We're here today to acknowledge, perhaps to celebrate, but I think as much to acknowledge that it's Julian Assange's birthday and it's an entirely appropriate time to reflect upon the cost to whistleblowers at any level of standing out and speaking out against abuse of power. And what Julian Assange represents is the way that systems of power around the globe delivered by governments with a strong self-interest to protect their secrets and to hide their mysteries, the extent to which governments around the world will go to monster, criminalise and imprison whistleblowers. And Julian Assange is the, tragically, the global poster boy for exactly the lengths to which governments will go to keep their secrets secret. So we're gathered here today to say that that must end. And this new parliament that we have should do some of that heavy lifting at a national level. Now that of course involves fundamentally reforming our whistleblower laws in Australia, protecting whistleblowers who speak out, creating new institutions like a whistleblower commission and welfare agency to ensure that whistleblowers are protected, but surely if the new government wanted to send a signal to whistleblowers within Australia that they will be protected, that this new government is on their side, the easiest, simplest message they could send right now would be to directly cable Washington and say pull the charges from Julian Assange and free Julian Assange and that's pretty high. That would be the simplest message. And that's what we are calling upon the Australian government to do today. And yet we have, we've seen the Prime Minister just in the last few weeks refuse to do that. Refuse to take the most obvious step and not only protect Julian Assange but send that signal to the Australian people, to the Australian public service, the whistleblowers actually will be protected going forward. And the failure to do that I think is a deeply troubling step from this federal government. It can still be corrected of course and I think part of what we're doing today is to hopefully extend the call to save the federal government correct course and actually send the cable as soon as possible because what has Julian Assange been charged with? Well, he's been charged under the Eskinadject and in fact was originally charged after a grand jury in the state of Virginia charged him with account of computer intrusion and hacking for allegedly assisting private money. Now if you know anything about the US criminal justice system they say that a grand jury would have died to have sandwich if the case were presented. But nevertheless that grand jury indicted him on one charge and then in May 2019 Julian was further charged under the US Eskinadject with 17 counts of soliciting, gathering and publishing US military and diplomatic documents in 2010. And all of those provided by private money, then private money. Now, what's remarkable about that May 2019 series of charges is that they post state, they post state the commutation of private mania's offences. So after the US government commuted those offences from Manning, two years later they went in and charged an Australian citizen for a few many ways a second order offence not the original leaking but the publishing and dissemination of the offence. So there are many things that Bob Carr and I disagree on. The former foreign minister. There are many things that I disagree on with Bob Carr but one thing I will agree on is when he came out and said why is there one rule for a US citizens and one rule for Australian citizens and why isn't the Australian government calling out that double standard and making the demand right now. I think we need to go back and remember what Julianne's crime was, crime in inverted cons. The crime was releasing hundreds of thousands of documents of US documents, diplomatic cables, defence documents that exposed some appalling and in many cases systemic instances of war crimes and gross abuse of power. I mean, the first document that was released I remember being horrified when I saw it. The video of the Apache helicopter like ruthlessly, brutally and it was an insight into war really and all the war is a series of connected crimes if you think about it but it was an insight into war and the Apache helicopter killing Iraqis and also in that 39 minute video killing two gorgeous journalists if you remember and it was appalling and then it was a shocking kind of insight into war and then the utter disregard of life that is inherent in war but it was also an insight into how those truths were constantly and sustainably hidden not just from the global public but also in this case from the US public and the response from the US and Australia governments was to support ongoing secrecy but of course that was just the first documents that were then tranches and tranches of hundreds of thousands of other documents released many of which showed the deep complicity between US embassies and the US government about the abuse, direct interference in other nations interests, ongoing war crimes we had a further insight into the appalling human rights abuses in Abu Ghraib like there was a litany of crimes that were exposed in the work of Julian Assange it's just that Julian Assange didn't commit any of those crimes those crimes were committed by the US government and the US military and what we have seen since is as predicted by him as predicted by Julian around the world governments seeing their self-interest inciting the US and the US military complex and signing against whistleblowers and in this case sending a very clear message that they will hunt you down wherever you are around this globe and silence you and imprison you and in this case Julian is facing up to 175 years in jail for the crime of telling the truth but we know that telling the truth is not and cannot be a crime it's about time the Australian government understood that telling the truth is not and cannot be a crime and so on today being Julian Assange's birthday let's unite in making that call and let's hope that we get majority MPs in the federal parliament MPs and senators in the federal parliament join us in that call to release Julian Assange to drop the charges and to end that two track justice it can't be one rule for US citizens and one rule for Australian citizens let's bring Julian up thanks very much


OK, I'm just going to get that out of the way. Or I'm going to trip over it. My name's Joe Pierce. I'm non-binary. I'm a developer. I'm a general science wumble. That is, I'm not an academic, but I love to learn about a wide range of sciences and see if I can make good use of the things that I find. Recently, I've been wumbling around the field of cognitive psychology. And I want to use it to explain some ways we can manage information overload. So what is information overload? Why do we need to manage it? Well, in 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler popularized the term information overload in his book Future Shock. He considered the book a thesis on surviving the collision with tomorrow. In it, he wrote that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb. And that by accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of people to demands they simply cannot tolerate. We may submit them to information overload. Among the symptoms he ascribed to it were anxiety, hostility, apathy, physical illness, depression, and even senseless violence. The examples he used to illustrate the effects of overload came from stories of extreme environments like the battlefield of World War II, where a soldier falls asleep while a storm of machine gun bullets splattered around him. Not due to physical tiredness, but a sense of overpowering apathy. Soldiers became hypersensitive and would hit the dirt at the slightest stimuli, increasingly showing anxiety and anger at the slightest inconvenience. The source of overwhelming stimuli in extreme situations is clear. But what about here? Now, where there are no bullets or glass flying through the air around us? 20 million words of new technical information are recorded each day. At 1,000 words a minute, reading for eight hours a day, this is six weeks' worth of reading. After reading the information of that one day, you would have fallen behind by five and a half years' worth of reading. And these statistics are from 2001. Toffoli seems even more prescient that as there's now medically recognized condition called Information Fatigue Syndrome, with symptoms that include hurry sickness, the belief that one was constantly rushed to keep pace with time, and pervasive hostility, a chronic state of irritability near anger or even rage. These might sound familiar. I believe we see evidence of information fatigue all around us.   My particular favorite, a lot of work is done on the internet and the internet is its own special hellscape. Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it's literally a billion times worse. Take a look as well at how many tech blog writers use the word rant in the blog title. So how might we, as developers, be overloading ourselves? Let's look at front-end web development as an example. There has been a huge growth in the number of frameworks and tools. This means that it's not only hard to keep up with what's out there, but that no one can know everything. If you ever work in a project with multiple unfamiliar tools and frameworks, information overload is a risk. So development is always going to be a learning process because there's always a lot to learn. Perhaps that means we can manage information overload by managing how we learn. It helps to understand a little bit about how we learn in order to hack the process. The two partners of human learning are our working memory and long-term memory. Working memory is where we process information. It's the site of our active conscious thinking and learning processes. Long-term memory has enormous capacity but cannot engage in conscious thinking or learning. They work together. Learning takes place in working memory, and the results are stored in long-term memory. But what are the results that we store? The learning process involves the creation of what we call schemas. These are memory structures that allow us to treat a large number of information elements as though they were a single element. We have schemas for everything. For example, while all trees are different and include an enormous amount of sensory information, we instantly recognize a tree because we have a schema for trees. Schemas are constructed additively for a novice learner. Every new thing is unconnected and must be managed separately. But as we gain experience, we form connections between the bits of information in our head allowing us to treat these collections as single schemas. But there are limits on our ability to learn. Back in 1956, cognitive psychologist George A. Miller, Gesundheit, investigated these limits on our ability to process information. You may have come across Miller's Law or the magical number seven plus or minus two. Miller's research suggested