A key ingredient of a happy life is how we handle fear. Fear is inevitable; it’s a part of life. So, what are we going to do with our fear? Most of us are neither encouraged to identify our fears nor are we encouraged to ask…
You might think with so much ugliness, cruelty and fear in the world, that optimism would be foolish or naïve. Nope. The ugliness has always been there; but, now, it’s there for us to see it. These days, the ugliness is coming out of the…
Plenty of people have focused on bringing “sexy” back. But, perhaps it’s time to dig a little deeper. What about romance? You know, that desire to be wined, dined, paid attention to, courted, wooed (I like that old-fashioned word). I hear from a lot of…
One of my clients, a divorced businessman, has a 16-year-old son “Evan”. Evan just told his dad that he’s gay. He said it very confidently. To Evan, there appears to be no doubt about this. But his dad wonders. The plot thickens… It seems that Evan…
Dear Michael: I am a happily-married woman with a young child, a great job and loving friends. There’s only one problem, I think I’m bisexual, and I don’t know what to do about it. What do I do with my feelings for other women? I…
We all have this idea of the “perfect” partner, and many of us feel disappointed and even annoyed when we don’t get him or her. A while back, I offered a workshop on this topic (“Finding Your Perfect Partner”). In this column, I’ve taken the…
Over the years, many people have asked me a lot of questions about couples counseling. For this column, I’ve boiled those questions down to three, which I call the ABCs of couples counseling: A: What can it do for my partner and I (the possibilities)? B:…
As a young gay boy in small-town Ohio, I read “The Well of Loneliness”, one of the few LGBT books I could get my hands on in our miniscule (and conservative) town library. The novel – written in 1928 by British author Radcliffe Hall…
I love working with couples: they come to me, wanting to improve their communications, work out problems between them and deepen their love. In couples’ therapy, one of the most helpful things I do is to help a couple examine their definition of love. Specifically,…
As an openly-gay mental health professional, I have long assumed that most LGBT folks are out to their health providers. Wrong! Recently, I was asked to present a talk to an LGBT group on the pros and cons of coming out to your doctor. I…
