One of the hallmarks of mental distress is fragmentation. Emotions are heightened, especially fear, and the mind becomes disordered as it deals with a level of stress it has rarely, if ever, encountered. Meaning falls apart; confusion and uncertainty take its place. The once solid ground underfoot turns into shifting sands beneath one’s feet. Those…
The most valuable asset you have is not your time or your money, but rather, your attention. It is so precious, in fact, trillions of dollars are spent worldwide to capture it. Add in the fact that we are living in a soup of distraction that includes being bombarded with more information than the human…
The word addiction comes from the Latin addicere, ‘to surrender oneself.’ The opposite of surrender is to conquer, from the Old French conquerre, ‘to overcome.’ If you talk to enough addicts, or work with them as I do, you will notice a common current running through our stories: we lived through painful events that left…
For decades, I lived in chronic, deep depression. I had no idea why I was there, or how to get out from under the black cloud. So I did what a lot of people in that situation do: I self-medicated with drugs to numb the pain. Then, one day when I was twenty-eight years old,…
We live in a hyper-materialistic world, one that directs our consciousness to focus on the outer at the expense of the inner. But if life happens from the inside out, this basically hijacks our internal navigation system and replaces it with mindless conformity to a uniform reality. Anyone who steps outside of this reality is…
We’ve all heard of the fight or flight response, a state where your body prepares for threat by releasing hormones to physiologically and psychologically deal with an imminent threat, or run away from it. But there is a third, often overlooked response called freeze, where you realize your best option is to become immobilized, either…
I can’t say when my anxiety turned into depression, but with hindsight and many years of therapy I know that it goes as far back as I can remember. Long-term anxiety, like the type I lived through as a child, eventually morphs into depression, as feelings of hopelessness and helplessness take over the psyche. Depression…
I don’t recall the exact age I suffered my first panic attack, but I do remember how it felt. As my chest tightened and my breathing became shallow, my oxygen level dropped, and I thought I was going to die. Breathing is fundamental to life, and when it gets restricted, for whatever reason, we fear…
In 1992 I began what became a two-year process of letting go of street drugs so I could spend more time with my new-found love, climbing. When I give presentations, I inevitably get asked the same question: “Didn’t you just trade in one addiction for another?” And I always give the same answer: Yes, and…
There is an invisible architecture of power in our society that is at the root of all forms of abuse, whether it is racism, bullying, or intimate partner violence. A global term for this epidemic is Sociopathic Narcissism, or in the case of the following story, what turned into Psychopathic Narcissism. With the murder of…