Cliff Heegel Ph.D.

Managing Your Narcissism Preface to any narcissists reading this: By recommending that you read this I am not intending to imply that you are ignorant or deficient in some critical manner. There’s a good chance that you already know a lot about the topics I mention here. However, at a basic level, narcissism is a […]

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. Read this book if you are older than 35. You might also find it helpful if you are younger than 35 but you have been kicked around a lot by life- in other words, if you have some humility due to the failures,  losses, and betrayals in […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.