Psychotherapy costs a lot. If paying full fee for for weekly outpatient therapy, it is usually one of our most significant monthly bills. It begs the question of what makes it worth it, and why therapists deserve to get paid such a high hourly rate.
The confusion evidenced by this question is the view of psychotherapy itself. It assumes therapy is for crazy people, or at a minimum people who are not well. Psychotherapy is a tool for crafting the person we want to be and the life we want to live.
Therapists aren't just really good listeners, or solid shoulders to cry on. We aren't sages with wise advise when you are gathering opinions from folks around you. What we bring to our work is expertise in how the unconscious communicates.
It is Freud's Birthday and most Americans, even psychotherapists, see him as a joke. These same therapists routinely rely on his concepts like denial, repression, displacement, unconscious, super-ego and the like. Face it: we are ill informed.
Psychotherapy exists in the realm of the symbolic. The target of change is not the drama of the week. Therapists are not sounding boards or shoulders to cry on. We offer those things, but we have significantly more sophisticated tools to offer clients.
Psychotherapy is not meant to be limited to addressing external, concrete dilemmas of the week. The realm of psychotherapy is the resolution of central, ongoing, internal conflicts.
Categories include Couples Corner, For Therapists, Thoughts on Therapy, Children/Parents/Parenting, Anxiety and Depression, The Trump Effect, Creating Change, Analytic takes of Stories on the News, Isms, Video Blogs, and Misc including Zits & Perfectionism
Sometimes we experience our upset as disproportionately large compared to how much we think we should be suffering. This may be in part because we are living with a memory of a time when we were much younger and much smaller with a very big load to carry.
To start, the question shouldn’t be if you need therapy, but if it would benefit you. Few people need therapy, and only in a few circumstances.
I never imagined myself a perfectionist.
Long term psychotherapy gets a bad rap in the age of managed care and evidenced based concrete treatments.
It is a reasonable question. “Does my therapist like me”?
Ok. So you may not be used to hearing the words erotic or fetish in a sentence with zits and popping, but that is surprising.
When folks struggle with ongoing depression, anxiety or bi-polar symptoms, serious action is required.
Couples fight. And when we do, partners expose our most vulnerable, panicky, hateful selves.
Most clients know that some of their best sessions happen when they don’t know what their therapy topic is going to be.
Both my client and I sat with such a strange mixture of feelings tonight. In the past 2 weeks his life has radically changed for the better.
Psychotherapy myths about therapists, clients, why people go to therapy, and the therapy itself prevent some folks from using this uniquely potent tool for crafting a better life.
Many folks, including some clinicians, use the terms counseling and therapy as if they are interchangeable.
In the debate about Britney's conservatorship, many are trying to argue that she wasn't or isn't competent enough to make her own decisions. How many of us have make such stellar life choices that we should get to run some else life too? Jamie Spears?
Dont Throw Out The Oedipal Baby With the Misogynistic, Hetero-Assumptive, Euro-centric, Overly-Gendered Bathwater. Freud's theories are a treasure trove of rich theory that is unparalleled.
Projection is primitive psychological mechanism used when someone feels a feeling or has a thought that is incongruent with how they want to see themselves. When the dissonant unattractive feeling or thought surfaces, they must assign it to someone.
Selective perception is everything right now. If you find yourself too frequently overwhelmed, frightened, anxious, and negative, you may be consuming too much of the dark. There is light to be seen right now too...but you must activity turn towards it.
We all need a plan we coordinate with others about how to take care of ourselves and protect others if we become compromised by the virus. This template is to help you build a plan to keep everyone safe should you become too ill to make the plan later.
Are you over-reacting? Are you under-reacting? Taking this all seriously enough, or maybe taking it way too far? The thing is, there isn’t really any way for us to know how far is too far. But there are ways to keep grounded, which we must do.
Therapists often avoid couples work, in part because couples bring so much rage and fear to sessions. But also because the work is simply so different than individual therapy. As a devoted couples therapist, here is one of the tools I rely on in sessions.
