Steps Family Therapy

  The first part discussed how what is healthy and what is not may not correspond to what our diagnostic manuals say. Someone may meet criteria, but may be healthier than someone who doesn’t, who projects their covert illness onto other people. This post is about how, even if someone is highly symptomatic, it may still be the healthiest state for them. Imagine a couple presenting with sexual difficulties. The husband has erectile dysfunction, has low desire, difficulty feeling arousal, and low motivation to improve sex. His wife considers this to be pathological and pushes the husband to get help. As I gather more info, I learn that the husband feels highly criticized by his wife–most interactions are her asking him for something or telling him something she is dissatisfied about, particularly sex. He has noticed her interacting flirtatiously with some of the men at the country club. Whenever he tries to tell her about his painful emotions, she responds with criticism. He feels shu...

  What Is Actually Healthy? Recently, I’ve noticed how some people who have traditionally been defined as “healthy” have been making people around them “less healthy.” According to the current cultural standards of health, people are generally considered healthy if they don’t qualify for a diagnosis, meaning they aren’t reporting painful feelings and aren’t engaging in behaviors seen as pathological. And that’s all well and good. However, there are many things our diagnostic manuals don’t thoroughly account for, such as how people make OTHERS feel. When I am diagnosing, I typically am not sending assessments out to my clients’ friends and family to get their subjective experience of the client. When we take a look at that metric, we can find more subtle ways that some “healthy” people infect others with mental illness, like asymptomatic virus carriers. Except, there actually are some symptoms. Here is a generic family case I might see: -A teen boy having trouble in school, who spen...

  Why So Critical?   Do you have that person in your life who is always on your case? Telling you what you’re doing wrong? Telling you what is not good enough? What may be good enough, but could be better? Criticism can be tough to take. Unsolicited critiques, critiques of character, or critiques of sensitive areas are especially painful. So why do people feel the need to criticize? Most instances of criticism are not helpful, so why does it still happen? The following are a few explanations of why someone is criticizing you, and how criticisms can become more manageable: 1. This person is trying to help. This is often the case of criticism between an older family member and a younger one (Parent-child, sibling-sibling). Criticism is the non-vulnerable way to express love. They just point out flaws, rather than saying, “Hey, I care about you so much and value your success. Would you care to hear my thoughts on this?”. If this is the case, it should be pretty easy to co...