that there's a definable limit on the amount of information we can usefully process in our working memory at any one time. And when that limit has exceeded, information overload leads to our learning becoming inefficient. Some web designers have used Miller's Law as justification for only putting seven or fewer things on a page. But this is a misinterpretation. It wasn't the number of things that was the important result, but the fact that there was always a limit. We now equate the things themselves to the schemas that I mentioned. Someone with experience who has more connected schemas will be able to handle more complex information in working memory at once. So how do we use the result of Miller's research? Well, in the late 1980s, John Sweller, an educational psychologist, asked what we can do to learn more efficiently given the limitations that Miller defined. His research led to cognitive load theory. What is cognitive load theory? Well, very simply, it defines cognitive load as the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory and describes a universal set of principles for managing cognitive load that lead to more efficient learning. I wanna give you just a brief overview of the core concept. Total cognitive load is comprised of three types. Intrinsic load, extraneous or irrelevant load, and domain or relevant load. Intrinsic load is imposed by the complexity of the task being performed. So learning to juggle with 10 balls is more complex than learning with three. We can only reduce intrinsic load by juggling fewer balls. Or in other words, if we're faced with a large complex task, we wanna break it up into smaller ones. We can then tackle these individually. You might be familiar with the agile hierarchy where we define a high-level epic to then break down into user stories which we further break down into tasks. Estimating an epic would impose an extremely high intrinsic load. Estimating user stories at tasks should be more manageable. Extraneous or irrelevant load is imposed by distractions or tasks that are irrelevant to the goal. These could be noise distractions, needing to learn an unfamiliar tool or a set of tools, or trying to decipher code that's unreadable or difficult to follow. To manage a relevant load, we could try working in a quieter environment or wearing headphones. Try reducing the number of tools or libraries we use to a minimum. There's a growing movement originating from Keith Circle to use NPM scripts alone for front-end task running, thus eliminating grunt, gulp, and webpack. Make sure that the code we write is readable. Never forget that the person unable to decipher your code might be future you. Style conformance tools like Lintas might also help you maintain consistency without having to impose the extra load of learning a style guide. How many times have you seen a style guide that's gathered dust due to the extra load that's required to maintain or learn it? So, we can manage extraneous load by reducing irrelevant tasks and distractions.  It helps us to connect the bits of information and form more complex schemas. Repetition and context variation give us the skills to apply knowledge in a wider variety of situations. By repetition, I mean practice. Schemas need reinforcing the repeated usage. This makes them easier for the working memory to retrieve in process. You can vary the context by seeking out multiple sources of information. There is no such thing as the definitive tree. It might be that only after seeing something expressed in five different contexts are you able to confidently recognize it yourself in a sixth. This might be easier to understand if I give an example in another context. So, the goal of a developer is to better understand the code base. We might assist that goal by varying the areas of the code base that they're assigned to work on. We might also pair a junior developer with one more senior to help them understand varied approaches and develop more complex transferable schemas. So, to sum up, we constantly need to learn, but there are limits on our ability to learn. Cognitive load theory can help us work within those limits, giving us a set of guiding principles. If we manage intrinsic load by breaking large tasks into smaller ones, reduce extraneous load by eliminating irrelevant tasks and distractions, and increase relevant load with appropriate repetition and varied learning context, we promote efficient learning, improve productivity, and escape the horrors of information overload. Thank you. Any questions? Beginners reading the subject. That's a good question, actually. I've looked at lots and lots of books on this, but my main one has actually just been a big cognitive psychology first year textbook. I think it's by Isink, Michael Isink. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a beginner book on this, though. There are some good books on safari. I think there's one by someone called Ruth Colvin, which is worth reading. I can't remember the title of it, though. It's probably because it's about a paragraph. Yes. John, when I code and do nothing else at work, I use focus. The only thing that helps me to stay focused is I talk with somebody on Skype. On Skype, not Viber, not WhatsApp, I talk to people on Skype, and then I actually code faster. I measure it. Can you explain this to me? Is it a normal fact? Well, I'm not a psychotherapist, so possibly not. Different things will definitely work for different people. So this is just a set of guiding principles. In your case, maybe whatever you're doing with Skype helps you to focus attention. Attention being one of the main things that Cognitive Law Theory actually writes about. There are various ways of focusing attention on learning material or whatever it is you're doing. If that helps you focus attention, then great. Why it does that? I don't know. Because the term is boring? I can't comment on that. Jamie, you mentioned that, didn't you? Yes, it's a terrific course. Yeah, I never got a chance to look at it before, but yeah. Does the topic, let me ask you, do you use things like meditation or mindfulness or things like that to help channel your focus? No, no, not at all. No. The closest I probably get to that is if I'm working in an open office, open plan office rather, I will have to put some kind of electronic music on my headphones purely to block out whatever's going on around me. But the research on whether music can help you focus your attention is slightly inconclusive. It might work for you, it might not. One of the things that the Learning How to Learn course that you all mentioned touches upon is simplified as the brain having a, I think we call it a diffuse mode that it works in, and a more focused mode. So sometimes you are kind of in this state where maybe you're more receptive to external information and in others where you're more channeling stuff that's already in your head, I suppose, that form part of this thesis is that an area that's of interest? Excuse me, I'm just talking about, is it diffuse state versus flow? That's it, yeah. Yeah. Cognitive load theory is sort of educational psychology, so it's more about learning rather than doing, but it's probably tangentially related, somehow. Learning. Yes. Videos versus reading versus talking to somebody who knows. Of course, now I know the answer. A person that knows and makes it sure is the best. So learning. That's an interesting question, actually, because assuming that the quality of the information is roughly similar, cognitive load theory does have something to say on whether you should have visual audio and visual material, visual material alone, so textual graphic, because there's part of it which I didn't go into, which is the modes of absorbing information, which is in auditory and visual, and that they can work together. So if you have visual graphic, something like a diagram, and you have auditory information describing the diagram, that will work better than simple text on the diagram. However, if it gets a bit complicated because of this text on the diagram and the audio information is slightly different to the text that's on the diagram, you'll actually expend load on comparing the two in your head going, hang on, they're not the same, and you won't pay attention. But yeah, that's a whole area I didn't really go into. Is there any research on how similar or different we as individuals learn, because I think in a lot of fields now, I feel like the 21st century is more about recognizing that we're quite different, each one of us, and that this might be one of those areas in which the learning process is going to vary, and that's true. What can we do as individuals to kind of test our? Well, what they, like I said earlier, they reckon that it's a universal set of principles that it works for everyone. It doesn't tell you specifically what will work for everyone, but that, for example, there's a whole area on cues and signals within learning material. It doesn't tell you that the same cues and signals will work for everyone. And it doesn't say anything about actually making it interesting. You know, engaging interest with learners is a big problem, and it doesn't mention anything about that. It just assumes that the people want to learn the information. And if you want to learn the information, this is got what you need. But yeah, that's a whole other problem. Is Future Sharks still relevant? Sorry? Is Future Sharks still relevant? Oh, Future Sharks. I've always wanted to read it. I just never have. It's surprisingly so, yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit, yeah, a little bit out of date. I mean, some of the language is a little bit, you wouldn't use it now. But yeah, some of it still seems quite pressing. Yeah? To memorize new information, often I use software like SuperMemo or Anki. The software about space repetition, the optimal time to repeat the same information in order to learn it. Oh, is it like flashcard type things? Is it like flashcards that repeats it to you periodically? SuperMemo is like it shows the information that you need to learn and optimal time. Just if you have some experience about this software, like SuperMemo or Anki, and if you can suggest something. I can't. I don't have any experience with those, but it does remind me of the recall graph that I was looking at the other day, which is probably how they calculate the optimal time. Yeah, because we don't forget in linear way. No.  Yeah. Last question. Are there any views or theories that challenge this theory right here? Is there anything else we should be thinking about? Is this definitely what it is? Or is there any other views? I mean, it's hard to say. This is true. It's not going to be an extra cut to that. To be fair, not being an academic, cognitive psychologist, I'm not really up with the current state of affairs. As far as I can tell, cognitive load theory is still fairly well regarded, but if there are, there's always things that challenge academia. So I'm sure you could find something. On that note, another round of applause, I think.


