Leslie Glass's Blog, page 279

What We Aren’t Eating Is Killing Us, Global Study Finds

From CNN:

Which risk factor is responsible for more deaths around the world than any other? Not smoking. Not even high blood pressure. It’s a poor diet.”In many countries, poor diet now causes more deaths than tobacco smoking and high blood pressure,” said Ashkan Afshin, an assistant professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

And it’s not just that people are choosing unhealthy options such as red meat and sugary sodas. Just as critical, said Afshin, the lead author of a 27-year global diet analysis published Wednesday in the journal the Lancet, is the lack of healthy foods in our diets, along with high levels of salt.”While traditionally all the conversation about healthy diet has been focused on lowering the intake of unhealthy food, in this study, we have shown that, at the population level, a low intake of healthy foods is the more important factor, rather than the high intake of unhealthy foods,” he said.

One in five deaths globally — that’s about 11 million people — in 2017 occurred because of too much sodium and a lack of whole grains, fruit and nuts and seeds, the study found, rather than from diets packed with trans fats, sugar-sweetened drinks and high levels of red and processed meats.The large study size means these findings are relevant to everyone, no matter where they live, said Andrew Reynolds, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand, who was not involved in the study.”The findings of the paper will inform policy decisions that shape what food is available in Western countries, how it is marketed and potentially what it costs in the coming years,” Reynolds said.

15 dietary risk factors

In the analysis, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Afshin and his colleagues looked at 15 dietary risk factors and their impact on death and disability. High levels of unhealthy red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, trans fatty acids and salt — all known to be health risks — were compared with the effects of a diet low in many healthy foods. Those healthy items included fruits, vegetables, whole grains, milk, calcium, nuts and seeds, fiber, legumes or beans, omega-3 fatty acids from seafood, and polyunsaturated fats, the good-for-you fats found in salmon, vegetable oils and some nuts and seeds.Except salt, which was a key risk factor in most countries, the study found red and processed meats, trans fats and sugary drinks toward the bottom of the risk chart for most countries.In fact, more than half of all global diet-related deaths in 2017 were due to just three risk factors: eating too much salt, not enough whole grains and not enough fruit. Those risks held true regardless of socioeconomic level of most nations, Afshin said.

The new study is part of the yearly Global Burden of Disease report, prepared by a consortium of thousands of researchers that tracks premature death and disability from more than 350 diseases and injuries in 195 countries.In January, the consortium released its “diet for a healthy planet,” which said that cutting red meat and sugar consumption in half and upping intake of fruits, vegetables and nuts could prevent up to 11.6 million premature deaths without harming the planet.Afshin said an overview of the current study, but few of the details, was in last year’s Global Burden of Disease report, making this year’s version “the most comprehensive analysis on the health effects of diet ever conducted,” despite some methodological flaws and gaps in data from underdeveloped countries.

“That’s a good claim,” Reynolds said. “Studies are published every year on how we eat; however, the amount of data considered and the global representativeness make this study worth attention.” He added that the risk rankings provide public policymakers with “invaluable information on what dietary behaviors to target first.”

Diet-related deaths by country

Ten million diet-related deaths in 2017 were from cardiovascular disease; cancer was responsible for 913,000 deaths, and Type 2 diabetes accounted for 339,000 deaths. In addition, 66% of disabilities in 2017 from a range of chronic diseases were due to those three factors.

Interestingly, obesity was not a top-tier contributor, coming in at sixth on the list of global disease risks, Afshin said.Uzbekistan had the highest number of diet-related deaths, followed by Afghanistan, the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. Israel had the lowest number, followed by France, Spain, Japan and Andorra, a tiny principality between France and Spain.In terms of lowest death rates, the UK ranked 23rd, above Ireland (24th) and Sweden (25th), while the United States ranked 43rd, after Rwanda and Nigeria (41st and 42nd). India ranked 118th, and China ranked 140th.

Highest risk factors

For the United States, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Russia, Egypt, Germany, Iran and Turkey, a lack of whole grains was the greatest risk factor; for many more countries, that came in second or third. That doesn’t mean people in these countries ate no grains but rather that they ate processed grains, with little nutritional value and the potential for high calorie counts.Reynolds, who published a study in The Lancet on the effect of whole grains this year, cautions that many of the products sold to consumers today as “whole grain” often aren’t.

“Whole grains are being included in ultraprocessed products that may be finely milled down and have added sodium, added free sugars and added saturated fats,” Reynolds said. “I think we all need to be aware of this and not confuse the benefits from the more intact, minimally processed whole grains with what is often advertised as whole-grain products available today.”A whole grain is defined as the use of the entire seed of a plant: the bran, the germ and the endosperm. The Whole Grains Council provides a stamp, available in 54 countries, that consumers can look for that certifies the degree of whole grains in the product.

Regional challenges

The greatest risk factor for China, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand was the amount of sodium in the diet. That is probably due to the extremely salty rice vinegars, sauces and pastes used to cook traditional Asian foods, Afshin said.

