Being a Marriage and Family Therapist in the Bay Area specializing in Couples Therapy Palo Alto, means I have the privilege to meet clients from very diverse backgrounds. One of them is the Silicon Valley background which is a culture in and of itself. Clients and couples with this background share some distinct characteristics: high…
Family Stress Test Stress is a natural and normal “by-product” of every family’s life. In fact, family stress can bring out the best of us: as we stretch to meet the challenges we face, we become better parents, our children blossom and our families grow. But too much stress can spiral our families in the…
Mary Ainsworth’s work on attachment identified three attachment categories (secure, insecure avoidant, and insecure ambivalent/resistant). The development of the disorganized/disoriented classification evolved as a part of Mary Main’s doctoral research in which she noticed that approximately 10% of infants in Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Procedure were difficult to classify.1 Disorganized attachment is an additional attachment category…
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the most widely used evidence-based treatment for depression and anxiety. In CBT, the focus is on thoughts, and how they directly affect emotions, and behaviors. If you are having a lot of negative thoughts, you are likely to have a lot of negative feelings. During cognitive behavioral treatment, you and…
When our children come to us with a problem, we usually want to help them. So we console, interpret, advise, distract or praise. Other times, we feel we must teach our children, and so we interrogate, lecture, moralize or order. And probably more often than we’d like, we respond angrily—blaming, criticizing, ridiculing, shaming or withdrawing.…
Your Reaction to “The New Normal”: Are My Thoughts And Feelings Normal? How Are You? No, Really, How are you? The answer to this question is often a resounding, “Eh.” As therapists, we see the silver lining in this: emotional honesty (we can see your eye roll). We have found that because we are in…
According to The New York Times, the most consistent data on infidelity comes from the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey (GSS). Interviews with people in non-monogamous relationships since 1972 by the GSS have shown that approximately 12% of men and 7% of women admit to having had an extramarital relationship. Results, however, vary year…
(Wikipedia) Anxiety is an emotion characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behavior such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints, and rumination. It is the subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is a feeling of uneasiness and worry, usually generalized and unfocused as an overreaction to…
You come home and see the pile of unopened bills and bank statements, but instead of opening them, you move onto something else. Maybe you come up with a justification for passing that pile for the umpteenth time, or maybe you stuff the slight feeling of panic back down and ignore it. You have no…
We all do it. The question is how. Not only do smartphones provide unprecedented access to information, they provide unprecedented opportunities to multitask. Any activity can be accompanied by music, selfies or social media updates. Of course, some people pick poor times to tweet or text, and lawmakers have stepped in. Forty-eight states have banned…
Investigators at Stanford and elsewhere have shown, for the first time in humans, that low blood levels of acetyl-L-carnitine track with the severity and duration of depression. People with depression have low blood levels of a substance called acetyl-L-carnitine, according to a Stanford University School of Medicine scientist and her collaborators in a multicenter study.…
Living with anxiety can be tough — your thoughts might race, you might dread tasks others find simple (like driving to work) and your worries might feel inescapable. But loving someone with anxiety can be hard too. You might feel powerless to help or overwhelmed by how your partner’s feelings affect your daily life. If…
My Marriage Has a Third Wheel: Our Child Here’s a typical weeknight scenario in our household: My husband, Tom, our 9-year-old daughter, Sylvie, and I feel like ordering in, and after a lengthy debate, we decide on pizza. Later, while the three of us are eating pepperoni slices and playing Bananagrams, Sylvie reminds Tom that…
What is dissociation? Dissociation, sometimes also referred to as disassociation, is a term commonly used in psychology that refers to a detachment from your surroundings, and/or physical and emotional experiences. Dissociation is a defense mechanism that stems from trauma, inner conflict, and other forms of stress, or even boredom. Dissociation is understood on a continuum…
There are many different types of emotions that have an influence on how we live and interact with others. At times, it may seem like we are ruled by these emotions. The choices we make, the actions we take, and the perceptions we have are all influenced by the emotions we are experiencing at any…
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a short-term (8 – 20 sessions) and structured approach to couples’ therapy developed by Drs. Sue Johnson and Les Greenberg in the 1980’s. It is grounded in research while focusing on negative communication patterns and love as an attachment bond. Attachment Theory “Attachment” between people typically provides a safe haven:…
A team of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently discovered why the drug ketamine may act as a rapid antidepressant. Ketamine is best known as an illicit, psychedelic club drug. Often referred to as “Special K” or a “horse tranquilizer” by the media, it has been around since the 1960s and…
The term medical marijuana refers to using the whole, unprocessed marijuana plant or its basic extracts to treat symptoms of illness and other conditions. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not recognized or approved the marijuana plant as medicine. However, scientific study of the chemicals in marijuana, called cannabinoids, has led to two…
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a mental illness that affects about 6 percent of adults at some point in their lives. (1) At its core, the disorder is about emotion dysregulation, says Ryan Hooper, PhD, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Chicago and an assistant clinical professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.…
Psychological projection is a defense mechanism people subconsciously employ in order to cope with difficult feelings or emotions. Psychological projection involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings. Have you ever disliked someone only to become convinced that the person had a vendetta against…
Being part of a group can offer insights that you may be too close to your situation to see. Discover why participating could be a helpful type of treatment for you. At first, the idea of participating in group therapy might seem intimidating. Who wants to share their story with strangers? But group therapy, in…
Introduction to attachment theory in developmental psychology, including Bowlby and Ainsworth’s contributions, evaluation and criticisms of attachment theory. Attachment theory is a concept in developmental psychology that concerns the importance of “attachment” in regards to personal development. Specifically, it makes the claim that the ability for an individual to form an emotional and physical “attachment”…
For Clinicians: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories (Shapiro, 1989a, 1989b). Shapiro’s (2001) Adaptive Information Processing model posits that EMDR therapy facilitates the accessing and processing of traumatic memories and other adverse life experience to bring these to an…
The concept of counseling in British English it is spelled counselling has actually been around for ages, and it reflects the need for one person to seek help or advice from another person. Counseling as a profession, therefore, places emphasis on social settings and does not derive from the clinic. It focuses on helping persons…
STRESS is an inevitable part of our life. Yet whether our daily hassles include the incessant gripes of a nasty boss or another hectoring letter from the Internal Revenue Service, we usually find some way of contending with them. In rare instances, though, terrifying events can overwhelm our coping capacities, leaving us psychologically paralyzed. In…