…past. Breaking a point of identity can shatter what my father psychologist Robert Firestone’s described as a “fantasy bond,” which we experienced with influential figures in our upbringing. Even a parent who was hurtful to us in many ways was someone we once depended on for survival. Therefore, it may have been more favorable to maintain a fantasy that we were connected to them in some way that’s frightening to break later in life. Recent studies…
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…d somewhat emotionally deadened way of being and living,“ wrote my father, Robert Firestone, in a book we co-authored Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion. Individuals build certain psychological defenses to adapt to their early environment that can hurt or limit them in their current lives. These defenses can lead to feelings of alienation, isolation, and depression. To truly face and fight our loneliness, we have to look inside at these dee…
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…lives. In a recent interview I did with my father, psychologist and author Robert Firestone, he elaborated on how an individual forms a sense of identity. He described how from the moment children are born, they start to be defined by their parents, and they incorporate painful experiences. While most parents have the best intentions for their children, no parent (or person) is perfect. Often, without realizing it, parents make inaccurate projecti…
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…Voice Therapy is a method developed by my father, psychologist and author Robert Firestone, to help people identify and act against their “critical inner voice,” a negative internal dialogue that criticizes and undermines us and others in ways that hurt and limit us in our lives. The steps of Voice Therapy help us to identify the destructive things we’re telling ourselves. Some of these are right at the surface. “You’re so stupid, fat, ugly, lazy…
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…py is a cognitive/affective/behavioral approach developed by my father Dr. Robert Firestone to help people challenge this critical inner voice. There are five important steps to Voice Therapy. Step 1 Vocalize or write down your self-critical thoughts in the second person. For instance, instead of writing “I’m so stupid, ugly, worthless, boring,” you would write, “You’re so stupid, ugly, worthless, boring.” This process helps to separate these vici…
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…g a form of emotional neglect. They’re missing what my father psychologist Robert Firestone has called “love food,” a form of attuned emotional nourishment and parental warmth that they need to thrive, particularly in their first year. In its absence, the child may learn that the best way to deal with their frustration at not having their needs met is to act like they don’t have any. As Dr. Daniel Siegel put it, the child learns to disconnect from…
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…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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…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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…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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…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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