Psychology

“To them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever” (Isaiah 56:5).

After a chance meeting of mutual friends, I was introduced to Tim and Sonia in a restaurant in central Toowoomba, Queensland, eight days before their home was washed away.

They say self-esteem is a vital ingredient for success in life. But what if everything we were taught about self-esteem is wrong?

Compromise is always present in relationships. It may pull us down, but it can also be a good reconciliation exercise when there are differences that cannot be resolved in any other way.

There is a saying that describes one’s life partner as being most appreciated during two life stages: before marriage and after the funeral. Unfortunately, proverbs and sayings hint at a reality which is also faithfully rendered by statistics showing that love wears off pretty soon in many marriages. But maybe this is part of the problem—the fact that we overburden love, treating it...

While browsing through a folder of old documents, I rediscovered some poems written during my student years. One of them drew my attention because of a verse that resonated with me from the beginning: Only childhood makes us whole.

Aside from fuelling jokes about how women impose unrealistic standards on men, or how men are just grown-up children who want their wives to be their mothers, the expectations couples place on their relationship define how they relate to each other, and influence marital satisfaction.

As a teenager, I remember pasting a quote from Blaise Pascal on the wall of my room. It was a thought I resonated with, not without some arrogance: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

“How can we rejoice if we’re at war?” This was one of the questions that arose in my mind after reading a book comprised of testimonies of people who experienced World War II as children. Decades after this nightmare, and stricken by a crisis that casts its shadow over people and nations everywhere, the question remains: can we still be happy in times...

Related to the subject of boredom, Blaise Pascal wrote: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day. – Emily Dickinson

Let’s begin with the introvert or extrovert question. We tend to be one or the other—or at least lean toward one or the other. Being either is not a problem, but it does impact how we handle life. Extroverts are likely to say that introverts are too quiet and introverts that extroverts are too noisy.

We are leaving. Even if we were not supposed to, we chose to and it is happening. We are moving again. It is the eighth time in eleven years of marriage.

Can the thinking of a single philosopher be so influential as to change the fundamental values ​​of a society and lead to tremors of transcontinental proportions, like the economic crisis that began in 2007? Could Ayn Rand's philosophy be the almost-imperceptible reason for transforming the United States, as Levine puts it, into a "selfish nation"?

I was only 13 when I first experienced it. My three best girlfriends handed me a letter. It said they no longer wanted to be my friends. The only reason given was, “The guys pay you too much attention.” After delivering the letter, they simply shunned me.