Jeff Levy, LCSW
Mental Health, Relationships, Trauma, Identity
1/12/2019 0 Comments This Is For YouJeff Levy, LCSW (originally posted on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, December 2014) Black Friday and Cyber Monday usher in the season of gift giving for many of us. A number of my clients have started sessions by telling me they are already done buying gifts this year. Others have shared how stressful it is to think about buying gifts for family members and friends. Some begin to talk about past holidays, past gifts, and loved ones who are no longer with us. And then, there are those people who walk into my office with a wrapped gift. “This is for you!” they say as they hand me a package. Gift giving and receiving aren’t reserved only for the holiday season. But the holidays are a time when gifts—either giving or receiving—have greater likelihood of manifesting in all our relationships, and our relationships in psychotherapy are no different. Yet, giving and receiving gifts in our therapeutic relationships has engendered much discussion and analysis.
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1/12/2019 0 Comments Unhappy Anniversary?Jeff Levy, LCSW (originally posted on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, October 2014) While meeting with one of my clients this week, we came upon the realization that her husband had died three years ago almost to the day. This wasn’t how we began our conversation. When we settled into our respective chairs, she started the session by sharing a general sense of sadness and she wasn’t sure where it was coming from.
That’s not the first time I’ve had an experience like that. There have been other times over the years when someone will share feelings of sadness or grief and there is not anything in particular to which they can be attached. For some of us, these feelings might be part of a larger history of depression. At other times, however, we may have a dim or unconscious awareness that our distress is attached to something, but we can’t identify the exact source. 1/12/2019 0 Comments Rescue Me!Jeff Levy, LCSW (originally posted on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, September 2014) I received a phone call earlier this week from Ray, a long time client. He rarely calls between sessions so when I listened to his voicemail asking me to call him back, I knew there was something important happening in his life. When we eventually spoke, it was through tears he told me his dog had been very ill and, for the first time the prior evening, she had been unable to walk.
I’ve written about Ray before, a long time survivor of HIV and someone whose health has steadily declined during the 20 plus years he has been HIV positive. Now, he is mostly home-bound and his primary companion is his 7 year old terrier mix named Rosie. He describes her as quiet and loving, following Ray from room to room, sleeping on his bed each night. 1/11/2019 0 Comments Clashing ValuesJeff Levy, LCSW (originally published on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, September 2014) In the almost 40 years I have been in practice, I can’t count the number of times I have worked with someone who has a value system that is different than mine. A number of weeks ago I wrote about how our differences still offer opportunities to foster deeper connections. In that post, I talked about differences in aspects of our identities and experiences that may, in reality, create emotional and present moment experiences that are more similar than different. And while I still believe that to be 100% true, I began to think about the times I have worked with an individual or family whose visible and invisible identities may be similar, but whose values have fundamentally conflicted with mine.
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February 2019
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