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Tag Archives: Iliescu Alice

Strategies to combat loneliness over the holidays

Posted on 28 December 2014 by Alice Posted in Articole .

Lonely people dread the holiday season more than any other time of year. Watching everyone around them connect to those they love makes their own feelings of emotional isolation even more profound. Indeed, the holidays can make loneliness feel especially excruciating.  

Loneliness is not an objective or qualitative measure of friendship or companionship but a qualitative one; a subjective feeling of deep emotional or social disconnection (or both). For example, many people might be married yet feel extremely lonely. Others might find themselves amidst large family gatherings yet still feel distant, unengaged, misunderstood, or unseen.

Loneliness Damages Us Emotionally, Physically, and Socially

Loneliness is not only painful emotionally but it can have a devastating impact on one’s long term psychological and physical health. Loneliness predisposes us to depression and increases our risk of Alzheimer’s disease, it suppresses our immune system functioning, it stresses our cardiovascular systems, and when chronic, it affects our very longevity.

In addition, loneliness also impacts our social functioning. Lonely people often develop defensive coping mechanisms that make it difficult for them to create new connections with others or deepen existing ones. It is natural for those who suffer loneliness to become self-protective and make efforts to avoid any situations that could expose them to further rejection.

Further, the rejection lonely people already feel often causes them to have pessimistic and defeatist outlooks and to be skeptical as to whether others are interested in them or care about them. Therefore, lonely people are likely to be reluctant to reach out and initiate contact with friends and acquaintances, have nowhere to go when the holidays come around, and then feel even more desperate and alone.

Managing Loneliness over the Holiday Season

The only way to overcome loneliness is to take actions that involve emotional risks, which for lonely people is a scary proposition indeed. With that in mind, the suggestions I make here involve relatively smaller emotional risks that have a decent chance of yielding positive results.

For those who are socially isolated, it is important to take proactive steps so that you do not spend the holidays alone. Reach out to friends, family (even distant family), and acquaintances in advance of the holidays. The best way to do so is merely to ask what they are doing for Christmas or the New Year. Such questions usually draw a response and then a similar question from the other person—and consequently, an invitation, once they hear “I don’t have any set plans yet.”

Fishing for invitations can feel risky for someone who is lonely and it might also feel frustrating to have to use such ‘tactics’. But keep in mind studies clearly show that loneliness makes us underestimate the extent to which those around us care about us as we are likely to view our friends and friendships more negatively than we should. Even if we’re skeptical about it, we should assume the person who invites us is happy to have us (otherwise they would not have extended the invitation in the first place). Spending the holidays with friends, even if not the closest friends, is far better than spending them alone and miserable.

Another strategy is to reach out to people you know and suggest actual activities. People are much more likely to respond to specific suggestions than to a generic ‘let’s get together’. Posting a message on Facebook such as, ‘Message me if you want to go caroling tomorrow evening!’ might get a response and asking people to message rather than post a reply means a potential lack of response will at least not be public.

Lastly, make every effort to put on a smile and have the right holiday spirit when you do socialize, as doing so will make for a better time and it will make others more eager to hang out again in the future.

For those who feel emotionally isolated but do have people around them, the holidays are a good time to work on deepening emotional connections you already have. Choose one person with whom you might get closer over the holidays and make an effort to spend time with them, talk with them, or do activities together. If it is a family member, going over family photographs is a great way to connect and rekindle feelings of a shared history. If it is a friend, going over old yearbooks from school or college can achieve a similar goal.

Psiholog, Psihoterapeut Iliescu Alice

Psiholog, Psihoterapeut Iliescu Alice

Lastly, make every effort to participate in group activities or family discussions as removing yourself from them sends a signal which pushes others away. Yes, it takes a huge effort to put on a smile and participate, but doing so is an important investment. The holidays do provide an opportunity to get closer to people which will pay dividends once January rolls around.  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                             Inspired by Guy Winch

 

 

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Tags: afectiune, antidepresiv, depresie, holidays, Iliescu Alice, iubit, izolat, neiubit, psiholog, psihoterapeut, sarbatori, single, singur, singuratate, sot, strategii, supravietuire .

HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH HUMAN

Posted on 22 November 2014 by Alice Posted in Articole .

When I tell you the publishing history of How To Be Happy Though Human, by Walter Béran Wolfe, you will wonder why I bother to mention the book at all. The answer is twofold.

 

First, in a lifetime of reading, this is the best book that I have ever found about human psychology. If you want to know what makes people tick, this is the book for you. The second reason relates closely to the first: because of its insights into what drives human behavior, I have found the book to be enormously helpful in creating credible characters for fiction and drama.

 

Of course, if you’ve ever read any of my stuff, you may think that I’ve never succeeded in creating convincing characters; nevertheless, I at least feel that I have understood their background and motivation, and was therefore able to have sufficient sympathy with them to be able to write about them.

 

Now for the publishing history. How To Be Happy Though Human was first published in New York in 1931. Routledge did a UK (United Kingdom) edition in 1932, which was reprinted periodically. The book must slowly have come to be regarded as a minor classic, because twenty-five years later Penguin UK brought out a paperback version under the Pelican imprint; it was reprinted in 1959. And, finally, Routledge issued a hardback edition in the UK in 1999.

 

The Routledge edition of 1999 was aimed firmly at the academic library market. How do I know that? Because it was priced at £135, although Amazon will sell you one for £89.10. What this 1999 edition suggests is that Béran Wolfe, and How To Be Happy Though Human, are now recognized as having a significant place in the history of psychology.

 

I can tell you little about Dr Béran Wolfe, beyond what is printed on the back of the Pelican edition. He was born in Vienna in 1900, but educated in the USA. He went back to Vienna for postgraduate study, and became an assistant to Alfred Adler. He must have been thoroughly bilingual, because his grasp of English is immaculate (few people can explain complicated issues so clearly) and he translated some of Adler’s work.

 

After his time in Vienna, Wolfe returned to New York, where he practiced psychiatry. His writing work was done between 11 pm and 3 am, and he always wrote to music on gramophone records (the neighbors must have loved him). He was apparently killed in an (automobile) accident in 1935.

 

Alfred Adler, by the way, was on one of the great Viennese triumvirate of psychologists, the other two being Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. All three men initially worked together but eventually fell out, and developed their own significantly different ideas. Of these three, not surprisingly, Wolfe was heavily influenced by Adler.

 

How To Be Happy Though Human is designed for the lay reader — the title alone tells you that — and it is a model of clarity in its organization and style. There are twelve chapters, with frequent sub-headings, and each chapter begins with a summary of what has been learned so far, and a short account of the contents of the coming chapter.

 

The book runs to some 355 pages, and I am not about to try to summarize it. Any kind of precis would be bound to give a misleading impression. However, I think it is fair to say that Wolfe, like Adler (and, for that matter, the Jesuits), believed that early childhood experiences play a major part in developing a person’s character.

 

All children are, without exception, weak and incapable of looking after themselves, and these early experiences of helplessness, or ‘inferiority’, are crucial. In particular, they lead to attempts to be strong, to be in control, and to put an end to emotional and physical discomfort.

 

Wolfe is a great believer in the purposive nature of human behavior, even if the underlying purpose of the action is not always clearly understood by the person concerned, let alone anyone else. In his book, he argues that any person, other than those with severe mental incapacity, is capable of deciding what to do. There are sensible things to do, and stupid, antisocial, selfish things to do. But you can always choose. The smart thing to do is to think about why you favor action (a) over action (b), and to decide if it is truly sensible or not.

 

The author comes across as a fairly hard-line man. He is not of the ‘pull yourself together’ school, but he certainly believes that no one is going to achieve happiness by pursuing exclusively selfish interests. This sometimes makes for uncomfortable reading (at least for me), because you find yourself realizing that Wolfe would not be enthusiastic about many of the things that you wish to do, and in some cases have done for years.

