There can be a number of reasons why a person can’t grieve well. Many people are emotionally repressed and they can’t break through that repression. A feeling that should be poignant – tragic or sweet – remains dull, stifled, dissociated. Another reason for poor grieving is that the expression of dear feelings – what the griever wants to feel – is sabotaged because those feelings are chemically tied to negative (even angry or hateful) feelings that are more hidden and that the person would rather not feel. The negative taboo feelings hold them all under water. Another reason for abo ..read more

This article is a divertimento about book formatter Word-2-Kindle’s endless chain of snafus perpetrated in the interior production of my book, “I Forgive” and Other Delusions. This post would be twenty to thirty inches long were I to catalog all the indicators of ignorance presented to me by W2K over the past several months. To simplify, following is my most recent email to Nick, principal or assigned torturer of the company. ?         ?      ?   ?   ?      ?         ? Nick – It’s a fail. And ..read more

This is to express my quiet appreciation and louder bemusement to the people of Singapore who have been clicking on this blog three hundred to four hundred-plus times each day for a while now. (Google Blogger provides stats per country.) I don’t know what it’s about as, per usual, no one ever – and I mean evvverrrr, sends me comments about my articles. The mass click appears to happen during my bedtime, which is awake time in Singapore. My guess, which is wishful thinking, is that these are Psychology classes (with brilliant professors) that have grasped the iconoclastic and food-for-tho ..read more

A 43-year-old client says that he has found a way to “defuse” conflicts with his wife. He’ll say: “I see what you’re trying to do. I’m just going to step away.” His ten-year-old daughter is distracted when he is trying to teach her math that she didn’t grasp in school. He believes there should be “consequences for her being disengaged.” A 54-year-old client states that he accommodates his mother’s self-centeredness because he wants to be “a good son.” He can’t bring himself to criticize or get angry with his torturously mentally abusive father because “he’s not here to def ..read more

My book is now in paperback form. (The Kindle ebook has been out in the world for a couple months.) I had tremendous difficulty with the professional formatter. The simplified reason is that I paid $149 to Word2Kindle instead of the $1,200 that Wordzworth Books asked. I’m a retired typographer and know that a book that’s already ninety-eight percent meticulously formatted at Microsoft Word (for MacBook Air) should not need a thousand dollars-worth of finishing touches.   A consequence, though, is that I uploaded the paperback to Amazon from a state of exhaustion not confidence, and I can ..read more

I’ve encountered many, many people who do not know what it means to understand themselves. They believe that if they have a feeling as a reaction to something that happens, or as companion to a thought or a belief, that feeling is “who they are” and has no deeper cause or reason. The feeling says what it is and all that it is.   This error is understandable by the nature of feeling. It seems like identity. But if we cry at a happy moment, or rage at a tangled computer cord or a slow driver, or get anxious if our fourth-grader brings home a “C,” we should wonder who we really are.   ..read more

A comment to a recent George Will article in The Washington Post. What a silly George he is. I told a Trump-defending client the following: If Biden, the sane and relatively normal guy, manipulated the economy in such a way that I ended up with a dollar profit, and Adolf Hitler manipulated the economy in such a way that I ended up with two dollars in my pocket, I'd still opt for Biden. Psychopaths aren't a good bet, regardless of the extra dollar or the advantageous policy. Anyone who claims to prefer Trump over Biden because of this or that policy is really saying that he prefers a narcissis ..read more

People who can’t accept a compliment, or feel a strange badness inside when they receive a compliment. People who feel they “don’t deserve to be happy.” A man I know who feels unworthy of his spouse’s affection. People who feel anxious or depressed when they reach a pinnacle, a success, who feel not pleasure or pride in it but rather a dull bad feeling that leads them to say “no big deal – it’s what a person’s supposed to do.” People, maybe mostly women, who reject a caring, “boring” man and are attracted to the “bad boy.” People who self-sabotage (fail, drop out) right before they would have ..read more

I was about to ask and write about this question: What happens to a person who never learned morality from a religion or from parents, who never fell in with a group or cohort or gang with their convictions and moods, who grew up with no guidance? I was about to say that was me. At temple and Sunday school, I never listened to lessons or felt anything but a fearful pressure of alienation and overwhelm. My parents neither said nor explicitly showed anything about “good,” decency or kindness. And I had no childhood friends or teenage friends whose closeness imbued me with their philosophy of li ..read more

My heritage is Judaism,* and even though I don’t feel Jewish, I realize I don’t feel not Jewish. The chemistry of feelings must be that complicated. There are different sensations in the mix. When I think of Jews, my knee-jerk association is “good,” as in they are good and moral people, probably superiorly moral. This is doubtless an atavistic feeling from my early childhood where I learned the Jews are the “chosen people.” That’s a notion that is laughable to me, but no more laughable than so many other religious conceits in all the other religions I know something about. There’s a ..read more