Search Results for: Robert Firestone

Genuine Relating in an Imperfect World

…month, I finished revising and updating The Fantasy Bond with my husband, Robert Firestone. While working on this book, now called Challenging the Fantasy Bond, I became aware of what a delicate balance it is to keep a relationship real. In a romantic relationship, people have a tendency to either move toward idealizing their partner or going in the other direction and being overly critical of them. These reactions result from the unconscious bel…

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Changing the Way You See the World

…humans, are so divided. Many years ago, my father, psychologist and author Robert Firestone, developed the “Division of the Mind,” to help explain how each of us is split between our “real self” and our “anti-self.” The temperament we came into the world with impacts both sides of this divide, but our earliest experience and the adaptations we made to them contribute a great deal to the nature and degree of this division in our personality. On one…

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kindness

Kindness Wins!

…fering up bad advice. This enemy, with its negative point of view, is what Robert Firestone calls our critical inner voice. It speaks the malicious language of our defenses, and what it supports is not our loving, vulnerable selves but our destructive behavior and attitudes. It comments negatively on our lives and condemns our actions. It picks us apart and destroys our confidence and self-esteem. And it undermines our romantic relationships by cr…

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Deep Sadness Can Deepen Love

…d negative. Sadness is a normal emotion To be sad is to be human. In 1980, Robert Plutchik developed one of the most influential classification approaches for general emotional responses. Sadness was one of the eight primary emotions he identified (the others being anger, fear, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust and joy). He proposed that these “basic” emotions are biologically primitive and have a high survival value. Sadness is not only a fu…

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How Insecure Attachment Creates Fertile Ground for Addictions

…On-Demand Webinars     In this Webinar: This online workshop with Dr. Lisa Firestone will provide tools to help people heal insecure attachment, resolve trauma, integrate their… Learn More Viewing clinical issues through the lens of attachment theory has helped me enormously in my work with clients. Problems and dysfunction make perfect sense when viewed through this lens. Take my client Becky, for instance. (I’ve changed her name for confidential…

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narcissist's mind

What Really Goes On in the Mind of a Narcissist?

…discussed the critical inner voice, a concept developed by my father, Dr. Robert Firestone, as a destructive thought process formed from hurtful experiences that shaped our sense of self, others, and the world around us. This cruel internal coach controls the negative conversation and commentary that goes on inside our own mind. While for many of us, our critical inner voice is often self-destructive, putting us down, attacking, insulting, and un…

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How to Fight the Loneliness Epidemic

How to Fight the Loneliness Epidemic

…is a cognitive/ affective/ behavioral approach developed by my father Dr. Robert Firestone to help people identify and challenge their critical inner voice. When I’ve used this method with clients who are struggling with feelings of loneliness and isolation, here are some of the “voices” they’ve expressed having toward themselves: “No one really cares about you.” “You’re such a burden. Who wants to be around you?” “Don’t put yourself out there. Y…

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Fear of Intimacy

By Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D. Joyce Catlett, M.A. In Fear of Intimacy, the authors bring almost 40 years of clinical experience to bear in challenging the usual ways of thinking about couples and families. They argue that relationships fail not for the commonly cited reasons, but because psychological defenses formed in childhood act as a barrier to closeness in adulthood. A wide range of cross-generational case studies and powerful personal acco…

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The Key to a Long and Happy Life

…py lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. The study’s lead researcher Robert Waldinger concluded that “it wasn’t their middle-age cholesterol levels that predicted how [the study’s subjects] were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.” These relationships extend beyond our significant other and immediate fa…

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What Does It Mean to Be Feminine or Masculine?

…human beings, regardless of our gender. In his book, Beyond Death Anxiety, Robert Firestone writes that these are “the ability to love and to feel compassion for self and others, the capacity for abstract reasoning and creativity, the ability to experience deep emotion, the desire for social affiliation, the ability to set goals and develop strategies to accomplish them, an awareness of existential concerns, the potential to experience the sacredn…

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