addiction counseling, adult therapy, cbt, substance abuse
Courtney Glashow
“High Functioning Addict”: Spot The Signs And ...

You hit every deadline this week. You made it to Saturday’s soccer game, answered the late emails, and nobody at work would guess how many nights end with a bottle of wine you meant to stop halfway through. From the outside, life looks fine. So when the thought “Do I drink too much?” shows up, it’s easy to push it aside because you’re handling everything.

If you’ve typed “what is a high functioning alcoholic” into a search bar at 1 a.m., that question deserves a clear answer. A high functioning alcoholic is someone who meets the criteria for alcohol use disorder while still keeping up with work, family, and daily life. That’s why the drinking can stay hidden from the people around you, and often from yourself. Below, we’ll walk through the signs, why this pattern is so easy to miss, what tends to happen over time, and how therapy helps you or someone you love.

“High Functioning Addict”: Spot The Signs And How To Get Help
boundaries, self-esteem, Narcissistic Abuse, family counseling, Childhood trauma
Courtney Glashow
Family Scapegoat Signs and What to Do When ...

Maybe you're the one who gets blamed no matter what actually happened, at home, at work, or even with friends. Something goes wrong, and somehow it lands on you. If that sounds familiar, there's a word for what's happening: scapegoat. A scapegoat is a person who's unfairly blamed for problems they didn't cause. Scapegoating shows up most in families, where it's often called being the family scapegoat.

Family Scapegoat Signs and What to Do When Someone Is Using You as a Scapegoat
toxic relationships, Narcissistic Abuse, breakup therapy, Trust Issues, trauma counseling
Courtney Glashow
How to Recover From Love Bombing

Love bombing can leave you doubting everything you felt. Here's how to recover from love bombing, why it hits so hard, and the steps that help you heal and trust yourself again.

How to Recover From Love Bombing
Couples counseling, toxic relationships, Trust Issues, Hoboken NJ therapist, Narcissistic Abuse
Courtney Glashow
8 Tips for Dealing With A Narcissist

You're walking on eggshells in your own home. Conversations that should be simple turn into something you have to brace yourself for, and the moment you push back on anything, the script flips and somehow you're the bad one. You've started Googling words like "narcissist" and "manipulation" at 11pm because you don't know what to call what's happening, but you know something is wrong. You searched for how to deal with a narcissist, and you landed here. This post walks through what actually counts as narcissistic behavior versus everyday self-centeredness, what to watch for in your own relationship, and 8 specific strategies our therapists at Anchor Therapy use with clients who can't, or aren't ready to, leave the relationship.

The first step to determine your dynamic with someone who you think is a narcissist is to know the difference between someone with narcissistic tendencies and someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

8 Tips for Dealing With A Narcissist
Couples counseling, marriage counseling, relationship counseling, Intimacy therapy, lgbtqia support
Courtney Glashow
Couples Therapy Show: Where Are They Now? Dr. ...

Dr. Orna Guralnik, is a New York City-based Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst, who rose to fame due to her hit Showtime television show, Couples Therapy. Couples Therapy is a documentary series that follows couples as they try to navigate their troubles and concerns. This unscripted series features real couples from the greater New York City area.

As viewers work through the show’s three seasons, they are taught to view the therapeutic process through a lens of compassion and empathy instead of hastiness. Episode by episode, viewers are immersed into the real world of couples counseling, viewing the progress and occasional backsliding of couples.

Couples Therapy Show: Where Are They Now? Dr. Orna Guralnik's Couples on Showtime

family counseling

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How to Deal With a Narcissistic Parent and Set Boundaries That Hold

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How to Deal With a Narcissistic Parent and Set Boundaries That Hold

You told your mother last week that you can't take calls during work hours. It's 2:15 pm on a Tuesday, and your phone already shows four missed calls and a voicemail saying you've obviously stopped caring about her.

Setting boundaries with a narcissistic parent is deciding which behavior you'll accept and what you'll do when it shows up, whether or not your parent agrees. If you've been searching for how to deal with a narcissistic parent, boundaries are the place to start. This post explains how to set a boundary your parent can't argue away and why the pushback is so predictable. It also covers what to do when the boundary gets ignored.

