Cliff Heegel Ph.D.

Our unconscious automatic reactions make us miserable. What’s wrong when you’ve tried and you just don’t seem to change? Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) sees psychological flexibility as central to living a mentally and emotionally healthy life. Managing the moment you are actually living in right this second requires you to be psychologically nimble and adaptive. [...]

Here’s a good book– Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck.  It hsa been around for a few years but it is definitely worth a read if you have not read it yet. If you read it and your life did not change for the better, read it again- this time, do the exercises. [...]

Living a serene life is not difficult for those who are not caught up in attachment or aversion. When attachment  and  aversion are both absent, everything is clear and simple. However, if you get caught in the mind when it starts to make judgments about how things should be different, your serenity is split apart. [...]

You are what observes, not what you observe. If that is true, then… ? What are you certain of? Anything? Nothing? It is important.

In brief: Something to look at here is the idea of shadow judgments. It is just another way to describe the function of the ‘selves’. Selves we like or think others will treat right we will identify with and accept as “Me”. And the shadow selves, the aspects of Me that we judge as inferior, shameful, or whatever they trained us to think, we will disown the shadow selves and not see even them as Me. This results in cognitive fusion with one of the opposite selves (for example, good boy/bad boy) which results in us being trapped reacting to the stories about our selves that are in our head that we are emotionally and cognitively fused with.