What I Ask Myself Now Instead of “What’s Wrong with Me?”
Does everything feel like too much these days? Get When Life Sucks: 21 Days of Laughs and Light for free when you join the Tiny Buddha list. “With Self-compassion, we give ourselves the same kindness and care we’d give to a good friend.” ~Kristin Neff For a long time, I carried a question with me […]
Why Letting Myself Fall Apart Set Me Free
Does everything feel like too much these days? Get When Life Sucks: 21 Days of Laughs and Light for free when you join the Tiny Buddha list. “Ironically enough, when you make peace with the fact that the purpose of life is not happiness but rather experience and growth, happiness comes as a natural byproduct. […]
Can Psychedelic Experiences Really Improve Your…
Mystics once spent years meditating in caves in search of transcendence. Today, a growing number of people believe something similar can be reached in a single afternoon with the help of a psychedelic drug. Swallow a capsule of psilocybin or take a carefully supervised dose of LSD and you may encounter what many describe as […]
From River to Stream: How Vulnerability Becomes Illness
Source: Photo by Zhivko Minkov on Unsplash When I see patients with serious Mental health issues, they often speak of their genetic burden: “My father had bipolar disorder”, “my grandmother was schizophrenic”, “my aunt has severe depression”. My patients feel their psychiatric destiny weighing them down, as though there is no hope for recovery or […]
Kids Today: Thoughts From Research, Practice, and the Classroom
Across time and generations, elders have often bemoaned with exasperation, “Kids today!” As a quintessential “baby boomer,” I often hear same-aged peers complain about youth (e.g., those born between the late 1990s and early 2000s). While developmental psychologists eschew using broad labels to describe large generational cohorts (i.e., the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, […]
Compassion as the Doorway to Forgiveness
“The past is the past!” “Forgive and forget.” “Let bygones be bygones.” Our culture has plenty of platitudes to offer when it comes to forgiving each other’s wrongs. Yet anyone who has lived through betrayal knows the reality is more complex. The process of forgiveness is anything but linear. In my clinical work, I once […]
From AI to BFF: Could AI Replace Humans as Friends?
A few years ago, I remember seeing a headline about a woman claiming she married an AI chatbot. I thought it was so ludicrous it had to be “fake news,” but it wasn’t. In 2026, apparently the thought is not so shocking. In a recent report from the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP), a significant portion […]
Body Love Isn’t Required for Eating Disorder Recovery
As an eating disorder therapist, I know that many individuals in eating disorder recovery feel like they have to work to ‘love the appearance of their body.’ This is far from the truth for a variety of reasons. Feeling like you have to work to ‘love your body’ is a lot of pressure that can […]
Why We Love the Olympics and How Watching Uplifts Us
There’s something profoundly moving about an athlete on the podium, tears streaming as their national anthem plays. Even thousands of miles away, we feel it; a lump in our own throat, a swell of emotion that surprises us. The Olympics aren’t just a spectacular display of physical achievement; they’re a cultural ritual that taps into […]
Identity Fatigue | Psychology Today
Freud says, “Whatever you say you are, you are not.” Adam Phillips says that identity is a “self-cure for a feeling of exclusion” and puts us forever in a position to defend that identity. Identity is thus false to begin with, and on top of that, takes effort and will to manage and reproduce. Both […]