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…
It’s very rare for us to see just how utterly inept and ham-fisted the thinking mind is when it comes to psychological matters, and in the absence of any insight in this regard we place an inordinate amount of trust in the thinking process to…
Only thought says what things are we think that things are – we assume things to be what they are defined as being but this just isn’t true. All we know are our labels for things and it is the thinking mind that provides us…
Ours is a purposeful culture, and this inevitably brings a whole raft of neurotic mental health ‘conditions’ in its wake, which we then attempt to solve in a purposeful manner! The irony is lost on us, however. Purposefulness is clearly a healthy part of…
Self-affirmations are part of every ‘mental health tool-kit’ it seems, and yet there is nothing even remotely ‘mentally healthy’ about dutifully repeating self-affirmations. It is actually odd that we should accept this supposedly helpful practice so very uncritically – where the hell does this idea…
How can self-observation help us, or free us, when we’re trapped in painful states of mind? This is definitely counterintuitive – when feeling bad in ourselves then the priority always seems to be correct what’s going on, to fix whatever it is that’s making us…
There is no such thing as a ‘technical fix for anxiety’. There can be on the short term, to be sure, but only at the price of ‘aggravating the original problem and causing it to rebound onus even more painfully in the future’. The so-called…
There exist certain situations from which it is impossible to escape on purpose – these situations are traps because the harder we try to extricate ourselves the more tightly we get caught up in them. There are many examples of this sort of thing that…
It isn’t just that who we are (or the way that we are) is in itself ‘good enough’, and so on this account we don’t need to be constantly striving to ‘better ourselves’ or ‘improve ourselves’ (and be constantly recriminating against ourselves if we can’t…
One way to explain understand anxiety is to say that it’s an indication that we aren’t engaging with life (or ‘facing’ life) as ‘who we really are’ but rather as some sort of ‘idea’ (or concept) of who we are, which is clearly not the…