This. Is. Awesome.
“In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.
The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat.
The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.”
(via drkathleenyoung)
How Your Greatest Insecurities Reveal Your Deepest Gifts
via psychotherapy an article from Psychology Today:
“In my decades of practice as a psychotherapist, this is the insight that has inspired me most:
Our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts.
I’ve found that the very qualities we’re most ashamed of, the ones we keep trying to reshape or hide, are in fact the key to finding real love. I call them core gifts.
It’s so easy to get lost in the quest for self-improvement. Every billboard seduces us with the vision of a happier, more successful life. I’m suggesting an opposite road to happiness. If we can name our own awkward, ardent gifts, and extricate them from the shame and wounds that keep them buried, we’ll find ourselves on a bullet train to deep, surprising, life-changing intimacy.
Over the years, I realized that the characteristics of my clients which I found most inspiring, most essentially them, were the ones which frequently caused them the most suffering.
7 Things You Can Start Doing Right Now to Make Your Life Better
One simple and important thing you can do to make your life better is take good care of yourself. You are valuable and deserve to be treated well, by others in your life and by yourself! But for some reason taking care of you can often be overlooked, especially when life becomes challenging. However, it is at these moments that you need to take care of you the most.
It is important to take care of yourself because it becomes very difficult to take care of your responsibilities at work, your partner’s concerns, your children’s needs or anyone else’s when you are not caring for yourself. Even when times are tough, you need to care for you first, then everyone else. If you don’t do this, you won’t be able to do the other things that you would like to do fully. There are different ways to take care of you depending on your personality and interests. The following is a list of ways you can exhibit self care – use the ideas that work for you:
Sharing Some Good News
I’m excited to share the news that my blog was recently listed as one of the Top 50 Blogs About Social Work on the website Social-work.org! I wanted to say thank you to Social-work.org and share my joy at seeing my blog listed.
Overcoming Loneliness
It’s Thursday and the weekend is rapidly approaching. So is the pressure to make plans, have fun and go out. It’s at these times that feelings of loneliness may arise. The truth is, everyone struggles with feeling lonely at one point or another and most people try to get rid of the feeling. If you share this struggle, you may enjoy reading this *excellent* article about loneliness written by Darlene Ouimet, a survivor of childhood trauma and abuse. The article discusses the connection between loneliness and self worth and how this feeling may dissipate through the process of emotional healing. There are some real gems in here.
Excerpt from the article:
As an adult I could relate those same feelings and I labelled them the feeling of extreme loneliness. I felt guilty and ashamed that I felt that way. I thought that by feeling that way I was letting down my friends and family. I could feel alone in a crowd; I could feel alone with my best friends. As I looked back on my life I realize that I had felt alone all my life. I felt different. I felt like something was missing in me. I felt like something was wrong with me. I was alone.
As I began to recover…
Psychotherapy Speak: What is Regression? A Definition
Regression is one of those words you may have heard other people use and not been entirely sure what they meant. It is a word used in psychotherapy and psychology to describe a behavior that a person might exhibit as a defense mechanism. In other words, it’s a behavior people use unconsciously (unknown to them) to protect themselves from a situation or a feeling that is overwhelming, scary, or difficult to handle. Regression defined is when a person reverts back to an earlier stage of development when they are under stress. So for example, a toddler who can walk may begin crawling again or sucking their thumb even though they have given up both of those behaviors, when a sibling is born. The birth of the sibling may cause them to feel stressed and they may unconsciously engage in these behaviors to get attention or feel taken care of by their parent.
Something to keep in mind is that most of us at one time or another have regressed. Just because you use one or more defense mechanisms doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. Understanding these concepts is a way to understand why and how you behave certain ways. Knowing and understanding why you engage in certain behaviors can be the first step towards changing them. Hopefully once you understand your behavior you can begin to make adjustments and improve your life in ways that are helpful to you.
5 Beliefs You Have That Are Holding You Back
Every day we carry around ideas about the world and our place in it. These ideas influence the decisions we make, how we live our lives and what we do on a day to day basis. Most of us have acquired these ideas through exposure to our families, our culture, and the images we see on TV and the internet. Some of the messages we receive are so pervasive it’s hard to even know that we make a choice to believe them. But I do think it’s important to understand and recognize these beliefs. It’s important to understand these beliefs because they influence the way you live and some of these beliefs may have faulty logic. If we are living our lives based on faulty logic, then we are not setting ourselves up for success. Instead we are setting ourselves up for failure. This is why I have put together a list of beliefs I think have faulty logic. Do you have any of these beliefs? Do you think they holding you back?
- Vulnerability is a weakness – most of us are taught from a very young age that being vulnerable is a problem. This is something our culture transmits to us every day. And, it’s especially true for men. However, I believe that within a trusting environment, being vulnerable is an absolute strength. Vulnerability is an essential component of love. In order to truly be in a loving relationship you need to be able to show who you are to the other person. How can you do this if you are hiding the parts of you that are scared or fearful? Love requires being able to show yourself fully, to another and have them show themselves to you. Therefore I believe that being vulnerable is an important and essential part of life because it allows us to love and be loved. Without love, where would we be?
