One of the strange things about doing therapy for more than twenty years is that I've started to notice something most people never talk about. Healing often makes people... less interesting. At least from the outside. Think about the person whose life is always a whirlwind. Every week brings a new crisis, a new relationship, a new betrayal, a new career plan, a new dramatic social media post. There is always something happening. They are fascinating to listen to because thei

When I was in sixth grade, our class had an end-of-the-year celebration. The first part was at a roller skating rink. The second part was back at school for a party. There was only one problem. I didn't know how to roller skate. I had NEVER roller skated in my life. To my eleven-year-old brain, this wasn't a small inconvenience. It felt catastrophic. I was convinced I would make a fool of myself. Everyone would laugh. I'd spend the afternoon falling all over the rink while ev

Yesterday at Mass at Our Lady of the Angels, Fr. Vincent said something that really struck me: "It is a great gift to be willing to step into the chaos of the lives of others." I immediately thought of therapists. After all, that is what many of us do every day. People walk into our offices carrying grief, trauma, fear, addiction, conflict, loneliness, heartbreak, uncertainty, and pain. They bring stories that don't have neat endings. They bring questions that don't have easy

One of the strange things about being a therapist is that themes tend to move through my office. My clients never know it, of course. They come in once a week, tell me about their lives, and assume we are talking about their unique struggle. And we are. But from where I sit, patterns emerge. Some weeks everyone seems to be talking about boundaries. Other weeks it's grief. Sometimes it's marriage. Sometimes it's loneliness. Lately, the theme seems to be questions. Well, I gues

One of the quietest warning signs in a relationship is not anger. It's not criticism. It's not even conflict. It's the moment curiosity disappears. Most people think relationships struggle because people stop loving each other. In my experience as a therapist, that is rarely where the trouble begins. More often, relationships start to suffer when people stop wondering about each other. Instead of asking, we assume. Instead of exploring, we conclude. Instead of becoming intere

One of the most common things I see in couples therapy is not a lack of love. It is a refusal to accept reality. That may sound harsh, but stay with me. Many couples come into therapy carrying a quiet frustration with each other. Underneath the arguments about dishes, finances, parenting, intimacy, communication, and schedules is often a deeper complaint: "Why can't they just be different?" Sometimes the complaint is understandable. Sometimes it is even valid. But sometimes t

Last week, I started missing my Nana badly. Not in the abstract way you sometimes miss people after enough time has passed. Not as a passing thought or a soft ache in the background. I mean badly. The kind of missing that sneaks into quiet moments and sits beside you. The kind where memories suddenly feel close enough to touch. I found myself thinking about her constantly. Her voice. Her humor. Her magic. I kept wondering why it felt so sharp all of a sudden. Then today I rea

Fear and anxiety are often talked about as if they are the same thing. But psychologically, they are not quite identical. Fear is the emotional response to a threat. Anxiety is the emotional response to the expectation of a threat. Fear says: “There is danger here.” Anxiety says: “What if danger is coming?” That distinction matters more than most people realize. If you are hiking and suddenly hear a rattlesnake near your foot, your body floods with fear. Your heart races. You

There are certain fears people carry that make no logical sense on the surface. Not everyday fears. Not practical fears. The deeper ones. The strange ones. The persistent ones. The fears that seem irrational, even to the person carrying them. For as long as I can remember, I had a fear that I would somehow go to jail for something I didn’t do. Or maybe for something I did unknowingly. Some mistake I didn’t realize I had made. Some invisible violation that would suddenly catch

If you were able to watch your life as a movie or a streaming series, would you be doing what a client on my couch recently said - would you be "screaming at the main character?" In movies and shows, the audience sees it instantly. “Don’t trust him.” “Don’t go back there.” “Leave the relationship.” “Take the job.” “Stop drinking.” “Tell the truth.” “Get out before this gets worse.” We sit on the couch practically yelling at the screen because the consequences feel obvious fro

