Below are the 3 most recent journal entries recorded in greverbal's InsaneJournal:

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
1:44 pm	Self Help And Psychology The self help movement really began with the advent of psychiatry and the first revolutionary ideas of Dr. Sigmund Freud. Although Freud’s ideas have been largely supplemented and many of them have been outright replaced, his work concerning the subconscious mind have revolutionized the way we view ourselves and our future. Psychology really began with Dr. Sigmund Freud and his inner circle of students who later went on to establish the science of psychoanalysis and the technique for raising the unconscious to the conscious level of awareness. This process of clinical psychoanalysis was the first rigorous science of the mind which has since been used as the foundation for many other practices and techniques that have spread throughout the Western world. Raising consciousness has always been a great value in spiritual traditions and, as a general rule, is far from being something new in history. As far back as 5000 BC, it is largely believed that Hindu sages practices rituals and techniques of mediation to raise their own subconscious minds to a higher level of consciousness and were monumentally successful in many cases. Even without the very detailed and succinct observations of modern psychiatry, these age old sages were capable of reaching incredible heights of transcendental consciousness all through the use of yoga and meditation. These practices have made a great comeback in recent decades because of the more rigorous discoveries in psychoanalysis which how that increasing your consciousness can actually be proven to bring about greater health and well being among many psychoanalytic patients. The self help movement has also gotten a giant boost from the discoveries of Sigmund Freud and his greatest student Dr. Carl Jung. Dr. Jung eventually broke away from his teacher and pursued a wider application of Freud’s ideas so as to apply the importance of spiritual reality to the discoveries of improving one’s level of consciousness. Freud was widely criticized for placing too much importance on the role of sexuality in our growth as human beings. Dr. Jung saw further than this and recognized that spiritual ideas also play an important role in our development and can be used to raise our consciousness in ways that Freud was never able to see. Dr. Jungs work involving the collective unconscious and archetypes of the mind have contributed to our understanding of the importance of self help and spiritual growth. In fact, it is widely known that Dr. Jung’s clinical practice helped to spark the earliest growth of the twelve step groups today and his specific work with the founders of Alcoholic’s Anonymous was the beginning of a movement which has utterly transformed our modern day society and the self help movement. Psychology has played an integral role in the development of the self help movement and this trend is far from being over. The most modern contributor to this great movement is Dr. David R. Hawkins who has written an even more influential work entitled Power Versus Force which now begins another great wave of contributions to the progress of higher consciousness and spiritual development. Dr. Hawkins discoveries concerning the science of kinesiology prove that consciousness itself can actually be measured according to the internal reactions of the body. This discovery brings great promise to the world of both psychiatry and spiritual growth because it introduces an actual compass for the spiritual seeker. Kinesiology may now be used to determine the level of consciousness of thousands of different spiritual techniques, practices, writings, teachers and even places or things which all carry with them a certain field of power that can be researched and understood directly through the reactions they have on the body’s internal energy meridians. The implications of this recent discovery are only just beginning to be recognized by thousands of people around the world. The future is bright for both psychology and self help as many new discoveries are being made each day that will soon transfer the way we view ourselves and the people around us. It will serve you best to be one of the wise people who gets on the self help bandwagon now while the discoveries are just making their greatest effect they will have ever made before. GRE Verbal Section information including types of questions in the verbal section, time restrictions, verbal section preparation, and more. For more information about this, visit Psychology Graduate School Search. (Comment on this)
1:43 pm	Sanity: Reality Or Fabrication? Modern psychology does not define the term “sanity.” Look it up in any psychology book and you'll find not a single attempt to actually define what it is to be sane. Different countries have legal systems that define sanity, in the same way that individuals define what is and is not sane for themselves. However, it is unusual that the field most concerned with mental health and insanity has made no attempts to form a single, concrete definition for it. There are some that theorize this situation is similar to the argument about the existence of heat and cold. Cold has a relationship with heat in that the former is the absence of the latter, nothing more. Is it possible that sanity doesn't actually exist and is merely the absence of insanity? Legal and mental health institutions round the world have volumes of guidelines and criteria used to determine if someone is insane, but not even a single line to mark a person as being sane. If you take the time to analyze it, it almost seems as if mental health experts believe marking someone sane to be a diagnosis of exclusion. There are hundreds of potential problems in psychology and psychiatry, with the list including anxiety disorders, depression, insomnia, psychosis, and dissociative personality disorder. All of these examples are considered to be signs of insanity, albeit the intensity varies from problem to problem, and person to person. However, most psychologists seem content to pick away at possible problems until they run out of options before declaring you sane. It is also