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Tony White

Psychologist

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Opposites in the human mind

People in their desire to be more in control, end up being more out of control. Paradoxically the more you let self be out of control, the more in control of self you will actually be.

May 13, 2018 //  by Tony White//  Leave a Comment

This is an interesting photograph about the human psyche. The more a person forces self or pushes themselves to be a particular way the more the opposite desire will arise in them. This woman was trying to be in total physical control of herself and ended up being totally out of control of her self even to the point of loosing consciousness. 

dichotomy

If you made an 8 year old child stand like that for half an hour, at the end what would it want to do? It would want to jump up and down and run around. Well the Child ego state in adults is no different. So I am not suggesting a rebellious reaction here but a Free Child reaction to being controlled.

People in their desire to be more in control, end up being more out of control. Paradoxically the more you let self be out of control, the more in control of self you will actually be. The common one you see in therapy is people who try and control their feelings. Again the more a person tries to control their feelings the more out of control their feelings will become. Highly controlled anger can easily become out of control depression.

As I say to parents you need to pick your battles with children carefully. In particular don’t make food an issue by pushing the child to eat more or to eat less. If this is done then the opposite desire can arise in the child and then you can end up with an eating disorder.

T shirt

However this raises a point I have made about psychotherapy in the past. There is a view that psychotherapy breeds mediocrity. If you take my argument above to the end then psychological health would be that person who is average on everything. They are in the middle on all their personality traits. Is that health? It would seem to be mediocrity. 

Category: PsychotherapyTag: personality

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