Welcome to From Insults To Respect. Today’s post offers an approach for respectfully helping someone experiencing hopelessness during a first-hour counseling session. I commend it to you for I have found it remarkably helpful over my many years providing counseling services. Helping people experiencing hopelessness can be rather challenging because many of them have no interest in doing anything about it. As the renowned psychologist and philosopher…
Welcome to From Insults To Respect. In recent news articles, we have learned that a group of people who were demonstrating in front of Trump Tower are suing Trump and his company for damages from what they claim was his security officers’ “wanton and malicious assaults and batteries.” Trump denied under oath knowing anything about the incident until a day after it happened, but his former…
Welcome to From Insults to Respect. By now you must have heard about the slap heard around the world, it being so widely discussed on media reports and Internet forums. What I found concerning in these discussions is the absence of what Will Smith could have done differently to deal with his emotional response to his wife’s reaction to a Chris Rock joke other than “he…
Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Today, I would like to discuss a topic that has been bothering me for several months–politicians and their followers attacking President Biden for inflation. Consider a press conference held by Senate Republicans this past July. At that time, they blamed the “insane tax and spending spree of President Biden and the Democrats for six straight months of raging inflation.” As…
Welcome to From Insults To Respect. Back in 2019, I criticized the use of “antipsychotics” and on Facebook someone criticized what I had written saying, “all of the research clearly indicates that the “antipsychotics,” when used by people diagnosed as having schizophrenia, decrease the risk of dying.” I then, very respectfully, asked that he supply me with the references that he is relying on to make…
Welcome to From Insults To Respect. Today we take a look at the experience of asking for help, which can be hard for some of us. As we do so, we’ll be utilizing the tremendously popular Beatles song, “Help” in order to bring to light some aspects of the experience in an entertaining manner. The song was released as a single in the summer of 1965…
Welcome to From Insults To Respect. In an earlier post (see HERE) I made some rational arguments for people to consider resolving their conflicts in private whenever possible. For example, I mentioned a research study that found people are more likely to escalate an argument into a fight when spectators are around (“Impression Management and the Escalation of Aggression and Violence,” R. B. Felson, Social Psychology Review, 1982). Rational…
Welcome to From Insults To Respect. Recently, I happened to be listening to Paul McCartney’s fine album, Egypt Station, and my emotions were stirred up by the straight away rocker, “Who Cares.” The first stanza, with its driving beat, sets up its theme: Did you ever get hurt by the words people say And the things that they do when they’re picking on you? Did you ever…
Welcome to From Insults To Respect. As I write this, it is a few days before Christmas. The season finds me increasing my tips at restaurants. Somehow, in some vague kind of way, I kind of respect myself for doing so. I wonder why? I’m not alone in increasing tip giving during the Christmas season. I know this first hand because during my Brooklyn College days…
A Positive Alternative To The Mental Disorder Approach
Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Regular readers of this blog know that I have become disenchanted with the mental disorder/mental illness/medical model for addressing psychological concerns (see, for example, HERE). Today I describe how this came about, along with my reasons for preferring a psychological maturity approach. My Disenchantment With The Mental Disorder Model Let’s begin with my early education as a psychologist. At first,…
