Category: Trauma & healing

136) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 15: FACT Exercise #2 — Choosing Meaning over Control

We’ve talked about the self-defeating nature of our Shit Avoidance Strategies, especially over the long term.  Not that they’re totally, 100% bad; they can even be life-savers!  But long-term, Shit Avoidance doesn’t help us rise to the challenges of life, fix the problems we’re facing, accomplish our meaningful goals, or grow as a person.  At…

124) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 10: Finding out who you really are:  Rational self-analysis

The predominant workhorse of the psychological healing world is a family of therapeutic practices and exercises centered on what I call “rational self-analysis”, or more colloquially, finding out “who you really are”.  This journey towards “authenticity” is central to most forms of talk therapy, and what most people likely think of when they think of…

120) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 9: Healing, and the Doctrine of Original Awesomeness

The essence of all three approaches to healing that I am planning to cover is the same.  It is rooted in what I have previously called the Doctrine of Original Awesomeness (https://dandolderman.org/2020/09/22/88-jordan-peterson-part-7-psychology-at-the-ending-of-the-world-subsection-2-the-doctrine-of-original-awesomeness/).  This, in short, is the basic starting point of Humanism, and is increasingly recognized within the bio-psycho-social sciences as “the way we are”.…

118) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 7: Resistance, the sneaky bastard

In this series on healing, we have been discussing the “problem” of resistance, and noting how people’s deeply internalized self-feelings and beliefs can be so strong, so reactive, so “resistive” that they are able to forestall, sabotage or otherwise prevent the person from truly walking the path to healing.  In other words, far too often,…

111) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 5: What Backlash can teach us about ourselves

Backlash, as we were discussing, is a major impediment to healing.  I believe the technical term is “pain in the ass.”  Backlash causes so much bloody suffering, causes us to perpetuate our own misery, undermine our goals, mess up our relationships, underperform in our careers, neglect our health, and transmit our dysfunctions onto the next…

110) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 4: Healing, when you hate yourself, think you don’t deserve it, want to die, believe it’s impossible anyway, avoid doing what you most need, and constantly sabotage yourself

When you start to turn towards “healing”, you will very likely experience a backlash.  Probably lots of backlashes.  You and Mr/Ms Backlash are going to become really great friends, in fact.  But first, you’re going to be enemies.  Epic enemies.  Like, Avengers vs. Thanatos kind of epic.  Sparta vs. Xerxes.  The Boston Bruins vs. Montreal…

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