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Today’s link from the shrink is:
6 Mind Hacks That Keep Stress In Check (Really!)
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The Shrink’s Links: Mind Hacks
Some Things You May Not Know about Your Self, Part 2
Peeling the Onion
When you meet someone for the first time, you’re generally on your best behavior. You will present the most polite, least objectionable version of yourself that you can come up with. This is called the public face, the mask, or the persona. Most of us cultivate this persona as carefully as we edit our Facebook page. Indeed, the Facebook page is another, virtual version of the persona. You probably possess several personas, some for work, others for family, and another for each circle of friends.
Many look at all these masks and say that they’re there to hide the real self. I disagree. The masks you choose are as authentic a part of your self as what lies beneath. Appearances do matter. The fact that you select, for instance, a bragging, audacious persona versus a reserved, deferential one says something, even though both may hide a fragile ego.
Seeing the truth about your self is like peeling an onion, not like cracking an egg. With eggs, there is a clear division between the inside and the outside and, once you get in, you are all the way in. Onions guard their insides more assiduously. You wouldn’t think so looking at the fragile skin they cover themselves with, which is easily rubbed off and sticks to your fingers. Onions are devious and defend themselves by raising a stink, bringing tears, and presenting layer after layer of vacant, unremarkable surface. Peel off one stratum and you are presented with another until, at last, when you believe you have reached the core of the onion, you find that there is no core, there are only layers, in the end, protecting nothing.
Maybe the fact that onions have nothing in their core is what makes them so preoccupied with security. They don’t want you to know the truth; the truth that they have no truth.
So, if people are like onions does this mean you have no essential truth within yourself? Are you hollow inside? Is there nothing behind all the layers of masks? What is your true self?
Well, who has been doing the peeling?
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The Shrink’s Links: What’s so funny about mental illness?
Bringing you the best of mental health and relationship articles on the internet.
Today’s link from the shrink is:
What’s so funny about mental illness?
Ruby Wax will tell you.
The Shrink’s Links:
Bringing you the best of mental health and relationship articles on the internet.
Today’s link from the shrink is:
You’re Such a Dumb Ass
No this isn’t a site you can go on to get abused. It offers dating a d relationship advice. Who among us has not, when dating or in a relationship, said to themselves, you’re such a dumb ass?
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The What Anger Says Series: Why Anger Does Not Need to be Managed
I get calls all the time from people wanting help with anger management. I offer to meet with them. I help them the best I can.
Let me tell you a secret: I don’t believe it’s anger that needs to be managed.
People call it anger management because that’s the name for it, but what they really mean to do is prevent violence. They’ve done something that scares them. They’ve lost control and hurt someone, or broke stuff, or said hurtful things and they’re in trouble. They’re afraid it’s going to happen again, as they should be. They should be afraid; very, very afraid.
However, they should be afraid of their violence, not their anger. Anger’s like the idiot light on your car that tells you that something needs your attention. If you saw that light glowing on your dashboard saying TEMP or OIL, you would get it check out, right? You wouldn’t go on driving as if you never saw it, you would take care of things.
When you feel some anger, that’s your clue that something’s not right. It’s time to slow down or stop what you’re doing and see what’s the matter. What is the matter? Oh, I don’t know, it could be lots of things. Maybe there’s injustice afoot. Maybe you’re expecting too much. Maybe you’re tired and cranky. Maybe it’s not that little straw that’s breaking the camel’s back, maybe it all the rest of the load that’s weighing you down. You’ll have to figure it out. The point is, it’s not the light that’s the problem. The light, the anger, is just telling you there’s a problem. Don’t put tape over the idiot light, you idiot.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call you an idiot. I should know better than to talk that way to someone who needs to read about anger management.
Before we get too far, did you notice that feeling you got when you thought I called you an idiot, that feeling you call anger? You cannot stop that feeling from appearing any more than you can stop people from knocking on your door.
