By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. I watched the amazing movie “Rabbit Hole” for the second time last night and was once again struck by how catastrophic grief changes (or doesn’t) over time. And yesterday I read, for the first time in years, the opening pages of blog I kept on Livejournal.com called ‘My Child’s Death.’ I started that blog just 18 days after my beloved daughter, Jesse, died, and the raw pain jumped out at me yesterday, causing me to reflect on the morphing of my own grief. Like many people, I remember meaningful quotes – lines from literature, poetry, song lyrics- words that capture my mood or a particular frame of mind. My car is covered in bumper stickers, and you can trace my bereavement journey with the little notes and papers stuck to my refrigerator. In my first few blog pages I found “And the worst part is knowing I’ll survive”( Emmylou Harris) and “Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone”(John Mellencamp). Posted on my refrigerator from those early days (moved from the front to a side corner, but still there): the mournful “Love knows not its own depths until the hour of separation” (Kahlil… Read more »
THE ‘OTHER’ KINDS OF MEDITATION
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. These days everything in the mental health world is about ‘mindfulness meditation.’ This is a wonderful leap forward, to be applauded, an amazing practice that has tremendous healing power. But in this new world of meditation consciousness, there seems to be a hierarchy of techniques. “Mindfulness meditation”, usually of the sit in the lotus position and follow your breath variety, is the presumed King of meditation. And I use the word “King” deliberately, because it seems to me not only that male teachers/practitioners promote it more than women, but also because there is a lean, spare, no-nonsense feel to this kind of meditation, also called “Vipassana Meditation.” There’s nothing mushy or emotional about it. Interestingly, female practicioners/teachers like Pema Chodron, Tara Brach, and Sharon Salzburg seem to be guiding people to other kinds of practice. Often these are practices that actively cultivate compassion, self-love, forgiveness, and the transformation of painful experiences into transformative. Not nearly as lean or spare as straight-up ‘mindfulness meditation,’ these techniques – Loving Kindness, Tonglen, Radical Acceptance – have different and equally important benefits. There are many reasons for us to promote alternatives to following-the-breath meditations. First, this technique is fairly difficult… Read more »
We’re Coming Back. Here’s What We’ve Been Busy With 10/5/2011
The Institute for Personal Growth, the premier outpatient mental health organization with three offices in New Jersey and New York City, has launched a Postgraduate Sex Therapy Training Program. The Program, based in Highland Park, NJ, currently has fourteen residents, seasoned psychologists and social workers who are participating in intensive training to become certified sex therapists. Dr. Margaret Nichols, founder, President and Executive Director of IPG, is an American Board of Sexology Diplomate and Certified Sex Therapist of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT). IPG is an official training facility for AASECT, and Dr. Nichols runs the new AASECT-sanctioned program with the help of the four other AASECT Certified Sex Therapists on the IPG staff. As the ‘Age of Viagra’ makes it more acceptable for the average person to acknowledge and seek help for sexual problems and dysfunctions, sex therapy is becoming an increasingly important specialization. In fact, IPG has not been able to keep up with demand. AASECT, the international certifying organization for sex therapists, lists only thirty sex therapists for the entire state, and five are at IPG. The Postgraduate Sex Therapy Training Program increases the number of IPG’s sex therapy specialists to nineteen,… Read more »
Sex Tips For Vanilla Couples From The Leather World, Part 1
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. I hate these kinds of articles – my eyes glaze over when I see them– and so this is the first time I’ve written one. But I think my advice might be slightly different from what you’ve have heard before. For nearly thirty years, my two main professional specialties have been sex therapy and working with sexual minorities. So I have an unusual breadth of experience knowing about people’s sex lives – all kinds of people, all kinds of sex lives. For a long time, I’ve believed that the two types of couples who sustain the hottest sex lives over the long haul are couples with open relationships, and kinky couples. Both types of couples fight the buzz-kill of familiarity with novelty but in different ways. (If you read Sex at Dawn, which I reviewed in my last blog piece, you’ll see why this is THE eternal problem and paradox of monogamy). But BDSM couples – many of whom are monogamous- seem to effectively combat SCS (Sexless Cuddling Syndrome) which seems to afflict a large proportion of vanilla couples. BDSM couples cuddle AND have hot sex. Let’s face it, the modern egalitarian couple shares interests, responsibilities, and… Read more »
The Eight Verses of Thought Training, Part One
“It could be said that The Eight Verses for Training the Mind contains the entire essence of the Buddha’s teachings in a distinct form.” –H.H. the Dalai Lama Sometimes the Universe offers a sweet and amusing surprise in bestowing upon us unexpected gifts and precious treasures. I was visiting a severely paranoid client in his new apartment. I was his psychotherapist, part of a team whose mission was to help homeless, substance-abusing, mentally ill individuals, I knew to work with his strengths, skills and resources, as a way to ease the pain that drove him into acting out his paranoia. Recently released from a prison psychiatric setting, and grateful for our help in getting him off the street and into decent housing, his face lit up when he showed me his proudest possessions since becoming established in his very modest digs: an array of fishtanks covering one wall, and a growing collection of books on Buddhism that he delighted in and lovingly fondled. Glowing with the pride of ownership, he selected one of his buddhist paperbacks: “Here’s a beauty, Neil!” “I didn’t know you were interested in Buddhism.” He caressed the book and put it into my hands: “I haven’t… Read more »
