The 134,000-member American Psychological Association recently published its annual report on stress. The report is trademarked: Stress in America™. Yet this official stamp of self-approval can’t hide the hollowness of the report. Millions of Americans are struggling to … [Read more...] about Stressed Out in America
psychological defenses
The Pain We Lock Away
It’s so important to see through our psychological defenses if we want to become emotionally strong and escape from suffering. Through our defenses, we lie to ourselves in much the way that parents lie to children to protect them from life’s harsher realities. Some experts … [Read more...] about The Pain We Lock Away
Cognitive Therapy’s Distorted Thinking
Recently I came across a best-selling psychology textbook, and I believe the sections of it dealing with the essentials of self-awareness are not accessing a deep enough level of understanding. The widely used textbook, written by three Harvard University professors of … [Read more...] about Cognitive Therapy’s Distorted Thinking
How Worriers Unconsciously Chose to Suffer
These days people are snapping a lot of selfies, those close-up self-portraits taken with a cell-phone camera. Could this activity foretell a coming trend in which more of us turn inward to take close-ups of our psychological self? When we penetrate our psyche, new intelligence … [Read more...] about How Worriers Unconsciously Chose to Suffer
Get to Know Your Psychological Defenses
We’re often the dupes of our defenses which render us blind to our emotional life and mislead us about the sources of our suffering. For starters, we don’t see that common varieties of suffering are both symptoms of mysterious dynamics unfolding in our psyche as well as defenses … [Read more...] about Get to Know Your Psychological Defenses