Author: William Bishop, LPC, LMFT, AAMFT Approved Supervisor
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Choice and quality of life | What choice, if removed, would most positively impact your well being?
The United States encompasses various sub-cultures influenced by a dominant meta-culture emphasizing freedom and choice. This dual nature of choice can lead to both empowerment and oppression. Reflecting on which choices could be beneficially removed may enhance well-being, drawing insights from cultures that prioritize routine and communal practices.
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Solutions and Causes of Anxiety
The post outlines various causes of anxiety, categorized into health, biological, relational, cognitive, and environmental factors. It emphasizes anxiety’s role in survival and stresses the importance of understanding its biological and psychological roots, such as nutrition, exercise, relationships, and mindfulness. Managing anxiety involves recognizing these interconnected elements.
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Concrete vs Abstract responsibility for teenagers
Many teenagers struggle with responsibility due to the shift from concrete to abstract tasks, leading to feelings of irrelevance. This disconnect affects their self-esteem and motivation. Emphasizing concrete responsibilities and minimizing shame in abstract tasks may enhance their ability to engage and develop a sense of accountability, fostering emotional growth and future success.
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Intentionality and Happiness | How life choices are impacted by purpose
This post emphasizes the relationship between intentionality and happiness, urging self-reflection. It identifies three approaches: balance, where both elements support each other; favoring intentionality, which may diminish joy; and prioritizing happiness, risking predictability and fulfillment. Ultimately, it encourages personal choice to find one’s preferred path toward fulfillment.
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Double Binded Communication
Often we send ‘mixed messages’ to people. It can be a source of dis-ease in a relationship when a partner or loved one is giving you two opposing messages at the same time. This creates a double-bind as there is not an effective way to respond correctly to the communication. Most commonly the opposing messages are…
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Addiction, Self-determination, Flow, Mindfulness, Culture, Emotional Intelligence, and Human Bonding
Addiction, Self-determination, Flow, Mindfulness, Culture, Emotional Intelligence, and Human Bonding What are the components of addiction? why is addiction less desirable? and what aptitudes help us to avoid addiction? “Let’s Turn the conversation towards Efficiency and Away from Morals” The Psychobiological and Relational causes of undesired, addictive, and compulsory behavior: Flow (peak experience) – Humans are…
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The Relativity of Oppression
Oppression exists, and much like other abstractions, oppression is often cognitively enmeshed with content or with something more concrete. There is often a more tangible entity that gets labeled as ‘oppressive’ or as the ‘oppressor’… through time we often allow for more tangible entities (such as a person, lifestyle, belief system etc) to be labeled…
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The Relationship between Anxiety and Attention
Attention is a learn-able skill There are many famous quotes and affirmations spoken through the years that point to the humbling truth that most suffering never actually happened … of course this is only partially true as we can all speak to the suffering involved in having a high level of anxiety. it isn’t that…
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Do you Like your self when you are with this person?
I had a client share an age old piece of wisdom with me a couple months ago – he said that he often asks himself the following question when evaluating his relationships: “Do I Like myself when I am with this person?” “do I like who I am when I am with this person?” this…
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Bottom Up and Top Down interventions to support regulation
In this post we will be exploring what people mean by ‘bottom up” and “top down” interventions and how you can use this information is relevant to regulation when we are emotionally overwhelmed. In the field of psychotherapy/psychology there is a strange debate right now about whether bottom up models or top down models are…
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Fear, Competence, Values and Anger in Parenting Rambunctious Children
This post will investigate how our perceived parenting competence impacts our fear and resulting emotional and behavioral reactions. We will focus on how fear can lead us into parenting interventions that are not consistent with our parenting values. I was offering a parenting coaching intervention in a couples context the other week and I arrived…
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When Attachment Theory and Existentialism Compete
In this post I will be investigating the relationships between one’s core sense of purpose in life (existentialism) and contrasting that with the most basic needs associated with human bonding (attachment theory). The question that I am playing around with is: “Are there some people who have a life purpose which is incongruent with maintaining…
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Parenting Paradigm | a level system to conceptualize parenting strategies
I was in a couples therapy session guiding an enactment surrounding an argument the couple had surrounding a parenting issue over the weekend. Both parties were having a difficult time understanding (cognitively) the other person’s position – though all my work focuses on maintaining connection through encouraging emotional openness, it was clear in this instance…
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Happy Relationship – loving another as yourself – loving we to love me
A relationship is a system… it is a whole with interconnecting parts – and the whole ends up being greater than the sum of its’ parts so lets think about this is a ‘couple’ context – you and your romantic partner (though yes this could apply to any relational system) what are some of the…
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Early Childhood Questions to Promote Bonding
I compiled the below questions to be used in an adult couple relationship to help facilitate bonding. When our partners see the depth of our true selves and know the intricacies of our narratives pertaining to our childhood, they are better available to be emotionally helpful. To be known and emotionally held by our partner…
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Choice is Oppression
Wow that is a provocative way to start! of course Choice is also liberation and a billion of other things, but in the post I want to shine some light on how individualism has created a blind infatuation with choice – and how ‘choice’ is actually the very source of our oppression. perhaps the single…
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Accepting, condoning, and boundaries
How do you accept what you can’t condone? what is it that your are accepting? we love people and we want them to behave in ways which will lead to the permanence of things… permanence of our relationship with them. People behave in ways that can hurt us both by insulting our systems of belief…
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Playful Communicative Connection Enactment
As a teacher, therapist, and supervisor I have developed a number of enactment interventions which serve to help clients to better connect with each other. I created many of my positive ‘attunement’ based enactments to serve 2 purposes: 1.) to create more manageable interventions for beginning therapists who may not have the therapeutic leadership skill…