I Hate You. What's For Dinner?

A lot of us end up spending a significant part of our adult lives unpacking our childhoods. We obviously do a lot of that in therapy, for ourselves and the parents we work with. Some, like our guest, use their creative work as part of processing their past. Today, we’re talking with Rob’s lifelong friend, author Jamie Beth Cohen. In our conversation, we revisit Jamie and Rob’s coming of age on the East Coast in the 80s and 90s, and do some speculating on what it’s like to be a kid these days.

Every parent has moments when they look at their kid and wonder, “Are they gonna be okay when they head out into the world?” In the day to day struggles that come up with school, homework, activities, chores, siblings, we can lose sight of the big picture. Which makes it all the more delightful when you get to have conversations with your kid that make you realize that yeah, they’re going to be fine. Today’s episode is the result of one of those conversations. We’re joined by Rob’s son, Teddy,

At its most distilled, disappointment is just noticing a negative difference between what we expected and what actually happened. It’s a moment for recalibrating our expectations and learning from an experience. Of course, we throw a lot of other feelings and experiences into the mix along with that gap, and that’s especially true when expectation and reality involves our kids. In this episode, we theorize about the purpose of disappointment, how it gets twisted up with how we were parented, a

There are deep biases embedded in the literature and therapist training for how therapy is supposed to be done. Some of those norms have evolved and some of the rules still feel very rigid. Old school rules say that an adult who is working on issues from their childhood might talk about their mother every week for five years, but a therapist would never suggest the client bring their mom to a session. But if both the adult child and parent are willing, why couldn’t we do things differently? T

June is a time of transition for a lot of families. The end of the school year, graduations from one phase of schooling to the next –– endings and beginnings have a way of surfacing the feels. And no one likes to process endings more than psychoanalysts. So as we’re at the end of the school year, and Rob has a child who just graduated high school — how?! –– we decided to spend some time today talking about endings. Rob shares some wisdom from his son’s head of school, Gillian talks about naviga

In our society, we’re not good at openly talking about death. We’re even worse at speaking openly about death by suicide. The silence that so often accompanies suicide–what our guest calls “the shroud of suicide”–creates additional burdens for surviving family members, especially women who survive their spouses. The expectation to shield others from the full weight of the death, to even erase the facts of the experience, is an enormous pressure that has long-term consequences across generations

Everyone struggles sometimes when their kids have strong opinions or feelings and they need them to just do the thing already. And when frustrations are high, it can be easy to slip into the kind of old-school parenting a lot of us were raised with and that we might be trying not to replicate. Our guest today, Kirk Martin, host of the Calm Parenting Podcast, knows those struggles intimately. In our conversation, he shares his journey with his son, Casey, and how he came to realize that he neede

All of us have some level of innate desire for autonomy and equality. But for some, the need for autonomy and equality tangles with Survival Brain in ways that have major impacts on their well-being, even overriding basic survival needs like food, sleep, hygiene, or physical safety. Though it can sometimes look that way from the outside, PDA (Persistent Drive for Autonomy or Pathological Demand Avoidance) is not just a knee-jerk, “You can’t tell me what to do!” PDA causes outsized reaction

There are many ways to do therapy, and many reasons why people gravitate to certain modalities, both as patients and practitioners. And while there are some who will insist that their way is the way, we’re happy to acknowledge where our preferred methods overlap and diverge with others, and how different therapies can help people arrive at the same place of better self-understanding and moving through the world with more ease. Today, we’re chatting with Gillian’s longtime friend and

It might sound silly, or even impossible, to have a theory of everything that might show up in our clinical work. And yet, when we’re sitting with people who are stuck or sitting with people that are suffering, so often it comes back to one of a few fundamental feelings, and all of the emotional gradations that come from them: safety, grief, and shame. Today, we’re digging into these emotional primary colors that are at the root of so much of what we see in our clinical practices, how they sho

Fear has a way of obstructing our development as people, as parents, and partners and friends. Our anxieties make us grasp for control when what we really need to do is get out of the way and let things unfold. Easier said than done. Today, we have Gillian’s dear friend and “soul mother,” Paula Tursi, with us. Paula is a New York-based yoga and meditation teacher, spiritual guide, writer and thinker who is at once deeply spiritual and highly pragmatic. In our conversation, we talk about the ro

Establishing safety and trust is how we create connections and personal change, in therapy and in life. If we aren’t open to new experiences or perspectives, it’s a lot harder for any of us to get to all the good, gushy, connected stuff that helps us grow. Today, we're with our friend and colleague, Dr. Matt Morrison, who is the training director of Long Island University's Psychological Services Center. Matt brings his experience supervising student psychologists and joins us to talk about his