If someone knocks at your door, do you always let them in? Do you offer coffee to every Jehovah Witness, every Girl Scout selling cookies, every campaigning politician? Do you let them move in, raid your refrigerator, sleep in your bed, and take over your house? Of course you don’t; and, just because anger comes knocking and all those dark, murderous thoughts come to mind, it doesn’t mean you have to entertain them.
Let me put it another way. You can’t stop your feelings any more than you can stop your toenails from growing: but you can clip them, and I hope you do.
Anger management does not stop anger from arriving. That’s not the objective. The idea is to shorten it’s duration and minimize its impact. The idea is to prevent violence.
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The Shrink’s Links: The Art of Manliness
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Today’s link from the shrink is:
The Art of Manliness
If I had a teenage son, I would have him read the Art of Manliness. That website contains far more than I could ever teach him. It has everything from how to be a mountain guide to how to be a good neighbor, everything from whistling to workouts, having integrity to preventing swamp crotch. Come to think of it, adult men need to know that, too.
Click here to go to the link
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The Shrink’s Links: The Plutchik Emotion Circumplex
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Today’s link from the shrink is:
The Plutchik Emotion Circumplex
“How does that make you feel?”
I’m a shrink. I say that a lot. Much of the time when I ask that, the person looks like a deer in the headlights. It’s not that they’re not feeling, it’s just they don’t know what to call it.
The Plutchik Emotion Circumplex can help.
Robert Plutchik’s theory of emotion is, my opinion, the most reasonable classification of emotions there is. He considered there to be eight primary emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation,trust, and joy. These ‘basic’ emotions are biologically primitive and each is the trigger of behavior with high survival value.
His circumplex model uses the idea of a color wheel. Like colors, primary emotions can be expressed at different intensities and can mix with one another to form different emotions.
Clink here to go to the link
Favorite Quotes: Life is a Journey
Birth is a beginning
and death a destination;
But life is a journey.
A going, a growing
from stage to stage:
From childhood to maturity
and youth to old age.
From innocence to awareness
and ignorance to knowing;
From foolishness to discretion
and then perhaps, to wisdom.
From weakness to strength
or strength to weakness
and often back again.
From health to sickness
and back we pray, to health again.
From offense to forgiveness,
from loneliness to love,
From joy to gratitude,
from pain to compassion.
From grief to understanding,
from fear to faith;
From defeat to defeat to defeat,
until, looking backward or ahead:
We see that victory lies not
at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey,
stage by stage,a sacred pilgrimage.
Birth is a beginning
and death a destination;
But life is a journey,
a sacred pilgrimage,
Made stage by stage...
- Alvin Fine
I can’t say it better than Rabbi Alvin Fine (1916-1999). Happy New Year, Rabbi.
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The Shrink’s Links: The Healthy Nutritionist
Bringing you the best of mental health and relationship articles on the internet.
Today’s link from the shrink is:
The Healthy Nutritionist
This is the website of my friend, Lora Downie, a Certified Health and Nutrition Coach, here in the Rochester area. She can teach you how to eat right, she can come to your house and help you cook, and if you can’t do that, she can be your personal chief. I’ve eaten her food. It is gooood, and you don’t have to feel guilty eating it.
Clink here to go to the Healthy Nutritionalist website.
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The Shrink’s Links: Experimental Theology
Bringing you the best of mental health and relationship articles on the internet.
Today’s link from the shrink is:
Experimental Theology: A Meditation on Mental Illness and Metaphor
I have been a big fan of Richard Beck’s blog for a long time and there may be hundreds of posts he’s made that I could recommend. But, if you are on my website, you must be interested in issues pertaining to mental health. Therefore I will point you to a bit he wrote about the iconoclastic views of Thomas Szasz, a critic of the disease model of mental illness.
If you like this article and subscribe to Experimental Theology, be prepared to receive several posts a week in your inbox. Some will be about psychology, because Beck is a psychologist; some will be about theology, because he also has a fresh, thoughtful take on what we say about God; some will report on his prison ministry, because he never seems to stop. Whatever you read, you can be sure that you will never look at things the same way again.
Clink here to go to the Experimental Theology website.
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Keith R Wilson 