…tion offers a temporary respite from stress, separation anxiety, and death fears, it tends to be maladaptive in life and interferes with a person’s movement toward individuation and autonomy. Robert Firestone writes, “Existential dread impels us to form illusory connections, hoping to recapture the infantile sense of safety, security and omnipotence provided by the original fantasy bond. We are subconsciously looking to a significant person or oth…
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…s become just another sexless relationship. People may also avoid physical intimacy and sexuality because a satisfying sexual experience can be a major disruption to the illusion of connection provided by the fantasy bond. The sex act is a real, but temporary, physical connection followed by a distinct separation. Similarly, times that are emotionally personal and intimate with close, affectionate contact always end, albeit temporarily, as the par…
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…ort zone due to being loved. I hunted down the following gem from the book Fear of Intimacy by him and Joyce Catlett: (A person) “has to sweat it out when things get close with other people, and they have to learn to suffer the pain of being loved and not provoke rejection… When the relationship is good… they have got to sweat that out, like an addict who goes cold turkey. They have to take a chance and not damage the relationship. They can feel l…
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…ns is that they have formed what my father, psychologist and author Robert Firestone, termed a “fantasy bond,” a largely subconscious connection with their partner in which they feel like they are not complete without the other person. This illusion of connection fosters a sense of safety or security that exacerbates the feeling of need toward the other person. However, when in a fantasy bond, the couple tends to favor the form over the substance…
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…nt can be best handled by dealing with our past. You can learn more about how to help make sense of your story in an eCourse with Lisa Firestone and Daniel Siegel….
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…at are the messages you got around food? Our first experiences learning to feed and nourish ourselves have a strong impact throughout our lives. Unless we can recognize and differentiate from unhealthy attitudes we internalized around food, we’re likely to subconsciously continue a cycle of self-criticism, or even self-punishment. Taking time to reflect on what kinds of messages we received around food, eating, and our bodies can shine an incredib…
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…ely even peeked outside her window for weeks. The time alone increased her fear and eventually gave way to a paranoid orientation. She even imagined that her friends were betraying her and that she could no longer trust them. Fortunately, she had the wisdom to contact me and I was able to help her calm down and rationally evaluate her present circumstances. Later, she realized that much of her alarm, although precipitated by the threat of the coro…
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…lize with the infant when he is hungry, play with him when he is tired, or feed him when he is trying to initiate social interaction.” She also noticed that the babies who were most comfortable exploring were the ones whose mothers made it clear they weren’t going anywhere. Ainsworth followed up her work in Uganda with her famous “Baltimore Study,” the first to methodically observe mothers and babies in relationship, in the home, and then with the…
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…criticizes our performance and undermines our accomplishments. It tends to feed on and fuel our stress levels by telling us, “You’ll never get this done! You’re going to fail. You can’t take this pressure.” By identifying this inner critic and noting when it starts to cloud our thinking, we can stop it from overwhelming us and heightening our stress levels. We can calmly separate this destructive attitude from our real point of view and take calme…
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…e.” By understanding where this critical inner voice comes from and how it feeds our feelings of insecurity, we can come to understand the forces that drive us to put ourselves down. In this presentation, Dr. Firestone will explain therapeutic steps to challenge and overcome the destructive inner critic that limits our lives. She will illustrate the value of practicing self-compassion and present ways to overcome self-sabotaging behaviors that fee…
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