Let's talk about feelings and life and change.
I am sorry, I know it took too much time to balance myself to present a new address for this blog. For more than a year I paid attention mostly to my blog in Turkish.
Anyway, now you can have a look at moodr.blogspot.com
The content is a little different. In fact the content is not only different but it is broader than what I have done here.
I will not delete this blog, I will just freeze it.
Hope to see you there.
My decision is to unite my blogs in English under one address. Psycho-blog will also be there.
I’ll let you know details later.
I have been hit by stumbleupon over the weekend. I am thankful for all the visit and comments that stumblers brought to Psychology Blog.
The post which was visited by a couple of thousands was Your Charm Does Not Depend On Your Body
I suggest you to read the comments section. I have the feeling that most people didn’t find that article fit for a psychology blog. I don’t totally agree with this however i can’t simply disagree either.
First, psychology is a broad concept. When I hear the phrase “psychology blog”, first web site I have in my mind is the Psy-Blog. Especially the post “Top Ten Psychology Studies” is a typical post which people expect when they hear something like psychology.
On the other hand, my psychology blog is mostly about clinical psychology and then mostly about alternative tips and techniques in clinical psychology. Therefore it is quiet natural that most people will not see fit that this blog has such a title.
Having said that, I am thinking of a solution on this. One solution might be to freeze this blog as it is now and go for another domain and continue from there. I have several domains in my hand lik this one (hayatkisa.com) on which I can make use of meaningful subdomains. Well this isn’t a big problem anyway because there are hundreds of millions of web sites out there and people remembering a web site with its unique domain name is a little bit history. I’ts valid for a handful of big web sites only.
I believe that starting anew with over one year experience in blogging would do better for me and for my visitors. Please comment about this. I am not going to delete this blog or any single post in it, nor will I move the posts elsewhere. I will just setup a new blog that has a better title with a deeper meaning than Psychology Blog.
What do you think?
They have both contributed to contemporary psychotherapy without knowing.
There two major concepts in contemporary psychotherapy: “here and now” and self-responsibility. Being responsible of each and every event, good or bed, is a notion that psychotherapists would like their patients to gain. If you are robbed, that is your responsibility. You had to know that that street was not safe. You had to know that in that time of day, this area is not secure. You had to know that carrying that much money / valuables by you is not a good practice. Irvin Yalom puts out that if Sartre was living today he would say that the Iraqi invasion and hunger in Africa are your responsibilities because you could do something to prevent them both.
Psychologists today are no different than Sartre in that sense. Many books on psychotherapy talk about how you are responsible of a misbehaving parent, spouse, friend, society. This is not to advice to save the world. The idea is that you have the choice to avoid such situations. You are responsible for putting yourself into trouble or not. You choose what you will live and experience. You also choose how you feel about this and that.
This was the Sartre part. On the other hand, contemporary psychology is deeply affected bu Buddhist perspective. Here and now approach of solving daily problems or working on complexes that emerged from the past is highly similar to Buddhist teaching.
On any day you feel blue, both a zen master and a psychotherapist would say that this life, you have to live through your stress and anxiety. Thus you will solve it. Beyond that, they would also say that you should forget thinking about yesterday and worrying about tomorrow. Today, this moment is the most important to you.
Therefore, it would be accurate to say that contemporary psychotherapy relies really much on Sartre and Buddha.
Death is to be evaluated in two major ways in a dynamic therapy. First, its about one’s fear and concerns about his/her own death. Second, its about grief and emotional pain that emerges from a loss of a loved one.
Both of them are very much related to one’s anxiety about his/her own end.
In dynamic therapy, the notion of death, or consciousness thereof is a mean to open the individual’s path to activate his/her will to life.
Theory believes that the fact to know that someday you are going to die would help your therapeutic process. It’s true that for some people, it acts as a motivating force to know that he/she isn’t immortal. However, for some people its just like “if I am going to day anyway, why would I bother about my life”. So this awareness of death would help or not, it depends on the person.
To create this awareness, some techniques are used. Most of them are about dreaming of one’s own funeral, burial, etc. Writing of one’s own obituary is another method of initiating awareness about death.
Dream analysis and interpretation is also used in this process. Symbols such as seeing yourself wounded or your body modified is usually interpreted as referring to your fears of death.
Briefly, it may help if you realize that you are not going to live forever and every second of your life is worth living.
I have promised to write about this responsibilities issue.
