Philip Chard

Doctors, lawyers, counselors, nurses, ministers—just about any highly trained and skilled provider of human-focused services—sometimes forget they have one job that precedes all others.

Nodding off at your desk? Feeling as if you’re in a trance much of the day? Sleeping through your alarm? Hitting an energy drop-off just when you need it? Well, the “Wake up people!” industry has a solution for you. Caffeine. It’s the most widely used psychoactive drug in America today. You can get it in coffee, tea, colas, energy drinks bottled water and even pills.

Ever been called stubborn? We usually regard those so labeled as rigid, unwilling to change, oppositional and, often, impervious to reason. They stand in stark contrast to people pleasers and accommodators and, consequently, are not conflict avoidant. Consider a few examples.

At our first session, John described himself as “insensitive.” In his 60s, divorced and on the cusp of retirement, he’d realized this for a long time, but its impacts on his life were becoming more onerous.

While often earning a bad rap, anger is a foundational emotion. Without it, our forebears likely would have lost the battle for survival. It helped them muster the energy and focus to overcome physical threats. Today we know that, on its face, anger is neither bad nor good. That determination emerges from how we express it and the ways it influences our behavior. For decades, psychology encouraged us to better control anger by venting. But, no more.

Next time you find yourself looking askance at a large person, even if that’s you, remember that, more often than not, there’s a decent human being inside that body.

We are not both body and mind. We are one bodymind, a fully integrated biochemical and electromagnetic entity.

We are not both body and mind. We are one bodymind, a fully integrated biochemical and electromagnetic entity that, among other things, generates consciousness. The common belief that mental and physical processes are somehow independent of each other has long been debunked by science, but this myth remains stubbornly ingrained in our thinking and continues to inform many approaches to treating illness and disease.

Because everything in the psyche is interconnected, altering one variable usually modifies the entire situation.

The mindset of most accommodators is more complicated than “pushover” or other unkind slurs suggest.