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By Robert Scaer
"I just can't seem to stop my mind," Linda told me. "I try to relax, but after a few moments, my brain starts to buzz again with a jumble of thoughts and feelings. I can't seem to turn them off." As she spoke to me during our second visit, she was visibly distressed. She had the pinched face and hunched shoulders of someone who felt at once threatened and helpless.
"Lots of times, it's the same old thing, just the same old negative thoughts and worries and blaming myself," Linda went on. "Sometimes I try to head them off by going out for a run, but they come back later. When they really get ahold of me, I get kind of shaky, dizzy, and sick to my stomach. If they go on long enough, I actually get a stiff neck, and eventually a headache."
A client's negative, intrusive thoughts are a therapist's stock and trade. Ditto the accompanying roster of bodily complaints, from stomach pains and neck tightness to headaches and back problems. In my 20 years as medical director of a multidisciplinary chronic-pain program, I've found these body-mind intrusions to be a sort of generic marker for significant emotional disorders, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and adjustment disorder.
But if Linda's distress seems familiar, it isn't just because we see this kind of client so frequently in our offices. It's also because her complaint rings true for "healthy" people like ourselves. All of us ruminate, bringing up the cud of old memories and unresolved problems, in the process experiencing a sinking feeling in the stomach or perhaps a tightening in the throat. As we well know, these experiences usually arise unbidden and often at inopportune times, such as when we're reading a book, eating a meal, or even, God forbid, making love! And when we're interrupted in this way, we basically lose it: we forget why we went into the bedroom, we lose track of our place in the book, and, if the intrusion is upsetting enough, we may even lose the wherewithal to continue with what's going on right now. We've experienced that most insidious of insults to our mind--the corruption of the present moment by emotion-linked memory.
When we catch ourselves in this state of nonpresence, we're likely to chalk it up to "mind chatter." When a client reports these repetitive intrusions, we may wonder about a tendency toward obsessiveness or the possibility of depression and/or anxiety. While all of these interpretations may have some validity, I believe that much more is at stake. I propose that in many of these moments of body-mind intrusion, our brain is trying to protect us from mortal danger arising from memories of old, unresolved threats. In short, we're in survival mode.
"Ordinary" Trauma
To understand the meaning of these everyday emergency responses, and to transform them into opportunities for healing, we first need to rethink our fundamental assumptions about trauma. I propose that the sources of trauma are far more complex than the standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) definitions. Under Criterion A, the DSM-IV defines trauma as the result of having "experienced, witnessed or been confronted with . . . actual or threatened death or serious injury . . . to self or others" and responding to that event with "intense fear, helplessness or horror."
This definition isn't wrong, but it's woefully incomplete. In fact, any negative life event occurring in a state of relative helplessness--a car accident, the sudden death of a loved one, a frightening medical procedure, a significant experience of rejection--can produce the same neurophysiological changes in the brain as do combat, rape, or abuse. What makes a negative life event traumatizing isn't the life-threatening nature of the event, but rather the degree of helplessness it engenders and one's history of prior trauma.
Let's look at the first criterion--the person's relative state of helplessness in the face of a threat. We can often avoid being traumatized by an actual life threat if we remain in control of the situation, either by effectively fighting back or escaping the situation. If we've adequately defended ourselves, our survival brain doesn't need to store the body-mind messages of a trauma as an ongoing warning signal. But if we haven't prevailed--if we couldn't avoid the oncoming car or fend off the mugger--the brain remembers that experience as mortally threatening.
The second precondition for the development of trauma is one's storehouse of prior trauma. If you endure a relatively minor negative life event that somehow reminds you of a prior event in which you were helpless, trauma can result. Let's say you're facing surgery of a fairly safe and common sort--say, a cataract removal. For many people, the procedure would be relegated to the category of "unpleasant but bearable." But for you, this situation brings back memories of having your tonsils out when you were 6. Your parents weren't allowed in the operating room with you, and you briefly saw a scary, sharp instrument, and, all in all, you felt helpless and terrified. (You may be conscious of these memories, or you may simply be aware of a tightening in your throat or the desire to scream when you think of the upcoming cataract procedure.) Because your survival brain still thinks it's in danger from that tonsillectomy, it'll store this new, similar experience as dangerous by association. Not only will you experience the cataract operation as traumatic, but you'll also be even more vulnerable to trauma during the next medical procedure you undergo.
All of us, clients and professionals alike, will continue to set ourselves up to be retraumatized until we recognize that many of our negative intrusive thoughts and sensations are, in fact, symptoms of trauma. They may not be identified as such in the DSM-IV, but these more commonplace body-mind invasions assume the same meaning, if not the intensity, as the trauma-related thoughts and flashbacks of full-fledged PTSD. In both PTSD and what we might call "ordinary" trauma, conscious and unconscious memories brutally intrude upon and corrupt the present moment. Not everyone suffers from PTSD, but each of us has sustained many of these smaller traumas, setting us up for being continually shoved out of the present moment into a frightening, helpless past.
Who Cares about the Present?
In psychiatrist Daniel Stern's model, the "present moment" is a brief period--lasting perhaps 1 to 10 seconds--that represents our conscious experience of the here and now. Only in the present moment can we fully live. If our "nows" are perpetually interrupted by intrusive memories, we're essentially stuck in a time warp formed by those stored perceptions. We can't problem-solve, we can't experience a daffodil or a sunset, we can't relate to other people, resolve old conflicts, or form new attachments. Only in the here and now can we directly experience, and move ahead with, our lives. The present is indeed a precious commodity.
Yet we repeatedly squander it. Therapists most readily witness this dissipation of the present moment with certain clients, the ones who focus obsessively on ancient complaints and worries to the exclusion of creative or productive ideas that might help them move forward. Many of these clients also complain of various aches and pains, most commonly gut symptoms, such as acid reflux or irritable bowel, or chronic pain in the head, neck, or back.
But if we're honest, we also recognize this corruption of the present in our own lives. How often do we find ourselves ruminating about this or that familiar resentment or well-worn worry? How often do we truly notice where we are, whom we're with, or what's actually happening--that is, experience our own precious moments? It's as though some dark, implacable entity invades our minds and bodies and fills them to the brim, leaving little space for pleasure in our aliveness, much less for growth or healing. That entity, I believe, is the total body-mind experience of a past trauma.
Remembered Horrors
Let's take a moment to look at the two primary types of memory that contribute to trauma. One type is emotion-linked conscious memory, which gives rise to the intrusive, troubling thoughts we keep experiencing. These thoughts arise from some little cue in the environment that reminds us of an unresolved conflict. For example, you may be balancing your checkbook when your mind suddenly jumps to the letter you received years ago from your ex-wife's lawyer demanding an accounting of your income and threatening to haul you into court if you didn't comply.
At other times, intrusive thoughts may pop up from a purely internal cue. You may be thinking about vacation plans for a trip to Hawaii when you flip to the memory of losing your luggage, including all of your money, in the Honolulu airport on a prior trip. Since you often don't consciously notice these cues--they can flit through the mind in a millisecond--you often find yourself bewildered by a sudden change in mood. You'd been feeling perfectly fine; why, now, do you feel so scared or so oddly dispirited?
And why, for that matter, are you clenching your teeth so hard your jaw hurts? Another kind of memory is at work here: the hardwired recollection of what the body experienced in trauma. Acquired in a flash and stored for a lifetime, these unconscious, procedural memories serve as survival mechanisms, ready to be unleashed instantly in the face of present, perceived danger. The clenched teeth that kept you from crying when you lost all your luggage now sets in whenever you plan a vacation; the spasm in your neck that started after a long-ago car accident now occurs whenever you're stuck in traffic; the cramping you felt in your gut whenever your father harshly scolded you now hits whenever your boss gives you feedback about your work performance. All of these bodily reactions serve as warnings from your survival brain that an old danger has resurfaced. It signals: Watch out! You're in big trouble! Right now! In these everyday circumstances, we experience a terrifying past exactly as though it were the present.
The Trauma Capsule
It's vital to recognize that our memories of a traumatic event reflect that event precisely. So what we've got is a sharply defined and bounded state, or capsule, containing all of the pertinent stored memories for each traumatic experience we've endured. My patient, Linda, for example, can't stop the loop of negative memories of the gender discrimination she experienced on the job last year. Although she came to the job with management experience, she was assigned menial tasks, such as running errands to the office supply store. Worse, she was repeatedly the target of sexual innuendos from her older male boss. When she complained, the harassment ceased. Briefly, she felt empowered, but not for long: Linda was passed over for her next promotion, one she'd worked hard for and knew she deserved. Because she was paying back a college loan and had minimal savings, she couldn't quit--at least not right away. She felt trapped and helpless.
Now, memories of the experience intrude on her consciousness in a host of situations--whenever she's short of money, whenever she gets into an argument with her boyfriend, whenever she has to deal with any male authority figure. She experiences intrusion on the present moment by a kind of internal "capsule" reflecting all of the conscious and unconscious memories of her job experience--cognitive, emotional, and bodily. Simultaneously, she's assaulted by thoughts of her mistreatment, feelings of shame and anger, and a host of unpleasant physical sensations--the same tight neck and gut cramps she experienced at the time of the original trauma.
When these kinds of memories arise, they corrupt the present moment by inserting past events into present perception. If the original trauma was severe enough, such as assault, it can feel as though one's actually reliving a horrifying past event, as in a flashback. For "ordinary" trauma, such as repeated job discrimination, it can ignite the volatile compound of distressing thoughts, emotions, and autonomic states that Linda experienced. Because I view dissociation as the perception of past as present, I call this phenomenon the dissociative capsule.
The Body under Siege
We often misunderstand the physical symptoms of the dissociative capsule as somatization disorder, which is defined as the intrusion of persistent somatic symptoms that don't reflect an actual physical disorder. But the symptoms I've been describing are genuine physiological disorders. The more clearly we understand this reality, the better able we'll be to help our clients in distress. Let's look at how these physical symptoms are produced.
