Image by Guylaine2007 These three qualities come from Transactional Analysis (usually abbreviated to TA). (Transactional Analysis is a psychotherapy invented by Eric Berne and his friends – people such as Muriel James, Dorothy Jongeward, Stephen Karpman, Claude Steiner and many others – on the West Coast of America in the 1950′s and 1960′s. The best [...]
Continue reading about A Psychological Health Checklist: awareness, spontaneity and intimacy
Image by kevindooley What is the self? A friend of mine went to a talk by a Buddhist monk. His question about self-improvement was: finally, doesn’t it come down to a hostility to the self? That is, self-improvement means judging ourselves as inadequate: that we need to be something other than we are. Doesn’t self-improvement [...]
Continue reading about Self-Improvement? or what is the self and what would improvement mean?
Image by ifindkarma The usual approach to self-improvement encourages us to be heroic, independant, take initiative and be positive. All of which are admirable. But I have a confession (or series of confessions) to make. I think that I feel pretty weak and easily influenced much of the time. When people around me are happy, [...]
Image by misocrazy One of the surprises that the early psychiatrists came across was that, “awareness itself cures”. What they were referring to is the kind of experience that probably most of us have had. Times like: we are talking about something we do and don’t understand why. Then the person we are talking to [...]
Continue reading about Awareness Cures: What I have learned from Gestalt #3
Image by bucklava Perhaps you have had the experience of hearing a piece of muzak in a shop and leaving when the song is half way through. This can be very aggravating – you wanted to hear the end. Or perhaps you thought you recognised the song but couldn’t quite place it. This kind of [...]
Image by Ingorrr Anything makes sense in context. Every thing makes sense in context. Meaning has to do with the relationship of the ‘thing’ (word, behaviour, object, whatever) to its context. This probably sounds a bit abstract, so bear with me for a bit while and I’ll try and show why it can be so [...]
Continue reading about It Depends on The Situation: What I have learned from Gestalt#1
Image by littleblackcamera Gestalt Therapy excitement and growth in the human personality by Perls, Hefferline and Goodman. First published 1951 (other editions since). This book changed my life. I discovered it in my mid-twenties and what I learned from it has stayed a significant part of my life for 25 years. The exercises in the [...]
Image by ninjapoodles This method is for those times when you feel stuck. It is not a method for dealing with external obstacles (priorities, goals, efficiency – all of which are important for external effectiveness) but for personal change. The central insight is that being stuck is different to being tired. When we feel stuck [...]
Continue reading about Embracing Our Conflicts: One Method for Personal Change