Does that mean those cultures are going to continue to live with that high risk? Not necessarily, said Corinna Hawkes, who directs the Centre for Food Policy at the University of London.”Anyone who studies the history of food will tell you cultural preferences change over time,” said Hawkes, who was not involved in the new study. “They do shift. But yes, in this case, it will likely involve a culture change.”

In Mexico, the lack of nuts and seeds was the highest risk factor, followed by a lack of vegetables, whole grains, and fruit in the diet. And it was one of the few countries where unhealthy sugary beverages ranked quite high — at No. 5. That’s not only due to a cultural preference for sodas and homemade sugary drinks called aguas frescas, study co-author Christian Razosays, but a lack of access to clean water and even fruits and vegetables.”We don’t have free clean water to drink,” said Razo, who has a Ph.D. in nutrition from the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico.”So people have to buy clean water to drink, and if they’re going to have to buy something, they prefer the soda,” she said. “It’s also easier to get processed food than fresh fruits and vegetables.”

Razo says that while Mexico is a huge producer of fresh fruits and vegetables, those are purchased by distributors in the United States and other countries, leaving people in the cities with little access to affordable fresh options or the ability to grow their own.”We encourage people to buy in local markets, but they are more expensive,” Razo said. “It’s hard to compete with all these huge brands that buy the produce. So, yeah, we have a big challenge.”As for nuts and seeds, “people just can’t buy them because they’re very expensive,” she said.

Call to action

Policymakers reacted to the study with a call to action.

“Unhealthy diet is the top risk factor for the Global Burden of Disease. The relative importance of this factor has been growing and requires urgent attention,” said Francesco Branca, director of the Department of Nutrition for Health and Development at the World Health Organization.”The public needs to be aware of the critical links between diet and health and demand public action to improve the access and availability of foods that contribute to healthy diets,” Branca said. “Considering the need for urgent action the UN General Assembly has declared 2016-2025 the UN Decade of Action of Nutrition, and is asking governments to make such commitments.”That is going to require a coordinated effort between public policymakers, food growers, marketers and distributors, which will be a significant feat, Hawkes said.Getting back to whole grains, for example, is going to require a complete change in the economics of food production and distribution, she said.

“Refining grains is highly profitable,” Hawkes said. “Take corn, for example. You can refine it into different ingredients: animal feed, refined flours and high-fructose corn syrup to name three. So manufacturers are generating multiple value streams from this refining process.”If we then say, ‘I’m producing corn to make one product,’ then we need to have dialogues with the industry to ask about where public investment is needed and how we can shift the system, because it’s going to be a big deal. It’s a big, big shift.”But Hawkes is hopeful. Twenty years ago, she said, when she entered a room of global health policymakers and mentioned the importance of diet, she was seen as “sort of a fringe person. Now, when I enter a room and say that, it’s taken seriously.”

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Major Study Debunks Myth That Moderate Drinking Can Be Healthy

From Fox News:

Blood pressure and stroke risk rise steadily the more alcohol people drink, and previous claims that one or two drinks a day might protect against stroke are not true, according to the results of a major genetic study.

The research, which used data from a 160,000-strong cohort of Chinese adults, many of whom are unable to drink alcohol due to genetic intolerance, found that people who drink moderately – consuming 10 to 20 grams of alcohol a day – raise their risk of stroke by 10 to 15 percent.

For heavy drinkers, consuming four or more drinks a day, blood pressure rises significantly and the risk of stroke increases by around 35 percent, the study found.

“The key message here is that, at least for stroke, there is no protective effect of moderate drinking,” said Zhengming Chen, a professor at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Population Health who co-led the research. “The genetic evidence shows the protective effect is not real.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around 2.3 billion people worldwide drink alcohol, with average per person daily consumption at 33 grams of pure alcohol a day. That is roughly equivalent to two 150 ml glasses of wine, a large (750 ml) bottle of beer or two 40 ml shots of spirits.

This latest study, published in The Lancet medical journal, focused on people of East Asian descent, many of whom have genetic variants that limit alcohol tolerance.

Because the variants have specific and large effects on alcohol, but do not effect other lifestyle factors such as diet, smoking, economic status or education, they can be used by scientists to nail down causal effects of alcohol intake.

“Using genetics is a novel way … to sort out whether moderate drinking really is protective, or whether it’s slightly harmful,” said Iona Millwood, an epidemiologist at Oxford who co-led the study. “Our genetic analyses have helped us understand the cause-and-effect relationships.”

The research team – including scientists from Oxford and Peking universities and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, said it would be impossible to do a study of this kind in Western populations, since almost no-one there has the relevant alcohol-intolerance gene variants.

But the findings about the biological effects of alcohol should be the same for all people worldwide, they said.

Europe has the highest per person alcohol consumption in the world, even though it has dropped by around 10 percent since 2010, the WHO says, and current trends point to a global rise in per capita consumption in the next 10 years.

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The Gaslighting Tango

What is the Gaslighting tango? It takes two to play, and one person is always the loser. Gaslighting is manipulating in such a way to make someone question his sanity.

It’s a form of control that may begin innocently enough. Say a boss, coworker, friend, family member or anyone who interacts with you, does something that seems strange. When he or she explains it away, you let it go. It may be something that makes you feel all is not well with the other person, but you rationalize it so that you can keep or repair the relationship. You’re in the gaslighting tango.