In the traumatized person, the muscle spasm that causes the neck pain and the abnormal motility of the gut that causes the cramps are actual physical phenomena triggered by the somatosensory and autonomic procedural memories of the original traumatic experience. Somatosensory memories include all of the sensations and the exact pattern of muscle activity that accompanied the trauma, such as the tightening of neck and jaw muscles. Autonomic memories, both sympathetic and parasympathetic, are often experienced as visceral sensations--a pounding heartbeat, cold sweaty hands, and pressure in the chest. Initially transient, these bodily changes can eventually lead to chronic disease. Numerous studies suggest links between early trauma and the development of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic back pain, and a variety of autoimmune diseases. The body remembers, and keeps on remembering.
Dissociation by Degrees
Each of us has our own, distinctive cache of dissociative capsules. The number of life traumas one has sustained will determine the number of capsules stored in procedural memory: there may be a few or there may be dozens. Many factors determine the size and intensity of each. A large, complex capsule created by severe and repetitive childhood trauma may intrude on the present moment repeatedly. In such cases, the present moment may be obliterated most of the time, causing maturational arrest at the age of the most severe trauma. This situation may explain the remarkable maturational suspension seen in such syndromes as borderline personality disorder and other severe attachment disorders in which the "self" may be stuck in the first decade of life. But it's important to remember that these dissociative states may form even in cases of "ordinary" trauma. Recall Linda's experience of gender-based job discrimination: because she suffered not merely shame, but shame in the context of helplessness due to her low rank in the corporate pecking order, her experience was genuinely traumatic.
Viewed from this perspective, one can see how many of the "little" conflicts associated with cultural and institutional bias can assume the dimensions of traumatic stress. In my own medical practice, many female patients who've struggled with persistent job discrimination have developed chronic fatigue syndrome, physical collapse, and even PTSD. Other patients have developed PTSD following their experience with an adversarial justice system during a plaintiff lawsuit following an auto accident.
For those who bear an existing burden of childhood trauma, even more "trivial" incidents can cause new trauma. I've treated hundreds of patients with full-blown PTSD following auto accidents occurring at speeds under five miles per hour. For these highly sensitized individuals, it isn't the accident per se that caused trauma, but the triggering of a dissociative capsule of earlier, unresolved trauma that transformed an unpleasant hassle into a genuine catastrophe.
Treatment: Mere Words Aren't Enough
Trauma healing, in essence, is the recovery of the purity of the present moment. This concept has vital implications for trauma therapy (which, from here on in, should encompass treatment for "ordinary" as well as extraordinary trauma). The bottom line: therapy must adequately address the body-based procedural memories that form a large part of the trauma structure.
Unless we can expunge the somatic contents of the dissociative capsule, they'll continue to emerge with every triggering event, contaminating the present moment and promoting further sensitization to trauma. But if we can find a way to extinguish these somatic cues, the accompanying emotions and autonomic feelings will also be neutralized, rendering the capsule inoperative. Emotions and autonomic states are inevitably associated with "feelings"--the body sensations directly linked to those states. Without the "feelings," the emotions and autonomic state have lost their threatening meaning for survival. The declarative memories of the event will remain, but in the absence of sensations and emotions, they'll be experienced as past events--period. The present moment will be liberated.
So, how do we get from here to there? The royal road to the present moment, I believe, is through the emotional brain. We know that the limbic nucleus, the right amygdala, evaluates the emotional content of incoming sensory stimuli. If stimuli imply threat, the amygdala triggers arousal, unless, somehow, it can be persuaded to go off duty. In his book The Feeling of What Happens, noted neurologist Antonio Damasio describes a woman with bilateral injury to the amygdala. Via personality and psychometric tests, Damasio discovered that while she remained functionally normal, she'd lost the capacity to experience fear or rage. Is it possible, then, that someone without a functioning amygdala would be incapable of being traumatized?
This hypothesis seems well worth exploring. If we can find a way to shut down the right amygdala while a client is exposed to the contents of the dissociative capsule, we should be able to extinguish its contents. With the amygdala "off-line," the traumatic memory would no longer be associated with the somatic cues of arousal--the tight chest, the pounding heart, the constricted throat. These symptoms would no longer intrude on the present moment. Procedural memories of the trauma--both bodily sensations and emotionally linked memories--would no longer convey threat in the here and now, because they'd accurately be perceived as old memories. We'd find ourselves restored to the present moment, in all of its richness and possibility.
Retraining the Brain
What therapeutic processes might convince the amygdala to "down-regulate?" I'm not touting any specific approach. But what we know about the neurophysiology of trauma suggests that some of the so-called somatic and energy therapies, such as Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), and Thought Field Therapy (TFT), may be particularly well equipped to escort a traumatized person from the past back to the present. Let's look at how these approaches might fulfill some fundamental needs of trauma healing.
Integration of the cerebral hemispheres. The functioning of the left cerebral hemisphere is a brain state that's normally inhibited during arousal. Theoretically, bringing the left brain back "online" and integrating the left and right hemispheres would interfere with, and inhibit, the independent function of the right amygdala. Alternating visual, tactile and auditory stimulation might well integrate the two sides of the brain and down-regulate the right amygdala while the patient imagines the traumatic event, thereby removing the arousal charge.
Brain integration may explain why some of the seemingly bizarre repetitive behaviors of energy therapies seem to produce dramatic results for some patients. The alternating sensory stimulation of EMDR, as well as the eye-rolling, counting (left hemisphere) and singing (right hemisphere) employed by EFT, may help to integrate the brain hemispheres and thereby relegate traumatic memories to the past. The EFT practice of repetitively tapping acupuncture meridian points, which promotes autonomic homeostasis, may also put the brakes on brain arousal.
Ritual. This is often part of the healing process in non-Western and especially indigenous societies, where it's often practiced by tribal healers or shamans. Rituals often involve repetitive behaviors, such as drumming, dancing, or singing, and frequently induce hypnotic trance states. The use of hypnosis in healing trauma may have its roots in this process. In addition, social rituals may activate the anterior cingulate, the part of the cortex that's known to inhibit the amygdala. We know that the anterior cingulate plays an important role in mother-infant and social bonding, a state that may be replicated by social ritual. The potency of ritual also may explain the impact of the eye movements of EMDR, the tapping procedures of EFT and TFT, and the repetitive affirmative statements of the latter two approaches.
Empowerment. This is the ultimate goal of all trauma therapy. To heal, an individual must recover from the state of helplessness that defines the trauma experience. During a traumatic event, a person experiences physical helplessness and effectively freezes into that state, leading to all manner of pain and illness. To recover, one needs a way to thaw out the body.
This "melting" process is at the heart of Somatic Experiencing, a body-based therapy in which one accesses the felt sense of the trauma and allows the failed motor defense to emerge in the form of a "freeze discharge," wherein the individual moves out of immobility into an effective fight or flight response. This ability to achieve discharge can be facilitated via a number of other somatic approaches, including dance, balance, equestrian therapy, and art therapies. What these approaches have in common is their capacity to access the freeze discharge and extinguish somatic procedural memories through completion of the bodily act of defense or escape. This completion at once permits and celebrates reempowerment.
Making meaning. Talk does play an important role in trauma therapy, but not as the first order of business. Once the contents of the dissociative capsule are extinguished, client-therapist conversations can help to provide the client with conscious, cognitive meaning and perspective. Talk can empower a client with the knowledge that the occasional recurrence of residual somatic symptoms--a sudden bout of nausea, a strangled feeling in the throat--actually represent an event from the past, and not an imminent threat that wipes out the here and now.
All in all, perhaps this is the most important lesson of trauma recovery: we never do quite fully recover. After all, our trauma memory capsules are nothing less than survival mechanisms, working in tandem with the amygdala to try to keep us alive. As one would expect from a primitive survival mechanism, it can never be totally extinguished. (Recall that after many years, Pavlov's dogs were reconditioned to the bell with just one trial.) Our stored memories of personal danger are fierce, focused, and highly motivational.
Of course, we can make enormous strides in discharging the contents of our trauma capsules, especially via approaches that address our body-based memories. But as we make our vital journeys back to the present, we'd do well to cultivate an attitude of gentle acceptance. For it's quite possible that all the body-based therapy in the world, plus regular infusions of meditation, running, yoga, and other mindfulness practices, won't be enough to keep us permanently anchored in the here and now. It seems we just aren't wired to live there fulltime. But we can make extended visits. And when we do, we can explore the lush landscape of the present moment with more wonder, wisdom, and pleasure than ever before.
Robert Scaer, M.D., was formerly associate clinical professor of neurology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado. He's published numerous articles and two books addressing the neurophysiology of trauma, diseases of trauma, and concepts of healing: The Trauma Spectrum and The Body Bears the Burden . Contact: firstname.lastname@example.com
By Katy Butler
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in a specially outfitted studio apartment in Seattle that reporters nicknamed the "love lab," mathematician-turned-psychologist John Gottman videotaped ordinary couples in their most ordinary moments--playing solitaire, chatting, kissing, disagreeing, watching TV, cooking dinner.
Sometimes Gottman, then a professor at the University of Washington, asked them to discuss an area of conflict while monitors strapped to their chests recorded their heart rates. Sometimes he sat them on spring-loaded platforms to record how much they fidgeted. He looked at how they brought up painful subjects, how they responded to each other's bids for attention, how they fought and joked, and how they expressed emotion.
Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, he and his colleagues studied newlyweds, men who battered their wives, couples who shouted a lot, and others who beat around the bush and never raised their voices. He used an elaborate coding system to track not only their verbal exchanges, but less obvious indicators of emotion: flickering facial expressions, sighs, clammy hands, rolling eyes, and galloping heartbeats. He followed some of the couples for more than two decades, recording who got divorced, who established parallel lives, and who stayed together--more or less happily.
He then took his data and translated them into numbers, quantifying an area of human life usually relegated to the psychotherapist and the novelist. Using complex computer models, he found that he could predict divorce with 91-percent accuracy, simply by analyzing seven variables in a couple's behavior during a five-minute disagreement. What he discovered made him famous. He appeared on network television and was immortalized by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. Most of what we reliably know about marriage and divorce in its natural state comes from his work.
