Psychology Tomorrow Blog

  • Glenn Campbell - The Case against Marriage: Loneliness and Engulfment Once you start falling in love, the big question is, where do you stop? No one wants to be lonely. It can be terrible to think no one cares about you, understands you or needs you. When the opportunity for love comes along, you may dive in. ...
  • Rev. Sheri Heller, LCSW - Meaning and Suffering My experiences as a psychotherapist and spiritual counselor have made it evident to me that we all seek to discern a deeper meaning in our human existence by connecting with a higher spiritual sense of life, on personal and collective levels. There are universal questions and concerns that invariably emerge for all of us. Who ...
  • Ada Rios-Rivera, PhD - What Is “Deriving” Our Worth? “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” ~ Zen proverb Anyone who knows as much or as little as I do about the world of finance has probably heard of derivatives. And anyone who’s ever heard an explanation of what derivatives are has been as confused as I have. But that’s part of the ...
  • Adam Neal - Latent Psi Inhibition: Achtung, Baby! “Achtung, Baby!” proclaimed U2 back in 1991 – ATTENTION! Well, the German word – “Achtung” – has many contextual meanings, including “Respect” and “Esteem.” So perhaps they didn’t mean it as “ATTENTION,” but since I do, let’s stick with the first part — ATTENTION! We’re walking through a crowded shopping mall and we spot a yellow sign warning ...
  • Nick Astraeus - Escape from God’s Subconscious It is fogged and the sea is black. Large stinking rip curls give off brown foam. Dead kelp is strewn across the beach in patches, and tiny flies cloud the rot. The gulls are swarming; they nosedive for fish; it is a feast beyond the break. An ominous fin slices through the sloshing stink. This world ...
  • Jennifer Bullock, LPC - Drama Therapy Beats Teenage Resistance: Yes, And? I discovered something in my teen therapy group recently: teens are not great at working together as team. This was somewhat surprising to me, and kind of surprising that I was surprised. I thought that because teens are so peer-group focused, that they would have slight advantage of working together in a group context. I ...
  • Dr. Joseph Valks - Psychology, Art and African Voodoo Where exactly is the dividing line between fantasy and reality? Reality can influence fantasy and fantasy may sometimes influence reality. At times fantasy can be beneficial and at others, as in the case of some mental illnesses, it may be detrimental. No two realities are ever exactly the same. What is one person’s reality may ...
  • Psychology Tomorrow: The Backstory I’m Stanley Siegel, a psychotherpaist in New York City, where I’ve practiced for nearly forty years. I’ve published many books over the course of my long career. I’ve appeared on Good Morning America several time, and the Oprah Winfrey show, as well as many others, and I was the psychology columnist for Newsday. I was, ...
  • Adam Neal - The Paranormal Closet If experiencing the paranormal is strange, and what is strange is queer, is the paranormal queer? By any logic, yes. Yes, it is. Strange and queer are synonymous, are they not? If the impulse to express oneself as queer is unexplained, and the paranormal is also unexplained, doesn’t it follow then that queer people are unexplained? The answer ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - Woman To Woman I am going to admit something here that I am not proud of. My feelings about other women over my lifespan have not always been positive. In fact I would even go further to say that they have often been negative. And it’s only been in the past two years that this has changed rather ...
  • Lindsey Walker, LMFTA - The Long Tale of Trauma We share the shapes of those who come before us, our ancestors. Our form mimics their form: our heads, hearts and limbs. Made new, in our generation, we present the world and ourselves with a unique opportunity to heal. Tall, strong, soft or thin, our shapes hold much more than meets eye. Tucked in the crannies ...
  • Zoe Greenberg - Poets Farm the City, Two Houses: Two Poems Poets Farm the City: Poets farm the city for love. Till the soil of a white page dig out the brilliant colors still flowering in our dry spirits We’re so afraid of the dark we lit a million sizzling torches and we grind our teeth beneath them all night, all night, all night. Poets know we’re mostly darkness that the soul remains invisible, inside and only ...
