Psychology Tomorrow Blog

  • Dr. Joe Valks - Ancient Technology: Fact or Vivid Imagination? What is the truth behind the mysteries of our inheritance? What wondrous thoughts inspired the architects of the Great Pyramid of Cheops at El Giza, and what was the reason behind the bizarre carvings in the desert of Nazca? Are they the work of clever earthlings, perhaps a race more advanced than us who were ...
  • Alyssa Siegel, MS, LPC - You Are Beautiful: In Most Every Single Way My father is gay and a gay New York male to the core. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this subset of person, gay New York males tend to be just a little bit concerned (consumed) with body image and style. I have often marveled at the fact that it is nothing short ...
  • Tracy Shawn, MA - The Art of Anxiety When I was thirteen years old, I bought a wall hanging depicting neon-yellow lemons converging into a sea of lemonade. Emblazoned across the cloth was the now-clichéd phrase: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” At the time, I thought it was one of the most profound things I had ever heard. I would stare ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli, PhD - Horcruxes and the Return of Bad Objects It has been a while since I wrote about Harry Potter and the particular magic that J.K. Rowling’s stories hold for me, and well, it just would not be my blog if I did not post about her alchemy from time to time. So Potter heads unite, here we go. Today’s post is about Horcruxes and the fact that ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW – Decoding Sexual Chemistry Who Turns You On Is All In Your Head. We’ve all had the experience of seeing someone on the street and feeling an ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - What Gets Other People Sexually Excited? What Gets Other People Off? Step 3: Identifying Fantasies and True Desires In the previous column I asked a series of questions to help you identify the thoughts, images and ...
  • Natalie Mills, MFT – Respecting the Value of Porn As a sex positive therapist, many clients seek my help for concerns they have about their sexuality, looking for guidance as they navigate sexual and or intimate relationships, and supportive treatment for symptoms related to sexual trauma they have experienced. They often have many questions about normalcy and fear of the unknown. Overall, I see ...
  • Rachael Uris, MA - Wandering Aimlessly: Practicing Mindfulness When we are in a new city, or mountain valley, or country, we find it easy to reside in the present moment. Every detail around us is new and exciting. Foreign street corners speak in dreamy song; morning dew along our backcountry trail radiates a celestial presence so new, we mistake ourselves for being under ...
  • Dr. Shannon Kolakowski - Emotional Wellness: Seven Daily Signs Have you ever wondered what it really means to be emotionally healthy? Have you ever wondered how your psychological well-being compares to others around you? When I meet new people in social settings, the conversational question of, “What do you do for a living?” often leads people to ask me the follow-up question, “So are you ...
  • Natalie Mills, MFT - Sluts, Sex, and Sabotage “What a slut - could she be any more desperate? She’s just trying to get attention. And look what she’s wearing!” Statements like this are definitely uttered by both men and women about women, but right now, I’m more concerned with focusing on women who talk about one another this way. Our larger community has come to ...
  • Alyssa Siegel, MS, LPC - Colorful You: Tattoos and Psychotherapy My clients are colorful. I don’t mean figuratively colorful, though I suppose they are that, too. I mean literally colorful. Their skin, by and large, is profoundly and profusely decorated with ink. Since drawing this subset of clients to my practice I have been thinking about the relevance of a person’s tattoos and whether or not ...
  • Kevin Keough, PsyD - On Crying: The Importance of Being Lachrymose Scientific research supports the accuracy of ancient folk wisdom that crying is good for our health. Although crying is a universal human experience that appears in every culture throughout history, we understand very little about this common yet mysterious phenomenon. Crying While Eating Traumatic events, prolonged stress, loneliness, loss, pain, and simple daily hassles often trigger crying. ...
  • Rachael Uris, MA - First Snow Though the clinic was warm and I had yet to be pried open by the speculum, I shivered and dripped softly with blood. They had told me it was normal, and offered me a blanket while I waited. The chalky pill - incompatible with pregnancy - had started my procedure. The being inside, if I ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - How Sex Heals: Embarking on the Journey of Intelligent Lust Scientists agree that frequent sex can improve heart health, build a more robust immune system, and increase the ability to ward off pain. Sex changes brain and body chemistry, boosting certain hormone ...
