Dealing with the stigma of depression is far easier in the abstract than face to face, often when we least expect it. I am a clinical psychologist and I suffer from a mood disorder. Occasionally someone will remark that these dual roles are a winning combination. Sometimes they are just the reverse.

Research suggests that about one-half of us will experience, in our life time, an event so traumatic, so disastrous, that it will meet criteria A for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Knowing that fact, then why is it that most of us do not prepare for disasters?

People-pleasers are proficient at pleasing everyone . . . but themselves. They are master accommodators, intuiting what is wanted of them and--in both word and deed--bestowing on others the attentiveness and care they’ll typically deny themselves.

Parts 1 and 2 of this post gave several helpful tips on how to think in a disaster situation. This part reviews two important topics: understanding how disasters happen and how your behavior affects disaster situations. Here are a few tips for acting productively in a disaster.

Most marriage therapists and relationship books warn against "mind-reading," which means assuming that your partner knows what you want. With some couples this is good advice. But one of the reasons that marriage counseling usually fails in relationships with chronic resentment, anger, or emotional abuse is that your partner can read your mind when your mind is negative.

A person's attitude has a lot to do with his or her chances of survival in a disaster. Here are some tips for productive ways of thinking that can assist you when disaster strikes.

After watching the longest Major League All-star game in history, the feeling I was left with was sorrow for the plight of Alex Rodriguez, the MVP third baseman for the New York Yankees, who happens to be the highest paid man in baseball.

In the eponymous fairytale, Sleeping Beauty's parents throw a joyous party to celebrate her long-awaited birth. They only have twelve place settings, so they invite twelve of the kingdom's thirteen wise women. The thirteenth wise woman, who is ill-tempered and lives in a remote corner of the kingdom, is not invited to the party. The way that the parents treated the thirteenth sister is the way many of us treat sadness and other negative emotions.

A sure-fire way to destroy your relationship is to diagnose your partner with a personality disorder or other character disease. Unfortunately, a cottage industry of self-help books exists to encourage you to do just that.

Dance therapy has recently been recognized in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, autism, and posttraumatic stress. And dance—whether you can move and groove with the best or not-- offers more than just good medicine; it unites the heart and soul of humanity on a global level. Enjoy a compelling film, a testament to the power of dance, that was 14 months in the making, spans 42 countries, and includes an international cast of thousands.

Perhaps more than anything else, our mental and emotional well-being depends on our willingness to confront obstacles in life. The all-too-common alternative, of course, is simply to retreat from them. If, however, we're genuinely to progress and feel good about ourselves, we need to resist the ever-present temptation to withdraw from whatever we'd prefer not having to deal with.

Would you feel like you'd still like to be president after you have just been liberated from six years of captivity?

Since our boot camps were featured on a couple of Oprah Winfrey Shows (they'd been around for a decade before the popular media discovered them), I have been interviewed often about the "radically new" idea of treating resentful, angry, and abusive people by training them to experience compassion.

If you take even a quick look at the newspaper, you can see that there are massive public policy efforts aimed to curb smoking. States are raising their cigarette taxes. Cities around the world are banning smoking in restaurants. Even Holland (where it seems like almost every vice is legal) will no longer allow cigarette smoking in restaurants and public places. What makes it so hard to quit smoking?

Daily I look around me and observe how people shy away from genuine, self-revealing communication--almost as though to embark on such a path would be like walking into a minefield, where a single misstep might be fatal. But the communication we all long for--a powerful, expressive dialogue that might spiritually connect us to each another--is in fact fraught with danger and uncertainty. So almost all of us experience the need to carefully monitor just how much of ourselves we divulge to others.

I want to create a new SAT - the Singles Aptitude Test. Think of it as a subversive guide for the single and savvy.

Why do some successful people hit bottom when they reach the top? And how can high-performers keep themselves from self-destructing?

After years of working with couples, I am still amazed at how very hard we make it for our partners to give us what we want.

Above all else, George Carlin loved language. Though it was far from his most penetrating bit, The Seven Words You Cannot Say on Television is surely his most well-known routine, having landed him in jail. So, in his honor, let's take a look at the peculiar American tendency to take offense at words.