A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
I used to really like Christmas, but the last Christmas I cared about was the last Christmas I was well, which was in 2015. Since then, I haven't cared enough to do anything for Christmas, including putting up a tree, but I thought I'd rummage through some of the ornaments from my childhood that were… Continue reading Christmas Tree Ornaments from Childhood
perso It's fairly common, at least in the mental health blogging world, for people to self-criticize, especially if they they think they've made a mistake or failed to do something. I don't tend to do that, and recently had a bit of an aha moment about how it came to be that I believe that… Continue reading Life Lessons: How I Learned It’s Okay To Mess Up
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is containment. Containment was first proposed by British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion to describe a pattern of communicating mental experiences. Another researcher later suggested that Bion's theory was influenced by his own traumatic experience fighting in World War I. Early… Continue reading What Is… Containment in Therapy
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay For a little something different, I thought I'd take a bit of a stroll down memory lane to the earlier years of my life. This first post in the "this is me" series looks at my childhood and the high school years. Here's me as a baby. My parents had built this house… Continue reading This Was Me: The Growing Up Years
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is not so much a single term as a group of terms that fall within the umbrella of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Love him or hate him, Sigmund Freud was quite remarkable in terms of his impact on the… Continue reading What Is… Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory
I got thinking about this because I've seen a number of people write about anger recently, and it's not an emotion I've ever been comfortable with. Anger is a basic human emotion. We all experience it sometimes, and it has an associated facial expression that is universally recognized across cultures. Yet anger is far from… Continue reading How Childhood Affected My Relationship with Anger
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week's term is attachment theory. Psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth originally developed attachment theory, which links emotional bonds in social relationships, human development, and evolutionary influences. Attachment in early life Infants automatically seek attachment to familiar caregivers, and display attachment… Continue reading What Is… Attachment Theory