In the course of studying more than 3,000 couples, Gottman discovered that most of them fought, and that even the most happily married couples never resolved 69 percent of their conflicts. When they returned to his lab at four-year intervals, the issues and even the phrases were essentially the same. Only their clothing and hairstyles changed.
What was crucial, Gottman learned, wasn't whether a couple fought, but how. Among those couples whose marriages survived well, whom Gottman and his colleagues came to call the "masters of marriage," wives raised issues gently, and brought them up sooner rather than later. Neither husbands nor wives regularly became so upset with each other that their heart rates rose above 95 beats a minute. They broke rising tension with jokes, reassurance, and distractions. They didn't escalate their arguments.
Faced with a request or complaint from their wives (and 80 percent of the complaints did come from wives), the successful husbands didn't play king or cross their arms like rebellious teenagers. Instead they changed their behavior--doing more dishes, working fewer hours, giving more than lip service to their wives' dreams, or taking an older child to the park to give an exhausted new mother a break. When news of these findings hit the newspapers in the late 1990s, my boyfriend at the time called it the "yes, dear" path to marital harmony.
Perhaps most notable, the master couples made at least 5 positive remarks or gestures toward each other for every zinger during a fight ; in calmer times, their positive-to-negative ratio was an astounding 20 to 1.
The "masters of disaster" in Gottman's study group--those who eventually divorced--fought differently. Wives raised issues harshly--especially when their husbands ignored them or put them down. (He named the wives' openers "harsh start-ups.") The husbands got upset more easily during arguments like these and had a harder time calming themselves down. And 94 percent of the time, conflicts that opened harshly didn't get any better as they went along.
Rather than complaining about specifics, the wives frequently globalized their criticisms, using phrases like "you never" and rhetorical questions like "What's wrong with you?" The husbands, for their part, frequently shut down, playing emotional possum or becoming as blank as a cement wall. The reverberation between them was so toxic that Gottman named criticism and stonewalling as two of his Four Horsemen of Marital Apocalypse. (The other two are defensiveness and contempt.) The presence of the Four Horsemen alone, he found, combined with pulse rates that rose above 95 beats per minute during a disagreement, were highly reliable predictors of divorce.
The background music of the less successful relationships, not surprisingly, was halting. In both happy and unhappy couples, partners made plenty of subtle bids for attention, closeness, or reassurance. But the partners headed for divorce responded to each other's bids only 33 percent of the time, while the happy couples' response rate was 86 percent.
Finally, Gottman's research showed him that it wasn't only how the couple fought that mattered, but how they made up afterward--what he called a "repair," echoing the language of engineering. In a longitudinal study of 130 newlywed couples published in 1998, Gottman found that 83 percent of marriages initially exhibiting the Four Horsemen became stable over time, as long as the couple learned to reconcile successfully after a fight.
Then in 1994, John Gottman went canoeing in Puget Sound off Orcas Island with his wife, Julie Schwartz Gottman, an experienced clinical psychologist in her own right. Mindful of the dismal showing of most existing couples therapies in outcome studies, he suggested that they combine his research and her therapeutic wisdom to fashion a science-based couples therapy.
They began writing a manual that night. Later they organized weekend workshops and started a Seattle clinic eventually staffed by 16 clinicians. In 1998, they began leading advanced trainings for therapists. By 2004, 4,000 couples had gone through their workshops or their clinic. By 2006, more than 3,000 therapists had taken a basic training workshop with them, 65 therapists had been certified in their approach, and 600 more were well on their way to certification.
The Gottmans call their new approach Gottman Method Couples Therapy. It braids together classic therapeutic skills with two new elements: scientific dispassion and scientific authority. The dispassion comes from their extensive use of assessment and feedback, a legacy of John's research training. More than 30 pen-and-paper questionnaires are methodically administered to each partner before therapy begins; videotaping and heart-monitoring are part of therapy itself. The authority comes from the research showing that therapists using this approach can decisively stop their clients from exercising the Four Horsemen of contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. They can teach their clients the behavioral skills used by Gottman's "masters of marriage," including little kindnesses that build a strong marital friendship, and tools to regulate conflict. Perhaps most important, the dispassion, structure, and authority of the approach act as counterweights to the discouragement and chaos often generated by couples in trouble--emotional storms that blow many a therapist into taking sides or losing control altogether.
Last April, Brian, my almost husband, and I flew from San Francisco to Seattle to attend a two-day weekend couples workshop with the Gottmans called "The Art and Science of Love."
Starting Out
An old joke says that women marry expecting men to change, and men marry expecting women not to. Even though we aren't yet married--we're both long divorced from other people--Brian and I fill that bill. I want him to dress better, set limits with his adult sons, and change his job. He wants me to lighten up. After seven years together, he still leaves me notes saying how much he loves me, and I still bring coffee and the newspaper up to our bedroom on Saturday mornings. But much as I hate to admit it, if John Gottman installed a video camera in our home, he'd sometimes catch us cohabiting with the Four Horsemen. I'm a master at the harsh start-up. I've ambushed Brian with pressing concerns when he's still half-asleep, rolled my eyes contemptuously during arguments, and couched my complaints as variants of "What's wrong with you?"
Brian, for his part, has often promised to consult me before inviting his sons to stay with us--and hasn't. I moved into his house six years ago, and I still sometimes feel perched there, overwhelmed by free-floating testosterone. He doesn't always keep agreements, and when I want a straight answer, he can fend me off with stonewalling and an evasive Irish-American jokiness that drives me up the wall. By the time we flew to Seattle, we'd begun avoiding some of our most tender differences rather than risk a fight.
That, in a nutshell, is our shared emotional climate at 9:40 a.m. on a windy Saturday last spring. We sit together in the front row of a huge conference room, packed with couples in similar straits, not far from the old Seattle World's Fair Space Needle. John and Julie Gottman are standing in front of us, warning us about the Four Horsemen, and suggesting that instead of tackling our most upsetting issues head-on, we start obliquely, building a "culture of appreciation" for each other. In sum, they want us to improve our background music.
"If you make a very small correction," John Gottman says, "doing stuff that seems natural and small, over time, it'll make a big difference." The idea is to fiddle with thousands of tiny daily interactions--things so seemingly trivial that it's hard to imagine they'd make any difference at all--as if we're fine-tuning a complex carburetor.
"You build romance and passion and great sex through little moments," he goes on, citing tidbits of his research showing that unhappy couples often respond positively to each other--just not often enough. He's 64 and slight, with a white beard and luminous eyes. He's wearing a bright-red tie and a yarmulke, but there's something about the way he sometimes throws out terms like "vasoconstriction" and "chance levels of prediction" that makes it easy to imagine him in a white lab coat.
I wonder if Brian is getting bored.
John's wife Julie, who's the copresenter of the workshop, is 55, zaftig, humorous, and easy, with long, curling, black-gray hair and the full, low, soothing voice of a practiced psychotherapist. She wears sensible shoes and a therapist-as-priestess black and white kimono, banded with images drawn from Haida Indian totem poles.
Joining Brian and me in the audience are about 200 other couples from many states in the union, in varying states of wedded bliss and distress. Most have paid $600 to be here. Some women lean forward, their expressions hopeful, rapt, or desperate. Some men sit back with their arms crossed, like attendees at a weekend traffic school.
Sometimes I poke an elbow into Brian to underline a point. Every now and again he whispers to me, "Let's acknowledge the men!" amazed that so many have agreed to be here on the opening weekend of the NBA basketball playoffs.
On our laps are melon-colored, three-ring binders entitled "The Art and Science of Love." What differentiates this workshop from others on the market, the binder says, is that it's grounded not in idealistic notions of what marriage ought to be, but on "solid research on what actually works in relationships that are happy and stable."
Embedded in this sentence is a clinical hypothesis: that unhappy couples can be taught to do what happy couples do. This assumption underlies not only this workshop and Gottman Method Couples Therapy, but also aspects of cognitive-behavioral therapy, the Positive Psychology movement, and Marsha Linehan's Dialectical Behavior Therapy.
The hypothesis assumes that unhappy couples have the maturity and the emotional wherewithal at least to try to treat each other differently. I wonder if that's true for me.
There's another difference between this and other couples approaches that the binder doesn't mention: the Gottmans' work is men-friendly. Some of the language that their therapy uses--"relationship repair," "overrides," and "harsh start-ups," for instance--could have come from a car-repair manual. It's a dirty little secret that men are often dragged to couples therapy, and feel emotionally illiterate or ganged-up-on once they get there. The exercises in our binders, however, look doable, practical, and circumscribed, rather than like an endless dive into the amorphous emotional depths.
The workshop's goal is to help us learn to imitate Gottman's long-married master couples. The bedrock of their successful relationships, it's explained, is marital friendship, built granule upon granule, through tiny rituals of courtesy, kindness, humor, and appreciation. Successful couples, have large "cognitive maps" of each other's worlds. They're curious about each other's inner lives, and they don't stint on expressing their appreciation for each other. When one of them makes a subtle bid for attention--something as simple as "look at the pretty boats"--the other one usually responds positively.
This system of mutual stroking, according to the Gottmans' model, produces "positive sentiment override"--an emotional tipping point that allows spouses to think, in tense moments, "My sweetie must be having a hard day" rather than "What a jerk!" or "He doesn't love me." And that makes it easier to disagree without being disagreeable.
It all seems eminently doable, but I'm not convinced. For me, the complex weather of human relationships conforms more closely to the dynamics of chaos theory than to Newtonian physics. The Gottmans' structure seems too linear and mechanistic. But maybe, I think with a glance at Brian, who's paying close attention, it's an image that works for men.
