radioactive and they had to be put in radioactive disposal."
Abandoned medical scanners, food-processing devices and mining equipment containing radioactive metals such as cesium-137 and cobalt-60 are picked up by scrap collectors, sold to recyclers and melted down by foundries, the IAEA says. Dangerous scrap comes from derelict hospitals and military bases, as well as defunct government agencies that have lost tools with radioactive elements.
Chronic exposure to low doses of radiation can lead to cataracts, cancer and birth defects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A 2005 study of more than 6,000 Taiwanese who lived in apartments built with radioactive reinforcing steel from 1983 to 2005 showed a statistically significant increase in leukemia and breast cancer.
India and China were the top sources of radioactive goods shipped to the U.S. through 2008, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Bartley, a metallurgist who has tracked radioactive contamination since the early 1990s, said there's no evidence the situation has improved. Two years after an Indian scrap-metal worker died from radiation exposure, the world's second-most populous country hasn't installed alarms, the Ministry of Shipping said in December. "The same thing could easily happen again tomorrow," said Deepak Jain, 65, who owns the yard where the worker died. "We have no protection. The government promised a lot, but has delivered absolutely nothing."
Indeed, we are being bombarded with low-level radiation from all sides:
Above-ground nuclear tests
created "background" levels of radioactive cesium and iodine for the first time.
• Countries dump everything from radiation from
nuclear meltdowns
radioactive submarines
in the ocean.
And the air
• In Japan, radioactive crops are
being mixed
into non-irradiated foods.
• The U.S. apparently signed a pact with Japan agreeing that the
U.S. will continue buying seafood from Japan,
despite that food is not being tested for
radioactive materials
• Much of our food is now
intentionally irradiated
(The government has even
treated some people as guinea pigs.
What can we do? Counterpunch notes: "You can tell the DOE to continue to keep its radioactive metal out of the commercial metal supply, commerce, and our personal items. You can demand a full environmental impact statement. Comment deadline is Feb. 9, 2013. Email to:
(with an underscore after "scrap_"). Snail mail to: Jane Summerson, DOE NNSA, PO Box 5400, Bldg. 401K, AFB East Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185"
- http://
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"Federal Rule Limits Aid to Families Who Can't Afford Employers' Health Coverage"
"Federal Rule Limits Aid to Families Who Can't
Afford Employers' Health Coverage"
By Robert Pear
"When someone says, 'It's not the money,
it's the principle of the thing', it's the money."
by Kin Hubbard
WASHINGTON - "The Obama administration adopted a strict definition of affordable health insurance on Wednesday that will deny federal financial assistance to millions of Americans with modest incomes who cannot afford family coverage offered by employers. In deciding whether an employer's health plan is affordable, the Internal Revenue Service said it would look at the cost of coverage only for an individual employee, not for a family. Family coverage might be prohibitively expensive, but federal subsidies would not be available to help buy insurance for children in the family.
The policy decision came in a final regulation interpreting ambiguous language in the 2010 health care law. Under the law, most Americans will be required to have health insurance starting next year. Low- and middle-income people can get tax credits to help them pay premiums, unless they have access to affordable coverage from an employer. The law specifies that employer-sponsored insurance is not affordable if a worker's share of the premium is more than 9.5 percent of the worker's household income. The I.R.S. said this calculation should be based solely on the cost of individual coverage, what the worker would pay for ''self-only coverage.''
''This is bad news for kids,'' said Jocelyn A. Guyer, an executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. ''We can see kids falling through the cracks. They will lack access to affordable employer-based family coverage and still be locked out of tax credits to help them buy coverage for their kids in the marketplaces, or exchanges, being established in every state.''
In 2012, according to an annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, total premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance averaged $5,615 a year for single coverage and $15,745 for family coverage. The employee's share of the premium averaged $951 for individual coverage and more than four times as much, $4,316, for family coverage.
Under the I.R.S. rule, such costs would be considered affordable for a family making $35,000 a year, even though the family would have to spend 12 percent of its income for full coverage under the employer's plan.
The tax agency proposed this approach in August 2011 and made no change in the definition of ''affordable coverage'' despite protests from advocates for children and low-income people and many employers. Employers did not want to be required to pay for coverage of employees' dependents. But they said that family members should have access to subsidies so they could buy insurance on their own. However, that would have increased costs to the government, which would have been required to spend more on subsidies.
Paul W. Dennett, senior vice president of the American Benefits Council, which represents many Fortune 500 companies, said: ''Individuals who do not have affordable family coverage should be eligible for premium tax credits in the exchange. The final rule does not provide that.''
Under the law, people who go without insurance will generally be subject to tax penalties. In a separate proposed regulation issued on Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service said that the uninsured children and spouse of an employee would be exempt from the penalties if the cost of coverage for the entire family under an employer's plan was more than 8 percent of household income.
Bruce Lesley, the president of First Focus, a child advocacy group, said: ''The administration recognizes that the cost of family coverage will be unaffordable for many families. They will not have to pay the penalty. But that will not be much of a consolation to families who cannot get health insurance for their kids.''
The 2010 health care law extended Medicaid to many childless adults and others who were previously ineligible. The Supreme Court said the expansion of Medicaid was an option for states, not a requirement as Congress had intended. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said Wednesday that she wanted to use her discretion to prevent the imposition of tax penalties on certain uninsured low-income people in states that choose not to expand Medicaid. A rule proposed by her department would guarantee an exemption from the penalties for anyone found ineligible for Medicaid solely because of a state's decision not to expand the program. The administration said this was ''an appropriate use of the hardship exemption.''
