A recent client--I’ll call her Lupe--was struggling with negative feelings toward her sister, Elena. Lupe had recently suffered a bad...

You’re probably not surprised to hear that I’ve been seeing a number of clients who find the holidays stressful. For some, it’s the...

My client “Lauren” was depressed ever since she’d had a mishap at work...“I feel like a total loser,” Lauren told me.

Many of us have seen the information circulating on the internet that we have 70,000+ thoughts per day and that most of them are negative...

Since you’re likely spending more time at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, you might review your resume or cv to remind yourself of...

...and as I often teach my clients, self-distancing is a useful strategy for finding relief from one’s own bad-feeling thoughts.

...“learned optimism,” the idea that we’re not hopelessly locked into a pessimistic mindset, even if we may have been practicing it...

We see a mistake or flaw pointed out by someone else as a comment on our whole self. Not “I made a mistake, but I am a mistake.” 

My last blog entry talked about David Burns’ work on “cognitive distortions.” I noted that the distortion called the “mental filter”...

My friend’s grumblings are a classic example of the “cognitive distortion” called the “mental filter” by David Burns in Feeling Good.

Inner ecology is way more important than any award or recognition. After all, one can be a person with numerous awards and still feel...

Would it be possible for you to simultaneously work toward solving your problems and feel ok about the fact that they exist?

Things are not always, never, totally, or constantly any one way.

Confidence issues are very common. Do you feel you lack confidence? Or is there some other trait you feel you don’t possess? 

It’s illuminating to realize that you've created every feeling you've ever had, and that the quality of your experience is related to...

Anxiety can be so overwhelming that it often seems one’s entire life is being consumed by it. One thinks, Anxiety is taking over my life.

At many points in our lives, we believe others have it made, while we struggle to find a scrap of satisfaction with our own situation. 

Realize that thinking certain thoughts not only feels bad, but also causes undesirable behavior.

This fitting-in vs. not fitting-in thing is a big part of our existential human experience. It became an old story, though--one I wanted...

Years ago, when I was a teaching assistant, I had a student who never missed an opportunity to aggressively challenge me in class.