Just for today

Just for today, do not anger.
Do not worry and be filled with gratitude.
Devote yourself to your work. Be kind to people.



Usui Reiki Treatment for the improvement of body and mind
Usui Mikao

Pareciera que siempre esta por ocurrir algo maravilloso...pero no ocurre

Conocen personas asi? Las que siempre estan por hacer el gran negocio, las que siempre estan por lograr algo increible. Las que estan por lanzarse hacia algo que les va a cambiar la vida... pero de hecho parecen estar embarcados en un buque que nunca llega a destino.
Les escuchamos una y otra vez, y siempre estan al borde de lograrlo. Mas el tiempo pasa...
Ya eran asi desde jovenes y siguen siendo asi pasados los sesenta... Que les ocurre a estas personas? Pareciera que siempre hay un otro o algo en el camino que les impide avanzar hacia sus formidables objetivos.
Nacieron con alguna maldicion? Tienen demasiada mala suerte? Es la envidia ajena que les bloquea el camino?
Los problemas pueden ser varios, pero basicamente nos enfretamos aqui con un problema en la personalidad.
Las personas que presentan Trastornos de Personalidad graves o Personalidades Limítrofes, suelen tener problemas a la hora de "mentalizar". Eso significa que hay problemas lo suficientemente graves en su manera de representarse al mundo como para no poder diferenciar entre pensamiento y realidad.
Estas personas piensan -desean- que algo ocurra, pero en la vida real, no ocurre como en el cine. No pueden diferenciar entre interno y externo. Entonces se les complica a la hora de ejecutar o de poner en accion y sobretodo de perseverar. Estas fallas en la mentalizacion no vienen solas, vienen acompanadas de dificultades serias en las relaciones, y de mecanismos de defensas que incluyen evitacion y negación.

Por lo que dificilmente van a aceptar una critica o un consejo.

When will it be realized...

...that there is not such a thing as "individual salvation".

Esa sed de infinito...

Como calmar esa sed de infinito? Ese deseo de liviandad y libertad, que pareciera encontrarse en la idea de habitar fuera de nuestro cuerpo? Muchas veces he estado allí... Es justo el momento para encontrarse con "el otro". Para lanzarse a tareas que involucren a los demás: escuelas, comedores, hospitales, asilos... La palabra seria: "servicio"?
Hace unos años decidí ir a la sección de infectologia de un hospital a donde, en ese entonces, se confinaban a los enfermos de SIDA, para los cuales no había esperanza de vida.
Llegamos sin que nos invitaran, con tres amigos. Nos pasamos la tarde abrazando a familiares y pacientes.
Me encontré con un chico cuyo tercer hermano estaba muriendo, en el mismo hospital que los dos anteriores. Tenia una actitud super agresiva, y no es para menos. Su enojo con la vida era enorme. Me miro con desconfianza. Su primera pregunta fue: "Vos, que queres aca?!". De alli en mas sucedieron cosas que no podría describir pero que se asemejan a un océano de luz. Entendí que esa era la puerta hacia nuestra propia esencia y que el amor desde este lugar puede transformar, completamente, el sentido de nuestra vida.

El "Otro" es una puerta hacia el infinito... como diria Emanuel Levinas. Es el desafio es atravesar la ilusion.

Quiero agradecer a mi querido amigo Stenio, porque me ha ayudado a recuperar este recuerdo...

The mirror of her eyes...

We follow her* eyes. The caregiver eyes are the first "mirror stage" that every human being goes through.

She will act accordingly to what she interprets of our state of mind.

She will tell us who we are, and we will believe her... we will introject our "pre-chewed" -kind of rudimentary- sense of Self.

Safe, playful interaction with the caregiver leads to the integration of primitive modes of experiencing internal reality.(Bateman, A.)

Because her own needs from her childhood will be at play, (Satir, V.) we will have to take what she did not have. Sometimes in big over-doses, we shall live with her ghosts in the garden at night...

For practical reasons I will be referning to the caregiver in terms of "she", we well know that it could be a "he" fullfilling this function.

The silence of the Bambies

Only with time, we learn that the world is not divided into black and white. Not only because we realize that there is a whole range of grays in the middle, but because we come to know that within the black there is white and vice versa. This is a part of the natural human evolution that goes from simple sketching of reality towards complexity, but will also depend on the flexibility we have.

The world that comics and TV show to us, such as the "totally good ones" against the "totally bad ones", case James Bond, Flash Gordon, etc. and the prevalence of the "good" over the "bad, does not help the process of understanding reality in a child. Leaving aside that in most of cases there is a subliminal political or commercial message undergoing.

Most of the children in western societies grow up believing in things like "Bambies" and "talking birds". Birds that are not afraid of men... Allowing myself this anthropomorphic license, must tell you: no animal would survive this method of "education". By the time they would have to cope with what is "real", and realize that fairies are an invention, they would already be in the jaws of some bigger animal: glup! Are there not predators around?

On top of this, it is common to hear things like "you should listen to your father, mother, older brother, teacher" etc., and this is alright because we need guidance to learn socializing, but is there someone that teaches a child how to listen or believe in himself? how to develop his own intuition? Facts, that later, might save him from falling into the jaws of a predator...? The adults, and society in general, tend to leave children handicapped to deal with the world, others and themselves. Are parents handicapped...?

Children are naturally intuitive, and we get their intuition systematically killed, when, for example, they express what they perceive and that it is not "socially very convenient". They can be told that they are wrong, just out of need to mascarade some event.

And what about all that stuff of loving fluffy teddy bears, little ponies, princesses and kissing toads...? Is not the world we live in "magical" enough?

So then, when we grow up, we move around trying to push events into the tiny compartments that we "know", into the tales we have been told... and we get frustrated at our own incapability to do so. So we blame ourselves, we may think that there is something "wrong" about us. But  may be we were just very good learners. The tale is right the world is wrong...?. I call this: "The silence of the Bambies".

Who decided that this kind of culture is a good way to bring up kids? Unfortunately, we repeat the story.

The more life and situations within grow in complexity, the more the flexibility they will require.

They will have to learn about reality, which includes the miracle of been alive. 

