Today I watched two movies from my childhood. I started out with “Ordinary People” from 1980 and later watched “The Breakfast Club” from 1985. Both amazing films in their own right, I quickly realized I was re-visiting a lot of my own pre-adolescent and teenage memories. I felt the need to reconnect, almost as if I hadn’t gone down memory lane in some time. But, the truth is that we are always going down memory lane, whether consciously or in our subconscious.

We live according to how we’ve lived in our pasts. We have reference points to which we can base decisions and help guide our actions. The idea of nostalgia comes in more as an afterthought at times. Having distinct memories that elicit elevated emotions of defining and breakthrough moments are often the ones we choose to revisit more often, perhaps for the higher levels of emotion which, in turn, make us feel more alive.

I am no exception to highly charged emotional memories. In fact, I tend to hold the highly charged memories more close in my memory bank because of their feel good or feel real capacity. Oftentimes, we act without thinking or we think without acting. I have found that if we act upon our thoughts with the intention that every moment is a potentially withstanding and defining moment we can, at that point, be more in the moment. The beauty is that we can reflect on our moments as memories almost instantaneously.

Listening to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s latest audiobook the first time was uneventful. It wasn’t until earlier today when I was able to draw some parallels and make real connections to his words. So, was I not as ready the first time around or does it take a repeat dose of the profundity of the work that the meaning finally took root.

I often think of knowledge as a metaphor of a tree. There is no tree without a seed and there is no seed without the tree. Sort of a chicken and the egg conundrum, knowledge operates from a more base realization. The idea is that it’s existence is variable and based on one’s perception.

The tree of knowledge does not prosper without water. Every ounce of study can be viewed as books and manuscripts supporting the tree analogy. Every word is a leaf in the vast landscape. Today, I pay more attention to the mental clarity of perception and knowledge. I choose that which is mindful and realize that, in Kabat-Zinn’s words, if I am breathing, I am at the very least, more positive than not.

So, I’ve been working at the hospital and mental health facility for just over a month and a half now. My first rotation on the Partial Hospitalization unit has been very good. Everyday is a bit like working in a triage. I’ve worked as a therapist and case manager from intake to discharge for seven full cases thus far and each one is definitely unique in itself. I’ve had a few challenging cases of polysubstance dependent adolescents with comorbid Axis I and II disorders that left me on the unit in continual bewilderment. The amount of deceit and manipulation certainly elevates with drug and alcohol cases.

As I approach my second rotation in Inpatient Assessment and Consultation, I’m brushing up on my personality testing, particularly the Rorshach and the Thematic Apperception Test, both of which I will be giving somewhat regularly for 10 weeks. I’m looking forward to the experience since I didn’t get to run projectives to this degree as a school psychologist. The validity scales and reliability coefficients are fairly low for personality projective testing, but there is still some value in obtaining scores for severely mentally ill and disassociative patients.

I’ve also been brushing up on my child and adolescent developmental theorists, particularly Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. I’ve also been reading more about clinicians work with Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Rational Emotive Therapy in addition to my already more pronounced clinical work with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I’m coming across so many more severely mentally ill individuals that I’m having to tighten up on my conceptualization and clinical skills. I’m also getting to see a broader spectrum of mental illness from outpatient adjustment and family systems issues to severe adolescent mental illnesses like emerging schizophrenia, bipolar individuals with hypomanic psychotic features, and occasional juvenile justice cases.

So, I’ll try and give further updates about my work on the unit. I’m enjoying the challenge for now and hope to make some real changes in the lives of my cases. I find that everyday and actually every minute is profoundly different. I hope to keep up my energy and continue to work on my own conceptualizations and theories in child and adolescent psychopathology. There’s a vast area of clinical research out there and seemingly limited time.

In a world where many things can hurt you, defense mechanisms are built. In a world where attempts

Life is rarely explainable in black and white terms. However, when we can describe them in concrete and explainable terms, it often feels right. That’s concordance, the idea of our thoughts working in agreement.  I feel, however, that there’s typically a spectrum to most ideas, theories, and postulates. In politics, religion, and every other  human construct imagineable, the sides seem so distinct with ever growing fences in between. However, my hypothesis on living in the 21st century is based more in the realm of concordance and discordance. I first learned these terms in a neuropsychology course in which the concordant (left) brain and discordant (right) brain were explained as having very stark and different functions, however the same functions are interwoven with a host of circuits which tie it all together like a juxtaposed circuit board of functioning.

