Daniel A. Bochner, Ph.D.

So many different issues affect us in our daily lives that we sometimes feel we're being bombarded by new problems every day. The articles in this section represent a smattering of those issues and ways to understand them so that you might be able to function better within your relationships. Criticism and Us dissects the issue of judgment, how it affects us, and why it's often so compelling to judge others. In Balancing the Animal and the Spiritual, the fact that we have animal instincts is contrasted with the fact that we need one another in almost everything we do. The compelling tendency for people to fall into dominant and controlling roles, and the problems or annoyance that causes, is the central topic in The Power and Control Addiction. The psychobabble concept, "boundaries," is so essential to our interpersonal functioning that Understanding Boundaries was an essential article within this collection. The Failure of Empathy in Everyday Life points to our need to distance ourselves from the struggles of others even though, really, bad experiences and circumstances afflict good people all the time, and the ability to maintain empathy could help us all live much more fulfilling and prosperous lives. This Everyday Maintenance section is rounded out with The Crippling Effects of Worry, an article that emphasizes the need for faith in our loved one's as an antidote to the self-defeating and undermining (of others) tendency to worry about things we cannot control.