by Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologist

Parents with young children are totally involved in caring for and protecting their kids. They are enmeshed with their young children. That deep level of codependency of parent and child ensures the survival of the children.

But change comes quickly. Your kids learn to do things for themselves, and then demand to do them. They develop their own personalities.

You celebrate each time your young children learn to do something independently, like tie their shoelaces, hammer a nail or write a story. Then they enter the teenage years, those few years of rapid physical and emotional transition from childhood to adulthood. They feel sexual urges. They feel very “adult.” They begin to flex the independence you so strongly encouraged up to now.

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by Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologist

Impatience with your wife or husband can bring you a mountain of grief.  Patience facilitates personal insights and growth. A couple of examples of impatience are in order.

You say "I stopped for coffee after I did the banking,"  and your spouse replies, "Why?  There’s coffee here."

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By Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologist

In my previous post, Alcoholism: Addiction with a Twist,  I commented on how addiction can lead to addictive or co-dependent relationships. I ended with,

"The benefits to all of overcoming an addiction to the wellbeing of another are far reaching, but as always, the healing process begins with awareness."

Awareness alone doesn’t remove the problem, but it may produce a roadmap to wholeness. And with wholeness can come real intimacy.

Codependency is full of opposites

Imagine a husband and wife where the man is addicted to alcohol and the woman is addicted to him and his well-being. She has an intense pull towards her husband. She loses herself in the intensity of the need to care for him.  On the other hand she has a strong need to pull away from him and get a life for herself.

We have all seen it: one of them leaves and comes back, and then leaves again and comes back again. There seems to be no middle ground. It’s either total enmeshment or complete cut-off.

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by Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologist 

Marriage is supposed to be exciting. Everybody knows that… 

I’m going to look at marriage from another point of view. In my experience many a relationship has crashed because there was too much excitement, or at least, excitement of the wrong kind. 

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by Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologogist

Grieving from loss touches all of us. It seems to intensify for many during the holidays, because there are so many memories of the past that was. 

Human beings who experience loss must grieve.  We must do that cleansing. The cycle of grieving and recovery from loss is a normal psychological/spiritual human process. We try to interfere with it at our peril.

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By Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologist

If you react to the heading with discomfort, you are part of the majority of people who believe that trauma is all bad: assault, sexual abuse, robbery, failure, marital breakdown or the death of a child cannot possibly be good for you. End of story.

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By Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologist

Mental illness is not neatly categorized and explained, and that can be a bit scary.  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV) gives descriptions of the many mental disorders affecting about 20 percent of the population. 

The three mental disorders we most often hear about are schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder (clinical depression.)

I have been up close and personal with all three: family members, close friends, colleagues, pupils and clients.  I even did internships in big mental hospitals, back in the days before they closed their doors.

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By Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologist

Addiction to a drug like alcohol develops gradually. Drinking alcohol may start out as social fun, or it may from the beginning be a way of escaping pain and difficulty. Sometime I think of it as one of dissociation’s helpers, because alcohol helps a person to split off from reality. But that's an idea for another post.

The point is that people cannot know whether alcohol has become an addiction until they are deprived of it, either through circumstance or through an attempt to quit drinking.

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