Category: Family
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Why Do People Get Divorced? | The Myth We Blame and What Is Actually Happening
Most people believe divorce happens because couples fight too much. In reality, conflict is usually a symptom of deeper relational structures. Understanding differentiation, systemic awareness, and developmental growth reveals what actually determines whether a marriage endures.
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Double Binds in Co-Parenting After Divorce
The parenting plan is essential post-divorce, as it navigates the emotional conflicts partners face regarding time with their child. It provides a pre-negotiated structure, allowing both parties to recognize their legitimate feelings while preventing endless disputes. By adhering to the plan, empathy and structure coexist, promoting psychological stability for all involved.
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Five Core Tasks of Adolescent Development
The guide highlights adolescent development’s complexities, emphasizing five core capacities: Regulation, Identity, Foresight, Relationship, and Agency. Adults play a crucial role by modeling behaviors rather than instructing. Emphasizing exposure, the guide suggests that maturity arises through managing emotional intensity, fostering identity fluidity, and nurturing strong connections for a healthier transition into adulthood.
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Nature, Nurture, and the Rhythm of Our Relationships | When Strengths Become Overused Skills
This content challenges the notion that all relational patterns stem from childhood experiences, emphasizing the importance of both nature and nurture. It highlights how certain behaviors can be strengths or natural aptitudes instead of merely reactions to past trauma. Understanding this distinction allows for healthier self-interpretation and intentional behavior.
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Adversity and Advocacy: When Suffering Stops Building Strength
The piece discusses the balance between teaching patience and empowerment in the face of adversity. While challenges can foster growth, excessive or nonsensical adversity can be harmful, leading to confusion and loss of confidence. It’s crucial for parents to discern when to advocate for empowerment instead of promoting endurance.
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Codependence and the Quiet Agreement Not to Grow
The content explores how comfort can create a codependent environment that stifles personal growth. It highlights that prioritizing stability often leads to enabling behaviors, preventing accountability, and reinforcing stagnation. True love involves embracing discomfort for growth and supporting each other in evolving, rather than retreating into familiar patterns that limit potential.
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When Intimacy Feels Unsafe: Understanding Fear Responses in Trusting Relationships
We flinch from the very thing we long for. This is one of the most painful paradoxes in human relationships. In moments where trust could deepen—or where emotional closeness is genuinely available—many of us experience not comfort, but contraction. Panic. Withdrawal. Or a conflict that seems to arise out of nowhere. This post explores why…
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Helping Diabetes Management in Teens | Identifying the barriers to achieving desired A1C
Assisting people with improved diabetes management behaviors has been a specialty of mine in my psychotherapy practice since 2009. My Wife has a been a senior research coordinator at the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes in Denver since 2006, She then Moved on to Stanford University where she works as a staff scientist….
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Double Binded Communication
Often we send ‘mixed messages’ to people. It can be a source of dis-ease in a relationship when a partner or loved one is giving you two opposing messages at the same time. This creates a double-bind as there is not an effective way to respond correctly to the communication. Most commonly the opposing messages are…
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Fear, Competence, Values and Anger in Parenting Rambunctious Children
This post will investigate how our perceived parenting competence impacts our fear and resulting emotional and behavioral reactions. We will focus on how fear can lead us into parenting interventions that are not consistent with our parenting values. I was offering a parenting coaching intervention in a couples context the other week and I arrived…
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Respecting Elders in a Society of Rugged Individualism
My intention is to stir up a conversation as to a possible answer to why there seems to be a decreasing degree of ‘respecting your elders’ in the United Stated and other individual focused cultures (as opposed to collectivist cultures).
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Parenting fundamentals – The basics for co-parenting your children
Quick summary: I will very briefly outline what I have found to be the most common ideas shared in the immense amount of parenting literature out there. I will give you ideas to think about as you work with your partner to create a supportive environment for your children.
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Parenting questions for couples – Questionnaire to increase synergy, collaboration, empathy, and overall understanding for couples who are co-parenting a child.
The intention of this exercise is to foster an open dialog surrounding the different parenting philosophies and different desires/dreams that each individual has for their children. As a person gains a greater insight into their partner’s philosophies along with a greater understanding or the emotional significance of those philosophies, they become better able to meet…
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Play therapy explained | How to use play therapy | Attuning to your child | how and why it works
Quick Summary: Play therapy is an effective and developmentally accommodating way for a child to communicate emotional or otherwise ‘complex’ information to an adult. A child will often tell you about what they are currently feeling or thinking about with their toys or drawing etc… If an adult can pay attention to the story line…
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Empathy building exercise – learning to be empathetic – increasing emotional understanding
Quick summary: In difficult times often we really want someone to ‘just be there for us’ and to ‘show compassion and understanding for what we are dealing with’ as opposed to offering pragmatic solutions or taking initiative to ‘fix it.’ In short people very often simply want empathy and they can feel worse, alone, or…
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Who are you? How to stop conforming to expectations and to start presenting the self you would like to present
Quick summary: Most people both consciously and unconsciously and both intentionally and unintentionally present themselves with different characteristics, beliefs, opinions, dispositions, emotionality, and behaviors etc in different settings. Who is the real you? How are different settings encouraging you to present your self in a certain way? If you closely examine the expectations of your…
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Strength Based Therapy – what it means
“most people are very good at articulating their problems and their faults… they are seeking my help to acknowledge and to understand their strengths and potential solutions… it is my job to ensure that the therapy session balances problems with solutions and perceived faults with perceived strengths.”
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What is Love? How do I know if I am in love or have experienced love? Love is selflessness and felt security… love is also a physical and emotional feeling
Quick summary: The reason that love is so difficult to define has much to do with the fact that the word “love” means far too many things in the English language. I will define the three most common definitions of love. Love is a euphoric to terrifying rollercoaster ride of emotions, love is a label…