January and February are such strange months this year. There’s this weird juxtaposition between “new year, new possibilities” and the pandemic’s inherent uncertainty. You have the uncertainty of vaccines, school (in, out, in, out), and hanging out in-person combined with the normal new-year messages. My inbox is filled with promises of a new body, new...
Anxiety is a funny thing. When I tell people my specialty is anxiety disorder treatment, they often reply with, “oh yeah, I have anxiety” or “my __________ has anxiety.” It’s funny, because they’re referring to it as if it isn’t a basic emotion. No one would say, “oh yeah, I have happiness.” They’d say, “I...
I was recently a guest on The Coach’s Podcast, and I was asked if I ever felt doubt in my abilities. Ah, yeah. All the time. It’s called imposter syndrome (or, as psychologists call it, imposter phenomenon).It’s not about what’s real. It’s about how we feel about ourselves. About 70% of people feel imposter syndrome...
I have to be honest. My general feeling about the holidays usually leaves me wanting to go to sleep around Thanksgiving and wake up after New Year’s. Thanks to the pandemic, those feelings have only intensified this year. That being said, I’m going to take some of my own advice … Expect to feel a...
I’d like to talk about the term “Choice Point.” It comes from the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT model. A Choice Point refers to a moment in time when you can choose behavior that moves you toward your values or behavior or one that moves you away from them. In the most simplistic terms,...
A client of mine had the greatest metaphor for her obsessive compulsive disorder. She said that when she came to see me, she had been singing “OCD’s song” for 50+ years. Through our weekly sessions and A LOT of work between sessions, she was able to learn “a new song which gave her freedom.” A...
I often tell my clients to practice being “sure enough.” While this might initially sound a bit negative, it’s quite the opposite. It’s less about the ho-hum “the best you’re going to get” and more about making a choice that helps lower your anxiety. Here’s the thing. Anxiety wants you to seek out certainty, a...
There are a lot of anxiety myths out there. In my last blog post, I dispelled 3 of them. Here are the final 4. Myth: Thought stopping (or replacing, suppressing) is an effective anxiety management technique. I think these were techniques used in the 80’s or sometime, because I still get the random client who...
There are a lot of anxiety myths out there. In my next 2 blog posts, I dispel 7 of them — and give you better solutions for dealing with excessive worry or anxiety. Myth: Anxiety is bad. Anyone who’s been reading my stuff knows the answer to this one. False! Anxiety is neither good nor...
Well, this has been a pretty shitty year, hasn’t it? I’m hard-pressed to find a silver lining, but I do feel moved when my clients say things like “having worked on my anxiety helped me face this situation so much better than my friends and family” or “for once, I am the one coping, and...