Author: Gilead Yeffett

→Couples and individual psychotherapist, working in: 6a Bessborough Place, Pimlico, London SW1V 3SG Longcroft House, 2-8 Victoria Avenue, City, London EC2M 4NS

The autonomy risk

In Western culture, we usually use autonomy to measure the level of freedom we have. The more autonomous a person is the more freedom we assume the person experiences. As such, autonomy is the very core of freedom.

The trend of focusing on the self started in the West about 100 years ago with the rise of psychoanalysis; not only has it been growing since, it is also spreading to other cultures, along with other Western concepts rapidly via films, advertising, personal development books and self-expression workshops to name a few vehicles.

As much as autonomy is doing a great deal

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The value of context

maze One of the risks of psychotherapy is that it can focus too hard on a specific issue, or a problem, thus isolating it from its context. Most problems are created by the contexts in which people live and therefore require contextual view and solutions. Poverty, violence, sexual behaviour, religious beliefs and practices, social practices and community life must all be part of the therapeutic work if we want to achieve anything beyond mere awareness.

I believe that people come to therapy with real-world problems and are seeking real-world solutions. Therapy that

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Where are our emotions?

We tend to think of our emotions as things within us, anger, anxiety, sadness are labelled as negative emotions that we are better off without. We even speak of releasing anger, thinking positively to push away sadness and other mechanism to change the way we feel.

In Gestalt theory, the validity of our emotions is achieved in what is referred to as co-creation. Co-creation is the idea that no activity has intrinsic value, but is a function of an interaction between people and their environment; the validity comes from an agreement and understanding between people that a certain activity carries

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Certainty and contradictions

“…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language”. Rainer Maria Rilke 1902

Most of us have an inherent need to avoid tension and conflicts and that is understandable, unpredictable situations can bring up anxiety. And of course, the more we know about the future, the more predictable it would become and the safer we can feel – a

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Heaven and hell

A Japanese warrior approached a Zen master searching for an answer to a question that was troubling him.

“Tell me master” asked the warrior, “are there heaven and hell?”

“Ha!” snorted the master in what seemed to be scorn for the warrior.

“What makes you think you could understand such things?” “You are only an uneducated soldier who is wasting my time.”

The warrior immediately froze in shock, no one, but no one, ever spoke to a warrior like this. It meant instant death.

“You are still here” said the master. “Are you too stupid to understand what I said?”

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A tale about a dog, a village and an agreement

There once was a fearsome dog that lived by the road that led to a village. The dog made the lives of the villagers miserable, if you happened to cross its path, you were sure to feel the strength of its teeth. There was no one coming or going, no trade and no playing, only fear. I am in control thought the dog to itself.

This went on for a while and the villagers grew tired and desperate.

And so one day they went to the head of the

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Celebrating our teachers

I love the thought of celebrating our teachers.We all learn, first by imitation and then by inspiration. We take tools that others have created before us and put them together in creative combinations that suit our new needs. And often we find it hard to admit that learn from others. Does it really matter where we get our inspiration from or who we have been imitating? To me what matters is that we can be inspired. Amongst the things we learn is the need to be original, but honestly, how many

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A brief note on relationships

While how we feel about our relationships is in our heads, it doesn’t mean that they started in our heads and that they need to end there. Sometimes a small change in how we behave in a relationship is all that is needed to change how we feel about a relationship.

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Three dirty words

Despite describing a natural part of what it means to be human, these three words seem to trigger discomfort and shame. How did it happen that we have isolated these experiences and made them unwanted?

Competition. Being competitive has got a bad name, the underlying message is that competitive equals aggressive. But mixed messages are rife, just look around. You need to be bigger, thinner, younger, fitter, happier or just more of this and less of that.

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Resilience continued: false resources

Emotional resilience is a good quality to have, most people would agree. Bouncing back means we can risk new behaviours accepting that if anything goes wrong, somehow we will know what to do.

After having written about the four resources that can help increase resilience, I started thinking about the things we do to decrease our resilience. Not that we do it on purpose, I doubt many people walk around thinking about how they

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