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Dysfunctional Family Roles and How They Develop in Childhood

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Dysfunctional Family Roles and How They Develop in Childhood

You're 34, and you manage a team at a job where difficult conversations are an ordinary part of your week. Then you walk into your parents' house for a holiday, and within ten minutes you're standing between your mother and your brother, smoothing over an argument exactly the way you did when you were eleven.

Dysfunctional family roles are the fixed parts each family member plays to keep the household running when something inside it isn't working. If your family was under strain, it probably had several of them. This post explains how those roles develop during childhood and why you and your sibling ended up with different ones. It also covers what it takes to step out of yours now.

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Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents Often Carry These 10 Patterns

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Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents Often Carry These 10 Patterns

Maybe you spent your childhood reading a parent's mood before you walked in the door, adjusting your voice, your plans, even your personality to keep things calm. Maybe you're an adult now with your own apartment and your own job, and you still flinch a little every time your phone lights up with their name. Growing up with a narcissistic parent means being raised by someone whose need for admiration, control, or validation consistently came before your own emotional needs, and the effects of that don't stay in childhood.

This post walks through ten of the most common, well-documented ways growing up with a narcissistic parent can shape you as an adult, from how you talk to yourself to how you learn to trust the people you love. Some of these might sound exactly like you. Others might describe a sibling who had a noticeably different role in the family than you did. Either way, recognizing the pattern is usually the first real step toward changing it.

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No Contact With Parents and How to Know When It Helps

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No Contact With Parents and How to Know When It Helps

Maybe it's the third holiday in a row you've spent bracing yourself before a phone call. Maybe you've rehearsed what you'll say to a parent who never actually lets you finish a sentence. If you've started quietly wondering whether the relationship is worth what it costs you, you're not the only one asking. No contact with parents means deliberately ending communication with a parent, usually after other ways of managing the relationship haven't worked, and even considering it can come with guilt before you've made any decision at all.

This post walks through what no contact actually means, why so many adult children are choosing it right now, and how to tell whether it might be the right move for you. We'll also get into what the research shows about how common this really is, what tends to happen to these relationships over time, and how to go about it if you decide that's where you're headed.

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Enmeshed Family: What It's Like to Date Someone Who Grew Up in One

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Enmeshed Family: What It's Like to Date Someone Who Grew Up in One

Your partner's mom calls every single day, sometimes twice. Every plan you make together gets run past her first, even small ones, even ones that have nothing to do with her. You've started to notice you're not quite sure where your partner's opinion ends and their mother's begins. You love this person, but you also can't shake the feeling that you're dating two people instead of one.

An enmeshed family is one where the boundaries between family members are blurred or missing entirely, so individual identity, decisions, and emotions get absorbed into the family as a whole instead of staying separate. When you date someone from a family like this, you're not just dating them. You're dating a whole system that doesn't always leave room for you. This post covers what enmeshment actually is, how to spot it early, and what it takes to build a relationship that can hold both your partner and their family without losing you in the process.

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What Emotional Contagion Looks Like in a Family

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What Emotional Contagion Looks Like in a Family

You walk into your parents' house feeling completely fine. Twenty minutes later, before anyone has said anything specific, your shoulders are up around your ears and you're bracing for something. Nothing really happened. You just walked into the room your mom was already tense in, and now you're tense too.

Emotional contagion is the process of automatically catching another person's emotional state through their tone, expression, and body language, often without either person realizing it's happening. In families, it usually flows in one direction: one person's mood sets the emotional temperature for everyone else in the house. If you've ever felt your own calm evaporate the second a certain family member walked in, you're not imagining it, and you're not overreacting. This post covers what emotional contagion actually is, why it shows up so strongly in families, and how to stop absorbing a mood that was never yours to carry.

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What Is It Like Being the Golden Child? Golden Child Syndrome Signs

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What Is It Like Being the Golden Child? Golden Child Syndrome Signs

If you're the golden child in your family, chances are you already know the feeling, even if you've never had a name for it. Golden child syndrome is the family pattern where one child gets held up as the favorite, always praised, always expected to succeed, and treated as the example everyone else in the family should follow.

Parents, teachers, and even extended family members may shower you with admiration, reinforcing a sense of confidence and achievement. Knowing that your accomplishments are met with pride and celebration can be very validating and keep you in a loop of wanting to seek constant approval from other people. You may find that your mistakes are overlooked or easily forgiven.

