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Building Better Boundaries
By David Sternberg, LICSW
Recently, several women in their 20s have come to see me because of their troubling relationships with their mothers. These young women are smart, ambitious, and otherwise successful in their careers and intimate relationships. But when it comes to their mothers, they haven’t developed the skills necessary to maintain healthy boundaries and enter therapy depressed, anxious, or sometimes both.
Relationship Therapy Group
By Marci Steinberg, LCSW
Many people don’t realize that the ability to be a partner in a quality romantic relationship is based on healthy relationship skills that are learned, rather than something we are born with. Group Therapy is an excellent opportunity for people to experience themselves and others as they currently are in their relationships--and to learn to respond at a level that is productive rather than destructive.
Respectfully Wield Personal Power
By Jonathan Goodman-Herrick, CSW
To meet the remarkable challenge of being in a couple relationship, it is essential to respectfully wield a significant amount of personal power. Personal power is the strength and self-validation to freely and fully assert, when it is appropriate, our own needs and feelings. It is the capacity to take authority, to lead and to influence, to give voice to ourselves, to speak or act on our own truth.
Secrets to Running a Profitable Family Business
By Kathy J. Marshack, Ph.D.
Although it is a lot work to maintain a healthy personal relationship among the busy-ness of entrepreneurial life, the methods of doing so are simple. Successful entrepreneurial couples already know these secrets. Now it’s your turn to cash in on what they know!
The Empty Nest
By Stanley E. Hibbs, Ph.D.
With our younger son off to college, my wife and I have entered the phase called the “empty nest.” I don’t know who invented that phrase, but I don’t much care for it. “Empty” implies that “there’s no one there.” Actually, there are two healthy, happy, positive-thinking adults in the “nest” who are looking forward to new adventures. There’s nothing “empty” about our nest.
Why Women Have Trouble With Self-Confidence...
By Colette Dowling, LMSW
Women actually learn low self-confidence; they're trained for it. Studies show that girls--especially smarter ones--have severe problems with self-confidence. They consistently underestimate their own ability.
Start “Wanting” Yourself
By David Sternberg, LICSW
After so many years of hearing from others what we should do and say (and shouldn’t do and say), many of us are now experts at "shoulding" ourselves. When making a decision, most of us respond with the automatic “should” so often that we don’t even consider our own needs.
Create a Better Work-Life Balance and Enjoy a Happier Life (1.)
By Patricia Walker, Ph.D.
An important part of a building a happy life is creating a balance among work, personal and family needs that will allow you to pursue your dreams, achieve your goals, and enhance your physical and emotional well-being. The right balance will be different for each person. However, finding and maintaining the balance that suits you best is not always a straightforward process.
Finding True Love
By Jim Weinstein, MBA, MFT
The successful quest for love frequently involves a rigorous honesty with ourselves, an honesty that will provide an in-depth answer to the question: "what will make me really happy," rather than simply "what do I want." Unfortunately, it is often the case that what we want will not really make us happy.
Have More Satisfying Relationships With Yourself and Others
By Susan Pazak, Ph.D.
Improving relationships will improve your quality of life! At one time or another we have allowed our dissatisfaction with ourselves or others to make or break our day.
Your Real Family
By Michelle Gottlieb, MFT
Family is not, necessarily, those people that you are related to biologically or legally. Family, according to my definition, consists of those people who are supportive, nurturing and accepting of you. Family is made up of the people that you go to when you have a problem and who will always help you. Family is comprised of the people that you would support no matter what is happening in your life.
An Introduction to Goal-Directed Therapy: Therapy With An End In Sight
By Thelma Golub, MFT
In Goal-Directed Therapy, you do not spend endless and expensive weeks, months, and years rehashing your dysfunctional childhood, pointing blame at other people, or complaining about the terrible hand life has dealt you. While these issues may legitimately arise in the course of the therapeutic process, they are not the focus of Goal-Directed Therapy.
Saying "Yes" to Life!
By Michelle Gottlieb, MFT
How often has the fear that we may get hurt stopped us from trying something new or reaching out to another human. Yes, we may get hurt, but we can learn from that, too. If we never try anything new, we will never grow.
Do You Really Know How to Communicate?
By Mary Ann Massey, Ed.D.
No doubt, if you're male, your female partners, friends, and/or spouse have accused you of not listening to them well. If you're female, your male partners, friends, and/or spouse have probably asked you to spare them the details and get to the point...All of us can call to mind exchanges that got out of hand--and want to know why!
