A current example is the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA), which, according to an Electronic Frontier Foundation article, would “create two Internet blacklists.

“The first is a list of all the websites hit with a censorship court order from the Attorney General.

“The second, more worrying, blacklist is a list of domain names that the Department of Justice determines — without judicial review — are ‘dedicated to infringing activities.’”

[Censorship of the Internet Takes Center Stage in "Online Infringement" Bill, Richard Esguerra, Electronic Frontier Foundation Sep 21, 2010.]

Could this and other corporate and political efforts lead to a kind of online “hostile environment” for the free exchange of creative ideas?

A hostile environment in a sexual harassment case may include “anything that creates fear, intimidates, ostracizes, psychologically or physically threatens, embarrasses, ridicules…”

A number of thinkers are saying that forces like corporatism and fundamentalism are exerting increasingly suppressive effects on creative people.

Davidson Loehr [Ph.D.s in philosophy and religion; senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin] says in his book America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher: “The America that most of us loved has been cleverly and systematically murdered to feed the monetary and imperialistic hunger of some of our greediest people.

“The results of this death are easy to measure. The United States is 49th in the world in literacy and 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy. Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature.”

Loehr quotes political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt, who identifies a list of social and political agendas common to fascist regimes, including: “Religion and government are intertwined; Corporate power is protected; Disdain for intellectuals and the arts.”

Speaking of elite power – Jennifer Abbott, a director and editor of the outstanding documentary The Corporation [source of this image] [dvd at Amazon] noted in an indieWire interview: “The corporation itself does not have morals, per se… it’s an absurd situation to have the dominant institution of our day have to prioritize profit above the public good.”

So what do we do?

One way to start may be to make these kinds of issues more personal. And to learn more about the often subtle forms of political, religious and ideological tyranny that can fuel the suppression of innovation and creative individuality.

If you’re a shareholder, maybe you could demand a corporation develop a more active program to support arts and artists, such as the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative.

Maybe we could do more to fund arts programs in schools. And support meaningful, spirituality-oriented films like those distributed by The Spiritual Cinema Circle.

There are also pressures toward censorship on a more personal level.

For example, being concerned with pleasing others can have a subtle, or even an extensive impact on creative expression, acting as an insidious form of self-censorship. It may be especially active for highly sensitive people who react strongly to others’ feelings and attitudes.

More quotes on the topic on the page: Censorship.

Research is helping explain shyness in terms of brain physiology, particularly involving the amygdala (technically amygdalae) – a pair of structures in the limbic system that processes emotional reactions.

In his article The Evolution of Anxiety, Rich Presta explains, “Whenever you get input from your senses, it gets sent to two different parts of your brain for analysis. One is the frontal cortex… The other is called the amygdala (uh-MIG-duh- luh), which is actually two nerve centers that look like almonds and are located on either side of the thalamus.”

He adds, “The amygdala is old. Real old. It’s part of what is often called the ‘reptilian brain’ because it’s been around since we were virtually reptiles ourselves, and one of the main jobs of the amygdala is assessing danger and keeping us safe.”

One of the key elements of anxiety is getting revved up with the “fight or flight” response that kept us safe from sabretooth tiger attacks – but we can still feel the response when “confronted” by a first date or a job review.

The article Shyness is inherited by Medical News Today reports that “researchers conducted brain scans on 22-year-olds and found that those who had been classified 20 years before as inhibited or shy children had a distinctive reaction in their brains when confronted with novel images.

“People who had been judged as toddlers to be inhibited showed in the scans that the amygdala structure in their brains responded much more actively to unexpected sights than did those subjects who had been judged as children to be more outgoing, said Jerome Kagan, a researcher in the department of psychology at Harvard University.”

The article adds, “Kagan also suggests that shyness is a temperament that can be inherited, but this temperament does not necessarily determine one’s eventual personality.”

“Sometimes because I am very shy, when I meet a director and they are shy too, we just sort of sit there.”

Sigourney Weaver

Maybe all this can help explain more about why so many of us were shy as children, and still feel it – often along with other forms of apprehension or anxiety.

