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Don Fenn - EzineArticles.com Expert Author
I've been a psychotherapist for 30 years, written 8 novels, science fiction, fable, political satire, romantic thrillers, 3 nonfiction books that turn psychology into a political philosophy; married, 3 children, 5 grandchildren. I'm dedicated to facilitating a true direct-vote world democracy without representation, dissolving nations and corporations, as they currently exist, and the economic aristocracy as ruling authorities, by eliminating the possibility of wealth, thus completely democratizing power.
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- Emotions Are For Feeling - Not For Fixing
[Self-Improvement:Personal-Growth] That includes all negative emotions. We mostly treat them as if they are for fixing. Negative feelings almost always include discomfort - what we try to fix - in order to tell us something that may need fixing in our self-system. But the negative emotion is designed for listening, not for doing anything just yet, so that we might learn some idea of what might need fixing that we've never noticed before.
- Depression Isn't Emotion - It's Oppression
[Health-and-Fitness:Depression] Depression is the absence of emotion. It's a suppression of whatever feelings might be there, that may desperately want expression, but are oppressively shut down. Depression sees to it that the depressed person is deprived of the cathartic healing potential of consciously feeling things. Indeed they are emotionally immovable.
- Heresy - The Root Source of All New Wisdom
[Self-Improvement:Inspirational] Heresy - whatever seriously defies conventional wisdom, religious or secular - is always shunned as change-avoidant creatures shy away from the anathema of unfamiliarity... naturally. Who wants to live in uncertainty and unsettlement for a while, sending comfort scurrying for safer ground - until the truth is established once more.
- Secrets Undermine Freedom
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] There is one aspect of government, whether a living god, king or our democracy, which has never changed through the centuries of human experience. That the most important, disturbing events, intentions, secret ops etc. are treated as top security. Where justification for this concealment is needed, the usual excuse is for "national security".
- What We Once Entrusted to God - We Now Demand From Politics
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] Politics is a repository where we dump everything ominous and uncomfortable that we don't want to know about, don't want to be responsible for, and don't know what to do with. We elevate certain persons to power far greater than we give to ourselves, expecting in return for them to handle what frightens and confuses us. As such politicians are small derivatives of what God once was worldwide. For most of human history what happened was God's will and doing.
- Aging Forgetfulness Isn't Senility - It's Wisdom
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Except for the almost total memory collapse of Alzheimer's, aging forgetfulness is both appropriate and adaptive to the needs of an aging person. Unlike young inexperienced-in-life people who often don't know where to put emphasis and effort, one who has lived several decades has honed their life to its essentials. They have discovered that very little in life deserves their disciplined and focused attention.
- The Advantages of Being Older
[Home-and-Family:Parenting] When it comes to understanding what's happening and what's possible, we've turned the world over to the younger generation. We've enthusiastically told them they're the cat's meow, that their shit doesn't really stink, and promised them that the world is their oyster - that they can do and be anything they want, bar none. We're understandably proud of this legacy we've willed our children, and regularly celebrate it on one TV show after another, giving each other another 'five' to mark the occasion.
- Money - The Amoral Arbiter of Virtue
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] It has come to pass that everything is about making money. Everyone's doing it as aggressively as possible, pushing the limits as far as they can. All over the world making money is the one thing in which everyone seems to believe. There's an implied sense that if we all do it, war might be replaced by doing business instead of killing each other.
- Divorce - Who Needs It and What Dies by It?
[Relationships:Divorce] There is a great deal to be said for making marriage something to get into and out of far easier than tradition would have it. Soon life will last 100 years. To make any one piece of life so stuck in the mud of the same old, same old, particularly something as dominant as who we live with, is to make life unchangeable except by acts of nature.
- To Secularize Humanizes
[Self-Improvement:Spirituality] To secularize is to humanize, to render unto people what has always belonged to God, superstition, magic, and all the ologies that have always laid claim to the spiritual realm of human nature. When that remarkable aspect of human reality-the spiritual-belongs entirely and exclusively to us, though we've never done much with it, nor wanted to have much responsibility for it.
- Thinking Outside the Tightest Box
[Self-Improvement:Inspirational] As information changes more rapidly, there's more talk about thinking outside the box. We generally mean by this to think about ordinary things in new ways. Like for instance, is marriage as sacred as we've always been taught it is, or would love work better if it were defined in a more flexible manner?
- The Science of Faith
[Self-Improvement:Spirituality] Faith and Science are constantly being represented as opposites in the arena of how we arrange to believe something. The usual view is that faith takes it as given without examination, while science insists upon proving it. Faith appears absolute, to be utterly relied upon; the other is always relative to the evidence, but once established scientifically it's assumed it can always be relied upon. Thus, in their different ways, faith and science always achieve the same outcome-apparent certainty.
