A Guide To The Articles On This Blog

Think of this as a place to begin. A Table of Contents, if you will. These articles explore many of the questions that come up in therapy and in ordinary life. They cover the broad categories on this blog such as anxiety and depression, relationships and attachment, ACT and family systems, emotional health, faith, and what it means to live a more meaningful life. Each summary offers a glimpse of what you’ll find in the article, so you can follow your curiosity and start wherever something speaks to you.

The articles are arranged from the most recent post back to the earliest.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Much Ado About Something (Or Nothing)

A Tragecomedy in Two Acts About OCD, Anxiety, and the Search for Certainty

Act I: The Fellow in the Waiting Room

When Jack meets Judy in a therapist's waiting room, they discover they share an unwanted companion: OCD, a remarkably persuasive fellow who demands certainty about nearly everything. Through humor, unexpected insights, and a few questionable metaphors, Jack introduces Judy to the peculiar ways compulsions, reassurance, and overthinking can make anxiety worse. Their conversation raises an uncomfortable question: What if the things we do to feel better are sometimes the very things keeping us stuck?

Act II: The Fellow Who Wouldn't Leave

Jack and Judy return for another conversation, this time about exposure therapy, perfectionism, relationships, and the exhausting business of trying to control uncertainty. As Judy begins challenging some of Jack's assumptions, they discover that recovery isn't necessarily about silencing the anxious mind. It's about learning to live well even when the mind refuses to cooperate. And perhaps the fellow who keeps interrupting their lives doesn't need to disappear. He just needs to stop being in charge.

You Are More Than the Worst Thing You Have Done

Taking Responsibility for the Past Without Being Forever Defined by It

A serious offense belongs to your story, but does it have to become the final definition of who you are? This essay explores the difficult territory between minimizing what we have done and allowing shame to turn our worst behavior into an identity. Real accountability requires facing the past without rewriting it, while recognizing that the present still contains choices. The past is settled. Identity is not.

Why Terrible Memories Are Hard To Forget

Trauma, Fear, and Why the Past Can Still Feel Present

Why can something that happened years ago still feel as though it is happening today?  Trauma has a peculiar way of confusing the past with the present, teaching our nervous  systems to recognize danger even when the danger has passed. Through the story of a small dog with a remarkable memory for frightening encounters, we explore how fear is learned,  why avoidance can make our lives smaller, and how traumatic experiences shape our sense of safety. We also consider the very real suffering associated with PTSD and how effective  therapy can help us recover a greater sense of choice. Healing doesn't require forgetting  what happened It means gradually discovering that the past, however painful, no longer has to govern the present.

Secrets Need Somewhere to Live

Privacy, Secrecy, and What Happens When Part of a Life Goes Underground

What is the difference between something that is private and something that has become a secret? This essay, introducing sexual (and other types) of secrets, explores how secrecy can create a protected room where troubling behavior, self-justification, and shame grow without having to encounter another person's perspective. Healthy people need privacy, but when secrecy begins protecting behavior from boundaries, the question changes from Who needs to know? to What is the secrecy protecting?

The Curious Case of a Brain That Won't Follow Instructions

Why intelligence, good intentions, and trying harder don't always translate into getting things done.

Why can someone remember the smallest details about a favorite hobby but forget an important appointment? ADHD involves more than difficulty paying attention. It affects motivation, memory, time perception, emotional regulation, and the ability to turn good intentions into action. With humor and everyday examples, this essay explores the curious contradictions of ADHD, including hyperfocus, boredom, masking, and the exhausting experience of trying harder when trying harder isn't enough.

Building a Fence Around a Very Interesting Brain

ADHD, Part Two: On motivation, structure, emotional fireworks, and why good treatment sometimes looks nothing like we expected.

What if managing ADHD isn't about trying harder but creating conditions in which better choices become possible? Beginning with a curious dog and a backyard fence, this essay explores the surprising relationship between structure and freedom. From dopamine and motivation to emotional intensity, relationships, and practical treatment strategies, it examines how CBT, ACT, and collaborative problem-solving can help people turn good intentions into meaningful action without losing the qualities that make them who they are.

I Don't Treat Sex Offenses. I Treat What Comes Before Them.

On human behavior, accountability, and the difficult work of preventing harm.

Why would a therapist who has spent decades treating sexual offending say, “I don't treat sex offenses”? Because by the time treatment begins, the offense has already happened. This essay looks upstream at the antecedents—the beliefs, relationships, sexual patterns, loneliness, secrecy, opportunities, and smaller decisions that can converge into harmful behavior. Understanding where an offense came from does not excuse it; it helps us discover what can still be changed.

