Karen's Blogs

Blogs are brief, to-the-point, conversational, and packed with information, strategies, and tips to turn troubled eaters into “normal” eaters and to help you enjoy a happier, healthier life. Sign up by clicking "Subscribe" below and they’ll arrive in your inbox. 

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Karen's Blogs

Karen R. Koenig

Being Okay No Matter What

Karen R. Koenig
Being-Okay-No-Matter-What
Most of us spend our lives stressing to make everything work out okay. We want our children to be happy and successful, friends to like us, employers to value us and our work, romantic partners to love us and live forever, and for various and sundry other endeavors to turn out swimmingly. And in so doing, we engage in a fool’s errand. For example, my middle-aged client Josephina is divorcing her husband of many decades to live alone for the first time in her life. Tending toward anxious, she worries about feeling lonely, being able to pay her rent, and managing by herself when she’s used to depending on her husband. She told me, “I just want it all to be okay.” Another client, Alan, studying to be a paralegal, gets frantic when he receives anything less than a B due to his scholarship requirements. He works two jobs and throws...
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Life Skills and Self-Care
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Why We View Parents Differently Than Other People

Karen R. Koenig
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I had an interesting discussion with my client Alexandria about how she often allows her mother to mistreat her. She’s been changing her thinking about their relationship lately, though, because she’s finally decided that she doesn’t want to be intentionally hurt repeatedly by anyone. Then again, if we felt the same way toward parents as we do toward others, there’d be no need to discuss the issue in therapy or elsewhere. A shift in thinking is natural as we grow older. Remember that our brains only fully form in our late twenties, so our emotional response to parents is based on a brain lacking adequate executive functioning: we don’t understand ourselves, others, or the world because we don’t have the cognitive ability to do so.  By the time we’re teens and making friends, we have a stronger (yet still incomplete) capacity to assess how we’re treated and decide if it’s acceptable....
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Family Relationships, Love and Friendship
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Why Must We Get Over Something?

Karen R. Koenig
Why-Must-We-Get-Over-Something
I confess that I’ve blogged about letting go until I finally realized it’s just another nonsensical phrase that we have no business using. Another is to “get over” something. Really, where do people come up with this stuff?  I tried to find the origin of “let go of” without, as they say, taking a deeper dive, but I came up with nothing. It appears that way back in the 14th century “get over” meant to recover from a physical illness. It’s unclear when it began to mean to stop being a ninny and start controlling your emotions. The phrase felt wrong to a client who shared her reaction to responses to the recent death of her mother. Though no one actually said, “let go” to her (thank goodness), one person implied that she needn’t feel grief because her mother’s death was “God’s will.” What a subtle way of telling someone to...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation
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Quit Making People Projects

Karen R. Koenig
Quit-Making-People-Projects
Do you make fixing others your life’s work? Do you find folks with problems—the more the merrier—and feel such immense pressure to make things better for them that they become your “pet project”? While people are teaching English as a second language, refinishing a table or learning to meditate, are you spending your time fixing others? This behavior stems from co-dependence, your need for others to be okay for you to be okay. Learned in childhood, this dysfunctional dynamic makes you ignore your needs and problems and focus instead on fixing troubled and troubling people. Take Sarah-Jean who almost lost her rental apartment because she was treating it like an Air B&B. She was a magnet for people who’d been evicted or kicked out of their living quarters and swore they only needed a bed for a night or two. Never mind that they ran the gamut from substance abusers to...
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Family Relationships, Love and Friendship
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Watch Out for Breadcrumbing

Karen R. Koenig
Watch-Out-for-Breadcrumbing
I’m sure many of you read the title of this article and had no idea what I was talking about. I’d never heard the term “breadcrumbing” either until I read How to Tell if You’re Being Breadcrumbed in a Relationship, Friendship or at Work by Amy Beecham but I certainly recognize the behaviors described. I bet some of you will too. Breadcrumbing is a manipulative technique used by unhealthy (often not nice) people to keep you hooked into them or your relationship with them. It involves giving you just enough love, praise, time, attention, good will to make you happy, but not enough to really satisfy you. In clinical terms, it’s called giving you intermittent reinforcement.  According to Beecham, “‘breadcrumbing’ involves leading someone on, and keeping their hopes up through small and superficial acts of interest. A breadcrumber might be flirtatious, complimentary or seem engaged with you at first, but will...
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Abuse and Trauma
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Book Review: The Eating Disorder Trap

