empathy

My Worst Therapy Session Ever

I’ve had a lot of therapy in my time visiting counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists, life coaches and emotional healing gurus. Most of them were helpful to some degree. If I were to have my time over again, I’d get help sooner like when I was a child and the other kids at school were bullying me or when parent’s arguments were frightening me and keeping me up at night.

I’m currently studying music performance full-time at a local secondary college and the environment feels a lot like going back to school; albeit one where the subjects are a lot more fun.

Last year I found myself getting into conflict with one of the other mature-age male students. He seemed like a decent enough guy but we started butting heads over some of his behaviour that I was finding triggering. He had some personal challenges that he complained about loudly and frequently in class which I didn’t want in my face all the time as we were there to study music. “Write songs about it and use it creatively”, I thought, “But don’t just keep coming in whining about it all the time”. I also didn’t like the way he interrupted and dominated conversations I was having with other people, or the way he back-slapped and touched me. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

The Top 10 Things That Make Me Angry

I feel like this guy some times

I feel like this guy some times

I’ve been doing a lot of work around anger lately; an emotion that I used to suppress and internalise much to my detriment. It’s not healthy to suck down your rage. Now that I’ve started to release the internal pressure cooker, things have become a little explosive and everything seems to be pissing me off.

So for your amusement, here are my Top 10 Things That Make Me Angry: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Have A Really Good Argument

When I was young, my parents used to argue… a lot. They got really good at it, because they put so much time and effort into practising. Screaming, shouting and hurling painful insults at each other was the order of the day. The more cutting the insult, the more points they scored off each other as their mutual self-esteem gradually wore lower and lower while they verbally pummelled each other into the ground.

Winning the argument was more important than anything else. They had the ability to drag a single argument out for days, weeks, months… even years! It was like being on the sidelines of one of those long and boring tennis matches that just goes on and on and on long past your bedtime, swinging from advantage server to advantage receiver depending on who had just fired the most powerful volley at their opponent. They may have started out at love all but gradually wore each other down bit by bit until they were too exhausted to play on and the match eventually got halted mid-play to be continued the next day.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

A Practical Guide to How Your Brain Works

Given that our brain is where the thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs and decisions that guide our whole life arise I think it’s helpful to have a rudimentary understanding of how it works so we can use it more effectively.

Your brain is the most complex system in the known universe. Over eighty billion massively interconnected neurons form the most complex parallel-processing biological computer imaginable, and it’s right there in your head controlling your every move. Nobody fully understands how it works, which isn’t at all surprising when you consider that we’re using our brain to try to understand itself. That’s like a computer trying to understanding itself. So I can hardly do it justice in a single article but here’s a rough guide to the features I think are most important.

Consciousness and The Mind

The mind is a function of our brain. When people talk about “the mind”, they … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Mastering Emotions at Passionately Alive

I often feel that my emotions are running my life. When it comes to happiness, joy, peace and love, that’s fine by me; but when it’s fear, sadness, anxiety, loneliness or depression, that’s not so good. We like to think that we’re in conscious control of our lives all the time, but the reality is that everything we do is driven by an emotion of one sort or another. We’re constantly either seeking the pleasant emotions or avoiding the unpleasant ones. Our emotions exist in our subconscious, so we often aren’t consciously aware of them until they pop up strongly enough to interrupt what we’re doing and make their presence felt. But they still play their role whether we acknowledge it or not; and if we ignore them, they just get louder and stronger until we start paying attention.

Our society places a premium analytical thinking and often downplays the … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago