Certainly the storied career of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has left many praising his legacy of career wins, devotion and loyalty to his university for so many decades, and his concern with providing a wonderful role model for the young men under his tutelage.

Sadly, the end of his career seriously tarnished the image of his decades of honor and success. Pundits will be debating for years whether to give Joe credit for what he accomplished or to revile him for what he did not do, with respect to the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse situation.

But it is precisely what he did not do that may be his greatest legacy after all. Because of what Joe did not do, sensitivity to the horrors of child sexual abuse (in and out of sports) is now at its highest level ever. Safeguards have become instituted in universities across the nation and victims are now encouraged to come forward, rather than living lives of secrecy and mental torment.

These crimes and sexual predators will always be among us, but because of the exposure of the Penn State situation, coaches, athletic directors, college deans and families of athletes will be on the lookout for signs and symptoms and as a result, countless abuses undoubtedly will be prevented.

Shortly after his dismissal, Paterno was diagnosed with lung cancer and broke his hip. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments weakened him, robbing him of his hair and his once-booming voice. In fact, in a recent interview with the Washington Post, he appeared frail, wearing a wig and speaking in a whisper. He canceled public appearances after the interview because of his failing health, according to family members and there was public speculation about how rapidly Mr. Paterno began physically failing when he gave every appearance of being hale and hearty just before he was relieved of his post.

It is really no surprise that a man who was so passionately devoted to his career and who suffered such major and humiliating stress, and the “death” of everything that he was justly famous for that his immune system deteriorated so dramatically and could not fight off the ravages of his illness.

For Paterno’s legion of fans, who referred to the coach affectionately as “JoePa,” the turbulent final months of Paterno’s life were a tragic end to an outstanding coaching career that was built around his motto of “success with honor.”

Rest In Peace Joe Paterno.

Does this sound like your family?

You are a Type A personality. You’re driven, intense and focused primarily on your career. You tend to look at yourself as having to be perfect, are impatient with co-workers and subordinates who are slower than you or who don’t share your passion about their work and careers.

Of course, these personality traits carry over to your home life, as well. You get impatient and easily irritated at your teens who don’t have that kind of passion about school, sports, or anything in their lives, except, their friends.

Most likely, your spouse does not share your personality traits, either. It’s what attracted you to them. They may be a people pleaser, “yessing” you and accepting you because he/she loves you. You predicted that you would be happily married, partly because it would be unlikely that your spouse would compete with you and therefore, you would always be in control in the relationship.

Or, perhaps, your spouse or one of your children, is just as competitive as you and therefore there is a constant power struggle going on within the family.

Unresolved or insensitively managed conflict negatively impacts families on multiple levels. In these situations, you hate coming home perhaps as much as you hate going to work. On the other hand, if you can learn how to skillfully resolve conflicts, it can be a platform for enhancing the love and warmth within your family.

The following is a three-step series of behavioral prescriptions for assessing and implementing a conflict resolution program at home. Once put into practice, in as little as 21 days you can see positive change in your relationship with your spouse, children and stop the “I hate going home” feeling:

Rx #1. Use A Thought Stopping Technique

Whenever you get angry at a family member, it is never what that family member says or does that gets you angry; rather, it is your interpretation (based on your own internal dialogue) of what that family member says or does that always determines your
emotional reaction.

Internal Dialogue

The key to analyzing your vulnerability to being provoked into confrontations, is to understand when your automatic thoughts, including your assumptions and conclusions, are distorted and therefore cause the emotional reactions you make.

Examples of automatic thought distortions are:

• “My teenager should respect my rules, even if she doesn’t like them.”(using should, must, and have to in judging your actions);
• “My husband is selfish and doesn’t care about my needs, ” (reading your spouse’s mind about what he must be thinking and feeling);
• “I will never be happy as long as these kids are living in this house.”(catastrophizing or fortune telling about what negative things will happen to you in the future);
• “I’m a failure as a parent” (negatively labeling yourself instead of describing your behavior as unfortunate or unproductive).

