Episodes
Aug. 2, 2022
Sadistic Partners: What the XXXX is Wrong With You?
It’s impossible to go through life without causing hurt to those people we love. We may have to do this for their own good—for instance, when we need to be firm with a child who we believe is engaged in destructive behaviours...
July 19, 2022
Are You Thinking About Suicide?
Suicide often stems from a deep feeling of hopelessness. The inability to see solutions to problems or to cope with challenging life circumstances may lead people to see taking their own lives as the only solution to what is ...
July 12, 2022
Contemplating Divorce
When your marriage is in trouble, you don't have any options without pain or sacrifice. You can divorce, separate, stay in the marriage, or get creative and change the marital rules. Each option has trade-offs. Everyone knows...
July 5, 2022
Raised Yourself
Because narcissists operate in an ‘all about me’ fashion, the world revolves around them, their needs and desires. They continue to be selfish and expect others, including their children, to cater to them. So, when their chil...
June 28, 2022
Child Rapist and Molesters Revealed
Images of child sex abuse have reached a crisis point on the internet, spreading at unprecedented rates in part because tech platforms and law enforcement agencies have failed to keep pace with the problem. But less is unders...
June 21, 2022
Is Your Relationship Healthy?
Much of my professional career has involved speaking, writing, and interpreting research about how to handle relationships that have gone wrong: partnerships that are controlling or toxic, for instance, or where trust has bee...
June 14, 2022
Responsibility: Our Lost Value
the word ‘responsibility’ and how often it gets confused with blame, which of course implies that someone or something is at fault for a given situation. And it always has a pejorative flavor to it; no one opens up their arms...
June 7, 2022
School Shooter Profile
It's hard to empathize with someone who carries out a school shooting. The brutality of their crimes is unspeakable. Whether the shootings were in Uvalde, Columbine, or Parkland, they have traumatized students and communities...
May 31, 2022
Fear of Failure
Rejection is a bitter pill to swallow. And most of us have had a good dose of it. Whether we didn’t get a job we applied for, weren’t admitted to our top choice college, didn’t make it to the team we tried out for, or didn’t ...
May 24, 2022
The Rise of Self Esteem
Confidence in one's value as a human being is a precious psychological resource and generally a highly positive factor in life; it is correlated with achievement, good relationships, and satisfaction. Possessing little self-r...
May 17, 2022
Anxiety: Living in Fear
Anxiety is both a mental and physical state of negative expectation. Mentally it is characterized by increased arousal and apprehension tortured into distressing worry, and physically by unpleasant activation of multiple body...
May 10, 2022
The Desperate Price of Loneliness
Though our need to connect is innate, many of us frequently feel alone. Loneliness is the state of distress or discomfort that results when one perceives a gap between one’s desires for social connection and actual experience...
May 3, 2022
The Resiliency of Wisdom
Keeping the brain engaged is key to building resilience. By seeking out new challenges and activities, people can take their resilience to the next level by developing wisdom. Wisdom is more strongly associated with life sati...
April 26, 2022
Making Confident Decisions
When making a decision, we form opinions and choose actions via mental processes which are influenced by biases, reason, emotions, and memories. The simple act of deciding supports the notion that we have free will. We weigh ...
April 19, 2022
What Happened to Common Sense?
For centuries scientists, science writers and philosophers have encouraged us to trust our common sense (Lilienfeld et al., 2010; Furnham, 1996). Common sense is a phrase that generally implies something everyone knows. One o...
April 5, 2022
Living with a Depressed Partner
There is a great deal of information available about depression. But when you live with a depressed person, it can be painfully difficult. Anti-depressants are the number-one prescribed medication in this country, but they ar...
March 29, 2022
The Effects of Childhood Abandonment
When children are raised with chronic loss, without the psychological or physical protection they need—and certainly deserve—it is most natural for them to internalize incredible fear. Not receiving the necessary psychologica...
March 22, 2022
Finding your "Soul Mate"
Relationship scientist Raymond Knee coined the terms “destiny beliefs” and “growth beliefs” to describe an individual’s general approach to seeking and maintaining romantic relationships. People with destiny beliefs assume th...
March 15, 2022
Raising Special Needs Children: Herding Squirrels
For anyone whose life revolves around caregiving, including the parents of special-needs children, there are inherent risks that can jeopardize both their own well-being and that of the people they care for. Insufficient mana...
March 8, 2022
Delusional People: Sold on Their Own Story
Delusional disorder, previously called paranoid disorder, is a type of serious mental illness — called a “psychosis”— in which a person cannot tell what is real from what is imagined. The main feature of this disorder is the ...
March 1, 2022
Living Through Dark Times
The Covid-19 pandemic led to a prolonged exposure to stress. As a consequence, researchers showed an increased interest in measuring social and community uneasiness in order to psychologically support the population. This inc...
Feb. 22, 2022
The Need for Power and Control
There is a downside to being in control when it involves trying to control other people, because other people don't want to be controlled by you any more than you want to be controlled by other people. In therapy, we often he...
Feb. 15, 2022
The Inner Child: Aggression, Tantrums and Trauma
Destructive behavior takes various forms: from subtle self-sabotage and self-defeating patterns to passive hostility to severe self-destructive symptoms, violent aggression and, sometimes, evil deeds. Commonly, destructive be...
Feb. 8, 2022
A Life of Regret
Regret is a negative emotion that occurs when a person believes his or her past actions or behaviors, if changed, may have achieved a better outcome. Regret is often closely associated with feelings of guilt and shame. We oft...