Month: October 2017

An epic 119 Kilometer pilgrimage over 5 days.

If  you start at Tui – you need two stamps per day to be eligible for the Compostela.

We walked and drove along the entire length of the most popular route, the Camino Portuguese and Spain.

The Camino is no longer a solitary, deserted path to enlightenment. Some 300,000 pilgrims walk it each year, usually on foot but also by bike, car and even horse. Everyone is on their own personal journey. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow you go, it’s not a race.

When you meet a fellow pilgrim along the Camino, you greet each other with a friendly “Buen Camino”, which literally means a “good road”

I would highly recommend walking the Camino to anyone who is on the road to recovery from Parental Alienation. I found the whole experience stimulating, invigorating, exhilarating, therapeutic and healing.

This is just the beginning of my journey, The New Me!!!!!!!!

The Camino de Santiago (Latin: Peregrinatio Compostellana, “Pilgrimage of Compostela”; Galician: O Camiño de Santiago),^[1] known in English as The Way of Saint James among other names,^[2][3][4] is a network of pilgrims’ ways serving pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain, where tradition has it that the remains of the saint are buried. Many follow its routes as a form of spiritual path or retreat for their spiritual growth. It is also popular with hiking and cycling enthusiasts and organized tour groups.

Thursday 5th October 2017

The Portuguese Way

Passes through different routes in Portugal (interior and coast) until it enters Galicia through Tui.

PILGRIM’S PRAYER

Saint James, Apostle, chosen among the first. You were the first to drink the Cup of the Master and you are the great protector of pilgrims; make us strong in faith and happy in hope on our pilgrim journey following the path of Christian life and sustain us so that we may finally reach the glory of God the Father. Amen.

Different rules apply when coping with people who have unhealthy narcissism. Here are 11 “Don’ts” in dealing with narcissists: Don’t take them at face value. Image is everything to narcissists. They work hard to present a facade of superiority…

Source: 11 Things NOT To Do With Narcissists

As helping professionals, we are trusted with some of our clients’ deepest, darkest secrets. Each day, we are subjected to the heart-wrenching stories and the immensely difficult life situations of the individuals who come to us seeking change and relief. It is impossible for any helping professional to know what our clients will bring through our door. In this sense, the only constant in our line of work is vicissitude, or variance. Stories compounded by grief, loss, sadness, anger, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and turmoil are not foreign to us as mental health professionals. Given how we are exposed to such types of stories and information on a day-to-day basis, it goes without saying that if we do not properly care for ourselves, we can become prone to many types of health issues. These can include burnout, compassion fatigue, heart issues (Schneider, 1984), depression and suicidal ideation (Schneider, 1984), compromised immune systems, headaches, stomach problems, and other

Source: Burnout in Mental Health Professionals

As clinicians, we all say it: ‘We must take care of ourselves.’ We empower our colleagues, patients and families by repeating this mantra to them in times of stress. But, too often, we forget to take our own advice. At some point, as humans, we therapists all fail to recognize our own limits. We take on another case, work another weekend, take another call, all under the premise that this workload is what we are built to do. But, what happens when we start to fall apart? Compassion Fatigue Compassion fatigue syndrome is a feeling of chronic stress, emotional exhaustion and tension often felt by therapists, counselors and anyone in the helping professions. It is common for clinicians to develop this syndrome at some point in their careers, given their close work with those experiencing and hearing stories of abuse, death and trauma. Central to this syndrome is a clinicians’ inability to engage in a productive therapeutic relationship with a patient (van Mol et al., 2015). This

Source: Therapy for Therapists: Coping with Compassion Fatigue

The issues may differ, but the tactics and actions will be the same, and clearly recognizable.
1. Demand–someone wants something
2. Resistance–the other does not feel comfortable with the demand
3. Pressure –used to make the resistant one give in
4. Threat –to turn up the pressure
5. Compliance–on the part of the resistant one
6. Repetition–this pattern reoccurs in at least other situations (just with a different name)

Emotional blackmail is a powerful form of manipulation in which people close to us threaten (either directly or indirectly) to punish us if we don’t do what they want. At the heart of any kind of blackmail is one basic threat, which can be expressed in many different ways: If you don’t behave the way I want you to, you will suffer.

A criminal blackmailer might threaten to use knowledge about a person’s past to ruin her reputation, or ask to be paid off in cash to hide a secret. Emotional blackmail hits closer to home. Emotional blackmailers know how much we value our relationship with them. They know our vulnerabilities. Often they know our deepest secrets. And no matter how much they care about us, when they fear they won’t go their way, they use this intimate knowledge to shape the threats that give them the payoff they want: our compliance.

Little is known about the etiology of histrionic personality disorder (HPD) or its relation to other personality disorders. In this study, we examined whether HPD is etiologically related to psychopathy and more specifically whether HPD and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) are sex-typed alternative manifestations of psychopathy. In addition, based on Newman’s (1987) response modulation hypothesis of psychopathy, we examined the associations between psychopathic, HPD, and ASPD features and performance on laboratory measures of passive avoidance errors and interference effects. Seventy-five live theater actors completed self-report questionnaires and two laboratory measures of response modulation, and peers completed questionnaires concerning the participants’ personality disorder features. The results provided weak and inconsistent support for the hypotheses that HPD is a female-typed variant of psychopathy and that ASPD is a male-typed variant of psychopathy. Contrary to previous findings, scores on response modulation tasks were not significantly related to psychopathy, or to either HPD or ASPD. The limitations of this study and possibilities for future research in this area are outlined.

Read More: http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/pedi.16.1.52.22557