RELATING
Stop Explaining Yourself
When I first started going to therapy, in one session I was wrestling with my guilt over not wanting to pick up a friend from the airport the following Sunday. I hated airport runs, especially in Seattle where the airport is a bajillion trafficky miles away from the city. I told my therapist, “I’m going…
The Things We Cannot Change
Sonya is saying that there is more to process. She and her partner are here for couple’s therapy, after a fight that has left them both tense and guarded for days now. We are attentive, her partner and I, both listening, but I sense we each have some confusion now. Sonya is tearful, forehead tight,…
Rupture and Repair in the Therapeutic Relationship
I’ve said it before: human relationships are messy. Why would your relationship with your therapist be any different? I had just begun my postdoctoral fellowship at a forensic agency, working with individuals mandated to treatment as a requirement of their parole or probation. Many of these individuals had been involved with the justice system since…
Growing Up (Together)’s a Bitch
A couple sat in my office recently, struggling with an issue that was beginning to feel familiar. They were both missing the olden days where they felt more in love and excited about each other, before kids came along and changed everything. Having to learn how to relate to each other anew had been driving…
A Sex Therapist Talks to Baby Boomers about Sex
When I was a teenager (not exactly the good old days) I had disdain for most popular culture of the 80s and instead I longed for the mythical 60s, a time when baby boomers were free and liberal and apparently dancing naked in the mud. This was in contrast to my young adult events, such…
The Impact of Growing up with a Narcissistic or Borderline Parent
People come to therapy for varied reasons that almost always have their roots in patterns of relating that they learned at a very young age. I’ve found that a huge proportion of therapy clients grew up with a parent who had traits of either Narcissism or Borderline Personality disorder. This is not usually something people…
You Don’t Have To Be Your Crazy Family’s Packmule (or anyone else’s)
Family dynamics can be rough and even rougher on into adulthood. If your family is governed by judgement, blame or scapegoating it begs the question “Do I simply embrace and accept this because this is flesh and blood?” or “Do I walk from this because it doesn’t serve them or me?” No family is perfect. You know that. A…
Multitudes: Dissociation and our Multiple Selves.
In everyday conversation we have come to use the word “ambivalence” to mean “indifference”: “Where do you want to go to dinner tonight?” “I dunno. I’m ambivalent, you decide.” But when psychotherapists use that word that isn’t what they are suggesting at all. They mean they suspect or sense that you are chock full of…
The Importance of Rupture and Repair
Human relationships are messy. We all enter into our relationships with internal working models of others, histories of relationships, a particular worldview and cultural expectations, and intrapsychic needs. Relationships involve a complex, overdetermined mélange of forces which interact in both powerful and subtle ways. It is inevitable that things would get messy, at least from…
The Importance of Choosing the Right Therapist
If you mention the forefather of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, many people think about psychoanalysis. They might envision a patient lying on a dingy couch, staring at the ceiling as Freud sits in his old leather rocker and analyzes the patient’s id, ego and superego. “I don’t want to revert to my childhood,” many people…
Just as You are: Acceptance as the First Step Towards Change.
“How do we end suffering? By accepting everything, exactly as it is. Hearing that is like a knife in the heart. Inside we shriek, no! … In fact, there is no choice other than accepting everything exactly as it is, because everything is exactly as it is. It is as simple as that. There is…
In Praise of Long Distance Relationships
Co-authored by Rajani Venkatraman Levis & Sarah Dardick Let’s face it – living together has long held an elevated status in the relationship hierarchy while long distance relationships (LDRs) have a serious reputation problem. The conventional wisdom about long-distance relationships (LDR’s) usually goes: Distance sucks, not enough sex, people cheat, not enough sex, too many…