The Hemp Connection:
creating change

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there? This post is about following the unknown path, the one that’s scary, mysterious, and potentially full of rewards as well as challenges. There are many gifts, trip-ups, and payoffs to pursue the uncommon option.

There are many known paths – you go to school for a certain amount of time, complete a certain amount of units, and you get a bachelor’s degree. You pass a test, and you get a driver’s license. You say “yes” to the proposal, and you end up getting married. You sign up for a trip, pay your fees, and off you go to Italy. Those things are relatively predictable. There’s a prescribed series of steps, and a pre-ordained outcome.

But what about the rest of it – the pursuit of peace, freedom, wealth, happiness and health? There are a lot of courses that seem predictable that turn out to be not so predictable. You go to graduate school and get a Ph.D. and discover you still can’t get a job. You have unprotected sex for a year, and you’re still not pregnant. You start a surefire business and the concept goes out of fashion before you’re even open. You take all of the prescribed medications, and still your diabetes gets so bad you have to take insulin. You buy a quiet little house in a quirky neighborhood, and discover that it’s not so quiet after all. Then what do you do?

Instead of freaking out and stopping dead in your tracks, I propose that you pause, examine the trip-ups, and then look at the gifts and pay-offs of the experience, and re-orient yourself along a new path. Maybe in retrospect you realize that you didn’t plan adequately, your market research was incorrect, or you were unrealistic about your physical condition and the impact of your chronic disease. These realizations are lessons in how to better prepare yourself for success when you make your next moves.

Take some time to consider the pay-offs of what you’ve done so far, even though, ultimately, you didn’t get the result you were looking for. Maybe you’ve got an education that serves well as background for another profession, you learned a whole lot more about how real estate or entrepreneurship works, or you have gathered information that’s useful to your doctor in helping you chart the best course of action. Maybe you gained new friends who love and support you, or you learned that you really hate being in charge or meeting daily deadlines. Those weren’t the original goals of your project or pursuit, but they’re gifts (pay-offs) nonetheless. Time spent going down “the wrong path” is not necessarily wasted, unless you fail to extract the lessons of your experiences.

The other thing that often ends up feeling like failure is taking the failed outcome and treating it as if it’s a dead-end, instead of a turning off point for the next experience, choice, or path. By continuously reevaluating your choices and experiences, and treating them as valuable information sources, rather than failures, you’ll be able to move forward with more ease, feeling enriched by your experiences, rather than robbed of time or resources.

Gretchen Kubacky, Psy.D. is a Health Psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. She has completed the inCYST training. She specializes in counseling women and couples who are coping with infertility, PCOS, and related endocrine disorders and chronic illnesses.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. HOUSE or her practice, or obtain referrals in the Los Angeles area, please visit her website at www.drhousemd.com, or e-mail her at AskDrHouseMD@gmail.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @askdrhousemd.

If you’ve been busy learning and applying various techniques to improve your health, you’ve probably heard of “Meatless Monday,” the idea of substituting a healthy vegetarian meal one day per week in order to beef up (no pun intended!) your vegetable consumption and lessen your dependence on meat. It’s a great idea, relatively easy to implement, and, over time, contributes to an overall pattern of good eating.

This “Mental Health Monday” column is also a good habit. Reading it is a way of bring attention (mindfulness) to the practices inherent in creating and maintaining good mental health. I often talk about ways to make small changes in attitude, behavior, or thought patterns. From a mental health perspective, what I like about Meatless Monday is the way it breaks down an overwhelming task (eating healthier) into a small, actionable, and rewarding step. If you implement Meatless Monday, it means you’re really thinking about what you eat. You’re taking time and energy to explore and experiment. You eat the food and realize that you don’t need meat to feel complete or satisfied. Or maybe you make a bad choice (pasta, pasta, pasta!), and realize that your needs call for more protein – but maybe it doesn’t have to come from meat.