So what is this week about? We will be talking about multi-layer perceptrons, the simplest non-linear neural networks, including of the deep tanked. So what will we do today? We will first talk about a little bit about real neurons and we will actually simulate one. Then we will talk about the need for multi-layer perceptrons if we want to solve interesting prams. We will then talk about approximating functions with artificial neural networks and learn how that's always possible. Then we will start talking somewhat by classification. We will review cross-validation a little while we are there. We'll talk about deep for shallow networks. Then you'll learn about neural tangent kernels, which is, from my perspective, one of the coolest understandable parts of deep learning. And then ultimately, we will solve animal faces using multi-layer perceptrons, giving you, in a way, the first truly interesting deep learning pram that you'll be solving yourself. So let's dive right in. Here, on the right-hand side, we have a neuron. And it's hard to know how we should be thinking about these neurons. No, but like, here's the simplest abstraction of neurons that we could have. We can say the membrane of the neuron, now it has this big membrane, acts like a capacitor. And fast approximation, it does. And then we can say any input, any synapse to the neuron. Synapse is the place where the signal from previous neurons goes to this neuron, acts like a little bit of a battery or more precisely, like a current source. So how should we model this? We can say that the change in voltage on the capacitor is gonna be, and again, of course, this is an approximation to what would be happening in reality, is gonna be the weight of the synapse, if you want the strength of it, the size of it, times the input that we have there. And this is, of course, the change in voltage at that point of time. We assume that we have a discretized set of time points, T. We can alternatively write this as a differential equation, of course. No, and then what happens? In this simple approximation, we can say we start with a membrane voltage of zero. In reality, starting voltage might be more like minus 70 millivolts or something and maximal voltage might be plus 30 millivolts or something. But we start at zero, and at every point of time, we add this voltage change that depends on what the input is. And if the voltage exceeds a threshold, in this case one, we set the voltage to zero. We make it that at that time point, there is a spike. So the output of the neuron is one where otherwise it's zero. And otherwise, nothing happens and we keep integrating. So that's the simplest model that we can have for meaningful spiking neurons. It's called the integrate and fire neuron. And it's very popular in the field. Now, we will also add some leakage current. What that means is if the voltage is very high, it will go towards zero. If the voltage is very low, it will also go towards zero into the opposite direction. More precisely, there's a negative voltage proportional current. In biology, this is universally the case and it varies in strength from neuron to neuron.  Let us see them simulated and let's play a little bit with the parameters.


This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. And I'd like to welcome everybody today to cognitive behavioral therapy, addressing negative thoughts. Now, a lot of us took courses in cognitive behavioral therapy. We've worked with CBT for many, many years. So some of this is just going to be a refresher. And others, you know, you may pick up a few new tips or tools as we go along. So we're going to define cognitive behavioral therapy and its basic principles. Just get a really basic refresher on what was that original CBT about? We'll identify factors impacting people's choice of behaviors, because, you know, they always have a choice. We'll explore causes and the impact of thinking errors, whether you call them cognitive distortions, irrational thoughts, or when I work with my clients, I try to call them unhelpful beliefs or unhelpful thoughts, because distortions and irrational seem sort of pejorative to me. So I try to avoid those words as much as possible and help clients see them as not incorrect necessarily, but unhelpful. And then we'll identify some common thinking errors and their relationship to cognitive distortions and some of our just very basic fears. Why do we care? Well, because cognitive distortions or irrational thoughts or unhelpful thoughts, whatever you want to say, really impacts people on a physical level, a mental level, and an emotional level. A person who perceives the world as hostile, unsafe, and unpredictable will tend to be more hypervigilant until they exhaust the stress response system.  So a big bird flies over and I mean literally a bird and they freak out sound the all hands on deck. And this goes on for a week or two or six months. You know, let's think about our clients. They don't usually come in right away where everything is sets off that startle response. Everything sets off that fighter flight response. The staff starts to get exhausted. All the rest of the sailors that have to drop everything and run to their battle stations. After a little while, they're like, really? No, no, we just we can't even do this. And it also reminds me of the boy who cried wolf anyhow. I digress sticking with the battleship metaphor. So eventually the captain says, you know what? Let's retrain on what is worth setting off the all hands on deck because everybody here is exhausted and nobody's even really responding anymore when they come to their battle stations. They're just kind of dragging their butts in like whatever is probably another false alarm. The same sort of thing is true with us. When we're on on high alert for too long, our brain says, you know what? We got to conserve some energy in case some really, really big threat comes along. So it turns down what I call the stress response system. It turns down the sensitivity. So you don't get alerted for every little thing that would cause you stress. But you also don't get alerted for those little things that would cause you happiness either. Anything that would cause the excitatory neurotransmitters to be secreted. You're just not getting those anymore, which a lot of people kind of refer to as depression is just kind of like, yeah, whatever. And only the biggest, most notable things actually cause an emotional effect. We don't want people to get to that point. That's no way to live. So we need to help them learn how to sort of retrain their spotters to figure out what is actually stressful. A person who perceives the world is generally good and believe they have the ability to deal with challenges as they arise will be able to allow their stress response system to function normally. There are going to be times you have all hands on deck, whether it's a real emergency or whether it's just a drill, but it will happen. And they can go, they can, you know, do what they're going to do. They have that adrenaline rush. They have the energy and the focus to do their jobs. And when it's over, they can go back to their quarters. They can relax, refresh. You know, just kind of chill for a while and then there's a low where their body rebalances before the next one. And this is kind of what we want in life. I mean, ideally we wouldn't have super high peaks very often, but we want to make sure we give our body time to rebalance after there's a stressor and not have to stand on edge, not be hypervigilant constantly just waiting for the next one to come along. So what is the impact of these thinking errors? Well, whenever we have that stress response system activated, the body is saying we either need to fight or we need to flee. So you're just dumping all kinds of adrenaline and other neurochemicals. So there's anxiety. There can be stress. When people start having this reaction, you know, they start having muscle tension, sweating, heart rate increases, breathing increases, people will call that anxiety. Some will label that as anger. Either way, they're both sides of the same coin. They need to do something, but if it lasts too long, then we start moving into depression and they just, they don't have to get up and go anymore. There's just not any excitatory neurotransmitters really left. They need some time to rest and rebalance. Behaviorally, think about it. If you go somewhere and you are just constantly on guard, are you going to keep going there or are you going to withdraw? So people who have a lot of thinking errors, unhelpful thoughts tend to withdraw more. They may turn to addictions to kind of numb or blunt some of the input. Sleep problems and changes. When you are hyper vigilant, when you have this stress response going, even if it's not at full bore, if it's still there somewhat, if you're stressed out, you're not going to sleep as well. You're going to maintain higher levels of cortisol. So you're not going to get that restful, rejuvenating sleep. You may kind of doze on and off. Eating changes. You know, depending on the person, some people eat to self-serve, some people can't eat at all, but we do see that the hormones, Garolin and Leptin get all out of whack, not under stress, but also when sleep gets out of whack, when your circadian rhythms get out of whack. So we're starting to see the cascade effect where it's emotional and behavioral, physical, you've got stress related illnesses that start coming up. If you're on that much, you've got muscle tension for that long, it starts to hurt.  