One of my clients has lived in a small, closely-knit community for many years now. In partnership with another couple, two people she considered good friends, she owned a restaurant/bar that served as a gathering point for their community. As it turned out, these “friends†had been stealing from her for quite some time, skimming… Continue reading The Ones Who Let Go
Category: The Psychotherapy Relationship
Second Thoughts on Sliding Scale Payment
While having coffee last week with my friends Christina and Peter, fellow writers from my Thursday afternoon group, we were discussing how a young philanthropist here in Chapel Hill had helped raise funds to rebuild a beauty salon burned during the riots in Ferguson. The young man’s efforts struck me as very personal: he did… Continue reading Second Thoughts on Sliding Scale Payment
The Role of Intuition (ESP?) in Psychotherapy
While working on an article about virtual psychotherapy for The Atlantic, I began to think about the role of intuition in the work we therapists do: how it functions and what enables us to understand the way a client is feeling without being told. In part, we’re responding to visual cues. Even when clients are… Continue reading The Role of Intuition (ESP?) in Psychotherapy
My Idea of Friendship
One day many years ago, my friend Ann told me she had scheduled an appointment with a surgeon to discuss whether to undergo a hip replacement. She and her doctor would be evaluating the results of x-rays and a recent MRI. As a candidate for this type of surgery, Ann was young, in her late… Continue reading My Idea of Friendship
Disappearing Comments
I’m not sure why, but a couple hundred comments (most of them probably spam) have disappeared from the approval queue. I apologize if your comment was deleted before I had a chance to read and approve it. Feel free to re-submit!