Sublime

“A marriage can only be as healthy as the least healthy person in that partnership,”

Therapy is hard work—and not just for the therapist. That’s because the responsibility for change lies squarely with the patient. If you expect an hour of sympathetic head-nodding, you’ve come to the wrong place. Therapists will be supportive, but our support is for your growth, not for your low opinion of your partner. (Our role is to understand y

A placator tends become enmeshed with his partner and lose his own identity. He appears conciliatory and passive, shy and vague, not fully “there.” He is overly accommodating and neglects his own needs. After some time, he typically will find that being so accommodating burns him out and also brings up old resentments. Controlling MEM are arrogant,

Unless the client walks in with a placard saying i remind you of your mother, I assume that what I feel is pretty much what everyone else feels. Minimally, I can use my reaction as data to help me arrive at a diagnosis—a relational diagnosis, not a psychiatric one.

Charles Segal, a recently retired Harvard professor of classics who taught my Greek Tragedy course, spoke about how the Oedipus trilogy reminded him of Erik Erikson’s three stages of development. In youth, Professor Segal said, a person struggles to figure out who they are in relation to their parents (a real head scratcher in Oedipus’s case). In m

Think for a moment about an important current relationship you feel stuck in—your intimate partner, of course, but also perhaps men or women in general, or your relationship to a child, friend, family member, or colleague at work. What is your core negative image of that person? Do you see them as overbearing or absent? Bullying? Controlling? Or sh

Many perfectionists are pushed into therapy by family and friends to address the problems of anger and hypercriticism and to work on their control tendencies and their insistence on being right.