When Do I Need to See Someone about My Anxiety? 4 Questions to Ask Yourself
You’re anxious. You have been dealing with anxiety for a long time and you are starting to wonder whether you need to talk to a counselor about what you are experiencing. You feel that talking to a counselor would help, but you don’t want to blow your issue out of proportion. You don’t want to seem weak or incapable of handling your own business, but this is really bothering you. How do you know when it’s time...
Banishing Failure by Changing Your Perception
A world full of black and white with no grays would be a simpler world. Take math, for instance. There really are no gray areas with math. Math is like reality television. Some people love it. Most people disdain it. Everyone sort of tolerates its existence and understands its place in society. Math is black-and-white, right or wrong. Nearly every equation has one answer — of all the number (and sometimes letter) combinations in the world, there is one right answer. Just one. You are either right or wrong.
Life is not pass/fail...
What’s Your Name?
When people heard my name they thought of wasted potential, and a person who wouldn’t do one ounce more than was necessary to just barely scrape by. Then I had my aha moment, my Damascus road experience. I had a thought, an insight that set me on the path to forever changing who I was...
How Mental Health Is Like Pulling Weeds
Yard work has ben one of the banes of my existence, and this was especially true when I was young. I hated yard work so much that I would rather have had dental work done in a back alley van than work in the yard...
You May Need to Rethink Medication for ADHD
Let me start by saying that the decision to give medication to a child always rests with the parent. If a parent feels uncomfortable about medication, they should not be shamed or coerced into feeling differently. That being said, there is a lot of misinformation and misguided notions out there on not only ADHD medication, but the disease itself...
The Reason Children Misbehave
You and I are adults; we talk like adults, use deductive reasoning, think about consequences for our actions, and make informed decisions based on facts (most of the time). Adults aren’t always wonderfully smart, though. We can, and often do, fall prey to the “little adult syndrome” when dealing with children, especially when they’re misbehaving...
4 Things a Child Therapist Thinks Every Parent Should Know
Children’s behavior can seem disordered when it’s really normal. To find the difference between normal and abnormal, a child therapist will ask: Are these behaviors normal? Could they be a response to the environment? Does this child have a true mental health condition...
The Most Powerful Question You Will Ever Be Asked
I am a therapist. My job is to talk to people and help them to solve their problems. Throughout the course of therapy I ask clients many, many questions...
Why You Should Let Bad Things Happen to Your Kids
This is just a symptom of a greater problem I see in a lot of families I work with: We are creating a culture of children and teens who cannot solve their own problems. And I’ll be the first to raise my hand and say I’m guilty of this as well...
Be More Careful with Your Language
I tend to be a little over the top in my criticism of people’s mistaken language and grammar. I am by no means perfect when it comes to these areas, but there are some errors that cause me to want to smack people. (Not in a violent way, but more in a, “I’m taking my glove off and slapping you across the face with it to show you how stupid you are” sort of way.)...
One Way to Lose Weight: The Do More Good Principle
One of the interesting things about losing a lot of weight is that everyone wants to know your secret. It is as if there were some magic potion that only a select few know about...
5 Marriage Rules from a Therapist
Everyone is a product of his or her upbringing. We all bring “family rules” into relationships, and most of the time we don’t even realize it. How did your family handle stress? Was money discussed with the children? How were children disciplined? Did the family eat every meal at the dinner table? Who handled the money in the house...
5 Crucial Things Parents Tend to Forget
Being a parent is hard. It’s the most difficult setting on the most difficult game you have ever played. The only way to succeed is to get in there, get your hands dirty, and be willing to learn...
On being a ‘successful’ therapist
The other day I was asked to speak with the members of the board at the agency I work for about what it is like to be a child therapist, what my day is like and things like that. “Just tell one of your success stories,” I was advised. “No problem,” I thought to myself. “This will be easy.” So I began thinking … thinking … thinking. After about 10 minutes, I was feeling pretty down because I could not think of a single “success” story. All kinds of questions were running through my mind at once, and I was having some difficulty sorting them all out: Do I suck at my job? What’s wrong with me? Am I too hard on myself...
Do you have diagnosisitis?
Diagnosisitis. Or, as it’s more commonly known, overpathologizing — an affliction that affects many counselors both seasoned and new. People most often come to counselors because they have a problem and need help. As counselors, whenever someone comes to see us, we flip the switch and turn on the counselor brain...
