Search Results for: firestone

Dr. Sheldon Solomon on Terror Management Theory: Exclusive Interview

…guy named Phil Shaver, who’s an attachment theory guy and the other is Bob Firestone because right about the same time, nobody in academic psychology took us very seriously. Except for Phil and Bob, who each pulled us aside. Your dad wrote to us and we used to go to conferences with purple ditto sheets because no one would publish our work. And I honestly don’t know – I will ask Bob when I see him next, you know – how he found one of these. But he…

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The Inner Voice that Drives Suicide

…to evaluate the risk of self-destructive tendencies. First, we created the Firestone Assessment of Self-Destructive Thoughts (FAST), and eventually, we developed another scale that uses the identification of a self-destructive thought process to assess suicidal intent. This became the Firestone Assessement of Suicidal Intent (FASI). A 2001 comparative study used the FAST to identify suicidal potential among Pakistani and American psychiatric patie…

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prescription drugs , psychalive, drug abuse, mental healtth

Mental Health Professionals React to U.S. Abuse of Prescription Drugs

…r tendency to treat the symptoms as opposed to the problem,” said Dr. Lisa Firestone. “Instead of asking how we can get ourselves to sleep, we should be asking “why aren’t we sleeping? What is making us so anxious? As people develop the threshold to feel the sadness in their lives, they open up a space to feel the joys. They can begin to address obstacles, build resilience, and make choices that will be more fulfilling.” Dr. Firestone and her coll…

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Angry at Love

…they once adored. Why Do We Feel Angry at Love Directed Toward Us? As Dr. Firestone wrote in his blog, “You Don’t Want What You Say You Want,” “Most of us profess that we want to find a loving partner, but the experience of real love disrupts fantasies of love that have served as a survival mechanism since early childhood.” These “survival mechanisms” refer to the defenses we formed in response to undesirable circumstances in our early lives. In…

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Why Am I Still Single? Learn the Barriers That Ward Off Love

…ting into healthy and fulfilling relationships. It will highlight what Dr. Firestone has found to be the most significant, internal reasons people have trouble finding love. These include defenses, unhealthy attractions, fears of intimacy, pickiness, low self-esteem, fear of competition, isolation, routine and rule-making. Many people harbor psychological defenses that they believe will protect them but that actually ward off love. Dr. Firestone w…

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jealousy and jealous feelings

How to Deal with Jealousy

…hor of Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice. As she and her father Dr. Robert Firestone define it, the “critical inner voice” is a form of negative self-talk. It perpetuates destructive thoughts and feelings, driving us to compare, evaluate and judge ourselves (and often others) with great scrutiny. This is one reason why learning how to deal with jealousy is so important. This voice can fuel our feelings of jealousy by filling our heads with critica…

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Why We Lost a Lovable Genius: The Hidden Enemy in Suicide

…suring people’s self-destructive thoughts on a continuum. Results from the Firestone Assessment of Self-Destructive Thoughts (FAST) showed that people at high risk for suicide or who have prior attempts are experiencing critical inner voices further down a continuum of self-destructive thoughts, and they are experiencing these thoughts with greater intensity than non-suicidal people with the same mental health disorders. The voices at this extreme…

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Beating Addiction: The Sneaky Role of the Critical Inner Voice

…of them that is self-critical, self-sabotaging and self-destructive). Dr. Firestone will explain the steps of Voice Therapy, a cognitive, affective and behavioral approach to challenging one’s core negative beliefs about themselves. She will help individuals and therapists working with clients learn ways to overcome the thought processes that drive addictive behavior. Dr. Firestone will further emphasize the importance of helping individuals stru…

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Become a Better Parent by Understanding Yourself

…their children. By bringing in the latest child development research, Dr. Firestone introduces parents to a more compassionate, self-reflective approach to parenting. She will emphasize how by making sense of their own experiences growing up, parents are actually doing the least selfish thing they can do for their kids. Parenting is not about perfection. We all want to be the best parent we can, but to the degree that we are blind to our own past…

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“Nobody Likes Me:” Understanding Loneliness and Self-shame

…s and social anxiety, a subject you can learn more about here. As Dr. Lisa Firestone put it in her article “A Way Out of Loneliness,” “It’s helpful to recognize that loneliness is very much a state of mind, and unfortunately, that mind is, in effect, lying to us.” Being alone isn’t necessarily the issue; it’s the filter of seeing ourselves as alone that must be challenged. People who feel lonely tend to view the world differently. There are even c…

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