Recently I came upon a blog post by “Jennifer” who rightfully complained that parents or separated or divorced partners will frequently use children as pawns in their covert wars with one another.  She wrote: Some parents get blinded by their own emotions and stuff going on in their lives that they fail to see the [...]

I recently read a blog post in which Jeremy presented submissions from his readers about the “psychobable” they find the most irritating.  Interestingly, two of the comments (numbers 4 and 9) are very much in line with my posts on “acting-out” and “denial,” which are part of a series I’m doing on the top 5 most [...]

  In the “jargon” of mental health professionals one frequently hears the term “acting-out.” It is amazing how frequently this term is misused. As was the case with “denial” true acting-out is an unconscious ego defense mechanism. Without knowing it, persons who act-out engage in some kind of behavior (as opposed to a psycho-physiological or [...]

Anyone familiar with the “jargon” of mental health professionals of all persuasions has undoubtedly heard the term denial.  What you may not know is that it’s fairly common not only for professionals but also for others to use the term improperly or in a poorly defined or over-generalized manner.  In classical (psychodynamic) psychology, denial is an unconscious [...]

In most unhealthy relationships, at least one of the persons is likely to have a significant disturbance of character. Relationships can be particularly unhealthy if one person is significantly character disturbed and the other is overly neurotic. The primary defining qualities of the disturbed character are a deficient, immature, or absent conscience, ego inflation, problematic [...]