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Family Scapegoat Signs and What to Do When Someone Is Using You as a Scapegoat

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Family Scapegoat Signs and What to Do When Someone Is Using You as a Scapegoat

Maybe you're the one who gets blamed no matter what actually happened, at home, at work, or even with friends. Something goes wrong, and somehow it lands on you. If that sounds familiar, there's a word for what's happening: scapegoat. A scapegoat is a person who's unfairly blamed for problems they didn't cause. Scapegoating shows up most in families, where it's often called being the family scapegoat.

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Weaponized Incompetence in Families: How to Spot It and Stop Carrying It

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Weaponized Incompetence in Families: How to Spot It and Stop Carrying It

Your brother says he "doesn't know how" to book your mom's follow-up appointment. So you do it, again. Your dad still can't figure out the thermostat after fifteen years in that house. So you drive over and reset it yourself.

You've stopped asking why. You already know the answer. If you wait long enough, it becomes your job. That quiet, exhausting handoff has a name.

Weaponized incompetence is when someone repeatedly performs a task poorly, or insists they can't do it at all, until someone else steps in and takes it over. It isn't always a conscious choice. But the pattern still shifts the workload, the planning, and the mental load onto one person in the family. In this post, we'll look at how weaponized incompetence shows up between siblings and parents, how it differs from an actual skill gap or learned helplessness, and what you can do when you're the one who always ends up handling it.

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Bridgerton Family Expectations and the Weight of Being the Responsible One

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Bridgerton Family Expectations and the Weight of Being the Responsible One

Bridgerton family expectations hit a nerve for a lot of viewers, and Anthony Bridgerton is usually why. He inherits the title at 18 after his father dies, and from that day on he's the one holding everyone together. If you grew up as the reliable one in your family, watching him grind through duty after duty probably feels a little too familiar.

That specific weight, getting handed adult responsibility before you're ready for it, has a clinical name. Parentification is when a child takes on adult-level responsibility for a parent's emotional needs, household duties, or younger siblings, well before they're developmentally ready for it.

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Birth Order Theory: What Your Place in the Family Actually Shapes

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Birth Order Theory: What Your Place in the Family Actually Shapes

Is the oldest really bossy and the baby really spoiled? Here's what birth order theory actually says about your personality, your relationships, and who you tend to date, plus what the newest research says about whether any of it holds up.

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Adult Sibling Estrangement and How to Cope When a Sibling Stops Speaking to You

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Adult Sibling Estrangement and How to Cope When a Sibling Stops Speaking to You

Adult sibling estrangement can leave you grieving someone who's still alive. Here's why it happens, how to cope, and what reconciliation can realistically look like.

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Growing Up With Conditional Love in a Dysfunctional Family System

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Growing Up With Conditional Love in a Dysfunctional Family System

If love in your home growing up always felt like something you had to earn, you already know how exhausting that is to carry. Maybe you learned early that affection came with conditions: be good enough, stay quiet enough, achieve enough, and you'd be okay. Step out of line, and the warmth disappeared. Conditional love is when a parent's affection, approval, or emotional availability depends on a child meeting certain expectations rather than being offered freely and consistently. That kind of environment shapes you in ways that don't just stay in childhood.

Growing up with conditional love in a dysfunctional family system can affect how you see yourself, how you relate to others, and how you move through the world as an adult, often without realizing where those patterns came from. This blog will walk you through what conditional love actually looks like, how it affects adult relationships and self-worth, and what healing can look like with the right support.

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What Is Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT)?

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What Is Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT)?

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is a highly effective, evidence-based treatment designed to strengthen the parent-child relationship while addressing difficult behaviors in young children, typically between the ages of 2 and 7. Developed by psychologist Dr. Sheila Eyberg, PCIT helps parents learn practical, real-time strategies for promoting positive behavior and managing challenging ones all while deepening emotional connection. Using a unique setup where child therapists at Anchor Therapy coach parents during play sessions, PCIT allows caregivers to apply new skills immediately and confidently, creating lasting change within the family dynamic!

