It should be no surprise with the rapid advances in genetics these days that they have identified a gene that may help to explain what a lot of folks call the Highly Sensitive Person. A researcher at the University of California Berkeley, Dr. Levenson, postulates that a variation of the serotonin transporter gene on chromosome 17 may may account for people who feel their emotions very acutely. This serotonin transport gene  can have two common variations– the “short allele” or the “long a […]

First I need to give credit to the originator of this metaphor, a friend and mentor Dr. Stephen Finn. Dr. Finn is a psychologist in practice here in Austin, Texas and is on faculty at UT Austin. He has mentored many psychologists over the years and is a world-renown expert on psychological assessment. If you are interested in psychological assessment you may find his website, www.therapeuticassessment.com, of interest. Now that I have given credit, let me explain what “saucering” […]

We’ve all been there. You’re in the middle of a screaming fight (OK, some of you are probably not screamers, so maybe a glowering fight) with the exact person that just 24 hours earlier you were feeling so incredibly in love with. Or you are furious with your 15 year-old for breaking curfew YET AGAIN when just last week you were sharing a touching moment with them where they thanked you for being such a great parent. And now you want to kill that same child. Not literally, but…Yes, it happens […]

Attachment styles represent the strategy that we learned as infants in order to keep our caregivers in close physical proximity. Human infants literally can’t last more than an hour or so without having an adult caregiver nearby. Babies MUST keep this in their awareness and work hard to keep their caregiver close.Different caregivers respond to different methods in order to maintain contact. If you​ have a parent who is highly distractible, for example, it would pay off to intermittentl […]

The following article appeared on time.com last month and is a HUGE topic in my work with couples. One of the first things I try to teach couples is that memory is faliable and so the “he said/she said” fight where one person opens with “when you said/did _____” and the other person fires right back “THAT’S NOT WHAT I SAID/DID!”  to which the other now disbelieving partner yells “Oh my gosh YES IT IS!” followed by something like “I remember EXACTLY what you said, it was Tuesday and we […]

“An Introduction to PACT Therapy” will cover the fundamental aspects of PACT therapy that make it so distinctly different (and arguably more effective!) than other forms of couple’s work. If you have avoided working with couples for fear of the complexity this talk will help excite you to the possibilities and show you a clear and coherent model that is elegantly simple. If you already work with couples and find that there are particular couples, dynamics or situations that y […]

For many decades, spirituality, and even more so religion, was considered to be at odds with psychology and psychiatry. It is true that Sigmund Freud, arguably the inventor of “the talking cure”, was not a fan. However, as with everything in life, things change. Psychology is no longer as opposed to spirituality and religion as it’s creator may have intended it to be. Personally, I am a researcher by nature, so as with all questions I like to consult the data.  I realize that m […]

Some time ago I published a blog on the “Care and Feeding of your Island/Avoidant Partner”. For those of you unfamiliar with the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), “Islands” and “Waves” are the terms coined by Dr. Stan Tatkin to help people understand attachment styles and how they show up in romantic relationships.​”Wave-ish” partners have a few hallmark qualities that can help you identify them. They tend to like to talk, especially at night as they ar […]

I recently came across an amazing article that really helps to delineate the difference between attachment parenting, which is a style of parenting that promotes specific behaviors like co-sleeping, breastfeeding and “wearing” your baby, versus secure attachment, which is more about repeated patterns of moment-to-moment attunement in interactions and how repairs are made (or not made). While many parents, myself included, would like to think that practicing attachment parenting guaran […]

I get this question a lot. So I decided to write a blog post about it. Now, of course first you need to realize that you cannot control another person. Believe me, I have tried and tried hard. I like to say that I am just stubborn enough and strong-willed enough and persistent enough that if anyone COULD control another person it would be me. And I have always failed every time I tried.  So please realize that. You cannot force another person to do anything, least of all couples therapy. […]

​One of the clearest definitions of love addiction I have seen is “a compulsive, chronic craving and/or pursuit of romantic love in an effort to get our sense of security and worth from another person.” Or, if you prefer something more pithy, author Ethlie Ann Vape calls it “affection deficit disorder”. She goes on to say that “Every woman with an absent father– whether through divorce, death, disease or distance– is going to associate feelings of affection wit […]

VICTIM. RESCUER. PERSECUTOR. That about covers it sometimes, right? Ever feel like you are in some weird play where there are always the same three characters? One person is getting screwed, one person is the hero trying to rescue that person and one person is the villain who is always seen as the bad guy. Which one do you most often get cast as? And how can you get out of that dynamic?​That dynamic is called Karpman’s (Drama) Triangle. I would love to say that I invented t […]