I have a very smart and wonderful client, Karen*, who recently said: “I feel like you are always telling me that I’m right and everyone else is wrong Isn’t it somewhere in the middle?”. Her question gave me pause. Was I erring on the side of being too supportive and excusing her of responsibility? Had I abandoned ‘therapeutic neutrality’ in …
“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.” -Oscar Wilde, The importance of being Earnest Many of my clients grew up in families where they could not be themselves at home. They were coerced to play a family role at great odds with their natural …
Good Will Hunting is one of my favorite movies. Will’s character is so compelling. By day he hangs out with his hard-living friends. By night he exercises his genius by solving quadratic equations, reading voraciously, and thinking big thoughts. Put another way, his public self seems to contradict his private self. And the contradiction goes in an unusual direction. …
Don Vito Corleone in the Godfather was not a paragon of gender equality. Witness his famous statement: “I spend my life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” His statement on women is false and misogynous but he offers a truth about children: they need to feel safe being careless. …
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.” – George Orwell 1984 I find in my therapy practice that there is nothing wrong with my clients except that they believe there is. People do not insist on a perception of reality that worsens quality of life out of …
What does anger look like to you? Fists pounding a table? Faces getting red? Veins bulging? Raised Voices? These are some of the common associations to anger in our culture. Such displays of anger are more reflective of rage. Anger can be expressed without any of the over-the-top behaviors described above. The value of anger is that a person …
I moved to the Philadelphia area in sixth grade. Coming from southern California, I had trouble finding friends who loved football as much as me. The first Tuesday morning at my new school in the Philadelphia suburbs, all my classmates were talking about the Eagles performance against the New York Giants the night before. I thought I was in heaven. …
Self-sabotage is another term that blames the person doing it. The implication can be that people don’t have the ‘good sense’ to allow themselves success. Self-sabotage falls on a spectrum of course. We can probably all relate to procrastinating before a big exam. Getting a lower grade than might have otherwise been possible can result. Minor bouts of procrastination …
‘Fear of success’ can occur in at least two ways. Some people truly desire success but fear failing. Others find the prospect of not failing more scary than failing. That may not make a lot of sense at first blush. If we dig a little deeper, a logical – but more complex – explanation emerges. This post is about a …
Do you feel fundamentally unlikeable unless you are doing something for others? Perhaps you counteract this feeling by acting in ways that generate positive responses from others. Termed “moving towards people”, this can mean attuning to and meeting others’ emotional needs, and/or finding it necessary to be helpful to others. In isolation these kinds of behaviors are worthy character traits. …
