Let's talk about happiness

Lynne Holdem presents another series of winter lunchtime dialogues that aim to enhance our understanding about being human. Drawing from psycho-analytic and psycho-spiritual thinkers Lynne will talk in everyday language and then invite participants to contribute their own thinking. Interested community members and professionals are all welcome.
• August 11: happiness: is it found, made or an inner creation
• August 18: passion, defences against passion and aliveness
• August 25: awareness of hope: conscious and unconscious
• Sept 1: the healing heart –the role of compassion and acceptance
• Sept 8: aggression, shadow and wholeness
• Sept 15: sympathy and empathy: helping or hindering
• Sept 22: freedom - fear and courage in being oneself
• Sept 29: generativity, from consumer to active citizen

Entry is by donation to Supporting Families in Mental Illness in Taranaki. Your donation can be by cash or to SF Taranaki via Give A Little. Coffee and tea provided. Bring your lunch if you wish. Dialogues take place at Lynne’s rooms on the third floor of BNZ building, 50 Devon St on Wednesdays at 12.30 -1.30pm.
http:www.psychematters-lynneholdem@blogspot.com for more information or phone Lynne on 06 769-6050.

Anxiety and Feeling

In this week’s dialogue I’ll present some ideas about the causes and treatment of anxiety.

I want to start as usual with Freud and but talk particularly of the further development of his ideas by the British Object Relations psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott and also visit with the more contemporary ideas of relational psychoanalyst, Stephen Mitchell and some insights from neuroscience about the reptilian brain and the limbic system. Hopefully we will start to build a picture not just of what anxiety is and it’s relationship to sensing and feeling, but also of the different types of anxiety and what that means for the treatment needs of people who suffer from anxiety.

In a way we continue last week’s theme of attuning to the person who we work with and how they organise their experience of themselves, of others and of relating itself. All of us, of course, experience anxiety from time to time. To be alive is to experience uncertainty, separation and threat. The question then becomes how to live life with awareness of danger and also awareness of pleasure and possibility.