Susan Meindl - EzineArticles.com Expert Author

Report this author if you suspect they are involved in any fraudulent practices.

Suggest a topic or article headline you would like the author to write about.

Susan Meindl is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Westmount, Montreal. She has an MA in Counselling Psychology from McGill University and a previous degree in English Literature from Acadia University in Nova scotia.

She practices using a Jungian approach to psychodynamic psychotherapy. Susan takes special interest in the psychological strains and professional stresses of creative life. She is also interested in and aware of the special challenges and advantages of (HSP) Highly Sensitive ... [More]

[View Susan Meindl's Extended Author Bio]

[Display Categories] Sort By [Title] [Newest] [Oldest]

Susan Meindl Email Alerts

Career Or Calling? - Vocation and the Helping Professions
[Business:Career-Advice] Most of what is written about the idea of vocation in the sense of "a calling" to a career is written about religious vocation. I believe, however that what is written has some relevance to all powerfully felt attractions to careers especially to those in the artistic or helping professions. Vocational callings have the characteristic requirement that the personal values of the aspirant be coherent with those of the domain or the institution. Luigi Rulla, writing about vocation, emphasizes the importance of congruent values even over questions of ability.

Circumscription and Compromise - Gottfredson's Theory of Career Development
[Self-Improvement:Achievement] Linda Gottfredson (1981) outlined a theory of career development and career choice which she describes as one of "circumscription and compromise". She perceives career choice as having a developmental trajectory. This means that she believes that career choice evolves within an individual as they grow up in their family and society... but she concentrates her attention on the on the limiting effects of socialization in determining career choices.

Life Span-Life Space Considerations in Career Choice - Donald Super
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Donald Super's Life-span, Life-space theory of career selection and evolution proposes that each individual has a unique and distinctive combination of abilities, personality traits and values which make certain occupations more appealing to them as an outlet for their talents and that particular occupations demand, within certain limits, specific abilities and temperaments.

Painful Memories - Un-Repaired Damage in the Foundation of Your Life
[Self-Improvement:Self-Esteem] When memories of difficult early experiences have been walled off and kept painfully "pristine," the unconscious feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy that existed "then" remain a constantly undermining undercurrent in the present. Once the memories have been examined they can be reduced to a painless flexible "scar" which remains as a mark that shows that something significant has been lived through.

Healing Painful Memories
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] Losses, injuries and abuse are rarely invisible to the sufferer. As a general rule, people are quite aware of the sources of their pain. What people often do not understand however, is how the unconscious strategies that they have developed to handle the experience of being hurt cause continuing problems for them in later life. Chronic depression is often the result. Willingly facing and courageously accepting painful memories-- in small doses, in the protective atmosphere of psychotherapy--creates a sense of agency to replace the feeling of victimization. Interest in life returns, depression lifts and self-protective social strategies fade away.

HSP - What a Therapist Needs to Know About High Sensitivity
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] This article offers an introduction for therapists and psychologists to the concept of High Sensitivity (HS). HS and Highly Sensitive People (HSP) are concepts elaborated by Dr. Elaine Aron and popularized in her book "The Highly Sensitive person: How to thrive when the world overwhelms you" (1996). HSP is not a DSM-IV diagnosis. It is a description of the experience of the 15 to 20 % of the population who appear at the top end of the human continuum for physical and emotional responsiveness stimuli.

Dream Therapy - Dreams Can Be Emotional Problem Solvers
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] A psychologist who works with dreams in therapy draws on their knowledge of the client's life situation and life history as well as their training in typical patterns of human response. They work with their clients to understand the dream images in relation to what the client is struggling with or has experienced in life. Together they try to understand what particular relevance and associations that these images have for this particular individual.

Developing Self-Esteem - Cleaning Out Our Messy Emotional Closets
[Self-Improvement:Self-Esteem] Our emotional lives can get as messy as our closets and we can try just as hard to shut them up and avoid dealing with them. Professional home organizers propose solutions to real world mess and clutter. Psychotherapists also act as "organizational experts" who work in a similar way to help their clients structure and prioritize their emotional experiences. The pay-off is a feeling of stability and order in the personality that we call high self-esteem.

Do I Need Therapy? How to Know If Therapy is Right For You
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] There are for most of us certain areas in which we hesitate to ask for help. These are often areas that are tied up psychologically with fears of seeming weak, needy or incompetent... and especially areas where we fear we will be judged by others for our failures.

Controlling Your Feelings - Emotional Intelligence and Emotion Management
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] You may be reeling from a recent blow, an emotional loss, a divorce, a death, a disappointment, a serious life transition. In these cases empathy, interpersonal support and especially time, are the forces that will naturally bring your feelings back down to what is normal, manageable and acceptable for you. You may be able to find these helpful resources in friends or in family circles, but when these supports are not accessible or effective you may find it useful to go through your process with another person in the safe space of a therapeutic relationship with a psychologist, coach or other professional helper.

I'm a Perfectionist - Is That a Mistake?
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] Levels of perfectionism vary from individual to individual and can also vary within an individual depending on the value that they place on achievement in different areas of life. Anxiety and concern about mistakes is one of the factors which distinguishes perfectionism from healthy effort and desire for excellence. The origin of these concerns can often be found in childhood. Psychologically, perfectionism is a defense. It can be seen as an attempt to defeat anxiety-causing randomness, chaos and uncertainty.

Stop Feeling Like a Failure - Finding Your Vision of Success
[Health-and-Fitness:Depression] Feeling like a failure is the dark side of our culture's obsession with being rich, famous and thin. Feeling like a failure might be better reframed as a too strong tendency to compare oneself to others. If you have an uncritical belief that worth can be measured by money, status or fame you are setting yourself up for unhappiness and missing out on other very important areas of human experiencing. This article suggests several ways to tap in to unexpected sources of satisfaction and success.

Reduce Anxiety and Depression - It Helps to See the "Big Picture"
[Health-and-Fitness:Anxiety] We live in a complex world of thoughts and feelings. No one can get through life without encountering at least some periods of fear and self-doubt. When this happens, anxiety and depression narrow our focus and threaten to hold us frozen in narrow paths of feeling and behavior because we feel the situation is too precarious to take any chances. But fortunately human beings are also endowed with imagination and creativity, mental processes which we can draw on to broaden our life view outwards again in order to regain our healthy "emotional range."

What is "Insight" in Psychotherapy?
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] People often enter therapy wanting to figure out what has happened to them... how they got into this state of depression, anxiety or hopelessness. They want to know if there is something they did and something they can do to make things better. If we see meaning-making as a kind of learning about why things happen in life, it becomes clear why psychotherapy with its insistence on uncovering and re-discussing the past is effective. Like an infant who learns which actions create what events, an adult in therapy becomes able to choose attitudes and behaviors which create new situations that fulfill their deeply felt needs and desires.

Talk Therapy - Silent Therapist?
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] Imagining the therapist as something like a translator clarifies some of the aspects of therapy that clients feel most uncomfortable with. Unlike many other professionals and paid consultants, a psychotherapist therapist must "hang back". Clients often find the psychodynamic therapists refusal to "take charge" and dictate solutions disconcerting...but to be a useful translator of their client's experience, the therapist must faithfully and patiently listen to the client and interpret and clarify what emerges.

Depression and "Meaninglessness"
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] This article offers suggestions for re-establishing a feeling of meaningful life. The longing for a life containing meaning and purpose and the feeling of an absence or void where purpose should be is a psychologically distressing. The question can arise at almost any age, but it is most likely to arise in periods of transition from one state of life to another. It arises most sharply when the previous tasks or values of a part of life no longer point the way as directly and clearly into the future.

Jungian Psychotherapy - Therapeutic Conversation and the "Rules" of Intimacy
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Clients can sometimes feel uncomfortable with the "one sided" nature of the exposure in any psychotherapy. This article describes the rules of intimate therapeutic conversation from a Jungian perspective and proposes that the therapeutic relationship follows the "highest rules of intimacy" in that the interaction is compassionate, patient and respectful of both participants. As a result, a Jungian approach to psychotherapy can be a very comfortable setting for clients who enjoy intimacy or wish to develop it... but also wish to retain their autonomy and personal initiative.