Karen R. Koenig
Book-Review-The-Eating-Disorder-Trap
Although The Eating Disorder Trap by Robyn L. Goldberg, RDN, CEDRD-S was written as “A Guide for Clinicians and Loved Ones,” much of it is equally useful to people with dysregulated, dysfunctional eating. So, feel free to learn from this book, pass it on to your therapist who may know little about the specialty of treating eating disorders (EDs), and encourage intimates to read what Goldberg has to say from her decades as a registered dietitian helping clients and their loved ones make recovery happen. Full of valuable information and insights, chapters are short and to the point with simple graphics, case examples, and research data and conclusions. The book begins by explaining how lack of accurate information about EDs in our culture lays the traps that unwittingly snare people into them. Goldberg shares the truth about BMI, what “normal” eating entails, why diets fail long-term, and how to decide the...
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Book Reviews
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Words to Measure Progress

Karen R. Koenig
Words-to-Measure-Progress
The words you use to describe your progress are key, so you’ll want to know which ones will move you forward and which will keep you stuck. Here are ways to think and talk about how well you’re doing. I’m guessing they might be quite different than the thoughts and self-talk you’re using now. Small steps. Describe progress as modest changes rather than looking for success in one fell swoop. The discussion of how to phrase progress came up with a client who said that she’s not doing any big things differently but is making small changes which are adding up. She’s going to the gym when she can, pacing her work to be less stressful, encouraging her children to be more active, not keeping juice easily accessible to them, and giving them more responsibility for thinking about consequences and taking care of themselves. Recognize success. I’ve written how the word...
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Life Skills and Self-Care
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So What If It’s the Truth

Karen R. Koenig
So-What-If-Its-the-Truth
I sometimes know what clients will say before the words are out of their mouths. This happened with my client Antoinette. After doing well in many ways, she succumbed to an urge to binge which led to a “medical” diet, weight loss, and rebound eating. After discussing what she’d learned, she lamented, “But, I’m fat again. It’s the truth.” The phrase, “but it’s the truth” is the one I want to call your attention to as I did to her. I believed her. It was the truth: she had regained a portion of the weight she’d lost and now her clothes were tight again. I couldn’t argue with her, but—here’s the point—since when does something being true mean we need to dwell on and obsess about it? I reminded her it also was no lie that there’s a horrible war going on in Ukraine; poverty, guns and COVID continue to kill...
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Life Skills and Self-Care
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Why It’s Okay to Waste Food

Karen R. Koenig
Why-Its-Okay-to-Waste-Food
Teaching Clients Why It’s Okay to “Waste” Food (reprinted from Gürze-Salucore Eating Disorders newsletter, July 29, 2023) A client and I had an interesting chat about wasting food. She was raised on a shoestring budget, with her grandmother insisting that everyone finish the food on their plate. I understood: My father would sit with me and read the New York World-Telegram until every morsel on my plate was in my stomach. He acted as if unfinished food was reason enough for the major crimes unit to haul me away. Though he was raised during the Depression when money was tight, by the time I came along he’d become a successful Manhattan podiatrist. I understand how old habits die hard, if at all. Now, I go out of my way to explain to dysregulated eaters that what we came to believe as children when we were told not to waste food was...
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Eating
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Thoughts About Food That Make No Sense

Karen R. Koenig
Thoughts-About-Food-That-Make-No-Sense
Did you ever stop and analyze what drives your dysfunctional eating? Specifically, whether your thoughts about food are rational? I bet not. Irrational thinking is the major cause of dysregulated eating. Here’s one common example. My client Jonah described how he always wanted to eat or buy two of everything. We hadn’t talked about this issue before and he explained that, for example, getting two hamburgers for a bit more than the price of one felt so right. For example, he thought the idea of paying $6 for two burgers when he’d have to pay $4 for one was terrific.  I told him that would work if he were buying them in a store and was planning to have two meals for the six bucks. He said, no, he ate whatever he bought at once, whether he was hungry for the second one or not and was tickled pink knowing how...
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Eating
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Better to Be Concerned Than to Worry

