A Message to New Therapists
If you are an intern and starting in this profession, toss away everything you have learned and pay attention to one thing – the customer. This isn’t a time to dazzle them with theory, or prove to them that you are really brilliant, simply let go of that and be yourself. You have to understand that the most important aspect in the healing profession is your bedside manner – so to speak. New...Learn More
The Three Foot Plan
Excited, I grabbed the basketball and toed the marker some 12 feet away from the basket. Same game, different environment. I was standing in front of my classmates at the University of Santa Monica, the graduate school where I studied Spiritual Psychology. It wasn’t new for me to shoot in front of a lot of people. I had once shot at halftime at a Lakers game at the Forum in from of 17,505...Learn More
A Client Returns
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...Learn More
A Tribute – Thank You for My Tears
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...Learn More
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
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...Learn More
Developmental Psychology
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...Learn More
My Fondest Counseling Memory
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...Learn More
Relationship Rescue
Unfortunately, we were never taught in school how to keep a relationship healthy. As with most mental health-related issues, we learned usually how to fix things by mimicking how our parents did things. If you came from a healthy home, no doubt the odds are you will be healthy in a relationship, but that doesn’t have a bearing on your partner. Paying close attention to what kind of environment...Learn More
The Year 2000 – Revisited
This was a very interesting week at Basic Steps Mental Health. With all of the talk about WWIII and nuclear war, I was reminded of the panic that hit everybody with the Y2K. If you weren’t old enough to remember what was going on back then, the main computers in charge of all the critical systems in the country were not equipped to switch to the year 2000. Fearing nuclear meltdown at the time,...Learn More