Over the years as a therapist, I have seen the rise in alcohol abuse among patients and in the environment around them. Many of them can only feel good when they can escape their problems through a drunken haze. Many of them deny they have a problem with drinking and some of them deny that…
I read an article recently about happiness written by a journalist who works for the Times in London. He was commenting about a book he was reading, given to him at Christmas, about how to find happiness in 2019. The title doesn’t really matter, as there are many such books on the market and as…
A good marriage with someone we truly love is generally the fairytale that is sold to us by society, sometimes parents and definitely religion. We are all expected to go on to develop along a certain tried and trusted path which includes marriage. Many are totally unprepared (especially if they marry young) for the immense…
At the time of writing, the term “codependency” cannot be found in any diagnostic manual anywhere. It is simply not classed as a recognisable disorder and as discussed earlier, some doubt it even exists in the form we accept today. This also includes many therapists who like to see it as a symptom of something…
I recently had a deep and rather philosophical conversation with a client concerning how much we can truly exercise free will in our lives. Him, going through a difficult period in his life, preferred to believe that we have limited free will and most things that happen to us were predetermined in some shape or…
The holiday season is the one time of year when everyone is expected to be happy, joyful and get on with everyone, even people that we have very little to do with. It is a season where hopes are high and everybody makes an extra effort to make it nice. Old disputes are forgotten for…
Samuel McChord Crothers once wrote ” try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.” Do you feel like what you accomplish is never quite good enough? Do you often put things…
Ever since I started doing therapy online in 2011, I have dealt with many different disorders. Early on, it was a transitional phase moving from office to online but it quickly moved on. In my office based practice, I dealt with a lot of codependent clients and this has increasingly been the case since 2011.…
I have often documented here how much control exists in codependent thinking. In contrast to their nemesis (someone with narcissist tendencies), codependents are generally nice people who are willing to do most anything for the object of their codependency (usually a partner, sometimes a parent or employer and often all three). However, that ‘most anything’…
It always amazes me how talented and intelligent people spend a lot of their time trying to convince themselves that they are the opposite. This is not to mention the amount of people who obsess about body issues and how they think they look and other people perceive them. In a process called confirmatory bias,…