There are lots of methods for developing a kind feeling towards your responsibilities but I don’t like many of them because they lead people to more stress and anxiety.
I prefer an analytical method, an analysis of what I want to do and how my current responsibilities are related to that. That means, whenever you have to carry the garbage and this is not something you like, know that this is something on your path that goes to another thing you like. If what you like is snowboarding and if snowboarding takes the act of having the garbage carried already, then it is very real that carrying the garbage is on your way to something you would like to do.
Why? Because life isn’t divided into pieces, a person’s life is a whole thing. There isn’t only the most favorite meal of you but also the time and effort it takes to eat it, if not prepare it or taking the walk to a restaurant.
And no, this isn’t about reward and punishment. This is something else. I don’t believe in reward and punishment systems either, not in religious terms I mean.
Briefly, realize that something labeled as responsibility that came along your way is most probably the step or the mean to what you really want. You can do this judgment.
Another issue here is to define responsibility. Anything can be labeled as responsibility but what responsibility is yours? Is drug recovery a responsibility for you if you are addicted or is it your health personnel’s responsibility? How is this responsibility divided? I hope to come with some definitions with that in following days.
I think the worst effect of the novel Pollyanna is the popular imagery of an optimistic person in people’s mind. This novel is so popular and so talked-upon that the character named Pollyanna has been exaggerated in her optimistic nature. We always make fun out of her optimism. Unfortunately, we tend to humiliate this optimism later on.
If you take something good and make so much fun out of it, it becomes the new bad thing. So, under peer pressure, we decide that optimism is not good to deal with life. Everybody looks like that they would accept us and agree with us when we tend to be pessimistic about life. Therefore many people try to win the race of being the first who criticize the other. It feels like when you are the first to criticize the other or simply yourself, then there is no room for others to criticize you.
The truth is that we don’t like to hear criticism, even the ones that people call constructive criticism. Once the name includes criticism, it signifies that somebody is going to have a say over our behavior. Of course, this is a wrong perception. However perception becomes reality.
In fact, most of the time, human being’s depression and anxiety is about living and being. Since you exist and most probably you are not going to die in the moment, you have every reason to feel better. Better than nothing.
Well, now, this was really so brief. Please bear with me while I’ll have more time to cover this topic.
Carpe diem is a latin phrase and means “seize the day”. It’s a brilliant teaching. It suggests that the time is always now and its more important than the past and the future. So true.
However, I see that many people have the urge to seize the day so much that they end up with seizures about the day instead of seizing the day.
Any teaching can become an anxiety. Our main failure with our lives is that we only pay attention to it when there is a problem. In fact, there is always the problem of being.
And when we start paying attention only after life hits somehow, then our teachings, life-hacks, therapies etc. become our new disorders and sources of anxiety.
The exit point of such an anxiety is to understand that if we want to seize the day, the method is not talking about seizing the day a day long. It’s about to stop talking about carpe diem and trying to understand that we live anyway, the day is not ahead but within us.
Depending too much on wise quotes is just about preparing yourself a new prison and this is a strong way of maintaining depression and anxiety.
I have slightly changed the style of the blog, and haven’t tested throughly on Internet Explorer. Please let me know by commenting on this post if you have any visual difficulties by those slight changes.
Traumatic events not only occur right in front of you. It is sufficient to witness something inhumane through a TV screen or a computer monitor to experience a traumatic event and carry on with its effects.
We all have been witnessed to Saddam’s execution who committed crimes against humanity and caused hundreds of thousands of people to experience live traumatic events if not millions.
However, thanks to our lightning fast technology of information networking, Saddam made us experience another trauma indirectly while saying goodbye to world.
Now, when people witness such events which seems like they have a mild effect, in fact our mind and unconscious are highly affected. When you see somebody executed by hanging on a movie, your brain helps you to forget what you feel during this experience really quickly. However, the feeling and the experience are not gone too far. They reside in your mind, they hide themselves from your conscious and find themselves places in your unconscious.
Furthermore, they become connected to your past self-experiences, feelings, etc. without making you feel anything on the surface. It is very possible that you have had headaches, low mood, less sleep or less appetite after having seen the execution somehow, without having the scenery in your conscious mind. This is sufficient enough to present you with a mild trauma.
Well, this is the world we are living in and unfortunately there are no room to escape from such occurrences. What we can do about it may be paying attention to our children so that they don’t have this traumatic experiences. Children tend to become a little more affected by scenery like this. They feel guilty. Save them.
