Perhaps the most immediate way to make it clear is to say that the left-brained verbal self is what we think of as our “everyday” self. It’s the voice we use when we talk to ourselves; it’s the one we “think” is making all the decisions, our verbal conscious awareness. Buddhists, when they talk about the “chattering” of our “monkey mind” during

Obviously, we need a balance between planning and acting. When the left brain dominates unleavened, we experience chronic tension and joylessness. When the right brain dominates unleavened, we live with chaos and shortsightedness.

relative underactivity of inhibitory centers in the front of the brain. This means that people with ADD who need to focus on an attentionally demanding task may have difficulty turning off or preventing the activation of competing areas of the brain.

the underlying cause is always the same: the labeling of parts of the self as bad and unacceptable, first by the outside world and then by judging parts of the self.

If we have ADD and we are constantly upbraided about our organizational selves, about our ability to keep track of what we are doing, we will naturally cut ourselves off from painful contact with our timekeeping selves, and we will become chronic procrastinators.

Inner-child exercises are about nurturance. Whatever the situation that caused the personality fragment to form, and whatever the emotion trapped in that childlike fragment, the underlying task is to mobilize the part of the person that loves or has ever loved a child and to bring that part into contact with the part that is needlessly suffering.

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.

Of terrific importance here is that you need to imagine these scenarios even though your parents may have never done these things and probably never would have. Remember that you are not really dealing with your parents. You are dealing with the powerful models of them that you constructed in your mind over the years.

It is this breaking down into parts, into what might be called the sub-selves, that underlies the phenomenon we call dissociation. All human beings have their own unique branching trees of sub-selves based on their personal life experiences, and it is by influencing the development of and the relationships between the various sub-selves that trauma