“I love you, but I wish you’d change your underwear more often.” “I love you, and I wish you’d change your underwear more often.” More than 30 years ago, family therapist Virginia Satir wisely called attention to the important difference between these two statements.[1]  The “but” in the first one effectively cancels out the “I love you,” to the...

Has my experience ever happened to you?  I'm in a workshop at a national conference with a group of mostly strangers.  The leader predictably asks us to participate in an icebreaker that, unpredictably, is interesting and novel.  I converse for a couple of minutes with a pleasant guy taller than me whose name is vaguely familiar. The feeling is...

Most of us have only a vague sense of what Quality of Life (QL) means. Wealth? Health? Leisure time? Fame? It seems obvious that a homeless person’s QL is lower than Donald Trump’s. Whitney Houston’s was tragically lower than Michelle Obama’s. But even these examples show that there’s more to QL than you might think. A homeless person with close...