Three Principles Living

Judith A. Sedgeman, EdD

insecure thinking Tag

No need to fix everything!

Lately I've talked with several clients who are sure that "fixing" something in their circumstances will bring them happiness. One is determined to find a job in a bigger city, where she thinks it will be "more fun" to live. One is trying to find a new set of room-mates and a new apartment because she thinks she needs to be with people who are nicer to her to be comfortable at home. Another is worried about the danger of living within 100 miles of a major US military installation and wants to move...

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“What’s wrong with me?”

Since I have begun seeing clients one-on-one as a Mental Health Mentor, the most frequent questions they ask in the first session are: "What's wrong with me? How did  this happen? Why can't  anyone explain to me what happened to my mind?" For the most part, they've had a lot of therapy. And they've been given diagnoses. But  diagnoses do not explain. Diagnoses describe and label symptom sets. What's eating at people are the WHY? questions. Why can't I just be OK again? How did I go wrong? How do people get chemical...

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What ever happened to peace and love?

What ever happened to peace and love? The answer is nothing has ever happened to peace and love. Peace and love are constants of the nature of all mankind.  Peace and love are the spiritual essence of humanity. Then how do we explain the murderous rage, the boiling resentment, the hatred of "others" spreading across the world? Those things have nothing to do with our spiritual nature. They are the products of insecure thinking unrestrained, misleading multitudes into vortices of fear. It looks hopeless to many that mankind will ever live at peace, that...

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Smarter? or Wiser?

I've been involved in many situations where leaders were smarter than most of the people they were trying to influence, but were oblivious to the fact they were no wiser. That doesn't  work out very well. Being "the smartest person in the room" creates an opportunity for the leader to find the humility that enters hand-in-hand with wisdom. First of all, wisdom is the great equalizer.  All human beings have access to wisdom; no one person is innately wiser than another. It's always possible to sort people out by "smartness", but...

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Seriously?

Consider this story: Not long ago, I was meeting with a person who started our conversation in tears, feeling hopeless because of a family situation that was outside of her control, but involved her children in a way that she could not think about without more tears and more pain. As she tried to explain it to me in gasps between the sobs, she grasped her head in her hands and said, "This is so serious. Sometimes I just want to kill myself. I can't do anything about it." Before I...

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Ask the deeper questions

A flood of questions follows horrifying actions like the Boston Marathon bombing. Who is to blame? How did it happen? Why? Could we have stopped it? Can we keep it from happening again? We analyze each incident with an excruciatingly complex compilation of details. We hope for answers from the accumulation of minutiae. Shouldn't we also ask the deeper questions, the questions that would generalize specific events to insights about the universal nature of fury, hatred, alienation, dissociation in human beings? Have we taken seriously the critical need to truly understand...

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