Over the last several months a theme has arisen with many of my clients: they are afraid to take up space. As cisgendered women, we discuss how we have been socialized to take up less space. We sit with our arms crossed and legs close together on a bus, or even worse, in my office....
Joe Purdy sings a very powerful song entitled “isn’t love”. The singer is singing about all of the ways in which he is so pained, betrayed, and broken in so many different ways by the person he supposedly loves. And then over and over again he repeats, after poetically explaining his anguish, “…and I hope...
If you know me or have been following my blog, you know I’m pretty open about my past struggles. I am quick to disclose snippets of my history, because a) it makes me authentic and b) I no longer let those experiences define me. By externalizing them, I gain control of them. As Brene Brown...
Yesterday I was in a session with a client who was very upset over reactions she’s received over a recent tattoo. My client, who has several tattoos, showed her most recent tattoo to several people in her life. All of them, she reported with tears in her eyes, judged her newest work. Reactions varied from...
Every year, like clockwork, the stress-inducing holidays arrive. When I sit down with my clients to delve deeply into what exactly is so stressful, I find a common theme: many of these families—or at least small dynamics between family members—have poor boundaries. These poor boundaries awaken the vulnerabilities and frustrations within each of us. Mom...
For anyone who knows me, I am pretty difficult to offend. I am an open book, and you can ask me anything. And, I’ll take it one step further; not only can you ask me anything, but I will answer honestly, probably in much more depth than you ever expected, anticipated or even wanted. Despite...
Occasionally, I find clients who contact me stating, off the bat, that they are looking for a therapist because they have no one in their life that will listen to them…so they’ve succumbed to paying someone to do so. Although I want to dive immediately into challenging this perspective, and exploring this phenomenon with them,...
As I sit here, preparing to write my first blog, I think about how ironic it is that social media provides me with such a sense of (false) comfort and security. Every day I see stories on the news about teens, for example, who take a racy picture of themselves, text it to a romantic...
