Applying Psychology to the Wider World

Philosophy, Psychology and Our Place in the World

When I studied philosophy — what many people might consider to be a quintessentially ‘ivory tower’, divorced-from-reality sort of discipline — I quickly realized that my relationship with different areas of the subject ranges from one of passionate engagement to one of sheer boredom. What distinguishes the two extremes is really simple: if a topic makes a difference to how I think or feel about myself, the world around me, or my place in the world, then I’m fully engaged; but if it doesn’t make a difference, if understanding a topic doesn’t change how I understand the universe, then I’m bored. It’s those areas which really have something to say about the larger world around us, those areas which really connect up with something beyond the books and the abstractions, that excite me the most.

I find something similar rings true in the fields of therapy and counselling and psychology. The theoretical models and the specific therapeutic approaches which attract me the most are those which not only prove helpful in the consulting room (or the online therapy practice, as the case may be), but which also resonate with my own experience and inform my perspective on the larger world. The more time I spend working in the area, the more I realize that it can have something to say about the broader world, that it can offer new ways of making sense of what we find in the world and in ourselves. Or, rather, it prompts me to have things to say and to make sense of the world in new ways, because it prompts me to think and reflect in ways that I otherwise might not.

The short articles in this section of the site offer a few of these reflections which have been motivated by ideas or models from therapy, counselling or psychology. While they may or may not encourage anyone else to try and make sense of the world in anything like the ways that I have, I hope at the least they might provoke an extra thought or question that might add to your own process of making sense of things.

Disclaimer

Each short feature or blog entry here represents my own personal reflections, informed by psychological or therapeutic theory; nothing here is intended as an authoritative assessment of cause or effect or of psychological attribution according to any particular body of theory or research. They are not scholarly, for the most part they are not buttressed with citations, and they are not meant to be taken any more seriously than the thoughts or ideas they might prompt.

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