Relationships & Communication, Sophia's Posts
Becky White George
Validation in Romantic Relationships

The importance of validation is something I emphasize with couples as it creates a dynamic based on understanding rather than score-keeping or proving right and wrong. In an emotionally charged conversation, it's common for individuals to focus primarily on their own emotional experience instead of their partner’s. Rather than listening to what the other person is saying, we may be thinking about our own response.

Validation in Romantic Relationships
Atalie's Posts, Relationships & Communication
Becky White George
Flexibility In Friendships

A common struggle for many of my clients in their 20s is navigating friendships. This includes friendship conflicts, growing apart, reassessing the closeness of the friendship, and defining what types of friendships feel fulfilling in which ones feel draining. In these conversations, we explore the importance of flexibility in friendships and why it becomes so much more pertinent during this life stage.

Flexibility In Friendships
Jessica's Posts, Trauma and Mental Health
Becky White George
Intellectualizing Feelings

I have thought through every situation from every possible angle my brain can come up with and analyzed so much of my life and experience that it often feels exhausting. This “self-awareness” can start to feel incredibly frustrating when I have some understanding, yet I still find myself in familiar patterns or generally not feeling better. If this description sounds familiar to you, you might be intellectualizing your feelings vs. actually feeling them.

Intellectualizing Feelings
Kalie's posts, Self Care & Mindfulness
Becky White George
The Animal Within

I recently stumbled upon the concept of animal chronotypes, which can be used to describe our personality traits based on our natural tendencies in social interactions and behavior. While these archetypes are often linked to sleep habits, they’re also super helpful for understanding how we connect with others. Each chronotype has its own unique traits and ways of navigating relationships.

The Animal Within
Jessica's Posts, Therapy: Getting Started
Becky White George
What I Wish Clients Knew

We were discussing a painful experience, and I was once again struck and inspired by their resilience. In this situation, I found a way to express this sentiment in the moment. However, there are many instances where sharing in the moment might not be the most therapeutic response. Even when I don’t vocalize it, I want my clients to know I carry these feelings and this care with me. Reflecting on this, I began to consider all the things I wish my clients knew about me, about the therapeutic relationship, and the process.

What I Wish Clients Knew

Trauma and Mental Health

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Foreboding Joy

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Foreboding Joy

If I asked you to name a vulnerable emotion, joy doesn’t present as the obvious answer. Instead, we tend to think about shame, loneliness, anger, anxiety, and other more traditionally “negative” emotions. So how is joy potentially the most vulnerable emotion we experience? Brene Brown answers this question in her research about foreboding joy, which she defines as: “the experience of joy immediately followed by worry or dread.”

So many of us have experienced this confusing phenomenon of mixed emotions without an understanding as to what or why this is happening internally. The feeling is so widespread that many idioms have attempted to illustrate this particular experience: have you ever thought, “This is too good to be true” or experienced the feeling of “waiting for the other shoe to drop?” I know I have experienced this long before I had a name for it. I remember one particular instance where I was looking over at my partner with love and awe, only to have the feeling transform into fears about the end of the relationship and how devastated I would feel. I also remember the intense negative self-judgment I experienced, becoming frustrated that I couldn’t enjoy a good thing and had to ruin it with these intrusive thoughts. Learning about foreboding joy has been illuminating and validating when thinking back on these memories.

I hear this same self-talk in therapy sessions every day. I have clients who describe not wanting to get too excited about a new relationship, not wanting to settle into a sense of calm at a new job, and generally not wanting to let their guard down in case the positive experience doesn’t last. So, why do we do this? Why does dread often follow joy?

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Tiktok Therapy

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Tiktok Therapy

The other day in a session, as I was trying to recall where I had recently heard about a specific symptom a client of mine was describing, I awkwardly realized I had just watched a video about it on Tiktok. Luckily, this happened with a Gen Z client who had taken to sending me relevant Tiktok videos in between sessions and we had a laugh together about my realization. A year ago, I could have never imagined saying “I saw it on Tiktok” in relation to mental health. Now, I find that more and more therapists are on Tiktok, and more and more clients come to session referencing videos they’ve seen. This realization got me wondering about the benefits and drawbacks of #tiktoktherapy, a hashtag that has 761 Million views. Here are some benefits and some drawbacks and cautions about Tiktok Therapy.

