A year of disidentifying - everyone in our dreams is us

-

Somebody asked me why I suggest that everyone in our dreams is us. 

Because they are.

Everyone and everything in our life is us too.


These blogs are explorations of adult emotional development and how understanding it can help us to live. I am a retired psychiatrist, mother and zen-based mindfulness teacher. In this blog I try to look the reality of life and death squarely in the eye. I am aware this is not for everyone. If you are squeamish about the idea please consider this your trigger warning.

Comments

Post a Comment

Tell me what you think about this idea, your experiences, or just what comes to mind when you read this.

Popular posts from this blog

The Limping Shrink Rule 4: Your solution to life's problems isn't necessarily the best solution for everyone else (or even for you)

-
Image
When you have finally discovered a way to solve your own problems, it's tempting to believe that everyone else only has to do the same and they will feel as sorted as you.  This is a common human fallacy,  and especially when people first get into a new model of looking at things it is pretty normal. We go around thinking that it's useful to see everything through the filter of our new psychotherapy specs, or Marxism specs, or exercise is good for you specs, and it can take a long time, sometimes a lifetime, for us to see that, after all, there are areas where this new idea works, and others where it isn't so relevant or useful (although it may well be entertaining). Things you should stop doing today  (because everyone in the world is overdoing them as much as I used to). Why you should take up yoga immediately  (Don't you just love this 'immediately')? How a gratitude journal will change your life  (I'm so grateful for this one). Why you should delete all ...
Read more

How do adults develop emotionally over time? A model

-
Image
Adult emotional development The idea I want to explore today is that while the tools of psychiatry have been collected together because of their effectiveness in making people less distressed or less behaviourally disturbed, they are from a variety of different basic philosophies that don't fit together in any other way. Because of this they are not very useful if we are trying to divine fundamental truths about the human condition. And fundamental truths are what I am after, in order to have an integrated basis from which to provide help.  Psychiatric tools have been partially helpful to the individual or to society. They have, as is natural, been subverted in one way or another by capitalism or state control or whatever. But the basic problem remains that in psychiatry we don't have a reliable framework for understanding all human distress that points to solutions for individuals.  One of the biggest and most persistent complaints from outside the system is the transition fr...
Read more