The Psychology of Mental Health

Preview of my next book

Ten Principles for Living Psychological Quality—Based on Reality, Reasoning, and Responsibility

1.  Identify and accept reality/truth.  Identify and live the best subjective truth in the moment, given the context.  Remember, most of what we call truth is man-made subjective truth. Therefore, any assumed or proposed truth is open to challenge—including all you have learned to be true.  Your goal is psychological independence.  Challenge the fear of disapproval, failure, and the belief that you do not deserve to be happy.  Develop faith in your mind’s ability to discern truth. 
2. Learn how to think with reasoning.  Reasoned thinking is the only way to know the best subjective truth for any given situation.  It’s the only way to build faith in your mind.  Always employ reasoned thinking to identify truth, not your emotions.  Use reasoned thinking to identify truth, clarify thinking, make decisions, manage feelings, and, challenging all that you believe for veracity.  Reject myth, tradition, authority, majority opinion, etc. 
3. Hold yourself accountable for personal psychological growth.  Be responsible physically, intellectually, and psychologically. Being responsible means knowing what is right and doing it, and, committing to learning and growing throughout your lifetime
4. Have continual conscious goals that you are working to achieve in all areas of your life.  In a larger sense, develop a vision of how you would like your life to be and develop programs to get there. These are internal goals that are about you the person and who you want to be.  They are in addition to external goals that are daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly achievement focused.
5. Mentally, constructive self-integration/individuation is your goal.  This means becoming one person in your mind and in your actions.  Not being at odds with yourself.   Become you own best self-advocate.   Develop your thinking and behavior toward realizing psychological responsibility and maturity.  This is a core feature of the Meta-Self—Your healthy adult self.
6. Nourish yourself by creating meaning and purpose in your life.   Don’t depend on others to motivate you. You must be productive and achieve to feel good about and value yourself.
7. Be empathetically connected to yourself and others.  Seek reality, reasoning, and responsibility in your own mind about you, and then with all others.  Observe yourself as you interact with others.  Focus on genuineness, respect, understanding and constructive action.  Be constructively self-critical and build and implement programs to change or overcome deficits.
8. Be your own self-advocate equally in equal measure to being constructively self-critical. Be honest with yourself about mistakes and your strengths and deficits.  Recognize your attributes and take action to correct your deficits.
9. Find ways that you can contribute to others.  Giving to others is giving to yourself.
10. Take action guided by reasoning.  Only do things that make you feel good about who you are. Conversely, do not do things that make you feel bad about yourself.  Internally/cognitively believe what makes you feel good about you but be sure that belief is functional both in nourishing yourself but not harmful to others.  Do not lie to yourself-you will know it and suffer the consequences.