This category contains some personal “ah, ha” moments as I study and work within the clinical mental health world.
“She just does it for attention,” is the statement I hear most often from parents with children who self-mutilate, and forgive me but this is often a wholly inadequate take on the situation, a judgment used by parents as a quick-fix diagnosis to relieve them of the mental shock brought on by this bizarre and…
My close friends and family know that I have been a dream analysis junkie for about the last 3 years. It started after reading Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.” I came away from the book fairly discouraged from ever getting into dream analysis because of the sheer volume and complexity of the material. My impression…
Those who follow much of the current pop-psychology and religious thought might be under the impression that perfect, unending peace of mind is the assumed goal for everyone; that one must strive to conquer one’s inner conflicts to such an extent that stress is altogether eliminated. Ridiculous! If tension-free living is your goal get ready…
Think that children don’t think about death? Think again. An abundance of research has shown that death can often be a pervasive concern for young kids. If you are a parent who has not had dreaded ‘death discussion’ with your child just wait, it’s coming. And it will probably come at a completely unexpected moment.…
I had before me what I thought was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work with a top-notch counseling team at a renowned cancer treatment hospital for my counseling internship. In reality, I would soon come to understand that I was about to enter a minefield of anti-male bias that would tax me in…
If you have ever stood in a crowded room and felt completely alone then you understand that loneliness is not the same as being alone. For a lonely person crowds will often serve to amplify, not decrease, the loneliness. Psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a leading researcher in the phenomenon of loneliness in the late 1950’s, said…
“The threat to the religious attitude lies not in science but in the predominant practices of daily life.” writes Erich Fromm in his famous work, “Psychoanalysis and Religion.” He explains that, “man has ceased to seek in himself the supreme purpose of living and has made himself an instrument serving the economic machine his own…
Some men look forward to having kids all their life. Not me. The thought almost never crossed my mind for 35 years. At 25 I was married and content with life. The wife and I traveled a ton and went where we wanted when we wanted, spending ungodly amounts of money doing it, and answering…
Sounds like a tall order. Is it possible for anxiety to be anything but a curse? The popular view of anxiety casts it as something abnormal, an illness, something to be avoided at all cost. I don’t know the stats but I’m willing to bet that treating anxiety accounts for a good majority of all…
(Below is a video of my friends Symon Hajjar and John Paul Pope, members of Dear Saint Isaac, performing the song “What if I die.” The following was written as a reaction to the song. It’s my hope that both the article and the song together take the reader to places he or she hasn’t…
The anxiety of death undergirds and animates nearly everything we do, but this is not a conclusion one comes to through a superficial and abstract view of death, but only after one is careful to give it the inward inspection it is due. I’m always amazed, and a bit frustrated, when I ask people about…
“What do you think of this?” was all my friend wrote me in a private Facebook message with an attachment of an article about a young woman, Brittany Maynard, who has stage 4 brain cancer. Brittany’s doctors gave her 6 months to live and she decided to beat the cancer by ending her own life…
According to Erich Fromm, “Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.” He and much of the psychoanalytic community have the idea that the amount of destructive tendencies in a person is directly proportionate to the degree to which his or her expansiveness of life is frustrated. Fromm was of the belief that this frustration is…
It’s been over 3 months since I’ve written an article. I’m not sure it’s the time to start again, but what the hell. Life is short; a lesson I’ve learned every day for the last 3 months. It used to be that death almost never crossed my narrow little mind except to make a point…
Since the time I first became a Christian 23 years ago in a wild charismatic church, I knew that I wanted to be a counselor. I didn’t know what that looked like necessarily at the time, I just knew I wanted to help people overcome their grief and internal struggles. Having come from a difficult…
It was amazing that I had fit in for as long as I did. Looking back, I can’t believe I spent nearly 20 years in a Christian movement that was almost wholly cut off from dialogue with anyone on the outside. For someone like me, extreme in his tenacity for questioning everything, it is a…
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced" -Kierkegaard
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