It starts to come out. And most people, when they're under a lot of stress for an extended period, you know, a day is not a big deal for most people, but for an extended period, become more susceptible to illnesses. They start getting sick easier. Headaches, GI distress, you know, some people store their stress right in their gut. Socially, think about the last time you were stressed. Were you patient and tolerant and just a pleasure to be around? You may have tried to be, but you're more prone to irritability and impatience, and again, wanting to withdraw. All of these effects contribute to fatigue and a sense of hopelessness and helplessness, which often intensifies thinking errors. So you'll see this negative reciprocal interaction. If somebody feels stressed out and overwhelmed and they withdraw, then they may start feeling like they have no support and they lose all their social buffers to the stress, so they feel even more stressed, so they want to withdraw even more. So we're going to talk about how to prevent that. Now I like this little diagram, maybe because it's got a heart in the center. I don't know, but behavior, feelings and thoughts. This is the outside of the circle. All three of these impact each other. When you do something, it often impacts your feelings and your thoughts about a situation. When you, when you're thinking, if you think positively, you're probably going to choose more positive behaviors and more have more positive feelings. You're thinking negatively. Obviously, you may choose more of an escape behavior or a protection behavior and may have more feelings of anger, anxiety, depression, etc. So these things are going on and they're all interacting. The one really cool thing is if you break this chain somewhere or this circuit, then you can stop that reciprocal negative downward spiral. Um, so cognitive behavioral helps people who are willing to show up or who are willing to address their thoughts. Not everybody is willing to start addressing their thoughts right away. Maybe they want to start addressing their sleep problems and their eating problems or something that's more physical. Okay, that's fine because anywhere we interrupt this circuit is going to have positive effects, assuming the intervention is positive is going to have positive effects on the other ones. So what about the triangle? Well, yourself. So your feelings thoughts and behavior impact you. It impacts how you feel and you're like, well, yeah. Okay, just stay with me. But the way you feel, think and act impacts your future and it also impacts how you interact with others. So, you know, that kind of affects things because remember social support is a big buffer for us. Now core beliefs and you can do this inward to outward or outward to inward, but either way, it comes down to core beliefs. If you have positive thoughts and positive feelings and you generally engage in positive behaviors to keep that cycle going, you will probably feel pretty good about yourself, have good relationships, have a somewhat optimistic feeling about the future and your core beliefs may be more like people are generally good. I can do this, you know, very self affirming and other affirming positive core beliefs about yourself in the world. Now, if your thoughts or feelings are negative, then you have this negative outer circle. You don't feel so good. You start questioning the goodness and trustability and dependability of other people. You have more of a bleak look in the future. So what do you think is going to happen to the core beliefs? The core beliefs may change to if someone doesn't love me, I am completely unlovable. They may change to being more extreme, more negative and more difficult to rectify if you want to have somebody who's happy.  It's just wonderful roses today. So we have to help people try to adjust eventually start adjusting those core beliefs. And when we get into cognitive behavioral, remember the ABCs, your automatic thought, wow, your automatic thought, then your end beliefs are what happened as soon as that event occurs. And those you don't think about. That's why they're called automatic. So when you have the ABCs, these core beliefs are those things that pop up that we need to address. So what factors affect this and whoops, you know, there's a lot of stuff right here in dbt. They call them vulnerabilities. You know, we're just going to talk about in general different factors that affect the choices our clients make in terms of behaviors. So negative emotions, if they are not, if they're feeling angry, if they're feeling anxious, if they're feeling depressed, they're probably not going to be really motivated to get up and engage in a whole lot of self affirming activities. They're not probably not going to be having a lot of positive self affirming thoughts. They're going to be focused on whatever is causing that distress and maybe escaping from that physically pain and illness when you don't feel well, it's harder to be Susie sunshine. I don't think many of us are just a barrel of monkeys when we don't feel well. So if our clients have pain, this is one of those, if you want to put it in behaviors, behavioral areas, physical areas, we can address and have them go see their physician, have them go see their physical therapist and get recommendations. So they aren't feeling physically painful, physically in distress all the time because physical distress and emotional distress both mess with sleep. Unfortunately, sleep is the first thing to usually go and I'm not talking about quantity. I know a lot of clients who when they get depressed, they're in bed for days, they'll get up, they'll maybe shower and go back to bed and they're sleeping a lot, but it doesn't mean it's quality sleep. So what we need to look at is what is the quality of their sleep? Are they getting that rejuvenation, the time for their brain and neurochemicals to rebalance so they can feel happy so they can have that nice balance of all the neurotransmitters they need to feel happy? Poor nutrition. Well, no matter how much sleep they get, if they don't have the building blocks to make the neurotransmitters and the hormones that are needed to prompt the feelings, the physiological sensations that we've labeled happiness or excitement or, you know, even depression and anxiety, those are all caused by different neurotransmitters being secreted in different combinations. If your body doesn't have the building blocks to make those, then it doesn't matter how much sleep you get. You're not going to get any benefit from it. And intoxication and this can be uppers, downers, anything that is psychoactive. If you are messing with that neurotransmitter balance, you're going to get it out of whack and you may either use up too much of the excitatory or cause a flood of it or you may use up too much of the depressant. Either way, there's usually a rebound effect, which we call withdrawal. So you're not going to be in a good space either during the intoxication sometimes, but definitely when you're sobering up, there's a period where there's going to be negative emotions, negative feelings. Environmentally, yeah, your environment can even make you grumpy. Introduction of a new or unique situation. Some people love new challenges, love going to new places, other people, not so much depending on the person taking on going somewhere new may be really stressful for them. So if they've already got this stress going on because of having to go to this new situation, then their thoughts may be a little bit more on the anxious side about a lot of things and they may have less patience and tolerance to deal with other stuff that comes their way because they're already kind of on edge and exposure to unpreferable situations, you know, going places that you just really don't want to go. Maybe one of the places I used to work. We had this meeting once a month and it was literally an eight hour meeting and we would all sit in there for eight hours and one person at a time would get up and give their staff reports or whatever. But it tended to be a relatively dreadful sort of environment or eight hours and we all knew we had to be there and that was fine. But it was an unpreferable situation. So most people getting ready to go to this meeting were grumbling on the way in. They were getting their coffee and going, I better do this because I'm not getting out for another eight hours. We need to help our clients assess. What is it in your environment? If anything that is making you already feel grumpy or not as happy and likewise, what can you put in your environment to make you feel happier? You know, I keep pictures of my kids and my animals on my phone. That way if I'm having a moment or not, sometimes I just like looking at them. I can take a look at it. It makes me smile and I'm like, okay, life is good. You know, this moment may not be so wonderful, but it's just this moment. Then we move on to stress of a social nature. Peers are family who convey irrational thoughts as necessary standards for social acceptance. Nobody wants to associate with those people or nobody's going to like you when you're like this or you really, if you really want to be successful, then you need to change fill in the blank. It's always a something needs to change.  And a lack of supportive peers to buffer stress because we all have negative people in our life. It happens. But if you have negative supportive peers that you can call afterwards and go, yeah, I just had to meet with someone so for an hour and it was just dreadful. And that person can go, well, I'm sorry just be there or make it laugh or whatever they do. It helps buffer the stress. If you don't have those positive social supports, then you're left walking out of it. You're kind of feeling shell shocked and then you also at the same time have to figure out for yourself. All right, what do I do next? Oh, it doesn't mean you can't do it. You know, people do it all the time, but it is good. It is awesome to have supportive peers to buffer your stress. So in cognitive therapy, clients learn to distinguish between thoughts and feelings realizing that thoughts will trigger feelings but they don't have to cause continual feelings and behaviors and feelings can cause certain thoughts but they don't have to. You can unhook from them and you can just say this is how I'm feeling right now. Now, where am I going to go from here? And we talked about that on Tuesday with unhooking from your thoughts and stepping back and going, what is the next logical action to get me to where I want to go? Become aware of the ways in which the thoughts can influence feelings in ways that are sometimes not helpful.  