In unhappy couples, the presenters continue, the relative dearth of positive feedback engenders a destructive cognitive shift over time to "negative sentiment override"--essentially, assuming the worst about one's partner. This leads to what John Gottman calls the "fundamental attribution error"--a default setting of blame, in which all the problems in the relationship are the partner's fault. Fights escalate and become a contest of wills, replete with the Four Horsemen. Both partners get painfully flooded with emotion and sometimes withdraw. Over time, this can result in a cascade of isolation, distance, loneliness, parallel lives, and eventual divorce.
When I hear this, I think of the morning 15 years ago, not long before my marriage ended, when my former husband sat opposite me at our kitchen table and gently stroked my head with the tip of a three-foot dowel, like a lobster using his antenna to groom a mate he dared not touch.
But that was a long time ago. Today, in a series of unthreatening exercises, I have a chance to do things differently. During the weekend, the Gottmans explain, Brian and I will be taught how to put deposits in our joint "emotional bank account" and engender "positive sentiment override." We'll learn to soothe each other and ourselves. And finally we'll develop ways to manage the conflicts we can't resolve, honor each other's dreams, and create a life of shared meaning.
No longer drifting in a river of emotion, I find myself looking at our relationship dispassionately, with the mind of a scientist. I realize how often Brian pays me compliments, and how seldom I compliment him. I ask myself: Why not be nicer? Where's the risk? "I don't give as many small things," I write in my notebook. "I need to criticize less. I need to learn softened start-up. I need to listen when he's overwhelmed. I need to learn when I'm overwhelmed."
And when John Gottman says how important it is for men to make cognitive room for their wives' dreams and accept their wives' influence, I think of times I've felt run over or ignored, and I give Brian an elbow-poke.
A few minutes later, the introductory lecture concludes and the Gottmans send us out to adjoining breakout rooms for the "Love Map," our first partner exercise. We find two chairs facing each other and begin. One by one, Brian and I turn over cards we've taken from a plastic pocket in our binder and guess the answers to questions like, "Who is your partner's best friend? What are his or her dreams and aspirations? Who is his or her favorite poet?"
I miss his favorite magazine-- Mother Jones --but get both of his second choices right-- Rolling Stone and Time. He gets all of my magazines right except The New Yorker. I name his best friend and he names mine, but I realize there are two women whom I talk to daily whose names he doesn't even know. These women are aware that I dream of selling my house in Mill Valley and building a straw-bale house from scratch in the dairy country near Tomales Bay, and going there to write. I've never told Brian about this dream. Mired in our day-to-day struggles, I realize, we seldom talk about our larger hopes and aspirations.
I miss his favorite poet--John O'Donohue--but get the next two right--Uriah Mountain Dreamer and Mary Oliver. He misses my favorite poet--Mary Oliver--but gets the next one right: Jane Hirshfield.
We feel close and happy. This is fun. Brian loves the exercise. He says he wants us to do this once a month when we get home.
So the day goes. Every hour or so, after a minilecture and a role-play from the two Gottmans, we stream out of the auditorium with our binders into adjoining breakout rooms to do little exercises with our partners. Along the walls stand roving therapists certified (or close to being certified) in Gottman Method Couples Therapy. Every now and again, a distressed or confused husband or wife holds up a small red card--like the penalty card in soccer--and a clinician quietly moves in like a therapeutic AAA truck to coach them.
Now we pick from a deck of "opportunity cards" that suggest ways we can turn toward each other. Brian nixes the notion of spending an evening discussing what I'd like to change about the interior of the house, but promises to plan a weeklong getaway when we get home. He turns down my offer to bring flowers home, but asks me to surprise him with tickets to a concert. We look down a list in the binder and circle things like "doing a favorite activity together," "playing together," "taking vacations together," and "time to make love." It's shocking to realize how hard we work, how long it's been since we went biking together in the country, and how much we'd like to do it again some time.
We're working behaviorally, moving up stair-steps like the itsy-bitsy spider, building the foundation of what the Gottmans call our "sound relationship house." The structure resembles Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs--starting with a solid friendship, proceeding to negotiating conflicts, and then to higher-level relationship needs. The Gottmans' goal isn't for couples to achieve a relationship rivaling Antony and Cleopatra's, but rather to learn how to have a good-enough marriage. A marriage is good enough, John Gottman once wrote, "If the two spouses choose to have coffee and pastries together on a Saturday afternoon and really enjoy the conversation, even if they don't heal one another's childhood wounds or don't always have wall-socket, mind-blowing, skyrocket sex."
The day proceeds. Between exercises, we take breaks for tea and pile little paper plates with grapes and slices of cut pineapple. The Gottmans don't drag any of us onstage to open our hearts in front of strangers. They don't deliver any aren't-I-smart paradoxical interventions, tell us that men are from Mars, or teach us how to exchange quid-pro-quos, like "I'll do the dishes and stroke your back if you'll have more sex with me." They don't suggest that marriage is a sexual crucible, as David Schnarch holds, or that it's a God-given opportunity for deep emotional healing, as Imago's Helen Hunt and Harville Hendrix contend. They just want us to create small, gentle changes in the trajectory of our relationships--ones that might create big payoffs if practiced over time.
A good Gottman marriage, I start to think, is a bit like a 16-foot scale model of an ocean liner made from 194,000 toothpicks and seven gallons of glue. They don't want to us to remake ourselves from scratch. They're handing us toothpicks, some glue, and a blueprint.
Struggling to Open Up
The next exercise, after lunch, is a step more intimate. We turn to a checklist in our binders, choose three positive qualities we see in our partners, and tell each other about them.
Brian checks that I'm "thrifty," "creative," and "a great friend," and writes comments like "you know your limits . . . smart bright writer and teacher . . . I trust you."
I'm touched.
I decide he is "virile," "committed," "protective," and "playful," remembering how he took care of both of our airline boarding passes and insisted we squeeze in a ferry ride on Puget Sound before the workshop began.
He smiles.
Like many couples, we come back to the big room hand in hand.
Next, after Brian takes a break, hovering around the tables laid out with tea and cut fruit, comes practicing a "stress reducing conversation." Learning to buffer our relationship from the stresses of the world, the Gottmans say, is critical to maintaining closeness over time. This means being Brian's ally, his sympathetic ear, his cheerleader, and not his educator, coach, critic, or mentor--a big shift for me.
For once, I simply listen and accept when he tells me he's so stressed by his job that he doesn't have the energy to change it. Instead of giving him a checklist of things to do, I take in his exhaustion and fragility.
When it's my turn, and I talk about wanting to drop a work responsibility, he says, "What stops you from doing something about it?" I feel reprimanded. I ask him to just listen. Then I speak not only of my own driven work habits, but of my difficulty saying no and of the day long ago when my beloved father beat me badly when I was caught after running away.
Brian takes my hand, looks in my eyes, and tells me he's never before really "gotten" what my childhood was like. He has tears in his eyes.
What we've just done together sounds so innocuous--a standard-issue exercise in reflective listening. I've done things like it before, although never with someone I'm so close to. And we've gone deeper than I expected. This isn't territory the Gottmans warned us about. I wonder if there are hidden reasons why Brian and I don't treat each other better, and marvel at how easily intimate partnerships can reawaken the hurts of our first deep connections. For a long time--perhaps since the end of my marriage, perhaps since childhood--I've been Miss Hard-Boiled, making sure I didn't risk too much closeness. Now that I've been more open with Brian (and vice versa) my heart hurts.
As it turns out, I'm not alone. Others in the rooms here seem to have emotional reasons--far deeper than mere ignorance or lack of skill--for not being able to "act as if" and do what happy couples do. A man to my left spends big chunks of time either reading the New York Times sports section or sitting with his eyes half-closed. To my right, before another exercise, one woman stays behind in the auditorium, hanging onto her husband and sobbing inconsolably. I wonder about her story: what long-ago childhood betrayal or recent affair fuels her tears? Another man and woman stand outside smoking in the courtyard, not talking, not touching, just staring into space. Are they too far down the "distance and isolation cascade" to turn back? Around the breakout rooms, red cards fly up. Two sets of chairs away from us, a man points to his wife accusingly. "I saw it!" he says. "You rolled your eyes! That's contempt!"
That night, Brian and I have a lovely dinner at an Italian restaurant across from our hotel. We bemoan the fact that we didn't set aside a few extra days just for fun, and swear we're going to come back to Seattle again sometime without work obligations. As we look over the bill and recap the day, Brian casually says, "I don't know about the love maps. What difference does it make if I know who your favorite poet is?"
This strikes one of my enduring vulnerabilities: my fear of never being known or understood. Quicker than thought, I say harshly, "You're missing the point." In his eyes, I see reflected the altar boy he once was, being reprimanded by a nun. For a moment, the good feelings of the day are scattered like toothpicks.
We've been here before: what the Gottmans would call my "harsh start-up" has hurt what I'd call the little boy inside my man. Brian starts a slow, sustained, invisible burn. It's little comfort to me that Gottman found many couples like us when he did his research: sensitive couples who easily got hurt; men incurious about their partner's life; women who felt ignored and therefore hit their men over the head with a rhetorical two-by-four to make a point. Those were the couples who often ended up getting divorced.
Later that night, we lie side by side on a huge king-sized bed. We aren't touching. It's a smoking room: the little hotel is full of couples from the workshop, and by the time we signed up, this was the only room left. The smell of smoke is in the air, especially now that we've closed the windows against the evening cold. Brian is on his side, turned away from me, angry.
"Nothing's ever good enough for you," he says.
I think of the toxic effects of the Four Horsemen, and that gives me the wherewithal to tell Brian that's a criticism rather than a complaint. Then, borne on the stream of the workshop, I reach out my hand and stroke his back. I hear two sets of footsteps, and a door open and close down the hall.
I stroke Brian's back and shoulder for a long time, as the light in the room fades. I wonder whether his heart rate is over 95 beats a minute, remembering John Gottman's remarks not long before the workshop day ended about the physical flooding or "diffuse physiological arousal" that often occurs when couples fight: cortisol is secreted, the heart races and the blood pumps, perceptions narrow, and the processing of new information virtually ceases. Men respond more intensely than women to a stressor, like a gunshot; they're more likely to sustain angry thoughts after a fight; and their hearts take much more time to slow down again. Through the years, this recurrent neurological cascade can damage men's immune and cardiovascular systems. This gender difference may help explain why women often are more wiling to engage in emotionally upsetting conversations than are men.
