You may recall I wrote a while back about my recurring “critic fantasy,” which involved a man getting up while I was giving a talk, and yelling that my book had nothing to offer. 
Well, last week, a man actually did approach me after a speaking engagement and tell me my work had nothing to offer!  [...]

If someone told you that a piece you wrote is garbage and you’re a moron for writing it, could you object to their behavior?
When I work with people who are having trouble starting a project, this is often an area where they feel blocked.  They don’t trust their ability to protect themselves against mistreatment.  They [...]

Many of us harbor deep-seated negative ideas about ourselves that nothing we accomplish out in the world seems to shake.  No matter how much money we make or possessions we accumulate, how many degrees we earn, or how ideal our lives look on the outside, we’re plagued by the nagging suspicion that something is wrong [...]

For many years, I was tormented by memories of uncomfortable events from my past.  I’d find myself constantly reliving arguments I had with others, breakups of relationships, disappointments in my career, and so forth.  The painful part of these memories was what I’d feel in my body as I rehashed them in my mind.  I [...]

Many of us are in the habit of telling ourselves we’re “not good enough.”  Whether it’s in our careers, our intimate relationships, our appearances, or some other area of our lives, we’re always convinced we don’t measure up to some standard of how we’re supposed to be.  Because it seems we can always find something [...]

If you’ve read self-help literature, you’ve probably heard about the “inner critic”—the mental voice that constantly tells you that you’re not good enough, and bombards you with memories of difficult events and visions of nightmarish possible futures.  There are many schools of thought on how to deal with the critic, and most focus on developing [...]

At some point in your life, I’ll bet you felt like you weren’t getting enough done.  You wished you could keep your attention on your work, and stop “procrastinating” by doing frivolous or unimportant things, but it just didn’t seem possible.  I used to have this problem myself, until I had a realization one day [...]

A little while back, I wrote an article on the function guilt performs in our lives and the limiting ways we tend to perceive it.  Today, I want to expand on a particular point I made in that piece, which is that the amount of guilt we feel seems to depend on the time of [...]

Human beings have a seemingly endless capacity to feel guilty.  We can condemn and attack ourselves for the stupid, wrong or inappropriate things we’ve done, again and again.  We can even continue feeling guilty about events that happened many years ago.  From the sensations we feel in our bodies when we think about those events, [...]