by Marcia | Dec 24, 2015 | Healthy Aging, Living Well
Maybe it’s just because I take extra time off for the Christmas holidays. Or maybe it’s a sign of advancing age. Whatever the reason, I find myself increasingly savoring small things. These days I notice my senses more and the news they bring me. I relish the thrust...
by Marcia | Sep 15, 2015 | Medical Care, Mental Health
You may have noticed in recent years that more and more doctors are hanging out new shingles. The sign that used to read “Roger Kurall, MD,” now says something like “Cheatham Hospital Medical Group.” The same change is in the works for...
by Marcia | Sep 4, 2015 | Living Well
A few weeks ago, after my dear old cat died, I looked for a new one. Enter BosBos (pronounced BoesBoes), almost two years old. Half Egyptian Mau and half Arabian Mau, he suffered abuse in the streets of Egypt before being flown to an Egyptian cat rescue last year....
by Marcia | Aug 25, 2015 | Living Well
Throughout history, games have offered people relief from the stresses of the everyday world. Play lets you fool around and have fun in a make-believe universe where risks and consequences aren’t a problem. Good games also have some not-so-obvious benefits....
by Marcia | Aug 18, 2015 | Living Well, Mental Health
What is therapy anyhow? When I put this question to clients, they usually mention talking, personal problems, and solutions, which everyone seems to assume lie within you. The insurance companies that pay me would ratchet up the definition to specify medical problems...
by Marcia | Aug 4, 2015 | Living Well
When I was about ten years old, my mother bought me piano lessons. It was the mid-1950s, and we were living in Washington, D.C., in those days still a sleepy town. My mother would drop me off at the teacher’s ranch house in Chevy Chase. Helen Jenks was a lonely...
by Marcia | Jul 31, 2015 | Living Well, Workplace and Career
Life is unpredictably challenging. Relationships are a rollercoaster. Work can be endlessly frustrating. Stress is exhausting. How many tools do you have in your kit to help you cope? Try these. 1. Are you in a dreadful situation with no way to escape? While you go...
by Marcia | Jul 7, 2015 | Living Well, Relationship Skills
Friends may be the family we choose, but they can unfriend us and not just on Facebook. Once they do, we feel excluded, rejected. Family, on the other hand, stays the same no matter what even if some relatives aren’t on speaking terms. The mere fact of blood ties is...
by Marcia | Jun 30, 2015 | Anger Management, Relationship Skills
It is tempting to go for payback when someone disses you. If you cut me dead on the street last week, or failed to respond when I as a neighbor asked for your help, the angry part of me might have wanted to hurt you. How could you do this to me? I probably wondered. A...
by Marcia | Jun 26, 2015 | Mental Health
Recently an alternative healer suggested that further training as a personal development coach could make me a far more effective therapist. This well-intentioned advice puzzled me, especially since the healer did not know my work. How does what I do differ from...
by Marcia | Jun 23, 2015 | Anger Management, Relationship Skills
In the wake of the June 17 shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the nation’s journalists have expressed outrage, horror, and grief in words familiar from responses to past atrocities. Dylann Storm Roof, denounced as a terrorist and a racist madman, may be...
by Marcia | Jun 5, 2015 | Learning, Living Well
Back in the days when fathers burned autumn leaves after raking them, when schools and churches kept their doors unlocked, and when term papers were produced on typewriters, not all games were packed in plastic and sold in stores. Sure, you could buy games. But back...
by Marcia | Jun 2, 2015 | Learning, Living Well
As the end of the school year approaches, American kids are groaning about tests and exams. Parents worry. Will Sally flunk history? Will Jason scrape by in biology? What about their grade point averages and college applications? I remember it well. In high school...
by Marcia | May 29, 2015 | Learning, Living Well
Daniel Boorstin, the eminent American historian and Librarian of Congress, collected old maps. One wall of his home in suburban Maryland held a replica of a colored map of Africa drawn in perhaps the thirteenth century. In addition to some predictable geographical...
by Marcia | May 26, 2015 | Living Well, Medical Care
The professional hierarchy, at least in America, places physicians at the top and lawyers in the middle while everyone else jockeys for position somewhere below. You might dispute your lawyer’s advice, but if you lived during the last two centuries, you probably...
by Marcia | May 22, 2015 | Healthy Aging, Living Well
In my daily work as a psychotherapist I see that hopelessness and stress often produce despair. I wonder whether we can conquer these problems at least some of the time by viewing them from a different vantage point. Can we beat the stress by retelling our stories so...
