Psychotherapy • Consultation • EMDR
Are you on our own side? I don’t mean are you on your own side against others but rather, are you consistently loyal to your own well-being and highest good? When you make mistakes, are you self-forgiving and patient with yourself, or are you angry and self-punitive? When you go through hard times do you…
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The community lost an invaluable resource and I lost a dear friend with the death of Dr. Jack Morin, Ph.D., author and pioneer in the fields of sexology and sex therapy, on June 14, 2013. He was 67. When I met Jack in 1975, change was in the air. We were both newly out young…
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Patrick hopes that therapy will rid him of his “problems with intimacy,” which he assumes must be the result of the insecurities he acquired from growing up in a dysfunctional family. He takes it for granted that his “trust issues” and the other difficulties he has in his relationships are evidence that he’s crazy. After…
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Eckhart Tolle, in his modern classic, The Power of Now, writes: “You have probably come across ‘mad’ people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other ‘normal’ people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares,…
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Henry has been feeling down for days, and is afraid that he may be sliding into another severe depression. His last bout, his third, was paralyzing and debilitating, and cost him his boyfriend. He’s fighting his mood by alternately trying to suppress it and struggling to think his way out of it, mostly through rumination…
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I’ve said before that most psychological self-help books aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. But once in a while a book comes along that really has the power to change our lives for the better. One such book is Just One Thing, by Rick Hanson. Rick is both a neuropsychologist and a meditation teacher,…
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When I left home at age eighteen, my first independent act was to look for a psychiatrist to cure me of being gay. I found one, too — not in Mississippi, not in Kansas — but right here in progressive San Francisco. It was 1967, and “reparative therapy” – now discredited as quackery — was…
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Eric has been single for five years. As a relationship-oriented guy he longs to connect with someone new, but he won’t let himself do it because he believes he isn’t “ready.” “Until I’m completely secure and whole in myself, and not dependent on anyone else to complete me, I won’t be able to be healthy…
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At first, Kevin’s focus on having safe sex seemed to him a reasonable and healthy concern, since he was, after all, a gay man in a city where many men are HIV positive. Gradually, though, his fears became increasingly intense, until he reached a point where, after every sexual experience, he felt terrified that he…
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At 42, Stewart finds himself single again. “I’ve fallen in love almost once every year since I was twelve,” he tells me, “and by now I’ve had at least twenty ‘soul mates.’ But I’ve never had a relationship last longer than six months. It always starts out so great, but in every relationship I’m the…
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