Health

You Can Have Your Own Opinion… Really It’s Okay.

Dominick D. Hankle PhDLeave a comment

Whether you know it or not, you can have your own thoughts and opinions. You’re permitted to have wrong thoughts, ideas, and opinions and you’re entitled to have correct ones. You can also disagree with other people and think their ideas, thoughts, and yes, behaviors are wrong and immoral. This is the beautiful thing about the mind; it’s yours and you’re responsible for what you put into it, how you process those inputs, and how it directs your behaviors. Now, the caveat about having your own thoughts is that when they’re translated into audible statements and visible behaviors they do so in a world of other minds, bodies, emotions, and social situations. Therefore, so that we may all live with some level of civility society also has the right to temper what you say and do for the common good. Through rational discourse, some of our rights to things like free speech and personal liberties must be tempered so we can all function in a diverse culture but never at the expense of total tyranny in regard to how one thinks, feels, and expresses oneself.

You always have the right to think and develop your mind in a way that is totally your own. You have the right to be virtuous in thought, immoral in thought, biased in thought, and even hateful in thought… it just can’t be expressed in a way that steps on another person’s rights and liberties. I can have a strong dislike for Christians and even feel anger toward them, but I cannot discriminate against them as an employer, be abusive toward them, or say excessively hateful things about them to stir up crowds to act out dangerously toward them. Yet, you can hate Christians and think awful things about them… it is your right to do so… it’s your mind and no one else’s (Just so everyone is aware, I am a Christian, so this is not intended to imply any thoughts I harbor toward Christians).

While I know this sounds radical it really isn’t. It only sounds radical because today, we fear ideas, we’re overly concerned about one another’s emotional and mental safety, and we have lost the ability to debate and dialogue in a way that actually could cause us to change our deeply held feelings, beliefs, and ideas. If I were to argue for or against any current cultural taboo (i.e., abortion, gender identity, marriage, animal rights, etc.) someone would scream that I’m speaking in a way that is harmful or makes them feel unsafe. Certainly, there are ways that might become true (i.e. see the above comments about the common good), but this fear has negated our ability to have our own ideas expressed even in the most rational way. This idea that you have a right to your own ideas, beliefs, feelings, and thoughts is well expressed in things like Thomas Jefferson’s writing on religious freedom, but other Enlightenment thinkers expressed this as well. Thomas Paine, an 18th-century political activist who had a strong influence on America’s founding ideas makes it quite clear that we can and must have a right to our own opinions and to do otherwise leads us to a very bad place:

“I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.”

What is most important about the above quote is not just that it expresses how important it is for us to have our own opinions but that by allowing others to have opinions also allows us to have the right to change ours. We can, and should, always be ready to modify our opinions in the light of better arguments, more facts, and to use a research term, improved data. However, we can’t do that if we believe everyone should think the same way about things (while we may all have any thoughts and opinions we like, I do believe there is an objective reality that we need to embrace or there are negative consequences that occur from ignoring that reality).

The intent of this post is to drive home the point that we cannot allow any faction of society to tell us, “You can’t think that way.” When we allow that to become a cultural mantra, particularly in the name of “making people feel safe” we go down the dangerous path of mental stagnation. We all have the right to think any way we like. It’s an essential part of being human. In fact, in some instances, it is the last line of defense in maintaining our humanity. Victor Frankl wrote a book called, “Man’s Search for Meaning” that outlines his life in Nazi concentration camps as a Jew. He describes how people survived this experience from a psychological perspective. In doing so he reminds us how important it is that we maintain the ability to think of things and hold our own opinions, thoughts, and attitudes about our world regardless of what we are being told. He states:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

That my friends, is a truth we cannot surrender. In the next post, I will demonstrate some of the best ways to change your opinion so that the mind you create reflects what is most true, beautiful, and good. After all, if you want to live well, the more your mind reflects objective truths the better you can make your way through the world.

