…hreatened in reality or are they just feeling threatened emotionally? What critical thoughts are they experiencing toward their partners and what critical thoughts are they having toward them selves as a result of these perceived threats to their relationships? By exploring feelings of jealousy and understanding why people react (or overreact) to the things they do, we can learn more about ourselves and limit behaviors that our destructive to our…
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…ing up means for adults. In fact, most of us are all too familiar with the critical thoughts that tell individuals who have just split up that they are failures, that they will never meet anyone or that they are unwanted or alone. But what effect does a break-up or divorce have on children? What critical thoughts are they hearing about themselves, and how can we help them cope with the real pain of the situation? Here the Mayo Clinic outlines a ba…
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…ning it on ourselves. We may then start to experience an onslaught of self-critical thoughts. For example, if your partner or spouse tends to nag at you about practical matters, you may initially feel infuriated at being intruded on or criticized. Your heated response may strike you as irrational. Getting mad would only rock the boat, so instead, you disregard your emotional reaction. Soon enough, you may start to turn this frustration on yourself…
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…erapist, you have a mindful therapy session. And then the client can learn how to be mindful just from being in the presence of their therapist. They can feel it and “soak it up,” as my mother would say. And so I think that it’s critical, it’s critical to be a mindful therapist and to have one’s own mindfulness practice. And as I said, it doesn’t have to be a formal sitting practice. It can be returning to the breath any time during the day. Sever…
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…pist to be able to track even low levels of massive disengagement would be critical. If you don’t track them, essentially, they’ll build in intensity and then you’re dealing with, you know, a massive situation here. So again, massive. But, what does it mean again about being able to track your own heart rate when it’s dropping, etc.? How do we pick up dissociation? So as we talked about before again, this brings the body into the work and I really…
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…s of both giving and receiving. In The Enemy Within: Separation Theory and Voice Therapy, I emphasize that this inward state needs to be distinguished from time spent alone in self-reflection, introspection, creative work, meditation, or other spiritual and intellectual pursuits. Essentially, it involves a process of regarding oneself more as an object than as a person. Each individual develops idiosyncratic ways of dulling and deadening him or he…
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…physical selves. As they reach adolescence and start dating, protective or critical attitudes from parental figures tend to teach young women to suppress or resist their sexuality. Everyone from their parents to their peers may be sending them the message that being sexual is synonymous with being a slut. Of course, not every woman is brought up with an unhealthy or repressive view of sex. Many young girls are well-educated and rightly taught to r…
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…their flaws, reading meaning into their words and actions, or seeing them critically and feeling easily annoyed by things that don’t really matter that much to us. We may even act in ways that provoke certain reactions from our partner. For example, a woman I worked with would complain that she hated when her husband would act parental. She often stated that she wished he would trust her more. She was typically a competent person, but she would o…
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…re some people who are more internalizers, or intra-punitive, or very self-critical. So, the prototype here would be, for example, a very self-critical, internalizing adolescent woman, who might be quite depressed and anxious. On the other side of the coping spectrum are the externalizers, the extra-punitive, the acting out. Again, the prototype that most people think about is a 12 year old, aggressive, ADHD boy. Well, we’ve known about this, we h…
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…und not living up to expectations. Many of us walk around with a “critical inner voice” filling our heads with should’s and should not’s: You should want to be a 24-hour parent. You should spend more time helping the kids with their schoolwork. You should make sure they’re having enough fun. You shouldn’t let them be on their devices. You shouldn’t let them eat that. You shouldn’t work all night. In addition to the guilt of not living up to our ow…
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