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Whew! 15 years of work! Although this is book #5 for me, it was the most difficult to write – because it’s about ME and MY thinking errors (don’t you just love self-disclosure?!). The publisher says that if you use the code MVY7M9SU they will knock off $3. That’s about 20%. Nice!

What Were You Thinking?

Some Common Thinking Errors and What to Do About Them

Authored by Joseph Bennette

A critical look into how our magnificent brains can help us make the most of our lives – and get us into deep trouble. Fortunately, thanks to our big brains we have the capability to solve our own thinking errors – once we know what those errors are. Explore some common thinking errors and what you can do to prevent or correct them. From the introduction:

Just what are thinking errors? Is it a thinking error to disbelieve what someone else believes? Is it a thinking error to misjudge someone’s character? Is it a thinking error to challenge convention? Just what do I mean when I subtitle my book, “Some Common Thinking Errors and What to Do About Them”?

We’re thinking all the time. Some of that thinking tends to bring about outcomes that differ from our intentions or wishes. Frustration is often the result when outcome doesn’t match intention or expectation. Maybe you’re seeking to lose a few pounds and have discovered that wishing isn’t enough. Maybe you’ve tried diets and other programs to lose some weight yet always find yourself defeated when you regain the pounds later. There is probably a thinking error at the root. Fix the thinking error and amazingly, the pounds drop like rain.

Every living creature makes mistakes. By ?mistakes, I mean choices resulting in disappointment, frustration, missteps, danger, and death rather than the intended or expected outcome. Humans are no exception. We make mistakes – loads of them!

We will continue to make mistakes. That is the course of life. The intent of this book is to help you perhaps lessen the number of mistakes and make your wishes come true more often in the way you wish them to come true.

I don’t intend to tell you the truth about life or to support any belief or belief system; only to investigate and challenge some common thinking errors. If you find after clearing these thinking errors that you are more supported in your beliefs, great! My hope is that you will find the courage to challenge your thinking and investigate your beliefs with clear thinking processes. I hope you will find the courage to change your life as necessary.

What Were You Thinking?

Some Common Thinking Errors and What to Do About Them

by Joseph Bennette

What I saw was clear and distinct as though I was looking out the window at an actual scene. The colors were as clear as broad daylight. What’s more, the scene changed in a logical order; that is, it proceeded like I was watching a movie. My client, too, saw a moving imagery that was spontaneous. I suspect that the frequency triggered spontaneous imagery related to deeper issues that were metaphorically represented.

Since then, I’ve experimented with the Galaxy on a number of clients and several have reported spontaneous imagery at frequencies of 12.3 to 12.8 hz. More imagery was reported at 12.7 hz unison (both lights flashing in unison) than at other frequencies in that range. In one instance, a person reported imagery that evoked strong emotion that we could work with using RET. Most other clients merely received insight or, in some cases, “gee whiz” information. As a hypnotherapist versed in metaphor, I could use their “gee whiz” imagery to draw useful information for the client’s sessions.

Not everyone who tries this process sees visions. Of the 25 clients with whom I’ve done this, 14 saw visions, 2 saw “something interesting”, and the rest saw lights flashing or unrecognizable patterns.

“Grandparents are a positive force for all families but play a significant role in families undergoing difficulties,” said Shalhevet Attar-Schwartz, PhD, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “They can reduce the negative influence of parents separating and be a resource for children who are going through these family changes.”

The study appears in the February Journal of Family Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). The researchers found that children and adolescents whose parents have separated or divorced see their grandparents as confidants and sources of comfort. Spending time with a grandparent was found to equip adolescents with better social skills and fewer behavior problems, especially among those children living in single-parent or stepfamily households.

As in previous studies, this research found that grandchildren are closer to their maternal grandparents and closest to their maternal grandmothers.

I have found this to be true in my own family. I grew up in a “traditional” two-parent home with two sets of grandparents and always felt very close to all four of my grandparents. My children grew up without much contact with their grandparents and struggled through adolescence. Now, I’m a grandparent and can see how our older grandchildren, who are just now coming into adolescence, tend to stay in touch – asking advice, talking about their “love lives” and much more – as though my wife and I were their closest confidants.

As my wife and I are new to this phenomenon, I can’t tell you the outcome. I can, however, tell you that the influence my own grandparents had in my life was profound and substantial. The last of my grandparents died in 2007 at the age of 97. And although I miss them terribly, my life feels steady and secure because of the influence of my grandparents.