In development, the pre-adolescent and adolescent brain starts to produce more white matter (software) and starts to prune the grey matter (hardware). For most of scientific history, neuroscientists believed that the brain stopped developing previous to adulthood and, therefore, humans were stuck with the hardware they were given at a young age. Of course, now we know differently. The brain actually continues to wax and wane in it’s physical growth and areas of use appear to strengthen, even enlarge, over several years of practice by a phenomenon known as brain plasticity.

So, one can look at concordant and discordant brain processes as somewhat of an anomoly of what scientists previously thought. Together with the theories of brain plasticity and brain circuitry, the idea of concordance and discordance takes on a newer, distinct role. I will only touch upon these lightly, but the lessons learned can be taken on in various measures.

Because the logical and calculated left brain develops and synthesizes language and linear verbal reception and expression, the idea of concordance can be platformed as a portrayal of a verbal menu, diagram, or chart. The right brain, on the contrary, is responsible for the abstract, non-linear, and imaginative parts of our thinking. This is the hemisphere of discordant thought, the instigator and global thinker, so to speak. Most of us often reside in one side more than the other, but it’s our series of circuits that appear to work their magic in making connections between both hemispheres.

The idea of left and right brain thinkers is still commonly used in pop psychology and even some modern neuroanatomy literature. However, the idea of circuitry is more current and accurate and discoveries are being made every day as to what these circuits are responsible for in humans. I took to the idea of concordant and discordant thoughts while study the brain simply because I connected with the idea of brain localization. At first, my left brain was in full bloom to the concrete areas and their functions. But it wasn’t long before I recall wanting to know more about the how, why, and where than simply the theories 0f what. This is where my right brain began to explore the possibilities. I often think of the possibilities as being identified by the left brain, hatched and nourished in the right brain, and given purpose by the circuits of the brain. It’s the circuitry where the puzzle gives itself meaning and we start to see the picture. It’s the circuitry where we begin to see ideas become applicable as function.

Strangely, but appropriately, after all my studies, I view the world in much the same way I view the brain. People are often in concordant or discordant arenas. Think about politics, religion, and even the very nature of laws, both human nature and legal ones. People tend to sit somewhere on the spectrum of being concordant or discordant in their views. I’ve often thought that if we stopped to make use of our corpus collosums, the white matter tract connecting the hemispheres, we might understand each other more. If we looked at how we’ve strengthened some circuits more than others, we might see some of the habitual acts as strengthened practices in others.

My inclination is that, as we begin to discover more about the brain, we also begin to step into uncharted waters often making matters of ethics more clouded and controversial. The very idea of artificial intelligence, creating super humans with megabrains, and programming brains to pre-determine behavior makes me quiver in the proverbial fear of mankind overcoming humankind. If we, in fact, are manifested products of our bodies and the hardware and applications in our brains combined with our experiences and previously learned behaviors, then where does that leave us in terms of individuality, spirituality, and morality. The areas of research are vast, perhaps endless, and continually interesting. I’m fairly certain that’s why I am where I choose to be, continually curious and often discordant with my own concordance.

So, you’re working with clients and patients who have come from far away. Maybe you’ve encountered similar places and you can make the connections. Or maybe you can’t. What do you do when your client comes from another country complete with different customs, belief systems, and social norms? What if these people come from your own country and you still feel a disconnect?

This is why it is important to collect as much background information as possible. Where the person has come from may just be as important as what they are going through. For example, a young Asian-American boy comes to your office complaining of stomach aches and headaches. If you don’t take a comprehensive background and brush up on your knowledge of his culture, you may not understand the somatization issues often common among Asian-Americans seeking therapy.

So, how about the folks who seem to have lived everywhere? For example, what do yo do with the clients who have lived a year or two in one region of the country only to have moved every year and a half for the past 40 years? The treatment plan may look completely different for these individuals based on their presenting problems, but you can take an early lead with their problems by identifying what they may be running away from or why the can’t settle.

