Path of the Snake

/
Path of the Snake

I have a friend who recently dropped out of a grad school he had been wanting to attend for years, and which I thought he was a perfect match for.  It was a program in somatic therapy, and he is a person who is naturally in tune with himself and always expressing himself through movement and dance.  When he told me he was dropping out, I couldn’t believe it - it was like The Flash quitting the track team.  We got to talking, and he told me the reason he was leaving the program was that it was too hard.  He said he loved the focus on dance and movement therapy, but that the pressure to turn inwritten papers every couple weeks was just too much.  He wondered what was even the point of all this writing when the focus should have been on somatic awareness, and he left...

Read More

Questions of Medication

/
Questions of Medication

As a non-prescribing therapist, I find myself being asked to counsel people on using medication to effect their mood very, very often.  People want to know if I think medication might help them, if it might harm them, what kind of medication might be useful, as well as how much.  The most frequent question I get from clients and others, though, is simply about whether or not I agree with the idea of medicating a person’s mood.  Make no mistake, this is a very popular topic in the therapeutic community.  And while I think the answer is simple, I don’t think it’s obvious...

Read More

Quality Control

/
Quality Control

Mindfulness seems to be the hottest topic in psychotherapy these days, with near-daily articles about its effectiveness in national papers, and with just as many studies published alongside trying to debunk its claimed effectiveness.  Some folks say mindfulness is a miracle cure for everything from stress to autoimmune disorders, others say it’s little more than a hoax.  Regardless of your stance on mindfulness, you have to acknowledge it’s a conversation going on with enough frequency that it affects you whether you like it or not.  From presidential recognition of its health benefits to corporate coaching to a yoga room at your local airport, mindfulness is coming down the pipe, so it’ll probably pay to have a better understanding of what it is...

Read More

To Be Righteous and Selfish

/
To Be Righteous and Selfish

Earlier today I was talking to my roommate, and he seemed like he was in a rough spot.  His cat was missing, his job was up in the air, and, most present, he was desperate for sleep.  I told him to get some rest, take care of himself; we’d talk later.  It was a funny sort of thing to say, considering the morning I’d had.  I was just coming home from seeing my own therapist, to whom I’d whined gloriously and had my expectations for what reality owed me properly reset.  My advice to my roommate, as is so often the case with advice, was the sort of thing that I needed to say to myself instead.  But it begs the question: how does a person take care of themself?

Read More

How To Break Out of Jail

/
How To Break Out of Jail

As I sit here on president’s day, wondering what to do with myself now that my routine has been all disrupted, I can’t help but think of a previous client of mine.  This was when I was working with inmates, and this client, we’ll call him Jon, was very very much in jail.  He was locked up on extremely serious charges, most of which ended up being dropped, and had spent about a year in jail by the time we met each other.  We went on to work together for just over a year, and towards the end of our time together he was able to negotiate a deal that got him back into the community on probation with no felonies - this is the kind of plea-bargain windfall so rare it starts snitch rumors.  Yet, he chose to serve his probation time in jail...

Read More