  • Tracy Shawn, MA - The Mermaid’s Call: A Short Story Michele watches from the beach, questioning what she is seeing. Something swims by with a gray tail and dorsal fin similar to the surrounding dolphins, yet the creature’s upper-half appears to be a human’s torso with breasts as iridescent as the inside of an abalone shell. Michele swallows, making out the cool green face of ...
  • Magdalena Bak-Maier, Phd - How Does “I Love You” Let Me Recount The Ways? Reflections on the many meanings of “I love you” and how they enhance or erode relationships For all its richness, the English language is actually a pauper when it comes to accurately capturing the sentiment of love. Being raised in America, my natural habit is to say “I love you” often. I say it to acknowledge ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - What Brings You To Orgasm? It’s really what you THINK Step 2: Identifying Fantasies and True Desires Sex is far from the base or primitive instinct that we have been led to believe. It is ...
  • Saddaf Sohail - Psychology Today: Another’s Psychology Tomorrow Still not very much appreciated in our part of the world (Pakistan), and suffering from myriad stigmas, it’s been a while since behavioural science along with psychology has noticeably helped mankind unveil the mysteries that human behaviour and the mind hold. Whenever I introduce myself as a behavioural scientist/consultant, 90% of the time I have to ...
  • Radka Salcmannova and Matthew Ortiz - “Poison Green”: Ecology as Ideology (Czech Center Gallery, NYC) Poison Green, the exhibit currently on display at Czech Center, attempts to describe the problem of ecosystems and social structures in cities around the world. What is ecology, and what is our approach to it? Poison Green shows ecology as an ideology made by the government in the 21st century. To be “green” in this day ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - On the Corner of Desire and Gratitude, Looking for Balance Street I went to church this last Sunday… ish. I can’t quite bring myself to say that I went to church because to me church has always has a negative connotation. I have, admittedly and historically, considered it to be a place where people who are politically conservative and generally narrow-minded go, congregating to pass judgment ...
  • Nancy Marks - Printmarks of Our Family’s Journey I adopted my daughter T. when she was six years old and I was thirty-eight. Her mother had been a client of mine at an AIDS service organization and, as her death approached, asked me if I would take T. when she died. Because of the instantaneous connection with T., becoming her mom is the closest evidence ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli, PhD - Psychic Survival and The Packaging of the Self We are, all of us, finely tuned complex beings. Every day in my clinical practice I am reminded of this fact. Individuals and their lives, and life solutions are never simple. Instead, each person carries within them a dense cast of internal characters and experiences which lend their voices and truths to lived experience, often ...
  • Terese Weinstein Katz, PhD - The Self-Compassion Diet: Gentleness, Not Self-Flagellation How we beat ourselves up for that brownie or pizza slice! Once we’ve lost control or overdone it, forget about self-care and serenity. But research keeps confirming some ancient wisdom when it comes to eating better. Gentleness, being kind to oneself, paves a better path to success than self-flagellation. One study asked dieters to go easy on themselves ...
  • Radka Salcmannova - “Artlantic”: Boardwalk Public Art Project Brings Attention to Art in Atlantic City Artlantic is a public art project commissioned by the Atlantic City Alliance and the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (ACA and CRDA). The ACA in conjunction with the CRDA built two parks for this public art project in an effort to foster social interaction through art. The landscape is designed by New York-based landscape design studio, ...
  • Adam Neal - Eternalizers: Sex, Drugs, and Junk The pioneering work of Ken Wilber, a foremost philosopher in the field of Consciousness, is rife with the theme of eternity. Arguably his most popular work, No Boundary, clarifies our understanding of our “selves” as respective illusions, and our ideas of time and space as products of our detachment from an overarching unity consciousness, or ...
