News and Insights

What do you think about Christmas? For many, it fosters great memories, for others only pain. Our wish is for you to see this holiday with new eyes, letting go of the past, so you can make of it what you like. This letting go of the past takes some effort. Processing through our pain is the key to experiencing a happy holiday. To do so, it may be as simple as putting pen to paper. If you find...

I’ve written a lot of articles in my career and when I drew a blank today I grabbed a box of Kleenex. In grad school, whenever we were blocked, we knew that something really important would come to the surface. And whalla it did. I was fooling around with a friend recently and they said, “When you are down people kick you.” Have you ever heard that phrase, “When you are down they will kick...

Locus of control is a fancy term for who we believe is in control of us. If you are the type of person who focuses all of your attention on what other people are doing now, what they have done in the past, and what you think that they will do, you have an “External Locus of Control”. In our practice, probably 90% of those we treat are focused on the external or what we also refer to as – “The...

The theme of this last week has been on people imagining the worst-case scenarios. You know, “What is the worst thing that can happen?” It is almost as if we were weaned on this. How often have you focused on the worst thing? The surprising thing is that when we fantasize about something, reality and fantasy register the same in the brain, and a thought can feel like something is really...

At the University of Santa Monica, where I studied Spiritual Psychology, they believed that applying love to anxiety made it fade away and we would truly heal. On paper and in real life it has been a difficult task. I entered therapy to tackle my problems with anxiety and the mere task of addressing anxiety – which was something I had avoided like the plague, has caused me even more anxiety....

In Graduate School we were taught to take care of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs simultaneously in order for the change to stick. If we only focused on improving ourselves physically, for example, weight loss, then it will also impact the underlying mental and emotional levels causing us to be unstable and usually, we’d slide back into the same physical condition. This is...

After recently traveling and being with a lot of people, it was a different experience from my familiar distancing, masking up, and isolating. For me, like many, the Covid experience was a lot of isolating and the social thing was an adjustment. It seems that the reports I was hearing was being around others was life-threatening, but after getting Covid and now having the antibodies has...

Getting over the loss of somebody special is not an easy task. In graduate school, they taught us people have to feel their feelings during this period. Feeling your feelings for somebody that is not used to feeling emotions can be a difficult process. The intention of this article is to assist people who are struggling with loss to get through it. Loss can be as simple as the loss of a pet or...

Twenty-seven years in the industry and I am still learning that heart-centered listening is the best way to treat people. After thousands upon thousands of sessions, I often hear the same things, but I feel it is ultimately important to simply listen with a full heart. I teach my interns how important it is to not fix people. If we were to do this, they would be dependent on us. When you help...

When I was five years old my mother divorced and married her soul mate – if there is something like that – my stepfather. Who knew that he was going to make such an impact on me? My natural father was an angry and bitter man who exhibited daily fits of rage. Not Les, Les was a kind soul that was genuinely happy, loved being around a lot of people, and always had something memorable to say or...