When I thanked a friend for how often she had my husband and me over for dinner and said how much she must enjoy cooking, she jumped in with: “It’s not cooking I like. It’s entertaining.” Ah: suddenly I realized I enjoyed entertaining too, aka having people over to the house—minus the food prep and pre- and post- cleaning. I was surprised by her remark because I thought of her as a foodie and had no idea she didn’t love cooking. I began to wonder if others also found cooking tedious but enjoyed (what my parents called) company. My husband and I recently had an afternoon visit from out-of-town cousins we hadn’t seen in years who said they didn’t want to come for dinner, but only wanted to hang out with us. What a relief—though we did put out a few no fuss, store bought noshes. Not cooking felt great and...

Although most people who attend therapy voluntarily bring with them a desire to change, they often say things like, “Well, it’s just who I am” or “This is me.” My sense of their sense of their Self is that they see it as something static rather than ever-changing. So, this is where we start in therapy: With the understanding that emotionally healthy people are open to change and recognize that sometimes it happens in what seems like one gigantic leap and most other times it’s such a minor shift, it almost escapes notice. In Existentialism for a New Era, The Millennial Therapist Sara Kuburic criticizes the view of “finding yourself” because “It assumes there’s a preconceived, constructed sense of Self that’s been given to you and you just need to find it . . . In my mind, you create your sense of Self. And that Self is perpetually evolving . . . Every...

Because our culture is so very either-or and one-way-or-the-other, it’s often difficult to value the concept of “and” rather than “or.” I see this with clients who are counter-dependent and co-dependent. These folks either have to do everything themselves or feel as if they’ve failed, or have few inner resources and a diminished belief in their ability to handle life on their own and are, therefor, overly dependent on others. My client Kayla is self-assured and believes she needs no help from others. When she gets into a tight space, she grins and bears it—sometimes with the help of alcohol and often with the help of food. “It kills me,” she insists, “to have to ask others to give me a hand. I was raised to be independent and fend for myself.” Yet deep down she knows she needs people to help her. Intellectually she understands that reaching out to others...

What is it about “guilty pleasures” that make them so enticing to some people? To both improve mental health and enjoy life, it’s time to stop engaging in this self-abusive concept. Guilt and pleasure are miles apart, at either end of a spectrum, and don’t belong together. Guilt makes us feel bad, inadequate, and selfish because we think we’ve done something wrong. Pleasure, on the other hand, makes us happy, even joyful, and often gets our dopamine popping because something feels so right. One of my clients is the king of guilty pleasures, often starting a session by asking with a sly grin: “Can I tell you about my guilty pleasure weekend?” It almost always involves dining at an upscale restaurant (which he can barely afford) and eating too much. In fact, most weekends, he does just that—with friends, his significant other, or alone. He tortures himself: if he eats at...

Growing up, my mother would often ask me, “Why do you care so much about what others think?” It was a fair question, although she seemed to care a good deal about others’ opinions herself. Perhaps by continually posing the question to me, she hoped I’d turn out less like her. Who knows? Whatever her motivation, her question stuck with me over the years and helped shape my life. I think of her question often because it seems these days many adults are stuck in childhood or adolescence. In the former, they’ve been groomed by parents to obey rules in fear of punishment or rejection. After all, even in the best of childhoods life’s about pleasing the powers that be. As teens, it was all about peer pressure because bonding with folks who’re not family is how we separate from family. Acceptance by our peer group provides connections when we reject...

Knowing the difference between the processes of assimilation and accommodation will help you make conscious, healthy choices rather than act on what might be your impulse to stay with old ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. For example, a client had a cousin who’d recently changed sex from female to male. Sadly, my client was the only person in the family who supported and accepted this change. Her description of how she managed to get another relative to be more open-minded and accepting of their (now) nephew is a perfect example of how these psychological processes work. According to Kendra Cherry, MSEd in What is Assimilation in Psychology?, “Assimilation is the cognitive process of making new information fit in with your existing understanding of the world. Essentially, when you encounter something new, you process and make sense of it by relating it to things that you already know. Through assimilation, we...

