Alex Colvard

Therapists are essentially story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong.

“This Is Your Life.” This is a game some couples play at the end of each year. They write out a summary of the year from their partner’s point of view. That is, they write, in the first person, about what challenges their partner faced and how he or she overcame them. Reading over these first-person accounts of your life can be an exhilarating expe

People who are good at mirroring also have what the Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls high “emotional granularity,” the ability to finely distinguish between different emotional states.

The really good confidants—the people we go to when we are troubled—are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They ask you to probe into what is really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem un