Q & A with Dr. B. – You describe a mother’s motivation for caring for her baby. I don’t understand how that relates to adults caring for themselves.

Dr. Larry Berkelhammer

The purpose of this website, my book, and the Community Education course I teach at the College of Marin, is to teach people how to live a vibrant, meaningful life through the cultivation of self-empowerment and self-efficacy. In this weekly Q&A column, I post questions from students and from people who attend my presentations along with my answers.

Here is this week’s question:

QUESTION: You describe a mother’s motivation for caring for her baby. I don’t understand how that relates to adults caring for themselves.

ANSWER: Parents have a responsibility to keep their young children safe from harm. As adults, we have a responsibility to keep ourselves safe from harm. For most of us, aside from the obvious harmful behaviors such as eating unhealthy food and not getting enough exercise or sleep, the form of harm from which we need the most protection is that of unhealthy, self-deprecating thoughts, negative thinking, and entanglement or fusion with our thoughts and beliefs. The In Your Own Hands course that I created at the College of Marin, along with the In Your Own Hands book, serve to help people develop the ability to self-observe their thoughts with self-compassion.

This website is offered as a free public service, supplying information that has been found helpful to certain people living with chronic health challenges or issues related to wellbeing. No treatment is offered on this website. The advice is general, and may or may not apply to your individual situation, and is not a substitute for psychotherapy or medical treatment.

If you would like to ask me something, you can type your question in the comment box below. An answer to your specific question may not necessarily appear in this column. The reason for that is I wait until I get a certain number of related questions, then I pick one that covers them all and I answer that one.