About 20 states are expected to expand Medicaid; governors in other states are opposed or uncommitted. Many illegal immigrants, prisoners and members of certain religious groups opposed to the acceptance of insurance benefits will also be exempt from penalties if they forgo coverage, the administration said. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that 30 million people will be uninsured in 2016 and that 6 million of them will pay penalties."
- http://
Related: "How Obamacare Is Changing Your Health Benefits"
- http://
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Robert Pear
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Musical Interlude: Adiemus, "Adiemus"
Adiemus, "Adiemus"
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"A Look to the Heavens"
"Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.
Click image for larger size.
Many young stars from this cloud are visible in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way's close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud."
- http://
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astronomy galaxies stars universe
"Anxiety! Why We're Anxious and the Secret to Getting Better"
Why We're Anxious and the Secret to Getting Better"
By Reid Wilson
"Anxiety and its next of kin, fear, are arguably the oldest, most basic human emotions, bequeathed to us by a vast history of prehominid ancestors. We owe our survival as Homo sapiens to these emotions, which were literally built into our nervous systems as an evolutionary hedge against extinction. Yet today, while still protecting us from genuine danger, they've morphed into a multitude of extraneous and dysfunctional afflictions—panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, and all-purpose generalized anxiety disorder (summoning up anxieties on any and all occasions)—the only effect of which seems to be to torment us pointlessly.
When I began my practice, psychotherapists still knew precious little about anxiety, even though it was probably the commonest form of suffering among the clients we saw. By and large, it was considered a symptom of some deeper psychodynamic process, and analysts helped clients find the deep-seated meaning behind their fears. The working Freudian hypothesis of agoraphobia in women, for instance, was that they withdrew to their homes out of an unconscious fear that they'd become prostitutes.
It wasn't until the 1960s, when behavioral psychologist Joseph Wolpe's experimental research perfected relaxation techniques and systematic desensitization, that anxiety began to be treated as a separate problem. To treat a fear of dogs, for instance, Wolpe taught the patient how to become deeply relaxed. He then introduced imagery that evoked a weak anxiety response, such as seeing a dog from a great distance and chained behind a fence. Relaxation procedures counteracted the anxiety produced by that image until it no longer distressed the patient. Wolpe would then introduce a slightly stronger anxiety-provoking image, such as being 20 feet away from a fenced-in dog, until it, too, ceased to arouse anxiety. Progressing up the hierarchy of fears about dogs led to recovery.
When it came to working with anxious clients, my own biggest asset was my experience, early in my career, of treating chronic pain patients in a hospital setting. I discovered that there were a number of similarities between the way people handle chronic pain and the way they handle anxiety symptoms. Those in chronic pain will anticipate their next pain episode with dread, so even though an episode might last only 10 minutes twice a day, it can dominate a pain patient's waking hours.
Once I realized that I could substitute "panic attack" for "pain episode," I began to get my bearings on treating the panic in agoraphobics, who'd started getting referred to me after a series of stories in the national media gave the condition a label for the first time. At first, I'd been hesitant to accept these referrals, but soon changed my mind. "Wait a minute," I thought, "I know something about this." Soon I'd cobbled together a treatment procedure.
I started by teaching agoraphobic clients formal relaxation, although I knew from my struggles with pain patients that, while relaxation could help some, it would never be enough. Additionally, I expected to use systematic desensitization, because it had worked well for the few clients I'd seen who'd had specific phobias. But with clients who feared panic, the method failed me. Since a panic attack arrives so unexpectedly, the client instantly becomes aroused to the highest degree and feels out of control. I couldn't seem to undo that reflexive response by pairing relaxation with anxiety-provoking imagery of the event. Clients felt too scared to trust that these relaxation and desensitization skills would protect them.
I had to shift my thinking. I couldn't help my clients undercut the intensity of their fear through some formal procedure in my office. Instead of progressing up a list of anxiety-provoking situations, I needed to focus on the on-off switch of panic. These clients either avoided their anxiety and felt comfortable or faced the threat and zoomed up to peak anxiety. I had to address the moment of panic. When you anticipate an anxiety attack, you desperately want something you can do that will bring immediate relief. I figured my primary strategy needed to focus on skills for responding to the actual feeling of panic.
I continued to teach formal relaxation, encouraging my agoraphobic clients to practice daily for a number of weeks. Then, instead of working only with imagery, we created and rehearsed a simple, structured, three-step response for panicky situations. As they approached a fearful situation, their first job was to counter their racing thoughts by mentally stepping back, accessing what I called "The Observer," and objectively commenting on what they were noticing—what today we call "becoming mindful in the moment." For instance, they might tell themselves, "We're pulling into the parking lot, and I can feel my heart starting to race. I'm scared."
Second, they were to shift their attention immediately to their well-rehearsed breathing skills. Focusing on the breathing had two functions: it reduced the chance that clients would start hyperventilating, which increased the symptoms they were trying to reduce, and it required conscious awareness. That helped draw their attention away from their fearful thoughts.
The third step was to subvocalize specific motivating messages that supported their goal of approaching the threatening situation. The most prominent were those that conveyed their intention to manage their distress instead of remove it. The common themes were "It's OK to be anxious here" and "I can handle these feelings." This step was no magic bullet, but it reversed the not-so-helpful tendency of desperately seeking comfort, which increases the distress because it's an impossible goal in threatening moments. If clients could permit themselves to be somewhat anxious, they could learn to cope with their distress.
