Tag: family

James Redfield – Childhood

I believe the real question concerning our early experiences in life should be this: Why would I have chosen to be born in this place, and to this cast of characters? What could I have possibly had in mind?

The purpose behind such a question is to find a higher understanding of our experience with our family and origin. Remember, our early family was the environment in which each of us first learned what the world was like and what was expected of us as human beings. A child must learn everything, not just the name of every object in the universe, but the meaning that these objects have in human life. To learn this, we had to watch closely how our parents or caretakers interpreted this vast world. This means we spend the first decade of life looking at the world through the eyes of our parents to see their descriptions, emotional reactions, and creativity. And this identification shapes and structures our initial worldview.

To find the spiritual reason we were born to our parents, we must look very deeply at who they were, how they viewed the world, and perhaps more importantly, at their dreams, both realized and unrealized. 🙏✨

Self Love

I had to self love or buy that the distorted , malignant abuse was deserved .

I touched on his distorted mentality, but had no validation and then it was the chemical straightjacket of psychiatry that allowed him to blame me for everything and he to be the hero/ savior/ father /child who was never interested in partnership or growth as a couple or in parenting our 3 sons

He’s past due for the facts and an end to his every effort to control and destroy me , mentally , physically and most of all spiritually . I never ever sensed his connection to any higher power .

Self nurture , and self love were absolutely necessary in my varied efforts to survive !

Blessings & Peace

Dona Luna

“Do you love Me?” Alice asked.

“No, I don’t love you!” replied the White Rabbit.

Alice frowned and clasped her hands together as she did whenever she felt hurt.

“See?” replied the White Rabbit. “Now you’re going to start asking yourself what makes you so imperfect and what did you do wrong so that I can’t love you at least a little.

You know, that’s why I can’t love you. You will not always be loved Alice, there will be days when others will be tired and bored with life, will have their heads in the clouds, and will hurt you.

Because people are like that, they somehow always end up hurting each other’s feelings, whether through carelessness, misunderstanding, or conflicts with themselves.

If you don’t love yourself, at least a little, if you don’t create an armor of self-love and happiness around your heart, the feeble annoyances caused by others will become lethal and will destroy you.

The first time I saw you I made a pact with myself: ‘I will avoid loving you until you learn to love yourself.’ ”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Childress -Treatment

I should talk about treatment.

You should know stuff about treatment. I thought about telling you about delusional disorders, you should know what they are too. But you need to know about treatment more.

Not the treatment of your children and this pathology – yet – just treatment of treatment stuff. Like behavior therapy and an Applied Behavioral Analysis. You should know about that (it will lead into DBT therapy because DBT is based on behavioral therapy principles of Applied Behavioral Analysis).

Behavior therapy is the “B” in DBT. You should know what the A-B-C’s of ABA are. What? Exactly.

It’s easy once you understand it. The Contingent Visitation Schedule is a behavior therapy structure (over a Strategic family systems intervention).

You should know about Solution-Focused therapy most definitely. That’s what’s going to unlock the trauma piece of the puzzle and get things moving forward. Do things seem stuck in one place? Solution-Focused therapy will unstick it.

You should also know about Narrative therapy – it is excellent. It’s a tricky little post-modern social constructionsist therapy, it’s in the same school of psychotherapy as Solution-Focused therapy. I use Narrative therapy all the time and no one sees it because no one knows what it is. I should introduce you to Narrative therapy.

Don’t try this at home kids, Dr. Childress is a trained professional. If untrained people start using knowledge willy-nilly, you might create a better world, and you wouldn’t want that.

So be careful with the knowledge I give you. The application of knowledge by untrained people could create a wonderful world, and you’re not ready for that yet – so use it in small doses so you don’t create wonderful too fast. Slowly.

I should tell you about therapy. Not therapy for your kids, not exactly, not yet. Just therapy for therapy things. What is it and how does it work.

There’s schools of therapy – four – actually five – actually six. Five and six are amazingly effective, but you need to know schools one-through-four as the basics for understanding therapy, then add five, then add six.

The four primary schools are

1. Psychoanalytic – Freud and the couch – this is the grand-daddy school of them all, called “depth-psychology” – it’s evolved to Self Psychology with a primary guy Kohut who is immensely relevant to the family conflict pathology in the courts. Bowlby, attachment, and Tronick, intersubjectivity, are in the psychoanalytic school.

2. Cognitive-Behavioral (CBT) – Skinner and lab animals – this is the reward-and-punishment behavioral therapy approach. Actually it’s about cues and triggers – what cues (elicits) the behavior. Sometimes it’s what we think – that’s the cognitive part of CBT. It’s the primary school in use most everywhere, and CBT is the foundation for DBT (Linehan).

3. Humanisitic-Existential – self-actualization and growth – this is the soft and accepting school of therapy – Rogers Client Centered therapy. This school of therapy is about transformations, it’s not appropriate for the pathology here in the family courts.

Family Systems – it’s about families and how they work – this is the school of psychotherapy that should be applied when diagnosing and treating family conflict – there’s three schools within family systems – Minuchin Structural – Haley & Madanes Strategic – Bowen Bowenian (he kinda describes it all, with the others expanding on Bowen-themes).