  • Pallavi Tomar, M.Phil - The Therapist in My Canvas Sometimes words fail us. The intensity of certain emotions, the rawness of certain experiences and the profundity of certain thoughts touch those aspects of our being that lie beyond the realms of expression in words. Certain situations are so intense and deep seated that it becomes difficult to simply explain them. They are to be felt, ...
  • Glenn Cambell - The Case against Marriage: An Introduction An except from Glenn Cambell’s Non-Fiction Book The Case against Marriage. You are probably not going to listen to me, but I am going to give it a shot anyway. You have been considering marriage, and I am here to dissuade you. I’m not against love, mind you, or even against bonding for life if that’s the ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli, PhD - Our Internal World: And How It Is Populated “Anomalies” by Julie Favreau Most of us are used to thinking about our life and how it progresses from the outside. We look at what we have accomplished and done, our family, our friends, our work, our daily routines and interactions. We tend to think about our lives as made up of the events that happen to us ...
  • Tracy Clifford - Nobody Asked Me: Thoughts from A Stepchild I came across therapist Mary Kelly’s blog, “Nobody Asked Me: The Plight of the Reluctant Stepchild” on Huff Post Divorce, and it really struck a chord with me. In her blog, Kelly describes the main problem she sees with stepchildren in her office is that they didn’t choose their circumstances. They didn’t want their parents ...
  • Saddaf Sohail - Anti-depressants: The Problem with the Solution During my course of study I was completing an internship program in Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), where I came across many cases of behavioural and mental illnesses and patients, whose only aim to visit the doctor was to get their dose of anti-depressants or relaxants to calm themselves down until their next visit. ...
  • Magdalena Bak-Maier, Phd - Transforming: Finding and Practicing Self-Love My interest and passion sits in transformational work. The word always conjures up images of a magician doing a spell and there we have it! The new, improved, more resilient, better version of what was before. Some of my clients struggle with the word transformation. To some the word implies I’m one thing today and I’ll ...
  • Dr. Joseph Valks - Psychology, Photography and Ninja Magic Traditional ninja magic involves drawing nine lines in the form of a grid, and then drawing a symbol onto the grid. The nine lines are believed to represent nine energy structures, which once activated can help the magician empower the concept he is creating from the symbol drawn over the grid. The symbol is then ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - Understanding the Life Passages of Gay Men In 1987, while marching on Washington, D.C., with a half-million other people, I nearly collided with a woman I knew and her nine-year-old son. My partner and I and an old college friend of his from Vermont had driven down from New York to join in the first national AIDS March, designed to draw desperately needed ...
  • Ada Rios-Rivera, PhD - Romancing The Hopeless “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love ...
  • Rachel Mayo - The Shadows of Philippine Contemporary Art Two things bothered me at a recent show at a Manila gallery: the current works of an old favorite painter whose works today can be described as “blah” and the new image of this particular gallery whose reputation at one time deemed the place as “respectable” and “prestigious.” This particular gallery had been known for a ...
  • Psychology Tomorrow MeetUp NYC - Game Changer, or History Is Made at Night: Dionisios Fragias NYC Opening New Sculptures and Paintings by Dionisios Fragias MAY 9 - JUNE 20, 2013 Opening Reception Thursday, May 9, 6-8pm 547 W. 27 St. #514 New York, New York 10001 RARE Gallery is pleased to present Game Changer, or History Is Made at Night, Dionisios Fragias’ third solo show at RARE. Comprised of three-dimensional objects and wall-relief ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - To Partner or Not to Partner? I am going to come right out and say it. I am an only child. Only children get a bad wrap, in my opinion. Yes, it’s true that we like having it our way and may be a bit more reluctant to share than non-only’s. But at least some of that it counterbalanced by the ...
  • Adam Neal - Extraordinary Piece of ASS: Acquired Savant Syndrome It has been wondered, begged, and mused silently and aloud to the point of platitude: Why do bad things happen to good people? A book of the title When Bad Things Happen to Good People was written by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, who explored his fractured spiritual foundation upon the loss of his son. Kushner’s three-year-old son spent ...
