Probably the first thing that comes to mind when I consider what I have learned by experience (rather than formal education) is that the majority of people’s suffering is due to what I informally call “secondary effects.” Secondary effects are thoughts and emotions about your thoughts and emotions, and for some reason they seem far more devastating than the original thought or feeling. Let’s take an example. You went through a divorce a few months ago, and are just now thinki

A colleague of mine often talks about psychology’s “physics envy,” by which he means an insistence in the field of psychology to be a science. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find another field that rests so uneasily on the fence between a soft and hard subject. For example, if somebody tells you they are a psychologist, you have no idea whether they spend most of their time conducting research in a university, or providing therapy in a private practice. Graduate student

In last week’s post, I introduced the idea that our culture discounts the emotional side of life in comparison to the intellectual, logical, or rational. This may be particularly true of people who have been educated in this way. My own education, for example, acted as if the emotional side of life did not have a place in the classroom, giving me the implicit message that it was not as “real” or “legitimate” as the intellectual side. It confused me, then, to realize that ever