Search Results for: Robert Firestone

How to Bring "Vacation Sex" Home With You

…ship to lose its sizzle? One explanation, which I (along with psychologist Robert W. Firestone) wrote about in our book Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice is that “The single most important factor that contributes to the deterioration of love, friendship and sexuality in a relationship is the formation of a fantasy bond. The fantasy bond is an illusion of connection or imagined fusion with another person that provides an individual with a false sen…

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How To Tell the Difference Between Real Love and Fantasy

…nd exciting from the deadening effects of what my father, psychologist Dr. Robert Firestone, termed “The Fantasy Bond?” A fantasy bond is created when two people replace real acts of genuine love, admiration, passion, and respect with the role and ritual of “being” in a relationship. Though this process is often unconscious, people can begin to recognize patterns and behaviors characterized by a Fantasy Bond that are destructive to their closest r…

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Why Are People Afraid to Grow Up?

…developing a mature approach to life and move toward a more satisfying and freer existence. This subject will be addressed in my next blog. Learn about Dr. Robert Firestone’s book The Self under Siege: A Therapeutic Model for Differentiation…

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Fear of Intimacy

…eign and unfamiliar. In their introduction to their book Fear of Intimacy, Robert Firestone, Ph.D. and Joyce Catlett, M.A. state: “The average person is unaware that he or she is living out a negative destiny according to his or her past programming, preserving his or her familiar identity, and, in the process, pushing love away. On an unconscious level, many people sense that if they did not push love away, the whole world, as they have experienc…

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breaking the fantasy bond with our mothers, psychalive, mothers day 2012, mother daughter conflict,

Breaking the Fantasy Bond with Our Mothers

…or many reasons, both personal and professional. For one thing, my father, Robert Firestone, has written extensively about the ambivalence inherent in every mother-daughter relationship. His descriptive accounts of the dynamics operating in the mother-daughter bond were published in Compassionate Child-Rearing (1990) and are explained in a chapter in our forthcoming book, co-authored by Joyce Catlett, The Self Under Siege: A Therapeutic Model for…

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Compassionate Child Rearing

Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D. – This eye-opening book introduces the theory and underlying dynamics involved in family relationships. The author helps explain how even well-intentioned parents unwittingly injure their children’s self-esteem and psychological functioning based on their own childhood defenses and self-destructive tendencies. By recognizing their own early life experiences and the internalized defenses they developed as a result, paren…

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The Fantasy Bond

Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D. – This book offers a consistently developed set of hypotheses centering around the concept of the “fantasy bond,” an illusion of connection originally formed with the mother/ primary caretaker and later with significant others in the individual’s environment. Based on 28 years of research into the problem of resistance, this book offers a consistently developed set of hypotheses centering around the concept of the “fant…

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Psychological Defenses in Everyday Life

Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D. – This book is a rich resource that broadens personal understanding by examining the origins of childhood pain, subsequent defense formation, and the pervasiveness and destructiveness of resulting maladaptive, addictive behaviors in adults. The authors point a way toward reversing the damaging process that keeps individuals from experiencing genuine satisfaction. The clarity and empathic tone of the book make it a valua…

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Eight Ways to Actively Fight Depression

…is actually the voice of a well-hidden enemy within, what psychologist Dr. Robert Firestone refers to as the critical inner voice. Internalized early in live, this inner voice functions like an over-disciplinary parent holding us back and keeping us in our place. Think of these thoughts as being like the parasites that keep you in bed when you’re sick with the flu. Don’t listen to these attacks when they tell you not to pursue your goals or to for…

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Open to Emotion

…et it’s a widely accepted thing to do. In Compassionate Child-Rearing, Dr. Robert Firestone discusses something he refers to as the implicit pain of sensitive child-rearing. Raising children with the emotional bonding they need—sensitivity, empathy and compassion—requires the parent to be open and vulnerable, willing to feel the child’s emotional states, (the pleasurable and the painful) as well as their own. To be tuned in to their child’s pain a…

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