As I lie there, I also remember Julie Gottman telling us, in her soothing, therapeutic voice, that it isn't the fight that matters so much as how the couple repairs things afterward. So I murmur, doing my best to own my part in things, and to nudge Brian gently to forgive me. I'm not in a rush, happy simply stroking him, simply feeling his skin. Finally he makes a joke--the kind of thing Gottman says that his master couples do to break tension. He turns to face me, and when he's naked like this, his bright eyes and grey beard somehow remind me of the battle-scarred Ulysses returning, almost unrecognizable after 20 years, to his faithful Penelope.
Finally, after hours of closeness, we sleep.
Learning How to Fight
On the morning of day two of the workshop, the Gottmans show us that they, too, fight, and not always gracefully. They've been married for 20 years. Both were married before, they've told me, and both came from painful, though decidedly different, family backgrounds.
John was born in the Dominican Republic to poor Jewish refugees from Vienna who had lost 24 members of their extended families to the Holocaust. Julie was raised in Portland, Oregon, where her father was a successful doctor and her mother a depressed incest survivor. Her early family life was so painful that she often slept in the woods.
John found a refuge at MIT, in the precision of mathematics and science. He admits he was "clueless" about male-female relationships as a teenager, and later decided that since he wasn't succeeding at relationships, he might as well study them. Over the years, he slowly learned to imitate what his master couples did. Julie, by contrast, had visions in the woods calling her to become a healer. She became a clinical psychologist, working with trauma survivors and Vietnam veterans, and she served long apprenticeships with two American Indian medicine women. I sometimes I wonder how they ever learned to respect, much less integrate, their different ways of being.
The fact that it's not always easy is laid bare on Sunday morning, when they reprise an old fight and role-play "repair." Julie begins by describing how she'd woken up one morning having dreamt that John had been flirting with other women. Already anxious about an upcoming speech, she'd wandered into the bathroom, where John was brushing his teeth. She'd told him her dream. He'd murmured reassuringly and hugged her for what seemed to her like a few seconds and what seemed to him like a long, long time.
He'd turned away--abruptly, Julie thought--and she'd gotten into the shower, feeling even more alone.
Now John takes up the thread, describing how he'd thought to himself, Wait a second! He'd apologized to Julie for things he'd done in a dream --things he hadn't actually done and wasn't thinking of doing. Hadn't he been cleaning up around the house lately, the way she asked him to, without much acknowledgement? Hadn't he been cooking her lots of great fish dinners? She has some nerve, having this dream about me being a louse, he said to himself. Don't we have enough problems during the day without her making up new ones at night?!
Then before he knew it, John said, he was snapping at Julie, and she was standing in the shower in tears.
I glance down at the page in my binder entitled "Aftermath of a Fight or Disagreement" and its subheads: Share Your Subjective Reality, Find Something in Your Partner's Story that You Can Understand, Are You Flooded? Admitting Your Own Role, and Making It Better in the Future.
I think of times, in my marriage and in long-gone relationships, when I, like Julie, wanted reassurance and had gotten none. At such times, I'd usually decided that I'd picked the wrong man to be with. The Gottmans don't go there. I feel almost naughty listening in on their argument, as if they've raised a black curtain and I'm watching them pole-dance or violate some other cultural taboo. In this culture, very little gets said about the years after the honeymoon, the years that fairytales call "Happily Ever After" and Joseph Campbell called the "spiritual ordeal" of ordinary marriage. If Brian and I had an interchange this painful--and we did just last night, and haven't fully recovered yet--I'd be tempted to tell nobody for fear of hearing, "What a jerk! Why do you put up with him?" or "Why does he put up with you?"
Modeling imperfection for us, the Gottmans show the normality of relationship angst--even recurrent angst. On the surface, they're teaching us behavioral skills and evidence-based techniques--how to understand your partner's equally valid reality, and how to reconcile. But on the metalevel, what they're teaching doesn't come from John's research. It's wordless and embodied--a normalizing of the fact that little things can set off surprising ambushes of hurt in intimate relationships. After watching the Gottmans in action, Brian and I don't look so odd to me.
"My subjective reality is that I come from a background where I was beaten up," Julie goes on as they model the process of repair. "I don't have a lot of self-confidence, especially when I have to give speeches to powerful people."
"I dream symbolically," she continues. "The person in the dream becomes the symbol of someone who's hurting me."
"So I become . . . .?" interjects John.
"You're not supposed to talk now," Julie says quickly. "As a good little psychologist ( Do I detect contempt, humor, or just anxiety here? I wonder fleetingly), I thought you'd understand that my dream is sym-bol-ic. I needed you to be by my side, and you couldn't be, and I felt very alone."
Then Julie softens, moving to find something in her partner's story that she can understand. "You try so hard to be a good husband--and you are a good husband." She starts to sniffle.
"Are you flooded?" John asks gently.
"Yes I am," she says. She turns away and takes a few deep breaths.
"I'm a little flooded, too," says John. "Let's take a minute to calm down."
"I have been taking you for granted," Julie goes on after a pause. "Perhaps I haven't made time for good things between us because we're both so darn busy. And you have been making some fabulous fish dinners"
Now it's John's turn to share his subjective reality. "Things haven't been going the way I wanted them to at work," he says, referring to a major federal grant that hadn't come through. He adds, "I haven't had time to play music, and when I don't, I'm mad at the world."
A little while later, as they move toward making it better in the future, John asks, "Next time, would you tell me that your dream is symbolic, so I'm not expected to be a psychologist all the time?"
"What if I say, ´I'm so raw, so vulnerable, I really need a good long hug?'" asks Julie.
John hesitates, pauses, and agrees, without enthusiasm.
"Okay," says Julie. "We're done."
"No we're not," says John. "What's one thing you could do differently?
Julie cocks her head.
"I could start by saying, ´This dream isn't really about you,'" she says.
"That's great!" says John, with apparently genuine enthusiasm and surprise. "Okay! Are we buddies?"
If only it were that simple, I think.
A Fight That Deepens Connection
Now it's our turn. We stream out to the breakout room again. Brian takes an inordinately long time getting slices of pineapple and tea.
Our assignment is to take a minor, resolvable conflict and process it the way the Gottmans did. The binder tells us "there is no absolute 'reality' in a disagreement but rather two ´subjective realities.' "We are to practice "softened start-up" and making I-statements.
I glance over the cheat sheet in the binder's back pocket called the Repair Checklist. It contains suggested lines: "I feel defensive. Can you rephrase that? How can I make things better? Let's compromise here." I'm game.
I fetch Brian from the refreshment table. It dawns on me that he looks pale, and that he's not quite as enthusiastic as I am to go on. In the middle of the night last night--after hours of touching--he'd jumped out of bed, having dreamt that I was part of a conspiracy to assassinate him.
I open my binder to the appropriate page and ask him to look over my shoulder at the Chinese-menu list of relationship differences for us to choose from. Yesterday we'd added "television" and "whether or not to get married" to the list, on top of "handling finances" (I'm more frugal), "how to raise and discipline children" (I have none and he has two), and "alcohol" (he likes it and I don't).
"Can we just cool the jets?" he says. It's too much, he goes on. He wants us to sit this one out.
I don't want to say yes.
We raise our red card. A therapist comes over and suggests we try "television." That seems too trivial to me, while everything else seems impossibly sticky. As we wander desultorily toward the breakout room, Brian hangs a few steps back.
I want to do the exercise. I'm afraid that if we don't, I'll miss out, we won't learn how to reconcile after a fight, and my article won't pan out well. I'm thinking, Okay, I get it, Brian, you're overwhelmed. Now can we just please go ahead and do the exercise, please?
But now I'm stuck in an Escher-like paradox. In order to do the exercise, I'd have to violate the spirit of the exercise, which is to honor my partner's reality and be willing to compromise. In the Gottmans' lingo, I need to maintain an up-to-date cognitive map of Brian's inner world. At this moment, his inner world is flooded by a neurohormonal cascade of cortisol and adrenaline spawned by last night's fight and his subsequent nightmare. I ponder the strange fragility of men, especially this one particular man. This bearded guy, six feet two inches tall, who loaded all my luggage into the car in Mill Valley, is now blanching at the notion of having a 15-minute argument? This guy who bicycles and jogs and took protective care of my airline boarding pass--he can't stand to look at a cheat sheet and try out expressions like "This is important to me. Please listen?"
Could it be that when it comes to emotional discussions, men are the ones who strain to lift the bags, and women are the triathletes? Could it be that men who tell us in so many words to back off are expressing their vulnerability, not their callousness?
These, of course, are afterthoughts. At the time, I wanted just to forge ahead, like the obedient subject in the Stanley Milgram experiment who continued to administer "shocks" to an allegedly helpless fellow subject who appeared to be in pain.
Not knowing what else to do, we recruit two more therapists, a man and a woman, from the back wall. Brian runs through his story of feeling overwhelmed again as if it belonged to us both. My stomach tightens, and I interrupt: I'm not overwhelmed. He is. I want to go ahead.
I wonder if we're too weird for this workshop.
The four of us sit down together, Brian and I facing each other with a therapist on either side, our chairs forming a rough square. The woman therapist turns to me and suggests we two take a break. The male therapist, who's "shadowing" the woman, as part of his certification process, says nothing.
I lean forward, my hands on my knees. I don't want listen to her. I open the binder. I decide to make this current disagreement--over whether or not to do the exercise --the subject of the exercise. At the top of a page I see, "Find something in your partner's story that you can understand." I ask Brian, a bit mechanically, to tell me how he feels. I say back that I hear that he feels overwhelmed, that he needs a break. Merely repeating back what he's saying makes me realize that it's true: he really is overwhelmed. The odd thing is, I'm trying to do that old therapeutic stand-by, reflective listening--this is something that John Gottman says successful couples don't do during fights.
