What Is an Emotion?
We’ve all lived with emotions for so long that we take it for granted that we know what they are — but do we? We may think they simply happen in out bodies and are beyond our control. They may seem to be entirely self-generated — just something that arises, unbidden. But are they, really? We may think of emotions as identical to feelings, and indeed, we often use the two words interchangeably. But are feelings and emotions exactly the same? And what is the role of sensations in the arising of feelings? Or of emotions? The best description I’ve seen is this one....
Read MoreHow to Discern Your Patterns
When you first discovered the book, The 5 Personality Patterns, your first question was probably, Which one am I? So what did you do? Probably you downloaded the pdf of the personality traits of each pattern. Or you searched the big chart in the book that shows the attributes of each pattern. Or you took the time to read the chapter describing each of them. And as you read through each one, you compared it to your own experience of yourself, looking for a match. Approaching the problem this way is natural, but it’s based on the idea that this is a set of types, on thinking of the types...
Read MoreDis-identifying from the Inner Critic
Inside each of us, there is a voice that criticizes us whenever we do something wrong. This voice is called the inner critic, and it is an amalgamation of all the commands we heard as a child to “Be good,” “Tell the truth,” “Stand up straight,” “Don’t hit your brother,” “Don’t draw on the walls,” “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” “Don’t run with scissors,” “Don’t talk back,”etc., etc., etc. Every time Mom, Dad, or whoever had power over us instructed us on what to do or not do, our little brain recorded it. Over time, we built up a library of their voices and mixed them together into one...
Read MoreDeveloping a Felt Sense of Self
© 2017 Steven Kessler, MFT Often in therapy, we see clients who are unsure how they feel inside and what they want. They may be experts at knowing what others expect of them and who others want them to be, but they stumble when asked what they themselves want. Similarly, they may be fragile and unable to tolerate conflict or strong emotions in anyone around them. These clients are not stupid or weak. The problem is that they have not yet developed a felt sense of self, a felt sense of the core of their own body that gives them an internal experience of strength and support and that they can...
Read MoreThe 6 Levels of Relationship
How do you know when you’re in love? How do you even know when you’re in a “Relationship?” How is a capital R “Relationship” different from all the other “relationships” of life? Let’s start by looking at relationships in general: friends, lovers, acquaintances. If we put these on a spectrum according to the amount of emotional investment in the relationship, we discover that they fall into six fairly discrete groups, the six levels of relationship*. 1. Acquaintanceship Acquaintances are the people that we don’t really know; we just...
Read MoreOur # 1 Mistake in Relating to Others
Our biggest mistake when relating to others is right there in front of our eyes, yet we’re blind to it. Why? Because we have experienced the world in only one way, that is, our own way. We have never experienced the world in the many different ways that others experience it. So we assume something that is wrong: We assume that everyone else experiences the world the same way we do. It is natural for us to assume this, and it’s normal, in the sense that everyone does it. But it is fundamentally wrong. And it causes big problems in communication, because when someone describes what...
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