by Marcia | May 19, 2015 | Living Well
If you’d like your days to exhibit a little more order and stability, stop to take stock of the seasonal events that help you orient yourself. What is your favorite time of year? What do you like about it? What rituals do you look forward to? Holidays and seasonal...
by Marcia | May 15, 2015 | Learning, Living Well
We all want to succeed, right? Sure! At least theoretically. But have you ever had the experience of hoping for something good and big, having it suddenly handed to you, and then finding yourself freaking out, overwhelmed? Therapists often say that there’s positive...
by Marcia | May 12, 2015 | Healthy Living, Learning
Losses accumulate over a lifetime. It is said that people worry about finances and finding the right relationship more than anything else. This article presupposes that you have a goal, a plan, and steps to reach it, but you shy away from the work to be done like a...
by Marcia | Apr 28, 2015 | Living Well
Some people argue that you shape your own reality, that your mind determines what you get in life. Evidence for this proposition has been put forth by various writers approaching the question from differing perspectives. Pam Grout writes experiments that let you prove...
by Marcia | Apr 17, 2015 | Living Well, Setting and Achieving Goals
Too often as we pursue our daily lives we have no sense of overarching purpose. We assume that what we want will somehow magically come if we keep putting one foot in front of the other. We will recognize the mysterious thing we desire when we see it. Not only is...
by Marcia | Apr 7, 2015 | Living Well
Money means different things to different people. It may be a scarce commodity, pursued like a sort of Holy Grail, or it may be the reliable source of treats—a fancy cell phone, prestige wheels, or a glamorous vacation. Money may be gratifying in the present but...
by Marcia | Mar 31, 2015 | Anxiety, Mental Health
The passage from winter into spring can be a tough time: problems at work, family with cabin fever, hostile winter weather clasping the earth in a viselike grip, and the approach of April 15, the dreaded deadline for Americans’ filing of income taxes—all hard, bad...
by Marcia | Mar 27, 2015 | Mental Health
As a psychotherapist in solo private practice, I don’t see too many people outside of work. It’s not that I’m socially phobic or antisocial—I’d be in the wrong profession if I were—but that I work at times when other people play. When evenings and Saturdays roll...
by Marcia | Mar 24, 2015 | Healthy Aging, Living Well
As we move from ice and snow into the blooming time here in the Northeast, it’s easy to say goodbye to winter. We can hardly wait for the gentle breezes, the bird songs, and the feel of soft cotton against our skin. Other goodbyes are harder. We have trouble with them...
by Marcia | Feb 27, 2015 | Anxiety, Mental Health
Many people come to see me in hopes that I can help them get rid of their anxiety. But as Irvin Yalom wrote in his wonderful book Existential Psychotherapy, anxiety comes with being human. You can’t erase it. You can manage it. In fact we all do so—by finding ways to...
by Marcia | Feb 24, 2015 | Healthy Aging
Let’s say you’re in your forties, fifties, or sixties. Your parents, still alive and in their seventies or older, are ailing, either one or both, and you’re responsible for their care. What can you do when their safety is at stake and they refuse to follow your...
by Marcia | Feb 20, 2015 | Living Well, Setting and Achieving Goals
Some years ago I heard about a home for abused women that taught them various skills to help them find jobs. The article quoted Andrea, who had become a Spanish-English interpreter in the courts for women who had suffered domestic violence. Andrea was passionate about...
by Marcia | Feb 17, 2015 | Mental Health
What do people want from therapy? Any solution depends on how the problem is defined, of course. The question you ask determines the answer you get. We therapists must all assess before we treat. When they take a history, social workers factor in each person’s life...
by Marcia | Feb 10, 2015 | Mental Health, Relationship Skills
As a psychotherapist, I work in a “helping profession.” It’s a label that many people swallow whole, without chewing. But what does it even mean? Most people think professional caregivers focus not on making money but on serving others. Still, help is in the eye of...
by Marcia | Jan 30, 2015 | Healthy Aging, Mental Health
I chose psychotherapy as my work in the world because it lets me imagine how it might have felt to be born as someone else. I feel privileged to hear other people talk about their lives. My hours of listening have taught me many things. Most of us licensed therapists...
by Marcia | Jan 27, 2015 | Living Well, Mental Health
No matter how you think or feel, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual seems ready to produce evidence that something is wrong with you. Obsessions and compulsions are a case in point. Ever find yourself plagued with a thought or a worry? It’s as if a bar of music had...
by Marcia | Jan 23, 2015 | Living Well
Traditional educational goals have never been under fire more than they are now in the age of the Internet. Cogent arguments have been made that rote learning is pointless. We need only to know where to find information. If so, what exactly should schools be doing? ...
