“Helicopter Parents Learn College Is Time For A Landing,” by Nicole Dieker on www.nbcnews.com is a helpful look at how to adapt attachment parenting to the needs of older children. This ensures that parents launch their children into college life, rather than keeping them as dependent upon the parents as they were as high … [Read more...]
Love and Connection: Oliver Sacks and Living Fully
Love and connection. In reading Oliver Sacks’s February 19, 2015, op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he tells us of his metastasized cancer and what he describes as his “detachment” from life, I was struck by his acute engagement with his life. He explains that knowing he has less time than previously thought means that … [Read more...]
Passion or Pragmatism: Which Is Most Important in Your Career?
In April 2014 the New York Times published two articles by Nicholas Kristof (here’s one, here’s the other) about the life and untimely death of a remarkable young woman, Marina Keegan, who graduated from Yale and wrote about searching for meaning in life, and the conflict people often experience between passion and pragmatism in plotting their … [Read more...]
True Joy: Alice Herz-Sommer
There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times about Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest living Holocaust survivor, whose obituary mentioned “her unalloyed joy in making music and, quite simply, in being alive." Herz-Sommer died on February 23, 2014, at age 110. She is interesting, not just because she survived the Holocaust and lived so long, but … [Read more...]
The Joy in Everyday Life
I read an interesting “Opinionator” piece in the New York Times called “A Decade of Goodbye,” about the process of helping a loved one die. The author, Joan Marans Dim, says that she had often thought Joan Didion had been fortunate, in that her husband died suddenly, rather than suffering through a protracted illness, as Ms. Dim’s … [Read more...]
Couples Counseling With High-Conflict People
The following article, “Couples Counseling With High-Conflict People,” is adapted from a 2013 guest post I wrote for Randi Kreger's Psychology Today “Stop Walking On Eggshells” blog. "You always nag me. Can't you ever just get off my back?! And then you wonder why I never want to spend time with you?! Who would want to spend time … [Read more...]
Substance Use Disorder and “Nurse Jackie”
Season Five of Showtime Channel’s darkly comic “Nurse Jackie” proves my contention that “if you deal with the behavior without confronting the underlying issues, you’re just switching chairs on a sinking ship.” I was referring to substance abuse in the quote, but it really holds true for the behavioral approach to all psychological … [Read more...]
Communications Technology vs. Relating
Communication is supposed to be helped by technology, right? We’re available 24/7 now, through cell phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. We may be communicating, but are we relating? Is a Facebook friend really a friend? Is the first time you tell the person you’re dating that you love them in a text? I know couples who … [Read more...]
Family Language
The article below about family language, also known as “chemistry,” was originally published on Your Tango, an online women’s magazine. Diane Spear, LCSW-R The emotional family language of childhood attracts you to familiar people and situations: chemistry. Have you known someone who says, "I'm with … [Read more...]
Date Night Ideas For Exhausted Parents
The article below, about creative date night ideas for parents, was originally published on Your Tango, an online women’s magazine, then was picked up and published online by the Good Men Project, Chronicle Daily, Care2 Green Living, among several others (thanks!!!). Did you have an abundance of date night ideas early in your … [Read more...]