I’m thinking very broadly about the impulse, or emotion, or need which brings people into therapy. I’m not thinking about what’s the most common problem in therapy, or anything like that, but more like what are the ordinary common denominators. And I’m hoping this will lead to insights for helping.
I’m a therapist so I like to see this stuff wherever I look. But Cormac makes it pretty explicit in this book that he is taking aim at the psy-disciplines: at one point Alicia dissects her “reservations about the souldoctors”, saying “Maybe their lack of imagination. Their confusion about the categories into which they’re given to sorting their patients. As if name and cure were one. The way they ignore the total lack of evidence for the least efficacy in their treatments. Other than that they’re fine”
Emotional life is changing. Children are taught emotional intelligence at a young age, partners and colleagues expect a higher degree of it than before, and it is more and more a part of popular consciousness. But without being clear on what healthy emotional life looks like, this new focus has created an opportunity for insecurities to run wild.
Low motivation comes in many forms. The truth is that it’s not always easy to get ourselves to do things! When we talk about motivation we don’t usually clarify just what that word means in particular.
The vast majority of people who experience anxiety have what might best be called “high functioning anxiety”. But what does that even mean?
Avoidant attachment shows its face in many adult relationships, including work and friendship, but is most obvious in romantic relationships. This attachment style is seen in the desire to move away from people, to use withdrawal, or to avoid experiences that are exposing, vulnerable, or intimate.
In this post I want to lay out a few misconceptions about what trauma is and isn’t, and how to tell the difference, as well as talk about why these distinctions might be important.
For just a moment, let us throw away everything we think we know about emotions and consider them in the following way: as sources of information that run parallel with our thinking in language, acting as guides and prompts for our movement in the world.
But let’s say we do learn to integrate our left brain neuroceptions. How does that help us with stress management?
Our society is fixated on the rational left, dominating the more intuitive right, and there’s no shortage of reasons why. But the truth is that for all the good we do when we incorporate our best rational thinking (left) in our decisions, we do ourselves a great disservice when we ignore the rich data from the intuitive right. What is the evolutionary advantage for if we don’t use it?
Once we’ve recognized how problems of “affect regulation” impact us and how counsellors participate in the learning of providing space for new insights, one might wonder the following:
What exactly are these insights into the nature of healing and change?
Are they the same for everyone? (How can that be!?)
There is one single fact that makes this kind of experience so productive for healing and change, something finally being confirmed by the hard sciences in the last twenty years: neuroplasticity.
