A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
Maja at Lampelina wrote quite a while back about the influence of fear on decision-making, and I'm finally getting around to exploring it on my own. Looking back, I don't think fear was a big factor in most of my decisions. If I wanted to do something, I did it, including some perhaps high-ish fear… Continue reading How Big a Role Has Fear Played in Your Decisions?
I've noticed that a lot of people in the blogging world have quite a strong inner critic. I don't, and II find it fascinating when it seems like people believe that they should self-criticize in order to do things properly, or in order to avoid being a bad person. So let's chat about it. To… Continue reading How Does the Inner Critic Get Started?
Perhaps there are things you want to do, or think you should do, but they’re just not happening. How hard do you push yourself to try to get ‘er done anyway? Do you keep trying even when it becomes clear there's no way it's going to happen? I can think of a few factors that… Continue reading How Hard Do You Push Yourself Against Mental Illness?
Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself is written by Kristin Neff, a prominent researcher in the area of self-compassion. It includes research findings, a variety of exercises with room to complete them in the book, and stories from the author's personal experience. The author draws on Buddhist teachings, and she writes that:… Continue reading Book Review: Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff
"Am I a bad person?" It seems to be a fairly common question. Searching for that question on Google yields 263 million hits. I've also seen it raised in the blogosphere. Regardless of what the answer may or may not seem to be, though, is it a valid and/or useful question? What exactly is a… Continue reading Am I a Bad Person? Or Is That the Wrong Question?
Being perfect is an ideal that some people may strive for or feel that they are required to attain, but how realistic is the notion of perfection? One of the biggest problems with perfect is that a lot of things in this world are subjective. When it comes to things that are subjective, everyone has… Continue reading The Problem With Perfect… Is That It Doesn’t Exist
Failure isn't fun. There's just no two ways about that. But what does that failure mean> I think that, particularly when mental illness is involved, it's easy to leap from "I failed at [X]" to "I'm a failure." But taking a step back, they're not really the same thing. Fear of failure Fear of failure… Continue reading When You Fail, Are You a Failure at a Task? Or as a Person?
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is imposter syndrome. I've seen a number of people write about this topic lately, so I thought I'd join in. The term imposter syndrome was first used in a 1978 paper in the journal Psychotherapy Theory, Research, and Practice. The… Continue reading What Is… Imposter Syndrome
We all have an inner critic hanging out inside our heads that makes itself known every so often. Chances are that the inner critic says things about you that are far harsher than you would ever say about anyone else. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and compassion-focused therapy (CFT) both pay quite a bit of… Continue reading What Does Your Inner Critic Have to Say?
The internet makes it very difficult to avoid comparison to others. There they are, in their Instagram-perfect photos and their seemingly amazing lives. Perhaps the "nice" thing to do would be to feel good for them, and maybe the reasonable thing to do would be to recognize that things probably aren't as perfect as they… Continue reading The Mental Health Effects of Comparison to Others