Robert Beridha, PhD

01/03/2024

09/25/2023

From Pathways to Bliss.

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07/15/2023

Psychodynamic therapy fulfills stringent criteria for evidence-based treatment for common mental disorders.

05/19/2023

the ears, the joints, the memory... honk honk rattle rattle

"The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?

One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another— but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment."
~Joseph Campbell

From The Power of Myth

https://jcf.org/titles/joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-with-bill-moyers-book/

05/05/2023

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent:
“Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!"
Kurt Vonnegut

05/02/2023

“Your new life is going to cost you your old one.
It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense of direction.
It’s going to cost you relationships and friends.
It’s going to cost you being liked and understood.
It doesn’t matter.
The people who are meant for you are going to meet you on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort zone around the things that actually move you forward.
Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of being understood, you’re going to be seen.
All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are.”

— Brianna Wiest

[ Art • “The Zodiac Prayer” by øjeRum ]

05/02/2023

"People are suffering," said psych survivor and counselor Tracy Myers. "The idea that sticking them in a cell and giving them drugs is a solution for this is insanity."

03/05/2023

"As people are learning all over again in the modern world, when people who will not acknowledge their own woundedness are given power, they will make new wounds and possibly wound everyone because of their need to deny their own woundedness. The word heal means to cure and specifically to make whole. It turns out that being a whole person means we have to accept our vulnerable parts, and that we have to accept and learn to face our original inner wounds. For in this old, mythological understanding, the fateful event of being wounded early in life creates the need for a deep healing process that becomes the path of awakening for each person.

The path of the wounded healer leads to a connection to the deep self within, which is our connection to wholeness, which is the root of the human capacity to heal. There's an old idea that says that in the same way that something greater than ourselves wounds us early on, something greater than ourselves seeks to awaken through the specific wounds we carry. In that sense, denying the inner wound means also denying the presence of the deep soul or the centering self, which holds the exact medicine we are looking for.

In some mythic stories, the wound inside a person is called the sacred affliction, or the holy wound. There's another play on words in which the wound which can be seen as a hole, can also be seen as a holy element that secretly holds the natural antidote, the inner medicine that we also brought to life.

The wounded healer is ever wounded, and ever able to find ways of healing. It's an archetypal condition. The point has never been to become perfect, or perfectly healed, or completely whole. The point has always been to become holy. That is to say, complete with our vulnerabilities and our wounds, because the wound becomes a womb from which we are intended to be reborn again and again. And that's why the old saying was, the afflicted are holy.”

- Michael Meade