Literally Anything Else

/ James Cole Abrams Therapy/
Literally Anything Else

When working with clients in early recovery, the question often comes up: “what can I do instead of using?”  In addiction, the substance or behavior comes to be the most reliable part of a person’s life - too reliable, as it turns outs.  Like a phone whose battery never runs out, the substance  is always available to fill the gaps between activities in a person’s life.  To occlude the downtime when questions about meaning, satisfaction, and self worth might arise.  Without the substance, a person in recovery finds themself suddenly and without armor exposed to all the painful and insistent questions that shape a life well lived.  And while those are great questions to expose yourself to, facing them constantly is not helpful or livable.  People need distraction, and the one I recommend most is Literally Anything Else.

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How Do You Know When Trauma is Healed?

/ James Cole Abrams Therapy/
How Do You Know When Trauma is Healed?

I’ve been working with a client who recently realized, and then confided in me, that they were carrying trauma from childhood abuse and it was making their life unmanageable.  What struck me was that they hadn’t known this before - they’d been living this way for so long that it just seemed normal to them.  The experience of constant anxiety, hyper-vigilance for perceived threats, and extreme willingness to blame themselves for anything that went wrong was just the air they’d been breathing for the past 30 years.  They hadn’t been having flashbacks to the trauma, they had been living it every moment of their life.

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Path of the Snake

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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...

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Questions of Medication

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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...

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Quality Control

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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...

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