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Something Old and Something New

Dominick D. Hankle PhD3 Comments

When we celebrate something new we can never forget it’s birthed from what’s in the past. We are creatures of continuity. It’s important to welcome what’s new but only by standing on the shoulders of what’s been in the past. Our past attempts, our failures, and our mistakes have given birth to our future hopes, desires, and aspirations. If we forget where we’ve come from we will never know where we’re going. If we cannot remember the signs of where we’ve been we may find ourselves walking the same trail over and over again. Jesus Christ did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, the spiritual tradition he inherited, he fulfilled it. We are not meant to abolish where we have come from but rather to transform it into a future filled with hope, love, beauty, and inspiration. We’re never trapped by our past but we should be informed by it so we can be transformed by grace.

I’ve worked with people throughout my career as a therapist, pastor, and professor who cling to their past in one of two ways. They either hold on to the past and allow it to shape everything they do or they’re so put off by it that any reference to what happened before is never permitted. This means the past either locks you into the only reference you have for living in the present or it’s a lost resource for understanding how to change and be a better person. Neither of these is helpful. If you’ve been hurt by the past transform it into a powerful engine for positive change. If the past was something you treasure, use it as a foundation to build something even better. The key is what we are now and what we will become in the future is always tied to our past. The power of the past is its ability to become a tool that allows you to transform what was into what can be. That’s what it means to be wise. A wise person is neither trapped by the past nor loses the lessons it has taught. A wise person uses the past to become a better human being. It’s a powerful force in your life, it’s just a matter of how you use it.

Chase Meaning Not Happiness or Success

Dominick D. Hankle PhDLeave a comment

What is the most important thing to pursue?  Is it happiness?  Is it success?  The great philosopher Aristotle said happiness is the thing people most want.  We don’t seem to chase happiness for some secondary purpose.   Everything we pursue and every goal we have we hope will make us happy.  His argument is solid and if you’ve ever read his work Nicomachean Ethics, then you know he makes a great argument for the idea that all human beings seek happiness as the ultimate good.  The problem is happiness has a much broader meaning for Aristotle than it does for us.  The Greek word he uses is difficult to translate into English.  The word he uses is eudaimonia which means “To flourish” more than to experience the emotional state of happiness.  If we’re flourishing happiness will be an effect of that experience, but it’s not the objective of what human beings desire.  We desire to flourish, not just experience a mood labeled as happiness.

If we want to flourish, we need to have meaning and purpose in our lives.  Meaning and purpose pulls us toward a sense of flourishing.  If I find meaning and purpose in my life and direct my actions, goals, and efforts toward fulfilling that meaning and purpose, then I flourish.  I experience happiness at times but also in the struggles and difficulties of life, I overcome and grow.  To suffer for something bigger than yourself stimulates a deeper and more fulfilling life.  To accomplish goals directed toward something more than myself is to feel that I am moving toward something profound and transcendent.  This is what it means to flourish in the broader sense that Aristotle describes in his philosophical work.

Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist captured by the Nazis during WWII, put in some of the darkest and worst conditions a person could ever endure, and who lost his whole family in the death camps believed one must make meaning of life to survive it.  A person will survive almost anything if he or she can maintain a sense of purpose and meaning.  He saw that prisoners who no longer could find purpose succumbed to their conditions in the concentration camps and died.  In his famous book “Man’s Search for Meaning” he writes:

“Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.“

So, my friends, if you want to flourish, be happy, and endure difficult situations when the arise, be sure your life is guided toward something bigger than yourself.  More and more it seems we’re simply floundering in a life numbed by entertainment from glowing screens on our walls, desks, and in our hands.  Ask yourself what the greater and more profound mission is for your life and pursue it with all you have.  It will be the best thing you can do for yourself and those in your life.

Drop the Bad Beliefs – You Don’t Have to Agree With Them Anymore

Dominick D. Hankle PhDLeave a comment
Does This Idea Work for My Life?

