Embracing the Dark Side

Discerning the positive aspects of sadness, bereavement, and other negative feelings.

Jenna Baddeley is working on a Ph.D. in social/personality and clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. See full bio

November 5, 2009

Relationship break-ups: truths, distortions, and negative emotions

Breakups raise primal negative feelings: guilt, sadness, anger, and fear. When people try to manage these bad emotions, they try to figure out what caused them, and often - erroneously - they blame themselves or their partner. Read More

August 21, 2009

Everything I Need to Know, I Learned from Improv

Improv provides valuable counter-conditioning to help people face life's pressures. Here are some of the lessons every improvisor is taught, and every person should know. Read More

August 11, 2009

Junk Mail: A Mental Health Hazard?

Junk mail. I love to hate it. Responsible for the harvesting of lots of trees each year and the contribution of lots of junk to our landfills, it's a hazard to the nation's environmental health. It's also a hazard to our collective mental health. With traffic jams, computer glitches, and other daily hassles, we have enough daily stressors to keep us on our toes. Read More

August 4, 2009

Self-esteem: a zero-sum game?

A. H. Maslow took self-esteem as synonymous with (self-perceived) dominance. If you believe that self-esteem is basically the same thing as dominance, you would have to agree that it would be just as impossible for everyone to have high self-esteem just as it would be for everyone to have social dominance. Read More

June 27, 2009

How to help a depressed friend (and when to stop trying): part 2

Depressed people can be acutely hopeless and hard to console, making friendships difficult. Below are some of my thoughts about what friends can do for a depressed person and how friends can maintain appropriate friendship boundaries with the depressed person in their lives. Read More

May 16, 2009

How to help a depressed friend (and when to stop trying): part 1

It is perfectly apparent to us that our depressed friend's life isn't completely hopeless, but when we try to tell him that he has reasons for hope, he feels invalidated and frustrated. Is it possible for both him and us to feel heard? Read More

May 4, 2009

Valentines from the ones who’ve hurt us: a matter of pain or hope?

A single woman in her mid to late thirties has always cherished the goals of being a wife and mother. Her first date in ten years virtually stopped communicating with her, but sent her a valentines card, which brought her renewed pain, but also hope. Read More

March 15, 2009

Is optimism cheap?

I have long believed that our optimistic spirit is one of the best things we Americans have going for us. In the midst of hard times, we are able to sustain the belief that things will be better again one day. Read More

March 12, 2009

The laziness myth

Human beings have a deep-seated need to grow and learn throughout their lives. Meaningful work fulfills that basic need to learn and grow. Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers discusses the characteristics of meaningful work: it is complex, it offers autonomy, and there is a relationship between effort and reward. Read More

February 24, 2009

Panhandling for redemption

A man approached me on a recent evening as I was getting into my car. He told me a variation on a familiar story: he had run out of gas and had with him neither money nor a credit card. His car was a couple blocks away, and his wife and kids were waiting for him there. They were all waiting take his wife's broken laptop to a store a couple miles away where they could get it fixed. Read More

Self-Help Basics

Most of us have things about ourselves we wish we could improve. Lasting change is difficult—many of our habits are deeply ingrained, and certain aspects of ourselves, such as core personality attributes, may be immutable. But many more things can be changed.

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