So You Want to Try Relational Therapy
The most important aspect of therapy is the relationship that is built between you and your therapist.
The most important aspect of therapy is the relationship that is built between you and your therapist.
There’s no reason why the field of therapy shouldn’t offer alternatives to meet people of all ages where they’re at with regard to verbal communication — which is where expressive therapy comes in.
The wisdom of your body is uniquely your own.
Trauma takes our power away and makes us feel like we don’t call the shots in our own lives — but we do. Here are some of the trauma therapies that can help, and how to feel out which one(s) might be right for you.
A quick look at Psychology Today lists dozens of modalities, filled with acronyms and industry jargon. So, to help guide you even more – and to help you feel more secure in interviewing a therapist – here’s the first in a series of breakdowns to help you Choose Your Own (Therapy) Adventure. Today we’ll look at some of the most well-known and popular therapies: CBT, and its offshoots, ACT, and DBT.
When your anxiety stems from a valid concern about a real and terrifying threat, it’s hard to draw the line between reasonable fear and full-blown panic – here are some concrete tips for managing COVID anxiety.
Experimental composer Pauline Oliveros approached her identity as a musician not as a solitary genius but as a collaborator and facilitator. Her Deep Listening practices emphasize the connection between healing and activism, and can teach us how to navigate fear and despair together.
Stigma isn’t easy to overcome this. To a large extent, we can’t do it alone: we are social creatures, and we depend on developing and maintaining relationships with each other in order to survive. But it is possible.
When are the Shoulds are invading your thought process, and try to be curious about that. What is it The Shoulds are trying
to protect you from? What does doing the “bad” or “wrong” thing mean?
“When we’ve all broken past the fear of being burdens on others, when we as communities learn how to ask for and give help and support, we’ll be able to take care of each other.”
Why does gay male sex turn you on if you’re a lesbian and is it okay? Plus, conflicting ideas about isolating & dating during quarantine, cheering up your partner over long distance, parents and mental health and Covid-19, SO MANY mixed signals from your ex wife who’s in another relationship and…should you fuck your boss?!?!?! Things are a mess out there, but at least we have each other and 26 questions from readers like you!
Chances are, you know someone who is quarantining alone right now. Maybe even you, yourself, are alone, and have been for the past several weeks. If so, it’s important to learn how this extraordinary circumstance might be effecting your mental, emotional, and physical health – and what steps you can take to mitigate and reduce that harm.
One patient in the study “Observation of Trends in Manic-Depressive Psychosis” by O. Spurgeon English recounted that living with bipolar disorder “is like opening all my pores on a cold day and subjecting myself to catastrophe.”
I too have felt like a catastrophe of a person, a catastrophe of a star, a catastrophe of emotions.
Recovering after being ghosted, dealing with queer tokenism, knowing if you’re a top or a bottom, straight people are STILL not ok, and did that organizer ask you for an organizing coffee or a COFFEE coffee??
We all must do the internal work of unpacking how the harms of our social structure have become internalized, have lived in our bodies, have shown in our relationships. We must allow ourselves to feel the weight of it.
“Many creatives still have reservations and fears around medication as they believe that it will dampen the creative flow, turn off the magic, or make them less able to connect with the emotion they are trying to convey. This misconception is dismantled in Erlichman’s poetry, she’s sharp and precise while illustrating the often untethered emotion that comes with mania or psychosis.”
“I’m worried the relationship is ruined before it even really got started. What should I do? Do I have to break up with her, or is there a way to work through this?”
Conflict is meant to happen. Relationships are strengthened by conflict. What are our capacities to engage with conflict in a way that doesn’t destroy us, but help us better understand each other?
Your therapist will probably never tell you the intricate personal details of what their work with you sets off in them, but please don’t doubt that we learn just as much about what it means to be a human by working with you.
Having an hour a week devoted to being listened to can lend itself to a misdirection of feelings. It’s easy to dismiss this as a harmless crush, but it can easily spiral out into an obsession that takes away from the real work that needs to be done.
Close your eyes. You’re walking through a shady wooded glen. Wait, weren’t all the bees dying like, a year ago? Did we all just move on from that?