News and Insights

A client I had seen five years ago came in for a court assessment. The case was pending since that time and this report was to bring it to a close. One thing for certain was the person had completely changed. As a therapist, you treat people, let them go, and in my case rarely see them again. If they return or call and say hi, it is a bonus. The key is to not get attached to the outcomes of...

I often call myself a dinosaur because I grew up in a different era where the social norms were much different. As a child, we only had a handful of television stations that came in fuzzy most of the time. Often I turned to the radio for entertainment and especially to listen to sporting events. You have to understand that we didn’t have the luxury of seeing every sporting event like they do...

Do these statements look familiar? “When you’re down people kick you.” – Well, what happens when you are up? “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” – Well, why can’t we think of the best things? It is interesting how we have been trained to focus on the negatives. In our lives, this is how we create the negative things. It is called: The Law of Attraction. Why don’t we instead...

Choosing a treatment program that meets your needs is an important decision to make. Our policy has always been to be ourselves, present our information, and let a person decide. Whether people decide to stay or go, we too are assessing if they meet our standards. As for our groups, we want to make sure that people don’t have a psychotic disorder and can reason. It can disrupt a group if...

When I started in the field as a counselor, my supervisor Marie preached about understanding where a person was developmentally. Working with the learning disabled you’d see an adult and then realize they operated as a child. Up to this point, I understood that early childhood trauma caused mental illness later in life. It was in our early years we tried to create a strong sense of self. If...

28 years as a counselor has had its ups and downs. There were scary times at the Mental Health Urgent Care when people who were psychotic got unruly. How can you convince somebody who feels you are in on the government plot against them that you are there to help? Somehow, I managed to do so. Though, I wondered this morning what was my fondest memory. I’ve had a lot of incredible memories. In...

When someone finishes our program, we make a big deal out of it. Our Partial Hospitalization program runs 4 weeks and goes 5 days a week for 6 hours a day. It is the equivalent of residential treatment, but you don’t need to get locked away from family and friends. Facing yourself for an entire month to me is the hero’s journey. Who wants to deal with the worst parts of themselves? Here we do...

Independence day. They are just two words but emotionally can mean a lot. If you are not independent you are dependent. So what are you dependent on? The definition of Dependence is: The state of being determined, influenced or controlled by something else. The state of being dependent on another for financial support. The condition of being dependent on a substance such as a drug or on a...

When I learned about intention setting over 20 years ago, I thought they were something simple to say or think because they seemed so obvious, but as I have turned to them in times of need, intentions are one of the most powerful tools we can turn to in a crisis. I’ve written about intention setting before, but as a recap, intentions are something that everybody does subconsciously. For...

While I was in graduate school and learning the Spiritual Psychology approach, we all knew that what we were being exposed to was something extra special. The fact that a portion of the students were flying in from all over the world to attend may have clued me in on this when I began the coursework. We would meet once a month for three days, practice the new skills we were learning from one...