Accepting the risk of change has been a big step in recovery: risks are hard to take because of the fear they trigger. I’m still stumbling around with the acceptance of risk – one minute eager for anything new, the next minute fearful of every change. I mentioned the analogy of prison when describing my […]
Archives for 2009
Carl Rogers: The Flow of Becoming a Person
Carl Rogers summarized what he had learned about his own process of becoming a person in an essay entitled “This is Me,” found in On Becoming a Person. This discussion helps illuminate the beliefs he gained from experience about effective change and acceptance of one’s self. He concluded that paper with a brief statement on […]
Facing My Double Again
catatonickid recently published a post about facing your double, reaching a place where nothing can be explained, a place where no choice could possibly be right. She calls that the “ideal argument for healing,” or, in the quoted words of Marie-Louise von Franz: “the beginning of the process of individuation” – the joining of the […]
Changing Belief, Discovering Purpose in a Work Life
There is a lot to explore in the idea of changing the mindset of recovery to that of finding purpose for the future. Just as I could undo the belief in my perpetual illness, I could also undo the belief that there had been little meaning or value in what I had done in the […]
Recovery, Well-Being and Purpose
It occurs to me that recovery is past, well-being is now and purpose is the future. Let me explain. Recently, I wrote about recovery as a concept I no longer wanted to apply to what I’ve been going through. The word carried a set of assumptions that kept me within an illness frame of mind. […]
What We Deserve from Life
What do I really deserve from life? That’s a question that comes up online a lot, even if it’s only implied. And the dismaying but common answer is often: not much. It always saddens me to read that, but it’s never surprising. Those of us who’ve lived with depression for a while know that the […]
