The LifeQuake Blog

Last week on Oprah’s show they explored how to talk to your children about sex and Dr. Laura Berman said something that provoked a huge response in the audience: that parents should give their daughters permission to masturbate. She went so far as to say that at 15or 16, introduce a vibrator. She asserted that if we teach young girls to take their power back around sexuality, they won’t be dependent on boys for their pleasure and confuse the good feelings they get from being pleasured by a boy with love.

Although Oprah was completely on board with this, Gayle was against it. She asserted one of the most sexist things I’ve ever heard on this show: that it is ok for boys to masturbate because they are more sexually driven as teenagers. Well, I can tell you that as a child growing up in the 70’s where sexual mores had changed dramatically, I lived in a home where I was taught sex was for marriage.  I drove all my chaotic, sexual feelings into food and between the ages of 13-15, gained 40 pounds. I remember having sexual arousal but not knowing what to do with it, my stress management technique was to eat cookies instead. How many girls who aren’t dating is this also true for? In the words of Dr. Toni Grant:  “Food is a good girl’s sex.”

But I digress. Getting back to Gayle and the Oprah show. Gayle has made no bones about mentioning her love for food.  Why is it ok to derive pleasure from food but not from our own bodies? If a teenage girl sat down at a great meal and ate from pleasure, Gayle (and many people in America who agree with her) would be fine with that but it is not ok to have that pleasure come from touching ourselves.  Unfortunately,  Dr. Berman did not go far enough. Although masturbation is part of the pleasure, what we aren’t taught is how to touch ourselves lovingly all over our bodies.

And here’s the irony: Food when eaten to excess produces childhood obesity, diabetes, and a host of other health issues. The last I heard, stroking your own body does not make you go blind! Nor does it produce weight gain.  In Ashley Montagu’s seminal work first published in 1971, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, he shares with the reader the studies that were done that support how critical being touched is to healthy human functioning and as an extension, to the ability to bond with another.  

My take on this is that when we are not touched, food becomes the safe  mother. The mother who gives us unconditional love.

When a teenage girl is given permission in her formative years to have intimacy with herself first, she does not reach out to find it indiscriminately with a boy, another adolescent most probably incapable of giving her what she truly needs. He can’t because he is being driven by the mother lode of testosterone into focusing his desire for sexual release.  If girls had another avenue for nurturing themselves, they wouldn’t be as driven to make food their lover. It is time for us to move beyond this puritan schizophrenia we have that allows kids to see soft porn scenes in day- time soap operas while at the same time making a physical relationship with our own bodies forbidden.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist and author of The LifeQuake Phenomenon. Her website address is www.LifeQuake.net. She is also available for consultation at 310-712-2600.

Whether you are already in therapy or feeling the need for a professional to guide you through these rapidly changing times, it can get confusing as to when to see a coach, a career counselor, a psychiatrist, or a psychotherapist.

Here are six tips to assist you in making the right decision:

1)     Do you have insurance?  Those who are career counselors or coaches only, may not also be licensed in California to practice as a counseling professional. However, there are licensed professionals who also do career coaching, life transitions coaching, and crisis management.  If you want your insurance company to reimburse part of your sessions, be sure to ask the coach when you make the call. Even if you don’t have health insurance, make sure they give you an official invoice or super bill that you can write off as an educational expense if it applies to your professional improvement.

2)     Are you depressed or highly anxious? If so, is it preventing you from functioning on the job, managing your children, or participating in social activities? Working with a coach who doesn’t have clinical training can be a mistake if they do not have the skills to assess when they are in over their head. For example, coaches are sometimes trained to interpret the client’s non-compliance with homework assignments as a form of resistance. They are not often trained how to assess clinical depression. I was referred an anorexic patient who had gone to a coach for hypnosis. By the time this patient was referred to me, she needed to be hospitalized. This is an extreme example but a licensed therapist, whether they be a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist spends at least three years in graduate or medical school, two years in a clinical internship with supervision, and then is required to take state board exams both orally and written before practicing on their own.   There are no coaching programs that require this kind of rigorous training and supervision.

