1) Be open to new ideas and ready to admit mistakes.
2) Give choice when possible.
3) Take time off and allow others personal time.
4) Be generous with positive feedback.
( Scientific American Mind, 2013, 24, 3, p. 18.)
Eleanor Roosevelt: You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.
it used to be thought that personality is indelible after age 30. But more recent studies have given evidence that it is malleable throughout life because it responds to life experiences, both positive and negative. For example, job satisfaction decreases neuroticism and increases extroversion. (Scientific American Mind, 2013, 24, 3, pp.8-9.) Personality’s continuing malleability is what supports change through psychotherapy.
A goal for psychotherapy is to help the client be able to experience and accept the full range of experience and emotional reactions, including uncomfortable ones like anger and sadness. Real life has ups and downs. (Scientific American, 2013, 24, 2. pp. 26-27). Positive reactions are not the only ones that can be adaptive.
Oxford University researchers found that kissing more than frequent sex indicates overall marital happiness. ( Health & Science. The Week, 2013, 13, 641, p. 17)
Scientific American (2013, 24, 2): Anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health” (p. 26). Therefore, don’t just accept the positive.
To strengthen friendships: 1) Share confidences, 2) Respect each other’s choices, 3) Make up after conflict, and 4) Be there through hard times. (Scientific American Mind, 2013, 24, 2)
Jeanette Winterson’s (2011) Why be happy when you could be normal? is an autobiography as compelling as any novel. This author vividly renders her duel with madness to win clarity. She does win but not without deep scars that cover easily reopened wounds. Her story, as she herself notes, is one of many in literature and real life where the wound is very near the gift. She is a gifted artist who can recognize both her gifts and her personal limitations.
JJeanette Winterson (2011) in her novel, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? ( New York, Grove Press) eloquently holds out the prospect of our mending the past and recognizes Freud’s contribution. She said, “Freud, one of the great masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead” (p. 58).
Michel de Montaigne: He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.
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