Quick summary – the topic of ‘normal’ or ‘day to day’ sex is perhaps not always given as much attention as could be helpful to the masses. As sexual education slowly decreases while pornography and celebrity gossip increases we find ourselves in a society that does not always know if they are more different or more the same as every one else. I will not pretend to tell you what normal sex is (though I could use a bell curve and list a bunch of stats), instead I am using this space to write about topics with brevity that happen in most people’s sex lives… to normalize events that people might go through.
Monthly Archives: June 2011
Play therapy explained | How to use play therapy | Attuning to your child | how and why it works
Quick Summary: Play therapy is an effective and developmentally accommodating way for a child to communicate emotional or otherwise ‘complex’ information to an adult. A child will often tell you about what they are currently feeling or thinking about with their toys or drawing etc… If an adult can pay attention to the story line or scenario that the child is enacting with their toys (puppets, action figures, dolls, cars etc) the adult can gain an understanding of something that the child is unable to communicate with verbal language (be careful not to over analyze; often children are simply re-enacting something they saw on a TV show etc.) When a child feels as though an adult can understand them they feel secure and validated in who they are… they also feel secure that the adult can meet their basic needs and their attachment needs. The security which arises from empathy and understanding promotes healthy relational, emotional, cognitive and physical growth for humans of all ages.
Balanced Boundaries – a metaphor about giving and taking for the health of yourself and others
I am a wooden vase filled with healing water gently replenished by the collective love… as I pour too little, I overflow and my wood becomes oversaturated and less aware of its own makeup and contents… bloated and blinded with excess… as I pour too much my wood becomes dry and cracked… delicate and injured.
Alcohol use and marital satisfaction
Quick summary – I did some brief research (based on two scientific articles) on what the effect of alcohol use has on marital satisfaction. I am including my more thorough investigation below, but I will describe some of the finding here. One study accented the importance of commonality… this means that marital satisfaction was correlated with the degree to which partners engaged in substance use at relatively equal amounts (both drink a lot = more satisfaction than only one drinking a lot ). Divergence in substance intake was associated with decreased marital satisfaction… this does suggest that offering rehabilitation counseling to only one partner in a relationship could have negative effects on the marital satisfaction (so offering counseling to both would be more ideal and arguably more ethical). Moderate substance use (couples who did not abuse substances) was correlated to higher levels of marital satisfaction. In short the research found that marital satisfaction was highest when the couple’s intake was both moderate and relatively the same for each partner.
What is empathy? How do I know if I am experiencing empathy?
Quick summary – Empathy is when a person opens up their emotional boundaries and allows another person’s feeling to be cradled and nurtured within the loving hands of his/her understanding. Empathy is holding a narrative of another person and allowing yourself to feel the person’s emotions related to his or her storyline while understanding that these are not your own emotions.
Existentialism in Psychotherapy
Existentialism is used in Psychotherapy to allow clients to explore their freedom in creating their own meaning. When a client finds his/her freedom to create meaning they greatly reduce their anxiety. The new meaning that a client creates can greatly reduce their suffering and can aid in a person’s recovery from a difficult lived experience.
pathologizing, labels, dichotomies, existentialism and acceptance
Quick summary: I am offering a discussion concerning the drive to label and how labeling impacts suffering. There is a heated debate in the field of psychotherapy as to whether psychiatric (DSM) labels help or hurt the client’s recovery. I am commenting on what encourages our emotional reactions and behavior related to the topic.
Anger and Arguments – Are you defending the topic or your self?
Quick summary: as part of increasing your self-awareness I suggest that you take a look at the topics that really get you ‘heated’ with the goal of coming to an understanding of how you personally identify with that topic. In this self-exploration you might just find that your emotion has very little to do with the topic and is perhaps more related to: an unresolved occurrence from you past, or an attempt to create a stable sense of who you really are (your identity), or both.
Existential Recovery – Emotional freedom inherent in the choice of meaning
Quick summary: Most of us believe that the outside world is responsible for our emotions, that our emotional dispositions are externally controlled (ex. he/she or this event etc made me feel this way). I am going to suggest that the meaning that you place onto an occurrence in often what you are emotionally reacting to… I will suggest that you have a freedom to choose your emotional experience as you have a choice in what meaning you place on the occurrences in your life.
Empathy building exercise – learning to be empathetic – increasing emotional understanding
Quick summary: In difficult times often we really want someone to ‘just be there for us’ and to ‘show compassion and understanding for what we are dealing with’ as opposed to offering pragmatic solutions or taking initiative to ‘fix it.’ In short people very often simply want empathy and they can feel worse, alone, or misunderstood if their confidant goes into problem solving mode. In this post I will give you a methodology as to how to offer empathy to a person. The process might not feel genuine at first, but by understanding and utilizing this technique you will eventually grow a more sincere empathetic ability.
Vengeance and the Ego
Quick summary: Vengeance is a tool which creates instability in an attempt to create a stable ego.
The Evolution of CBT = Mindfulness – moving from changing projections to eliminating projections
I am suggesting that CBT will evolve into mindfulness as mindfulness reduces the unwanted affects of both positive and negative projections where as CBT is designed to reduce the unwanted affects of negative projections alone.
Past goals driving current choices? – Overcoming your inner teenager
Quick summary: What drives your choices, ambitions and behaviors? I am going to suggest that many (if not most) of us still carry values, goals, wants, wishes, desires etc that we forgot to let go of when we grew into adults. Being a teenager is truly difficult… you believe that you are an adult though you are not as biologically and emotionally developed as you think, you desire independence though you don’t truly even know what it is, you have the goal of being unique and different or the same and accepted… either way it is very important for you to have a uniquely identifiable identity, you want to be right and you believe that you are as life has not taught you that being right is subjective and relative, and you wish things to be fair but fairness was a judgment that required only your input. These teenage goals still encourage many of our behaviors as adults. In this post I will help you explore which goals you may still be carrying that you can let go of after you have gained a degree of insight.