Each year around this time, conversations with clients turn to the predictable stress of time with family over the holidays. Like ghosts in the night, old issues, long dormant, reappear at holiday time. How is it that an adult with partner and children can walk into their parents’ home and instantly feel 10 years old again? The anticipation of a holiday encounter can lead any adult to feel slightly unhinged in a way that few other situations do. Let’s face …
Category: Marriage
I had a wonderful time presenting to physicians, nurses, social workers and psychologists at The Reading Hospital this spring. The audience wanted to understand the meaning of emotional cutoff and the impact of this process on development and family relationships over the course of the life cycle. Always true to my training as a family therapist, I began with my family genogram, and a story about my father’s cutoff from his family of origin. This happened when I was two years old …
Join us for the next CPSP “Community Psychiatry Forum*” In Collaboration with The American Association of Community Psychiatrists Engaging Family Supports Learning Objectives – Participants will be better able to: Identify strategies and barriers to engage family members as supportive members of recovery team Enable people in recovery to identify and connect with potential sources of support in the community Describe issues commonly concerning family members and other natural supports and potential approaches for addressing them CME: You can …
Every so often I read something that speaks to a yet unarticulated thought or idea about my work with couples and families. Such was the case when I read NY Times columnist David Brooks’s article “Three Views of Marriage.” He describes three prevailing perspectives on marriage: the psychological, the romantic, and, what he calls the moral view. It was Brooks’s description of the moral view that spoke to me. As a couple and family therapist, I am witness to the transformational power of …
At CCAF, we are committed to bring research about relationships and family life to the public. In this spirit, I share the article, “Masters of Love” from this month’s Atlantic Magazine. The article traces the 30 year history of research on marriage; the work of John and Julie Gottman of The Gottman Institute is featured. Their work is noteworthy for their capacity to predict, with up to 94% certainty, which couples will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and …
In this informative and engaging interview, Dr. Berman offers clear, specific advice about how to avoid pitfalls and seize opportunities when dealing with the thorny issue of money and the family. …
The Center for Couples and Adult Families extends a warm welcome to Michelle Jackson, a seasoned Couple and Family therapist who joined our Clinical Faculty last month. There are many reasons I’m thrilled to have Ms. Jackson aboard, not the least of which is our ability to serve more couples and families at CCAF. Her arrival is evidence of our growth; clearly the word is out that there is couple and family therapy available at Penn. Ms. Jackson’s sensitivity to …
This is but one of a number of studies that confirms what Couple and Family Therapists know so well: that the quality of relationship impacts health over time in a variety of ways. …
An article by my friend and colleague Laurie Charles. We are board members of The American Family Therapy Academy; her work with families around the world informs and expands my thinking about health across the lifespan. Our psychiatry residents will also benefit from her experience as they move on to practice psychiatry in the US and around the world. …
Research findings from a team at Emory University Medical School provide evidence of “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” – that environment can affect an individual’s genetics and then be passed on. As a family therapist I have intuited this often in my consulting room. There are times when a young adult with severe sadness sits with me, and I can sense that the sorrow is somehow lager that she is; it is too big a sorrow for someone that age. When together …
