Maybe you have been thinking about it for years, or went a few years ago and it wasn’t great, or people have suggested it to you but it seemed silly. If you have never done a serious and successful stint of real psychotherapy, if not now, when.
No need to wait for psilocybin (mushrooms) or MDMA (ecstasy) to finish up their FDA trials in the coming years. Ketamine has multiple qualities that make it uniquely suited to psychotherapy.
Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy has made a come back. Psychedelics are uniquely potent and novel tools for helping us in therapy with our deeply stuck places. Ketamine is currently legal and available for use by specifically trained psychotherapists.
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.
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.
Certainly our national conversation about the importance of a healthy work/life balance was meant to reduce workaholism and improve the quality of our lives. It is however a built on a bizarre fallacy that somehow work isn’t life.
Be brave. Be very very brave. As scary and disregulating as this conversation is, we can help our teens develop a frame for understanding how to handle hard emotions and difficult chapters in their lives. And it may well save their lives.
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
“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.
Philadelphia psychotherapy practice Full Living specializes in making thoughtful matches between clients and skilled experienced therapists in the Greater Philadelphia Area.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.