The best feeling in the world is knowing your presence and absence both mean something to someone.

One of the most common questions I get asked at in my practice is a concerns people have when considering the cost of therapy is, "How many sessions will it take?" Frankly, there is no way of telling.  Depending on what you want out of therapy, the length of treatment can be as brief as 10-12 sessions to see real results, or continue for months and even years.  Many people find therapy so useful that they continue for longer than they had planned.  Often, people come in with one specific issue that needs to be addressed, but in the process of therapy discover that there is much more to talk about.  The mind is powerful and extremely complex, and no one can predict how quickly or slowly an individual will respond to therapy.  However, this is not to say that treatment with me is open-ended.  In my private practice, I like to set real world goals that will help us evaluate if the therapy is working and when to end treatment.

Life is an adventure, not a fairytale... and to get there you have to be realistic, honest, open, towards eliminating all absolute meaning in things.  

I recently posted on my main website this post

• Of the estimated 17.5 million Americans who are affected by some form of depression, 9.2 million have major or clinical depression
  
• Two-thirds of people suffering from depression do not seek necessary treatment
  
• 80% of all people with clinical depression who have received treatment significantly improve their lives
• The economic cost of depression is estimated at $30.4 billion a year but the cost in human suffering cannot be estimated
• Women experience depression about twice as often as men
• By the year 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that depression will be the number two cause of "lost years of healthy life" worldwide
• According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suicide was the ninth leading cause of death in the United States in 1996
• Major Depression is 1.5-3.0 times more common among first-degree biological relatives of those with the disorder than among the general population

Source: Washington University School of Medicine 

This is undeniably true. 

Seven Rules for the Unruly: 

1. The path is not straight
2. Mistakes need not be fatal
3. People are more important than achievements or possessions
4. Be gentle with your parents 
5. Never stop doing what you care about most 
6. Learn to use a semicolon
7. You will find love

-Marion Winik 

For anyone who has ever lost a special someone.

Do not stand at my grave and weep 
I am not there. I do not sleep. 
I am a thousand winds that blow. 
I am the diamond glints on snow. 
I am the sunlight on ripened grain. 
I am the gentle autumn rain. 
When you awaken in the morning's hush 
I am the swift uplifting rush 
Of quiet birds in circled flight. 
I am the soft stars that shine at night. 
Do not stand at my grave and cry; 
I am not there. I did not die. 

~Mary Elizabeth Frye 

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. If you do what you always did, you'll get what you always got. We can only be comfortable for so long until we need change. 

Being a life coach, I recently came to the funny irony that makes very little sense to me, but is all so true. Our world is consumed to with so much clutter that we often neglect the people that adore us most. Rather, with the very little time we have left, we spend all of our energy getting consumed on people who ignore us. We fall in love with people who hurt us, and in turn, we unintentionally hurt the ones that can truly love us most. These are indeed interesting times, and all of the sudden, the irony isn’t all that funny anymore.