It’s summer. Time to get caught up on summer reading and summer movie watching. For those of you a year behind like me, a movie review for the Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt movie, officially titled–Live, Die, Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow. Six reasons why this movie will make you feel better today: 6) After you die, you get to come ... Read More »
My Take on the Theory of Everything
I saw a handsome, smart, and ambitious young man recently who unfortunately is suffering from anxiety and stuttering issues. His first assignment: watch The King’s Speech. I wanted to inspire him. And while you’re at it, please read my blog post on “Movie Therapy.” (“Feeling Sad, Anxious, or Just Out-of-Sorts? An Introduction to Movie Therapy,” February 19, 2013*) I wanted ... Read More »
Why Are Some People So Controlling?
A young man sat in my office today and pondered his father’s unhealthy behavior. He said his dad would go on daily rants over the smallest infractions. When not having angry outbursts, he is just generally irascible (teens: that means cranky) to his wife and kids. He is clean to a fault (being clean is good; to a fault, not ... Read More »
Five Things I Learned About Life from Kentucky’s Loss in the Final Four
Note: I have readers from all over the world and many of you may not be fans of US college sports, much less basketball, but please be assured that, as always, there is a positive mental health theme here. The key word is loss, and the message is about how to handle loss, no matter the venue: basketball or your ... Read More »
Time to Find a Mission
It’s mid-March. The sun was shining and it was 70 degrees in Lexington yesterday. After a brutal six weeks of record breaking temperatures and snowfalls in Kentucky—in Lexington we hit -18, and that’s not wind chill; and we saw nearly 30”of snow fall accumulate in two arctic blasts. We also had motorists stranded on Kentucky Interstates for 24+ hours and ... Read More »
What Kentucky, Grandfathers, Dogs, and a Little Girl Who Survived an Airplane Crash Have in Common
Before we move on to unfortunate current events such as ISIS, AQAP, and terrorism in Paris, let’s take a break from man’s inhumanity to man to reflect on the heartfelt story of a sole survivor of a small airplane crash. By now you’ve heard the story of 7-year-old Sailor Gutzler who survived the crash of her father’s Piper small twin-engine ... Read More »
2014 — Top Ten Best Theories to Explain Why You Are Unhappy
As always, like to do a top ten list at the end of the year. Top ten best theories to explain why you are unhappy . . . 1) Attachment theory: A subset of Freudian theory. In a nutshell: your parents are to blame and that’s why you can’t form healthy attachments to others. A good theory for those times when ... Read More »
Why PTSD is So Intractable–Trauma is Stored in Our Brains!
Marilyn vos Savant is a national columnist and author and has been listed in Guinness World Records for “highest IQ” (both as a child and an adult). I was reading her Q&A column in Parade (Sunday newspaper magazine, readership 79 million) and was delighted to see a mental health question. The reader asked why, if we could hypnotize people to ... Read More »
A Look through the Forgiveness Window
A client, “Janine” recently shared with me the abuse she’d undergone at the hands of her father when she was growing up. The beatings were relentless until finally, after turning 18, she escaped by leaving home. What followed were some difficult teen years, two marriages for the wrong reasons, affairs, and alcohol abuse. She was, as Freud would say, continuing to “act out” the ... Read More »
Is Stress Your Friend? If Not, You Must Read This
I never post links to other articles, websites, pages, blogs, or images in the body of my blog posts. Why? For one of my of my blog posts, I reviewed a book titled, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. (June 2: “What Do Boko Haram, the Internet, and Books Have in Common?”) The ... Read More »