Articles

How Can I Get Along With My Family This Holiday Season?

How Can I Get Along With My Family This Holiday Season? Start With Acceptance

With the holidays right around the corner, and with the pandemic prompting us to recommit to social distancing, family has been on my mind a lot recently. And if your family is anything like mine, the polarization and stress of this year is making our relationships feel even more intense than usual. Everything feels heightened. It makes me think about the human proclivity towards black-and-white…
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5 Reasons Why We Recommend Weekly Therapy

Do I Need To Go To Therapy Every Week?: 5 Reasons Why We Recommend Weekly Therapy

My last session with a therapist was months ago. It wasn’t supposed to be months ago— at the end of our last session, I told him my schedule was tight the following week and he said, “Well, give me a call when you want to schedule something.” Even though I’m a therapist myself and I know the positive impact therapy has on my anxiety and…
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5 Tips for Learning How to Accept Help

Do You Worry That You’re A Burden?: 5 Tips for Learning How to Accept Help

“I don’t want to bother anybody.” “I don’t want to be a burden.” “I should be able to do it myself.” We are currently experiencing many layers of loss and overwhelm. For most of us, it’s a loss of normalcy in general: we don’t have the activities or the routines we’re used to. We may be feeling stretched by new work demands and remote school…
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Can I Tell My Therapist When They Get It Wrong

Can I Tell My Therapist When They Get It Wrong? The Short Answer: Yes

I’m a therapist, but I’ve also been in and out of therapy since I was quite little. I’ve worked with some therapists that were helpful, some that were unhelpful, and some that, looking back now, I can see did more harm than good. In my teens and early 20s, what I would often do if my therapist said something that hurt me (or they seemed…
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Talking to Your Non-Black Parents about Anti-Black Racism

Calling Them In: Talking to Your Non-Black Parents about Anti-Black Racism

I wasn’t looking forward to Father’s Day this year. While I missed my father and planned to see him, I knew we would have to take additional precautions– wearing masks for the duration of our time together, meeting outdoors, and maintaining six feet of distance. This makes it hard to connect, especially with my children present. And given that I had been thinking about the…
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The Lifelong Commitment to Being An Ally

Start Where You Are: The Lifelong Commitment to Being An Ally

I will be the first to admit that I have had to do some hard work recently, and that until the past couple of weeks, I was not always actively thinking about or challenging my own privilege. While I considered myself a feminist and an ally, there was a lot that was happening in our country and that happened in our history, that I didn’t…
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Adapting Without Acclimating

Adapting Without Acclimating: Keeping Your Imagination Alive

I visited India in my early twenties. When I first got there, I didn’t think I would be able to handle it. I had never really traveled before, and I was used to daily hot showers and sleeping in my own bed every night. Backpacking, eating unfamiliar foods, traveling by rickshaw… it was all way out of my comfort zone. Yet after a week or…
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Getting Through (Another) Day in Social Isolation

What Do You Need? Getting Through (Another) Day in Social Isolation

How did you feel when you clicked on this article? Hopeful? Anxious? Overwhelmed? My email inbox and social media feeds have been full of tips on getting through quarantine and countless examples of folks making the most of their time at home. As I scroll through sourdough bread recipes and exercise routines, I find myself feeling both overwhelmed and angry. Then I remind myself that…
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Life in the Time of a Pandemic

Life in the Time of a Pandemic: How to Stay Sane while Keeping Safe

Until the past few days, I was feeling both very detached about the news continuing to overwhelm my inbox, and simultaneously feeling afraid. Over the past 48 hours, my response has began to change, as there seems to have been a national realization of the seriousness of the situation. Is it possible to at once avoid checking out or panicking? How can we meet this…
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To Touch and Be Touched: Physical Connection and Mental Health

When you think of troublemaking middle schoolers, you might picture them doing things like smoking or talking back to adults. When I was in the 6thgrade, while those things were happening too, we often got in trouble for– wait for it – excessive hugging. That’s right, our school administrators had to reprimand us for being late to class because we were busy giving each other…
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