Note from Hannah: This is a guest post by Emily Caswell as part of the popular New Perspectives Series featured on this blog. The goal of this series is to shed new light on mental health, wellness, and just being a human being. For more posts in the series, click...
It’s an odd place to get parenting advice, but the best story regarding mothering I ever heard was from Penn Jillette on Marc Maron’s podcast WTF. Penn talked about how his mother’s philosophy was that she loved and cherished her children for who they were, from the...
Can being self-assured help us to go boldly into unknown life territory? This is a question I've been thinking about lately. But what does it mean to be self-assured? To me, it seems like a very desirable quality, something to cultivate in oneself and in our children....
I've learned, mostly the hard way, that I don't know what the best outcome is for another person. That probably sounds weird for a therapist to say. There is a general sense that you go to therapy for someone to tell or "guide" you to a particular outcome. But that's...
I was invited to do my very first guest post on the fabulous another jennifer blog. Here it is: My daughter is a young toddler now. On a recent family outing around town, she decided to keep in her hand, through a few stores and the intervening car rides, an oversized...
In a memorable moment in graduate school, my professor said, "A good social worker needs to walk the walk, not just talk the talk." I knew instantly that it was true. It is helpful and necessary in my job to say things, make suggestions, offer observations, provide...
In elementary school, our art teacher would coax us into making some unintended dribble or scribble into a "happy mistake." I was not receptive. I would rather have started over so that I might have some pristine piece of art when I was done. A quarter of a century...
Okay, so this topic is bigger than a blog post can contain, but it's a start. I'm so worried about this problem, I need to start talking about it every place I can. The problem: many people, and most notably young people, feel that their worth is in question. They (or...
I get excited when clients make breakthroughs. They are also really excited, and so we both feel terrific. This week, a client pointed out that not every session contains a breakthrough. "That's true," I admitted. It got me thinking about the importance of having a...