Table of Contents
Table of Contents
ADHD
A Critical Review of an adhd classic: Driven to Distraction
But there is a central issue that I have with the literature on adhd, and this is a problem with this book and with the field more generally. My issue is this: why distraction? Or perhaps the question could be asked in the following way: distraction from what?

Unpacking the controversy: A closer look at the arguments surrounding ADHD diagnosis
ADHD is a neurobiological divergence which is present from birth, and that the subjective lived experience of ADHD symptoms is a derivative of this. We’ll return to this shortly, but first let’s have a look at the second competing explanation for the rise of ADHD.

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.

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.”

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.

Representations of “Everything:” A movie, a philosophy, and a dream
Today’s post is a description of the unseen force of the feeling of everythingness. If the feeling is of everythingness is the aspect under examination, then that leads to the question, what is everything?

Confidence as an Intervention: Part I
…confidence is the absence of doubt. It is the inability to see the ways in which things can go wrong.

What is adult adhd?
Adult adhd is not a thing. It is as I described in my previous post, a corrupt name that follows a corrupt concept.

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.

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.

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
Existentialism

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.

Representations of “Everything:” A movie, a philosophy, and a dream
Today’s post is a description of the unseen force of the feeling of everythingness. If the feeling is of everythingness is the aspect under examination, then that leads to the question, what is everything?

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.

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.

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
Counselling - General
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.
Nightingale’s Senior Clinician Matching Assurance (SCMA)
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 II: Boundaries with Individuals, Couples, and Families
The overall health of me is improved by the overall health of us.

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.

Unpacking the controversy: A closer look at the arguments surrounding ADHD diagnosis
ADHD is a neurobiological divergence which is present from birth, and that the subjective lived experience of ADHD symptoms is a derivative of this. We’ll return to this shortly, but first let’s have a look at the second competing explanation for the rise of ADHD.

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
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
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.

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”

Confidence as an Intervention: Part I
…confidence is the absence of doubt. It is the inability to see the ways in which things can go wrong.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Insights, Part V – Client-led Healing
This is what client-led healing looks like. It naturally reduces pain and anxiety and fatigue, because those are often the natural consequences of living in a left brain world.

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.

Insights, Part III – Recognizing Stress
But let’s say we do learn to integrate our left brain neuroceptions. How does that help us with stress management?

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?

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!?)

How do Counsellors Help? Part IV – Healing the “Hard-Wired” Brain
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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.