Latest Post

Broken Resolutions?

Resolutions are tricky. They come with such promise and most of us are brimming with conviction and motivation to stick to them after spending the holiday season brimming with excess food and alcohol. It seems the perfect time to buck up, bear down, do right, break those ...

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I Can’t Get No Sleep

I can’t get no sleep! Who hasn’t had those nights? Where all you want is to sleep, after a hectic and draining day in New York, and as soon as your head hits that pillow, you know that tonight is not going to be one of those nights. Trying not to think about anything ...

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Upgrade Your Operating System

Last month I proposed a model of change not based on self-improvement, but on rethinking your entire relationship to yourself. Mindfulness, or what I refer to here as stepping off the hamster wheel, is a learned skill that research shows is profoundly effective in reducing ...

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NYC: Concrete Jungle Or Diverse Ecosystem?

New York City is one of the most bustling and challenging cities in the world, so it makes sense that many people struggle with navigating life here. I hope to show you in the first of this blog series on living in New York, that what you might think makes living here ...

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Embrace Your Feminine For Peak Performance

Anyone living in New York would agree this is one of the most fast-paced, aggressive, competitive and impersonal cities in the world. Out on the sidewalk, most of us New Yorkers impatiently swerve quickly in and out of pedestrian traffic, jammed with clueless, camera-wielding ...

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Thank You Donald Trump

As shocked, heartbroken and horrified as I was last Wednesday morning at hearing the news that Donald Trump was to be our next president, I also had to quickly find a way to talk about it with my children, my students and my clients. As the week wore on and I sat with ...

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Previous Posts

Persepective

A few days off over the long weekend break helped me find perspective. Taking time away from my normal hectic NYC routine to be with friends and family provided me with a chance to step back from it all, and consider everything from a different angle. I welcome these ...

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I’m In Love With My Phone

I’m in love with my smart phone. There; I said it. “Love?” You might ask. “Really?” Really. The other night, I couldn’t find my phone. It was time for bed, and my phone was nowhere to be found. I tried calling it from my ostensibly obsolete landline, but since ...

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Angst and Anxiety

As a therapist, I get asked a lot about angst and anxiety; what it is, how to avoid it, how to stop being anxious. We therapists do tend to study anxiety quite a bit, but I’m actually motivated to write to you about anxiety for an additional reason. Can I share a secret ...

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Make Like A Flower & Bloom

The other day, I was passing through one of those quaint East Village gardens on a sunny afternoon and paused at a small patch of wildflowers that seemed especially happy about the warm weather. These flowers were about 10 inches tall, bright yellow, and literally quivering ...

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Am I Depressed?

Let’s talk about depression. Did you ever notice how a loss like a divorce can be a catalyst for one person to be devastated, while for another person it can lead to a new, better life? Hell, it can even be both of those things for the same person! What’s up with ...

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MTA Delays & Your Mental Health

“Due to a signal malfunction, we are experiencing extensive delays in F train service. We apologize for any inconvenience.” Who would have thought that this one announcement would lead to an eruption of several different reactions across the train car? Some people ...

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Searching For A Therapist

The process of finding a therapist can be daunting. Whether you are considering therapy or you are merely curious to learn more about its nature, this post will discuss important factors to consider when searching for a therapist. There are hundreds of therapists out ...

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Creating The Condition For Growth

“All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.” – Buddha As a therapist, I’m clearly interested in what gives rise to mental health issues ...

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Understanding Emotions

Hey there! In my previous post on depression I wrote that it’s mood and symptoms “stem from your beliefs about yourself, your goals and your appraisal of what a situation ultimately means.” I thought it would be useful to talk a bit more about the theory of emotions ...

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Understanding a Panic Attack

Sam is casually grocery shopping after having gone through another stressful week of the New York City grind. As Sam is navigating the fruits and vegetables section, something stops her in her tracks. Around her, nothing has significantly changed from a few moments ago ...

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Avoiding Conversations

When I was a kid, whenever I wanted to confess to my mother that I had done something wrong or if I wanted to ask for her permission to do something, I would often feel paralyzed. I’d repeatedly rehearse what I wanted to say and I would imagine the words building up ...

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Who Is In The Driver’s Seat?

A driving tenet of a type of therapy that I practice is summarized in one simple quote by the famous greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. “[People] are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.” This powerful philosophy is anchored on thefundamental ...

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Self-Esteem In The Face Of Rejection

Many people come to therapy seeking to develop a high self-esteem. Time and time again, I meet with people who, after some form of rejection – a break up, negative feedback at work, someone ghosting on one of several online dating platforms – experience a shift in ...

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What’s Therapy Like?

This summer Netflix released the show Gypsy, which portrays a caring yet highly unethical therapist. It reminded me of how few honest, informative depictions of therapy there are available to the general public, (I think the best is In Treatment), so I thought it would ...

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How To Let Go

In my last post, I wrote about how the ACT model of therapy creates the conditions for growth and healing. I thought it would be useful to spend my next few blogs writing specifically about each component of the ACT approach in more detail. The 3 main components of ACT ...

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