Nostalgia: Why Thinking About the Past Can Be Good for You
Andrea Brandt2022-08-09T09:09:59-08:00I went to dinner recently with a group of old friends with whom I’d fallen out of touch. After the usual catching up on what we’d missed [...]
I went to dinner recently with a group of old friends with whom I’d fallen out of touch. After the usual catching up on what we’d missed [...]
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” — Norman MacEwan [1] As long as you live, you have [...]
How do you stay married? By not getting divorced. That’s a joke I heard recently, and there’s a lot of truth to it. You make it to [...]
There's a reason that the midlife crisis is such a cliché. It's because it's a real phenomenon. We can see the midlife crisis plotted on a U-shaped [...]
If you’re a habitual New Year’s resolution-maker, you’re probably familiar with how quickly they can fail. There’s no one holding you to your promise to keep your [...]
If you’re a habitual New Year’s resolution-maker, you’re probably familiar with how quickly they can fail. There’s no one holding you to your promise to keep your [...]
Our natural go-to response to painful feelings is to stuff them out of sight. If your mind were like a tunnel and unwanted feelings could slip out [...]
From the time you are developing in the womb until your dying day, you will experience many small and large injuries to your psyche, your sense of [...]
Photo of man and woman sitting on bed with sad expression When a person is exposed to multiple traumatic events over a long period, they [...]
You’re probably already familiar with individual therapy. Whether you’ve done it weekly for years or you’ve never walked into a therapist’s office, you know how it works. [...]
Lately, I’ve heard many people asking if the post-pandemic summer of 2021 and the coming decade will be like a repeat of the 1920s — The Roaring [...]
When children experience the death of a parent or caregiver, they tell themselves a story about it to make sense of it and cope. As Joan Didion [...]
In a study recently completed in France, 15 people spent 40 days together in a cave. They had no clocks, no daylight, and no contact with the [...]
Communicating what you want and resolving conflicts is the only way to have a happy, healthy relationship that can support and enrich your life. You probably already [...]
Joy is a level above happiness. It's fulfillment on top of happiness, triumph on top of happiness, elation on top of happiness. Happy is how you feel when you [...]
Joy is a natural part of us, and we’re wired to feel it. If you’ve spent any time with a child, you’ve witnessed how much joy we’re [...]
This past year has been hard. Really, really hard. Social distancing, everything canceled or closed, sickness, death, some over-worked and some out of work, and let’s not [...]
A lot has changed in our lives over the past year. We’ve changed the way we dress (hello, face masks), the way we work, the way we [...]
Even in a year of huge stressors, where almost every day there’s a breaking news story that can make us feel awful, the arrival of Election Day [...]
When it comes to communication, quality is always more important than quantity. The couple that bickers all day may be communicating a lot, but they're certainly not [...]
Few things make us consider our own mortality more than a pandemic. The nightly news, newspaper front pages, and mournful posts on social media serve as constant [...]
For days, weeks, or even months after losing someone, you may wake up in the morning with an overwhelming sadness. It can feel like a heaviness pushing [...]
We feel guilty when we believe we have done something wrong, but we feel shame when we believe that we are wrong. In other words, guilt is about a [...]
Your ability to forgive yourself and practice self-compassion is a vital element of self-esteem. When you carry feelings of guilt and shame, it’s impossible to feel good [...]
Much of the advice therapists usually offer to people suffering from anxiety doesn't work anymore. In normal times, I would tell you to go to the beach [...]
Much of the advice therapists usually offer to people suffering from anxiety doesn't work anymore. In normal times, I would tell you to go to the beach [...]
Asking “what are you thankful for?” during a global pandemic might seem absurd. Every day the news gets grimmer. We hear sirens outside our windows. We read [...]
Everyone has met a couple like this: She loves sushi; the smell of raw fish makes him nauseous. He loves horror films; she finds even mildly scary [...]
How do you know if you use passive-aggressiveness in your relationship to express your hidden anger? When you’ve hidden your anger from everyone, including yourself, it can [...]
Physical abuse can leave physical scars, while emotional abuse leaves psychic ones, but what about emotional neglect? The absence of emotional support in childhood can be as [...]