Do any Google search for resources focused on managing your fears, and you will easily net over five billion results. Look at the marketing materials of virtually all Calgary counselling services, and you will see a correspondingly heavy marketing push in the same direction.
Read moreWhat do you do when toxic conflict and conspiracy theories sit down at your Thanksgiving dinner table?
Read more“Can you help me, I just don’t know what to believe any more?”
Read moreOver two decades ago, I had a newly retired addictions counselling and Calgary Sex Therapy client in my office who I’ve never been able to forget. His struggles with sex and relationships had, at that point, gone on for over thirty-five years and, throughout that time, he had amassed over a thousand sexual partners – mostly paid sex workers – in virtually every major city in the world.
Read moreRead moreImagine you have been watching your marriage slip away for years.
Perhaps you finally got to wondering what he had been doing on that computer all of those late nights. You found a spare moment, logged in and started looking at his internet history. When you did, you were instantly greeted by thousands of erotic or pornographic web sites and the hours spent on sites for escorts. Instantly, you understand why he hasn’t been sexually interested in you once this month.
Or:
Nautilus –
Read moreSchroepfer will never forget when one of her hospice patients was hovering at the edge of death. She was unconscious, barely hanging on. Her children had all told their mother it was okay to let go. But the woman’s grieving husband hadn’t been able to give his blessing. Finally, after talking with his daughter, he decided he was ready to give his wife permission to leave them. “He sat down beside her and told her he loved her, and that it was okay,” Schroepfer recalls. “He got up to walk back to his chair. Right after he sat down, she raised her head out of the coma, said ‘I love you,’ and died. I was glad their daughter was there too, or I would have thought I’d imagined it.”
Read moreTradition: It can make life rich (big ethnic holiday feasts) and sometimes limited (seemingly arbitrary social taboos about clothing), but where does it stem from?
New research out of Karolinska Institutet’s Emotion Lab in Sweden attempts to answer that question, by creating a psychological model behind the notion of tradition. It turns out that humans have a tendency to be quite sheep-like: the researchers found that it likely comes from a threat of punishment – as well as people’s willingness to copy others.
Read moreEven if blowing oneself up were instantaneous and the individual didn’t feel physical pain, adds Caouette, there is still great psychological duress. ‘This is not mentioned in our paper, but suicide bombers usually go through a long preparation to make them ready to become suicide bombers.’ They have to say goodbye to or cut off contact with their families, who might not approve of their actions. ‘In the end,’ she said, ‘martyrdom can take many forms of self-sacrifice, whether feeling pain or losing one’s life.’
Read moreAt the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” – that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism, it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction – be it physical or psychoemotional or spiritual.) Understanding, after all, is what everybody needs – but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer such expansive understanding. He illustrates this mismatch of scales with an apt metaphor:
Read moreThere are other psychological factors at play in the decisions taken by individual parents not to vaccinate their children. One is the rational selfishness of avoiding risk, or even the discomfort of a momentary jab, by gambling that the herd immunity of everyone else will be enough to protect your child.
Another is our tendency to underplay rare events in our calculation about risks – ironically the very success of vaccination programmes makes the diseases they protect us against rare, meaning that most of us don’t have direct experience of the negative consequences of not vaccinating.