The Strange Ways We Ask to Be Loved

This reflects on attachment styles, such as an anxious style and an avoidant style. Underneath a surprising amount of adult relationship behavior are remarkably simple questions: Are you there? Do I matter? Are we okay? The trouble is that partners rarely ask those questions directly—we pursue, withdraw, criticize, become defensive, demand reassurance, go silent, or insist we don't care. This essay looks beneath those strange strategies to the attachment longing they are often trying to protect, and at how two people can accidentally frighten each other while both are trying, in very different ways, to feel loved.

The Big Deal About Attachment Theory

For all the enormous books and psychological terminology, Attachment Theory begins with a simple idea: human beings are built to need other human beings. Early relationships become maps for what we expect from closeness, conflict, dependence, and repair, and sometimes we keep using those maps long after the territory has changed. This essay explains why attachment still matters in adult relationships—and why our history influences us without having to become our sentence.

Depression and Its Terrible Idea About How to Get Better

Depression has a terrible suggestion: Wait until you feel better before you start doing things again. Unfortunately, withdrawing from life removes many of the very experiences—connection, movement, pleasure, mastery, meaning—that might help life begin to feel different. This essay turns the usual sequence around: don't wait for motivation to move; sometimes we move first, make the world slightly larger, and allow motivation to catch up later.

The Space Between Feeling and Choice: Anxiety, Emotional Regulation, and the Freedom to Choose How We Respond

A feeling can be powerful without being an instruction. Anxiety, anger, shame, fear, and childhood history can be louder than our thoughts. Our remarkably persuasive internal prosecutor tries to convince us why everything is someone else's fault and these powerful feelings may all get a vote—but none needs veto power. This essay explores the small but consequential space between what happens inside us and what we do next, because much of emotional maturity consists of learning to live in that space long enough to make better choices

The Monkey That Never Crossed the Lake

The famous “Hundredth Monkey” story claims that once enough monkeys learned something, the knowledge mysteriously spread across the water. It is a wonderful story—and apparently not a true one. But what “did” cross the water was the story itself, making this essay an exploration of the beliefs, assumptions, family narratives, and inherited truths human beings absorb, repeat, and eventually mistake for reality simply because we've been carrying them for so long.

A Really Good Essay on Anxiety

What if the goal is not to get rid of all your anxiety? Anxiety offers certainty on installment: one more check, one more reassurance, one more explanation, and perhaps then you'll finally feel safe—but the account somehow never gets paid off. This essay considers the unsettling possibility that freedom from anxiety and freedom in general are not the same thing, and that sometimes a fuller life begins when anxiety is allowed to come along without being allowed to choose the destination.

ACT, Part Seven: Am Is All That Matters

Finish the sentence “I am ____” and notice how quickly a lifetime of roles, judgments, wounds, accomplishments, diagnoses, and identities rushes to fill the blank. Those stories matter, but trouble begins when a description of who we have been starts deciding who we are allowed to become. The final essay in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) series explores the freedom of becoming larger than our stories and remembering that “am” belongs to the present—the only place where the next response can still be different.

ACT, Part Six: Be Where Your Feet Are

Our bodies are remarkably obedient about staying where we put them; our minds are not. We can sit at dinner while mentally we’re at work, replay yesterday while driving, or allow next Thursday to ruin tonight—and our phones have industrialized the ancient human talent for being somewhere else. This essay is about attention, presence, and returning to the only place where life can actually be lived: “where your feet are.”

ACT, Part Five: Knowing North Isn't Walking North

A compass can tell you exactly where north is, but it has one serious limitation: it doesn't get you there. In fact it, by itself, doesn’t get you anywhere. Values matter only when they eventually acquire feet, and committed action is where knowing what matters becomes doing something about it. This essay is about acting before we feel completely ready, recognizing the choice points scattered throughout ordinary life, and discovering that when we've wandered off course, the next step north still counts.

ACT, Part Four: What Are Your Days Adding Up To?

Very few people deliberately decide to spend their lives on things that don't matter. It happens quietly, one obligation, distraction, deadline, and ordinary day at a time. This essay explores values—not as lofty statements about what we believe, but as directions revealed by what we repeatedly move toward—and asks a deceptively unsettling question: What is the life you're already living adding up to?

ACT, Part Three: What We Do With Feelings We Don't Want

Some feelings arrive like packages we would gladly return unopened: anxiety, shame, grief, jealousy, loneliness, rejection. The problem is that our attempts to escape them can work beautifully in the short term while gradually making our lives smaller. This essay examines experiential avoidance and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s (ACT’s) counterintuitive alternative: perhaps we do not always need to get rid of what hurts; sometimes we need to become better at carrying it while continuing toward what matters.

