Gay Men’s Career Confidence: Do You Have ‘Professional Self-Esteem’?

What is professional self-esteem? In recent years in my psychotherapy practice, I have noticed a dramatic increase in the demand for more “coaching”-style services, and I have been happy to develop this for my clients. There are personal coaching issues, to be sure, but what I find much more frequently is that clients need professional … Read more

Express Yourself, Part II

For the previous article to this, click here for Express Yourself, Part I

Last month, I related a story of a recent study from Dr. Kevin J. Petrie at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) of how 37 people living with HIV were studied in two groups: one group who expressively wrote about their feelings for 30 minutes a day on 4 consecutive days, and a comparison group who wrote objectively about how they occupied their time.

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Face It: Lipodystrophy, Lipoatrophy, and Self-Esteem

In the earliest years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, many people were distressed by the appearance of nickel-sized purple lesions on their bodies and faces that were a visible sign of living with Kaposi’s Sarcoma, an AIDS-related opportunistic infection. The lesions involuntarily “outed” them as having the highly stigmatized disease of AIDS. Society’s reaction to patients with these visible symptoms often caused additional psychological distress to people who were already fighting a host of medical challenges in the days with almost no treatment options.

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