We all face challenges in today’s increasingly complex and demanding world. The world requires we evolve or fall behind. Counseling is a journey of personal growth and development. It can help us in every aspect of our lives. Our goals as clinicians are to enable clients with the necessary skills to do this work on their own. The skills we teach are important for managing our emotions and day to day life–educating clients on various coping strategies or how to recognize common cognitive distortions in their self-talk. Clients learn how to set reasonable and appropriate boundaries in trying rel ..read more

We all have faced a situation that seem insurmountable at one point or another in life. Some problems are insoluble. Some situations a struggle through a dark forest where there is no path and no light to guide you. Which is why I remind you as Robert Frost so eloquently stated…. The best way out is always through. As a therapist, sometimes my job is to be with my clients as they “get through.” Which I take to mean looking at one’s situation in a cold hard light. That can be hard to do – but necessary. Because we all are capable of deluding ourselves by telling little, white lies. These lies c ..read more

There’s a strong connection between the way you think and the way you feel. And it goes both ways. The way you think affects your emotional state and your emotional state affects the way you think. These are the guiding principles at the heart of CBT and REBT. There’s a brutal truth in life that some people refuse to accept: You have no control over many of the things that happen in your life. When something is really bothering you common remedies are to talk about it or to sleep on it. What’s interesting is that when we stop to think about these remedies they don’t really change anything ..read more

SEEING THE WORST IN PEOPLE Lots of people carry around a lot of resentment and hostility towards others in our lives and it’s not just due to the tangible behaviors they enact that we believe to be wrong. In fact probably more important than the behaviors themselves are the thoughts and motivations we believe are behind these behaviors. We begin to draw up a psychological picture and the picture is grim. We see these people as cold, callous, uncaring, cruel, jealous, spiteful, evil, etc. We see the very worst in them and then take it for granted that their behaviors stem from those bad th ..read more

Perhaps you’re not having the best week… or month… or year. I get it. Many feel the same. Covid-19 has not helped! Over the course of a lifetime, we will each go through many difficult times. We naturally have to transition between different chapters of our lives and none of escape trying moments. It is during these times when it is important to be able to tap into our toolbox of coping skills to make it through. There are four key ingredients to developing coping skills for resilience: connection, wellness, healthy thinking, and finding meaning. CHALLENGING THE NON-CHANGE BIAS Life is full of ..read more

Life’s hard. For many of us, this is just a given. For others, it is something they resist accepting at all costs. And it shows in the outcomes in their lives. They settle, they live in denial, they refuse to accept accountability. All very human reactions. But such reactions will be detrimental to the quality of one’s life. Let’s be honest. Often, life can feel like we’re scrambling to escape an avalanche of responsibilities and an endless to-do lists of tasks after task. And when we are feeling overwhelmed, it’s easy to find fault or point out what’s wrong, but if we get in the habit of comp ..read more

As a counselor, my goal for all my clients is hopefully by the end of our time together, for them to report feeling more at peace with themselves and the world around them. If treatment goals are met, they will know themselves a bit better and have a greater understanding of their inner psychology. An important part of personal development is learning why we do the things we do; this way, we can understand what got us to this point and what we need to do differently going forward to generate better results. To get to that end goal, we go through a process where we explore a client’s inner and ..read more

Though DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) is known predominantly as a treatment for borderline personality disorder (BPD), its foundation is pretty simple. The concept of dialectics is used to simultaneously foster change and acceptance.  This allows sufferers to accept the present while acknowledging that their future must involve change.   DBT is an empirically based treatment, meaning it is backed by evidence. It is broken down into two major components: skills training and individual therapy. Skills offer specific solutions to pretty common problems. Though created specifically ..read more

All too often some counselors and their clients fall into a trap many people fall into in the wider sphere of life is that they tend to focus on the past at the expense of the here and now. Thinking about the past can be useful but only as it relates to present functioning. Otherwise it’s like walking through the ruins of an ancient civilization or digging up archeological relics; sure it’s interesting but there’s no life, no vitality, no vibrancy. Most of us know that having had a hard childhood can affect our adult lives. Depending on the severity of childhood hardship, and the amount of cou ..read more

A key component of radical acceptance is not fighting reality. It is the cornerstone of DBT (Dialectic Behavior Therapy). Radical acceptance can be defined as the ability to accept situations that are outside of your control without judging them, which in turn reduces the suffering that causes them. Radical acceptance is a distress tolerance skill that is designed to keep pain from turning into suffering. It’s easy to confuse the idea of radical acceptance with unhealthy states of being like giving up, complacency, or settling for less. The typical argument runs something like, “Acceptance is ..read more