Dr. Payton

I have come to believe that listening to others without our own personal reaction to what we are hearing is kind to those people as we are actually being with them when we don’t react. If we react we are not listening and that is like not being with them. They may react if these…

Competition seems to inevitably lead to winners and losers and this runs the risk of separating people. On the otherhand, competition is often considered to be healthy. So is competition healthy or not?  Or is it sometimes healthy? What might healthy competition be. It has been decribed as being healthy when the goal is not…

Much has been written about the wonders of being connected through the internet to the world and the potential problems of changing how we connect to each other. My daughter forwarded an article from the NY Times by Barbara Fredrickson about this topic. Ms. Fredrickson is a professor of psychology at the University of North…

The above is a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King and the rest of the quote is: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of mutuality.” Margaret Meade once said: if we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut…

In an earlier blog I mentioned research by Ms. Fredrickson and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that involved one group receiving training in metta meditation while a control group did not. The metta meditation really seemed to help that group feel better and be more positively connected to others.…

When we treat other people as if they are statistics then we are separating ourselves from those people. This is because when we choose to not see other people as individuals we don’t really see them at all, like when we stereotype others by treating them as if they are like everyone else in a…

The most recent AACAP News summarized an article by Copeland, etal., in JAMA Psychiatry 20:1-8 that looked at children and adolescents who were bullied or the bullies 10 years later. This was a follow-up from the Great Smoky Mountain Epidemiological study that was done in wesern North Carolina. They found that both those who were…

Over the past several months I have helped a number of people who have had traumatic experiences that keep bothering them even after they are no longer exposed to the traumatic situation[s]. They report becoming very anxious very rapidly when anything reminds them of the traumatic events. They often have develped a number of good…

Taming is a reference to what the fox is teaching the little prince in the book by Saint Exupery called The Little Prince. In this book the fox is helping the Prince to understand what it means to care about others that the fox calls “taming” others. The Prince learns that because he cares for and loves…

Bipolar II disorder [I will refer to this as BP2 for rest of blog] made the news when it was reported that the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones was given this diagnosis. Most people are aware of bipolar I disorder [BP1] yet BP2 is more prevalent and has significant levels of morbidity [the impact of the illness…