Gabriel Ellis, PhD | The Curious Mind Podcast Archiv

"Who am I?” and “What do I want"? A needs-oriented life should answer these questions. Like the virtue orientation of the last episode, also a needs-orientation comes with its own opportunities, problems and dangers. The goal is happiness, the dangers are isolation and anxious navel-gazing.





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Dissatisfaction with one's own life is like a forest without a clearing: there is often a lack of clarity, joy, and self-determination. In order to shed some light on the darkness, I distinguish between three approaches to life in therapeutic practice. In this episode I examine a virtue-oriented life, its psychological benefits and dangers.


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Self-devaluation and inner dialogue go hand in hand with imperceptible feelings. These feelings affect us, often without us noticing them. And in the therapeutic context, this often contributes to the perplexity as to why we are feeling so badly. Accordingly, it is important to bring self-assessment and inner dialogue to light and adapt them so that they are accurate and healthy.





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In early Buddhism, body awareness is a precursor to meditation. But also psychologically it is important to integrate body awareness into normal life in order to cleanse and heal the mind beyond modern, more elaborate, methods.


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Strong will is essential to Buddhism, otherwise we are at the mercy of the machine part of being human: the judgments, feelings, attachments and habits. Original Buddhism seems to have taught the suppression of feelings, but today we rightly do not see this as healthy. Rather, we should satisfy our needs smartly and thereby create degrees of freedom for ourselves so that we suffer as little as possible from the machine aspect of our humanity.





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Many people would like to trust their gut feeling. A nice wish, but we hardly have a good understanding of what “gut feeling” or intuition actually are, or how we can make them more reliable guides in our lives. In this video essay I examine mood, intuition and gut feeling from a Buddhist and psychological perspective. In original Buddhism, correct ethics were developed to transform the sense of self and prepare it for meditation. In psychological practice, I use this perspective to remove the breeding ground for depression and anxiety.


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Psychedelika im Rahmen therapeutischer Selbstentwicklung erleben zur Zeit eine Renaissance - eine Entwicklung, die wir in diesem Gespräch kritisch beleuchten.  Mein Gesprächspartner ist Joachim Wehnelt, der online in seiner gestalt-therapeutischen Praxis mit Männern und mit Gruppen arbeitet. Mehr über seine Arbeit erfahrt ihr hier: https://www.siebensinne.net/





Hiermit beginne ich einen deutschsprachigen Podcast, den ihr hier separat findet:


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYYy4a_T4Mza29vKD_IAWnA


https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ol4tU0upyYQPz3Kx9LbAl





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After Putin's attack on Ukraine parents are faced with the issue of explaining to their children what is going on. This is a short primer with background information and practical examples.  





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After we introduced in the first part Frankl and his classic book "Man’s Search For Meaning" we now focus on the therapeutic method he established. We discuss the main priciples of Logotherapy, its philosophy, application, and limits in the therapeutic practice.


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In this episode we introduce Frankl's classic title "Man’s Search For Meaning", the historical background, and the existential aspect in psychotherapy. While existential philosophy has been known since the mid 19th century through thinkers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, the existential aspect has been introduced into psychotherapy only later - most prominently through Viktor Frankl. He was an Austrian Jewish psychoanalyst who had to endure for years the imprisonment in concentration camps, which strenghthened his focus on the meaning of life and its application in psychotherapy, which later came to be known as Logotherapy.





For an outstanding description of the living conditions in Auschwitz see: Hermann Langbein "People in Auschwitz".





And if you wonder about how prisoners in concentration camps dealt with their faith I can recommend the thesis of Flavia Giuffra: “Was God Behind the Barbed Wire? An Inquiry into Jewish Faith and Practice in Auschwitz”





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In this concluding session with "Hanni" we reflect on how to get away from the pain which comes from a lack of appreciation. Hanni wishes to be emotionally independent and yet finds herself feeling hurt, which in turn creates one of the mind-loops which keeps up the pain at the background of her mind. One pragmatic idea we discuss is to visit some sort of support group, which has the advantage of the company of well-meaning people in a safe space which makes it relatively easy to open up. On a more profound level I suggest Hanni to go to the point of pain (for example "maybe I'm not worthy of love") and to first of all acknowledge that this is what she feels - and thus to benefit from the strength and self-appreciation that comes with such an honest look at those voices within her that crave for recognition and yet she intuitively so much wishes to eradicate.





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As it became clear in the first session, Hanni struggles with feelings of self-criticism which work in the background of her mind and color her mood and experience negatively. Yet, these feelings are rarely in the foreground and it is thus not clear to her what the content of the self-criticism actually is. Hanni sometimes sees that in the background the mind is actually repeating uncomfortable situations on a loop, but it's difficult for her to catch and remember them. I encourage Hanni to bring those loop-memories to the foreground and and write them down in order to find out which set of convictions they are feeding. In this session we also see that Hanni sometimes disconnects: her mind is occasionally blocked in the first half, and she has difficulties to get out of it and articulate herself. Such issues of disconnect in-the-moment would be essential to investigate within a longer-term therapy, but preparing our mere three-session-arch we agreed not to work on such deeper issues and to focus on more pragmatic emotional, cognitive, and communicative aspects instead.


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This is the first of three sessions with Hanni, an expat living in Western Europe. She's in her early 40s and currently single. She struggles with her past and a mental setup that leads to several issues, for example self-judgment, a sense of isolation, and persistant feelings of discomfort. In such a case we of course don't have the expectation to solve these issues in three sessions. But it might be interesting for the listeners to get a glimpse into a complex case and how to reflect it. In this first session we start to explore these topics and see which themes emerge as the most important ones.


Free discovery call: https://calendly.com/gabriel-ellis/30min


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In this episode I have the pleasure of talking with psychologist and historian Dr. Ulrich Koch from the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. We reflect on the concept of psychological trauma, how it has evolved in history, and the different ways it is understood today.  


Here are some interesting publications about the concept of psychological trauma:  


Ulrich Koch (2021). Between Social Criticism and Epistemological Critique: Critical Theory and the Normalization of Trauma. https://utorontopress.com/9781487508968/languages-of-trauma 


Ulrich Koch (2014). Schockeffekte. https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/schockeffekte-2486 


Ruth Leys (2000). Trauma. A Genealogy.  


Allen Young (1996). The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  


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