Thought Stopping

Once you learn about the distortions that are part of your automatic thinking, you can then learn how to stop them in their tracks. This works through a process of challenging your distorted thinking and developing a more rational, alternative set of beliefs. . The end result is dissolving negative emotions and engaging in a healthy, more reasonable outlook, despite the situation.

Rx # 2. – Identify Your Typical Conflict Management Habits

People resort to behavioral habits when they experience conflict with others. These reactions include:

• Non-productive behaviors, such as: confronting, dominating, defending, using sarcasm,hostile humor, repressing emotions, insisting on being right, stonewalling, and blaming;
• Neutral behaviors, such as: avoiding, cooling off, apologizing, and giving in or backing off to avoid confrontation;
• Positive behaviors, such as: active listening, empathizing, disarming, inquiring, and using “I feel” statements.

The goal is to eliminate negative and neutral behaviors and practice positive confrontation reduction skills until they become new habits. On the average, with practice, these skills actually can be learned in only 21 days!

Rx # 3. – Use These Powerful Confrontation Reduction Skills

Active Listening 

The key to all interpersonal communications is genuine listening. This is different from defensive listening, which is where you internally plan your retort
while the other person is talking to you.

In order to really listen, paraphrase what the other person says in your own words. Do this without judging, agreeing or disagreeing. Then, listen and reflect the content, needs and feelings of the other person.

Next, ask for feedback to determine whether you interpreted correctly. If you have not, ask for clarification. Continue this process until you are sure that you have heard what the other person is saying and how he or she really feels emotionally.

Once you are certain that you understand the message and feelings expressed by the other person, respond. The other person then listens and paraphrases for you. This process continues until you have both clarified your positions and are certain that the other person really heard you and understands.

Empathizing

This involves putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and trying to see the world through his or her eyes. As you do this, consider the age and experience of the person with whom you are in conflict so you can accurately assess the experience of the other person.

Disarming

The fastest way to defuse an argument is to find some truth in what the other person is saying, even if you do not agree with the basic criticism or complaint. For example, saying “I can understand why you feel angry with me since you believe that I
violated your trust by sharing our conversation with dad” acknowledges and validates the angry person’s feelings without actually agreeing with what was said. This opens the door to clarification, feedback and reconciliation.

Childhood has changed. Instead of pick-up baseball and basketball games on the corner lot, there are competitive travel leagues for kids as young as seven or eight. Instead of the three “R’s”; Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic, kids are faced with standardized tests and after-school tutors. Instead of Sunday night with the Wide World of Disney, there’s questionable “family” shows such as the Family Guy, South Park, and the Simpsons. And then there’s technology!

Kids today are experiencing higher levels of stress than ever before, partly because they’re being exposed to “mature” material before they’re able to process it, partly because the demands on their time are higher than ever, and partly because they don’t have time to decompress.

Here are five ways to help the kids in your life minimize and deal with stress.

Turn off the TV.

Even when carefully monitored, TV can still cause kids stress. The bright colors, advertisements, and frenetic action are all designed to pull kids in, but they’re not designed to calm them down. (Some shows have even caused seizures in epileptic children). Turn off the assault on their senses. Sit with your children and discuss the day. Discuss what is going on in their lives. Listen to them!

Help kids identify and name their stress.

Kids, especially younger ones, can have a hard time recognizing and labeling their stress. They may know they feel “bad” or uneasy, but may not know that what they’re feeling is stress or anxiety. Ask questions about what the bad emotions feel like (butterflies? angry tigers? a tummy ache?) and then help your child figure out when the feelings started. Was it when the teacher handed out the math test ? When former best friend Lanie sat with someone else at lunch? When everyone laughed at your book report? Identifying what children are feeling can help them sort out those feelings and instill the belief they have some control over the stress they’re experiencing.

Give kids choices.

