By Dr. Amanda Craig, LMFT

No type of therapy can be more vulnerable, intense, or rewarding than family therapy! At the same time, family therapy is often the most misunderstood and the most resisted type of therapy.

In many cases, the road to the first session is a long and perilous one, fraught with shame, guilt, anger, and self-condemnation. Those brave enough to walk through the therapists’ doors had often overcome ingrained misgivings, judgements, prejudices, shame, or embarrassment.

By Dr. Amanda Craig, LMFT

The best and worst advancement of modern society, ‘the screen’… It allows us to work faster, to be more productive, think bigger, and communicate instantly while having dinner, driving a car, and spending time with others. No longer able to leave the office behind at the end of the day, we are always ‘on’.

It happened. You are blind-sided, side-swiped, disoriented and bewildered. Whether your change was intentional or surprising, happy or sad, scary or exhilarating—one thing you can be sure of is this:

The change is in charge now.

By Amanda Craig, PhD, LMFT

I’m waiting for my son to get home from school.  It’s a beautiful day and I know he is going to want to play soccer, then football, and then play hockey with lacrosse sticks and a soccer ball.  Brutally honest, I am thinking about the couple of e-mails I would like to send and loose ends I’d like to wrap up before the end of business day.

By Alex Peskin, LMFT

The best magicians make us think we are seeing something that is hardly possible to believe. Really, unless we are lost in Hogwarts or Westeros, we know that what we are seeing is actually a sleight of hand.

Distraction and misdirection lead us to focus somewhere else while something significant is still happening right in front of us.

You might not realize it, but some of the best everyday magicians are those of us who are lacking in motivation. 

Did you make a New Year resolution this year? If you did, it’s probably because you wanted to make a real change in your life and you wanted it to happen soon. And, if you are like most people, right about now, you are beginning to see the cracks in your resolve.

Maybe you hear the cookies calling your name and you debate if you should have just one. Or, perhaps you had a hard time getting up this morning to go to the gym, like you resolved to do every day.

Revised

Oh, the Holidays! We have a love-hate relationship with them. We look forward to them all year only to begin complaining about the stress, the over-the-top schedule, pants busting at the seams, and budget chocking on the dust of runaway spending.
 
We yearn for the perfection of holidays of our childhood, when Christmas (or Hanukkah or Festivus) was about BEING, having fun, family, and care-free wonder of what’s next. There was room for boundless joy, surprise, awe, tradition AND newness, doing AND being. Surely it wasn’t perfect (remember the time when you got your holiday outfit dirty before you even left the house and got the full doze of Mom’s wrath?), but it was to us.

It’s free. It’s portable. It’s low-cal. Your best tool for a happier life…

Do you ever feel like your world is spinning out of control? Like there’s not enough hours in a day to get through your to-do list? Do you berate yourself for not getting more done, being more efficient, effective, in control, organized? Well, darlin’, pour yourself a cuppa, get comfy and read on. This one is just for you.