Feeling good is more complicated than it looks. Armand DiMele, joined by Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, and co-host Giullian Gioiello, unpacks the spectrum of gladness, from alert calm to manic highs to nervous laughter, drawing on brain chemistry, fruit fly research, and callers sharing their own deflections from pain.
Why do people hide the truth from their doctors, their partners, and themselves? Armand DiMele and co-host Giullian Gioiello, joined by Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, examine what questions really do: test safety, reveal love, expose fear, and build trust. Callers explore childhood silencing and emotional breakthroughs.
Isolation can feel safe, but stepping into the world transforms a person. Armand DiMele walks through eleven therapeutic factors that make any group experience healing, from a coffee house to a marriage, showing how Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, applies the same principles in her women’s groups. Callers round out the conversation with their own experiences of loneliness and connection.
New Year’s Eve 2013 becomes an occasion for taking stock. Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, shares her year working with combat veterans and their families on PTSD, and Armand reads an open letter from Christina McDowell confronting her father’s fraud. Callers reflect on loss, loneliness, and the quiet sustaining power of memory.
Disappointment is the hidden threat to political activists: it slides into apathy, rage, or depression if left unexamined. Armand DiMele, joined by Lisa Arnone, LCSW, and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, uses the Occupy Wall Street moment to explore what happens psychologically when passionate effort seems to yield no visible result.
Caring for a seriously ill spouse strips away plans, freedom, and identity. Dr. Diana Denholm, MD, author of “The Caregiving Wife’s Handbook,” joins Armand DiMele and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, to examine how caregivers manage resentment and burnout, and what the person being cared for can do to preserve their partner’s dignity and wellbeing.
Why do otherwise controlled people suddenly explode? Armand DiMele and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, trace the roots of losing control across rage, sexuality, eating, and grief, arguing that the narcissistic wound is the most reliable trigger, and that suppression itself sets the stage for the blowup.
Power is largely an illusion, and fighting that truth is a recipe for depression, rigidity, and exhaustion. Armand DiMele and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, trace powerlessness from its biological roots through addiction, codependency, grief, and disability, arguing that accepting what we cannot control is itself a form of strength.
Your attitude toward money, not your bank balance, is what keeps you stuck. Armand DiMele and Nick Papadopoulos, Success Counselor, trace how childhood environments of scarcity or abundance shape spending habits, self-sabotage, and the unconscious games people play around earning and giving money away.
Every family is a web of valences, positive and negative, and Armand DiMele maps the full constellation: single fathers raising daughters, mothers and sons, absent parents, and the toll each pattern takes. Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, adds clinical perspective, and a caller named JT illustrates what happens when a child withdraws from an unaccepting world and how embarrassment, not circumstance, becomes the last barrier to belonging.
