Evolution of the Self (2024)

If you’re prone to judge people negatively, you’ll generate an environment too threatening for them to feel comfortable divulging their private thoughts and feelings to you.

If in your mind’s eye, you can persuasively conjure up an image of your desire, then—as in, "seeing is believing"—it can simulate reality and, in a sense, take you there.

Like just about everyone else, you will be faced with situations that bedevil you because they turn out to be more complicated and difficult than anticipated. Here's how to cope.

If you’re just confident enough to tackle something difficult, you’ll learn which of your limitations can be transcended and which are unchangeable and so must be adhered to.

Since thoughts control emotions, and, in turn, emotions control behavior, it’s crucial to focus on how you unwittingly think yourself into inertia.

Being highly motivated to get things done can be richly challenging and energizing or disheartening and physically and mentally exhausting. This is what makes the difference.

Often inborn tendencies don’t evolve according to your nature because of such factors as parental abuse, bullying experiences, and traumas altering your perception of reality.

Solving or resolving? Here's how long-term solutions can correct things impossible to fix with short-term, stopgap remedies.

Short-term solutions, however beguiling and near-at-hand, can just as easily get in the way of resolving problems as facilitate their resolution.

The only way to fix a friendship gone sour is to assertively discuss your wary feelings about it—and if that can’t work, you’d be well-advised to leave it.

Review: The film’s carefully mapped-out confusion seems to reflect director Alex Garland’s key point--war, civil or international, ultimately blurs crucial moral distinctions.

Here are six ways that the actual motives of your partner’s frustrating, overbearing behavior may—contrary to your conclusions—have little or nothing to do with their intent.

The common tendency for parental caregivers to look at things judgmentally represents the greatest hindrance to effective, more caring, and more humane parenting.

However invalidating their parents’ response may feel, a young child—assuming their parents have superior knowledge—is apt to doubt the authenticity of their personal experience.

As children grow older, their lying becomes more knowing and more sophisticated. And their reasons for lying become more varied and increasingly similar to their parents'.

The uncontrollable mood swings and the indiscriminate intensity of a borderline's emotions may be involuntary, but they still do a number on their children.

The undeniable realities of social communication should convince us that the maxim to avoid saying anything “not nice” requires far more qualification than the saying suggests.

The benefits of accepting criticism all relate to the chance to reevaluate the possibly false assumptions or erroneous conclusions you mistakenly may have made.

To change obsolete programming, you have to become aware of it, and you have to be sufficiently incentivized to break free of psychological defenses.

If you can’t take care of your own needs, you’ll desperately depend on another to address them—and that almost guarantees that eventually the relationship will fail.