The Limitations of Professional Psychology
This is just an overview, a summary, of my thoughts from over three decades of study and practice in positive psychology to describe some limitations of contemporary professional psychology. What do you think? What have I missed? I’m eager for any comments, disagreements, or other perspectives.
Listen to Your Sleeping Dreams
The lesson from my story is, listen to your dreams! What parts of you might you have left behind, things that make your heart sing? It could be anything. If you feel a kind of nagging emptiness in living that you can’t quite define, the clues you need may be in your dreams if you can learn to listen.
Research Links Music to Health Outcomes for Young and Old
Music can reduce physical pain, facilitate regeneration and health of neurons in the brain, improve memory, and other benefits. The outcomes are greater when people take music lessons or learn to play an instrument, rather than passively listen to music. Music’s impact is evident across all ages, benefiting children and older adults alike.
Words to Live By
“We invented a mountain of superfluous needs, shopping for the new, discarding the old. . . that is wasting our lives! When I buy something, or you do, you’re not paying for it with money. You’re paying with the time for living that you had to spend to earn that money, but with this difference: life is the one thing money can’t buy. Life only passes by. And it’s miserable to waste one’s life losing your freedom.”
How Do People Change?
Perhaps the core lesson I brought with me from my years of training as a psychologist was this: all human growth is derived from positive relationships. People change from experiencing on a fundamental level that new possibilities exist. Seeing that, experiencing that, in the form of another person who shows it to us, more by how they relate to us than by what they say to us. . . that’s the magic sauce.
The Counter Slop Revolution
I believe, purely by observation though not with hard data, that a counter movement against constant stimulation and toward greater authenticity, depth, and substance is underway, below and away from the braying social media bullhorns and the firehoses of emotional manipulation aimed at us all by mega tech corporations.
AI Love?
We live in an age where technology is diverting us from human connection and psychological growth and health. The epidemics of loneliness, despair, suicide, and flight to violence and authoritarianism of the modern age can only be accelerated, not resolved, by the erasure of the human and the complexities of building positive, authentic relationships.