If "evolution" is a process of "adapting", think about how we deny the laws of nature in every way we can.

If we had to go through millions of years for this in the west... I happily give up the iPad.

Imaginary dialogue between Pablo Neruda and me

Pablo: "Life goes on grinding up glass, wearing out clothes, making fragments breaking down forms and what lasts through time is like an island on a ship in the sea, perishable surrounded by dangerous fragility by merciless waters and threats...."

Pablo Neruda

Alex: ...and as I live and look arround, I realise, that nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand... but we must build as if the sand were stone...

A.O.J.





Photograph by Zou Wen Dou

Blessings

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It is not by keeping it to yourself 

but

through shearing it, that your light will grow.

A.O.J.

Eric Whitacre: "Lux Aurumque"

It just came into my hand this wonderful story and I wanted to share it with you.
Please click on this link.Think about this whenever you feel lonely; because you are not realy alone... ever... 

One thing is to open your heart and another to open your emotions. Sometimes people get them confussed....

Our myth...

When we talk about ourselves, when we tell someone about who we are, what we did in life, how it was, etc., we pick information from this huge pile of events that configured our lives. We choose what is relevant for the definition of who we believe we are. We take into account the person we are talking to, having our own favourite stories of survival, that would "define" who we are and why. This is our personal mythology. We make this selection. We tell these stories to ourselves. 
Sometimes could be interesting just to sit down with a piece of paper and write a short script. May be even entitle it. And then read and see, and then... Well, this is already part of another story...

Illustration by Elsa.

Peter Cathcart Wason (1924 - 2003)

Peter Cathcart Wason was an English cognitive psychologist, who worked on the psychology of reason. He made great progress in explaining why people make certain consistent mistakes in logical reasoning. He designed logical problems and tests to demonstrate these processes, for example the Wason selection task, the THOG problem and the 2-4-6 problem.

The task was deceptively simple: the experimenter laid down four cards, bearing on their uppermost faces A, S, 4 and 9 respectively. The participants knew that each card had a letter on one side and a number on the other side. They had to select just those cards that they needed to turn over to find out whether the following assertion was true or false: "If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side."

This selection task, which Wason tried out during a year at the Harvard centre for cognitive studies in 1963, was not published until three years later. It has launched more investigations than any other cognitive puzzle. To this day - and to Wason's delight - its explanation remains controversial. Its continued popularity among researchers is borne out by its current ban from a major psychological journal.

Here's the little test: Pictured to the right are four cards. Each card contains a letter on one side, and a number on the other. Which cards must you turn over to prove the following statement false? "If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side."

Researchers Peter Wason and Philip Johnson-Laird gave a similar test to 128 college-educated subjects in 1972. The most frequently given answer was "A and 4," (46 percent), with "only A" the second most popular (33 percent). Only 5 percent gave the correct answer, which is "A and 9."

It's fairly obvious that you must turn over the A-card: if there is an odd number on the other side of the card, you have proven the statement false. The popular tendency is to also turn over the 4-card to see if there is a vowel on the other side. However, the statement does not say an even-numbered card cannot have a consonant. For the same reason, turning over the S-card proves nothing, since the statement makes no claims about cards with consonants. On the other hand, turning over the 9-card and finding a vowel proves the statement false.

Why does this test fool so many people? The answer is a common act of reasoning called "Confirmation Bias". Research shows that most people prefer confirming something rather than proving something wrong. Therefore, we gravitate toward confirming our beliefs, even when our task is to disprove something. (By turning over the 4-card we're trying to find further confirmation of the statement.) In the process, we make some flawed assumptions...

The world...

...Will never be reflected exactly as it is, in your mind, but the configuration of your mind will be reflected into the world that you perceive...

Painting Ramiro F. Saus

Brian and Brenda

For a long time, already, we know of the equus medicae magnificat. I really like this story of a man and his horse. I like this spiritual path they are walking together...

My attention went in the first place to the name of his "mission"..."Horses know their way home"....while for us sometimes it is difficult, isn't it?

He, very poetically, gave a name to all there is to the healing process: "feel the connection", and that, is his ultimate religion. What he calls G'd I call our natural inner master...I believe we are talking of the same thing...words are just dresses to our experiences. It just feels so right... Give it a look and explore! May be there will be something for you too.

Photograph by Jodie Sinclair

The coordinates of your sight...

On compassion...

All major spiritual traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness. The important thing is, that they should be part of our daily lives." Thus spoke the Dalai Lama. Opposed to some schools of therapy that proclaim a very technical, "purified" and adjust to a specific 1, 2, 3 step manual, I state, that there is no cure without kindness and compassion. And because compassion is something that all the patients that come to our clinic need to feel about themselves, I believe that we should become a first mirror. Not an empty mirror, but a mirror of empathy and validation of the experience. Whether towards a patient that suffers depression, or when confronted with all kind of different other pathologies, to show compassion and acceptance is an absolute basic, and the first step toward healing.

A.O.J.

Thought of the day...

It seems that within the inner journey, we discover and bring to light what was always there... even though it was not, until we saw it... Somehow, it reminds me of quantic physics and the poor old Schrodinger's cat...

Alex Olivera

Radio "La Colifata"

Iniciada en agosto de 1991, por iniciativa del lic. en Psicología (en ese momento estudiante) Alfredo Olivera y como parte de la terapia de recuperación para pacientes del Hospital Neuropsiquiátrico Dr. José T. Borda, la intención original del programa era dotar a pacientes internados y externados de un espacio de autonomía, y facilitarles herramientas para recuperar la iniciativa necesaria para su reinserción a la salida del internamiento. Olivera buscaba reconstruir el uso del lenguaje (entendido como su capacidad simbolica* (...) cuya pérdida es uno de los elementos asociados a las psicosis, así como modificar la idea de que los internos psiquiátricos son gente peligrosa (...) y mejorar la comprensión del problema de la demencia.
Lee mas...

*Nota de la autora Alex Olivera

The Watcher I

The Watcher II

The importance of may be...

I was watching the other day a video of a visual artist that I like very much. In an interview he was asked what time of the day was his favourite. I was nicely surprised by the fact that we share the answer and for the same reasons. Lets listen to him: With you Bill Viola

The condition of the mind is always doubt...

