Family Secrets
Discovering infidelity is a common reason that couples seek therapy. Infidelity is much more frequent than one might expect, and the popular culture tends to equate infidelity with a loveless or passionless marriage. In my work as a couples therapist, I often discover marriages that have experienced infidelity but that clash with this popular conception.…
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Parents of teenagers are bound to struggle to communicate and connect with their kids. It’s hard enough to lure a teen out of their bedroom, let alone to convince them to engage in an authentic conversation. One strategy to connect with teens is to create scenarios that set the stage for conversation. Driving to and…
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Sibling relationships are frequently the longest intimate relationship of a person’s life. Brothers and sisters share memories about each other’s childhoods, and are likely to remember each other’s past from common and relatable vantage points. Parents, understandably, are prone to remember their children’s past from a more mature but inherently different viewpoint. As a result,…
Read More Relocation is an interesting psychological process. My experience as a therapist is shaped by geography, and practicing in DC means that relocation is a recurring theme. A typical day of office hours might include sessions with clients from the Middle East, Europe, the Midwest as well as the South. Some of my clients grew up…
Read More Celeste Ng’s 2014 debut novel about a Chinese-American family coping with the excruciating aftermath of a teenager’s death is as absorbing as it is humbling. It is absorbing due to its complex and realistic characters, each with their own layers and secrets and struggles related to the middle daughter, Lydia’s, mysterious disappearance and death. And…
Read More Lauren Groff Riverhead Books, 2015 391 pages When couples in therapy describe their relationship challenges, the delicate act of balancing separateness and togetherness surfaces as a recurring theme. Lauren Groff’s provocative 2015 novel, Fates and Furies, injects this theme with steroids and invites readers into a provocative narrative exploring the internal emotional worlds of two…
Read More Director: Andrew Haigh Writers: David Constantine (short story ‘In Another Country’) Andrew Haigh adaptation 1 hour, 35 minutes, December, 2015 Communication surfaces as a centerpiece for most couples in therapy. Married people often direct more effort towards communicating with children, friends and colleagues and less effort towards engaged discussions with their spouse. 45 Years was…
Read More Kim Edwards, 2006, 401 pages, Penguin Books Relationships and intimacy are an expected focus in psychotherapy. Most clients reach out to our practice because something is happening — or is not happening — in an important relationship or in several relationships. Some action-forcing event often makes it clear that something has to change in order…
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 More Can a marriage be saved following infidelity? Is it okay to cheat if a marriage has become sexless? If infidelity is discovered and a couple wants to stay together, how do they find their way through? Such questions are frequently raised in couples therapy if one or both partners have strayed. Ian McEwan’s 2014 novel,…
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