Life is a therapist...

A girl continuously checks her phone to see if the boy she's interested in has called or texted her back. He was texting with her all day yesterday, and now all of a sudden, the messages have stopped. Maybe he's just busy... or maybe he's changed his mind about her? Did he 'come to his senses' and realize she's not good enough after all? Maybe she'll send him one more message, just to see if he responds.  A writer feels paralyzed; none of the ideas he's already come up seem to be worth writing about and he's scrapped them all. Unless he can write the most expressive, significant, thought-provoking piece of prose, what's the point of even picking up the pen and getting started? No one wants to read something that's simply substandard, after all. He'd become the laughing stock of the writing community and never be taken seriously. He'll just wait for a better idea to come along...it's bound to happen sooner or later.   A woman c...

There was a young woman I saw several times at the correctional facility I work at. Several sessions into our work together, we began discussing her past in the context of more recent grief issues that had come up for her. As we talked, it became clear that she was holding in a lot of anger, resentment, and pain from past traumatic experiences and that she had buried her emotions so deeply that she had, in essence, forgotten how to "feel" them. She would talk about the experiences and losses with about as much emotion as she might talk about what she ate for dinner yesterday. There appeared to be a complete disconnect. I thought about asking my client to start a journal to begin the process of reconnection, thinking that free-flow writing might begin to awaken and evoke those emotions, and help her to identify her feelings. I had seen these results in other clients who have used journaling as an effective therapeutic tool. However, my client's reading and writing skills...