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 little passage from Inner Gold, a book Arnie Kotler put together from some lectures by Robert A. Johnson. Arnie is a friend and a former teacher of mine. Robert A. Johnson is a psychoanalyst. I am going to quote the entire passage first so you can read it as one piece and get [...]

Subtitled: An uncertain mind sometimes deals with Reality better than a mind that is certain “It ain’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so” ~Will Rogers I love that Will Rogers quote. It captures, in a humorous way, the essence of the human predicament. [...]

Here’s a short audio reflective exercise that can help you awaken from what Tara Brach calls “The Trance of Unworthiness.”  Below the audio link is an excerpt from one of her articles that I found on the internet. And if you want to know a lot more, read her book “Radical Acceptance.” Audio Link: http://askdrcliff.com/audio/tranceunworthy.mp3 [...]

I had a dream the other night. In my dream I was talking to a woman I’ll call Julia about how to handle her thoughts about herself. I realized that Julia was quite good at handling her thoughts about other people. She was powerless, however, when it came to thoughts about herself. Whatever Julia thought [...]