My approach to couples counseling combines basic counseling principles with the work of John M. Gottman who wrote an excellent and practical guide: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Since Gottman’s book is a “guide”, he has developed 7 principles that are expressed in the form of exercises. I recommend that any couple interested [...]

Anxiety
Anxiety is an emotion, and a very complex one at that. But first, what do we mean by emotion? I use the work of Clore (1994) and think of emotion as a mental state. According to Clore, an emotion is a mental state in which “a situation is perceived as positive or negative for one’s [...]

Many thousands of people suffer from depression. Anti-depressants are, of course, an effective way to treat the symptoms of depression. Psychotherapy (one of the things counselors do) is also an effective treatment for depression, and is directed toward resolving the cause as well as the symptoms of depression.

A group of research psychologist and neuroscientists were asked twelve questions that were then formed into a book called The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, edited by Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson (1994). Of course they covered a lot more than 10 things and each author had a different theory. Here are 10 ideas that [...]

One way of looking at counseling is to think of it as a three phase process for solving a problem. The three phases described by Hill in her book Helping Skills, are exploration, insight, and action. Interestingly, any of us who routinely solve problems, meaning all of us, are well aware of these three phases [...]