Relationships: Love the One You Are With

We had an interesting conversation this morning about the reality of romantic relationships… which ended up being about much more than relationships… When I did more couple’s counselling, I often would think to myself, these two folks are coming in here complaining about each other. But really, if they want to know if the relationship is a good one and …

Ghosts

Today is Halloween. The holiday is felt by many to be derived from the Celtic festival of Samhain. On this night the door of the underworld opened a crack and spirits of the dead, as well as other beings, like faeries, traveled back to their old homes. Costumes developed as a way to avoid being harmed by these spirits, who …

In Memoriam

In memoriam. He was brilliant, a creative artist and writer with a strong and clear voice. He was impulsive and he had a generally paranoid view of the police, which they reciprocated. He had been arrested several times. When we met him he was on probation and that was why he came to see us at all. He could be …

Time Change: Fall Back

The time change in the United States is the classic “time of challenge and time of opportunity.” First, the challenge – If you wanted to do something to make America more depressed you would be hard pressed to come up with a better intervention. Shift everyone’s schedule so that they wake up an hour later (according to the solar clock) …

Moodsurfing Courses – Coming Soon!!!

We have been busy on the site, but not in ways that might be visible… The forum has taken quite a bit of work and is likely to take more work to really get it rolling, but so far we are pleased with the positive response to the idea. We have also started to develop course material for online classes …

Forum – Week One

We have had the Bublaa hosted forum up and running for a week. It looks great and we have had some interesting posts already. A couple of notes – You have to sign up for a Bublaa account to access the forum. And the forum is “private” meaning that once you have your account I have to approve your membership. …

Mood Phobias

We were talking with a couple of wonderful psychologists about what it is that helps people come to terms with moods and learn to live with them creatively.  One of the barriers to successful mood surfing is a fear of moods.  I suppose the analogy is of someone who is afraid of the waves trying to learn how to surf. …

Relationships: Too Many People in the Bed

Many years ago, a consultant we worked with made the observation that there are always at least four people in any intimate relationship. And often, six or more. The four people are (in the case of heterosexual relationship) the man, his female partner, his introjected mother (the internal mother that  developed from his childhood), and his partner’s introjected father. Often, …

The Different Types of Vacations

This past weekend, we were at a Halloween party talking to a computer engineer who recently moved here from Holland.  The topic turned to a discussion of things that are unusual about Americans, in particular,  the American relationship to work and vacations.  We take less vacation than almost any industrialized country in the world.  Of course, we think it’s responsible …

Should or Could?

The idea for today’s post comes from a wonderful online resource for folks with moods –  MoodScope.com (they have an interesting mood tracker app and blog). They wrote about the power of changing a single word in one’s thoughts – going from I should do something, or I should have done something, to I could do something. Give it a …

Mom is Tired: Transactional Analysis

The Winter Blues continue to be on the minds of people I talk to. One thing that sometimes happens when we get the blues is that we feel a bit abandoned, and one type of abandonment that is particularly significant emotionally is the abandonment by one’s mother. We have have had a number of conversations with themes related to Mom …

Starting a Forum

We have finally gotten started with our online forum. This is a place where frequent visitors and subscribers can ask questions, make suggestions, offer advice, share wisdom, etcetera, related to living creatively with moods. We want this forum to be lively, positive, candid and meaningful. To that end we can promise that we will give top priority to answering questions …

Depression is Depressing

Sometimes helping someone deal with their moods can seem a bit like being a gynecologist in Victorian England. How can you help someone with something (sex, or depression) when the topic itself is off limits. We are exaggerating, but there are so many ways that the idea that “depression is depressing” interferes with actually dealing with the mood. Not to …

Unemployment

What to do when you suddenly find yourself unemployed? Over the years, we’ve helped a bunch of folks through the challenge of unemployment. Those who have been the most successful have paid attention to a few factors: 1. Maintaining a Routine. One of the easiest ways to get in to trouble when you suddenly find yourself unemployed is to take …

Bay Area Blues

If you live in the bay area you probably noticed that this past week you felt a little less energetic. It was the first cold and rainy week of the season, and the days have been getting noticeably shorter (maybe you used to wake up after dawn and now it is dark). We are naturally seasonal animals trying to live in …

Loneliness

This seems to have been the week for discussions about loneliness. We have been talking about the experience of loneliness with a number of people in different situations: A married woman whose husband is away on business, A widowed professional man, A woman who recently ended a two year relationship. What has been interesting in these conversations is that they start …

Practice

We have been blessed to work with many very, very intelligent people over the years. It always stimulates us to have smart people ask challenging questions about the work that we do. One of the common complaints of smart people in therapy is: my therapist isn’t telling me anything I don’t already know. We used to try to point out …

Appreciating Depression?

We are indebted to Tom Wootton for his observation that the key to living creatively with bipolar is accepting and making use of depression. Tom wrote a book about depression (The Depression Advantage) that was one of the first things he wrote about bipolar (for more, see his website, Bipolar Advantage). He noted that it was a difficult book to …