Love

Terms of Endearment

By Elisabeth LaMotte / November 28, 2023

I came across this moving review of multiple Oscar winner Terms of Endearment and memories of Emma, Aurora, Flap and Patsy felt like resisting old friends. Then I watched the four minute and twenty second trailer and quickly became a tear soaked puddle. The film’s centerpiece – the exceedingly real mother-daughter/ Aurora-Emma duo, inspire us…

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Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow

By Elisabeth LaMotte / October 29, 2023

Tomorrow and, Tomorrow and, Tomorrow’s book jacket describes a “love story you haven’t heard before”. This provocative welcome offers a fitting invitation to enter the page turning journey of Sadie, Sam and Marx – three super smart college students at MIT and Harvard, making their way in the gaming industry. The love story is new…

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How Do You Measure a Year?

By Elisabeth LaMotte / July 29, 2023

As an empty nester I feel reasonably grounded when I reflect on my approach to raising our daughters. I wish that we had found a way to live abroad at some point. It never felt like the right time, and though my husband had professional opportunities that would have allowed for postings abroad, I did…

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Leopoldsdadt

By Elisabeth LaMotte / December 7, 2022

Family therapists love a good genogram. For those unfamiliar with this term, a genogram is a comprehensive family history framed through the psychological lens of Family Systems Theory. Family Systems Theory is a relationally oriented approach to therapy emphasizing the formative importance of the family landscape. Systemic therapists believe that relational patterns are often passed…

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The Midnight Library

By Elisabeth LaMotte / September 6, 2022

Engaging in therapy, it is quite common to look back on past choices and scan for patterns. Reflecting on past decisions often illuminates insights about the present and the future. Honest examination in this mode is a template for therapeutic change. Let’s say a therapy client is working on a pattern of choosing unhealthy relationships.…

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Run Towards the Danger

By Elisabeth LaMotte / May 26, 2022

Practically speaking, preparing for foot surgery feels surprisingly like preparing to have a baby. I stopped taking new therapy clients two months prior to my surgery date in an attempt to mold my work/life balance into the most manageable place during the 3 to 6 month recovery period. Not since giving birth two decades ago…

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Coda

By Elisabeth LaMotte / April 20, 2022

As a systems therapist, family roles and dynamics are an important area of exploration. Developing a deeper understanding of the roles directly or indirectly assigned in childhood helps therapy clients reflect on how such roles are internalized and carried into adult careers and adult relationships. Developing a grasp of how past roles play out in…

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Being the Ricardos

By Elisabeth LaMotte / January 14, 2022

Discovering infidelity leads many couples to seek therapy. The road to repair such a betrayal is a painful one that takes patience, commitment and hard work. As a couples’ therapist who believes in the power of prescriptive film-viewing, I often suggest that couples working through the discovery of infidelity watch movies on this topic. The…

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Driveways

By Elisabeth LaMotte / July 13, 2021

Most schools of psychology emphasize the significance of examining the past. As a systems therapist, I try to help therapy clients discover how past family dynamics shape current life experience. Rather than harping on the past, which no one finds particularly useful, we reflect on what a client’s life was like growing up to develop…

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Our Souls at Night

By Elisabeth LaMotte / April 12, 2021

Committed relationships often feel complicated, as any couples therapist will acknowledge. But falling in love often feels simple. Clear and inspiring, liberating and pure. Kent Haruf captures the purity and ease of burgeoning romantic feelings in his final novel, Our Souls at Night. The novel is a quick, engaging read that explores the magic of…

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