Resilience

One of the things I love about being a therapist and a writer is that both require that I do a lot of reading. This past weekend, while preparing for a workshop on marriage, I pulled out a book I'd bought several months ago and hadn't had time to read yet: Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Dr. Sue Johnson, developer of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. Read More

He celebrated every triumph, grieved every loss, galumphed beside us on every hike through every literal and emotional terrain, and always slept at our feet. He placed himself on bed rest with me at the end of my pregnancy. He bore witness to it all. He outlived our marriage. He was my greatest comfort. How could I let him go? Read More

The idea of mental health—as we know it—has reached a dead end. It doesn't describe much of anything relevant to people's lives today. If you Google "mental health," most of what comes up describes mental illness, not mental health. Read More

Is it easier to offer comfort to someone grieving the loss of a pet than someone grieving the loss of a human? Are people more comfortable with pet-inspired grief than with people-inspired grief? Read More

Whether his achievements were the result of talent or practice or something else entirely, one trait stands out as allowing Oscar Micheaux to pursue his successive dreams: He was willing to be the oddball and to appear foolish in others’ eyes. Read More

Grief is the loneliest journey we take together. Monday it feels like a tsunami of unendurable pain. Tuesday it's a low-grade despair you can’t shake. It makes you hyper productive to avoid the pain or puts you in a sleep-filled coma to avoid the pain. It can blow all the feeling right out of you like a gust of numbness and you feel nothing at all. Read More

The storm of opposition to DSM 5 is now focused on its silly and unnecessary proposal to medicalize grief. To paraphrase Voltaire, normal grief is not 'Major', is not 'Depressive,' and is not 'Disorder.' Grief is the normal and necessary human reaction to love and loss, not some phony disease. Read More

What seems like bad luck may stem from the subconscious workings of a phenomenon that therapists are just at the very beginning stages of recognizing and treating. Read More

What do deadbeat dads, estranged or dead relatives, and birth parents in closed adoptions have in common? What they have in common is the power of absence. That's when what isn't there is what captures attention, and traps it in an emotional embrace. The power of absence; let's look at how it works. Read More