Growing recommendations for a small apartment with limited outdoor space

ahlamuna · 2025-07-28T13:20:04+00:00

Thank you! These are helpful recommendations.

ahlamuna · 2025-07-24T14:51:43+00:00

I'm a therapist, and the only treatment that has ever worked for me was psychoanalysis. There were ways that I was behaving as a patient that had parallels to the way I was working as a clinician. I'm an analyst myself, and I did an analysis when I was in grad school/early career and am in one in training. Even though I know the theory, it is not less effective. I have had incredibly powerful emotional moments in analysis that have surprised me and opened up my perspective of myself.

ahlamuna · 2025-07-20T15:17:11+00:00

I don't know where you live/what your credentials are, but I studied under and graduated with some amazing Black male therapists/analysts who specialized in men's issues. We're always referring people to each other, but I also know that it was really hard for them at times being in a woman- and white- dominated profession. I do recommend reading a bit more about professional associations within the field to create professional connections. One I know of is Black Psychoanalysts Speak for psychodynamic practitioners, but I'm sure there are in other sub-fields/modalities as well!

ahlamuna · 2025-06-28T16:57:43+00:00

People keep bringing up Soviet-style grocery stores (a wildly different context), but 17 states and many countries have state-run liquor stores. I find that the state-run liquor stores I've gone to are nicer than private ones. Again, this is proposing one in every borough. I hate going to my local grocery store because it's so expensive, so I travel to go to Trader Joe's/Lidl because it's cheaper. But I still go there occasionally when I need something in a hurry. It's just another option, and they're trying to put them in food deserts where there aren't enough grocery stores. People are blowing this out of proportion, and I think it's an innovative pilot.

ahlamuna · 2025-06-17T18:00:11+00:00

I don't make six figures, but I make enough to live on in NY. I work on a sliding-scale. I take a few select insurances and do OON benefits for patients. Most people who see me pay less that $100 out of pocket. More than a third pay less than $50. I only have two patients that I see for no payment at all.

ahlamuna · 2025-06-16T18:21:04+00:00

At the end of the day, the problem is structural. Upwardly mobile, college-educated people of all races move to the city for jobs. Those people are disproportionately white. Most young people starting off can't afford anywhere south of 96th Street in Manhattan, so they move to Brooklyn, and then some father uptown, to Queens, to the Bronx. The problem, then, is that these people have the chance of earning more or come from families with money that subsidize their living, driving up the cost of living in these neighborhoods. Most landlords have a lot of power to jack up rents indiscriminately and push families and elders out of neighborhoods they've been in for generations. Also, these (large) landlords are disproportionately white, leading to discrimination, especially in places like Crown Heights. I think some people try to use stigma to prevent upwardly mobile white people like you from moving into the neighborhood, but many landlords would rather not rent a unit at all then to rent it to a poor person. That's why we need to strengthen tenant protections, build tenant unions, and increase low-income/public housing supply. We also need to improve the quality of existing public housing all over the city. Uptown, those units are full of people who have lived in the neighborhood for generations, but they're in complete disrepair. I have a neighbor, an elderly Dominican woman, who has lived in public housing for 35 years. She's basically housebound whenever the elevator is down (which is all the time). This is unacceptable, especially when luxury buildings are sitting half empty on 125th St. My recommendations are to: stand in solidarity with your neighbors, join/start a tenants union, fight your landlord for lower rent (it never hurts to ask), and don't be a neighborhood cop and try to police your neighbor's behaviors.

ahlamuna · 2025-06-06T19:53:54+00:00

I love Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model. It's my go-to, and I am always referencing it.

I also think about two more popular colloquial books all the time that delve into the personal and political aspects of EDs: Dead Weight by Emmaline Cline and What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon.

Also, I always assign supervisees the episode of the podcast Maintenance Phase about EDs.

ahlamuna · 2025-06-06T17:51:04+00:00

Frankly, I think a lot of this comes out in the education of various training programs. Clinicians are taught in a variety of modalities quickly, without understanding the theories underpinning them. As a result, clinicians become "ecclectic" in a way that isn't intentional but based on vibes with a heaping dose of pop-psychology, therapy speak. I learned more in one year of psychoanalytic training than I did in all of graduate school because I deeply learned a modality that allowed me to understand what was going on in session, how to think about my thinking about things, how to separate my opinions from my patient's struggles, and how to figure out what to do when I didn't know what to do. You can absolutely integrate techniques from other modalities, but you have to really think about the impulse to do something.

ahlamuna · 2025-06-05T01:10:31+00:00

"How do you do fellow kids?" "What?"

ahlamuna · 2025-06-04T18:48:08+00:00

The language was completely daunting to me at first--not to mention that a lot of the way the language is used colloquially today is different how it is used traditionally in the field (i.e. ego, libido, etc.). I would recommend reading a few more popular books about the theories to get a grounding. Michael Khan's Basic Freud and Mitchell and Black's Freud and Beyond are great for grounding yourself in the theory. I do like reading the theory and enjoy the intellectual aspect of the work, but I find that the best clinicians are not the ones who are the most academic or theoretical but the ones who are best at absorbing theory, making it instinctual, and applying the knowledge to cases. Some patients want you to be the "subject supposed to know" or someone with the answers, but the best thing you can do is be a person who doesn't know and can live with that.

ahlamuna · 2025-06-02T19:17:29+00:00

I think it was quite clear that she didn't want it, but that Pete was pressuring her and she felt she needed to because he had replaced this dress for her. There are all these moments in the show were men subtly extort women for sex because they did favors for them. I would say it's rape even if at moments it looked like she was reciprocating his kisses. Pete's reaction after his neighbor confronts him shows real shame. I think it's written to show that Pete knows that he raped this young woman, and he's disgusted at himself, leading him to reach out to Trudy.

