Do You Matter?

Five questions that highlight the quality of your connections

The Most Important Parenting Question You've Never Been Asked

The well-meaning behavior that harms children

Why Trying to Feel Safe Never Works: Winnicott on the Fear of Breakdown

D.W. Winnicott's unsettling theory about the catastrophe you're still waiting for

The Invention of Self-Doubt

Why Our Doubts Say More About the World Than About Us

Your Brain Is a Liar. Here's How One Psychiatrist Proved It.

Teaching our minds manners and etiquette.

The Overlooked Observation That Keeps Us Coming Back

Bluma Zeigarnik’s framework for designing focus and closure.

The Social Experiment That Changed How We Understand Ourselves

Solomon Asch and the unbearable pull of agreement.

On Becoming a Person

Carl Rogers on the painful gap between our true selves and performed selves

Notes & Thoughts: The New York Times 1st Well Festival

The Hidden Language of Healing: 10 Things Every Great Therapist Knows

A primer on what's left unsaid

The Necessary Unknown: The Voynich Manuscript, Winnicott's Third Space, and Why We Need What We Cannot Understand

The cognitive pull of the unsolvable

The Beautiful Trap: How Limerence Warps Perception and Fuels Obsession

The intrusive and inescapable high that isn't love, at all.

The Survival Paradox: How Sexual Violence Hijacks Our Most Ancient Protection System and Why Victims Comfort Their Abusers.

On Fawning, in Response to the New York Article about Neil Gaiman

Albert Bandura on Self-Efficacy: The Science of Confidence and the Belief in One’s Potential

Why Confidence is a Practice, Not a Trait

The Science of Connection: What Four Decades of Attachment Research Reveals About Our Deepest Human Bonds

Understanding the Invisible Architecture of Human Attachment

Art as Liberation: How a Viennese Psychiatric Institute Became a Sanctuary for Creativity

How The House of Artists at Gugging Became a Model for Psychiatric Reform

The Psychology of Catastrophizing: The Hidden Logic of Self-Torment.

The Second Arrow of Awfulizing

All in Your Head: Franz Gall, the Fowler Brothers, and the Science That Wasn’t

Phrenology, Franz Gall & The Fowler Brothers

The Loneliness Cure: Dr. Ruth’s Practical Wisdom for Connection

The Secret of Connection from New York’s Loneliness Ambassador

How a Therapist’s Intuition Led to a Revolutionary Trauma Treatment

The Story of Brainspotting: David Grand’s Unexpected Discovery

Philippe Petit, Fears of Children and Freud's Home Movies

Dispatches From the Past

One Year Without Therapy

How it's going

7 Misbeliefs About What it Means to Be An Adult

Freeing Yourself from the Myths of Being a Grown Up.

The Slow-Moving Magic of Psychodynamic Therapy

Quick fixes often create more problems.

Anxiety Expert Dr. Chansky's Rules for Ruminators

How to control your thoughts by choosing what to think about