Then there’s the client who comes to you with very little knowlege of English whom you don’t feel comfortable continuing in treatment with you. This would be a time to help the client and their family find someone who does speak their language. It would be nice to try and help, but in fact, you’d have to set aside your helping ways and offer the best help by refering the client to another qualified professional.

One of my attorney friends expressed it best when he mentioned I have gained the years of professional experience that will ultimately help to put me in the position I desire. The truth is that I was one of the fortunate ones. I knew from the beginning of my journey that I wanted to become a psychologist. But, I didn’t always know this.

My journey started 13 years ago in Illinois. I was working as a Project Impact teacher and advocate for troubled children and adolescents re-integrating into the regular school environment. I had also been bartending at a local corner restaurant in Springfield, Illinois for nearly 3 years before I started my work in the schools. I had been thinking and planning as I spoke to my bar “clients”, both young and old for all those years. I suppose I wanted to help people solve their problems, partly because I was given their trust fairly easily and partly because of the challenges it inevitably presented. Throw in a little bit of my analytical scientific nature and the general wisdom I had accrued from my short quarter of a century of experiences and you have before you a budding psychologist in training.

Four years later I enrolled in a graduate program in Charleston, South Carolina. The program offered two terminal graduate degrees at the end of about a three to five year committment to the coursework and a full year internship. Since, I was working in the field as a therapist and several other roles, it took me a little longer. But, I finished and am glad I took the time, since for me, I continued to study the fundamentals and underpinnings of Psychology on my own, even outside of the classroom.

Today, I look back and realize I have been fortunate enough to continue to be passionate about the field of psychology. I have two more years of training at the doctoral level, one full year of teaching at the graduate level, and several years of professional experience as a school psychologist under my belt. Now, I am on my final internship before being granted my doctorate in psychology.  I have a whole new respect for the folks who have gone this route in life. After all of these years, I have been given a variety of positions in which to take new and specialized perspectives to where I am headed. I now see my opportunities with a bigger perspective and am glad to have selected all of the opportunities that I could on my way.

As a member to a handful of professional organizations and associations, I often come across forums and listservs regarding topics we all must consider (e.g. money, requirements, professional advancement) at some point. Just recently, I came across a thread of commentaries on the monetary difficulties of being a doctoral psychologist. As this is in my near-sighted future, I read on to note that people claim the financial accolades vary tremendously based on location, specialization, and experience. I imagine that this is true of every field. However, the thread was mainly complaining that psychologists often do not make the salaries they deserve, especially after all the years of training.

As I read the host of vents complaints, I realized that I have completed a decade of my own formalized training from my pre-medical years at Augustana and Redlands to my clinical and school psychology training at The Citadel and my now capstone doctoral expeience at PCOM.  I agree that the amount of time, energy, and money that has gone into my pursuits has been astronomical. I’m simply fortunate that I stuck with it and tried daily to see the rewards at the end of these struggles. I know that it’s not a road for everyone and I also see, first-hand, the committments, sacrifices, and great compromises that people have endured to become doctors of psychology. It’s somewhat of an eye-opener when you come across a degree of accomplishment. But, it’s even more meaningful when you cross those roads with gratitude and appreciation.

Today, while sitting in a training and orientation for my job, I experienced a pretty strong case of deja vu. I turned to a woman seated next to me and mentioned that I felt like I had been in that situation before. I don’t know why, but it seemed very important to have to share that notion. Another woman across the table began to talk about her own experience with deja vu. The whole thing got me to think about global consciousness, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and the archetypes that exist in our worlds.

So, here I was seated next to two women I had only known for the first time about 24 hours previous to the training. They were all part of the whole experience. The presenter’s face was all to familiar. Even the color, temperature, and mere aura of the room seemed so familiar. The paintings and newly hung large sheets of paper that she put on the wall, to the most minute detail had all been exactly where they were, once before, or at least seemed that way. Now, I’m not completely convinced that deja vu is not simply a manifestation of familiar settings overlapped and,somehow, tapping into the memory parts of our brains. Sometimes, I think there is a lot more to it, but does that have to mean anything at all.

