Are feelings facts?

Soup

Here, a feeling is, in actuality, a fact. Let me make a stronger claim: all feelings are facts. They are facts in the same way that the table I am sitting at currently is made of wood and that I am a psychotherapist. All are part of the same category of thing we call facts.

Nightingale’s Senior Clinician Matching Assurance (SCMA)

Announcement - Orange

We are pleased to announce that starting on Monday, July 24, 2023, we will be launching a new way that clients will begin their therapeutic relationships with Senior Clinicians (Senior and Directorial Clinicians) at Nightingale Counselling and Research.

Boundaries, Part I: Next Level Boundary Setting

Boundary setting is one of the most popular topics in counselling therapy today. Posts about boundaries on our social media get more engagement as the algorithms get to work on some hot content. But I’ve noticed that in the topics that are more viral, the quality of the nuance and sophistication drops by equal measure. Because of this, boundary setting has a pretty poor reflection in the PopPsych of our times.

A dream is a wish your [neurons and/or unconscious] makes

While I’m no expert, I’ve learned about dream work by doing. My Jungian therapists over the past 18 years have helped me tend to this part of myself and it was likely the greatest education I could’ve received. The only hard-and-fast rule that I’ve gleaned is that the client, not the therapist, needs to take the lead in terms of offering their feelings, their interpretations, their point of view about their dream

Perfectionism, Part I: The Problem of the Product

Perfectionism causes personal and professional problems for perfectionists themselves and those around them. And, in a bitter twist of irony, it turns out to be an inefficient and ineffective way of producing good work with any consistency. Perfectionism is not segregated in any single population, but it is one of the most common difficulties experienced by people with adhd.

Exploring Diagnosis and Normalization

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.

Feelings vs Emotions, Part II: Dirty Fuels and Fatigue

Paper vs Scissors

In Part 1 of Feelings vs Emotions, I explored the definitional and substantive differences between feelings and emotions. I wrote about the relationship between interoception—the senses that offer information about the state of our body—and the binary feeling of good/bad. In today’s post, I will focus on emotions. “Emotions,” as Damasio notes in Part 1 “indicate actions,” and then later describes them as “concerts of actions.”

Feelings vs Emotions, Part I: Loud Bodies

Versus

The language of psychology can be confusing. But the use of precise language is critically important to the process of counselling, because we cannot attend to the parts of the world that we cannot name.