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The Impact of Death on our Everyday Lives

…eactions predispose withdrawal into a more inward, self-nurturing, and self-protective lifestyle; (2) on an interpersonal level, our responses can trigger a retreat from love or loving relationships and/or a generalized reaction or avoidance of intimacy and sexuality; and (3) at the societal level, our fear reactions reinforce the need to give up our individuality, conform to the conventions, beliefs or mores of a particular group, institution, or…

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Why Are So Many Parents Limited in Loving Their Children?

…er parent may suppress her children’s pain in just the opposite way—by over-comforting and over-protecting them. In any case, the child is always more expendable than the parent’s defense system. The more self‑protective a person is, the more he or she will act out his or her defenses on the child and progressively fail to perceive the child correctly and encourage healthy development. 5. Having children reminds parents that time is passing and te…

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Why Are We Hooked on Rejection?

…” How can the dismissal of one person cause such a spiral of universal self-shame? Why can’t we shake that sinking feeling of humiliation and unworthiness the moment someone decides they don’t want to be with us romantically? My father, psychologist and author Robert Firestone, recently commented, “It’s amazing how people will suck the marrow out of rejection.” While most of us like to think that all we want is true love, the reality is, many of u…

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Where the Rubber Meets the Road

…onflicts and concerns to highlight how the conceptual rubber meets the real-life road. We’ll look at parent-child and family relations, cultural norms that are anything but normal, and general issues of human dynamics that play out before us. I aim to make Glendon’s theoretical contributions come alive for readers interested in their personal development by sharing my interpretations, insights, observations and struggles to gain greater awareness…

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Open to Emotion

…with my feelings, situation. This was a real, spontaneous, E-motion–energy-in-motion–that physiologically demanded immediate release. As children grow up, with our help they develop the capacity to better regulate their emotions, a crucial life skill they gotta learn. But what was going on here, was not this. How many times have you heard yourself or others saying, “Don’t cry, it will be alright,” trying to soothe? I grew up with parents and othe…

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How Over-Parenting Hurts Your Children… and You

…ill be spending it with the best version of you. If you choose to be a stay-at-home parent, your kids will thrive if they see you pursuing what you love and if they are included in these activities to whatever extent they are interested. Let your kids see what makes you happy and enjoy observing what makes them happy. Support their unique interests without concern about how they reflect on you. In a recent interview for Prevention Magazine, Michel…

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What Are Defenses?

…om anyone at a time when he was incapable of getting it for himself. To a 3-year-old with an absent father and neglectful mother, these defenses seemed like the rational reaction to an irrational world. As independent adults with our first chance at overcoming past hurts, these tendencies can become our enemy. “When children are faced with pain and anxiety in their developmental years, they develop defenses to cut off that pain. But the tragedy is…

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What Goes On in the Mind of Your Therapist?

…vous about trusting others. She will then criticize herself as shy and anti-social. The boy may reach adulthood feeling anxious and pressured to make others notice him. He may struggle to control his acting out or attention-seeking behavior. Ideally, therapists are sensitive to the ways each individual has been hurt. Because they have no connection to their clients’ pasts, therapists have the opportunity to see their clients free of the labels tha…

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identity, sexuality, psychalive, sexual stereotypes,

Identity, Sexuality, and Society’s Assault on the Self: A Commentary on John Irving’s Novel, In One Person

…eled as “aberrant” and “deviant.” As e.e. cummings accurately observed, “To-be-nobody but yourself– in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” The importance of becoming an individual in one’s own right, as expressed in Irving’s novels and in much of e.e. cummings’ poetry and prose, is the theme of a forthcoming book The…

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breaking the fantasy bond with our mothers, psychalive, mothers day 2012, mother daughter conflict,

Breaking the Fantasy Bond with Our Mothers

…r Siege: A Therapeutic Model for Differentiation. What are some of the less-than-beneficial aspects of the mother-daughter bond? First, women tend to imitate their mother’s negative point of view about life and her maladaptive ways of coping with pain and anxiety. For example, if their mother acted victimized and helpless, they often have tendencies to relate to life as passive victims. If their mother saw men as weak, indifferent, or degrading of…

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