Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Webinar Recording with Dr. Lisa Firestone

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Webinar Recording with Dr. Lisa Firestone

By PsychAlive

During the months of November and December, PsychAlive is excited to offer the following free video recording of ”Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Webinar with Dr. Lisa Firestone.”

Each of us has an “inner critic” judging our every action and instructing us on how to live our lives. But how much are we letting this inner critic control us? Are we living the lives we were destined to live, or are we living someone else’s life? Are our actions based on what we really feel and believe or on negative programming from our past? This webinar with Dr. Lisa Firestone explores how to counter negative thinking and live free from imagined limitations.

To view all the slides used in this presentation click here

For information regarding upcoming webinars with PsychAlive Click Here

Books

The Ethics of Interpersonal Relationships, Dr. Robert Firestone, PsychAlive

Suicide and the Inner Voice, Dr. Robert Firestone, Suicide, Self-destructive Behavior, Psychalive

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice, Dr. Robert Firestone, Dr. Lisa Firestone, Psychalive

Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion, Dr. Robert Firestone, PsychAlive

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What is Fear of Intimacy?

What is Fear of Intimacy?

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Where Does This Fear of Intimacy Come From?

Where Does This Fear of Intimacy Come From?

While there are times when we are aware of actually being apprehensive and distrusting of love, we are more likely to identify these fears as concern over potentially negative outcomes: rejection, the deterioration of a relationship or feelings of affection that aren’t returned. However, our fear of intimacy is often triggered by positive emotions even more than negative ones. In fact, being chosen by someone we truly care for and experiencing their loving feelings can often arouse deep-seated fears of intimacy and make it difficult to maintain a close relationship.

Why Do Positive Feelings Trigger a Fear of Intimacy?

Why Do Positive Feelings Trigger a Fear of Intimacy?

It may be surprising to learn that the real resistance to intimacy often doesn’t come from the acts of our partners, but from a lurking enemy within us.

The problem is that the positive way a lover sees us often conflicts with the negative ways we view ourselves. Sadly, we hold on to our negative self-attitudes and are resistant to being seen differently. Because it is difficult for us to allow the reality of being loved to affect our basic image of ourselves, we often build up a resistance to love.

Where Do These Negative Attitudes Come From?

Where Do These Negative Attitudes Come From?

These negative core beliefs are based on deep-seated feelings that we developed in early childhood of being essentially bad, unlovable or deficient. While these attitudes may be painful or unpleasant, at the same time they are familiar to us, and we are used to them lingering in our subconscious. As adults, we mistakenly assume that these beliefs are fundamental and therefore impossible to correct.

How Does Fear of Intimacy Affect Us?

How Does Fear of Intimacy Affect Us?

We don’t intentionally reject love to preserve a familiar identity. Instead, during times of closeness and intimacy, we react with behaviors that create tension in the relationship and push our loved one away.

Here are some common ways people distance themselves emotionally as a result of a fear of intimacy:

Withholding affection
Reacting indifferently or adversely to affection or positive acknowledgement
Becoming paranoid or suspicious of a partner
Losing interest in sexuality
Being overly critical of a partner
Feeling guarded or resistant to being vulnerable

How to Overcome a Fear of Intimacy?

How to Overcome a Fear of Intimacy?

In order to overcome our fear of intimacy, we must challenge our negative attitudes toward ourselves and not push our loved ones away. It is possible to challenge our core resistance to love. We can confront our negative self-image and grow our tolerance for a loving relationship.

We can overcome our fears of intimacy and enjoy more loving and more intimate relationships.

Ways to Improve Your Relationship

Ways to Improve Your Relationship

Relationships expert, Dr. Lisa Firestone explains some simple ways to improve your relationship.

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My 2-year-old nephew sat calmly amid the frantic atmosphere of the playground. Bigger kids clamored noisily around him: chasing, digging, screeching in delight and crying over newly scraped knees. My nephew appeared to be in some sort of trance.