Natural And Unnatural Sex: Sex At Dawn, By Christopher Ryan And Cacilda Jetha
Book Review by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. What is ‘natural’ in human sexuality? It’s not a trivial question: what is ‘natural’ is assumed to be normal, and by tenuous extension, what is ‘unnatural’ is inferior, deviant – abnormal. We take it for granted that the ‘purpose’ of human sex is reproduction, which privileges heterosexual penile-vaginal intercourse as the most ‘natural,’ ‘preferred’ form of sexual behavior. And we assume that humans have always lived in pair-bonded nuclear families (remember the cartoons of male cavemen clubbing women?), an assumption that implies that monogamy is ‘normal,’ while multi-partnered sex is deviant, or at least evolutionarily irrelevant. Our judgments about sex, and we have many of them, have been shaped by the Bible, for the religious, or Charles Darwin, if we look to science for enlightenment. Increasingly, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and others interested in sexuality historically and cross-culturally are challenging Darwin’s beliefs about sexuality (Soon I’ll post a blog on “Best Books About Sex In My Professional Lifetime”). Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality adds to the literature of this vibrant and interesting multidisciplinary group of dissenters. Christopher Ryan is a research psychologist and his coauthor (and wife) Cacilde Jetha a psychiatrist…. Read more »
In Memory of Jesse Part II: The Dead Kid List
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Displayed at eye level on my freezer door is a magnet my son gave me that says “Gardening, yoga, bubble baths, medication…..and I still want to smack somebody!” In my last post I described a little of how therapy, meditation, etc etc helped me survive the death of my daughter Jesse. Therapy, with Bruce Wood, a therapist’s therapist if there ever was one, actually reaffirmed my own belief in the importance of what I do for a living. This was an unintended positive consequence, not only of therapy, but also of Jesse’s death. As Ram Dass would say, you would never wish it to happen this way, but…..here it is. Grist for the mill. Anyway, I realized after posting that I had left a couple of things out of the list of healing activities. One is dark humor. Like the magnet. Or jokes about playing the ‘dead kid card’ to get – or get out of- things. I learned the value of laughing in the face of death in the ‘80’s, during the years I ran a group for guys with AIDS. No cryin’ in that group, for the most part – just a lot of… Read more »
MY TRANSFORMATIONAL CANDY STORE
“Let the grass grow through you; cherish the wild inside you.” — Robert McCrea Imbrie “To study the Way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.” — Dogen Enlightenment? What is the ‘light’ in enlightenment? Is that ‘light’ in any way connected to the wildness and unpredictability of what we experience when we observe in a non-judgmental, non-striving, non-clinging way the streaming mental images, memories, mental constructions and thoughts of praise/ blame, gains/losses, success/failure, comfort/discomfort that constitute the flotsam and jetsam in the river of our mind? “Most men,” according to Thoreau, “live lives of quiet desperation.” Does enlightenment mean a light in the darkness of desperation and toxic feelings? Does it mean the LIGHTness of spirit, the openheartedness, the limitless love for self and all beings, the freedom from fear that meditation, in its own time and way, bestows as a grace? Has nature given us an appropriate fear of the future? Can we transform that fear into a thrilling ride in the amusement park of the mind? We fear the future because we don’t feel safe, but a scary ride at… Read more »
SEEKING A TEACHER
“Follow without hesitation, those who are the possessors of love, you shall surely achieve your good. Follow only those who try by strength, skill and tact for the welfare of all beings, you shall surely achieve your good. Follow them alone who never hurt anyone by word or deed, but never indulge evil, you shall surely achieve your good.” — Thakur When seeking an opportunity for growth and positive change, I think it might be best to approach a potential teacher, mentor, coach or therapist slowly, even warily, and to do so in a common-sense and investigative manner. For example, although I do not admire some of the personal predilections of Chogyam Trungpa, I have learned useful practices from reading several of his books and four books by his woman disciple Pema Chodran, who seems fresh, alive, existentially grounded in a practical approach to Buddhism, and very easy to understand. I’ve been impressed and grateful for Trungpa’s books and by his establishment of Naropa University in Colorado. But I know from a scientific point of view that I must take responsibility for testing and experimenting in a safe and common-sense way the ideas and practices he or anyone recommends, remembering… Read more »
Tiger Moms, Attachment Parenting, and ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ Child-Rearing
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. I’m not a fan of attachment parenting. I won’t get into snarky but humorous commentary on the subject, let’s just say I’d rather stick hot pokers in my eyes. But I’m not enamored of Tiger Moms, either, not just because of the meanness factor but also because I couldn’t care less if my offspring go to Yale or make a ton of money. And I’d feel horrible imposing such extraordinary demands on a child. I’m an ‘it doesn’t matter’ Mom. On many, many child-rearing issues that people argue passionately about, I believe: it doesn’t matter. Not the little stuff, anyway. Like how you give birth or whether you do the attachment thing or feed the kid on a schedule and let her cry herself to sleep. Like whether you do day care at six weeks or stay home till the kid’s in college. Even, ultimately, whether you breast feed or not (I’m ducking rotten tomatoes from the La Leche League as I write this). Think that’s heresy? I’m not the only heretic. The first time this point of view rocked the world of psychology was when Judith Harris published “The Nurture Assumption.” Harris had spent many… Read more »