Decades ago, I heard the Henry Ford quote “Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right.” It’s true because our thoughts propel our actions, that is, what we think and tell ourselves is exactly what we do. Not a week goes by without a client insisting they can’t do something: get to work on time, say no to their children, sit with feelings, attend AA meetings, etc. And each time I hear them say “I can’t,” I know they won’t, no matter how much they yearn to change. For example, Portia tells me she can’t stop fuming at her husband who has a very different temperament than she does. She’s Type A and he marches to his own inner drum, getting things done when he feels like it. Every session, she comes in and complains she “simply cannot accept his scattered behavior.” How could repeating these...

Within every choice, every decision, every intention are the seeds of consequence. You might not wish it to be so, but it makes the statement no less true. If you smoke cigarettes, you might not get lung cancer or you might. If you refuse to wear a seat belt, you might be uninjured in an accident or thrown from the car and killed. If you yell at your boss, you might be forgiven or fired.  Many of us think of consequence as divorced from choice, that choice is now and consequence is later. That false perception keeps the two unnaturally detached and makes it easy to forget that potential consequence is embedded in every choice. Sure, life’s a crapshoot, but we improve it exponentially when we play the odds.  When I asked my client Stella if she worried that her heavy drinking would damage her liver, she snickered in her typical...

All 8.1 billion of us on the planet struggle with bedeviling thoughts to greater or lesser extent. Effective management depends on your view of them and the effort you put into governing them. What’s your take on thoughts? What’s their purpose? Are they facts or truths? Are they all created equal? You must seriously consider and answer these questions in order to be in charge of your thoughts rather than the other way around.  Neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett author of the groundbreaking book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, calls the brain a prediction machine which works nonstop to keep us out of harm’s way. Emotions and thoughts are constantly interacting with each other, surfacing as considerations that either float in and out of awareness or bombard us. Some are automatic reactions to the present (wow, they’re hot) and others are memories that intrude because...

To be mentally healthy is to know yourself extremely well and still manage to like yourself. These are two distinct but strongly related feats. In truth, some people are so afraid they won’t like themselves if they dig too deeply into their psyche that they barely scratch the surface of self-knowledge before making a fast retreat. These are people who insist they don’t need therapy and it’s a bunch of hooey, anyway, and who pretend to have enormous self-knowledge when it’s obvious to anyone who’s been with them for five minutes that they’re clueless about themselves. The first part of the equation, knowing yourself, is easier than the second. Self-examination begins with recognizing your challenges and weaknesses as well as your strengths. The goal is to hold both at once. One would think it’s more likely that positives would shoot to the surface and we’d need to reach deeper inside to...

Decades ago, a near stranger asked me why I often wore neck scarves. True, this was my habit and that of many others, as was the fashion back in the 1980s. I’m sure I mumbled that I liked how they looked or some such, but this woman’s question never struck me as coming from curiosity. It rang of judgment (as I got to know her, it turned out she was a preachy sort) which irked me. Recently, when a client described how her mother keeps asking her why she doesn’t want children, I thought of the scarf interaction and how people often ask questions that are clearly inappropriate or unwanted. Fortunately, in my clinical training, I was taught to answer inquiries of a personal or impertinent nature with another question: “Why do you want to know?” I’ve used that response over the decades well beyond my professional arena, asking it softly,...

Months ago, as I was ironing, my beloved iron sputtered and died. After trying various ways to revive it, I grumbled, “Ugh, now something else is broken. I’m so tired of this happening.” Then the light bulb in my head flashed on to remind me that “s**t happens” because that’s the way of the world—always was, always will be—and our wish that life would simply roll merrily along without a hitch is merely self-serving foolishness.  Objects break or get lost, people and animals get sick and die, deals fall through, plans turn to disaster, weather trumps plans, and if things can go wrong they almost surely will. We know this on some level, don’t we? We experience the process ourselves and see it happen to others every day—and yet we still cling to the fantasy that we’ll have predictable, perfect lives. If random stuff happening weren’t so difficult to bear, it...

One of my favorite courses in social work school was called Values Clarification (or something similar). Most people have never heard of the topic. Neither had I. But it’s a crucial life skill in understanding yourself and your place in the world. Good Therapy defines values clarification as “a psychotherapy technique that can often help an individual increase awareness of any values that may have a bearing on lifestyle decisions and actions. This technique can provide an opportunity for a person to reflect on personal moral dilemmas and allow for values to be analyzed and clarified. This process may be helpful for self-improvement, increased well-being, and interactions with others.” An understatement of its usefulness, in my humble opinion. Values come up all the time in and out of therapy, but we don’t generally call them that. Instead, we say: my beliefs are, I think that, what’s right (or wrong) is. When...

