Search Results for: lisa firestone/feed/2009/11/fear-of-intimacy

The Death of Psychoanalysis and Depth Psychotherapy

…warted by the fact that its positive thrust was accompanied by a guilt and fear reaction that led to the ever-increasing utilization of drugs and alcohol. This misguided attempt to quiet the emotional pain and anxiety that resulted from rebelling against societal norms, challenging the nuclear family, and seeking independence weakened them and eventually led to the downfall of their movement. These young men and women simply could not cope with th…

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A Female Call To Arms! Be Yourself

…ing the make-up off for a day here-or-there, by not holding in our stomach fearing that some guy is looking, by surrendering to being our real selves, we open to the extremely heady feeling that women go wild for, a fortified female identity that tells a woman she is free to “just be” herself. You can’t get more Sex in the City self-confident than that. Acting in Stepford Wives kinds of ways by minimizing ourselves while going overboard to stroke…

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“I don’t know”, “I don’t remember”, “I didn’t do it” – Opportunities to Teach Responsibility

…“What happened?” if the tone strikes them as harsh, accusatory or if they fear the consequences. Often we as parents get strident in our tone, because we are scared (like when someone is hurt) or angry (like when something gets broken). After all, who volunteers to face an inquisition! Our first step is to manage safety and then to manage our tone. A neutral tone is more likely to invite a response than one that is fearful or critical. Once we ha…

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Living Vs. Reliving

…hers, we cannot have a genuine experience of them. This leads instead to a feedback loop – we respond emotionally, without questioning, to what we imagine the other’s intentionality to be, and we act toward the unwitting soul who engaged us as though our (perhaps skewed) perception were the truth. Accordingly, they then react to our reaction with denial, defensiveness, or responsive anger, thus closing the loop: We have been wronged, and the jerk…

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Preventing Teen Suicide

…de sometime during the past year. These statistics are alarming and arouse fear and concern in everyone. However, many suicides can be prevented if young people and those closest to them became familiar with and learn how to respond to the danger signs of a suicidal crisis, both in themselves and in their friends and family members. Parents, teens, friends and family, teachers, counselors, and survivors — people who have lost someone to suicide –…

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The Problem with Overpraising Children

…stop wanting to try. They may hold back, because they feel like a phony or fear that they will fail. 3. Life will be a disappointment Parents often make sacrifices in hopes of giving their children the best. Sometimes this is done to an extreme, and the parent’s life starts to center solely around the child. When we cater to a child’s every desire and treat them as royalty, we fail to reflect the real world they will enter as adults. Our willingne…

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How to talk with kids about the economic crisis

…tension or agitation regardless of the smile you glue on your face or the fears you try to hide behind closed doors. They become upset and worried, but because they are being overlooked, they feel that whatever’s happening is none of their business. Therefore, they have no one to talk to about what they are thinking and what they are feeling. So remember, just because kids can’t understand a situation, doesn’t mean that they aren’t affected by it…

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Are you Parenting Like Your Parent?

…e, negative traits in our parents, especially those that caused us misery, fear and frustration, can also linger in our psyche and impact our behavior. This is especially the case in present moments of stress that somehow remind us of our past and manage to set off old triggers in us. As you may imagine, scenarios that are reminiscent of our childhood are increasingly likely to arise when we ourselves become parents. We may not really remember how…

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Tao, Jenny Yip, Mindfulness, Cognitive-Based Therapy

The Tao: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive-Behavior Therapy

…ess of exposures. This exercise requires clients to write about their most feared situations. Exposures via writing require the highest level of cognitive functioning. Unlike visual or auditory processing which comes and goes, when we write, we make a concerted effort to mindfully process our thoughts before externalizing them onto paper. This is infinitely more effective. Even if a client exposes to a feared situation in vivo, s/he can avoid or e…

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VIDEO: Dr. Peter Levine Case Example of Somatic Experiencing Approach for PTSD

…, there was a fire-fight, friends were killed. This whole experience — the fear, the terror, the boredom, and then the explosion — this all gets together. But if you’re locked like this, there’s nowhere you can go. You have to help the person get out of the shock. Then, they can begin to start processing the emotional stuff. So this whole defensive response, like mine in the car accident, got locked into his body and as we teased that apart, in th…

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