Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, PhD
In addition to the blog posts featured below, you may want to check out Sharon’s Psychology Today blog Mysteries of Consciousness.
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Contentment Is a Good Place to Start
What would it take for you to be content? For a long time, I thought all I needed was a loving husband, a warm home, a bunch of animals, and a publication with my name on it. Then the day came when I had all those things, and I found myself wanting more. More animals. Bigger Read more
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A World Ruled by Meaning
Those who know of my intense interest in near-death experiences and past-life memories might be surprised to discover that, not so long ago, I was an atheist. Four years ago, I didn’t believe in a higher power and I didn’t believe in life after death. I had given up all those “spiritual” beliefs around age twenty, when I Read more
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You Ain’t Smart Unless You Sound Smart
“[B]eing trailer park trash doesn’t preclude intelligence.” If only we lived in a world where this was not news. If only we lived in a world where this was not something a person could prove only by discarding the way of speaking they grew up with and adopting “standard” English. But we don’t live in that world. And that’s what Read more
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On Feeling Alone
I don’t care how many friends you have or how many heart-to-heart talks you manage with your loved ones, I think we all have moments when we feel alone. Moments when we’re stuck inside an emotion that we don’t see any possibility of sharing. Or when we’re thinking thoughts we have no way to convey. These are Read more
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The Invisibility of Evil
“You will learn that when the truth isn’t pretty, expected, or delivered with a fair dose of charm, people will almost always put their faith in a lie.” So reads one of many chilling lines in H.G. Beverly‘s recently released memoir The Other Side of Charm, about her unwitting marriage to a sociopath. Before her marriage to Read more
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Dying to Be Me
I had the suspicion, when I ordered Anita Moorjani’s memoir Dying to Be Me, that it was going to be a book that I needed to own in hardback. Something told me it would become one of those books I would keep on my shelf for years as a souvenir of an important spiritual and intellectual turning point. Read more
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The Importance of Readers
There’s a phase of the writing process to which I’m particularly resistant. It’s not the dreaming phase, where even the worst ideas look golden. It’s not the sitting-down-to-a-blank-page phase, where I hesitate to ruin those golden ideas by turning them into words. It’s not even the arduous process of writing an entire first draft, then a second, then a third. When things look like crap, with no trace of inspiration anywhere, I Read more
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Are We Attracted to the Things We Fear?
Conventional psychological wisdom says that we avoid the things we fear. That avoidance is, in fact, one of the primary indications that fear is present. But what about those cases in which our fears actually push us into the arms of their objects? What about the boyfriend who is so afraid his girlfriend will leave Read more
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A Story for a Very Cold Day
It’s 10°F this morning, and there’s ice on the inside of the windows. First thing I did? Go out and check on the chickens. Who were out in their yard apparently as happy as ever. I took them a big pot of hot water since their regular water dispenser was frozen solid. And I threw them Read more
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God In Us
Two thousand years ago, a baby was born who grew up to claim he was God. All the church people–the Sunday School teachers, the pastors, the Awana leaders, the evangelists and theologians of ancient Israel–they threw a fit. After all, how much more blatantly heretical could you get? According to Hebrew Scripture, you couldn’t even Read more
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, PhD 