crazy is just a metaphor If you want to say that a person is crazy, you have to try long and hard to come up with a way of expressing this idea without using a metaphor. To say that the person has gone crazy is already to use a metaphor. "Crazy" comes from the word "crazing" which is the system of tiny cracks that can begin to appear in the glaze of an otherwise and heretofore perfectly good piece of pottery. Apparently someone, sometime looked at a person who was going crazy and was reminded of a glazed pot that was beginning to craze, and they used the phrase "He is becoming crazed" even though he knew it wasn't literally true. And to say a person has "gone crazy" is to mix two metaphors. He is sitting right in front of you, so he hasn't gone anywhere literally. And he is not a pot with glaze, so he is not crazed. So he has not literally gone crazy, even though he has gone crazy. Hersh, 2011 (on imagination and metaphors)

mirrorgirlblog.com. My #life as a therapist Older, more experienced therapists cry more often in therapy How often do therapists cry in therapy and does it matter? For a profession that trades in emotions, you'd think these questions would have been tackled before. But as Amy Blume-Marcovici and her colleagues point out in their new paper, the issue has been strangely neglected. There's been plenty of research on crying medics , yet all we know about crying therapists comes from an ethics paper published in the 80s (56.5% of therapists said they'd cried in front of a client), and an unpublished qualitative study of ten psychodynamic psychotherapists for a doctoral thesis completed in the 90s. From their survey of 684 US psychological therapists - 75% women; age range 22 to 85; 35% CBT, 23% eclectic with psychodynamic emphasis, 19% eclectic without psychodynamic emphasis - Blume-Marcovici's group found that 72% of the sample had cried in therapy ever. Among these criers, 30% had cried in the last four weeks. Looking at the correlates of being a therapist who cries in therapy, it was older, more experienced therapists and those with a psychodynamic approach, who were more likely to be criers. Surprisingly perhaps, female therapists were no more likely to cry in therapy than male therapists, despite the fact that they reported crying more often in daily #life than the men. This mismatch between crying in everyday #life and crying in therapy was a consistent theme. Older therapists too cried less often in daily #life than younger therapists, despite more crying with clients. Also, whereas crying in daily #life is typically associated with negative emotion, in therapy it was associated not just with the therapists experiencing sadness (reported by 75% during their last therapy cry), but also with "feeling touched" (63%), warmth (33%), gratitude (15%) and joy (12%). "This suggests that tears that occur in the therapy situation are different in nature than tears shed in daily #life," the researchers said. However, it's worth noting that, at their last time of crying in therapy, the therapists believed their clients were experiencing negative emotions like sadness, grief and powerlessness. Therapist personality was only weakly related to crying, with openness being the most relevant trait. More agreeable and extraverted therapists also showed a tendency towards crying more. The personality questionnaire used in this study was extremely brief, so it's tricky to read too much into these results. Ditto for therapist empathy, which showed an association with crying tendency, but not frequency or proneness, possibly due to the limitations of the empathy scale that was used. This research provides no objective data on the effect on clients of having a crying therapist. However, the therapists' belief was that their crying was either inconsequential (53.5%) or that it had changed their relationship with their client for the better (45.7%). Less than one per cent felt it had harmed their client. Referring to the literature on therapist self-disclosure, the researchers speculated that perhaps therapist crying has a positive impact when the therapist-client relationship is already strong, but can threaten that relationship when it is weak or negative. Blume-Marcovici and her colleagues called for more research on this neglected topic, and particularly for future studies to investigate the effect of therapist crying on client outcomes. They said their initial results are "meaningful" because they challenge the idea that "therapist crying in therapy is occurring due to the therapist being overwhelmed by intense negative emotions that arise in therapy, and instead signals a moment of potentially positive emotional connection, even if amid painful negative affect." _________________________________ Blume-Marcovici, A., Stolberg, R., and Khademi, M. (2013). Do Therapists Cry in Therapy? The Role of Experience and Other Factors in Therapists' Tears. Psychotherapy DOI: 10.1037/a0031384 --Further reading-- When therapists have the hots for their clients What should a therapist do if a client confesses to murder? Successful therapists focus on their clients' strengths Post written by Christian Jarrett ( @psych_writer ) for the BPS Research Digest .