Being cool and charming is fun and nice. Paying attention to being cool and charming every hour is a huge syndrome of this and the last century. Apart from becoming an anorexic or bulimic, people spend astronomical amounts of money and effort in aesthetic surgery, cosmetics and several unhealthy exercise programs. If you only knew that being presentable, charming or cool doesn’t depend on your body or how you look like in a picture, you would not just be happier but you would be also more cool, charming and good looking than ever.
However physically beautiful or good looking you are, a minor drop in your mood would make you look like less charming than you normally are.
If you pay close attention to your friends, relatives, co-workers, etc. you will notice that there are so many people that attract you who are not physically beautiful or good looking at all.
Imagine that your favorite actress had breast cancer and she had a surgery and suddenly she left one of her breasts. What would change in you in terms of your liking against her. Not much, because you have an idea of her in your mind that goes behind her physical being. You have seen her in a couple of movies or shows and you have not only her image in your mind but also an experience of her aura.
So, if you insist on just making up things physically on your body and not pay attention to your soul, you are building a destructive force for your charm. It’s like shopping for food while you are hungry and thus get everything in the market regardless of whether you need it or not.
In order not to end up with countless effort for your beauty with no avail, start beautifying your soul first and when you feel that you love yourself enough then pass on to the physical side, and continue to beautify yourself that way too.
Try it, It’s good for your health.
Sam Cyrous, who is an online friend of mine, started “phoenix ad aeternum“, his psychology blog in English. Worth having a look at it.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD);
After giving the formal and scientific definition of what OCD is, I would like to mention that most people who suffer from OCD have their own definitions of OCD, of course a definition affected by their OCD.
That is, they usually think that their OCD is not right. There have to be a more accurate OCD than they have.
Just from this point, it is not difficult to imagine the anxiety and stress that OCD may bring on any given day.
Well, it depends on what action you will take of course, but this relativity isn’t our concern for this topic. Psychologists usually suggest to move immediately about what you want to do. Moreover, some therapists tell about how short life is and that the sooner you act upon something the better it is for you.
Unfortunately, many methods fail. Cause of the failure is, if somebody would want to do something, she/he would do it immediately anyway. Do you remember any moment that you felt uneasy to eat your favorite meal? This should be so rare, if any. Then think about this: How would life be, if each of your responsibilities were like eating your favorite food? Most probably you could be the most successful person on earth.
Now, it looks like that action isn’t necessarily dependent on the best time. Instead, action usually depends on your will and liking. So therefore, it is usually the best to do to start from something you really like. If there is liking in it, believe that there won’t be any difference between watching your favorite movie and washing the dishes. It all depends on whether you like the act or not.
So, then how am I supposed to like my responsibilities? That’s the topic of my next post.
Taking a break, taking your time is an art. When you feel helpless, bored, afraid, that may be a sign of that you should take a break. Be it 15 minutes or two days, what you have to do is just stop for a while and feed your body and soul for refreshment. Most of the accidents on ski-fields occur in the afternoon about after 3:00pm. Can you guess why?
Tired bodies that haven’t took their time to rest for some couple of 15 minutes fail. Poor human being. The same is valid in business life, romantic love, theeth whitening, washing your car, paying your bills etc. etc.
Do take a break before it is too late. It may seem that you are capable of working nonstop. However, this is only a decision. You may even think that this post is not something that would apply to you but if you are human then it is very possible that you need to take a break.
You may also prevent depression and anxiety, and even other several mental diseases like alzheimer for instance, by taking your time and taking necessary breaks when you have to.
If you are unable to allocate half an hour for yourself, that obviously means that you are already in trouble.
Have a nice weekend.
In a sense, this year was the year of life-hacking blogs. If you go over Technorati and have look at the most popular blogs, you’ll see that some blogs about life-hacking are making their places in the top ten, if not in the top five.
It is surprizing to me that a vast majority of these blog’s content are about recent technological innovations and products instead of human mind and psychology. Recent technology and products are not the proper means of change, they don’t play much of a role when your goal is to hack your life and become who or what you want to become. I don’t underestimate the productivity that technology and its products brings to us. I just want to emphasize the misinterpretation of a word like hack (that has positive connotations most of the time before Kevin Mitnick became popular) into something related other than the core-subject, which is human mind, in my humble opinion.