See more info including videos in the post Anxiety and the Amygdala – anxiety relief programs.

It is important to note that shyness is not the same as introversion.

Laurie Helgoe notes in her Psychology Today article: “On the surface, introversion looks a lot like shyness. Both limit social interaction, but for differing reasons.

“The shy want desperately to connect but find socializing difficult, says Bernardo J. Carducci, professor of psychology and director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast. Introverts seek time alone because they want time alone.

“An introvert and a shy person might be standing against the wall at a party, but the introvert prefers to be there, while the shy individual feels she has no choice.”  [From Revenge of the Introvert.]

Also see my post Shyness, Introversion, Sensitivity – What’s the Difference?

shyness, shy people, feeling shy, social phobia, social anxiety, timid, withdrawn, fear of people, shyness and amygdala

Or you don’t even attempt something like introducing a speaker at a business event, or auditioning for a community theater role – both of which could not only be downright fun, but enhance your confidence.

Even talented and accomplished performers sometimes feel disrupting or disabling anxiety.

Laurence Olivier – “The man often considered the greatest actor of the 20th century didn’t face the dreaded affliction until late middle age, but then it hit him hard. In one run at London’s National Theatre, Olivier had to have the stage manager push him onstage every night.” [From Even stars get stage fright, Patrick Enright, msnbc.]

Emma Roberts, besides acting, also expresses herself creatively through painting, collage, writing and singing (she released an album in 2005), but a news article reported she’s uncomfortable performing in public.

“And doing a music video is so embarrassing,” Roberts said. “I don’t think I’ll be doing [another] album unless I write it for someone else. I have stage fright. I can’t ever do theater because I would pee my pants,” she says, laughing.

“It’s way too nerve-racking. There’s a comfort in being able to mess up when you’re on a movie set.”

In a 2005 interview, at age 14, she talked about part of what caused her anxiety: “Singing, I’m still getting used to, and it’s kind of embarrassing just because everyone’s watching, either going, I love you or I hate you.”

Another dynamic may be perfectionism

Cherry Jones earned a Tony nomination for her acting in a play, but said she was “nearly paralyzed by a profound case of stage fright” from trying to live up to the “greatest performance” she had ever seen in the role, that of Colleen Dewhurst.

That sort of perfectionism can drive anxiety and insecurity. Trying to be “perfect” can be energizing and inspiring up to a point, but too much concern can lead to a drop in performance.

[From my post Actors and Anxiety – Get Help For Your Stage Fright.]

Managing stage fright or fear of public speaking

Also in that post is a mention of energy psychiatrist Judith Orloff, M.D., who works with many actors and says she sometimes prescribes a beta blocker such as Inderal, a medication to reduce the fight or flight sensations of anxiety such as muscle tension and increased heart rate.

But in her book “Emotional Freedom” she details what she says is a better way than drugs – a three minute mini-meditation that includes learning how to breathe, center and let thoughts flow by.

A program is available from CTRN – a company serving clients “with Public Speaking, Flying and many other fears & phobias” – see the article How to Conquer America’s Greatest Fear: The Fear of Public Speaking.

Morty Lefkoe has developed a method to deal with performance anxiety – see a video with Paul Scheele of Learning Strategies describing how the program helped him on the page: Undo Public Speaking Fear – The Lefkoe Method

- or go directly to the Undo Public Speaking Fear site.

dealing with stage fright, performance anxiety, help for audition anxiety, relieving fear of public speaking

A diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for instance, can deeply affect our sense of identity and change the course of our life.

The decision to take medications to treat a mental illness may also have a long-range impact on our physical and emotional well-being.

Meg Hutchinson

In An Interview with Meg Hutchinson on Music and living with Bipolar Disorder, the folk music singer-songwriter talks about her own diagnosis, and her choice to take medication.