Social Phobia - Social Phobia Has Its Reasons
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] There is more to Social Phobia (also called Social Anxiety Disorder) than the DSM-IV definition which describes it. Social Phobia is an interpersonal pattern of behavior which is most likely to appear and cause distress when a person feels that their social goals of "asserting their wishes" or "gaining approval from others" are dangerously unattainable or likely to fail. These beliefs cause great distress and prevent normal social functioning. Social Phobia can often go unrecognized since it hides behind other behaviors such as perfectionism and compliance. This articles discusses some less obvious patterns of social phobia and suggests directions for healing.

Emotional Abuse - Always Taking the Blame Leads to Low Self-Esteem
[Self-Improvement:Self-Esteem] Many clients who come to therapy suffering from feelings of inadequacy or low self-esteem are, in the eyes of others, highly successful and competent in every domain. This is because low self-esteem is rarely about what people can or can't do in practical situations... but really about feeling inferior in a relational way.

High Anxiety - Anxiety Shrinks Your World
[Health-and-Fitness:Anxiety] When individuals are highly anxious and they become vigilant and preoccupied with possible dangers in their environment, the world becomes small and dull. Its teeming possibilities seem to reduce themselves down to few or none. Psychotherapy helps us dare, with the support of a sympathetic other, to bravely and curiously explore the full possibilities of our ideas again. In this receptive, tolerant and encouraging environment, the constraints that anxiety has put on us are loosened and our world can expand again to include the many possible futures that we deserve.

Mid-Life Depression - "Is That All There Is?"
[Health-and-Fitness:Depression] When life is lived in response to "shoulds" rather than "wants", it is not unusual for mild depression to arise as a sort of insistent psychological foot-dragging. We might call it "passive-aggressive" depression! Investment and energy is withdrawn from the current state of life. Our heart is "pulled away" from the activity of life in a kind of inner refusal to go any further down this unsatisfying path.

Emotional Abuse - Are You Being "Too Sensitive"? Probably Not
[Relationships:Domestic-Violence] Emotional abuse is far more common than physical or sexual abuse. Most emotional abuse is verbal. Racial slurs, insults, derogatory remarks and threats are blatant examples of explicit emotional abuse but much more commonly it is covert and hidden in more ordinary interpersonal exchanges. Much of the time the damage is done by tone of voice and verbal emphasis... for example comments made in a contemptuous or accusatory tone.

Mature Students - Stress and Challenges of Returning to School
[Reference-and-Education:College-University] Returning to study as an adult, be it after a hiatus of a few years or several decades, is a wonderful opportunity for personal growth and development. Sometimes, however, it poses particular personal and interpersonal challenges which lead to stress and may interfere with the achievement of academic or skill acquisition goals. This article provides an overview of some of the challenges and issues that a mature student might encounter and which might be worth addressing in personal therapy. Speaking about these matters with a thoughtful friend, a therapist or a counsellor may help to normalize the experience and may permit you to find realistic and practical ways to solve the problems as they arise.

Imposter Syndrome - Successful Women Often Feel Like a Fake
[Business:Career-Advice] Imposter Syndrome is the name given to a cluster of commonly held thoughts and attitudes which plague successful women by tempting them to attribute their success to error, luck, charm or sensitivity rather than to ability. When a woman chooses to address her feelings of impostership in individual or group therapies certain typical feelings emerge. Anger and grief may be revealed, but their resolution, in individual or group work, leads to new positive attitudes which foster growth and healing.

Menopause and Perimenopause - Depression, Anxiety and Renewal in the "Change of Life"
[Womens-Interests:Menopause-HRT] Our mothers called perimenopause and menopause the "change of life." This is perhaps in the end a more poetic and evocative description of the potential of the experience than we generally give it credit for. Just as alcohol lowers our inhibitions and makes us more socially bold, the hormonal fluctuations and the sleep deprivation caused by interrupted nights, de-stabilize our feelings. As our moods swing in wider arcs we may dip into deeper stratums of emotional self and meet a part of self that recognizes and refuses to deny or accept the frustrations, injustices and limitations that we have accepted, embraced or endured as part of our female life roles. Depression and anxiety at menopause are the psychological discomforts which may drive us to look for psychological solutions. ...

