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Posts Tagged ‘Psychotherapy’

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…

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Why Silence in Therapy is Good

If you were to meet me at a party, you might describe me as rambunctious, animated and a little irreverent. I like my coffee black and I like my humor crass. So, it may surprise you to know that once I don my therapist scarf (or fingerless gloves, as may be the case), I tend…

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How to Get Someone to Go to Therapy

I love it when people tell me they don’t think they need therapy, because often it’s the telltale sign that they do. You might have someone in your life that you KNOW needs therapy. They might insist, after their millionth angry outburst, or perhaps coolly rationally while you are confused and crazy, that they’re fine…

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How Long Will Therapy Take?

It’s not infrequent that when I talk with people new to therapy they ask “How long will therapy take?”  Not an unreasonable question, but almost always an unanswerable one.   Pete Pearson of the Couples Institute gets credit for one of the best analogies I’ve heard, which is that the question “How long will therapy…

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Psychotherapy and the Fundamentals of Life

As a young person, I hated math. By the time I made it into 1st grade, I began to sense a connection between those drills, 100 problems in 90 seconds, and my own flimsy mortality. I decided early on that numbers were created for no other purpose than to torture the pure of heart and, thus,…

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Understanding Depression: Void vs. Emptiness

Depression is a pretty odd thing, different from other “illnesses,” in that it ranges between very grungy and visceral experiences like fatigue, through problems with sleep and eating, and then into the lofty realms of the meaning of life.  Well, I suppose to its credit, at least it’s not boring. Understanding depression calls us to…

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Life Transitions, a.k.a., Life

The other day I was killing some time at a trendy coffee shop, enjoying my once-a-day caffeine romance, and I found myself inadvertently eavesdropping on two college freshmen bonding over the unexpected difficulties they were encountering in their new phase of life. Navigating a vast pool of possible topics, one of the women ever so…

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Small changes are big changes

One November morning, when I was early in my graduate training to become a therapist, one of my professors stood at the front of the classroom, with his wild hair and even wilder eyes, and said slowly: “I want to talk to you all about something important.” The room fell silent. This man was known…

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A Message to the Last Single Lady in San Francisco

Many of us have been witness to the confusing phenomenon, which I will call the Accidental-Man-of-My-Dreams Syndrome, or AMMDS for short. It goes like this: Your best friend (or colleague or younger sister, or other single lady), declares she isn’t all that interested in settling down. She is happy focusing on the job that she…

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How to find answers in your feelings

As a therapist, I will tell you a big secret – the most important question I ask is “How did that make you feel?” Yeah—a running joke for we’ve all heard—all you have to do is say that phrase on repeat to be a therapist. But in practice it is the hardest question for most…

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