Marriage
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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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,…
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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 Director: David Frankel Screenplay: Scott Frank and Don Roos Based on the book Marley & Me by John Grogan How do I balance the demands of my job and the needs of my kids? Should I work or stay at home while the kids are young? Should I take the job that pays the bills…
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 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 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 Us David Nicholls 396 pages, 2014 “It was dizzying, really, to be in love at last. Because this was the first time, I knew that now. Everything else had been a misdiagnosis – infatuation, obsession perhaps, but an entirely different condition to this. This was bliss; this was transformative.” Despite pages of engaging writing about…
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