As a grandparent, I can attest to the monumental influence grandparents have in the lives of their grandchildren. Even when there is little or no physical contact – a letter, email, or phone call can significantly change the direction of an adolescent. And it’s not the advice given that makes the difference – although good advice can make a difference – rather, it’s the care and concern that matters most to the adolescent. Grandparents can touch deep resources within the adolescent – genetic resources of which the adolescent and the grandparent are mostly likely unaware – yet are profoundly powerful.

I like to think there is something “magical” in grandparents. They’re just people – like everyone else. But for whatever reason nature endowed us with a supernatural reverence for our grandparents that makes them more than “just people” - they’re fantastic people. We can’t help but want to love and respect our grandparents – even when they do everything they can to dissuade us. We WANT our grandparents to be special for us. And that want, I believe, gives us access, through imagination, to some of our most powerful psychological assets.

If you are a grandparent, I hope you will take the opportunity today to make some magic in the life of one or more of your grandchildren. Especially maternal grandmothers (mothers of mothers) have a special “in” to the hearts and minds of their daughters’ children. A letter; postcard; phone call; text message; IM; email; whatever means you choose – do it today. You don’t have to “teach” or “share wisdom” or “be wise” – just let them know you care. That’s all. Everything else is just “how” you let them know.

Parenting is for parents. Grandparenting is for the angels. May we grandparents spread our angel wings of care and support around our grandchildren and create a generation of caring, loving, compassionate young people who will carry on the tradition to their own grandchildren.

Study Source:
“Grandparenting and Adolescent Adjustment in Two-Parent Biological, Lone-Parent, and Step-Families,” Shalhevet Attar-Schwartz, PhD, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Jo-Pei Tan, PhD, University of Putra; Ann Buchanan, PhD, and Julia Griggs, PhD, University of Oxford; Eirini Flouri, PhD, University of London; Journal of Family Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 1.

Tempted? Clench your lip muscles shut!

A study reported in the Journal of Consumer Research says firming muscles can shore up self-control. Of course, it only works if the choice you are faced with is in alignment with your goals and the muscle clenching is done at the moment of highest self-control dilemma. For example, when faced with the choice to snag a high fat snack when your goal is to lose weight is the perfect time to clench your muscles – adding will-power to your self-control dilemma.

Apparently it doesn’t matter which muscles you clench – what matters is the timing. You must clench DURING a crisis of will-power – like when you’re staring that cigarette in the face! It doesn’t help – in fact it works to your detriment – to clench muscles before the temptation.

So, next time you feel the urge to break your diet, clench your lip muscles shut instead!

Study source: Iris W. Hung and Aparna A. Labroo. “From Firm Muscles to Firm Willpower: Understanding the Role of Embodied Cognition in Self-Regulation.” Journal of Consumer Research.

A little trauma actually strengthens your resilience.

Mark D. Seery of the University at Buffalo published a paper on the psychological effects of adversity vs resilience. He concludes that a little adversity is actually good for you. But, how much is “too much” adversity depends on each person’s resilience. Many studies have shown that traumatic events can cause long-lasting psychological damage.

The common wisdom is “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” – which is not supported by scientific evidence. Quite the contrary, most evidence points to the opposite – that which doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, at least psychologically.

However, Seery contends that a little trauma actually strengthens your resilience – a bit like exercise traumatizes yet strengthens muscles. Just like in the case of strengthening muscles by traumatizing them (to build muscle, one must damage muscle cells a little), a few traumatizing events in one’s lifetime can strengthen their resilience after future traumas.

Resilience or “bounce back” requires time. Bounce back time differs from person to person and from time to time within one person. Resilience is dynamic, changing with knowledge, techniques, and environmental factors such as social networks and support groups. Several factors affect it, including how one dealt with similar negative events in the past.

“Negative events have negative effects,” Seery says. “I really look at this [building resilience] as being a silver lining. Just because something bad has happened to someone doesn’t mean they’re doomed to be damaged from that point on.”

I contend that it’s not the result of negative events that make you weaker or damage your psyche. Rather, it’s what you do about the trauma makes a difference in your level of resilience and resilience time. Many studies indicate that the sooner one initiates a technique for lessening the impact of the negative event the better.

I’ve personally used Rapid Eye Technology’s Immediate Release Technique (IRT) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).

Association for Psychological Science. “The Silver Lining To Adversity.” Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 29 Dec. 2011. Reported online at www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/239417.php.

It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

Thinking, that is! A study out of Case Western Reserve University shows that it takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it. No wonder it’s so hard to stop smoking or stop berating yourself or stop that tune that got stuck in your head. It just takes too much energy!

Some years ago, I underwent a year of intensive thought transformation in which a group of us focused attention on catching each other or sometimes even catch ourselves saying the “wrong” things – things that detracted us from our goals. “Try” was on the taboo list of words for obvious reasons – it holds a built-in failure. So, each time we’d hear one of us say the word, “try”, we’d say, “Cancel that!” The process seemed horribly difficult as we were catching each other often over that year. In the end, however, the goal was attained and my speech cleared up so much.

