Headstuck?
The most common reason we get stuck in our lives is because of something called “experiential avoidance”. What is that? This brief video explains it beautifully.
For clients
How To Be Alone 101
Put down your cell phone and the constant quest for companionship with others, and open up to what life is like being with you…
The problem with positive thinking explored
This theme seems to be making its way from psychology research into the mainstream media more and more (see the TIME article I posted on June 21). Decades of the “positive thinking” industry have little to show, and folks are looking for something more realistic and useful…
Introducing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: A handout for clients
This one-page handout explains what ACT work looks like. Since ACT can be thought of as a unique set of life skills, it involves learning and practicing these skills so we can make progress in areas that are important to us.
Want sleep? Turn off your screen.
Sorry, but the evidence is mounting: light from our TVs, computers and video games is telling the sleep regulation centers of our brains that it’s daytime when it is not. But test this against your experience: compare reading a book an hour before bed versus watching TV or using your computer.
Using a computer before bed disrupts sleep (NY Times article)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy explained
In this brief interview Barbara Kohlenberg eloquently explains the heart and structure of the ACT model. “When one has compassion for one’s own suffering,” she says, “then that suffering changes.”
Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking
The model I have found most useful in my work as a therapist has been Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is one of what some call the “Third Wave” of therapies (following the first two waves of behavior therapy and cognitive therapy). It is based on the premise that due to the inherent nature of language, we are unable to avoid, change or erase troubling thoughts and feelings. Rather, our goal is to lean into and accept these difficult thoughts and feelings in ways that do not restrict our ability to move forward and create a meaningful life.
This short TIME article points out several studies that illuminate the futility of just trying to think good thoughts, or avoid that which troubles us…
Suspending the “self” and living from our essence
“We each have a self — but I don’t think we are born with one.” This is an eloquent and powerful 14-minute talk on the struggle with self-identity by movie actor Thandie Newtown, daughter of a white man from England and a black woman from Zimbabwe. But it is not just about racial identity. It is about the relationship between who we are, our essence, and the “selves” we have constructed, which she says are “projections our clever brains create”. “When the self is suspended” as when she is fully engaged in dancing or acting, she says, “so is divisiveness, and judgement.”
I honestly believe, that the key to my success as an actor, and my very progress as a person, has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel so anxious and insecure. I always wondered why I could feel others’ pain so deeply, why I could recognize the somebody in the nobody.It’s because I didn’t have a “self” to get in the way. The thing that was a source of shame, was actually a source of enlightenment.
Insights into life with bipolar
A fascinating conversation with two authors — one a writer the other a lawyer — and several callers about life with emotional ebbs and flows of a bipolar mind…
Talk of the Nation show on living with Bipolar (radio feature)