A Psycholgist on the Loose
Posts tagged self help
It Only Counts if the Judge Sees You Do It . . .
The good thing about horse shows is that when you’re showing your stuff in the ring, you don’t have to be good all the time. You only have to be perfect when the judge is watching you.
I’ve been thinking about how to set reasonable goals on this becoming more functional through taming the EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM. Which took me to thinking about horse shows and treatment centers. That’s a match, right? (Ah, perhaps more of a match than you’d ever believe.)
Because when you’re in the ring atop your expensive steed–no matter how horribly your horse behaves, no matter what kind of More >
Avoidance Anxiety… Will You Calm Down so I can Calm Down
I’m an “unabler,” the fella on “Intervention” admitted.
Of course, he meant to say he was an enabler. I like his version better. He was describing the “unabler” as someone who gets rid of her anxiety by taking the other person “off the hook”–paying their bills when they are spending their money on drugs or cars and apartments they cannot afford…for starters.
Bored? http://Twitter.com/mysteryshrink
Enabling is just way we respond because we are “intolerant” of other people being anxious. We are “allergic” the other person being anxious.
Well, guess what? No matter how perfectly we try to arrange our lives and how carefully we try More >
The Eye of the Beholder: The Lawn Mower Fueling Incident
“Which is more important? The world that is made up of facts, or the WORLD AS YOU SEE IT?”
On an afternoon in August, I was mowing the lawn when I ran out of gas. Whew. As if perspiration wasn’t already blinding me. I located the full gas can and returned to the mower in the middle of the back yard. I opened the gasoline hatch and rotated the handle off the can.
Great. The gas can had an opening about four inches in diameter and flat on the top of the vessel and the hatch in the mower was less than an inch across. How was I supposed to do this? The More >
The Wrestler: Praise Can Be Dangerous
If you were famous enough to have YOUR OWN ACTION FIGURE would you have Self Confidence and Self Esteem? More to nail on the Psychobabble Wall of Things that Aren’t True: If you get enough Praise . . . you will have SELF CONFIDENCE and SELF ESTEEM.
But wait! Praise is a good thing, right? After all, praise makes us FEEL good. We’ve even told parents and teachers that praise (social reinforcement) is the way to get kids to accomplish tasks. We’ve told husbands and wives that praising their spouses can MAKE THEM FEEL LOVED. Can’t get too much praise, can’t give too much praise . . . More >
Confidence, Ssmonfidence
Yep. Nail another of the reliable psychobabble topics to the wall. Just rip it out of your head and ram a spike through it.
We’re supposed to have this SELF-CONFIDENCE BEFORE we accomplish tasks, projects, and relationships. Fine. So Just where are we supposed to get S-C?
We can’t buy it, obviously, since people with lots of stuff are missing S-C as often as the rest of us bargain hunters. Okay, so your parents, right? Your parents, if they loved you, were SUPPOSED to GIVE you Self-Confidence. So that worked, right?
Well, no. So, phooey there. Every parent I’ve ever worked with loved their children and most desperately wanted to GIVE their children S-C. Their More >
Anxiety: The “Women in Therapy” Incident
Okay. Some more on FUSION . . . sticking yourself to someone else’s anxiety. Making THEIR anxiety about YOU.
We lose power over ourselves when we cannot operate separately . . . when our “mood” is determined by the “mood” of another person. When our sense of doing okay is dependant on another person (usually a spouse or a child) doing okay . . . we are going to try very hard to keep the other person calm so that we can be calm. Though, of course, we deny such a motivation. We say we are twisting into a pretzel to keep them calm More >
Losing It… Losing One’s Self
The woman who lost 100 pounds on burgers is an example of someone who could listen to her THINKING self amidst the crowds telling her what she should do.
Well, doc, you say, when do we get to HOW to engage the THINKING GUIDANCE SYSTEM?
Now. A start. Your THINKING GUIDANCE SYSTEM is in gear when YOUR BEST THINKING is your point of reference for decisions. Remember, only your TGS considers options in a thoughtful way, your EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM , has only one goal (no matter what rubberly rationalization you’re using) and that one thing is —-
do whatever you have to do to rid More >