The editorial reviews are flooding in. Check out some of these comments about Beyond Your Confines. Truly touching. It is my hope that this book can help us all to reach beyond the confines of our mental prisons. With a little more awareness, we can challenge polarized thinking and work towards a safer, healthier society for all. Chris Warren-Dickins Psychotherapist and author of Beyond the Blue and Beyond Your Confines #BeyondYourConfines
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I am delighted to announce the publication of Beyond Your Confines: A key to free your mind.
The pandemic confined you to your home, and now you have emerged, blinking into the daylight of hope. But to what extent has your mind kept you trapped within a prison of your own creation? We have always constructed labyrinthian prisons of fears and assumptions, but the evolution of technology has taken us further from the wisdom and natural rhythms that we can find within. The less aware you are of your internal (mental) state, the more you become a prisoner of it, and this blindness can lead to challenges to your mental health, your ability to parent, and it can even threaten your career. Learning how to free your mind from an internal prison should be a high priority. However, Beyond Your Confines is not just an exercise in individual growth. Your mind does not exist in a vacuum. We live in a world of polarized views, discrimination, and privilege, and so no mind can be free without an assessment of the part we play in all of this. We are, after all, as interconnected to each other as we are to the environment we pollute. Beyond Your Confines helps you find the key to free your imprisoned mind and discover your wisdom and natural rhythms from without and from within. Thank you to the wonderful (and patient) Anabeth Bostrup for her cover design. Beyond Your Confines is available now at all good book retailers. Chris Warren-Dickins Psychotherapist and author of Beyond the Blue and Beyond Your Confines #BeyondYourConfines Beyond the...next chapter8/3/2022 Time for my next non-fiction!
The editor has finished, and the cover designer is working away. Would you like to win a free copy of a first edition? If so, use the link below to sign up for alerts. http://eepurl.com/gD41jr Chris Warren-Dickins Psychotherapist and author of Beyond the Blue and Beyond Your Confines #BeyondYourConfines Beyond the reach of words - Trauma7/1/2022 We register trauma in our body before we find the words to express it. In the words of Bessel van der Kolk, we understand trauma to be a “speechless horror”.
If we can register trauma in our body, we can learn to heal through the use of our body. We can learn to sense safety, and we can distinguish the past trauma from present reality. At first, this might seem scary. Our body might once have been a place of danger, shame, or bewilderment. But in time, with the help of an experienced therapist, we can learn to trust those internal cues that help us to become regulated again. When a therapist helps us to learn about our body, we learn about our triune brain. We learn that we have the neocortex (cognitive), mammalian (emotional), and reptilian (sensorimotor or body) brain, and this can help us to learn why we think, feel and act as we do. With this deeper level of knowledge, we can learn to regulate our responses to triggers in our environment, whether that is the sound of a slammed door or the face of an angry colleague. When we learn about our body with a therapist, we also understand that our responses are a matter of survival or protection, not a matter of dysfunction or weakness. Shame or pathology has no part in a trauma-informed approach. With the right help, it is possible to get Beyond the Blue of your trauma. Chris Warren-Dickins Psychotherapist and author of Beyond the Blue and Beyond Your Confines #BeyondYourConfines Highlights from the book tour6/30/2022 Psychotherapist and author Chris Warren-Dickins takes you Beyond the Blue of the male label, and beyond the blue of depression, anxiety, relationship conflict, and trauma. For a healthier society for all. Chris Warren-Dickins Psychotherapist and author of Beyond the Blue and Beyond Your Confines #BeyondYourConfines
Three years ago today, at the United Nations discussing gender-affirming healthcare.
We still have work to do #healthcare #unitednations 🏳️⚧️ Chris Warren-Dickins Psychotherapist and author of Beyond the Blue and Beyond Your Confines #BeyondYourConfines Opening Pride Ridgewood, NJ6/11/2022 I had the honor of being invited by the Mayor to speak at Ridgewood's Pride. In case you didn't get a chance to hear my speech, here it is. Chris Warren-Dickins Psychotherapist and author of Beyond the Blue and Beyond Your Confines #BeyondYourConfines Thank you, Dorit Kemsley6/7/2022 Thank you to @doritkemsley for discussing eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR) (in particular, R-TEP), an 'A' level of treatment for trauma (World Health Organisation). As Peter Levine once put it, ‘trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods’.
