The Patriarchy hurts women in obvious and well-chronicled ways. But how it hurts men is a more covert affair, and is responsible for the uptick in male suicides, particularly in middle-aged males. There is a myth that runs through our culture, one that says a man can shut off his emotions and be an island…
I have been watching a disturbing trend gaining momentum in North American circles over the past ten years, a trend I have dubbed “Bipolarism.” I first noticed it bubbling up at dinner parties, where a guest would be chastised for not championing the social cause of the day. Intellectual rigour wasn’t embraced, in its stead,…
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has been the talk intervention of choice for treating mental illness for decades. The basis of this treatment is to get the client to take an honest look at the thoughts, feelings and attitudes underlying their belief system so they can decide if the stories they believe about themselves and the…
Mere months before I met Jay, my friend told me about the ending to his first love relationship. I had never been in love, and I told Andy that it sounded so painful I was certain that I never wanted to be. “Oh, but it was worth it,” was his response. Little did I know…
When I was eleven years old, I had an old road bike that I found in the back of the garage. There happened to be a fabulous rectangular configuration or roads in our neighbourhood that made for the perfect circuit, complete with hills, curves, and straightaways. All summer long I rode this circuit, over and…
Healing is hard work; to this day it is the single hardest thing I have ever done. To face the rage, pain, abandonment and betrayal was an impossible task that was only navigated with a tenuous combination of hope, faith and desire. The flip side is that healing is the gift that keeps on giving,…
Have you ever felt like you were navigating life without a compass, as though there were no absolute bearings any more, only vague signposts? Well I spent most of my teens and twenties in that state, without really knowing what the problem was. Then one night in my early thirties I was sitting in my…
The symptoms inherent in the mentally ill differ from the general population only in degree or intensity, not in their actual presence. This is why, in times of great turmoil, we would profit from taking a long look at the inner workings of our psyches, as well as that of our broader society. Rather than…
For me, an event that looms as large and final as death is best framed in existential terms, where the death of a loved one becomes an object of our consciousness, and we become the conscious mind that must wrap itself around this object. Relationships play a fundamental role in the coherence of our psyches,…
When I was twenty-six years old we had a family crisis on the west coast of British Columbia, so I moved there to take full-time care of my niece until the situation sorted itself out. Two months into my stint, my truck insurance was about to expire, and I mentioned to my sister that I…