When people talk about pain, we usually picture damaged tissue: a pulled muscle, an inflamed joint, something “wrong” in the body. But much of the pain that shows up in everyday life—diffuse aches, flu-like soreness, that heavy, leaden feeling—is not primarily about tissue damage. Instead, it reflects how the nervous system is calibrating threat and …
Continue reading Norepinephrine, Pain, and the Overprotective Nervous System
Every day, we make countless decisions. For most people, these choices follow a predictable pattern: consider options, weigh outcomes, choose, and move forward. But for minds with ADHD, decision-making operates as a fundamentally different process that deserves understanding rather than impatience. What appears as hesitation or procrastination frequently represents something far more complex—a recursive engagement …
Continue reading The Hidden Depth of ADHD Decision-Making: When Every Choice Carries Infinite Weight
Weather and climate significantly influence our daily lives, affecting everything from our physical activities to our mental health. For individuals with Bipolar Disorder (BD), the impact of these environmental factors can be particularly profound. This writing surveys the intricate relationship between weather, climate, and BD, exploring how these elements can influence mood, cognitive functions, and …
Continue reading The Intersection of Weather and Mental Health: Bipolar Disorder and Climate
In the realm of personality psychology, Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types offers profound insights into how individuals develop and use their cognitive functions. Whether we lean toward sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, these functions exist within us from birth and shape how we process the world. However, developing these functions is a lifelong …
Continue reading The Spiral of Growth: Exploring Jung’s Theory of Type Development
A double bind is a paradoxical situation that arises within the context of interpersonal communication. This double bind situation involves one of the individuals receiving conflicting messages on different levels of communication. Moreover, regardless of the individual's response to the message, the result is some form of punishment. In their paper "Toward a Theory of …
So much of life is reflecting on whether something is still serving you or not. For example, habits and mental shortcuts (heuristics) are necessary to navigate daily life. These habitual behaviors help to free energy or reduce the energetic cost required from interacting with one’s environment. However, this reliance on habitual modes of operating …
Continue reading The Role of Habits and Energy in Everyday Life
In the current phase of human civilization and development, rationalism and science appear to reign as the supreme authorities in matters of what is deemed real or true. As Carl Jung writes in Psychology and Religion: West and East, “a scientific theory that simplifies matters is a very good means of defense because of the …
Continue reading Attitudes, Experience, and the Role of the Unconscious
Assign me my fate, and I won't hesitate. Pause for a moment and do a brief retake. Distort the original, and the copies die at a slow rate. Line me up at the starting line, and I will run the race. Start me in the blocks, and I will write the page. Transmute me into …
Working as a mental health professional is taxing on the individual. Some recent studies have shown that 78% of psychiatrists and more than 50% of psychotherapists reported work-related burnout, according to self-reports (Summers et al., 2020; Olazagasti et al., 2021) As a psychotherapist myself, I can speak to the reality of this experience; however, I …
Continue reading Being a Psychotherapist: The Role of Transference
A Two Sided Truth 