People walk around with a meaning-making system in their head and they’re seldom aware of how much it impacts everything about them.  Much of what I do in therapy is help people become aware of their meaning-making system and how it’s causing them pain.  A component of everyone’s meaning-making system is something philosophers call a worldview.  A worldview is a set of beliefs about things like:

  • What does it mean to be a human being?
  • What is the nature of the world?
  • What’s wrong with the world and why do things go wrong?
  • How can what’s wrong with the world be fixed?

The beliefs you build around these questions guide you and your interactions with the world (and people) in an almost invisible way.  You’re probably not even aware of how you feel about these things until your life gets turned upside down.  For example, You may think human beings are nothing more than evolved animals with complex ways of thinking and behaving that allows them to get what they want in a complex social world.  People can’t just take what they want (Although they would if they could) they need to develop the social skills to get what they want from people in a nuanced way.  At some point in life, you find you need help with something and someone comes along and does just that.  Unconsciously you believe this individual is helping you because they want something.  You engage the world around you with suspicion because you know how people are and you need to protect yourself from their inherently selfish drives.

This belief may allow you to function in the world, but it may also keep you from being happy and enjoying healthy fulfilling relationships.  The beliefs you have about the above subject areas will impact how you engage the world around you.  Because of that, I want to encourage you to spend a little time exploring your meaning-making machine that guides your interactions with the world.  What is a human being?  Are they merely physical creatures, do they have souls, can they be good creatures or are they only evil creatures cloaked in kindness to get what they want?  Is the world created with a design and purpose or is it a randomly evolved biosphere merely meant to nourish life?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  How can people live in the world in a way that limits the bad things that happen?  All of these are good questions to explore.

It is my hope that by spending some time digging into the meaning-making system you have in your head you can see where some of these beliefs have handicapped your ability to thrive, live a fulfilling life, and enjoy other people.  Much of what you carry around in your head are merely beliefs you’ve held on to in order to make sense of the world at a time when you were struggling.  They may not be necessary beliefs but merely constructed lies that helped you when you needed them.  Sometimes the world changes and therefore some of your fundamental belief propositions might need to change as well.  I am not a relativist; I believe there are fundamental truths that human beings need to embrace and in doing so they can thrive.  However, I do know people often carry around useless ideas they used to cope with in a bad situation from the past that no longer serves them well.  Let’s see if you can get rid of some of those.

If You Want a Better World, Learn to Love and Be Loved

Dominick D. Hankle PhDLeave a comment
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More and more I am convinced the heart of all human misery is the result of a fracture in a very important psychological mechanism built into the human heart. We are intended to be creatures that love others and receive love. When we cannot love others in a healthy way or have not been loved in a healthy way we create a world that is fractured, broken, and hurtful. Psychologists have numerous theories that talk about the minutiae of how this mechanism works, but in the end, we struggle to love others and are negatively impacted by those that love us in a broken way. Here are just a few ways that happens.

A very early and significant way we are negatively (or positively) impacted by how we are loved is related to something known in psychology as attachment theory. The manner in which your primary care giver shows you love, meets your needs, provides a sense of safety for you, etc. can impact how you engage the world later in life. The theory was formulated by John Bowlby but explored extensively by Mary Ainsworth. Without going through all the details of the theory and the subsequent research it developed, attachment theory finds that those children who were provided with a caring, loving, responsive environment were more able to adjust to the world around them than those who were not. When this care and love is not provided properly, insecure and anxious attachments develop in people and they exhibit such behaviors and emotions as anxiety, the inability to regulate emotions, difficulty with developing relationships with peers, etc. Later research even demonstrates insecure attachments impact romantic relationships and marriage satisfaction. Taking all this into consideration you can see that when someone is not loved properly they struggle to give and receive love in a healthy way. Then, that gets propagated to others and the world continues to spiral into a broken dysfunctional pit that seems impossible to overcome. When we cannot love or are loved in an unhealthy way we in turn love others in ways that are broken. The cycle is difficult to break.