Once I'd developed this treatment approach, clients started getting better. After a while, I became a bit cocky about my clinical effectiveness. "No one else around here is doing this," I thought to myself. "I've figured out something new!" So I decided to write a self-help book based on what I'd learned. Then on one weekend in 1985, just as I completed the book, I got the proverbial wakeup call. I'd been looking through all my files to revel a little more in my successes and discovered that fully 40 percent of my clients had dropped out of therapy prematurely! None of them had said, "Dr. Wilson, this isn't really working for me. I think I'm going to quit therapy with you." They just didn't make another appointment. Needless to say, none of this treatment failure had been showing up on my radar.
Widening My Perspective:
After that rude awakening, I started searching for clinical studies on anxiety. I didn't have to look long, because the research field was beginning to explode. Studies on systematic desensitization confirmed what I'd noticed: it yielded a small improvement, but, overall, it wasn't any better than standard psychotherapy for treating agoraphobia. Replacing systematic desensitization was the new field of exposure-based therapy. Instead of training subjects to relax as they faced an image of the feared situation, researchers of this cutting-edge treatment asked subjects to expose themselves systematically to the situations they were avoiding, let themselves become anxious, and remain in the threatening situation. With each practice, researchers encouraged subjects to linger longer in the feared environment or move farther away from their safe zones. With time and repetition, their panic attacks subsided, and they could return to many of their previously avoided locations.
By the mid-1980s, exposure had become the first proven treatment of agoraphobia. However, it wasn't clear how long clients needed to practice each exposure and what degree of anxiety they needed to experience during each exposure session. These features of the treatment engendered numerous studies, with conflicting results. Then came a paper by Temple University therapists Edna Foa and Michael Kozak that suggested that exposure therapy might extend to all anxiety disorders. In 1986, they published what has become one of the most frequently cited psychology articles of all time, "Emotional Processing of Fear: Exposure to Corrective Information." This paper looked past the study of panic to the nature of fear itself.
Foa and Kozak's theory was that people who develop an anxiety disorder hold on to distorted information about themselves or their environment, which causes them distress. The faulty information is contained within the strong threatening feelings that are associated with their specific fear—what the authors called the "fear structure." They postulated that the only way for anxious clients to incorporate corrective information was for them to access the intense arousal associated with that specific fear and then linger in that state long enough, without blocking or muting their thoughts or feelings, to learn at a primal level that they're safe.
Foa and Kozak's theory helped me begin to see that, in order to improve, clients needed to experience close to the strongest level of anxiety they ever had in a feared situation, and stay in that situation much longer than I'd been suggesting. However, I had to confront my own timidity about assigning long, hard exposure practices. I was afraid that if I pushed clients, I'd chase them away. But when I went easy on my most troubled clients, letting them gradually work their way up their hierarchy of fears, they tended to drop out before making any gains. I decided to become more directive in my work, although I was still concerned about losing clients.
As I attempted to be a student of this prolonged, intense exposure, I struggled to teach my clients the behavioral model of repeated exposure, because it simply didn't fit my personality to be pushing only behavioral change. To balance this exposure treatment with a more comfortable personal style, I returned to my roots as a cognitive therapist, with one big change: I no longer challenged cognitive distortions sentence-by-sentence.
In the past, I'd spent multiple sessions helping clients identify and correct the errors within their catastrophic, mind-reading, black-or-white thinking, and other cognitive distortions. That process now seemed tedious to me and far too labor-intensive for my clients to tolerate. I felt we could have greater leverage if we worked together to address clients' beliefs instead of just their momentary thoughts. In addition, I wanted clients to know why they were practicing this new approach more than I cared about exactly what they practiced.
By that point, my referrals had broadened to the other anxiety disorders. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) became my new nemesis because those clients were so rigidly stuck in their obsessive beliefs. One OCD client was Camille, a 42-year-old mother of two, who feared "sickness" from rabies and from various objects that represented the death of her grandfather. An alcoholic, she drank a bottle of champagne every day, starting at about 5 p.m., when her major parenting chores were complete. Drinking was the only remedy she could find for her obsessions.
In typical exposure-based treatment, the therapist details every step of the procedure. With Camille, once I explained the principles behind OCD treatment, I reduced all of those procedural instructions to two. "To get better, first you must do just the opposite of what the disorder is compelling you to do: you need to generate doubt about getting sick from touching objects. Second, you must try to keep that feeling as long as possible." Then I did my best to look and sound confident, despite being unsure about my ability to turn simple theory into helpful practice.
To my (well-concealed) shock, Camille got better. After five sessions over six weeks, she was well on her way to recovery. She even had eight consecutive days without a drop of alcohol. When I asked her how she'd accomplished this, her answer included, "I'd touch a contaminated object and have such a strong urge to wash! But I'd remember what you said, and I wouldn't wash. Sometimes my arms went numb all the way up to my shoulders, but I wouldn't wash. And I'd say to myself, 'I hope that good doctor knows what he's talking about!'" Camille was willing to trust me enough to go against the demands of her disorder.
In 1988, I wanted to take another step in turning over more control to clients. I'd recently developed a brief-treatment protocol for individuals who feared flying. To find out what would happen if I reduced my attention to the details of each client's problems, focused on the broader principles of recovery, and encouraged clients to take greater ownership of their recovery plan, I designed a two-day group treatment for fearful fliers. A staff member from the corporate offices of American Airlines participated in the third group I held, and benefited from the treatment. Six months later, American contracted me to create a national program. Soon my weekend treatment group grew to 25 participants at a time. The weekend culminated in two round-trip "graduation flights" on Sunday afternoon.