Feeling Like a Failure - 5 Ways to Feel More Successful Without Doing Anything Remarkable
[Self-Improvement:Success] This article proposes five ways to adjust your perspective on success and failure. Far too many people judge themselves failures because they are not rich enough, famous enough or thin enough.

Artist's Block - Beliefs That Make Talented People Fail
[Arts-and-Entertainment] Why is it that some people seem to create effortlessly and unselfconsciously while others struggle and suffer and seem to always hold themselves back even when their talent is evident to others? Some reasons may be found in the the understanding, attitudes or beliefs that they hold towards the the sources, quality and sustainability of their creative efforts.

Signs of Anxiety - Are You Mistaking Arousal For Anxiety?
[Health-and-Fitness:Anxiety] Human beings perform at their best physically, intellectually and emotionally in an environment which offers, what is for them personally, an optimal level of arousal; neither too low or too high. Giving a little thought to the cumulative nature of arousal can help you lower your level of physical and emotional stress and remain in your comfort zone.

Career Change - Mid-Life Crisis and the Call of Vocation
[Business:Career-Advice] The "mid-life crisis" is often the focus of jokes and derision, but results of psychological research contradict the popular notion that mid-life crisis results from emotional instability. There is much which suggests that suggests that mid-life change is a rational response to dissatisfaction and unmet needs by well-adjusted people. The eminent psychological theorist Carl Jung once proposed that when a mid-life crisis is resolved healthily, the individual's life incorporated "spirituality" or "Vocation".

Creative Living - High Sensation-Seeking Personalities and the Artist's Life
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Visual-Graphic-Arts] Psychological researcher Bonnie Cramond proposes that the Sensation-seeking individual's search for variety and intensity of stimulation, are also qualities that are considered to be characteristic of the creative person. Sensation-seekers and creative types are both often characterized by high energy and are sometimes considered to have "difficult" personalities. Sometimes the qualities that cause problems for High Sensation-seekers and creative individuals are the same ones that may facilitate in their creative efforts. It may be that what differentiates individuals who use their rapid ideation to create versus those who are disruptive and unproductive is the talent and opportunity to express their energies and ideas in some creative mode.

Synchronicity - When and How Does it Occur?
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] It is easy to be amazed and slightly in awe when experiencing synchronistic events and to feel that the experience is "magical" or uncanny. Synchronicities may be understood as manifestations of unconscious creativity aimed at resolving unconscious conflict and deadlock. They do not need to be understood as occult phenomena but remain marvelous and mysterious nonetheless as examples of the continual interplay between conscious and unconscious thought and of the creative and self-healing capacities of the human psyche.

Grad School Perfectionism Creates Stress, Anxiety and Depression Rather Than Excellence
[Reference-and-Education:College-University] Grad school is both the end of a structured education and the beginning of a new identity. For a student who is already inclined to define him or herself by academic excellence, this sometimes creates a situation where the need for achievement leads to an "over-valued idea" about doing perfect work and creates problems with perfectionism. Anxiety and concern about mistakes distinguishes perfectionism from healthy effort and desire for excellence. Because perfectionism refuses to compassionately admit to human limits, it continually undermines self esteem.

Highly Sensitive People - Do You Have to Be Uninhibited to Be Creative?
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Psychological researchers Carson, Peterson and Higgins have researched the idea that creative individuals are less able to screen out unwanted stimuli. They refer to an ability called Latent Inhibition (LI) which is the brains ability "to screen out of attentional focus, stimuli that have previously been found to be irrelevant." Other researchers studying creative process have discovered that creative individuals tend not to "screen out" irrelevant details and do not "pre-categorize" stimuli as automatically or rigidly as non-creative individuals. Since creative thinking is dependent on the ability to recombine elements in original ways, it is easy to see that having more elements available would tend to be advantageous in creative processing.

