Psychology

We’d been married only a few weeks when we discovered that growing our spirituality as a couple was going to be much more complicated than the instructions on the packet suggested.

Five decades ago, when the World Organization for Social Psychiatry was established, many thought it was a joke. Others, being more analytical, tried to prove that mental illness can only be an individual experience; that the problem always exists only in an individual and never in a group.

Our reality isn’t always a calm place. Feelings of safety and peace that are so necessary for our well-being often elude us. What is happening today on a global level only goes to show how fragile our world is, and how easily we can lose control over the things we thought we had mastered.

These days we all need to hear good news—that life will soon return to normal and that we will be able to return to the troubles of yesterday, which now seem small to us. In the meantime, our lifestyle has seen changes that we could not have imagined just a few weeks ago.

There is nothing we can do. Thousands of dreams ended with this short sentence. In the face of too great an obstacle or tragedy, giving up seems the only option left. But there are some people who love what they do so much that nothing stops them from adding an unless. This word breeds the courage and creativity in finding solutions, and then...

An experimenter is like a hunter who, instead of waiting quietly for game, tries to make it rise, by beating up the locality where he assumes it is. – Francis Bacon, 17th-century English philosopher

Both personal experience and numerous studies confirm that genuine friendships are an essential source of balance and well-being, and that cultivating them contributes significantly to our physical and emotional health.

I open the window and breathe in the air, trying to guess the weather. Floating around, mixed, are scents and miasms alike; it's hard to decipher these intricate clues.

Many couples only realise after divorce the price they have paid for failing to find common ground, and a few even manage to rediscover the forgotten path to their partner's heart and to rebuild their relationship.

Some forms of love come easily to us. A parent's love, for example, is a natural instinct: you love because it would be impossible not to. But marriage demands a longer commitment. Marital love does not come ready-made; it must be learned, cultivated, and tested.

Anger is like an avalanche which, once started, runs its course to the very end. It is strong and manipulates us easily, turning us into ticking time bombs. This is why we need to know how to manage it and how to keep our temper in any situation.

It happens to all of us: we feel the warmth of a song or the peace of prayer and have the sense that God’s love is there, alive and near. But true love does not stop at emotion. It asks to be expressed in concrete ways, shaping the choices and actions of everyday life.

The promise to live with our loved one “until death do us part" has gradually lost its meaning. Today, it is considered unrealistic to get married with the idea that the relationship will last forever.

Among the greatest disappointments of life is having our expectations unfulfilled; not by politicians, or publications that promote false news or weather forecasts, but by those close to us—people in whom we have invested our confidence.

Because life in developed societies follows a more or less regular pattern, sociologists have managed to identify the age at which conditions are most conducive to forming a friendship. It's not that people who are not of this age are unable to form meaningful connections with other people, but at other ages, life takes us on different paths, without asking for our permission.