Blog
What Eleanor Longden's TED Talk Reveals About Living With Voices
In 2013, a young woman named Eleanor Longden stood on the TED stage and told a room full of strangers about the years she spent hearing voices no one else could hear. She had once been an ordinary college student.
What the Rat Park Experiment Teaches Us About Addiction
In the late 1970s, Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about the addiction research of his time. What happens next has shaped decades of thinking about addiction -- and it might change how you think about your own struggle, or a loved one's.
The Caterpillar Doesn't Know It's Becoming a Butterfly
Before a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it doesn't sprout wings and carry on. It dissolves. Inside the chrysalis, most of its body breaks down into something closer to liquid before slowly reorganizing into a wholly different creature.
What a Cut Teaches Us About the Body's Inner Healing Intelligence
Cut your finger and you don't have to do anything for the healing to begin. That quiet, automatic process is a small, visible example of something much larger: an intelligence in us that is always oriented toward wholeness, and that doesn't live only in skin and blood.
What Francis Weller's Five Gates of Grief Teach Us About Mourning
When most of us picture grief, we picture a funeral: a casket, a specific date on which someone we loved died. The psychotherapist and grief worker Francis Weller argues, in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, that this narrow picture leaves out most of the grief we're actually carrying.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
We tend to imagine childhood as something that lays down a road -- brick by brick, in order, leading somewhere we can trace backward if we ever need to understand how we got here. In practice, it rarely works that way.
The Anxious-Avoidant Cycle: Why Pursuit and Withdrawal Feed Each Other
Almost every long-term couple I work with recognizes some version of this pattern, even if they've never had language for it: one partner moves toward engagement, wanting to talk it through right now, while the other partner moves away, needing space before anything else.
Anxiety Starts in the Body, Not the Story
By the time anxiety has a name -- a specific worry about a deadline, a relationship, a health scare -- it has usually already been happening for a few seconds without one. The racing heart, the tight chest, the sudden alertness came first. The story about why came after.
What Is High-Functioning Depression?
From the outside, someone with high-functioning depression might look like they have it all together. They consistently show up to work. They’re meeting their deadlines. They make it to social events. And they even manage to smile at the right moments.
Intimate Standoffs
Are we trying to change the right things in our relationships? Couples therapy can help you understand why you and your partner can’t break your conflict patterns.
You are more beautiful for having been broken.
Healing is not the pursuit of perfection. Wholeness of our being does not mean the erasure of our scars. Our uniqueness, our authentic self, is revealed by the cicatrices collected on our journey through life. The wounds we suffer and heal speak to our strength. You are one-of-a-kind, trying to be anything else is torment.
The Truth About Passive Aggression
Feigning indifference is one of the tools in the passive aggressor’s toolkit. It's a way of showing disrespect with the intent of making the other person feel unimportant. This is so common in adult relationships that is has become normalized.
Wrongful Convictions: Letting Go of Negative Self-Beliefs
Why is it so hard for us to let go of the negative beliefs we hold about ourselves? Why, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, do we cling to convictions that we are bad, weak, flawed, unlovable, worthless, or not good enough?
Thoughts on Diagnoses
While a diagnosis is a cluster of symptoms that cause someone distress, it rarely gets at the underlying issues creating and maintaining the distress. My work, as I see it, is about identifying and alleviating the root causes of distress.