Taking things further, excessive abuse has been found to certainly have a negative impact on people raised in such a toxic environment. While certainly high levels of abuse create people who deal with physical injury and developmental issues, it also creates psychological damage. First, it can create an internal experience of self-hatred. Many people dealing with this self-hatred and abusive history consider suicide, become addicted to drugs, and deal with depression and anxiety. Post traumatic stress disorder and other trauma related mental health concerns are commonly found in children and later adults who experienced extreme abuse. However, even more disturbing, some research indicates excessive abuse of children during formative developmental ages causes the empathy pathways of the brain to be stunted and underdeveloped causing anti-social behaviors and at its worst, antisocial personality disorder. The most extreme lack or inability to love children being raised in our very homes creates people who’s neurological structures make it exceptionally difficult for them to empathize and love others.

Over the course of the next few posts I want to explore how we can change this trend and learn to love others and receive love in a healthy way. This innate characteristic of being human is essential for living life well and flourishing in the world. Imagine if we could transform the world to be a place where people can learn to love others and be loved in a healthy way. What might it be like if we could help people learn to mitigate against the broken and distorted love they received in order to break the cycle of distorted love? The world could at least be a little better because of the things I want to discuss. Augustine of Hippo, a Christian philosopher and minister in the 5th century often spoke of sin as nothing other than disordered love. Perhaps we need to reconsider that again in our day and age? How is our love disordered and how does it perpetuate a disordered world today? I look forward to sharing thoughts on this with you over the next few posts!

Why You Can’t Maintain Good Habits!

Dominick D. Hankle PhDLeave a comment
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In the last post, I indicated that we really need to take a hard look at ourselves in a holistic way and start setting goals that make us healthier. I proposed we set goals that help us take better care of our bodies, our minds, emotions, relationships, and spiritual lives. This is the best approach to healthy living because each of these five spheres of human life encompasses much of who we are and are completely integrated with each other. If you take care of your mind, your body becomes more healthy and if you take care of your emotions you can think more clearly, etc., you get the idea. That means you should set at least five goals, or at least be mindful of five important practices related to your physical health, your emotional life, your mental life, your relationships, and your spiritual life. That might mean you set the proverbial weight loss goal but you should also attempt to spend quality time with each of your family members throughout the week. Perhaps you can enjoy dinner out with your spouse, playing cards with your children, or taking time to call a friend you haven’t talked with for some time. When you focus on all five of these areas you’re looking at your life holistically and each goal and habit you start for each area will help you in the others.

One of the toughest things about setting goals and developing habits is we seldom follow through with them. We feel inspired to lose that 10 pounds but after about five days we start ignoring the diet, the exercise, and the new gym equipment we got for Christmas. Other goals and habits are just as easily ignored. I know a number of my friends who got tablets for Christmas because they were going to start reading more ebooks this year… Mostly they are binging Netflix shows on them and haven’t even purchased their first ebook. Why is it so hard to get started on building new healthy habits? Being healthy is important to me so why can’t I do it!

The main reason you can’t maintain (or start) good habits and complete your goals is that they have no connection to what you believe your meaning and purpose in life is. Even worse, you may not know what your purpose in life might be! You may be one of those kind souls drifting from one thing to another, functioning well enough, enjoying parts of your life, but not living life with purpose. When you either have no purpose or can’t connect your goals and habits to that purpose, you fail. What we do has to matter and I mean “really” matter. If it doesn’t connect to what you believe is your purpose, it just won’t matter. In fact, you may simply be adopting a goal or habit because it just seems like something people ought to do. Remember, something you ought to do is not something you will pursue with any real energy and is almost as bad as something you should do or need to do from a motivational perspective. You want your habits and goals to be something you do because it allows you to fulfill your life’s purpose. For example, I hate to eat right and I hate to exercise. I would love it if I could maintain a decent looking midsection while eating cake and reading my favorite book. Sugar and reading are two of my greatest addictions! The problem is when I do that I look fat and can’t keep up with my family who likes to travel, hike, and do so many physically exerting activities. Yet, even though I hate these things, I eat fairly well, limiting my sugar and I exercise at least three to five times a week. How is it I can consistently participate in something I hate? First, it’s important to me to be a father who can participate in all my family’s activities. I want to make memories with my family and to do that I have to be able to travel with them and participate in all the activities they enjoy. Secondly, I’m a college professor and speaker. I’m frequently in front of groups of people which means my physical appearance is part of my message. Nothing will distract more from my teaching than a physical appearance that doesn’t reflect healthy living and temperance that I speak about as an essential part of living well. I can’t let my addiction to sugar and sedentary activity keep me from fulfilling my purpose which is to help empower people to be the best they can be. Because of that, I exercise and watch my food intake so that I can fulfill my life purpose.