I treated this crowd of clients using three central principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for anxiety disorders. The first principle is to convince clients that their anxiety stems from an exaggerated appraisal of the threat. One of the biggest obstacles to treatment is clients' catastrophic belief that something terrible is going to happen, and they won't be able to handle it. CBT strategies help clients reframe the severity of the problem they're facing so it becomes something they can handle. The socially anxious client might be embarrassed to stumble over his words, but he doesn't need to perceive himself as humiliated. The agoraphobic who's in good health might have a panic attack, but not a heart attack.
The first task of the team leaders—a senior pilot with American, a recovered fearful flier, and me—was to address the participants whose fears related to safety. We helped them become more familiar with pilot training, maintenance schedules, and airline safety records. Then we addressed the issues of those who were more concerned with their own anxiety by reframing their symptoms as normal and harmless features of the fight-or-flight response.
A second principle of CBT for anxiety is to dissuade clients from struggling against their anxious sensations. Since we're asking them to enter situations that they perceive as threatening, they need to expect that anxiety will come with the territory. If they fight and resist feeling anxious, paradoxically, they'll feel more anxiety. We encourage them to replace this demand with an accepting attitude like, "I can allow myself to feel anxious here."
In the flying program, after we challenged their catastrophic beliefs, we worked specifically on shifting their attitude about their anxiety to, "I can handle my anxiety, because I know my fears are exaggerated." We also taught them several skills to help them control panic, instead of trying to eliminate all anxiety.
A third principle of CBT for anxiety disorders is to counsel clients that the best way to turn off their "fear program" is to confront the feared event. In this case, the confrontation was in the form of taking a commercial flight. Their job was to enter and remain in the feared environment—to take the flight—while holding on to that attitude of acceptance: "It's OK for me to be anxious. I can handle it."
In many ways then, our flying program looked like the traditional cognitive-behavioral protocol, but I challenged the traditional CBT approach in three ways. First, because we worked with 25 participants, I couldn't target the specific thoughts and feelings of each one, as standard CBT treatment dictated. Second, because of our time constraints, we couldn't help the participants test out the validity of the principles through a series of behavioral assignments. Third, participants didn't gradually work their way up the hierarchy of fears: they moved directly from sitting in the classroom to engaging in the activity that was at the highest level of their fear hierarchy.
This project pushed my persuasive skills to the limit, but that was my objective. I wanted to find out how efficiently and quickly I could hand over a therapeutic protocol to clients so they could change their actions. About 80 percent of those who took the course completed the two graduation flights on Sunday afternoon. Some had refused to fly for more than a decade, so it was a huge accomplishment for them. It showed me that anxious clients can absorb some basic principles, learn to trust their validity, and then take major steps toward confronting their anxiety without a lot of handholding from a therapist.
From Foa to Barlow:
Then, from an eye-opening event in 1999, I committed myself to moving even more quickly and assertively in treatment. This required that I modify my procedures yet again, because I was spending too much time trying to help clients manage symptoms and the events that triggered those symptoms. I realized that the battle with anxiety is an internal one, and that I needed to start focusing on clients' avoidance or denial of their own feelings.
The catalyst for my change came when I was co-teaching a daylong workshop with psychologist David Barlow of Boston University, who's long been at the forefront of the research on anxiety treatment. During the workshop, he presented an eight-day intensive treatment model that he'd pioneered for individuals with agoraphobia. On day one, clients were asked to drink a half-liter of caffeinated water to ensure that they'd have a good anxious buzz during their exposure practices. The treatment goal by the end of the first day was to have clients face the highest fear on their hierarchy.
The idea of moving quickly didn't shock me, since I'd taken a similar tactic with the fear-of-flying program, but requesting that clients begin treatment by drinking caffeine to accelerate their symptoms—that was surprising! Then Barlow showed clips from an episode of 20/20 featuring his program, and it caught me off guard.
The video introduced a day-one exposure practice with an agoraphobic client whose biggest fear was being trapped in an elevator. As the client stood in the back of an elevator, crying, her whole body shaking, the therapist stood in front of the elevator door with her finger on the "open" button. She asked, "Are you ready for me to let the doors close?" The client hesitantly nodded, the therapist dropped her arm, and the doors began to close. The client quickly took one giant step forward and extended her arm to block the doors from closing. Just as quickly, the therapist reached over with her hand and pushed the client's arm down, saying, "Don't do that." The doors closed.
I was shocked. The therapist touched the client. Forcibly stopped the client. Admonished the client. I'd never do that! Even as a therapist conducting exposure practices, I was using a kinder, gentler approach. I'd have permitted the client to stop the elevator, and we'd have backed up to plan skills she could use to tolerate that closed space next time.
Later I asked Barlow what the therapist was saying to the client in the elevator as they were on their way up to the fifth floor for the first time. Was she reminding the client to practice her relaxing breath? Did she reassure her that the doors would open again in a short 45 seconds? Nope, he replied. The therapist didn't "help" at all. She only smiled and excitedly said to the client, "Look at you! You're doing it! You're doing it!"
Barlow was moving exposure practice to the extreme. He wasn't easing clients into their behavioral assignments: he directed them to drop their crutches, their sacred rituals, and their compulsive efforts to feel safe. His view was that clients needed to learn to tolerate feeling profoundly unsafe. He had an eagle eye for even the smallest ways people shield themselves from distress. If a client sat down in his office and began to take off his jacket, Barlow would ask him to leave it on, just in case he was trying to get cool and relaxed. From Barlow's perspective, a comfortable client wasn't working on getting better.
