“Why is it that we sometimes can't feel close to someone we've lived with for a long period of time?” This was the heartfelt question from a young woman and mother who was struggling in a relationship with her partner. The relationship had been going sideways for years, but she was reluctant to break up [...]
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, my mother used to tell me, as she watched me with some perplexity while I painstakingly painted Twiggy eyelashes around my eyes. “Oh mom,” I would sigh in my most grown-up voice at the venerable age of 16. What did she know about beauty? She who never [...]
Somewhere along the way, we westerners have wholeheartedly embraced the notion that the holidays are supposed to be about having wonderful, cozy, nurturing and loving times with our families. Holding onto that thought can be depressing. As if all the tension, stress and dysfunctionality that we may have experienced with various members [...]
Animals can teach us a lot about relationships. They just seem to handle them so naturally and gracefully, with a minimum of fuss. Not so for we humans. All of life involves relationships of various sorts and they are central to our human lives. They are the alchemical vessels we are cooked in, changed [...]
James Hillman’s extraordinary book, A Terrible Love of War, examines the phenomena of war in our world in an effort to understand its importance, its inevitability, its impact and its meaning. It is divided into four chapters: War is Normal, War is Inhuman, War is Sublime, and Religion is War. While the first chapter lays [...]
Beware. Many therapists, social workers, ‘do-gooders’ and ‘good mothers or fathers’ have a raging mother complex lying underneath the calm, kind exterior, and it’s a killer. This complex knows no gender boundaries and can be equally present in both men and women. In my blog on The Inner Community, I talked about complexes in general, [...]
Debra has a wonderful series of reflections on Alchemical Psychology - check it out!
This was a question that again came into focus as I talked with an old client I hadn’t seen in many years. Deep woundings of the psyche can fester for years, and probably even lifetimes. They are like the deeply entrenched psychic tattoos that simply don’t go away. And so how can we heal these [...]
Don’t you think it is interesting that with humans most of our perceived problems are with the other? We don’t own it as a problem with ourselves, or the way we naturally are, but, rather, the problem is located elsewhere. These problems fall into several categories: Present, but Deficient The one we are [...]
Pi and All of Life Sometimes Life throws us into a boat with creatures that seem very foreign, strange or threatening to us in some way. Life of Pi is a beautiful, in some ways mythic story of the hero’s journey by author Yann Martel. As I contemplated the title, I thought about the meaning [...]
