By Dr. Barbie Hessel (Spoiler note: this post discusses details from You Can See Everything*.) Thirty-four days before Elizabeth Holmes began serving her prison sentence for fraud at Theranos, she and her partner, Billy Evans, invited filmmakers Nathan Fielder and...
On feelings, the stories we tell ourselves, and learning to tell the difference I’ve noticed how quickly we can turn a feeling into a conclusion about our lives. We have a difficult conversation with our partner and begin wondering whether something is fundamentally...
I’ve sat with adult children whose bodies tighten before they see a parent. They describe being criticized or having parts of themselves dismissed. Some say distance is the first relief they’ve felt in years. I’ve also sat with parents who say the cutoff came...
A lot of people walk into my office already bracing for the shovel. They’ve decided therapy means digging up their childhood, and they want to get it over with. Sometimes we do dig, just usually not right away. I’ve started explaining it as archaeology and...
When one of my clients first came to therapy, she believed there were certain triggers she would never get past. Her anxiety sometimes made her vomit. She had flashbacks and carried a tremendous amount of shame, both about what had happened to her and about the way...
