Being oneself and being “different” is an idea that gained space in general culture. Accusing someone of being stereotyped it’s considered offensive, for that means trivializing his or her personality, and basically it’s calling such person stupid. Stereotypes are always corny.

However, who dismisses easy talks and ventures into the road of “being oneself”, will soon discover that it’s not as simple as words make believe. This question is the core of most of individual problems, of suffering and social misfits. Comprehending it in a proper way is the first step to face the challenge in a constructive way that moves toward a solution.

“Being oneself” means differentiating oneself from the environment and culture in which one has born, grew and live. It means “becoming oneself”, expressing the unique characteristics that make a person be an individuality and not a clone of a given model. This differentiation occurs in many aspects: in the way of thinking, feeling, understanding, proceeding, choosing, and in the priorities and behavior. It’s easy to realize that it’s something complex that doesn’t happen quickly. This process is technically called Individuation. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a beautiful bougainvillea. I bought it all in flower, as a matter of fact, I bought two of them, one with intense pink flowers and the other with white ones. They started to climb on the railing of my porch, it was beautiful to see, but they didn’t get to cover it entirely, as I wished. After a while, the flowers fell, the leaves remained and then they also started to show signs of tiredness. Soon I realized that the plants needed more soil, and I transplanted the two of them into a large pot. And the flowering started again. It lasted a few months and then as before the flowers fell and the plant looked balder than ever. I bought vitamins and salts, they helped. But didn’t solve the problem, until they didn’t even help anymore. It was clear that the plant needed more earth. A lot of it. The problem wasn’t its, I was sure it had health and strength to grow strong and beautiful. The problem was the lack of resources. Lack of ground, of basis and the nutrients coming directly from Mother Earth not from industrialized package ready to use. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody knows that we have a plane geometry and a solid one. In the plane we count on two dimensions: height and width. In the solid, depth is added, which is what gives consistency turning an apparent and superficial object into a firm, massive, robust one.

In the human world, height is represented by thought and its ideals, either the church or the media’s, the new car or the perfect body. God and devil meet in the verticality of thinking, with their cardboard idols or the golden’s. The thinker rationality is the “height”, for he or she is engaged in the mental construction of elevated thoughts or unreachable goals. The patriotic or the family ideal, the dream to be a model or a football player belong to the verticality. Anything that leads upward, that abstracts from the daily and bodily materiality, from feeling and the real relations around us is “height”. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s common seeing relationships that start in the moderate heat of the immature enthusiasm of youth and drag themselves at a warm temperature for years. It’s of the youths to have a short vision of the future, for the simple fact that they lack experience and knowledge, although theoretically they should have easier access to passion. However, passion requires maturity.

Like a fire of straws, shallow and weak, juveniles enchantments vanish to leave place to a daily “liking”, to reciprocal affection and habit. Mostly more habit than real liking, for when one wants the good of somebody else they may go through be a conflict about their trivial interests. Bargaining, that’s how many relationships really are.

And what about that joy that makes you hopping with happiness when near the loved one? And the charm, the discovery? Where is the eyes full of admiration and pride for the other? Read the rest of this entry »

The End of Poverty? Is a fantastic movie made in 2008. It tells the origin of poverty in the world, its causes and future perspective. There are interviews with people from different countries, either who suffer poverty (the poor) or who studies poverty (scholars and a politicians). Representatives from Tanzania to Belgium, from Venezuela to Kenya all are unanimous about the picture described. Read the rest of this entry »

“Psychotherapy is a field of the art of healing that developed and reached a certain autonomy in the last fifty years. The opinions in this field have transformed and differentiating in various way, and the amount of experiences that has been accumulated gave place to different interpretations. This because psychotherapy is not that simples and unique method it was first believed, but it slowly revealed itself to be a kind of “dialect procedure”, a dialogue, an evaluation between two people. The dialectic, originally the art of converse of the ancient philosophers, was soon used to designate a creative process of new synthesis.” (“Pratica della Psicoterapia”, C. G. Jung Opere, Torino, Boringhieri, 1981, Vol. XVI, p. 7)

These are the first words that open the book of Jung “Principles of the practical psychotherapy”, whose first edition was published in 1935. Let’s see what they mean. Read the rest of this entry »

It may not be grand like pompous ideologies, it may not be attractive like fancying oneself as leaders of masses, but anybody possesses the power to change the world and right now. It’s a question of recognizing it and learning how to use it.

I believe that many have heard the famous quote, “You can only change yourself, not the others.” It’s a great truth, however it seems that it’s sometimes taken in a depressing sense. The common interpretation seems to imply that one has to give up the idea of altering anything outside oneself, and has to concentrate into one’s interiority. There, in the inner world, in the silence or in the chaos of the isolated mind it’s possible to obtain results. Changing the way one sees things and oneself… and voilà, the world has changed, although anything outside has been transformed. Read the rest of this entry »

Our identity is the consequence of a series of relationships, starting with the most important, with our mother, and followed by the one with our father. The way our personality, innate tendencies and attitudes are molded, find their way or limits, are developed or frustrated depends exclusively on the relationships in which we grew up. We are relationships.

Since newborns, we live inserted in a web of relations, the people around us relate to us in a specific manner and that will become the way we relate to people and mainly to ourselves. The way we deal with our emotions mirrors the style the adults who took care of us dealt with them. The way we interpret ourselves and the role we play are the effect of how we have Read the rest of this entry »

A cultural and a personality trace, impunity is an ethic exception that has turned into a rule in society in general and in the lives of more people than we can imagine. It’s defined as the absence of the consequences that would objectively follow the individual’s actions, and the collective’s.

Impunity is comfortable because, as a big umbrella that can indefinitely be stretched, it protects anyone who wishes to find shelter for their irresponsibility. It’s an inclusive and tolerant concept because the more people are in the better is the gain for everybody. Impunity is persuasive, strengthening itself by the number and the reach; its psychological dimension is easily exported, as a virus that spreads among a population with a weakened immunologic system. Read the rest of this entry »