One of the biggest sources of stress for anyone of any age is feeling like they don’t have control over their lives, or the events in it. By giving your child a say in what’s happening to them, you help them feel more powerful. Let’s say your fourth-grader is freaking out about her math class. You can’t let her skip math, but you can give her options. Does she want to ask the teacher for extra help, or look into tutoring? Would she like Mom or Dad or an older neighbor to help her? Would she prefer to study in the morning or right after school? Even small choices help a child feel a sense of control over the outcome of a stressful situation.

Be a good listener.

Sometimes, the best thing to do is to just listen to your child, without offering advice or suggestions. Listening will allow your child to share some of the burden of their anxiety, which can help alleviate anyone’s stress. By paying attention to them, you can also gain insight into what the underlying sources of their stress may be.

Be there for your child.

Just knowing that you are unquestionably available to your child can help him or her feel more secure and less stressed. After a tough day at school, to be able to come home and be surrounded by a loving, caring family can be the best stress-reliever of all. Take time to laugh and have fun, and create positive memories and events to counteract any negative occurrences in their life. It will help you relieve your own stress, too!

When we assume our kids are processing stress the same way we do, we are missing an opportunity. We have the tools available to help ourselves through stressful situations because we’ve been around long enough to know what stress feels like and how to combat it. Your child doesn’t have those tools. It’s your job to observe, listen, and then help your child work through their feelings. Pass your knowledge on to your child and everyone wins.

More than twenty years ago, stress was the cover story in Time magazine. “Stress” was referred to as “The Epidemic of the Eighties,” and it was referred to as the nation’s number one health problem.

Flash forward to 2007. Results were released on December 12, 2007 from “Stress in America,” the American Psychological Association’s (APA) annual survey of stress in the general public in the U.S. The researchers interviewed 1848 adults 18 and over, and the interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.

Seventy-nine percent of those surveyed believe that they cannot avoid stress and in the month prior to the survey, 77% of those surveyed experienced stress-related physical symptoms, including headaches, GI problems, and fatigue. Seventy-three percent admitted to emotional symptoms, including feeling nervous, lack of motivation, irritability, and anger. In addition, nearly half of Americans (43 percent) reported that stress negatively impacted their relationships with spouses or partners. A fourth of Americans believed that in the previous five years, their personal relationships suffered because of stress.

Since that report in 2007, the APA has found remarkably consistent findings each year. Add the holiday season to the mix, and for many, stress spikes even higher.

STRESS AND YOUR BODY
The domino effect of not controlling your stress levels is clear. Many studies have shown a direct link between stress and fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal diseases, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and macular degeneration.
We now understand that stress also impacts cholesterol levels, platelet activation (causing heart attacks), and shortened life span. Since sleeping difficulties negatively impact the immune system and lifespan and since stress is one of the main causes of insomnia, you can see your health and your life, itself, depend on taking charge of the stressors in your life.

HOLIDAY STRESS

For many people, stress levels spikeduring holiday season and here are the key reasons:

• Many are nostalgic for the happy family experiences they had at this time of year and the family is now far away or is fractured by divorce and/or deaths
• People who live alone often feel much worse around the holidays, which are viewed as times for people to come together to celebrate
• If you are divorced and during the holidays you must split time with your children with your ex, it can be very frustrating and lonely
• For many people, the winter months and the grey, gloomy weather increases depression and mood changes

A DOZEN WAYS TO DEAL WITH LIFE’S STRESSORS, REGARDLESS OF THE SITUATION

It is important to remember that occasional or low levels of stress may actually be protective of our health! For example, stress makes us more vigilant to potential danger. So, totally eliminating our stress is not only impossible, but is probably not a good idea. It is prolonged and debilitating stress that is the culprit.

Both the National Mental Health Association and the American Psychological Association offer many recommendations to build resiliency against the inevitable stressors of life.