Dealing with Criticism
By Stanley E. Hibbs, Ph.D.
Most of us don’t respond well to criticism. We deny, defend, whine, sulk, and/or counterattack. This may feel good in the short term, but it rarely helps in the long term. The criticism escalates, feelings are hurt, and important relationships are damaged.
What Should I Do?
By Michelle Gottlieb, Psy.D., MFT
It is a very difficult, but very important task to differentiate between fear of commitment versus really not loving someone. One of things you need to ask yourself is if you have ever been able to create a truly emotional intimate relationship with anyone or not.
Dealing with Empty Nest Syndrome
By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick & including an interview with Lana Ackaway
Just when you feel you've perfected parenting for all stages of childhood, from infancy through the teen years, you’ll find yourself without an audience. How you handle your empty nest, once you become a parent of grown children, will depend on how well you prepared yourself and your children for that newest stage of your family's life.
What is Real Love?
By Colette Dowling, LMSW
True love is not only hard to find, it’s also hard to tolerate. All of us have been wounded in some way, either by early love relationships or later ones. Naturally, we create defenses to avoid getting hurt again - but we also maintain defenses against love itself. Why?
Reality Online Dating--Tips for Smart Surfing
By Pamela Smale Williams, LPC, LMFT, AAMFT
There are advantages to online dating, such as the ability to be able to chat back and forth before taking the leap of meeting in person. There is also the added benefit of getting to see what someone looks like. No longer do you have to be shocked or taken aback when your blind date shows up that first time!
Nurture the Friendship in Your Marriage
By Nancy Gump, LMFT
Creating and sustaining friendship and shared meaning are the primary necessities for a strong marital foundation. Inevitably, every relationship has some areas of perpetual conflict. Couples become stronger if they learn to build on their friendship, and to distinguish between their solvable and unsolvable problems.
Turn the Great Wheel Of Change
By Jonathan Goodman-Herrick, CSW
There is only one place where we can dependably turn around a primary relationship. It is not in our partner. It is not in our relationship as a whole. Even our character and behavior are not the place to begin. The only place to dependably turn a relationship around is in our own heart.
Healthy Families
By Michelle Gottlieb, MFCC
One of the most important components of a healthy society is a healthy family. But what are the components of a healthy family? Several things go into creating a family relatively free of dysfunction.
Chance Encounters
By Dr. Bradley Olson
The events of that day so long ago which I thought to be miraculous were not, and the seemingly everyday, conversational leave-takings of my family, which I naively believed to be merely ordinary, were truly extraordinary. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of my grandmother or her legacy and in some way or another, however briefly, I miss her with all the conviction a 10-year-old heart can conjure…
Heart to Heart
By Lana M. Ackaway, LCSW-R, NCPsyAv, CASAC
I like to help others manage and resolve difficulties of the heart - love, loss, and work during significant life changes/transitions; for example, career change, death/illness in family, early "recovery," relapse with addiction(s), divorce, new marriage, new success, etc. As a first step in this process I help you identify your issues via your participation in a specialized two-session personal "Heart To Heart Checkup."
Meantime Girl
By Michelle Gottlieb, Psy.D., MFT
If you cannot talk with your partner about your relationship, then it is not very healthy. Stop and ask yourself if the guy you are dating know has any meaning in your life. If he is just a playmate, that is fine, but be honest and do not get upset if he won’t act as if you are the love of his life.
Tangos Of Debt Accumulation
By Mitchell Milch, LCSW
Every couple dances in complementary ways. Some of these dances are healthier than others, but all, notwithstanding denials and protests to the contrary, are mutually gratifying on some level. When it involves a pattern of debt accumulation, it may look like one partner is the aggressive culprit and the other is the helpless victim--but don’t be so sure. The two "dancers" likely have deeply personal agendas perpetuating their shared tango of debt accumulation.
Stop and Smell the Roses
By Jill MacDonald, MA, LPC
We have all heard this expression many times in our lives. As we grow older, we come to appreciate this more and more. We begin (hopefully) to see how precious our lives are and how brief. However, during the years of parenting our young children, we often forget to “stop and smell the roses.”
Nobody’s Perfect
By David Sternberg, LICSW
We may be in a good relationship and/or have a rewarding job. But when our reality doesn’t match our idealized notions of what a job or a mate is supposed to be, not only are we disappointed, we often become depressed, angry and resentful. We feel as if we have failed in some deep and meaningful way.
