I was listening to an NPR piece called “Wisdom From YA Authors on Leaving Home: Neal Shusterman” on Weekend Edition Saturday for August 27. Mr. Shusterman reminisced about his troubled adolescence adjusting to life in a new country. He related that overcoming depression and loneliness was instrumental in the future adaptations he had to make throughout the course of his life. His advice was “find your comfort zone and leave it.” This radio piece resonated with me professionally and personally. […]
Category Archives: Marriage
Honesty Is Only the First Step
As a seasoned clinician, I am well aware that insight is the gateway to change. I tell my patients that discovering fresh insights into our problems and ourselves is akin to opening a window that has previously been shuttered or stuck. However, in order to discover those insights, we must open that window to risk new behaviors and experiences that may feel out of reach or simply too intimating to contemplate. I was communicating electronically with an adult twin woman […]
Love Cannot Conquer All—Even Twin Love
As so many of us discover after a number of years of marriage, the exact qualities that attracted us to our beloved turn out to be personality traits that may contribute to our feeling unhappy, lonely, or sad later on in the relationship. This predicament can become especially intolerable if you have a twin who gets you, has your back, demonstrates unconditional love and acceptance, and needs to hear no more than a few words drop from your lips to […]
Happiness Is in the Remembering
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a few terms to distinguish between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self.” He believes that what we remember resonates more strongly than what we experience. Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun, borrows this perspective to explain the discrepancy between parental discontent about the day-to-day drudgery of taking care of children and the indescribable joy and rewards of raising children. She writes, “It may not be the happiness we live day to […]
Happy Wife: Happy Life
“Women cannot afford the luxury of unambivalent love for their husbands. . . . When couples quarrel it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude.” These sentences, originally written by Arlie Russell Hochschild in her book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, and quoted in Jennifer Senior’s book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, caught my attention and piqued my curiosity. I am an adamant “ambivalence” advocate and have written repeatedly […]