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Our life stories: needs, beliefs & behaviours - part two, "beliefs"

I posted yesterday on the first, "Needs" section of the "Needs, beliefs, behaviours" diagram (below).  Today I want to say a little about the second section of the diagram - "Beliefs".

Beliefs

This diagram is downloadable both as a Powerpoint slide and as a PDF file

Peer groups, Cumbria spring group - second morning, authenticity & feedback

Yesterday in "A 3 layer view of intrapersonal & interpersonal judgement" I wrote about the first morning of this four day residential group.  Now it's the start of the second day.  What happened yesterday?  I began in that "on-my-own" familiar way - getting up quite early, washing, writing, meditating, plunging in the stream.  I tried running up the Drove Road, but slightly pulled my calf muscle again - a recurrence of a strain from earlier in the week.  I walked/hobbled back down through the fields.  Lambs, cowslips, beautiful hares, calls from the curlews. 

Berlin weekend: self-affirmation theory

All day Friday and all day Saturday exploring Berlin.  Then on Saturday evening we went to a reasonable restaurant and this morning - Sunday - I woke with what seems to be a pretty good dose of food poisoning.  Humph.  Well it's been a peaceful day for me with my system gradually recovering.  Dear Catero has had a tourist time on her own, popping in now and again to see how I'm doing.  Gradually and steadily getting better is the answer.  By late morning I was up for reading again.  The book I have with me isn't as appealing as I'd hoped (rather jaundiced "realism"), so I've been enjoying looking at some research papers on self-affirmation!  Sad or what?! 

A couple of fine, recent books on attachment

I wrote earlier this month on "Attachment, compassion & relationships".  I've been aware of John Bowlby's work on adult-child attachment for many years but, when I've approached it for insights that might help in my work as a psychotherapist, I've been put off by the complexity of assessment methods and variety of reported attachment styles, as well as by the rapidly growing size of the relevant academic literature.  As Jude Cassidy and Phillip Shaver write in their preface to the 2008 meister work "Handbook of attachment (2nd ed)" - see more details at the end of this blog post - "Anybody who conducts a literature search on the topic of 'attachment' will turn up more than 10,000 entries since 1975, and the entries will be spread across scores of physiological, clinical, developmental, and social psychology journals, will include numerous

Attachment, compassion & relationships

Well I didn't sleep too well last night.  Catero, my wife, and I went to the cinema yesterday evening and watched "500 Days of Summer" . I enjoyed it and it got me thinking about relationships.  The "Summer" of the title is a woman who doesn't believe in romantic love.  She's kind of charming and maddening and, as I biked away from the cinema, I wondered how I would have approached treating her if she had come to me for therapy!  Interestingly a newspaper reviewer commented that the film is "weirdly incurious about the inner life of its female lead".

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