Therapy creates a situation in which someone by definition in distress or wanting to change meets a professional who says they have the knowledge and skills to help the other, and thus charges money for a service, which is extremely hard to define. The power differential is built in and the potential for abuse is great.

If we neglect our needs, whether they are for playing sports, or musical instruments, for love, social contact, making things, whatever they may be, the longer we leave them the harder it becomes to break some internal barrier that our organism erects and start fulfilling them again.

It seems obvious, as a main issue in ADHD is an inability to pay attention, that an attention-building technique should be helpful. The problem, though, is if people with ADHD will actually be able to sit down and do it!

“Decades of studies show that people who say their health is poor are likely to die sooner than those who rate their health excellent, even after controlling for how sick people actually are.” What can this mean? It seems we are our own best sources of information…

Writing poetry can be a practice of mindful awareness — but does anyone else want to read it?

One of the Mommy-wars I referred to in a recent post is the sleep war, in which CIO (Crying It Out) advocates sing the praises of leaving a baby or young child to cry until they fall asleep, while anti-CIO mothers think that this is psychologically damaging and offer a variety of alternatives, including the ritual chanting of ‘this too shall pass’.

Something about this article rubs me up the wrong way — maybe it’s the title itself, “Master your emotions”. The cheerful, practical, common sense tone reinforces the idea that we are messy souls who need keeping in line, and who need to enforce a certain wholesome discipline for our own good. It sounds as if an adult is taking charge of a child.