What Lies in the Shadow

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What Lies in the Shadow

Clients offer a lot of reasons for coming to therapy, but at the bottom of all of them is this: it’s hard to be yourself.  The world we live in can seem like a dangerous place, and there are plenty of forces out there that want you to be just a piece of yourself, or something you’re not at all.  And though many of us were lucky to be told to just be ourselves when we were young, many people have a difficult time letting that lesson really sink in.  The truth is, we’re all made up of disparate internal elements; our personalities are complex...

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To Be Righteous and Selfish

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To Be Righteous and Selfish

Earlier today I was talking to my roommate, and he seemed like he was in a rough spot.  His cat was missing, his job was up in the air, and, most present, he was desperate for sleep.  I told him to get some rest, take care of himself; we’d talk later.  It was a funny sort of thing to say, considering the morning I’d had.  I was just coming home from seeing my own therapist, to whom I’d whined gloriously and had my expectations for what reality owed me properly reset.  My advice to my roommate, as is so often the case with advice, was the sort of thing that I needed to say to myself instead.  But it begs the question: how does a person take care of themself?

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What it Means to be Free

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What it Means to be Free

When I was 13, I requested that my parents sign me up with a therapist.  Being 13, I probably actually said psychiatrist on account of not knowing any better, but my folks made a wise choice and found me someone who was more interested in talking than prescribing.  That being said, now that I work with that age group, I can see that this is not as rare a request for a teen to make as I had always assumed.  A lot of my clients are brought to me by baffled parents who don’t know quite why their kids want to talk to a professional.  And when I meet with those teens who ask for a therapist, the reason is often the same: angst...

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The Walking Cure

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The Walking Cure

I remember taking a walk with a fairly new teenage client this winter, trudging aimlessly through the snow.  The walk had been his idea, and I’d had to convince him to wear shoes for it.  Once we got moving, conversation flowed in fits and spurts.  We would talk while we walked, then quiet down to take in some natural splendor, then listen to the crunch of the snow under our boots as we made our little track across the snowy field.  Properly bundled for the cold, it proved to be exceedingly pleasant to stretch our legs while we meandered through a conversation about fantasy novels, school bullies, and the thousand adult decisions required in the proper navigation of middle school life...

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Crossing Boundaries

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Crossing Boundaries

People talk about boundaries quite a lot these days - holding boundaries, crossing boundaries, clarifying boundaries, etc.  And the expectation when you hear a word like boundary is quite punitive - what happens when they get crossed?  A situation that I see often with clients is that one person will be furious that their boundaries have not been respected while the other person doesn’t really understand what is meant by a boundary to begin with, let alone how they disrespected it.  To be sure, the topic of boundaries is a tricky one in any relationship, and is even more difficult to navigate between parents and children...

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