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How To Tell the Difference Between Real Love and Fantasy

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How Jealousy Destroys Relationships

Stories of jealousy range from the mild – a competitive comment from spouse to spouse about an attractive coworker – to the extreme – a stalker-like attempt to control a partner’s every move. While some jealousy may be a natural or instinctive reaction to the threat of losing a loved one, when jealousy takes over or appears in non-threatening circumstances, it can have a very destructive influence on a relationship. One of the most harmful effects of jealousy is that it can lead a couple to limit eachother’s independence.

What Are Defenses?

When he was 3-years-old, Kevin watched his dad drive away. For the few months following his parents’ split, Kevin and his brother had moved in with their father. The three of them lived together contentedly until the day Kevin’s mom showed up out of the blue and announced that she was taking the kids back.

The Inner Voice that Undermines Your Relationship

Sometimes our criticisms of our partners and ourselves has less to do with reality and more to do with a self-critical set of standards imposed on us by an internal enemy. When attempting to understand what goes wrong in our relationships, it can feel as if we would have to wade through un-translated copies of unresolved conversations, transcripts of old arguments and storage shelves of complaints over under-appreciation and overreactions. Trying to make sense of things becomes so overwhelming that when a relationship does end, we find ourselves offering the vague oversimplification, “It just got so complicated.

How do I Know if I Have a Fantasy Bond?

There are ways to uncover how and why a genuinely loving relationship can forego passion for routine. How often do we find ourselves going from a vital sense of love for another person to a weighted feeling of complacency or dissatisfaction? Why does this occur?

Busting the Myths About Suicide

There are many commonly held beliefs about suicide that keep us from trying to help people at risk. Here are some of the typical misconceptions about suicide that are NOT true: Most suicides are caused by one particular trigger event. A person who attempts suicide has to feel bad about themselves for a long period of time.

The Fantasy Bond

The question of why love fades can be explained by the concept of the fantasy bond. Dr. Lisa Firestone helps us understand how and why this form of relating hurts our intimate relationships.

Addictions

Addictions and addictive behaviors are appealing because they offer immediate relief from psychological pain and anxiety. However the relief is only temporary; they never provide a lasting solution to our problems. When we “sober up” we find that our emotional pain is still there.

Understanding Anger

For most of us, anger can be an intimidating subject. On one level or another, anger causes everyone a certain amount of fear. We’re afraid of someone getting angry at us and we’re afraid when we feel angry at someone else.

Anxiety

Anxiety can be a serious psychological condition that limits us in our interactions, our development and our general state of mind. For some of us, anxiety has a constant presence, continually setting off alarms in our brain that tell us to worry over every little thing. For others, we may hardly take notice when we are feeling anxious.

Mindfulness

Role Models

“Example is not the main thing, it is the only thing.” Albert Schwitzer The most powerful influence that parents can have on their children’s lives is the example they set by how they live their own lives. Children instinctively identify with and imitate their parents.

Communication with Children

How to Communicate with Your Child “No matter what I do, I can’t talk to my child.” “My daughter and I start out having a reasonable conversation, but we always end up yelling at each other.” “My son just won’t open up to me.

Compassion and Child-Rearing

Critical Inner Voice and Intimacy

Where your critical inner voice comes from As small children, we are helpless and entirely dependent on adults for nurturance and to have our needs met. It is impossible for even the most loving parent to anticipate and respond to all of the needs of an infant, therefore every child suffers from some degree of frustration, deprivation and pain. At these times, children defend against the intense emotions that they are experiencing as unbearable by cutting off from their feelings.

Defenses

“What’s keeping me from feeling?” How could something as natural as feeling our emotions be so difficult? There is a very logical explanation for why we have trouble accessing our feelings and instead find ourselves cut off and detached.

Depression

Depression can be a very serious, debilitating disorder. About seven out of a hundred people suffer depression at some point in their lives, making it an important health concern that commands treatment. Dealing with depression can feel especially difficult, because the symptoms it generates (i.

