In “The Inner Voice of Love,” Henri Nouwen writes: You must avoid not only blaming others but also blaming yourself. You are inclined to blame yourself for the difficulties you experience in relationships. But self-blame is not a form of humility. It is a form of self-rejection in which you ignore or deny your own...
Cindy Haines, Chief Medical Officer of HealthDay and Managing Editor of Physician’s Briefing recently remarked that “Grief is an inevitable component of life lived fully. It is a rare soul, indeed, who passes through unscathed. But losing a child ranks at the top of the hardest to bear.” I have thought about this so often...
Dr. Ron Pies, professor of psychiatry at Tufts and SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, published the following post in the New York Times in September, 2008. I consider it a classic in grief literature. You can get to the original by clicking here. Let’s say a patient walks into my office and says...
Don’t take anything personally. That’s the second agreement of Don Miguel Ruiz’s classic, “The Four Agreements.” I need a reminder today. So I open his book to that chapter and read: Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally…Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in...
Today I have the honor of interviewing Owen Stanley Surman, M.D., a practicing hospital psychiatrist known internationally for his work on psychiatric and ethical aspects of solid organ transplantation. Following the death of his wife, Dr. Surman devoted six years to writer a memoir, “The Wrong Side of an Illness: A Doctor’s Love Story,” which...
