Category: Emotions
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The Building Blocks of Emotional and Social Intelligence
The blog explores emotional and social intelligence, emphasizing their role in enhancing mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness. It highlights essential capacities like empathy, self-awareness, and compassion, which contribute to navigating life’s complexities. These skills are not fixed but can be developed, fostering connection, clarity, and presence in everyday experiences and psychotherapy.
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The Dialectic of Courage
Courage exists on a spectrum and requires balance, as both underdevelopment and overdevelopment can lead to issues. It is a crucial emotional capacity that influences actions in response to fear. The challenge lies in deciding when to act courageously or heed fear, depending on individual responsibilities and the potential consequences of those choices.
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Invalidating Communication | What not to do when offering emotional support
For this post, I will list the most common disruptive communication mechanisms/patterns that people use when receiving another person’s emotions. People come into my office all the time asking for assistance with communication, loneliness, and lacking connection. In other posts I have described what ‘to do’ when your goals are to be compassionately empathetic – for this post,…
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Does laziness cause depression or does depression cause laziness?
The content explores whether laziness causes depression or vice versa, suggesting a complex relationship. It lists 20 behaviors that might unintentionally promote depression and emphasizes the importance of intentionality and action in combating it. Each individual’s approach to wellness is unique, so addressing these factors can help alleviate depression.
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Fear, Competence, Values and Anger in Parenting Rambunctious Children
This post will investigate how our perceived parenting competence impacts our fear and resulting emotional and behavioral reactions. We will focus on how fear can lead us into parenting interventions that are not consistent with our parenting values. I was offering a parenting coaching intervention in a couples context the other week and I arrived…
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Feelings are important in growing consciousness – Existential and Mindfulness Based Emotional Reflection Therapy
Accepting your emotional reality and holding an awareness of those feelings helps us to be conscious of how we are currently being influenced … understanding this influence opens up the possibility to use reflection to guide your actions towards your best interests and towards the most ideal interaction patterns.
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Reflection and Psychotherapy
Reflection is the ability to hold a stimulus in the present moment without reacting automatically. In a state of reflection, a person can notice or observe the presence of a thought or feeling that they are experiencing… noticing or observing can then lead to two different reflective actions; either the person can continue to observe…
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Relationship Help | “My partner says that I don’t listen” | how to meet the emotional needs of your partner
I am going to talk to you about what you should be paying attention to and what you should not be paying attention to while trying to become a better listener in your relationship.
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Compassionately Assertive – Maintaining Boundaries without Aggression – using empathy and clarity to get your needs met
Quick summary: This post will explain how to use empathy, self-awareness, and assertiveness to ensure that your personal boundaries are respected by others. Often we have a difficult time when an instance calls for decisive action in order to help the environment to respect our individual boundaries. Some react with aggressiveness that protects a person’s…
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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…
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Understanding how your Values impact the choices that you make
In this context I will use the word ‘values’ as having the following definition – a ‘value’ is an emotional state or character attribute that you desire to live within or to be defined by; If you value feeling in control you will make behavioral choices that you believe will lead you to acquiring the…
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What is Transference in psychotherapy – placing emotional reactions related to another onto the therapist
Quick summary: Transference = when you transfer an emotion meant for one person onto a different person. Transference is unconscious = the person is not aware that they are doing it (though they can be made aware). Transference happens in psychotherapy when a client places an emotional reaction that is related to someone in his…