Is there a per­son who has never known the eerie dis­tance of iso­la­tion and sep­a­ra­tion, who has never suf­fered the pain of rejec­tion or the loss of love? Lone­li­ness is an aching void in the cen­ter of our being, a deep long­ing to love and to be loved, to be fully known and accepted by at least one other person.

- James Park 

Episode descrip­tion: 

In this episode I speak with Emily White about her mem­oir Lonely: Learn­ing to Live With Soli­tude,  in which Emily recounts her strug­gle to com­pre­hend and over­come her chronic loneliness.

In the con­ver­sa­tion Emily dis­cusses some of the roots of lone­li­ness and how the exist­ing in the West­ern soci­eties stigma around the state makes it harder for lonely peo­ple to bat­ter lone­li­ness. She also talks about the core dif­fer­ences between lone­li­ness and depres­sion, the dif­fi­culty of tran­si­tion­ing from lone­li­ness and how it can be helped and touches upon how  expe­ri­ence of lone­li­ness day after day can influ­ence our phys­i­ol­ogy and behavior.

 

 

 

Fea­tured track:

I close the episode with the track Your Are My Applepie by North­ern Safari, which I ded­i­cated to my spe­cial friend Andy, who’s always been there for me, even if “there” is a place some­where in rural England.

The lyrics are writ­ten by my friend, a tal­ented writer and an amaz­ingly warm per­son Anette Skåhlberg.

 

 

 

Episode related resources:

Emily White’s website

Inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the UCLA Lone­li­ness Scale

Lonely: Learn­ing to Love With Soli­tude by Emily White

Lone­li­ness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Con­nec­tion by John Cacioppo

Lone­li­ness: The Expe­ri­ence of Emo­tional and Social Iso­la­tion by Robert Weiss

Pro­fes­sor John Cacioppo on Lone­li­ness (video, Cor­nell University)

North­ern Safari

My two favourate lonely tracks:

Lonely Lonely by Feist from Let It Die, 2004

Lonely town by fLako (feat. Dirg Gerner), From Carv­ing Away the Clay– EP, 2011

 

 

 

 

Episode descrip­tion:

I con­tinue my con­ver­sa­tion with psy­chol­o­gist and pod­caster Dr David Van Nuys on dreams and how they can inform our wak­ing life. In this episode Dr Dave and I dis­cuss pre-cognitive and psy­chic dreams, syn­chronic­i­ties and sim­ple but effec­tive tech­niques to improve our dream recall.

Dr Dave, host of Shrink Rap Radio Psy­chol­ogy Pod­cast and Wise Coun­cil Pod­cast, also talks about his pod­cast­ing career, its chal­lenges and its rewards.

After the inter­view I talk about some of the find­ings of con­tent analy­sis research, a sci­en­tific method for accu­rately describ­ing what we dream about, con­ducted by Calvin Hall and Bill Domhoff.

Episode descrip­tion:

I con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion with Dr David Van Nuys on dreams and how they can inform our wak­ing life. In this episode Dr Dave talks about dream work in groups helps us to get to a deep level rather quickly and builds trust and inti­macy through shar­ing dreams, how keep­ing a dream jour­nal allows us to see how our dreams evolve over time and how night­mares can help us over­come the fears in our wak­ing life. Other issues Dr Dave touches upon are the dif­fer­ence between the imag­i­nary and the imag­i­nal and Jung’s idea of the Big Dream.

Dr Dave also gives me some sug­ges­tions as to how I can con­tinue work­ing with the dream I share on the pro­gram, using the method out­lined by Robert Jon­son in his book Inner work. He also com­ments on my dream using the If– this-were-my-dream approach.

After the inter­view I share how not lis­ten­ing to the inner wis­dom that came through another dream, led me to more unnec­es­sary suf­fer­ing and hurt­ing. Because of the some­what sen­si­tive sit­u­a­tion around the dream, I chose to not share it with Dr Dave on the show, nei­ther did I take the time to work with the dream on my own. In the wak­ing life I chose to remain pas­sive and end­ing up in the exact sit­u­a­tion the dream had been warn­ing me for.

Fea­tured music track:

To cel­e­brate the irony in our lives, I play my first day with a mous­tache, another track from Baasztian’s lat­est album diag­no­sis: chron­i­cally ironic.