  • Dr. Joe Valks - Could Leonardo da Vinci and Trees Hold the Secret to Free Energy and Time Travel? What is it about Mother Nature that has a calming effect on people? Why do they feel at peace and at one with the natural world? Could it have something to do with the geometrical patterns exhibited by trees and flowers of breathtaking beauty? Could it be nature’s magical sounds – the wind in the ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - Intelligent Lust: How Smarter Sex Can Change Your Life If you’re like most of us, the subject of sex makes you at least a little uneasy, if not completely uncomfortable. Sex is shrouded in so much ...
  • Natalie Mills, MFT - American Courtesans: Our Unsung Healers What comes to mind when you think of sex? Notice the different images, sensations, and emotions that might come up for you. What desires do you notice? This is an exercise that might be easier for some and more difficult for others. To understand why, we have to be curious about what sex is and ...
  • Ada Rios-Rivera, PhD - Relationship Mythology: Suspension of Belief “If we are only guided by other people’s thoughts what’s the point of having our own?” (Oscar Wilde) The other day I was answering a friend’s questions about relationship mythology. An alternative to therapy, Relationship Myth is a unique approach to couples work. This model uses each partner’s story of their first meeting as well as the one they both ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli, PhD - On Wounded Healers As someone who teaches, supervises and works with fellow colleagues, analytic candidates, psychology graduate students and members of other healing professions I have found that often, many of us entered a healing profession because of a personal wound. Or perhaps not because of it, but because such wounds alerted us early on to the need ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - When Too Much Sex Is Bad for You When is sex bad for you? Among mental health professionals, that question is hotly debated. Definitions of sexual pathology can range from sex that crosses legal lines to any form of sex involving humiliation or self-harm that leads to lowered self-esteem. And there’s just as much disagreement about what constitutes “compulsive” or “addictive” sex or even if such a phenomenon ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli, PhD - Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me: On NOT Helping and the Dance of Mutuality It may seem curious for a psychoanalyst to write a post about not helping but that is exactly what I am going to do here. Three weeks ago I wrote about how difficult it is to sit and wait from the patients’ point of view (Action, Thought and Change: What Do I Do?). This week ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - Forbidden Desire: The Cost of Living Without Sex Sexual denial never succeeds and sexual desire can never be buried. Why do some of us choose to live without sex? What is the emotional cost of sexual abstinence to parts of our lives? The secret life story of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a closeted gay man, told in the new Clint Eastwood bio-pic, tragically depicts how ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - My Directions: A Guide to Maintaining a Happy Partner At the tender age of 36, I seem to have found what feels like the right relationship for me. This process has been intentional at times, unintentional at others. Sometimes graceful and thoughtful and sometimes flailing, groping, bumping into things in the dark. It happened when I least expected it, as I hear these things ...
  • Jennifer L. Reimer - Girl X: Part One My sister was born after my mom had two stillbirths and six miscarriages. They were obsessed, and claimed to be doing this all for me, so that I could have a sibling. The first stillbirth, when I was almost three, was the worst, because she was in labor, full-term, and bled in the waiting room ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli, PhD - Action, Thought and Change: What Do I Do? Over many years of listening and working with patients, I have come to differentiate various degrees of thoughtfulness which, when considered and allowed to steep, move people toward action and change. In treatment, there are those moments when something clicks for the patient, when some piece of behavior syncs with history or memory or something implicitly known, ...
  • Lindsey Walker, LMFTA - Floating and Not Knowing This is a limiting space, a frozen one, one where your specialness has been whipped back by other forces - once outside of you, now they are within. Sometime, somewhere, something was scary. It frightened you and you moved. You went where no one could get to you. Often, not even you. Shocking events can take ...
  • Jennifer L. Reimer - I Am the Girl from the Moon (at least that’s what they say.) Cat Power. Meow. Phoenix the cat rushes to my side. 5:09 am. I think that qualified as a nightmare. Or is this the nightmare? The truth. The reality in which these beings actually act, watch, punish. This is the second time I’ve woken up. Last time, 2:03 am. NOOOOOOOOO. I usually “wake up” around ...
