People often make appointments with me to “fine-tune” some aspect of their life. For example, a reader emails that he and his wife want to attend marriage counseling to help make things “as vibrant and healthy as possible.” He goes … Continue reading
Category: Life’s a Beach!
Five Ways NOT to Feel Sorry for Yourself (DE Wave)
People often say to me, “Why am I feeling down? Why do I feel sorry for myself?” It’s a perfectly reasonable observation, but it doesn’t get to the heart of why some people cope better than others. The key to … Continue reading
Don’t Be Ashamed of Your Success (DE Coast Press)
I received an email from a reader regarding a recent column where I wrote that a fear of success could be a fear of being “found out” as a fraud – whether you earned the success or not. The writer … Continue reading
Can Anxiety Be a GOOD Thing? (DE Wave)
Contrary to what the drug companies would have you think, anxiety can often be a useful and necessary thing; specifically, when that anxiety triggers a call to sensible action. For example, you feel anxious at the sight of an oncoming … Continue reading
Your Past Does Not Define You (DE Coast Press)
Pop-psychology loves to tout that the purpose of therapy is to “deal with the past.” I suspect that at least part of that comes from the feel-good prattle that pervades Oprah, Ellen, and the rest of daytime TV’s vast wasteland. … Continue reading
When Use Becomes Abuse (DE Wave)
It never ceases to amaze me how people can fire off a snippy email to me when it’s obvious that they haven’t even read my entire article. (I urge you to keep on firing, however – I get many of … Continue reading
What Hypnosis Is — and Is Not (DE Coast Press)
I get a lot of questions about hypnosis. The most common misperception is that it’s a state of unconsciousness, like sleep. Actually, most experts define hypnosis as a “special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and … Continue reading
Embrace the Positive in Place of Victim-Think (DE Wave)
Well, it’s just around the corner. Though most of us full-timers secretly look forward to it, we still grumble, “I’m sick of the traffic! What? More construction? Things aren’t what they used to be! Who are all these people!?” But … Continue reading
Human Hardware and Software: Do We Have Both? (DE Coast Press)
A University of Wisconsin-Madison imaging study shows the brains of people with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) have weaker connections between a brain structure that controls emotional response, and the amygdala, which plays a key role in the processing of emotions. … Continue reading
Attracting a Healthy Romantic Partner (DE Wave)
People – divorced, widowed or single – ask me what it is that can prevent a person from finding a loving relationship. The answer boils down to a combination of factors, the first of which is simply not searching persistently … Continue reading
Alcoholism: Disease, Choice … or Neither? (DE Coast Press)
One of the down sides of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar programs is that they have convinced many people that alcoholism is a medical disease. There’s no proof of this, i.e., no empirical evidence of disease verifiable by MRI, blood test … Continue reading
Is Anorexia a Strictly Medical Problem? (DE Wave)
One of the subjects that occasionally comes up in my office is the issue of anorexia; generally defined as a pathological refusal to eat. According to Dr. Walter Kaye, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, people with anorexia … Continue reading