Episode related resources:

Inner work: Using Dreams and Active Imag­i­na­tion For Per­sonal Growth  by  Robert A. Johnson

Dream work: Tech­niques for Dis­cov­er­ing the Cre­ative Power in Dreams by Jeremy Taylor

#290 of Shrink Rap Radio:  Ally work with Jun­gian ana­lyst Jef­frey Ruff

#289 of Shrink Rap Radio:  Jung and hold­ing the oppo­sites with Jon Jackson

 #204 of Shrink Rap Radio:  Night­mares as a tool for per­sonal growth with Anne Hill

#199 of Shrink Rap Radio: The secret his­tory of dream­ing with Robert Moss

The Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for the Study of Dreams

Episode descrip­tion:

Do you ever get a feel­ing that your dreams are try­ing to tell you some­thing impor­tant? Do you want to estab­lish com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the uncon­scious? In the next few episodes I talk dreams with “Dr Dave”,  also known as David van Nuys, Ph.D. Dr Dave is the host of the pop­u­lar Shrink Rap Radio Psy­chol­ogy Pod­cast, taught the course Myth, dream and sym­bol at Sonoma State Uni­ver­sity for a num­ber of years, has been a mem­ber of a dream group for over three decades and has inter­viewed many spe­cial­ists on the fas­ci­nat­ing sub­ject of dreams on Shrink Rap Radio.

In Part One of the con­ver­sa­tion Dr Dave sets up the foun­da­tion for talk­ing about dreams pro­vid­ing the back­ground on Freud’s and Jung’s con­tri­bu­tion to the field and describ­ing briefly how the two big minds explained the dreams’ lan­guage of visual metaphors and sym­bols that is some­times hard to under­stand and take seri­ously. Dr Dave also reflects on where dreams come from and what lies at the roots of our thoughts.

After the con­ver­sa­tion, I give a brief sum­mary of how Freud and Jung saw the func­tion of dream­ing and take a few min­utes to intro­duce other the­o­ries that try to give us some clues as to why we dream.

More info about the guest:

David van Nuys, Ph.D, is Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­ogy at Sonoma State Uni­ver­sity and served as that department’s Chair for seven years. He has also taught psy­chol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Mon­tana, the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, and the Uni­ver­sity of New Hamp­shire. He runs a mar­ket research con­sult­ing busi­ness, hosts  Shrink Rap Radio Psy­chol­ogy Pod­cast and Wise Coun­cil Pod­cast  and in 2001 co-authored the book, This is the Zodiac Speak­ing: Into the mind of a ser­ial killer, in which he pro­files the mur­derer in this famous, unsolved case. HBO picked up an option on the book with the idea of pos­si­bly using it as the basis for a mini-series. Over the years David, who is also a father of three, has been involved in ham radio, sport judo, freight train hop­ping, folk gui­tar, piano, did­jeridu, sky div­ing, fly­ing sailplanes, wind­surf­ing, moun­tain bik­ing, road cycling, motor­cy­cles, cross-country ski­ing, down­hill ski­ing, and Tai Chi.

Fea­tured music track:

Although tech­ni­cally Baaszt­ian is not a “musi­cian from Swe­den”,  I think he is more than qual­i­fied to be part of the show: I met him in Upp­sala through the depart­ment of psy­chol­ogy (coin­ci­dence?), he hap­pens to have a Master’s degree in cog­ni­tive psy­chol­ogy (the plot thick­ens!) and is now doing his Ph.D. in psy­cholin­guis­tics, the study of the psy­cho­log­i­cal and neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal fac­tors that enable humans to acquire, use, com­pre­hend and pro­duce lan­guage (just cool!).

I close the episode by killing lew wal­lace – the track from Baasztian’s lat­est album diag­no­sis: chron­i­cally ironic. Of course, I inquired what Baaszt­ian him­self thought about the some­what vio­lent lyrics and to what degree they they might have to do with his repressed desire for vio­lence but for­tu­nately this seems to be the case when lew wal­lace is sim­ply lew wallace.

We will hear more from Baasztian’s album as I con­tinue my con­ver­sa­tion with Dr Dave in the fol­low­ing episodes. I feel that just like our dreams, Baasztian’s lat­est album can be explored from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. For one thing, it offers a vari­ety of cross-cultural and musi­cal ref­er­ences and reflects his humor.

Episode related resources:

Shrink Rap Radio Psy­chol­ogy Pod­cast with Dr Dave

Inner work: Using Dreams and Active Imag­i­na­tion For Per­sonal Growth  by  Robert A. Johnson

Revon­suo, A. (2000) The Rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams. An evo­lu­tion­ary Hypoth­e­sis of the func­tion of dream­ing. Behav­ioral and Brain Sci­ences, 23(6), (877–901)