The Relationships of Anxiety:
Following my exposure to David Barlow's approach, I studied everything I could about how people use safety behaviors to protect themselves from what they fear. Then I made it a point to help my clients peel away their crutches, including the breathing skills that had been the cornerstone of my work.
Next, I began to attend to a bigger picture: clients' struggle with uncertainty and the anxiety it produced. All anxious clients enter treatment fighting or avoiding their doubt and distress. For the first half of my career, I'd focused on skills to help clients accept symptoms of anxiety, permit themselves to feel uncomfortable, and tolerate not quite knowing how things would turn out. Now I sensed that the best maneuver for clients was to provoke the doubt and discomfort they feared, regardless of where it appeared.
Once again, I began to experiment. The model I shaped is built around two relationships—my relationship with clients and their relationship with their anxiety and doubts. In terms of the therapeutic relationship, I believe my clients and I need to create a special partnership of mutual curiosity and exploration as two people with complementary assets joining together to solve a problem. As I gain rapport with clients, I ask questions at every turn, not to probe, but to defer. If I explain a principle, I stop to verify, "Does this make sense to you?" If it doesn't, I work until it does. When we're about to do a behavioral practice, I ensure that the client not only understands the instruction, but agrees with the logic behind the action.
I defer to clients because my ultimate goal is to hand everything over to them. If they can participate in the construction of the protocol, they can "own it." If they own it, they can continue to use it in the future. This is the piece that so often gets lost in exposure treatment. Evidence-based CBT relies on a formula. Therapists describe how clients can recover from the disorder through repeated, graduated exposure to their fears over a number of weeks. Then they present the treatment steps and give the instructions for each step. Such therapists figuratively, and sometimes literally, "follow the manual." This can cause them to lose track of an essential task: helping clients metabolize the strategy.
The second relationship I've built my model around is the one between clients and their doubt and distress. They enter treatment seeking to remove their doubt, to know for certain that events will turn out in the best possible way, and when they can't guarantee the outcome, they become more anxious and avoidant. My primary intent isn't to give clients reassurance and comfort about the specific themes of their worries, but rather, to help them shape a new way to relate to their uncertainty and discomfort. We don't simply focus on solving the presenting disorder, even though that's what clients first expect. Anxiety disorders continue throughout life; therefore, clients must change their relationship with the disorder, which is what generates their distress.
An example: Mary came in for two sessions last year to address her classic symptoms of claustrophobia, the fear of restriction and suffocation. Parking structures were tough. "With their low ceilings, I feel like I'm going to be crushed in there." Elevators and traffic were a struggle, especially if they were crowded or slow. In session one, as I learned about the extent of her difficulties with feeling closed in, I asked how she coped with the problem. I was looking for her safety crutches, something I wouldn't have done in the past. However, I knew that she and I would need to create a plan to reduce her dependency on her distress-avoiding maneuvers. "I avoid closed-in places—parking garages and tunnels," she said. "If I have to go in a parking garage, I always try to go in the daytime and park where there's the most light. I also try to get others to drive me."
As we continued, I asked her about her expectations of the sessions. "Well, I'm hopeful and a little nervous," she replied. "Earlier you said, 'You have to go through the eye of the needle.' So, of course, I started thinking, 'Is he going to lock me up in a small place and test me?' I teased her about her response. "There's an idea! Do you have others for me?" She was right that we'd soon be doing some provocative exposure practices, but I wanted us to conduct them within a trusting partnership. Being playful is one of the ways I develop rapport.
Early in the first session, I ask clients about their long-term goals. Tolerating doubt and discomfort is hard, and I want them to have ready access to an outcome picture that's strong enough and important enough to help them do the work. Mary's goal was to be able to move through her world with more ease and less hesitation.
My intention with clients is to gain rapport by reflecting back how they currently perceive their relationship with uncertainty and discomfort, and acknowledging that it makes perfect sense to me that they've decided to be so intimidated. I find out if they have any specific themes that need to be addressed—Mary's were being trapped, having a heart attack, or suffocating in an enclosed space—and I offer them alternative views to challenge their catastrophic fears. This is standard CBT fare, but I'm not interested in lingering on this: I want to address such specific fears and put them behind us. I use those conflicts to introduce the higher-level theme of their relationship to doubt and distress.
When we get to the treatment plan, we build it together, piece by piece. I impose nothing on the client. For example, to Mary I said, "I'm going to suggest that you do some things that are uncomfortable. Short-term pain for long-term gain. You've heard that expression before?" Yes, she was on board with that concept. Then she continued, "I'd like to get to the point where I might have just a mild dislike of something, but I don't go into these panic attacks."
Great! She'd just linked the strategy of going toward her discomfort in our practice with achieving her long-term goals. I took that opportunity to reinforce how this "pain" would help her reach those goals. "We call that habituation," I said. "It means you develop a habit of facing it enough so that in the future, when you face it, your distress level doesn't go up here (I point above my head). It just goes to here (I gesture around my waist)."
I take time to persuade all clients about the merits of habituation: frequent, intense, long exposures to the fear will reduce the threat. But my goal isn't habituation. I take advantage of the logic of habituation—the necessity to go toward what they're afraid of—to introduce the possibility of a new response to their feelings of intense distress and uncertainty. I often represent it by one of two messages: "This is hard, and I want it" and "I can take the hit." Here's how I introduced the first message to Mary:
"When you're feeling like you're suffocating or trapped," I said, "I'm going to suggest that you say to yourself, 'I want this feeling.' What do you think about that?" Mary replied, "I was waiting for you to say 'I want this feeling to stop.'" "So how do you think your body reacts to the message: "This is a bad experience. I want it to stop?" Mary said, "Well, I think it probably heightens all the anxieties." "Then what if I had the opposite response and said 'I want this'? I wouldn't secrete so much adrenaline, would I? "Yeah, I guess that seems right," she said.
