A Vote for Marriage Counseling
From WebMD: Is Your Marriage Toxic?
Give it time. Don’t expect the walls of resentment to come down right away. Rivkin suggests allowing at least three months to see if working with a therapist or using the advice from a relationship book is helping your marriage. Change may come slowly. But don’t be afraid of taking baby steps. “One little change can be huge to begin to change a pattern.”
Radical Acceptance
A possibility for your on-deck reading pile: Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach. A favorite in the genre for some. I could summarize, but I’ll radically accept the job done by Publishers Weekly and posted on Amazon:
Brach offers readers a rich compendium of stories and techniques designed to help people awaken from what she calls “the trance of unworthiness.” The sense of self-hatred and fearful isolation that afflicts so many people in the West can be transformed with the steady application of a loving attention infused with the insights of the Buddhist tradition, according to Brach.
Ovulation, Personality, and Perception
Three from PsychCentral:
Racier Clothing Choices for Ovulating Women
Should We Manipulate Our Dreams?
The NYT asks assorted pros an Inception-inspired question: “Nightmares have been seen variously as omens or sources of self-knowledge. Should we replace them with happier dreams?”
A Life in Therapy
My Life in Therapy, from the NYT Magazine, has Daphne Merkin recalling years spent in psychoanalysis.
Projection. Repression. Acting out. Defenses. Secondary compensation. Transference. Even in these quick-fix, medicated times, when people are more likely to look to Wellbutrin and life coaches than to the mystique-surrounded, intangible promise of psychoanalysis, these words speak to me with all the charged power of poetry…
Animal Emotion
ScienceDaily: Emotions help animals to make choices
Happy? Angry? Anxious? How can we measure animal emotions? To understand how animals experience the world and how they should be treated, people need to better understand their emotional lives. A new review of animal emotion suggests that, as in humans, emotions may tell animals about how dangerous or opportunity-laden their world is, and guide the choices that they make.
DepressionMD
WebMD is churning out articles about depression daily. Here are some from their “Top Stories” list:
Rethinking Cravings
PsychCentral: Train Brain To Reduce Cravings.
Smokers who are taught cognitive strategies, such as thinking about the long-term consequences of smoking, show increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with cognitive control and rational thought.
Judgment
ScienceDaily: What You Say About Others Says a Lot About You, Research Shows
This research suggests that when you ask someone to rate the personality of a particular coworker or acquaintance, you may learn as much about the rater providing the personality description as the person they are describing.
Web Addiction and Depression
WebMD: Internet Overuse May Cause Depression.
Researchers say that their work suggests that teens who use the Internet pathologically may be about 2.5 times more likely to develop depression than teens who are not addicted to the Internet.