A doubting mind will always be a doubting mind. You will have to move away from giving answers...your answers will never answer enough...

A.O.J.

Art work by Maggie Taylor

Thought of the day...

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings."

E. Gilbert

Coincidences...

While we were in New York, we went to a Chinese/Japanese tea-house to refresh a little.
Sitting close to us there was a couple studying for their Californian exams. We overheard some conversation about "Meridians?Heaters?" (you know these things happen...).


For many that already know me, I believe that you gather my love for TCM. So thanks to them I was able to get information about the best TCM School in the USA. But also to become acquainted with some of their work.


C. Picara Vassallo is a Licensed Acupuncturist who's personal history and dedication is outstanding.
Here is her site. Simple, but full of heart. Come and have a look!

"UTMOST SOURCE ACUPUNCTURE"

Lenguaje

Wilhem Humboldt dijo respecto al lenguaje "The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world" Sapir-Whorf no agrego nada realmente nuevo al concepto, sino que lo desarrollo incluyendo la clasificacion cognitiva.
Debo agregar a esta frase de Humboldt, el hecho de que para cada uno existen diversidades aun en la representacion del mismo signo que obedece a la representacion del mundo... Eso, hace aun mas colorido y rico, el concepto de representacion, ya no a nivel mundial, nacional o grupal, sino familiar y mas que nada individual; subjetivo.


Pero estamos hablando de representaciones que no incluyen siquiera los Kanji! o los jeroglíficos.


Por lo que todo lo que pudiéramos decir esta sumamente apretado por nuestra cultura, y no podemos dejar de pensarnos a nosotros mismos como etnocentricos.


Escribí hace un tiempo acerca del lenguaje. La metáfora que entonces utilice fue la del lenguaje como pequeños vestiditos a donde tenemos que hacer caber, el bagaje enorme que contiene nuestra subjetividad.

Porque el lenguaje es algo tan fuertemente determinante y al mismo tiempo tan relativo, ha sido objeto de múltiples y extensas reflexiones en sus varios niveles.

San Agustín sostenía, que el lenguaje es un conjunto de meras etiquetas aplicadas a conceptos existentes. Resulta extraño pensar en conceptos, sin dimensionar, al menos, una suerte de protolenguaje. Además, no hay nada en el concepto de cuatro patas y una tabla que pudiera sugerirnos la palabra "mesa". aunque si "table"...pero la tabla en si ya es una palabra que nombra un concepto que es en el fondo variable, de acuerdo con su uso. Una tabla puede usarse de techo, por ejemplo.

Otras escuelas piensan que el lenguaje es como un velo, que cubre "verdades eternas", por eso hay cosas que no se nombran. Es como que ciertas palabras del lenguaje abrieran un pasaje entre lo que es y el que lo nombra, y al hacerlo "de/des/velara" lo que oculta...."Abracadabra"? o simplemente...Abra-la-palabra? Habrán querido decir eso nuestros "magos"...?

En este sentido por ejemplo el nombre de D's. Lacan llamaría a esto un significante a resguardo.

Los Japoneses llaman a este fenómeno, kotodama. Pero van mas allá. Hay un poder espiritual que impregna las palabras. Una suerte de "animismo" lingüístico.

Pero, necesariamente, tiene que existir una profunda conexion simbólica del otro lado de la palabra que se ubica entre el objeto que se nombra y el que nombra, porque si bien el lenguaje es un fenómeno social, crece en un venero densamente subjetivo.

AO

Dissociative Identity Disorder

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Trastorno Disociativo de Identidad: hecho o artificio?

A bibliographical research by Alex Olivera

Historical review, actualization of the research and evidence on the Dissociative Identity Disorder (in Spanish). Click above (in gray "Trastorno Disociativo de Identidad...").
By Alex Olivera


There is almost no material what so ever in Spanish about this terrible disorder

In many countries DID is still considered for many reasons a kind of invention, therefore it is hardly studied in the University by the future psychiatrists.
This fact misleads very gravely the health practitioners at the time to diagnose and decide over treatment, even to the point of confusing it with Schizophrenia, or Border Personality Disorder.
I thought it fundamental to produce fresh information about what are the advances in neuroscience about this malady, so that the professional interested can always go into deeper research himself.

Special thanks to my friend and mentor, Hector Fernadez Alvarez, a light, difficult to match...

A.O.

The power within

It is our decisions what ultimately determines who we become and where we go in life, not done by us once in a while, but consistently. It is at these moments that we shape our destiny. Our decisions. Not the conditions of our lives, determine our destiny.

A.O.

Professionals: Dependent Personality Disorder (DPD)

Herewith I present to my collegues a brief descriptive document on Dependent Personality Disorder. I hope this will be a useful adding, to the knowledge you already have on the matter.

"Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially because it will always be related to our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge."

A.O.

The lessons of love...

Enjoy!

Be coming home...

I believe in the inner wisdom, that each of us have.
I believe that at some level, that wisdom, is always present. Even in quite serious mental illnesses, the person tends not to be completely ill...
Because of the work I have done in psychotherapy, I understood that we live in a "universe of our own representations". Most of the times these representations have to be modified in order to find relieve. There are many ways to do this.
My patients may times referred that they had the feeling as if a part or parts of them would be alienated. The classical thing would be that they "did not want" to act that way.
I like to use the metaphor of "parts of the person"that left and went into the exile. and are trapped into a night kingdom...
In the same manner there are other parts that are wise and observe the process. And knows better than the therapist what has to be done, but it is hardly heard by the other parts.
It is to the wise part hidden inside of each of us, that I direct most of my work, because that is the only and first alliance that can be made...from there we can both work together to try and find a path back home for those parts of us that got lost.

Sometimes the work in therapy feels like the tale "Narnia", where we go through a dark wardrobe and find this frozen land, that we have to unfreeze together. With love and compassion.
I did learn through the working with Dissociative Identity Disorders (DID)-some of the most challenging, complex and dangerous disorders a therapist would ever confront- that every each of us involves a multiplicity of traces, grouping of areas contained in a little universe of feeling and cognitions. The hardest it is to make a synthesis between them, the harder to make sense in our minds. And the more pulled apart we feel.
Some parts are stuck in childhood, at night in the room, some parts are ashamed, lonely, helpless, and others are angry... They need each other, they cannot be left alone in the dark... we have to bring them to the warmth of our hearts... Because it was thanks to them that we managed to survived.

"Rest, does not come from sleeping, but from awakening"

AOJ

Something to bright up you day...!

Before you play this video, please roll down your mouse, until you find a virtual ipod on the right hand side. Click on the sign // on the bottom of the wheel, that will make the background music stop, so you will be able to watch the video with no interference.Thank you!

Now, this video is about more than 200 dancers performing their version of "Do-Re-Mi", in the Central Station of Antwerp, with just 2 rehearsals they created this amazing stunt! Those 4 fantastic minutes started the 23 of march 2009, 08:00 AM. ...

Don't you just wish life would always have this magic?

Enjoy!

AO

"Who am I?"

That, who I am...

Many times we try to define ourselves. We do it on the positive and on the negative. Sometimes both can be a problem. By doing so, we build. We put one more brick to the description of ourselves. By the end of our lives, may be we lived long enough as to believe in the castle we made out of sand... may be, we are already living there. All those words are charged enough as to make pyramids!

But who are we? We do not really have one answer for this multi dimensional question, it depends from what angle we look, and even then, we will still be left without words...But one thing is for sure, whatever "we are", involves a process of transformation. Constant transformations, as we grow, learn and interact with the environment.
And amidst all these component of the cosmos of our personal existence, are emotions...
They project onto areas in our brain that make them addictive...Do you know anyone addicted to their emotions? Sure you do.

Even though we are not our emotions, they can shape us, build us, even change our neurological system, our synapses in the brain, our neurotransmitters...There is enough evidence for that already.
We'd been through life, since we were children...taking advantage of them, getting angry to get what we wanted, sulking, but also laughing and feeling high...and suffering them.
Emotions are, what promote changes in our lives...there is no change without emotion...and also, they can make us freeze and powerless and despaired...
Emotions, are conditioned answers to a way in which, information -of what we perceive- is processed. It is also a mixture of chemicals in our bodies, that sometimes scatter for no apparent reason...norepinephrine, dopamine, glucocorticoids...sending signals out of place.
Sometimes is the environment, the "magnetic campus" of the other'subconsciousness...
We get used to associate some chemical shots in our blood stream with an emotion, and to identify with it...to name it. We actually name a chemical effect in our body!...and we make a possession of all of these, as if they were simply "Me"..."I am..." But...are you?

And think what happens when you name...you say things like "I am...", and many times this "I am" is followed by something negative and what is worse a generalization.

I heard many a times in my clinic things like " I am...a failure..."!

An emotion is happening to you. Goes to up to your head, you rapidly try to find a name, try to justify it, to understand the reasons, until you reach the conclusions that, "Oh! this is because ...." This is called attribution. And there you go flying from your head to your emotions in your tommy, and tommy to head, and...what a cycle! By the end you are like into a snow-ball!

The truth is that you do not have to feel fully identified with what is happening. Even if a part of you does, another part of you can observe...and as you observe...emotions calm down...and the whole process calms down...

Think of how many times you exploded to let someone know...to be acknowledged...to be heard...
-a good exercise, is to stand up in front of the mirror...and claim to yourself what you are claiming from the other...-Sometimes it is us that need to hear ourselves, to aknowledge...to know... to pay attention to us.

That, is a core, there...deep down the waters of your waving sea...

...

A.O

Casos Clinicos: Capgras

El Síndrome de Capgras fue descrito en 1923 por Jean Marie Capgras y J. Reboul-Lachaux. He aqui un caso clinico, desgraciadamente un poco plagado de interpretaciones psicoanaliticas (mal invitablemente epidemico de muchos psiquiatras Argentinos). Lo mas interesante son las explicaciones neuro-psiquiatricas y la descripcion del caso, asi que no se distraigan por palabras tales como "perdida de objeto", etc.- teorias sin fundamento y poco cientificas-:

Capgras

(click on the link)

Giandomenico Tiepolo

I am afraid I might become like my mother...!

When we think of someone who is strong and independent, what we admire is her strong sense of self, that vital part of the personality that allows her to have a positive self-image, to identify her own wishes and maintain her self-esteem by asserting herself with other people.

The lack of this inner development is the key to borderline problems, which occur when a young child fails to separate her own self-image from that of her mother (1). This happens roughly between the ages of two and three, often because of a parent’s own emotional problems.
A mother’s encouragement of a child’s self-assertion is vital. When the mother suffers from low self-esteem, dependency or feelings of abandonment, she has difficulty encouraging her child’s emerging self, and to introduce an exploring vision of the world, which includes a space for the other as an other, and not a mere reflection of her own fears of rejection for example.
The child experiences this absence as a loss of self, creating also feelings of abandonment that lead to depression sooner or later in the child.
To deal with the depression, the child gives up efforts to support her emerging self and instead, she relies on her mother’s approval to maintain the esteem of a "false self." All these efforts, are to achieve proximity to her.

• Be like him or her.
• Act as she or he is still there and in control.
• Treat yourself as she or he treated you.

These are part of a copy or modeling process. And it is maintained by the wish that the the important persons -and over all, their mental representations- will: forgive, forget, apologize, wake up,listen, make restitution, etc. Or make it possible for there to be rapprochement and reunion. These semi-unconscious wishes could be called "the gifts of love"...

Some kind of "living testimony" for the mother's rules and values...so that they, in the imaginary, will become more loving, affirming and nurturing.

In their relationships, they become more concerned with the parental internalization than they are with what is actually happening...

It is because of these patterns of regressive "loyalty", that it is so difficult for them to change...because they have to decide to let go of these wishes, grieve the loss of what never was, never can be or cannot "again" be, so that he or she might be more adequately present in the here and now, bringing more suitable answers rather than the care giver's.

Alex Olivera, Lorna Smith.

(1) When we talk about mother, we mean the person that is most significant and spends more time with the child, fulfilling this function.

