stina

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“I’ve got nothing to talk about today.” Famous last words in therapy 😂 There’s actually some psychology behind why these sessions can end up going surprisingly deep. Memory is associative. Thinking about one experience can make related memories, emotions and ideas easier to access - a process psychologists call spreading activation. It’s why a conversation about your boss can somehow lead to your dad, an ex, or something that happened when you were ten. Emotion also influences what we notice and remember. So although a tangent might feel completely random, we can find ourselves repeatedly landing on similar emotional themes - rejection, criticism, abandonment, not feeling good enough - through completely different stories. That doesn’t mean every passing thought has a hidden meaning. But when you stop trying to decide what’s important to bring to therapy, you sometimes create the space for connections you hadn’t consciously made before. So yeah, sometimes the tangent is where the interesting stuff is!

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We really need to add “how to speak to someone who is grieving” to the national curriculum. Grief makes people awkward. They panic, overtalk, compare, minimise, disappear, or try to fix something that cannot be fixed. Maybe the real skill is learning how to sit beside someone’s pain without making it about you.

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How to break your unhealthy patterns 👀 #cbt #personaldevelopment