by Marcia | Jan 16, 2015 | Mental Health
Most people come to see me for help not with serious mental illness but with problems dished out by the school of hard knocks. On a first visit we scope the territory, I set up a mental database, and we set goals for our work together. No matter what the issues are,...
by Marcia | Jan 2, 2015 | Living Well, Setting and Achieving Goals
New Year’s resolutions? Ugh. We’ve all been there, done that. It can be fun to read them years after the fact—all the good intentions most of which never got off the drawing board. To make changes that stick, of course, you need to do more than make a list in...
by Marcia | Dec 23, 2014 | Healthy Aging, Living Well
Unlike an autobiography, which simply tells a life story, a memoir taps into universal truths and lets us find echoes of them in our own lives. In the movie Shadowlands, a university student remembers his father’s saying, “We read to know that we are not alone.”...
by Marcia | Dec 16, 2014 | Learning, Living Well
Creativity is a fundamental part of human nature, something to which all of us can lay claim. Okay, you did not ghost write War and Peace, create the first flying machine, or paint Guernica. But everyone experiences wonderful imaginative leaps in daily life at least...
by Marcia | Dec 12, 2014 | Living Well, Setting and Achieving Goals
Habits have lots of virtues. They add comforting structure to our lives and help us counteract chaos. They give us a safety net by letting us go on automatic pilot in times of crisis. In novel situations we rely on habits just because we gravitate wherever possible...
by Marcia | Dec 5, 2014 | Living Well, Setting and Achieving Goals
During the recent Thanksgiving holiday, I took ten days off. For a full week and a half I would leave my daily responsibilities behind, I thought. I was going to rejoice, kick up my heels, and indulge in carefree play! As my holiday started, though, I found myself...
by Marcia | Nov 11, 2014 | Healthy Aging, Living Well
When we think about being healthy, mentally and otherwise, we usually think in terms of food, sleep, and exercise. But there are many other components to good health, and one of them is opportunities to socialize. It’s not healthy to be lonely. The need for...
by Marcia | Nov 7, 2014 | Living Well, Relationship Skills
Therapists like to tell people to talk about their feelings. But why? And if it’s important to do this, why do a lot of people avoid it? One father earnestly told his child, “Nobody wants to know how you feel. They just want to know that you will act rationally.” If...
by Marcia | Oct 28, 2014 | Living Well
Did you know that exposure to the natural world is good for you? I bet you did even if you never thought about it until now. You don’t need a classroom to teach you this. As you move through each day, try asking yourself this question: how does nature inform your...
by Marcia | Oct 17, 2014 | Living Well
It can feel hard or easy to make a decision. Deciding that you want swordfish for dinner may be easy. Deciding whether to buy a new car or a used one may seem harder. It may be harder still to choose between going back to school and finding a full-time job. Whatever...
by Marcia | Oct 14, 2014 | Childrearing, Mental Health
You are worried that something is wrong with your child. Perhaps worse, you doubt your own ability to fix it, and so you are bringing your child to see me, a therapist. It seems only fair, under the circumstances, that I should tell you up front what I can do for you...
by Marcia | Oct 3, 2014 | Living Well
These days more people have less and less money to spend. Living well doesn’t necessarily mean tolerating hardship. If you are creative, you can continue to enjoy your perks while knowing exactly where your pennies go. These tips will help you spend your money wisely....
by Marcia | Sep 26, 2014 | Mental Health
Back in the days before I became a therapist, I went to see therapists. Lots of them. Over a period of decades. Most of them have all but vanished from memory. I got nothing out of most of the sessions. So why did I keep on going? My mother died when I was twelve. I...
by Marcia | Sep 9, 2014 | Living Well
Feeling tired, stressed, irritable, or anxious? Modern life gives adults a tough row to hoe, particularly when the weather and world events look grim. If the daily grind seems out of control and almost more than you can bear, you might want to stop and take stock of...
by Marcia | Sep 2, 2014 | Living Well
You and I know that we live in a high-tech world. We cope with problems, stress, and uncertainty on a daily basis. Even if your workplace, your home, and your neighborhood seem pretty safe and secure, just look at the plight of the wider world around us! To cope with...
by Marcia | Apr 29, 2012 | Anxiety, Living Well
These days it seems as if everyone is worried about money and paying the bills. Nothing tops financial stress when it comes to making people feel anxious, powerless, and stuck. If money problems plague you, here’s help. You can get a head start on stress and...