The fifth school is Post-Modern Social Constructionism – I think of them as boutique therapies – Cultural therapy – Feminist therapy – Solution-Focused therapy – Narrative therapy. They are all amazingly powerful, tricky to learn but powerful when used.

I strongly suggest the addition of Solution-Focused therapy to DBT family therapy for this pathology in the courts, it will release the process from its focus on the past. I add Solution-Focused therapy to pretty much everything I do from the other schools of psychotherapy.

I like Narrative therapy a lot. I use it a lot. I embed Narrative therapy into my work in the other schools as well. The Post-Modern Social Construction schools of psychotherapy are like principles – you can use the principles within the other schools as well.

They all blend. But do you know what happens when you blend a bunch of paints together? It turns to mud-color. Mixing colors to create a painting is a professional craft.

I should tell you about therapy. You’re going to want DBT (court-adapted), that’s from the Cognitive-Behavioral school, so you should know about an Applied Behavioral Analysis, you’ll find that helpful.

You should know about attachment-therapy, that’s from the Psychoanalytic school – that’s going to be Tronick and his breach-and-repair sequence. You’ll find that helpful too – watch Tronick’s Still Face YouTube description of his research on the breach-and-repair sequence.

You should know about Solution-Focused therapy too so you can get un-stuck from your stuck. You’d probably like to be unstuck from your stuck.

Dr. Childress and the School of Rock… er… Psychotherapy, this Sunday 8 Pacific on Facebook Live. Let’s change the world – slowly – go slow – you don’t want to create wonderful too fast, you’re not ready for a wonderful world just yet, so just use a little of the knowledge I give you to solve little things until you’re ready to solve everything.

Don’t create the solution too fast because then you won’t have a problem to fix, and you need your problem. Why do you need your problem? I don’t know. It makes no sense to me, but you hold onto it so I guess you need it.

So fix it slowly. Otherwise you’ll wind up with everything fixed and you won’t have your problems anymore.

Dr. Childress – Schools of Psychotherapy – Sunday over morning coffee and crumpets. Let’s rock this Internet thing and take her out for a spin to see what she can do – tomorrow at 8 Pacific.

Schools of Psychotherapy and coffee with Dr. Childress.

Craig Childress, Psy.D.

Clinical Psychologist, CA PSY 18857

Healing Trans generational Trauma

Healing From Transgenerational Trauma: My Mum, My Daughter, & Me

By Ruth E. Dixon

Emotional trauma is the type of wound that, if not processed and integrated, can become a void that expands to swallow not just the traumatized person but also their children and grandchildren.

www.madinamerica.com/2022/11/healing-from-transgenerational-trauma-my-mum-my-daughter-me/

Toxic Family

Sherrie Campbell PhD

One of the most frustrating things about our narcissistic family members is they see nothing wrong with the mass destruction they leave in their wake. They have no interest in changing, and do not appear to suffer from, or recognize, their complete lack of empathy. This is exactly what allows them to continue on as the vile person they are.

In fact, the more they abuse, the more divorced from empathy they become. The more divorced from empathy they become, the crueler they grow to be. For this reason, they will continually up the anti on the heartless ways in which they treat you.

If you can recognize this and understand that people like this do exists in the family system, you won’t be so hard on yourself when you choosing to remove them from your life.

If you have removed them, they earned it.

Get Your Kids Back Free Workshop 11-14/18

Join me on November 14th through the 18th for my free, live workshop, Let’s Get Your Kids Back. I will be live each day at 3:00 PM PT in the Alliance to Solve Parental Alienation Facebook group. Register today and receive your workbook. The countdown begins!

Let’s Get Your Kids Back Workshop

Being a Mom -Like working 25 full time jobs

Having a detached father/child partner was draining and though I tried very hard ; I could not hold all the ” balls” in the air .

His expectation that he was the power and thus due the upmost attention and 3 sons challenged that . Of course he did nothing to support me , rather it was always competing and self serving with no growth or solidify of basic foundations .

Totally devalued me , psychiatrist drugged me into submission where I discovered his shadow and found myself in the unenviable position of his having total control of my life

He still feels entitled and feels I’m not grateful !

I feel Mothers are due support and respect and their many jobs should be acknowledged with services awarded the work force .

More balanced , children result from nurture and nature in balance and support of each other . No one person in the family should wield more power , and destroying the divinity of mother child has a kick back

Like France , we should automatically financially support Mother & Child for the 1st 5 years , until child begins school

Mom could work selected hours on line or take courses . It’s a WinWin💯

Blessings & Peace ☮️

Childress : The Drain of Family Courts & More

I just finished traveling for testimony. I hate traveling. I walked to the airport. I no longer live in the known universe.

The fairies bring me over from my tropical island paradise off the coast of Seattle and I walk up to the trains that drop me off at the SEATAC airport. I literally walk to the airport, and baseball games.

I have left the known universe and live is some parallel multiverse of reality now. That’s not possible but it just happened.

And I’m exhausted. I can only stay in your universe for short bits of time or like Marty McFly I begin to disappear.

