You know that feeling when you want someone close—but the moment they actually get close, something inside you recoils.
Or maybe you feel safer on your own—until the space around you gets so quiet it starts […]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the dynamics of giving vs receiving, as well tensions between the need to express ourselves outwards vs. needing to retreat inwards. Sometimes we long to put ourselves out there and other times we yearn to take things in or sit with what’s inside.
Many of us take the idea of love for granted. We think we want it (love, that is). We try to get it. We imagine the form we want it in, and we imagine how happy we’d be if only we could find another to meet our […]
When I read this poignant account of the author’s experiences with her psychoanalyst, I knew I wanted to post it as a guest post on my blog! I’m grateful to the author for allowing me to do so and hope you will enjoy this as […]
Conflicts and anxieties about rivalry and competitiveness
Are you a perfectionist? Competitive? Afraid of what people would think if they saw or knew the “real” you?
You may be more anxious and/or conflicted than you know!
Symptoms of anxiety such as
Healing from therapy trauma:
Most therapists are good people who are competent, kind, ethical, and qualified when it comes to helping people with mental health or relationship struggles. Licensing and ethics boards also exist to help protect clients from being harmed by therapy.
But therapists are […]
What psychoanalysis has taught us about transference, and some thoughts on transference at the beginning of therapy:
A lot of clients come to therapy with already activated transferences- transferences to the therapy setting; to the actual therapist; or to the idea of therapy.
Transference, loosely defined, refers to […]
When I was growing up my teachers used to say: two wrongs don’t make a right.
Annoying and clichéd at the time, little did I know just how often I would need these very words in my work as a therapist.
In the couples I work with, one of […]
Getting Past Anxiety: A Formula that Works
Do you worry all the time? Are you a ball of stress? Do you struggle with perfectionism, panic, or simply overthinking things?
Anxiety is no fun, but lots of people wait until things get really bad to get help.
If you struggle with […]
Are you hiding from the world, or desperate to be noticed?
A psychoanalyst I know recently told me that people only feel the need to show off that which they have had to hide.
Since so many of my patients struggle with shame over showing the world […]
