Are you neurotic, narcissist or neurotypical?

Regardless of how hurtful people can be, if we are in a relationship with them, we tend to assume that they share our similar values. But this isn’t always true. And this common assumption can get us in a lot of trouble, especially with narcissists.

While there are others that think like us (to some degree), these days, we regularly encounter people who shock us.  We find ourselves saying, “How could they say (or do) such a thing?”  “Doesn’t he/she care about my feelings?” And if we love the person, we might find ourselves making excuses for a person who has hurt us because we want so desperately to hold onto our original view of the person we fell in love with in the first place.

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From Trauma Drama to Ease in Relationships

I have a client who had 2 difficult housemates and didn’t feel like he could move.   He called them entitled, and he felt like they regularly demanded far more from him than they were willing to do themselves.    He often felt enraged, like a seething volcano about ready to erupt!  He didn’t feel like he knew how to react to these kinds of stressful relationships!

He felt resentful because he was doing a large majority of the shared responsibilities.   He was very concerned about saying something because he felt that, no matter how respectful he tried to be, they had a pattern of lashing out, being vindictive, or undermining his needs.

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Does Inequality Affect Your Happiness

You may not know this about me, but after I got my Ph.D. in Neuroscience, I spent about 10 years in the field of public health (specifically epidemiology) looking for underlying factors that contribute to mental and cognitive health problems across populations.   One of the things that resonated with me about the field of public health, was that we looked at risk factors at all levels ranging from the individual, to the relationship level, community level and societal level.   While most of my writings have been on things that we can do in our relationships and personally to improve our mental health, we cannot forget the enormous role that our communities and society play in our happiness.

Right now a major contributor to our mental health is the increasing inequality that we are experiencing.  Income inequality is at an all time high, and the richest 85 people have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion. And in a comparison across 31 countries, US has the second highest level of inequality, only second to Chile.

So how does income inequality affect our mental health?

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Why You Might Want to Stay Away from Prince Charming

Prince Charming, First Impressions:

A few years ago, I met a man who was extremely charming, who seemed to have a rich, fascinating and varied life, who seemed smart, talented and accomplished, and who I felt an amazing connection to.

Our relationship felt mutual at the beginning, but it didn’t take long for me to feel like:

Something Wasn’t Right

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