The paradox of acceptance is that it brings change. This is the topic of a guest blog I have on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. Pushing for change usually brings resistance while accepting the way things are is required to make realistic changes. And accepting who we are is normally needed to make [...]
Psychotherapy is sometimes accused of being focused on illness. That it doesn’t appreciate the whole of life because it has developed from treating sick people rather than healthy people. I think this is partly unfair. Medical doctors don’t get criticised for focusing on sick people and I think it denigrates the compassion that can be [...]
I have a guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is called Changing Ourselves and Changing Others. This is a very big topic to take on all at once. I look at the way that we influence each other and how demanding that others change is likely to produce the opposite. [...]
Continue reading about Changing Ourselves and Changing Others
Along the way of our lives we accumulate baggage – all those ways of thinking and doing and relating to people. Over time the baggage can accumulate making us narrower and narrower. This is the topic of a guest post of mine on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is called The Baggage [...]
I have a guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It investigates the phrase, “I couldn’t live with myself if . . .” which I find very striking. I tease out that there is a me and a self implied in this statement – that can live happily or unhappily together. It [...]
I am having a dialogue with Sarah Luczaj over on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is about our experience and how it relates to who we are. We don’t know much about what goes in the world, and we are unaware of much that goes on in ourselves too (there is physical [...]
My guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog this week is about how we all rely on those who have gone before us – and how we have heroes. It is called The View from the Shoulders – from the proverb that ‘if we can see far it is because we stand [...]
Continue reading about Our forebears and heroes and what we owe them
My latest guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog is a bit contrarian. It’s called The Downsides of Optimism. There is much in the blogosphere about how we should be positive and so on. I largely (but don’t entirely) agree with this. So I wanted to put the other side of the [...]
