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Valentine’s Day Gift Guide: Partnership
Partnership two is always better than one In marriage and long term relationships, it can be easy to believe that we know everything about our partners. Instead, keep your mind open to learning...
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Brace yourself. Finals are coming.
The final stretch of the semester is fast approaching, and with winter break so close we can taste it, it can be hard to find motivation to get through finals week. Different articles have compared...
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Valentine’s Day Gift Guide: Playfulness
Playfulness share your silly side! One of the greatest gifts of marriage is the ability to relax and just be your silly selves together. This sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of our busy lives,...
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Valentine’s Day Gift Guide: Desire
Desire less Final Destination and more Love Actually Romance is about the possibility of the thing. Nurturing your physical connection as a couple means slowing down to make each person feel wanted...
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Valentine’s Day Gift Guide: Wellness
Wellness healthy is the new sexy Give each other the gift of strong, healthy bodies! We all know exercise is often the first thing to go when we’re busy. Make an effort to get some physical activity...
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Valentine’s Day Gift Guide: Vulnerability
Vulnerability Be a soft place for tough feelings Intimacy is the force that animates our romantic relationships, and it includes many of the traits that we have highlighted in this guide: friendship,...
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What’s the Matter with Hanging Out?
I’ve done it. Many of my clients and friends have done it. Maybe we’ve all done it at some point. We’ve continued to spend time with someone we cared about…who didn’t quite feel the same way about...
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Marriage Interrupted
One of the topics that we touch on in the Marriage is Not That Hard episode is the problem of being attracted to other people while married, and how this impacts infidelity. Firstly, everyone feels...
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Wounded Families – There Is a Better Way to Divorce
Guest Post by Rona Hitlin-Mason, LPC The Washington Post had an article about Prince Harry’s trip to the US to promote the Invictus Games for wounded warriors. The article noted that when the Prince...
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The Unexpected Gifts of Marriage
Marriage is so hard. You hear this on talk shows, on the internet, from elders—pretty much everywhere. I won’t lie—I’m a married person, and I’ve said this. And marriage is hard…sort of…but not...
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Stop “Should-ing” on Yourself
Sometimes it seems that we are at war with our feelings. We tell ourselves not to be sad, upset, or hurt. We say that we should feel grateful, or be more positive. Constantly, we focus on what we...
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Grace, Not Forgiveness
For some time now, I have been turning over the question of forgiveness, and in particular, what it means to forgive your partner within marriage. Forgiveness is often touted as the answer to making...
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It’s Not Facebook, It’s Us
One of the complaints we hear frequently about social media is that seeing the edited versions of other people’s lives negatively impacts our view of our own lives. People we follow online choose...
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Who Are You and What Have You Done with My Kid?
Parenting teens and adolescents is hard. Sometimes parents find themselves wondering if it an alien has replaced their once sweet kid with a moody, irritable impostor. It’s debatable as to whether...
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I’m Anxious, But I’m Yours
Lately, I have seen several articles about what to do for a loved one who is struggling with anxiety and other mental health disorders. Obviously, the emergence of these articles is a great thing, as...
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Four Key Skills To Use When Solving Problems With Your Partner
I’ve been thinking about the importance of language in relationships. Because, as a therapist, and a wife, and a writer, this is sort of thing that I contemplate on my commute home from work. But I’ve...
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Language Matters: Getting Rid of Negative Self-talk and Pessimistic Thinking
Many of us are given to having a stream of negative self-talk in our minds; questioning our abilities, disparaging our character, doubting the success of our future, and more. And sure, sometimes we do...
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How to Not Be Okay
I am a big believer in the power to change one’s life (I mean, I’m a therapist, so duh.) I always think that with some effort, virtually any difficult circumstance can be improved, even if all we have...
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Is Anxiety a Choice?
This post comes to us from therapist and best-selling author, Jodi Aman! Read more about her work below. Living in fear is a painful, lonely way to exist. People say our suffering is a choice. They...
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How to Help Someone You Love
In the newsletter last week, we discussed how to take care of yourself when you’re going through a hard time. This week, we talk about how to support someone else who’s struggling with something...
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3 Behaviors that Scare Your Couples Therapist
It may surprise you to hear that infidelity is not necessarily the issue that worries couple therapists the most. In fact, while I recognize the emotional devastation and pain that infidelity causes,...
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The singular best parenting advice I know
In parenting, it can be difficult to figure out what to do when your child behaves in ways that you don’t like, or can’t seem to accomplish what you’ve asked of them. Difficult is one word for...
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How Not To Be the Wicked Stepparent: Navigating Blended Family Life
Recently, I finished Helen Oyeyemi’s book Boy, Snow, Bird, which, among other important themes, updates the fairy tales to show how a woman with no prior ill intent can find herself in the role of the...
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Giving Up with Grace
One of the most important skills I’ve learned as a therapist is how to give up. I know, that sounds discouraging, but stick with me here. It turns out giving up successfully can be an incredibly...