Now I take a turn to share my subjective reality: how important it is for me to follow the rules, to move forward, to be obedient, to get things done. Saying this in the presence the two therapists, who essentially are just tracking what we're doing without commenting, somehow loosens my hold on having to get my own way. And this, in turn, makes it easier for me to do what John Gottman calls "accepting influence from one's partner"--realizing dimly that it's not only men who refuse influence from their partners, not only men who sometimes bullheadedly play the king and cross their arms like adolescents.
I feel heard by the two of therapists, whose names I barely know. And I've heard Brian. Although the exercise isn't officially over yet, I'm ready to stop even though it means not following the rules. Brian and I walk outside to the courtyard and breathe the fresh air until a bell sounds to bring us all back.
During the next minilecture--on how to handle "gridlocked" perpetual conflicts--Brian whispers to me that he's decided to leave after lunch, instead of taking a plane at 3 p.m. as he'd originally planned. I'm sorry, but for once I feel no need to push him or lay out all the good, logical reasons why he should stay with me.
It's a paradox: I feel far more connected to Brian, and yet my hands aren't clenched. Before the workshop, I'd assumed that I was a failure--and our relationship was a failure--if we didn't solve our conflicts, once and for all, the way I had in mind. I don't think that way anymore.
Flying home the next day, taking care of my own boarding pass and my own luggage, I remember the cautionary words of Wendell Berry in an essay on marriage that capture some of what I learned in the workshop. "Some wishes cannot succeed. . . . Because the condition of marriage is worldly and it's meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. . . . When you unite yourself with another, you unite yourselves with the unknown."
I return to the chaos of the quotidian. Tulips touched with orange fire droop in a vase on our kitchen table and the weekend's newspapers are piled around it. In the living room, my 25-year-old stepson Zack is checking his email with his best friend, Ned, standing by, and both of them, to my surprise, are planning to spend the night. If I ever needed proof of one of the Gottmans' most basic propositions--that 69 percent of what couples argue about doesn't change--this is it.
In the months since the workshop ended, I've found such Gottmanesque statistics oddly comforting--and surprisingly therapeutic. When I raise something with Brian and feel awkward, I remind myself that women raise 80 percent of the issues in relationships, and I feel normal again. When I can't get a straight answer, I cite Gottman's research on the importance of men's taking influence from their wives. And when I'm irritated, I remember that 96 percent of the time, people who use a "harsh start-up" find the conversation doesn't go the way they'd hoped.
As I write these words, it's been four months since the night Brian and I lay on that impossibly wide bed in Seattle. For a month or so after we got back, we consciously had "stress reducing conversations" in the evenings, but lately we've slacked off. I haven't yet, as I promised, surprised Brian with music tickets. (He surprised me.) Brian didn't find us a place this summer for a getaway as he'd promised. (I did.) But he and I did go kayaking last weekend on Tomales Bay, much to our joint delight.
Things between us seem different--gentler, warmer, closer, more fun--and not so different, since we have the same old conflicts. But we discuss more and argue less. Brian never invites his sons over anymore without checking in with me (if I weren't typing this right now, my fingers would be crossed). If John Gottman had a hidden camera running in our house today, he'd see a lot less of the Four Horsemen. I wouldn't yet classify us as being among the masters of marriage, but I've become much better at the softened start-up. When I'm grateful or admiring of something Brian has done, I'm far likelier to say it out loud.
Describing things this way seems too pat, though. Not even the most complex computer model could disentangle the variables of our lives together, or even of our weekend in Seattle. When I look back, I don't remember statistics. Instead I remember leaning into Brian's arms and looking out at the dark blue of the bay on our ferry ride; I remember stroking his back in bed at the Hotel Marqueen; I remember the two therapists who sat and witnessed us.
In the realm of numbers and words, the world of the intuitive human community will always be at a disadvantage. Yet quantification always leaves something out. Our weekend was a union of science and intuition, and it's far easier to write about the science. But a mysterious alchemy takes place when a person lets go of old moorings and casts off into the unknown--as I did, when Brian showed me his vulnerable face and I didn't turn away. If he and I hadn't happened upon those two therapists that morning, I might not have dared do that. They held me while I moved into a new experience of accepting Brian as he is. John Gottman's research and all the weekend's little exercises may have prepared the ground for that experience, but they didn't take me there.
I look over my notes at Gottman's percentages and I still find them oddly comforting and reassuring. But it isn't the same comfort that I get from remembering how, in a smoky hotel room one Saturday night in Seattle, I reached across a huge king-sized bed and Brian turned to meet me.
Networker Features Editor Katy Butler was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2004. She's written for the New Yorker and The New York Times . She's teaching creative writing at the Networker's Symposium West in San Francisco in October and memoir writing at the Esalen Institute in December. Contact: email@example.com or www.katybutler.com
by Susan Johnson
On the first day of a clinical placement in my doctoral program during the early 1980s, I was assigned to a counseling center and told by the director that because of unexpected staffing problems, I'd be seeing 20 couples a week. I'd never done any couples therapy, but I did have considerable experience as a family and individual therapist with emotionally disturbed adolescents--a tough, challenging group of clients if ever there was one! So my first thought when given this new assignment was, "After what I've done, how hard can this be?"
I plunged in and almost immediately was appalled by how hard it actually could be! People who seemed perfectly sane and reasonable often became totally unglued with their partners--enraged and aggressive or almost catatonically mute. I was in way over my head, with no idea what to do with these couples.
I remember one wildly angry pair, whose fight escalated to the point that they threatened to kill each other in my office. What I didn't know at the time was that while I was trying to prevent a double homicide, the clinic's director and staff were poised on the other side of the door, debating about whether someone should come to the rescue. "Do you think she can handle it?" one whispered to another. At that moment, they all heard me break into the melee and shout at the top of my lungs, "Shut up, both of you!!" In the ensuing stunned silence, the director said to the worried assembly, "I think she'll be just fine."
In spite of my complete befuddlement and frustration, I found the dramatic, intricate, baffling dances these pairs did with each other enthralling, and wanted to understand better what was going on. Clearly though, I needed some tool in my toolkit other than "Shut up!" if I wanted to make any headway with them. The drama enacted in front of me by a couple was so powerful, so emotionally compelling, and yet so complex and ultimately confusing, that I felt chronically lost. I desperately needed some sort of map that would help me make sense of what I was seeing.
I remember one woman, who mostly communicated with her husband by screaming at him, sitting in my office one day describing in gruesome detail all the horrible things she was going to do to the husband's body as he lay asleep in bed that night. As usual, he ignored her completely, except to occasionally yell back, "You're absolutely crazy! You belong in a nuthouse!" Sometimes a wife would sob to her husband, "I love you, I love you--you have my heart in your hands." Then a minute later, she'd be screaming at him, "You bastard! I'll never let you touch me again!" Partners wept, made outrageous threats, and sat sunk in depression, all the while knowing perfectly well they were destroying their relationships, but unable to help themselves. I had no idea how to help them, either.
by Esther Perel
Sex makes babies. So it is ironic that the child, the embodiment of the couple's love, so often threatens the very romance that brought that child into being. Sex, which set the entire enterprise in motion, is often abandoned once children enter the picture. Why does parenthood so often deliver such a fatal blow?
The transition from two to three is one of the most profound challenges a couple will ever face. It takes time--time measured in years, not weeks--to find our bearings in this brave new world. Having a baby is a psychological revolution that changes our relation to almost everything and everyone. Priorities shift, roles are redefined, and the balance between freedom and responsibility undergoes a massive overhaul.
Eventually, most of us come to recognize ourselves again within this new context of family. For some of us, this is when romance starts to work its way back into the fabric of our lives. We remember that sex is fun; it makes us feel good, and it makes us feel closer.
But while some couples gravitate toward each other again, others slowly wander off on a path of mutual estrangement. Reclaiming erotic intimacy is not always easy. The case is often made that American parents today, regardless of class, are overworked and overwhelmed. We constantly sort conflicting demands into their appropriate hierarchical slots: The Crucial, The Important, The Dreamt of, The Ought-to. Sex often remains firmly at the bottom of the "to do" list, never fully relinquishing its last-place status to other, more mundane tasks.
Why is it that our erotic connection with our partner winds up so demoted? Does it really matter if the dishes aren't done, or is there something more beneath our mysterious willingness to forego sex? Perhaps eroticism in the context of family is simply too difficult for anyone to embrace.
by Jay Lebow
Couples therapy is on a roll. Whereas a mere 20 years ago, surveys showed that consumers didn't think much of it, today it's become increasingly accepted by the general public. Indeed, to end a marriage without benefit of some sort of marital therapy or counseling is now widely viewed as somehow irresponsible--as if the couple were remiss for not making that last-ditch effort to put themselves back together again. And whereas, two decades ago, the most prominent models of therapy focused almost exclusively on individual work, today as many as 70 percent of therapists here and abroad treat couples as part of their practices, according to a study conducted by prominent psychotherapy researcher David Orlinsky of the University of Chicago and his colleagues around the world.
Yet the research about couples therapy, as well as research about couples themselves--why some marriages succeed and others don't--hasn't kept pace with the growth of couples therapy. The slow pace of research on couples is partly due to the fact that relational distress isn't considered a "mental disorder" by DSM-IV, and thus doesn't usually qualify for government funding. In addition, researchers and clinicians have only recently recognized how important couples therapy can be in the treatment of such individual mental health problems as depression and anxiety. Even now, those researching the behavior of couples and couples therapy treatments have been limited to a small group of investigators dedicated enough to continue their work despite sporadic funding.
In spite of these handicaps, a considerable body of information has emerged that tells us a great deal about what works and doesn't work, both in couples' relationships and in couples therapy. The two strands of research inform each other: learning the specific differences between the ways couples interact in satisfying and unsatisfying relationships serves to pinpoint helpful behavioral, cognitive, and affective skills that therapists can encourage in their clinical work.
by Katy Butler
On the morning of September 21, 1993, a 37-year-old former graduate student named Susan Kandel took an elevator to an upper floor of Duke Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, where she was attending a day treatment program. She was panicked and miserable: her therapist had recently moved to another state, and she was about to leave agency-supervised housing to look for her own apartment.