Karen R. Koenig
Better-to-Be-Concerned-Than-to-Worry
Because I believe that self-talk determines our mood and actions, a while ago I started replacing the word “worry” with “concern.” So, instead of thinking, “I’m anxious we may need a new roof” (which we do), I’ve turned it into, “I am concerned we may need a new roof” or even “I have a concern we may need a new roof” which brings more detachment from my thoughts because it’s something I “have,” not something I “am.” Concern shows that something is important to you and you want to put attention on it. It matters enough to think about; it’s on your mind. It’s on one end of a continuum whereas, “worry” or “anxiety” is on the other. It’s a mental note of something to consider. Worry ratchets up concern to a higher level. It’s concern on steroids. Whereas concern shows fleeting and mild attachment to a thought, worry makes it...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation
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When and When Not to Care What People Think

Karen R. Koenig
When-and-When-Not-to-Care-What-People-Think
A common discussion I have with clients concerns their worries about what people will think of them. It’s a general attitude they carry around, rather than picking and choosing to care about what certain people think about specific certain things. While caring too much can get folks into trouble, you also don’t want to slide over to the other extreme and not care what anyone thinks about you. The goal is to figure out who’s important and why. We care what people think of us because it’s hard-wired into us. If people don’t think well of us when we are young and we can’t fend for ourselves, we might die. Ditto when we’re old or sick. We need people to think well of us if we’re to survive and thrive. So, when we hear people say, “I don’t care what anyone thinks,” assuming they really mean anyone, there’s something gravely wrong....
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Family Relationships, Love and Friendship
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Why We Lie to Ourselves

Karen R. Koenig
Why-We-Lie-to-Ourselves
All of us lie to ourselves at one time or another, some of us more than others. Here’s one example you’ll recognize instantly: You’re stuffed to the gills but there’s still a slice of pizza left, so you snarf it down, thinking, “I’ll skip dinner tonight or start a diet tomorrow.” The truthful thought would be, “I’ll feel awful if I eat this slice of pizza and I’ll probably eat a big dinner tonight and eat the same way tomorrow.” This type of lie has a kind of magic to it. It flies against our knowing better, our experience and what we understand about reality. It’s different than the lie you tell your boss that your project is almost done when you’ve barely started it or the one you tell your sister when she asks if you like her expensive new hair cut which she’s wildly excited about but you think...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation
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Mistakes Help You Win, Not Lose

Karen R. Koenig
Mistakes-Help-You-Win-Not-Lose
I recently read a great quote which had no attribution, “I’d rather make mistakes than do nothing, I’d rather mess up than miss out completely.” How true, how true. It seems that people are either on one side of this divide or the other: willing to mess up in order to win or succeed or, at the other extreme, living in fear of erring and surrendering a chance to reach their goals. Sad, huh? Whether we’re talking missteps or major failures, what’s the secret the person quoted above knows that people who fear messing up don’t? It’s really no secret at all, just an entirely different mindset than believing you must do everything right that causes you to live in terror of doing things wrong. The idea is to accept that missteps are an essential part of life that we can’t escape and not be ashamed when you do something that...
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Life Skills and Self-Care
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Defending Yourself Is Not the Same as Being Abusive

Karen R. Koenig
Defending-Yourself-Is-Not-the-Same-as-Being-Abusive
I could swear I’ve blogged about victims of abuse thinking that defending themselves against mistreatment constitutes abuse. So here are my thoughts, perhaps again. My client Judy’s wife, Dee, blows up at the least little thing. She has a whole litany of criticisms about Judy and demands she listen patiently to every last one of them. If Judy tries to leave in the midst of Dee’s tirade, she’s accused of being self-absorbed and ignoring Dee’s needs. Finally, one night when Dee started screaming at Judy the minute she came home from work, Judy yelled back, “Shut the f*** up.”  In our next session, though, rather than be proud of speaking up, Judy felt awful, insisting, “I’m just like Dee. I can’t believe I cursed her out. Shame on me.” A generally soft-spoken person, it’s hard to even imagine Judy cursing, so she clearly had been pushed to the brink. Her retort...
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Abuse and Trauma
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What’s the Difference Between a Friend and a Therapist?

Karen R. Koenig
Whats-the-Difference-Between-a-Friend-and-a-Therapist
Some people say they don’t need a therapist because they have friends, while others rely heavily on family alone. Relatives may be helpful, but we can’t rely on them to support what’s best for us because they’re often invested in themselves, in us as is, and lack distance and perspective to advise what’s in our best interest.  That’s what a therapist is for. I thought about the friend/therapist divide one day talking with an old friend. The friend in me wanted to be empathic, while the therapist in me knew that the healthiest response to what she presented as a problem was to challenge the slanted picture she was painting. Unfortunately, the therapist in me was first out of the gate until I reined her back in and, instead, switched hats (apologies for mixed metaphors) and simply offered compassion for what she was feeling. This is exactly why therapists can do...
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Family Relationships, Love and Friendship
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Who Takes Care of You?

