tool

 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

November 2018 – Tool of the Month – Dan Siegel’s ‘Wheel of Awareness’

Sorry for the six-week absence from the newsletters. I’ve been very busy with school work, which is amazingly immersive sometimes. However, I was not so busy that I couldn’t listen to a great podcast interview of Dr. Dan Siegel, where he discusses his mindfulness practice/exercise, called “The Wheel of Awareness.” It’s well worth a listen, both because Siegel is one of the great explainers of neuroscience and mental stuff in general, because the Wheel is a very useful practice, and also because Siegel is a great human being to hang out with for an hour.

I hope you find it useful and hope you all are finding, as we traverse the rocky current times, a balance of enough support, and enough challenge, to keep growing and unfolding.

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in Depression / Tool of the Month
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

September 2018 – Tool of the Month – Getting Targeted Feedback: The Tracking Chart

The tool-of-the-month for this month is a description of the process by which we all learn, and the critical factor of getting and taking feedback. In doing this, having tools to help track our progress is important to correct for distortions in our own very human self-assessment, and to build confidence in our own ability to learn and change. This template for a “tracking chart” is applicable to virtually any definable change, and though it is not a panacea or change in itself—we are the ones having to do the hard work—it is an important support in the process.

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in Depression / Tool of the Month
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

August 2018 – Tool of the Month – Looking For What Is There

The tool for this month is a skill that involves spotting the aliveness in our environment, when depression is telling us that it’s essentially all grey and dead out there. It never is, but depression can be pretty convincing. So we need to practice, as if we were carefully scanning for the subtle life in a desert, seeing what is already there in front of us, that carries a sense of life and interest for us. Give it a shot, but as I point out in the article, remember that healing from depression is work, and learning new tools requires work and repetition to get the hang of them.

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in Depression / Tool of the Month
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

June – Tool of the Month – 10-10-10 Breath Tool

This month’s tool…of the month…is a down and dirty way of engaging your nervous system if over- or under-activated, and helping it come back into balance. The breath is a remarkable tool for getting into parts of our nervous systems that our thinking mind can’t access (sounding like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons, i.e., making just nonsense noises). So here’s a simple pattern of breathing, with a link to a short demo, for you to experiment with and see what it does for your own system.

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in Depression / Tool of the Month
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

May – Tool of the Month – Reorienting When Startled

In this second edition of the “tool of the month,” I’m addressing the need to reorient to our bodies and surroundings when we are caught off guard, surprised, by the behavior of one of our fellow humans. Being startled does particular things to our attention and connection to, and groundedness in, our selves, so it’s important to reconnect and reorient as soon as we can, in order to have a clearer sense of how to deal with the situation.

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in Depression / Tool of the Month
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

April – Tool of the Month – Deciding Like an Optometrist


Here is the first of the “Tool of the Month” articles, which I intend to send out mid-month, between longer articles. The inaugural tool is “Decision making like an optometrist,” a formalization of something you probably do anyway, but perhaps without noticing you’re doing it. And for this inaugural TofM, we have an article by myself and also by guest writer, Janice B., to give two takes on the same tool. I hope it’s helpful to you all.

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in Depression / Tool of the Month