Destructive Relationships

No matter what you do, do you keep ending up in the same type of relationship? Even when you think you are falling in love with a completely different kind of person, do they turn out being the same as all the others? Are you the victim of some kind of recurring bad luck or is there some other explanation for why this pattern keeps repeating itself in your life?

Discipline

One of parenting’s most challenging opportunities Often in circumstances where it is necessary for a parent to discipline a child, the parent’s own anger or frustration comes through in lieu of healthy guidance and direction. At these times, we hear words we never thought we’d say coming out of our mouths: “Because I say so!” “If you don’t do it, you are going to be in big trouble!

Fantasy Bond

Definition: The fantasy bond is a form of self-parenting and self-protection that offers an illusion of pseudo-independence at the expense of real relating. The degree of reliance on the illusion of connection or fantasy bond is proportional to the degree of frustration and pain experienced in a person’s developmental years. “Most people have fears of intimacy and are self-protective and at the same time are terrified of being alone.

Fear of Intimacy

There’s one sad truth in life I’ve found While journeying east and west – The only folks we really wound Are those we love the best. We flatter those we scarcely know, We please the fleeting guest, And deal full many a thoughtless blow, To those who love us best. This amusing little poem isn’t so amusing when we consider just how true it can be when it comes to our intimate relationships.

Isolation and Loneliness

Human beings are naturally social animals. When we find ourselves becoming isolated, we should take that as a warning sign that we are turned against ourselves in some basic way. If not already there, we are on a path toward feeling bad, lonely, introverted or even depressed.

Love

To love (verb) The dictionary offers two separate definitions for the word love. One is of a noun and the other is of a verb. The dictionary has unwittingly pinpointed the problem that many of us have with love.

Self-Limiting Behaviors

“Why do I keep sabotaging my own success?” We have the opportunity to apply for our dream job, but we end up procrastinating and missing the deadline for submitting the application. Or we go to the interview, but our behavior is uncharacteristically subdued and unenthusiastic, and we “blow the interview.

Sexual Stereotyping

How is sexual stereotyping affecting your relationship? Due to the advances made in recent years to establish equality between the sexes, society reflects fewer attitudes that support discrimination and inequality between men and women. Most of us espouse a point of view that is liberated from old sexual prejudices that once bordered on racial bigotry.

Sex and The Critical Inner Voice

“Turn down the lights, turn down the bed. Turn down these voices inside my head.” I Can’t Make You Love Me, Bonnie Raitt When we are sexually intimate — experiencing our loving feelings on both a physical and emotional level — we are making the closest contact possible with another person.

Stress

Many of us experience stress on a daily basis. Stress has taken so routine a space in life today that we’ve grown accustomed to rubbing our foreheads, medicating our headaches, casually bringing it up in conversation and then, at the end of each weekend, anticipating another week filled with it. Today, many of our lifestyles have fallen into the go, go, go pattern of leaping from task to task, interrupted only by brief moments of unwinding the after-dinner glass of wine, the annual vacation or the weekend zone-out session of TV.

Tantrums

What to do about temper tantrums and meltdowns: Dealing with a child who is having a temper tantrum or meltdown is challenging for even the most capable parents. Methods that are effective in dealing with the child’s natural expressions of anger or frustration don’t work in this intense emotional situation. At these times, parents find it difficult to get through to their children and help them cope with their feelings.

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Webinar Recording with Dr. Lisa Firestone

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What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

Mindfulness - Full Catastrophe Living

Mindfulness - Liberation from Delusion

Mindfulness - Come to Our Senses

Mindfulness - At Home in Our Own Skin

Mindfulness - Many Approaches

Mindfulness - Life Before Death

Mindfulness - Lifestyle Change

Mindfulness - The Nitty Gritty of Attunement

Mindfulness - Liberation from Suffering

Mindfulness - Challenging the Negative Self-Image

Mindfulness - Hope for Changing the Future

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