Most people don't like everybody and so, you know, that's okay but recognize how that affects your interactions with that person and your thoughts about that person. Learn how thoughts that seem to occur automatically affect emotions. So recognize, start getting down to what are these core beliefs that happen every time there's a negative incident that make me feel angry or anxious. Constructively evaluate whether these automatic thoughts and assumptions are accurate or perhaps biased. Evaluate whether the current reactions are helpful and a good use of energy or unhelpful and a waste of energy that could be used to move toward those people and things important to the person. So again, back kind of to that ACT sort of thing. Is this a good use of your energy to help you achieve your goals and be the person you want to be? And develop the skills to notice, interrupt and correct these biased thoughts independently. Like I said, you don't always have to call somebody. You can do it on your own but sometimes it's nice to have that buffer in that middle moment. So what causes these thinking errors? How can we even start helping people address their thoughts and until we start thinking about, well, what caused them? Information processing shortcuts. As we grow up, we learn things. You know, when you were knee-high to a grasshopper you didn't have a lot of experience. So you learned things but things you learned when you were a kid, unfortunately, because you were cognitively a child are either, are dichotomous. They're all or nothing. It's either this way or no way at all. So things that you have, things that you learned back when you were a child may not have been challenged.  It's all or nothing. Well, I am a bad girl. So I guess that means I'm not okay. And if I'm not okay right now, I'm never okay. That can stick with a person. So these outdated dichotomous schemas can really trip somebody up. Once the person gets into, you know, middle school-ish the thoughts aren't nearly as dichotomous. There's a lot more formal operational thought, if you will. But up until then, I mean, you've got a child who's experiencing a lot of stuff and taking in like a sponge, everything they hear and it gets sorted into a yes or a no pile. There's no kind of middle pile that there's no yes and. So what we want to do is help people look at those thoughts now and say, okay, if they're all or nothing, is there a way to find both and? So for example, we'll take that scenario I gave you earlier.  When they're young, they take that to mean always everything about me is bad. I'm unlovable. So what is the both and compromise? As an adult, we can look back and go, you know, I'm a good person. I may make poor choices sometimes. I may make bad choices, but I'm a good person. So there's that both and, you know, I'm not perfect, but I'm good. So it's not all or nothing. And I encourage my clients to really always look for that middle ground. How can it be both? Or does it have to even be that negative one? But most of the time, there's a little bit of something on both sides. The brain's limited information processing capacity and limited responses.  They don't have experiences to go, well, mom's having a bad day. She kind of tends to say things she doesn't mean when she's having a bad day. It's just, it's devastating to that child. When you're older, if somebody says something that's not necessarily tactful, you know, you can look at it and go, yeah, that really wasn't nice, but that person probably did not intend to be hurtful. They may have something else going on. Children have fewer experiences. So what was devastating or overwhelming as a child may not still have to feel that way. When you were a child, if your best friend moved away, oh, that was devastating. It was the end of the world. Now, as an adult, you can go visit them.  You can still stay in touch. So there are ways to do it. Yeah, you can't go out and swing, swing on swings together all the time, but it doesn't have to mean the end of the end of time. Things will change and there's a little process of grieving that has to go along with that, but to an adult, a friend moving away is less devastating than say to a six-year-old. Your parent being angry with you. If you grew up in an alcoholic or addicted household, you learn don't talk, don't trust, don't feel. When the parent came in, if the parent was angry with you, you could have been in a lot of hurt. You know, there could have been some actual danger to your physical or emotional person. So it was scary. As a 26-year-old or however old your client is, is it that threatening?  You don't have to be in their household if they were violent towards you. So is it as terrifying when your parent gets angry? Yes, there's lots of issues with wanting acceptance from your parents. That's over here. That's a whole other issue. But when your parent is angry, do you have to have that person's approval? When we're in crisis, we don't process much. When you're in crisis, your body is worried about surviving. If you've been in a car wreck, if somebody has gone to the hospital, whatever the case is, you're not processing all of the data in order to make an informed decision.  So if something happened when someone was in crisis that hurt their feelings, made them angry, you know, fill in the blank, some sort of dysphoric emotion, we want to say, well, let's look back at that and see if there's a both and. Let's look back at that and see if there was something that you missed that might help you understand why this person reacted that way. But understanding that in crisis, we just generally don't make the most informed decisions. So emotional reasoning, helping clients understand that feeling are not facts and helping them learn to identify feelings and separate them from facts. So if they say, I'm terrified. All right, so you're terrified. Got that. About what are you terrified? You know, tell me what are these things that make you feel like the world is such a scary place? And let's list them on the whiteboard or flip chart. What is the evidence that those are present dangers right now that they're actually impending threats? So tell me about what the evidence is. In what ways is the similar to other situations where you felt terrified and how did you deal with those situations? I have a friend who actually went this morning on an airplane flight and she hates flying, totally terrified of it. So what is the evidence that this plane is going to crash? What is the evidence that it is likely that this plane will crash? And she's flying on an American-based commercial airliner. There really isn't any when you look at the proportions. So okay, there have been a couple of crashes over the past 20 years and in a couple of those, there were some fatalities. No doubt. But looking at the proportions and running the numbers, what's the likelihood? In what ways is this similar to other situations that you have felt terrified? You know, maybe there haven't been any other situations where she's flown and gotten through it and been like, score, I did that. But what other situations have you had to get through that you were terrified and how did you deal with those? Help people develop distress tolerance skills. One of the things I told her was when you're sitting on the airplane and the airplane starts up, don't wait till you start getting really stressed necessarily. But when we were little on the car, when we were in the car, we used to find things on the drive, find something that starts with A and everybody would find something that started with A and then find something that starts with B and so on. And if you couldn't find something that started with that letter, you were out.  Because there are some letters that you're going to have to work really hard and it's kind of like the game apples to apples. You end up finding something really inane in order to get that letter and you laugh and you're so busy focusing on that. You're not focusing on all of the things that could possibly maybe go wrong. Other distress-tolerant skills, you know, you can go through the whole DBT curriculum and learn some of those. The biggest thing is if you have to face the terror, if you have to go through it, figure out a way to not have to focus on it and fight it and go, I shouldn't be afraid, I shouldn't be afraid because that doesn't work. If it worked, we wouldn't be talking about it. And develop emotional regulation skills. So prevent those vulnerabilities, set yourself up so you are as prepared as you can to not feel stressed, to not feel anxious. She has her spouse with her who can help diffuse some of it. She's got her kids with her. She downloaded some movies. She's prepared to endure the distress. She's, you know, trying to go into it with a positive mindset as much as possible and focusing on the destination, which, you know, is ultimately the reason she's getting on the plane. Social causes of stress and thinking errors, everybody's doing it. Well, that's not true. There's very little that everybody does. So correcting misinformation. Have the client gather objective information about, you know, if they say, well, everybody else that I know has succeeded. Okay. Well, let's gather objective information about that. Who do you know? And tell me if they've succeeded. If I want to be liked, I must do it. This need for approval or low self-esteem can cause a lot of problems in thinking errors and fears of rejection. So we say, okay, let's look at developing some self-esteem so you don't need to worry about if somebody likes you. What would it be like if you woke up in the morning and you didn't care if so-and-so liked you? I mean, we all want to have friends. