We like to tell ourselves a tidy story about how the mind works. The world sends signals, our senses receive them, the brain processes the information and produces a rational response. Clean, sequential, logical. The mind as a sophisticated camera, faithfully registering reality.
There’s just one problem: this story is backwards. Continue reading
There is a moment in therapy that never loses its strangeness. A patient says something—a sentence, a phrase, sometimes just a word—and you can see that they themselves are surprised by it. The words arrived before the thought. The sentence finished itself. They look at you with that particular bewilderment and ask: “Where did that come from?”
Lacan would say: from the Other.
There’s a particular kind of pain that defies easy description. Not the sharp sting of a cut or the dull ache of a bruise, but the hollow, gnawing distress that floods your chest when you’re separated from someone you love.
Whether it’s your child’s first day of school, a partner traveling for work, or the end of a relationship—this pain is real, visceral, and rooted deep in your mammalian brain.
13 minutes read
There is a fantasy that haunts us—the fantasy of the unified self.
We imagine that somewhere beneath all our contradictions, all our competing desires and impulses, there exists a coherent “I” pulling the strings.
12 min read
We are our own worst masters.
This is the uncomfortable truth that haunts our age of endless optimization, relentless self-improvement, and the incessant pursuit of productivity. Continue reading
To walk through life as an atheist is to carry the burden of both freedom and fragility. There is no script, no grand design to follow—only the choice to create purpose and hold onto what is beautiful, even as the inevitability of loss whispers in the background.
3-minute read
Do you really need to overcome envy? Here, I want to give you something that could be more useful the next time you’re feeling envious.
Envy is at its core feeling sorrow about not having what somebody else has. Continue reading
7-minute read
Do you have dreams? Little dreams big dreams, fantasies, plans, hopes, passions?
People often assume that some dreams are difficult (or impossible) to fulfill because they lack something – talent, ambition, or financial means. But what are the real obstacles? Continue reading
8 min read
The era of instant gratification brought us a new plague – the illusion that one can make choices without experiencing life.
Listening to the people who come to my practice, I realize that there is a great fear of time-wasting. Continue reading
