The Feeling of Being

The Feeling of Being

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...
Cats, Catastrophe, and Catharsis

Cats, Catastrophe, and Catharsis

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....
Great Games for Grownups, No Computer Needed

Great Games for Grownups, No Computer Needed

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....
Turning Therapy Inside Out

Turning Therapy Inside Out

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...
How to Make Music Like Yo-Yo Ma

How to Make Music Like Yo-Yo Ma

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...
Do You Belong Here?

Do You Belong Here?

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...
Payback?

Payback?

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...
Psychotherapy, Coaching, and Skateboards

Psychotherapy, Coaching, and Skateboards

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...
Priceless Games

Priceless Games

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...
What You Really Must Know

What You Really Must Know

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...
Mapping the Known World

Mapping the Known World

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...
Doctors and Discomfort

Doctors and Discomfort

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...
Hope and Memory

Hope and Memory

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...
The Secret Remedy for Chaos and Confusion

The Secret Remedy for Chaos and Confusion

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...
How to Beat the Fear of Success

How to Beat the Fear of Success

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...
How to Beat the Fear of Failure

How to Beat the Fear of Failure

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...
Ten Ways to Make Good Things Happen

Ten Ways to Make Good Things Happen

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...
Is This Money Problem Yours?

Is This Money Problem Yours?

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...
The Upside of Anxiety

The Upside of Anxiety

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...
On Becoming a Psychotherapist

On Becoming a Psychotherapist

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...
Learning How to Say Goodbye

Learning How to Say Goodbye

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...
Anxiety, Control, and Taking Charge

Anxiety, Control, and Taking Charge

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...
Talk Therapy: Who’s on First?

Talk Therapy: Who’s on First?

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...
I Can’t Help It

I Can’t Help It

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...
What My Clients Have Taught Me

What My Clients Have Taught Me

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...
When Do Habits Become Bad?

When Do Habits Become Bad?

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...
Psychotherapy as Education

Psychotherapy as Education

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? ...
A Psychotherapist, a Psychiatrist, or Both?

A Psychotherapist, a Psychiatrist, or Both?

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,...
How to Bring Out Your Inner Leonardo

How to Bring Out Your Inner Leonardo

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...
How to Make or Break a Habit

How to Make or Break a Habit

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...
Why Good Thinking Is Not Enough

Why Good Thinking Is Not Enough

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...
Behave Yourself Naturally

Behave Yourself Naturally

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...
How to Make a Decision

How to Make a Decision

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...
How I Do Therapy with Children

How I Do Therapy with Children

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...
Ten Reasons to Fire Your Therapist

Ten Reasons to Fire Your Therapist

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...
Little Ways to Make Yourself Feel Better

Little Ways to Make Yourself Feel Better

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...
How Healthy Are You?  Take This Quiz to Find Out

How Healthy Are You? Take This Quiz to Find Out

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...