Our lives are a story. There are characters, conflicts and resolutions. There is joy and pain, comedy and drama. There is mystery and adventure. How we tell our tales, and thereby how we see ourselves, plays a huge role in how we live our lives. Because perception is everything. If we view a failure as […]
Using Storytelling Techniques to Reframe Your Life
A Review from Pysch Central
Charlotte Rains Dixon Reviews “Step Out of Your Story”
Once again, the wonderful folks at New World Libraryhave offered me a book to review. And once again, I’m making slow progress through it because I keep stopping to ponder and do the exercises. I found the receipt of this book particularly serendipitous because shortly before it arrived, I announced that I was pondering offering […]
Your Life as a Character Development Workout
How Antagonists Help Us Strengthen Emotional and Mental Muscles
Does the same type of character keep showing up in your life and pushing your buttons? These people may look nothing alike, but they keep presenting you with more or less the same frustrations and issues. Or perhaps there’s a negative situation you keep finding yourself struggling with: picking up the slack and getting no […]
Tapping into Your Omniscient Narrator
How Writing in the Third Person Helps You Step Out of Your Story
In the movie Stranger than Fiction, Harold Crick is a robotic IRS agent who begins to question his mundane existence when he hears a mysterious voice narrating his life and foreshadowing his untimely death. When he discovers that he is not the master of his own destiny, but rather a fictional character dreamed up by an […]
Cyber-spying and Defriending
How Facebook is Finding Its Way Onto the Therapy Couch
As a psychotherapist in private practice, I can’t help but notice that Facebook is wreaking mischief in some of my clients’ personal lives. One client caused a family scandal when he established privacy settings that prevented some, but not all, of his relatives from seeing his status updates. A 14-year-old client gave up Facebook for […]
How to keep your cool when your anger is out of proportion
Common superstition holds that bad (and good) things come in threes. So when, in one evening, two back-to-back clients sought advice about how to respond to unforeseen personal attacks after I also had been verbally accosted earlier that day, I knew I had to address the issue in my column. One client had been the […]
When Is It Time to Ditch a Frenemy?
What separates friend from “frenemy” is the presence or absence of one essential ingredient: trust. Trust is the litmus test of any relationship, period. Without trust, there can be no (healthy) relationship. So if you want to distinguish friend or foe, start by asking yourself, “Do I trust this person? Does he or she have […]