She went to a breezeway connecting two wings of the building and jumped, expecting to fall 90 feet to her death. She landed instead on a maintenance workers' platform 40 feet down and was taken to the emergency room with three broken vertebrae. A month later, still in a body brace but not paralyzed, she was involuntarily committed to John Umstead State Hospital, an aging two-story brick mental hospital in Butner, on the outskirts of Durham. She, the hospital staff and her family all expected her to be there for a long, long time, and she was in deep despair.
It was her fourth commitment to John Umstead State Hospital, and her seventh serious suicide attempt. Two years earlier, facing an oral presentation for her Ph.D. in molecular biology at Duke, she had driven to a motel room on the North Carolina shore and swallowed 250 milliliters of chloroform--more than 25 times the lethal dose. Two days later, she was discovered in a coma, with a hole in her esophagus and her liver badly damaged; when she recovered sufficiently, she was committed to John Umstead for her first long stay.
Kandel had been given the most reviled diagnosis in the therapeutic lexicon--Borderline Personality Disorder --when she was 20. A brilliant but withdrawn college student, she had spent much of the next 17 years turning on a wheel of suffering from suicide attempt to mental hospital to halfway house to suicide attempt. Much like a distressed monkey gnawing its knuckles in a small cage at the zoo, she discovered at 17 that cutting her forearms with razor blades made her feel somewhat better. When she was 19, she was sent to a mental hospital for the first time, and there she took her first pill overdose.


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Students will learn how to analyze and solve problems involving circuits with resistors in series.
Explore how resistors and circuits are like water running through pipes.
Calculate the total resistance of multiple resistors wired in series.
A list of student-submitted discussion questions for Resistors in Series.
This study guide is an overview of circuits and circuit diagrams. It discusses voltage, current, Ohm's law, loop rule, and junction rule and reviews how to solve resistors in series, resistors in parallel, capacitors in series, and capacitors in parallel.

subset: commoncrawl


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Combo includes the rubberized snap on protector cover and Holster. Thin polycarbonate snap on shell faces inward for maximum protection. Holster ratchet swivels to multiple locations for your convenience and comfort. Slim fit shell case provides scratch protection with precision cutouts for ports, controls and camera opening.
BlackBerry Tour 9630,
BlackBerry Tour 9630, Bold 9650 Rubberized Snap On Cover with Swivel Holster Combo
$13.99 + FREE Delivery
Only 1 left in stock--order soon.
30 day warranty
$13.99 New Available online


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We understand the challenges you face as a local service business owner. Booker provides the tools you need to grow your revenue and customer base. We also make it easy to run your business 24/7 from a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Our expertise in cloud-based business management software makes us the safe, reliable choice.
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Discover how Skin Spa New York was able to expand their franchise successfully with the support of Booker's flexible business management software.
professionals, at nearly 10,000 locations, rely on Booker to grow their local businesses daily.
Our Dedicated Team Is Here to Help


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Deadliest Catch: Season 5 DVD
(75 reviews)
(75 reviews)
Sale Price:
List Price: $29.98
You Save: $25.01 83% off
- Additional Details
- Format: DVD
- Number of Discs: 5
- Run Time: 588 minutes
- Region: 1
- Studio: Discovery Comm
- DVD Release Date: August 27, 2012
- Genre: TV Series
The Deadliest Catch Season 5 DVD set takes you deep into the world of the Bering Sea as we follow seven vessels and their crews through the most brutal fishing seasons on the planet - Red King Crab and Opilio Crab. Forty-foot waves, hurricane winds, sleep deprivation, and operating heavy machinery on a pitching deck, are just a few reasons the injury rate is one hundred percent. The rugged adventurers in Deadliest Catch DVDs, who fish these waters are the real deal. Crabbers have the mindset of pirates - high risk for high reward - and putting life and limb on the line is just part of the job.
The crabbing season kicks off in October. Captain Sig Hansen, a 30-year veteran and a third generation fisherman, will match his skills against his old rivals, Phil Harris of the Cornelia Marie, the Hillstrand brothers of the Time Bandit, and Captain Keith Colburn of the Wizard. The fleet will push hundreds of miles out to sea and fish four hundred feet deep in search of the prized crustaceans. The captains will strategize, and the crews will be pushed to their limits of mental and physical endurance as they repeatedly drop and haul the 700-pound crab pots. Before the season is out, the men will face down huge storms, severe injury, a ticking clock and each other to bring in the King crab harvest.
Three new boats join the fray. The 78-ft Lisa Marie, the smallest boat in the fleet, will battle waves that seem to swallow the vessel. Aboard the Incentive, a team of old salts can't find the crab. While on the Trailblazer, a crew is haunted by a near-fatal incident from a few years ago when a man went overboard only to be narrowly saved by Capt. Jonathan Hillstrand.


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Lily of the Desert, 99% Aloe Vera Gelly, 8 oz (228 g)
By Lily of the Desert101 Reviews
Expiration Date:?Apr 2017
Expiration Date
The length of time for the expiration date or "best used before" date depends on the type of product, as well as the brand.
Perishable items (such as flax oils or certain probiotics) generally have shorter expiration dates. Although our warehouse is fully air-conditioned, these more fragile items are put in cold storage (freezer or refrigeration unit) for maximum freshness.
Our receiving department does its best to verify and then enter the correct expiration dates for all incoming products. However, discrepancies do occur from time to time. This being said, the exceptionally high turnover at iHerb ensures that our inventory is among the freshest in the industry.
Shipping Weight:?0.65 lbs (0.29 kg)
Shipping Weight
The Shipping Weight includes the product, protective packaging material and the actual shipping box. In addition, the Shipping Weight may be adjusted for the Dimensional Weight (e.g. length, width & height) of a package. It is important to note that certain types of products (e.g. glass containers, liquids, fragile, refrigerated or ice packed) will often require protective packaging material. As such, these products will reflect a higher Shipping Weight compared to the unprotected product.
- Product Code: LTD-10108
- UPC Code: 026395101085
- Package Quantity: 8 oz (228 g)
- Dimensions: 7.6 x 3 x 1.7 in, 0.55 lbs (0.25 kg)
- Volume Discount
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Product Overview
- Soothing Moisturizer
- Best Value
- Enhanced with Polysaccharide-Rich Aloesorb
Lily of the Desert Aloe Vera Gelly naturally replenishes and relieves skin after prolonged sun or wind exposure. It also refreshes and cools the skin surface on application.
- Made with Certified Organic Aloe Vera Juice/Gel
- No Parabens
- No Artificial Colors
Suggested Use
Apply to skin. Repeat as necessary.
Other Ingredients
Organic aloe vera barbadensis leaf juice (gel), carbomer (thickener), certified organic aloe vera juice (gel) concentrate, organic aloe vera barbadensis leaf polysaccharides (Aloesorb), tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E), retinyl palmitate (vitamin A), ascorbic acid (vitamin C), disodium EDTA (preservative), caprylyl glycol (emollient), phenoxyethanol (preservative), sorbic acid (preservative)
No animal testing
Aloe vera is a natural plant; therefore, the color may change due to seasonal variations without affecting purity, efficacy or quality.
For topical use only.
iHerb Customer Reviews
I'm really liking this gel! It's feel very nice and light on my skin (I use it on my face) I hope it will reduce some of my acne scarring, but I have only been using this for 1 week. It hasn't made break out, so I'm gonna keep using it. This does not moisturise your skin well, so follow up with a cream or lotion after.
It's nature's wonder in a nice plastic tube which is very convenient to carry around. Absorbs quickly and makes the skin soft and pliable. It leaves no residue whatsoever. It works wonders for sun burned skin and itchy skin. It is also great for skin irritation and acne breakout. It really helps soothe the skin, calms the redness and dries without leaving a sticky film. It also hydrates at least 3 epidermal layers. I am a strong advocate on scientific medical research and evidence-based information, and constantly want to differentiate between marketing hyperbole and real world effects. I hope you'll find my review Helpful to you. Best wishes & good health to everyone!


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Patriotic Nico Stands Up To Lewis Challenge
July 18th, 2014
What? The 2014 FORMULA 1 GERMAN GRAND PRIX Round 10 of 19 Where? Hockenheimring, Hockenheim When? July 18 - 20 Qualifying • Saturday July...
Pirelli reveals 18-inch F1 tyre at Silverstone test
July 10th, 2014
Jules Bianchi topped the final day of Formula One testing at Silverstone for Ferrari, while Pirelli unveiled and tested an experimental 18-inch tyre...
Triumphant Hamilton Back In Race After Rosberg Suffers First Non-Finish
July 8th, 2014
What? The 2014 FORMULA 1 BRITISH GRAND PRIX Round 9 of 19 Where? Silverstone Former WW2 aerodrome and once the outright fastest circuit of...
'Seriously Fast' Silverstone Reaches 50 Not Out
July 3rd, 2014
What? The 2014 FORMULA 1 BRITISH GRAND PRIX Round 9 of 19 Where? Silverstone Circuit, Silverstone When? July 4 - 6 Qualifying • Saturday July...
Formula 1 rules to experience another overhaul next season
July 1st, 2014
Formula 1® is set for more changes in 2015 with the governing body looking to make the racing even more exciting for fans at the circuit and for...
Rosberg readier than ever as Hamilton fightback falls short
June 23rd, 2014
What? The 2014 FORMULA 1 AUSTRIAN GRAND PRIX Round 8 of 19 Where? Red Bull Ring, Spielberg Formerly known as the Oesterreichring and, in shorter...
Preview: 2014 Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix
June 18th, 2014
Where? Red Bull Ring, Spielberg When? June 20 - 22 Qualifying • Saturday June 21 Race start • Sunday June 22 Laps? 71 x 4.326 km Track...