I’m forever challenging clients who say, “I always” and “I never” or who tell me they’re a certain way, such as insisting, “I hate parties” or “I try never to hurt anyone.” These statements are a sure sign that someone is lacking cognitive flexibility or the adaptive ability to make judgments about what’s necessary or effective situation by situation.  One of the biggest mistakes that dysregulated eaters make is holding on for dear life to old ways of thinking, rather than make decisions based on current reality. For example, my client Tonya grew up in a family in which she was sexually and emotionally abused. No wonder she didn’t trust people and took pride in relying only on herself—except that no man or woman is an island and we need to depend on others to live our best lives. Her response to others was adaptive in childhood but is maladaptive now....

During a session with a client who’s rapidly progressing (though it doesn’t always feel that way to her), I asked if she could think of herself as a home, actually a new home she’s moving into. I admit that one of the joys of my job—and there are many—is watching the “becoming” process from dysfunctional to functional. The idea behind the house analogy is that my client is moving into herself or into being her best self. Think of what a home represents. First off, you own it. It’s yours, which brings you both freedom and responsibility for it. For example, the joy of owning your home and living there means you can do whatever you want with it within legal limits. There’s no one there to tell you what to do. If you’re self-motivated, that’s not a problem because you want to be in a place that puts your health...

Are you someone who’s so humble you never claim credit for anything and brush off compliments? This quality is characteristic of many dysregulated eaters. It’s one thing to be appropriately self-effacing—modesty and humility are laudable qualities—but it’s quite another when doing something well feels so unbearable that you can’t tolerate feeling proud that you achieved a personal goal or make a difference in the world.  Many people are raised to eschew boasting and bragging and that’s fine, but how do you ever build a healthy self without incorporating positives into it? A perfect example is when I tell a client, “Wow, you really spoke up to your boss this time and you did it in a very effective way. Good work!” and they insist, “Well, it’s all thanks to you. You’re the one who taught me how to stand up for myself.”  What’s wrong here? My client was brave and moved...

Ever wonder how some people say they want to do something and then get it done? Many factors motivate change, but the final step is always about taking action.  I’ve observed this process working with a client over time. When I first started seeing Cherise several years ago, she was binge-drinking and eventually got a DUI, making it impossible to drive which hugely impacted her life. She was at the point back then where, after telling me about her latest black-out, she’d insist, “I’ve got to stop drinking. I really need to quit.”  I knew the moment I heard the word “need” that she wasn’t giving up alcohol any time soon and we had a long discussions about how external motivators don’t work nearly as well as internal ones. Since then, we’ve had many more chats about how pressuring herself to do something (especially a biggie like stopping drinking) was only...

Many people who grew up to become co-dependent go overboard helping others to their own detriment. They’re all give and no take, which puts them in a position of relying on food for comfort rather than the support of others. The 4 Most Important Things You Need to Do to Recover From "Super-Helper Syndrome" provides some spot on advice for reversing this behavior and taking better care of yourself. “Super-helper syndrome” is a term coined by psychologists Jess Baker and Rod Vincent to describe people who have a compulsion to help others while failing to meet their own needs.” Sound familiar? Their goal in life is to please and help others which is how they garner feelings of self-esteem and self-worth. Sure, we want to feel good about doing unto others, but we also want to feel as good about doing unto ourselves. Baker and Vincent want to teach “super helpers”...

Many people say they eat to feel comforted and can track that path to the refrigerator right back to childhood. I certainly can. At first, I sought food when I was unhappy and after a while it just became a habit and a way to not feel uncomfortable feelings. In the best of situations growing up, we feel safe most of the time in the world at large and all the time with our families. They make us feel secure through being predictable and non-threatening, by validating our feelings and encouraging us to express them (all of them), and by keeping us from harm. Growing up feeling safe includes getting emotional and physical comfort when we’re distressed. If we fall down and scrape a knee, we get a band-aid and a hug and maybe a reminder to not run too fast. If we didn’t make the soccer team, we get empathy...

It’s great to have life goals and dreams. Having a clear vision of how you want your life to go gives you something to work toward and helps you move forward. What is not useful—in fact, it’s downright detrimental—is to decide that you must have a certain job to be happy or one particular person as a spouse or partner to feel fulfilled. That’s just a set up for disappointment and pain and for ending up feeling badly about yourself when these events don’t manifest the way you’d like them to. This dynamic happens often when searching for a mate. “If I don’t find one, I’ll be devastated,” I’ve heard clients say. Worse, many of them narrow it down to one person, “If I can’t have them, I’ll never be happy.” Setting yourself up to have to have one particular person for a romantic partner is a recipe for disaster. Sure,...

Many clients were victimized in their dysfunctional families when they were children or adolescents. They had no choice. Even if they wanted to run away, they lacked the means or ability. Children and other powerless people are true victims. Though the Oxford Language Dictionary defines victim as someone “harmed, injured, tricked or duped,” are you really a victim as an adult when you can avoid something happening?  Perhaps that’s where the confusion comes in. Some people put themselves in situations where they’ll more than likely get “harmed, injured, tricked or duped” and choose to do so repeatedly. There’s a difference between a car veering off the road and hitting you and standing squarely in front of the car so it can’t miss you. In the former case, you’re not choosing to put yourself in harm’s way by standing at the bus stop with everyone else, while in the second you’re going...

Some people assume they can’t change habits because they’re lazy, unmotivated, undisciplined or lack will power. This assumption is dead wrong, and if you want to change behavioral patterns, you must give up these inaccurate beliefs and be open to learning about what works to rid yourself of old habits and develop new ones. Ready? “How to Conquer Your Primitive Brain” by Adam Piore (Newsweek, 2/17/23, pp 22-31) debunks myths about destructive habit formation and advocates scientifically proven strategies for constructive habit replacement. Some of the article’s major points: “Research suggests that habits, which operate below conscious awareness, usually cannot be tamed simply by resolving to resist them . . . we need to reverse engineer the chain of behavior that precedes them, and then either remove the cures that set us off altogether, or take the time to build new habits that will replace them.”“Habits are an essential tool of...

We’re told to live in the moment, but if you don’t use some of them planning for the future, what will happen to you down the road? I don’t mean for you to worry which is not planning. I’m talking about realistically thinking about how your life will be 10, 20 or 40 years if you continue on your same path and don’t move healthfully forward. Specifically, what will middle or old age be like if you don’t change habits or face fears? My client Grant , 41, was perfectly comfortable living at home with his elderly father. Grant worked part-time, had no health benefits and prided himself in spending his time as he wished. When his father, who had Medicare and social security, had a heart attack and needed more care than he could afford, Grant had no savings to help out. Although he had a college degree in political...

Attempting to Zoom with three college friends, I twice tried and failed to get into the session. I assumed I’d done something wrong ‘til I received a text from one friend who was having the same difficulty and another from the Zoom “inviter” who couldn’t get the link to work. We each thought we were the ones who’d messed up. Then the ”inviter” re-sent the link and three of us got in, but the fourth kept texting, “I can’t get in. Help! What am I doing wrong?” She eventually used the re-sent link and there we all finally were laughing at how pathetic we are at technology. These are my kind of people: their first thought is they must be at fault. Why, you might ask, would I be such a fan of people who automatically think they’re wrong? Because back in social work school, one of my professors explained how...

Every time someone says, “Oh, they’re so nice, they’d give you the shirt off their back,” I think if this is our standard for niceness, no wonder so many people are dysfunctional. My reaction is always the same: It’s not a great thing for someone to go shirtless. Better for them to keep theirs on and help others get their own shirts. Being selfless, noble or altruistic are admirable, appropriate qualities—but only in some situations. When someone stops to drag a driver out of a burning car, that’s an amazing act of self-sacrifice. When a well-fed person encounters a hungry person on the street and gives them half their sandwich, that’s kindness and compassion in action. When you take the money your parents give you for your birthday to upgrade your cell phone and instead give it to your friend who lost theirs in a fire, that’s living with an open...

A pattern that shows up a lot in dysregulated eaters is clients trying to prove something. Their goal is to show someone (or themselves) that they are or aren’t a certain way and they go at it with such a vengeance that it overrides their common sense and ability to make healthy decisions for themselves. For example, my client Dawn who’s recovered from drug and alcohol abuse has recently taken a part-time, entry-level job, her first since quitting drugs. She enjoys it but working the night shift has turned her life upside down—she’s eating poorly, is exhausted all the time, and can’t attend her usual AA or NA meetings for support. When I asked why she stays in the job or hasn’t requested a more suitable schedule, she said she’d thought about asking for another shift, but didn’t want people to think she’s a quitter. She expressed fear that her parents...