The Gaslighting Tango Begins

Say you have a great time on a first date, and the date leaves abruptly. You’re thrown off balance by this behavior. A little while later the date calls and wants to know why you left in such a hurry. A good question might be: why would you pick up the phone for someone who appears to have ditched you? But you do pick up the call because the dinner was fun and you want to see the date again. You don’t realize you’ve been gaslighted. You just suddenly wonder what really happened. Did you do something to chase the date off? Are you really at fault? You feel weird and unsure of yourself, but agree to go out with the date again. You’re now set up for the gaslight tango. It will happen again and again. This is something that happens with both men and women. There is no gender that has an exclusive on gaslighting. Anyone who wants to gain control over another will try to manipulate the facts to get the upper hand.

Another example might be a family member who is always setting up little traps for you to fall into and when you question what happened or why she or he did it, the gaslighter says you’re too sensitive but doesn’t answer the question. You are put on the defensive and find yourself arguing or trying harder to get your gaslighter to see your point of view, which never happens. It is possible over time to get beaten down and become certain that you are at fault.

Gaslighting Changes Your World View

If you are gaslighted by someone, the world seems cockeyed and you’re driven crazy by hearing one thing and thinking something else happened. You run the tapes in your head over and over to figure out if you’re right or wrong. You try to defend yourself and work harder to prove yourself to the other person.

The Expert Explains

Robin Stern, PhD, Author of The Gaslight Effect, says there are three stages of gaslighting. The first is disbelief it is happening. The second is defending yourself against the manipulation and trying hard to find ways to make it stop by getting the other person see you’re not what they think. The third stage is depression. This is when you experience a personality change. You are unhappy and unlike yourself. People express concern about you and treat you as if you really do have a problem. Gaslighting really happens in many kinds of relationships and can seriously damage people’s self esteem. Read Robin’s warning signs below to see if you have experienced them.

Where Does Gaslighting Come From

The term comes from the 1944 film called Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, & Joseph Cotton. The insidious husband does it to his wife to drive her crazy. It’s a great movie, and, even though a little histrionic in the acting, not out of date at all.

14 Warning Signs of The Gaslighting Tango

You are constantly second-guessing yourself.
You ask yourself, “Am I too sensitive?” a dozen times a day.
You often feel confused and even crazy at work.
You’re always apologizing to your mother, father, boyfriend, boss.
 You can’t understand why, with so many apparently good things in your life, you aren’t happier.
You frequently make excuses for your partner’s behavior to friends and family.
You find yourself withholding information from friends and family so you don’t have to explain or make excuses.
You know something is terribly wrong, but you can never quite express what it is, even to yourself.
You start trying to do things to avoid the put downs and reality twists.
You have trouble making simple decisions.
You have the sense that you used to be a very different person – more confident, more fun-loving, more relaxed.
You feel hopeless and joyless.
You feel as though you can’t do anything right.
You wonder if you are a “good enough” girlfriend/ wife/employee/ friend; daughter.

If you need help to deal with addiction and recovery, check out Recovery Guidance for a free resource to find professionals near you.

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Alcohol-induced Brain Damage Continues After Alcohol Is Stopped

Although the harmful effects of alcohol on the brain are widely known, the structural changes observed are very heterogeneous. In addition, diagnostic markers are lacking to characterize brain damage induced by alcohol, especially at the beginning of abstinence, a critical period due to the high rate of relapse that it presents.

Now, a joint work of the Institute of Neuroscience CSIC-UMH, in Alicante, and the Central Institute of Mental Health of Mannheim, in Germany, has detected, by means of magnetic resonance, how the damage in the brain continues during the first weeks of abstinence, although the consumption of alcohol ceases.

The research, published today in JAMA Psychiatry, whose first author is Silvia de Santis, shows that six weeks after stopping drinking there are still changes in the white matter of the brain, as revealed by the neuroimaging study carried out on ninety voluntary patients interned for his rehabilitation treatment in a German hospital.

The results of this work are surprising, explains Dr. Santiago Canals, of the Institute of Neurosciences CSIC-UMH, who has coordinated the research: “Until now, nobody could believe that in the absence of alcohol the damage in the brain would progress.”

Ninety patients with an average age of 46 years hospitalized because of an alcohol use disorder participated in this study. To compare the brain magnetic resonances of these patients, a control group without alcohol problems was used, consisting of 36 men with an average age of 41 years.

“An important aspect of the work is that the group of patients participating in our research are hospitalized in a detoxification program, and their consumption of addictive substances is controlled, which guarantees that they are not drinking any alcohol. Therefore, the abstinence phase can be followed closely,” highlights Dr. Canals.

Another differential characteristic of this study is that it has been carried out in parallel in a model with Marchigian Sardinian rats with preference for alcohol, which allows to monitor the transition from normal to alcohol dependence in the brain, a process that is not possible to see in humans,” explains Dr. De Santis.

