It’s 2:00 pm on the hottest day of the year and I am watching the men lay brick in the full sun, building a second story on the building next door. As I watch them labor and sweat, I am reminded, in this Pride Month, that the rights and freedoms I enjoy today—being able to......
We have all heard “If you don’t fully love yourself, how can you love someone else?” As someone who is from Poland, a woman of faith, and life-long member of the Gothic sub-culture, I have been told for a large part of my life that I am odd and too different. I have experienced stereotyping,......
Embracing Sex Addiction The essence of recovery is embracing and growing from our mistakes and missteps rather than avoiding pain and discomfort. My recovery from sex addiction started when I was 28. I was fortunate to participate in a group my father organized consisting of therapists and clergy. It was during one of these meetings a......
Intimacy. When I talk about this concept with clients, the common assumption is that I’m talking about sex. While sex, ideally, will involve intimacy, many of the people I work with have rarely experienced intimacy and sex together. In fact, many people come to realize they haven’t experienced intimacy anywhere in their lives. For the......
As a therapist at Psychological Counseling Services (PCS) in Scottsdale, I see clients from all over the country who share the ineffective practice of numbing emotional pain with sex addiction. They come to PCS for our Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP), and at intake report a common theme – I don’t like what I’m doing, but......
If someone tells you that he relapsed again because of his childhood, do you believe him? It is important that he understand more about how he grew up and how life experiences impacted him, so that he is able to heal and have more awareness of his self. This is where therapy can be useful.......
Many of us grow up with a subtle sense that there is something wrong with us, that we are not good enough or not worthy. Why is this? A growing body of evidence shows that these core beliefs, as well as many mental health and medical disorders, have their roots in difficult experiences we have......
Spirituality is often thought of as something special or mystical. This depends on one’s interpretations, beliefs and faith as well. However spirituality is also found in the ordinary. A different view of Spirituality can be thought of as what the world or life is trying to teach us (depending on your orientation, world or life......
As human beings, we harbor attachments to each other, animals, places and things. With great attachment comes great loss—deaths, separations, divorces, and life transitions. When these attachments are broken we each experience a personal grieving process. Society has developed rules about our grief process, such as what losses we grieve, how we grieve them, and......
This is not a story of finding love in all the wrong places, nor is it going to be an intellectual discussion on love and how to define it. For me, love has been a challenging concept, and I am certain its understanding has alluded me. This story lacks the detail to fully describe a......
