Caring Psychological Counseling

Most lay people have heard of Sigmund Freud and his Psychoanalytical method. It is the quintessential man-on-the-couch method mocked in so many New Yorker cartoons. Adlerian Psychology on the other hand is almost unknown beyond the professional world of Counseling Psychology. However Adler’s concepts are every bit, if not more, a part of mainstream life as are Freud’s theories of the Id, Ego and Super Ego. “Adler's style of treatment was warm, gentle, and creative, not cool, aggressive, and systematic,” (http://www.adlerian.us/) Individual Psychology is the name Alfred Adler gave to his theory of personality and his system of therapy . By individual he meant that the individual is indivisible (the original Latin meaning) w hich was in contrast to Freud's division of the personality into segments. The 5 basic principles of Adlerian Psychology (formulated by Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs) are as follows. 1. SOCIALLY EMBEDDED : We are social beings who want to "belong" –...

Older generations of men, notably our post WWII males, come to therapy reluctantly, if at all. Many men today are not so standoffish when it comes to therapy. However, men still tend to wait longer to seek help and guidance for their emotional issues than do women. At times, when men seek counseling, they are looking for and often need quick results. Frequently, men come to counseling after being persuaded by a spouse or employer to seek help for a lack of emotional connection, anger management or substance abuse. Opening up to a therapist does not always come naturally and often men prefer instead to rely on stoicism. Why do so many men close down when the situation calls for an emotional response? For an answer to that we have to go back to that older WWII and post-war generation of men, the generations who set the example for today’s middle aged males, who in turn are setting the example for younger men. The last World War changed the landscape for men in this country for all time...

The biased nature of our memories is a well-discussed phenomenon when and wherever siblings or old friends gather together; the main events of shared experiences often coincide, however, the finer points of remembered experience often differ widely. Why is this? Are memories recorded differently from the start or is there another force at work? The answer is “Yes,” there are at least two forces at work making our memories uniquely ours. Firstly, the part of the brain that is involved in memory forming, organizing, and storing is the hippocampus . It’s here that new memories are associated with existing memories and content from dominant memories are overlaid onto less dominate, less immediate memories. In this way current events consistently overwrite and rewrite portions of our remembered past updating our recollections with new experiences.  Secondly, the brain works on a sort of trade-off model of memory storage; where the most emotionally impactful content of a memory is ...