My informal research began with psychoanalysis senior year of high school that culminated in a series of electroconvulsive shock treatments senior year of college. The psychiatrist admitted ECT was like kicking the TV, but he was out of options.
Though I majored in psychology through graduate school, I was a troubled, explosively violent man. Changes came many years later with Aikido (Ki-Breathing Meditation) Metacognitive Therapy, Attention Training Therapy, and Open-Focus Therapy.
Alfred Adler, considered by some the father of individual psychology, believed, that understanding of human nature lies not with psychologists and psychiatrists, but with those of us who have suffered and survived.
I am happy and centered. Well, maybe suffering just an iddy bit. ; ) Though I have made huge changes even in the past five years, it takes day by day, moment to moment mindfulness. As my father would say as he handed me the car keys, “Keep your wits about you.”
Albert Ellis would say, “It is fucking hard, but it is never too fucking hard.” When we are knocked for a loop, we get up and start again. Over time we reach higher and higher levels that were, not long before, beyond our reach. We break through limits that would otherwise have been unimaginable.
While in Japan “Scripting the Mind with REST, Rational-Emotive Self-Talk,” sold out of two twelve thousand printings. My popular coauthor was Japanese and our book was in Japanese. World famous psychologist Albert Ellis twice edited my English manuscript and wrote the forward. I was a bit known in Japan, since I was writing feature pieces for The Japan Times daily English language newspaper.
Joel Dames has worked as school psychologist, counselor, and teacher of grades elementary through university. He has published in professional journals including Contemporary Issues in Reading, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy. He coauthored “Scripting the Mind with REST, Rational-Emotive Self-Talk,” (in Japanese with English Introduction by world-renown American psychologist Albert Ellis) Mikasa Shobo Publishing Co., Tokyo.
Current Book: Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
At 81, his life has been one of incredible suffering and incredible self-renewal. He writes with the wisdom of a psychotically violent monster self-transformed into a loving husband and father.
At seventeen I wrote music; the unknowing start of a lifetime obsession with solving unresolvable problems.
“The solution is in the moment, the only place where we have control”. I love that . I am going to try to keep that in mind. Electroshock therapy…wow. I have always wondered what that felt like. Did you feel any benefit from it? In my mind when I think of it, I picture the metal bowl on the head with wires coming out, and it just seems as if it would be so painful.
The ECT treatments were outpatient. So before they give the shock (one electrode on each temple) they administered an anesthetic and just as it was taking effect produced the shock. It basically sends the brain (body) in convulsions. I recalled nothing of the shock or convulsions. But for years after, I’d have the same nightmare – a horrible buzz of elecrical current surging from my brain throughout my body – horrible paralyzing feeling.
It might have helped. But what might have helped more was when I ripped off the electrodes before one of the treatments and walked out of the office vowing never to return.