Most of us in fact, never “get it together!” We never get ourselves together. Instead we go through life frustrated and dissipated, letting our restless energies push us in one direction, then in another, never quite able to settle down, to figure out what we want to do, and never quite able to discipline ourselves […]

Parker Palmer has written one of my all-time favorite books — one that I re-read every year — Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. Powerful…powerful book, and one that I have written on quite a bit over the years.

One of the books that I have really enjoyed reading over the years because of my interest in the integration of theology and psychology, especially pertaining to pastoral counseling in the context of the Christian community is Theology and Pastoral Counseling: A New Interdisciplinary Approach by Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger. In the book Hunsinger applies […]

“Good therapists” tend to embody qualities that you would look for, perhaps, in a mentor: They believe in you and in the possibility of things going well for you, they want to hear what you have to say, and they redirect you from cynicism to hope and expectancy.   The above is a quote from […]

“Mindfulness is basically just a particular way of paying attention. It is a way of looking deeply into oneself in the full spirit of self-inquiry and self-understanding.” Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn, pp. 12 Mindfulness. That is a word I […]

How much TV do you watch? How much internet do you surf? That’s one of the first questions I ask people when they tell me that they don’t have enough time to practice self-care in their lives. We looked at what self-care is and isn’t last week, and yesterday I talked about a method of […]

Last week I began talking about this issue of self-care in our lives. But what usually happens when I talk about this issue is that we try to take on too much too quickly. We get all excited about changing our lives — not only for ourselves — but so that we can be life-giving […]

Last Friday I briefly touched on the topic of self-care because I think it is a super important issue. I know that in my work just as a marriage and family therapist, that one of the main issues that keeps couples in an endless loop of conflict is their inability to regulate their emotions — […]

In my work as a therapist I talk a lot about self-care. But self-care tends to be a confusing term for many people. We can define it in many ways, but a couple of definitions that I have referred to recently are the following: “The process of managing responses to stressors. Self-care includes what we […]

“How did you make that clear whiteboard?” There are a lot of questions I get as a therapist, but the above question is one I get a lot of from clients…and from other therapists. I would like to say that I came up with the idea myself, but I didn’t. Rather, my good friend Aubrey […]

Back in December I was laid up in bed sick for a few days. And while in bed I decided to watch a few documentaries on Netflix. There were so many options to choose from and I couldn’t decide. But I remember someone on Twitter or Facebook mentioning that if you work with youth you […]

I’m so excited for Emily Freeman’s new book, Graceful: Letting Go of Your Try-Hard Life. It’s a book for young girls, ages 14-18, and I can’t wait to recommend it to young girls I work with in therapy and ministry. Emily is a great writer and has taught me a lot about grace through her […]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote the post, Laptops and Mobile Phones: Creating the New Deficit In Our Kid’s Lives. In the post I talked about the emotional deficits that parent’s use of technology can often create in their kid’s lives. One of the articles that I referenced in that post was called, Is […]