Often in my clinical work I ask a client the following question: "Do you have a moral obligation to be happy?" This opens up an avenue of thought that often neglected. My goal is to lead the client to the conclusion the seeking happiness is a moral imperative. To...
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” This is one of my favorite sayings. As humans, when we get into a disagreement or conflict with another person, our instinct and deepest need is to feel heard and understood. Therefore, our initial words are centered...
Imagine this… its late at night, you are feeling tired, so you go to bed. You put on your PJ’s, hop in bed, and then all of a sudden you turn on the TV while you lay in bed. Then you start checking your phone to see the latest Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter updates....
We recently passed the one year anniversary of when the world shut down. Typically, we associate anniversaries with things to celebrate. It seems easy to hold space to remember those happy occasions. Perhaps a less considered kind of anniversary is that of tragedy,...
We all can easily say that at one point in our lives we had trouble getting an appropriate amount of sleep throughout the week. This is due to us waking up multiple times throughout the night and having difficulty falling back to sleep for a long period of time. We...
Everyone carries assumptions about what they will get out of coming to therapy. Some clients are having such a hard time in their life that just signing up for that first session, getting out of the house, driving to the office and plopping down on the coach feels...
When a person goes into therapy they are generally looking to feel better, or have an outlet. As a therapist I am always assessing my clients, “Do they need a higher level of care”, “Am I the best fit for the client”, “What approach is going to work for my clients”....
Most of us have heard of fight, flight, or freeze. These are common responses that humans, and animals have when faced with various situations. Thinking about trauma, and how that impacts us we think about one more term “Fawn”. This term is coined by Pete Walker, a...
Part of the human condition is a desire to be understood. We want the foremost people in our lives to understand what our daily existence is like. The fear of abandonment is less prevalent when someone notices whether we are joyful, fearful, sad or if we are...
“I can’t control my emotions”, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” These are two common phrases that many people have said before. I have seen many children, teens and adults who are unable to display emotional regulation. What is emotional regulation? Emotional...