Sublime

As a couples therapist, I have three sources of information: what the partners report about themselves and each other, how they behave in front of me, and how I feel witnessing their behavior.

Groves wrote, if a patient repeatedly makes a doctor angry, the patient is likely a “demander,” whose unreasonable expectations simply need to be redirected into a desire for good medical care. A patient whom a doctor finds depressing may be a chronic “help rejecter,” who needs reassurance that the doctor won’t abandon him or her once a symptom aba

Then there’s developmental psychology, which maintains that our basic nature is dependent on the kind of parenting we received. If you were fortunate to have “good enough” parenting during certain critical periods in your early development, you emerged from childhood with a certain amount of “ego strength.” If you didn’t, you were out of luck. You

Good therapy should rearrange the landscape of the mind and empower the client to live differently. You should help your client reexamine his/her life. You have to tell your clients the truth, even when, especially when, they are deeply invested in the lies they are telling themselves about their problem.

In the 1950s, an American psychoanalytic therapist severed his Freudian roots and turned to the Stoics to form a radically new form of therapy. Rather than plumbing the depths of the content of a problem and exploring how a stumbling block might relate to, say, one’s early psychosexual development, Albert Ellis argued that we should look at whateve