Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist Featured in Three Recent Publications

We’re excited to share that our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist was recently quoted in three publications. In the articles, Matt addresses relationships, including both romantic relationships and friendships, and the anxiety of tax season that can even stress accountants. 

For Canada’s The Conversation, Matt speaks to how home renovations, which have increased during the isolation of the pandemic, can put a strain on a couple’s relationship. In “Renovating Your Home Could Ruin Your Relationship…but It Doesn’t Have To,” Matt observes from his experiences working with couples throughout COVID-19 that the pandemic has exposed cracks in relationships that were already there. “Couples are experiencing a whole variety of stresses–childcare, household management, personal challenges, strains in the relationship–and the temperature has gone up during the pandemic,” he says.

Renovating a home means making high-stakes decisions, which can be difficult when tensions are already running high over a year into the pandemic. Matt urges couples to approach decisions with curiosity, as well as work to understand their partner’s point of view. He asserts, “It tremendously taxes our skills not to react when our partner says something we disagree with or isn’t what we expected.” In contrast, he also emphasizes that partners shouldn’t avoid being assertive about what they want as this can lead to lingering resentment.

On a similar subject of resentment, Matt talks to Insider about how to deal with feelings of jealousy around a friend’s relationship. In “What to Do If You’re Jealous Of a Friend’s Relationship, According to Experts,” Matt explains that jealousy is “a pretty ordinary human emotion,” especially one that can arise around friends, and offers some strategies to deal with these feelings.

In particular, Matt advises people who are feeling jealous of a friend’s relationship to be honest with themselves about why they may be bothered, including worry about losing a friend or the friendship changing. After this, Matt encourages folks to express these concerns to the friend: “You have to find some ways of sharing those fears with your friend and communicating to your friend.”

Lastly, Matt was also quoted in Money’s “‘This Big Cloud of Dread’: Even Accountants Hate Doing Their Taxes,” which explores why accountants can feel anxious about doing their own taxes even though they do taxes for a living. In some ways, this isn’t a surprise. Matt notes, “More than anything, they’re miserable to do.”

However, accountants that avoid doing their taxes can also speak to how people, in general, can put off their own needs. “People [often] struggle with valuing themselves and so make others’ needs more important,” Matt observes.