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.
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.
A conversation about self-esteem that quietly refuses to flatter you — and is more useful for it.
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.
On the latest Got Therapy?, I described the work of explaining a complex idea to someone without the background as having to "step down." Dr. Dan Rose caught it immediately: "saying step down already generates the potential for…
On the latest Got Therapy?, I read Dr. Dan Rose a standard definition of emotional intelligence: a capacity to be aware of, control, or express one's emotions. He stopped me at one word. "The word control, I like concepts like…
On the latest Got Therapy?, I asked Dr. Dan Rose something our profession doesn't ask itself often enough: having all this knowledge about psychology, what do you actually do to take care of yourself?
On the latest Got Therapy?, Dr. Dan Rose opened with a line from Wilfred Bion: the goal "is not to end suffering But to get better at it." I pushed back. I said I was fine with just the happiness part. By the end of the hour, I'd…
On the latest Got Therapy?, I said something I believe more the longer I think about it: music is "almost a therapeutic ingredient." Dr. Dan Rose agreed, and then spent an hour showing why.
On the latest Got Therapy?, I asked Dr. Dan Rose a simple question: "Do you give yourself a self-affirmation?" His honest answer was that the whole idea can "feel a little cringey."