Schumacher out of a coma, leaves Grenoble Hospital
June 17th, 2014
Formula One legend Michael Schumacher is no longer in a coma and has left the Grenoble Hospital where he was being treated. The German was...
Australian Grand Prix Trophy to be named in honour of Sir Jack
June 10th, 2014
Australian sporting legend, the late Sir Jack Brabham AO OBE, will be immortalised in history with the Formula 1® Australian Grand Prix winner's...
Dan's The Man As Silver Arrows Fall Short
June 9th, 2014
What? The 2014 FORMULA 1 GRAND PRIX DU CANADA Round 7 of 19 Where? Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Montreal Who was on Pole? Nico Rosberg •...
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Scosche Cases and Armbands are for iPod, iPhone, iPad and more. Our iPhone protective cases are award winning. The railKASE has won the award for the best protective case for both the iPhone 4s and the iPhone 5.
cases and armbands
Cases & Armbands
strapSHIELD p5Sport Style Cover with Hand/Wrist Strap for iPhone 5S and 5 Learn More$29.99
KICKclip - Kickstand Hy...KICKclip combines protection with convenience to create an all-ar Learn More
$24.99 special offer


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Details and Shopping
Customer Favorite
Stretchy ankle cropped pull-on jeans. Elastic waist. 5-pocket style.
*77% Cotton, 21% Polyester, 2% Spandex
*Machine Wash Cold
Measurements for Size Small:
Waist (all around - relaxed): 29 1/2"
Hips (all around - relaxed): 33"
Rise: 8 1/2"
Inseam: 25"
Leg Opening Width: 6 1/2"
*77% Cotton, 21% Polyester, 2% Spandex
*Machine Wash Cold
Measurements for Size Small:
Waist (all around - relaxed): 29 1/2"
Hips (all around - relaxed): 33"
Rise: 8 1/2"
Inseam: 25"
Leg Opening Width: 6 1/2"
Rated 4.5 out of 5Â by 26 reviewers.
Rated 5 out of 5Â by blinkette Awesome! Love! I am 5'4, 120, athletic and bought them in a size 26. Fits perfect and sooo comfortable and cute on!!! 3.2.2013
Rated 4 out of 5Â by karenb Super Cool Love them. Great fit. True to size. I got the Seaside Blue. Great wash. Fresh for spring. I'm 5'4" and the come a little long for my taste, but I just roll them up once and Bam. Done. Perfect amount of stretch. Just enough for me to sit with my legs in close but not too stretch so as to not look like jeans. One thing, I wish they had belt loops. 3.20.2013
Rated 5 out of 5Â by 1tnchick Awesome! I was hesitant when I ordered "pull on" pants and crops but they way exceeded my expectations. The colors (I bought several) that are so hot for Spring look great. The quality is great and the fit is great. When you have them on, nobody can tell you just pulled them on. My husband came in while I was trying them on and asked where the zipper was. He was surprised and also pleased because it totally flatters your backside. Love! 3.11.2013
Rated 1 out of 5Â by joeyivy66 sent them back pronto Felt like a squeezed sausage in these. Uncomfortable and too tight and I am slender and a former jeans model...Disappointed, no pockets and not worth the price.....no regrets whatsoever. 10.22.2013
Rated 5 out of 5Â by OhNuts Favorite Jeans I have the black pair. My most favorite pair of jeans hands down ever. Please bring back more sizes in the dark color. Please!!! 4.26.2014
Rated 5 out of 5Â by piratejacques Awesome Skinny Jeggings I purchased these in 26 Abyss (5'3", 100lbs) and they fit well as skinnies. The 27s were more like a boyfriend fit. The color is a charcoal. These pants are made of thick, quality material and I haven't had issues with them slipping down, which is good because they don't have belt loops. For the length, they go down to almost my ankles, so I can wear them as regular pants or roll them up and wear them as crops. 10.16.2013
Rated 4 out of 5Â by JMoe Great Summer Pant I'd purchased this pant in blizzard - as I had been needing a new pair of white pants. I was hoping for more of a stark white but they ended up being a little more cream colored than I was hoping. Besides that the fit is perfect - just the right amount of stretch. I prefer to leave the little cuff down b/c if I roll them up the ends stick out a little due to the tiny slit in the cuff 8.28.2013
Rated 5 out of 5Â by faithloves sweet pants These are great pants. Comfortable, flattering, great material; good color choices. Only complaint is no pockets; I'm a pocket fanatic. But no big deal! Great pants; great value. 6.16.2013
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» Center for Student Success
MU Home » Academics » Center for Student SuccessAcademic Catalogue
The Current Year's Academic Catalogue
This catalogue sets forth your academic requirements if you enter Methodist University during the 2014-15 academic year, or have completed a Request for Change form and delivered it to the Registrar's Office to move from an earlier catalogue.
Click here to download the 2014-15 Academic Catalogue (undergraduate)
here to download the 2014-15 Academic Catalogue (graduate)
Currently Active Academic Catalogues
Students entering Methodist University during the following academic years are governed by the academic regulations of that year's catalogue, unless the Request for Change has been processed. Students who entered Methodist University prior to the earliest year below must change catalogues to either the current catalogue or one from the previous five years.
Please note that the above active catalogues contain both undergraduate and graduate information.
Academic Catalogue Archives
Students, faculty, or alumni who wish to access even older catalogues for reference purposes can visit Davis Memorial Library's Academic Catalogue Archives page.
(Catalogues in PDF format require Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in. Click the button below and follow the three steps to download and install if necessary.)


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The LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer, also known as "The Tot Tablet," is hard to compete with, especially because it has educational games, e-books, a video recorder and camera all built into it. It has won several awards, including the 2012 Preschool Toy of the Year. It was the number one requested gift on the list for young children this past Christmas. LeapFrog Enterprises continues to grow while other toy companies, such as Mattel and Hasbro, are experiencing declining sales.
This toy is very similar to the iPad. However, the LeapFrog tablet is specifically designed for 4-9 year olds–and therefore is much less dangerous to drop! TheLeapFrog LeapPad Explorer comes with a few apps pre-installed. Others, like Thomas the Train apps, can be purchased separately. Although the LeapFrog apps may be more expensive to download than apps for the iPad, they are of high quality and educational, just like all of LeapFrog's products.
The recent trends that we are seeing beg the question, are young children beginning to ditch their Barbies and Mr. Potato Heads for more technological toys? It would definitely appear that way.


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Toms Classic Cord Women's Slip-on (Grey)
A good pair of comfy cords is on everyone's list.
- TOMS toe-stitch, and elastic V for easy on and off
- TOMS classic suede insole with cushion for comfort
- Latex arch insert for added support
- One-piece outsole for flexibility and durability


text: Close-Up Profiles It was quite a journey, and James Cornelius never imagined that one day he would be the proud owner of a company. The 46-year-old Illinois native is the president and owner of U.S. Praxis, but after graduating high school, owning a manufacturing company was the last thing on his mind. More


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- Locations & Hours:
- Redwood City 650.367.8181
- Take A Tour!
Spice Folding Queen Size Xtra Bed (Folding Mattress Extra)
- Your Price: $1,499.99
- Retail: $2,320.00
- You Save: $820.01
Spice Folding Queen Size Xtra Bed (Folding Mattress Extra). Bed closes and can push up against a way for storage. Pull bed out and open to reveal a queen size mattress. Bed is mounted on rolling castors for easy mobility. Bed can be opened and closed by one adult. Available in full or queen size. No particle board. Fully assembled. Manufacturer: Interiors of the Bay.
- No particle board
- Fully assembled
- Straps hold bedding in place
- One person can open and close
- Can be wheeled room to room
- No installation required
More about Interiors of the BayInteriors of the Bay is located in the San Francisco Bay Area. All of their products are made from real wood, with no particle board.


text: Landscape Ever wonder why "the other man's grass is always greener"? Maybe it's because his landscape contractor planted the right seed for the landscape's need. Choosing the right grass seed can make the difference between a lawn that thrives and one that needs constant attention—or worse, complete replacement when the plush lawn you thought you had planted turns brown and dies. More


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I have recently gotten a raspberry pi, and have decide to not use a Desktop Environment. I have QT, and other development packages installed, however without QT-Embedded, I can't use the virtual windowing tools that QT Comes with. I wanted to create a media center style PC without the fancy additions of XBMC and other media centers. As I don't have a DE/Window system I can't run anything with a gui. I wanted to make a system that would allow me to run/play movies on the pi from any of my devices (Phone, Tablet, Desktop). So I have decided to make a GUI/Server on my computer that would control the PI via TCP. I would use PHP for a web system that would create trigger files that a FileSystemWatcher would pick up for the mobile devices, and will use a direct C# gui on the desktop.
I can do this with no problem as it is done with a standard TCP Connection. I will send commands such as: ~MSFS; to Mount the Shared file system (if not done), ~PV;FileName to Play the Video using omxplayer. All of this is pretty easy and as I will drive everything from the desktop it isn't a lot of pi side stuff to do. Now the problem is.. by forking the process I lose the direct input into the program, and as I will be running it externally instead of on the device I don't get the direct CLI input. As it is all command line, I pause videos by pressing "p". I am sure there are other commands I just haven't looked into them.
The Need:
As I will be controlling it from the PC Server I want to have the ability to send commands such as ~PAUSE; or equivelant, from the desktop to the pi, and have it send the 'p' key to the omxplayer. I have read about using pipes to communicate between parent a child processes, however as I am not taking input via command line for this it would be done all internally during the TCP Packet processing, I don't know how to get that stream. In C# it would just be a memorystream or stock stream that I could just save off and call good. I am not sure if I can do that with the pipe. Now, pausing is just an example, however having the ability to pause a video is a good thing, and would really be a requirement in making it useful.
I am making a client/server program for my Raspberry PI, that will run a child process. I need to send a specific key to the child process when a specific packet is sent. ie) Server Sends ~PAUSE, Client Processes and sends the "p" key to the child process, which then should pause the video (as that's how it works when I run the program directly, hitting p will pause it). How do I do it?