Psychotherapy isn't an act of loving kindness. Love can compromise the more meaningful work therapist can offer. If a loving good listener is all takes to get better, you don't need an extensively educated rigorously trained, expensive clinician.
In a world of quick fixes and self-help books, it is daunting to commit to long-term relational psychotherapy. The problem is that if it was easy to understand why you were so stuck, you would understand it. If there were easy answers to the issues t
Successful couples offer up many compromises to increase their connection, but they must be allowed to remain separate entities.
“The Next Right Thing” teaches a key life lesson, one many have not sufficiently learned. Depression, Anxiety, hopelessness, overwhelmed-ness, grief and loss, can all leave the sufferer immobilized and unable to perform the tasks needed to resurface.
Eating Disorders no longer appear in the media as a dominant narrative, but the statistics are the same, with Anorexia and Bulimia still the most likely reason young girls enter a mental health institution. Eating Disorders are culturally constructed.
Some would question how therapy could help if the political climate is a primary source of distress, since individual psychotherapy certainly cannot change our political climate. I have two answers to that question.
Narcissism is often treated as if it is inherently a bad thing, but it is actually just another word for self-love. Getting through the hardships and blows of life requires a fairly solid amount of positive self-regard and healthy narcissism is the key.
As if life isn't hard enough; who needs perfection to ruin the decent? There is a cruelty to perfectionism. It takes something that could be enjoyed, even celebrated, and turns it into failure.
Because so many people have felt depressed before, they imagine what worked for them can also help the clinically depressed person. They are wrong and their advice is more likely to hurt the person suffering from real Depression.
People compare many things to therapy: hikes in nature, talks with a good friend, meditation, and even confessions to a priest.
Finally, diagnostic Anxiety qualifies for medical marijuana use.
You can’t all be bad. Or at a minimum you cant be only bad. We walk in the same streets with you.
Even as adults, we can worry if our parents are disappointed in us.
Some folks fear they are going to be asked to hate their parents by their therapist.
Full Living Psychotherapists share thoughts on why a good match matters.
Philadelphia psychotherapy practice Full Living specializes in making thoughtful matches between clients and skilled experienced therapists in the Greater Philadelphia Area.
Therapist credentials, education, training.
Up-selling is a term borrowed from the business world.
Liam Neeson recently revealed that some 40 years ago, after a friend was raped, he found himself entering predominantly black neighborhoods, seeking out black men, hoping for an altercation in order to channel his rage.
Some basic policy questions: How do you or your agency determine service fees? Do you or your organization offer a sliding scale? If, so, to whom, under what circumstances? What is your or your agency’s late cancellation policy?
Lena Dunham didn’t get it just a little wrong. She got it massively wrong. She did a truly horrible thing. She protected a man accused of sexual harassment because she didn’t want to believe he did it.
While there are lots of ways to describe and define emotional, mental, and psychological health, there is one consistent theme; Integration.
Kavanaugh’s tears were real. He was devastated that his good boy, church-going, sports and beer loving, devoted son, persona was being brought down. It is part of his true self. A part of himself he is very proud of.
I know I know…the motto is “strike when the iron is hot”.
It isn’t sustainable. The ongoing shock, panic, horror and emotional devastation resulting from the daily barrage of thoroughly unbelievable atrocities and absurdities promulgated by Trump and his administration.
When I woke to the reports of Anthony Bourdain’s death by suicide Friday morning, I was visibly upset.
We are currently involved in a national dialogue about sexual harassment, abuse, rape, and molestation, of young people, employees, job applicants, and others who are vulnerable to the abuses of power.
The events and dialogue surrounding this month’s march by white supremacists, KKK, skin heads and neo Nazi’s in Charlottesville have left many of us shocked by the display of such blind hatred and aggression towards whole populations of people.
Making this one change prepares the foundation for all kinds of growth and change.
We judge each other as dispositioned towards negativity or positivity, scarcity or abundance, as if it is a chosen disposition.
