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Herb Cohen: What Happened To The American Dream?

Herb Cohen – Thoughts on American’s Dream

Hi… I’m Herb Cohen and I strive to help others over come a variety of issues. It’s hard to imagine why we are not happy when everything around us seems picture perfect. The truth is, most people are harvesting some type of issue that is causing a lot of unhappiness in their life. Seeking the help that is needed can unleash those issues and put life back on track.

I Have a Good Job, Nice Home, Married With Kids, Dog and Two cars… Why am I Not Happy?

In our consumerist culture, we mistakenly believe happiness exists in material things and success is measured by how much we possess and can actualize the “American Dream” as described by the title. Yet research shows that how affluent we are, is not a determinant of happiness.

In fact, we see that in some very poor nations with exception to those that may be at war, have significant higher happiness ratios. Impoverishment did not contribute to happiness but what did was when there were strong family connections. There are cultures with tight multigenerational family communities and they scored high despite not having running water or electricity. Yes, they scored higher than Americans.

Lifestyle

Let’s look a little deeper at our American lifestyle. In our culture we have a strong self- identity and we grow up feeding this identity to assimilate into a me centered culture. We are not we centered. We think about a career and being successful and there is an assumption that if we play our cards right we will sail into the sunset, happily ever after.

Broken Families

A little deeper. Within our culture, marriages only survive 50% of the time. That’s a significant number of broken families. 1 in 5 people develop serious drug or alcohol problems and this is due to the fact that 1 in 5 (most likely the same 1 in 5) people have suffered abuse or mis-attatchment (poor quality parenting) growing up. Statistics show that these issues are multigenerational, thus they continue  from the past into future generations.  This is not how we think of the American Dream working out.

Young children, birth to age 5, are manifesting synaptic brain connections at the rate of 700,000 synaptic connections per second. By age 5 a child has more brain connections than there are stars in the universe. Those connections are then pruned based on how the first 5 years went: Was I loved unconditionally all or most of the time? Was my world safe? Was I left to cry and fend for myself even though I was helpless. Perhaps I was cared for well some of the time, but not so much the rest of the time. These factors determine how resilient we will be as adults, whether we will have significant health issues, become obese or become addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex or food.

As you can see, if connection is critical and if how we define ourselves is impacted by how we are raised – by the quality of our family connections, we may be successful, but not necessarily happy.

The good news is that the technology needed to repair our poorly nurtured brain are here and research shows our brains can change back to how they should be and we can be released from our inability to be happy. EMDR is a gentle psychotherapy that enables the brain to heal itself using properly administered bilateral stimulation.  Perhaps we can realize the American Dream and be happy too after all.

Seek Treatment Today

If you are ready to seek the help you need in your life, contact me. Together we will get to the root of your issues and help you get on track to living the American Dream.

Here are some of the services that I offer: