Blog

Good communication is essential for relationships, but it’s challenging for nearly everyone. In my therapy practice, I help many people with communication issues, including couples, families, and individuals. This work usually involves developing reflective listening skills and learning to talk about one’s own emotions, rather than blaming others. However, these essential skills depend on something more fundamental: self-awareness. Successful communication is based upon our awareness of ourselves, which allows us to recognize what we are really feeling, listen to others without reacting impulsively, and express ourselves in an intentional way. 

Continue reading “Self-Awareness: The Key To Better Communication”

We don’t usually accept our authentic feelings, allowing them to simply be whatever they are. Instead, we try to control our inner experience based on our preferences and our beliefs about what we should and shouldn’t feel. We may admonish ourselves to be positive, or to not be affected by a difficult experience. In fact, many “self-help” programs revolve around the idea that we need to control what we feel, so that we can always be confident and happy. We might think that it’s wrong to be angry, or that allowing ourselves to be hurt would mean that we are weak. We believe that feeling a certain way makes us a good person, and feeling another way makes us a bad or unlovable person. 

Continue reading “How To Relate To Our Feelings”

Our society is highly polarized by political and cultural issues. This touches all of us on some level and has the potential to impact the therapy process as well. How a therapist handles this is not only important for our clients’ trust or sense of safety, but it also may be therapeutically useful or not. So I’d like to share how I work with political issues when they come up in my therapy practice. 

Continue reading “Political Division And Therapy”

Imagine that some mean, judgmental person followed you around all the time, putting you down and accusing you of screwing up. From the time you woke up in the morning, until you went to sleep at night, they would be there pointing out your supposed mistakes and flaws. To make matters worse, let’s assume that you believed everything that they said about you. How do you think this would affect the way that you see yourself, and how you live your life?

Continue reading “Freedom From The Inner Critic”