One of the tedious aspects of having problems with our minds is that we need to take more of an interest in how they work than untroubled people do: we have to become mind mechanics because something is hurting inside. A particularly noxious problem that afflicts many of us is…
Some the reason why we are far more fearful, inhibited and sad than we should be is that we are – unbeknownst to ourselves – wandering through our lives with a…
The fundamental idea behind psychotherapy is that we tend to grow mentally unwell because we haven’t been able to think with sufficient clarity about the difficulties in our past, typically in…
It may sound strange to locate the problem here, but some of our most despairing moods are caused by failures of the imagination. We are not merely ‘sad’; we cannot picture…
A basic distinction in humans is between those who are simple and straightforward to deal with – and those who are – as we tend to be reminded when we interact…
We almost all have a character inside our minds whom we might call the inner critic. It tends to pay its visits late at night, it waits until we’re very tired…
It’s peculiar to think that there might be a word like ‘misanthropy’ in our language: ‘a dislike of humankind.’ For a phenomenon to become a word, it needs a sufficient number…