VM Psychological PLLC

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Death is in the therapy room long before anyone says the word.It enters when a parent becomes ill and the phone ringing ...
09/04/2026

Death is in the therapy room long before anyone says the word.

It enters when a parent becomes ill and the phone ringing begins to feel different. It appears when the body changes, when retirement unsettles a person’s sense of purpose, or when a relationship ends and takes an imagined future with it. It is present when children leave home, when an anniversary comes around, or when someone realizes that time has moved faster than they were ready for.

Sometimes we are grieving a person. Other times, we are grieving who we used to be, the safety we once felt, or the life we were certain would happen.

We tend to speak around death. Even in therapy, people may worry that naming it will make it more real or reveal a fear that feels too dark to share. I understand that hesitation. I also believe silence can leave people alone with something that is already shaping the way they live.

Therapy should be one place where death does not have to be cleaned up. There should be room to say that it feels frightening. There should be room for anger when it feels cruel and for confusion when no meaning can be found. Grief does not need to become a lesson before it is allowed to be witnessed.

Yalom wrote that “though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.” That line stays with me because it holds a difficult truth: facing mortality can change how we live.

It can make our usual distractions feel less convincing. It can expose the relationships we have outgrown and the conversations we keep avoiding. It may lead us to question why we continue postponing the things that matter while giving so much of ourselves to what does not.

This does not mean death is desirable, and it certainly does not mean loss should be reframed into something beautiful. Some losses are devastating. Some remain painful for the rest of a person’s life. Yet awareness of death can still bring us into closer contact with life as it is happening now. We may become more honest about what we want, more protective of our time, or more willing to love people while they are still here.

At VM Psychological PLLC, grief and mortality are welcome in the room. You do not have to make your loss sound hopeful. You do not have to reassure anyone that you are doing better. You can speak about death directly and take the time you need to understand what its presence has stirred within you.

These conversations are rarely easy. I believe they are among the most human conversations we can have.

—VM Psychological PLLC

To look within without turning away. To sit with what is tender, hidden, and unfinished. Maybe this is where we finally ...
08/30/2026

To look within without turning away. To sit with what is tender, hidden, and unfinished. Maybe this is where we finally begin to know ourselves.

08/07/2026

Is it cheating or exiting?

Esther Perel has written and spoken extensively about infidelity, and one idea I keep coming back to is how complicated the word “cheating” actually is.

Most couples have some idea of what cheating means. But how many couples have actually sat down and talked about what their definition includes?

We tend to enter relationships with an unspoken philosophy about what it means to be faithful. We have ideas about what is okay, what crosses a line, what should be shared, what can remain private, and what loyalty is supposed to look like. A lot of the time, we assume the person we love is living by the same rules.

But what happens when they aren’t?

Can we really say someone cheated a rule that was never actually spoken?

I sometimes prefer the language of “exiting the relationship.” By exiting, I don’t necessarily mean ending the relationship or physically leaving. I mean the places where someone steps outside of what the couple has understood and agreed their relationship to be.

For some couples, that is s*x with another person. For others, it could be an emotional relationship, secret conversations, financial dishonesty, po*******hy, withholding information, or creating a kind of intimacy somewhere else that the couple understood to belong within the relationship.

This is where I think Perel’s work opens up an important conversation. Fidelity is not necessarily defined the same way in every relationship. Two people can love each other deeply and still carry very different ideas about what it means to remain inside their relationship.

Maybe the question isn’t only, “What do you consider cheating?”

Maybe we should also be asking:

What does staying inside our relationship mean to you?

What would make you feel like I had stepped outside of it?

What have we actually agreed to, and what have we simply assumed?

We can’t expect our partners to know every boundary that has only existed silently in our own minds. Sometimes one of the most intimate things we can do is make the unspoken parts of our relationship spoken.

VM Psychological, PLLC

I found this card today, and I can’t stop thinking about it…“I carry you with me into the world… remembering being alive...
07/21/2026

I found this card today, and I can’t stop thinking about it…

“I carry you with me into the world… remembering being alive together.”

That may be one of the most honest descriptions of grief I’ve read.

Later, I walked past these absolutely stunning hydrangeas. They were impossible to ignore. Full of color, quietly beautiful, asking nothing of anyone. Which reminded me that grief often works the same way. It doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it simply shows up in what catches your eye.

Perhaps a flower…

The smell of rain…

A song…

Or a place you haven’t been in years…

We spend so much time talking about “moving on,” (or should I say THE MYTH OF MOVING ON) because love doesn’t work that way. The people we lose don’t disappear from our lives. They become part of how we see the world. They shape what moves us, what softens us, what makes us stop for just a moment.

Maybe that is what it means to carry someone.

Every act of kindness they taught us.
Every memory that still makes us laugh.
Every ordinary moment that suddenly feels sacred because they would have noticed it too.

