Posts by Marty Cooper
Anger is your friend: the restoration of anger
When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the…
Energy theft: toxic forms of shame and guilt
[Democracy is coming] From the homicidal bitchin’/That goes down in every kitchen/To determine who will serve and who will eat. —Leonard Cohen, “Democracy” Sarah, 27, who is about to finish graduate school with a PhD in engineering, hates to call her mother…and does so, dutifully, and with dread, every week. Saturday mornings come with…
Regulating Energy to Regulate Depression
Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist and preeminent writer on neuroscience, has a great story about being at a conference with a gaggle of different hard science people, especially physicists. He realized that he didn’t really know how energy is or should be defined, so he went around asking these folks, whose bread and butter is studying…
The River of Grief: Pain That Teaches
Most of us are not very good at grieving. We deny loss, we judge emotions, we fear getting lost or stuck, or “wallowing,” or we fear judgment or unsupportiveness from others. Maybe it’s the legacy of eons of human history in which we were so exposed to disease, social chaos, natural disasters, psychological trauma, and…
Why Sunshine Can Scare You: Unconscious Triggers for Anxiety
I was sitting with a client who was describing being at a party full of close friends, people she’s known for years and is comfortable with, when she, out of the blue, began feeling anxious. There was nothing that happened in the interactions; the same sharing of recent events was going on as before the…
Slowing Down
What you’ll notice is that when anxiety or depression arises, we tend towards a speeding up, but for different reasons…we have to learn pacing…
Self-Regulation As An Inner Tube On The River Of Life
This is our condition: we’re on the river of our inner lives (emotions, body sensations, deep unconscious memory and beliefs), and the degree to which we are not getting drowned/overwhelmed (or frozen in especially cold patches of water) is the degree to which we can regulate the inflation of that tube. But also, the degree to…
Depression And Energy
“Essentially, even if at a small level, when taking action you are proving that: I can do something, and I can not be overwhelmed by doing it, so therefore I do have some efficacy in moving out of the depression.” – Marty Cooper One of the hardest elements of depression, as you who have experienced…