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Has your relationship started to feel different, even if it’s hard to explain exactly what changed? Relationships can change so slowly that it’s hard to notice what’s happening until something between you just doesn’t feel the same anymore. Most couples don't end up in therapy because of one terrible fight. More often, they've been having some version of the same fights for years. Research has found that couples wait an average of six years after problems begin before seeking help. That's a lot of time for miscommunication to take it's toll. During this time, resentment builds up and people start avoiding certain topics because they already know how the conversation will go. Even though they may still love each other, be successful together, and have great moments, the walls start to go up, and the couple may notice a rising distance, increased conflict, reduced closeness, and feelings of isolation or of being unheard. When a relationship is stuck.Communication problems are one of the biggest reasons couples seek therapy, although "communication problems" can mean almost anything. A couple may avoid talking about things because it's easier than fighting. They may be keeping score without even realizing it. They may be feeling lonely, longing for more intimacy, or be feeling insecure, angry, or defensive. The subjects might be money, sex, parenting, housework, in-laws, work, or how much time someone spends on their phone. Sometimes substance abuse or other addictions play a role. Sometimes something significant has happened, such as an affair, a job loss, illness, or loss of a family member. But there are also many couples who cannot point to one event that changed everything. Even more so, many couples may feel ashamed to be having difficulties, because on the outside everything looks great and there is no clear reason why things seem to be changing. In these cases, what brings people to therapy is simply that they miss what they used to have with each other. And that's a great reason to come. Relationships change as life changes.Relationships are entities onto themselves, and every phase brings something different. Moving in together, engagement, marriage, pregnancy, infertility, or new parenthood can put enormous stress on a couple. If they decide to commit, the relationship can start to take a backseat behind work, kids, schedules and responsibilities. Later on, life shifts again. Children grow up, careers change, and parents age. Menopause and other midlife changes affect everything from sleep to sex to how someone feels about themselves and what they want next. Parents who have been focusing on children for the past 20 years find themselves alone again with each other. Some transitions bring couples closer. Others expose things that have been sitting under the surface for a while. Sometimes the couple just realizes that they have lost touch and that their relationship could use some attention. Couples therapy can be helpful at any of these points. It's a place to reconnect, work through a change, or make sure the relationship doesn't get lost in everything else that's going on. Why Gottman therapy is different.Gottman therapy starts with a careful assessment of the whole relationship, not just the problem that brought the couple in. Each partner completes detailed questionnaires looking at friendship, intimacy, conflict, trust, commitment, shared goals and other parts of the relationship. The therapist gets a picture of what's working well, where the relationship is vulnerable, and where the couple keeps getting stuck. From there, couples learn to communicate in ways that help each of them feel heard and understood, manage conflict, support each other's goals, and build a sense of shared meaning. For couples who have talked about the same problems over and over without getting anywhere, Gottman therapy provides a roadmap to see what you already have, what's getting in their way, and where to begin. It usually makes sense to come sooner.There isn't a clear measuring point at which a relationship officially becomes troubled enough for couples therapy, and waiting for that point can mean there is simply more hurt to work through. A pattern that's been happening for six months is easier to deal with than one that's been happening for six years. So is talking about loneliness while both people are still trying to reach each other, rather than after years of pulling away. That being said, Gottman therapy can help even couples who have been growing apart for years, as long as both parties are invested and interested in reconnecting. For couples who have been together for years, Gottman Method therapy can help address what has accumulated along the way, including the most important old hurts that are still lingering. Some of those experiences can’t be repaired years later, but they can finally be heard and understood in a different way. The goal is to figure out what still needs attention, create understanding around what can’t be changed, and use that understanding to build a stronger relationship in the present. The level of connection that can be rebuilt by communication and understanding can be surprisingly strong. Of course, couples therapy doesn't guarantee that every relationship stays together, and that may not always be the goal. Sometimes therapy helps people repair a relationship. Sometimes it helps people understand each other more clearly and make difficult decisions with more compassion and less anger or confusion. If you and your partner keep getting pulled into the same arguments, have stopped talking about things that matter, or simply feel farther apart than either person wants to be, couples therapy can help you understand what's happening and help you to begin doing something different. If you are ready to make an appointment with one of our Gottman trained couples therapists, please call us at 1-800-871-5491 or email us at [email protected]. ReferencesGottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(2), 221–233. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.2.221
