Ideas Worth Remembering
Writing on psychotherapy, supervision, couples and family life, and the everyday work of staying well.
There is an easy assumption about self-knowledge: that knowing yourself makes you feel better. Understand your patterns and you will be calmer. See yourself clearly and you will be happier.
"Narcissist" has become a verdict. The theory behind it was built to do the opposite.
Mindfulness has become the one intervention we recommend without thinking. That should worry us.
Our field should say plainly what the hosts of Got Therapy? said this week: it is not one size fits all.
We tend to think of therapy in hours — the old 50-minute notion, sometimes 30 minutes. The hour is real. But the hour is not the therapy, and we should stop talking as if it were.
The profession adopted an outcome nobody argued for. It's time somebody argued against it.
We have built a profession that quietly rewards the wrong thing.
There's a moment in this episode where the conversation stops being about a movie and becomes about responsibility, and I've been turning it over since.
A conversation about self-esteem that quietly refuses to flatter you — and is more useful for it.
Two therapists set out to talk about happiness and ended up dismantling it — gently, and with a joke about a camera lens. What they built in its place is more useful.
Every Father's Day we hand out the same compliments: steady, strong, reliable, the rock. My co-host Dan Rose and I spent an episode on fatherhood, and we came away convinced the profession should be more careful about which of…
It is easy to treat avoidance as one coping style among many. On the latest Got Therapy?, Dr. Dan Rose put it more bluntly, and I think he was right to.