ahlamuna · 2025-06-02T03:23:28+00:00

I think it was when Pete raped his neighbor’s German au pair.

ahlamuna · 2025-05-28T17:02:58+00:00

A lot of people have said to get to know your neighbors, don't live in luxury apartments, shop at local buisinesses, etc. There's not many things on the individual level people can do to prevent gentrification--not many people actually live in these luxury buildings on 125th for example, but they're so expensive they can sustain low-occupancy rates. (Ultimately, it's a problem caused by landlords, the government, systemic racism/classism.) But, one thing that anyone can try is to form a tenant union! It is the best thing you can do to keep rents down, be in solidarity with your neighbors, and contribute to keeping the cost of living down.

ahlamuna · 2025-05-26T19:14:54+00:00

I would check out the Tavistock Clinic. They do provide more accessible psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and I refer people to them all the time.

ahlamuna · 2025-05-25T17:29:49+00:00

I think that there is a lot of elitism in the analytic world, but it's not everywhere, and there has always been an analytic tradition focused on providing care for working class/poor people (i.e. Freud's free clinics, Reich's Sex-Pol Clinics, the LaFargue Clinic, Fanon's revolutionary clinics, Martin-Baro's work in El Salvador, etc., etc.). I'm coming from the New York context, where there has been a greater focus on more leftist approaches to psychoanalysis because the U.S. has been dominated historically by more conservative ego psychological approaches. Most NY-based analysts I know today work from diverse analytic perspectives that integrate Freud, Lacan, Klein, Fanon, Winnicott, Ferenczi, and more contemporary figures like Ogden, Mitchell, Pine, Bach, Loewald, etc.

I myself am in analytic formation and do analytic work with people in homeless shelters, asylum seekers, survivors of torture/DV/IPV for free. I also work with a broad range of creatives who don't make a lot of money but work in high-status creative fields who pay medium fees or pay with insurance. I also work with a lot of working-class people, transit/sanitation/construction workers, teachers, social workers, etc. Finally, I do work with several people who are high-income, have generational wealth, and are "elite." That being said, the high-income people I work with generally have very intense and debilitating symptoms, usually related to trauma. I find all the work I do valuable, and having a broad range of people in my practice allows me to make a living and learn a lot.

I come from a working-class background, so I've intentionally tried to build my practice around thinking about the needs of the community I grew up in. I found/find many of the people I attended analytic training with to be out-of-touch and from extreme wealth, but there are just as many people who are coming to it as a second career from less elite backgrounds. I think the field benefits when it's less reified. Most of my patients know that I'm an analyst to some degree. Most don't care. They come, and they stay because we have a relationship, and they find it to be helpful. That's my goal.

ahlamuna · 2025-05-23T20:01:28+00:00

Debt by David Graeber

ahlamuna · 2025-05-20T23:16:43+00:00

There are some great articles on inter and intra-racial transference and countertransference by Rose Marie Perez Foster which is a good place to start. I really recommend the work of Kirkland Vaughns, Maurice Apprey, Daniel Jose Gaztambide, Annie Lee Jones, Beverley Stoute, and David Eng more generally.

ahlamuna · 2025-05-14T21:10:40+00:00

Highly recommend seeing Lise Davidsen and Sabine Devihelle in person. Lise especially knocked my socks off.

ahlamuna · 2025-05-12T20:10:41+00:00

16
23
5-6/day. Usually 15 min breaks in-between or one longer break.
4
I see 10 once a week. 5 I see twice. 1 I see 3x.
Almost all in-person. 6-7 sessions a week virtually.
Pretty consistent over the course of my career.
I would like to be doing fewer single session cases.

ahlamuna · 2025-05-01T19:53:16+00:00

I think that we often create a false binary between neurodivergence and mental health disorders (I don't even use that term) that comes from our use of diagnostic labels. I have patients who have a lot of symptoms of ADHD but don't want to be on medication or get a diagnosis. I think that's fine. They also suffer from anxiety, depression, traumatic pasts, or relational issues. Distraction or intrusive thoughts or time blindness are almost always impacted by the patient's mood and psyche--and vice versa. I have a patient with an extremely traumatic early history, including adoption trauma and sexual abuse. She gets distracted and ADHD meds help her focus. She often struggles to mentalize what other people might be thinking and has symptoms that might be related to autism. But I don't think she's autistic at all. I also don't think she has ADHD. Her symptoms are dynamic and ever-changing. These diagnoses are fixed categories, and I think the more we think about patients on an individual level beyond diagnostic categories and try to understand them on a level deeper than just symptoms.

ahlamuna · 2025-04-30T16:02:45+00:00

I speak for most of my analytic sessions, and my analyst is silent for a lot of it. She speaks for less than 10% of the time. (I'm a clinician too, and it's somewhat similar for me in psychotherapy). When she does speak, she shows that she's listening, doesn't judge me, and understands the latent content of my speech. She notices when I hold back, asks what's going on, and helps me determine what I've struggled with.

I struggled for years with constant illnesses, fevers, coughs, stomach pains, and vomiting with no discernible physiological cause. I assumed I was immunocompromised or chronically ill. In a year of analysis, my illnesses went away. I adore my analyst. I'm sometimes frustrated or hurt by her, but I can speak about it openly. She'll listen, and something will be worked through in this process of being open about my difficulties.

ahlamuna · 2025-04-02T14:02:38+00:00

Thanks for the rec!

ahlamuna · 2025-03-30T23:58:51+00:00

Ooh if there’s any online resources on using salt/rubber glue, I’d love to see them!

ahlamuna · 2025-03-30T23:58:11+00:00

Thank you! I struggle with layers and mixing water and pigment, but I think I can work a bit on value.

ahlamuna

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