Grad School Burnout - Mild Or Severe Depression, Anxiety and Stress Symptoms in Graduate Students
[Health-and-Fitness:Depression] The world needs the passion and enthusiasm of those individuals who are willing to push forward into the highest levels of knowledge in their domains, to broaden and deepen what we think and know. It is a loss to us all if students burn out or drop out in despair after such significant investments in their studies. Psychological and emotional exhaustion may create,depression, loss of pleasure in interpersonal relationships and diminished self worth which need to be addressed so that the student can finish his or her program.

Highly Sensitive Persons - High Sensitivity and Creative Ability
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] Sensitivity to Stimulation: A temperamental connection has been observed between between high Sensitivity and creativity. Individuals may manifest extreme sensitivity to stimulation, or psychic over-excitabilities, in any of five areas: intellectual, psychomotor, imaginational, emotional, or sensual.

Highly Sensitive People and "Being Psychic" - HSP Not ESP-Reading Non-Verbal Signals
[Health-and-Fitness:Anxiety] Many HSP's wonder if they are "psychic"? Highly sensitive individuals are also highly sensitive to the nuances of interpersonal signal and response, but they may not be consciously aware of the degree to which they are reading and responding to their partner's non-verbal communications. They know that they get "feelings" about places, things and especially people and like everyone they are alert to possible signs of interpersonal strain. HSP's are sensitive readers of non-verbal signals and with a little conscious understanding and skill they may be uniquely situated to translate this nuanced understanding into better, deeper, relationships with those around them.

Synchronicity and Statistics - Connections, Causality and Meaning-Making
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Synchronicityis one of the most endlessly fascinating concepts proposed by psychological theorist Carl Jung. By "synchronicity" he meant an "acausal" connecting principle. Acausal means not logically connected in the sense that we usually imagine of one object acting on another to produce the final effect. Rational thought tends to remain insistently in the logical realm of A causes B. Once driven beyond the ability of easy causal explanation, option C, the alternative force which might be proposed to move both A and B and create all striking coincidences varies.

"Someday" Fantasies Hurt the Artist's Career
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Visual-Graphic-Arts] Dreams of "Someday" can be unproductive place-keepers which are used as a strategy to hang on to hope in a pathological way. In a life where the fantasy of "Someday" rules the present moment is devalued. The individual lives in a state of passive waiting, minimal effort and perhaps immersion in a deadening, depriving or invalidating work-milieu. Aspiring artists often accept a series of "Mc-jobs". The kind of work one is doing in the here and now is not considered important because it will be abandoned "someday."

Good Therapy - Courting Surprise
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] If we wish to experience something genuinely new we usually do not have to look farther than the things we habitually refuse. The things we refuse are as defining of the shape of our character as the things we endorse. Shame, guilt, fear and refusal close off areas of self and experience, locking them down and out of sight. For many people the therapeutic experience is a "first"; it may be the first time that they can express their thoughts and feelings in an uncritical and accepting environment where they can speak speculatively and emotionally freely. When understanding becomes the prize then shame and guilt are neutralized.ogether the therapist and the client "court surprise" and genuinely new positions become possible in life. Together the therapist and the client "court surprise" and genuinely new positions become possible in life.

Highly Sensitive People - Invisible Difference is Problematic
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] Psychologist Elaine Aron makes the point repeatedly that High Sensitivity is not a matter of having sharper vision, keener hearing or more tender skin than other people. There is nothing that can be weighed or measured on the outside of a person which will indicate to the observer that an individual is highly sensitive in Aron's terms. High sensitivity happens inside the brain. It is specifically a tendency to process sensory information in a more detailed way.

Artist's Block - Jungian Psychotherapy Explores the Meaning of Talent
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] When the psychotherapy client is an artist or performer, it is often very clear how their emotional state negatively impinges on their work. Singers lose their voices, artists and writers become "blocked", and dancers develop mysterious, hard to treat physical ailments which limit their movement. Artistic clients sometimes hesitate to seek therapy for their emotional suffering because they are afraid that they will lose their creativity if they heal emotionally. On the contrary, cognitive theory and brain science, suggest that unhappiness, anxiety and depression, shut down and limit all kinds of mental activity, narrowing the focus and limiting the range of potential ideas and behaviors. Psychodynamic therapists and their "blocked" clients will often prioritize emotional healing as a necessary part of the fully experienced life that is the source of creative freedom.