The second message I promote in response to the threat is "I can take the hit," which is a different angle of the same theme. The "hit" is defined as whatever the client fears might happen. The socially anxious client may start visibly shaking while she gives her speech. The OCD client may not know whether he inappropriately touched a child. Those with generalized anxiety disorder will have to make decisions without being sure that they'll turn out. To recover from these disorders, they all must be willing to embrace the sense of doubt about whether they'll experience those outcomes, rather than trying to get rid of it. They're going to get hit by distressing thoughts and feelings. Healing begins as they do more than just stop fighting: it begins when they start allowing themselves to take the blow instead.
It's at this juncture that creating a partnership becomes essential. As we shape the approach, I frequently check if clients can recognize how this shift in their orientation might lead to their desired outcome. It takes the form of, "Do you see where we're going?" When we begin the behavioral practices, I'll once again defer to them. "Should we try this now?" "Does this experiment make sense to you?"
To Mary, I said, "If this doesn't sound like a good idea to you, and you don't trust me, then you shouldn't do anything I suggest. I've got to depend on you—we have to collaborate—or nothing's going to work. I'm wholly dependent on you, and I want you to understand you're in control. I'm going to create a protocol to help you get better, but if I don't sell it to you, we're lost." You might think I'm being overly solicitous and deferential by such talk, but I think I'm keeping clients in the room, engaged in the construction of a paradigm that they'll carry with them for years to come.
We finish the session by designing an exposure practice that Mary suggested for that evening: to drive into one of her most distressing parking garages and linger there for 15 minutes. In our second session the next morning, she described her 15-minute practice in the parking garage. "It's three stories," she said. "Unfortunately, it was sunset and there was a fair amount of light coming through, but still the ceiling was quite low. I really didn't feel quite as panicky as I usually do, so I went into the middle. I went to the darkest place I could find, because I was trying to get that panicky part going so that I could just stay with it for a few minutes."
This is exactly the response I'm looking for. I want clients to absorb the principles well enough to invent their own practice. Mary knows that seeing more light is a crutch that makes her practice easier. She's now looking for helpful practice, not easy practice. When she noticed she wasn't feeling panicky enough, she drove to the darkest place she could find. She's incorporated the essence of the treatment in a single message: "I'm going to go toward whatever is frightening me." Excellent! That's a dramatic change in her relationship with her fears.
I said, "When you left yesterday I was feeling that I didn't orient you enough. I thought, 'Oh, she's going to distract herself.'" "No," she answered. "Actually I turned the radio off and I left the windows up, which I never do. And then there was quite a bit of light coming through, so I went like this (she shades her eyes with her hands) and just concentrated on that really low, concrete ceiling. I tried to make it as unpleasant as I could, and sit with that for a bit. And I waited. "You were saying what to yourself?" "It was something like, 'Stick it out; this is fine,'" she said.
Because she absorbed our general plan from session one, she instructed herself to refrain from the typical crutches she used to keep her feelings at bay—finding more light, rolling the window down, turning on the radio—and then she provoked further threat by directing her attention to her highest fears: darkness and low ceilings. She trusted that the treatment theory was valid, she committed herself to change her relationship with her threats, and then she found every opportunity to take the hit.
It's that specific intention—to find a way to practice taking the hit—that distinguishes this work. In typical exposure treatment, the client is assigned tasks that generate discomfort. Instead, I'm intent on helping clients to change their point of view from "I know I'm supposed to face my fears to get better, so I guess I'd better go do it" to "Where can I find some more opportunities to face my symptoms?" It's the difference between saying, "I hope I don't get too anxious doing this" and "I hope I get anxious enough to make this a good practice; I really want to get stronger, and I believe this is a good way to reach that goal."
"How did you feel when you drove out of the garage?" I asked. "Well, I felt more empowered. I felt really happy about that," she said. Then I queried, "So, what do you think would happen if you don't practice another garage for three months?" She answered, "I'm not going to habituate."
With Mary, I immediately reinforced her spontaneous-imagery rehearsal by keeping our conversation focused on the future. In traditional exposure treatment, the therapist's attention is on implementing the proper procedures for the current practice. That task is critically important, but insufficient. By contrast, I continually elevate the discussion to principles that clients can adopt as a standard of living.
Later, I asked Mary, "If you had to put together a little set of guidelines for 10 people who are coming in tomorrow, facing these kinds of fears, what would you say are the most important principles of recovery?" She said:
Face your fears in small ways that you have control over, gradually do these things longer, and then do the harder things. Talk yourself through it in a really strong, commanding voice. Talk to your primitive brain. Let it overreact, and then say, "I like your expression, but you don't have to juice me up so much next time. I'm fine. Save that for real situations.
In a one-year follow-up, Mary reported handling tunnels and parking garages well, and she'd only had one panic attack on a flight, which had been another source of extreme anxiety. When she'd become apprehensive driving through one long, unexpected tunnel, she said, "I remembered those horrible things you put me through, and that I came through those!"
