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I often hear myself say to my clients something like, “Let’s try to set aside correcting your thoughts and your feelings and focus on noticing them fully so we can explore them together and see where that leads us.”   So often, as I am getting to know someone, I find that we get sidetracked by a pervasive desire to correct everything that’s wrong.  What’s wrong with me?  Why don’t I feel happy with what I have?  Why do I mess up my relationships so often? Why do I end up drinking myself into a kind of numb state?  Can you help me change?  This translates often to:  can you help me correct my bad thoughts, my bad feelings and bad choices? I’ve found as I consider carefully how I listen (Luke 8), I hear far more accurately when I’m not looking for what’s wrong, but instead give my ...

Climate change is increasingly a mental health issue. More functional people experience it as a nagging threat of overwhelm. Those with chronic illnesses experience it as an existential threat. The Washington Post recently published an extensive article about people with schizophrenia, focusing on the high temperatures in Phoenix. They are especially vulnerable. People are dying. Here’s the link. Here’s an excerpt: “When temperatures surge, the effects of schizophrenia can be profound. During the record-breaking heat wave in British Columbia in Canada in 2021, for example, researchers found that an astonishing 8 percent of the people who died in the heat had been diagnosed with schizophrenia — rendering it more dangerous, when combined with heat, than any other condition studi...

In the last several years my life has taken some very unexpected and difficult turns. We moved out of our old Philadelphia home where we’d lived for over 25 years, the results of the pandemic on psychotherapy practice are still up in the air and most difficult for me, my church community dissolved in conflict.  Since I’m “in the business” of helping people change, you might think I knew how to deal with all this.  I’ve not found it easy by any measure. As I’ve pondered all the changes I didn’t expect in my life, I’ve turned to a long conversation with God and some trusted friends about power.  There’s so much going on in our world that looks like power grabs to me and I find it infuriating. I really don’t like it when it looks like the bad guys are winning. I tell myself it isn’t that c...