FROM THE BLOG

I would like to introduce a thinking skill that is very simple to learn and use. I call this skill Dialectical Synonyms, or DS for short. If you remember from English class, synonyms are two words tha...

In the previous blog post, we learned that certain thoughts can sometimes provoke certain emotions which in turn can sometimes provoke certain actions. That’s why it’s so important to figure out what’...

Have you ever looked at yourself in one of those funny mirrors? Whose image did you see? It was you, of course. After all, it wasn’t George Washington or Michael Jordan staring back in the mirror—it w...

Psychologists have long noticed that thoughts, emotions, and actions all influence each other. Since the 1960’s, psychologists have especially focused on how certain thoughts can inspire certain emoti...

Restoring Balance with Thoughts In the first chapter we learned about the three minds:  The Thinking Mind, the Feeling Mind, and the Balanced Mind.  Do you remember how both our thoughts an...

A sequence we have seen repeatedly throughout these blogs is this: Awareness, Acceptance, Action. As we have already learned, awareness and acceptance alone can often transform our lives from unbearab...

When people hear the word mindfulness, sometimes they think of meditation or great mystical experiences. However, the concept of mindfulness is actually quite simple and ordinary. In this blog, I woul...

In the previous blog, we discussed the first three components of mindfulness: 1. To be aware2. On purpose3. In the present However, there is one more component of mindfulness: “Without judging.” Now...

Perhaps you have heard the term “mindful.” “Mindfulness” seems to be the latest buzzword in treatment circles, not to mention society in general. But actually, the concept of mindfulness has been arou...

As previously mentioned, trauma has a way of throwing our lives out of sync in many different ways and directions. In this blog, we will focus on how trauma affects two mental processes: awareness and...

Trauma affects different people in different ways. But there’s one thing trauma always does: It throws you off balance. In fact, the effects of trauma can you leave you feeling so out of sync that you...

Not everything that happens to us in life is something we signed up for.There are some things in the past we desperately wish never happened to us.There are other things in the present we desperately ...

In the previous blog series, we learned all about mindfulness. In particular, we learned that applied mindfulness involves a three-step sequence: Awareness, Acceptance, Action. First we need to become...

So far in this blog series, we have further developed the themes of awareness, acceptance, and action. We have learned that we cannot accept difficult facts or make difficult changes until we first ov...

Have you ever noticed something about someone else before that person did? Maybe that person has a funny tic or says the work “like” way too many times in one sentence. On the flip side, have you ever...

In the previous blog, we talked about five stages of acceptance. Now we are going to talk about five stages of action. Do you remember why we talked about acceptance first? Because we can’t change rea...

All of us struggle at times to accept the reality we have been dealt.  Sometimes reality is so painful we would rather pretend that some things do not exist or never happened.  However, ther...