Embracing the Dark Side

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

by Jenna Baddeley

Hate to Exercise?

Exercise can be hard, physically uncomfortable work. This is, of course, painfully true if you are just starting an exercise program after years of being sedentary. But it is at least as true if you are among the craziest of exercise enthusiasts, the kind who run marathons and lift very heavy weights. So why do some people love their exercise and others hate it? Read More

Making Good New Year's Resolutions for 2012

Among the top new years resolutions are resolutions about weight loss, exercise, smoking cessation, and debt reduction. After six months, only about half of resolution-makers are still on track to meet their goals. Is it really any wonder why? Read More

Psychologists and their mental illnesses

Marsha Linehan's disclosure of her mental illness is an inspiration for psychologists. Read More

Peer review: The good, the bad, and the ugly

The peer review system is a major way of establishing credibility and quality of scientific research articles. On balance, peer review undoubtedly improves the quality of research articles - and perhaps of research projects as well. However, there are a number of problems with the way that the system currently works that make it less constructive and it could be. Read More

The Bachelor: Redemption through a marriage proposal?

The Bachelor. Every season, a single man - the star of the show - is supposed to end the season by proposing to one woman from around 30 attractive singles who are competing for his attentions. Read More

On the "irrationality" of women (and men)

Among the more egregious examples of modern sexism is the notion that women are irrational. Apparently this notion is still commonly-enough held to be stated and debated across the internet. Read More

Thank you, anger

As the title of a popular book suggests, a lot of people misunderstand anger. Certainly, a lot of people have a lot of problems with anger. Many of the problems that people have with anger are basically about not liking to feel angry. Feeling angry can make people feel guilty, anxious, or even just more angry. But anger may be our ally more than many of us realize. Read More

Speaking of grief: Tips for grievers, friends and family on talking about loss.

Mourning traditions around the world, from Hindu traditions to Jewish and Christian traditions, provide structured time for mourners to lament their losses in the presence of supportive friends and family. In all cultures, too, there is a statute of limitations on the expression of grief. Weeks or months after a loss, grievers are expected to have rejoined ordinary life. Read More

What do women want? Hint: it isn't Prince Valiant.

Renowned relationships and marriage researcher John Gottman has found that one of the characteristics of successful husbands - husbands whose marriages are long and happy - is that they accept their wives' influence. This means honoring their wives' opinions, ideas, plans, dreams. Read More

The Therapists of Christmas Past, Present, and Future

Scrooge is often taken as a symbol of miserliness, but more primary is his self-imposed isolation and disconnection from other humans. Helping people soften their self-imposed barriers to connection is one of the ends to which therapy is best suited. In n the course of one long night before Christmas, Scrooge is fortunate enough to receive the equivalent of years of therapy - delivered by one ghost and three spirits. Read More

The Law of Attraction: Science, Faith, and the Cult of Positive Thought. Part 1.

The law of attraction offers a simple solution to all of life's problems. In the process, it promises us the idealized infancy we never had. Read More

Fort Hood: Living with loss

The Fort Hood community has suffered well-publicized losses in the recent shooting that left thirteen people dead. What is perhaps less obvious is that most members of that community live with unpublicized life-altering losses, both threatened and actual, every day. Read More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. As I have pointed out in previous postings, though, the problem with our almost reflexive preference for happiness is that we ignore, disown, and deride suffering and people who suffer. Read More

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

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

Psychological disorders that avoid social pain

Recent research in psychology shows that the social pain of rejection and ostracism is longer-lived than physical pain. Might it not be nice to have a psychological disorder that allows one to avoid the negative emotions associated with bearing social pain (sadness, anger) or causing social pain to others (guilt, shame)? Read More

Singlehood: A Normative Discontent?

Single adults are a growing demographic as people now marry later and divorce more frequently than in previous times. Women owe it to the feminist movement that we now have more freedom to make choices in our love lives, including the choice to remain single. Read More

Depression and its metaphors

Depression is commonly referred to as the "common cold" of mental illness. This metaphor refers to high prevalence of depression, and given depression's especially high prevalence among people seeking help from primary care physicians (10% or more of primary care patients are depressed), it makes sense that it would look quite mundane to doctors. Read More

The medical view of depression: good for patients, or just for doctors?

It is popular these days to explain depression as a medical problem caused by chemistry: an imbalance of serotonin and other neurotransmitters. Many mental health care providers favor this explanation of depression's causes, supposedly because it destigmatizes the illness and shifts blame away from the patient. Read More

Unfashionable Advice to the Bereaved

Bereaved people carry a double burden: the pain of loss, and the pain and awkwardness of living in sadness among people who almost invariably would prefer not to hear about it. Bereaved people are acutely sensitive to others’ anxiety and avoidance and discomfort around their suffering. Many choose to remain silent rather than to disturb others. Read More

Give negative emotions a place at the table

In the eponymous fairytale, Sleeping Beauty's parents throw a joyous party to celebrate her long-awaited birth. They only have twelve place settings, so they invite twelve of the kingdom's thirteen wise women. The thirteenth wise woman, who is ill-tempered and lives in a remote corner of the kingdom, is not invited to the party. The way that the parents treated the thirteenth sister is the way many of us treat sadness and other negative emotions. Read More

The pursuit of happiness and its dark side

Mainstream American culture has a real thing for happiness. We believe happiness to be the most important goal of human life. We also believe that people (at least those who are strong, self-reliant, hard-working, and virtuous enough) can achieve happiness if they pursue it. Unfortunately, our beliefs in the importance and achievability of happiness result in dysfunctional beliefs about the meaning of unhappiness. Read More