The damages observed during the period of abstinence affect mainly the right hemisphere and the frontal area of the brain and reject the conventional idea that the microstructural alterations begin to revert to normal values immediately after abandoning the consumption of alcohol.

With the consumption of alcohol “there is a generalized change in the white matter, that is, in the set of fibers that communicate different parts of the brain. The alterations are more intense in the corpus callosum and the fimbria. The corpus callosum is related to the communication between both hemispheres. The fimbria contains the nerve fibers that communicate the hippocampus, a fundamental structure for the formation of memories, the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex, “explains Dr. Canals. The nucleus accumbens is part of the reward system of the brain and the prefrontal cortex is fundamental in decision making.

The researchers from Alicante and Germany now try to characterize the inflammatory and degenerative processes independently and more precisely, in order to investigate the progression during the early abstinence phase in people with alcohol abuse problems.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Opioid Epidemic Is Increasing Rates Of Some Infectious Diseases

From NIH:

The United States faces a converging public health crisis as the nation’s opioid epidemic fuels growing rates of certain infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, heart infections, and skin and soft tissue infections. Infectious disease and substance use disorder professionals must work together to stem the mounting public health threat, according to a new commentary in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. The article was co-authored by officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Since 1999, nearly 400,000 people in the United States have fatally overdosed on opioid-containing drugs, with 47,600 deaths in 2017 alone. Many people with opioid use disorder (OUD), who initially were prescribed oral drugs to treat pain, now inject prescribed or illegal opioids. High-risk injection practices such as needle-sharing are causing a surge in infectious diseases. Additionally, risky sexual behaviors associated with injection drug use have contributed to the spread of sexually transmitted infections.

Infectious disease health professionals can play an important role in addressing the problem by not only treating a patient’s injection drug use-associated infection but also connecting the patient for treatment of their underlying OUD, the authors write. For example, coupling opioid agonist therapy, such as methadone, with treatment for HIV or hepatitis C, can prevent further transmission of those viruses and reduce opioid use. Comprehensive treatment will result in improved outcomes for both the infectious disease and the underlying OUD, according to the authors.

Conversely, substance use disorder health providers should screen their patients for unrecognized infectious diseases and consult with their infectious disease colleagues regarding a comprehensive treatment plan. Substance use disorder professionals also should be aware of and direct patients to needle and syringe programs, which can decrease injection risks and provide an opportunity to provide other services as well.

New federal resources made available to address the growing opioid epidemic can assist health professionals in improving and implementing coordinated, evidence-based strategies to prevent and treat OUD and opioid-associated infections. These efforts will be key to stemming and ultimately ending the intertwined problem of OUD and infectious disease, according to the commentary.

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Just 20 minutes Of Contact With Nature Will Lower Stress Hormone Levels

From Science Daily:

Taking at least twenty minutes out of your day to stroll or sit in a place that makes you feel in contact with nature will significantly lower your stress hormone levels. That’s the finding of a study that has established for the first time the most effective dose of an urban nature experience. Healthcare practitioners can use this discovery, published in Frontiers in Psychology, to prescribe ‘nature-pills’ in the knowledge that they have a real measurable effect.

“We know that spending time in nature reduces stress, but until now it was unclear how much is enough, how often to do it, or even what kind of nature experience will benefit us,” says Dr. MaryCarol Hunter, an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and lead author of this research. “Our study shows that for the greatest payoff, in terms of efficiently lowering levels of the stress hormone cortisol, you should spend 20 to 30 minutes sitting or walking in a place that provides you with a sense of nature.”

A free and natural stress-relieving remedy

Nature pills could be a low-cost solution to reduce the negative health impacts stemming from growing urbanization and indoor lifestyles dominated by screen viewing. To assist healthcare practitioners looking for evidence-based guidelines on what exactly to dispense, Hunter and her colleagues designed an experiment that would give a realistic estimate of an effective dose.

Over an 8-week period, participants were asked to take a nature pill with a duration of 10 minutes or more, at least 3 times a week. Levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, were measured from saliva samples taken before and after a nature pill, once every two weeks.

“Participants were free to choose the time of day, duration, and the place of their nature experience, which was defined as anywhere outside that in the opinion of the participant, made them feel like they’ve interacted with nature. There were a few constraints to minimize factors known to influence stress: take the nature pill in daylight, no aerobic exercise, and avoid the use of social media, internet, phone calls, conversations and reading,” Hunter explains.

She continues, “Building personal flexibility into the experiment, allowed us to identify the optimal duration of a nature pill, no matter when or where it is taken, and under the normal circumstances of modern life, with its unpredictability and hectic scheduling.”

To make allowances for busy lifestyles, while also providing meaningful results, the experimental design was novel in other aspects too.

“We accommodated day to day differences in a participant’s stress status by collecting four snapshots of cortisol change due to a nature pill,” says Hunter. “It also allowed us to identify and account for the impact of the ongoing, natural drop in cortisol level as the day goes on, making the estimate of effective duration more reliable.”

Nature will nurture

The data revealed that just a twenty-minute nature experience was enough to significantly reduce cortisol levels. But if you spent a little more time immersed in a nature experience, 20 to 30 minutes sitting or walking, cortisol levels dropped at their greatest rate. After that, additional de-stressing benefits continue to add up but at a slower rate.

