Happy New Year readers!
It’s been quite a while between posts. I’m sorry if you’ve been hanging out for your weekly/fortnightly hit of blog. I’ve recently moved practice location and spent some time on holidays, so I feel a break from writing was justified.
Now I’m back in the saddle, it’s time to resume a venerable tradition that I started last year: rating my own blog posts and listing the favourites.
Back pre-Covid, I thought that it would be a fun activity to read and review my creative writing. Little did I realise how much of a drag it would be. You know when you stare a document or spreadsheet long enough it starts to lose all sense and meaning? Well, that’s what happened to me last year reading all those posts. It turned into quite a painful and boring experience.
So, instead of subjecting myself to another lengthy reread, I thought I’d rate only my favourite posts of the different article series. Since starting the blog, I have had five series: Maladaptive Schemas and coping styles, Anti-fragile, Most common disorders in Australia, Covid-19 and Thinking Traps.
Best of Maladaptive Schemas and Coping: Surrender Coping
This article is on the strangest of the three schema coping styles: surrender. Surrender is living out a negative schema (a schema is like a negative self-belief), and acting as if it is real. The article draws a parallel between the freezing of a hunted deer, submitting to a powerful other and the surrender response.
Best of Antifragile: Break don’t Bend
I’d been wanting to write an article on suicide and former defence members for a while. The longer I work as a psychologist the more I come to the conclusion that many mental health issues are related to difficulties with change, especially externally derived change. This post talks about the importance of being in control of altering your identity when life circumstances change.
Best of most common disorders: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
This is first in the series on most common disorders. It’s a more poetic than my other articles in this series. I focussed on the dramatic tension in PTSD between remembering and forgetting. So many of the disorders that I encounter relate somehow to traumas (often small t traumas that occur in childhood). PTSD is generally more violent and severe than other trauma-based disorders and problems.
Best of Covid-19: Fighting Virus with Virtue
It is no exaggeration to say that Covid-19 has affected everybody. In the mental health system, we saw a large increase in people seeking help. This series started early during the pandemic and writing these articles was a way that I coped with the changes.
This article was my understanding the right way for me to act in the face of this generation-defining event. I reread it today for the first time in 9 months and I think it stands up pretty well even now.
May 2021 see the end of this vicious virus.
Thinking Traps: Mental Filter
OK, so this one wasn’t written in 2020, but then again, the thinking traps series had finished before the start of the year. Psychotherapy often works by changing perspective. We all have our own perspectives, largely shaped by our experiences. It can be powerful to recognise that things we thought were objective and unchanging are really just our mental filters.
The rest of 2020: Eternal Recurrence
How should we face suffering in life? Some traditions say that we should accept that life is suffering. Heavy hardships must be radically accepted, in this view. Nietzsche went even further: we should wish to live out our suffering again and again, and to do this would be to live a truly healthy life. I compare Nietzsche’s perspective with a schema therapy approach, which sometimes treats trauma by re-imagining it in a more positive way.
So, that’s my list for 2020. Looking at the list, it seems that I enjoy writing about trauma(?!). If you haven’t checked out many of my blog articles, the ones on the list might be a good place to start. For those regular readers, I hope you continue to enjoy and find value in this blog.