Needs Satisfaction Cycle

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1. Automatic Negative Thinking And Depression Arguing about the cause of depression is a little bit like arguing about what came first between the chicken and the egg. On one hand you have psychologists who believe that changes in mood cause negative thoughts about the self, world, and future while on the other hand you have psychologists who believe that negative […]...
2. Confluence In Gestalt Confluence is the last resistance in the needs satisfaction cycle and occurs between the stages of closure and withdrawal. This is when a person doesn’t know how to let go. It’s necessary to withdraw from an experience and have some down time in order to recharge your psychological and physical batteries. After a football player […]...
3. Catching Negative Self-Talk In The Moment A mean spirited, vicious little troll has taken up residence in your psyche. This troll is critical of pretty much everything you do. He’s harder on you than maybe anybody else in your life right now. We all want to be happy. Happiness is the purported goal of life for most people. But how can […]...
4. What To Do When You Cannot Stop Thinking About Something We are going to talk about what to do when you cannot stop thinking about something. We’ve all been there, the ruminations continue although we desperately want them to go away. It’s a situation that approaches the obsessions experienced by people with obsessive compulsive disorder. The problem is that trying not to think about something […]...
5. Depression And Negative Self-Appraisals Negative self-appraisals are a common feature of depression. Most people who are depressed report feelings of guilt, worthlessness, low self esteem, and deficient abilities and intelligence. The question is whether the depression causes these beliefs or these beliefs cause the depression. It’s the classic paradox of what came first between the chicken and the egg. The […]...
6. Should Have Known Better ‘I should have known better’ is yet another example of the tyranny of the shoulds. This one is particularly egregious since it’s pointed towards a past happening that by definition can’t be avoided or changed, only endured. So it’s a form of self-abuse that pulls you into a cycle of negative thinking where you get […]...
7. Communication Patterns Lots of close relationships become defined by toxic communication patterns, by hurtful comments and thoughtless remarks, causing psychological and emotional pain. More often then not everyone involved would like the situation to change but they feel stuck, and despite their best efforts continue to engage in harmful cycles of communication. It’s easy to be positive […]...
8. Example Of Negative Self-Talk If you’re a fan of the the sitcom ‘Friends’ you might remember an early episode where there’s a power outage across New York and Chandler ends up getting stuck in an ATM vestibule with a beautiful woman. Throughout the episode we are privy to not just their interactions but also to his internal monologue, which […]...
9. Isolate The Desirable Elements Of Your Addiction As an addict, and we mean compulsive dependence on anything not just a chemical substance, if you’re unable to recognize all of the desirable, wanted effects, past and present, of the entity you’re addicted to you’re never going to be able to quit. This sounds counterintuitive of course. It would seem that the best way […]...
10. Combating Low Self-Esteem The challenge in combating low self-esteem is that self-esteem is itself ephemeral. It’s a feeling, a state of mind, an orientation towards people and the world that might be very real but remains difficult to pin down, difficult to define. But what is not difficult to pin down or define is the automatic negative thinking, […]...
11. Projection In Gestalt We have talked about the importance of completing the needs satisfaction cycle in various aspects of your life in order to feel a sense of wholeness. In this framework psychological distress is often the result of unconsciously being unable to move from one stage to the next. Gestalt psychologists call the mechanisms we use to […]...
12. Working With Abusers The tendency is to villainize abusers but trying to get them to accept the role of villain is a terrible idea. They won’t play ball, even if they seem receptive. What they will do is actively or passively thwart every therapeutic attempt. This is because at the conscious level abusers don’t believe they’re villains, they […]...
13. Replacing Negative Self-Talk With Positive Self-Talk The antidote for negative self-talk is positive self-talk. Simple, right? Objectively speaking it is simple, but the problem is that people mistake their subjective biases for objective reality. In the context of this article they mistake their negative self-talk for fact. They think of it like an incontrovertible report from an outside authority rather than […]...
14. Becoming Version 2.0 Of Ourselves A lot of people who are struggling and unhappy in their lives and relationships approach change with the goal of fundamentally restructuring who they are. They want to become something different. We’re not talking about modification, we’re talking about about all or nothing thinking. This sort of attitude towards change signifies is underlying unfavorable perception […]...
15. Psychology Of Seeking Revenge Seeking revenge appears to be about righting a past wrong but it’s actually about mitigating a present hurt. Although the events happened back then those hurt feelings are still very much alive right now. And so from the psychological point of view while revenge is almost always consciously rationalized as simple justice, as giving the offending […]...
16. Work Versus Leisure In the modern world it seems that almost all of human life is geared towards creating more time for leisure. People work for the weekends, they plan for vacations, they look forward to the day when they can retire. But is leisure all it’s cracked up to be? The answer is a decisive no when […]...
17. Positive Self-Talk We’ve talked about how detrimental negative self-talk is to your personal growth and happiness. The funny part about Western psychology is that it is so concerned with treating dysfunction that it often ignores the other side of the coin, instead just hoping to get everyone up to a baseline level of functioning. But it follows […]...
18. Breaking the Cycle of Abuse We tend to paint people who abuse as the villains of the story, and this has to do with living in an individualistic society where we believe that each of us is responsible for our own actions. While this is ultimately true, it’s equally true that our thoughts and actions are a product of an […]...
19. The Vicious Cycle of Negative Self-Talk Negative self-talk is the abusive running conversation you have going on in your own head about yourself. If you engage in a lot of negative self-talk then you are your own worst critic, you’re a lot harder on yourself than anyone else is on you. You’re probably also a lot harder on yourself than you […]...
20. Cutting Through The Vicious Cycle Of Addiction The Attempt to Reduce Unwanted States of Being The vicious cycle of addiction lies in the fact that people consciously or unconsciously use their drug of choice in order to diminish their isolation, anxiety, depression, guilt, unhappiness, etc. but in the long-term these unwanted states of being are actually amplified, which causes them to consume […]...