- Perfection is achievable – holding onto the idea that it is possible to be perfect can be very damaging. It is an unreal and unattainable standard to hold yourself to and therefore very destructive. There is no such thing as perfect, it just does not exist. The sooner you can recognize this and let go of the expectation that you can achieve perfection, the less suffering you will experience. I think so many of us experience and prolong our suffering because we somehow believe that we can achieve perfection. This is just not true.
- It’s bad to be angry – there are so many messages sent to us about being angry, such as anger should be feared, or that we should run away from our anger. Anger is just an emotion, no more dangerous than sadness or joy. All of our emotions should be recognized and honored. They are messages sent to us by our minds and our bodies, letting us know if something is working for us or not working for us. Feeling angry is not dangerous. It’s not the feelings that can get you into trouble, it’s what you do with the feeling that can. Be careful and mindful when you want act on those emotions of anger. You cannot necessarily control your feelings, but you can control your responses to your feelings. You can read more about being angry here.
- Real change can happen quickly – it is almost impossible to make any real change in yourself or another person quickly. For most of us, change takes time and a tremendous amount of effort. I think this is sometimes hard to understand because you may want things to be different. Maybe, you have tried a new behavior once or twice, but it doesn’t feel like change is happening fast enough. So you may abandon all your efforts at change because you don’t think anything is happening. But the reality is change happens very slowly and takes a lot of time, and this is normal! So when you are trying to live your life differently keep this in mind. If you remember this, it will help prevent you from feeling discouraged and also help you have more realistic expectations. The more realistic your expectations are, the more likely you are to follow through on your goals.
- It’s better to feel nothing than to feel bad – some people try to numb out when they are feeling sad or down about something. I’ve heard many people say “I’d rather feel nothing than feel this bad”. But there is a danger when we numb out the “bad” feelings! We end up numbing out all the good feelings too. And then you are left with emotional numbness, which can feel very isolating and distressing. In these moments, remember feelings can change. You will not feel sad forever. Feelings do come and go. So instead of trying to numb them out, just ride them out and remind yourself, they will go away. You can read more on emotional numbness here.
It can be difficult to recognize when we have beliefs that get in our way. One way to notice when you may have a belief that gets in your way is to look at the moments in life when you get stuck. Do you see any patterns? Do you get stuck every time you are trying to start a new job? Maybe you have a hard time meeting new people and part of that stems from your ideas about perfection? Who knows what may be getting in your way. Be curious about yourself, not critical. Try to examine why you believe certain things. Know that you can create meaning and new beliefs from your life experiences. You don’t need other people to tell you how the world is - trust yourself and your experiences to create meaning for you. And ultimately be kind to yourself. The more kindness you can give to yourself, the greater joy and meaning you will find in life.
Written by Victoria Marano, LCSW
Psychotherapy Speak: What is Ego Strength?
Ego strength is a good term to know when you are working on improving yourself. It is defined as your ability to be exposed to different types of stress and your capacity to tolerate that stress. There is not one way to define ego strength, because one person’s strength may be another’s weakness. But there are some specific character traits that may be helpful when you look at the word resiliency. I think that people who have great resiliency also have ego strength. Resiliency is a person’s ability to over come adversity and challenges. I think the more resilient a person becomes, the more ego strength they develop. Many studies have been done to try to define resiliency. The following is a list of characteristics associated with being resilient:
- to have another person in your life that you can connect with and feel loved by
- to be able to accurately asses what you are good at and what you may need more help with
- to have a positive outlook on things
- to be a creative problem solver
- to have the ability to manage difficult feelings
- being a strong communicator
- to have social support in your community or from your peers
Ego strength and resiliency are things you can build. You can use list above as a guide to begin that process. You may want to ask yourself, how do you deal with difficult situations? What are your strengths when it comes to challenges? Focus on knowing your strengths and use them as a guide to build upon. Then, once you know and understand your strengths, think about what you can do to build upon them and create more resiliency.
Psychotherapy Speak: What is Transference? A Definition
Transference is a term that is used frequently when people talk about psychotherapy. Freud was the first person to use this term to describe a phenomenon that occurs in the relationship between the therapist and the client. Transference is when a client “transfers” feelings or thoughts about a person who was significant to them in their life, onto the therapist. It has now become a term that can be used to describe an experience that occurs between any two people, not just therapist and client. An example of transference in therapy is if a client had a parent that was very cold and withholding, the client may experience the therapist as cold and withholding, even though they may not be. The client may be transferring their feelings about their parent onto the therapist.
Have you ever noticed any patterns in how you experience other people? Or do you think you know a lot about someone you’ve just met? You may want to think about these questions and become curious about whether or not you are using transference.
We grow, including the intellectual and the spiritual, without being deeply aware of it. In fact, some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant...
Alice Walker, Living By the Word