“Healthcare practitioners can use our results as an evidence-based rule of thumb on what to put in a nature-pill prescription,” says Hunter. “It provides the first estimates of how nature experiences impact stress levels in the context of normal daily life. It breaks new ground by addressing some of the complexities of measuring an effective nature dose.”

Hunter hopes this study will form the basis of further research in this area.

“Our experimental approach can be used as a tool to assess how age, gender, seasonality, physical ability and culture influences the effectiveness of nature experiences on well-being. This will allow customized nature pill prescriptions, as well as a deeper insight on how to design cities and wellbeing programs for the public.”

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Ghosting and Gaslighting Revisited

Ghosting makes you disappear. Gaslighting drives you crazy. There are no rules on how to behave these days. That’s the reason our two articles What is Gaslighting and Ghosting, Why It Hurts have provoked such powerful responses.

The term gaslighting, of course, comes from a mid century movie in which a husband tried to kill his wife by altering her reality and making her think she was crazy.

Many readers didn’t have a word for what they know a loved one is doing to make them feel crazy and confused. It turns out thousands of people experience this on a daily basis from spouses, parents, siblings, children, cousins, friends. Who knew this was so prevalent. Both men and women have gaslighting done to them, and everyone is confused by it. Loving and healthy people don’t lie and try to hurt you. Why would a loved one do it? (This is a mental health question. People with personality disorders do it.) Having a name for a behavior that really hurts you helps to explain it. It also helps you to decide what to do about it. Being gaslighted makes you want to tear your hair out, and that is the intention. People do it to control you. Do you want to be controlled?

If You Resist Gaslighting, You May Get Ghosted

Ghosting is a term that means someone has cut you off and cut you out. It includes de-friending on social media, not returning phone calls, and basically acting as if the ghoster never knew you. Ghosting in dating leaves the ghosted one wondering what happened. In friendship, the same. Why would someone just disappear you with no explanation? Why not be honest and say the relationship isn’t working out. If it’s an adult child who ghosts a parent, being disappeared as if the parent never existed is painful beyond belief. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, except accept it and move on. On the positive side, ghosting sets you free from someone who doesn’t care about you. That’s a good thing.

Escape From Toxic Relationships

Ghosting also occurs when someone needs to get away from an abusive or dangerous person. Moving, changing numbers, blocking phone calls are all totally necessary for survival. But that is not really ghosting. One reader said there should be two terms for ending relationships, and we agree. Clarity here would help. Cutting someone out and disappearing for survival is not ghosting. There’s nothing wrong or pejorative about getting away. It’s a form of empowerment, healing, moving on. No explanations to the dangerous or toxic person are necessary. In fact, the less said the better.

Why Not Be Honest

Many of our readers wrote that they ghosted people all the time. Maybe all of us have done it at one time or another. I know I have, but not intentionally. Is it laziness, busy life? I know that I get so many emails every day, I can’t remember to do everything I should to be thoughtful and kind. I simply can’t remember everything and everybody. If we were all Taylor Swift, the world would be a nicer place. But if a relationship isn’t working out with someone you once cared about, it would be nice if an explanation were offered. A lot of our readers think so. Others shrug and move on. We’re all different. No one answer is the right one.

What is Etiquette

There used to be a thing called etiquette. Everybody learned it. How many people these days know how to spell etiquette, or much less know what the word means. My grandmother had a strong set of rules on how to behave in every situation. Basically they revolved around the idea of “the other fellow first.” Be kind. Don’t think of yourself. Be compassionate. Say nice things. Don’t backbite, complain, or gossip. Always pitch in and help, give to charity, care about others. Don’t talk about it when you’re hurting. No one wants to hear your problems. Those philosophies make it nice for everyone around you, but are not ideal for developing a strong sense of self, fairness, and confidence in you. Those rules had no place for one’s own feelings, and did not acknowledge the complicated reality of other people’s mental health and how it affects you. You might be following the rules while others around you without good intentions could well be taking advantage of it. Think Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. And if the wolf is a substances user, it gets even more treacherous.

Self Awareness Is The Key To Better Relationships

Who are you? What do you want for yourself? What can you tolerate from people around you? What behaviors are absolute no-nos? Understanding these things can help you navigate what has become a much trickier world without rules to keep you safe.

 

 

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4 Steps For Resolving Conflicts

Who decides what’s right and what’s wrong when people disagree or have a problem to solve? How should we behave? Here are four steps for resolving conflicts.

1. Define What Unites

Conflicts are not black and white. They are glorious swirling shades of gray. We are not all right. Nor are we all wrong. In conflict resolution we look for the balance in the situation. Despite the disagreements, usually most parties are fighting for the same principle. We are all trying to reach the same goal, but perhaps each has a different route.

To find what unites all parties, ask yourself:

What is our united focus?
Despite the conflict what is the single purpose we are trying to achieve?
Can we leave other issues outside of this one discussion and not add fuel to the fire by bringing in other issues or conflicts?
What am I willing to set aside in order to resolve the conflict?

