Paul Dunion, EdD

I am encouraged by Stephen Marche’s New York Times article, “The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido”.  Mr. Marche appropriately invites men to take their masculinity seriously: “… let’s start with a basic understanding that masculinity is a subject worth thinking about”. It is an extremely worthwhile summons that has been duly ignored since Herb…

You will inevitably live out some kind of relationship with fate, which is your life.  As in all relationships, you adopt an attitude toward fate, some way of thinking, feeling and acting toward it. However, a great deal can be lost when we don’t pause and examine what kind of relationship we are constructing.  Let’s…

Being fully alive offers countless opportunities to exercise emotional resiliency. Life presents us with defeat, loss, suffering and ample chances to undergo a broken heart. An old definition of the word resilient is “to rebound”. We can begin by asking: Rebounding from what and to what? When the weight of life crushes down on us,…

It was a Monday morning, the day after I attended a Matthew Fox workshop.  Typically, I would still be carrying the glow of having been in the presence of a man who devoted his life to the pursuit of The Sacred.  However, as I left my office, heading toward the kitchen, I carried an interior…

We continue to view psychological wounding as an aberration. Consequently, folks who admit they need such healing are defined as having unnatural childhoods, leaving them stigmatized as damaged goods. We have yet to normalize our understanding that because our caregivers were imperfect, we would have experienced a level of neglect or abuse, leaving us wounded.…

I have committed to bringing what I refer to as more Hermetic energy into my life. Hermes was the messenger, able to deliver communiqué from the gods to humans as well as information from mortals to the Divine. We can utilize this divine messenger as a metaphor. The spirit of Hermes lives as we allow…

The natures of Being and Becoming in relationships often go undefined and therefore hard to talk about or do anything about. If the features of Being or Becoming go unnamed, then a shroud of emptiness and estrangement descend upon a relationship. However, acknowledging and welcoming either the deeper life of Being or Becoming can revitalize…

We tend to see ourselves as either knowing something or eager to know. We tend to forget about ourselves as the inquirer. Our personal identities become vague and opaque. There may be a richer way to both be informed by our experience and be clearer about whom we are. I would invite the consideration that…

The typical reaction I get when I bring up the topic of intimacy is the assumption I’m referring to sex.  Usually, I’m not. But this common reaction is telling in regard to our understanding of Emotional Intimacy.  Has the culture insisted upon the notion of intimacy being about sex?  Has this limited our understanding of…

The psyche exercises an intense regard for its own protection. At times, it will indulge in what appear to be self-inflicted harm, if it believes such treatment will contribute to other fundamental needs such as survival.  Self-loathing or the loss of self-love is often one of those strategies employed in support of some other basic…