Every working day in my psychotherapy practice I help people with the use of EMDR. You might have seen Prince Harry talking about it to Oprah, and I was overjoyed to see someone who is male labeled speaking out about psychotherapy, trauma, and EMDR. I hope this encourages more people who are male labeled to seek help, and get the right type of help. Find out more about how you can get beyond the blue of trauma, and beyond the blue of the male label. Chris Warren-Dickins Psychotherapist and author of Beyond the Blue and Beyond Your Confines #BeyondYourConfines Spring forward with confidence4/17/2022 Spring is already a season of uncertainty (I tried to arrange an outdoor playdate yesterday, and I experienced all seasons in one day!), but for the last two years we have been experiencing an unprecedented level of uncertainty. We have had to adapt to a pandemic, and various strains of COVID, and there has been a lingering threat of a world war.
No matter how much uncertainty exists in world affairs, you can create a sense of stability within yourself. I hope some of these blog posts and links to resources help you to do that. Chris Warren-Dickins LLB MA LPC Psychotherapist and author of Beyond the Blue and Beyond Your Confines Burnout3/16/2022 More and more people are experiencing burnout. I do not need to point to the contributing factors, you just have to turn on the news, but I do need to point out the significance of burnout to the way your brain functions.
You can recognize burnout via a whole range of symptoms, and these are just some for you to think about: An apathy for the things that you once cared about, a sense of exhaustion, and an overall negative outlook. Why you should care about burnout There is a worrying trend amongst some to wear burnout as a badge of honor. They confuse the terms ‘grit and resilience’ with ‘burnout’, and so they shut off the warning signs that tell you that you need to rest. Eventually, you will cause harm to your mind and body, and ultimately this has a negative impact on all the things that you hold dear. Burnout should be taken more seriously because research shows that it can thin the gray matter of your prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain that is responsible for important functions such as reasoning and decision-making), and it can enlarge the amygdala (the brain’s alarm system). As a result, our alarm system goes into overdrive, sensing threat when there is none, and we are less able to mediate this heightened state with cool, calming reason. When our amygdala is in overdrive, this activates the sympathetic nervous system, our ‘fight-or-flight’ response, and this can lead to excess production of cortisol (the stress hormone). There is plenty of research to show the health implications for excessive cortisol levels, including increased blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. What you can do Any attempts to calm the amygdala will help to reduce burnout. This can be tackled on a couple of different fronts – your body, by activating your parasympathetic nervous system (your natural rest and digest state), and your thought process, by challenging the short-circuited thought patterns that lead to these heightened states of stress. In terms of your parasympathetic nervous system, you can activate this through various different methods, including simple breathing exercises or calming visualizations. I have set out some exercises on this page, so try each and start to repeat (on a daily basis) the ones you enjoy. In terms of your short-circuited thought patterns, try to watch for assumptions or beliefs that might trigger the amygdala. For example, you have been working late and you see your boss talking to HR. By assuming that they are talking about you, you are personalizing the situations and jumping to conclusions. They could be talking about a whole range of issues other than you. You are also catastrophizing, because even if they are talking about you, you are assuming it will lead to something bad, such as losing your job. You need to calm your mind by looking for evidence against this, such as a recent positive performance review, or the fact that the Great Resignation has left companies currently desperate to keep their employees. A key component to all of this is to adopt a compassionate tone to your self-talk. Throughout my years as a psychotherapist, I have found this to be one of the most underrated factors in recovery from burnout. When we judge ourselves, we end up feeling even more alienated, and this serves to worsen the symptoms of burnout. The first step to recovery is to recognize how much pressure we have been experiencing, and adopt a kind, compassionate voice, talking to ourselves as if we were talking to a young child. When we can direct compassion inwards, we are in a better position to then direct that compassion outwards, and learn to connect with, and help, other people. There is no better antidote to the cynicism and apathy that burnout can create than recognizing some sort of good that we have thrown out into this challenging world. Chris Warren-Dickins LLB MA LPC Psychotherapist, author of Beyond Your Confines and Beyond the Blue Chris
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