Posts by Griffin Hansbury

From the New York Times, on the importance of working with an LGBTQ-affirmative therapist: “Having a gay-affirmative therapist really changed my life in a lot of ways,” said one student therapist. “I had always thought, ‘I’m just like my straight friends, only I’m attracted to men.’ But what I found out is that there’s a deeper…

In our culture of mandatory happiness, wise words from Svend Brinkmann, author of the Danish bestseller Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze: “I believe our thoughts and emotions should mirror the world. When something bad happens, we should be allowed to have negative thoughts and feelings about it because that’s how we understand the world.” “Life…

This conundrum is often the log jam that gets in the way of emotional healing: “When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So, you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless ― that…

“Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” Psychologist Susan David on the value of so-called “negative” emotions.

“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed…

Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor of biology and gender studies, has been writing about the non-binary nature of sex for a long time. Now is a good time to revisit her work. She writes about it this week in the New York Times: “Two sexes have never been enough to describe human variety. Not in biblical…

The psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy speaks about the importance of mentalization–being thought of by another, so that we might think of ourselves. He says, “If we do not have someone around us who is able to think about us accurately, as we are, we will have an enfeebled sense of ourselves. We will never really be…

When searching for your “real self,” it’s important to keep in mind that we all have multiple selves. Which one is real? Scientific American looks at the research that is calling authenticity into question as a concept: “Perhaps the thorniest issue of them all though is the entire notion of the ‘real self.’ The humanistic…