When I was a new practitioner in the 1980's and 1990's, a mere child, things from my end were very different than they are now. In those days I was mostly practicing with CBT; I'm still practicing with CBT, actually. But, hopefully, better. But some amazing new approaches to treatment are on the table for younger clinicians. I often find myself wondering what graduate school is like for these new practitioners...and I wonder if I'd like to take some of those classes now... I find myself, now a new clinician again, running to catch up with the younger, more brilliant therapists that I know or read about on social media. Catching up on the new approaches, the new acronyms, the new knowledge, and the new treatment focus areas. These newer clinicians truly amaze me! I'm incredibly impressed with them. You'd think I'd be exhausted and frustrated; but I'm enthusiastic. Because I'm seeing the tremendous growth in our understanding of human behavior and in...

They steal your joy. They bring disapproval into your garden.  They dis you, your efforts, your children, your home, your needs, your experiences, your strength, your feelings, just expressing yourself. They bring cutting sarcasm, disrespect, minimizing important things, blaming, efforts to control you, and psychological attacks.  We know that at some level our penchant to care too much, our altruism, our sensitivity actually makes us a target to cruel, lying, betraying , or hurtful, small people.  What they don't expect is that moment when we stand up and say no more . They are shocked the moment we quietly close the door. They are in a state of disbelief the moment we trust ourselves, trust our instincts, and stop participating in their power game.  We are ready and on the move. We have found the gumption and the renewal. We pick up our own paintbrush and become the artist of ourselves, and we are the artwork. Let's make it personal. We are worth...

Let's begin with this, despite your inner narrative,  You are real and you deserve your successes .  I don't know why most of the human condition is the way that it is. I don't get it why we have to suffer and struggle with painful emotional issues and psychological disorders. It doesn't make sense that our own thoughts would fight us, work against us, undermine us.  Intellectual fraud, that's what imposter syndrome feels like. It's the sinking suspicion that you don't deserve your success, that others can see what a phony you are. It's the fundamental inability to accept your accomplishments. So why am I talking about this? I remember the day that I realized that I felt like an utter fake. I was in my late twenties and I was in a position of authority at work. I had an amazing reputation, a reputation that I had earned. But still I felt like a phony. It was weird. What I remember about those years, thirty years ago, is that I was working ...

I've been noticing something extremely common. People apologizing for just being . Sorry my purse is on the table. Sorry I brushed you when I passed you. Sorry for taking a moment of your time. Sorry for making a sound. Sorry for bothering you. Sorry I am a burden. Sorry for drawing our attention somehow. Sorry for disagreeing. Sorry for liking something different from you. Sorry, you probably are too busy to talk to me. Sorry, you probably don't want to really be my friend. Sorry for apologizing. Sorry for asking for the things that I want or need. Sorry for sitting here. Sorry for standing in your way. Sorry for forgetting. Sorry for remembering. Sorry for occupying this space. Sorry. Sorry. Some men apologize often. And women? Wow, we apologize ALOT. We apologize for our very presence sometimes. I'm here to tell you to PLEASE TAKE UP SPACE. Be there. Open your mirror and put on your lipstick. Chew your gum. Ask for a refill. Send back a cold meal. Tell...

  In my longing career, in my life, I've been fortunate to see tremendous growth and change in the field of mental health as we understand better. Some of the things that have changed dramatically over the past couple of decades include (but is not limited by) this list: our understanding of Trauma, our understanding of people on the Autism spectrum, our appreciation for and understanding of various gender identity and sexual identity, how to approach and treat people with several important diagnoses, our increasing understanding of our brain with trauma and with human behavior as a whole, the chemical agents in our brain: their absence and their presence, and how they affect us, and SO much more. It's exciting to me. But I'm older now. 😀  It's very, very hard for me to learn all of these new things. The information is amazingly available, but I'm struggling to read the material and to really remember and process it quickly. But with my effort, it IS happening for...

I was thinking about the years of my early to mid-twenties when it became clear to me that so many things that I thought I knew, in fact, I did not know. Furthermore, I was beginning to get an inkling of the vast, infinite amount of things that I hadn't even known that I didn't know.  It was incredibly eye opening and incredibly exciting to begin to appreciate that there is so much more to the world than I had ever considered before. Suddenly my world grew enormously small and enormously large at the same time.  In those moments of realizing that the number of things that you don't know that you don't know, several things begin to happen. First, something like Imposter Syndrome sets in, that niggling doubt that you are a fake in the world, that everyone know that you have no idea what you're doing,  that you're not as knowledgeable as you thought you were, or the fear that your inexperience will always be a detriment...  That part of the mind-expanding can feel ...

S o many of us work hard to improve our self-esteem and self-confidence and one of the common strategies for making improvements is to use affirmations. Affirmations are statements that we can use as a form of positive self-talk in order to get into the habit of substituting negative thoughts about ourselves to positive thoughts. You might be considering using affirmations for yourself or even for your child. If you were to pay attention to all of your thoughts in a given day and to count all of the negative things you say to yourself in a single twenty-four hour period, how many negative thoughts about yourself would you guess you say to yourself? Five? Fifty? Five hundred? Some studies estimate that we have over fifteen thousand thoughts in a given day and that, conservatively, over 75% of those thoughts are self-judging thoughts. That can be over eleven thousand negative thoughts in a single day! Think of that! Thousands of negative thoughts in a single day! We know that...