  • Nick Astraeus - Theology Tomorrow In August 2012, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey released “A Flight Through the Universe,” a simulated tour of intergalactic space, in realistic scale, composed from real galaxy location data. Each point of light in the video is a galaxy containing roughly 100 billion stars. The video captures almost 400,000 galaxies. The total number of galaxies in ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - A Breast-Psychology Self-Exam One evening, a couple of years ago, my partner at the time telephoned me to tell me that he was going to go out to a movie by himself and that he would not be home at the usual time we spoke. I was in for the evening with my son and was happy that ...
  • Dr. Joe Valks - A Divine Architect Theory of Evolution With the recent discovery of the “God Particle” there has been great interest in Stephen Hawking’s “Theory of Everything” which is the golden grail of theoretical physics, a theory that would explain and link together all known physical phenomena and could in principle predict the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out. Could ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - Achieving Failure: “The Patient Who Cured His Therapist” THE PATIENT WHO CURED HIS THERAPIST Starting with the premise that failures often are quite functional, we can see that an apparent impasse in any kind of relationship often can be found to be accomplishing some yet undefined, undetermined ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - Achieving Failure: “Getting Crazy” GETTING CRAZY Buffalo, New York, Winter 1986 Myrna Novik was described to me as an overweight, quite crazy thirty-four-year-old woman who had been un­der regular treatment for more than half her life. At a com­bination seminar and consultation in her ...
  • Velleda C. Ceccoli, PhD - Being Virtual: Social Media and the Relational Self Is our culture of texting, tweeting, friending, Facebooking, Instagramming, Linked-iness and LOL speak threatening interpersonal connection and communication? You know, the old fashioned kind? Is our techno-connectivity eroding interactive experiences involving face to face contact and conversations, and changing the quality of our relationships with others? Is social media creating a new kind of intimacy? As ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - Exquisite Unions: Final AIDS I was teaching family therapy at the University of California at Berkeley and working with the AIDS Project at a medical hospice in San Francisco. My job, in collaboration with the visiting nurses, was to deal with the staff, the physicians, their ...
  • Adam Neal - Psi Co-therapy: Using Psi in the Therapeutic Process In an exquisitely written memoir, Tales from a Traveling Couch, psychotherapist Dr. Robert U. Akeret begins and ends with a basic thesis: Did my psychotherapy practice truly make a difference in my client’s lives? With an in-depth exploration of five of his most memorable clients, Akeret takes readers through the trials and tribulations of each person, ...
  • Psychology Tomorrow MeetUp NYC - Defining Moments: History Is Made at Night What are defining moments? In Issue Six of Psychology Tomorrow Magazine we introduced a new column on this subject, in which contributors recount critical experiences in life that changed them forever. In late May Psychology Tomorrow MeetUp met at Rare Gallery in Chelsea to explore this subject further. Headlining the evening was Psychology Tomorrow Artist-in-Residence Bill Hayward, ...
  • Alyssa K. Siegel, MS, LPC - Nature vs. Nurture Prepare yourself, for I am about to talk about something heavy. If you’re in the market today for a light and funny post, this isn’t it. Gender role reversal. Yep. That’s it. The big daddy. The big mommy. This topic has been floating around in my head for a while now. And I’m putting it out there ...
  • Steve Turtell - Boys before Playboy: Poodles and Porn on Commerce Street (1975) Ma, a.k.a. Sydney Chandler Faulkner, had two older friends, Mack and Nelson, a long-term couple who’d met in the army during WWII and had been together ever since. They raised poodles and published The Poodle Review, a monthly magazine for other breeders. When they had company, they kept the dogs out of sight in the basement ...
  • Stanley Siegel, LCSW - The Patient Who Cured His Therapist: Introduction Despite the early hour the thermometer outside registered scant digits below triple figures. Steamy summer moisture clouded the city air. A handsome man wearing a stylish Italian-cut suit – with shirt, tie, highly polished shoes – and ...