This week I reached a milestone: one full year in private psychotherapy practice, and my tenth year as a psychotherapist. I doubt this is all that exciting to anyone other than me, but hey, this is my blog, so I get to toot my horn a bit! It’s been a challenging and rewarding first year. Setting up a business on my own was scary, particularly in the first few days and weeks. But I love the freedom I have to work with clients exactly the way I want to–according to my best judgment, their specific needs, and their own goals–rather than following the rules and regulations of HMO’s or agencies. And I love the freedom to select and design my own office, develop my own website, set my own hours, offer clients a flexible schedule, and generally indulge my inner control freak!

As I look forward to year two, and since I’m already being a little immodest (!), I thought I’d do a “Best of Stephen” retrospective of blog posts over the past year, posts that people found helpful, insightful, or just a lot of fun. I also link to a couple of other therapists in town who I’m proud to call my colleagues. Enjoy, and happy autumn!

Lots of people were interested in my series of posts on the all-too-common phrase, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” Why do we hear that so often, and what does it mean? And how do we move past it? And what if they say this?

This is a great tool for couples. It was created by this great therapist. Check it out.

This therapist is expanding his private practice, and he’s great. (We used to work together at Group Health.) Congratulations, Tom!

I got attention (and a little grief!) for my posts on “empathy, sympathy, and compassion.” I think what’s most useful about separating out these three words and deciding what they mean is that we can then be more conscious about being empathic, sympathetic, and compassionate. And, we don’t always have to be all three. (And sometimes it’s best if we’re not.)

I had fun talking about Bill O’Hanlon’s four motivators–blessed, blissed, dissed, and pissed. He offers a great way to understand what really drives you, what really motivates you to make changes in your life.

Need a webmaster? Check out my post on a webmaster who’s in a class by herself.

Finally, a little fun–my favorite from the Unhealthy Pop Song Lyrics Series. If you’d like me to do a therapy critique on your favorite song, let me know!

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under About my practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.