Devouring a column by advice giver par excellence, Carolyn Hax, I had a good chuckle at her response (which I paraphrase) to a letter writer: When life is irritating and people are jerks, just “deal with it” and don’t make a big to-do. I confess there’ve been times when I’ve felt like saying exactly that to clients but never had the nerve because it’s sounds so un-therapist like, so unprofessional. Aren’t we supposed to be infinitely understanding, patient, compassionate, and kind no matter what?  After reading Hax’s Washington Post column (that comes out in my local paper), I began thinking about whether there’s a place for her manner of brashness in the therapy session, which is meant to be a space for honesty and straight talk. I decided there is and that my job, above all else, is to help clients become emotionally healthy and that sometimes frankness and bluntness is...

Anyone who knows me well would use the words chatty, highly verbal, or strongly interactive to describe me in a relationship—unless I’m employing a technique therapists call strategic silence. It’s used to encourage clients to sit with and expand feelings by helping the therapist get out of their way. This blog is not about how strategic silence is used in therapy. It’s meant to teach you how to use this technique to improve your dealings with difficult people. Social discourse involves one person saying something and another saying something in return. A back-and-forth volley of words is expected as it is in playing tennis: When your opponent lobs the ball over the net, it’s assumed you’ll try to hit it back.  To use strategic silence effectively, you must accept and feel okay about breaking a social norm. You also need a valid reason for using it which is self-care and not...

Learning how to handle stress goes a long way toward curbing dysregulated eating. Of course, all stress isn’t created equal, but our responses are generally ingrained and we react unconsciously. In order to manage stressful situations, think about how you react interpersonally, that is, whether you move toward or away from people when stressed. There are two extremes you want to watch out for: Do you close up and push family, friends and co-workers away or do you grab onto and cling to them for dear life?  Many people cave inward when life starts to spin out of control. My client Shara says of her romantic relationship: “When we’re stressed, neither of us wants to talk. It’s like we need to crawl into our own shell to keep it together. We can go on like that for days or even weeks.” My client Grant does exactly the opposite: “I ask everyone...

How do you know you’re breathing? When I ask clients this question, they think it’s a silly thing to ask and usually say, “Well, duh, I just know.” What I want them to recognize is that there are some things we don’t question. Instead, we “just know” they’re true.  Two such truths to acknowledge intertwine: that we’re lovable and have choices. Do you “just know” you’re lovable or is this a question that you’re unsure how to answer? Healthy people know they are (that is, they’re worthy of love and have lovable qualities) in the same way they know they’re breathing. Their worth and value is either a given from an early age or a question that’s been asked and answered at some point in life, so they never have to consider it again. It’s also true that there are choices and consequences in life. We make a decision and either...

The documentary, Stutz, will touch hearts and go a long way toward healing the mind of anyone with eating problems, weight concerns or low self-esteem. Actor Jonah Hill wrote and directed this film about his long-time therapist, renowned psychiatrist and author, Dr. Phil Stutz (not to be confused with TV’s “Dr. Phil”).  From the notes I scribbled on scrap paper watching the Netflix film: “I keep thinking of how Stutz’s teachings could help heal my clients, blog readers and Facebook followers. I was awed at how open, honest, and vulnerable Hill was, telling the world who he was below his public persona. I ached hearing Stutz’s sad life story and felt buoyed at the amazing man he became in spite of childhood suffering and developing Parkinson’s.”  Hill made this film to honor Stutz who helped him heal from over-eating, poor body image, and low self-esteem and to share with others “the powerful...

One of the most talked about topics in therapy is boundary setting. If you grew up in a family with appropriate boundaries in which people knew where they ended emotionally and others began, you probably have no problem with them. You do what family members modeled, it feels natural saying yes and no as appropriate, and you choose to be around people with healthy boundaries. If your parents and relatives exhibited poor boundaries—prying into each others’ business, taking advantage of each other, always saying yes and never saying no or vice versa, and being bossy—you likely have problems with them too. Not to worry: this is a learnable skill that requires paying attention, having courage, knowing what to say when, and practicing until they trip off your tongue easily. When someone violates your boundaries, you might instinctively:  Explain what someone is doing wrong or point out they’re not listening to you.Repeat...