ACT, Part Two: Your Mind Is Always Making Suggestions

The human mind rarely says, “Here's one possible interpretation.” It says, “She doesn't care. You're going to fail. Something is wrong. You can't handle this.” This essay explores cognitive fusion: the strange human tendency to mistake what our minds say about reality for reality itself, and the freedom that appears when a thought can become a suggestion rather than a command.

ACT, Part One: What Happens to Us When Life Gets Hard?

Most of us have a thoughtful, generous version of ourselves that is remarkably easy to locate when nothing difficult is happening. Then life applies pressure, and twelve possible responses suddenly become two: attack or retreat, defend or appease, control or escape. This opening essay introduces “psychological flexibility,” which describes the founding principle in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Psychological flexibility is not the ability to stop feeling difficult things, but the ability to retain enough freedom to choose who we want to be while we are feeling them.

When Your Eight-Year-Old Self Takes Over the Meeting

One moment you're a competent adult; the next, somebody says exactly the wrong thing and a much younger version of you appears to have taken over executive management. The people-pleaser, perfectionist, controller, withdrawer, and hypervigilant child is not stupid—they are often remarkably intelligent adaptations to the worlds in which they developed. The problem is that old survival strategies have expiration dates, and maturity sometimes means thanking the eight-year-old for his service without letting him chair the meeting.

Self-Differentiation, Part Two: When Your Thoughts and Feelings Take Over

Sometimes the greatest threat to differentiation isn't what our partner says; it is everything that happens inside us immediately afterward. A thought becomes a fact, a feeling becomes an instruction, and suddenly an entire internal committee agrees that something must be done immediately. Bringing Dr. Bowen’s theory and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) together, this essay explores how noticing our thoughts and emotions without automatically obeying them creates enough room to ask a better question: Who do I want to be here and now?

Self-Differentiation, Part One: Belonging Without Losing Yourself

Marriage creates an “us”, but a healthy “us” still contains two “I’s”. Drawing from Bowen family systems theory, this essay asks whether we can remain meaningfully connected to someone we love without requiring their agreement, managing their feelings, surrendering our convictions, or disappearing into the relationship. Differentiation isn't independence or emotional distance; it is the much harder task of learning to belong without losing yourself.

Your Marriage Has Hormones: Why Perfectly Intelligent People Can Become Remarkably Stupid During an Argument

How can two intelligent adults function beautifully all day and become completely unraveled when one of them rolls an eye? The answer is, because marital conflict isn't happening only between two rational minds! Two nervous systems, adrenaline, cortisol, attachment, and perceived threat have all joined the conversation. This essay explains why the brain can treat an irritated spouse a little too much like a mountain lion—and how understanding what happens inside us can help us get our better brains back online.

Marriage, Family, and Becoming Pops

This is the first part of the introductory trilogy to this Blog. It describes more about Thomas Kurtz and how who he is reflects on how he does therapy. Before writing about psychology, I begin with the relationships that have taught me most about it: more than forty years of marriage, raising a family, and now being called Pops. This essay explores what family teaches us about staying connected while becoming ourselves, why repair matters more than perfection, and why human beings are formed in relationship. It is also an introduction to the conviction underneath much of what I write here: “Life first, psychology second.”

Anxiety, Pain, Faith, and the Tunnel

This is the second part of the introductory trilogy to this Blog. It describes more about Thomas Kurtz and how who he is reflects on how he does therapy. I know anxiety professionally, but I also know what it is like to wake up with it in my own body. Chronic pain and anxiety can narrow life like a tunnel until the question “How do I make this stop?” crowds out the more important question, “What still matters to me?” This essay is about learning to keep walking when you cannot see very far ahead—and about a faith that does not necessarily remove the darkness but reminds me that darkness and aloneness are not the same thing.

Rivers, Hobbits, Dogs, and Learning to See

This is the third part of the introductory trilogy to this Blog. It describes more about Thomas Kurtz and how who he is reflects on how he does therapy. Part three is about Fly fishing, Tolkien, old books, dogs, grandchildren, and psychotherapy. These may seem like an odd collection of teachers, but they have taught me something important; how to pay attention. An experienced angler doesn't see a different river; he has learned to see more of what was there all along. This essay explores play, mastery, wonder, and the possibility that living well may have less to do with controlling life than becoming very good at noticing that you're alive.

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Published by Thomas Kurtz Counseling, LLC.