Two days of travel and one day of testimony wipes out an old-guy like me, and it is immensely disruptive to my life and practice. It is also majorly expensive for the client to pay for three full days of my time.

I think I may need to add a wear-and-tear surcharge for the wear-and-tear on an old guy, making me cross universes and all, that portal of passage is tough.

The portal of passage’s not tough, I just walk into it like a Stargate thing, the fairies are very accommodating at dropping me off in your world. It’s remaining in your world that’s the wear-and-tear part. I start to vanish.

I live in the Internet now. Howdy. I can easily testify remotely. Remote testimony is a good thing. Holy cow, I’m so much less expensive when it’s just a couple of hours rather than days.

Is my in-person testimony more powerful because I’m in-person? Probably. It feels that way. When I’m sitting right next to the judge in my witness stand chair, I’m present.

I think I’m pretty good at testimony by this point. I’ve done it a lot. I’m way more experienced as a testifying expert than either of the attorneys are at examining me.

As an expert witness, I’m not an advocate. I’m evidence. That’s my role in the courts. I allow the attorney to present the evidence. I listen to the question, I answer the question, then I stop and wait for the next question.

I don’t fight with opposing counsel. They have a job to do in the courts and I understand what their job is. It’s to discredit my testimony in any way possible. They try. I listen to their question, I answer their question, then I stop and wait for the next question.

Opposing counsel has two options, 1) attack my opinion… the problem is, I don’t have an opinion, I apply knowledge and I can explain the knowledge all day, or 2) they try to slander my professional reputation. I don’t think that works either.

The opposing counsel can make the argument to the judge that I’m somehow an unethical psychologist who is not credible in my testimony as a result. I don’t think the judges believe it, and I think it’s less-and-less believable as I become a known entity in the courts.

I don’t fight with opposing counsel. They have a job to do. Ultimately, the legal system will need to reevaluate the role of opposing counsel when possible child abuse is a consideration. As an attorney, they are an officer of the court. To mislead the court through deception or tactics of delay that results in the court’s participating in the child abuse is problematic professional behavior.

When possible child abuse is a consideration, the zealous advocate role for the abusive parent needs to be tempered with truth.

We’ll have that discussion someday when the legal system wants to have that discussion – the respective roles of Forensic and Clinical Psychology in the family courts. I’ll speak for clinical psychology – treatment not custody.

I have couple of appointments today. I’m exhausted but at least I’m home. Mr. Pippin’s glad to have me back, and I’m glad to be back in my universe-of-origin again.

I don’t like being in your world anymore. I’m perfectly content on my tropical island in the Pacific Northwest drinking tropical drinks with little umbrellas – climate change, adapt and get used to it.

Don’t make me travel. Don’t make me come back to your world to often. I start to fade until I get back to my island with my fairies and trees and mermaids and stuff.

I have to board Mr. Pippin when I’m away from home. He doesn’t like that. I don’t like that. Don’t make me travel. I live in the Internet now, I’m in the otherworld not your world. I can be anywhere on the planet in a blink at the speed of our connection into the world-wide web.

Don’t think of me as young-Luke, think of me as a dead Yoda, still around but all kinda glowing and twinkly now, smiling with Ben and your dad. Go get ’em Luke… use the force, Luke. You can do it.

If you need my testimony, channel me in through the Stargate portal between your universe and mine.

Covid came and got everyone used to using the Internet. Use it. I can testify remotely nowadays. Because if you want me to travel for testimony, it’s gonna cost you for days of my time, because it costs me days of my time and more, I’m exhausted today.

It’s hard on an old-guy to travel. It used to be an adventure. I’ve adventured enough. I wanna be home with Mr. Pippin.

There are typically two-phases of my involvement on a matter – report writing and then testimony. My report is my power, my testimony is the support. My support can be through the world-wide web of our connections.

If I am required to manifest across the portal into your world, it’s going to cost you money because it costs me my life. I’m not in your world anymore. I walk to a Mariner’s baseball game, I walk to a Bob Dylan concert. I party with fairies in the woods and have esoteric conversations with a cat.

Don’t make me come out there. You people are nuts. I’m not. It’s like matter and anti-matter, and it doesn’t matter because I can testify remotely through the Internet and be anywhere in the world you need me to be, any office, any courtroom, anyplace at all.

I need to get ready to see a client. I’ll be in the next room in my home-office location. The client will be half-way around the world. Clients in Australia make me nuts trying to schedule, they are a whole day away. Am I in the future or are they. Is my today their tomorrow, or is their today my tomorrow?

It makes my brain hurt.

I’m a traveler of both time and space now, when you work with Dr. Childress, we’re always on Seattle time because that’s my home-universe now. Weird world.

Craig Childress, Psy.D.

Clinical Psychologist, CA PSY 18857

Abusive Ex : Tell Your Children The Truth

I begged him for decades

He expresses love for our sons but it’s noted they belong to him .

He ignored the health and emotional trauma that result .

He excels at that .

I wish him well , but know I must address this as has been his requirement. That expose this war of his , and his Mother is adversely affected .

Who knows ? He’s not a talker….

youtube.com/watch