Here are a dozen ways to get started:

• Recognize that it will never be a perfect world, even during the holidays, so go with the hand that has been dealt to you for these holidays. “It is what it is.” The holidays will pass quickly.
• Become assertive and learn to say “no” to unreasonable time pressures and responsibilities that others put on you.
• Exercise regularly, engaging in aerobic activities, and maintain good nutrition, avoiding caffeine, alcohol and nicotine.
• Build relaxation time into your life and enjoy calming music or reading, especially during those times when you are not with family
• Have a relaxing hobby that you enjoy and give yourself permission to engage in it each week, in order to distract your attention from stress-producing news on TV, for example.
• Do one task at a time, instead of multi-tasking
• Use the power of visualization to picture yourself engaging in relaxing, healthy pursuits and write down goals in order to accomplish those pursuits.
• Use imagery, meditation or self-hypnosis to imagine accomplishing your goals peacefully, while letting go of situations over which you have little or no control.
• Laugh each day, whether it’s from hearing or repeating jokes, watching funny videos or hanging around with funny people.
• Stay away from highly tensed, negative people
• Try to play with a pet each day.
• Get professional help if you still feel overwhelmed and stressed.

Our world these days is filled with invitations to worry and feel hopeless. But events and situations only represent 10% of the stress in our lives. What we do about these events determines whether we will be overwhelmed or resilient. Begin practicing these dozen stress-busting tips and watch your life take a turn for the best!

Jack Singer, Ph.D.
Clinical/Sport Psychologist

Statistics show that about 75% of caregivers are women and two thirds of the caregivers in the United States hold down regular jobs in addition to being a caregiver which can lead to huge emotional and physical stress over time.

What is a Caregiver?

A caregiver is someone who, whether paid or unpaid, looks after another person who can no longer look after themselves due to illness, trauma, or old age. When a person is limited in what they can do, they need someone to step in and give them the care they need. These are people who need help with daily basic tasks such as grocery shopping, house cleaning, bill paying, meal preparation, medications, bathroom and personal hygiene, and so much more.There are millions of caregivers in the United States alone. If you are a caregiver, you are by no means alone.

It is not easy to be the one who is caring for someone else, no matter what their particular health issue may be. If you are in the position of being a caregiver for a loved one, here are some tips to help you when your energy flags and you are concerned about burnout.

Seek Resources

The internet is a wonderful tool for finding information about just about anything these days. Spend some time Googling terms that apply to your particular set of circumstances. For instance I just typed this search term into Google, “How to be a good caregiver” and found several excellent articles. This one in particular I thought was very helpful: Taking Care of YOU: Self-Care for Family Caregivers.

Take time to find out all you can about care giving and the resources available to you. Since you are not alone, there is plenty of information on the Internet, in magazines, and at local hospitals and nursing homes about the art of being a caregiver. When you know what you are facing, you can prepare for it.

Craft a Strong Support System

If you are caring for a family member, you may not be the only one who is working to see your loved one get better. Keep in contact with other family members so that you can coordinate your efforts on behalf of your loved one. If each person knows their role, there will be fewer reasons to stress out along the way and no one person bears the brunt of the entire responsibility.

Get to Know the Medical Professionals

I just Googled this term “Caregivers talking to medical professionals” and instantly found a great article at Caregivers Support.org called “Communication with Health Care Professionals” that gives some excellent advice and tips for talking to healthcare professionals.

Take Care of Yourself!

Caregiving is demanding and caregivers need time off from their caregiving responsibilities to relieve stress and prevent burnout.

• Schedule regular afternoon or evenings out.
• Take time to talk with friends, either in person or on the phone.
• Eat nutritious meals.
• Get enough sleep.
• Exercise regularly. It is a great stress buster.
• Make a list of jobs you could ask for help with. For some reason, this seems to be one of the hardest things for caregivers to do!
• Arrange adult day care.
• Join a support group.
• Draw strength from your faith.
• Take time to pamper yourself.
• Plan a weekend getaway.
• Hire a temporary caregiver from a respite care program. While many forms of respite care exist, the quality of care provided by respite services may vary.  Therefore, it is important to check out the facility before leaving your loved one

Was there ever a concern for the victims in this case by the university and those within the football program? Was there ever a concern in that organization that by not informing the police, that the perpetrator was free to carry out his demented desires with untold other victims?

