Thoughts from a Therapist

Psychology, Relationships, Meaning, and the Conditions that make Change

Category: Beliefs, Truths, Opinions, & Thoughts

  • Dialectic and Deconstruction Solutions: summary/outline

    Dialectic and Deconstruction Solutions: summary/outline

    DDS is a collaborative platform that organizes and makes visible existing solutions to major human problems. By utilizing deconstruction, dialectics, and solution design, it encourages accountability and fosters progress. With a digital ecosystem that includes a solution library and cultural engagement, DDS promotes democracy and emotional resonance in problem-solving, emphasizing collaborative healing and development.

  • Do the Ends Justify the Means?

    Do the Ends Justify the Means?

    This content emphasizes the importance of aligning our actions with personal values while pursuing goals. It argues that compromising values can lead to internal dissonance, shame, and a distorted sense of self, ultimately affecting relationships and ethical standards. Integrity and congruence are presented as essential for personal fulfillment and harmony.

  • Strength Is Contextual

    Strength Is Contextual

    Strength is not a singular trait but a contextual movement toward personal balance. It emerges differently for hyper-empowered individuals, who may need restraint, and hypo-empowered ones, who may need assertion. True resilience demands disrupting entrenched patterns, fostering authentic growth instead of adhering to culturally ingrained distortions like toxic masculinity or chronic caretaking.

  • Curiosity Without Judgment: Understanding the Adaptive Logic of Our Behavior

    Curiosity Without Judgment: Understanding the Adaptive Logic of Our Behavior

    The article explores the importance of distinguishing between judgmental and curious forms of questioning when reflecting on our behaviors. It emphasizes that understanding the underlying intentions behind our actions, often shaped by past adaptations, allows for personal growth. By fostering curiosity without judgment, we can integrate our past experiences into a healthier present.

  • Interviening with Extremism

    Interviening with Extremism

    This piece examines the emotional roots of extremist beliefs, highlighting trauma, shame, and the need for belonging as key drivers. It emphasizes that change comes from fostering compassion and humility rather than confrontation. While not everyone seeks to leave extremism, creating safe spaces for understanding can facilitate healing and reconnection.

  • Resilience, Humility, and the Temptation to Be Neurotic

    Resilience, Humility, and the Temptation to Be Neurotic

    Resilience involves embracing uncomfortable emotions like shame and guilt rather than avoiding them. True resilience is relational, allowing for emotional presence and accountability, particularly after causing harm. A meaningful apology acknowledges impact and fosters connection. By recognizing neurotic defenses, we can practice resilience and strengthen our emotional growth and relationships.

  • The Practice of Differentiation: Becoming the Observer of Ourselves

    The Practice of Differentiation: Becoming the Observer of Ourselves

    Differentiation is the ability to observe our inner life without being consumed by it. In this post, we explore how becoming the witness to our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can create the spaciousness needed for real choice.

  • Spiral Dynamics and Political Polarization: Why We Struggle to Govern Across Worldviews

    Spiral Dynamics and Political Polarization: Why We Struggle to Govern Across Worldviews

    How do we govern a nation when its citizens live in entirely different existential frameworks? This post explores Spiral Dynamics as a lens for understanding political polarization, authoritarian regression, and the psychological roots of our cultural divides. By mapping the values behind each stage of human development—from survival to global consciousness—we uncover why common ground…

  • The Dialectic of Courage

    The Dialectic of Courage

    Courage exists on a spectrum and requires balance, as both underdevelopment and overdevelopment can lead to issues. It is a crucial emotional capacity that influences actions in response to fear. The challenge lies in deciding when to act courageously or heed fear, depending on individual responsibilities and the potential consequences of those choices.

  • Analysis vs Observation

    Analysis vs Observation

    This post contrasts sensation analysis with simple observation. Analysis categorizes and deducts, often distancing us from direct experience. In contrast, observation focuses on present sensations without interpretation, enhancing immediacy and allowing feelings to exist without justification. This shift can reduce reactivity and clarify experiential understanding beyond academic reasoning.

  • Anxiety as a Signal of Misalignment

    Anxiety as a Signal of Misalignment

    Existential anxiety signals misalignment between our lives and core values. Rather than aiming to eliminate it, we should interpret anxiety as a message indicating areas where change is needed. By acknowledging it, we can address disconnection and seek environments that align with our true selves, allowing for fulfillment and integrity.

  • Does laziness cause depression or does depression cause laziness?

    Does laziness cause depression or does depression cause laziness?

    The content explores whether laziness causes depression or vice versa, suggesting a complex relationship. It lists 20 behaviors that might unintentionally promote depression and emphasizes the importance of intentionality and action in combating it. Each individual’s approach to wellness is unique, so addressing these factors can help alleviate depression.

  • 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…