August / September 2004

CREATING OPTIMISM: A Proven, Seven-Step Program for Overcoming Depression
BY BOB MURRAY AND ALICIA FORTINBERRY
New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004, 272 pp., $22.95, ISBN: 0071417850.
Reviewed by Stanley Krippner

Bob Murray, a psychologist, and Alicia Fortinberry, a Feldenkrais practitioner, believe that the root cause of the contemporary depression pandemic is failed relationships. Their mission is to encourage people to improve their interactions with each other based on concretely expressed needs. Get the relationship right, they argue, and the cure will follow. In their words, “Our society produces isolation, maltreatment, and disempowerment. . . . The very way we live is abusive to ourselves and our children.”

In their book, Creating Optimism, they provide a seven-step program for using relationship formation to overcome depression, pessimism, anxiety, and related problems. Their book is based on the Uplift Program, which they developed at the University of South Florida, and is touted as being of value for both practitioners and for lay people who want to improve their mood and enhance their personal interactions. Both authors have worked in the media, hence the book is reader-friendly and is clearly written. The examples are engaging and the exercises, REVIEWS ranging from guided meditation to “action lists,” are practical and useful.

Murray and Fortinberry are not advocates of the medical model insofar as the treatment of depression is concerned. For example, they suggest that serotonin deficiency may be a symptom of an overactive amygdala or a small hippocampus, both of which have been associated with affective disorders. They admit that antidepressants do work (although for a smaller number of patients than drug companies would have us believe), but they suspect that the active variable might be the trusting relationship between the prescribing physician and the patient. In any event, antidepressants are a limited answer to a vexing problem, and may only provide short-term relief. The “real cause” of depression, anxiety, and the like is “a failure of relationships, usually between adults and children in early childhood,” including parental criticism, infighting, divorce, substance abuse, exposure to violence on television, and traumatic physical or sexual abuse. As a result, the depressed person is flooded by danger signals from the amygdala, and the frontal lobes cannot control this or cut it off. Decisionmaking is hampered, recall is distorted, and mood alterations result.

The authors make a controversial claim that childhood trauma can lodge in the body, creating a “kinesthetic memory” or (in their words) an “ongoing energy event.” The resulting habitual somatic patterns of defense and restriction keep retriggering corresponding emotional patterns, as well as making the person prone to muscular pain and injury. From an evolutionary perspective, the isolated nuclear (or one-parent) family is a symptom of the mismatch between how people live now and how they were genetically programmed to structure their lives. Murray and Fortinberry assert that our “society lost its way somewhere around five to ten thousand years ago” when people stopped living in hunter-gatherer bands and “were forced to wrest a living from the earth as farmers.” The band shrunk to an extended family that protected the land as they worked it. Eventually, this morphed into even smaller family units, which suit an industrial and information age that requires mobility and compliance from its workers.

However, human beings are still relationship-forming animals, and the social environment is the nexus of an individual’s relationships. Hence, change comes from the outside in— contrary to advice given by other self-help books that only an insideout shift is effective. The authors exemplify this assertion by prescribing exercises purportedly to help their readers create the specific types of relationships that are based on meeting functional needs rather than the dysfunctional needs that can doom relationships to failure.

For example, if someone is criticized, emotionally abandoned, or even abused as a child, that person will seek out companions and spouses who are likely to repeat this pattern. If they fail to do so, they run the risk of being manipulated or provoked to provide this type of gratification. This dysfunctional need is based on mistaking mistreatment for love, and condemnation for attention. Murray and Fortinberry demonstrate how functional needs involve successful negotiations and work toward harmonious relationships at home, at work, with friends, and even during a “first date” with a potential companion or lover.

Finally, Creating Optimism shows how these relationship techniques can foster self-esteem, a sense of competence, and (with others) a sense of shared purpose. It goes beyond most self-help guides in its focus on the body (“where depression lodges”), the natural environment, and the exploration of one’s spirituality.

I shared this book with a friend who has been diagnosed as “bipolar” but who prefers to handle his mood swings without medication. He wrote me:

When the authors claimed that you could only heal and feel optimistic from the outside rather than from the inside, this was completely adverse to my way of thinking. But now I believe that an individual can find healing from numerous sources, be it inside or outside. Throughout the book the authors mention the backward nature of some religious dogma (‘fear of God’ and such threats). I was happy to see this addressed without sacrificing the impor-tance of a healthy spirituality.

With regard to the exercises, my friend commented:

The happiness tips and exercises are very well thought out and a great way to do something a-bout one’s state of mind instead of only taking the passive role of reading the book. So I really enjoyed this book and under-stood what it is trying to do. However, the authors discuss a tendency of humans to seek relationships that reenact past trauma, but I don’t recall them explaining why these relationships are so enticing. And I doubt that we can com-pletely rule out criticism when making a list of needs to present to our lovers. It is hard for me to believe that constructive criticism should be ruled out if a relationship is to reveal per-sonal needs that are not being met. This, I suppose, is an argu-able point. However, this book deserves more compliments than disparagements. The emphasis on purpose in life was motivating to me and was a great way to finish the book.