  • Martha Crawford, LCSW - Autotomy and Remembering “Starfishes, which have hard spiny skeletons and five (or more) arms or limbs in a star-like arrangement, are also adept at autotomy when caught by predators.” Some people live their whole lives in one zip code. They remain near and close to their family of origin, and their extended family. They find their earliest attachments to ...
  • Suzy (Sumanasa) Daren, LMFT - Yoga Psychotherapy Non-dual, Yogic philosophy teaches us that we are all emanations of the One (Shiva, God, Consciousness, Love, Essence, Nature, etc.). This perspective has many implications for the practice of psychotherapy – let’s turn our attention to just a couple. First of all, as human beings our lives are ALL sacred, no matter how each of us ...
  • Lindsey Walker, LMFTA - Real Girl vs. False Self This girl is there. She (if she is real) was present for the photograph. The image is blurry. Blurry enough so that the spontaneity of genuine human expression is masked – we are not quite able to tell if she is really real. She could actually be a doll. Many photographers have used dolls or mannequins to communicate something ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - Daughter Div.ided: A Bi-Coastal Divorce I am a deeply divided human being. Those who have known me longest have known this best. I have grappled with this throughout my life, at times calling this way of being flexible. At others, compartmentalized. I grew up in New York City. I went to a private school and I wore a uniform. Then I ...
  • Hyman Spotnitz, M.D. - The Talking “Cure”: When Is Therapy Over? A guy walks into a therapist’s office - sadly, this is no joke - and says, “I just read a piece in The New York Times, and I’ve got some questions: What do you know about my condition? What’s your success rate with people like me? When will I get well?” (Mark O’Connell, LCSW, The Huffington ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli, PhD - On Surrendering and Letting Go What does it take to let go in our lives? To allow for loss – of a loved one, a cherished object, a known and familiar feeling or experience. How do we go about surrendering and letting go? My experience is that most of us will cling to that someone or something, refusing to let it ...
  • Zoe Greenberg - The Studio, Omega: Two Poems The last letter of the Greek alphabet, in Christianity especially it is a symbol of the end and of the perfection of the world. Tielhard de Chardin called the goal at which humanity strives for the “point Omega”. (The Herder Dictionary of Symbols) Omega: According to Daniel, Omega meant beauty. But what did beauty ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - Your Brain on Sex: An Introduction If you’re like most of us, the subject of sex makes you at least a little uneasy, if not completely uncomfortable. Sex is shrouded in so much mystery and secrecy and considered so personal that it’s a wonder we can ever have an honest conversation about it. But if we could talk freely and openly ...
  • Bethany Schneider - On Secrecy and the Writing of Time Travel Novels I’m the youngest of four children, and we were raised in a small house. There really weren’t any secrets between us, or at least none that I knew of. My father was a minister and my mother was a memoirist so… open books of all kinds. When I grew up I became an English professor, ...
  • Vamik D. Volkan, M.D. - Large-Group Identity and Post-Traumatic Flocking Paraphrasing Erik Erikson’s (1950) statement about personal identity, I use the term large-group identity to refer to a large group that shares a permanent sense of sameness while also sharing certain similar characteristics with other large groups, especially with those who are neighbors. When I think of the classical Freudian theory of large groups, I visualize ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - Empty Nesting For two months, I watched a bird build a nest on a wooden beam over the entrance of the building where I live. It’s an old building, built in 1906 as part of the “American” exhibit for the Lewis and Clark World’s Fair and moved somehow from it’s original location on the riverfront to where ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli PhD - On Seismic Activity: And the Disruption of the Self In my work as a psychoanalyst I spend much of my time in areas of experience that tend to be de-stabilizing to our sense of personal integrity and unity. I am speaking here of those times when emotion overwhelms us, disrupting our sense of being oneself and ushering in feeling states that cause a disturbance ...
