How to Cope With Trauma

It only takes a matter of seconds for the world to become frightening and dangerous. The trauma of injuries and accidents can be devastating to those injured and the people close to them. There may be the loss of loved ones and friends to cope with and the aftermath of these events can be felt far and wide. Trauma can affect an entire community or just a few but, either way, these effects may change the way of life forever.

Though everyone responds differently, the effects during and after a crisis will be felt by everyone involved. Some feel the effects straight away but others may have a delayed response to the situation. Often, these people are so busy helping others that they appear numb to the experience. They are often seen as brave but may actually be hiding from their own personal trauma and pain. Because of this, they may become the most severely affected of all.

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Integrating Psychotherapy and Spirituality

Why “integrating” psychotherapy and spirituality?  This question seems silly to many people for one of two reasons.  Some would say it is silly because the two must necessarily be kept separate, like church and state.  Others would say it is silly because they are inherently intertwined and don’t require any effort on our part to be integrated.

I am inclined toward the view that the two are inherently intertwined, but believe that they have been artificially separated by psychology, the discipline that most clearly undergirds most of what we practice in psychotherapy, in its zeal to be scientific.  Freud’s disdain for religion didn’t help either.  Of course there have always been those, like Carl Jung, who have kept alive the perspective that psychology and psychotherapy have an intrinsic relationship to spirituality.  However, this perspective has only moved toward widespread acceptance among psychotherapists in the last few decades, thanks in part to the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.  Such acceptance in mainstream psychology, as reflected in the American Psychological Association, has only been noticeable in the last few years.

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The Psychology of Communication

On the limits of the process of communication and the central role of interpretation

Communication is about using symbols and in case of humans, using language, to convey meanings and ideas between individuals and it involves the act of evoking reactions from other individuals. Human communication is marked by intention and anticipation of the reactions and communication in humans can be verbal when mediated by language or non-verbal when no language is involved. Communication can also be direct when a certain pattern of behavior evokes a particular type of response or subtle and indirect when behaviors are not predictable or ambiguous and not even completely comprehensible. Thus communication is separated into certain distinct categories such as:

1. Direct and Indirect communication

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