family

Measuring Maturity

When I first talk with potential therapy clients, I have two favorite questions that I like to ask:

  1. How would you know that things were getting better?
  2. How would you be functioning differently than you are right now?

tenor (2).gif

Most people can do a pretty good job at listing their complaints, discomforts, and symptoms. Describing a higher level of mature functioning, however, takes some thinking.  In a few weeks I’m giving a presentation about how I’ve worked on my overall functioning. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how I have measured my own progress as I work on myself. I’ve asked myself those two questions—how do I see things improving, and how have changes in my functioning contributed to this?

(more…)

My advice about loneliness featured on CNN

 

Grandma at the park; Shutterstock ID 595954499; Job: -We live in lonely times. The elderly are lonely. The teens are lonely. People are lonely in cities and in rural areas, so much so that it’s now considered a public-health issue (one with real, physical health effects). In a cover story for the Harvard Business Review last year, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that “the world is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness.”

Read my advice here.