David Teachout's Blog, page 12

Relationally-Directed Therapy

Change is difficult, at least so says common wisdom and the refrain of most anyone faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges. From learning a new skill and changing careers, to losing weight, change is that curious process that feels difficult at the beginning and seems to collapse under its own impetus when completed. Consider for a moment, change is only considered hard

Political Identity, Relational Loss

Political season is well and truly in full swing these days. One can barely find a cute picture of a panda online without bumping into a near-overwhelming number of memes (supportive and derogatory), quotes (false, out of context and sometimes true), and speeches (fervently pro and anti) about various candidates and the positions they likely take. Along for the ride is the “no

Emotions Support Our Thoughts

Emotions often get the short end of the stick when it comes to working through the struggles in life. They’re either portrayed as the sole problem (“I wish I wasn’t so emotional about x”) or negatively contributing to the situation (“Emotions are always getting in my way”). Even when discussing so-called “positive” emotions like love and happiness, the tendency is to

How Mood Changes Perception

Human perception intuitively seems a case of simple connection, we see reality unfiltered. “I know what I saw” is a typical reaction when confronted with information showing an image we held as being less than accurate. This is particularly prevalent when emotions are running high, the full weight of our need to be right bearing down on a single vision. Despite this,

Your God Is Not My God

Civilizational struggle is often based on the notion that one or another group doesn’t share in the other’s values and thus warfare or other forms of struggle are about one value overcoming another. This way of looking at civilizational conflict is far more about self-promotion than providing any analytical power. Values do not demand a particular action, they are identifiers for

Systems of Care: Viewing People Through an Integrated Lens

Anyone who has stepped into a meeting with a doctor can attest to a degree of heightened anxiety and wariness. What tests need to be run? What are the results? How will my family and friends react? What does this mean for my life? It’s that last question which eventually seeps into the conscious eye and becomes dominant. Whether the

Biases: A Shortcut to Limitation

We have far too many mental short-cuts, or heuristics, to be about the business of deliberating over everything we are told and faced with. We communicate and if it were pointed out that some or much of what we hear is not the whole truth most of us would shrug and explain that the whole truth simply takes too much time

Say — you want a revolution?

Originally posted on The Weekly Sift:
Changing presidents or even changing minds isn’t enough. A real revolution has to change a lot of people’s political identities. Some years ago, I was at a restaurant a couple blocks from my apartment when that cycle’s Democratic congressional candidate (Katrina Swett, which would make the year 2002) came in to campaign. It was…

Musings of a Connected Life

Whether sitting down for coffee, watching a form of media or engaging in an online discussion, the shared experience is being felt and thought about in quite different ways. My perspective of the world is both inevitable and a limitation. There are innumerable other possible lenses for viewing my experiences through, an observation born out each and every time I

Perspective Guides Life’s Possibility

“There is really, then, no limitation outside our own ignorance, and since we all can conceive a greater good than we have so far experienced, we all have within our own minds the ability to transcend previous experiences and rise triumphant over them…” (Ernest Holmes, from “Can We Talk To God?”) More is more, so says the hobgoblin of the American