2. Set The Stage For A Peace

Before conflicts can be addressed, it’s important to create a safe place:

Everyone has an equal voice. No one can dominate by battering.
Everyone’s opinion matters. Really.
Everyone behaves on a mature way, leaving baggage from family of origin behind.
Ethics and principles of fair play are the guides for finding solutions that work for everyone.

3. Do Your Homework

Before you broach the conflict, make sure you can articulate your position. Answering these four questions will help you separate your personal feelings from the higher common good.

How is this one particular conflict affecting the whole group dynamic?
Am I actively listening to others and not reacting to them?
Do I let others voice their opinions and ideas?
Am I helping to find a resolution or hindering by making it all about me?

4. Discuss In A Voice Of Mutual Respect

In a healthy conflict situation, we intentionally set aside our personal power or authority. It’s not about winning or losing but rather arriving at a common destination. During the meeting, all parties should ask themselves to:

Keep an open mind. Respond rather than react to the other parties involved.
Have compassion and understanding for all who are involved in this one issue and conflict.
Show kindness to others whose opinions are different than mine.
Know and acknowledge that there is abundance in the universe. No one has to make fear-based decision.
Stay in the present. Worrying about being left out in the future will impede today’s progress.
Communicate from personal experience. Share what works for you and acknowledge something different may work for another.
Share as an equal. No one is less than the other parties involved and no one is greater.
Stay focused on the matter at hand. Do not get distracted by other unrelated issues.

I have to remind myself that while there is a conflict, I am not being attacked personally, but rather I will work with others to find solutions to the issue at hand. We need this in every area of life.

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3 Steps To Get Free Of Manipulation

Manipulation is getting you to do, often unreasonable, things that you really don’t want to do. It’s important to know that manipulation is often built on a series of lies or misinformation intended to inspire feelings of guilt or sorrow, or worry about what could happen. Your natural eagerness to fix things fuels the manipulator to ask for more. Yet no matter how many hoops you jump through nothing is fixed for long. Manipulators rely on you to back down and give in to ever greater demands. Call it an addiction.

Manipulators use arguments, moods, emotional threats, etc. to keep you working for them no matter what the cost to you. A few examples include:

Transportation anywhere any time for any reason
Money for crisis after crisis
Help finding shelter, jobs, food, travel, medical needs, law enforcement, legal
Job covering up or fixing things
Moral Support on the phone for hours every day

How to disengage is ridiculously easy in concept and incredibly difficult in reality because manipulators will stop at nothing to confuse you and make you think you’re both essential to them and crazy or selfish or plain mean for objecting. Steps to recovering your sanity and your life include Awareness, Thinking About Change, and Taking Action.

Step One: How Do You Know You’re Being Manipulated

It’s simple. You’re uncomfortable.
You never have a free day to be yourself or do what you want to do.
You dread interaction with the manipulators in your life.
Someone asks you to do something you know isn’t right.
Someone tells you something you know isn’t true.
You don’t dare tell your true feelings because it will start an argument.
You explain your feelings endlessly, but only to yourself.
Someone’s tugging on your heartstrings so you’ll feel guilty, responsible, horrible, if you don’t fulfill requests.
You lose sleep over the one-sided relationship and what you should be doing about it.
You’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t do what you’re asked.

Step Two: How To Begin Thinking About Change

It may come as a huge relief to know you can get out from under by beginning to say no. If someone asks you to dance you can say no. Or if someone offers you food and you’re not hungry you can say no. When someone makes you feel bad all the time, you have the choice to disengage.

It takes a lot of practice to say no to manipulation. With children and teens it takes a professional, so be sure to ask for help. If you feel you’re going crazy, it may not be you. Your manipulator has gotten into your head and is telling you how you should think and what you should do. You can stop his/her voice in your head by the following.

Don’t accept anyone’s lies as your reality.
Rely on facts instead of stories about who’s to blame. Especially if the other person thinks you’re to blame. Get the facts.
Don’t even think about arguing. There’s no way you can win in an argument with a manipulator.
Stop listening to anger and hurt feelings. It doesn’t help the other person to vent to you, and only hurts you to listen.
Your actions can be guided by the truth, your feelings, and what’s right for you.

Step Three: Taking Action

It’s really scary to change. What are the right actions to take? This depends on many factors including whether your manipulator is living with you, is potentially dangerous, or at risk for suicide or overdose. If you are fearful, call the hotline below.

Setting boundaries is a good first step. You may already know that your manipulator will not accept boundaries, but try it with empathy and firmness. You can always disengage further if you need to. Setting boundaries on phone calls, visits, running errands and paying for things works like this:

Accept one phone call a day, not a dozen.
Talk for one minute, not 40.
Don’t be available for visits or errands that aren’t convenient for you. Really this is important. You can say no and the world won’t end.
Don’t listen to venting. Say you have to go.
Don’t take blame for someone else’s troubles and woes. Say you have to go.
Don’t argue. Say you have to go.
Get help if your manipulator is living with you.
Get support from family or friends or a therapist when you’re badgered, or feel anxious or hopeless.