What I want all of you to do as you start thinking about your next set of goals and habits is to ask yourself, “Does this really help me accomplish my life mission? Will this help me fulfill my purpose?” If it doesn’t, don’t pretend you’re going to continue pursuing that activity, it will fall short. If you really think it’s important, you need to connect it to that life mission if it’s going to be something you do consistently. If you don’t know what your life mission or purpose is, stay tuned, next week we will look at how to develop that. See you then!

Starting A New Healthy Life – A Holistic Approach

Dominick D. Hankle PhD2 Comments
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We walk around life in a haze. We have ignored what matters most in life in order to walk around in our own world of illusions. We like to think we’re okay, but we’re not. We think we’re in good physical shape but most of us are overweight, taking more medication than we should, and eat like teenagers at a county fair. Our bodies are screaming for us to stop abusing them, but we just keep hurting ourselves and mask that abuse with medications, treatments, and a multitude of other distractions. Most of us are embracing death more than life by killing ourselves slowly through food and immobility. Sigmund Freud believed human beings have a “thanatos drive” which in layman’s terms is a type of death wish. There are many times I think he was on to something. It’s not just our bodies we’re killing, most of us have become lazy thinkers as well. We tell ourselves that we’re thoughtful and deep thinkers, but we can barely spend more than three minutes looking at a social media post. We like to think we spend time learning new and important things and we’re staying informed but most of our time is consumed with irrelevant junk food for the mind. If we’re honest with ourselves we might actually find we’re more likely succumbing to the psychological traps of group think, confirmation bias, and feeding our minds with news stories that support what we already believe. We’re comfortable with what we know and we seldom challenge our beliefs in order to grow.


So, we continue to fool ourselves by believing we’re physically okay and that we’re much more thoughtful than we really are. We’re lazy thinkers and afraid to challenge our opinions and knowledge by engaging different opinions and new ideas. It doesn’t stop there, however, because we’re also emotionally lazy. We choose to be emotionally numb instead of engage our emotions and the emotional lives of others. We’re afraid to let others see us cry, be saddened by the tragedies we see on television, and we keep ourselves from becoming angry at the daily injustice we see people experience. We aren’t comfortable feeling our emotions and we’re unable to talk about them with even the closest people in our lives. We ignore the emotions of other people we meet every day and avoid celebrating with them or being a comforting voice they need while they suffer. We have indeed become emotionally lazy and numb.


When we don’t take care of our emotional lives and ignore our physical well-being, we also negatively impact our relationships with other people. Too often we take our relationships for granted or only see them in utilitarian ways. We ask what the relationship does for us instead of how we can help and be of service to the people in our lives. We need to ask ourselves, “How can I love this person in the way they need me to love them instead of the way I want to love them?” We’re lazy with our relationships and when that happens, we isolate ourselves which isn’t good for our mental or physical well-being.


A final part of our lives we’ve grown lazy in is our spiritual life. We’re so caught up in the material aspects of life that we forget we’re a transcendent creature who is not merely a body or merely a spirit in a body, but a human being with a body and spirit meant to live within the physical world with a transcendent sense of reality. For most of us spirituality is that convenient experience we have when we want to pray to get something from the divine or to ease our anxiety about death, tragedy, and daily inconveniences. Your spiritual life must be bigger than that. It has to embrace a larger meaning and purpose that guides your everyday life.