Remember that everyone models their parents, this pattern in not about simply modeling but a big replacement of the self, by that of the mothers.

Terapias para las personas que no responden a terapia.

La Terapia Interpersonal Reconstructiva IRT (Benjamin 2003) forma parte de un grupo de métodos, para ayudar a aquellas personas que normalmente no responden a otras terapias. Dentro de este grupo no se incluyen personas que tienen comprometida su capacidad de apender, por lo que no es apropiada para aquellos cuyas habilidades cognitivas son limitadas.

Funciona muy bien con sujetos que padecen trastornos del Axis II ( Trastornos de Personalidad) y para los estados co-morbidos del Axis I -tan común al Axis II- tales como depresión, ansiedad, distorsion del pensamiento y pseudo-alucinaciones (las que están en el espacio interior o subjetivo, no en el espacio exterior, y tienen existencia subjetiva y constituyen una realidad evidente para el sujeto).

Es un método de intervención basado fuertemente en la teoría del rol del apego en Bowlby (1969-1977) y en las investigaciones de Cassidy & Shaver en 1999.

La intención de este modelo es la de transformar ciertos "modelos" internos, que fueron hechos propios por fenómenos como la internalizacion, recapitulacion, e introyeccion, y permite al paciente ir ganando libertad e independencia de ellos, para poder actuar en un modo mas deseable y propio.

Esta terapia -así como la Terapia Cognitiva entre otras- me resulta interesante como "modos de intervención" mas que como terapias en si mismas. Proviniendo de una base "psicoanalitica" ha tenido el tino de acercarse al paciente y trabajar desde otro lugar, mas claro y cognitivo.

Fotografía de Christophe Bouffil

AOJ

Susanne Boyle

Not long time ago I posted a video of the famous British singers contest Britain's got talent. In that occasion we heard and saw Paul Potts. Well...this contest keeps on bringing surprises.
In this occasion I would like to introduce you to Susan Boyle. Unfortunately I cannot post the video directly, so you will have to click on the link and look it up. A window of Youtube will open with the video ready to be watch. I hope that this will be a soul trip for you as it is for me every time I hear it.

This are the lyrics of the song "I had a dream" from Les Miserables, song that Susanne will interpret.

"There was a time when men were kind
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting
There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting
There was a time
Then it all went wrong

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame

He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came

And still I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed."

Enjoy and have a great week end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

A.O.J.

The perpetuation of personality disorders: a model

According to Semerari and Dimaggio, some of the most contemporary investigators on the field of Personality Disorders, the concept that the way in which an individual relates to other can in itself be pathological, is today well accepted.

Our personality, gets created out of various mental operations, such as the building of self image, ascribing meaning to the world, performing actions, relating with others, and finding solutions to the problems and conflicts presented by the social environment. All these things, are inter acting with a biological body, that comes to this world with it's own genetic charges, and what we call the temperament of a child.

A malfunction of these operations and, when it spreads to wide areas of interpersonal and inner life, it takes a Personality Disorder form.

What makes a personality disorder is not in itself what we call traits of the personality which can be more or less paranoid, obsessive, narcissistic, histrionic etc.-we all have all these traits in bigger or smaller amounts- but rather the believe that the person has on the ability of "knowing" what the other might be thinking... and here, the key point will be the incapacity of a des-centered perception. Admitting that there is a point where the other person's mind is opaque.

But there are other issues. The perception, in Personality Disorders, does not take significant variations in different contexts, but tends to be repetitive. In a way is like a closed television circuit. Every relation will be inevitable tincted of the repetition of past history without to much capacity to recognize the variables. This prevents the individual from taking advantage of the information and feed back realistically available on permanent basis.

Think of a "script". People with personality Disorders are monothematic. There is a "life theme".

There is a lack of psychological skills to be able to figure out what is on the other's mind, taking it for granted. This is done through mechanism of projection that tend to become permanent, because of a failure in the capacity of mentalizing.

People with PD tend to get into relationships that reinforce the pathology. They tend to elicit reactions on others that confirm their expectations.

But the interesting part of all this is that the creation of a disorder in personality field, is in fact an attempt to a solution. A dysfunctional one, but a solution.

It is amazing the way in which these "solutions" inter act with our biology, producing a cycle in the individual.

Anxiety and depression are the common Axis I personality disorder friendly friends.

We shall be developing some articles on P.D. as a form of documents. Stay with us.

Compassion...

The path to authentic compassion arises from within, beginning with a deep acceptance and love of oneself.

Language

Language is an agreement on words. Most of words are old, but language and words still evolve. And they do evolve because the experience grows, and changes, and we need new words. Since the out-coming of cybernetics we talk about "processing"..."she is still processing" we say...may be before we used words like "brewing"? "She is still brewing" This seemed to come from the English tea culture, doesn' t it? That is what you do in teapots, you "brew" and while you brew the tea, you have to wait. Or "chewing" or "ruminating".
We keep on introducing words to our baggage of lenguage in order to be closer to what we want to express.
Because they are symbols, words can only point at the experience, can never with hold it, they are in place of the experience. So because most of our thoughts are in words, the more words the more the reduction of the experience they can contain. They tend to hide much more than they can express.
The Japanese zen poets knew about this.
So poets like Basho (1644 – 1694) wrote what are called "Haiku". Haiku is a particular style in poetry, a minimalistic style. Like the touch of a feather. Only pointing at, never too much engage into describing...and then just the silence...
It was funny because when I went to Japan last year I commented on a Haiku and they all looked at me expecting that I would go on. They were sure I did not know the whole "poem" but in fact I did...
A Hiku gives you a soft push, in order for you to go alone...

The noise in your mind...

If you try to stop the noise in your mind, you will never be able to. The more the noise gets attention the louder it will get. Just let it be there. Put more attention in what is behind the noise, your breath...while you are fighting in yourself to get yourself, over-impossing and wanting to be right...life goes on...
You are here.
Surrender to your existence...