In the world of mystics, shamans, seers, and psychics, one’s vision is not taken lightly. I imagine that a case of deja vu should be taken as a lot more than a simple case of someone’s memory reconstituting itself. This is an area of huge debate I’m sure, but the ideas that roam around our cultures are all so different with the experience. I’ve even heard from very wise people that deja vu is a sign that your life is on track. That same notion was what I shared with the two women sitting next to me today. Why did I state that to them? Do I really believe that or am I wanting to stir the pot a bit? The answer for me is, “No and yes.” I don’t believe that one’s life is in order because they have a lot of deja vu. However, I think their unconscious might be more aligned to their conscious during these times. Remember, this is only a theory and not gospel, even though some may even see that as theory.

As humans, we like to assign meanings to everything. The left hemisphere of our brains likes to assign names and labels, categories and definitions, for the many things we come across thr0ughout our days. In essence, our left hemispheres don’t like things to go unattended and unknown for very long without an uneasy and uncomfortable eeling that the things in our worlds are existing uncompartmentalized. This hemisphere is responsible for analyzing and tagging.

Our right hemispheres are not concerned with the analysis and descriptive labelling of the things around us. These hemispheres are more concerned in the effort to assign meaning and abstract thought processes to that which may be going on around us. In this respect, I often wonder if deja vu is more of a right brain activity. I also wonder if the right hemisphere is mostly responsible for our interpretation of deja vu, therefore, assigning it meaning, inappropriate or not. After all, the experience is a real one. The activity exists in our heads, however it is a matter of perception whether it exists in the universe.

So, the notion of deja vu leads me to believe in my more recent interactions with our vast universe. Is there a collective unconsciousness that underlies and encompasses our days and nights? Is this consciousness that we feel and know a real entity that exists in culture or in myth? Or is this simply fictional?  In the paraphrased words of Carl Gustav Jung, a collective unconsciousness does exist in and within the generations of any society and culture simply due to our knowledge and memories of archetypes and mythological figures in history.

To me, I agree and see this clearly since it’s hard to dismiss a world where things have inevitably happened in history, so my feeling is that we have to accept it. I feel that we have no choice and that we must accept the world before and around us, imperfect and all. The easier we can come to this notion, the better we can move along within it.  Looking at global unconsciousness in this manner gives it a left-brained, analytical name where we can be literal with it’s meaning and assign it some kind of tangible category or feeling. How and what we do with this information appears to be up to our more imaginative right hemispheres.

Perhaps, tying in a global phenomenon such as deja vu with universal constructs such as Jung’s collective unconscious is not too far fetched. It would make sense that the first thing that came to my mind after my experience today was this notion of connectivity. The universe is something we cannot control. If it innately leads us to connectivity, whether it be with another person, a memory, or even historical events, it posesses something far greater than just a thought. It possesses, by nature, a collective entity, and that is why I continue to believe in Jung, Campell, and a host of other believers in the collective unconscious. it’s an entity that changes exponentially according to and in accordance with everything that exists and everything that is. The discordance that one introduces into the everyday definition of something is the work of the right-hemisphere.

For all of you who like to know that there is always an answer, you my friends, are likely more left-hemisphere driven. For those of you who read this blog adn think, “Well, he’s got a point, it is a blog and it is what it is” and move on, you may also be left-hemisphere driven. However, for the folks who almost automatically decide that there is no one answer to all this and you’d rather take it to an unknown areas of further unknowns, you’re probably using your right-hemisphere and it’s allowing you to process, without coming to a conclusion. Sometimes, in therapy, I feel that it might be useful to constructively become one of my client’s corpus callosums, metaphorically bridging the hemispheres of the brain, all the while creating consonance and disonance to see new ways.

This, to me, is the way of the Universe and the secret to being okay with the world. Accept that which is not necessarily confounded as true in the Universe and consider that it could be and you’ve found a different plane, an altogether scientific and even spiritual theory of sorts. Go ahead, give it a shot. You can’t hurt anything and you’ll only be tapping further into your universe, and I promise, it doesn’t hurt to do that.