University administrators were aware that a graduate assistant had seen Sandusky attacking a young boy in the team’s locker room shower in 2002. However, even though Sandusky was prohibited from holding youth sports camps on campus in 2002, he continued to hold them through 2008 under his Sandusky Associates company at the university’s Behrend campus, just outside Erie. Further, it is being reported by a person familiar with Sandusky’s relationship with Penn State that the former coach long maintained an office in the East Area Locker building which is across the street from the Penn State football team’s building, and was on campus as recently as week ago working out.

We see this all the time:  athletes or coaches with addictive issues are protected so that they can continue to perform for the team; domestic violence is almost an acceptable behavior if the athlete is one of the stars of the team; coaches who abuse their athletes describe their victims as wimps, or worse (e.g., “This is nothing.  You should have seen how my coaches treated me!”).

Why is it that the everyday Joe is accountable, but many star athletes and coaches (as well as celebrities in any arena) get a free pass, unless the media get wind of their behaviors)? Think Lindsay Lohan here.

It’s time to make every individual, regardless of his/her popularity, power or importance to the team accountable for their behaviors.

The Michael Vick’s of sports have paid for their deeds, but I fear that they represent only the tip of the iceberg.  Furthermore, these cover-ups tarnish the image of the majority of athletes and coaches who lead clean lives, tending to their families, and appreciating the gifts that the Almighty has bestowed on them.

Jack Singer, Ph.D.
Licensed and Certified Clinical & Sport Psychologist

R.I.P Joe!

Jon recently aired a segment on his radio show in which he had the opportunity to talk with 3 former professional football players about life after a career in professional sports.

It was a telling story in that it emphasized the fact that besides being one play away from retirement as a result of injury, the average career is but a whisp of smoke within the context of the remaining and long years that athletes face when the cheering comes to an end.  And make no mistake, as our guests stressed when your life as pro ends, it ends period.

Gone for many are the big paychecks, public recognition and the feeling of being part of a team.  In other words your life as you knew it is over.

For the majority of former pros what awaits them is unemployment, divorce, financial destitution and for some the daunting challenges of dealing with addiction.

But life doesn’t have to end up that way, as there are options for making a successful transition to a life after professional sports.

While each of the athletes had made a successful transition to new lives when their playing days came to an end, this is not the case for close to 80% of all professional players as most struggle with financial insolvency, unemployment, divorce and for many some form of addiction.

I will provide sound advice for former athletes, in fact for anyone facing a significant life change whether it be in career, financial setback or death of a partner. Please join us by clicking here to either listen in live or to download the show for future listening.

By now, all of you who are baseball fanatics have observed the unbelievable collapse of a wonderful baseball team during September, which culminated in their most frustrating moment, losing to Baltimore with one strike separating them from a win and at least a tie in the wild card race.

We all read with sadness how Tito Francona felt somewhat helpless trying to rally his players and eliminate the causes which he identified as contributing to their uncharacteristic collapse.   If you look at any organization in the business world, what would you, as the CEO, do if your manager is impotent?  This was the question facing the Red Sox brass, when Tito removed himself from the equation, citing that the club needed “a new voice.”

What to do to rectify the situation:

Here are my thoughts about putting this baseball organization back on top where they can get the most out of their remarkable talent base.

• First, management must identify the specific sources of disruption in the leadership and communications failures that plagued the Sox, particularly as the season wound down.

• Secondly, they need to carefully assess the personality traits of candidates for the manager’s job and match them to the needs of the players whom he must manage.  This step is almost never addressed in athletic hiring decisions.  Using the specialized tools of the Industrial/Organizational psychologist during this process will offer a new picture of the organizational culture and the best fit for a new manager.

• Third, each ball player needs to be assessed to determine what specific issues led to their personal failure to produce consistently.  Sport Psychology techniques are perfectly suitable for making this determination and designing individualized remediation programs for each player, designed to prevent this from reoccurring next season.