A lot of people come into therapy believing that the solution to depression or anxiety is to finally feel different. Less anxious. More motivated. More confident. More certain. More energized. And it makes sense. When you’re depressed, everything in you says, “I can’t move.” When you’re anxious, everything in you says, “Don’t move.” So people wait. They wait to feel better before they start living again. But one of the most effective treatments for both depression and anxiety

There’s a moment in a lot of couples sessions where one or both people look at me almost like a judge sitting behind a bench. “He started it.” “She always does this.” “Tell her why that doesn’t make sense.” “Am I crazy for being upset about this?” And at first glance, the content of the argument can seem incredibly important. The dishes. The in-laws. Money. Sex. Texting someone back. Tone of voice. The forgotten errand. The vacation plans. The way one person sighed before ans

There’s something I’ve noticed over the years, sitting across from people who tell me they want peace. They say it clearly. Confidently. Sometimes even desperately: “I just want peace.” And I believe them. But here’s the part we don’t say out loud: Most people don’t actually want peace… at least not at first. Because peace is quiet. And quiet is where everything you’ve been outrunning finally has a chance to catch up. We say we want peace, but we keep choosing noise. We stay

There are seasons where it feels like everything in your life is asking for your attention at the exact same time. Work expands. Opportunities show up. Responsibilities multiply. Ideas keep coming. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, you start to feel… scattered. Not incapable. Not overwhelmed in a dramatic, falling-apart kind of way. Just disorganized. Like your hands are in too many things, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t quite get a clean grip on any of t

She sat across from me, carrying something heavy enough that it seemed to bend the air in the room. At one point, after laying out the reality of what she’s facing, she looked at me with a slight smile and said, “You’re supposed to give me words of wisdom about the path ahead.” There was no edge in it. No sarcasm. Just a quiet, honest expectation - the kind that people bring into therapy when the ground has dropped out from under them and they’re hoping someone else has a map

There’s a reflex I see all the time. Someone says, “Thank you,” and the response comes back almost automatically: “Don’t worry about it.” “It was nothing.” “Of course.” It sounds polite. It sounds humble. It even feels right in the moment. But if you slow it down, something subtle is happening underneath it. You might actually be erasing the moment. Not in some dramatic, harmful way. More like a quiet dismissal. A soft deflection that keeps both people from fully landing in w

There’s a phrase that gets thrown around in entrepreneurial circles that sounds tough, gritty, almost admirable: “Eat what you kill.” At face value, it’s about ownership. You generate the revenue, you earn the reward. No safety net. No guaranteed paycheck. No one is coming to save you. And for a certain kind of person, that’s not just appealing. It’s intoxicating. But here’s the part we don’t talk about enough: That same mentality that fuels entrepreneurship can quietly erode

There’s something almost sacred about being handed a box of old cassette tapes, but not because of what they are - because of what they represent. Someone spent years of their life listening, learning, trying to grow… and at some point decided, this mattered enough to pass on. Recently, I was given a set of tapes by a retired mental health professional, " The Psychology of Achievement" by Brian Tracy. A relic, really - from a time when growth didn’t come in reels and algorit

There’s a quiet dividing line that runs through how people think. You don’t see it on the surface, but it shapes everything. It determines how we listen, how we argue, how we grow, and how we stay stuck. On one side is a fundamentalist belief system. On the other is an open one. This isn’t about politics or religion, even though it shows up loudly in both. This is about something deeper. It’s about the structure of the mind itself. A fundamentalist belief system is not define

There’s a quiet tension I keep hearing in my office. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t come in yelling. It comes in tired. It sounds like this: “I didn’t get into this, to do it this way.” And more often than not, it’s coming from people in the helping fields. Therapists. Nurses. Social workers. Teachers. People who chose a path that, from the beginning, was never about maximizing profit. It was about alleviating suffering. Somewhere along the way, though, many of the places the