Mental health is like this. You can’t take a huge, amorphous goal (say, “feel happier”) and just say, “that’s what I want – where is it?!” It’s a process, a project, a series of steps and experiments. There is a need for assessment, evaluation, and revision. Over time, you learn what’s missing in your upbringing, your thought patterns, and your ways of relating. Or you learn that there’s something you do quite often that is off-putting or unproductive in your relationships. You implement homework assignments from your therapist, read self-help books and do the exercises, and practice affirmations and positive self-talk. At some point, you begin to notice that things are improving. The process gets easier. You don’t have to consciously think really hard about how to have a productive talk with your boyfriend, set a boundary with your overbearing mother, or express your anger productively. You’re better. You’re happier. You’re healthier. And it all started with a small experiment, such as:

• Meatless Monday
• Not saying negative things about yourself, privately or in public.
• Joining a therapy group.
• Going to the gym just once a week.
• Adding Vitamin D3 supplements.
• Eliminating gossip.

In and of itself, one action is not enough. Cumulatively though, as you slowly implement mentally and/or physically healthy choices, the impact is there. What are you going to start doing to get happier and healthier today?

Gretchen Kubacky, Psy.D. is a Health Psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. She has completed the inCYST training. She specializes in counseling women and couples who are coping with infertility, PCOS, and related endocrine disorders and chronic illnesses.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. HOUSE or her practice, or obtain referrals in the Los Angeles area, please visit her website at www.drhousemd.com, or e-mail her at AskDrHouseMD@gmail.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @askdrhousemd.

Every superhero has a superpower:

• Leaping over tall buildings in a single bound!
• Flying without mechanical assistance!
• X-ray vision!
• Breathing for extended periods under water!
• Becoming invisible!

When I was a child, the superpower I wanted most was to be able to shrink down to about one inch tall, so that I could observe the world without being observed. Although that would still be fun, if I had a superpower now, I would want it to be wiping people clean of mental and physical illness and disease. I wish I had a magical capacity to briefly join energetic forces with my clients, and quickly relieve them of what ails them.

And yet, I am a mere human, so I have to deal with my very human limitations. Since I don’t have a superpower, I apply the capacities I do have – empathy, understanding, relating, connecting, validating, offering technical and scientific education, and utilizing my intuition, among other tools – to the practice of psychotherapy. Although remarkable changes can occur quite quickly in therapy, in reality, it’s not magic, and it’s a process that can take months or even years.

The superpower I have as a therapist though is one that you can use yourself. It’s called reframing, and it’s the practice of taking a negative statement and changing it around into something positive, containing elements of optimism. For example:

• “I have really bad hypoglycemia, and now I have to use this stupid glucose monitor to check my sugars and make sure they’re not too low” BECOMES “I have a special machine that allows me to track my sugars and prevent hypoglycemia, so I feel really good most of the time.”

• “I have to go the doctor every three months for tests related to my PCOS, and I hate going to the doctor!” BECOMES “I have the opportunity to monitor my health closely, and prevent complications.”

• “This disease makes me miserable” BECOMES “I have a chronic condition, AND I can manage it effectively.”

See how the first statement in each example contains elements of negativity, fatalism, pessimism, and victimhood? The counter-statements – the reframes – cite a benefit or positive outcome, and take an assertive stance about owning the quality of your life.

Reframing isn’t useful just for therapists, or women with PCOS, or people with chronic medical conditions. It’s useful in all aspects of your life. Once you start reshaping your language, your thoughts will change, and so will your actions. So it’s not exactly a superpower… I'm okay with that, because it’s a highly effective tool to incorporate into your life.

Gretchen Kubacky, Psy.D. is a Health Psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. She specializes in counseling women and couples who are coping with infertility, PCOS, and related endocrine disorders and chronic illnesses.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. HOUSE or her practice, or obtain referrals in the Los Angeles area, please visit her website at www.drhousemd.com, or e-mail her at Gretchen@drhousemd.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @askdrhousemd.