Everyone struggles with ghosts, usually the residue of our childhood or other significant emotional traumas.
These are resolvable — if we will do the work.
In my case, the ghost has been the disappointments wherein I have attempted to promote myself, either through my workshops or my books. I sincerely believe that the skills and resources I offer are vital in the seeking to be the best human being I can be. They work. They work for me; they work for others.
But I am a strong introvert and an amateur in promoting myself. I have not been successful and slowly have become discouraged. In the past, I have been strongly self-motivated, and what surprises me now is how strongly dependent I have become on external motivation. It is not a bad thing yet in now engaging with an individual who is both very creative and motivated to promote my work, my enthusiasm seems restored.
The skills and resources I teach can be learned from a book, but they are best learned by regularly engaging in the work with a good facilitator, in this case —me.
Up until about 2012, I was a physician-psychotherapist and had my own anger management program. I called it ‘anger management’ for two reasons. First, it was an easy issue that people could identify in their lives. Second, and more important, is my belief that anger is the canary in the coalmine of our culture — it reveals our deep lack of understanding of emotional issues in our culture. My work is not that of anger management — it is that of emotional management, especially how to integrate the emotional and the rational to the transrational.
My workshop was a 17-hour weekend program, experiential, every two-to-three weeks, in which I engaged with 15-20 individuals who struggled with anger issues in their lives. Because I was a physician in Ontario, my workshop was covered by the provincial health insurance program, and thus individuals (men and women from all walks of life) could attend without charge. They could be doctors and lawyers or individuals who had spent most of their lives in jail. I also used these programs to supply my ongoing groups of people who wanted deeper engagement, meeting weekly as needed.
For the most part, my workshop came out of my own growth. By age 40, I was a very competent professional anaesthetist yet deeply unhappy with my own ghosts of a very painful childhood. I started to engage with good experiential therapy and soon realized the field to be the most creative experience I have encountered — I switched to training as a therapist and spent years resolving my own ghosts. Amongst other learnings, I came to recognize that the skill I bring as a therapist is my own humanness.
Although the deeper work of my clients was done in the groups, people changed their lives with the single weekend. There were many occasions wherein an individual could come for the single weekend but did not have the resources for ongoing attendance. It was not uncommon for that someone to show up in my driveway thanking me because their lives changed with that single weekend. Examples are listed in Appendix 4 of my book Blowing Out the Darkness.
After about 20 years of this practice, I noted how a portion of my group client load did not engage with the work; they watched other people doing the work yet did not do so themselves. Without being pejorative, I characterized them as lazy (they avoided the work) or fearful (they were afraid of the consequences of doing the work). There was no therapy I could offer them other than challenging them to engage.
As a consequence, I decided to do my PhD studying laziness and fearfulness. When I added self-righteousness to this mix, I recognized an ancient process acedia as having a modern form of any combination of laziness, fearfulness, and self-righteousness that blocked the individual from engaging in authentic living. I also posited that modern acedia is the underlying emotional basis of climate change. Climate change is a technological issue, yet we do not resolve it because of our cultural acedia. (All this is described in my second book Acedia, the Darkness Within).
I ‘retired’ (semi-retired) fifteen years ago, moved to British Columbia, and since then I do individual work, calling myself a coach. I have spend a lot of time and money attempting to promote my two books, unsuccessfully (again being an amateur).
With the current encouragement, I have decided to focus on promoting myself. I am available both for individual and corporate consulting, for the management of any emotional issues, including life satisfaction, leadership, burnout, and group functioning. If people find my work useful, the spin-off will be my books are promoted.
If what I have written tweaks your interest, connect with me at [email protected]. I will also be modifying my website davemacquarrie.com to have less focus on my books and more focus on what I can offer.
Thanks. Hope to meet you.
Never have I been so frightened by a book as I have been with The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, a fascinating and scary description of how capitalism has shifted in the past thirty years, essentially since the development of the World Wide Web and the digital age. A brief review is available 
It has been a while since my last post. Amongst other aspects, I decided to drastically limit my attention to email and other distractions. For about two months now, I am only opening emails from those whom I know personally — all the others are trashed immediately. As a result, I find myself more relaxed with more available time, which of course I have already filled with (more beneficial) activities. Being “retired,” I am actually at least as busy as when I was in practice, perhaps more so (as I am more actively responding to the social issues of the day).
This post repeats what for me may be prominent news stories, or at least need to be. If you have not seen them, they need to be seen. The shift is happening, slowly.
Slowly our culture is responding yet we are at a knife’s edge, balanced between the collapse of civilization and the transformation to a more healthy society. It is not yet clear what we shall be. An interesting reflection of a significant day in our modern culture.
In June 2019, the Great Transition Initiative (GTI) organization sponsored a major forum 
We are running out of time. The 2018 IPCC report, for example, indicates we have until about 2030 (12 years, not 11) before we exhaust out climate budget for staying below 1..5°C, our best chance of avoiding major tipping points. Many believe that to be an optimistic assessment, such that we have perhaps much less time. Even then, the need of political action (not talk!) will take significant time,, such that we likely need to make major changes within the next 18 months (especially with the coming US elections being a major player here).
Resilience.org has recently presented an excellent forum entitled