As I was writing this piece, I could sometimes almost feel many readers in the therapeutic community recoiling, much as I did when I first heard David Barlow talk about a therapist "forcing" a claustrophobic client to stay on the elevator, no matter how terrified and quivering, all the way down to the ground floor. What shockingly brutal treatment! And how profoundly antipathetic to all the therapeutic values we were taught to hold dear! Aren't therapists supposed to be patient and accepting, to make the client feel completely safe and secure, and to create in therapy a cozy haven from a cruel world? Surely, our psychodynamic forefathers and mothers would be appalled at the idea that a legitimate therapist—and not an outright sadist!—would design a treatment based on instructing clients to ramp up their fears past the point of bearing while telling themselves (through chattering teeth) how much they welcome the experience. Make no mistake: compared to the soothing ambience of the typical clinical encounter, this is therapy from the school of hard knocks and tough love.
Why does such a counterintuitive form of therapy work at all, much less exceptionally well, often when other approaches have failed? For one thing, it calls up qualities of strength and resilience in clients that therapists often miss. In this profession, we've perhaps become a little too used to thinking of our clients as fragile, wounded souls, who need more to be swaddled and protected and comforted than encouraged and challenged. I understand that perspective: as a therapist, the last thing I ever wanted to do was make my clients feel worse, particularly if I wasn't sure there'd be an equivalent payoff for them at the end. But since I started down this path, I've been awed by my clients' ability to summon up the personal courage, gritty determination, and willingness to try anything to surmount their fears, regardless of the costs in discomfort and unpleasantness. They've given me the strength to carry on, more than the other way around.
For another thing, everything I ask of my clients is done in the context of a deep, mutually trusting, and respectful therapeutic partnership. In that sense, this work looks more like "traditional" therapy than like some of the manualized, protocolized CBT approaches, in which the therapist gives instructions and assigns preset tasks aimed at eliminating discrete symptoms. In this method, clients and I together design a plan that's intended to change their entire relationship with anxiety, which will prepare them to deal successfully with their anxieties—whatever form they take—throughout life. Before we actually begin doing anything, we determine together what they'll need to do, how we'll proceed, and what their long-term goals are. The focus isn't on imposing a formula, but on helping them create a new personal philosophy and a more effective strategy for learning to live free of crippling terror. And, just as in any good, old-fashioned kind of therapy, my clients know that they're not alone, that I understand fully what they're going through, and that I'll be there with them—supporting, encouraging, sharing their struggle—heart and mind, all the way through to the end.
- http://
Reid Wilson, Ph.D., is associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine. He runs
, the largest free anxiety self-help site on the Internet. He's the author of "Don't Panic: Taking Control of Anxiety Attacks" and "Facing Panic: Self-Help for People with Panic Attacks."
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Reid Wilson
The Poet: David Whyte, "The Winter of Listening"
"The Winter of Listening"
"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning red in the palms
while the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry,
while the great cloak of the sky grows dark
and intense round every living thing.
What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.
What we hate in ourselves is what we cannot know
in ourselves, but what is true to the pattern
does not need to be explained.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now
and ready to arrive in the world.
All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting
how everything has its own voice
to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.
And the slow difficulty of remembering
how everything is born from
an opposite and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life I must call my own."
~ David Whyte,
"The House of Belonging"
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text:
Contact has been made with both the Tannadice club and the striker's agent over a potential switch to Ibrox.
A transfer embargo means McCoist is restricted to targeting players who are out of contract in the summer as he is only able to register free agents from September 1 under the terms of the signing ban.
McCoist said: "We have to sign players whose contracts are up at the end of the season. I'm very aware and respectful that these players are still with other clubs and I wouldn`t want to do or say anything that would influence them in any way in their relationship with their own clubs.
"All I would say is that Jon is one of a number of players we are looking at and are interested in. There has been contact between the two clubs and there has been contact between club and agent but there is nothing more concrete to tell you on that one."
Motherwell midfielder Nicky Law and Middlesbrough defender Andre Bikey are also on the radar.
McCoist said: "Nicky is another player whose contract situation we are aware of as well. Again, he is one of a number of players we are looking at.
"It's a sensitive situation because these players are under contract at the moment to their own clubs and they've got a job to do for those clubs and, indeed, the fans of the clubs they represent. So it's very delicate."
The Light Blues boss added: "Bikey is a player that we are interested in and have been interested in once or twice, certainly last year. He is a player we have been monitoring as well.
"I'm not sure if he's got a different situation with his contract but he is certainly a player that we have been watching regularly. But, to be fair, there have been literally hundreds of those in the last months."
- Sports & Recreation
- Soccer

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Final Fantasy XIII-2 Vid Shows Off New Stuff
Written Monday, December 12, 2011 By Lee BradleyView author's profile
Square Enix has released a new video for Final Fantasy XIII-2, offering a look at the new features and gameplay elements we can expect when the game hits next year.
There's some stuff about the Historia Crux in there - detailing the ability that lets you jump backwards and forwards in time, replaying missions and testing out different outcomes. You also get a glimpse of the revised ATB and Paradigm systems, as well as the monster recruitment feature.
Chuck in a whistlestop tour of temporal rifts, the casino and a bit of gawping at the game's lovely graphics and you've got a super-fast preview of pretty much everything FFXIII-2 has to offer. Check it out below.


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New Wiring For 1948 Dodge Truck
Started by Craig107 , Jun 02 2013 02:26 PM
26 replies to this topic
Posted 02 June 2013 - 02:26 PM
Hello all! I am the proud new owner of 1948 Dodge B-1. It's a pretty solid vehicle with just a few issues; the major one is the electrical. The car runs and drives great but all the lights do not work. The wiring is original and should probably be replaced. I want to keep it a 6volt as well. What are your suggestions on wiring harnesses? Also how tough of a job is this to do on my own? If I have a pro do it how much would I cost? Sorry for all the questions but I'm excited o get started on this awesome truck!
