Joke:
If heaven has two doors one saying "Heaven" and one saying "Lecture on Heaven" the codependents are the ones lined up in front of the "lecture on heaven".
Codependents tend to be unsure of their own minds, they have put...

Money, like a genie in a bottle, has the ability to morph into any shape and help us make our most startling dreams come true. Money can buy stuff, status and sometimes even people.
Let's face it, money makes you feel special. The red carpet treatment can...

I would have gladly gone to The Shubert Theater to see Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit" last month just to see Angela Lansbury take her curtain call. Her absolutely infectious and charming rendition of Madame Arcati was a complete pleasure if not honor to witness, but it was her eyes that...

Want to smooth out those frayed edges, lower your stress level the natural way or just plain feel good? Try these research proven ways to bring both your body and mind into balance, find out which ones work for you and make them part of your weekly emotional fitness regime.

Welcome back. Hopefully over the holiday weekend you remembered what it feels like to be relaxed. You may have wondered "is all this stress really worth it?" Or, "how can I hang on to some of this lovely, relaxed feeling that I am experiencing?" Well here are a few short...

Dear Dr. Dayton
I think I got scammed by the whole acai berry weight loss thing. I am always trying to lose those ten extra pounds that everyone tries to lose and the ten more I gained since I was let go from my job due to cutbacks. So...

Question:
"A brief period of closeness with a man who might have mattered to me, has caused me to open up to my long-buried pain, and recognize that my uber-independent stance is an adaptive mechanism that doesn't really work for me that well anymore since for...

When we get scared, our thinking mind gets smaller and our feeling mind gets bigger. Evolution has made it this way so that we will get flooded with feelings of fear when danger lurks and beat a straight path toward safety, unhampered by any random thoughts that might...

Gut reactions, it turns out, may have a higher rate of accuracy in their ability to predict outcome then the most carefully laid, "scientific" plans. In his book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in...

"Do that thing that only you can do, that's how to be successful as an artist," says, Steven Lavine, president of California Institute of the Arts. "Especially in today's economy it's important to be entrepreneurial with your skill set and adapt to the environment in which you find yourself."...

We learned, from Elizabeth Kubler Ross's work on death and dying and from Jonathon Bowlby's on grief/loss and separation, that human beings become profoundly attached to caretakers and experience a deep sense of loss and disorientation when they are separated from them. In my own work in the...

Ever wonder why men need so much "space" while women seem to need just the opposite when under stress? The answer may be found in recent UCLA studies, in which researchers found that women respond to stress somewhat differently from men. The well known fight/flight response to...

Caring for your soul isn't often discussed in conjunction with therapy. Generally therapy is thought to be the province of the mind, a path toward better thinking which is supposed to lead to better living. But the human machine runs on something more than thought and action. And that is...

Our emotions are physical, they travel through out our bodies on something called peptides. Certain chemicals are designed to bind to like receptors on our cells, in what functions as a seamless emotional, communication network. Stress related chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol or calming body chemicals like serotonin and dopamine...

One fifty minute session per week is simply not enough to change a person's life. If insight is to translate into meaningful life change it needs to be accompanied by small daily actions and lifestyle changes that translate insight into action so that change becomes sustainable and renewable. The fifty...

You can actually make your body systems function more efficiently by regularly taking a little 90 second break to focus on calming your heart. What goes on in our hearts affects our entire bodies. The heart's electromagnetic field far out-powers and out-ranges that of the brain or any other body...

It's "Children of Alcoholics Week" so this blog is dedicated to anyone, of any age, who has lived with addiction and the emotional extremes, chaos and dysfunction that it engenders. One of the strange phenomena of living with dysfunction and pain as a child is that the effects of it...

Because our emotions are experienced in our bodies, emotions make us want to do something. People aren't built to simply lie back and feel their emotions. The experience of emotions is accompanied by the release of hormones in our bodies, changes in breathing and heart rate along with changes in...

Life is continuously happening to us. We're in a constantly evolving pattern of injury and healing, loss and redemption. Emotional fitness, strength and sobriety allow us to face the daily ups and downs of life with relative emotional balance. This doesn't mean that we no longer hurt, fly off the...