In my NYC art therapy practice, I come across lots of adults who struggle with burn out and who would benefit from making more time for themselves in the day to day. Yet it can be hard to find something replenishing with packed schedules and limited resources. Enter adult coloring books! Coloring books are the perfectRead more
Katrina and 9/11 Memorials: The Use of Group Art Therapy for Collective Trauma
Memorials as Group Art Therapy Just blocks from my NYC art therapy office stands the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. In the 13 years it took to complete the memorial, there has been a lot of debate and criticism regarding what was planned, how long it was taking to complete, and how costly it was. One such piece ofRead more
Art as Therapy: The Shame to Pride Project
Art and art therapy Artist Stephanie Calvert is using her own art as therapy in creating work using materials from her childhood home and I find it inspiring in my work as an art therapist. The Huffington Post’s Katherine Brooks features Ms. Calvert in her piece, “One Daughter is Turning Her Hoarding Parents’ Belongings into Beautiful Art“.Read more
Group Shaming in the Internet Age: The 21st Century Bystander Effect
The Effect of Groups on Our Capacity to Help I distinctly remember the first time I learned about social psychology–I was sitting in a large auditorium when my dry Psychology 101 professor clicked his slideshow to an image of NYC in the 60’s. As I doodled in the margins of my notebook, my professor began to speak about Kitty Genovese, aRead more
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 justRead more
What are you? (Therapy patient? Client?)
If you’re like most people I talk to about this topic, you couldn’t care less about how we refer to the folks we work with in our NYC therapy office. In fact, the odds are slim that you’d ever be referred to by anything but your first name by your therapist. And so it mayRead more
The end of psychology? So says the Onion (Or: Because science…)
Like the best satire, this piece from the Onion lends itself to at least a few interpretations. The mock headline reads, “Psychology Comes To Halt As Weary Researchers Say The Mind Cannot Possibly Study Itself.” Perhaps it’s a critique of a critique of Cartesian dualism (and therefore a defense of psychology) or perhaps the OnionRead more
“Trust me, I’m a psychologist”
msmiffy / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA 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,Read more
I 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 ofRead more
We are a social species. Maybe our therapy should start looking like it.
Q: How come the rents are so high in New York City? A: Because of all the people who want to live there. We are here in NYC because of all of the people, the jobs, the opportunities to date and build friendships, to experience culture. And yet for most people in NYC their therapyRead more