Holding Space, Active Listening and Carl Rogers
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Communicating with those in the final stages of life can be awkward and uncomfortable. Interacting with families connected to the dying loved one can also be strained. Right words are sometimes elusive. Striking the balance between meaningful support and maudlin sentiment is a challenge — our interpersonal skills are being tested by the definitive stressor. The […]
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Stephen Sondheim’s Pivotal Relationship with Oscar Hammerstein
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Stephen Sondheim, who died recently at the age of 91, grew up in a highly dysfunctional home. The man who was to become the central figure in the American Theater for six decades was raised in an atmosphere of material privilege laced with significant emotional turmoil. Sondheim’s father, Herbert, was a clothing manufacturer and his mother, […]
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The Eternal Grief of Losing a Child
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This is how author Mark Twain described his reaction to hearing of the sudden death of his daughter, Olivia “Susy” Clemens: “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned […]
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Are Public Opinion Polls Dying?
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“The total collapse of public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health,” E. B. White wrote in The New Yorker. “A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people’s minds would be uninhabitable…People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take the nation’s pulse, you can’t […]
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Halloween Star Michael Myers Teaches Coping Skills
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Michael Myers is the epitome of The Boogeyman. He sits on the front row of Hollywood horror film royalty, right there with vintage fiends like Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein. His contemporaries, the likes of Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, have their macabre moments, but as Myers’ creator, John Carpenter, remarked, “He’s a force of nature, […]
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