Library & Resources

Many parents have been seduced by the appealing but dangerous notion of parent-as-friend. The generation gap that existed forty or fifty years ago has narrowed as parents have adopted youthful ways of dress, of lifestyle, of thinking, making the demarcation between generations harder to find nowadays — and making it easier to pursue the idea of friendship with our kids.

Of all the darker human emotions — sad, angry, afraid, hurt, disappointed, jealous, etc. — there’s only one that’s always toxic, only one that’s sure to wreak havoc on our relationships. Perhaps because of its toxicity, it’s the emotion least understood or talked about: shame.

Our children are bombarded by toxic messages — from media and television, from peers and perhaps from us — about what’s required in order to be acceptable, in order to be fully loved: be smarter, be thinner, be stronger, be more popular, do more, do better, do your best … It’s an endless stream of prerequisites to feeling worthy. The underbelly of those messages is the…

Have you ever found yourself bickering with your partner over what really happened? Debating your version versus mine? How easily we forget that there are always two realities at play: objective reality and emotional reality.

The United States is facing an autism epidemic. The latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that 1 in every 88 children in the U.S. is diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The number of children with ASDs has greatly increased from the 1980s when children were diagnosed at a rate of 2-5 in 10,000 (Kogan et. al., 2009).…

Mental illness has a significant impact on the welfare of our population. It is associated with decreased work productivity (e.g., Kessler, et al., 2008), increased health care cost and utilization (e.g., Ormel, et al., 2008), and decreased quality of life and life satisfaction (e.g., Rapaport, Clary, Fayyad, & Endicott, 2005). In the psychological literature, quality of…

If you’ve ever reminded your kids to “sit up straight” when they slouched at the dining table, you probably had no idea how very wise a suggestion it was. Research in recent years has revealed multiple benefits from moving through life with good posture — and it makes sense for children to establish this habit when they’re young.

Among the many predictors of good outcome in therapy, none is more powerful than the relationship between client and therapist (Safran & Muran, 2000). Put simply, without a strong enough relationship, or therapeutic alliance, the client and therapist cannot do meaningful and effective work.