Dr. Lindsay Gibson
speaker
515 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 13 Jun
Dr. Lindsay Gibson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
To me, I look at that question differently. I look at it, do any of us owe anybody else anything?
The answer is yes, I think we do as human beings. If I'm walking down the street and somebody trips and falls, I'm going to stop and help them get up. I mean, there are things that call out altruistic, helpful responses. I mean, I wouldn't want to live in a world where that wasn't there. But what has happened is that there has been such a—to get back to those stereotypes again—
There's been such an assumption that because you're my child, you owe me something in terms of like payback or I'm entitled to your attention and I can treat you any way I want because we're family and you're my child. That's where you get up to a point where there should be a boundary. I mean, there is no law that says you have to respond in a certain way.
And what I'm about is know what it's going to cost you to respond. Think about yourself, too, and then make your best decision about it. We ultimately do have the right to say no when something is going to harm us.
Yeah, you know, I think if you ever watch little kids, their default mode is happiness. And that's because they're spontaneously going and doing the next interesting thing. They just naturally are following their energies of the moment. So I think that's what happens with people too.
If we take away some of the things that have been holding them back, if they feel released to say no to the things that kill their energy... if they don't feel guilted into acting more compassionate or loving than they really feel, if we take these things off of them, it's like a cork that bobs to the top of the water.
The emotionally immature person needs other people to emotionally stabilize them, keep them calm, make them happy, and also to buffer their self-esteem, make sure they keep feeling good about themselves. That is a terrible drag on a person.
That's exhausting when we can get the idea that we're not in this world to function as a sort of an auxiliary coping mechanism for people who can't do it for themselves. we begin to feel our energy coming back. You know, that's what happiness is. Happiness is like free energy. Happiness is, I get to go and do the next thing that I feel like doing.
Not in a, you know, hedonistic, inconsiderate kind of way, but I just get to follow my nose for what my own individual interests are. And that's what makes us happy. along with some of these emotionally mature skills in relationships that keep things, you know, relatively satisfying between ourselves and the people that we love, that all adds up to happiness.
We do have something inside us, and this is what I would call the core self, which is very based in the body. It's very based in emotion. And this core self tells us when we are getting what we need or when we're being treated badly.
Hey, David. How are you this morning?
Oh, no. Yeah. No, I don't think we should do anything without compassion at some level. It's not that we don't want to have compassion, but what I'm talking about is that with the people that I worked with in psychotherapy, the adult children of these emotionally immature parents, the problem was really an excess of compassion, that they were trained and
and guilted and shamed into having for these parents, okay? It's involuntary on the part of the emotionally immature parents, nothing diabolical here. And so when people come to me and they have been conditioned into this sort of compassionate attitude, I take it on myself to have them examine that dynamic
What I've seen is that the compassion takes over the instinctual self-preservation, and the person feels too guilty, too ashamed, and too self-doubting to even think about what's healthy for them. Absolutely.
Yeah, well, I don't think there's much possibility of change unless you have the self-reflection, okay? And you have the self-reflection because you have a sense of self. And you develop the sense of self because your emotional needs have been met And you have been responded to as a little human being early enough that that sense of self gets in there.
OK, you know, to go back to the Sopranos, that's what his therapist was over five years trying to enjoy how much you've gone back to the Sopranos.
Yeah, well, she got him to start in a minuscule way, self-reflecting. So that makes change possible. I think there are earth-shattering moments that really shift your paradigm, and I think they really shift reality. like permanently shift your view of something or your way of thinking about yourself or other people. And I think that kind of change can happen in a flash.
It's like something, like a joint goes back into place. There's a click and it's like, ah, that's not what it is. It's this. And that, like everything else starts to reorganize around that new realization. So I think that can happen.
What I have found though in psychotherapy, the biggest change that people seem to have gotten from therapy is that they have a realization of their own inner experience. They now know how things affect them, what they really feel, what they really think. And they use that now to guide themselves through relationships and through their lives And usually the results are very adaptive, very good.
They have more energy. The insight is not an intellectual exercise. It is like a becoming, an awareness that, oh, this is who I am.
Showing 481–500 of 515 · page 25 of 26
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