Broadening of consciousness: the vibrant stillness

Because therapy is a way to broaden consciousness, sooner or later you come to reach some kind of a spiritual level. When I mean spiritual I do not mean religious. I mean a level of transcendence, transcendence of the impact of certain events, that are in the configuration of our lives.
It is in the "here and now", when you are completely inspired by nature, and you observe around, that you see everything moving, everything changing...and it changes over a stillness, as if it slides on some kind of warm sleeping animal, which is still and breathing... and then you come to realize, that what you are perceiving, is no more, no less, than your own self..with-holding events. Here and now.

When we cling to events, it is in a way because we need them. We need to identify with them. We need them to make them part of our identity, whether they are past or present events....something inside does not let go... it is struggling. But around this struggling there is "something" observing the struggle...
Somehow...when you reach to feel the stillness within you..., this pure life energy, which no words can hold...you realize that you do not identify with those events...that, even if they are there, they are like clouds in the sky...

A.O.J.

Mesa sobre la que escribia, "literalmente", la poetiza Alejandra Pizarnik.

Ampliacion de la conciencia

La ampliación del campo de la conciencia, se produce por medio de rupturas epistemologicas. Es como si habitáramos en el centro de una muñeca rusa, de esas que van una dentro de la otra. Este proceso va sucediendo de adentro hacia afuera. Nos deja con la sensacion de que tenemos un metro mas para respirar alrededor nuestro.
Esta ampliación de la conciencia sucede en terapia a medida que nos va "cayendo la ficha" con respecto a determinadas cosas. Pero tambien, obviamente, ocurre en la vida! En la vida, salvo que algo muy significativo ocurra, suele no poderse apurar este proceso por que los seres humanos tenemos una "zona proximal de desarrollo" como bien decía Vigotsky -aunque el se refería al aprendizaje solamente-. Creo que por fuera de la zona Vigotskiana, hay otra zona -las muñecas rusas- que esta en relación al conocimiento que hemos adquirido a través de la información y la experiencia -información practica-
Para Vigotsky lo que habilitaba esta zona proximal era la madurez que nos permite acceder a, por ejemplo planos mas y mas abstractos de la información - un niño de cinco anos no puede aprender álgebra (al menos que sea un fenómeno).
Madurez mas información, conducen a un nivel de aprendizaje, que nos permite la ampliación de la conciencia, uno de los grados mas sutiles y mas poderosos del terreno en donde se mueve el conocimiento.
En terapia la informacion circula mas rapidamente, porque ademas los terapeutas podemos, o al menos se supone que deberiamos poder, tener una mirada diferente, mas holistica sobre las cuestiones que nos plantean nuestros pacientes. Aveces con pequenos "bocadillos" en momentos oportunos, logramos ese "click" que hace la diferencia para poder seguir creciendo.
Entramos en una suerte de retroalimentación antipoética de aprendizaje- ampliación del campo de la conciencia-aprendizaje, a donde el limite para la explorcion puede extenderse indefinidamente

Esta pequeña frase...

...La recuerdan?
"...serenidad para aceptar las cosas que no puedo cambiar. Valor para cambiar las que si puedo. Y sabiduría para poder diferenciarlas."
Yo creo que quien creo esta oración ya poseía las tres cosas. No?

Jump the wall!

...do not bump into it...
...do not try to pull it down...
Your life is much greater than the wall...

Una subjetividad que se inventa

Como terapeuta se que tengo que poner mi propia historia sobre la mesa porque de alguna forma, esto hace que el otro, se anime a cambiar. La gente mas terriblemente sola del planeta, aquellos que han sido mortalmente rechazados, aquellos seres de lo que llamamos "allá afuera" necesitan mirarse en un espejo que le permita construir de alguna forma un camino...una esperanza.
Por otro lado una diría

Existe mi historia para el otro? cuando necesita tanto ver su propia historia...para no caer en la tentación de engancharse con la mía..?
Hay puntos en que las dos son relevantes, pero del arte profundo que surge, casi como el duende del flamenco...se encuentra en la inter-subjetividad...Allí donde tu y yo son uno en el racconto. Donde me he perdido de mi y estoy profundamente en tus caminos y puedo ver el mundo con tus ojos, y revisar a donde fue que la solución que intentaste aplicar a aquello que tanto te dolía, empeoro notablemente las cosas...
Y darnos cuenta de repente...como la subjetividad, se inventa entre nosotros... ...

A.O.J.

Mirror neurons

Vittorio Gallese is professor of human physiology at the University of Parma, Italy with appointments in the departments of neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology. He is an expert in neurophysiology, neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Gallese is one of the discoverer of mirror neurons.

His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, including action understanding, empathy, and theory of mind.

Vittorio Gallese studied medicine at the University of Parma, Parma, Italy, and was awarded an M.D, in Neurology in 1990. He is a Full Professor of physiology in the Department of Neuroscience of the University of Parma. As a cognitive neuroscientist, his research focuses on the relationship between the sensory-motor system and cognition, both in non-human primates and humans using a variety of neurophysiological and functional neuroimaging techniques. Among his major contributions is the discovery, together with the colleagues of Parma, of mirror neurons, and the elaboration of a theoretical model of basic aspects of social cognition. He is actively developing an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of intersubjectivity and social cognition in collaboration with psychologists, psycholinguists and philosophers.

Gallese has been doing research at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and at the Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan. He has been George Miller visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2007 he received together with Giacomo Rizzolatti and Leonardo Fogassi the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology, for the discovery of mirror neurons.
Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal,Jean Decety and Vittorio Gallese have independently argued that the mirror neuron system is involved in empathy. A large number of experiments using functional MRI, electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography have shown that certain brain regions (in particular the anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and inferior frontal cortex) are active when a person experiences an emotion (disgust, happiness, pain, etc.) and when he sees another person experiencing an emotion.However, these brain regions are not quite the same as the ones which mirror hand actions, and mirror neurons for emotional states or empathy have not yet been described in monkeys. More recently, Christian Keysers at the Social Brain Lab and colleagues have shown that people that are more empathic according to self-report questionnaires have stronger activations both in the mirror system for hand actions and the mirror system for emotions, providing more direct support to the idea that the mirror system is linked to empathy.

