How to Keep Your Heart Beating

/
How to Keep Your Heart Beating

Before I went to sleep last night I reminded myself that I had a blog to write, and ran through the general outline of my idea for this week.  I woke up, enjoyed some breakfast, sat in the sun for a bit, and checked facebook.  Suddenly I didn’t have a plan anymore - my calendar was immediately and coldly cleared, as my hopes for the day were suddenly pulled and distorted into the black hole of tragedy.  Lucky as I am to not know anyone personally involved in the shooting at Pulse, I can’t keep the pain of such a horror from entering my chest.  This is the reality of tragedy, that it is impersonal in its ability to cross boundaries, insatiable in its ability to demand attention, and implacable in its ability to cause pain...

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

Crossing Boundaries

/
Crossing Boundaries

People talk about boundaries quite a lot these days - holding boundaries, crossing boundaries, clarifying boundaries, etc.  And the expectation when you hear a word like boundary is quite punitive - what happens when they get crossed?  A situation that I see often with clients is that one person will be furious that their boundaries have not been respected while the other person doesn’t really understand what is meant by a boundary to begin with, let alone how they disrespected it.  To be sure, the topic of boundaries is a tricky one in any relationship, and is even more difficult to navigate between parents and children...

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