Soup
Counselling - General
hart caplan

Are feelings facts?

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.

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Counselling - General
Shane Trudell

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.

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Counselling - General
Bernadette Amiscaray

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

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Counselling - General
hart caplan

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.

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Counselling - General
Shane Trudell

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.

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Paper vs Scissors
Counselling - General
hart caplan

Feelings vs Emotions, Part II: Dirty Fuels and Fatigue

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.”

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Versus
Counselling - General
hart caplan

Feelings vs Emotions, Part I: Loud Bodies

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.

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Counselling - General
Shane Trudell

Antipsychiatry and Depathologization in Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris

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”

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ADHD
hart caplan

Kill the meaning. Keep the name.

All people with adhd deal with hyperactivity in some form. All. It is a corrupt practice to say that boys and men who exhibit a surplus of movement have adhd and girls and women who exhibit a surplus of psychic activity—worry, indecisiveness, nervousness, fearfulness, and perseveration—have an anxiety disorder. This is the very definition of prejudice.

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ADHD
hart caplan

The “no” of adhd

There exists in every person with adhd a ‘no’ lying in wait. I simply call it oppositionalism. To be oppositional means to stand against something.

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Emotions
Counselling - General
Shane Trudell

Healthy Emotional Life

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.

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Typewriter
Counselling - General
Shane Trudell

What to do about low motivation?

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.

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Rollercoaster
Counselling - General
Shane Trudell

High Functioning Anxiety

The vast majority of people who experience anxiety have what might best be called “high functioning anxiety”. But what does that even mean?

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Avoidance
Counselling - General
Shane Trudell

Avoidant attachment

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.

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HSIHADHD Logo
ADHD
hart caplan

Listen to hart on HSIHADHD

Listen to my fun and wide ranging conversation with Robbie McDonald and Jordan Lane on their podcast Holy Sh*t I have ADHD (HSIHADHD). Facebook Twitter

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M≠T
Counselling - General
Shane Trudell

Misery does not equal trauma

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.

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Gandhiji’s Three Monkeys
Counselling - General
hart caplan

Insights, Part IV – Information and Denial

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.

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Counselling - General
hart caplan

Insights, Part II – A Left Brain World

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?

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Colourful Brain
Counselling - General
hart caplan

Insights Afforded by Therapy – Part I, Introduction

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!?)

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Counselling - General
hart caplan

How do Counsellors Help? Part III – Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency we all have to look for evidence that conforms to what we already think is so. We see what we expect to see. And if we expect an event or a relationship to unfold in a certain way, then we are likely to perceive that it does, in fact, happen that way.

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Counselling - General
hart caplan

How do Counsellors Help? Part II – Therapeutic Experience

In our last post in this series, we introduced the concept of the counsellor’s ability to “target and titrate.” But what exactly does that mean, and how does it create a healing experience? And even before that, what does it mean to have an “experience” in the first place?

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Counselling - General
hart caplan

Covid-19 Stress Infographic

We produced this infographic for our colleagues at Envision Physiotherapy as a guide to help them assess the levels of stress and the resiliency of coping strategies in their patients. We present it here as a (hopefully) helpful guide in assisting readers to assess their own levels of stress and capacity to cope.

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Counselling - General
hart caplan

The “Stress Container” Explained, Part II

There is a high cost to our powerful coping strategies, and this is why they often only work temporarily. At some point, the costs come to outweigh the benefits. When these coping systems exhaust their temporary efficacy, they start to progressively add more stress then they eliminate.

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Counselling - General
hart caplan

The “Stress Container” Explained, Part I

The size of your container is largely formed during early childhood. Children who are supported in the experience of appropriate stress—neither too much nor too little—can more easily tolerate large volumes of stress.

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