Episodes
June 7, 2022
School Shooter Profile
It's hard to empathize with someone who carries out a school shooting. The brutality of their crimes is unspeakable. Whether the shootings were in Uvalde, Columbine, or Parkland, they have traumatized students and communities...
May 31, 2022
Fear of Failure
Rejection is a bitter pill to swallow. And most of us have had a good dose of it. Whether we didn’t get a job we applied for, weren’t admitted to our top choice college, didn’t make it to the team we tried out for, or didn’t ...
May 24, 2022
The Rise of Self Esteem
Confidence in one's value as a human being is a precious psychological resource and generally a highly positive factor in life; it is correlated with achievement, good relationships, and satisfaction. Possessing little self-r...
May 17, 2022
Anxiety: Living in Fear
Anxiety is both a mental and physical state of negative expectation. Mentally it is characterized by increased arousal and apprehension tortured into distressing worry, and physically by unpleasant activation of multiple body...
May 10, 2022
The Desperate Price of Loneliness
Though our need to connect is innate, many of us frequently feel alone. Loneliness is the state of distress or discomfort that results when one perceives a gap between one’s desires for social connection and actual experience...
May 3, 2022
The Resiliency of Wisdom
Keeping the brain engaged is key to building resilience. By seeking out new challenges and activities, people can take their resilience to the next level by developing wisdom. Wisdom is more strongly associated with life sati...
April 26, 2022
Making Confident Decisions
When making a decision, we form opinions and choose actions via mental processes which are influenced by biases, reason, emotions, and memories. The simple act of deciding supports the notion that we have free will. We weigh ...
April 19, 2022
What Happened to Common Sense?
For centuries scientists, science writers and philosophers have encouraged us to trust our common sense (Lilienfeld et al., 2010; Furnham, 1996). Common sense is a phrase that generally implies something everyone knows. One o...
April 5, 2022
Living with a Depressed Partner
There is a great deal of information available about depression. But when you live with a depressed person, it can be painfully difficult. Anti-depressants are the number-one prescribed medication in this country, but they ar...
March 29, 2022
The Effects of Childhood Abandonment
When children are raised with chronic loss, without the psychological or physical protection they need—and certainly deserve—it is most natural for them to internalize incredible fear. Not receiving the necessary psychologica...
March 22, 2022
Finding your "Soul Mate"
Relationship scientist Raymond Knee coined the terms “destiny beliefs” and “growth beliefs” to describe an individual’s general approach to seeking and maintaining romantic relationships. People with destiny beliefs assume th...
March 15, 2022
Raising Special Needs Children: Herding Squirrels
For anyone whose life revolves around caregiving, including the parents of special-needs children, there are inherent risks that can jeopardize both their own well-being and that of the people they care for. Insufficient mana...
March 8, 2022
Delusional People: Sold on Their Own Story
Delusional disorder, previously called paranoid disorder, is a type of serious mental illness — called a “psychosis”— in which a person cannot tell what is real from what is imagined. The main feature of this disorder is the ...
March 1, 2022
Living Through Dark Times
The Covid-19 pandemic led to a prolonged exposure to stress. As a consequence, researchers showed an increased interest in measuring social and community uneasiness in order to psychologically support the population. This inc...
Feb. 22, 2022
The Need for Power and Control
There is a downside to being in control when it involves trying to control other people, because other people don't want to be controlled by you any more than you want to be controlled by other people. In therapy, we often he...
Feb. 15, 2022
The Inner Child: Aggression, Tantrums and Trauma
Destructive behavior takes various forms: from subtle self-sabotage and self-defeating patterns to passive hostility to severe self-destructive symptoms, violent aggression and, sometimes, evil deeds. Commonly, destructive be...
Feb. 8, 2022
A Life of Regret
Regret is a negative emotion that occurs when a person believes his or her past actions or behaviors, if changed, may have achieved a better outcome. Regret is often closely associated with feelings of guilt and shame. We oft...
Feb. 1, 2022
Trust: Our Deepest Need
Being vulnerable with each other can also be a mutual endeavor, and it doesn't just involve revealing parts of yourself. It can also involve a joint effort toward something rewarding — an adventurous experience on a vacation,...
Jan. 25, 2022
Psychopath Stalkers
Stalking is defined as repeated and unwanted attention, harassment, contact, or any other behavior directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to feel fear. In 2006, psychologist Brian Spitzberg at San ...
Jan. 18, 2022
Bonding Through Laughter
Humor, the capacity to express or perceive what's funny, is both a source of entertainment and a means of coping with difficult or awkward situations and stressful events. Although it provokes laughter, humor can be serious b...
Jan. 11, 2022
Gender Identity: Mind My Pronouns
Gender is related to but distinctly different from sex; it is rooted in culture, not biology. The APA (2012) defines gender as the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological ...
Jan. 4, 2022
Marrying a Divorcee
A divorcee is not a supernatural being who needs to be kept at bay and never considered for marriage. Nevertheless, there are a few problems in marrying a divorcee that needs to be taken into account before you plunge into a ...
Dec. 28, 2021
The Resentful Vigina: Sexual Warfare
t has become increasingly clear to me that at the basis of most divorces are problems of sexual connection. Two people may think that they are fighting about the kids or the in-laws or about whether to renovate the kitchen, b...
Dec. 21, 2021
Toxic Family Members
Some lucky people are born into families they adore spending time with—their loving mutual bonds make holidays and multi-generational vacations a drama-free joy. But for others, simply seeing an incoming call from a parent tr...