REVERSING UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS It seems to me that most Americans have one or more people somewhere in their family or friends that they just can't get along with.  The way it feels is like, "I just don't feel comfortable around them.  I can't be myself.  They make me feel and act crazy, so I […]

GROUND RULES FOR SETTLING MARITAL CONFLICTS   These are not my guidelines.  They are the ones most frequently presented in the many books I have read to help couples work through their disagreements and misunderstandings.  They are also the ones I have been taught in my training, and the ones I have seen to work […]

A recent study found that about  one woman in three who went to a doctor’s office walked out with a prescription for an antidepressant, most without even a follow-up appointment to see how it would work. Today some 11% of American women and 5% of men are taking antidepressant medication. The main reason these meds are […]

ARE YOU SELFISH AS A GRANDPARENT? by Dr. Paul Schmidt             A client recently shared with me a very helpful sermon he had heard from his pastor, Brian Tome at Crossroads Church in Lexington.  It helped me as a grandparent, and it made me think about the various styles of grandparenting I have heard described […]

We all have our fears. It’s what we do with them that makes our lives work out for the better or the worse. A big key to success in life is deciding what to believe we are afraid of. But you may ask, do we really have a choice about what we fear in life? Yes we […]

At seventy-five, I am less and less interested in the exterior of people’s lives – what their bodies, clothes, houses, vacations, or social media images look like.  I pay more attention now to how their eyes twinkle, how their voice dances, how their laugh breaks out across a room, whether both children and adults enjoy […]

Recovery from troubling thoughts, emotional surges, addictions, and bad habits can be greatly assisted by retraining the brain.  To get the most out of everything you want to learn by hearing and reading, it will benefit you greatly to start five sheets of paper, or better still, five documents on your computer that you can […]

Sometimes when we want to talk with someone, we assume they wouldn’t understand, or worse still, wouldn’t listen. Maybe they’d even fire back some criticism at the messenger so they didn’t have to deal with the message. So we send our message through a third party. This is called a ricochet message, or a bank […]

Work, rest and play all affect each other. They are a spiraling interdependent cycle: doing well at one makes it easier to do the others, and doing poorly at any of them makes the others go harder. (Diet, exercise, sex and sleeping work the same way, as do praying, forgiving, and acts of kindness.) Work includes […]

  GUILT, BOGUS GUILT, AND SHAME: How can you tell the Difference?   If you’re feeling bad about yourself, you might as well do it up right. Make something good come out of it. You can do it three different ways, and though they all feel pretty much the same at the time, the way […]