Of course, there is an assumption behind the argument. I believe that the majority of visitors to these blogs are aiming to change their lives either that way or this way. They would like to become more productive, they want to do more good in less time. I don’t believe that people visit those blogs just to get informed by the bells and whistles of what is the most recent.
Since change, transformation and thus feelings are involved in this, life-hacking is more than just being informed of Zune and being the first who use it.
Change and transformation of one involves knowing herself better and sticking with the idea of a better, healthier self.
The stickyard to solve and get out of your Monday syndrome is to realize that the problem isn’t Monday. Monday, like every other day of the week, may bring unknown problems of life and it is not Monday to blame.
Every end and every beginning brings stress and anxiety. Probably this is why we celebrate our birthdays, graduation, marriage, circumcision, etc… Those signify milestones of our life that brings us closer to the unknown end.
Realize that Monday is just a word and it can have many connotations with it. Moreover, you can manipulate these connotations in your mind when you have to confront with your Monday anxiety.
What you will face on every Monday is the same thing you face on every Sunday, or every other workday. Bear with it. Monday is neither king nor a serf. You can treat it anyway you like just realize that it’s not necessarily the beginning of a work week. It is our minds that make Monday a symbol for the beginning of irritating series of events.
Maybe you can evaluate the weekend for preparation if the coming week is a little more busy than usual. Thus you may feel prepared and more powerful against the anxiety of monday.
Having a good sleep would also prevent unnecessary anxiety. Sleep is always good for your body 🙂
I have seen the movie V for Vendetta yesterday night, finally.
There is so much to write about in the movie but first things first, I would like to talk about the fear factor in V for Vendetta.
Apart from the notion of fear that is used by governments, it is also very important on individual basis what V has done to Evey.
It would not be polite to tell scenes in detail since it will involve spoilers from the movie.
Instead of doing this, let’s focus on fear and freedom.
Being free from fear might be a real definition of freedom. Freedom is not necessarily being happy. Freedom is taking your own decisions without interfering environmental pressure.
V for Vendetta is a must for see for all of us who have to deal with fear.
Social phobia is a kind of anxiety that occurs in social engagements. Like any other kind of anxiety, causes may differ from one to another.
Since it’s a kind of anxiety, anti-anxiety medicaton is helpful for social phobia. Apart from anti-anxiety medications some anti-depressants among ssri’s are also helpful.
One technique of relaxation with social phobia might be about thinking that you are not special. Yes, right; realize that when you are walking in a crowded street, you are as special as everybody else and not as special as everybody else.
That means when anxiety hits you with the idea that other people may criticize you for who you are, how you behave etc., try to realize that you are not that special and people don’t always have time to bother with you.
The feeling that you are somebody special to them in a negative sense and the feeling that everybody is staring at you is totally nonsense. You are equal to every one of them and the possibility of them criticizing you and you, criticizing them is 50%.
Thus, you can have this relaxation to know that you are not that special to get ciriticized everytime.
The same as valid for the anxiety you may experience in front of an authority figure. If you were in her shoes, how far would it be important to deal with you to a negative extent as well as a positive extent.
So, the next time you experience social phobia, repeat yourself that you aren’t that special to fear from society. You don’t have to.
Like many other psychological disorders, besides medication, you should also try talk therapy.
Have a nice and sound mind.
Talk therapy is advised for a variety of psychological disorders. Depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder are among them.
The best practice would be medication and talk therapy going hand in hand.
The therapist should be experienced, clever, patient and an up to date person.
Empathy is a core aspect in psychoteraphy. The therapist should comprehend tha patient’s uneasiness to the fullest extent possible. She should peacefully destroy the patient’s scenario of the dead end.
environmental factors are not among things that the therapist or the patient are able to change. However, it is cruical that the therapist should lead the patient to a healthy transformation of the self and his/her perception of the reality so that the patient can be able to transform his/her own attitudes to life. Thus, he/she can develop a better life for himself/herself.
Talk therapy, also known as psychotherapy is about bringing the consciousness and awareness in the patient, without being tackled by his/her pessimistic views about everything.
Consciousness is a term widely used for many purposes. As a psychology term, we use consciousness to refer to one’s knowing of self and her environment.
During depressive times, or anxiety, or trauma, human being tend to lose consciousness. This is mostly due to defense-mechanisms.
It is a refreshening defense mechanism when you remember less about events that leads you to unhappiness. It is good that you don’t live everyday as it is the day that something happened which truely upset you.
On the other hand, this lowered level of consciousness may cause other problems to you.
