American Neurosis

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1. Anorexia And Control The need for control is thought to be one of the major causes of anorexia. People who develop anorexia usually come from family situations where they have been forced to repress their feelings of helplessness. These feelings stem from abuse, perfectionistic expectations, or rigid rules where autonomy and independence are denied. In this sense anorexia […]...
2. Death Anxiety Death anxiety is exactly what it sounds like, anxiety about death. We don’t like to talk about death or even think about it. Irvin Yalom says it’s like staring at the sun. You can only look for a few seconds before turning away. Most of us secretly convince ourselves we’re immortal, that we will somehow […]...
3. When People Exit Your Life Have you ever stopped to think about why it hurts so much when, for whatever reason, people you care about and have grown accustomed to exit your life? From the existential point of view what’s going on is symbolic death and it acts as an unconscious reminder of the inevitability of physical death, of your […]...
4. Emotional Detachment and Not Caring The commonly held belief is that those with emotional detachment don’t care about much of anything, that they don’t get overly excited in the face of desirable happenings or overly upset in the face of undesirable happenings. Instances that provoke a great deal of anxiety in the general population seem to easily roll off the […]...
5. Family Constellation While in the process of improving your life you are probably going to experience push back from the people around you. Ironically it is those closest to you, particularly family members, who are most likely to stand in the way of your growth. They don’t have it out for you, and if asked they would […]...
6. Running From Responsibility At the superficial level the reason people shirk responsibility is that responsibility implies hard work and implies the possibility of being blamed for bad outcomes. But at the deeper existential level we have to understand the powerful role that anxiety plays. Shirking responsibility acts as an anxiety reducer. Responsibility means the ability to respond. So in […]...
7. Destruction Of Your Being I recently had a conversation about existential anxiety with a smart guy who made a comment that will be useful for explaining a stumbling block that impedes understanding for many people. We often write about anxiety being the threat of nothingness, either real in the form of death or symbolic. But it can be kind […]...
8. Doing Nothing To Combat Anxiety When faced with a threat to our well-being or the well-being of the people we care about we all feel compelled to take action. Existential anxiety is the threat of nothingness. We inherently know the best way to alleviate that threat and the painful feelings cued off by it is by doing something, not by […]...
9. Emotional Wounds Are Like Physical Wounds From the psychoanalytic point of view the paradox occurs that areas of conversation where people feel at ease, where they seem interested and engaged, are likely to be a waste of time, dead ends that don’t have much to do with the moving parts in the underlying neurosis. Conversely, areas where they clam up, where […]...
10. Reasonable Anxiety In an existential context no anxiety at all or very high levels of it are bad while reasonable, bearable levels are good. We will get into what reasonable is. The idea of anxiety being a good thing comes as a shock to a lot of us and the simple act of processing the ramifications is […]...
11. Neurosis If you’re interested in understanding the true drives and motivations of the people around you you’ll be led astray often as long as you take their words and actions at face value. Because while some people do develop into healthy, mature adults where external behavior and conscious thoughts and feelings align with deeper life motivations, […]...
12. Anorexia and Neurosis The conditions that lead to the development of a character neurosis are similar to those that lead to developing anorexia from a psychodynamic point of view. You will probably read in a lot places that anorexia should be categorized as an addiction, and there is probably some truth to this. However we believe that conceptualizing […]...
13. Managing Death Anxiety There’s nothing particularly neurotic about death anxiety and in fact we might make the opposite case: Excluding the truly enlightened among us, those who claim to have no death anxiety whatsoever recur to various psychological defense mechanisms to achieve that state. Defense mechanisms are symptoms of neuroses just like smoke is a symptom of fire. […]...
14. Neurosis Case Study Liam is twenty-seven years old and lives in a small town in Washington State. He enjoys playing guitar and believes he is an expert even though he is actually a mediocre player. He lives in a place where few other people play musical instruments, so the community supports his narrative to some extent. He receives […]...
15. Neurosis And Death Anxiety “Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.” – Paul Tillich Anxiety is central to the formation of all neuroses, and when we view all anxiety as stemming from death anxiety the quote above by Tillich becomes intelligible and profound. Death anxiety is the threat of nothingness, nothingness in both its symbolic and […]...
16. Insidious Trauma And Neurosis Here’s the way the DSM-V defines trauma: Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence in one or more of four ways: (a) directly experiencing the event; (b) witnessing, in person, the event occurring to others; (c) learning that such an event happened to a close family member or friend; and (d) […]...
17. Anxiety And Talking Too Much In Social Encounters When most of us think of social anxiety we think of shutting down, we think of talking very little, we think of becoming closed off, shy and unengaged. This is of course a common form anxiety takes but it also manifests on the other end of the spectrum as an almost compulsive need to fill […]...
18. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Trauma Not all victims of trauma end up manifesting symptoms of PTSD but they do end up facing consequences in one form or another. You can’t be exposed to death or threatened death, serious injury or threatened serious injury, or sexual violence or threatened sexual violence without having the experience exert a profound impact on your […]...
19. The Decision To Grow Is Also The Decision To Die Why is it that so many people, maybe most people, remain stuck in undesirable environmental conditions and dysfunctional patterns of behavior even when they’re aware that change is possible and that this change would benefit them greatly? Why do people choose stagnation over growth? The answer lies in the ever-present specter of existential anxiety, that […]...
20. Feelings Of Superiority And Neurosis Certain people think they know more than they do in areas where they have little experience or training, yet it’s almost impossible, like hitting your head against a wall, to dispossess them of their wildly inaccurate or hopelessly basic points of view. For this personality type the culprit is the idealized self-image, a falsified perception […]...