Work & Career
Fans of Everything I Never Told You will relish the journey into Celeste Ng’s new novel, Little Fires Everywhere. Shaker Heights, Ohio (where Ng lived during part of her childhood) shapes a fitting backdrop for Ng’s tale about motherhood, family, secrets, coming-of-age and intimacy. The Richardsons present a glowing portrait of familial perfection. They reside…
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Clients in therapy describe a variety of life stressors. In a place as expensive as Washington, D.C., it is understandable that money surfaces as a frequent source of tension and anxiety. Therapy clients describe the sensation of feeling like there’s never enough money to create a sense of financial security. Interestingly, some therapy clients notice…
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Playing in DC at The Kennedy Center through January 28th! Each November, many therapy clients begin to plan for and fret over the upcoming holiday season. The holidays in general – and Thanksgiving in particular – represent a psychologically robust time. I sometime joke with clients that there’s a good reason Hollywood creates so many…
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“Emotional affairs” are complicated, controversial and difficult to define. When a married person begins developing strong feelings for a possible romantic partner who is not their spouse, the emotional pull may be subtle at first and often accompanied by feelings of growth and vitality. Interestingly, sometimes the spouse may notice a romantic dimension of the…
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Breakups can be heartbreaking, traumatic and disorienting. Therapists are intimately familiar with breakups, because a relationship’s demise is often the catalyst for therapy. A surprising outcome of certain breakups is that sometimes, they ultimately save the relationship. Director Michael Showalter’s hilariously raw romantic comedy, The Big Sick, illustrates a compelling roadmap to the ways in…
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Elizabeth Stroud’s 2017 follow-up to “My Name is Lucy Barton” stands alone as an engaging, page-turning tale about how two people can have vastly different experiences of the same relationship. A group of character studies follows the same characters that played roles in “My Name is Lucy Barton”. This time around, their stories are excavated…
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In her January, 2015, New York Times article Writing Your Way To Happiness, Tara-Parker Pope cites a plethora of research demonstrating that the act of writing can improve mood disorders, reduce depression, and even improve outcomes for cancer patients. Journaling is among the therapeutic writing strategies discussed, and journaling is a long-standing tool encouraged by…
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Deepak Chopra famously said: “When you blame and criticize others, you are avoiding some truth about yourself.” The tendency to focus on the flaws of others in order to deny scary or painful dimensions of the self comes up often in therapy. Sigmund Freud described this process as projective identification. Projective identification — often called…
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Family Systems theory is a school of psychology through which individual functioning is best understood in the context of their most intimate relationships. This “systemic” perspective emphasizes how each individual is shaped by the culture of their “family of origin”. (Family of Origin refers to the family in which we were raised.) The theory focuses…
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The mysteries of attraction and the selection of romantic partners are frequent focal points of discussion during individual therapy. If you have a pattern of choosing unsuitable or unavailable romantic partners, it is important to figure out why you are making substandard choices, especially if you want to experience more fulfilling relationships. It is also…
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