At the heart of PCIT is the belief that strong, healthy parent-child relationships are the foundation for emotional and behavioral development. Through its two-phase model- Child-Directed Interaction (CDI) and Parent-Directed Interaction (PDI)- parents learn to foster warmth, trust, and effective communication while also setting consistent boundaries. Check out our blog “6 Ways to Set Boundaries and Enforce Them.” As a result, children often become more cooperative and emotionally secure, and parents report feeling more in control and connected. By rebuilding relationships through guided interaction, PCIT not only reduces behavioral issues but also brings families closer together.

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What Is My Parenting Style?

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What Is My Parenting Style?

Positive parenting can go a long way in building an emotionally healthy life for your child. Your parenting style can impact very important aspects of your child’s life, from their self-esteem to their ability to succeed in a scholastic environment. The way you interact with your child and discipline your child will have an influence on them for the rest of their lives!


Oftentimes, many parents want to know what parenting style they are using and which is the best parenting style overall. In all honesty, there is no one “right” way to parent- there is no universal code that all families should know. Deciding how to raise a child is a concern that all parents grapple with at one point or another. Whether you are raising a child all on your own or with the help of a significant other, many parents just want the best for their kid which can trigger a lot of anxiety over which parenting style to choose. Parenting styles can vary from person-to-person but researchers have narrowed parenting styles down into four distinct categories generally speaking.

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What is Perinatal Psychotherapy?

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What is Perinatal Psychotherapy?

Perinatal psychotherapy is a form of mental health counseling designed to help women during the perinatal period, including pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum phase. This type of therapy focuses on addressing the various emotional and mental health challenges that can arise during this time, from anxiety and depression to the life transition of parenthood. The primary goal is to help women navigate the complex emotional and psychological changes that come along with being a parent. Not only are you managing the physical and emotional demands of pregnancy, but you are also planning for the major life change that comes along with the birth of a child.


Perinatal therapy is especially important because many women experience increased vulnerability during the perinatal period. Of course, pregnancy and childbirth comes along with physical demands, but there is also potential for emotional difficulties, such as postpartum depression or anxiety. A perinatal therapist at Anchor Therapy can give you a safe and supportive space to explore your emotions, process past trauma, and successfully manage the stress of transitioning from pregnancy to parenthood. Perinatal counseling can also benefit women experiencing fears about pregnancy or childbirth, those with mental health disorders, and/or parents struggling with the emotional demands of having a newborn.

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How to Cope with Parents Aging

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How to Cope with Parents Aging

As a child, you feel like your parents are indestructible. Your father is Superman and your mother is Superwoman. They can face anything, and they are your protectors. But, as you age into adolescence and, eventually, young adulthood, you are excited as life transitions are constantly occurring. With increased age, you have more freedoms- you can drive, stay out later than usual, you go off to college, and so on. However, as you are getting older, so are your parents. As a child or teen, you may not notice it right away.

Growing older is not always easy. Growing older represents a time of aging for everyone, including your parents. When your parents become senior citizens, they may also experience differing levels of their independence. Perhaps you have to step in and parent your parents. Your parents may become stubborn or argumentative. It is a stressful time for everyone involved. Through counseling for aging parents, you can learn how to approach the situation with sensitivity and empathy. 

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Navigating the Challenges of Living with a Family Member with Mental Illness

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Navigating the Challenges of Living with a Family Member with Mental Illness

Living with a family member who has a mental illness can be an emotional rollercoaster. It's a journey filled with challenges, uncertainties, and moments of both joy and despair, especially if you are a young adult and finding yourself in a caretaker role. You may be a caretaker to your partner, your parent, a child, your sibling or someone else close to you. In this blog, we'll explore various aspects of living with a loved one who has a mental illness, from understanding their condition to taking care of yourself which is most important. 

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4 Tips On How To Build Close Relationships Within The Immediate Family

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4 Tips On How To Build Close Relationships Within The Immediate Family

Every family has a different structure, background, culture, and set of values. For some, family relationships come easy. However, the “perfect” family doesn’t really exist. There’s so many different variations and circumstances for families that it can be stressful to adjust to the particular environment. 

The “standard” family structure, the American Dream, consists of two parents, one or two kids, a nice house, and financial stability. Yet, it’s important to be aware that The American Dream isn’t exactly realistic. You can still be satisfied with your family and life when it doesn’t necessarily adhere to the “perfect” standard.

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