The trend toward forgiveness has been around for decades. But what about people who have a compulsion to instantly forgive people no matter how heinous their crimes against them or others. Here are a few examples. Bobby came to see me for overeating problems, and the fact that he was a trauma survivor soon surfaced. After describing his horrendous childhood—Dad was murdered when he was six, Mom was an abusive alcoholic, and he was the oldest of five children whom he was charged with taking care of. Neglected physically and emotionally, he was the one who got stuck asking neighbors for help and money and the one who cared for his mother when she was dying of liver cancer. When I asked how he felt about caring for his mother who barely cared for him, he said he felt bad for her because she’d had a hard life. I understood his...

I confess, I’m a creature of habit: I have dance classes on Tuesday night, watch TV or read from 8:30 on in the evening, exercise 10-11 most mornings, and my best friend and I exchange phone calls every Sunday at 9 a.m. Although I have my share of flaws, I’m nothing if not consistent, raised as I fortunately was by creatures-of-habit parents. So, what do you do if you weren’t raised with a model of consistency and want to learn how to do things more regularly and stop flip-flopping between performing and avoiding certain activities? This is an especially crucial skill for dysregulated eaters who swing from under- to overeating and being a couch potato to becoming gym rats. In How to Be Consistent, Brad Stulberg explains the five principles to follow to develop habits of consistency. I’m sure you’ve heard some of them before, but maybe this time you’re ready...

A client told me this anecdote. Her first therapist helped her to see that we can live quite well without controlling everything in our world and she was excited to share this enlightened insight with her mother. But when she told Mom that “anything can happen to anyone anytime,” Mom freaked out and quickly changed the subject. This story reminded me of a former boyfriend to whom I was complaining about my mother when suddenly he slapped his hands over his ears (in a restaurant, no less) and kept repeating “no, no, please stop.” My complaints must have stirred up a helluva storm inside him that he needed to shut out the pain my words were triggering in him. I’ve accepted that life can turn on a dime ever since my father died suddenly in the summer between my junior and senior years in college. Ever since then, I wince when...

I’ve noticed this phenomenon over my 35 years of being a therapist: many clients who are great at giving care are crummy at receiving it. These are people who become uncomfortable when someone wants to do something for them—give them a gift or do them a favor. These are often the same people who rely on alcohol, food or other obsessive habits to deal with life rather than turn to people. Take Astrid who is finally accepting now in her late 50s that there’s a cost to perpetual giving. Doing for all her neighbors, colleagues, and family members exhausts her but it also makes her insist, “It makes me feel good about myself, you know, worthwhile.” Of course, anyone can see that by saying this, she’s also saying that the opposite is true: if she isn’t giving or taking care of someone, she’s of no value. Worse, if she’s taking care...

Many questions and topics come up repeatedly in therapy that you may want answers to, so here they are. Where possible, I’ve directed you to read more about them.  Am I a bad person because I judge and feel critical of others? Rather than thinking others are bad people, use critical thinking skills (based on cognition and rationality) along with your honest emotional reactions to determine someone’s worth and appeal by weighing their pros and cons. You’re supposed to use these skills to know who’s emotionally healthy and who isn’t.  How do I know if I’m normal?  That’s an easy question to answer: there is no normal for everyone for everything. What you’re really asking? Usually, when clients ask this question, they want to know if their thoughts or feelings are healthy/unhealthy or common/unusual. In my book, it’s more important to be healthy than common. Lots of people do awful things...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Rather than start a diet at the beginning of this year, think about January as a good time to evaluate and improve not just your thoughts, but the way you think. Change it, and your feelings and behavior will be transformed, automatically shifting you in the direction you want to go for health, fitness and higher self-esteem. Let me explain a simple tool for measuring how take in and process information. I’ve been using it since I learned about it in social work school back in the late 1980s. Be careful not to judge yourself as you’re learning about this new concept. Just take note of your habits and how you might change them. Consider what you do with new information. When you’re presented with a different way of looking at something than your usual way—for example, trying intuitive or mindful eating versus dieting—how do you decide whether to hold onto...

Many dysregulated eaters have difficulty setting boundaries. All/nothing thinking leads them to accept everyone into their lives and allow people to walk all over them or keeps them emotionally defended and alone. This is known as having loose or tight boundaries. One is not better than the other. Boundaries need to be set according to what’s necessary. Like doors, boundaries can be open, closed or swing back and forth.  We learn about boundaries from parents and other adults who take care of themselves and others and say yes and no appropriately on a case-by-case basis. Boundaries are fluid—like swinging doors—set according to varying people and situations. Wise parents are sometimes available to their children and sometimes not. They watch out for them and themselves and are clear about what they will and won’t do for others. Alternately, parents with poor boundary setting provide unhealthy models for their children. Maybe they feel...

