The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in this video, I'll introduce the concepts of a powerful body-centered way to calm and regulate your emotions.  It doesn't require a therapist or a lot of expensive training.  It uses the power of your own nervous system to make you emotionally stronger and more resilient.  It is based on a therapy for trauma and anxiety called the Community Resiliency Model, but I believe these are great skills for all of us to have. This is the first video in a three part series. Down / Bottom Up People come into therapy for a lot of reasons -- but generally it’s because they are unhappy about some portion of their lives or how they are reacting to things.  When we think of therapy, we tend to think of "talk therapy" -- come in, talk about your problems, your childhood, your relationships.  Now — I'm a big fan of talk therapy -- you can gain powerful insights about your behavior and the behavior of those around

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'm doing the second part of a series on calming your emotions naturally using the skills from the Community Resiliency Model or CRM.   This video introduces the first three fundamental skills: tracking, resourcing, and grounding. The Community Resiliency Model was developed by Elaine Miller-Karas with the Trauma Resource Institute as a way for people and communities to use their own resources within their own nervous systems to bring calm and balance to their lives.  These methods have been taught individually and to entire stressed out communities of all ages in multiple countries around the world.  Learning these skills allows people to gain some mastery over their emotional responses -- not by supressing them or avoiding them, but by expanding our ability to tolerate and function while still having uncomfortable emotions.  In the first video in this series, I go through a simplified overvi

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'm doing the third and final part of a series on calming your emotions naturally using the skills from the Community Resilience Model or CRM.   This video introduces the final three skills: Gestures, Help Now, and Shift & Stay. The first video in this series gave a simplified overview of our nervous system and how it helps us to survive.  I explain the two systems that activate us to fight or flight when we are in danger (the sympathetic nervous system) and the one that calms us back down after the danger has passed (the parasympathetic nervous system).  These systems work together to help us stay in our resilient zone when we have distress or upsetting experiences. The second video introduced the first 3 fundamental skills in the toolkit: tracking, resourcing, and grounding.  These skills train you to notice when your body feels distress or wellness and helps to activate your parasympathe

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how you can use Google Docs in a Chrome browser to dictate for free on your PC. I’ve gotten used to using the dictation feature my iPhone to speed up all sorts of typing activities — emails, texting, notes, etc.  Since I work on a PC, I find myself wishing that I could dictate into it sometimes also.  Specifically, since I’m training to be a therapist, I have to write up progress notes for each patient after sessions.  These notes take much less time if I dictate rather than type.  In addition, because I’ve been sitting the whole session, I prefer to stand and dictate rather than sit and type.  I happen to know that the best dictation software for a PC is Dragon Naturally Speaking.  They have been around forever and are the undisputed leader in the industry — unfortunately, a single user license costs $200.   I am not willing to spend that kind of money on a “nice to have”. I also tried

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my takeways and summary of the book Trauma Sensitive Yoga in Therapy by David Emerson. You may have noticed that I'm reading a lot of books on trauma.  I'm a mental health therapist in training and I started out reading a whole pile of books on everything my clients are experiencing -- anxiety, depression, ADHD, self esteem issues, PTSD, you name it.  The problem is that since I'm already doing a bunch of reading in school, I can only read so fast -- so I decide to focus on trauma.  My reasoning is that that is the area that, if I'm not careful and informed, I could really do some harm to my clients.   In doing all of this reading on trauma, one of my main takeaways is that trauma is a full body experience -- flashbacks and uncontrollable thoughts can make your body feel like it's experiencing those terrifying experiences right now.  I've come to believe that

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my experience and thoughts around getting the Covid vaccine. I got vaccinated last week during the first phase in my state.  A friend told me that it was now my civic duty to spread my experience far and wide so that others will feel better about the process -- so here goes! I received the vaccine because I'm a mental health therapist and mental health professionals are included in the first phase of the vaccine rollout in my county.  I should let you know that I am not AT ALL squeamish about getting vaccines -- I will happily get any and all vaccinations that are available for me and for my kids and we ALL get the flu vaccine every year after one particularly bad Christmas flu experience.  My family has been very careful during this quarantine period and I have ALWAYS planned to get the vaccine as soon as it was available.  So, I wanted to let you know my basic stance on vaccin

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll discuss my understanding of how sharing works in Google Photos. Like many of you, Google Photos is my choice for cloud-based photo storage, but I've always found that one of the more confusing and convoluted aspects of the service is how you share photos with others.   There are quite a few options, each of which has slightly different features and drawbacks.  Let's go through them one at a time. Share a copy of photo This is by far the way I share photos most frequently.  Say for example, you have a funny pet photo that you want to share with a friend on text or email.  You can go into the Google Photos app, find the photo, and hit the Share button.  Now, you can see that Google Photos is encouraging you to share with others who have a Google account -- those people are all listed down here -- we will come back to that in a second.  For now, hit "Share to. . ." and then

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share a summary and my takeaways from the book by Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson --  Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. Right now, I'm a mental health therapist in training and I've been reading tons of books to help me support and understand my clients better.   Some of these books are really excellent and I thought I'd share a summary and my thoughts since it may help you if you are considering purchasing a book.   In addition, it helps me to better synthesize and understand the information if I share it with you before I share it with my clients. The book I read this time was Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents.  So, I've read a bunch of books about having parents with all kinds of issues: Narcissism, Borderline Personality Disorde