An element of a good psychotherapy, the one which requires the most skill and psychological strength from the therapist, is our work at uncovering early childhood dynamics (archeology) impacting our daily patterns (dances).
When we are considering giving up, on our relationship, or on life itself, our thoughts become narrowed to whether or not we are going to give up, and how we would leave if we decide we are done.
Of all the many bridges we cross in our work to join our clients, isms can not only significantly compromise our ability to empathize, sympathize, and understand where are clients are coming from, but they can literally reduce our interest or capacity.
and how you should run, not walk, to begin your therapy journey.
It is both hard to turn away and unbearable to watch.
As during most weeks of this past year, social media has been rife with commentary related to issues of race, justice and protest.
Current national political debate is so divided and contentious that most of us aren’t listening to one another’s points, or concerns.
For both seasoned clinicians and beginners alike, getting unknowingly sucked into enactments with clients is par for the course of long-term work traversing the world of the unconscious.
Psychoanalytic theory pays plentiful attention to the role mothers play in early childhood development.
In a letter penned in defense of a light sentencing for his son, Brock Turner’s father described him as “happy go lucky” prior to the events one night in January 2015.
I am a large woman, who worked for a decade on size-activism.
When we tell someone at a party that we are a psychotherapist, they inevitable ask “Don’t you get bored hearing about everyone’s problems”?
As parents, a lot of us have our fingers crossed.
Sometimes clients express their wish that we could be friends.
It is true that no analyst or analytically oriented psychotherapist worth seeing is interested in anything else as attentively as our moms*.
Internships rock. They are a great way to test out a type of work without the commitment of a job.
Sigmund Freud postulated that for psychoanalysis to be effective, the client must share with the analyst all that crosses their mind during the course of the clinical hour.
“What is wrong with me”? “Why do I do this to myself”? “Why do I keep making the same mistakes”?
Most folks make New Years resolutions about their most core issues.
If you want a future for you kids that reflects a fantasized “good ole days".
Parenting is hard. I know parents are supposed to be consistent.
Here is my current contribution to the perennial debate about why some folks hate feminists, the concept of feminism, and consistently see them as “angry feminists”.
Hate gets a bad rap. Yet real love doesn’t exist without it. Hate and love always live next to each other.
It is not just Jews and school-bound kids that are gearing up for the new year.
My big celesbian sighting (that is a celebrity lesbian-sighting), was in a hotel lobby in upstate New York, and Alison Bechdel was in her sweatpants version of pajamas.
Often given as a graduation gift, Dr. Seuss’s Oh’ The Places You’ll Go is a masterpiece reminding us of the natural ups and downs of life and the dangers life entails.
This is a text I received from my 7 year old son one morning upon realizing I wasn’t going to the zoo with his class that day.
The TV show Hannibal is the most internally consistent psychological drama on TV.
I have a client who sometimes starts a session saying “I don’t want to talk about Rwanda”.
As an analytically oriented psychotherapist, I am always thrown a bit by “attachment theory” and “attachment parenting”.
When couples fight, the need to be right can easily distracts us from the damage that insistence does to our relationship.
When I first entered 12 Step recovery in my early 20’s I was faced with the daunting task of identifying a “Higher Power”.
I am a large, body-positive, feminist, who worked with in the Eating Disorder field as both a clinician and educator.
Most of us start thinking about New Year Resolutions the morning after Christmas.
What could possibly compare to the expectations for Christmas?
Communication skills are key to turning couples fighting into vehicles for relationship growth and change or just increasing injury and disconnection.
The short answer to if you should go to psychotherapy is Yes!
Our unconscious minds are filed with truths about our history, hopes, fears, struggles and triumphs.
Here is a new feature of my blog…book recommendations.
I want to be thankful on Thanksgiving; I really do. It is just that the build up is so big, the expectations so high, the demand for joy, and gratitude so relentless.
It is completely routine for couples to say and ask random things about the chores and business of the running of a house and life in the middle of otherwise lovely conversations.