sacred secret I was swimming in my own sweat and anxiety when I woke up this morning. It was a nightmare, and it probably doesn`t surprise anyone that the main character was my charming ex-boyfriend. I was doing everything wrong, the more he was silent, the more my own sound came through, manifesting itself in anger that after a while unleashed itself. The object wasn`t him, because I cannot make myself hit him in the dream, but my sister who I love dearly. In the dream she keeps coming to me, she wants to ask me something, but I get so annoyed because it steals time from my aim: Asking him the questions I need to know (are you together with somebody?). This frustrates me so much, especially since she doesn`t go away when I ask the first two times, that I begin to hit her. She goes away for a while, but always comes back. I am getting more and more angry, and can`t stop hitting her. My charming ex is not so charming anymore. He points at me, scolds and says: Now you see how bad you are! I feel there is nothing I can do to defend myself. He is right. I can`t control myself. The dream doesn`t dissolve when my cold feet touch the bathroom floor. I have goosebumps, and every movement is covered by sticky sirus. I find my clothes slowly, pulling on pink and brown clothes, with a warm jacket on top of it. When I am washing my face, also this painfully slow, I notice that my eye is itchy. When I start rubbing, my finger brings with it a interesting consequense from the nights tossing and turning: A half lense. I close one eye, too see if my vision is unclear, but that`s not the case. This means the lense is still whole. The part I have on my finger, must be the one who went behind my eye three weeks ago. The dirty left-overs come forward again. When I tell you my deepest secrets, can I trust that it will be respected and that I`m still safe? Will you hate me or think I am a bad person? What will my dear readers think. I am not sure that it will be safe, so I must know this before I start telling you about it. Can I trust you? I will end this with words from another blog that I really love. It`s about sacred places, and this part is about our most vulnerable: The Heart Lastly, a place of critical importance for everyone is more figurative. When someone shares a piece of their heart with us, they are allowing us to see something that is very sacred and special for them. Oftentimes, we can feel vulnerable when bearing our soul to someone or sharing something deeply personal. For those listening, it is not a time to judge, belittle or ignore. When someone allows you to walk in their heart, you stand on sacred ground. Cherish the opportunity to learn more about them and listen with your head and heart. Because when we can see the side of someone that we've never seen, we will have made a new friend http://forwardwalking.com/author/stevejames1012/

my secrets I was swimming in my own sweat and anxiety when I woke up this morning. It was a nightmare, and it probably doesn`t surprise anyone that the main character was my charming ex-boyfriend. I was doing everything wrong, the more he was silent, the more my own sound came through, manifesting itself in anger that after a while unleashed itself. The object wasn`t him, because I cannot make myself hit him in the dream, but my sister who I love dearly. In the dream she keeps coming to me, she wants to ask me something, but I get so annoyed because it steals time from my aim: Asking him the questions I need to know (are you together with somebody?). This frustrates me so much, especially since she doesn`t go away when I ask the first two times, that I begin to hit her. She goes away for a while, but always comes back. I am getting more and more angry, and can`t stop hitting her. My charming ex is not so charming anymore. He points at me, scolds and says: Now you see how bad you are! I feel there is nothing I can do to defend myself. He is right. I can`t control myself. The dream doesn`t dissolve when my cold feet touch the bathroom floor. I have goosebumps, and every movement is covered by sticky sirus. I find my clothes slowly, pulling on pink and brown clothes, with a warm jacket on top of it. When I am washing my face, also this painfully slow, I notice that my eye is itchy. When I start rubbing, my finger brings with it a interesting consequense from the nights tossing and turning: A half lense. I close one eye, too see if my vision is unclear, but that`s not the case. This means the lense is still whole. The part I have on my finger, must be the one who went behind my eye three weeks ago. The dirty left-overs come forward again. When I tell you my deepest secrets, can I trust that it will be respected and that I`m still safe? Will you hate me or think I am a bad person? What will my dear readers think. I am not sure that it will be safe, so I must know this before I start telling you about it. Can I trust you? I will end this with words from another blog that I really love. It`s about sacred places, and this part is about our most vulnerable: The Heart Lastly, a place of critical importance for everyone is more figurative. When someone shares a piece of their heart with us, they are allowing us to see something that is very sacred and special for them. Oftentimes, we can feel vulnerable when bearing our soul to someone or sharing something deeply personal. For those listening, it is not a time to judge, belittle or ignore. When someone allows you to walk in their heart, you stand on sacred ground. Cherish the opportunity to learn more about them and listen with your head and heart. Because when we can see the side of someone that we've never seen, we will have made a new friend http://forwardwalking.com/author/stevejames1012/

eastern thoughts It`s early morning. I can see the sun warming the mountain in front of me, chasing the cold away. I sit here with my ipad in front of me, and read a book on it (not telling). Its about a girl getting raped, trying to forget about it. But her body remembers. I found a part that I liked a lot, because it describes how dissociation can feel. She describes herself like being in a sterile cave, where not even bats would be. She also explains how it feels to be a "sunflower", a person who smiles and looks perfect on the outside, but feels cold and dead inside. Sometimes we try to hide away parts of us, not realizing that we only truly blossom when we dare to show who we really are