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5 Stages of Grief

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5 Stages of Grief

I suffered my first heartbreak during my senior year of high school. I was 17 years old and had just broken up with my first boyfriend. I never knew it was possible to feel so much pain. For weeks I called my friend Julia multiple times a day, crying, I sat in my car in the school parking lot, crying, and went to bed and woke up, crying. I had never really lost anything before, and grief wasn’t yet something I had encountered much in my life.

My mom, also a therapist, noticing me in my pain, told me about the Stages of Grief as described by Swiss-American Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. For the first time in weeks, I was able to name the different waves of grief I was going through, and through this was able to experience some relief and stop crying every. damn. day.

Little did I know that I would return to the Stages Of Grief over and over again throughout my life as I moved through teenage heartbreak into adult heartbreak, and deaths of pets, friends, and family. The awareness of the stages of grieving helped soothe my aching heart throughout these different losses, and also helped me provide support to clients and friends alike to cope with grief at any stage.

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Coping with Grief

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Coping with Grief

“And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”- Maya Angelou


These lines from the poem “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou were read to me in session by a client as she prepared for her first Thanksgiving without her husband. Though this client has been feeling the immense weight of her grief daily and even hourly, the thought of the imminent holiday season has been bringing up new and intense emotions. The experience of managing grief comes up every year in therapy sessions, but this year the grieving feels even more pervasive as so many of us have lost family members throughout the pandemic. In some way, we are all grieving the loss of unmet expectations and hopes from the past 21 months.

For many, the end of the year holidays signifies a time of togetherness, happiness, and celebration. For those of us that are grieving, these feelings are muddled together with pain, loneliness, longing, resentment, and a myriad of other emotions. Creating space for all of these jumbled emotions can feel overwhelming. Here are some coping skills to keep in mind this holiday season for anyone experiencing grief in any form.

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ADHD Symptoms in Women

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ADHD Symptoms in Women

Women with ADHD are often overlooked, misdiagnosed, or undiagnosed all together. After working with Kaitlin* over the past year, I have been able to witness the long-term effects of this oversight and the journey it can take to receive an accurate diagnosis. Kaitlin has lived the majority of her life with various mental health symptoms that never quite fit into any one diagnosis. She has spent years testing out various medications and treatment methods with only limited success. This year, at age 34, she received an ADHD diagnosis and finally felt everything click into place. As I celebrated this feeling of relief and progress with Kaitlin, I started thinking more seriously about why and how this diagnosis took so long to figure out. Looking at my own caseload, I realized that almost all of my female clients with ADHD or ADD were diagnosed later in life. This pattern within my client base is representative of the current statistics regarding ADHD: 50-75% of women with ADHD go completely undiagnosed. Using Kaitlin as my inspiration, I started learning more about what has been missing in ADHD research and diagnosis and what is finally improving now. Here’s what I’ve been learning:

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Mental Health Support

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Mental Health Support

As someone with limited athletic ability and no cable subscription, sports, in particular tennis and gymnastics, have never been a big part of my life. This year, however, Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles changed that. Their bravery in bringing mental health into the dialogue highlighted the incongruence between how we may assume someone is feeling and their internal world. This year, I cared about sports.

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Opiate-Free Pain Management

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Opiate-Free Pain Management

Are you dealing with chronic pain and seeking out ways to manage it without opiates and other pain meds? A recent study came out confirming that Opiod medication is not useful for chronic back or joint pain. In my years as a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, I have encountered many clients dealing with chronic pain issues. Read more to learn about opiate-free methods of treating chronic pain.

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What are you noticing now?

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What are you noticing now?

For any client or practitioner of EMDR, you are no stranger to this question. The question “What are you noticing now?” is at the fulcrum of EMDR therapy. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) is a therapy treatment which reprocesses memories that became stuck in our brains and bodies during the trauma. The present-moment focus of EMDR couples beautifully with Mindfulness: a continual refocusing of your attention on the present moment. In Mindfulness, we recognize that we have stories about our past that loop, narratives in our mind that play like a tape over and over again. We worry about the future. And this is all leads to dukkha, or suffering, the First Noble Truth of Buddhism.

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Is EMDR for me?

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Is EMDR for me?

Whats the deal with EMDR? People in the field of trauma treatment are buzzing about it. My clients are both intrigued and confused by it, and even more intrigued when it actually works. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) is a therapy treatment which reprocesses memories that became stuck in our brains and bodies during the trauma. Forgive my metaphor, but imagine taking a toilet plunger and unclogging the toilet of your mind. Gross? Yes. Effective? Heck yes!

You might be wondering, is EMDR for me?

 

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