Thoughts from a Therapist

Helpful tips on How to Expand your Personal and Relational Wellness

Category: Beliefs, Truths, Opinions, & Thoughts

  • Choice and quality of life | What choice, if removed, would most positively impact your well being?

    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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Depression Bubble

    The Depression Bubble – a metaphor for understanding a loved-one’s depression – and compassion and suggestions for the healer… Depression can be like a bubble blocking the person inside from receiving positive influence from the outside world. Inside the depression bubble the person is left to deal with their hopelessness, apathy, sadness, meaninglessness, lethargy and…

  • 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…

  • Breathe before you help others to breathe

    You settle into your seat on the airplane and right before takeoff you hear the familiar mantra: “In the event of pressure loss in the cabin, oxygen masks will deploy from the ceiling above you… please safely secure your own mask before attempting to assist others…”   We all hear this and end up remaining…

  • Hope in a space of Hopelessness

    Quick summary: In this post I will offer a metaphor that sheds light on a common misperception of hope – being that hope is connected only to concrete outcomes… that hope is a belief that things will one day be what they are not ever to be. Instead perhaps there can be hope for a…

  • Reflection and Psychotherapy

    Reflection is the ability to hold a stimulus in the present moment without reacting automatically. In a state of reflection, a person can notice or observe the presence of a thought or feeling that they are experiencing… noticing or observing can then lead to two different reflective actions; either the person can continue to observe…

  • Democratically Denying Education – the internal flaw of democracy

    Democracy needs education to function properly; without an informed electorate it would be unclear as to what any given person’s vote was based on… this turns voting into a game of chance where we the people are choosing one person or policy based on either no information, false information, or fallacious information. Yet the freedoms…

  • Integrity and Your Social Potential

    Perhaps it is at times better to measure your integrity on the degree to which you are asserting your potential to best positively influence the community and to manifest your purpose as opposed to measuring your integrity by the degree to which you conform to an overgeneralized social value, an overgeneralized social perception, or a…

  • Scientism

    Scientism is essentially the result of dogmatism for the scientific method, which leads to gross overgeneralization about the importance or ability of the scientific method. Most speakers on the subject relay their concern of the impact that scientism has had on the field of human psychology and spirituality.

  • Respecting Elders in a Society of Rugged Individualism

    My intention is to stir up a conversation as to a possible answer to why there seems to be a decreasing degree of ‘respecting your elders’ in the United Stated and other individual focused cultures (as opposed to collectivist cultures).

  • Freedom from and Freedom to

    Freedom is the very thing which inhibits freedom

  • The difference between good intentions and good actions = understanding, humility, and empathy

    There are many saying about how many “evil actions” have been the result of good intentions. So how are we to know if our actions are good? Are there actions which are indisputably wrong and indisputably right? Instead of going into a heady philosophical investigation as to why good and bad are infinitely one, inseparable,…

  • Authenticity and Stress | you are healthiest when you are your real self | “don’t plant corn in the sand”

    You are the you that you are supposed to be… allow yourself to have the humility to let yourself be as you truly are.

  • Drink too much? Try being yourself in your life… choose to stop inhibiting yourself

    Many people find themselves drinking significant amounts of alcohol to uninhibited themselves… there is a simple and perhaps strange question that doesn’t seem to be given enough space or attention surrounding our drinking culture… I am not arguing here that there are not indeed some rather positive benefits of overindulgence, and by looking at these…

  • Overcoming anger | are you angry with another or are you truly angry with your self?

    Quick summary: the answer to the title question is almost invariably “both”, but to move forward with the false dichotomy noted I am going to comment on how anger is often an emotion that we feel for ourselves…though we are often quick to blame something external for our feelings. Though the environment might have done…

  • Components of the Obesity and Nutrition Problem in our Shared Country

    Quick summary: I am providing a list of themes with very brief explanation of how they are related to obesity and other nutritional concerns in our country. Some of the themes are more related to the individual while others are more related to society as a whole.

  • pathologizing, labels, dichotomies, existentialism and acceptance

    Quick summary: I am offering a discussion concerning the drive to label and how labeling impacts suffering. There is a heated debate in the field of psychotherapy as to whether psychiatric (DSM) labels help or hurt the client’s recovery. I am commenting on what encourages our emotional reactions and behavior related to the topic.

  • The Evolution of CBT = Mindfulness – moving from changing projections to eliminating projections

    I am suggesting that CBT will evolve into mindfulness as mindfulness reduces the unwanted affects of both positive and negative projections where as CBT is designed to reduce the unwanted affects of negative projections alone.