But I dare to go further. I dare to think that the concept of "Darshana" in India is very much related to this. According to Wikipedia, Darśana (Darshan, Sanskrit: दर्शन) is a Sanskrit term meaning "sight" (in the sense of an instance of seeing or beholding; from a root dṛś "to see"), vision, apparition, or glimpse. It is most commonly used for "visions of the divine," i.e. of a god or a very holy person or artifact. One could "receive darshana" of the deity in the temple, or from a great saintly person, such as a great guru.
In the sense "to see with reverence and devotion," the term translates to hierophany, and could refer either to a vision of the divine or to being in the presence of a highly revered person. In this sense it may assume a meaning closer to audience. "By doing darshan properly a devotee develops affection for God, and God develops affection for that devotee".

The psychoanalysts discovered something called the "inconscience's field". According to this theory people that live together enter into some kind of "magnetic field". It comes to me the analogy of a home that has many computers and share "media" for example. I had a patient whose son used to dream things that were more according to the process of my patient than his own processes...

The cognitive behaviorists call it "modeling". Modeling is something you do not have to be aware of in order to do it effectively.

Gallese has published over 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and edited books.

...and always remember...

Stanley Milgram

The story
If someone told you to press a button to deliver a 450-volt electrical shock to an innocent person in the next room, would you do it?

Common sense may say no, but decades of research suggests otherwise.

In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Yale, kown as Stanley Milgram, began what became one of the most widely recognized experiments in his field. In the first series, he found that about two-thirds of subjects were willing to inflict what they believed were increasingly painful shocks on an innocent person when the experimenter told them to do so, even when the victim screamed and pleaded...read full article

"He who does not at some stage, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalts in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence."

"Selected Letters" from Rainer Maria Rilke

Painting by me

Beware of the clincal/family doctor.

In the health field there seem to be a constant trespassing of limits.
It is not strange to see family doctors, or general doctors prescribe psychiatric medication such as Benzodiazepines (check for these (some of them I have not heard about for a long time now..): alprazolam (Xanax), clorazepate (Tranxene), diazepam (Valium), lorazepam (Ativan), oxazepam (Serax), Clonazepan -a favourite-(Klonopin in the United States and Rivotril, Ravotril or Rivatril in Europe, South America, North America Canada and Mexico, India and Australia and prazepam (Centrax)). Some of these drugs are also given by practitioners on occasional basis- not regular- as pre anesthetics or for endoscopies. But this is very different than to prescribe them.

We know not just few cases where someone goes to the doctor and sais "Dr. I cannot sleep". It is so easy for the doctor then, to prescribe sleeping pills. The clinician is not prepared to understand all the possible causes for insomnia. He will make his own limited reading.

These things make me go goose pimpled.

Do these guys have an idea of what they are doing?

Did they ever heard of the long term collateral effects of certain psychiatric drugs?

Were they trained to understand that to a certain population you just DO NOT prescribe sleeping pills?

There is not one psychiatrist that I know, that would favour this behavior. They are asking the clinicians to keep out of that field and derive patients for a consultation. But it is just useless. Narcissism in the medical community tends to be quite paroxystic.

They might think that it is very reasonable, that if someone is undergoing anxiety, to medicate with anxiolytics!

I do believe, that the license that doctors have to prescribe should be discreet. Should be discriminated. Of course the labs will incentivate the opposite. Labs make trillions of dollars by it.

Some collateral effects of certain psychoactive drugs they are IRREVERSABLE (for many reasons, which will not be discussed here) One of them is loss of short term memory.

I knew this woman that was for seventeen years under Benzos, prescribed by her family Dr. He said to her as he kept on writing prescriptions: " What can you do, now days with the stress we live under...I have been taken them for twenty years myself, and here I am!"

Another woman used to regulate herself the intake of anti-depressants as if they were aspirins for headache! "Oh, I feel low today, I shall take an anti-depressant!" Who gives her the prescriptions? Do you believe this? It is surrealistic, but better believe it. And she is not atypical!... unfortunately.

We are living in a light culture of psycho-drugs, and not in a culture of light but of darkness and ignorance. This kind of thing is what we see around coming from people that should be health educators! I am not including every one, but whoever the shoe fits...but there are far to many Cinderellas out there.

Terror movie?

No. Reality show.

So what the population can do, is to think that if it takes so long to choose a hairdresser because you do not want someone to mess with the outside of your head, should take time to go to the right guy that will take care of what goes on inside your head...Isn't that right?

If you think you are having some kind of emotional disturbance, ask for a psychological consultation. Under no means let your family dr. to prescribe you with tranquilizers or any kind of psychoactive drugs .

Honor your life. You just got one life to live.

A.O.J.

Disorganized attachment and the disorganization of the self: the alien self.

Because of their constitution, infants are primed to expect to find a version of their internal states mirrored by their caregivers. These mirroring responses are necessary to help them learn to represent their internal sates, both to themselves, both to others. If a small child does not have access to an adult that has this ability to recognize and respond, he will find it very difficult to make his own experience meaningful. I put emphasis in their, because it is not about the internal state of the caregiver we are talking about. That is why caregivers with psychological burdens are not the ideal at all to do the job...
If the adults mirroring reaction do not reflect the infants experience accurately, the infant is nevertheless forced to use this incongruent reflections to assist in organizing internal states. As these adults do not map sufficiently well on the child's experience, the self will be prone to disorganization, that is, incoherence and fragmentation. This forces the child, once again to internalize representations of the parents state, rather than his own experience. This creates an alien experience within the self. Subjective experience that correspond to this may be a sense of having feelings and ideas that are known as ones own ideas but do not feel like one's own.
All of us have non integrated parts of the self to a certain degree. States of mind that are not felt to fit coherently into the self structure, are nevertheless integrated into it by the capacity of symbolization.
In children whose attachment history, is one of disorganization because of hostile, frightening or fearful behaviour of their caregivers, the capacity of mentalizing is compromised. The discontinuity of the self will be more and more evident more the time. Making eclosion at the adolescence, when the boy or the girl is restructuring himself in search of an identity.

Adolescence is an enough confusional time because it is when the personality takes shape. this starts around 14 years of age, so you can imagine when the search of a sense of identity is in play -deeper crisis than it would naturally occur-

Adolescence is a key point for the outburst of some long cooking history that started when infants. Now, this is very importan, because most of the people are traying to search in the adolescence the causes of something that is just emerging in the adolescence but was always there.
Because parents, whos own state of mind work as a TV closed circuit, will continue to do what they have always done, will always tend annulate the perception of the child in favour of their own perception. Simple example:

-What flavour of ice cream do you want?
-Vanilla, please.
-No. You think you want vanilla but what you really want is chocolate.
-No, no, I want vanilla
-No. You want chocolate, because chocolate is what we have.
-O.K. I want chocolate.


You can understand the difficulties that children that are systematically treated in this way will have to connect to their own feelings and perceptions...Why would they trust their perceptions?

Someone that "knows" better to deal with the world, knows that they think they want vanilla but what they really want is chocloate! So when they think they want vanilla ice cream they will ask for chocolate, or wait until someone tells them what they want. Does it sound familiar to you?
It is the typical case of wanting to go to the right and ending in the left!
Or "Everything was going alright, but I do not know what happened..." The devil did put the tail in!
These incoherence, according to Linehan, Fogany and Bateman, are theoretical bases for development of Borderline Personality Disorders. But of course not all. On top of this will be a special vulnerability to disorganization, and will be genetics playing a role. It is not the same to have antecedents of Bipolar Disorders or Affective Disorders such as Depression in the family, that not to have them.

A.O.J.

Psychopaths

Some people used to ask me if it was not scary to work in a Psychiatric Hospital, I answer that the scary part has to do more with some of the psychopathic population that runs and works at the Mental Hospitals than the patients themselves.

There is a huge percentage of mentally ill "outside", and most of them in powerful governmental, political, financial, educational, economical positions. Now, THAT IS spooky.
According to a friend, "the world has only one problem: Psychopaths. Social or Anti-Social ones." But they all end up been anti social ones, dont they? They know quite well how to hide "Under the mask of sanity"...

Learn more...

Family violence and attachment

I have seen some confusion among some colleagues, toward situations of maltreatment in couples. Example violent husbands.
Many studies show that people that come from violent homes, tend to repeat the story. The reading some make about these evidences is that people model a way to function. This is what they saw, this is what it is about for them. I believe this is a little shortsighted interpreting of the situation, even though there is NO doubt how strong culture is.

I also heard about Masochist tendencies in the victim. Heard of narcissistic projections. And even worse I heard some saying "they stay because they like it".
Most of the women I met under these circumstances did not like it.
They also knew that there was better somewhere, even if that was not their case.
Did not hear too much into the academic means about the way the brain works, and that fact, turns many of these into shallow theories.
Even though all of them have certain truth to it, there is still something that goes a bit beyond.
Within us there is an area of our brain related with the attachment system.

Secure attachment is fundamental for a healthy development. Yet, being in an attachment relationship activates the attachment system, and this makes the people less acutly aware and judgmental about the mental state of the other.

When the person es so unlucky to have parents that for some reason they maltreat their children, the child tends to search for proximity, even though. The more gets attached the more it is mistreated, and the more it will seek for protection. For survival reason this attachment area gets very stimulated but it is not able to discriminate who will be a safe figure to turn to, specially if there are not many around...You see, this mechanism is so deep inside, and so related with emotion, that cannot work discrimination. It is like "hunger is hunger". Then you eat the salad? or you eat the chips, bacon and the fried egg? Whatever is available! Hunger is hunger. Not talking of appetite.
This over attachment will go on in life for as long as the person lives. Will be even worse if the process of introjection of a caregiver figure was sensed as an alien to himself, which will produce in the best of cases a constant sense of void and need to check on the availability of a body because has problems with symbolizing in absentia. This happens to Borderline Personality Disorders.
Most psychopaths who are most charming people, "smell" needy like "pork smells truffles", also men with narcissistic personalities will search for someone dependant..and the rest is all history.

Naivity and need to be right: the best ground for psychopaths

Psychologist Robert Hare cites a famous case where a psychopath was "Man of the Year" and president of the Chamber of Commerce in his small town. (Remember that John Wayne Gacy was running for Jaycee President at the very time of his first murder conviction?) The man in question had claimed to have a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He ran for a position on the school board which he then planned to parlay into a position on the county commission which paid more.

At some point, a local reporter suddenly had the idea to check up on the guy - to see if his credentials were real. What the reporter found out was that the only thing that was true about this up and coming politician's "faked bio" was the place and date of birth. Everything else was fictitious. Not only was the man a complete impostor, he had a long history of antisocial behavior, fraud, impersonation, and imprisonment. His only contact with a university was a series of extension courses by mail that he took while in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. What is even more amazing is the fact that before he was a con-man, he was a "con-boy." For two decades he had dodged his way across America one step ahead of those he had hoodwinked. Along the way he had married three women and had four children, and he didn't even know what had happened to them. And now, he was on a roll! But darn that pesky reporter!

When he was exposed, he was completely unconcerned. "These trusting people will stand behind me. A good liar is a good judge of people," he said. Amazingly, he was right. Far from being outraged at the fact that they had all been completely deceived and lied to from top to bottom, the local community he had conned so completely to accrue benefits and honors to himself that he had not earned, rushed to his support!

I kid you not! And it wasn't just "token support." The local Republican party chairman wrote about him: "I assess his genuineness, integrity, and devotion to duty to rank right alongside of President Abraham Lincoln." As Hare dryly notes, this dimwit was easily swayed by words, and was blind to deeds.

What kind of psychological weaknesses drive people to prefer lies over truth?
This may have something to do with what is called Cognitive Dissonance. Leon Festinger developed the theory of Cognitive Dissonance in the 50's when he apparently stumbled onto a UFO cult in the Midwest. They were prophesying a coming world cataclysm and "alien rapture."
When no one was raptured and no cataclysm he studied the believers response, and detailed it in his book "When Prophecy Fails." Festinger observed:

"A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."

We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.

But man's resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.

It seems that part of the problem has to do with ego and the need to be "right." People with a high "need to be right" or "perfect" seem to be unable to acknowledge that they have been conned.

From Cassiopea.com