Some time ago somebody asked me about an emotional outburst and what to do about it. The person identified yearlong emotional coldness as the reason for the sudden state of being overwhelmed with sadness. I was asked for advice. Since emotional coldness is a very common problem in our Western world, I decided to share the basic outlines of my answer with you here. In my opinion there is no use dealing with emotional coldness, unless we try to find its origin first. Let me name some possibilities of what the origin could be: Due to a traumatic event, one shuts down emotionally and this is not a...

I catch myself often being angry at myself: »Oh, my god, how can I be so stupid. I have been repeating the same mistake over and over again for years!« Lately I have been inclined to interpret my mistakes in another way, not by using my stupidity as the basis for explanation. Let us think back. How did we learn as kids? Psychologists claim that a child learns mostly by imitating the grown-ups around him. And frankly speaking: How could a new born child learn by taking advice from the parents? The child does not understand words yet. Thus the method of imitating is the only way to learn how to walk,...

Pessimism is a very common thinking pattern nowadays. It is accompanied by a well-known reasoning: ‘I choose pessimism, because I hate to be disappointed.’ Thus pessimism seems to be the safe way through life. But is it really? What if it escalates to depression? And even if it does not – do we really want to be miserable for 70 or even 100 years, simply in order to avoid disappointment? I used to be a pessimist. The upper safety strategy was so deeply rooted in my ways of thinking that I was not even aware of it. In addition to that I had another belief: ‘If I expect the worst, I will...

In these difficult times, when we go through one personal crisis after another and sometimes life feels like a roller coaster, we find ourselves often turning to Eastern philosophy for answers. Compassion seems to be one of the keywords of many Buddhist scripts and other religious texts of the East. Not being absent from the Bible it still appears to strike out more in Eastern religious and philosophical texts. Compassion had also become a buzzword in new age literature and self help books of the West, like those written by Louise Hay, Phyllis Krystal and many others. Yet I find myself wondering HOW...

People often find similarities in my story, even though they might have a different diagnosis from mine which is schizoaffective disorder. I have recently written the following lines as an answer to an e-mail. I find them interesting for others as well: Over the years I have come to the conclusion that the exact diagnosis does not matter that much. Also there are cases when people get totally O.K. in their thirties, even though they have been diagnosed with ‘chronic’. So do not despair! The western medicine (psychiatry) does not believe that our lifestyle can help the illness, but they...