- Fear Created God
[Self-Improvement:Personal-Growth] Fear is a daunting, intimidating emotional experience. It grabs us, it seems, with a will of its own, utterly mesmerizing us in a negative way, filling us with its alarm and dire warnings. Fear is most often perceived as an ominous, externally-sourced presence, that suddenly takes over everything else that might be happening, making us completely lose track of our own thoughts, feelings and willfulness, propelling us with its own purpose. It's an experience of possession by forces much greater than our selves-the ultimate emotional model of domination.
- Parent Vs Person
[Home-and-Family:Parenting] To be a parent is to be, not only a person, but also an icon. To be an icon means to become a public person, meaning who we are belongs not just to us, but to others as well-particularly our children. Our iconographic identity is created, not just by us, but also by our offspring. We may want to be known as great parents, but only our children can verify that.
- Attraction & Connectivity
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] They say when we answer a question it poses two more. That when old mysteries are exposed, revealing new and powerful information, this process eventually uncovers even more awesome unanswered questions. Such is the case with what we've discovered in the name of science, best exemplified by the patterns of attraction and connectivity between very tiny, atom, as well as very large, planet, objects, which mathematics helps us explain so well that we are constantly inventing new technological gadgets based upon this new information.
- The Ambiguities of Love
[Relationships:Love] For believers in God, love is immortality, the perfect happiness of heaven, or the perpetual renewal of life in reincarnation. Thus for the vast majority of human history, love has been perceived to be an attribute of God. Thus it could be said that in traditional religion we worship idealized intimacy; while in humanism we try and implement it.
- Ambivalence - The Supernova of Psychic Evolution
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] We humans are uniquely fortunate that ambivalence pervades everything we experience, think, feel and intuit, or we wouldn't have gotten as far as we have. Though you wouldn't know it from the way we feel about ambivalence. We hate and mistrust it. For centuries we've been trying to do away with it by denying, and as much as possible, obliterating its presence from our consciousness. We've worked very hard to achieve an alternative, that for thousands of years we've considered to be nothing less than heavenly: i.e. single-mindedness without complication or contradiction.
- Is Objectivity All it Claims to Be?
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Though we are aware of all the changes that have taken place in the last hundred years - computer-driven technology expanding our understanding of nature and the universe - we still think about these innovations in the old ways. We thus have very new experiences, but lack creative metaphors to describe them. We pay some people a lot of money to come up with new ones, but the ones they come up with are all based upon old assumptions of meaning.
- Grief, Loss & Change
[Self-Improvement:Inspirational] To suggest that the death of a loved one and change have anything in common seems surprising, and perhaps even outrageous. We dread the one, and at least sometimes want the other, so they must be opposite. And yet they are one-and-the-same thing, part-and parcel as all emotional opposites are such as love and hate.
- Truth is Fiction
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Philosophy] Until approximately 500 years ago religion possessed almost sole proprietorship of truth making. Now science has that power. Though the two authorities still duke it out claiming priority.
- The Love Predator
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Every living thing predates, which simply means life eats to stay alive, both materially and, for humans, emotionally. Though some say all life feels.
- Speaking As a Psychotherapist 2 - Secular Spirituality
[Self-Improvement:Spirituality] As a psychotherapist for 35 years I've come to regard my work as not only emotionally stimulating and evocative, but also very deeply spiritual. This is a secular spirituality that doesn't partake of any magic, otherworldly power or traditional religions. It derives instead from the mystical potential of being human.
- Psychotherapist - A New Kind of Person
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] When something new happens, it must instantly begin to grapple with what used to be. The new only very gradually replaces the old, and with a lot of struggling. So it is with being a psychotherapist, liberally confused with a number of social roles, including parent, friend, lover and doctor-all of which contribute pieces to a psychotherapist's identity, but cannot by themselves, represent it. As with all new things, we must discover what and who it is.
- Speaking As a Psychotherapist
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Speaking as a psychotherapist, it isn't our grownup loved ones who sometimes drive us crazy - as we like to pretend. Grownup lovers never hurt each other very deeply, meaning the kind of hurt that won't go away, that haunts and torments us, that makes us alcoholics, or motivates our sexual affairs to have what we can't get at home, to which we feel entitled. And yet we blame adult loving for all of these painful emotional experiences.
- Being Old - Or Pretending
[Self-Improvement:Personal-Growth] When we get to 70 years, we're old. In our 80's the majority of us die. When we get to 90 we're cheating the odds. When we get as ancient as 100 we've successfully given the finger to fate ... at least for as long as life continues to last. Our only regret is that our grandchildren may live to be 120. It didn't happen in time for us ... our usual lament is when we watch young people having it better.
- Is There No Psychic Evolution?
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] We are almost completely unaware of the evolution of psychic function. We believe that people of ancient times were exactly like us, as if conscious human nature was born, like Paul Bunyan, in it's present form, without any need for psychic leaps of understanding-perhaps most of which haven't happened yet. Whether as archeologists, historians, sociologists, or anyone studying ancient times, we draw conclusions about motive and state of mind based upon present-time human consciousness, assuming that psychically we always have been like we are today, and always will be exactly the same.