[T]hat feeling that you’re just – that nothing can stop you. Before I realized what I was dealing with, I just found those spells of kind of a lightning and electricity and creativity to be so intoxicating. And so that song ["The Living Side"] talks about how, even now, sometimes I miss the extremes of that ride, and yet there’s a lot in the song that says I promise to stay on the living side…

[Medication] has been…a core part of my treatment and something that’s been really challenging. I grew up in a very homeopathic, natural, organic kind of household. We didn’t medicate very much. We didn’t even get all of our vaccinations. These are hippie parents who had a really kind of holistic approach to our health and something I value a lot. So this is a real paradigm shift for me, to get to a place where I went, wow, I need help, and to realize that it was severe, that it was as dangerous as not treating cancer or diabetes or something.

It’s also been something that I’ve been very – you know, paid a lot of attention to to make sure that I wasn’t over-medicated, and to make sure that I made med changes with professional supervision, and that I did it slowly and carefully, and that before I made any changes I looked at my lifestyle and said, “What do I need to do before I’m ready for the next change here?”

And for me that’s been starting a meditation practice, changing my relationship with alcohol, you know, many things that all factor in to my health. So, yes, it’s still a very important part of treatment. It’s not the only part, and I think that’s something that we get pretty confused about in our country, that we just treat the symptom and we don’t look at the underlying causes or the person as a whole and figure out how can we adjust all of these other things towards their health.

But, yes, I feel grateful that there’s medication. I feel grateful that there are mood stabilizers on the market now that have fewer side effects and that we’ve come a long way in the last 30 years, a real long way, as far as treatment options. And I’m glad to be bipolar in this generation, you know. It’s a little bit easier I think.

You know I needed to be in the hospital when I was, but I also knew that the things that would heal me would come outside of that setting, and I needed to return to them. So if you have those things already, go back to them and use them as a way to heal yourself. And if you don’t have them prior to the breakdown, find friends that will help you get to those things that treat you on the deeper levels that I think we need to heal.

Clearly, Hutchinson has been thoughtful in making her treatment decisions. But in spite of an orientation toward natural health instead of drugs, she chose to take psychiatric medications, along with making other changes in her life.

In Giftedness, sensitivity and psychiatric drugs: why do we take them and why do we quit? I take a look at some of the influences that might lead us to take drugs to cope with extreme states and the pressures of high sensitivity and giftedness.

What’s ‘normal’?

Hutchinson’s story is one of apparently severe distress, perhaps outside the range of ‘normal.’ But who decides what’s ‘normal’? Where does hypomania end and mania begin, and who decides what we should do to cope with or eliminate it?

In Peter D. Kramer on normality and mental health, Kramer, author of  Listening to Prozac and Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. notes the ever-diminishing concept of ‘normal.’

I have been thinking a good deal about normality lately. It’s a concern in the medical world. The complaint is that doctors are abusing [their] privilege, to define the normal.

Ordinary sadness, critics say, has been engulfed by depression. Boyishness stands in the shadow of attention deficits. Social phobia has engineered a hostile takeover of shyness.

Anatomy of an Epidemic

Hutchinson chose to make psychiatric medication a core part of her treatment.

Are psychiatric drugs really effective, and are patients being given the facts about their long-term effects so that they can make a truly informed decision?

Are we really living in a time of better treatment options for people with mental illness?

One author whose work has illuminated my own road to better mental health is journalist Robert Whitaker. In his Huffington Post article, Anatomy Of An Epidemic’: Could Psychiatric Drugs Be Fuelling A Mental Illness Epidemic?, he takes a look at psychiatry’s track record:

The number of adults, ages 18 to 65, on the federal disability rolls due to mental illness jumped from 1.25 million in 1987 to four million in 2007. Roughly one in every 45 working-age adults is now on government disability due to mental illness.

This epidemic has now struck our nation’s children, too. The number of children who receive a federal payment because of a severe mental illness rose from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007, a 35-fold increase.

I wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic to investigate this epidemic, and this pursuit necessarily raises a very uncomfortable question. Although we, as a society, believe that psychiatric medications have “revolutionized” the treatment of mental illness, the disability numbers suggest a very different possibility. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling this epidemic?

