Stephanie Adams

The recent death by suicide of reality television character Russell Armstrong, husband of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Taylor Armstrong, has sparked media conversation about the dangers of reality TV. But in my mind, the real danger here is the effect that his suicide could have on his three children.

These last two weeks I’ve realized something: You don’t hear the words “innovate” and “therapy practice” together all that often. Yet the idea of being innovative is in all the marketing books, and most therapists tell me they are desperate to improve their marketing more effectively. Why, then, is it so hard for us to marry those two words?

I’m moving in a month. My husband, a former Texas Aggie, is returning to the homeland to attend medical school. Which means I will be closing the door…leaving…terminating… the clients I have worked with at the Family Counseling Center.

I’m in a session with a client, and I’m gritting my teeth. It is becoming a familiar reaction to an ever more common problem: TMI. No, I’m not talking about hearing something awkward, although certainly that happens too. It’s not that the information is too much because it’s uncomfortable to hear; it’s too much because it’s just too much. I don’t need to know the backstory of how you obtained the family dog in order to understand that the kids aren’t taking responsibility for it. I don’t need to know what you ate at Thanksgiving dinner if the problem is that your ex-husband showed up uninvited. It’s just unnecessary.

Death is on the brain lately. Sounds cheerful, right? Makes you really want to keep reading, doesn’t it? It should. It happens to all of us. I was really lucky. My first experience with death, the one where I really got it, happened when I was 23. I had that many good years before putting together the reality that sometimes people we love leave us and never come back. It seems to have accelerated somewhat since then.