Client dialogue: Adhd and Trauma and Bears... oh my.
What follows is a writing project I worked on with a client. The thing that is missing from the vast majority of work written on psychotherapy is the voice of clients.
Counselling - General
Latest
The problem of causality: the Chinese parable of the wise farmer
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer replied, “Maybe.”
adhd
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Feelings vs Emotions, Part II: Dirty Fuels and Fatigue
In today’s post, I will focus on emotions. “Emotions,” as Damasio notes in Part 1 “indicate actions,” and then later describes them as “concerts of actions.”
adhd
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Feelings vs Emotions, Part I: Loud Bodies
The language of psychology can be confusing. But the use of precise language is critically important to the process of counselling, because we cannot attend to the parts of the world that we cannot name.
adhd
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An immodest proposal on the language of neurological difference
I'm don't feel great about the language we currently use to describe and denote those of us who have a neurological difference.
adhd
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How philosophy can help us to understand adhd: the curious case of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) is still not widely known and is even more poorly understood but, in my clinical experience, globally experienced by those of us who have adhd.
Critique
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The future is everything, or how to psychologize with a hammer
As I have worked with clients over these past five years, it has become clear to me that the foundational determinant of well-being is our relation to the (our) future.
Anomie and the cost of the future
Which is heavier, wearing a 25kg backpack and having to walk around with it all day every day or not knowing if you and the people in your life are going to be safe—in whatever way you want to conceptualize "safe"—on a day-to-day basis?
Naming
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Anomie vs depression
What this suggests is that when there are not sufficient rules and laws and conventions, one's imagination is completely ungoverned. And an ungoverned—"fantastic" in Kierkegaard's words—mind ultimately leads one away from oneself... towards the sickness unto death that is despair.
Meme(s) of the week: rats, isolation, pornography, and shopping, also... the meaning(s) of life
The wellbeing or illness of people is a reflection and product of the society in which they live. It’s true for rats, and its true for people.
adhd
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Stuckness and movement, Part II: movement begets movement
One of the little aphorisms I regularly offer to clients is the following: movement begets movement. Problems of movement and stuckness are problems that all client populations face, but it has been my experience that they are particularly common in the population of people with adhd.
Stuckness and movement, Part I: the experience of stuckness
It is simply a truism in the counselling world that one of the main struggles clients have is with the feeling of being stuck.