Inside Hookup Culture
Are We Having Fun Yet?
January/February 2016
On college campuses across the country, hooking up has all but replaced traditional, old-school dating rituals. With its rawness and frantic incoherence, we’ll be seeing the emotional legacy of this way of learning about love and commitment for many years to come.
Magazine Article
Point of View
Losing Our War on Stress: It’s time to reconsider our approach
January/February 2016
Psychologist Kelly McGonigal believes that stress isn’t the public health menace it’s usually made out to be—our compulsion to avoid it is often the bigger problem.
Magazine Article
The Case for Porn
January/February 2016
Porn is polarizing. Porn is confusing. Porn can be alarming. For therapists, porn can push us out of our comfort zone and trigger negative countertransference. But one thing is for sure: porn is everywhere, and it’s here to stay. But this doesn’t mean that we’re being overwhelmed by an epidemic of “porn addiction,” as some people suggest. Porn can play a big role in achieving “rec-relational” lovemaking, and it doesn’t have to take away from a secure attachment.
Magazine Article
The Dance of Sex
January/February 2016
If you’re going to help a couple get closer and really learn to work harmoniously with one another, whether in bed or anywhere else, the key is helping partners experience bonding moments that open them to becoming emotionally accessible to each other. If you can do that, their bodies will follow, and sex will almost always improve.
Magazine Article
The Mystery of Eroticism
January/February 2016
It’s long been the conventional wisdom among couples therapists that if couples fix the emotional issues in their relationship, their sexual lives will improve. However, good intimacy doesn’t guarantee good sex. Couples today are confronting a new frontier in the basic understanding of what marriage is all about. Since most of us grew up in sexual silence, therapists need to ask more probing questions when it comes to doing good couples therapy.
Magazine Article
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The Sex-Starved Marriage
January/February 2016
A sex-starved marriage isn’t about the number of times per week or per month people are actually having sex. It’s one in which one spouse is longing for more touch, more physical closeness, more sex, and—here’s the rub—the other spouse is thinking, “What’s the big deal? It’s just sex.” But it’s a huge deal because it’s really about feeling wanted, loved, and connected. It places the marriage at risk of infidelity and divorce.
Magazine Article
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The Unspeakable Language of Sex
Why Are We Still so Tongue-Tied?
January/February 2016
If you’re like most couples therapists, you know how to help partners communicate more clearly, handle conflict with less uproar, and connect more emphatically. But 50 years after the so-called sexual revolution, many therapists are still unsure about how and when to talk about sexual issues. In our obsession with pop sexuality, we’ve vastly overestimated the power of sexual acts while vastly underestimating the feelings associated with them.
Magazine Article
Transforming Sexual Narratives
From Dysfunction to Discovery
January/February 2016
Therapists too often ignore the importance of the longstanding, often unconscious stories that partners carry with them into their sexual relationship. Helping them share these stories with each other can open the pathway to erotic discovery.
Magazine Article
In Search of the Big Story
Learning to Ask the Beautiful Question
January/February 2016
This March, poet, storyteller, and philosopher David Whyte—this year’s Symposium keynoter—returns to Washington DC to share his wisdom. Whyte specializes in helping people make sense of their life’s journey in a way that ordinary psychology can’t. In his latest book, he uses redefinitions of some familiar words to jog us awake and say, “Open your eyes! Watch! Listen! Smell! Pay attention!”
Magazine Article
November/December 2015
America's Conversation about Race
What Do Therapists Have to Say?
Magazine Issue
Black Unlike Me
Some Uncomfortable Reflections on Growing Up White
November/December 2015
At a time when many are calling for a renewed national conversation about race, an aging, liberal, white New Yorker—who admits he’s never been a party to any such conversation, not with a black person anyway—shares some highly uncomfortable, extremely personal reflections.
Magazine Article
Bookmarks
Who Do You Trust?: Revisiting the McMartin Preschool Case
November/December 2015
Review of We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s and The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children
Sometimes it can be easier to argue about witch-hunts than risk confronting the dark, unsavory reality of child abuse.
Magazine Article
Case Study
A Cure for the Yips: Brainspotting and Performance Blocks
November/December 2015
Traumatic experiences are often the root of athletic and other kinds of performance blocks.
Magazine Article
Clinician's Digest
Has CBT Lost Its Mojo?
November/December 2015
Questions have been raised about whether the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy, the field’s most researched treatment model, has been overstated.
Magazine Article
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Community Mental Health Today
Encompassing the Big & the Small
November/December 2015
The promise of the community mental health movement of the 1960s, providing high-quality psychological and social services to poor families, remains unfullled. But today, two professionals bring together both a grasp of broader social issues and a store of practical clinical wisdom to offer complementary perspectives on how to best help poor communities.
Magazine Article
Editor's Note
November/December 2015
This issue of the Networker is an attempt to explore what we can contribute as a profession to the “conversation about race,” which, as lame and ungainly as the phrase often sounds, keeps heating up around us, even as most of us have done our best to ignore it. The intent is not somehow to analyze racism as yet another clinical problem that we can solve through our good intentions, insight, and therapeutic ingenuity, but to recognize the hard and uncomfortable truth of how racist oppression, explicit or implicit, doesn’t just harm “them.” Ultimately, it harms us all.
Magazine Article
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Family Matters
Saturdays Lost: Revisiting a Bittersweet Ritual
November/December 2015
A son remembers a distant father and the bittersweet ritual that bonded them.
Magazine Article
In Consultation
Breaking the Chain of Resentment: How to Help Clients Move Past Old Wounds
November/December 2015
How do you strike a balance between validation and empowerment in helping those afflicted with chronic resentment?
Magazine Article
Lessons from the Love Lab
The Science of Couples Therapy
November/December 2015
The pioneers who birthed couples and family therapy never paused to scienti cally study the relationships they treated. Now, after systematically observing and doing therapy with thousands of couples, two of the field’s leading researchers summarize what they’ve learned about successful relationships and effective couples therapy.
Magazine Article
Point of View
Destigmatizing Autism: The Future of Neurodiversity
November/December 2015
Author Steve Silberman discusses what it means to view autistic people as individuals seeing the world in a different way, rather than just a checklist of deficits.
Magazine Article
The View From Black America
Listening to the Untold Stories
November/December 2015
Many poor, young, black people see themselves as trapped behind a wall-less prison with no exits. They know all too well that their daily experience—whether it’s going to underfunded schools, succumbing to drug use and abuse, or being the victims of police brutality and economic disparities—doesn’t matter unless it disrupts the lives of the white mainstream.
Magazine Article
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Bookmarks
America’s Opportunity Chasm: A Noted Scholar Documents Our Decline in Social Mobility
July/August 2015
Robert Putnam documents the myriad psychological, health, and political consequences of the ever-growing disparities between rich and poor in America today.
Magazine Article
Reflections on the Divorce Revolution
Assessing Our Impact
July/August 2015
When it comes to helping couples considering divorce, therapists have a hundred ways to ask “What’s right for you?” but often find themselves tongue-tied when it comes to asking “What’s right for the others in your life?” Is it possible to talk about interpersonal responsibility without shaming clients and driving them away?
Magazine Article
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Bookmarks
Life after Trauma: What are the possibilities for post-traumatic growth?
September/October 2015
Review of Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth
The new emphasis on the transformative power of trauma can be a template for false assumptions about the “gift” of suffering and the meaning of recovery.
Magazine Article
