Bad Therapy: A Book that People Will Love or Hate
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Bad Therapy: A Book that People Will Love or Hate

ByJoe Martino

I have been telling my friends for years that conservatives were going to be coming for therapy. And in many ways, it’s deserved. We have more money, time, resources, and energy focused on mental health and don’t have results that match. Therapy is mainly run by people with a liberal orientation to life and politics. As such, it is an easy target for conservatives to attack as we seem to embrace the ever-dividing line of ideology in our country. But that doesn’t absolve therapy or therapists from answering some very legitimate questions about treatment, how we do it, and what outcomes we’re getting from our current efforts.

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Do these ten things to have better conversations

ByJoe Martino

We all have arguments and disagreements. It seems to me in the past, we have decided to stop having uncomfortable conversations because they typically go wrong. Here are ten skills that you can start incorporating into difficult conversations right away. I believe they will help us all have better difficult conversations. Seek to understand the…

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Those who disagree with us are not our enemies.

ByJoe Martino

We have to develop the ability to hold two things in our minds at once.  I pray that we return to being people who value questions. We need to step away from our identity politics and embrace that those who disagree with us are also people just like us.  We have to fight against our normal nature of craving certainty. Certainty is good until it becomes the thing destroying us.  There is no such thing as a life or a relationship without danger and disagreement.

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If you had a friend that talked to you like you do, would you still be friends?

ByJoe Martino

You’re not an idiot because something bad happened like you lost $100 that you can’t afford to lose. You’re not shameful because someone molested or raped you as a child. You didn’t deserve to be raped because you were drunk at a party. Your worth isn’t diminished because your father didn’t know how to adequately love you. You’re not worthless because your mom took every chance she could to remind you that you were an accident that wasn’t planned.
I do not believe you are an accident. I do believe you have worth.

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The Emotionally Secure Couple: Chapter One

ByJoe Martino

Then we try to soothe our pain. We try to soothe it by working out or making millions of dollars or getting involved in church. We try to outdo our shame, falsely believing that we can outrun it through activity. The net result becomes a heaping of shame on top of shame. Our activity does not do away with our shame; instead, it numbs our response to it. A numb soul tends to be numb to everything. This causes us to pick activities that keep us from connecting with someone else, which causes us to experience more shame.