Psychotherapy • Consultation • EMDR
In order to make sense of our lives, we humans tell ourselves stories which provide a sense of the context and meaning of our experiences, and labels are the short-hand terms we use to refer to our stories. We refer to people as “victims,” for instance, when other people have harmed them, but the term…
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Q: I’ve been depressed for a long time and finally started getting treatment for it last year. I’ve been taking anti-depressants and seeing a therapist for eight months. I am feeling better, but I’m still down a lot. I’ve never meditated, but I have friends who do, and they say it could help me be…
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This month my mind has been wandering back to memories of the San Francisco Pride celebrations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. That period in our history was such a radically different time. Then, as now, I worked as a psychotherapist near the Castro with a predominantly gay male clientele. During those years, half…
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In the late 1980’s, when the Prozac family of anti-depressants became available, I saw the new drugs make dramatic changes in the lives of many people. Patients who had been lost for years in the black hole of deep depression suddenly found a new buoyancy and a re-awakened capacity for pleasure. They re-discovered hope and…
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Recent findings in neuroscience suggest a pessimistic conclusion: that the way we’re wired makes it easier for us to be unhappy than happy. The complex human brain isn’t an organ for dispassionately investigating the world. It evolved as a tool for anticipating and overcoming dangers, for protecting us from pain, and for solving problems; so…
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My friend Jack worked fifteen-hour days non-stop for months. What sustained him through this marathon was the thought of his planned trip to Hawaii at the end of the project, when he’d have nothing to do but lie on a beach for two weeks. When the day finally arrived and the job was done, he…
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My husband and I marked my 70th birthday in February with ten days of non-stop partying in New Orleans. I mention this because I know all too many people who can’t imagine the 70th birthday as anything other than a disaster to dread and mourn. I haven’t found it so. I’ve faced my share of…
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Q: There’s a guy in my circle of friends who pushes all my buttons. I’m totally in love with him, and he’s so hot that whenever we’re in the same room, I can hardly keep my eyes off him. He’s friendly to me, but that’s all. It’s obvious that he will never feel for me…
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Kirk has fallen into the depression he regularly feels at the end of the year. He tries to explain it all as Seasonal Affective Disorder, but it doesn’t take us long to find a deeper cause. In late December he will be going “home for the holidays.” Every year for a week he leaves his…
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When Tez Anderson learned he was HIV-positive in 1986, the doctor told him that he could expect to live for about two more years. He lost any sense of a future orientation and fell into a deep depression. He continued to survive beyond his predicted deadline, but in the absence of any effective treatments that…
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