At the facility where I work, we define addiction as a result of living a life that lacks personal meaning. The solution is, thus, obvious: Help clients begin the process of pursuing a meaningful life. But how to accomplish this? We’ve been working for more than a decade answering that question. One conclusion we’ve come […]
Addiction psychologists generally believe that shame is a bad thing for someone suffering from addiction. Philosophers disagree.
The play, Equus, has stirred the imagination of many psychologists—mainly because it raises doubts about what we do in the therapeutic hour.
The opioid crisis and fentanyl, the opioid most responsible for drug overdoses, has once again brought addiction into focus. In British Columbia, where the crisis is at its worst in Canada, the overdose death rate from illicit drugs has been rising since 2008.
Dr. Laura Armstrong, Ph.D., C.Psych., is an Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychologist, and researcher at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada, in the School of Counselling, Psychotherapy, and Spirituality.
Changing Environments Over the past decade, “meaningful work” has become a phrase I see more frequently in management and leadership circles. Google Scholar searches for the term “meaningful work” yields 16 items between 1981 and 1990, 38 between 1991 and 2000, 140 between 2001 and 2010, and 297 between 2011 and 2018. I am quite […]
Using a model researched and developed by Human Dynamics Inc., entitled The Agile Business Leader (ABL) Leadership Development Program, this session is designed to provide leaders with a primer on practices and tools for functioning in a world of complexity, chaos, interdependency, and ambiguity. This leadership development program creates strategies for success by leveraging existing […]
My life’s work has been an intellectual, creative, and lived exploration of healing and existential meaning at the intersections of mind, body, and dialogue. Provocative questions in medical ethics brought me to the fields of philosophy and medicine, but it was sitting with patients as a psychiatrist and listening to their life-stories that invited a […]
This manual grows out of MCC workshops I have given in the last ten years to psychologists, counselors, coaches, and other mental health professionals all over the world. The feedback I have received from attendees and alumni of these workshops confirm that MCC’s focus on positive motivation and the transformation through meaning has been very helpful for those devastated by the tsunami of life.
The present work attempts to show, through a case study, the possibilities of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) applied from existential thought. First of all we describe the symptoms referred to by a patient diagnosed as suffering from “negative schizophrenia”. These symptoms are then analyzed in existential terms, with special emphasis on the notion of “personal identity”.