On staying with hard feelings
I've been thinking about how we teach kids to move past discomfort too quickly. A parent told me last week that her daughter was upset about a friendship, and her first instinct was to problem-solve it away.
Read More →Writing
Essays and reflections on therapy, parenting, and the work of being human.
What I tell parents about screen time
Here's what I actually say when parents ask me about screens: It's less about the time and more about what else isn't happening. It's about noticing when we reach for distraction.
Read More →The thing about therapy no one mentions
Most people come to therapy wanting to feel better. And they will. But first, they usually feel worse. Not because therapy isn't working, but because it is.
Read More →On being the steady one
I work with a lot of people who were the steady ones in their families. The ones who learned early to manage everyone else's emotions. They're often surprised to discover they have needs too.
Read More →Why I don't give advice
People are sometimes surprised when I don't tell them what to do. But advice is cheap. What's harder—and more valuable—is helping someone figure out what they already know.
Read More →The stories we tell about our childhoods
I've noticed that people have a go-to story about their childhood. Usually it's a few sentences, polished from repetition. In therapy, we start to look under that story.
Read More →On rupture and repair
Here's what I tell parents: You will mess up. You'll say the wrong thing, lose your patience, misread a moment. The goal isn't perfection. The goal is coming back.
Read More →What makes a feeling "too much"
I hear this phrase often: "I'm being too much." Usually from people who were told, in one way or another, that their feelings were inconvenient. That their needs were burdensome.
Read More →The work of grieving
Grief isn't just about death. It's about all the ways we lose things: relationships, versions of ourselves, futures we imagined. And it doesn't follow a timeline.
Read More →On knowing yourself
Self-knowledge sounds simple. But most of us have spent years learning not to know ourselves. Learning to ignore signals, override instincts, minimize needs.
Read More →What therapy can't fix
Therapy won't make your life easy. It won't eliminate struggle or guarantee happiness. What it can do is help you relate to difficulty differently.
Read More →The pause between stimulus and response
Viktor Frankl wrote about the space between stimulus and response. That's where our power lives. That's where we get to choose. Most of my work is helping people find that pause.
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