Dr Marlene Wasserman aka Dr Eve was the final speaker at this excellent workshop held by Psychologies Magazine at the beautiful Groot Constantia in Cape Town. The first thing Dr Ev made us do was to get up and dance or move around a little bit to the music in the hall. She was really trying to get people to get into their bodies after two very intellectually stimulating sessions. This really is the fundamental problem I believe in sexuality i.e. that people are trapped inside their heads and living with imaginary or real fantasies about their lovers instead of getting down and dirty. She focussed her initial opening on relating from the “We” to the “I” in relationships. Most couples become stuck to the hip metaphorically speaking. They cannot express their individuality and this is almost like a death knell in a long term relationship.
Her presentation included some terrific story telling and there was a lot of giggles all around. Remember this is a seminar room filled with older women and some of them are likely unhappy in their sexual relationships for various reasons. And what Dr Eve does so well is give people permission to see themselves as sexual beings. One thing was clear is that contentment in a relationship is a place of indifference. When the people who she counsels tells her they are happy and content, she immediately become suspicious. To me it could also mean they have basically stopped growing. And sadly it seems that in many relationships as the “We” becomes merged, the “I” is lost at the alter. This is part of the reason why so Valium has been consumed by women and alcohol by men.
From the 1960s the sexual revolution started. Oral contraception emerged alongside feminism. The era of therapy and the emergence of the Me generation. Sexual and human rights form the basis of a healthy relationship and parts of this is protected by our Constitution. Love became taken seriously as a relationship value. The quality if life is very important to relationship happiness. Viagra gave permission for sexual satisfaction. Same sex relationships have become accepted and even legalised in South Africa. In South Africa there has been a lot of talk of late of prostitution or sex work being decriminalised. It has been reported 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men suffer from abuse. And it turns out that HIV/STDs is a consequence of intimate relating.
Lifestyle can increase stress which has a direct link in sexual performance. Religion, righteousness and rigidity become solutions for management of relationships. You must identify your core relationship values i.e. love, monogamy, fidelity, exclusiveness, respect, trust, honesty. There are 3 basic forms of relationships:
- Side by Side
- Joined at the Hip
- Intimate with Interdependence
What I really like about Dr Eve is how she can put people at easy when it comes to this subject matter, which is often so ridiculously complicated by society. There was so many excellent visuals in Dr Eve’s presentation, I would highly recommend anyone who has the opportunity of hearing her speak do so. You won’t regret it. Her new book, The Pillowbook, was on sale and I didn’t hesitate buying a copy and asking her to sign it for me. The message is truly encouraging for me because she thanked me in turn for my contributions with my online dating research. You can expect a review of it shortly. I must conclude with a recommendation of my two favourite books on sex and sexuality:
Popularity: 33% [?]
Dr Helgo Schomer was the 2nd speaker at the Psychologies Workshop I attended on Saturday, 28 July in Cape Town at Groot Constantia. The first time I met Dr Schomer was after hearing him on 702/Cape Talk when he was a regular on the Tim Modise show before Tim resigned to run communications for the 2010 Fifa Worldcup. I really liked his energy and direct approach to dealing with problems. Sometimes I perceived him almost confrontational like Dr Phil but Helgo is physically the antithesis of Dr Phil because he is a real fitness freak and in fact specialises in health psychology. For more on Dr Schomer remember to check out his profile on the UCT website.
Anyway he spoke at length about stress management. I purchased the 1st of the DVD series of the Schomer lectures, which is in fact the same talk. We live full lives and there is a constant drain because of stress and work. Just 15 years ago we didn’t have this constant demand. He told us a story of when he lost 60 days worth of work when his PC crashed. His head of department at UCT didn’t want to listen to him when he said that it was acting up. So when the crash happened he lost the plot, called his HOD, to tell him to look out the window as he throwing his computer out his window. We have more information at our fingertips then ever before, yet we have less knowledge.
