Freedom
The Past Is Not Dead. It’s Not Even Past.
“The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner The Past Is Our Default Setting : The Hidden Neural Loops Most of us, most of the time, live in and through the past. But the past isn’t just what happened back then. It’s the neural networks grooved into our brains, shaped by … Read more
Read MoreWhy I Teach about People-Pleasing.
Why do I do this? I mean, be a psychotherapist and teach an on-line course and coach people to end people-pleasing? Let’s start with why am I a therapist? At the age of 20, in my second year of my undergraduate, playing for the varsity volleyball team I was struck by the question of meaning … Read more
Read MoreWhat Are You Trying to Prove?
What are you trying to prove? Maybe you’ve heard this one directed at you when you did something reckless or annoying. Minus the emotion and directed objectively toward ourselves it can be revealing, even healing. When taken seriously, as a question of self-inquiry, (and not as an attack) it gets at what’s driving our emotional … Read more
Read MoreThe Many Faces of Denial
Most of the time I’ve spent on my healing journey (ongoing) was about breaking through denial. Or more accurately having my ego broken. A working definition of the ego is that it is denial in the form of a personality. We build it so that we don’t have to see and feel things as they … Read more
Read MoreA Good Man Is Hard to Find
Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, plays with the idea of goodness as conventionally understood. A family sets out on a holiday with grandmother in tow. Grandmother, although of good Christian stock, is manipulative and willful. En route, they hear that a murderer named the “Misfit” has escaped from prison, … Read more
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