Psychotherapists can help us make breakthroughs in dealing with depression, but often the insights gained during a session don’t lead to permanent change. Why is it that we can’t always put the new insight into daily use and sometimes forget it as soon as we’re out of the room? That’s the problem that a new […]
emotion
Healing Power in a Human Voice
Have you heard or felt a wave of healing power in a human voice? Voices can carry many influences. They can scar like a knife edge or terrify with a scream, but here I want to talk about the power of voice to restore lost harmony. Let’s put it as a question: in your experience […]
Why Therapy Can Work: Ideas from Brain Research
Brain research is one of those many scientific fields that I’ll never know much about, but I find it important to get even a limited understanding of the direction of recent findings. It helps me to know, for example, that emotions are generated unconsciously through multiple brain systems before anything gets to awareness. As I […]
Why You Can’t Wish Depression Away
(I’ve changed the title of this post because I realize the earlier version sounded too sweeping. This post is focused on the way we can beat ourselves up for not being able to will or wish depression away at moments of greatest vulnerability to its onslaught. I didn’t mean to suggest that we can never […]
Meditation and a Prayer for Healing
This is an edited and shortened version of a post on meditation I did some time ago. The prayer at the end remains important to me, so I thought I’d put it up again. I hope it makes some sense to you. Here are a few journal excerpts from many years ago about early experience […]
Depressed: No Friends, No Life
Lately, I’ve come across a number of questions online by plainly anguished people, asking: Why do I have no friends, no life? The first time I saw one this blunt, I reacted almost defensively, laughing as I recalled an old film in which a man hires a private detective to find out why he has […]
