This was originally a reply to a blog post entitled Self-Respect: Come to Your Success by Pagan mystic and teacher Thorn Coyle.

For me the biggest obstacles to coming to my success are old commitments and convictions that I've outgrown. Take my bedroom curtains for example.

My current level of success means I have less time and more money but I ( Read more... )

This rant was triggered by a friend's retelling of an earlier experience with talk therapy.

The relationship between a client and a professional talk cure person (therapist, counselor, psychologist, whatever label) is not one of equals. One of the ways that it's not equal is that the professional has most of the responsibility when it comes to ( Read more... )

This was originally a response to an LJ entry by a friend. It got way too long and too important to be buried in a comment to a f'locked entry. The original entry contrasted how the poster and her brother were treated by their mother when ill.

What I'm hearing here is that you and your brother were treated very differently by the female authority ( Read more... )

Yesterday I read an article by Joss Whedon that disturbed me. He was drawing parallels between the stoning of a Dua Khalil and a soon-to-be-released American movie Captivity. Specifically he compares the way women are viewed as rightful victims of violence ( Read more... )

Great article on recovery by Caille Millner, using Gavin Newsom's recent foray into "rehab" as a starting point.

Suzette Haden-Elgin shares her method for writing both fiction and non-fiction in fifteen-minute snippets

The City of San Francisco and the Northeast San Francisco Conservancy are proposing to protect trees vital for the survival of ( Read more... )

( strong )

• New Apple iPod nano - 8GB - Black - Apple Computer
• Crazy World - Kenny Thomas
• But Beautiful: Standards Vol.1 - Boz Scaggs
• Nell McAndrew - Maximum Impact - Nell McAndrew
• A Lotus Grows in the Mud - Goldie Hawn

In his blog, dilbert.blog (syndicated as dilbert_blog), Scott Adams theorises about what causes some people to be successful at losing weight and staying thin while others fail. His theory is that: "People organize their lives to get their minimum required units of pleasure. While individuals vary in terms of how many units of pleasure they need, everyone is ( Read more... )

This is an oldie-but-goldie from the infancy of the Web. It's Dean and Marshall Vandruff's list of underhanded ways of winning arguments. It fits in well with two topics that have been discussed on my flist lately, verbal power-over tactics (and how they relate to gender) and how to know when somebody is not acting in good faith with you. If ( Read more... )

Adults who grew up in moderately dysfunctional homes have a measurably different chemical response to pictures of fearful or angry faces. The article includes an MRI and a link to a research paper from UCLA with the title Neural Bases of Responses to Threat-Relevant Stimuli Associated With Childhood Family StressThe conclusion to the abstract says ( Read more... )