Psychotherapy, put plainly, is a conversation that is supposed to assist someone in making a significant change in their life. Psychotherapy thus rests on the implicit claim that speaking is a necessary or important part of how change happens in our lives. In some ways this is obvious. A situation in a restaurant cannot proceed unless I can vocalize my order, or I cannot complete a work project without similarly communicating. At other times speech is utterly powerless.
Read MoreThe fall season, with dynamic shifts in light, temperature, and color, is a natural time to reflect on the process of change. At this time of year, we’re surrounded by messages encouraging us to “embrace change,” often accompanied by images of trees with leaves shining in gorgeous reds, oranges and yellows, or children running and laughing through vibrant heaps of fallen leaves. But trees don’t turn bright colors overnight. And changes in our lives are seldom simple or spectacular, and accepting, let alone embracing, them can be daunting. We may feel discouraged to acknowledge we feel conflicted or not ready to celebrate the transition from summer to fall or the life changes that this season can be seen to symbolize.
Read MoreOften, during my first or second session with a client, this question comes up. Can we get this problem sorted out in a few weeks, or will I have to be in therapy forever? For someone who hasn’t been to therapy before, it makes tremendous sense to search for a way to orient themselves within the process. With the caveat that every client is different, every therapist approaches this work differently, and every situation is unique, here is a general therapeutic timeline that I’ve seen occur with many of my clients over the past ten years.
Read MoreThe therapeutic quality of gardening is universal. Before anyone starts thinking, "But wait! I don't have a green thumb!", I want to challenge us to consider that gardening doesn't require any green digits to take part in or to relish. Below I will explore several aspects of gardening that can be very therapeutic, whether you intend to grow prize-winning roses or gain appreciation for how a seed so small can turn into a tree so big.
Read MoreHuman life always needs some mixture of stability and change, familiarity and freshness. If life is overly structured it feels rigid and entrapping. If life lacks structure it can feel chaotic and overwhelming. Making healthy change, in therapy or in life, will generally involve some understanding of this tension between stability and change. I have often thought about healthy structure through the image of a trellis. Trellises are relatively rigid structures that allow a plant to develop in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
Read MoreThe day of my first training as an intern therapist, I had to dance through some serious energy and excitement before even thinking about learning a thing. It was the first of many appropriate but humorous contrasts of my internship experience. From dancing wildly in my workout clothes in my living room to settling into a cozy chair in a downtown office within a matter of hours, day one already necessitated making room for all parts of myself. Part of me was ready to dive into the work of a therapist, and another part needed to spend some quality time with Lizzo to be grounded. To be an intern therapist is to feel and lean into every part of becoming, arriving, and growing all at the same time.
Read MoreHave you ever noticed how expansive a child’s sense of wonder is? You might spot a young child in a park awestruck by a ladybug. They study it with such presence, interest, and delight. They have an openness to discovering without any preconceived notions. This kind of presence makes curiosity, and its gifts, possible. For many adults, it’s difficult to relate to the openness of this child. Some might even relate more to the bug, feeling that there are emotions, reactions, or parts within themselves that feel socially undesirable and would garner judgment from the outside world. Our first reaction might be to shoo these parts of ourselves away rather than to get to know them. Just as the bug is an essential part of our ecosystem, so too are these emotions, reactions, and parts an essential part of our own internal system.
Read MoreHuman experience is entirely bound up with our sense of time. Time is so ubiquitous—the unquestioned background of everything—that we don’t often talk explicitly about its importance. There is evidence, however, that distress is notably bound up with distorted experiences of time. Paying attention to time, however, is hard because the word ‘time’ has many different meanings. We are most familiar with measured time or clock time. There is also something that could be called body time. Attending to our experience of time is easier if we distinguish between these two types of time.
Read MoreAlmost everyone I have worked with has been told, often by a health professional, that they ought to “try mindfulness”. And this is unsurprising, given that in the last 20 years there has been an explosion of mindfulness research, newspaper articles, books, and blogs (!). But, despite well-meaning health professionals and therapists, the context with which mindfulness is introduced really matters and can have dramatic, unintended consequences. Once mindfulness is set up as a tool to get from A (suffering) to B (less suffering), any failure to reach the goal feeds self-judgment and self-criticism. But there is no way to be aware of your experience “well” or “badly”. There’s just you in the middle of your experience and your awareness of your experience. That’s it.