This does not mean that antipsychotics don’t have a place in psychiatry’s toolbox. But it does mean that psychiatry’s use of these drugs needs to be rethought, and fortunately, a model of care pioneered by a Finnish group in western Lapland provides us with an example of the benefit that can come from doing so.

Twenty years ago, they began using antipsychotics in a selective, cautious manner, and today the long-term outcomes of their first-episode psychotic patients are astonishingly good. At the end of five years, 85% of their patients are either working or back in school, and only 20% are taking antipsychotics.

Life after medications

Like Hutchinson, when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a label I no longer find appropriate, I was grateful to be living today with so many drug options. Yet studies such as those discussed in CVD drives 25-year loss in life expectancy among the mentally ill reveal the health risks of medications, about which most mental health patients are never informed.

Years later, after a long process of withdrawal and recovery from the debilitating physical and emotional side-effects of psychiatric medications, I’ve come to see psychiatric drugs differently. My life after drugs is one I embrace, as I also embrace my high sensitivity and creativity.

Related:

Posts:

Giftedness, sensitivity and psychiatric drugs: why do we take them and why do we quit?

Woman interrupted: misdiagnosis and medication of sensitivity and giftedness

Misdiagnosis of the Gifted

Books:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications

~~

mental illness and creativity, psychology of creativity, creativity and mood swings, mental health and creativity, sensitivity and drugs, sensitivity and giftedness, high sensitivity personality, mental health books, drug books

What are some of the reasons people stop taking medications??

What are the alternatives?

• My inner life, and sometimes my outer life, is painful/chaotic/confusing. The DSM symptoms list for certain mental illnesses seem to fit me so I must be ill.

The mental suffering of sensitive, creative and divergent children and adults is real. Existential depression, loneliness, and emotional overwhelm are very real, as are the complications arising from our use of behaviors and substances to alleviate our suffering.

These experiences don’t require a diagnosis of mental illness in order to be taken seriously. And treating our suffering doesn’t need to include tampering with our highly sensitive brains.

• It is a relief to be given a psychiatric diagnosis.

When I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder I felt relieved. I thought I finally had an explanation for all the difficult relationships, mistakes and trauma in my life. And there were pills that would fix it all!

I trusted the medical professionals who interpreted my creative energy as mania and my mental energy as ‘racing thoughts,’ because they must know best.

Unaware of high sensitivity and the complex dynamics of giftedness and creativity, I was very self-critical and ashamed of myself.

I’d spent years in therapy and graduate school studying psychology, committed to understanding my mind and taking responsibility for what I thought were my failures and inability to ‘fit in.’ The bipolar diagnosis felt like a huge ‘pass.’ I had a ‘disease’ and it wasn’t my responsibility.

It’s challenging and often lonely to live in this world with a creative, sensitive brain. But it’s not a disease. I take responsibility for learning as much as possible about living a healthy, meaningful life as a gifted HSP in an often unsupportive world. Thankfully, there is much more information available to us now than in the past, and a growing community of people with similar challenges and gifts.

With the growing understanding of these issues, and the support of others with similar personality, I now have a self-concept based on my own interpretation of myself over my entire life, rather than on the opinion of psychiatric professionals who have had only brief encounters with me.

• I need relief now! There’s nothing else I can do but take medication.

When we go to a therapist or psychiatrist we are often in acute distress. Real healing of the mind and body take time, but when we’re suffering we’re especially vulnerable to doctors who may tell us that we have a disease, we need drugs and the drugs will help now.

What they are unlikely to tell us is that no disease has been proven in the case of mental illness, the drugs don’t really ‘cure’ but sedate and alter the brain, and effective alternatives exist.

Even the need for short-term drug intervention for suicidal and delusional patients might be overestimated. Studies have shown various supplemental, nutritional and alternative therapies to be as or more effective in relieving symptoms.

• My doctor must know what she’s talking about and she seems to really care about me.

The reality is that psychiatrists have no idea why and how the drugs they prescribe work, nor are they aware of their long-term effects and the data on their inefficacy.

We all need people who care about us, especially when we’re in emotional crisis, and mental health professionals are usually in that profession because of a sincere desire to alleviate suffering.

