Laura O’Neill, LPC, RN | PhD candidate | Catholic psychotherapist | Army veteran | Attachment & interior freedom | Veritas. Fides et Ratio. Caritas.
Northern Virginia
Joined February 2024
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Self-exploration can be profoundly reparative but only when it unfolds within an accurate anthropology of the person.
Engaging in analytic work with a clinician who holds a reductive or fragmented view of human nature risks subtle psychic distortion, as the therapeutic frame itself participates in shaping the client’s self-representation and moral imagination.
#ontologymatters
#notneutraltherapy
#truthbeforetechnique
#soulsarenotconstructs
#formationoverfeelings
Sometimes what looks like emotional dysregulation is also a person's unwillingness to tolerate the ordinary indignities of being one human being among other human beings.
#personality
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
The best insight on “pride” I’ve read for a long time.
And the significance of “light, lightness and laughter.”
Sent by my friend “Presterton” (a modern day Chesterton, whose quote is at the top).
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
If there is only one paragraph from Dostoevsky you'll ever read, let it be this:
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
Feelings are not special insight into the truth. The story we derive from our feelings is often wrong and always distorted from whatever base reality is. Have some humility.
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
An important reminder:
Validation does not equal agreement.
“I understand why you feel that way” is not the same as “You’re right.”
We can recognize another person’s feelings, experience, or point of view without surrendering our own.
That distinction can save marriages, friendships, workplaces, and political conversations.
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
It’s funny in a slightly grim way to see people rediscovering that the traditional precepts of the natural law are not at all arbitrary moral commands imposed from without, but rational and wise precepts for the conduct of human life, whose violation usually produces disaster in some form.
“I made this letter so long only because I didn't have the time to make it shorter.” #BlaisePascal
Sir. Precisely.
Aristotle recognized that it is almost impossible for a young person to be truly “wise.” And why is that? Well, the young often operate from their impulses and passions. A young person can become remarkably skilled in abstract subjects like geometry/mathematics, but #practicalwisdom is different. It requires knowing what to do with the particular circumstances of real life, and that kind of judgment simply takes time! It is formed through lived experience, by encountering real situations over and over and gradually learning how to see them well.
Again, this is Aristotle.
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
“What is the cure for depression?” is the wrong question.
Depression is the psychic equivalent of fever. Fever is a “non-specific” response to an enormous range of underlying physiological conditions, from the common cold to Ebola.
Depression is likewise a non-specific response to an enormous range of underlying difficulties. It is therefore pointless to talk in the abstract about the cure for “depression” because depression, like fever, is not one thing but many things.
Depression is an effect, not a cause.
Effective treatment means understanding and addressing the causes, not just treating the symptom.
Those causes, more often than not, are woven into the fabric of a person’s life. That means the solution requires that we examine ourselves, and how we live, and how we function, and how we relate to others or fail to relate.
That is hard work—and what real psychotherapy is about. Without doing that work, the vulnerability to depression will always remain. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. But for most people most of the time, there are no quick fixes are magic bullets.
For most people most of the time, depression is a message. That message is: we must change something about ourselves.
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
This line by Thomas à Kempis permanently changed how I move through the world
Excellent. He didn’t hit the nail on the head. He drove it through the floorboards.
The need to characterize difference of opinion as reckless or dangerous may reveal wayy less about the opposing thought than about one’s capacity to tolerate psychic conflict. 😉
What cannot be considered must instead be condemned.
#chronicicallyincurious
#grandiosity
#sanctimony
#projection
#splitting
#moralization
#allthethings
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
There’s an old Chinese proverb that I love:
“He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived.”
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
Precisely C.S. Lewis's point in The Screwtape Letters: the enemy doesn't need to ruin you, he only needs to distract you.
Screwtape finds that a reliable way to lead a patient to hell is to distract him with jargon, for instance. Have the patient evaluate ideas not by their content but by their labels ensures that he never engages meaningfully with their content.
Another method is to fix his attention on the "stream of immediate sense experiences," so that his mind is drawn away from universal issues and he no longer thoughtfully engages with things that matter.
The path to hell is not so much paved by grand sins than it is by small, constant distractions from what really matters. The path to goodness begins with reclaiming your attention, and turning your eyes from the endless stream.
Wasting time "doomscrolling" is not neutral. It distracts you from doing good in the world.
Nothing generates interpersonal chaos quite like a pattern that cannot recognize itself as a pattern.
#blindspots
#personality
Parts organized around avoiding rejection can become rejection-generating machines. Whew! But, yep. “I will never feel that again” is sometimes the first brick in the road right back to it.
#partswork
#therapythoughts
It seems obvious but running a chaotic household eventually catches up to you. Chronic stress is not merely an unpleasant feeling. It has biological consequences, including inflammatory signaling. #Inflammation can feed fatigue, anxiety, and anhedonia right back into the system. That loop is why I consider lifestyle and home routine “critical care” clinical interventions in certain situations.
#therapythoughts
InteriorFreedomCounseling retweeted
Sometimes people walk out of therapy feeling better - sometime they leave feeling more.
Secure attachment isn’t a childhood with no hard feelings. It’s growing up learning, again and again and again, that when you’re upset, the relationship doesn’t disappear.
You can fall apart a little and still be wanted.