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you want to be a hermit living out in the woods. But if we're talking about a particular so-and-so, what would it be like in the morning to get up and go, you know what? If that person messages me today or calls me today, that's great. And if not, I'm okay with that. How liberating would that be to get your power back? And how people develop social supports that share their same values and goals, at least mostly, or at least can respect yours. So for example, when I work with people with co-occurring disorders and they don't drink and they don't use drugs. So they may be around people, family, friends, who drink. If you're going to be in that situation, do you have to drink? And can you be around? Do you have social supports that can be supportive of your choice to not drink? Doesn't necessarily mean they're not going to not drink in front of you, but at least they're not trying to get you to drink. So the social causes of irrational thoughts, if I want to be liked, I must do this. Why can't you be liked for who you are? Cognitive bias, negativity, mental filter. Focus on the negatives and worry about the future. Most of us know some people like that. Most of us have had a moment where we felt like this. We've just gotten ourselves in a tizzy and spun out of control. But you can bring it back. So you want to ask yourself or have your clients ask themselves, what's the benefit to focusing on the negative? If you know that this is going to go south really fast, what's the benefit to just focusing on that? Could you focus on alternatives or plan Bs? What are the positives to the situation? Most people who have mood issues who present to us in counseling don't focus on both sides. Yes, every side has a little bit of negative to it if you really want to look hard enough. But every side also has a silver lining if you really want to look hard enough. So we need to balance the positives and the negatives. So encourage people to look for the positives in the situation. Yeah, this really sucked, but... And what are all the facts? What are all the things going into it? Sometimes people will go to work and not know or wonder if they're going to get laid off because you're not necessarily always guaranteed a job anywhere. There can be layoffs. But if somebody is going to work every day worried about this, focusing on the negative, oh, yep, I'm definitely going to be the one that's going to get the pink slip. And they go to their mailbox each time looking for that pink slip, expecting it to be there. How's that going to affect their mood? As opposed to, all right, there may be layoffs coming. What can I do to make myself really valuable? Or, and what are my options if I do get laid off? Let's make a plan B and C. So I don't just feel like the rug was pulled out from under me. Coin toss activity. If somebody tends to be stuck in negativity, have them flip a coin every morning. If it lands on heads, they can just be their normal selves to their heart's content. If it lands on tails, they need to act as if they are a happy, positive, optimistic, maybe even obnoxiously optimistic person for the entire day. You know, we want them to be farting rainbows. And when I say that, they usually look at me and laugh and, but that's okay. I'm like, every time you start having a negative thought, I want you to see a unicorn farting rainbows and take it from there. And then have them process how they felt at the end of the day if they weren't constantly focused on negativity and worrying and only seeing the bad stuff. Disqualifying or minimizing the positive. If something happens and somebody says, well, I just got that promotion because they didn't have anybody else to give it to. Okay. If your best friend just got a promotion, would you say that to them? What is scary about accepting the positive, about accepting the fact that maybe you got the promotion because you're awesome. Sometimes we disqualify the positive because it fails to meet someone else's standards. So might that be true here? You know, maybe you got this promotion and you're actually deep down inside kind of proud of it.  So you minimize it.  Ecocentrism, my perspective is the only perspective. Take different perspectives. I always say three.  They were rude to you. What are three reasons? What are some alternate perspectives? Why that person might have been rude? Maybe you did something that triggered them. Maybe they were having a bad day and it's got nothing at all to do with you. You know, there are options that we can look at. Personalization and mind reading. What are some alternate explanations for the event that didn't involve you? If you think, well, that person just really doesn't like me and you know, I've got to work with them every day and they hate me. My question to my client would be, what's the evidence for that? And what are some alternate explanations for why that person may be behaving that way? I had a staff member that a lot of my other staff members had difficulty getting along with and ultimately, you know, we had to sit down and look when I had some different staff meetings with people and say, you know, what gives you the idea that she doesn't like you? What gives you the idea that it's about you? And, you know, they cited all kinds of behaviors and I had to come back to, well, what are some alternate reasons? Why somebody, anybody, not just her, might be expressing those behaviors. Could it be something besides you? And of course, they came back to, yeah, availability heuristic, remembering what's prominent in your mind. If somebody was, if you're a supervisor, for example, and you're doing evaluation for the year, what are you really remembering when you're doing that evaluation? The whole year or the last three months? And that's the availability heuristic. So when you're talking to somebody about their relationship with their best friend or their spouse or their kids and if somebody says, well, that child has always been a problem. Okay, let's look at that. You know, the child is 18 and you've had a lot of problems with him lately. But what about three years ago? So was he always a problem or is this something that's relatively new that something might have changed? Magnification. People getting stuck on fearing the absolute worst. So you want to ask them, is this a high probability or a low probability outcome? If they're magnifying something that happened like, oh my gosh, that is the worst thing in the world, is this going to matter six months from now? Maybe you totaled your car. And yeah, that is a huge bummer. And you're safe. In six months, is this really going to matter that much? You know, there are going to be some bills and everything, but the big scheme of things is at the end of the world. What have you done in the past to tolerate events like these when something really, really unpleasant has happened? And then if they're looking at dichotomous ways of thinking, which a lot of our clients still do, they're like, so-and-so always does this or never does this. Have them look at the differences between love versus hate, perfection versus failure, and all good intentions versus all bad intentions. Because a lot of our dichotomies fall in one of these three categories. This person always does this or never or does it intentionally or, you know, just doesn't care. Belief in a just world, the fallacy of fairness. Encourage people to look for four good people they know that have had bad things happen.  I am as difficult to get rid of. I can't get rid of stupidity if it's part of me. But if it's a thought or a skill, I can either get rid of it or improve it. Stable.  Versus I can change this thought or skill. I can learn math. And internal attributions mean it's about me as a person versus about a skill or a skill deficit or something completely unrelated. So when somebody makes a global internal negative statement, we want to help them challenge that. Global internal positive statements I'm all about. But the negative ones I want to say let's take a look at that. Is that true that this is about you all of the time? And it means that there's something wrong with you. So we want to ask them how are these thoughts? How are these ways of thinking impacting your emotions, health, relationships and perceptions of the world? We want to increase motivation to start looking at these thinking errors because it's a lot of work to start changing the way you automatically think because you've got to stop. You've got to become mindful and then you've got to decide, well, what are the alternative thoughts? Because this is what I thought for so long. How may this thought have been helpful in the past? Most of the time thoughts we have came from somewhere and whether it was a thought we had when we were a child, something we learned when we were a child that is dichotomous and not quite applicable anymore, it may have been helpful in the past to help you navigate situations. Doesn't mean it was wrong. It means it's not helpful in the present. Asking them to always ask themselves, is this thought or feeling bringing you, the client, closer to those people and things that are important to you? Is hanging on to this negativity, bringing you closer?  