Consciousness is so useful for cognition. Perceiving objects and events as they are, requires a clear mind and a consciousness is usually refers to a clear mind.
Some important aspect of fear is that it is really paradoxical and recursive.Let’s imagine any situation that brings fear to you. For instance, it may be a fear of separation from your spouse. Now try to realize that it is not something that happened yet. We know this so far.
Now, try to realize what you are dreaming about during you have this fear.
Most probably, you will easily realize that you dream about how afraid you will be.
This is what you are afraid from. You are afraid form being afraid.
You may say that this isn’t fear, this is just the pain of isolation, suffering that would come with the reality of separation. I urge you to try to differentiate fear from anger, anger from hate, hate from suffering and then again fear from the pain of losing a loved person. How much different are those feelings?
You will see that those aren’t much different from each other.
Fear is a very fundamental emotion that we name it differently while there are different uneasy situations. Therefore, fear has many sides, many faces, however fear is fear. Its different faces do not make fear something else, fear with a mask is not any other emotion then fear itself.
Give it a try, dive into it when you are afraid of something. You’ll see that what you are afraid from is fear itself.
Feel free to ask and comment.
We often come across business or human resurces advertisements lik this: “We are looking for presentable sales representatives”. Now that’s okay, I am not against this.
We also read in many human resources books, self-help books and also there, we see the same suggestion of being presentable.
Then we try and force ourselves to be presentable but what is this? How do you define presentability?
People tend to understand a new hair cut, nice make-up, polished shoes, maybe not expensive but not cheap clothing, etc. This is okay, Of course there is great advantage both menthally and phsycially to look good.
However, I also observe that looking good become something like a religion and it goes beyond one’s real abilites. I mean presentability is emphasized so much that one can forget what she/he is really able to achieve and choose her/his power of having a good look. I don’t mean that people pay more attention or pay attention to only looking good. I say that while being phsyically good looking, people may tend to count on looking and avoid showing their other skills or find it unnecessary to inform about their real skills.
Apart from this, it is also a problematic issue to define what presentability is. To me, presentability in general means what you make people feel about you. If they feel comfortable, sincere, trustable with you, then you are presentable, at least presentable enough for an ordinary business day.
Unfortunately, depression is something that can be seen in children too.
Similar to depression in grown-up people, children also tend to show sadness and irritability.
Low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness, loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities, change in appetite and sleep patterns, concentration difficulties, some phsyical pain that have no physical cause and a general change in activity level are main symptoms of depression in children.
Treatment can be made by antidepressants, psychotherapy or both. It is a very cruical responsibility to treat a child in depression because suicide and self-harm is not less common with children in comparison to depressed people in general.
There are psychiatrists and pschologists who are experienced in healing depressed children.
Well, I came across this photo while hanging around flickr. You can click on it and see other photos of her too. This is babeffe, a flickr firend of mine. I like her photos really much.
Now, this is a slef-photo of her. Looking at her, I thought about general phsyical beauty, how we come to create the attractive self.
It is on our hands to be attractive. It is really a positive energy that would make us happier.
Instead of sitting in a dark room and waiting to be found, you can also work on your attractiveness and find yourself a date immediately.
Even when you have an ongoing relationship, you can create new leads of excitement by looking at yourself and making only little changes that would have great impact on your look.
That’s worth dealing with. Nowadays I also plan a post on distorted self-image and how that leads to more and deep into depression and meaningless anxiety.
Enjoy life. It is not as long as you think about.
Have you ever had a feeling of having your mind full with unnecessary thoughts and feelings?
I sometimes think that I filled my mind with so much emptiness or so much dirty, useless information that my mind is going to explode with them. What an anxiety…
I live through the fear of not getting my mind back again to useful thought and feelings. I mean nice, happy feelings.
However, forcing yourself usually does not help. Instead of having this self-pressure on you, remember that it is yourself who put all that mess into your mind. This means you can empty your trash too.
This is worth thinking about. If you have any questions on this or if you feel like discussing it please feel free to comment.
One of the topics that both psychologists and therapists put emphasis on is attention.
I don’t necessarily mean those attention deficit disorders. I mean simply paying attention to things around us. Clothings, the floor, trees, cars, everything.
Try it. You will see how much detail in your life passing away without catching your attention.
This is only one side of the attention case. the other side is about realizing what you do at the very moment and where you are and your physical connection to the world.
