A Potent Mindfulness Technique to Expand Beyond Your Ego — If you could level out a negative mood, regulate volatile emotions or quiet an anxious mind in just a minute of mindfulness each day, would you do it? No, this isn’t an infomercial. A few years ago, psychotherapist and mindfulness expert Jake Eagle and pain management specialist Dr. …

5 Evidence-Based Techniques to [begin to] Stop People Pleasing — Seeking: Validation and conditional acceptance based on most recent acts Candidate: Expert workplace politician; never satisfied with achievements; inconsistent distribution of praise; narcissists welcome Client [me]: Eager to please, always says yes, no boundaries I might as well have spent my teens, 20s, and 30s carrying this farcical job description…

It’s Much Easier to Just Check Out — There are a million ways to check out. Pick a screen, any screen. Distractions are calling, and they promise relief. It’s tempting to be anywhere but right here, right now. Depending on where you look, “now” can be a very scary place. War(s), mass shootings, corporate fraud, social injustice, political…

Surviving and Thriving Despite My Best Attempts to Self-Destruct — Hello, friend. Thanks for sharing a moment of your time. I’m Russ. I’m a 42-year-old Californian living in NYC. People always ask me how I ended up on the East Coast. I suppose I wanted to run away. You could say I’m good at running. It seems to be a…

Including addiction therapists like me — The line between addiction and recovery can be tenuous and fragile. Though I have years of hard-fought sobriety, I walked right up to the edge of substance use the other week. I stood at the edge of that yawning abyss of nothingness and reveled in a moment of thrill-seeking defiance. …

For the People Pleasers and Validation Seekers — If I’m a master of anything at all, it’s catastrophizing poor performance into evidence of deficiency. It could be the tiniest morsel of a critique hidden in an otherwise glowing performance review. My mind will seize upon that morsel and manifest a mountain of doom. You too? When you’re a…

A Letter of Hope and Strength — This piece is for all the addicts, alcoholics and anyone diagnosed (or yet to be) with substance use disorder. You might not want to admit it yet, but you know who you are. You are not alone. Maybe drunken holiday party antics cost you a job. Maybe you’ve wrapped your…

Telling This Secret Helps Me Heal — If there’s one way to ensure you’re not getting my business, it’s to attempt a hard sell. There’s just something about being sold that really sets me off. Granted, most people don’t like being sold. It just pushes me to a different level. I feel personally offended — like it’s…

Every Client Inspires Me to Be a Better Version of Myself — I like to say every day is an adventure. Working as an addiction therapist, I never know who or what will cross my path next. Maybe I’ll need to do a call with Child Protective Services (CPS) to advocate for a client; maybe a client will show up drunk to…