I met with a client today who I hadn’t seen in several weeks.  She started telling me about her Mother’s Day–where what she wanted was peace and quiet, but what her kids needed was crisis management, and guess what won out.

“Well,” I said, “that does sound like a real mother’s day.”  We both laughed, and what I was thinking of was my own Mother’s Day (my second), from a few weeks ago.

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It’s easy to catch a case of this: You see someone else’s life (or what you think you know of someone else’s life), and you think how much better they have it than you do.

Why are we so susceptible?

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A lot of us assumed bullying was over when we left high school.  Turns out, it’s still happening in the workplace.

So what do you do about it? 

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My post, Assertiveness for Beginners, sparked some passionate discussion.  There were two main–and very different–themes in the discussion.  Some people were talking about isolated (or recurring) incidents of hurt feelings, that may or may not constitute bullying; others were talking about systematic harassment by their bosses (bullying).

So in this post, I’m going to talk about the former.  In a few days, I’ll be doing another post, “Assertiveness with Workplace Bullies”, and that’ll address the latter.

But first, you need to distinguish between the two.  How do you know when your boss is just being thoughtless or unaware, versus when your boss is a bully? 

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I drew some interesting criticism with my blog post Therapy: A Customer Service Profession?.  Several of my fellow therapists wondered about me as a therapist, whether I was too reactive to the client I wrote about, and what it said about my professional skills and/or perspective.

Since self-evaluation is part of the therapy process for our clients, it seems important that we engage in it ourselves.  So, what makes a good therapist?

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It’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to admit in polite company.  But I know from my practice–and my own life–that it’s more common than we want to think.

Say, you’re home with your daughter all day; your husband works full-time.  You get more time with her, which he envies; he gets more time with adults, which you envy.

When does envy become full-blown jealousy?  When it is a problem?

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In graduate school, I was told that in therapy, the relationship is a primary source of healing.  There were studies that said interns got as good (or better) results than more experienced therapists, because their clients felt so cared for.

I like that idea.  It rings true with a lot of my professional experiences.

But I’m wondering if it’s less and less true.  Is the healing relationship an antiquated notion, out of touch with where our culture is going? Take the experience I had last week, for example.

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I was just meeting with a client and discussing a situation where she was demeaned by her boss at work in front of her colleagues.  Should she speak up or not?  That is the question.

Since I’ve been on a self-esteem/self-worth jag on my blog of late, it seemed only natural to ponder that question here.

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I started out calling this post “Building Kids’ Self-Esteem”, but then I realized I really want to talk about something else.  Esteem is really about how other people see us, while worth is about feeling innately, inherently worthy.

I talked in my last post about the Catfish phenomenon, and how I believe it is fueled by low self-esteem on both sides.  But maybe I was wrong.  Maybe it’s about low self-worth on both sides.

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Urban Dictionary defines “catfish” as “someone who pretends to be someone they are not online; to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.”  I just watched the “Catfish” documentary (I know, I’m a little behind), which first brought widespread attention to the phenomenon, and it got me thinking:

Why do some people grow up to behave this way?  How do we protect our children from catfish, but also from becoming catfish themselves?

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