The Unrelenting Society

People with unrelenting standards simultaneously see themselves as unworthy and struggle to accept others. Their capacity for relaxation, pleasure, satisfying relationships or a sense of achievement is obstructed by these excessive standards. I wonder about the pervasive influence on us all of hypercritical attitudes in media combined with the incessant promotion of perfection in advertising. It seems that these massages are now being taken up and further promoted in social media.

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The pain inside

“She’s just doing it for attention.” This is a phrase I have often heard from people trying to understand why a patient, a friend or a loved-one has been deliberately hurting themselves. Self injury goes against all our natural instincts of survival and self-protection. Unfortunately, the assumption often ends up being that a person who does such a thing must be either attention-seeking or “crazy”. But, most often, neither is the case.

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It gets worse before it gets better

There is a common paradox for psychological therapy: many times the strategies we have found to provide us relief from our problems are at the same time perpetuating our problems. Consequently, therapy can at times be very uncomfortable: you make a choice to confront difficult feelings and experiences that you have developed a range of strategies for avoiding.

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Buying your way to happiness, or despair?

Many of us enjoy the buzz a shopping spree creates now and then. But for some people buying becomes very much like an addiction. It is a problem that can have very significant consequences – the most obvious being debt and other financial problems. It can also create friction or breakdown in relationships or be a source of severe guilt and shame.

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