You have a way of handling things, and it held up for years.
This year it isn’t holding, and you can’t point to the week that changed.
You’ve already tried the obvious repairs, the ones everybody suggests.
Each one held for about a week.
The people who write to me about individual work run from their twenties to the edge of retirement, men and women in roughly even numbers.
The young ones are usually doing therapy for the first time, and they carry more anxiety than anybody else on my schedule.
The older ones have run the retirement numbers and don’t like the answer. The sentence that comes with it is “I don’t want to be a greeter at Walmart.”
Anxiety and depression feel about the same from the inside whichever of those people you are.
You’ve been out on the water since sunrise with the bait that always worked, and the cooler is empty.
By afternoon you’ve reached a private verdict on your skill as a fisherman.
The fish quit taking that particular bait. That’s all that happened out there.
Therapy is the tackle box. I open it, you pick something else out of it, and you go back out on the water.
I had an art professor who gave a C to an answer explained one way.
The A went to the answer explained three different ways, and I’ve run my sessions on that rule ever since.
We stop at the point where you tell me nobody ever explained it to you that way before.
Email sgutkn@gmail.com. Tell Me What Quit Working.
Motivation is the part people expect me to supply with a speech.
I find it by listening.
When you feel heard, and the plan is one you helped build, the practicing happens on the days between appointments.
Motivated people practice. That’s the entire reason I bother listening this closely.
Plenty of the people who write to me have had therapy somewhere else already, and it didn’t take.
Others liked theirs fine, and it was six years ago.
A few arrive raw and finally willing to cry about it, which is its own kind of ready.
Put the last attempt in your first email, including the part that annoyed you. It saves us a month of finding that out the slow way.
Write to me at sgutkn@gmail.com. Say it however you’d say it out loud.
If you’d rather ask questions before you commit to anything, say that instead. That’s what the free conversation is for.
Then we find out what you’ve been fishing with, and what else there is to try.
You've been using it on people who decided what you meant before you finished. Use it on somebody whose whole job is hearing the end of your sentence.
Send me an email. Tell me what's going on, in whatever words you've got. Ask how I can help you.
If you'd rather talk first, say so. The consultation is free, by video or phone.