A Therapeutic Space for Individuals, Couples, and Families
Even healthy marriages go through periods of divorce, mostly of the emotional kind. Some couples, however, are on the road to the real thing. These couples have some special ingredients. Michelle and Howard were such a couple.
Understanding how and why couples go through divorce, even while staying married, helps us navigate that challenging period when it
“When did you lose your voice?”, I asked Paula. She said, “I know exactly when.” Paula didn’t realize that her depression had anything to do with her marriage. She thought she had a chemical imbalance. Until the therapy with the family, Paula didn’t even let herself know that she felt angry at being shut out by her self-assured husband. She had given up trying to get him to hear her, and her quiet despair and helplessness showed up as depression. As the therapy unearthed these patterns, she discovered her voice. Her mood lifted.
For the last thirty years ago a story has been built up about depression that it’s caused by a “chemical
When kids show signs of emotional or behavioral troubles they may be sent to a mental health professional who suggests that a “chemical imbalance” is the problem. Here’s what can happen when the family, not just the child, becomes the patient. The side-effects are good.
In his thoughtful Op-Ed from The New York Times, psychotherapist Avi Klein reflects on the men who come to him
Depression is not a straightforward problem; it typically doesn’t yield to straightforward solutions. Here Dave consults on a case of an elderly depressed woman. His seemingly crazy intervention brings surprising results. Enjoy.
In this post, Dave Keith reflects on how he came to understand psychosis as a symbolic expression, embedded in a person’s relationships and experiences. This offers an alternative, dynamic and life-affirming perspective on what is often considered the “destiny” of mental illness.
Anxiety is a common human emotion, one that we all experience at one point or other. Though most of us feel anxiety as a painful feeling that we want to “go away”, our anxiety in fact may be a helping us learn something important about ourselves.
Good physicians take a clinical history in the interest of arriving at a diagnosis. While the clinical history is a review of ‘facts’, there are in fact, few ‘facts’ about human experience. Different examiners will get different histories depending upon what they ask about. Different family members give different reports of the same set of events. In my view clinical histories are a form of fiction pretending to be ‘objective’.