Next time, when you come home from work try to think about clothes of people you met during the day. Don’t take this as a memory exercize, put the emphasis on yourself, your attention, investigate whether you were really there with your mind or not.
Then you can shift this further to other objects of attention, voices, manners, mimics, gestures.
You will see that your attention will get better.
If you have decided to go through a therapy that may change your life a little bit, an important decision now would be about chooisng the right therapist.Instead of looking for a therapist first, try to do an internet search on therapy methods. Try to understand what is the best method that would fit your nature.
Apart from this, an initial therapy session would be helpful on having mor information on what therapy really is and that may ease your choices.
If you believe that you are really in a depression which is a medical thing rather than a mood or personality thing, try to look for a psychiatrist instead of a psychologist.
However, if I were you, I would look for a psychologist first that would help me to develop more insight for me. Hence, a psychologist may also tell you whether you are in a depression or not and may lead you to a psychiatrist.
Always, always love yourself and have fun with your problems.
It is very important to think about the way you handle obstacles in your life.
It is also very important to know whether there are really obstacles in your life or is it just you make-up them according to your hidden decisions.
Let’s leave hidden decisions to another post and focus on real obstacles.
Assume that you are in love with somebody and she/he is married and she/he loves her husband or his wife very much. What do you do?
Another assumption might be that you are eager to buy two movies and watch them at home but at the same time you have only enough money to eat something for that day. What do you do?
The most important thing is not what you do but how you handle your feelings towards this hinderness.
Do you accept easily that you are not able to do everything in life? How much time and resources do you allocate to cope with inabilities?
Those may become the questions of the day. It’s not important “what” do you do, it is usually “how” do you do that brings hapiness or stress to you.
Please think about it. Don’t forget to enjoy tha entertainment that we call life.
During relationships, there are times that one can fall into doubt whether to tell her/his feelings or not. They don’t have to be feelings all the time, this can also what you think about her/him.There are reasons that people may avoid talking or establish any other communication like mail, chat, sms, etc. that is using language.
One of the reasons is past relationships in that she or he committed in an open communication which resulted in snob behavior on the other side. There is a thinking like, “if i am going to tell what i feel, the sun will go down, there won’t be any magic again”. This is the point exactly where a relationship gets poisoned by strategy.
Because by this time, you may enter into some cold war in which there are misery and the unknown.
On the other hand, some people may use this miscommunication (not to communicate is a miscommunication) as an attractive feature that will result in a posionous seduction. Thus, they may feel like they have a new weapon on her/him.
The fact is, we don’t need weapons in a relationship. Your body, your gestures, your communication overall is a very good tool to seduce someone. Moreover, those are real. When you tell about yourself and your relationship openly and still seduce her/him, you can feel that this seduction is very real.
Enjoy.
Those who are not very familiar with psychology are thinking psychotherapy as something that necessarily deals with the past.
It’s true that Sigmund Freud, who is one of the fathers of psychotherapy, established his psycho-analytic theories on dealing with past transgressions, unresolved conflicts, etc.
On the other hand, a psychotherapy session can be held not only about past memories of a patient but also on very patterns that the patient is behaving accordingly, without talking or investigating patent’s past life.
Recent therapeutical approaches involve methods that can break into one’s current behavior which is far beyond from reality and put new healthy thinking instead.
If you would like to take a therapy with a psychologist but you are afraid from dealing with your memories, childhood, etc. you can ask her / him to start from somewhere that you don’t have to immediately bring memories into your mind.
Try it and enjoy.
We sometimes tend to think that we are evil. We also tend to think that the society is evil too.
Both are not true. We are neither angels nor devils.
During therapeutic process, tehrapists usually try to overcome the idea that willingness is evil by nature.
We tend to think that if we are going to uncover our will, and do what we want, we are going to want bad things and do them.
This not the reality in fact. The reality is that we are running away from freedom. This freedom is a very basic one. Being able to get out form a job and find another one that can be more suitable to our nature and abilities is an option. This is a freedom.
However, we tend to think that if we let ourselves to be free, we would committ murder, we could be very aggressive, we could be a rapist, etc.
The reality is that we are resisting our freedom because we feel really safe in the problematic environment that we draw everyday. We are drown in this scenario.
If we try to understand that we are neither angel nor devil, things could unfold better and we can catch our freedom before the end comes.
Life is shorter than you imagine. Enjoy.
You have always the option of getting miserable anytime you want.
You can think about how and where the world is going, and dream about wars, torture, tears, and the most bad things that can come to your mind.
