Thoughts From a Therapist
Individual Growth
The ‘individual growth’ category contains posts concerning reaching your potential, finding motivation, creating ambition, and finding meaning and purpose. Topics will range from vocations to recreations and from exercise to philosophy.
Browse by topic
-
How to Navigate Ethical Dilemmas: The Eleven Dialectics Behind Why We Decide Differently
Every ethical dilemma, from a bag of chips to gun regulation, runs on a small set of competing values. Where we habitually land on…
-
How to Create Your Own Political Positions
We can name our political label faster than a single position. A therapist and systemic interventionist maps the seven domains a country is responsible…
-
Why Can’t I Change Even When I Understand My Patterns?
Why can’t we change patterns we already understand? Analysis can circle a problem endlessly until curiosity, regulation, and connection create an off-ramp.
-
How Parenting Made Me More Controlling
Control can be an adaptation to anxiety, responsibility, and parenthood – and eventually the thing that perpetuates it. A therapist on letting go of…
-
Exercise Snacks: How 10 Seconds Can Build Both Physical and Psychological Strength
Ten squats, whenever I thought of it. What started as a fitness habit turned into a lesson in discipline: make the goal small enough…
-
Is My Job to Make You Feel Better?
Sometimes therapy is meant to settle the nervous system. Sometimes it’s meant to challenge it. The harder work is recognizing which one you came…
-
Meditation Is the Practice of Returning
“I didn’t do it well” is the most common thing I hear about meditation. But every time your mind wanders and you return, you’ve…
-
Understanding Anxiety Is Only the Beginning | The Gap Between Insight and Action
Understanding anxiety is only the beginning. Learn how insight, physiology, habits, and values work together to reduce anxiety by turning awareness into meaningful action.
-
Guilt for Being Who We Are
Why do we feel guilty for simply being ourselves? Explore how empathy, early social experiences, and internalized “shoulds” can lead us to carry responsibility…
-
Contextual Intelligence and Political Identity
We treat liberal and conservative as fixed identities. They are better understood as contextual strategies — orientations toward flexibility or toward structure that become…
-
Treading Water / the Addiction to Doing
Some people believe that if they stop kicking, they will drown. They are exhausted, and they also trust the effort more than the water.…
-
The Realities of Rigid Identity
Rigid identity develops when beliefs become protective structures rather than flexible perspectives. Whether through victimhood, perfectionism, spiritual bypassing, or rigid religious and political identification,…
-
The Question of Enough | Stimulation, Fulfillment, and the Physiology of Contentment
One pattern I see repeatedly — in my office and in my own life — is the question of enough. Not the familiar concern…
-
The Necessity of Adversity
Expanding Our Capacity to Navigate Everyday Stress When we think about stress tolerance, it is easy to imagine it as something we either possess…
-
Social Anxiety and the Burden of Control | From Managing Perception to Living in Congruence
Social anxiety is often described as fear of judgment. That description is accurate, but incomplete. At a deeper level, social anxiety is more precisely…
-
Love, Acceptance, and Growth | What Real Love Actually Asks of Us
Love involves more than blind acceptance; it requires balance between acceptance and growth. Authentic love respects individual uniqueness while also encouraging partners to develop…
-
Fear of Abandonment vs. Integrity | Choosing Which Fear We Live With
The text explores the conflict between fear of abandonment, fear of death, and fear of self-betrayal during social situations, particularly in risky activities like…
-
Somatic Descent Into the Hidden Narrative: A Clinical Vignette about Anger and Grief
She came into therapy with a sharp, immediate reaction whenever the subject of suicide emerged. Her face tightened. Her posture stiffened. The anger arrived…
-
Emotional and Social Intelligence as a Living Balance | A Map for When You Want to Grow
This content discusses the importance of emotional and social intelligence for personal growth, emphasizing the need for balance in various capacities such as self-awareness,…
-
When Compassion Silences Self-Worth
The content emphasizes the importance of balancing compassion for others with self-advocacy. Uncontrolled compassion can lead to self-abandonment and resentment, undermining true empathy. Healthy…
Keep exploring
Browse by topic