Category » Applied Philosophy & Psychology
Choosing Victimhood: Logotherapy III
Let’s continue our discussion of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy in which victimhood is a chosen status. Last week, our schoolyard bullying saga ended with the beaten person’s choice: experience her feelings of sadness, aloneness, and embarrassment or depress those feelings. That last phrase, depressing those feelings, is important because it changes the emphasis. While most of […]
Choosing Victimhood: Logotherapy II
Last week we discussed Viktor Frankl’s position that we choose our attitudes, even in the direst circumstances imaginable—which Frankl knew. We left off acknowledging the courage required to break through the diffused responsibility of crowds and to step forth to protest a scenario of schoolyard bullying. The person who acts with such courage forfeits her […]
Choosing Victimhood: Logotherapy
It’s hard to argue with a man who, during a three-year imprisonment in a Nazi death camp, insisted that we choose our status as victims. That man was the Austrian psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl (1905-1997). At the core of his philosophy of survival was meaning. In last week’s blog, meaning was tied to purpose, a reason […]
Broken Chains
Broken chains can be seen positively or negatively. Breaking a chain of days using an addictive substance is success. Breaking a chain of days, weeks, or months in recovery is often viewed as failure. Chains arose as a theme in The Daily Stoic (May 16th). Epictetus’ idea was to put one success in front of […]
Persist and Resist
In the last months of 2020, I completed my first reading of the Stoic, Epictetus’ Discourses, which included his Fragments. Fragment #10 is the subject of this New Year’s blog. In that passage, Epictetus says of persistence, this is the ability to bear or endure hardships that ought be endured. Of resistance, this is the […]
Emotions and Tail-chasing
The last blog discouraged following emotions as a means of a well-spirited life. And the question arises: But how do we know which values to pursue if we don’t follow our feelings? Psychology doesn’t claim a full understanding of emotions. Yet in the last century, progress has been made. Nico Frijda argued that fundamental emotions, […]
Emotions and Values
In the last blog, the discussion was on the primacy of values over emotions. Many times, in SMART Recovery meetings, I have been asked, “But what are values?” This blog focuses on the meaning of emotions and values and the relationship between them. Value is described as “…the worth of something” (Audi, 1998, p. 829). […]
Nothing Changes if Nothing Changes
In pretty much every SMART meeting I’ve facilitated, someone is asked: Are you being led by your values or emotions? It may be helpful to examine this question and its terms. The idea is that, if you’re being led by values, you have examined your life, plotted out some goals, found some means of achieving […]
Recovery as Investment
For years I have thought of counselling, therapy, and self-questioning as the most profitable enterprises in which an individual can invest. This, because such investment is in that which we only leave once: the self. If 20 constructive meetings, with a person able to see how and why you see the world as you do, […]
Acceptance & Facing the Facts
In the multipart blogs (Resilience, Sobriety v Recovery, Why did I use?, Perfectionism, and finally this series, Acceptance), I keep reviewing an idea to see if I’ve explained my present understanding as clearly as I’m able to. (At least) two points from the Acceptance series could be clearer. The first of these is the second […]