Read MoreThe relationship between therapist and client is important. How a therapist and client connect, behave, and engage with each other is one of the main tools for creating positive change in a client’s life. This relationship, called the therapeutic alliance, is a powerful component of the efficacy of psychotherapy. The therapeutic alliance mediates change. In practicality, this might mean that a therapist and client come to a mutual agreement about how therapy can progress. They might also collaborate on therapeutic goals and decide what “showing up”, or active participation might look like in their work together. Oftentimes, the therapeutic alliance goes unnamed in a session, but it is still hard at work.
Read MoreWhen you want something badly, but aren’t clear about why, your thinking can run wild. It is easy for the mind to build up to conclusions based on unexamined assumptions, creating a tower of thought that appears to be sturdy, but turns out more like Jenga blocks that are about to collapse. Ask yourself what you actually want, and why you want it. When you ask yourself a genuine question, listen for a sincere answer from yourself. It can help to write it down or talk it through with a therapist, partner, or friend, just to hear it out loud. The words you use and your tone of voice can help you sift through the layers of what you think you should want, so you can discover what you actually care about.
Once couples begin to feel comfortable with their enhanced skills of communication along with their new tools of managing stress and conflict, the nature of premarital therapy shifts. Now that the basic building blocks have been set, the couple is allowed a space in which they can enrich their relationship, and enhance the strengths that they already possess. In this final phase of premarital work, the therapist guides the couple in developing a more balanced relationship, and maximizing teamwork.
This Seattle Times story features one of our Self Space therapists in a discussion of the anxieties that can arise as we contemplate retuning to the office after being remote during COVID-19.
Read MoreI sometimes find clients enter therapy hoping for a ‘quick fix’ or some technical solution to their difficulties. I think many of us, myself included, have hoped that there was some technique, some pill, some mantra, something that could ease our pain. It makes sense that we would hope for some technical solution. The only problem is that ‘control’ can mean different things. Control, perhaps most obviously, looks like mechanical control: the fixing and building of things, technical facility, mastery. But there is another, subtler form of control that I’ll call human control or the control of presence, and it has something to do with welcoming, containing, or ‘being a guest house’.
Read MoreMental health is important at every stage of life, and we have a collective responsibility to include older adults in the discussion surrounding mental health care, both to reduce the stigma of seeking help and treatment and to change the perception of what we expect wellness to look like over our lifespan. While many people commonly believe that mental health issues are inevitable in older age, this is actually not true. For example, while some people experience chronic illness throughout their lives, many others do not, and are diagnosed with treatable mental health conditions later in life.
Read MorePart II of this series about Prepare/Enrich Premarital Therapy focuses on how this therapeutic approach helps couples move through conflict. Stress and conflict are present in every relationship. The work we do in therapy provides us with tools that allow us to feel supported when navigating seasons of high stress and conflict. The end goal here isn’t always to find a solution to a problem, but rather to find safety, understanding, and receptive communication within the relationship when problems inevitably arise.
Read MoreFamily counseling is usually called for when a child is experiencing mental health symptoms or is demonstrating problematic behavior. While family counseling can be quite effective with adolescents, people at that developmental stage tend to highly value their privacy and are in the process of discovering their own individual identity. Teenagers love the confidentiality that individual counseling offers. In general I recommend family counseling for children 5-12 years-old. There are several benefits to coming in as a family instead of having the child attend alone.
Read MoreTo be human is to experience grief. From denial to acceptance, grief consumes the full spectrum of our emotional experience. We grieve when there is loss: death, unmet expectations, breakups, miscarriages, time. Yet, how do we grieve endings that haven’t quite ended? Ambiguous endings, like the ending of a pandemic that isn’t quite over, is like a relationship with no closure. There’s no marker to honor the time we spent together and little hope for a new beginning ahead.
Read MoreTis the season! The season for appreciation and being thankful. It may be hard to think about what to be thankful for especially after the past 18 months and how all our world has changed so significantly. Though it may be difficult to do, cultivating gratitude can have a tremendous impact on our lives. Some proven benefits of gratitude are boosting the immune system and improving mental health. Being thankful allows us to slow down and appreciate what we have and what we need.
Read MoreThis past weekend The Seattle Times reported on why it is so difficult to find a therapist. The author, Hannah Furfaro, paints the picture of how more people than ever are looking for mental health support, due to the normalizing of therapy and reduction of stigma, the intensifying effects of the pandemic on mental health, and an increasing understanding of how mental health and physical health are intrinsically linked. Unfortunately many people struggle to find a therapist with availability they can afford and who feels like a cultural and relational fit. When we founded Self Space, it was exactly these issues that we intended to address and have been focused on solving since we opened our office doors in 2018.
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