Posted 02 June 2013 - 02:38 PM
I've wired two vehicles, 52 truck/ 53 car. Harnesses are not difficult only time consuming. There isn't much wiring on that truck. Go for it and spend the wiring money on front disc brakes.
I wish you well.
Posted 02 June 2013 - 02:55 PM
Welcome! I used RIWire.com to redo my truck, spendy, but a complete harness that was super easy to install.
restored great granddad's B-3-D: were did my money go? It's now going into TODD and the COE!
FEF || TODD Build || COE Project || Building a Wood Bed || Setting Split Rivets || Caboose Project || Door Lock Mount Rebuild || Rebuilding Control Cables
Posted 02 June 2013 - 02:56 PM
Its just money...
5 out of 5 guys swear the other 4 are idiots...
Posted 02 June 2013 - 03:03 PM
Welcome aboard Craig. Be sure to post some photos of your truck. Try this link for great wiring info provided by Alan... http://api.viglink.c...13702140513019�
Posted 02 June 2013 - 04:06 PM
Unless you are going for a perfect original restoration I would suggest making your own. You can do it yourself for about 10% of what buying an entire new harness would cost. Pull it out intact and redo it one wire at a time.
"Bones heal, chicks dig scars, and the United States of America has the best doctor to daredevil ratio in the world." Captain Lance Murdock
Ed J
Posted 02 June 2013 - 04:42 PM
So I've decided to do the wiring on my own. I admit I know very very little when it comes to vehicles but thats the reason why I wanted an old truck...to expand my abilities. I'm not sure how I would even go about making my own wires so any help on that would be awesome (like where to buy and what to buy etc). I've also been looking around at full harness kits and I am not sure which one I would need if I go that route. Here a few links of harnesses I'm looking at. What would work best? Thanks for all the help!
http://www.kwikwire....rd Harness.html
http://www.painlessp...=Classic Trucks
Posted 02 June 2013 - 04:51 PM
I think you will find that both of those aren't geared towards either 6v operation or retention of your stock column etc. They are set for street rods with modern columns.
"Bones heal, chicks dig scars, and the United States of America has the best doctor to daredevil ratio in the world." Captain Lance Murdock
Ed J
Posted 02 June 2013 - 04:56 PM
Thanks Young Ed! I'm def trying figure this stuff out!
Posted 02 June 2013 - 05:02 PM
Thanks Young Ed! I'm def trying figure this stuff out!
A few pics from my wiring project. You can't pull the entire dash out in your truck like I did but you could leave everything attached to the gauge pod and pull it that way.
"Bones heal, chicks dig scars, and the United States of America has the best doctor to daredevil ratio in the world." Captain Lance Murdock
Ed J
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Hello and thank you for the plugin!
It works great and it's really easy to handle.
I created a chart for the annual visitors and the min value of the Y axis is -5000.
I would like to ask you if there is a way to change the default values of the Y axis somewhere in your plugin files?
Thank you!


text:
Brisbane Dive Academy is conducting an underwater cleanup in conjunction with Clean Up Australia Day. Last year we cleared out miles of fishing line and tens of kilograms of sinkers, but had to leave behind a large number of glass bottles and other debris. This year our aim is to clear out as much of the glass and other dangerous debris as we can.
For more information and costs (a minimum charge to cover air fills) contact us at the Dive Centre of 07 3890 0342.
Next Sunday Divers from Blue Vision Dive Academy in collaboration with several divers in Bayahibe will be happy to make a new uw clean up at Catalina island. Everybody is welcome
Underwater Cleanup- Luncheon Bay
Para el mes de Septiembre estamos programando el tercer Clean Up en Cabo Corrites - Choco, con el auspicio del Hotel Turqui Paradise, los días 22 y 23 un grupo de amantes de la protección del medio ambiente participaremos de la limpieza de fondos y de playas.
La idea es recibir la participación de la comunidad de las poblaciones de Aruzí y Partado, sobre todo de los jovenes quienes nos ayudadan en la recolección de basura de sus playas.
El plan de la salida desde Bogotá, incuye:
4 days of Ocean information, in favor of the sharks and turtles, with help from all local organizations & the artist Carlos Hiller. Together we will try to collect money for Mision Tiburon so they can tag all the Bull Sharks at the Bat islands.
On Friday 23rd of September we will reward all our divers again who help us collect rubbish. The third dive of the day will only be 5 euros. Come and join!
On Friday 9th of September we will reward all our divers again who help us collect rubbish. The third dive of the day will only be 5 euros. Come and join!
We are looking for volunteer divers to conduct a dive cleaning of the Ballast Point Pier, Tampa, Florida, on September 17th to support both International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) and Project Aware's Dive Against Debris.
On every dive we will collect rubbish this month, as we always do. But this month being the Project Aware Dive Against Debris month, we hope to find even more volunteers showing their love for a clean ocean. We will also organise beach clean ups and rubbish collections in areas of our village where wind can easily "feed" the sea, in particular with plastic bags and bottles. Every Friday we will have a special offer on 3rd dives. Please check for updates. We look forward to seeing you :)
Debris cleanup at San Remo. Bring your dive gear for an underwater cleanup or stay dry on land for a beach clean up. Gloves and bags all supplied. Meet Rob at the San Remo wharf at 1pm.
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