Getting Unstuck; Unravelling the Knot of Depression Attention and Trauma

In these dialogues with your parents, you will need to see your parents as they might have been under the best of circumstances. The crux of the exercise is for you to assert and make known the perceptions that you had at the time, and to insist that your parents act upon them in order to become the parents you required but did not get.

It is easy to see how we lose contact with some of our right-brain potentialities simply because our judging left-brain self finds them unsatisfactory. For instance, if our parents find our early expressions of a sexual self — rubbing our genitals or even, perhaps, becoming aroused while being physical with them — to be too unsettling, it is quite

Even the most lovingly begun relationship will flounder if poor management of time and task are not identified and dealt with. Marriages in which one or both partners have ADD — -and this includes marriages that have a solid base of love — can be plagued by issues surrounding reliability, finances, child-rearing (especially when the children also h

The Watkins define an ego state as “an organized system of behavior and experience whose elements are bound together by some common principle, and which is separated from other such states by a boundary that is more or less permeable.”

If the disorder is less severe, we get three other sorts of splits: (1) between left-brain reasoning and the control of emotions, (2) between left-brain reasoning and the control of behavior, and (3) between left-brain reasoning and the control of sensation.

People with ADD need other people more intensely than people without ADD do for several reasons. Because they have trouble reflecting, they often need to talk things out in order to think. (“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”) Because they have trouble structuring their time productively or enjoyably by themselves, they are prone t

You must, however, spend sufficient time with the child on your own for the techniques to be as effective as possible. The point is to stay with the strong feelings you may encounter instead of running away from them. You want to feel these feelings, to tolerate and focus on them. An overwhelming majority of the time, if you can tolerate the feelin

When we looked at his inability to enjoy his accomplishments, to take vacations, to pursue the things he enjoyed, we found the sixteen-year-old who mistrusted himself so completely that he had stopped using his own pleasure as a guide in making decisions about his behavior.

In my view, meditation, Buddhism, Taoism, yoga, Guirdjieff, Joseph Campbell’s hero journey, the many different types of psychotherapy — the whole pursuit of “enlightenment” in general — can all be seen as addressing the central issue of the integration of left-right-brain functioning.

He believes that the majority of our inhibitions and psychosomatic illnesses come from just such unresolved tension and its continued recurrence in the present, as we are reminded of and relive our frustrations and disappointments.