Just a 100 years ago it used to take 2 weeks from Cape Town to Simon’s Town and you had a lot of time to think and contemplate your life with very little interruptions. Have you ever been to Joburg airport during Easter? It’s like a real mad house. He found himself in this situation and in a witty move attached himself to Desmond Tutu’s entourage so he managed to avoid all the delays and queues. Dr Schomer explained how just helping people can drain us when we cajoling family or massaging egos. If we are in love and driving in the traffic we are in a state of bliss and nothing can bother us. And in this state for about 3 to 9 months we live in the best emotions.
Now Dr Schomer has 3 daughters aged 20, 18 and 8 years old, so he understands women. The entire audience at this workshop was women except for myself and one other male delegate. An interesting analogy he made to determine your fitness level and stress levels, is to mimic a 2 year old; if you are a women for 3.5 hours or a man for 4.5 hours. Noise is another thing that drains us. Just thinking about how big humanity is can drain us. By comparison Pofadder has 1 STOP sign, 1 police station and what emerges is that we need space to cope. About 150 years there was only 1 billion people on earth and now we are approaching 7 billion. Is it possible to translate the negative into positive? There are just so many distractions we are dealing with. And how many times have you hit rock bottom?
Dr Schomer had a presentation with several slides from a model on stress management he has developed with some other researchers. So the problem comes in when we have a stresfull event which hits right through the exterior into our core concept - you can also say our identity. Now even communities like Khayelitsha , a township outside Cape Town, functions and the audience would be wise to go and stay in a bed & breakfast, to understand how things operate. There are different levels of stress that can be experienced: the first being light stress; and when experience a fender bender it increases to moderate stress; or when you go to collect your child at school and they are missing you may experience very quick increase to high stress levels.
Next he told us a hilarious story about cycling up Constantia neck. At the top of this road it’s mostly yield signs and therefore you are not obligated to stop. He was overtaken by a vegetable truck, which was being held together, with mercy, tow guys in front and two in the back. Next thing you know they were both being passed by a new BMW 7-series with tinted windows. This car has ABS breaks and stopped at the yield sign. The vegetable truck couldn’t stop in time and bumped into the back of the BMW. After this happened all the guys from the truck jumped out and ran into the bushes. Out of the BMW emerged a man, who was clearly high strung because he was waving a gun around. After about 10 to 15 minutes Dr Schomer managed to calm him down, to the point where he lowered the gun. It turns out he was going through a divorce, his kids didn’t want anything to do with him because he was having an affair and also problems at work.
Adaptation: What puts a smile on your face? In a team of 10 he normally splits it up with 6 women and 4 men to get the emotional intelligence of the group right.
Frustration: When you are swearing it’s a sign of frustration. He showed us an awesome photograph of a model who learned to sweep with a broom, at a very young age, to calm down. Men like to do things like climb mountains to get back to balance.
Deprivation: He talked about being a Buddhist Catholic and that he has a spiritual teacher whom he consults from time to time. Once a month he meets with another senior psychologist whom he talks to for 3 hours every month.
Nutrition: A primary area of expertise for Dr Schomer is health psychology. Healthy nutrition can reduce the drains from stress. Women make a common mistake by skipping breakfast because what happens after a 8 hours of sleep your body is starved for nutrition and needs to replenish it’s energy sources. If you skip breakfast your body starts to eat into it’s own muscle for energy and food eaten afterwards turns into fat. A a big lunch can cause the brain to shut down after skipping breakfast. For men 1 beer a day is healthy and for women 1 glass of wine. Smoking and specifically nicotine de-energises the body.
Self-Perception: What he wants is for you to avoid going into therapy. You have tell yourself constantly “I like myself” to boost your self-image. Avoid physical, emotional or mental abuse - which is to big to cover. Praise yourself whenever you can.
Anxious Reactivity: You can experience a worst case scenario when you constantly antagonising yourself and people around you. So he concluded with some important questions you have to ask yourself:
- Is your life meaningful?
- ?Do your emotions rule you or do you rule them?
- Is your life energy constantly kaput? Constantly drained?
Overall Dr Helgo Schomer is an exceptional speaker with high energy. And when you realise he is very physically active, swimming, surfing, jogging, cycling it’s understandable. He told me when we first met he developed a reputation among models and I can only imagine the stories from his private practise. So you may be interested in purchasing the Schomer Lectures DVD series please call his office in Cape Town on 021 4385308 and tell him I sent you.
