Nikos Marinos Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

19/11/2024

Because we feel collectively very good about humour, it can sound odd to suggest that some of us should try to become a little less funny about ourselves. We shouldn’t – for our own sakes – be quite as comedic as we are.

A person who grows up in authentic circumstances is allowed to feel sad whenever an occasion demands it. They can cry when someone leaves them, be happy when good news arrives, get angry when they’ve been hurt, and envious when someone acquires something they would have liked to have.

But there are other sorts of childhood where what an offspring experiences is far too dangerous for those around them. Parents might be too angry or depressed to tolerate reality, forcing their children into precocious proto-careers on the comedy circuit. A person may tell us with a witty air that getting slapped around by their ‘daft’ uncle was a ‘hoot.’ News of tragic events may be delivered in such light-hearted ways that we forget to notice the pain ruthlessly going unmentioned.

It can be the greatest kindness to tell a funny friend that though we have the highest respect for their comic talents, we don’t necessarily always want to laugh.

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19/11/2024

“A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow th…

04/10/2024

High ambitions are noble and important, but there can also come a point when they become the sources of terrible trouble and unnecessary panic.

One way of undercutting our more reckless ideals and perfectionism was pioneered by a British psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott in the 1950s. Winnicott specialised in relationships between parents and children. In his clinical practice, he often met with parents who felt like failures: perhaps because their children hadn’t got into the best schools, or because there were sometimes arguments around the dinner table or the house wasn’t always completely tidy.

Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequence of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism.

To address this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: what he called ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pretty decent, usually well intentioned, sometimes grumpy but basically reasonable father or mother. The concept of ‘good enough’ was invented as an escape from dangerous ideals. It began in relation to parenthood, but it can be applied across life more generally, especially around work and love.

To learn more, click the link.

https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/good-enough-is-good-enough/

12/09/2024

It can, at points, seem horrifically clear that simply no one really cares. They barely notice our presence, they hardly stick around to listen to what we have to say, they catch none of our hints – and they are overwhelmingly preoccupied with their own projects and day-to-day concerns.

On the basis of such evidence, it is easy for us to fall into a large, damning and dangerously heart-breaking conclusion about our situation: that we are profoundly alone – far beyond any possibility of connection or empathy.

But the truth may be at once more mundane and rather more hopeful. Most of us are extremely keen to help when we notice an urgent need, but we are also continuously distracted, grievously taken up with our lives and unlikely to spot that there is anything at all the matter with people around us unless the problem is spelt out in the clearest, most unambiguous terms. In other words, we respond well to screams, but terribly to hints.

We should rehearse these facts without rancour or surprise when we are fragile and desperate. The apparent indifference of others is only apparent. We need to learn to scream.

To learn more, click the link:
https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/on-asking-for-help/

05/09/2024

05/09/2024

Walking through her garden one day, Virginia Woolf had an exquisite epiphany about creativity and the meaning of life – read it at the link: https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/virginia-cotton-wool

23/04/2024

23/04/2024

“I’ve shown women as they are, as divided human beings, and not as they ought to be.” —Simone de Beauvoir https://buff.ly/2wLkofv

23/04/2024

Being in a particular psychological environment every day for years has a pretty big impact on our habits of mind. It influences what we assume other people are like, it forms our view of life and gradually shapes who we are. The psychology inculcated by the work we do doesn’t stay at work. We carry it with us into the rest of our lives.

Work can be very good for people. The mentality fostered at work might be making up for aspects of the self that didn’t get properly developed before. But work can narrow our characters too. When a certain range of issues and ways of thinking become entrenched, it means that others start to feel awkward and even threatening. A person who has become very used to implementing the ideas of others – and maybe very skilled at it – can then find it deeply uncomfortable to be put on the spot and asked what they think the big objectives should be. They’ve got entirely out of the habit of asking themselves such questions.

Keeping in mind how work shapes a person means we should be slower to blame other people for the way they are. Perhaps it is their job, not ‘them’ that has made them as they are – that has made them so nervous, angry, or boring. Our identities are vulnerable to our jobs. And that may open the avenues of pity.

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https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/how-your-job-shapes-your-identity/

23/04/2024

"La photographie est une impulsion qui vient d'un regard permanent et qui saisit l'instant dans son éternité".
Henri Cartier-Bresson

23/04/2024

For more on what a truly ethical business would look like, follow the link below.

https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/what-good-business-should-be/