Do You Become A Vending Machine When Your Buttons Are Pushed?
By Mitchell Milch, CSW
We all fall prey to moments when adult self restraint goes out the window in retaliation for being "the good victim." Still, it’s no accident that if we are likely to "lose it" on a regular basis we probably have found partners that have a mutual need to accommodate us because they too either "lose it" frequently or also have vested interests in being victims.
Marriage, Communication, Sex
By Dr. Frank Papandrea
Being intimate in relationships requires health in three areas - emotionally, mentally and physically. While effective communication is the primary vehicle of intimacy, it too often remains the number one absent portion of the relationship quota.
Boundary Issues
By Jane Adams, Ph.D.
Boundaries are key to how we deal with intimacy, loneliness, conflict, anxiety, stress and challenges at every stage of life. Problems with interpersonal boundaries are frequently at the root of relationship difficulties – between parents and children, spouses, partners, friends, and professional colleagues.
Feminism and Psychotherapy
By Susan M. Axtell, Psy.D.
In many ways psychotherapy and feminism seem like they should go hand in hand. Both are about empowerment, self-understanding, and health. Both deal with the negative effects of (patriarchal) society on the psychology of women and men.
Changing Your Reality
By Jim Weinstein, MBA, MFT
The phrases "face up to reality," "in reality," "up against reality," "reality check," and "virtual reality" all convey a meaning of reality as a state that is true and factual. In fact, reality to a great degree depends on the very personal perspective through which it is experienced. This article attempts to illustrate this premise and demonstrate how it can be used to significantly advance your personal happiness.
The Most Important Step to Overcoming Rejection
By Claire Arene, MSW, LCSW
The ability to subvert the harmful, long lasting effects of being rejected depends on your ability to understand the behavior of the individual who rejects, the way you choose to interpret the messages conveyed by rejection, and how you choose to integrate those messages into your sense of self.
Are You in an Unhealthy Relationship?
By Claire Arene, MSW, LCSW
The longer an unhealthy relationship continues, the more damaging it becomes and the more difficult it can be to engage in a healthy relationship in which there is genuine love and acceptance. We all have a responsibility to safeguard our emotional and mental wellbeing in pretty much the same way we safeguard our physical health.
Does He (Or Does She) Really Like Me?
By Michelle Gottlieb, MFCC
Lately I have had several people ask me how to tell if the person that they are dating likes them--really likes them. I have also been asked how to work it to get someone interested. Now, the first question sounds like mind-reading, which I have never figured out how to do. The second sounds like manipulation, which I am very much opposed to...
Basic Stroke Information
Brain cells die when they no longer receive oxygen and nutrients from the blood or when they are damaged by sudden bleeding into or around the brain. These damaged cells can linger in a compromised state for several hours. With timely treatment, these cells can be saved.
Headed Toward Love?
By Michelle Gottlieb, MFT
I recently had someone write me to ask how she could tell if someone really loved her or if he was just using her. Now, according to the old song, "it's in his kiss"--but I am not sure if the is the best way.
Family Therapy with Families Facing Catastrophic Illness--Building Internal and External Resources
By Ellen Pulleyblank Coffey, Ph.D.
When crises become the norm of life, durational time sets in. This is time without past or future and with a recurring experience of a disturbing present that is difficult to organize, express or forget...Often we and the people around us expect our grief to last for a prescribed length of time. Depending on the level of stress during an illness, this experience can last for much longer than we would expect.
Remembering Fabulous Frank
By Janis Jennings, Ph.D.
Childhood memories of how we interacted with our parents and grandparents continue, at some level, to inform us about the bittersweet complexities of families. Whether our early experiences were loving and nurturing, hurtful and perplexing, or something in the middle, they influence what we either want or don’t want in our present day relationships.
Getting a Loved One to Change
By Jim Weinstein, MBA, MFT
The truth is that people are rarely unaware of the negative consequences of their behavior. It's far more likely that either they see no alternative to that behavior, or that they're using it to cover up/compensate for feelings of fear, shame, guilt, anger, or jealousy. Therefore, a lecture (no matter how well-intentioned or gently delivered) is unlikely to help them to change.
Leaving Home
By Sally Frances, MA, LCSW
The developmental task of leaving home not only comes into play for adolescents who are contemplating their physical leave-taking in order to go to college or move into their own place after graduation, but also for older people who left home long ago and who now have families of their own. For these individuals, too, "leaving home" can become an important issue to work on in therapy.
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