Gottman, J. M., Coan, J., Carrère, S., & Swanson, C. (1998). Predicting marital happiness and stability from newlywed interactions. Journal of Marriage and Family, 60(1), 5–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/353438 Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (2000). The timing of divorce: Predicting when a couple will divorce over a 14-year period. Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(3), 737–745. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2000.00737.x Brittle, Z. (2017). How to repair the little things so they don’t become big things. The Gottman Institute. https://www.gottman.com/blog/repair-little-things-dont-become-big-things/ The Gottman Institute. (n.d.). Marriage and couples research. https://www.gottman.com/blog/couples/ The Gottman Institute. (n.d.). The effectiveness of the Gottman Method. https://www.gottman.com/about/research/effectiveness-of-gottman-method/
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 The school year starts, and suddenly, your child doesn’t want to go. For many families, it seems to come out of nowhere. From Kindergartener’s crying at drop-off to teenagers having stomachaches, school attendance can be an unexpected struggle. In just a few short weeks, parents and kids can start to dread Sunday night and wonder about how they will get through the weekday mornings. Sometimes this may be just a normal part of adjusting to school. Many young children have a hard time separating at first, and kids of all ages have days when they would rather stay home. Young children are still learning how to separate from a parent, spend the day somewhere else, and be okay. Some struggle more than others. It’s not uncommon to see children having a hard time at drop off, and although some will continue to struggle throughout the day, it is also not uncommon for them to feel much better once they are in the building and have completed the separation from their parents. As kids get older, school gets more complicated. The work is harder. Friendships and social status feel more important. By middle and high school, there may be anxiety, depression, bullying, academic problems, social anxiety, or some combination of them. For teenagers, the problem doesn't disappear once they enter the building, and it's not uncommon for parents to receive a call halfway through the day with a request to come home. If your child settles in after a few weeks, that's reassuring. If mornings are getting harder, physical complaints are becoming more frequent, or the family is starting to plan its life around whether the child can make it through the school day, it's worth paying attention. Why does it happen?There are many reasons a child can get to this point. Anxiety is an obvious one, but sometimes school itself has become genuinely difficult. A child may be struggling academically, feeling intimidated by new school demands, dealing with bullying or friendship problems, feeling overwhelmed by noise and activity, or dreading one particular class. Kids with ADHD or learning differences can spend an enormous amount of energy keeping up with their peers, and many kids find school challenging, boring, or simply exhausting. As parents, we feel worried about our children and naturally may want to protect them from the stressors that they are experiencing. The difficulty is that each time the child stays home from school, the pattern becomes reinforced. Staying home keeps the child back somewhere safe and familiar. The hard class is gone. So is the cafeteria, the social pressure, the work they're behind on, or whatever else has been bothering them. Instead, they may spend the day doing something enjoyable, like interacting with parents, playing video games, or scrolling social media. They stay home, and they feel better. It’s an important pattern, because the relief a child feels when they avoid school can make it harder to go the next time. Although it can be frustrating, they aren't manipulating anyone. Their brain is doing exactly what brains do: remembering what made a bad feeling go away and seeking to repeat this pattern. Why does this seem so much more common now?There has actually been an increase in school avoidance since the COVID pandemic. Before 2020, about 15% of U.S. students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year. By 2022, that number was 28–29%. As of last year, the national rate was around 23%, which is still 53% above pre-pandemic levels. It appears that COVID changed children's relationship with school in ways that we are still figuring out. For a period of time during the pandemic, it was not mandatory to go to school. For adults, that was an interruption in the usual routine. For a child who was five or six at the time, it was part of learning about what school was, and what we learn at an early age sticks with us. The pandemic, however, doesn't explain everything we're seeing now. Childhood anxiety was already rising before COVID, and anxiety is closely connected with school avoidance. In addition, social norms have changed, and children growing up now have fewer opportunities for independent play and time away from adults than previous generations. Although the closer connection with parents is shown to have many positive impacts, it also may mean fewer everyday chances to practice being away from parents when not at school. For teens, academic pressures have grown exponentially. Getting into college is high pressure, and brings increasingly growing demands for teenage success. In addition, growing up with phones and social media have changed their world in ways that it is difficult for those who have grown up in earlier generations to imagine or understand. For today’s teens, social pressures never really go away, they are pretty much always multi-tasking and “on call” for their peers, FOMO is a living, breathing entity, and nighttime phone use is linked with later bedtimes, poorer sleep and daytime tiredness. Researchers call this family accommodation; when families change routines or expectations to reduce a child's anxiety.Another generational difference is that parents today know far more about children's mental health than previous generations did, and that's a good thing. Taking your child’s feelings seriously and trying to protect and help them is parenting at its best. The strange contradiction here is that this very understandable instinct to understand and protect our children can sometimes unintentionally make avoidance easier. Researchers call this family accommodation; when families change routines or