When you decide you are not going to give them your power, then you may start feeling happier. And I don't always use that with clients, but sometimes the power metaphor helps. When we talk about thinking errors, ask them, are there examples of this not being true? And, and or, how can the statement be made less global, stable and internal? Is it about you or is it about what you do at work? Is it about you or is it about your relationship with this particular person? So the last couple of slides focusing on some of the irrational thoughts or unhelpful beliefs, our basic fears, our rejection and isolation, failure, loss of control, the unknown and death. Generally, the things that cause people to have this fight or flight reaction fall into one of those categories. So some of the unhelpful beliefs that we hear a lot coming up when we do the ABCs is that mistakes are never acceptable. So if I make one, I am incompetent. So we've got dichotomous thinking and we've got a lot of internal global labeling here, rejection and isolation. When somebody disagrees with me, it's a personal attack against me. Well, sometimes it is. But does that mean it's about you? We're helping them address their rejection and isolation fears. We want to ask them if they disagree with you, were they attacking you and saying you were stupid or were they attacking, if you want to use that word, or were they attacking the thought and saying they disagreed with the thought? There's a little bit of a difference. It's somewhat semantic, but it's a difference because they may have a lot of respect for you, but they may disagree with what you just said. If someone criticizes or rejects me, there must be something wrong with me. Again, that's one of those internal global negative statements. To feel good about myself, others must approve of me. We want to make sure our clients can self-validate and they don't rely on external validation because they're setting themselves up for a world of hurt if they are not their own best friend. To be content in life, I must be liked by all people. Now, thank you for a second. Are you liked by everybody? I know I'm not liked by everybody. So does that mean that I should not be content in life? And what does it say to give people that power to say, if you don't like me, then I can't be content because I've got to be liked by everybody. Sometimes with clients, I'll help them look at what may be going on with the other person, why that person might like them, because a lot of times other people's reactions towards you are more about their stuff than about you and helping them see how that might be true. My true value as an individual depends on what others think of me. So these other unhelpful beliefs pertain to those thoughts of failure and loss of control. None of us likes to fail. Don't get me wrong. It's not pleasant, but it happens.  Which means we need to get beyond our safety envelope. We need to push ourselves beyond our boundaries. And when we do, sometimes we're going to stumble and fall. We pick ourselves up and we learn from it. But to expect to never fail at anything is not realistic.  How many times have you heard that from your clients? I won't try anything new unless I know I'll be good at it. I'm in total control and anything bad that happens is my fault. So let's look at this Locus of Control thing here. You're in total control, so you can make it rain. You know, it was unpleasant today because I had to come to work and it was raining outside. So that was bad and it happened. Was it your fault? Pointing out and depending on your relationship for your client, you're probably going to be more or less snarky when you present some of these. But a lot of times I have a semi-joking relationship, if you will, with my clients. And they're like, yeah, I see your point. That kind of didn't make a lot of sense. Other times, you know, if they're more serious, I'll ask them to identify things that happened that were bad that they had nothing to do with. If I feel happy about life, something will go wrong. Or I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Helping people stay focused in the moment with mindfulness. Something's going to go wrong down the road somewhere sometime. Yeah, it's true. It's going to happen. Let's enjoy what we've got for right now. The past always repeats itself. If it was true then, it's true now. So what was true when you were 10? Is true now that you're 40? Always? Is that true? It's not my fault. My life didn't go the way I wanted. Everybody conspired against me. And there's no gray area. So for people who feel the need to hold on to control, it's dichotomous. It is or it isn't. It's got to be that way. There's no gray area. And it can make life seem very uncomfortable because they've got to put things in one of two buckets. And sometimes things don't fit nicely in buckets. What happens if we add a third bucket, that both and bucket? So a quick note about irrationality. The origins of most beliefs were rational and helpful. Given the information the person had at the time and their ability to process that information because of their cognitive development. So things that we identify as unhelpful or automatic beliefs now came from somewhere and they made perfect sense whenever they were formed. They may not be healthy or helpful now, which is why we want to look at them and either adjust them or just throw them out the door. But when they were formed, they were on point. Irrationality or unhelpfulness of thoughts comes when those beliefs are perpetuated without examination. So again, we need to look at them. Continually look at what you're telling yourself and go, is this still accurate? And continue to be held despite causing harm to the person. Sometimes you're going to look at a thought, an automatic thought and you're going to go, yeah, that is still spot on. Now, is holding on to this, helping me achieve my goals? You know, yeah, the world right now is kind of a scary place. Is holding on to this fear and terror, helping me be a happy, productive yada yada or whatever kind of person you want to be? Or is it causing me to feel anxious and angry and scared? Sometimes it's more productive for clients to think of thoughts as unhelpful instead of irrational. Because like I said, I feel like irrationality and distortions seem very pejorative to a lot of clients. So questions clients can ask themselves when they are faced with a situation, what are the facts for and against this belief? Is this belief based on facts or feelings? Just because you feel scared, is it a scary situation? Does the belief focus on just one aspect or the whole situation? Does the belief seem to use any of those thinking errors we talked about? And if so, you know, what do I need to do about it? What are some alternate explanations for this belief? What else could have caused this to happen besides whatever I'm afraid of? What would you tell your child or your best friend if they had this belief? What would you tell, what would you want someone to tell you about this belief? If you could have somebody tell you something that would make you feel okay, what would you want them to tell you? And how is this belief moving you toward what and who is important to you? Remembering that beliefs are a combination of thought and fact and personal interpretation of those thoughts and facts.  I am a animated talker. Now, if you are seeing me from 100 feet away and you are seeing me talk, you might think I was angry because I make a lot of really big gestures because if you had grown up in a situation where there was domestic violence or something, but if you had grown up in a household like I did where you had a first generation Italian, first generation Italian Americans talk big. They talk real big with lots of gestures and sometimes loud. And that doesn't necessarily mean any anger. A lot of times it's just pure excitement. So understanding that there's thoughts and facts, you know, you see this going on, but your personal interpretation can really affect what you get out of it or what you perceive that situation to be. So we need to look at how is your personal interpretation maybe adding a negative bias and what do we do about that? It may be 100% accurate. What do we do about it? So it doesn't keep you miserable. Thoughts, impact behaviors and emotional and physical reactions. Emotional and physical reactions impact thoughts and your interpretation of events. Irrational or unhelpful thinking patterns are often caused by cognitive distortions. My two favorite words in that same sentence. Cognitive distortions are schemas or shortcut ideas or memories, if you will, which were formed based on faulty, inaccurate or immature knowledge or understanding of the event. You know, little kids may not have quite understood what was going on. They just understood that mommy and daddy were screaming. Identifying the thoughts, the hecklers I call them, those negative voices inside your head that are maintaining unhappiness helps people choose whether to accept the thoughts and say, yeah, you know, that's right. I really am not good at that or whatever the negative thought is and change it or let the thought go. Are there any questions? Thank you, Ms. Benson. Well, thank you all.  The easiest one to remember is support at allceus.com. There's only two of us in the office so either my husband gets it or I do. So it'll get to me. And I guess that's it. So I will see you all on Tuesday. If you have any types of courses that you want to see added to the list, please let me know. I'm always interested in doing what you want to learn about not necessarily just what I pull out of my rabbit hat. Yes, you can print the slides in the golly, golly, golly. When you go into the class, there's a link that has a PDF of the slides that you can print if you want to go ahead and print those out. The video version of this will be up on YouTube by tomorrow morning, maybe later this afternoon. Okay, everybody have an absolutely amazing rest of your day and weekend. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. This episode has been brought to you in part by allceus.com providing 24-7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006.