3)     If your life is in chaos, are you de-compensating and need medication to function? A licensed psychotherapist (if they are good) will know to refer you to a psychiatrist. What is amazing is that if you were to go to your family practice M.D.  and report being stressed out he/she may prescribe anti-depressants without the thorough evaluation that an M.D. trained in psychiatry would do to make sure they put you on the appropriate psychotropic medication to rebalance your neurotransmitters. A psychiatrist is also going to follow up to see how you are doing on that brand and dosage. There are also psychiatrists who treat these imbalances with nutritional supplements and herbs. These doctors are called orthomolecular psychiatrists.

When I work with my clients whose brains are in overload, I work closely with a holistic psychiatrist who practices near by – Dr. Hyla Cass- CassMD.com. 

4)     Is your life working so-so, but you want more meaning and purpose? Are you just in job burnout and want career counseling?

Traditional career counseling involves elaborate questionnaires to determine your interests and skill set but may not tap into what you are passionate about. There are coaches who do not have academic training in psychology but who have developed their own methodology for helping people discover their life purpose, their mission, or their vocation of destiny. They will give you homework assignments and a structured program to follow and these coaches and programs for the high functioning individual can be very effective.

5)     Are you experiencing a creative block? Some people know they are meant to do something artistically but are going through a dry period or maybe the demands of their day job in corporate America is getting in the way of contacting the inner muse for their artistic needs at night.

This may be the domain of either a therapist or a coach. Choosing which to go to may begin with you exploring how deep seated the issue is. If there is childhood trauma connected to the block, you may need a therapist trained in hypnotic regression that can take you back to the origin of the trauma and provide the healthy adult protection your child self may need to heal the issue.

A coach may work with you more in the present and deal strictly with your conscious beliefs that are getting in the way and give you exercises to re-inspire your creativity. In my practice, I have found that when a client is feeling blocked, it helps to have them close their eyes and breathe into their body bringing an awareness of where the fears are stuck in the body. I don’t necessarily need to go back to childhood because the unconscious trauma is still in the body and when we surrender into these places, it drives the fear to the surface and we can use the breath to morph the old beliefs into a new reality. I also have found that dream interpretation works really well with writer’s block and other creative obstructions.

6)     Are you dealing with an issue that needs the augmentation of group support?  Sometimes we need a community around us such as the Anonymous programs if you are struggling with an addiction. If you are healing from breast cancer, no one understands what you are going through like other survivors who’ve gone through it. Or, perhaps if you are in a spiritual crisis, you may need to attend services at a church or temple in affiliation that is aligned with your beliefs. Also, when people are going through a transition in their lives, group therapy may be beneficial as a cost effective means of having a breakthrough.

In summary, by asking some of these questions when you contact a coach or therapist, you will clarify for yourself who is suitable.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist, marriage, family, and child counselor as well as a career and life transitions coach. She also specializes in working with frustrated artists and those wanting a life that is joyfully fulfilling. Her new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive) in Times Of Personal and Global Upheaval is available through her website www.LifeQuake.net and the major online bookstores.

Since my book The LifeQuake Phenomenon was released in February, I have done a lot of interviews with journalists on a variety of topics, some with the theme of addiction – mommies who drink too much wine at play dates, men who use exercise to compensate for big appetites, screen writers who think they need pot to reach the muse, etc The one question that has come up a lot about addiction is to whether non substance related habits can be addictions. For example, the internet. Can surfing the net, participating in social communities, or watching You tube be an addiction?

My answer is always the same. Nothing outside of us in and of itself is ever an addiction. So here are four questions to ask yourself to determine if you have an internet addiction:

1) How many hours do you spend on your computer in non-work related activity?

2) Are there things in your life that aren’t getting attended to because of your internet time?

3) are there people who need your attention that you are avoiding by being at your computer?

4 Are there emotions you are corking through this distraction?

One of my clients felt trapped in her marriage. She had had an affair and ended it because she had children and wanted to keep the family together. Unfortunately, instead of working on the issues with her husband, she chose to watch You Tube videos instead. Another client used chat rooms as a way to safely connect with people and avoid being in the world where she could get emotionally wounded as she had experienced when her boyfriend dumped her.

So, the key is to notice if your computer time is providing a way to not deal with changes you need to be making. Left unaddressed, this will lead to a crisis. when we need to make changes and distract ourselves instead, eventually the life you’ve outgrown will burst into chaos. By taking the time to really let yourself feel your feelings, you could discover solutions to how to negotiate the next phase of your life a lot less stressful.

