Cold Turkey Quick Fix Are you ready to be less predictable and downright mysterious? Now that you have owned your responsibility for your reaction habits (The motto: This is unfortunate, inconvenient, and unpleasant, but not a disaster unless I decide to make it one.) and you have been successful in …
Impractical Psychology On this New Year’s my mind goes back to Ellen, the thirty-three-year old mother with breast cancer who, after she’d been informed that she had from twenty-four to forty-eight of consciousness left, called me for help. Me? What did I know? I was a twenty-five-year psychologist barely out …
Practical Psychology: What Works and What’s Nuts Have you ever been in a relationship in which you felt ‘who you are’ was slip-slipping away? Maybe you stopped seeing your friends or family as often. Or you changed the way you dressed or the way you ordered from a menu. Not …
Food, Boundaries, and the Fastest Way to Ruin a Lovely Dinner MysteryShrink Short The couple at the next table at Brennan’s in old New Orleans giggled and smiled like newly weds- which they were. Both widowed in their sixties, they’d met a year ago on a cruise and married six …
MysteryShrink Shorts Overdosing on Back Braces “Good afternoon,” I said from the podium a couple of days ago. “My name is Barbara and I’m a back-brace addict.” I didn’t start out as an all-out back brace fiend. Neither of my parents had an unhealthy attachment to medical devices—though my brother, …
“Paying Attention to What You’re Paying Attention To” Series Three Things the Other Person Does Better ***To make sense of this post, first read: “How Orange Jell-O Changed My Life” The habit of talking about ‘the other people’ in the family when leaving a family event is a fairly common …
Paying Attention to What You’re Paying Attention To: The Orange Jello Incident My in-laws lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is about a nine-hour drive from Austin. Why do I mention the length of the trip? Because, nine hours is a long time for a husband to listen to his wife …
