Psychology Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.