In most places around the world, human societies have changed more in the past two hundred years than they have in the previous forty thousand. Nevertheless, we have the same emotional needs as our humble hunter-gatherer ancestors. We can travel to the moon, talk on a cell phone in Dubai to a friend in Montreal, …
The Committee responsible for revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has gone back and forth in their deliberations over Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but it looks like the diagnosis will remain. Never mind their concerns. I doubt omitting narcissism from psychiatry’s Bible would curb the common practice of hurling the label at foes …
Chaim Potok wrote: “Life is like the blink of an eye. What is it worth? Nothing. But the eye that blinks — that is something.” Yet Tamami Nakano of Osaka University and her colleagues are discovering the blink is meaningful. Rather than just a mechanical reflex that keeps the eyeball moist and flaps away dust, …
I wish for a world where we understand what it means to be human as a species among other species, without the pretext of superiority. I wish for a world adapted to our social and emotional needs, and not the dominant economic theory. I wish for a world where our most adaptive traits—empathy and creative …
For several days, I felt a physical uneasiness in response to the Newtown tragedy. From my sensorimotor psychotherapy training, I interpreted the activation in my body and my unusual emotional sensitivity as evidence that I was outside the window of tolerance. You know you are in your window of tolerance when you are resilient to …
What if there is something fundamental about empathy such that when we cannot act on it, we lose part of ourselves, perhaps even our humanity? What if we have unwittingly created a world in which we chip away at our capacity for empathy, and with it, one of the unique traits of humankind: the ability …
I often wonder what it would take to heal centuries of violence, oppression, complicated grief, and emotional neglect. And yet the impulse to heal, social engineer, and reform often seems symptomatic of what is traumatizing about the US and the West in general — that perpetual need to fix a broken system. We know things aren’t right with the …
I typically ignore national awareness initiatives saddled to particular months. There are simply too many of them. For example, October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month; Crime Prevention Month; Health Literacy Month; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender History Month; National Breast Cancer Awareness Month; National Cyber Security Awareness Month; National Disability Employment Awareness Month; National Family Sexuality …