  • Brian Fernandes-Halloran - Riding North to Cabo Delgado I have found that in the process of recreating my memories in the form of assemblage that I am changing my memories. Following some of the principles of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus’ “misinformation effect”, I am developing the perceptual imprint of a memory through repeatedly visiting and manipulating its new physical form. Surprisingly, secondary memories and ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - A Dangerous Method: Can Sex Restore Mental Health?   A Dangerous Method Trailer from Transmission Films on Vimeo.   The film A Dangerous Method tells the story of the complex relationship between Sigmund Freud and his much younger heir-apparent, Carl Jung, both early founders of the modern field of psychology. Freud and Jung came to represent differing schools of psychoanalytic thinking, a separation not only hastened by ...
  • Nick Astraeus - Trapped in God’s Subconscious When the sky turns a purple gradient and the lands are dominated by dark green and cones of yellow streetlight reveal a shadow cat or rat or roach in the periphery, I stumble through the same analyses of where I am and what went wrong and flex in claustrophobic agony that I wander onward in ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - Cracking the Code of Sexual Chemistry “Sexual attraction is not at all a purely physical event. The soul is always in search of whatever will complete its desire, and our physical eyes are never separate from the eyes of the soul.” (The Soul of Sex by Thomas Moore) We’ve all had the experience of seeing someone on the street or in a social setting ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - The Introvert’s Dilemma From the tone of my column (The Dance of Therapy) one might be led to believe that I am an extrovert but it isn’t so. I am a proud, card-carrying member of the introvert’s club. In fact one of the reasons that I am so passionate and forthcoming in my writing is that because in ...
  • Johan Lowie - Driven by Emotion “I start out sketching ideas and work to a particular mood, the mood of the story. In the course of the work I’m eliminating unnecessary objects, composition and capturing that mood with a simplicity of imagery.” “Johan Lowie’s work is about the world of thought, the inside world, rather than just a sensory experience. His two passions have always been art and ...
  • Ada Rios-Rivera, PhD - False Advertising: And The Post-Honeymoon Truth “Seems like everybody has a price. I wonder how they sleep at night when the sale comes first and the truth comes second.” (Jessie J. and B.O.B.) I’m a music junkie not just because a great tune can take me out of a bad mood even before the first verse is over but also because music ...
  • Ali Znaidi - Anxiety Chant: A Poem Unsettled soul, what are you singing? What are you humming? Turbulent leaves utter a sad sound, a scream when the merciless hands of the cruel wind shuffle them up— this sounds like when a little child randomly turns the pages of a newspaper, then throws it in the dustbin. Unsettled soul, what are you singing? What are you humming? The cruel wind is chasing the ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli PhD - On Monsters, Dementors and Other Magical Beings This blog is about Dementors, those magical creatures in the Harry Potter books, that suck all happiness away with a deadly kiss, leaving one empty of life and with nothing to look forward to. A fate, some would say, worse than death. If you are not familiar with the Potter books, no worries, read on, ...
  • Adam Neal - Psi of Relief: The Parapsychology of Grief In the wake of a death, sudden or expected, the grief comes upon us as instinctively as hunger. Our body endures wave after wave of pain, uncontrolled by any means of distraction or intention. It is as if our mind is clenched by an external energy, gripping tightly and forcing us into a primal focus ...
  • Filippo Biagioli - African Art’s Contemporary Rites I could talk about African art quoting names, ethnic groups, more or less known and explored zones because today, thanks to texts, witnesses, videos and photos, it seems possible, to whom may be interested in this topic, to grasp its every little nuance. The magic miracle that happens every single time, instead, is to discover that ...
  • Chuck Leddy - Divination Through the History of Dreaming After Trisha Coburn’s doctor told her she was in good health, Coburn said she had a dream (O Magazine) in which a disembodied voice told her to “look deeper.” Fearful, the 46-year-old Coburn returned to her doctor and asked him to look into the deepest part of her body: her colon. She said the skeptical doctor’s examination ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - Mind, Body: Therapy, Massage Mmmmm. I got a massage today. Afterwards I felt like positively charged mush. A massage is a luxury I treat myself to maybe three times a year. And every single time I get one I decide that I will find a way to have them more often. Every month if possible. Every few weeks I ...