The media is scaring the heck out of people and some of that is good. We’ve been needing  to get out of denial and wake up to the fact that we’ve been overextending ourselves financially in this country. However, what I’ve been seeing in my practice is a paralysis and an increase in addictive behaviors to numb out from the overwhelming fear people have that the entire country is going belly up. So I am here TO BRING THE GOOD NEWS!!!!

1) Getting rid of the clutter.  The big buzz word right now is CHANGE. But for most of us that translates as LOSS. Take an inventory of everything in your surroundings that is de-funct and obsolete.

To be successful now you have to create small changes where you can see improvement immediately.   To get in the spirit of change you have to get rid of the dead-weight. There is no room to move into new if you are surrounded by stuff that is not life giving.  What is old and useless? Take inventory of what is de-functional. For chicks it is the closet, your wardrobe, expiration labels on foods and medicine in the pantry, and the garage.  Then move to your desk at home and at the office.
Now go on to your habits. What habits are dead-weight for you? What about people?

2) Make a list of all the things you fear are going to happen to you in your economic LifeQuake. Now one by one, say each of them out loud. Notice where you feel the  anxiety in your body:  is it in your throat, your gut, or your heart? Breathe into that place.  Keep breathing there until it releases.

3) Now, ask yourself what is one thing I could do today that would simplify my life and put more money in my hands? Cut your cell phone expenses, shop at thrift stores. Have a garage sale. Take your lunch to the office. Buy some used free weights and get rid of your gym membership, etc.

4) Make a list of five changes you will initiate that will kick off Spring as a true breath of fresh air.

When people are diagnosed with a catastrophic illness, people rally around to support…in the acute stage. However, if that illness cannot be cured with a round of chemo and radiation it is difficult for most people to be supportive for years when the illness becomes chronic and debilitative. So how do you live with the incapacitating pain over many years when many of your friends may have disappeared?
The answer is simple, it’s the solution that is the challenge. You turn it into a LifeQuake. The difference between the chaos and stress one experiences when a crisis hits and the chaos and stress one experiences when you turn it into an awakening to a fuller potential you can be summed up in one word: context. Do you hold the experience in terms of the loss to your life as you have known it or do you choose to interpret this challenge as grace?
Here is one technique for transforming the belief that you have lost your health into taking a stand that out of this experience, you will become healthier:
Envision yourself in radiant health. What I mean by that is that you are happy and are glowing- radiating love like a person does when they are in love. Now, place your hands over your heart and imagine you are using your hands to direct love toward a pet or someone you have deep, positive feelings for. Once your hands start to get warm, direct that same intention of tenderness and unconditional love toward yourself, setting an intention that you are sending healing into your own body. After a few minutes, place your hands over your face, and keep radiating love toward your face.

Whether you have an illness or not, this technique will start to make you radiate and glow. Now go out and spread that energy through your smile to everyone you meet. This has a huge impact on the immune system, your emotions, and the well being of your fellow humans. Altruism takes many forms. When we choose to love ourselves in spite of whatever pain we are experiencing, we move the whole world forward. We assist all of humanity toward a new consciousness in which chaos and upheaval becomes the deconstruction of something that is no longer viable and the reconstruction of a new identity that is based on how much you love, not what you look like, how much money you have in the bank, or how much career clout you have.
Yes, long term illnesses can become the very thing that makes you the most powerful person imaginable.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist, crisis coach, author of The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval and survivor of three near fatal experiences.  For personal consultation, she can be reached at 310-712-2600.

