Faith and Reason

If you've ever been told to "breathe" during a difficult moment and found it insulting, this is meant to explain why the advice is legitimate, even if the delivery usually isn't helpful.

The mind's tendency to ruminate isn't a personal failing, it's a well-documented pattern with an identifiable neural signature, and it responds to specific, learnable practices.

You cannot program your way to a community where people feel genuinely safe, known, and accompanied in their suffering.

In the past few posts, we’ve been exploring the ACT skill of cognitive defusion, or the ability to notice thoughts without getting tangled up in them. Defusion helps us take a step back from the swirl of mental chatter so we can see thoughts for what they are: words and images passing through the mind, not absolute truths we must obey. But once we’ve learned to step back from our thoughts, we inevitably run into the next challenge: our feelings. Fear, sadness, anger, loneline

"Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts". Psalm 139: 23 Being in the here-and-now, connected to our true self - it's something which sounds wonderful yet impossible for many. Our intellect is a gift, but things go awry. Why? Lock in, because this is going to be a bit of a long one. The Problem Solving Mind In an earlier post, I wrote about the mind as a problem-solving work of art. We can analyze the past, think about what went wrong, and cons

Faith for all defects supplying - where the feeble senses fail. - Pange Lingua Something I'll be talking a lot about is "internal experiences." In ACT, we differentiate between the internal and external experiences we have. But what does that mean? If something is an external experience, it is happening outside of ourselves. Someone else could see it, too. We would probably be able to take a picture of it happening or record it on our phone. Events such as a rainstorm, a con

"Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason." CCC §159 There is much which contradicts faith in the world. However, if we take seriously the pairing of faith and reason, and understand the arts and sciences as human contributions to creation, we can begin to see where truth shines through in the fields of counseling and psychology. That isn’t to say all psychological theory and practice is in line with the Catholic faith. Bu