Karen Horney Part 2/4 Moving Towards People Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst. Her career came into prominence in the nineteen twenties when she formed theories on human attachment and neurosis that split from Freud’s key ideas. Horney’s theory of personality development and individuation are still highly relevant to modern theories of personality, attachment psychology and psychological trauma. Horney observed that children deploy three different coping styles during the time they are individuating from...

Karen Horney Who was Karen Horney? Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst. Her career came into prominence in the nineteen twenties when she formed theories on human attachment and neurosis that split from Freud’s key ideas. Horney’s theory of personality development and individuation are still highly relevant to modern theories of personality, attachment psychology and psychological trauma. Even though she is not well remembered, her work is as relevant as it was at the turn of the century. Applying her...

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Brainspotting Trauma activates our body’s fight or flight system making us experience strong emotional and physical reactions without a logical cause. This can make you feel angry or scared before you can intellectually understand why you react that way. Reexperiencing trauma is not a choice. It is an unconscious reaction. Brainspotting is a revolutionary new trauma processing tool to help you process this unconscious reaction. To heal trauma we need a tool that will let...

In the first session when I give patients my initial observations they often have difficulty hearing what I mean regarding their emotional experience. I hear things like: “I’m not angry because I’ve also done bad things to people and everyone makes mistakes.” “I’m not sad because I know it happened for the greater good.”  “I’m not afraid because I know that it can’t hurt me.” These statements are not attempts to feel emotion, they are attempts to turn emotion off. These statements are attempts to solve and...

Our phobias are often metaphors for our most unconscious parts of self. In the 2013 movie Gravity, Sandra Bullock plays an astronaut marooned in space. At every moment she is seconds from spinning into the hopeless oblivion of deep space. Bullock’s character must use her ingenuity to navigate the shuttles and space stations to find her way back to earth. During her time in space Bullock is haunted by trauma from her past. Numerous shots suggest that her time in space causes her to regress to infancy and face not...