Today is the day guys, I finally got my results back on, today's the day guys, I finally got the results back for Duke's ethnicity, no, his breed. All right guys, so I just got Duke's result back for his breed, and yeah, and I'm gonna share it with you now. Here we go. So recently I posted a video that I got a little heritage dog breed check called Embark, and we did that, I think two or three weeks ago, and when I submitted it, I was disappointed because it said it was gonna take like three to five weeks just for the lab to get the results on that, and I ended up getting it way quicker. I got the notification, I've actually been sitting on it for like four or five days, but I've been really busy, so I haven't been able to record, but I made myself not look at the results until right now I'm gonna look at it while I'm recording. So this is all in real time. Okay, let me pull it up. For those of you who don't know, Duke is a rescue. I got him two years ago. We think he was like maybe three years old when I got him, so he's either like four or five years old right now. I think he's still pretty young. 50 pounds, they found him with a broken leg wandering the street. I've heard a lot of people say different breeds for him, like Pit, Mix, Cadajula, which is something that I've kind of just gone with because I've seen comparable pictures of Cadajulas, but now I'm gonna find out the truth. I mean, as accurate as it is, who knows how accurate it really is. Okay, and this one, and by the way, this is not a paid promotion. I'm not getting paid.  This is just the brand that I happen to go with. They had a discount one day. I used it, so now I have it, and I'm just talking about it, but it's not in partnership with Embark. So with this one, they also included a diagnostic of any, they included a diagnostic of any inherited possible medical problems, stuff like that. So I think that's really helpful to know, especially if you get a rescue and where you don't really know their history. What is this? Breed reveal. It's like a gender reveal, but for doggies, for puppies, huh? Okay, Perfect Mix of Five Breeds. Is that what he is? Is that what it's saying? It's pretty cool. Okay, and then it says, or guess his breeds start breed game. Okay, I don't wanna do that. Skip to results. Skip to results. Okay, so he's 40.9% American people. 20.9% German Shepherd. And then it's just a mix of all smaller stuff. Super Mutt, what does that mean? Exclamation point or a question mark. Some dogs descend from other dogs that were themselves mixed breed. Okay, okay, so he's a super Mutt.   You can learn more about each breed. Okay, there's the family tree that we saw in the video. Mix matches. Explore other embarked dogs who have breed mixes that are similar to Dukes. A mix match. Interesting. Maternal haplotype. So someone else did this DNA test and Duk has 28% shared DNA with this other dog named Bitsy. And this dog named Bitsy is also in LA in Hermosa Beach and there's an option to chat with them. Crazy. Okay, so I'm gonna do that later and see if I can meet his doggy family. So now I'm gonna check out the health summary. Progressive retinal atrophy. Oh, that doesn't sound good. Duk inherited one copy of the variant we tested. This result does not impact your dog's health. Okay, that's all I care about. So I'm looking through and it's showing if it detects certain things, looking for specific things. Like one is breed relevant conditions. It looked for 24 things and it didn't detect anything. Then the other one is for additional conditions. There's 167 reports and it looks like it didn't detect anything. Let me scroll down. Except for this one, this progressive retinal atrophy which I'm assuming refers to the eyes. PRACRD4 chord one is a retinal disease that causes progressive non-painful vision loss over a one to two year period. What does this result mean? This result does not impact your dog's health. It could have consequences for siblings or other family members and you should let them know if you are in contact with them. But what about Duke's chances? That's what I wanna know. Okay, so I guess this is just something to like watch out for and notify your vet about. And that's the only thing, this is eyes. Okay, good to know. Dukie, what do you think? Dukie, why are you being antisocial? Come here, come here. What do you think? Say hi to my kisses. Are you happy with the results? Are you happy? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Oh, good boy. Oh, good boy, you happy?  Say bye. Say bye, baby.  And then next time, next time we'll be back, okay? Good boy. All right, thanks guys. Thanks for watching. Oh, and also shout out for this awesome shirt that I got for the fundraiser for when we did AIDS Walk. They gave me this shirt. Now I can rep it. Thank you all that donated and contributed for sure, gonna do it again next year. It was really rewarding and awesome to give back to the community. Oh, and vote, vote, vote, vote. Okay, talk to you soon. Peace. We head for the sky, it's all right. Our wings wouldn't fly, it's all right. If we are crashing down again.


I'm Stephen Cox. I'm a sculptor. I'm English. And I'm generally known for working in stone. And in particular, I'm very, very interested in working with the hardest stones in the world, in particular imperial porphyry. Now you've seen Stephen Cox discuss peregrine sentinel, and I wanted to bring in a few more views of that sculpture that I didn't capture in the video that I made when I was there in his house. So here we're looking at the front and sides of peregrine sentinel, and you can see the wonderful variety of textures. One of the things that Stephen emphasizes in his work is the relationship that he has with the material. And it's a great deal of respect, as I'm sure you've noticed by now, for what it took to form this imperial porphyry, for how rare it is, for how difficult it is to work, and for the weight of history and symbolism that it has. And so a lot of that is reflected here. You might notice the wonderful sort of abstracted bird shape, but you might also notice that the form here also resembles that of a female figure. A lot of his work tends to explore really sort of classic abstract forms that could be read in a multitude of ways. And the other thing I want you to notice is the attention being played to different textures and to sort of responding to the different faces of the stone. So here we see those views, and here we have a slightly better detail. Here we're looking at the side of the sculpture and a detail of the front and top. You can see the unfinished texture that we have at the top of the sculpture and also down at the very foot of the sculpture. And then the entire back has been left in that sort of unfinished broken state that you would have for stone coming directly from the quarry. I love this particular detail of the stone in Peregrine Sentinel. Here this is at the base of the sculpture and you can see this very rough, unfinished piece of the sculpture. And it shows all of those working marks and you can get a sense from this of just how difficult it is to work these hard stones like porphyry, basalt, and diorite. The normal tools and techniques that would work on softer stones like the alabaster and marble we'll cover later are completely ineffective. They're completely ineffective against this sort of stone. It all has to be worked with sort of punches perpendicularly against the stone and those tools wear out very much more quickly even if you're using power assisted tools. The process is much, much slower. So there's a real awareness here and a desire to show the evidence of the difficulty of that working. Here's a short video from Steven's sculpture yard and we're looking at a piece that is a similar size and shape to Peregrine Sentinel and you can see here how he has marked up some of the forms on the stone with the intent of carving in and creating a finished sculpture. Here's Steven with one of his larger and earlier pieces in Imperial Porphyry. This is a work called Dreadnaught and it's a piece in which he's been exploring the Imperial Porphyry and sort of its condition and the things that have happened to it over its history. The pits and hollows that you see in this work are from pieces of tuff that he gouged out and dug out of this enormous piece of Imperial Porphyry. It also had a split down the middle and that was then gilded by Steven.  It was ultimately abandoned in the quarry until Steven brought it back to Britain and worked with it. Now I'm showing you a closer view of Dreadnaught and you can see that line of gold there to call your attention to that split in the porphyry and that may well be why the Romans abandoned it in the quarry. Also all of those large inclusions of tuff might have made this a less desirable piece of stone for the Roman masons but you can see their initial marks from drills that they used to kind of cut down in and used to split the stone and we'll see some wedge marks on the other side in just a moment. Here on the backside of Dreadnaught you can see some of those tuff inclusions that haven't been removed by Steven. They look like big chunks of marshmallow in a jello salad for example and more of those sort of drill marks from the Romans. There are a few sort of square cut marks too that are evidence of wedges that would have been driven in as part of the stone splitting process and what I think is so interesting about Steven Cox and his work is that for one thing he's one of the only sculptors currently working in these hard stones today. His assistant Tim is following in his footsteps in a way using basalt and deliberately working with hard stones but these are materials that in many ways are materials of the past not of the present and in Steven Cox's work we see a dialogue between a present day sculptor and these very ancient important materials. He has tremendous respect for them and the work that he does represents a sort of conversation that he has with these materials and when you examine his work and really look at it and we'll see some more work when we get to alabaster you really get a sense, a better sense of those materials thanks to Steven's intervention as a sculptor.


I'm standing along Pine Creek, which is a tributary to the Susquehanna River. Pine Creek's valley actually forms what's known as the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon. And this is an area that receives a lot of attention for its recreational opportunities. So you see people fishing and boating in the creek, as well as hunting and hiking through the woods here. But up on the ridges along either side of the creek, there's actually been quite a bit of shale energy development. And so there are dozens of wells on top of the ridges around here. So one of the concerns is that the drilling activities could impact the water quality. And another concern is the amount of water that they actually withdraw from the creek here to serve as the water for hydraulic fracturing purposes. The Marcellus shale has very low permeability, but it also contains a lot of natural gas. So in order to release that natural gas from the shale, the process known as hydraulic fracturing is required to actually open up fractures in the shale and therefore allow the gas to flow out of those fractures into the well bore and up to the earth's surface, where it's then captured in pipes and transported to the marketplace. A typical well site may use up to 5 to 10 million gallons of water per well, and each well pad may have anywhere from 4 to 10 or more wells. The millions of gallons of water used per well to fracture the shale is typically derived from surface water sources such as Pine Creek. In fact about 80% of the water used in hydraulic fracturing across Pennsylvania comes from surface water sources. So the industry does have a permit to withdraw water from this particular location. The regulators, in this case the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, will look at the proposed withdrawal, look at the overall flow of this stream and determine what is a safe amount of water to withdraw from the stream while also protecting the stream's aquatic health and allow for enough water for any downstream users. Once the river's flow drops below a certain level, the industry is no longer allowed to withdraw water until the rainfall brings the river flows back up to some normal level where the industry then can resume their withdrawal practices.