Angela R. Wurtzel, MA, LMFT #33686, Certified Eating Disorder Specialist

Working from home has been surprisingly worthwhile and therapeutically rewarding. I have always, and I do mean always, loved having a physical office and working in person. When I moved my practice online, it remained important to me to have a specific place in my home where I practice therapy. Here I am in vmy virtual setup in Echo Park, Ca.

Writing From the Inside Out is a clinical and creative writing group that meets twice a month. By using art and poetry alongside writing prompts to access clinical material, participants find they access deeper elements of the therapeutic encounter(s).

Working abroad has meant finding the right height for my screen for my zoom sessions, and using what I have with me to make due. It has also meant finding and noticing the simple beauty around me, a quiet and slower pace while being abroad than in the past for me. I did venture to a little village over the weekend to walk in the gardens and have a coffee and water at a cafe in

A room with a new view. One of the benefits of providing psychotherapy virtually is being able to work from almost anywhere. Especially, these days, it’s essential to be safe, secure and available.

Utilizing creative writing as a means to access our unconscious and conscious experiences in our clinical moments can provide an expansive and informative consultation. In modern psychoanalysis, one of the techniques is to ask ‘object related questions’ as a means to be less confrontational and to help keep defenses intact albeit a little more flexible. Approaching consultation from a creative, more objective perspective, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and those we hope to assist in psychotherapy. From more information, link in bio to my website or DM.

I’ve loved to bake for most of my life and during this past year my creative outlet has been writing and baking on Sundays. Today, I baked these strawberry muffins and they are just so puffy, round and didn’t deflate so I felt moved to take a picture of them right out of the oven. An hour later, they haven’t lost their shape. The process of baking and cooking, for me, always involves a recipe because I lack the instinct to put flavors together. I have to say, I’ve learned a lot this past year and feel a little more brave and willing to risk making a meal “on my own,” while remembering I have plenty of assistance from anytime I get stuck. Sort of like living my life and being in therapy at the same time. A little help is all I need. https://thecafesucrefarine.com/fresh-strawberry-buttermilk-muffins/

Friday Feeling: Good Enough! Thanks to for the candle that holds the name “good enough” coined by Winnicott who’s clinical writings are sometimes hard for me to grasp until I do, usually in a clinical moment. Plus, my home office now has a glorious scent even without lighting this candle.

Special Delivery from created all of the illustrations and I am looking forward to relishing in her artwork and learning more about the living plants around me.

Written in 1989, by Joyce McDougall, a noted French psychoanalyst, Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatic Illness, brings forth an attention to how inner deadness, a lack of being able to find words for emotional experience, can be associated with psychosomatic manifestations. Her in-depth examination of the mind body connection, psychic deprivation and survival helped me understand the economy and use of eating disorders and process addictions in psychic life. One aim of the text is for the analyst to measure the fierce resistance to explore the psychic factors that feed psychosomatic vulnerability and protect somatic creations. Inevitably, she discovered that many experience the analytic frame and the relationship with the analyst “as comprising a safe place” to explore their “inner theater” and “discover that psychosomatic manifestations may have a psychological history that is capable of reconstruction.”

Memoirs help me understand the inner world of the author and, often, myself. Most know Kay Redfield Jamison for her acclaimed memoir, An Unquiet Mind, which was one of the first books I read when starting to practice psychotherapy. In 2010, when I learned she had written a new memoir, Nothing Was The Same, I could not have related more to that title, that experience in that year. Even today, as we live through a pandemic, I hear myself say, others, too, nothing will be the same, I reckon with the past, the losses, and wonder what is to come.