Essays on the work I do and the things I'm still thinking about. On couples therapy, maternal mental health, trauma, and the strange business of becoming yourself.
A woman I'll call M. came to her third session and told me, very quietly, that she had slammed the nursery door the night before. Hard enough that the baby monitor bounced off the dresser. Her husband had looked at her like he didn't know who she was. She hadn't known who she was either. "I am not an angry person," she told me. "I have never been an angry person. What is happening to me?"
Read articleA client sat down on my couch a few years ago and said something I've thought about a lot since. "I'm doing my mother's anxiety for her. She never got to feel it, so I'm feeling it for both of us." She wasn't being dramatic. She was being precise. And she was putting words to one of the strangest and most common things I see in this work: people carrying something they didn't start.
Read articleWhen couples email me asking about couples therapy, one of the most common questions is some version of this: "Do you do Gottman or EFT?" Sometimes they've done their homework. Sometimes they've read an article. Sometimes their sister's therapist used one of the two and they want the other one. I always give them the same answer, which is that I do both, and that I think the "versus" in this question is a little bit of a trick.
Read articleWelcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
Read articleEvery generation has a word nobody told it in time. For the current generation of new mothers, I think that word is matrescence. It means the developmental transition into motherhood — the becoming, not just the having. And almost no one in the prenatal visits and the baby showers and the "how is the baby?" questions after birth ever names it out loud.
Read articleMost of the people I meet in my practice have never been to therapy before. They sit down on the couch, a little stiffly, and almost always say some version of the same thing: "I don't know where to start." I want to write the essay I wish they'd had to read the week before, so that the first session feels less like a cold open and more like something they know roughly the shape of.
Read article