Elisabeth LaMotte
Exploring childhood and understanding the mother-child bond is an important dimension of most forms of psychotherapy. Discussing child development and the significance of a secure emotional attachment can often help therapy clients gain insights about their adult selves, as well as the strengths and challenges of their unique parental bonds. Understanding these complex dynamics can lead…
Read More
Women entrepreneurs and on-line shoppers alike can’t help but enjoy Anne Hathaway’s snappy, stylish performance as internet mogul Jules Ostin in Nancy Meyers’ 2015 film The Intern. The film’s tag line — “experience never gets old” — is a tribute to the wisdom and elegance of Ostin’s unlikely intern Ben Whittaker (Robert DeNiro), a seventy year old retired widow who…
Read More
Charlie Kauffman: Screenplay and Director DC Counseling and Psychotherapy Center is excited about a cross site collaboration through posting this film review by Nick Bastion of Vixen Daily When I think about my favorite romantic movies, the first one I think of is one that usually catches people by surprise. Many women I help with…
Read More
Self-esteem is a common and complicated theme in psychotherapy. Underpinning many of the catalysts that bring people to therapy is an underlying lack of adequate self-esteem. One way to think about increasing self-esteem is to focus on a person’s sense of themselves and subsequent ability to exist and operate in the world as a…
Read More
David O. Russell has triumphed again. Like The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, the film Joy blends captivating entertainment with psychological sophistication. Russell tells the almost true-to-life tale of master inventor Joy Mangano, a New Jersey mother of two who rises from obscurity, overcomes loads of adversity, and builds a home- shopping empire.…
Read More
Alice Hoffman, Simon & Schuster, 2015 “I suppose this is what love can do to a woman, bring her into a garden at night, convinced she somehow can affect fate’s plan with her desire. Love like this was a mystery to me. I didn’t understand how people allowed sheer emotion to get the better of…
Read MoreMany clients seek therapy feeling stuck in a painful place and unsure of how to move forward. Moving forward often involves developing a deeper understanding of how you got to where you are, and what may have happened in the past that may be creating anxiety or unhappiness. To do so effectively through therapy, it…
Read More
“Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.” Nora Ephron This provocative quotation would be a suitable tagline for Jonathan Demme’s 2015 film Ricki and the Flash, released for on demand viewing this week. This unexpectedly moving tale explores the long-term impact of divorce and maternal estrangement. When a crisis in their adult child’s life…
Read More
What happens when two misfits find each other? Why is intimacy sometimes trigger for anxiety and self-doubt? What does it mean to have a true friend? Mary and Max, a 2009 film by writer/ director Adam Elliot, delves into the friendship that builds through the unexpected correspondence between kindred spirits turned pen pals. Set in 1976, the…
Read More
This unsettling but inspiring film profiles composer and performer Brian Wilson’s life, from his early years in the 1960s forming the Beach Boys through his mid-life years in the 1980s living in the aftermath of an apparent paranoid psychosis. Love and Mercy begins as the mid-life Wilson (John Cusack) breezes into a Cadillac dealership, where, he encounters and is eager to impress a beautiful saleslady…
Read More