Healing Your Relationship With Food
I want you to imagine you’re at work, and someone brings in donuts. Do you think to yourself: I’m going to have a donut. I bet they taste really good, and I see no reason to deprive myself. Why the [...]
4 Things Everyone Should Know About Asexuality
I was at a therapy workshop about LGBT-affirmative counseling about a year ago, and an audience member asked, “I have a client who told me she is asexual. What does that mean?” “Well,” said the presenter, “You know how some [...]
How to Make Friends as an Adult
Something I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about recently is the challenge of making friends as an adult. When you’re a child, it’s easy. You go up to someone on the playground and say, “hey, do you want [...]
Why Sex is Different Than Broccoli
Sex therapist Marty Klein is an incredibly good speaker. He’s an excellent writer (and you should seriously consider getting your hands on a copy of his book Sexual Intelligence), but his speaking is absolutely unparalleled. That’s why when I was [...]
Loneliness and Online Harassment
Maybe it’s because I’ve been rereading Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, but the above discomforting interaction led me to think a lot about vulnerability, connection, and loneliness. Let me explain. I have two profiles on Facebook. One, which I’ve been [...]
The Pursuer-Distancer Dynamic
Why Your Partner Clams Up or Runs Away From Conflict (or why you do!) I want you to imagine that you’re at a cocktail party, and you’re talking with someone you have just met. As people naturally do, you stand [...]
8 Ways to Support Someone Who is Contemplating Suicide
Trigger warning: frank discussion of suicide. The first time someone told me he was planning to kill himself, I was a sophomore in high school. I had met Freddy (name changed), who lived in Florida, one time through a [...]
The “ Into the Woods ” Phenomenon
How to Balance Big Dreams and Realistic Expectations Note: This article contains some minor spoilers for the musical and movie “ Into the Woods ”. When I was very young, Stephen Sondheim released a new Broadway musical called Into [...]
Using Gamification to Improve Your Life
“And snap! The job’s a game!” -Mary Poppins The first time I ever used the concept of gaming and leveling up in a therapy session, I had never heard the word “gamification”. All I knew was that the client sitting [...]
Why I’m Reducing My Facebook Use in 2016 – And You Should Too
This morning, I left my home to discover that it was raining hard. If you’re reading this from a different region of the country, you might be wondering why that’s even noteworthy, but for those of us in Southern California, [...]