Posts Tagged With ‘ Dr. Ron Kaiser ’

When I feel overloaded and overwhelmed and a sense of loss of control over important parts of my life, I can usually look at my desktop to help me regain a sense of control. As much as we have come to rely on electronics for communicating, banking, and other activities, I still get a lot of mail and other required paperwork.  Unfortunately, much of it falls into a sort of intermediate category between “Act on this immediately” and “File it away for much later use”.  Some things need to remain handy until I get more information in order to take action.  There may be meetings... Continue Reading

In working with individual patients, I’m often intrigued by the fact that individuals with low self-esteem can be quite critical about others with whom they interact.  It’s actually quite paradoxical but frequently observed that a person with low self-esteem is bothered by the fact that some of their peers choose to act in ways or have opinions that are different than theirs.  In essence, they criticize others for not choosing to adopt behaviors and attitudes that they reject in themselves.  Whether it is articulated this way or not, they are essentially saying, “Why isn’t... Continue Reading

Among the things that people are never trained for is how to be a bystander.  Whether we are a bystander at the scene of an accident or we are supporting a friend or relative who is dealing with an injury or illness or death of a loved one or we are navigating the process of how to remain friends with both members of a couple who are going through a divorce, there is a common denominator.  We are bystanders. It is difficult to know how to react to situations such as these where our roles may not be clearly defined.  We often want to help, in fact some people – including me –... Continue Reading

Do you ever take a meeting with yourself?  At the risk of sounding weirder than usual, I believe that most people don’t spend enough time talking with themselves.  As a result, we may take too many actions without pre-planning or without fully researching our options.  The best way to get around that is to have regularly scheduled meetings with ourselves. While I suspect that most people, whether they recognize it or not, usually hold a meeting inside their head when facing the possibility of making a major change involving a career or relationship or a move to another community,... Continue Reading

I don’t usually get overly personal in these blogs, but events of the past few weeks make it a little different this week. Like every couple, especially one who has raised children, we’ve had to deal with our share of stresses over our 52-year marriage.  Since we have lived healthy and active lives, however, few of those stressors have been in the health area.  But less than a month ago, my wife was diagnosed with melanoma near her left ear.  Fortunately, our physicians moved quickly and she had successful surgery yesterday, less than a month after the initial evaluation of her... Continue Reading

If I were to become King of the World, or at least the social media world, the first thing that I would decree is that the administrators of all the social media platform get together and forever banish the word, FRIEND, and come up with a better term to describe those with whom you connect on social media. Let me state that, in many ways, I am a fan of social media and appreciate the connections that are available to me there and the access to wonderful information that is often provided to me by those connections.  I can get lots of feedback for my ideas, promote my thinking and... Continue Reading

Every once in a while, people are surveyed about what they consider to be the most significant inventions that have taken place in the past century.  Cell phones are usually up there in the top ranks along with some of the vaccines and the rockets that enable space exploration – and I suspect that the electric car will earn a prominent place on the list as it becomes more commonplace.  Very few people share my choice: The TV remote control.  While I agree that the cell phone enables us to do an amazing variety of things that were unthinkable years ago – while still enabling us... Continue Reading

I’m old enough to remember when meditation wasn’t much of a thing – at least not outside of Asia.  I never learned about it during my Bachelors, Masters, or Doctoral programs.  When meditation began to gain some prominence in the last third of the 20th century, it was initially kind of a fringe practice before becoming more mainstream over time. For many years, meditation didn’t interest me because it seemed to arrive with sets of stringent rules for practice.  Some recommended a practice of 45 minutes a day, while others encouraged two sessions of 20 minutes a day before... Continue Reading

Whenever people discuss potential calamitous events of the future – like destruction of the planet due to global warming or an intentional or inadvertent nuclear event or the total collapse of the Social Security System or robots who start controlling humans rather than the other way around, you will often get at least one person who utters a sentence along the lines of, “At least I won’t be around to see it”. That’s a particularly troublesome statement to me – not just because some people will live considerably longer than the average lifespan, and they may actually be... Continue Reading

A true measure of emotional strength is the ability to stay calm at a time of crisis or chaos or turmoil.  The ability to stay calm is such an empowering skill.  Staying calm at a time when others seem unable to do so is such a powerful emotional tool.  It permits rational decision-making as well as enabling the calm individual to serve as a role model for those who lose perspective by thinking the worst and then making poor decisions under stress.  A calm individual instills confidence in a group by suggesting that things aren’t hopeless and spiraling out of control.  Fear of... Continue Reading