Here, There, Everywhere
I had a dream recently. In my dream I am sitting in my bedroom waiting for my next patient. No, I didn’t see patients in my bedroom until the pandemic started.
Holiday Connections
Many years ago, I volunteered for a suicide hotline. Although we were trained to take suicidal calls, callers in our four-hour shifts were not always at immediate risk of suicide.
DARKness IS SADness
An important part of a psychoanalytic treatment is discovery. How can you deal with a problem if it is out of your awareness or you have no words to describe it?
Comply or Die?
Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) helps patients change their realities by taking charge of overt and covert self-statements. For many years, I used CBT and other similar approaches in therapy.
Being There
It’s been a long day, but Mabel’s 87-year-old knobby hands grab mine with all the force she can muster, and I know that I’m right where I’m supposed to be.
Raising Her Voice
All of my life I have been a woman of faith. St. Francis De Sales says the purest form of prayer is the cry of the heart.
Learning from the Baby
I attended a workshop led by Beatrice Beebe, PhD, who does research on mother- infant interaction. I watched her videotapes of mothers and their infants, observing their facial expressions, vocal communications, and touch.
A Shift in Perspective
My husband and I set out on a chilly February morning to hike down the Grand Canyon. Ice was forming on the shadowed walls.
Touch
Tell me you have never walked by a marble column, a bronze sculpture, a mahogany desk or a stone fountain and not had the urge to reach out to touch it. Where did this impulse originate?
Moral Injury
Thousands of soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are re-entering civilian life with invisible wounds: some with post traumatic stress disorder from killing or witnessing death and dismembering injuries, but also with moral injuries, which may be hidden or medicated with alcohol and drugs, and which require different treatment approaches than fear based trauma.