The light in the church steeple switched itself off a midnight, so I generally hung around at least until then. When the small stone structure was built, Mozart was still alive, although my sister would have taken little comfort in this. “Mozart? His first name was what? Who played in his band?” But she died […]
JD Vance’s 2016 bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, has been made into a movie. Vance tells his own story, how he survived poverty, with a family history of dysfunction and addiction, and then graduated from Yale Law School. Both the book and the movie have been roundly criticized for their portrayal of generational poverty. Vance’s family […]
Psychotherapy has traditionally been solidly secular, and along the way garnered a reputation for actually being dismissive and scornful of religious belief. Sigmund Freud considered religion to be an illusion, akin to Marx’s opinion of religion as an opiate. Interestingly enough, Freud’s followers are still frequently called his “disciples” as often as they are called […]
“Lighten up.” “Dude, chill!” “Can’t you take a joke?” These are the sort of things we can hear when someone has used irony to hurt our feelings and then claimed they were “only joking”. The jab could have actually seemed rather funny at first, and we might have even laughed. But just like when we’re […]
Boy sopranos sing like angels. There is a unique and lovely quality to a little boy’s voice, one that can take on even more richness for a short time after puberty. The Vienna Boys Choir has been enchanting audiences for hundreds of years, as have, more recently, groups such as the Harlem and the Newark […]
It’s not uncommon to hear someone say that they are “moving on with their life”, or to have someone advise us that we should move on with our lives. It is worth considering in what context the idea of moving on is generally used. First of all, we are not generally told we should move […]
We are a nation that is crazy for sports. We elevate sports to occupy a very important place in our nation’s zeitgeist. We are also convinced that sports are extremely important for children, and communities and families invest much time and money into children’s sporting organizations. It is said that sports promote both healthy competition […]
A legacy burden is a belief or an emotion bequeathed to us by our family, ethnicity, or culture. The U.S. is rife with legacy burdens: racism, sexism, materialism, homophobia, individualism. White Supremacy is a legacy burden. It is a (fallacious) belief system that Black people are inherently inferior to White people, and has been used […]
Most parents would like to delay their child’s first sexual experience. Research indicates that the only way to really do that is prevention. Prevention means talking to our kids about physicality when they are very young, and talking about sexuality when they are about to begin middle school. Parents can hesitate doing this for many […]
“We hooked up last night.” This is a statement bound to provoke not only anxiety but confusion in the mind of parents of teens and young adults. Most parents remember a time when sexual experimentation was more explicit. There were “bases” and making out was very different from doing it. Now, hooking up can mean […]