Karen R. Koenig
Who-Takes-Care-of-You
The other day I read a phrase that virtually begged to be blogged about: “Okay, I’m over self-care. Everyone else can take care of me now.” How wonderful is that? We hear so much about self-care in the media (and in therapy) that the other half of the equation, having others take care of us, often gets lost in the shuffle. The truth is that life is exponentially better when we care well for ourselves and also have others care for us. You might be wondering what kind of care I mean. Most people think of doing things for people who are sick or have a disability and can’t fend for themselves. That’s one kind of caring, but there are more. I think of caring for people as falling into three categories: emotional, physical and social, but there may be other ways to think about the subject. In emotional care-taking, people...
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Emotions and Actions

Karen R. Koenig
Emotions-and-Actions
People who grow up in dysfunctional families often are highly reactive in situations. How can children learn what to feel and how to react appropriately in relationships if parents and family are emotionally unhealthy? We need healthy role models for that to happen. For example, my client Mona was insulted by something a co-worker drew on a “community” board in the lunch room at work. Mona thought they’d had a decent relationship, so she was hurt and angry that this woman would make fun of her publicly. The back story is that Mona and her co-worker had a brief interaction previously which had, unbeknownst to Mona, bothered the co-worker.  Mona was hurt by the drawing. Who wouldn’t be? With her history of emotional abuse in childhood and adulthood, her reactions ran unsurprisingly in two directions—either she felt full of rage and wanted to hurt someone back or she wanted to isolate...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation
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Why Do We Care What People Think of Our Appearance?

Karen R. Koenig
Why-Do-We-Care-What-People-Think-of-Our-Appearance
I get having concerns about what people think of you. Mine have lessened with age, but I swear I’ll be heading into the cremation oven—still wondering, “Do I look alright?” Self-consciousness for me is second nature coming from very looks conscious parents.  Now that we’re no longer children, though, it’s time to move toward becoming more comfortable with how we look. One way to do that is to understand that our discomfort is not based in the past. There are actually folks out there who weren’t made to feel bad about their particular hair/thighs/stomach/nose/chin/etc. and are walking around today not thinking much, if at all, about these body parts. Or maybe their whole family was higher weight and no one made a big deal about it. Though we can’t restart our lives in another family that doesn’t have “bad-body” issues, we can make changes in the present by paying attention to...
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Body Image
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Mature Hurt

Karen R. Koenig
Mature-Hurt
There’s a world of difference between the emotional hurt of a child and that of an adult. Because the human brain doesn’t fully develop until the late 20s, children and adolescents have only partially formed brains whose final part is our frontal lobes which are responsible for cognitive functions such as problem solving, memory and judgment. Prior to that, we rely mostly on emotions to assess and react to situations. Think about the nearly unbearable hurt and pain you felt as a child. No matter how wonderful and functional your childhood was, you suffered. Maybe you got lost in a department store at age 5, frantic to find your parents. Or at age 9 you listened to them screaming at each other night after night and were terrified they’d hurt each other and you’d end up alone. Or at 16 Dad left you and mom and you were sure it was...
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Emotional Management and Self-Regulation
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This website is owned and operated by Karen R. Koenig, M.Ed., LCSW. It contains material intended for informational and educational purposes only, and reasonable effort is made to keep its contents updated. Any material contained herein is not to be construed as the practice of clinical social work or of psychotherapy, although adherence to applicable Florida States, Rules, and Code of Ethics is observed. Material on this website is not intended as a substitute for medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment for mental health issues or eating disorder problems, which should be done only through individualized therapeutic consultation. Karen R. Koenig, LCSW disclaims any and all liability arising directly or indirectly from the use of any information contained on this website. This website contains links to other sites. The inclusion of such links does not necessarily constitute endorsement by Karen R. Koenig, LCSW who disclaims any and all liability arising directly or indirectly from the use of any information contained in this website. Further, Karen R. Koenig, LCSW, does not and cannot guarantee the accuracy or current usefulness of the material contained in the linked sites. Users of any website must be aware of the limitation to confidentiality and privacy, and website usage does not carry any guarantee or privacy of any information contained therein.

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