Category: Healing from The Inside Out
The Good Therapy Blog
June 4th, 2010 |
The theme of my recent post on my blog PoliPsych . . . is so important in today's world!
What has been cursed or hidden because of its power needs to come out into the open.
As a result, I feel called to help it come into full view in June's Power Abused, Power Healed newsletter.
Recently, I read an article on CNN.com* exploring the use of birth control to suppress a woman's monthly period altogether . . . and the startling fact that 72% of women said they "did not like having a period" and 40% of women would prefer never to have one! And now birth control pills are being utilized to avoid... Read More
April 16th, 2010 |
The spiritual dimension can surface most unexpectedly. The change process seems to invite it.
People come to therapy because they perceive, at some level, that something about their inner lives needs to change. This sense of impending change can be frightening and confusing. It may involve specific changes they are aware of, such as a difficult choice about staying in a relationship or leaving it; it may involve changes beneath the level of awareness, such as a change of self image that makes it possible to heal from grief, or return emotionally from a war zone, and begin a new phase of life.... Read More
April 13th, 2010 |
Tax time is widely known as a time of great stress, fear, and frustration for many of us. Why do we have such strong feelings about April 15?
Three of the major reasons Tax Day results in such strong feelings are:
• Our unconscious relationship with money
• Our unconscious relationship with the IRS
• Our reflexive tendency to unconsciously regress under stress Read More
April 13th, 2010 |
Experiencing emotion is a normal part of healthy development. But for those who were traumatized as children, they may have learned to ‘numb out’ so as to protect themselves from their painful emotions. Although working through past abuse issues in therapy are scary, and often cause unpleasant emotions to resurface, it’s worth the effort. Doing so allows you to continue in your emotional growth which had been stunted by the trauma – allowing you to then make growth in all areas of your life. Feelings, or the lack thereof, can allow you to either grow, or to stay where you are – no... Read More
April 7th, 2010 |
This article is a meditation on the third step of Alcoholics Anonymous (and all other 12-step programs). The third step says: “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.” In some versions of the step I have come across, the step reads “…as we understood God.”
Rather than focusing on the gender of God (or Higher Power), I’d like to talk about what makes turning it over so difficult for so many people, regardless of whether or not they are in recovery for addiction. Read More
March 15th, 2010 |
GoodTherapy.org Featured Column written by Judith Barr, MS, LPC
Click here to contact Judith and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile
March is here.
March is Women's History Month*... a month created to celebrate the gift that women are to our world and our civilization.
But just a few weeks ago, on February 7, not long before Women's History Month . . .
Right out in the open, we saw misogyny in action in Super Bowl commercials.
Misogyny: hatred of women! In very expensive Super Bowl commercials. Read More
© Copyright 2010 by http://www.GoodTherapy.org Therapist Tempe Bureau - All Rights Reserved.
February 8th, 2010 |
February is touted as the month of love
with Valentine's Day almost smack dab in the middle of it!
But do you know what love really is?
Many songs try to tell us.
For example ... in John Denver's song "Perhaps Love"* we are told
Perhaps love is like an ocean, a fire, or thunder,
a window or an open door.
And in the Bette Midler song, "The Rose."** we are told
Some say love it is a river, a razor, a hunger, a flower. Read More
January 13th, 2010 |
Promises, resolutions, commitments. How do they differ?
In my experience with people, promises are made by children, or the child within the adult. A child that is being compliant to an authority figure, inside or out. Have you ever seen children make a promise with fingers crossed behind their backs? A "child's" promise is not a healthy use of our power.
Resolutions, which are made on New Year's Eve, have become a joke. The connotation is that the resolver will fail. That's why so many articles and media interviews address the theme of New Year's resolutions. That's why - perhaps - the title... Read More
January 12th, 2010 |
Yesterday, I played the waiting game to get out of the airport parking lot. In the big picture, everyone had the same intention. But, even as drivers barked insults at each other, attached to “their place in line” most missed how helping others reach their goals, would eventually help all of us get home. We had become so attached to ourperceptions that others were trying to get “their space” that they had forgotten the power of the community to reach it. For, if we all cooperated, and let someone in front of us, the ensuing conflicts could have been avoided. But, because of those perceptions,... Read More
January 7th, 2010 |
Over the past decade, as I began to practice spiritual psychotherapy as well as more traditional psychotherapy, I have worked with a number of clients who have expressed difficulties with prayer. Some don’t know whom to pray to; others don’t know how; and others report that they have tried it and their prayers were rarely if ever answered.
I recently read The Private Patient (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2008) by British mystery writer P.D. James in which she describes... Read More
December 21st, 2009 |
The lyrics of the song say, “There’s no place like home for the holidays.”* Is this true for you?
It goes on to say, “If you want to be happy in a million ways, for the holidays you can’t beat home, sweet home.” For how many people is this true?
For how many people is this song simply the idealized image resulting from:
• Madison Avenue and a market-driven culture?
• distortions of the soul of their religious and spiritual traditions?
• cultural mores fed by movies, television shows and songs like “Home for the Holidays”?
• longings for loving, harmonious families... Read More
November 17th, 2009 |
We live in a world that is frightened of the darkness. A world that doesn't understand and therefore is frightened of the darkness. As a consequence of holding the fear at bay, that fear gets distorted into hatred of the darkness, denial of darkness, scapegoating of the darkness. And in scapegoating the darkness, we also scapegoat anything or anyone that triggers in us memory of the darkness - memory of a conscious or unconscious experience of the darkness within us that needs to be explored, healed, and transformed. We live in a time... Read More
October 22nd, 2009 |
"Every form of power can be used well or misused.
The law has been used to manipulate as well as to serve justice.
Parenthood has been used as a means of captivity, and it has been used to nourish a soul, helping it grow into fullness.
Sexuality has been used as a weapon to rape and dominate, as a substitute for unmet childhood bonding and physical touch, and as an exquisite sacred expression of love and union."*
The recent events related to film director Roman Polanski bring up a lot of questions for us to examine as individuals and as a world culture. Read More
October 14th, 2009 |
So much is being said and felt about healthcare reform. But do we know if our fears surrounding the issue of healthcare reform are from the here-and-now, or from once-upon-a-time long, long ago?
As a psychotherapist I see how often our ancient terrors are enmeshed with our current fears, such that the fear we feel over current events is magnified by the unresolved fears from our childhood. This happens not only on an individual scale, but also a cultural, national, and even global scale. This enmeshment of ancient and current... Read More
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