interesting to note just how much effort psychology puts into finding and defining various forms of insanity. For example, there are currently six different forms of pedophilia. Out of the 300 major psychological disorders, a startlingly large amount are considered to be connected to sex and sexual health. There are a few disorders that are used to describe mood and mentality changes brought about by the weather and other factors in nature that affect us. Social and familial relations are also taken in as an avenue of study, typically with disorders that are inevitably linked to disorders in other fields. So literally, there are thousands of ways for a person to be insane to some degree, but no way to tell if a person is sane. For some, this actually poses a most intriguing conundrum: does sanity even exist? That question, while probably not taken seriously by the vast majority, does put an old adage in a new light. There are some people that often joke that everyone's insane, that the appearance of sanity is just a matter of how much insanity is present. Given that sanity is not defined by psychology, the field that ought to be the most concerned with understanding it, the joke may not necessarily be completely untrue. There are ways to determine sanity, but these are based on the legal definition and are used strictly to see whether someone was legally liable for a crime or not. However, not being criminally insane does not automatically make a person “sane” in the psychological sense. After all, only a small percentage of the various mental illnesses out there can actually lead to criminal behavior. Of course, all this could simply mean that the dividing line between sane and insane is up to the individual observers to determine. That brings a number of risks, as the observations and definitions are likely going to be highly subjective. Even sanity in the legal sane is subjective, as different jurisdictions define it differently. The lack of a credible source for what makes a person sane may be psychology's way of telling the world that sanity doesn't exist. Now there's a disconcerting thought. GRE Verbal Section information including types of questions in the verbal section, time restrictions, verbal section preparation, and more. For more information about this, visit Psychology Graduate School Search. (Comment on this)
1:43 pm	Mind-Killer: The Psychology of Fear Less than optimistic philosophers have often noted that the two greatest motivators in history are fear and greed. Now, while the definition of greed can sometimes border on being a philosophical concept affected by culture and environment, fear is much more tangible and universally defined. Yet, despite the nature of it, people have generally been apprehensive about studying the psychology behind fear and the effects it may have on a person's mental health. Modern psychology, some analysts believe, all too often boils down to fear in some form or another. If this is to be believed, then fear might actually play a bigger role in shaping a person's psychology than any other intrinsic factors. Fear, of course, manifests itself in a number of forms. For example, the ancient Spartans were considered fearless because of their fighting abilities but the reality was far different. Raised in an environment where acceptance and embrace of the norm was paramount, the primary fear and anxiety that a Spartan felt was directed towards the idea of being ostracized. A man with a chronic inability to stay in a committed relationship might fear being loved, probably as a side effect of growing up unloved himself. Fear can also manifest as more solid mental health issues such as anxiety and phobias. Fear may also lead to someone developing a variety of psychological disorders as potential complications. The fact is, fear is more prevalent in our daily lives than anyone would care to admit. In fact, people have a subconscious tendency to deny even the feeling of fear. Most people would prefer to shift their emotions to things like anger or depression, rather than accept their fears. This can be due to a number of factors, including environment, upbringing, and previous experiences. Most experts believe that the key to overcoming this problem is to recognize the fear as fear, rather than defining it as something that it appears similar to. People who have this problem often develop the fears they have during childhood, but rather than outgrow those fears, they have allowed them to remain rooted in their psyche. This may not necessarily damage mental health, but it can have some unwanted effects on how a a person interacts socially. Of course, not everything about fear should be seen as a negative. It has been said that fear “is what separates heroes from the rest of us.” Fear also helps ensure the survival of the human race. Fear triggers many survival instincs that prevent us or cause us to avoidtaking too many unnecessary risks. Fear also triggers the body to enter survival mode when faced with extreme danger, pumping large amounts of adrenaline into the system to give ordinary humans the near-superhuman physical abilities needed to survive certain situations. Fear prevents people from taking unreasonable risks that could endanger their current status, whether the risk is social, physical, financial, or sexual. It is only when people fail to acknowledge fear or acknowledge it too much that it becomes a problem. Of course, this is easier said than done. Despite being a natural and integral part of the human psyche and survival instinct, fear is often derided by modern society as something that is unwanted or should be faced down. Literature and culture are filled with references to larger-than-life figures that literally feared nothing and took insane risks, which are things that are well outside the grasp of the average Joe. While there are some fears that are unreasonable and people should make every effort possible to cast them out, it is a good idea to understand that being afraid is not always a negative thing. GRE Verbal Section information including types of questions in the verbal section, time restrictions, verbal section preparation, and more. For more information about this, visit Psychology Graduate School Search. (Comment on this)