Tag: choice
Ask the right questions, find a trauma therapist.
Trauma therapist
I have seen my fair share of shrinks throughout my adolescent and adult life, looking to find a trauma therapist. I’ve experienced all sorts of therapy methods, in different corners of the world, with specialists and generalists alike, cognitive, psychodynamic, behavioral, person centered, and existential therapists. In fact, the reason why I became a psychotherapist has to do with the often questionable practices that past therapists engaged in and my desire to do better, learn from the things they did well as well as their mistakes. My very first therapist I had as a teenager was a psychiatrist that would take everything I shared in session and pass it along to my family members and others outside of it as well; this was the first time I thought of becoming a psychotherapist, a better therapist than the one I was seeing at the time.
Want to be happy?
Happiness is a similar concept to that of the key to the meaning of life; we actively seek it and are willing to go to the depths of our strength to get it. Happiness, as many definitions as there are people and still a common goal for most human beings.
I’ve been fascinated with the concept of happiness since my first encounter with philosophy in Mrs. Ivan’s class in 8th grade (this was a social sciences class and since Mrs. Ivan was teaching philosophy to high school students she exposed us to it too). As a teen, I was convinced that happiness is a similar concept to that of a unicorn; we have the words to describe the concepts but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to exist in reality, quite the nihilist.
How fear destroys creativity
We are all born creative, to various degrees. The innovations and inventions past and present have been brought to life by people like you and me. Well, maybe not entirely like us, because our unique environment and experiences always set us apart and change our perception of the world.
So why is it that even though we are born creative and are able of creative endeavors, we can still make ourselves believe that “I’m not the creative type”? What happened to the child that used to dream and fashion tools for his discovery?
A beautiful thing called choice
“I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing” (J.P. Sartre).
There have been times in your life when you felt like there are no choices to be made or maybe you figured that because you cannot see additional possibilities, there are none. You rationalize that when it comes to things that are external to you, you have no choice in the matter. If you can think of the situations that shaped your current views on choice, you might realize that most if not all have something in common: in those situations you either felt overwhelmed or underwhelmed by the choices available. In such situations, our thinking is no longer abstract and filled with possibilities; rather it becomes split in a black and white type of mentality. Why is that?