Ian Sane / Foter / CC BY As a therapy center in the heart of New York City that offers several options for group therapy, we get a lot of calls from prospective therapy patients asking if we offer support groups. Nope. No way. Why? Because we don’t believe in the premise. There are aRead more
What’s remarkable is that we make it.
The last few days have been remarkable in so many ways. New York is a city largely shut down, even days after Sandy blew through town. My therapy office has been without power all week, and many areas in the region are underwater, flooded, burned or literally blown away. I’ve seen New Yorkers waiting inRead more
Inconvenience
“I’m sorry to bother you with all this drama.” “I’m your therapist. Bothering me with drama is pretty much the job description.” Other professions whose job descriptions include this responsibility: friend, mom, dad, brother, sister. Convenience is great, I suppose. But the best things, well, aren’t. A slow cooked sauce, or an out-of-the-way inn inRead more
Embracing imperfection in therapy (video from HooplaHa)
Several months ago I was contacted by a team that was putting together a new website built around inspirational stories. They told me about a woman they’d met whom they lovingly described as having “some quirks.” A few weeks later I met Donna in my NYC therapy office and we did some therapy (or theRead more
On ease and happiness: What history can teach us about therapy and depression
BOBXNC / Foter / CC BY-NC On Christmas morning I happened to catch CNN’s Fareed Zakaria interviewing historian David McCullough, loosely on the topic of a McCullough’s new book about the wave of 19th Century American emigrants to Paris and more broadly on the topic of what we can, at our present moment, learn fromRead more
Beyond managed care: Out-of-network psychotherapy in NYC
Hayleyisfree / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND For the purpose of this conversation, psychotherapists in NYC (the market is quite different elsewhere) can be roughly divided into two camps: those who accept insurance as an in-network provider and those who do not. When we talk about psychotherapists, by the way, we’re including a whole lot ofRead more
Two kinds of anxiety
1.The mysterious, complicated, mushed-up kind of anxiety: You wake up and for seemingly no good reason you feel anxious. The sound of the shower turning on makes you jump; you feel a creeping anxiety as you leave the house; and the anxiety ebbs and flows in waves throughout the day. It’s an ordinary day, andRead more
“What if ‘the real you’ is a jackass?” A case for fake.
I acted out on Facebook, and it wasn’t the first time. But really, I couldn’t help myself. It happens. Someone innocently posted this little bit of pith: “The real you is better than a fake someone else.” You’ve heard something along those lines. (Probably in your Facebook feed). And it seems sensible. Except, consider the following:Read more
Sometimes the body lies
calca / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA I got an email yesterday from a one of my therapy patients here in NYC. She’s leaving her job of several years to go into business for herself. It was a tough decision, but a good one for her, and she’s taken the time to leave well. She wasRead more
Start small? Hardly
Not once have I picked up the phone at my NYC therapy office and heard the words, “I’d like to make just a few small changes in my life.” And yet so many people seem satisfied to pass along that age-old, conservatizing little adage: “start small.” Start small? It seems beyond question to me thatRead more