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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Resistance is Fertile

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Resistance is Fertile

One of the biggest questions in modern therapy is how to most-effectively work with what’s known as a “resistant” client.  The idea of resistance is a simple one that belies a complex reality: some clients wont respond well to what the therapist is doing, and progress will be slow or nonexistent.  It’s a little hard for me to write about any of this - resistance, progress - without throwing quotes on every other word, but since that looks awful in print please assume I view all of this askance.  It’s worth noting that the question of resistance is a question that has only shown up in the modern era of therapy; Freud and the analytic gang not only weren’t worried about “resistance”, they didn’t have even have a concept of it.  Why is that?

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What Lies in the Shadow

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What Lies in the Shadow

Clients offer a lot of reasons for coming to therapy, but at the bottom of all of them is this: it’s hard to be yourself.  The world we live in can seem like a dangerous place, and there are plenty of forces out there that want you to be just a piece of yourself, or something you’re not at all.  And though many of us were lucky to be told to just be ourselves when we were young, many people have a difficult time letting that lesson really sink in.  The truth is, we’re all made up of disparate internal elements; our personalities are complex...

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How To Break Out of Jail

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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...

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