Category » Applied Philosophy & Psychology
The Rate of Change of the Zeitgeist
I don’t remember where or when I first heard the word Zeitgeist, but I do remember it as one of those lovely mind-widening moments that permits a different view of life and the world. If you accept Heraclitus’ fragment LXXXI, commonly recalled as No one steps in the same river twice [“Into the same river […]
When Career Issues = Life Issues
This blog can be read alone or alongside an earlier blog, Fear of Decision-Making (27 October 2021). The main thinker behind the earlier blog was psychologist, John Krumboltz (1928-2019). The main premise uniting this blog and Fear of Decision-Making is that career issues are life issues. Krumboltz argued that one’s career development is a lifelong […]
Becoming, Being, & Self-Actualization
Regular readers of this blog may recall earlier discussions of self-actualization. This term can be equated with ontological intensity. Ontological intensity is the strength and courage we bring to being as fully ourselves as we can. Self-actualization is a term used by Aristotle, Maslow, Rogers, and Erikson. While there are shades of difference in their […]
The Experience of Addiction
The aim of this blog is to convey to readers the experience of being in addiction. I will offer a self-disclosure, stating that my experience of nicotine addiction (another psychoactive drug) ran roughly 10 years ending in 1984, when I stopped smoking cigarettes. The reason I mention this is that there is a sense of […]
Sponsorship in Recovery
Given the recent success, of within-group communication in the two SMART Recovery groups I know, I have begun research on the efficacy of sponsorship. Sponsorship is typically a one-to-one relationship, with someone well into recovery making herself available to a newly sober person struggling with her new reality. The research is older, non-SMART based, but […]
Boundaries and Adulthood
Boundaries have been coming up everywhere. In my counselling psychology classes, amongst friends and family, and internationally. Boundaries are often an issue that arise within families suffering dysfunction or one of its variants, addiction. The contemporary take on the professional variant of this concept arose from Salvador Minuchin (1974). Minuchin analogized the walls of a […]
Fear of Other People’s Opinions (FOPO)
In early February, I received a question from a SMART Recovery meeting attendee. I promised I would answer that question following the completion of this recent series. I understand the distilled question as follows: Is the Fear of Other People’s Opinions (FOPO) different from a fear of loud, visible, emotional conflict? Do these fears share […]
Assumptions VI: Assessment
It’s not surprising that I like the assessment stage of counselling or clinical psychology. In my former career in architecture, I dealt mostly with existing (rather than proposed) properties, mostly heritage. Such properties have rich histories that sometimes took the research right across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a full contextual understanding. And that’s […]
Assumptions V: Black Holes and Other Life Stages
This blog examines the trajectory of a human life in the contemporary West. The point is to see how the unfolding stages of a life wash up against the ideas elaborated in this series of blogs. When the assumptions of my guesstimated approach to individual therapy were laid out, I had not yet heard of […]
Assumptions IV: A=A → Virtue Ethics → Stoicism → REBT
This fifth blog (the first is unnumbered) in the series that began with Before We Change (19 January 2022), is concerned with the link between metaphysics and ethics. In simpler language, the focus is on how humans have evolved to work well with the fundamental nature of reality. The working well is ethics, as this […]