You can get miserable by not being able to change this.
Or more simply, you can also think of a loved one that you have lost a couple of years before.
Getting miserable in seconds is an option. We choose it so often that we cannot believ to ourselves that we leave ourselves into the cold but safe hands of depression and anxiety.
If we just choose not to get miserable and accept our current situation as is, then we would be able to cope with what we don’t like and what we want to change. We will have the energy for this coping and change just if don’t choose to get miserable.
Life is shorter than you imagine.
Anxiety, fear arise from the fallacy that we don’t have options.
Whenever something “bad” occurs, we tend to think that we are stuck to this event. We don’t have any other option than being harmed by it.
Instead of this helplessness, you can always “choose” living “through” an event that makes us unhappy. Thus, we’ll be able to see that we have options. We’ll see that we choose to live the misery.
Although this is very open to discussion, human experience is telling us that we are the creators of anxiety and fear, and we are the creators of the idea that we don’t have options, we are unable to choose.
Try it, fast, now. Life is really short. Enjoy.
There have been ways and methods for interpreting dreams for various objectives. One of them is tellin the future in which we are not interested here. That type of dream interpretation is called oneiromancy. Its roots go back to ancient egypt.
We are interested in the way dreams reflect our unconscious thoughts and feelings. This has been mentioned mainly by Calvin S. Hall, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
The symbolization in dreams are very important in understanding what a dream is about. It may contain meanings with cultural connotations. It may find its material in everyday life. At the end, it prepares a mixture, a fully symbolized theatre in front of us.
For instance, if you see a tree in your dreams, that may have the object to mention about the time that you have climbed to a tree and what happened that day.
It is like a sunday newspaper game. A friend of you in your dreams may come and say to you that you haven’t done your homework. However in real life, it may be that you are not in a school. Well this has other meanings like you have a feeling or thought in your subconscious about not having done something which is your responsibility. A thing in real life that has nothing to do with a homework or your friend.
You may try this at your home, you may try to interprete your dreams, find the symbolism and decode it. It would be entertaining at times.
the eye in the mirror is the mirror of the eye, originally uploaded by solea.
In many silly self-help books, I see this “love yourself” thing. No, I am not against this. I just oppose the way some books emphasize self-love and then impose things that would lead to self-hate.
Recently, I discovered how self-hate is hidden or how it finds itself ways to get hide under covers of self-help, self-healing, self-love, etc.
The main idea, what I believe to be true is this: whenever a person “forces” himself to do something and sets himself an objective, then life gets poorer just because there is an objective. That is to say whenever there is an objective in mind, be it losing weight, learning a new language, earning more money, doing more exercise, etc., we tend to forget the very moment that we are in and start to dream about our objective.
This is usually why objectives do not get accomplished. Aims, objectives need processes. There have to be a process that leads you to this objective. If you deny the process and just concentrate on what you want to happen, anxiety rushes and then there is no time left to work on it to be able to make it happen.
By self-love, we mean that you have to accept and love yourself as you are. Only then you will be able to understand that there is a present time where you are accepted by yourself completely as you are, and now you have this time, not to dream about the future but to work on the process towards your objective.
Hard to tell though.
Fear is the feeling towards something that has not happened yet.
We are always afraid from possibilites, things that may happen.
I am afraid of death that is not happened yet. Somebody else is afraid of being lonely, being seperated from her husband/lover/boyfriend, that has not happened yet.
Therefore, fear is an empty feeling. The anxiety it brings is trash. You can move away from fear because it is generated by your thoughts. Usually it is not generated from something that is definitely and exactly going to happen.
The worst side of fear is that it makes us behave towards those negativity. We believe something bad is going to happen and we live fear and anxiety.
As a result, something bad happens out of our behaviors, that’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
If you realize that you feel very sad, try to talk to this sadness immediately.
Ask it about what it really wants from you.
Especially when you feel sad and there is no obvious reason, that usually means your mind tries to tell you something.
It may remind you a sad event, an upcoming anniversary of a sad event, or simply a near-past event that forces your feelings.
By this point, better don’t try to “cope” with it. Instead, look at it and try to define it.
What does your sadness looks like? What color is it? In what area of your body is this sadness.
That’s the beginning to talk to your sadness.
Fear and anger are borthers. If you look at them closely, you can see the bond between them.As Yoda of star wars said: “fear is the path to the dark side. fear leads to anger. anger leads to hate. hate leads to suffering. i sense much fear in you.”
