A Guide To Anger And Conflict Resolution
Welcome to From Insults to Respect. As my fingers tap out this post, I find myself mourning yet another mass shooting. My troubled heart goes out to folks young and old who must live for the rest of their lives with the images of the carnage they so innocently faced. Whenever such incidences occur, we hear people connecting the horrendous murderous acts to people who have been…
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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. This week I happened to be listening to the old Graham Parker song, “Nobody Hurts You.” As I interpret the lyrics and how they are sung, it seems to me that they are a useful jumping off point for a discussion about so many of us being, at times, so disrespectful to ourselves. Graham’s Song The first line, sung with…
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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Very recently, the US government passed a bill that provides a major overhaul of our taxation policy. Since the bill was signed into law, some of my friends have begun to ask me what I think of it. In response, I first tell them about a psychological study. The Study In the study, primatologists Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B.M. de…
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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Today, let’s see if we can tie together some of the loose threads of my last post, which chronicled Joni Mitchell’s experience of depression. There we found that she explicitly rejected the idea that her experience indicated that she was mentally ill. Instead, she came to believe that, “Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the…
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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. From time to time I have been discussing two distinct ways of looking at the nature of depression–the medical model and what we may wish to refer to as the creative temperament view. The medical model views people who experience depression as having an illness that requires, as the first line of treatment, taking pills that are called “antidepressants.” The enormously…
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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Today’s topic, a problematic condolence call from President Trump to a grieving soldier’s widow. What Happened Myeshia Johnson’s husband, Sgt. La David Johnson, died in an ambush in Niger on Oct. 4, 2017. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Johnson received a condolence call from President Trump. Mrs. Johnson then told ABC news that the president struck a callous tone during their conversation–telling…
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On Sunday, November 5, 2017, I sat down in front of my computer to write this week’s blog post. Just as I put my fingers on my computer keyboard, a little message popped up in the lower right hand screen of my monitor. I glanced over to see that at a Texas church in the small town of Sutherland Springs numerous people had been shot and over twenty had…
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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. From time to time, I like to provide posts that offer some suggestions derived from my parenting course, “How to Discipline Your Children and Have Them Still Like You.” For example, in one such post (see HERE), I explain how to teach children to deal effectively with criticism. In another (see HERE), I provide child discipline suggestions made by William James,…
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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. I hope the beauty of spring is helping to make your daily challenges more pleasant. Regular readers know that from time to time I write a post advocating that mental health service providers change the way people access their services so that it becomes more respectful and more consistent with the principles of science. What I mean by this, is…
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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. I hope all is well in your neck of the woods. Recently, I wrote a post titled “On Being Gullible,” the goal of which was to guide gullible people we care about toward more discerning ways. We focussed on three sets of skills that people use to avoid being gullible–Plausibility Checking, Trust Calibration, and Assessing Argumentation. In my earlier post, I…
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