expectations to reduce a child's anxiety. Doing this initially when a child is having a hard time can be a supportive and positive response. When it becomes a pattern, however, it can unintentionally lead a child to feel less confident in their ability to cope. This isn't to suggest that we should start to feel less empathy, or that children should simply be told to “deal with it.” Watching your child panic is horrible, and anxiety is a real thing that can cause very real physical symptoms, including a racing heart, stomachaches, nausea, headaches, dizziness, sweating, muscle tension, shakiness, and shortness of breath. Instead, it’s about finding the difficult middle ground between taking a child's distress seriously and still helping them discover that they can do hard things. There can be a fine line between taking a child's distress seriously and feeling that the distress has to be removed. Children benefit from chances to find out that they can feel anxious and still get through something. Why staying home can make going back harderAttendance often needs to lead, not follow, anxiety reduction. A recurring pattern across outcome studies is that treatment focused on rebuilding attendance succeeds even when anxiety symptoms take longer to resolve. What this means is that resolving anxiety in the short term by allowing a child to stay home from school may actually make the anxiety worse in the long run, whereas increasing anxiety by helping a child go to school will actually make things better. If this seems backwards to you, think about it this way: Imagine that a child is extremely anxious about school, so it seems reasonable to give them some time at home until they're feeling better. The child stays home and feels better, mostly because they have found a way to avoid everything that is making them feel stressed. The next morning, school feels frightening again, and now the child knows that staying home is the fastest and easiest way to make those feelings stop. Each time the child stays home, the problems continue to grow. After a few absences, they’ve missed schoolwork. They're worried about walking back into class. They don't know what their friends will say. A child who originally stayed home because of one problem may now have developed several reasons to be afraid of going back. This is why returning to school is often part of treating the anxiety rather than something that happens after the anxiety is gone.The return back to school doesn't have to look the same for every child. Some can go back for a full day. Others may start with a class or two, meet someone at the door, or have temporary support during the parts of the day that are hardest. The important part is that the child begins to experience going to school while anxious and finding out that they can do it. Although they may feel very anxious initially, each day that they successfully go to school reduces anxiety and builds self-confidence. The exception to this is if a child is truly in an unsafe environment in the school, such as a situation centered around bullying. Understanding the triggers to the anxiety is as important as understanding the patterns reinforcing it. This will allow for an appropriate plan for resolution. This is hard on parents too.None of this is easy to do at 7:15 in the morning when a child is crying, saying they're going to throw up, siblings are stressed because they need to get to school, and a parent needs to get to work. Families make decisions in those moments because they have to. That's why school avoidance usually can't be addressed in the moment it is happening. Families need to develop a plan. Parents may need help figuring out what to do at home, and the school needs to be involved. It helps enormously when everyone is communicating and knows the plan before the morning falls apart. Don't let it quietly become the new normal.School avoidance tends to become harder to undo the longer it goes on. Of course getting a child back into school matters. But there's something larger at stake here. Children need to learn that anxiety can be uncomfortable without being in charge. They can be scared and still accomplish the task, gaining confidence in themselves along the way. We sometimes wait for children to become confident enough to do something difficult. In reality, confidence often comes from doing the difficult thing and discovering that they could.Therapy for school avoidance can have a significant impact on reducing anxiety and helping children return to school. At Wavelengths, we combine individual CBT and family counseling with school-based coordination and structured psychoeducation. Your therapist partners with you to explore the reasons for school avoidance, addresses triggers for anxiety, helps your child build resilience and coping skills, and works with you and the school to develop a plan. If you are noticing a pattern of reluctance, physical complaints without a medical cause, or distress around school that's intensifying rather than easing, our therapists can help you understand what's driving it and help you build a coordinated plan. Call us today at 1-800-871-5491 or email us at [email protected] to get started. ReferencesTreatment for School Refusal Among Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280927921_Treatment_for_School_Refusal_Among_Children_and_Adolescents_A_Systematic_Review_and_Meta-Analysis Outcome of a Multi-modal CBT-based Treatment Program for Chronic School Refusal https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2333794X211002952 Outcome of a Multi-modal CBT-based Treatment Program for Chronic School Refusal (PMC full text) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8013532/  by Marisa Columbi, MHC Intern If you find yourself asking this question, the answer more frequently than not is YES! The truth is everyone can benefit from therapy, but when is it time to seek professional help? Everyone experiences some kind of emotional distress or difficulty dealing with tough situations at some point in their life, and I can guarantee it won’t happen just once. Life throws obstacles at you at any age, whether it be work stress, problems with your relationships, loss, financial issues and so much more. In some cases, you can work through these difficulties without outside help, and at other times you may need a little support.
