I was having a conversation lately with someone who was stuck in a really bad story. She is dating the same guy over and over again. And while his name has changed, his character has been the same. It’s messing with her head.It’s keeping her up at night. It’s making her feel hollow inside. Then…
A constant theme in mental health that I have written about is that what happens to you is less important than how you make sense of what happens to you. This is a very important concept. So important, I want to write it again. What happens to you is not as important as how you…
As part of my PhD program I feel I am constantly lost in statistics of some sort. I am constantly looking words I don’t actually understand. For the most part, I hate it. But I love statistics. I love that statistics tell us stories. I love stories. I first shared this video over a year…
I have posted before about the importance of goals. We will all end up some where. The question is where will we end up? How do we decide where we want to go. The vast majority of people never will. They will simply wake up and start the day not really considering where the day…
Tonight I’ll be kicking off the 2012 Hopes and Dreams conference. Myself, my wife and a couple of others will travel about an hour from here to meet with thirty to thirty-five couples and talk about relationships. But what is a conference all about? I get this question a lot so I thought I would…
Yesterday I wrote about why I don’t believe sandwich sign parenting will work. The day before I wrote about three levels of thinking and how I believe our parenting needs to move to a level beyond punishment as a motivation. One of the readers asked a great question. He asked, What does this look like…
Yesterday I talked about the three levels of thinking and how they effect life. I promised to talk about this woman and the parenting style of shame and fear. Then the conversation had some great questions about how exactly does it look to discipline with an eye toward teaching moral reasoning versus just punishment. I’d…
Someone once wrote that feelings cannot be disputed because they are experiences. Whereas beliefs can be disputed because they are how we interpret our experiences. I completely agree with this sentiment. I believe its very important to understand the distinction before we try to understand life, we must first seek to understand how we make…
“You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to…
So often we allow our thoughts to run unexamined through our brain. Often those thoughts lead to negative behaviors. Below is a list of 8 limited thinking patterns that I will often explore with clients. They are taken from the book Thoughts & Feelings by Matthew McKay, Martha Davis and Patrick Fanning. It is a…