 

There is, quite frankly, nothing on the web about Béran Wolfe that I can recommend to you. There is a 2005 essay by V. Sundaram, but that does not, in my opinion, give a very good impression of Wolfe’s book, and in any case it describes him as Australian when he was, of course, Austrian.

 

I first read this book in about 1960, and it must have made a considerable impression on me, because when I came to read it again, a few weeks ago, I found that certain passages were very familiar; it was as if I had read them yesterday. The book’s principal virtue, for the average reader of this blog, is not so much that it is a self-help manual — though it is certainly a fine example of that — but that it provides an outstanding guide to human motivation.

 

I re-read Béran Wolfe mainly because I wanted to remind myself of what he had to say about ambition. And of that, more later, in another post.

 

Secondhand copies of the book, particularly the 1957 Pelican edition, are fairly easily obtainable. The Pelican is holding up fairly well because it was a stitched edition; but the print is rather small and the paper none too wonderful.

 

*Michael Allen, Friday, September 01, 2006.

 

http://grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com/2006/09/w-beran-wolfe-how-to-be-happy-though.html

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Tags: happy, Iliescu Alice, psiholog, psihoterapeut .

THE MEANING OF LIFE: FORMATIVE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES – Alfred Adler, M.D.

Posted on 22 November 2014 by Alice Posted in Articole .
 

     “We are self-determined by the meaning we give to our experiences; and there is probably something of a mistake always involved when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determineourselves by the meanings we give to situations.” — Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

“From the first days of childhood we can see dark gropings after this ‘meaning of life.’ Even a baby is striving to make an estimate of its own powers and its share in the whole life which surrounds it. By the end of the fifth year of life a child has reached a unified and crystallized pattern of behavior, its own style of approach to problems and tasks. It has already fixed its deepest and most lasting conception of what to expect from the world and from itself. From now on, the world is seen through a stable scheme of apperception: experiences are interpreted before they are accepted, (p. 12) and the interpretation always accords with the original meaning given to life. Even if this meaning is very gravelymistaken, even if the approach to our problems and tasks brings us continually intomisfortunes and agonies, it is never easily relinquished. Mistakes in the meaning given to life can be corrected only by reconsidering the situation in which the faulty interpretationwas made, recognizing the error and revising the scheme of apperception. In rare circumstances, perhaps, an individual may be forced by the consequences of a mistaken approach to revise the meaning he has given to life and may succeed in accomplishing the change by himself. He will never do it, however, without some social pressure, or without finding that if he proceeds with the old approach he is at the end of his tether: and for the most part the approach can best be revised with the assistance of someone trained in theunderstanding of these meanings, who can join in discovering the original error and help to suggest a more appropriate meaning.

“Let us take a simple illustration of the different ways in which childhood situations may be interpreted. Unhappy experiences in childhood may be given quite opposite meanings. One man with unhappy experiences behind him will not dwell on them except as they show him something which can be remedied for the future. He will feel, ‘We must work to remove such unfortunate situations and make sure that our children are better placed.’ Another man will feel, ‘Life is unfair. Other people always have the best of it. If the world treated me like that, why should I treat the world any better?’ It is in this way that some parents say of their children, ‘I had to suffer just as much when I was a child, and I came (p. 13) through it. Why shouldn’t they?’ A third man will feel, ‘Everything should be forgiven me because of my unhappy childhood.’ In the actions of all three men their interpretations will be evident; and they will never change their actions unless they change their interpretations. It is here that Individual Psychology breaks through the theory of determinism. No experience is a causeof success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences — the so-called trauma — but we make out of them just what suits our purposes. We are self-determined by the meaning we give to our experiences; and there is probably something of a mistakealways involved when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations (p. 14).”

 

* Alfred Adler (1870-1937), What Life Should Mean to You, 1931, Pp. 12-14. Edited by Alan Porter.

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Tags: compoartament, Iliescu Alice, pattern, psiholog, psihoterapeut, temperament .
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