The therapy company I work for recently celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary and they asked me to do a 5-10 minute speech... yeah, I don’t know what they were thinking either.  At the beginning of the evening, a friend asked me if I was ready, and my response was “Well, I grew three canker … [Read more...]

In this third and final lesson in this series on over nurturing, we’re going to look at three more ways that people can over nurture, which is based on the following scale: No Nurturing (-10)---------Healthy Nurturing (0)---------Overly Nurturing (+10) Micromanaging: Whether you’re a boss, a … [Read more...]

Please Note: My next blog will be in two weeks (i.e. early September) because I’m taking a holiday.  The following is an excerpt from the introduction I’ve written for a future book based on the theme I’ve been writing about this past year – being nice in a healthy way. Who is the best … [Read more...]

Tip: This post can be helpful even if you’re not a parent since it can give ideas for what your parents could’ve done differently (or it can help you judge bad parents with more insight).   As a therapist, arguably the most important thing I can teach parents is to relax because no … [Read more...]

A few weeks ago we looked at a scale that considered how the stereotypical married man struggles with sloth while women typically struggle with vanity.  To take this concept a step further, women often end up in a battle between vanity and nurturing.  Whether we’re naturally drawn to … [Read more...]

One of the hardest things about being an overly nice person is you tend to get more hurt than the average person.  This can lead to extra people pleasing behaviors or avoiding people altogether.  It’s interesting; those who become reclusive are typically very nice people who have burnt … [Read more...]

The other week I experienced something that reminded me how overly nice people can spin a story to be more than it is in order to punish themselves or make it bigger than it needs to be.  On a recent Friday evening I did something that was morally questionable, you know, what you’d expect of … [Read more...]

Last week we looked at the following scale as a way to describe why there can be common conflicts between men and women since men typically lean to the sloth side and women typically lean more to the vanity.  Sloth (-10)---------Healthy Middle (0)---------Vanity (+10) The first thing I … [Read more...]