My own reaction to the book is that it is an original and provocative treatment of depression. I am less inclined than the authors to reduce the etiology of depression to a single set of determinants. Nevertheless, a topic of this importance needs to be discussed and dealt with from different perspectives.

STANLEY KRIPPNER is Professor of Psychology at Saybrook Graduate School and a former AHP President.

THE GENESIS MEDITATIONS: A Shared Practice of Peace for Christians, Jews and Muslims
BY NEIL DOUGLAS-KLOTZ
Quest Books, 2003, 272 pp., $24.95, ISBN: 0835608247.
Reviewed by Sharon G. Mijares

This book makes an important contribution to healing religion and healing humanity, given the current relationship of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Worldrenowned Sufi teacher Neil Douglas-Klotz explains that we have misinterpreted the early Creation stories guiding Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in that they became fixed stories focusing on apocalyptic endings and thereby losing their potency. Instead the reader of this book experiences the ever-renewing life force inherent within these stories that are really about communal beginnings. It is these shared stories of beginnings that have the potency to bring people of these differing religions together.

The book is divided into two sections. One section examines the original prayer of the Aramaic Jesus along with the teachings and practices of the early Jewish and Christian mystics. The second section focuses on “recreating the living meditation of our own psychological and spiritual experience.” This book is filled with both knowledge and experiential exercises. Douglas- Klotz provides a different understanding and timeframe of our relationship with our ancestors. Our ancestors are not simply left behind in our distant past, but rather we are following them—all part of an expanding movement of the caravan of life.

The book portrays an “alternative history of the modern world” and examines possible solutions for the way ahead, light and dark, the dance of Holy Wisdom, and the call of abundance. Topics such as the first human and the story of the Fall are illuminated in fresh and inspiring ways. The Storyteller tells the reader about The Fall. “Are there any questions so far? . . . Was it Adam’s fault? Was it Eve’s fault? Was it the snake’s fault?” Find out the Storyteller’s answers to these questions and more. It’s all about renewal and return.

This is a deeply moving book and I highly recommend it. In short, Douglas-Klotz takes us on a journ-ey through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with an eye to the unfolding story of Creation and our part in it.

SHARON G. MIJARES, Ph.D., is a Self Relations Psychotherapist and editor/ co-author of Modern Psychology and Ancient Wisdom: Psychological Healing Practices from the World’s Religious Practices (Haworth, 2003). She and Gurucharan Singh Khalsa co-edited The Psychospiritual Clinician’s Handbook: Alternative Methods for Understanding and Treating Mental Disorders (Haworth, 2005).

REACH OUT: Body Awareness Training For Peacemaking —Five Easy Lessons
BY PAUL LINDEN, PH. D.
www.being-in-movement.com (a free e-book)
Reviewed by Marilee Niehoff

The premise of Reach Out was developed by Paul Linden and his wife as a way of teaching children a simple, systematic method to put the body into a state of relaxed alertness and achieve an integrated state of awareness, power, and kindness. His method is preventive, and conceptualizes the physical body as playing an important role in peacemaking. Dr. Linden writes: “We started from the idea that peaceful words don’t work well when they are delivered by someone in a physical state of fight-or-flight arousal.” Dr. Linden and his wife use this creative visualization to foster peace, dignity, self-respect, and friendship. I think this is terrific.

This workbook then goes on to offer simple, self-awareness exercises that focus on both the emotive and physical aspects of the body, love, power, focus, and spaciousness. I think one of the clearest examples of what this workbook is meant to produce can be seen in the testimony of a small child, after having undergone the body awareness training. The little boy recalls an encounter with a bully trying to steal his ball on the playground. ”I softened my breathing, and I opened my body, and I said to him, ‘I don’t want to fight with you. Why don’t we play with my ball together?’ And so we played, and we didn’t fight.” While this example is an ideal one, one which perhaps was resolved more simply than other circumstances we encounter in life, it does offer a concrete solution, and an approach to conflict that has far-stretching applications.

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While the aspirations of this book are quite lofty—world peace, the end of poverty, disease, hunger, and war, the solutions he gives are tenable in day-today living. Dr. Linden draws from Aikido, and ancient forms of mediation, relaxation, and peaceful resistance. The exercises he develops, however, the steps, and the explanations, are simple and straightforward enough to be easily grasped by a child. He includes useful pictures and illustrations, and overall I believe this manual would be extremely helpful in a wide array of settings—for an educator, a performer, an athlete, a healer, or just as a way of developing healthy practices to use in everyday life. Dr. Linden holds a B.A. in philosophy, and a Ph.D. in Physical Education. This manual reflects a cohesive integration of the two— offering a peaceful life philosophy that is mindful of the experiences and realities of the physical body in conflict. Such integration resonates with my lifetime experiences of working in Watsu, a method that uses water, music, and physical therapy to relax, strengthen, and heal patients. I appreciate the aspirations of this book, as well as the teaching methodology, and hope along with Dr. Linden and his wife that such integrated practices will help bring about not only personal health, but better relationships among people, and a more peaceful world.

MARILEE S. NIEHOFF, Ph.D., hasspent her career as an Organizational Psychologist helping people relieve stress, and she is a licensed water therapist, who specializes in Watsu, a form of Shiatsu exercise and relaxation beneficial in relieving pain and stress.