change therapy

a bunch of people tagged me on facebook with the “25 things about you” meme. i’m going to try and do this a) really quick and b) restrict my answers to the kinds of things discussed here on this blog, namely psychology, creativity/art, spirituality, books and lefty stuff (you know, social justice, peace – bleeding heart kind of things). here we go:

1. i still remember the feeling of my heart beating when i first read about ron melzack’s neuromatrix theory of pain which states that pain (and sensations in general) can be related to neurological “images” of ourselves, not necessarily to the physical reality of our bodies. neatly explains phantom limb pain and neurological “pain loops”
2. i love children’s books and think that if adult books were presented like children’s books we’d all be better off
3. watching the films “sacco and vanzetti” and “Z” when i was a teenager made a big impression on me and is one of the reasons why i’m a bleeding heart
4. year and years ago, someone once said to a dear relative of mine that women pour all their creativity into having children and are therefore not good artists. my blood still boils
5. i used to say the lord’s prayer when i woke up from scary dreams. hard to imagine now
6. i once fell crazy in love with the works of torquato tasso, an italian renaissance poet who wrote libretti for monteverdi
7. please don’t make me listen to classical italian or french opera
8. i call the typical first two psychology courses “canadian tire catalogue” type of learning. you learn nothing but one fact after the other. yuk
9. i once hunted down a book by abraham maslow (the “inventor” of the famous “hierarchy of needs”) at the library, only to detect later on that i already owned the book
10. the first book i ever ordered was a beautiful book about roses by a descendant of the king of sweden who lives in a beautiful castle on a magical island in southern germany
11. when i told my ex husband that i was thinking of becoming a social worker he said he’d leave me if i did that
12. i am fascinated by biological psychology and utterly incapable of memorizing even the most important and most often repeated facts in it
13. i am often baffled by how much intuitive sense buddhist ideas make to me
14. i think i would make an awful marriage counsellor. way too opinionated
15. a good-hearted right-winger will always win me over a mean-spirited left-winger
16. my respect for adult learning started very early, when an uncle of mine received a PhD in theology at age 60, something almost unheard-of in 1960s germany
17. i never had a romantic relationship with anyone who was not an artist or at least strongly interested in the arts
18. i was one of the first people to do psychological research on the web
19. one of my heroes in christian mysticism is julian of norwich, who lived in 14th century england and who was also the first woman in the western world to write a book
20. i would love to be a corporate philosopher/psychologist, wondering through a company having fruitful conversations
21. watching a bob marley concert in berlin, shortly before he died, was one of the most intensely spiritual experiences i ever had
22. i think freud is underrated and that without him we would be nowhere today in psychology
23. when i lived in paraguay, i had a great friendship with a pastor. we drank lots of brandy and smoked cigars; only when it came to talking about spiritual things, he got all bashful. but he was a great preacher
24. i love singing the types of hymns they sing in evangelical churches but often feel like a fraud when i do that because i don’t subscribe to many of their doctrines
25. i try to write a ritual poem (“words of power”) for every moon phase

i’ll tag a few people here, and a bunch more over on facebook.

alexander
catatonickid
laura
giggle on
angel
kilroy
mellow yellow
nourish
lola
damien
roxie
sojourner
evan