I wonder if we were unintentionally making it harder on ourselves by canceling (stopping) our thoughts instead of reframing them – sort of like nudging an asteroid instead of hitting it head-on.

For my readers unfamiliar with reframing, the concept is to redescribe a thought form from a different perspective or to relabel it. So, in the case of the word “try”, we replaced it with “do”, etc. Instead of stopping, we looked into changing our thoughts by changing our language. Instead of resistance to change, we explored our options. Instead of saying, “NO”, we examined ways to say yes (positive) instead while retaining the same outcome. Wow, did that speed up our process!

Consider in your life where you are saying, “no” or are working to stop a thought process instead of changing or modifying it. Might it be less energetic (read “difficult”) to do if you were to think in terms other than stopping? Might you seek ways to nudge the asteroid?

Study reference: http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/jcbfm2010107a.html

Happy thoughts helped Peter Pan to fly.

Two researchers, Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, used an iPhone Web app to collect data on people’s feelings, thoughts and activities. They wanted to know how people felt doing various activities including doing nothing at all. What they discovered was that during times when people were not actively engaged in a specific activity, their minds tended to wander. During times of mind wandering, respondents reported lower feelings of happiness than when they were engaged in an activity, especially sex. Says Killingsworth:

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost. Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities. This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the nonpresent. Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people’s happiness. In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged.”

Mind wandering is natural for humans, apparently the only animal with the brain capacity. It occurs to me that if our minds must wander, why not give them something useful to wander about? Instead of ruminating on past failures, why not focus that rumination on past successes – or daydream on future successes? We’re practicing mind wandering all the time (okay, the study authors say only 46.9% of the time), so focusing on happy thoughts, which helped Peter Pan to fly, might make the difference between serious depression and living a happy life.

Think about it.

Source: Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind”, Science 12 November 2010: Vol. 330. no. 6006, p. 932 DOI: 10.1126/science.1192439

A leading hospital says up to a third of the children it treats for certain conditions are ill because their parents smoke around them.

Dr Steve Ryan, Medical Director of Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital, says bronchitis, asthma and ear infections could be cut if parents quit smoking.

He said parents often lied about whether they smoke near their children. The British Lung Foundation says 17,000 under-fives are treated every year for exposure to second-hand smoke.

Speaking to BBC Radio Five Live, he said out of the 35,000 children the hospital treats every year, 2,000 are there because they have been exposed to their parents’ smoke.

He said between a quarter and a third of those suffering from certain conditions such as chest infections and asthma were the victims of passive smoking.

High Intensity

Parents often know the health implications of smoking around their children, he added. “People feel guilty,” he told BBC News. “If it was easy, they would give up. Looking after children is good fun but it can be stressful and for some, cigarettes are a way of relieving that stress.”

He does not think legislation is the answer but believes parents should be aware of the various levels of risk.

The top level, he said, was parents smoking in cars, where children were “trapped” and exposed to a “high intensity” of fumes. Mothers smoking is a greater risk than fathers smoking, and smoking in the same room as your child is also high risk, he added. “Having smoke on your clothes is a lower risk,” he said.

“But a good tip for parents is always put on another layer of clothes when smoking outside. Our staff are made to put a coat on when they go out to smoke during their breaks.”

Medical conditions

Amanda Sandford from smoking campaign group Ash said an estimated half of all children are exposed to smoke in the home. “It is clearly a widespread problem and I don’t think people realize that so many children are regularly breathing in smoke,” she said. “About a quarter of adults smoke and there are more among young adults, people between 25-34, the age at which they are more likely to be parents with younger children.” She added that now smoking was banned in enclosed public places, parents should treat their home like the workplace, and smoke outside.

Research published in 2005 suggested children exposed to their parents’ smoking were three times more likely to develop lung cancer later in life. The government’s independent Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health concluded in 2004 that exposure to second-hand smoke can cause a number of serious medical conditions, including lung cancer, heart disease and childhood respiratory disease.

Banging the Drum

Martin Birchall, an Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) surgeon and professor at Bristol University, said: “Passive smoking at home, exposing children to smoke they cannot escape from, increases the risk of them getting ear disease, sticky runny noses and sore throats, and further down the track, some of these ENT symptoms can in due course led on to worse diseases such as asthma.”

He added: “We need to keep banging the drum. We need to publicize the fact that every cigarette you smoke is a cigarette that your child is smoking also.” A Department of Health spokesperson said: “Second-hand smoke kills. We must continue to help people understand the dangers of second-hand smoke, especially for the health of their children.”

