Deborah Lara

@SlowwCo In ways do you see the internet’s potential to do so?

@mssocialwelfare @TheShr1nk 🙏♥️

@evolvingwithdeb @TheShr1nk This is my experience working in the field. I do think many feel both relief and confidence in their decision, AND long term sadness or depression following abortion. Especially after they have a child, questions come up.

Abortion. What are the mental health concerns?

@TheShr1nk ♥️🙏

@evolvingwithdeb thank you! This is what I was trying to say and bring up. It's something we don't discuss but should. You did much better than me.

@sheologian @TheShr1nk Yes, good point. I should clarify that the women I worked with don’t speak for the whole at a population level. Just offering another angle, anecdotally.

@TreiZece @KemtrupTweets Interesting perspective. In some ways, society may need people who are focused “out there” more than “in here” in order to function. I’m sure there are good adaptive evolutionary reasons for this and people who have natural inclinations toward either way of being.

@KemtrupTweets I can see how the Universe needs these ppl to keep the balance. Why take for granted that "inner life" is a must? Psychotherapy seems to have created this alternate (fake) universe of self-importance.

A thing that being a psychotherapist has proven to me is that wide swaths of people don’t tend to value, focus on, understand, prioritize their inner life: thoughts, wishes, feelings, motivations, unconscious workings, biases, etc. Why is this? It’s incredibly important.🧵

@dremmasvanberg @KemtrupTweets Agreed. To add, there’s also the pain of the existential loneliness that comes on the other side of more self-understanding. In some ways “going deeper” helps relate differently/better to others, but it also makes us feel more like an outsider, as others aren’t “going there” too.

@KemtrupTweets It can be so painful - why would we want to go there unless we have a lot of encouragement and someone to travel with us? And it’s also so discouraged- just look at the messages we’ve received about the pandemic and how little space there has been for collective healing

@KemtrupTweets This is such a curious/good point.

@bitesizetherapy I think it depends on a lot of things. (FWIW) If you see people multiple times per week, if you’ve worked with some of them longer. I find feeling itself isn’t so draining but the anxiety of not having a sense of the person is.

@yslexdia @psychgeist52 @DrCamiloOrtiz We have a unique type of cognition that differentiates us, but even this is an evolutionary adaptation. At our core we are driven and impacted by the same forces and motives, particularly relative to other social species.

Why do most clinical psychologists know nothing about evolutionary psychology? Serious question. I'm trying to understand this gap.

@yslexdia @psychgeist52 @DrCamiloOrtiz I agree. I spent some time with Orangutan families in Borneo and it made me truly see that we are much more like the rest of nature than we are different from. It completely shifted the way I saw human life and problems.

@DrCamiloOrtiz @DrGipps @flowhypno Understanding adaptive functioning is critical to therapy. How we don’t see how understanding our evolutionary history and nature helps in therapy makes me question our field a bit…

@DrGipps @flowhypno It might be precisely the opposite. That "undesired states" are naturally selected to help us survive and trying to get rid of them is like trying to stop your liver from producing bile.

@psychgeist52 @DrCamiloOrtiz Evolutionary think is sorely lacking in our field in my opinion.

@psychgeist52 @DrCamiloOrtiz I get this perspective, but humans have the problems they do for a lot of the same reasons other forms of life do. Understanding our evolutionary history and nature would give us much better perspective in addressing some of the problems we work with.

@SlowwCo @podclipsapp 6/ This is my dorky hyperintellectual, late-night analysis of it, anyway. 🤣 🤷‍♀️ I liked that you posed it here. 🙌🙏

@SlowwCo @podclipsapp 4/ If we speak more in terms of Jung and Campbell, he also represents the archetype of the father figure and spiritual guide in the hero’s journey, inducing the move from the (as Campbell and Jung have put it) “immature ego of dependence to the mature ego of inner authority.”

@SlowwCo @podclipsapp 5/ As Jung put it, “the first half of life is about the development of a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” JP to me represents a figure for people for that first half, where a Watts or other Eastern thinkers represent the second.

@nyctherapist In terms of cognitive development, Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self as an extension into/through adulthood of Piaget’s work and research. As well, Susanne Cook-Greuter’s Ego Development Theory as an extension into/through adulthood of Jane Loevinger’s work and research.