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.
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Small gestures can go a long way toward creating a closer relationship.

You know that maintaining intimacy is important for your relationship with your partner. But did you know that it’s also good for your health?

Psychologists and researchers have discovered a number of benefits for people who experience intimacy in their committed relationships. In fact, closeness in relationships has been found to influence social, emotional, and physical health.

People in intimate relationships…

* Are better at successful navigating various developmental stages
* Are more likely to maintain solid, lasting friendships
* Are less likely to be in car accidents
* Are more resistant to diseases and mental illness

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Some years ago, my wife and I were invited to do a fire walk. We built a BIG fire – over 8 feet tall and 20 feet across we stacked the wood – then burned it down to a 15 foot round bed of hot coals. It was so hot in fact that we burned our faces from several feet back.

Sure it’s possible to walk on coals – lots of people have done it before and not gotten so much as an ouch of a burn. But I had not done it before – and even after the first person walked across – and even though we knew scientifically and spiritually that it was possible – the HEAT and FIRE coupled with our own past experiences with fire – I had been burned badly on my feet in a fire in the garage in our old house – confronted us with the real possibility of serious injury.

FIRE BURNS FLESH!!! My body knows it – which is why I don’t put my hand on the hot stove on purpose. My body knows about heat and knows how to react to it – mostly by AVOIDING IT.

I don’t care how much you believe you can do it – when you stand at the precipice and your face and arms are burning from the heat – you are face to face with one of the greatest inbred fears of animal-kind – the fear of fire – ala Frankenstein’s monster. All animals are afraid of fire – including humans. Fire is TERRIFYING.

What would it take to make me step from the cool grass onto the superheated hot coals?

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We are all extraordinary, all strange — freaks, every last one of us.

“We should keep in mind the world is messy, and we’re all different to varying degrees. Nature always takes the exception to the rule, undermines the archetype, and reminds us that our ideas about what is natural and what we should do to correct nature’s ‘imperfections’ are as sound as a sandcastle battered by a rising tide,”  writes University of Iowa psychologist Mark Blumberg in his latest book, Freaks of Nature. “We are all extraordinary, all strange — freaks, every last one of us. Some of us just happen to be more notable, with a particularly interesting story to tell.”

“To me, the nature-nurture debate is a dead end,” said Blumberg. “Asking whether something is more nature or more nurture is like asking whether a hurricane is more wind or rain. It’s both — always both.”

In nature, biological systems operate within the context of their environment. According to evolutionary theory, systems either adapt to their environment or die off. Freaks of nature sometimes becomes the dominant species because they can adapt better than those we consider “normal” or not freaks.

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What can you do about it? How can you lift the onus off your back?

“Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories.” (Karl Szpunar, lead author of a recent study on the relationship between memory and future thought and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.)

Suicidally depressed people “don’t remember particularly what happened last month and they can’t really tell you much of anything about what they envision happening next week.” (Szpunar)

What happens when many of your memories are of traumatic events? Might that mean your future thoughts will also be trauma filled? Or maybe you don’t recall things because of drug-related memory loss. Or perhaps your childhood has become amnesic due to childhood illness or psychological issues.

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