5 Simple Steps to End Any Fight
…espect and caring. And perhaps you will even live longer and certainly with a lot more satisfaction from your relationship. Follow Dr. Firestone on Twitter or Google+….
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Becoming Your Real Self: Shedding the Baggage of Your Past
…rds at your child that your father yelled at you? Do you find yourself withdrawing from your romantic partner in a self-protective style similar to how your father was with your mother? Or do you find yourself acting without regard for another person’s boundaries in a fashion reminiscent of your mother? These are all examples of common ways that negative traits of our early caretakers manifest as part of our personality. These patterns can also hu…
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Are You Hardy Enough?
…rentiated individual, as outlined in my new book, co-authored by my father Dr. Robert Firestone and Joyce Catlett, The Self Under Siege: A Therapeutic Model for Differentiation. Individuals who are more differentiated, who are living their lives based on their own unique values and desires, are open to new experiences rather than tied to routine. They can think clearly and problem solve. They are proactive not victimized when faced with difficulti…
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What Goes On in the Mind of Your Therapist?
…not necessarily being seen for who he or she really is. This can leave children confused about who they really are and cause them to struggle in forging their own unique identity. Throughout childhood, a person develops psychological defenses to cope with their specific circumstances. These defenses may work to protect them as children, but they often go on to limit or hurt them as adults. Think about the little girl who stays quiet in her househo…
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Helping Parents Distinguish Love from Emotional Hunger
…rances. Parents who behave in this manner exert a strong pull on their children that drains a child of his or her emotional resources… [Parents] often confuse their own intense feelings of need and anxious attachment for genuine love. They fail to make a distinction between emotional hunger, which is a strong need caused by deprivation in their own childhoods, and genuine feelings of tenderness, love, and concern for their child’s well-being. Pare…
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The Fantasy Bond
Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D. – This book offers a consistently developed set of hypotheses centering around the concept of the “fantasy bond,” an illusion of connection originally formed with the mother/ primary caretaker and later with significant others in the individual’s environment. Based on 28 years of research into the problem of resistance, this book offers a consistently developed set of hypotheses centering around the concept of the “fant…
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How Negative Thoughts Are Ruining Your Life
…heory and therapy technique developed by my father psychologist and author Dr. Robert Firestone. It is the basis of a book we co-authored titled Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice and the subject of many of my lectures, Webinars and my upcoming six-week eCourse “Overcome Your Inner Critic.” Why I have invested so much of my time and work into this subject is because what I have found in my 30 years of research and clinical practice is that, in almo…
Learn MoreWhere the Rubber Meets the Road
…ed a psychology conference in New York City and stumbled across Dr. Robert Firestone’s book, The Fantasy Bond. In spite of the fact I had stacks of assigned reading, this was the book I couldn’t put down. It enlightened me in ways none of my professors could, answering theoretical questions roaming around in my freshly primed mind. Most importantly, it made sense, not just theoretically, but personally. And this really is the crux of the matter, t…
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Why Are We Hooked on Rejection?
…” become “I will never meet anyone like him. No one will ever love me?” To help us catch on to this cruel internal dialogue without blindly believing every word it utters, it’s helpful to think of our thoughts in the third person. Would we ever let someone talk to us the way we are shouting at ourselves? Moreover, would we ever tolerate someone speaking to a friend of ours the way our critical inner voice speaks to us? We have to catch on the mome…
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Why Are So Many Parents Limited in Loving Their Children?
…ven regain genuine loving feelings and regard for one another. Lastly, children whose parents have, for the most part, resolved their issues of trauma and loss from the past have a better chance. In Compassionate Child-Rearing, I described many parents who came to understand and feel for what had happened to them as children. As a result, they were able to develop more compassion for their past and for their present-day limitations. Regaining feel…
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