Using Softened Startup in Conflict Discussions
Dirty Dishes in the Sink, Smelly Socks on the Floor Sometimes the things that drive us most crazy in a marriage are the ...
Anxiety Knows No Age Limits: Each moment is all we really ever have
We all get anxious from time to time. Even mild panic that’s morphed from mere anxiety is normal. Most often, though, ...
Working with Emotions: How mindfulness and awareness help
Bringing the hidden to light is an important part of psychotherapy, sometimes achieved through focus on intellectual ...
How to Be Sad
There's a plethora of information about happiness. My literature search on this subject yielded over 13,000 scholarly ...
Psychologists Need Self-Care Too
Who Helps the Helper? Self-care and Professional Ethics Most psychologists get into this profession because ...
How to Keep Your Marriage Healthy While Coping with Chronic Illness
Most marriages will be confronted with challenges. How we cope, make meaning from, and find benefit in challenges ...
Suffering, Compassion, and a Skate Ramp
Last summer my neighbor’s son built a huge skate ramp right next to our property line. (We’re on different ...
Waking up on the Grumpy Side of the Bed: Coping with difficult moods
“Yesterday all day a small gardenia was a great consolation.” Thomas Merton A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily ...
Remaking Love: When did you stop dancing?
Taking Down the Walls to Intimacy Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all ...
Look Into My Eyes: The crucial role of eye contact in relationships
People are innately attracted to faces, especially eyes. The human face is associated with our identity; we are ...
The Elusive Muse: Reclaiming creativity and focus
For three months, I’ve resisted writing. I sat at my desk or the kitchen table—my favorite place to write—to compose an ...
Facebook’s False Face: Comparing our insides to other people’s outsides
Guidelines for Kindness When Posting We seldom deliberately present a bad face on social media. Selfie stick in hand, ...
Implacable Grandeur: Mindfulness and Change
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life ...
Accepting Life’s Turbulence: Fasten Your Seatbelt
This dramatic cumulonimbus was captured at 37,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Pilots know to avoid going ...
Psychotherapy: A Safe and Sheltered Space
One size does not fit all when it comes to finding a good therapist. Many variables influence the extent to which people ...
Learning to Notice What is Already There: The Rose Itself
Behavior therapists have long used a technique to distract clients from their difficult thoughts. The client wears a ...
Marriage and Parenting: Balancing everyone’s needs
Work-life Balance -- Making Time for Yourself When I was born, my father’s colleagues congratulated him with the ...
Maintaining Composure as a Parent and Householder
Maintaining a graceful composure when performing life’s demanding household and child-raising chores can take a toll, ...
Better Sex through Non-Sexual Touching
Two people rarely have the exact same sex drive. One person might be happy with daily sex, another with monthly. Besides ...
Parenting: Playing the Hand You’re Dealt
As parents, most of us make terrible fortune-tellers. When my daughter Eileen was a first-grader, she was sent to the ...
We Fear What We Cannot Control: Acknowledging Pain and Suffering
The German airplane crash by a suicidal pilot, the Florida shootings, the Boston bombings. Every week, we read about ...
Psychotherapy, Love, and Healing
Nothing is more natural than the urge to be held and comforted by someone who understands our suffering. ...
“I’d be better off single”: Distress-maintaining thinking
How may times have you gone to bed thinking that you hate your partner, fantasizing how you would live on your own? Your ...
Standing Behind the Waterfall: Learning to Change Distorted Thinking with Mindfulness
Thoughts are not facts. When we’re upset, our thoughts seem valid—yet it’s exactly when our emotions get stirred up that ...
Building and Keeping a Strong Relationship After Having Kids
Marital conflict is bad for kids. While every marriage has conflict, especially after the first baby, persistent ...
The Effect of Having Kids on a Marriage
Marriage is Strained After Having Children Being a parent is hard. But being a parent is really hard on a marriage. ...
Meditations on Humpback Whales: Mindfulness of Sights and Sounds
On a recent trip to Africa, I climb the bluff from which, I’d been told, I could see whales breaching. I have the strand ...