Living A More Peaceful Life

Having a manipulator in your life means the storm is constantly in you. Someone is always tugging at your heartstrings. Freeing yourself means the storm will be transferred to the other person for a while. He or she won’t want to let you go. But then, he or she may grow up, and start taking responsibility for himself and find happiness when you stop jumping at every command. It happens.

Or she/he may just stay mad and feel thwarted. That’s his or her choice and consequence. Your reality will be different. It will get quiet and peaceful if you let your anxieties go. Many people turn to God for love and support. Others start doing all the things they didn’t have time for when they were the serving others’ needs. Our advice is to get as close to nature as you can. Nature is a good model. It is cruel, but always changing. Beauty always follows the storms. We can learn to change with nature and the seasons.

Take walks, go to the movies, bowl or play tennis or golf. Take up gardening. Learn to cook or quilt. Read a novel. No one should be dominated by another. The pain and guilt of letting go passes if you let it. Counseling can help you break free from manipulation and addiction. Find help near you at Recovery Guidance.

The post 3 Steps To Get Free Of Manipulation appeared first on Reach Out Recovery.

The Truth About Family Estrangement

From The BBC:

Being estranged from a relative comes with myths – and stigma. But it’s more common, and in some cases can be healthier, than you might think.

It’s often said that food brings people together. But it can also split families apart.

Cookbook author Nandita Godbole has experienced this first-hand. Her affluent Indian family, who generally had hired cooks in their homes, disapproved of her choice of profession. By working with food, she was going against their expectations. When Godbole’s recent book Ten Thousand Tongues: Secrets of a Layered Kitchen delved deep into family history, she met even more resistance.

Clearly, this wasn’t just about the food. By changing traditional recipes – and exploring parts of her family history that others felt ownership over – she was perceived as challenging family hierarchies. Some relatives stopped speaking to her.

Godbole’s story may be unique. But her experience of disconnection from her family is far from unusual.

More than 40% of study participants had experienced family estrangement at some point

Family estrangement has been defined as distancing and loss of affection that occurs over years or even decades within a family. It isn’t clear if such estrangement is on the rise, since it is a relatively young field of research.

But it is common. Research by Stand Alone, a UK charity that supports people who are estranged from relatives, suggests that estrangement affects at least one in five British families. One US study of more than 2,000 mother-child pairs found that 10% of mothers were currently estranged from at least one adult child. And one US study found that more than 40% of participants had experienced family estrangement at some point – suggesting that in certain groups, such as US college students, estrangement may be almost as common as divorce.

Stand Alone founder Becca Bland, who has personal experience of estrangement as she has no contact with her parents, has also noticed that the topic is much more discussed now than it was even five years ago. This is borne out by Google Trends data showing steady growth in people searching for estrangement-related terms, primarily in Canada, Australia and Singapore.

“I think Meghan Markle and the royal family have definitely made family estrangement news,” says Bland. The Duchess of Sussex, who in 2018 was the most Googled person in the UK (and second most Googled person in the US), has driven recent conversation around complex families due to her own difficult relationship with her father. So have other celebrities like Anthony Hopkins, who acknowledged in a 2018 interview that he’s barely spoken with his daughter in two decades. Celebrity gossip can be a useful way for ordinary people to process and explain their own life experiences.Y

Though examples of estrangement can be found around the globe, it’s more common in some societies than others.

One factor seems to be whether a government offers strong support to residents. In countries with robust welfare systems, people simply need their families less – giving them more choice over whether to maintain ties. In Europe, for instance, older parents and adult children tend to interact more and live closer to each other in countries further south, where public assistance is more limited.

Financial factors also intersect with other factors, such as education and race. In Germany, higher education levels of adult children are associated with higher rates of conflict with their parents. One theory is that highly educated family members are likely to be more geographically mobile, and less likely to need each other financially.

The research of Megan Gilligan and colleagues, on caregiving-related conflict in US families, has shown racial differences in the experiences of adult children. But it can be difficult to separate out the influences of culture and class. Gilligan, a gerontologist at Iowa State University, notes that in the US, “minority families tend to co-reside more; they tend to be more reliant on exchanges”.  

In Uganda, family estrangement is on the rise, says Stephen Wandera, a demographer at Makerere University in Kampala. Ugandan families have traditionally been large and extended – which proved crucial in recent decades as family members stepped in to care for people orphaned or devastated by civil war or Aids.

But in recent research, Wandera and colleagues found that 9% of Ugandans aged 50 and over live alone – a surprisingly high percentage. That’s not the same as estrangement, of course. But Wandera says that as families get smaller and more nuclear, and as urbanisation increases, the prevalence of estrangement is likely to rise.

This won’t be happening right away. “Cultural norms are still strong, and they take time to fade,” he says. But Wandera expects change within 20 years or so.

This doesn’t mean that governments should limit financial support to older people to encourage stronger families. Spanish family culture has been called “more coercive” than, for example, Norway’s, where intergenerational relationships are generally more amicable because they’re chosen and less financially pressured.

Why it happens

Divorce contributes to the loss of family relationships, especially with fathers. So do secrets. The abandonment of relatives with marginalised identities is also a common factor, such as family rejection of sexual and gender minorities in Vietnam.