But perhaps someone trained by, and very often given perks by, drug corporations and the institutions they support, isn’t the most informed and objective resource.

• Not taking drugs to treat mental illness is as dangerous as not treating cancer or diabetes.

While not treating suicidality or other extreme states can be dangerous, the fact remains that mental illness is not like physical illness.

The question is, do psychiatric medications really treat life-threatening and severely debilitating states, or do they sedate and disable the brain, giving an illusion of improvement?

Might these drugs be even more dangerous than the ‘diseases’ they claim to treat?

• I think I have a mental illness as well as a creative/sensitive personality, so I need medications.

Sounds logical, but even if you decide you really have bipolar disorder or another mental illness, it’s a good idea to think twice before you choose how to treat it.

These drugs have many physical and psychological side effects (often discounted by psychiatrists as symptoms of the purported illness), and more or different drugs may be prescribed to deal with them.

• I just need to take drugs for a little while, then when I’m better I’ll stop.

Getting on psychiatric drugs may be easy, but getting off them can be hell.

It’s becoming clear, through the investigations of people like Robert Whitaker in Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, that the prognosis for those on psychiatric medications is grim: a 10-25 year shorter life span, and the likelihood of permanent disability.

It takes some people years to taper off psychiatric medications, and some are never able to do so successfully. I was lucky – it took me a year of slow tapering to get off multiple psychiatric medications which had caused depression, intense anxiety, sleeplessness, diabetes, tinitus, digestive problems, cognitive dysfunction and more.

Now that I’m drug-free, I sleep, dream and experience my emotions again authentically, but I continue to experience some physical side effects from the medications and may for some time. It’s a long road to recovery.

• What are the alternatives?

There are orthomolecular psychiatrists who actually do tests to determine what underlying physical conditions may be responsible for mental distress.

There are also many books and organizations, some listed below, which provide information on behavioral, nutritional and supplemental alternatives to drugs.

Although supplements can have side effects and need to be carefully chosen, many have been used for thousands of years to effectively treat emotional and mental conditions.

There is life after psychiatric drugs. For me, it’s been a better life.

Related:

Posts:

Woman interrupted: misdiagnosis and medication of sensitivity and giftedness

Misdiagnosis of the Gifted

Books:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications

Organizations:

Safe Harbor — Includes links to find medical doctors (by zip code) who can assist with helping people safely get off of psychiatric drugs and medical personnel who will treat people without the use of psychiatric drugs

Alternative to Meds Center — Residential psychiatric medication withdrawal with medical and naturopathic oversight in Sedona, Arizona

Green Mental Health — Holistically-centered mental health care system which reflects traditional environmental, humanitarian, and health conscious values

The Road Back — How to get off psychiatric drugs safely

Soteria House — Alternative and non-drug solutions for people diagnosed schizophrenic

Mind Freedom International — is a nonprofit organization that works to win human rights and provide alternatives for people labeled with psychiatric disabilities

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights
~~

sensitivity and psychiatric drugs, sensitivity and mental illness, sensitivity and drugs, sensitivity and giftedness, high sensitivity personality, mental health books, drug books, highly sensitive books

Why do so many people believe that they have to put in a lot of time and effort—and then need a lot of reinforcement—in order to produce a lasting change in their life?

People hold this belief because they have tried unsuccessfully to change a variety of things in their lives, such as eating junk food, not sticking to an exercise program, getting into relationships they know are bad for them, having negative feelings like anger and anxiety, and procrastination.

When I ask clients what they have done to produce change in the past, I get a litany of answers: therapy, books, workshops, hypnosis, EFT, NLP, willpower, support systems, etc.

For people who have spent years trying a variety of techniques to produce a real change in their behavior or feelings, and they haven’t succeeded, it was reasonable for them to conclude: Change is difficult, if not impossible.

That’s why so many people hold this belief.

That leads us to the obvious question: Why is change so difficult?

Very often we know our current behavior doesn’t make logical sense and is self-defeating.  We know what we should do instead.  We know the value of change.

