Yesterday, I attended Senator Debbie Smith’s funeral service – such a sad day.

Debbie valiantly fought a battle with brain cancer and approached it just like she did everything else – with strong determination and a firm sense of purpose.

She wasn’t a quitter by any stretch of the imagination and gave that hideous disease all she had.…

How many times has someone told you the keys to effective communication? How many are there–5, 10, 20? Sometimes, it’s hard to keep them all straight.

So, with the help of Michael S. Broder, Ph.D, who wrote about this in the Huffington Post, I’ve condensed the keys to effective communication to just three. Read on!

1. Give Feedback — When you give feedback, be as specific as possible. The most effective feedback is given in a constructive manner,…

When you are in conflict, it’s pretty easy to blame a lot on the other person. If only he/she would ___________ (fill in the blank to personalize).

Yet conflicts have a lot to do with us and our contribution to them.

What do I mean?

When things have broken down with another person, here are 6 questions to ask ourselves to figure out if it’s worthwhile to attempt a collaborative conversation with him/her.

As you read through them, you…

My neighbor just left after spending about an hour and a half with me, sipping tea and chatting. Yes, it’s all very 1950’s, but alas–this is the beauty of freelancing! As we were visiting, I noticed myself slipping into teenage-girl mode, gossiping about people we both know. And, all the while, I knew it was wrong.

Or, was it?

I thought I would do a little research on the subject, and it turns out that gossiping can actually be good for you–if you do it the right way.…

My neighbor just left after spending about an hour and a half with me, sipping tea and chatting. Yes, it’s all very 1950’s, but alas–this is the beauty of freelancing! As we were visiting, I noticed myself slipping into teenage-girl mode, gossiping about people we both know. And, all the while, I knew it was wrong.

Or, was it?

I thought I would do a little research on the subject, and it turns out that gossiping can actually be good for you–if you do it the right way.…

Sometimes, a community can be overwhelmed. Like Boston was in 2015 with almost 100 inches on snow.

Think about it – that’s an 8 foot high snow pile!

Firefighters were spending their time digging out hydrants and then doing it all over again as the snow accumulated.

There are 13,683 of them!!

Everyone was trying…

Life is full of choices, and the menu of options starts as soon as we wake up in the morning. Should I get out of bed? What should I have for breakfast? What’s the latest I can push my departure-time before I’m late to work? (a favorite, of course).

What few people realize is that some of the most important choices will happen when we’re in the midst of conflict. In a recent article in The Huffington Post by author and therapist Margaret Paul, Ph.D., the author lays out the…

It’s exhausting! … I heard this phrase twice last week.

The first time, I read it in the newspaper. Kim, a young woman from LV, described how tiring it is to have a mental illness and to live with the stigma every day.  She wouldn’t ask for extra sick days when she needed them. It was exhausting to hide her illness from potential employers or…

Fear–we all have it. Some of us have more. Some of us have less. But, being afraid is part of the human condition, whether we like it or not.

But, when was the last time you tried to define it? I have to admit, even in my role as a therapist, I’ve rarely asked my clients to define what “fear” means. Without a definition of the actual term, we typically spend hour upon hour trying to process “fear.” But, define it? Almost never.

So, it was with great relief that I…

Texting often gets a bad name – it’s impersonal or distracting. It occupies some young people’s time way too much.

With all of that bad rap, have you ever thought that texting could be life-saving?

That was the vision of Nancy Lubin, the CEO and founder of DoSomething.org, which runs campaigns via text like collecting “jeans for teens” who are without a home or bringing dogs to campus so students can…