Author: Craig Constantine

Addiction with Howard Gluss

February 9, 2023

What are the dynamics and challenges of balancing direct patient care with creative podcasting, and how does this balance influence the impact and approach in both fields?

Craig and Dr. Howard Gluss discuss the psychological impact of audio, from addiction and therapy to the intimate power of sound in storytelling.

My podcasting work is about my psychology work. It’s just an extension of who I am. It’s just a different arena I’m playing in [
] A lot of times I don’t really care what the subject is, because [my goals is] to try to find the psychodynamics that are present in that subject. I try to go on a journey with my guests and look for those ‘aha’ moments where we’re both going, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting.’

~ Howard Gluss (9:30)

Craig and Dr. Howard Gluss explore the intersection of podcasting and psychology, focusing on how Dr. Gluss balances his work as a clinical psychologist with his creative expression as a podcaster. Dr. Gluss explains that while his sessions with patients are about being fully present for them, podcasting offers him an opportunity for self-expression. He sees both practices as interconnected, as the creativity and fulfillment he gets from podcasting positively impact his work with clients. Dr. Gluss also reflects on his approach to treating addiction, emphasizing the need to separate the person from their addiction to help them rebuild a life they enjoy, which may reduce the desire to self-destruct.

I do feel from a psychological and spiritual point of view that sound is very powerful. If you look at some of the Eastern religions, sound of ‘Om’—both in Buddhism, Hinduism—is so prevalent as a meditation [
] To me, sound is very ancient. It’s very powerful. It’s very visceral, spiritual. It gets me very connected.

~ Howard Gluss (12:12)

They also discuss the psychological and spiritual power of sound, with Dr. Gluss drawing connections between ancient practices like meditation and the unique experience of audio in podcasting. He suggests that the medium of sound can be particularly intimate and impactful, engaging different aspects of the mind. The conversation touches on the challenges podcasters face when they lack feedback from their audience, which can lead to assumptions that may not be grounded in reality. Dr. Gluss notes that these assumptions can be influenced by the podcaster’s own insecurities, a topic that resonates with his work in psychology.

Takeaways

Balancing creative and clinical work — exploring how creative expression through podcasting complements clinical work and enhances personal well-being.

The psychology of addiction — treating addiction involves separating the person from their disease, allowing individuals to rediscover passions and build a life worth preserving.

The power of sound — audio, as a medium, taps into ancient spiritual and psychological connections, providing a unique form of engagement.

The intimacy of podcasting — podcasting allows for a personal, one-on-one connection with listeners, fostering a sense of closeness and authenticity.

Assumptions in communication — a lack of audience feedback in podcasting can lead to self-doubt and assumptions, often reflecting the podcaster’s own insecurities.

Therapy through telehealth — telehealth offers a different dynamic than in-person sessions, with both pros and cons in terms of connection and observation.

Audio’s impact on imagination — the absence of visuals in audio content allows listeners to fill in details themselves, leading to a deeply personal experience.

The challenge of perfectionism — podcasting can trigger perfectionist tendencies, with creators obsessing over details that may not significantly affect the outcome.

Cultural significance of sound — sound plays an important role in different cultures and religions, particularly in meditative and spiritual practices.

Resources

Daraknot Health — A concierge-style in-home treatment service specializing in addiction, depression, and anxiety, providing customized care in the client’s home.

Engaging Minds podcast — A psychology-focused podcast that explores various topics, hosted by a clinical psychologist.

Intimate Fame podcast — A series of audio dramas focusing on the lives of famous individuals, including Wallace Simpson, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean.

Om meditation — A meditation practice rooted in Eastern religions, specifically Buddhism and Hinduism, that uses the sound “Om” as a spiritual tool.

(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)

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Audience

February 9, 2023

I think people want things that are really passionate, and often, the best version they could be is not for everybody
 The best art divides the audience. If you put out a record, and half the people who hear it absolutely love it, and half the people who hear it absolutely hate it, you’ve done well, because it’s pushing that boundary.

