You know when to change the oil in your car, because the windshield sticker tells you after a few months of driving or a certain number of miles. You know when it’s time to change a baby’s diaper because—well—you just know! But how do you know when it’s time to make an important first step ... Read more

The greeting “Happy Holidays!” often suggests joy, celebration, and happy moments. Yet for most people, the reality of the holiday season can feel very different. Instead of joy, many experience holiday stress, rising stress levels, anxiety, depression, and pressure from family members, loved ones, and expectations that feel impossible to meet. The joyful experience this ... Read more

Every year, as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, we have an opportunity to review our lives, our relationships, and the moments that bring us meaning. But Thanksgiving also marks the beginning of the party- and shopping-sprint that ends with Christmas, and it’s easy to rush past the deeper sense of gratitude to which Thanksgiving invites us. ... Read more

Imagine walking out of your apartment in New York tomorrow morning and seeing your innermost thoughts written in bright lights above your head. Would you feel exposed? Embarrassed? Relieved that other community members could finally understand you? The truth is, many of our private fears and emotions are more alike than we realize. As the ... Read more

Introduction: The Gift of Love and Healing “One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all.” With this famous opening line, O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi reminds us that love often requires sacrifice, vulnerability, and growth. In the story, a young couple gives up their most treasured possessions to bring joy to one another ... Read more

“Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love.”– Reinhold Niebuhr In October 2012, New York City endured the powerful force of Hurricane Sandy, which brought not only damage to physical infrastructure but also deep emotional strain. In the storm’s aftermath, entire neighborhoods had to rebuild—not just homes, ... Read more

Find Compassionate Therapy for Addiction and Co-Dependency in Queens, Long Island, and New York City Introduction: Is Addiction Affecting Your Life or the Life of Someone You Love? Addiction doesn’t always look like what we expect. For some, it’s a quiet, persistent dependence on substances, relationships, or behaviors. For others, it slowly becomes evident through ... Read more

What Is Grieving? Grieving is a master concept that helps explain many of the issues that clients bring into therapy. Learning the practice of “good grieving” helps bring healing within and between people. “Good grieving” is the process of responding and adjusting to change and loss while learning how to keep your heart open to ... Read more

The goal of couple counseling is to help couples create a safe place and a relationship that is “big enough” for both partners–big enough to include the wishes, hopes, dreams, and longings of each partner.   What is Professional Couples Counseling?  Couple counseling includes dealing with typical day-to-day issues in their life together, as well as ... Read more

Is your relationship feeling strained, uncertain, or simply stuck? Couples therapy can offer a way forward: not just to fix what’s broken, but to rediscover the deep emotional connection you both long for and the relationship satisfaction you desire. To illustrate the healing journey couples take in therapy, let me offer three metaphors I’ve used ... 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

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

“attuned and responsive” James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi blockbuster movie, Avatar, features human-like, cat-like creatures called Na’vi. When these blue, 10-foot tall creatures connect with each other in an emotionally intimate way, they announce to each other, “I see you!” The fundamental need of everyone, from cradle to grave, is to be seen, to be acknowledged and responded ... Read more

It is written in the Talmud (the most important text in traditional Judaism), “Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it, whispering, ‘Grow, grow!’” It is the destiny of every little blade of grass to become all it can possibly be. And it is the responsibility of each blade’s guardian angel to ... Read more

For people of all ages, there’s something about September. Even for those of us who have been working throughout the summer, there’s a wistful sense that the “real year” is about to begin. The summer days dwindle down to a precious few, each day gets just a little bit shorter, the cicadas emerge and sing ... Read more

Starting at the age of 9 or 10, children begin wanting to be grown-ups. They want to experience grown-up perks and prerogatives such as: To a child, being a grown-up means you have arrived. Hidden from them, of course, is the dark underbelly of adulthood – needing to stay up late to accomplish 30 hours’ ... Read more

One of the scariest movies ever isn’t about vampires or chain saws. It’s the 1951 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The scariest part is not the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, but the warning they bring to Ebenezer Scrooge: What if you spend your whole life climbing the ladder of success, only ... Read more

Thanks to the hopeful (or cynical) genius who invented the concept of New Year’s resolutions, the average gym derives the majority of its revenue from new memberships purchased in January. A January 2013 article in Forbes magazine suggested that, although more than one-third of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, “just 8% of people achieve their New Year’s ... Read more

Just like compound interest for our mind and heart, the lessons we learn early in the new year will keep producing dividends month after month. Let’s look right now at 3 lessons that, if learned early in 2015, will spare you a lot of frustration this year. In 2015, you will experience some necessary, legitimate ... Read more

Once upon a time, getting married was easy. Your parents chose your mate for you, you had little or no say in the matter, and you got what you got. If you were lucky or blessed, it was a good match; if not, you endured, and the whole thing was over in a few decades, ... Read more

For most of history, your pool of potential marriage partners was limited to the people who lived in your village. You knew just about everything there was to know about each of them. Today it’s often the case that the only thing you know about someone is what they choose to tell you in their ... Read more

Nothing helps clarify your values like being in an intimate, committed relationship. We are often unaware of our deeply held values and goals. But when your partner-to-be says or does something that runs afoul of one of them, you might hear yourself saying, “You believe what?!” The similarity between your values and goals and those of ... Read more

Imagine an emergency room doctor trying to remove a small splinter from her patient’s eye. Now imagine that the doctor has a telephone pole protruding from her own eye! How can the doctor see clearly enough to help her patient, with a big log stuck in her own eye? But, of course, this is something all ... Read more

The question, “Isn’t it selfish of me to practice self-care?,” comes up sometimes in my counseling practice, and I answer it in 4 ways: “What’s the alternative?” If we don’t take full responsibility for caring for our adult selves, who will? In the beginning, our parents and other caretakers did the best they knew how to ... Read more