are you sure about that?

Tell me about it: Picking up the pieces after spilling the beans about my gay husband - Family News & Advice | Parenting, Marriage & Kids | The Irish Tim - Tue, Aug 13, 2013

How we can change our history? I guess at times we can have the experience of regretting parts of our lives whether through something out of our control or as the result of a decision or choice that we took. Hind sight is a wonderful thing and if we use it to learn and teach ourselves it can help to change our history that is yet to happen.  We cannot change our history that has been but we can change the history that is yet to come. In thinking about history that has passed we can become bogged down in 'if only,' 'what if?' 'I wish I had to do it again.' Those thoughts can stop us being in the present or moving forward as if tied to the past with a bungee chord.  I like the idea that we can create our own history accepting that at times we will be effected by events our of our control such as accidents, ill health, bereavement, redundancy and so on. But where we have choice and where we can learn from our own and others histories, we can effect t...

Locus of Evaluation and Mindfulness: a recipe for increasing self-esteem. In this piece, I want to look at the relationship between Locus of Evaluation, Self- Esteem and Mindfulness. I will present something about Locus of Evaluation (LoE) and something about Mindfulness, followed by a way of bringing them together, meaningfully.   I am not sure if this correlation exists already. Locus of Evaluation (LoE), was posited by Carl Rogers in the 1950’s and is one of a series of ideas that formed a Person Centred Approach to therapy. It helps us to understand that where we look for our conditions of worth can affect self-confidence and self-esteem and general mental health. Rogers (1951) defined the locus of evaluation as ‘the extent to which [one’s] values and standards depend upon the judgements and expectations of others, or are based on a reliance upon [one’s] own experience’ (p.156) Albert Ellis (2000) from a Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy stance support...

I have recently begun to read 'Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey into Story Telling' by John Yorke. I am reading it on Kindle, on the train to and from work. I find it fascination and stimulating. He methodically explores and explains through multiple examples, the development and structure of story telling in art, literature, cinema, television and so on. I like his suggestion that storytelling is a fundamental expression of human narrative. Each story that follows his suggested structure takes us through a journey with a protagonist and an antagonist. There is something that we desire, the holy grail, love, gold, and the antagonist is there to prevent our achieving this goal. In the story there is usually a crisis where we do battle to attain the desired goal and some sort of climax following the battle. The end is a resolution and redemption. Story structure is based upon physics, there is a beginning, middle and an end. It seems to follow a 'classic good versus evi...