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How to Extract Yourself From the Scarcity Trap
Nancy grew up in a lower middle class family, where she was taught that there was never enough. While the family could afford to buy a home, and her parents could afford to travel, when it came to her needs, she was regularly told that there wasn’t enough. Her parents claimed to not have enough to buy her a mattress that sank in the middle, a desk, clothes or supplies for school, and that there wasn’t enough to go to a good college. Yet she had heard her financial advisors tell her parents that they were in good shape with their financial...
read moreFrom Couch Potato to Gym Bunny
My client was getting married in a year, and desperately wanted to be in shape before her wedding. She knew that one of her biggest challenges in losing weight was that she had no motivation to exercise. The last time she had been to the gym was 3 years ago. She recalled that she did not want to be there, and couldn’t wait until it was over! It had been about 10 years since she had exercised regularly. She never knew her dad, but had inherited her dad’s lack of desire in being healthy. After releasing it, I asked her how she felt about...
read moreYou Are Not Your Diagnosis
I had a client who regularly reminded me of her diagnoses to justify her behaviors and struggles. “I have bipolar disorder, and therefore I… “ , “I have autism, and therefore I…. “. I’ve heard other mental health professionals rail against giving people diagnoses. They’ve argued that it isn’t helpful, because labeling people, makes them feel limited by their diagnosis. I told my client: You are not your diagnosis! I remember how relieved I was whenI was finally diagnosed with a learning disability. It finally explained my decades of...
read moreReviving from Failure to Thrive
John would lock himself in his apartment for days, not talking to anyone. After not being able to reach him for days, his mom stopped by his apartment and found pizza boxes and empty cans of coke and pepsi strewn throughout the apartment. The place reeked with his body oder, moldy food and urine. John had been struggling with severe mental health challenges for entire life. In addition to depression, he had autism and oppositional defiance disorder. He had a habit of alienating everyone he met, and so he was lonely and uninterested in...
read moreSeven Questions to Create a Meaningful Life
For decades, I was taught that I needed to accept what I could not change and have the wisdom to know the difference. Despite years as a graduate student in Neuroscience and post doctoral fellowships in psychiatric epidemiology at the most prestigious medical schools in the country, whenever I saw a doctor or counselor at these same institutions, more often than not, I would be either told my problem wasn’t real, or that I just had to learn to accept it. I had become disillusioned with Western medicine when I realized how little coursework...
read moreHow Ancestral Trauma and Behavior Affect Us
A client of mine has Parkinson’s disease. While eliminating underlying causes, we discovered she had repressed anger that she had inherited from her great-grandmother. In asking questions of her subconscious, I got that her great-grandmother was angry about her illness. I then discovered her great-grandfather shared the same ancestral trauma around his wife’s illness. My client who had traced her ancestry then revealed that this great-grandmother had 6 children, but died young. Her husband then remarried, and they had 8 more! We...
read moreWhy It is So Important to Take the Time to Just Be
My friend practices Vipassana meditation and is off to a meditation retreat this weekend. He invited me to go, but I still have a lot of unpacking to do, and I don’t feel like I can get away for a whole weekend. This conflict remind me of the conflict between being vs. doing. I used to be hyper focused on doing. My list of things to do has always been longer than I have had time to complete. But because I didn’t take the time to renew, I wasn’t enjoying life, and I wasn’t very productive while working. Then a friend introduced me to...
read moreA Most Unusual Underlying Cause of Disorganization
My client was a successful professional organizer. I had known her for years, and she had taken a leadership role in an organization that we were both a part of. She had played a key role in making it run smoothly So I was surprised to see that on the day of her appointment, she called to cancel because she had double booked her appointments. She rescheduled, and again she had to reshuffle things, but this time she made seeing me a priority. This was not the organized professional I knew her to be! In her session, I asked about what was...
read moreTen Consequences of Childhood Neglect
Like most empaths, I have been deeply disturbed by the separation of immigrant children from their families at the border. The impact of childhood neglect can be profound. I know this from Harlow’s research on baby monkeys, the studies of children in orphanages, by the work I’ve done with clients and my own history of neglect. I have been worried about the lifelong psychological damage this could do to these children, the impact it will have on their ability to feel safe in this world, their ability to trust and form healthy relationships,...
read moreThe Unbelievable Effects of Developing Resilience
So far, 2018 has dealt me with one punch in the gut after another. It began with the end of my relationship with my boyfriend who I was crazy about. It has been full of problems with housemates, stress from a law from the EU that could destroy my business, friendships falling apart, stress from more work that I could handle, loneliness, and despair about having to move out of my beloved home. I was feeling beaten up, run down, hopeless and quite depressed. I was feeling like a victim to life. In the midst of all this happening, I developed...
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