My Blogs

After perhaps thinking about it for some time, why do people begin therapy? Someone may have given them the name of a therapist they know and trust, but what motivates them to make the call, send the email, and/or make the first appointment? Here are 7 reasons why people make the decision to begin therapy. … Read more

One of the first questions I ask new clients is, “What prompted you to begin the process of therapy now?”  Here are some common reasons why you may feel motivated to begin the process of therapy: Why therapy now?  Perhaps you can identify with one or more of these reasons that motivate people to enter the … Read more

The French writer Jean Giono published a short story in 1953, The Man Who Planted Trees. The story begins in France in 1913. The narrator embarks on a walking tour of Provence, passes through a desolate area, sparsely populated by enclaves of desperate people, and encounters the title character, Elzéard Bouffier, a man in his mid-fifties … Read more

You are thinking about entering therapy and you think that now is the right time to begin, but you may not be sure what to expect.  Here are 7 things you can expect in therapy: 1. Safety You don’t go into therapy to be frightened or to be judged, but to heal, and healing requires … Read more

Recently a client came into my office and announced, “I have five things I want to talk about!” He knew just what he wanted to talk about. Other clients know they want to be in therapy and that now’s the time, but they’re not exactly sure what to talk about. What issues do people usually … Read more

When you begin a course of therapy you bring your whole internal self – mind, will and emotions. Since focusing on emotions plays such a big part in the process of therapy, let’s spend a few moments thinking about what emotions are. Emotions are messages from our self to our self, in response to internal or external stimuli, that … Read more

Have you ever watched a gymnast perform her balance beam routine, or a tightrope walker with his long balancing pole? They practice diligently so that they can perform breath-taking feats of balance. Relationships are like that too, a delicate balance of connectedness and separateness. The technical word for this is differentiation, the practice of maintaining a “solid … Read more

Good emotional and relational health requires a balance of healthy connectedness and healthy separateness. Central to healthy separateness is our ability to cultivate a “solid sense of self.” Since we will ever be works-in-progress, how can we work on building a healthy sense of self? One of the most important concepts in therapy is today, you … Read more

Cultivating a solid sense of self involves knowing what to say “yes” to, and what to say “no” to. Some opportunities are right and ripe for us to embrace, and others are not. We want to embrace life, say “yes” to life, but we must first take an inventory of what truly brings us life … Read more

“safe haven, secure base” American psychologist Harry Harlow revolutionized the way we think about emotional attachments, and he did it with artificial monkeys. In a series of experiments during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harlow observed that baby rhesus monkeys, deprived of their mothers, preferred and clung to soft terry cloth surrogate “mothers” rather … Read more