Personality disorders and mass formations
An Integral understanding of personality disorders, and how they fit into the mass formation distortions that currently seem to be happening everywhere.
Influence and discernment
We tend to respond better or worse—and be influenced more or less—by different sequences of social engagements. For example, first impressions stick, and the last interaction in a sequence more heavily defines the whole social encounter.
Thanksgiving and our ancestral voices
It’s a running gag in America that holidays generate emotional conflicts like the Caribbean generates hurricanes. Red/blue political arguments, intoxicated relatives, old family wounds exposed, social obligations grudgingly met, and on and on.
Reducing Gun Violence: Part 1 [72]
What has worked in America to reduce gun violence? If we look beyond bombast–“Longer prison terms for gun violence! Bring back the death penalty!”–and self-righteous moralizing–“More bans on buying/using/carrying guns!”–we …
Why "Therapist in the Wild"? [66]
You’ve probably seen one or two of the Therapist in the Wild episodes that my son Ethan and I are producing for our website. You might have asked yourself, “Why …
The Dalai Lama and the suffering of change, conditioning, and suffering [65]
The Dalai Lama gave a lecture at UCSB in 2009, and it was quite the occasion. He had a cold, but talked joyfully in heavily accented English to 5,000 attentive …
Approval and Disapproval Influence Us All the Time [64]
Whether we know it or not, our social existence is dominated by feeling accepted or unaccepted, OK with the world, or ashamed of some mistake, flaw, or failing. How we …
Males Inherit More Intelligence from their Mothers [63]
A lot of fathers are going to hate this, but genetic research has found guys probably get a lot of their intelligence from their X gene, the feminine one. Of …
Traditions guide and unite us: "You killed our iguana! You have to go catch us a new one!" [61]
Four to ten-year-old kids increasingly wake up to, “I’m part of a family, tribe, and nation that I care about.” Most children eventually feel morally bound to follow the rules …
Do you want to go shooting? [60]
“Do you want to go shooting?” asked Ray many years ago, while he and Judy were over for dinner. “Sure,” I said, intrigued with the idea of firing a high …
Designer babies: what's not to like? [57]
The Christian Science Monitor (6-25-12), in response to scientists for the first time mapping the DNA of a fetus, recently had a commentary questioning the ethics of “designer babies”–altering a …
Lady Gaga and American Relationship Blind Spots [39]
People often say America is a celebrity culture, but this seems unfair to me. All cultures are celebrity cultures! Humans are fascinated with extraordinary people everywhere. In the U.S. we …
Stephen Colbert, Dan Savage, and Why It’s a Bad Idea to Try to Negotiate with Biology [18]
Recently on the 7-12-11 Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert interviewed advice columnist Dan Savage about monogamy and fidelity. Dan passionately advocated that sexuality in relationships can and should be negotiated, with …
Evolutionary Relationships – Our Ability to Be Intimate GROWS as We Mature
For the last two hundred thousand years, the human race has been growing into the capacities that we received with the FOXP2 mutations, and those capacities extend beyond where any of us currently are—we don’t know the upper limits of any human developmental line, including profound intimacy.
Britney Spears, Michelle Obama, and Sarah Palin as mythic symbols and regular women [13]
Several years ago I did a one-day workshop on my book Shame: the Misunderstood Emotion for Santa Barbara Adult Education. During the presentation, I mentioned Britney Spears as a modern …
Redefining Middle Age – Baby Boomers are Purpose-Driven
Boomers are redefining middle age, and—in spite of the increased self-absorption and narcissism that our generation suffers from—middle age is becoming more purpose driven.
What if Arnold, Maria, and their kids are all telling the truth? [08]
I’ve lived in Southern California—specifically Santa Barbara—most of my life, and so feel personally connected to the icons of the area. In the seventies I led a training group at …