Rewiring Your Brain for Healthy Empathy: Acquiring a Voltmeter

February 1, 2012

Empathy’s useful, done right — like a voltmeter for relationships

In the scheme of “rewiring your brain for love,” one of the benefits of mindfulness practice when it comes to relationships could be thought of as acquiring a voltmeter — that quality of empathy that allows you the ability to accurately read the voltage between you and your partner.

Unfortunately, many people don’t “do” empathy in a way that supports a healthy relationship.

I’ve posted below an introduction to different levels of empathy, and how they can serve or undermine your relationships, which I hope you’ll find useful.

Acquiring a Voltmeter: Empathy

(Excerpt from Chapter 8 of Rewire Your Brain For Love)

Insight into your own inner workings, and having a coherent narrative about how you came to be you, are incredibly important for healthy relationships — and when you put those together with being empathic?

Wow.

Now you got it goin’ on.

Like lots of other people, for too many years I had empathy all wrong. Okay, well, to be more self-empathic, I only had it partly wrong, but it was an important part. Vital, even.

Mostly, I thought being empathic was about tuning in to others, getting what they were feeling. And then, to the very best of my ability, it was my task to try to make everyone feel better.

It worked, in a lot of ways. When I was little, I was really good at being able to detect the mood of my mother and behave in ways that I knew would make her feel better. I figured out how to soothe my dad’s ruffled feathers after my mother had dissed him.

Without consciously realizing it, I’d taken as fact that, if only I tried hard enough, I could make everybody feel better. If they didn’t feel better, I felt like a failure-or, to put it in attachment terms, I was afraid that they’d no longer love me.

And boy-howdy, did I try. Remember how I mentioned before that I had anxious insomnia when I was ten? Yep. That came from trying so hard to make everyone okay, from all of that “empathizing.”
Apparently, I didn’t get the memo that “everyone” included me. I was miserable. [click to continue…]

13 Ways to Have More Mindful Sex

January 5, 2012

Improve your love life through simple meditation

I had a fun interview with Jennifer Abbasi for iVillage.com, and the results are up: 13 Ways to Have More Mindful Sex. Shockingly, the articles and other posts in which I discuss sex and mindfulness always get tons of hits. Imagine that! :)

I’ve posted the first part of the article here, but you might enjoy it more with the slideshow pictures that iVillage, has to go along with each suggestion — feel free to click on over. (It’s not G-rated, but it’s not anything more that you’d see in a typical women’s or men’s magazine.)

Have fun!

~ Marsha

Step One: Think Your Way To Better Sex

Forget the romantic chocolates and acrobatics: A recent study suggests that we can actually think our way to better sex. Researchers at Brown University showed that women who received “mindfulness” training reported their responses (“calm,” “excited” or “aroused”) to erotic pictures faster than they did before the course. Such responses reflect the ability to register changes in your body. You may lack awareness of sensation and arousal during sex, researchers say, if you’re too busy thinking about the grocery list or knocking around self-doubts like, “Do I look fat right now?” We talked to Marsha Lucas, Ph.D., a psychotherapist and neuropsychologist in Washington, D.C., and author of Rewire Your Brain for Love, about how to use mindfulness to improve your sex life.

Read More HERE

Tips to Protect Therapists from Taking on the Fears & Distress of Their Clients

December 18, 2011

Question:

Do you have any comments about therapists taking on somatizing the fears and anxieties of clients? Are there recommendations for therapists protecting themselves while working with clients in the altered state that guided imagery produces?

Answer:

This is more likely to happen to newbie therapists, before they get their boundaries in place, but this issue affects us all.  You want to aim to set your boundaries in such a way that you can still experience empathy and compassion, but without taking on the client’s pains and fears.  This balance is critical to being effective and to staying that way, without burning out.

Remember it’s not your job to absorb pain, but to strengthen and assist the person so that they can better deal with what is causing them pain.  Your job is to help them shift and change so that they can surmount or ameliorate their circumstances. [click to continue…]

Mindfulness Has Positive Impact on Bipolar Illness

December 16, 2011

Researchers from King’s College and the Institute of Psychiatry performed a qualitative study to explore how practicing mindfulness related to living with and managing bipolar illness.

Qualitative methodology was used to explore the experiences of 12 people with bipolar illness who had been practicing mindfulness for at least 18 weeks. Semi-structured interviews exploring how the practice of mindfulness meditation affected their living with their condition were recorded verbatim, transcribed, and then analyzed using thematic analysis. [click to continue…]

Why Our Brains Make Us Laugh

November 30, 2011

This alternative approach to understanding how humor relates to our brain function is an eye opening and intriguing one.

He who laughs last usually has to have the joke explained. But then why bother? After all, nothing kills humor faster than analysis. That sentiment has long dogged humor studies, a field often disparaged as an affront, even an existential threat, to its subject matter. It’s just a joke: Don’t overthink it.

But what if humor (or mirth, in research speak) is intimately linked to thinking? What if we’d have trouble thinking without it? That’s the argument of “Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind” (MIT Press, 2011).

Coauthored by three scholars, the book had an unusual genesis: It began in 2004 as an undergraduate term paper. First author Matthew Hurley, a native of Reading, Mass., had enrolled at Tufts University after a few years of travel and work as a computer programmer. As part of a self-designed major in cognitive science, Hurley took a course on humor taught by the psychologist Reginald Adams Jr. It struck Hurley that most humor theories focused on why we find certain things funny. But, he wondered, why do humans find anything funny? Why do we have a sense of humor in the first place? [click to continue…]

How Meditating May Help Your Brain

November 30, 2011

Another study analyzing the benefits of mindfulness meditation for both newbies and experienced meditators.

Enjoy,
~Marsha

When you’re under pressure from work and family and the emails don’t stop coming, it’s hard to stop your mind from jumping all over the place.

But scientists are finding that it may be worth it to train your brain to focus on something as simple as your breath, which is part of mindfulness meditation.

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the latest in a hot emerging field of research examining how meditation relates to the brain. It shows that people who are experienced meditators show less activity in the brain’s default mode network, when the brain is not engaged in focused thought.

The default mode network is associated with introspection and mind wandering. Typically, drifting thoughts tend to focus on negative subjects, creating more stress and anxiety. It has also been linked to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers looked at experienced meditators and trained novices. There were 12 in the “experienced” category, with an average of more than 10,000 hours of mindfulness meditation experience (Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” suggests that it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert at something), and 12 healthy volunteers who were novices in meditation. [click to continue…]

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