Cultivating Emotional Mindfulness: What, Why, and How…

The ability to mindfully experience, regulate, and respond to one’s feelings is essential to mental health and well-being.  Yet problems managing emotion abound and play a central role in most psychiatric disorders.  Regardless of diagnosis, many people seeking treatment have some degree of difficulty being present with and making good use of their emotional experience. […]

Doing versus Being

Anyone who has ever studied a foreign language, knows that with new vocabulary comes new ways of seeing and understanding the world. As an example, if you ask a German to describe a suspension bridge, he is likely to say it is a thing of beauty. However, if you ask a Spaniard to describe a […]

Treating the Child Under the Behavior: Affect & Relationship in Children with Autism

Most treatment models for mental health problems in children with Developmental Disabilities (DDs) including Autism or Intellectual Disability (e.g. Down syndrome) are based on manipulation of behaviors, with much less, or no emphasis on the child’s affective experiences or on use of interactions/relationships. Challenging behaviors in this population are so often regarded as just that, […]

Transforming Anger and Hate

With 20 plus years of work with angry individuals, in a variety of settings such as prisons, domestic violence programs, school rooms, universities, and in private practice, I have found that the strategies which are most effective for transforming raging behaviors are rarely discovered without professional help. Unfortunately, mainstream therapy also misses the boat on […]