philosophy

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Just keep walking

“Look, no matter how much you want to be Y, you cannot be reborn as him. You are not Y. It’s okay for you to be you. However, I am not saying it’s fine to be “just as you are.” If you are unable to really feel happy,

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Present vs. Past

“If one assumes that people are beings who can change, a set of values based on etiology becomes untenable, and one is compelled to take the position of teleology as a matter of course” If people are creatures of free will, then we are able to change, and if we

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At Least It’s An Ethos

“The Freudian etiology that is typified by the trauma argument is determinism in a different form, and it is the road to nihilism” Saying that my behavior now is caused by my past trauma is saying that my trauma determined my actions, which is stepping towards denying will, and then

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Frozen in the Past

“If the past determined everything and couldn’t be changed, we who are living today would no longer be able to take effective steps forward in our lives” If everything is predetermined, then we lose our free will. Excerpt From: Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga. “The Courage to Be Disliked.

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All Problems

“All problems are interpersonal relationship problems. (Emphasis mine) This is a concept that runs to the very root of Adlerian psychology. If all interpersonal relationships were gone from this world, which is to say if one were alone in the universe and all other people were gone, all manner of

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Loneliness Needs Other People

“To feel lonely, we need other people. That is to say, it is only in social contexts that a person becomes an “individual.” Being lonely isn’t the condition of being alone, being lonely is the condition of being separated from other people, desiring to be with other people. Loneliness

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Internal Worry Does Not Exist

“There is no such thing as worry that is completely defined by the individual; so-called internal worry does not exist. Whatever the worry that may arise, the shadows of other people are always present.” Our problems arise from our entanglements with other people. Excerpt From: Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga.

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Choose your life

“We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences. Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live” It’s not so much the hand that you are dealt,

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Trauma is Denied

“In Adlerian psychology, trauma is definitively denied. This was a very new and revolutionary point. Certainly, the Freudian view of trauma is fascinating. Freud’s idea is that a person’s psychic wounds (traumas) cause his or her present unhappiness. When you treat a person’s life as a vast

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Etiology vs. Teleology

“This is the difference between etiology (the study of causation) and teleology (the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause)” Not what caused the behavior, but why, what purpose is being served. What’s the goal here. Excerpt From: Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga. “The

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Look to the present

“in Adlerian psychology, we do not think about past “causes” but rather about present “goals” Instead of trying to unravel the why of something by looking at the past and creating a narrative, we need to look to present how this behavior is serving a need or a goal. For

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Anger is a tool

“The goal of shouting came before anything else. That is to say, by shouting, you wanted to make the waiter submit to you and listen to what you had to say. As a means to do that, you fabricated the emotion of anger.” Expressing anger is a way to short