If you are ready to call it quits on smoking – and want to stop and stay stopped, I recommend that you purchase my book, “You Can Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped Forever” – available at 1derworks.com and Amazon.com.

Adapted from BBC news release

It is improper and imprudent to simply throw away judgment for the sake of being perceived as "nonjudgmental."

Can I throw away my many years of training and experience? No – it is part of who I am.

Can being nonjudgmental harm me or my client or someone else? Of course it can, in certain situations and environments.

There are bounds to tolerance. Unconsciously and instinctively I KNOW it is wrong to have sex with a child, for example. To help a pedophile get better at his trade would be unconscionable to me. I CANNOT offer such behavior safe haven in my sessions. On the other hand, if a pedophile wishes to overcome his harmful behavior, I am willing to assist. That is because I have a judgment about that behavior and the erroneous thought processes that produced it. I cannot be nonjudgmental in this case.

I have a list of behaviors I judge incompatible with health and wellness – for the individual and for society in general.

Behaviors indicate an underlying fundamental thinking error. That fundamental thinking error could be based on an underlying erroneous belief or it could be an erroneously applied interpretation of a correct belief. Either way, behavior is the avenue through which such thinking processes manifest in the physical. My job as a clinician is to assist my client in identifying and correcting these fundamental thinking errors.

What I’m saying is that it is improper and imprudent to simply throw away judgment for the sake of being perceived as “nonjudgmental.” Judging behaviors and thought processes is intelligent use of your mental resources – you do it naturally. And like changing clothes, the person exhibiting the behaviors is able to change behaviors and correcting thinking errors. As the clinician, it is my responsibility to assist my clients in identifying and correcting their errors in thinking – which means identifying and correcting my own first. As I correct my own thinking errors, I naturally become better at identifying and correcting the thinking errors of others. Judgment then becomes a useful vehicle for change.

When judging a person’s behavior/thoughts, I ask some questions:
“What thinking error is required to produce this aberrant behavior in a person?”
“What life decisions might a person have to have made in order to exhibit this set of behaviors?”
“In what ways does this set of behaviors harm the person exhibiting them or harm those within their scope of influence?”
“What therapeutic resources do I have that will assist this person in overcoming these harmful behaviors or erroneous thinking processes?”
“What clinician is best qualified to assist this person?” (if not me, who?)
…and etc.

I always judge my potential clients. During our initial visit or phone consultation, I judge whether or not I will take them on as a client. I immediately screen out people I don’t like – hey, I’m human and have feelings – if someone rubs me the wrong way, I realize my negative sense about them will interfere with what I will do with them therapeutically. I screen out those with behaviors and erroneous thought processes I know don’t respond well to my resources or who may need resources outside my scope of practice. These are ALL judgments – I acknowledge that I am far from nonjudgmental.

Using judgment constructively is a goal worthy of pursuit, I believe. And non-judgment is a myth.

Researchers have long sought a factor that can trigger the brain’s ability to learn – and perhaps recapture the “sponge-like” quality of childhood. Neuroscientists at Children’s Hospital Boston report that they’ve identified such a factor, a protein called Otx 2. Otx2 helps a key type of cell in the cortex to mature, initiating a critical period–a window of heightened brain plasticity, when the brain can readily make new connections.

And where does this protein come from? Interestingly enough, it is developed in the cornea. Basically, when the eye opens and is functional, it tells the brain to start receiving data and learning.

“The eye is telling the brain when to become plastic, rather than the brain developing on its own clock,” says Hensch, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and at Harvard University’s Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology. In essence, the eye is telling the brain, “The eyes are ready and seeing properly — you can rewire now.”

That finding is very significant to Rapid Eye Technicians because it may help explain the phenomenon that occurs when their clients blink their eyes rapidly in response to the instruction given them by their technician.

As of yet, no study has determined that rapid eyelid blinking can generate the Otx 2 protein identified by the researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston. However, given the anecdotal evidence of thousands of clients reporting significant change in their lives after RET sessions, I feel confident in suggesting that perhaps the basic RET process of rapid eyelid blinking, eye movement, and strong directional languaging, affects a release of Otx 2 and a triggering of the brain into rewiring plasticity.

“The nervous system is recycling an embryonic factor to induce brain plasticity,” says Hensch.

As the brain is triggered into rewiring mode by the rapid blinking process, suggestions given by the technician by way of direct commands to “release” old programming followed by instructions to rewire in a new frame (called “reframing”) offers the client the best conditions for setting real change into their brain. As the brain rewires, so does conscious perception – and eventually subconscious underlying belief.

Article adapted and commented upon from original press release.