A conflict that comes up a good deal in therapy is whether we can care about someone but no longer want to be responsible for taking care of them. Discussion of this topic arises more often with people who are co-dependent than with those who aren’t. In fact, it’s often a tip off of their over-focusing on other’s needs.  Here are two examples. A client broke off a long-term relationship with her boyfriend in another state. They hadn’t lived together for a while and slowly became more friends than lovers. My client made great strides in therapy, more or less leaving her ex in the dust, while he continued to be jobless, live with his parents, and do drugs. They’d been each other’s support for decades and she still had deep feelings for him, but she was tired of him calling to complain and always make himself out to be a...

Clients often complain about the narcissists in their lives and I’ve written several blogs about coping with them. I was thinking about them when I was waiting for someone in a doctor’s office and clocked fellow A talking non-stop to fellow B for 40 minutes! I couldn’t believe fellow B sat patiently, injecting only a few questions. Nor could I suppress a silent cheer when fellow A finally stopped talking and fellow B said, “But, you never answered my original question.”  We needn’t become captive to narcissists, especially the ones who drone on and on (and on and on) talking about themselves. I recently read about a technique called “gray rocking” which is one tool to try out. According to Deborah Ashway, LMHC, the term describes the person on the receiving end of an interaction trying “to make themselves as boring and nonreactive as possible to decrease the amount of provoking...

It’s time to accept that you have tremendous power to manage your behaviors, thoughts and feelings and very little to govern the lives of others. Unfortunately, too many people have this paradigm backward: they feel and act powerless and believe they’re responsible for others’ actions. Here are two examples, one clinical and one personal.  A client described how a neighbor had been harassing her for months when she was walking her dog. He seemed to pop up wherever she went, even when she changed her route to avoid him. A gentle soul, she only hinted that she didn’t want his company on her walks and didn’t want to date him. One session she came in all upset. “He got hit by a car,” she exclaimed, referring to her neighbor, “and died!” Then she went on to explain how it was all her fault because he was probably out trying to find...

Once more a similar issue keeps cropping up in sessions, which got me thinking about a sticking point in growing and healing. This time it was how little pleasure many dysregulated eaters have in their lives, while exhibiting a seemingly infinite capacity for pressuring themselves. Here’s what I mean. We all have activities or chores we’d like to get done today, tomorrow or this week. We have formal and informal deadlines and requests and demands that others rightfully make of us. Mostly, if we want to get paid, work is required. If we have children, they come with the need to be taken care of. It’s natural to feel mild pressure about getting things done. Pressure gets us up and moving. However, if we never stop feeling pressure—because there will always be more to do—it will drive us mad. Those relentless “gotta do, gotta do” thoughts can ruin our lives if...

I was reading an “advice” column letter from a woman saying that her actively alcoholic boyfriend “promised to stop drinking.” I sighed when I read his words, thinking about all the times they were my words about food and all the times I’d heard clients make the same promise. Famous last words or maybe we should call them famous lost words, because somehow their meaning and importance gets lost in the shuffle of life. Let’s take a closer look, or as they say these days, a deeper dive into the meaning of this promise and what prompts us to say it. I know what I was feeling when I swore to myself that I would stop noshing and overeating, turning to food when I was upset or bored, and living my life for my next meal. I was beyond frustrated with my terrible relationship with food. I was exasperated, in dire...

Many people with eating problems don’t trust themselves, not only around food, but to make wise decisions for themselves in numerous arenas. Self-distrust is learned in childhood and is often confused with not knowing what you think or feel. Difficulty identifying thoughts and emotions is different from distrusting what you experience. Think of self-knowledge as the precursor to self-confidence. Trusting yourself comes after knowing what’s going on inside you. Labeling emotions in the most specific way possible provides this information. Yes, you have to trust that the label you put on feelings is accurate, but emotions are only a piece of the information puzzle. Assuming that you are able to identify affective states all or most of the time, you possess the major skill for developing self-trust. Of course, if you’re uncertain about what you feel or suffer from self-doubt, particularly when you’re in emotional distress, you’ll have to work on...