Search Results for: michelle deen/2010/06/2009/12/dr-lisa-firestone-“suicide-the-warning-signs”/2010/03/helper-tasks-how-you-can-help-someone-whos-suicidal/2010/03/helper-tasks-how-you-can-help-someone-whos-suicidal

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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Why Are People Afraid to Grow Up?

…re to developing a mature approach to life and move toward a more satisfying and freer existence. This subject will be addressed in my next blog. Learn about Dr. Robert Firestone’s book The Self under Siege: A Therapeutic Model for Differentiation…

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You Don’t Want What You Say You Want

…ctions with others, — each individual in the couple could expand his or her capacity for both giving and accepting love. Learn more about Dr. Firestone’s latest book The Self Under Siege:…

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The Value of Being Personal with Your Children

…tudes or way of being. Indeed, any technique, attitude, or approach to childrearing that treats children as objects to be manipulated by certain parental styles of communications is detrimental to their development. Many adult patients have complained bitterly about being treated as an object by their families. Children need adults who relate to them directly; they need people who are open with them about their real thoughts and feelings. This typ…

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Fear of Intimacy

…And regrettably these limitations tend to impact how they parent their children. From this less than perfect experience, children grow up with a less than perfect image of themselves. As a result, people arrive at adulthood psychologically equipped to survive in the type of emotional environment that they have come from. But it is a whole different world out there. That is why, when someone falls in love with us, the experience seems so alien. We…

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Compassionate Child Rearing

…etter understand the effects they have on the emotional state of their children. The lesson of the text is that children deserve the same rights, respect and consideration as any fully grown human being. To raise their children in a healthy environment, where they are seen and heard as independent individuals, parents must come to understand the ways in which they hurt their children and the events from their own past that helped motivate their be…

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Psychological Defenses in Everyday Life

Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D. – This book is a rich resource that broadens personal understanding by examining the origins of childhood pain, subsequent defense formation, and the pervasiveness and destructiveness of resulting maladaptive, addictive behaviors in adults. The authors point a way toward reversing the damaging process that keeps individuals from experiencing genuine satisfaction. The clarity and empathic tone of the book make it a valua…

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

…sex, for example Garp’s mother, Jenny, in The World According to Garp and Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules. What does this say about our society? Is the asexual or nonsexual person the new norm? On another level, Irving’s novel exposes a common human failing that many people don’t like to think about very much; our tendency to categorize, label, and then stigmatize other people, at great psychological cost to them and to us. At one point in the…

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What Are Defenses?

…ted psychologically… also serve as terrible limitations to the self,” said Dr. Robert Firestone author of Psychological Defenses in Everyday Life. As children, the ways in which we comforted ourselves often served as substitutes for something we were either not getting or wished to avoid. Whatever we did, whether we calmed ourselves with self-soothing habits or disappeared into a world of fantasy, we felt relieved by our behaviors. The pain was le…

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