The Church of the Backyard: Finding Comfort in Nature
For many years I have met with a group of women one Friday morning a month. Around our kitchen tables, we light a ...
The New Year, Rebirth, and Obstacles
By the third or fourth week of January, many of us are reevaluating our lives. We’ve either made resolutions ...
Every Ornament Tells a Story: Coping with Holiday Stress
Two weeks into December, and I had no holiday spirit. I had no desire to decorate or to do what I have done for the last ...
Procrastination: Scratching Items off the Mental To-Do List
A lot of our stress comes from holding our undone tasks in mind; the more we have, the more they weigh upon us. ...
Chronic Pain: Talking About Pain
Treating pain is difficult for several reasons. Narcotic painkillers bring with them addiction and other problems, but ...
The Present Moment and Transformation
Research reported in the respected journal Science, in an article titled “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged ...
Happiness and Pleasure Born of Reverie and Reflection
When I was little and living in lush, sweaty Georgia, my mother would take me and my brother out to the lawn and we’d ...
How Wisdom Emerges from Body-Scan Meditation
Mindfulness Meditation: Using the Body Scan as a Focus Body-scan meditation focuses deliberate attention ...
How to Survive a Rip Current of the Mind When Practicing Mindfulness Meditation
Ruminations and Worry Make Meditation and CBT Difficult Recently during a visit to Hawaii, I read a pamphlet on ocean ...
A Lesson In Mindfulness: Blackberry Picking
Being mindful when doing daily tasks is a lesson in informal meditation practice. The Great Irish Poet Seamus Heaney ...
Alternative & Complementary Treatment for Emotional and Physical Health
With changes in health care following the Affordable Care Act, providers will soon emphasize health promotion over ...
Depressed, anxious, or both? Part Two
Depression is a Treatable Illness According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 17 million adult ...
How Anger Hurts Relationships
Getting angry...is easy and everyone can do it; but doing it . . . in the right amount, at the right time, and for the ...
Being Playful Gives Freedom from the Restrictions we Put on Ourselves
Gerald Heard visited Georgia O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch in 1937. He had an interest in Eastern religions and metaphysics. ...
140 Characters or Less: The Three-Sentence Rule in Communication
Couples frequently come to therapy complaining of communication problems. Conflicts don’t get resolved. ...
How Mindfulness Can Reduce Stress
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction In 1979, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University ...
Powering off to reboot your internal drive
When your iPad or smartphone is having issues—unresponsive, randomly crashing, or just running sluggishly—it’s time to ...
ADHD Medications in Childhood: Dependency and Addiction in Adulthood
ADHD Medications in Childhood: A Cautionary Tale The NY Times article ‘Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions’ was all ...
Mindfulness in Everyday Life: Letting Everything Become Your Teacher
Sometimes we can’t ignore external signals to be mindful. My puppy is a reminder. When I am absorbed in a task, usually ...
The College Transition: Things to Talk About
College is a rite of passage, a transition into adulthood. It’s a transition for parents, too, who can no longer ...
Educational Engagement : Learning to Learn
Red Brick, Ivy, and Spiderwebs: Learning to Engage I spent my first two years as an undergraduate at a red-brick ...
Learning to Stay Calm During Difficult Discussions
By the time couples come to couples therapy they have a built up a lot of tension around recurring problems. For ...
Summer Travels and Travails: Tips for Stress-free Vacations
Tips for Making Summer Vacations Stress-Proof: or at least stress-resistant By now, most of us have either ...
Strains of Summer on Family Life
School is out. Swim season is in full swing. From my home, I hear the loud speaker blasting ...
Chronic Pain and Narcotics
A Behavioral Approach to Treating Chronic Pain and Medical Problems In the June 2 edition of The New York Times, the ...
Appreciating the Absence of Pain
You don’t appreciate not having a toothache until you have a toothache. Sitting in the endodontist's ...
Empty Nest, Work-Life Balance, and Political Action
Anticipating an empty nest, I decided to join the Contra Costa Psychological Association’s Board of Directors. My ...
Psychotherapy and Change
I officially started my tenure as President of our association on January 1, but the gavel was passed at our annual ...