So it turns out that Perry Farrell (born PerFetz Bernstein on March 29, 1959), frontman to the rock band Jane’s Addiction was right about something. The all to familiar lyric “I was standing in the shower thinkin’ about what makes a man…” has found it’s way back into my syanpses as of late. The truth is, I can relate. I do some of my best thinking in the shower.

Rock and roll is often one huge metaphor after metaphor. Sometimes, it grabs you with an undeniable guitar lick, other times it holds you with suspense. Jane’s used to do both for me back in the 90s. It was rock, intrigue, drama, and wisdom all rolled into one. Putting a latter lyric from the same song aside (“…and pissin’ on myself”), the song still reverberates as much today as it did for me nearly 20 years ago.

So, what did I exactly think about in the shower just now. Here’s the top 7 for today.

• Take advantage of Flat Rate packaging for heavy, yet small items in the mail.
• If you only think negative thoughts, you’ll only get negative results.
• Along the same lines, If you reframe an automatic negative thought, you work it from within.
• Appreciation of one’s life is often overlooked. We do it all the time until something bad happens.
• If you imagine life w/a severe disability (blind/deaf/mute/mentally ill/etc.), you can appreciate life the way it is.
• Facebook is probably the closest thing we have to a global consciousness realized. Scary, huh?
• Randomness is good. It’s what keeps spontaneity in the mundane.

So, that’s about it for now. Nothing completely profound, but not bad for 10 minutes. Maybe I should see if I can get a shower installed in my office. To me, there’s nowhere (outside of the woods) I have found that has quite the same resonance.

Following a rather intense, but mostly fun-filled reunion weekend, I’m sitting at O’Hare airport relaxing to the tunes on my laptop. My short layover has been lengthened to some unexpected free time in Chicago. If any of you have the Echoes collection or any other Pink Floyd albums for that matter, you  probably already know where I’m going with this entry. A proverbial trip down memory lane is inevitably in order.

I was reading a neuroscientist’s approach to music and the brain just now. He discussed a nice historic account of 6 different staples of emotions, from Love to Anger and everything in between. I, was mildly interested, but mostly because the read repeated fundamental knowledge of what we already know about emotions elicited specifically from music. I’ve always been fairly astute at finding appropriate music in my mind’s eye (or, I guess, ear) either during situations or even when there was nothing to actually play it on. Music, to me, exists in nicely stored packages in the mind.

And, for all intensive purposes, music comes from within, deep within. I think some people even exude music naturally without even having knowledge of their own innate gift. Still, others completely embrace and acknowledge their emotional connections to their favorite songs in ways more personal than almost anything on earth. Currently, my headphones are just now piping in Learning to Fly (P. Floyd) into my willing ears and I am channeling emotions of driving through corn-lined, blue skied, crisply refreshing open air roads in the midwest circa 1991. I can’t help but let it take me there.

To me, nothing else in this world can do what music does to me when it comes to memories. I’ve categorized entire years of my existence based on a few key albums from every era. 1989 was all about the Staring at the Sea Singles (The Cure), Metallica (Kill ‘em All/Ride the Lightning), and New Order’s Substance with, of course, some Dead Kennedys, Def Leppard, and The Doors thrown in for good measure. I remember it like it was yesterday, or at least, a few days ago. This weekend brought it all even closer in memories and, sometimes, I found mere people reminding me of a song. I take great solace in the comfort of knowing a memory is only a song away.

So now, as I sit here in O’Hare’s terminal K, my media player cues Hey You (more Floyd) and I can’t help but drift. Back to study hall during my sophomore year in high school this time.  Walkman in hand, I found a way to listen to The Wall enough times to hear it daily and regularly in my brain. But, this time, it was blaring at 10 as I slept, overworked by some test I pressured myself to do well on. See, it’s all right back in front of me, at the tip of a memory synapse, with the speed of a single  note. This is the power of music and it couldn’t be more appropriate for me to break out these tracks right now.

To the old high school cohort I saw this past weekend, it was great to have crossed paths with you again. 20 years is a healthy chunk of time, so I hope to see you around again in the more near future. In the name of rock, post-, punk, and all things auditorially pleasing, be well all.