Now that the term “Bromance” is showing up in pop culture so prevalently, I found myself asking the question, why? Also, what changes might it bring to heterosexual relationships between men and women? As horrific a plague as AIDS is and has been on the world, perhaps it has changed men and their capacity for intimacy. When gay men started going to funerals as often as they were going to the gym, a change began to take place in the mating habits of homosexual men.
I started to see it in my practice: more gay men searching for relationships with men that had genuine intimacy and partnership. Although there is more tolerance in the male gay culture for non-monogamous relationships, as their friends began dying prematurely, more gay men began to seek a deeper connection than just sex with other men. Now that we are twenty five years down the road and another whole generation has reached adulthood, straight men are evolving and developing a stronger sense of their feminine side. Now, we women have pretty much taken credit for that as we entered the work force into more powerful positions and demanded more of men, thus developing our masculine side too.
Some of that may be true. Straight men have become more feminine as a result of the Feminist Movement but I think that gay men coming out of the closet has also had a huge impact on the relationship needs of straight guys. The prevalence of men raised by single mothers in this generation (a rather new phenomenon) created a void in traditional male modeling for intimacy, not just with women but in their friendships with men as well. Both men and women are searching for lives that contain meaning and purpose. Intimacy in relationships (all relationships) is growing stronger as we become more isolated in this cyberspace definition of friendship. Ashley Montagu’s seminal book, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (first published in 1971) showed us many years ago that we need to physically touch each other without sex necessarily as a follow up. It is interesting to note that the hard back release of Touching coincided with the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement and the paperback edition came out in 1986 as the AIDS epidemic in America began to proliferate in the straight world. Coincidence?
Who knew that the group who brought us Michel Angelo, Truman Capote, and Versace would also bring straight men into deeper connection with each other? As a straight woman who believes some straight men are capable of emotional intimacy, I thank you Harvey Milk and every brave gay man who has chosen to openly fight for the right to marry. Whether you know it or not, you are helping us women not just as our fashion consultants and substitute for boyfriends on Saturday night, but also by influencing our future husbands by your stand for marriage.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist who has just published a book called The LifeQuake Phenomeonon. The thrust of her work is to assist people in releasing old beliefs that keep them from living a life that is authentic and joyful.
For more information: go to her website, www. LifeQuake.net or call
310-712-2600 for personal consultation.

People are not sleeping well these days. My clients complain about it, my friends complain about it, and even my parents complain about it. As a former insomniac, I thought I should give some tips in today’s blog about how to resolve this important issue. Lack of sleep ages the body like no other lifestyle factor.  It lowers the immune system and interferes with the REM sleep phase which is so important to dreaming (even if you don’t remember dreaming, dreaming is essential to health). Lack of sleep is also the number one cause of auto accidents, and it retards one’s ability to adapt to daily stress.

Here are some tips that work for me:
1) Force yourself to turn off the TV and computer at least one hour before bed.
2) Go to sleep at the same time every night and wake up at relatively the same time every morning, even on weekends.
3) Listen to soothing music and read books or magazines that are not disturbing but are uplifting.
4)  Do some kind of cardio work-out at least five days a week earlier in the day.
5) Eat complex carbohydrates like rice, pasta, or potatoes at dinner. It increases serotonin, the chemical that calms the brain.
6) I have found for me, one milligram of melatonin one half hour before bed really helps. Some people find taking tryptophan, an amino acid promotes sleep naturally.
7) Scan the day you just completed. Take note of what your emotional state was at every point in the day.  Now using your awareness, scan your body from head to toe. Wherever there is pain, breathe into it until you start to feel it release a little.
8) Count your blessings instead of sheep as you drift off to dream land…

As a change expert and crisis management consultant, I am often asked by journalists, “Is what is going on with Wall Street, a LifeQuake? ”  My answer is always the same: “It depends.”

In September, as I was finishing the final edits on my book, the newspaper headline read,  “Wall Street Quakes!” and I thought, oh, it has begun. For some people, the stock market crashing meant the end of their life savings, for some, the end of a dream to retire, and for others it meant a crossroads.

A LifeQuake is not a mere crisis but an awakening to a new level of consciousness that can come from a crisis.
So for some, who use this crisis to learn how to adapt to change on the spin of a dime, the stock market going up and down can be a lot like our emotions over the course of the day. Do you react to every event that you didn’t expect from fear or do you respond with the attitude that somewhere in this upheaval there is good? If we declare that no matter what happens, we are always winning, it doesn’t matter how the outer events unfold, you will experience your life as a winner. On the other hand, if your happiness is dependent on the DOW instead of the other Dow spelled “ Tao” that teaches us all that peace and security is always available, then your life and your inner state will always be like its own personal stock market: a rollercoaster.

Further, you will get trapped in seeing Wall Street as your Holy Grail instead of discovering the purpose of all this chaos – to know you are safe and secure no matter how life shows up and that love is all that really matters.  As someone who has lost everything a couple times over, I can tell you from personal experience that this economic crisis can take us from loss to liberation.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of her new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How To Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval. To order her new book or read her blog, go to www.LifeQuake.net.