But estrangement is often quiet and undramatic. Gilligan explains that it’s typically gradual, rather than a big event. The people she’s interviewed have often said “I don’t quite know how this happened” rather than pointing to a specific incident, she says.

Still, even if the triggers seem trivial, they reflect long-lived tension. Families looking to reconcile should recognise that conflicts are unlikely to be just about isolated incidents, so it could be helpful to engage with the past.

For those seeking reconciliation – or to prevent estrangement to begin with – suspending judgement may also be helpful. In her research with older mothers, 10% of whom were estranged from an adult child, Gilligan found that the most significant factor in the estrangement was a mismatch in values. For instance, “if the mother really valued the religious beliefs and practices and the child had violated them, the mother… really viewed it as offensive”, she says.

Factors went beyond religion too. One mother who highly valued truthfulness cut off a son who told lies, while a mother who highly valued self-reliance stopped speaking with a daughter who she believed was dependent on a man.

Violations of what mothers saw as their personal values made estrangement even more likely than if the child had committed a crime

In fact, these violations of what mothers saw as their personal values made estrangement even more likely than when there were societal norm violations – such as the child having committed a crime. And this value congruence was more important to mothers than to fathers.

The mothers “were kind of describing the things they just couldn’t let go [of] – things that had happened that had been upsetting to the mother”, Gilligan says. “It just constantly kept coming up in the relationships. So they never got over it.”

And as in the classic Japanese film Rashomon or the TV series The Affair, two people can have such different memories of the same experience that it’s almost as if it wasn’t the same experience at all.

Adult children in the UK, for example, most often mention emotional abuse as the cause of their estrangement from their parents. But parents are much less likely to mention emotional abuse (which refers to persistent attempts at control through humiliation, criticism or any of a number of other damaging behaviours). Instead, they referred more often to causes like divorce, or mismatched expectations.

Since Gilligan’s research was focused on mothers, she didn’t speak with their children. So, it’s difficult to know if the same trend would have applied. But either way, this disconnect is common. “The estranged adult child and the parent are not communicating about what’s upsetting to them, so I don’t really think they’re on the same page at all,” she says. And, of course, if one person is defensive or unwilling to listen, the pair might be speaking without truly communicating.  

Bland sees this disconnect as stemming from how the generations have very different conceptions of family.

“There was a rigidity about family in the post-war generation” in the UK, she says. People saw their family relationships in terms of concepts of duty and self-sacrifice, which sometimes meant people putting up with emotional or physical abuse – or not perceiving it.

For siblings, mismatched values and expectations also play a role. But parental favouritism is another significant factor.

Estrangement’s upsides

While it could be easy to see estrangement as solely negative, the reality is more complicated. Just as traditional taboos against divorce can keep women tethered to abusive and exploitative marriages, a dogmatic belief in the sanctity of families can keep people suffering needlessly.

Some of the clinical literature would say, actually, estrangement is maybe the best way to deal with these types of relationships – Megan Gilligan

“Some of the clinical literature would say, actually, estrangement is maybe the best way to deal with these types of relationships,” says Gilligan. “If [relationships] are this conflictual, if they’re causing this much anguish… maybe this is the healthiest way for parents and adult children to deal with that.”

People can feel that cutting out toxic relationships was the right choice. The Stand Alone report found that, for more than 80% of people affected, choosing to end contact is associated with at least some positive outcomes like freedom and independence. It can be a crucial step away from a legacy of abuse.

It’s also important to note that estrangement isn’t always permanent; people cycle in and out of distance and reunification. Nor are conflicts always with every other member of a family. Trang Nguyen, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, comments that among Vietnamese families where there’s parental rejection of LGBT women or trans men, “usually siblings are closer, and a supportive sibling helps a lot”.

Family estrangement is painful partly because it’s an ambiguous loss, one without finality or closure.

It’s also one many other people don’t understand.

There definitely seems to be consequences of estrangement psychologically, but maybe the consequence is the stigma – Gilligan

“There definitely seems to be consequences of estrangement psychologically, but maybe the consequence is the stigma,” Gilligan says. In other words, cutting off contact with a family member might be most painful because of the way society misunderstands and attaches shame to it.

One online article aimed at pensioners blames individualism, divorce culture, psychotherapy, and “a child’s immaturity” for estrangement. Even therapists commonly blame, dismiss or disbelieve their patients who are describing estrangement. Women are especially likely to be stigmatised. Some people limit their social interactions to avoid discussing family.

But experts say that people who are already isolated from their families shouldn’t be made to feel even more alienated over their situation – whether it was one over which they had little control, or a decision unlikely to have been reached lightly. From an academic standpoint, the stigma also makes it hard to know exactly how many people are estranged from their families. It’s especially likely to be under-reported in cultures where it’s socially unacceptable to discuss family conflict.

Cookbook author Godbole is familiar with that stigma. “I have accepted that it may take a while for people to come around, and some never may,” she says. “I am OK with that.”

Estrangement, it seems, doesn’t always need to be “fixed”. But as with other painful experiences, the shame of the situation might.

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