If you are experiencing one or more of the following criteria, you may want to consider reaching out to a therapist: by Jessica Satkunasingham, LMSW  In today's digital age, technology has significantly impacted the way students learn and interact with the world. One of the latest advancements in artificial intelligence is ChatGPT, a powerful language model that can generate human-like text responses. While ChatGPT has many potential benefits, such as assisting with homework and answering questions, it also poses dangers that can hinder high school students' success. In this blog, we will explore these dangers and discuss how students, parents, and educators can mitigate the negative impacts.
by Kayleigh Monahan, LMSW  Summertime is always a time we look forward to, especially as New Yorkers. Gone are the gray days of winter and the cold and we welcome in the bright sun and warmth. The summer months are a great time to utilize the outdoors to help increase your coping skills and overall mental health.
The National Council for Mental Well-being lists a few ideas on their website, I’ve pulled a few of my favorites to help you start with some ideas! 1) Relax outside for a change While the appeal of the Air Conditioning and a comfortable seat inside can be great over the summer. As the sun begins to go down and the temperature outside cools you can take your book outside for a bit. The fresh air and change of scenery often help us to avoid getting stuck in a depressive mindset. by Jayoti Chabra, LMSW  Procrastination is the action of delaying or postponing something.
This issue can be linked to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and poor study habits. Procrastination is connected to negative functioning and risks to mental health. People who procrastinate tend to have high levels of anxiety as well as poor impulse control. Procrastination is even linked to physical illness. Triggers for procrastinators:
by Melissa Marconi, LMSW  Why do I keep hearing about “identifying core values”? You might have noticed a rise in discussion around “identifying values” in social media/self-help platforms lately. Several treatment modalities such as CBT and ACT emphasized clarifying values to guide decision-making, set goals, and build on clients’ strengths. I have found when I incorporate values exploration into my practice, my clients become more self-aware and self-compassionate. They are often better able to identify practical goals and improve challenges connected to family, work, relationships, spirituality, and other life domains.
by Andrea Panebianco, MS  Every person has a distinct set of interests that makes them unique, including children, which is a wonderful thing to recognize as mentor, parent, or teacher. What makes this concept so compelling is that children’s interests can be used to help them learn in a variety of ways; a concept which informs an interest-based learning approach. Using interests can help instill growth and can facilitate the introduction of new concepts (Touhill, N.D.). Similarly, children’s interests can be a useful tool to boost social-emotional skills and communication.
by Melissa Laks, LMSW  Why should we identify our emotions
Identifying our emotions and learning to manage them is one of the most important skills we can have. Feelings are powerful and can become overwhelming at times. With time and practice, we get better at knowing what we are feeling and why. This skill is called emotional awareness. Emotional awareness helps us know what we need and want (or don't want). For us to deal with uncomfortable emotions, it is helpful to know exactly what we’re feeling in the first place. For example, feeling a general sad is going to be experienced differently than if you are feeling lonely. So, comforting sadness would look different then comforting loneliness. by Caroline Rudin, LMSW, MS.Ed., PMH-C  “Congratulations!” There are balloons and bouquets of flowers all over the hospital room. The room smells sweet and clean. Your makeup and hair are beautifully done up as you lie in bed with soft, cozy sheets and blankets, cradling your newborn in your arms. Your partner is sweetly standing over you, holding your hand, in amazement of your efforts and your child. Your family rushes into the room to gush over your baby and take turns holding and changing her for you so you can begin to rest.
“CUT!” Does this sound like a fairytale? A television commercial? Most times, it is. Let’s rewind, shall we? |
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Wavelengths Psychology
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As of January 1, 2022,all healthcare providers are required to provide estimates for the cost of care for all clients not utilizing health insurance. The Good Faith Estimate shows the cost of any items and services that are reasonably expected for your healthcare needs and treatment. This will be provided by the office upon scheduling and/or as requested. This Good Faith estimate does not include unexpected costs that could arise during treatment. Learn more here.
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