Therapeutic Psychiatrist: What Do I Think I Am Doing?
Dave offers his reflections about what it’s like to be a psychiatrist disguised as a family therapist. Hint: The language is different, and no medications required
Tag: family therapy
How To Help A Self-Destructive Teenager
Teenage “cutting”: Teenagers are often seen in individual therapy for the self-mutilating behavior called “cutting.” Here’s a family therapy approach that stopped the cutting by revealing what was behind her apparent self-destructive behavior.
From A Child’s Perspective: Are My Parents Going To Be OK?
The modern Child Psychiatry perspective is limited to focusing on the child, without including the family culture in which that child lives. This narrow understanding contributes to the child’s isolation. That little person is usually worried about, and trying to help, the parents. No matter how it appears.
What Parents Worry About
To be a parent is to know worry. There’s no escaping it, and there’s really no cure for it. As my blogging buddy David Keith says, “If you can’t stand guilt don’t become a parent.”
A Hidden Truth: Kids Worry About Their Parents
Kids instinctively “worry”, that is, feel responsible for their families. Don’t forget that. Children worry about their families. They are trying to help the parents become not only better parents but better people. But their therapeutic methods get diagnosed as mental illness.
A Daughter With Chronic Illness Learns To Love Herself
When family dysfunction meets disease: How a therapy session transformed family patterns and helped a young woman improve her self-care.
“Chemical Imbalance”: The Seduction of Certainty
Part of the appeal of the “chemical imbalance” metaphor is that it people don’t have to feel ‘guilty” about their depression, or problems with their kids. But it can keep both patients and therapists from getting to the all-important bottom of things.
The Problem With Simple Formulas in Mental Health
The logic of “chemical imbalance” persuades both patients and practitioners that context and subjective experience are not important. But that logic interferes with the understanding the person’s pain, and what it’s made of.
Parallel Play As A Model For Therapeutic Conversation
Dave: Parallel playing is akin to writing poetry, fragments, often disparate, are blended into a collage-like whole. In a real
THE “DUMBING DOWN” OF OUR CULTURE AND OTHER EVENTS
Lack of curiosity is a dangerous thing–in medicine, therapy, culture. Trump’s manner of speaking certainly promotes “not knowing what you don’t want to know”. He is a disturbing model for over-simplified explanations and sneering at complexity or any level of sophistication or subtlety.