In short, the Red Sox masterminds need to go outside the organization and bring in an expert, who can come on board and help them make the right selection, so our beloved Sox will go on to years of post-season glory!

Mary Smith headed outside to her friend’s pool. Settling into a lounge chair, she tapped the Skype application on her phone. Hundreds of miles away, her face popped up on her therapist’s computer monitor; he smiled back on her phone’s screen.

She took a sip of her cocktail. The session began.

Ms. Smith, a 33-year-old high school teacher, used to be in treatment the conventional way — with face-to-face office appointments. Now, with her new doctor, she said: “I can have a Skype therapy session with my morning coffee or before a night on the town with the girls. I can take a break from shopping for a session. I took my doctor with me through three states this summer!”

And, she added, “I even e-mailed him that I was panicked about a first date, and he wrote back and said we could do a 20-minute mini-session.”

Since telepsychiatry was introduced decades ago, video conferencing has been an increasingly accepted way to reach patients in hospitals, prisons, veterans’ health care facilities and rural clinics — all supervised sites.

But today Skype has made online private practice accessible for a broader swath of patients, including those who shun office treatment or who simply like the convenience of therapy on the fly.

“In three years, this will take off like a rocket,” said Eric A. Harris, a lawyer and psychologist who consults with the American Psychological Association Insurance Trust. “Everyone will have real-time audiovisual availability. There will be a group of true believers who will think that being in a room with a client is special and you can’t replicate that by remote involvement. But a lot of people, especially younger clinicians, will feel there is no basis for thinking this. Still, appropriate professional standards will have to be followed.”

The pragmatic benefits are obvious. “No parking necessary!” touts one online therapist. Some therapists charge less for sessions since they, too, can do it from home, saving on gas and office rent. Blizzards, broken legs and business trips no longer cancel appointments. The anxiety of shrink-less August could be, dare one say … curable?

Ms. Smith came to the approach through geographical necessity. When her therapist moved, she was apprehensive about transferring to the other psychologist in her small town,  who would certainly know her prominent ex-boyfriend. So her therapist referred her to another doctor, whose practice was a day’s drive away. But he was willing to use Skype with long-distance patients. She was game.

Now she prefers these sessions to the old-fashioned kind.

But does knowing that your therapist is just a phone tap or mouse click away create a 21st-century version of shrink-neediness?

“There’s that comfort of carrying your doctor around with you like a security blanket,” Ms. Smith acknowledged. “But,” she added, “because he’s more accessible, I feel like I need him less.”

The technology does have its speed bumps. Online treatment upends a basic element of therapeutic connection: eye contact.

Patient and therapist typically look at each other’s faces on a computer screen. But in many setups, the camera is perched atop a monitor. Their gazes are then off-kilter.

“So patients can think you’re not looking them in the eye,” said Lynn Bufka, a staff psychologist with the American Psychological Association. “You need to acknowledge that upfront to the patient, or the provider has to be trained to look at the camera instead of the screen.”

The quirkiness of Internet connections can also be an impediment. “You have to prepare vulnerable people for the possibility that just when they are saying something that’s difficult, the screen can go blank,” said DeeAnna Merz Nagel, a psychotherapist licensed in New Jersey and New York. “So I always say, ‘I will never disconnect from you online on purpose.’ You make arrangements ahead of time to call each other if that happens.”

Research on the effectiveness of on-line therapy shows the same effects, essentially, as in person therapy, so the practicality of on-line therapy outweighs the few negative issues, such as not sitting in front of the client and seeing his/her body language, eye contact, etc.  In addition, I am able to Skype with clients who are on vacation in other locals, and with athletes, who are out of town performing in major events and want to touch base with me before or after their events.  In short, I have found using Skype has grown my practice and dramatically increased my access to clients.

Dr. Jack Singer offers Skype Therapy with clients all over the world.  For more information, contact Dr. Jack at (800) 497-9880.