Writing & Resources
Oakland therapist Justin McGahan provides writing and resources for couples, individuals, psychotherapists, and other helping professions.
Here you can find articles on relationships, mindfulness, personal growth, and practicing psychotherapy.
Most Recent Posts
As you read these words, what is passing through your mind? Do you feel your body making contact with the chair in which you sit? To where is your attention going? Is it fully here, on this page, or is more of it on your hunger or the air’s temperature?
Mindfulness is a basic awareness that’s available to everyone at any moment. Mindfulness is about being aware of your mind in this moment, with a gentle acceptance of wherever that is.
If we are caught up in a feeling or distracted by thoughts in this moment, we are not fully aware of or present in this moment—mindlessness. We are also being mindless if we are aware of this moment, but unwilling to be present in it—for some reason this moment seems undesirable or unacceptable.
Sometimes we may know why feelings are here, perhaps something or someone from our past has a bearing on why we are getting triggered in this moment. Therapy is a great place to explore this and gain insight into why you feel the way that you do. However, the most important thing is that you are mindful of these different parts and emotions.
Mindfulness
As you read these words, what is passing through your mind? Do you feel your body making contact with the chair in which you sit? To where is your attention going? Is it fully here, on this page, or is more of it on your hunger or the air’s temperature?
Mindfulness is a basic awareness that’s available to everyone at any moment. Mindfulness is about being aware of your mind in this moment, with a gentle acceptance of wherever that is.
If we are caught up in a feeling or distracted by thoughts in this moment, we are not fully aware of or present in this moment—mindlessness. We are also being mindless if we are aware of this moment, but unwilling to be present in it—for some reason this moment seems undesirable or unacceptable.
Therapy
Sometimes we may know why feelings are here, perhaps something or someone from our past has a bearing on why we are getting triggered in this moment. Therapy is a great place to explore this and gain insight into why you feel the way that you do. However, the most important thing is that you are mindful of these different parts and emotions.
Couples & Relationships
With an unpleasant face your partner says, “You didn’t do the dishes last night.”
This is a common enough phrase, right? It’s not really about the dishes! This is the primary communication, or what is said aloud. There’s more meaning to this statement than just what was said. When this meaning is openly discussed, your partner’s upset and concern can be fully addressed, allowing you both to move forward instead of repeating nasty patterns.
When your partner/spouse is frustrated that you didn’t do the dishes, it’s likely more meaningful than annoyance over a household chore.
Dirty dishes is a simple metaphor for day-to-day, mundane interactions within a couple that can be ripe for projections—making up a personal story and meaning for someone’s behavior.
A sink full of dirty dishes is trivial. It’s about what your not doing the dishes signifies for your partner. There are ways of communicating with your partner that can get to the bottom of issues faster and yield more self-understanding for both of you.
For Psychotherapists
In mindlessness, we are often drawn into our thoughts and feelings. They distract us from, inform, or seem to control our behavior while we, consciously or unconsciously, assume our internal processes to be realistic and true. Through this assumption, we become immersed in or fused to our internal process. A main practice in mindfulness meditation is to defuse from our internal experience so that we can observe the contents of consciousness (e.g., values, impressions, thoughts, emotions, reasoning, stories about experience). This is a shift from subjective immersion in to an objective perception of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
A mindful approach to therapy differs from conventional approaches because it is more concerned with opening directly to experience than with problem or symptom resolution. An emphasis on presence, what is happening moment-by-moment, instead of cognitive reflection, allows for a radically different approach to exploring experience. Reflection is an exploration of the contents of consciousness; while presence is the way we observe, hold, react to, contract in, strive toward, and ultimately experience the contents.
In addition to mindfulness-based and mindfulness-informed therapy, I suggest a third, equally important category of mindfulness integration: the therapist’s being mindful in the moment with the client, which I call mindful-being. Of course, I could simply call this mindful psychotherapy, but that title doesn’t delineate which part of the therapy is mindful. Mindful-being is the therapist’s way of being in session, touching every aspect of therapy, for example, what is noticed, interventions, counter-transference, compassion, or insight. This has more of a bearing on how the client experiences the therapy than what is said to the client.
Open Relationship, Open Marriage & Polyamory
What differentiates between polyamory and other kinds of nonmonogamy is that the assumption is that there will be multiple relationships that are both sexual and emotional. This means multiple significant relationships are simultaneously maintained. They usually contain characteristics of an important partner or lover—friendship, romance, emotional intimacy, spiritual connection, commitment, or love.
You might be interested in a different structure than monogamy:
You want to have multiple relationships and develop relationships on your terms
You have the desire and capacity to have emotional and sexual intimacy with, and perhaps commit to, more than one partner.
You want “more than sex” from your additional relationship
You would like to experience a different couple dynamic than monogamy
You are interested in exploring your affinity for different genders or types of sex
You believe another relationship might augment your existing couple life
What differentiates between polyamory and other kinds of nonmonogamy is that the assumption is that there will be multiple relationships that are both sexual and emotional. This means multiple significant relationships are simultaneously maintained. They usually contain characteristics of an important partner or lover—friendship, romance, emotional intimacy, spiritual connection, commitment, or love.