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Your Brain is Rigged
Many of us have been there. Seemingly stuck in an unhealthy relationship, carried along on a roller coaster of emotions, and finding ourselves having great difficulty walking away. Some of you may not...
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Don’t Hold Someone Else’s Bag
Despite what this title would suggest, this is not a warning from the TSA or Metro (see something, say something). It’s not folks’ actual bags that I’m concerned about, but their emotional ones. And...
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Life’s Questions Answered, the Quick and Dirty Way
Below, I discus some of life’s questions that regularly make an appearance in the therapy room. In my office, finding the answers to these questions can involve steady, patient exploration and...
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What makes a good marriage?
In the last newsletter, I talked about how one of the commonly asked questions in couples therapy was whether partners should stay or get married. Given that any relationship, healthy or otherwise, is...
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Fight Night: Creating a Healthy Space for Conflict
The oft-repeated advice “never go to bed angry,” gets under my skin. The idea that a conflict with your spouse should be wrapped up all tidy and neat with a bow by the end of the evening seems…well,...
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The Relationship Bank Account
Hi! My name is Maria Perozzi, LMFT. I’m one of the new therapists here at Group Therapy Associates. I’m quite excited to be writing my first article for GTA. For those who already work with me, you...
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The ‘Good Marriage’ Myth
When I was young, I thought marriages could be divided into two discrete categories—good and bad. Both of my parents had been divorced prior to meeting each other, and having seen first-hand their...
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Why Get Married?
In the last newsletter, we talked about how whether a marriage survives depends on the willingness and desire of both people to continue to work on it. And with all this talk about working on marriage,...
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Your Marriage Won’t Save Itself
There’s an idea going around that if your marriage is strong enough, then it should be immune to certain vulnerabilities. For instance, if you’re attracted or drawn to someone other than your spouse,...
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Why Trying to Control Your Feelings is Pointless
The prevailing world view is that emotion and logic operate in separate spheres of the brain, and as such, we can separate the two. Now, however, there’s a solid body of research that contradicts...
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Stop, Drop, and Feel
One of the issues that we hear frequently in couples therapy, and also came up in our couples lunch last week, is that men lack emotion. The story goes that men simply feel less than women do, and...
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It is All Your Stuff
Recently, my husband and I were riding together in the car, and got into a brief back and forth about using the GPS to find the way home. I should say up front that this is not unusual for us. Our...
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Be Someone Else
One of the most difficult things to sit with in therapy, and in relationships with friends and family, is to be with a person who wants to make changes, but can’t seem to do it. We all either know or...
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3 Ways to Stay Empowered While Dating
In an ideal world, dating would be straight-forward, and you’d take on the rest of your life with the one you love by your side. However, it’s 2017 and some people are as faithful as their options....
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“Real World” Mental Health
As a college senior preparing to enter the “real world” (although college is definitely no fantasy land either), I am starting to realize that the free on-campus mental health resources that currently...
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The Two Truths Problem
I don’t like my cat. It’s a relief to say it. I don’t allow myself to think about it very often, and saying it out loud (so to speak) is a bit scary, but also sort of like letting out a breath after...
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How to Avoid Defensiveness
Don’t get defensive is something we say all the time. Defensiveness is our natural and reflexive position when confronted with the idea that we’ve done something wrong or disappointed someone,...
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The Problem with Emotional Memory
I rarely take the stance that emotions are something to be side-stepped or disregarded. Most of the time, I write about how we need to acknowledge and accept our emotional reality, and how we can’t...
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Coping With Loss and Grief
Throughout the course of our lives, we will inevitably experience loss, and naturally, grief is a part of the process. Both loss and grief are not only predictable, but likely to occur repeatedly...
View ArticleHelp Yourself: 2018 Guide of Mental Health Resources
Thankfully, discussion and awareness about mental health and wellness is becoming more widespread in the United States today. Of course, private psychotherapy is only one way to receive counseling and...
View ArticleThey Never Told Us Not to Love Them
In grad school, our professors told us not to sleep with them, and not to accept gifts, and not to let them fix our cars or code our websites. Our professors told us not to give it away, not to work...
View ArticleThe Relationship Table
As a couples therapist, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what makes a relationship strong. In some ways, there’s no easy answer to this question. But through my professional experience...
View ArticleIn Your Feelings…
Some days ago, in my office, I began crying at my desk. It caught me off guard. I had been down, sure, but mostly mopey and whiny, and I didn’t think it was much deeper than that. But then a thought...
View ArticleIt’s Turtles All the Way Down
What I’d like to do is scare you…and then offer a bit of hope. The topic is not something I like to think about much myself, because it induces a sort of peering into the void fear, a philosophical...
View ArticleToo Much Sext? Or Not Enough?
By now, you’ve likely heard about sexting–you know, where you send a sexy text, photo, or video? Google sexting and your results will mostly tell you the hazards involved. On the other hand, the...
View ArticleHow to Help Your Child Realize They’re Enough
Many parenting practices I discuss with families are contextual. Often, what I suggest a parent do depends on a family’s particular circumstances, their resources, the ages of their children, the...
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