If you have a better understanding of who you are, you can begin to see the many places where you’re functioning in a way that keeps you from living a fully human life. People ignore the different dimensions of human life, overemphasize some, or have a completely skewed understanding of how they interact with one another. They might be really into physical fitness but then find themselves completely ignoring their spiritual life. They may be hyper-spiritual people but end up ignoring their physical well-being. They may think that the things they believe have little to no impact on how they develop relationships with other people. I have encountered some people who see relationships in purely utilitarian terms and so they live for what others can do for them. The opposite is true as well, some people have no boundaries and expend themselves in service to others to the point of exhaustion. We must understand, to be truly healthy and live well is to live well holistically. We need to live with bodies in the best physical condition our situation allows, minds as sharp as we can make them, a level of emotional intelligence that allows us to know how we and others feel, in balanced relationships that have healthy boundaries, and with a spiritual sense that allows us to infuse life with meaning and purpose. It’s my hope I can help you achieve these results so please, check back with us and let me know your thoughts and how I can serve you.

Building Healthy Communities

Dominick D. Hankle PhD1 Comment

Sometimes, when the world looks like it’s falling apart, our first impulse is to pull away from it. We feel as if we’re exiles in a world filled with people from another planet. We see people rioting, ignoring basic common sense and forgetting how to interact with one another at a most basic courteous human level. We need to appeal to the “Better angels of our human nature” as Abraham Lincoln once stated when trying to find a way for a war-torn nation to reunite.

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Our experience of exile is not unique; it can also be found in the Jewish Babylonian exile experience in the Judeo-christian bible. God asked the Jews to respond in a particular way to their exile and it’s in this Jewish response we can learn how to respond to our own contemporary situation. Remember the Jews experienced a tremendous loss of everything after their defeat by the Babylonians. Their kingdom was destroyed, and they were carted off to live in a foreign land. I bet their first impulse was not very different from our own. They most likely just wanted to pull back, become disengaged, and protect themselves. God, speaking through the prophet Jeremiah, gives them a different mandate (Jeremiah 29:4-7):

“Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have set you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

This is a powerful lesson to consider when reflecting on how to build healthy communities regarless if you’re religious or not. The Jewish people saw themseves as living icons of the divine presence in a fallen world. God gave them a law they believed made them a holy people set apart for God’s purposes allowing him to dwell among them in a transformative way. Through the prophet Jeremiah God tells the exiles he wants them to be set apart but exist within a foreign city as leaven and light making it a better place for everyone. God tells them, “I want you to live there, flourish there, and prosper but not simply for your own benefit, for the benefit of the city as well. By being active agents of prosperity and goodness, you too will flourish.” Basically, God is saying by being the presence of the living God these exiles will cause this foreign city to be a special place. When the city flourishes, they will be blessed, and everyone will know the God of the Jews is a powerful God. This self understanding of the ancient Jews drove them to be something transformative in the communities they ocupied. It’s this vision of being a positive force in your community that I want you to think about.

Over the next few posts I want to help you develop into a powerful icon of what is good and beneficial for your community. There is an interesting paradox surrounding the focus on service to others and volunteering in a community setting. The more we focus on service to others the less we focus on our own fears and problems. We find meaning and purpose in our service to others and this meaning and purpose gives us a huge psychological boost. Serving our community is the best thing we can do for ourselves.

So how can we become an icon of what is good and beneficial for our community? In this series of articles, I will explore the following topics: 1) Becoming other focused through gratitude 2) Maximizing relationships in your community 3) Why compromise isn’t a bad word, and 4) How we forgive one another and restore our relationships.

I look forward to engaging you in this journey. Remember, if the communities we live in don’t flourish, we can’t either. However, to fix what’s wrong in our communities really starts with one or two people willingly engaging one another and envisioning a better future. Let me help equip you to do that very thing.

(This series was originally posted on the website A Race to Healing)