Category: Tips from a Therapist
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Child Abuse & Neglect
Note: This piece was very hard for me to write so it might be hard for someone to read. If you start feeling upset, anxious, etc. while reading this, please take a break to love on yourself before coming back to this. If you aren’t sure how to tell when you need to take a break,…
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How to Tell if This is the Right Therapist for You in 3-ish Sessions
Let’s say it how it is: it is ridiculously hard to find a decent therapist. As someone who has been a psychotherapy client before and as a therapist myself, trust and believe I fully know and understand that it’s needle and haystack-levels out there. And don’t let you have 1 or more marginalized identities and…
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Reflecting After the End of a Romantic Relationship
Maybe you did your life reassessment, looked at your whole life, and you realized that it was time to end a romantic relationship. Or maybe you already ended the relationship and are now trying to decide what your next move will be. The most common advice I hear given to people, especially cis men, after a…
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Boundaries 201: Bringing the Skills Home Part 2
So this piece is both 1)a part 2 to a 2-part series about setting boundaries around family and other people close to you in your life (Here’s a link to Part 1 here) and 2)a sequel to the intro to setting boundaries post I wrote in August (Intro piece here). Please take a chance to…
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Reader Request: Explaining Mental Health Status to Parents
This is a reader request (Thank you again, by the way). This post will cover 1)Doing some self-reflection to sort out what is making you want to talk to your parents about your mental health status, 2)Figuring out how safe the situation is for this, 3)Preparing for the talk, 4)Ways to go about having this…
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Intro to Self Care
Self care. This word has become popular on social media and in progressive spaces, especially with the new presidential administration, but there’s still a lot of confusion about what it is. Literally self care about taking care of yourself, physically, emotionally, etc. A way I like to think about self care is learning how to…
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How to Know If/When You’re Depressed
Before I start I wanna say that it’s legit ok to feel sad sometimes. Humans are not supposed to be happy all the time. That’s impossible. Humans are supposed to feel a wide range of emotions. Even emotions that can be very uncomfortable or just plain suck to feel. That’s life. Hiding from those emotions…
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Making the Most of Your Time While Unemployed
So you lost your job. Whether you were fired, quit, asked to resign, etc., loss of a job is still a significant, routine-altering change. I mean you already had your lunch spot set up for months, even years. Even if your workplace was toxic, you were sipping the poison slowly and what didn’t kill you…made…
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Finding the Right Therapist for You – Part 2: Your Role as a Client (Written in 2014)
Please check out Part One of this two-part series. This post is about your role and rights as a client. As I said in the previous post: therapy should not be something that is done to you. Rather, it should be something you do together with your therapist. For the sake of self-disclosure, I will…
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Finding the Right Therapist For You – Part 1: Theoretical Approaches (Written in 2014)
This is part one of a two-part series regarding how to find the right therapist for you. A number of people have been requesting these posts for months and I am finally able to put this up. In this post, I will give very brief and basic descriptions of some of the more prevalent theoretical…