Blog

Suicidality in Therapy: Why Those Most in Need Often Get the Least Support

Suicide is a loaded issue, even within the therapy community. Sulome Anderson's article in The Atlantic, "How Patient Suicide Affects Psychiatrists" addresses numerous issues therapists struggle with. Anderson invokes this issue of the undesirable therapy patient in a very personal way. The author’s friend, Margaret, had numerous suicide attempts, self-harming behaviors, and was constantly in and…

Therapy, dis-equilibrium and growth

Therapy is a necessarily uncomfortable process. Development, in or out of the therapy office, is a disruption of our emotional equilibrium. That's generally--definitionally--disorienting.Too often our NYC therapy patients (and all of us) conflate equilibrium with happiness. Equilibrium suggests a sort of inertia or balance (a term especially revered these days) but we can just as easily have a…

Notes on anger management in NYC

An anger management workshop in NYC with a difference (or so I was told). A few years ago I was invited by a new colleague to an anger management therapy workshop at her therapy practice in NYC. We had connected as therapist colleagues and had some conversations about the practice of therapy in NYC and the conversation drifted to my (cynical) views on the state of anger management therapy in NYC…

The Overreaching Net of the Bipolar Disorder Diagnosis

Therapy for New Yorkers who hate therapy

My Specialty? I work with New Yorkers who hate therapy.. It started out as a joke. Generally it's another NYC therapist who asks, though often it's regular New Yorkers making small talk.But it's always with the therapists: What's your specialty?The question bugs me. It sets me up to define my therapy practice based on a category of person I work with as defined by that set of persons' maladies or…

PTSD, Trauma therapy and the problem with method

The United States military is one of the largest consumers of clinical psychology in the world and given that we are emerging from a period of sustained military conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the need for PTSD therapy and trauma therapy among combat veterans is high. The military is, if nothing else, a master of efficiency and, unsurprisingly, has brought a so-called empirically-based…

Ritual as a Tool for the Young Adult Transition

Starting the first full-time job as a therapist--lessons for the young adult?. In my therapy work with young adults, a big focus is the transition from student into full-time employee and essentially from adolescence to full-fledged adulthood. The transition can be a bit of a shock to the system as adulthood is a marathon, not a sprint. Cramming and pulling all-nighters are no longer options in…

CBT-plus: Going further with/ than cognitive behavioral therapy

CBT-plus. For a time, I received supervision at the American Cognitive Behavior Institute in NYC, one of the pioneering training centers for the wildly-popular therapy approach of cognitive behavioral therapy. I learned a lot about this method and utilized it in my practice. When I moved to a new NYC therapy practice, Tribeca Therapy, we created our own tailored method of CBT, which for now I’ll…

Support Therapy and Instability

Right at the corner from our NYC therapy office, in Tribeca on Church and Reade Streets, this image caught my eye. Stuck on a stoplight amongst graffiti and stickers, "SUPPORT THERAPY AND INSTABILITY", shouted at me from where I stood on the sidewalk. My first reaction was to roll my eyes and interpret it as a dig at therapy. The phrase seemed to infer that therapy perpetuates dependency and and…

“The Pregnant Therapist”--New York Times

Pregnant Therapist. On April 28th no less than 15 people emailed me Jessica Zucker’s article, "The pregnant therapist," from the New York Times. I am pregnant and I am a therapist, so it wasn't surprising.  I was thrilled to get this article and even more so that someone is opening up the conversation of what it means to be a pregnant therapist.What Zucker states is true: no one writes about your…

Thoughts on Hope in NYC Therapy

Creating Hope: It’s life or death. Therapy for depression. Here’s how it can go when we need help with depression: You haven’t landed that full-time job yet, you're living back with your parents after graduation, you're feeling isolated from those you went to school with and are scared to talk to them. They have their lives SO together. This has been going on for over 6 months. You broke up with…

Therapy and Social Change

Therapy and Social Change. There is nothing more important in therapy than our partnership.But of course you might say, “You’re a Therapist. Of course you have to believe in this partnership!” Let me tell you how I got there.I used to be a community organizer before I entering graduate school to study therapy. I organized because I saw systemic problems that needed to change in the world of work,…