There is a growing body of research that shows that women who are stay at home moms are drinking more alcohol than their working mom counterparts who juggle multiple roles.  So I found myself asking, “why is that so?” Why isn’t the stress of being so overly committed to both home and career sending women to the bottle more than the woman who is doing one job?

So here is what I came up with along with some suggestions for deciding when it is time to put the fino on the vino.  Women who are mothers today represent the largest educated population of women in history. Since the 60’s, we have been given a choice about when and if we even want to have children. Most women have a career and some kind of life after leaving their parents home now for at least a few years. They know what freedom over their lives and bodies are, even if they have a job. In today’s world, when you have children you are signing up to be a chauffeur, a tutor, a teacher ‘s aid in the classroom, a school volunteer, and be responsible for your child’s play dates and social activities.

When I was a child, we lived around the corner from the school so my mother didn’t drive us to school.  I never asked my parents to do my homework with me, and all activities I was involved with usually involved a school bus or was in our neighborhood. My mother did not organize my social life. I had a social life if I could get a ride.  It is a tough job being a stay at home mom. The demands of raising children today are huge but what makes it more difficult than balancing career and home can be found in one word: identity. You lose your sense of self when you don’t have an identity outside of motherhood.  We are after all animals, mammals, but none – the – less, animals. We need reinforcement. When you perform well at work, you either get acknowledgment, a promotion, a raise, or all of the above.  When you’re a stay at home mom, you’re lucky if you get an occasional acknowledgement from your kids.

So how do you know when your “mommy medicine” is a problem?

1) For the most part, quantity is not the main issue. Dependence is. If you have three glasses of wine over the course of a long Sunday family dinner like they do in Italy, it may be fine if your state of mind is celebratory. If you have three glasses of wine every night before and at dinner, you might want to ask yourself,  “are you tired of being the one who makes dinner every night and/ or has to listen to everyone’s complaints about their day?”

2) Do you really, really look forward to that glass of wine at night and if you had to go without it for a week, would it bring up some intense emotions?

3)  Is your wine drinking at night, the only time through the course of the day, that you feel happy?

4) Are you using it to numb out other yearnings, like to go back to school or go back into the workplace?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, perhaps it is time to include more time for yourself to contemplate what gives your life meaning outside of being a mom and what brings you joy. On my website, under the media page at the very bottom is an exercise I did for You Tube called “Connecting the Dots” that can help you discover what gives you energy and passion and perhaps even can lead to finding your other life purpose.

If your alcohol consumption is getting out of hand, perhaps it is time to consult a therapist or attend an AA meeting.  People are out there to help.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of her new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval.  On her website www.LifeQuake.net, she outlines on the “seven stages” page how addiction can be part of the awakening process of a LifeQuake.

Yesterday I was contacted through Facebook by a guy from Torino, Italy who has the same last name as me. I accepted his invitation to be his friend given we have the same name. I was slightly amused by the fact that although he’s married, he listed one word under the “Your interests” category: women. But if you understand Italian culture, you don’t judge.

Anyway, he contacted me again today inviting me to be a part of the Galardi Family where 30 people all named Galardi were listed. At first, I almost didn’t accept.  Although I do business under the name Galardi, my legal last name is Gagliardi but people don’t know how to pronounce it correctly in this country (phonetically it is pronounced Gaul-yar-dee).  When  I started doing media appearances twenty years ago I shortened the name so it wouldn’t be pronounced Gag -liardi.

But in looking at all these pictures of people with my current last name, it made me think about how the word family is changing. Now with Facebook, we really are connecting with each other all over the world every day and the idea of a global family is no longer just an ideal concept. We are meant to transform our definition of family as we make this global leap in evolution.  The evolutionary biologists tell us that we are all connected to ancestors in South Africa. So I decided that whether my name is Galardi or Gagliardi, I am connected to these people in Torino. The irony is that my grandmother’s second husband John Sorgini was from Torino.  Although we were not blood related, he was the only paternal grandfather I ever knew. Six degrees of separation…

Dr Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist and Change Expert.  Her new book The LifeQuake Phenomenon is available through her website www.LifeQuake.net or the online bookstores.  To contact Dr. Galardi for a consult, call 310-712-2600.