What The Wild Things Are

Understandings of Self, Awareness, and Mental Health in an Ever-Changing World

Samantha Stein Psy.D.

I Was a COVID Frontline Worker

There aren’t any manuals out there titled “How to Help People Through a Lethal, Global Pandemic That You, Yourself, Are Surviving.” I learned a lot.

Maintaining an Important Relationship When Values Aren't Shared

Differences can be navigated—if there is a way to meet in the middle, move forward with compassion, or find connection in spite of the distance.

There Are Few Actual Tigers in Our Lives

Much of the anxiety we experience today—setting aside true, reality-based concerns—is not adaptive and is even maladaptive. Here's how to cope with it better.

Why Gain Requires Loss

While we may think of an exciting choice as fully about gain, even the most joyful choices we make can involve giving something up.

Time May Fly, But You’re The Pilot

How do we shift our relationship with time into a more healthy one?

Does the United States Need Couples’ Therapy?

Maybe agreement is not necessarily the goal. Maybe the goal is that we can live together and learn from each other and creatively come up with something different.

A Relationship Needs Gratitude and Kindness

Regardless of their presenting problem, couples ultimately need help with communication, kindness, and appreciation.

Cheating and Masculinity

When their marriages fail to validate their masculinity, some men seek an outside partner as a workaround.

Killing Ourselves Off in Order to Be Loved

The onus is on us when we are challenged by who people are—not to reject them, but to expand our capacity to love.

Pandemic Rage

We should feel empowered to do all that we can and make the best of the life that we have. But the hard truth is that our power is limited.

Sitting With Ourselves

It isn’t possible to know who we are or what we want when we don’t make the time to be still with ourselves.

Why Making Amends Is So Important

When we're accountable and make amends, we are forced to face our own humanity. It's painful but it forces us to understand ourselves more deeply.

The Importance of Pride Month

Shame is debilitating and can lead to mental illness, addiction, isolation, and death. This is why pride is so important.

12 Ways Parents Can Show Support for Their Nonbinary Kids

Advice to parents of newly out nonbinary youth and young adults from someone who has been there.

Why Teaching Our Kids about Consent Early in Life Matters

If we want to create a world where love and respect are the norms, we need to start now.

The Land of Opportunity

We have the opportunity to either escape from or show up for this life. Which one will you choose?

That Powerlessness You Feel Is Called "Moral Distress"

What happens when life forces us to choose between two “wrongs,” or bad situations, either one compromising our core values, obligations, and commitments?

Finding Our Way Through Collective Grief

How do we wind our way through the collective loss and grief we are experiencing?

My Battle With Anger as a Parent

To this day, I still think about what happened that evening with the pacifier, no matter how small it may seem.

Feeling Anxiety in the Face of Change

When we were growing up, we absorbed a lot of information from our environment about how we needed to be in order to feel loved.

When My Adult Son Changed His Life, He Also Changed Mine

When my only child moved to California, I was not thrilled.

Dry January Is Hard

“As my heart raced and cortisol shot through my veins, the only thing I could think of was, 'Damn, I need a drink,'” she wrote.

Will We Survive or Perish? (Part 2 of 2)

If the goal is a loving community, sustainability, and respect for all people and nature, then we must choose a path that includes all of us.

Will We Survive or Perish?

The only way forward is with each other.

Why Do We Have Rampant Pandemic Denial?

We insist that disability and death is something that happens to others, not us.

Unseen Victims of the Pandemic

In the United States, our incarceration rate is the highest in the world. What is happening to all those people during the pandemic?

Life Under COVID-19

How do we cope when the rhythm of yesterday has become a bunch of questions of today? We return to our values and passions.

All in Good Time

Time is a precious resource: Spend it well. It’s up to you to decide what that looks like.

Life's Great Contradiction

We long to feel safe, but following one’s heart is often filled with risk, contradiction, and loss.

Sobriety's Rewards

We all have ways we try to avoid the discomfort of this human experience. What happens if we show up instead?

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