People do not enter therapy carrying only symptoms. They bring habits of responding to the world, long-standing emotional reactions, and private meanings that may make perfect sense to them but feel confusing or even unreasonable to others. They also bring questions about purpose, identity, and direction that do not disappear simply because panic attacks are less frequent or depressive episodes are shorter.
If there's one finding in the psychological literature that warrants your most urgent attention, I'd argue that this is it: Social relationships are our most powerful psychological currency; they are the key to our psychological health. There is no "I" in "Self." The "I" is always in "Society." Human beings are social before they are anything else. Human interaction shapes our psychological landscape more than any other factor.
The experience may arrive as a dream that feels less like imagination and more like a profound moment of connection. A familiar scent like perfume or cologne may start drifting through a place where no one should. You may experience a sudden sense of being lovingly accompanied when you feel most alone, or a spontaneous song on the radio that carries such precision and memory it briefly stops time.
When I ask why, I often find the real reason they are saying this is fear: fear that the therapist will manipulate them, fear that the therapist's questions will embarrass them or trigger anxiety, fear that they will be criticized or expected to become a different person, fear that they will be blamed for their own problems, fear that the therapist can read their private emotions and inner thoughts, or fear that they will not "get" therapy and fail as a patient.
"I think I'm in love...," my client says, referring to her newly discovered relationship with ChatGPT. "I've never felt so seen, so understood." This particular person has been in a secure, nurturing marriage for many years, but something about her exchanges with artificial intelligence (AI) feels awakening and ideal, like no relationship has before. "I can say anything, and it never gets defensive. It just... listens. And reminds me that I'm there."
Conversion therapy is the discredited and harmful practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity. The therapist in the case (Kaley Chiles) argues that this law is an unconstitutional restriction on her speech: psychotherapy is, on her view, a kind of speech, and thus the state law violates her First Amendment rights. The state responds that psychotherapy is a medical procedure,
The phenomenon of evil has always been part of human existence but is particularly pervasive in our present times. By definition, we think of evil as being purely negative, pernicious, vile, vicious, and destructive. A noxious force and tragic existential fact of life that brings only misery, sorrow, and suffering to those accidentally or intentionally exposed to or victimized by it. Which, to some extent, includes each of us. But can the painful and devastating experience of evil and the profound suffering it brings possibly be productive, growth-enhancing, or psychologically and spiritually transformative? Can good come from evil? Can suffering be redeemed?
Village elders offered these powers-stillness and compassion-in lullabies hummed as they fastened tiny saddles, in laps that welcomed small bodies and soothed anxious hearts, and in gentle gazes that shimmered beneath the stars. Slowly, these two powers soaked in, one moment of care at a time, seeping into each child's bones and settling into their hearts. Before they even knew it, the village's children were walking hand in hand with stillness and compassion (Boyette & Hewlett, 2017; Doucleff, 2019).
Psychobabble replaces mental health misconceptions with liberating truths that can help readers avoid misinformation, navigate important debates in the mental health field, and better maneuver their own therapy journeys. The problem is not that therapy has gone mainstream, but that some of the assumptions we have absorbed from therapy culture are actually holding us back from healing, growing, and solving our problems.
Synchronicities can be dismissed as quirky experiences, an anecdote to trot out at a dinner party, but they can also be profoundly transformative and healing. It's for this reason that synchronicity-informed psychotherapy informs my clinical practice. As a refresher, synchronicities are events in the external world that coincide in a meaningful way with the internal world of thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, memories, and dreams, but not due to causal reasons.
Narrative therapy encourages us to begin by identifying our dominant narrative—the main story we tend to focus on and tell about ourselves. Dominant narratives, though told and retold, are not always fully accurate; they sometimes ignore other important parts of the story.