Popularity: 18% [?]
This past Saturday I attended the first ever Psychologies Magazine Readers’ Workshop at the beautiful and picturesque Groot Constantia. I had only picked up one copy of this magazine and enjoyed most of it. It’s exactly my cup of tea. One thing bothered me though was that this magazine is aimed at women. And I quickly sent off an email to the editor. Only to find out that there was letter from another man published asking the same question. Why this is a magazine for women because many men are interested in psychology. For god’s sake Freud and Jung were both men!
Anyway Marc Kahn was the first speaker and dazzled the stage with no presentation. I’m still in two minds about when to use a presentation and when not. He used a very simple structure for his talk on emotional intelligence and the word picture were vivid. There was also a lot of audience participation which is always wonderful to observe and participate in.
So the key question Marc began with is whether emotions are good or bad. In fact this is a common misconception he said as he proceeded to outline how perceived negative emotions can have very practical and useful benefits indeed. Emotions have thousands of textures and at the core are mad, sad, glad, bad and fear.
So now we can proceed to unpack them…
- Mad: you feel upset, anger or even pissed off. The colour frequently associated with it is Red. You feel hot inside like there is a rise in the energy-in-motion (e-motion). Your heart beat increases; your muscles tightens and the word that comes to mind is “No” or “Stop” and so it allows you to set boundaries. When you have poor discretion anger becomes destructive and you can experience Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
- Sad: When you are sad you withdraw into a place of comfort. You go inside to attend to yourself and to heal. When you hold back, you build up the baggage inside. So allow sadness to run through you because it’s nature’s way of healing you. The colour associated with sadness is most often Blue/Grey. Like with all emotions there are different shades of this one. One of the tragedies is that boys and adult men are not able to experience sadness as it should be experienced. It’s the old adage: boys don’t cry that leads to a tremendous amount of emotional baggage built up in grown men, and more often that not the anger that emerges is directed at their fathers. In women anger is often blocked because it’s considered, again contrary to what’s healthy emotional response, not ladylike to express anger.
- Glad: You feel happy, excited about life and like you want to celebrate. The colour associated with this emotion is Yellow. Think of the sun shining and wanting to jump for joy. The word associated with this emotion is “Yes” because you always give yourself permission to feel glad. The opposite is where you feel miserable - you don’t get excited and you feel afraid.
- Fear: This emotion makes you feel like running away. You can experience an adrenaline rush because you sense danger. It warns you to be careful. People who ignore fear take many risks and live dangerous lives. Living in fear leads to paralysis and that’s not good either. (Ramon’s own comment: someone gave me this excellent definition of fear once: False Evidence Appearing Real) Capitalise on fear by challenging those feelings. The colour most often associated with it is White.
- Bad: This where you feel guilt or shame. The colour associated with this emotion is often Black. Marc proceeded to deal with guilt and shame separately:
- Guilt: This is when you feel what you have done is wrong. When you feel no guilt you become sociopath and you live out of line with what’s considered socially acceptable in human behaviour. When you are riddled with guilt this leads to neurotic behaviour.
- Shame: You feel embarrassed about yourself and is often a reflection on how you see your self image. When you never feel share you become arrogant or a narcissist. Use discretion especially in what you say when you talk yourself. That little voice inside your head is always talking.
After the review of the 5 core emotions Marc took some questions and discussed briefly Depression. This is something which hits home for me because I’ve experienced it twice in my life and managed to overcome it. As Marc described it I realised how accurate that was: Basically it’s a complete suppression of emotions both “positive” or “negative” ones. And it often leads to feeling fatigue and your mental state becomes numb or empty. You feel flat. Freud called it the frozen fear because you are afraid of the consequence of allowing yourself to feel anything. So emotions are an entire landscape which to draw from. Most of use receive at least 12 years of education about using our minds but very little education about our emotions. Remember your emotions are like a tap and with education and with practise you can learn to open the tap slowly and close it fast when needed.
Popularity: 14% [?]