- Thinking & Feeling - Squabbling Siblings
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Human nature is comprised of a large brain that wants the Big Picture always to be visible, while a feeling animal wants the now to be safe and significant ... no matter what the Big Picture says or does. This still unresolved dilemma, in which feeling and thinking compete for dominance far more than they cooperate, is why the human species remains unstable in some basic ways.
- How We Think Matters Very Much
[Self-Improvement:Inspirational] Ideas are a dime a dozen. To be useful for more than speculation, they need lots of company to form a matrix of sense that has power. In science we call it mathematics, pattern.
- How Well Do We Really Understand Children?
[Home-and-Family:Parenting] Though we are deeply reluctant, and very afraid to acknowledge it, the human family-in its present form-is gradually losing its hegemony as the quintessential form of human society, worthy of our deepest affection and support. The villain in this change of perspective is psychotherapy, which has discovered that family produces as many problems as it solves and cares for. And we still haven't gotten to the bottom of the barrel of the perfidy that families commit and conceal-not out of villainy, instead out of ignorance and old habits.
- "To Thine Own Self Be True" - Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] Polonius' speech in Shakespeare's Hamlet will always encourage and inspire us. But it has taken on special meaning in this second century of psychotherapy-which, at its best, is the study of, and the facilitation of individuality. Revealing what a huge piece of the educational pie, discovering the psychology of the learning person, will eventually become the core aspect of all levels of education beginning with birth.
- Do We Serve Ourselves Best by Helping Others?
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] A resounding no! Serving our own destiny first by being the most and best that we can be will render us far more valuable to the welfare of others.
- The Advantages of Not Knowing How to Think
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Philosophy] For as long as we've known how to read, and invented fiction, we've been fascinated by mystery, particularly crime mysteries. One of the most basic features about reading or watching them is that we don't know how to think about what's going on. Indeed that's the point of a mystery, whether it's about crime or simply the unresolved features of any story.
- "Mental Illness" is a Fraud
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] "Mental Illness" is a false concept designed to conceal from most of us that we all have aspects, more of less, of psychic dysfunction. It stands to reason. Our species is still evolving, and we are very imperfectly formed, still in large ways maladapted to each other, and to our environment.
- The Rich Create Depressions
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Philosophy] Excessive wealth inevitably produces periodic Depression. When adversity strikes the economy, the essential resources that are needed to overcome it, are secreted away in safe foreign places, forcing the poor to overcome the abandonment of the rich.
- Nature Vs Ownership
[News-and-Society:Environmental] Environmentalism is dragging us into a headlong collision with the human passion for ownership. What was necessary at one time, as an act of acquisition for security and safety reasons, is fast becoming a license to destroy planet-essential habitats like the Amazon rainforest.
- Shared Responsibility Vs Victim-Villain
[Self-Improvement] In any human event, every participant is responsible for the outcome. Responsibility varies from one person to another at any given moment-sometimes to a large degree. But overall, in the course of that event and its aftermath, responsibility exists in much more balanced proportions than we care to acknowledge.
- Guilt, Violence & Money
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Guilt is the glue that holds society together. It's how we hold each other accountable, by prohibitions, laws, inhibitions, judgments, and punishments. It's all very familiar and historical.
- Music & Memory
[Arts-and-Entertainment] Like particular odors certain music triggers memory, marking special moments and their moods, conjuring vivid familiarity, making the past instantly present, reassuring us that this unique memory would always be there, something permanent to rely upon as long as we are alive. Like the first time I heard a professionally recorded version of the second song that I ever wrote at age 65, never imagining before that I could do this, certain that the second song would sound as bad as the first one. It wasn't.
- Libraries Were My Inspiration
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Philosophy] Of libraries I'm a devoted fan. Ever since I was seven years old libraries have been the tits upon which my mind has suckled voraciously for information. Libraries were the original Internet where you could find almost anything, offering liberation from the conventional attitudes and ideas of your own time and place.
- What's Science Fiction?
[Arts-and-Entertainment] Science fiction defies categorization as it contains a huge gathering of disparate forms of fiction including horror, futuristic, magic, fantasy and a profusion of more demonic monsters than the Middle Ages ever imagined in its preoccupation with hellfire and damnation. Interest in the future is always partly fear-based-the unknown, the mysterious and 'what's-to-come'.
- The Menace
[Arts-and-Entertainment] She smelled menace in the air. It wasn't so much an odor, but a sixth sense that something evil lurked ahead.
- What's War?
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Philosophy] War is a romanticized version of adversity, where, no matter what's happening, or who is affected, we get our own way entirely. Adversity is functional, not personal.
- Diary of a Nomad
[Arts-and-Entertainment] It was the year 2507. Humanity had become relatively civilized. Life was easy, except the more intangible parts of it.
- Is Hallucination Normal?
[Reference-and-Education:Paranormal] Is hallucination a normal part of human evolution? Did we all once hallucinate? The brain is built to do so.
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