So why doesn’t all that information and motivation result in change?

People Who Know Reality Through Their Eyes

The answer to this question lies in how we know what we know.  The overwhelming majority of people are visual, which means they know the truth about reality because they can see it.

“What do you mean you disagree with me, can’t you see that I’m right?  Look at the evidence.”

So if you think you see something out there in the world, it must be true.

For those of you who have used the Lefkoe Belief Process to eliminate a belief, you’ll remember there is a place in the process where the facilitator says: “Imagine being a child and observing the events that led you to form the belief.  Doesn’t it seem as if you can see your belief?”

The answer for visual people is always: “Yes, I can see it.”  And that is why it is so difficult to get rid of old, limiting beliefs and the behavior they engender:  Because we think we saw the belief out there in the world many times.

When mom and dad are critical, we think we can see I’m not good enough in their comments and behavior.

When mom and dad aren’t available when we want them, we think we can see I’m not important in their comments and behavior.

When mom and dad make all the decisions and what we want is ignored, we think we can see I’m powerless in their comments and behavior.

Later in life we use logic and a bunch of other techniques to try to erase the belief.

But our subconscious seems to be arguing: Maybe the belief doesn’t make sense, maybe it is self-defeating, maybe the behavior and emotions coming from the belief are ruining my life… but I saw it in the world, so it must be true.

What makes the Lefkoe Belief Process so effective is that it helps people realize that they actually never did see their belief in the world, that what they think they saw was, in fact, only one arbitrary interpretation of a series of events that has only existed in their minds.

For example, not being able to get mom and dad’s attention could mean I’m not important.  It also could mean that mom and dad just had poor parenting skills or they felt uncomfortable around kids, and their behavior had nothing to do with my importance.

When we give meaning to events that have no inherent meaning, it seems as if we can see that meaning in the events.  Therefore, that meaning (belief) must be true.

But, in fact, we don’t discover (see) the meaning in the events, we attribute the meaning to the events.

People Who Know Reality Through Their Feelings

For those people who know the truth through their feelings, earlier in their lives they felt the belief to be true.  In other words, whenever mom and dad were critical, they didn’t see I’m not good enough, they felt I’m not good enough.

Why do such people trust their feelings to tell them the truth about reality?  Because they think that their feelings are caused by reality, that their feelings tell them something about reality.

For example, if I feel uncomfortable with you and decide not to deal with you any more, why would I act on those feelings?  Because I think there is something about you that is causing the feeling, so the feeling must be an accurate reflection of the way you really are.

For such people, using logic or motivation or most other techniques to get rid of beliefs doesn’t work because their subconscious is saying: But I felt (my belief) hundreds of times in the past, so it must be true despite evidence to the contrary right now.

Here the Lefkoe Belief Process helps people to realize that reality didn’t cause them to feel their beliefs; they caused the feeling by giving a particular meaning to the events that appear to cause the feeling.

In other words, the fact that mom and dad were disappointed or angry at you didn’t cause you to feel I’m not good enough.

You had to first say that those events meant I’m not good enough before you could feel that.

If you had said instead that mom and dad’s behavior meant: Mom and dad have unreasonable expectations of me and their frustration or anger has nothing to do with me, their same behavior would have made you feel that meaning, instead of I’m not good enough.

So the next time you are trying to change something in your life (or are trying to help a friend change), remember that change without getting rid of the beliefs that cause the current behavior or feelings is almost impossible.

And that change probably is difficult when you are convinced you either saw or felt the belief causing your current behavior or feeling on numerous occasions earlier in life.

When you realize you never saw your belief and you caused the feeling, not reality, your belief will just dissolve.

When you know how to produce lasting change, it actually is very quick and easy.

Thanks for reading my blog. I really would appreciate your comments and questions.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using The Lefkoe Method, go to ReCreate Your Life where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

[Thanks to Morty Lefkoe for this article provided specifically for Talent Development Resources.]

See more articles by Morty Lefkoe.

personal growth development, personal development, self growth, personal growth resources, life change, positive change

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