Well, whenever we feel fear, it comes out of a feeling of being threatened by something. Thus, it can lead to anger towards this something.
You can easily understand this relationship between fear and anger if you try to remember that both anger and fear have the same effects on your body. Same heaviness in the stomach, same difficulty and/or change in breathing.
It’s worth thinking about.
Hell yes. They do have a psychology of their own.
The psychology field that studies on animal psychology is usually called as comparative psychology.
Mostly pets have been dominant in the area of comparative psychology. There have also been research on dolphins, birds, especially pigeons.
First known psychological experiment on comparative field is the famous Pavlov’s Dogs experiment.
Recently, a “Brrreeeport” wind is going on in search engines. So now is the time to talk about some blog psychology and the impact of search engines on that psychology.
Human beings are after instant feedback. The more instant the feedback is the more people are interested in it. For instance, although many people very well know the hazard of smoking, they still smoke because smoking usually gives no instant feedback on health, no swift injuries, no immediate effect on breath.
So, while blog world is getting bigger day by day, instant feedback increases on search engines, comments, etc.
This is the search engine psychology.
Jackie’s Big 2-1, originally uploaded by crume.
I don’t want to tell classical known facts here. This will be a quick post just to tell that alcoholism isn’t alcoholism.
If you think that you are an alcoholic and you should seek help, then of course do it. And this is what I want to talk about, exactly.
Sometimes, we just want to bring ourselves to a therapist where we can deal with our problems and give a try to change.
Alcoholism, if you just think that it started recently for you, it may just be an indicator to some other problems. You may not be alcoholic but claim to be alcoholic so that you can bring yourself to a therapist where you can talk what you cannot talk to yourself.
Life is not long. Enjoy.
A traumatic event is something that gets you extremely confused. For instance, if someday, you are going to see that there is no-more gravity on earth, that is a traumatic event.
A traumatic event is something that you cannot really believe on the first hand. If you strongly believe that your lover wouldn’t cheat on you, than her/his cheating will be a traumatic event.
Traumatic events occur often in natural disasters and wars as well as everyday life. Their interpretation as being a traumatic event may differ from person to person. One can believe that someday there will no longer be gravity on earth and thus when someday a pig flies, this will not be a traumatic event for her/him.
Most often, traumatic events make us feel guilty towards what have happened. When you experience an earthquake as a traumatic event, you may immediately think “what have I done to deserve this?” If not in your mind, you probably feel it unconsciously.
While it is not necessarily a traumatic event, loss of a loved one also makes us feel guilty about ourselves as if we killed her/him. Unfortunately, this is one aspect of human psychology and experiencing a traumatic event has usually relations with our guiltiness.
To be continued.
I have always been in rejection towards cognitive psychology, I don’t know why this is so.
However, I feel that cognitive approach is much more better than analytic approach when it comes to some movement in life, especially after a long major depression.
Whenever there is anxiety, there is this fear. People may think that fear comes form other people or other subjects apart from self. Thus, people tend to save themselves from fear that is caused by other factors, other than self
For whatever reason, anxiety is very much related to the self, and the fear is usually about self. About being nothing, about vanishing, passing away, etc. By this time, it is not useful to think about the reason. The fear is big.
The solution lies in accepting yourslef. Knowing and verifying that you exist. It’s not other people or it’s not this everyday life that bores you or depresses you. It is the very important fact that you exists. The fear come out of the question: “do I exist?”.
From now on, whenever anxiety catches you, try to remind yourself that you exist. You are safe and you exist. Thus, you are there to cope with whatever that makes you think that it gives you fear.
Although it is very easy for us, human beings, to fall into tears, misery, and agony, that does not necessarily mean that we are in a depression. Medically speaking, depression is assumed to be the decreased traffic of serotonin in the brain. So, that means it is an illness and it can be cured.
Having said that, being miserable does not always mean that you are in depression. Here are some basic guidelines that you can test yourself briefly, whether you are suffering from depression or not:
Apart form this basic, mini test, you may feel miserable and depressive after a loss of a loved one, an end of a romantic relationship, a financial loss and alike, that doesn’t mean you are in a depression medically. So, that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with your flow of serotonin in the brain.
Depression is rather like diabetis, generally, people suffering from depression can be cured by medical help and talk therapy, and their depression may occur again in the future. It is medical. It can be cured. Not every misery and agony is depression, although they may lead to depression.
