Catherine Penn Williams, MA, LPC

12/30/2025

12/29/2025

James Hollis in an interview on the Keep Talking Podcast- on being a recovering nice person, and stepping into new roles for oneself..

He says: "many of us were raised to be nice all the time, and nice means accommodating whatever is demanded in your environment. If you are nice in all directions and its a reflexive niceness - sooner or later it will violate your own personhood, and sooner or later is will violate the expectations of your own soul.

Just the capacity to say no to someone "no I do not want that", or "no I am not going to allow you to do that to me" - are moments where one is not being nice, but one is being very real, one is being authentic.

The opposite of a reflexive niceness is not evil - its called authenticity. Reflexive niceness is a protection, an old protection, its what we actually call co-dependence. There is a power differential, and the power is always in the hands of the other, never within me, and therefore I don't have the right to say no I don't want to do that. I have to co-operate with you.

As Jung said: "Neurosis is the flight from authentic suffering", so suffering either way - if you have inauthentic suffering, you will be hit with a depression that comes from the unlived life. If you risk and step into life more fully, you will have a lot of anxiety, but thats preferable to depression, because depression ultimately steals from us our capacity to engage life, and to grow and develop. We can stay stuck in all our patterns, our avoidances, but sooner or later something shows up and pathologises."

“Each morning the twin gremlins of fear and lethargy sit at the foot of our bed and smirk. Fear of further departure, fear of the unknown, fear of the challenge of largeness intimidates us back into our convenient rituals, conventional thinking, and familiar surroundings. To be recurrently intimidated by the task of life is a form of spiritual annihilation. On the other front, lethargy seduces us with sibilant whispers: kick back, chill out, numb out, take it easy for a while . . . sometimes for a long while, sometimes a lifetime, sometimes a spiritual oblivion. (As a friend advised me in Zurich, “When in doubt, administer chocolate.”) Yet the way forward threatens death—at the very least, the death of what has been familiar, the death of whomever we have been.”

The daily confrontation with these gremlins of fear and lethargy obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression, for each is aroused by the dilemma of daily choice. Anxiety will be our companion if we risk the next stage of our journey, and depression our companion if we do not. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.

James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.

Art: Johann Heinrich Füssli

12/19/2025

12/12/2025

Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from the book, Eternal Echoes
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

County Clare Cottage, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

12/08/2025

Psychologist and Jungian Analyst Polly Young-Eisendrath knows a thing or two about relationships.