Although I indulge in watching viral videos, I rarely play them more than once. But I can’t seem to stop watching Adele fooling a bunch of her own impersonators by pretending to be one of them. There is something Shakespearean in the way she dons a prosthetic nose and chin, feigns a bad case of […]
Are You Hiding Your Inner Rock Star?
The Masks We Wear Can Help - or Hurt Us - in Life
It’s Not Whether You Win or Lose, But How You Tell Your Story
Redefining What It Means to Have a Happy Ending
When I was young, one of my favorite books was Sugarcane Island, which was the first “choose your own adventure” type of interactive book. The premise was fairly simple: You had been shipwrecked on a deserted island. The goal was survival and finding your way home. At the end of each chapter was a list of […]
Flip the Script
Are You Miscast in Your Own Life?
In the movie “Stranger Than Fiction,” Harold Crick is a robotic IRS agent who begins to question his mundane existence when he hears a mysterious voice narrating his life and foreshadowing his death. When he discovers that he is not the master of his own destiny, but rather a fictional character, Crick tracks down his […]
“Inside Out” Teaches Us that Every Emotion has a Purpose
As a therapist, I often feel like a tour guide for my patients. Using various “maps” and my knowledge from years of traversing the emotional terrain, I help them navigate the territory of the mind and make sense of what they discover. Pixar’s “Inside Out” took that journey one step further, introducing the indigenous people […]
Accessing Your Inner Superhero
Each of us is on a journey. This journey is our story. And naturally you are the protagonist in this story, which like any story, has conflict. And no one can resolve this conflict but you. As therapist Kim Schneiderman, LCSW, MSW, writes in her excellent book Step Out of Your Story: Writing Exercises to […]
Using Storytelling Techniques to Reframe Your Life
A Review from Pysch Central
Our lives are a story. There are characters, conflicts and resolutions. There is joy and pain, comedy and drama. There is mystery and adventure. How we tell our tales, and thereby how we see ourselves, plays a huge role in how we live our lives. Because perception is everything. If we view a failure as […]
Charlotte Rains Dixon Reviews “Step Out of Your Story”
Once again, the wonderful folks at New World Libraryhave offered me a book to review. And once again, I’m making slow progress through it because I keep stopping to ponder and do the exercises. I found the receipt of this book particularly serendipitous because shortly before it arrived, I announced that I was pondering offering […]
Your Life as a Character Development Workout
How Antagonists Help Us Strengthen Emotional and Mental Muscles
Does the same type of character keep showing up in your life and pushing your buttons? These people may look nothing alike, but they keep presenting you with more or less the same frustrations and issues. Or perhaps there’s a negative situation you keep finding yourself struggling with: picking up the slack and getting no […]
Tapping into Your Omniscient Narrator
How Writing in the Third Person Helps You Step Out of Your Story
In the movie Stranger than Fiction, Harold Crick is a robotic IRS agent who begins to question his mundane existence when he hears a mysterious voice narrating his life and foreshadowing his untimely death. When he discovers that he is not the master of his own destiny, but rather a fictional character dreamed up by an […]
Cyber-spying and Defriending
How Facebook is Finding Its Way Onto the Therapy Couch
As a psychotherapist in private practice, I can’t help but notice that Facebook is wreaking mischief in some of my clients’ personal lives. One client caused a family scandal when he established privacy settings that prevented some, but not all, of his relatives from seeing his status updates. A 14-year-old client gave up Facebook for […]
