psychology

Lie To Me

One of my favourite TV shows is Lie To Me. Tim Roth plays Dr Cal Lightman, an eccentric expert in deception detection who runs his own consulting business primarily assisting lawyers and prosecutors get to the truth. There’s always a story behind the story, and the trick is to work out who’s lying about it. His techniques combine reading of facial microexpressions, body language, gestures and human behaviour to discern the true emotions of everyone involved; often including his own staff.

Having learned the art of stripping away people’s facades to reveal what is really going on underneath, Dr Lightman has an arrogant edge about him, which is tempered by his paranoia and the painful dysfunctional relationships that he finds himself in. He sees through the white lies that other people spin to soften the real truth from him, and relies on his ability to cut through the protective … 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

Voice Dialogue, Self Awareness and Your Inner Child

We like to think that we’re consciously in control of everything we do, but the reality is that the emotions, beliefs and memories buried deep in our subconscious are running the show most of the time. And while the subconscious baggage we accumulate may have served a purpose in the past, sometimes it isn’t so helpful in our present day lives. Getting in touch with our subconscious to change what’s lurking down there so that it works for us rather than against us is hard because our conscious thinking gets in the way and we can end up just over-analysing ourselves.

A few years back I decided that some self-awareness was what I was missing. I just didn’t see myself as positively and as capable as I seemed to be in other people’s eyes. So I found a group working on self-awareness by doing inner child work. They used a … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago