In the psychological sphere of things, forcing always comes from fear. In the psychological sphere of things, forcing is fear and this is why we can’t ‘force ourselves to face the fear’! Deliberately (or purposefully) facing fear is an impossibility, therefore; it’s a ‘contradiction in…
If there is one thing we need to understand about mental health it is this: we can’t change our mental state on purpose. If we were to understand this then at least we would be halfway to finding that great blessing we call ‘peace of…
The usual way for us to be in the world is within a sealed bubble of ‘positive pressure’. This might sound like a strange way of putting things on the first hearing, but all that we’re saying here is that we go around in daily…
Therapy’s a funny thing. It’s a funny thing because it isn’t really what we think it is; very often, what we call ‘therapy’ is just a way of confusing ourselves! Or as we could also say, it’s very often a way of delaying or postponing…
What happens when we create worlds for ourselves that are existentially ‘non-challenging’ is that we promptly fall asleep on our feet. This isn’t just something that is probable (or even very likely) – it is an inevitability. It happens every time… An ‘existentially unchallenging…
What creates a sense of identity is being trapped – as soon as we cease to be trapped, we lose our identity! As Jean Baudrillard says, “It’s always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.” This is…
We don’t have to ‘accept ourselves’ in order to find peace – we just have to see ourselves the way we are. That turns out to be a lot less problematical! ‘Accepting ourselves’ is actually very problematical (impossibly problematical, in fact) since as Alan Watts…
We all tend to have an odd sort of relationship with our thinking in the sense that we tend to think compulsively rather than ‘thinking freely’. This is a point that may not immediately make sense to us, but it is nonetheless a point that…
When we talk about motivation, and the importance of ‘being motivated’ there is immense scope for confusion here because what we don’t normally realise is that there are two totally different types of motivation. The key thing is not that we should be motivated (which…