Now that we’ve learned the art of containment – expanding our hearts and minds to encompass our children’s emotional worlds – we can lay out strategies to handle the feelings that enter this sacred space. We need to develop a regulation toolbox, a set of tactics we can pull from when our kids feel broken […]
Helping Our Children Emotionally Regulate (Part One)
Emotional coaching did not appear on the list of jobs we thought we were signing up for when deciding to become parents. We were aware of the physically draining stuff – changing diapers, schlepping strollers, getting food on the table (cereal for dinner counts), and providing chauffeur services to a hundred activities in the span […]
Seeking Family Harmony
Early in my family therapy training, I realized that growing up in a family did not mean I understood one. As an intern, I quickly found myself knee-deep in family dynamics jargon – circular causality, differentiation, triangles – concepts designed to help me make sense of what I was looking at when watching families operate […]
Unfillable Holes – Finding Meaning After Premature Loss
There are holes in life, spaces where the fabric never reconnects. The cloth doesn’t regenerate in those spots – it gapes like an open wound that no bandage could ever cover. The chasm left where a loved one once stood can be so wide that at times it’s all we can see, until a jolt […]
Choosing the Children We Have (Part Two)
In our last article, we discussed the importance of choosing the kids we have so that they don’t grow up feeling like impediments to our happiness. We explained that having children is only one part of becoming a parent – deciding that we want these children is another matter entirely, one that requires an active choice on our part […]
Choosing the Children We Have (Part One)
I used to hate cliches. Now I love them. Sometimes there’s just no better way to neatly say what you’re trying to express than to catch a ride on the back of a well-worn aphorism. It’s as if an entire corpus of wisdom on a particular topic has been distilled into its essential components, bottled […]
Holding onto Hope (Channukah)
They say hope floats, which is important to know, because when we’re struggling to stay above water, sometimes hope is all there is to hold onto. Hope’s buoyancy makes it like love and faith – precious commodities in life that prevent us from sinking into the abyss when hardship threatens to pull us under. Hope […]
The Importance of Difficult Emotions
The flood of feelings starts with dread, that horrible experience of barely breathing while you wait with your heart in your throat because you know something terrible is coming. You just don’t know yet who it’s coming for. Maybe the names you’re about to hear on the radio won’t be someone from your community, so […]
We Are All Soldiers
I am in awe of our soldiers. Nowhere in the world is there a fighting force comprised of more remarkably determined, principled, courageous young men and women than in the Israeli Defense Force. Despite the anti-semitic rhetoric now being spewed all around the world, all fair-minded and honest observers (there still are some) routinely extoll […]
Strategies to help our kids cope with the war in Israel
Whether we live in Israel, America, or anywhere in the world, our children know that Am Yisrael is going through an incredibly difficult period. They see us crying. They feel our pain, sadness, and worry. They hear us on the phone with family members, discussing the horror and tragedy. They know that we and our […]