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Exploring the truth behind inspirational sayings
“Your attitude determines your reality.” “Fear is the only thing holding you back.” “Gratitude is the key to happiness.” Self-help is full of such pithy statements. I bet you’ve seen hundreds of them. They’re usually presented as great insights, key ideas, or even as fundamental principles of the universe. Almost all of these ideas can be shown to be false with just a little analysis. But before we dismiss them all, we need to delve into an arcane-sounding question: What do we really mean by ‘true’? This question is at the core of epistemology — a long-standing branch of philosophy. And though it may seem incredible, there are at least half…
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Our ironic attitude to death
As a culture, we avoid talking about death. Whether it’s because of existential angst (the worry about what’ll happen to us after we die?), a simple association with sadness and sorrow (we’ve experienced other peoples deaths but by definition we’ve never died ourselves), or because of an empathic understanding of how sad our death may make our friends and loved ones (at least, we assume so). This is very understandable but it’s counterproductive all the same. By treating death as something unspeakable we avoid it’s consideration at all cost. The effect of this avoidance is huge. Though it might feel like bringing a sledgehammer to break a nut, remembering that…
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Why I am a Coaching Psychologist
Last semester, a student asked me “Why are you a Coaching Psychologist, and not a therapist, when you clearly know so much about psychotherapy?” (I paid him for the flattery later.) I gave a rather glib answer at the time, and since then I’ve been wanting to find time to marshall my thoughts and be honest and upfront about my reasons for preferring to be part of a young upstart of a discipline, rather than adopting a label with a century-long pedigree. Today’s the day. I think Freud did the world a great service. He did more than most to illuminate how we have rather little conscious awareness of the…
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We could all use a little help
I read a piece this week in The Philosophers’ Mail called Why you need to go and see a therapist. It’s a really good piece, but it’s a bit narrow in scope. The basic premise is simply that “thinking about our lives is so hard,” that “getting therapeutic help should – ideally – be an ordinary and wholly unsurprising thing.” The article also discusses how most of us see therapy as something for the crazy and traumatised, and certainly not for all of us so-called ‘normal’ people. (Who, honestly, can say they’re ‘normal’?) Well, I agree that therapy has this image, that it has stigma associated with it, but that isn’t…