Feeling Stuck

May 16, 2011
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Last week I wrote about change and how we need to take action in order to change.  Sometimes change is also in how we see the world, think about ourselves, treat ourselves mentally and emotionally, and other internal psychological aspects to who we are. Whether we are trying to change something where we can take [...]

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You Have to Change to Change

May 9, 2011
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One of my favorite authors, Irvin Yalom, MD, is a psychotherapist who has written a book entitled Existential Psychotherapy. I’m sure I have mentioned him before.  He has also written a great book (amongst others) on death and death anxiety entitled Staring at the Sun.  In his book on existential psychotherapy, he addresses four major [...]

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Anxiety and Control

May 2, 2011
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Anxiety is a complicated mental, emotional, and physical human experience.  There is not usually one answer or cause to one’s experience of anxiety.  Philosophers and psychologists have been exploring this experience for a while now and anxiety is still mysterious in many ways.  In many other ways we know a lot about anxiety – what [...]

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Who are You?

April 25, 2011
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So often in counselling/psychotherapy/social work and many self-help books, the focus is on “fixing” pathology. The focus is on exploring one’s life to find the problems so that we can fix them. In many theories, the focus is on looking backwards to childhood to find where things went wrong. In psychology and the practice of [...]

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Destroying Old Patterns

April 23, 2011
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In a brief addendum to my last post on Addiction is Good For you, I would like to share a quote from Rollo May (1977) in his book, The Meaning of Anxiety.  This quote in one way helps to illustrate the usefulness of addiction in people’s lives.  The addiction helps to actualize the self and [...]

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Addiction is Good For You

April 19, 2011
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I’ve written before on the idea that addiction can give a person reason to look more deeply into his/her life, resolving issues, hurts, and longings previously ignored.  The person might never have honestly looked at their life.  I want to take a brief moment and spend a bit more time on this subject.  In my [...]

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Hope

April 12, 2011
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Hope doesn’t seem to be a word we use much anymore – at least I haven’t used it much and I don’t hear others using it. I hear my clients sometimes lacking hope or not being able to find hope, and I myself have recently been on a struggle to find hope. What is hope [...]

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Addiction and Potential

January 18, 2011
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The more I work with the phenomenon of addiction, the more fascinating it becomes as an extremely dynamic coping strategy – dynamic in the sense that it can exist for subtle and unseen reasons, complicated by one’s individual psychology. It is also maddening because it keeps people in a double bind. A definition of double [...]

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I Don’t Love You Anymore

January 4, 2011
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“I don’t love you anymore,” is a phrase that gets thrown around either in the middle of a deteriorating relationship or at the end. One person does not FEEL that they love the other because of a handful of reasons so they express this. They do not feel drawn to, or close to that person [...]

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The Unseen

December 18, 2010
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I am struck by the impact of the unseen in our lives as human beings. I spend most of my time with clients talking about aspects of themselves or their lives that cannot be pointed to while we talk. Some of those phenomenon occur internally, some in the future, and some in the more spiritual/existential [...]

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You Are Not Your Emotions

November 30, 2010
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One thing the Eastern religions have given us in the West is a perspective that we are not our emotions, that we are the part that can observe our emotions and thoughts. The West has been so consumed with Self Psychology that one can get lost in the internal, psychological world of one’s self if [...]

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Acceptance and Change

November 26, 2010
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Acceptance can be a very powerful approach or mindset to deal with suffering. It is not always about self-acceptance but overall acceptance of the way things are. This is a very Buddhist philosophy but a philosophy for anyone to adopt. The paradox in this philosophy is that once you fully accept your life, your self, [...]

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Space and Place

November 23, 2010
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An area of our lives that does not always get a lot of attention in the realms of psychology and spirituality is that of place. There is a lot of focus on relationships with others and relationship with self – a lot of focus on one’s thoughts and emotions – a lot of focus on [...]

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Addiction in Relationships

November 20, 2010

  I work with couples that are trying to mend their relationships after or during the impact of an addiction. There is a typical dance that happens in many of these relationships that does not actually help the relationship deal with the addiction. More so, it does not help the person who is not addicted [...]

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Emotional Sobriety

November 15, 2010

This week I wanted to share a book that can be quite helpful to those struggling to overcome addictions or to manage their more drastic emotions. Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance by Tian Dayton, PhD, is a clearly written book about the impact of relationship trauma. Many people will have different [...]

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Coloring Outside the Lines

November 9, 2010
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“Hey, you! Yea, you! Why you trying to be so perfect? Who do you think you are anyway? Do you really think you are going to work so hard that you never let yourself or anyone else down? Do you really think anyone cares if you make a mistake? Do you really think anyone is [...]

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Boredom

October 12, 2010
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Psychologist Rollo May (1909-1994) wrote quite a bit on the issues of our existence as human beings, especially subjects such as anxiety and emptiness. In his book Man’s Search for Himself, he calls the 20th century the “age of emptiness”. Before the age of emptiness the focus was more on making a name for one’s [...]

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Anger

October 5, 2010

Anger is an interesting emotion. I would say it is widely experienced and seldom understood. Anger is often vilified by our society, especially the mental health community. We have programs for “anger management”, like it’s some out of control toddler we have to manage and not some aspect of ourselves. Anger management courses often don’t [...]

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Fear

September 21, 2010

There is not much else that gets in the way of what we want other than FEAR. Fear can be debilitating, exhausting, and down right aggravating. Many people do not usually understand what is keeping them from the things they want in life. Most of the time, it is some aspect of fear. With respect [...]

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Cultivating Being

September 14, 2010

People come to counseling for all sorts of reasons. Everyone brings with them different goals, expectations, hopes, and desired outcomes. For many people counseling is helpful and for some it is not. Some people might not even know why it was helpful, but feel that just talking to someone, going somewhere to spend an hour [...]

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