~ Rick Rubin

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Vannevar Bush

February 8, 2023

Vannevar Bush—head of military research during WW2, author of “As We May Think” and “Science, the Endless Frontier”—wrote a memoir late in life, Pieces of the Action. It was out of print and hard to obtain for a long time, but Stripe Press has brought it back in a new edition with a foreword from Ben Reinhardt. [
] Here are some of my favorite quotes from the original edition:

~ Jason Crawford from, Highlights from the memoirs of Vannevar Bush

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There’s a sort of incredulous-eyes, slight shaking of the head, expression that I make when I want to emphasize just how amazing I find it to be when I gape into the maw of All Human Knowledge. Sometimes I find something like this which is so blindingly important to so much of the society and culture upon which I find myself standing, that I’m drawn up short. I feel like I’ve heard the name “Vannevar Bush” but I couldn’t have told you a thing about that person. Then I look at the hundreds of unread books, and the hundreds of digital, read-later things I’ve collected, and I smile, because I think I get it.

I smile when I manage to remember that there’s no goal. The point isn’t to accomplish anything in particular (fix something big in the world, follow every thread of interest, learn the question whose answer is 42.) The point isn’t even to enjoy the ride. The point is, how you answer the question life asks you.

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Illusions

February 7, 2023

Let the impermanence of all life-forms sink in. The stability and solidity of the things we see are mere illusions. We must not be afraid of the pangs of sadness that ensue from this perception. The tightness of our emotions, usually so wound up around our own needs and concerns, is now opening up to the world and to the piognancy of life itself, and we should welcome this.

~ Robert Greene

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Burnout

February 6, 2023

Looking back, I think I went through a really intense period of burnout last year (in many aspects of my life, not just training). As a result, I found that the second I encountered meaningful challenge in my training – whether that be psychologically or physically – my body would just shut down, and kill the session dead. The best way I find to describe it is that my ‘spare emotional bandwidth’ is severely reduced, and things I would normally take in stride or even relish the challenge of instead boil me over into stress and anxiety much quicker. Consequently I’ve had to curtail the intensity of my training to the point that my criteria for success for a day will sometimes be as as little as “did a single push up” or “went for a walk”.

~ James Adams from, Parkour, Perpetual Challenge, and Burnout

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Last year I had a conversation with Adams for the Movers Mindset podcast. I had found this article (in July 2022) as I was doing my prep-work for the conversation and have only just gotten around to reading it. I really appreciate (both “hey, thanks for writing that” and “yes, I too have burnout”) him sharing the reality of burnout from pushing oneself.

Most of my days’ activity is no more than, “went for a walk.” Unrelated, last week I strained a muscle in my lower back—one of the lateral ones that’s connected to your pelvis and is involved when you twist and bend-forward. I was sitting, improperly with my lower back “collapsed”, turned my torso to my left and *twang* To be honest, it’s simply where the stress and burnout “came out”. It’s taken me a week of careful recovery work and today I’m back to: I can bend over, very nervously, with no pain but wondering at which instant it will hurt. Injury and recovery; I’ve done that countless times. But the real problem started in my head.

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More present

February 5, 2023

A million years from now, when alien anthropologists begin gathering evidence about what humans were like, they will definitely want to dig up the Self-help and Spiritual/Religion sections of our bookstores and libraries. There they will find direct evidence of what we yearned for and struggled with.

~ David Cain from, Trying to Be More Present Isn’t Enough

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For some reason ( <- sarcasm alert ) my mind went directly from my title, to More cowbell. Which I’m linking to, on the off-chance you’ve not seen it. But to Cain’s topic I’ll simply add that it’s really (really REALLY) clear to me that I am the source of all my stress, anxiety, and problems. Certainly, there are injuries and trauma in my past—oh the stories I’ll not tell. Every time I turn and face the strange (hat tip David Bowie, rest in piece) I find it’s all smoke and mirrors. Every. Single. Time that I stop, and ask myself: What exactly is the thing that I’m anxious about, wigged-out about, pissed-off about, and—yes this too is a problem—excited about
 Be clear, Craig. Use “i” language. Then I simply do it, or I delete it from my life. Bliss. Calm presence. The sun comes out and my mouth makes that strange shape y’all call a “smile.”

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Reproach

February 4, 2023

When you call someone “untrustworthy” or “ungrateful”, turn the reproach on yourself. It was you who did wrong by assuming that someone with those traits deserved your trust. Or by doing them a favor and expecting something in return, instead of looking to the action itself for your reward. What else did you expect from helping someone out? Isn’t it enough that you’ve done what your nature demands? You want a salary for it too?

~ Marcus Aurelius, 9.42

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Nostalgia

February 3, 2023

Longing for the past is generally referred to as nostalgia – a gentle, tender feeling that might make these stories seem like nothing more than harmless sentimentality. But it is crucial to distinguish between wistful memories of grandma’s kitchen and belief in a prior state of cultural perfection.

~ Alan Jay Levinovitz from, It never was golden

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You may or may not like that particular essay; There are 2,000 others to choose from over on Aeon. I was poking around, found this one, and pinned it for later reading. Figuring out how to pin things for later reading is a huge force multiplier. When I want to read good stuff, I never spend time looking for good stuff. I just go to the pile of good stuff—twitch at the 700+ items, veer back over into “that’s an embarrassment of riches, long live the open Internet—and start reading. Hmmm
 nostalgia?

I remember, back in The Day, when I used to really enjoy reading— wait, no. That’s today, and without the 20-minute car ride to the Hall of Books.

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An impression

February 1, 2023

The passage that follows is from a book I’m working on right now. I’m not sure the passage works for a Writing Wednesdays post, but what the hell, I like it and my instinct tells me to put it out there.

~ Steven Pressfield from, The River

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I do have certain distinctly imprinted “passages” from my own story. No, it’s not story-time today. Upon reading Pressfield’s comment (and the passage) I was left wondering what was the critical feature (or features) of my own passages which made them indelible. It certainly wasn’t receipt of accolades or actual accomplishment. It certainly wasn’t that a passage began with a grand vision or even a coherent plan.

I hope you weren’t expecting me to have an answer
 this blog is, after all, just me working with the garage door up.

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Step 2

January 30, 2023

People – especially really smart people – have a tendency to attempt solving big problems (like earning a profit) without first solving more basic ones (like how you’ll get there). This is why the “Step 1, Step 3” joke resonates. And it’s why understanding the hierarchy of earning profit is so important.

~ Morgan Housel, from The Hierarchy of Earning Profit

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Oh, crikey! That’d be me. I too–frequently get frustrated when my “awesome idea” isn’t received the way I’d like it to be. I think it’s exactly the same step–two problem that Housel points out. I’m jumping over step 2. But in cases where I try to figure out step 2
 *crickets* It occurs to me that there’s another way to address the issue: Stop chasing ideas that solve a problem that I have, and instead try to chase an idea that solves a problem someone else has.

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Full stop

January 29, 2023

Death is a declarative punctuation mark – a period in a life full of commas and semicolons. Death is a full stop, the end of opportunities for the deceased and those who knew them. Death is cruel like that.

~ Hugh Hollowell, from «https://www.soverybeautiful.org/if-we-love-we-grieve/»

I like the punctuation metaphor. I like the finality of the imagery. When I read that turn of phrase, I heard the sharp crack of a mechanical typewriter striking the period. I’m just not sure that the metaphor is apt for the experience of someone else’s death. That’s always been more like turning the page, midway through a book, and discovering the next face—and alas all the subsequent pages—are inexplicably blank. That’s not a period or an ellipses or even a highbrow em-dash. That’s just

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And in the end

January 27, 2023

It’s great to live a life of courage and compassion
 but all the courage and compassion in the world doesn’t make any of it any easier. All it can do is hopefully make it more meaningful, somehow.

~ Hugh MacLeod, from «https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2022/07/12/the-one-choice-all-fulfilled-people-make/»

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I’d go further: The more courage and compassion I muster, the harder it gets. Compassion gives me a big “why” that burns inside, driving me to the next, harder challenge. Courage begets more courage; With each win won through courage, it becomes easier to again deploy courage intentionally. It seems that courage and compassion lead to the tackling of increasing great and difficult challenges. Meaning is great, but I haven’t yet figured out how to use any of it to pay the proverbial rent.

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Journalism

January 26, 2023

The point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society. There are things, there are facts, there are truths that actually feel regressive, but it doesn’t matter, because the point of journalism isn’t to make everything better. It’s to give people accurate information about how things are.

~ Sebastian Junger

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Bootstrapping

January 25, 2023

What’s the difference between a good leader vs. bad leader? What do good leaders do differently?

It’s an essential question every leader must ask themselves.

~ Jason Evanish, from Good Leader Vs. Bad Leader

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“What do good leaders do differently?” They ask themselves that question. It’s a good article (an actual article, not just a wee listicle) worth glancing at simply for the first graphic which should make you chuckle and stick with you.

I want to ask the next question: What do effective leaders do differently? Because I’m emphatic that it’s possible to be a good leader—even a great leader—but end up not being effective. Great leader, great goal, and yet
 sometimes failure. There are also some horrific examples of bad leaders who manage to be extremely effective. It really feels like the quality of a leader and the effectiveness of a leader aren’t interdependent. What’s up with that?

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