Responsibility

What 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

The 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

Coming at Happiness Sideways

“I just want to be happy”. This is a fairly common refrain I hear from frustrated clients. And fair enough. Who doesn’t? I woke up this morning, feeling, well, not happy. And I wish somebody could have waved a magic wand and make unhappiness disappear. But happiness is a tricky thing. You set out to find it … Read more

Hurts So Good: Let’s Get Kinky

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. —William Butler … Read more

When You Feel Like Giving Up

Not everybody is ringing in the New Year with unreserved optimism. For some of us, it’s all become a bit too much and all the New Year resolutions and positive affirmations to the contrary have a hollow sound, empty of power to make a difference. COVID doesn’t help. We’re getting ground down. The late psychiatrist, Scott Peck, opened … Read more

Bruce Sanguin

Psychotherapist