The obsessives were traumatized in childhood by the abuse of irrational power in their family of origin. As Carl Jung tells us power is the opposite of love, not hatred. What to do when the early family situation is emotionally chaotic ? One defense against chaos is control; another one is not to feel – …
Thomas Moore tells us if the body is in pain one of the first things to look at is the infection – if the soul is in pain, we might look for a lack of friendship. Friendship offers the soul intimacy and relatedness, without intimacy the soul goes starving. Throughout our lives we encounter many …
Women who are disconnected from their feminine center. Looking at newspapers and television one has to wonder whether the world isn’t lost in some collective slam dance. People racing around frantically going nowhere. At bottom, this madness has been promoted by corporate and patriarchal cultures. Never have we been so cut off from our intuitive …
Depression can fall into three categories: (1) Reactive, (2) Endogeneous, (3) Intrapsychic. Most of the time, when depressed, people suffer from one of these types, however there are times when two and, for some people, all three can be present. The initial task of therapy is to sort this out as different approaches to healing …
Are You Depressed? Is There A Bottom To The Well? Read More »
If we’re honest with ourselves we have to acknowledge that most of the time we spend on this earth we’re alone. In this sense we all share being exiles in the universe. The author Thomas Wolfe believes that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human …
The holidays are coming and “consume-terror” is at its heights. If you’ll only buy your loved ones a stairmaster, a vacation to Lake Tahoe or a new computer you’ll have a Merry Christmas advertisements tell us, even if you can’t afford it. You better buy that “perfect” gift, otherwise you’re not with the program and …
Accepting Our Weaknesses Frees Our Strengths. We’ve all been around power hungry individuals who try to manipulate marriages and families or places of work with tyrannical control. Unfortunately this behavior gets rewarded by many of our governmental and religious institutions as well as most corporations. I refer to these personalities as suffering from “General Manager …
No one can do our soul work for us and from mid-life on, soul work includes the search for meaning. Only when we stop expecting our spouses to bring meaning to our lives can we begin to tap our own potential. If our primary measures of self-worth and security depend solely on the affirmation and …
Do you remember the thrill of playing hide and seek as a small child trying to find the darkest place where you could hide; left alone only with the excitement of your imagination? Do you also remember that after a period of aloneness you got more and more restless until you finally left your hiding …
“It’s A Joy To Be Hidden – But A Terror Not To Be Found”–Winnicott Read More »
In my thirty-five years of practice in psychotherapy, never have I seen and experienced as much fear, anxiety, and emotional pain as I have in the last six months of 2008. The collective psychic atmosphere was dark, sinister and threatening. By the end of the year, I was exhausted bordering on depletion. I was tired…so …