Blog
Gray is the color of human
It's so often the stuff of therapy: People piss us off. They hurt our feelings. Lie. Deceive. Over promise and under deliver. Ex-boyfriends cheat. Former bosses withhold money we're owed. People do bad things. In NYC you hardly have to step outside for someone to rub you the wrong way. It sucks, and when that happens we have a right to expect compassion and respect from our friends.We also need…
Sep 27, 2013Therapy and burnout
I get a number of emails from folks outside of New York asking questions about therapy. High school students looking for advice on therapy as a career or a young therapist asking for tips on starting his or her own practice. A few months ago I got on that has me thinking about what it means to be a therapist, how I think about the practice of therapy, and how those views of mine line up against…
Sep 24, 2013
The limits of love
I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency." --Kurt VonnegutBecoming a dad just over a year ago has had a tremendous affect on my work as a therapist. As dads do, I fell in love with my daughter on sight. She's wonderful. It is a joy to love her, and easy. It's easy…
Sep 23, 2013
Therapy at its best: Doing what you don't know how to do
It seems these two Irish lads were on their way to somewhere else for the day, when they came upon a wall seemingly too high to scale. They stood there for awhile in the cold morning mist pondering their dilemma. As they looked at that wall standing in their way, they took their caps off and threw them over the wall.--Irish legendWe choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in…
Sep 20, 2013Finding A Therapist: A radio interview with Lite FM NYC
It was a lot of fun doing an interview last week on Finding A Therapist with Nina Del Rio, who is the host of Lite FM NYC's "Get Connected." One of the things we discussed was that the challenge of finding a good therapist in NYC is compounded be there being so many choices of therapists. We talked about what it means to see beyond the psychoanalytic options (of which there are so many in NYC)…
Mar 27, 2013"Why are you punching me in the face?"
An absurd question, obviously. Punch back! Run away! But investigate why? Pretty crazy.And yet the slightly-less-ridiculous equivalent of this question gets asked all the time:Your partner gets home from work and is banging around in the kitchen and barking, "Where's the damn pepper!""Honey, why are you so upset?"Your daughter runs into your bedroom screaming, "I hate you! I f$%#ing hate…
Dec 10, 2012"Why are you punching me in the face?"
An absurd question, obviously. Punch back! Run away! But investigate why? Pretty crazy.And yet the slightly-less-ridiculous equivalent of this question gets asked all the time:Your partner gets home from work and is banging around in the kitchen and barking, "Where's the damn pepper!""Honey, why are you so upset?"Your daughter runs into your bedroom screaming, "I hate you! I f$%#ing hate…
Dec 10, 2012"Trust me, I'm a psychologist"
Mind Hacks, a psychology and neuroscience blog, posted a piece called Trust me, I'm a brain scan. They report on a study (a meta-study, actually—a study of studies) that found that, when the results of a particular piece of research are presented alongside a picture of a brain scan, readers were considerably more likely to find the results credible as compared with those not presented with such a…
Dec 06, 2012Wanting more from your therapy (and your life)
Do you have a wanting problem?. I think you might. It's pandemic.A question of what's possible from therapy. So, so many of the people I work with at my NYC therapy practice set deep, broad limits on what they imagine they'll be able to accomplish, in therapy and in life. Some examples:"Anxiety is just a part of my life, and I know I'll have to live with a lot of it, for a long time.""I don't…
Dec 03, 2012I hate therapy (and don't even get me started on psychotherapy)
Ok, I hate the word therapy. Or, more to the point, I hate the word therapy as a word to describe what I do.How come?. I hadn't looked up therapy until just this moment, but it's always smelled of illness to me. When I hear "therapy" I think less about the coming together of two or more people than I do of sickness and disorder. I think of words like chemotherapy and phrases like intensive…
Nov 29, 2012Lose the grudge
Resentment comes up a lot in my work as a therapist here in New York City. I suspect it's a frequent topic in therapy everywhere. It was also a frequent topic of the sermons at the Presbyterian church where I spent most Sunday mornings as a child. While the faces of the ministers changed over time, the message around resentment remained consistent. It was bad, and ought to be avoided.How it was…
Nov 26, 2012How to get good help from mediocre therapy
If you live in NYC, finding a therapist is easy. Finding a good therapist in New York is a bit trickier.Perhaps you're a New Yorker who feels like he or she really needs to find a therapist who's in-network with your insurance plan (I don't recommend it, but not everyone follows that advice). Maybe you don't have insurance and have found poor low-fee or sliding-scale options. Maybe you don't live…
Nov 19, 2012Browse all Tribeca Therapy topics
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