Women's Career Change - Changing Identity
[Business:Career-Advice] You have to have a sense of self in order to develop a sense of meaning and purpose. Having a sense of self means being clear about your beliefs, emotions, likes, dislikes, values, goals, etc., and believing that you have a right to express them. If you do not have a stable self, it will be difficult to create a stable and coherent professional identity. A common mistake which is made is to attempt to justify what is essentially a personal developmental choice by surrounding it with practical and "rational reasons" having to do with income, professional advancement or stability. While all these things may be aspects of what is hoped for in the long term they may become emotionally and interpersonally problematic because they can rarely be absolutely guaranteed.

Changing the The Unchangeable Past - Psychotherapy Mediates Memory
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] In therapy, we "re-view" our memories in an atmosphere of compassion, bear witness to our past and integrate feelings and events from different periods to create a new, more nuanced vision of our past. Our experience of the world is so complex, and our perceptions of what we experience are typically so limited by our previous experience and individual perspectives that most of our remembered experience is not nearly as objective as we imagine.

Jungian Psychotherapy - University For Forty-Year-Olds
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] Adults who go back to university at forty often find it an uphill battle, both in how the university culture is structured and in how their aspirations are received by their friends and families. Return to university as an older person is often a deeply meaningful act which, since it is often difficult, and physically, emotionally and financially costly, may take the place of a self-chosen "initiatory trial" which helps create the new character needed for the second half of life.

Low Self-Esteem, Therapy and Humility - Humility As an Indicator of High Self-esteem
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] The simplest dictionary definition of the term "humble" is simply "the quality of being modest or respectful." When used as a verb however, "to humble" begins to feel more sinister; "to make somebody feel less proud or convinced of his or her own importance" or, "to lower somebody in rank or importance."

Highly Sensitive People - Sounds, Smells and Sentiments
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] High sensitivity is innate. You are born with it. Infant research shows that this sensitivity seems to be present from birth. Carl Jung was apparently not far off the mark in his observation that about a quarter of his therapy patients seemed extraordinarily sensitive, both physically and emotionally. Current studies suggest that 15-20 % of all humans (and even animals) show the trait of high sensitivity and that it is equally divided between men and women. This non-trivial rate of appearance in the population suggests that it offered an evolutionary advantage. Individuals who are sensitive or reactive will "look before they leap" and survive to reproduce. High sensitivity is related to introversion, somatic symptoms, and empathy. It sometimes creates problems in interpersonal relationships.

Synchronicity - Not Coincidence But "Meaning-Making"
[Reference-and-Education:Psychology] Carl Jung observed that we seem to experience "meaningful coincidences" of thoughts and events which do not seem to be causally connected. He called these experiences "Synchronicity." Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive theorists now propose that unconscious processes evolved as a normal and necessary mental adjunct which compensates and extends rational thought by automatizing many parts of thinking and releasing attentional resources for logical and conscious processing. Experiences of "synchronicity" occur when we are willing to be consciously attentive and reflective about the connections that our unconscious proposes to us.

Women's Career Change - Mid-Life Passage
[Business:Career-Advice] The different life trajectories experienced by men and women especially around the physical and emotional demands of child rearing, mean that men and women often experience the arrival of mid-life in contrasting ways.Re-evaluation of values at mid-life creates a new or revised self-concept which may produce a disparity between employment and personal aspirations which did not exist previously but it seems that the personal demand for self-actualization which arises at mid-life for women still does not sit easily with us.

Jungian Psychotherapy - We All Walk in Shoes Too Small
[Health-and-Fitness:Mental-Health] A Jungian approach to therapy combines the best current scientific psychological knowledge about human behavior and thinking habits and interweaves it with a respectful appreciation of philosophical and spiritual wisdom. Compassion, non-judgmental attention and empathy create a therapeutic environment where, curiosity, self-revelation and self-exploration are safe and supported and where self-understanding can grow.