Grief isn’t forgetting. It’s allowing love to continue having a place in your life, even after your someone is gone.

— Vinnie

Projective identification is not simply seeing in others what we cannot see in ourselves.It is a relational process in w...
07/06/2026

Projective identification is not simply seeing in others what we cannot see in ourselves.

It is a relational process in which unbearable feelings, wishes, fears, or aspects of the self are unconsciously evacuated into another person. The goal is not merely to rid oneself of the feeling, but to locate it elsewhere and, at times, influence or control it from a distance.

What makes projective identification different from ordinary projection is that the recipient often begins to experience what has been projected. The feeling comes alive in the relationship itself.

A therapist may suddenly feel hopeless in the presence of a patient who cannot consciously experience despair. A partner may feel irrational guilt while the other remains strangely innocent. A parent may become overwhelmed with anxiety that a child cannot yet symbolize or articulate.

The feeling is no longer contained within one person. It has become something shared, enacted, and communicated between two minds.

Klein understood this as beginning in infancy, when overwhelming emotional experiences cannot yet be thought about and must instead be managed through relationship. The infant does not simply express distress; the infant attempts to place distress into another who can carry, survive, and potentially transform it.

Bion later expanded this idea, suggesting that psychological growth depends on the presence of someone capable of receiving these projected emotional states without retaliating, rejecting, or becoming consumed by them. When this occurs, raw emotional experience can be metabolized and returned in a form that can finally be understood.

In this sense, projective identification is not inherently pathological. It is one of the earliest languages of human connection.

The problem emerges when projection replaces reflection, when feelings can only be evacuated rather than experienced, when relationships become organized around inducing others to feel what one cannot bear to know about oneself.

The question is often not, “Why am I feeling this?”

The deeper question may be:

“Who is struggling to feel this, and what is happening between us that requires me to carry it?”

Some of our strongest emotions do not originate solely within us. They emerge in the space between people, revealing truths about the relationship that neither person can yet fully speak.

Projective identification reminds us that the psyche is never entirely individual. We become ourselves in the minds of others, and sometimes we discover what another person cannot yet know by noticing what suddenly appears within our own emotional world.

Your Body Is Talking. Might it have a narrative?Not everything shows up as a thought.Sometimes it shows up as a tight ch...
07/06/2026

Your Body Is Talking. Might it have a narrative?

Not everything shows up as a thought.

Sometimes it shows up as a tight chest before a difficult conversation. A knot in your stomach when you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. A lump in your throat when there’s something you wish you could say but can’t quite find the words for.

We live in a culture that encourages us to think our way through everything. But some experiences aren’t asking to be analyzed. They’re asking to be noticed.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that many of the sensations we fight against are carrying information. Anxiety, grief, anger, fear, vulnerability, they often show up in the body long before they show up in language.

That doesn’t mean every ache has a deeper meaning. But it does mean that when something keeps showing up, it may be worth getting curious instead of immediately trying to get rid of it.

A simple question I often return to is:

“What am I noticing in my body right now?”

Not to fix it.
Not to judge it.
Just to listen.

Sometimes healing begins the moment we stop arguing with our experience and start paying attention to it.

Vinnie Mangiapane, MA, LLP
VM Psychological PLLC

“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul, there is no such ...
06/16/2026

“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul, there is no such thing as separation.” — Rumi

06/11/2026

Not every loss can be transformed into something useful.

The reality of grief is different from what others see or guess from the outside. Platitudes and pat explanations will not work here.

There is not a reason for everything. Things happen that do not have a silver lining. We have to start telling the truth about this kind of pain. About grief, about love, about loss.

Because the truth is, in one way or another, loving each other means losing each other. Being alive in such a fleeting, tenuous world is hard. Our hearts get broken in ways that can’t be fixed.

There is pain that becomes an immovable part of our lives. We need to know how to endure that, how to care for ourselves inside that, how to care for one another.

We need to know how to live here, where life as we know it can change, forever, at any time. We need to start talking about that reality of life, which is also the reality of love.

Your survival in this life post-loss won’t follow steps or stages, or align with anyone else’s vision of what life might be for you. Survival won’t be found, can’t be found, in easy answers or in putting your lost life behind you, pretending you didn’t really want it anyway.

In order to survive, to find that life that feels authentic and true to you, we have to start with telling the truth. This really is as bad as you think. Everything really is as wrong, and as bizarre, as you know it to be.

When we start there, we can begin to talk about living with grief, living inside the love that remains.

One of the things I often tell clients is that our parents and early caregivers provide the first blueprints for our emo...
06/11/2026

One of the things I often tell clients is that our parents and early caregivers provide the first blueprints for our emotional world.

Before we ever knew the words attachment, trust, love, shame, grief, or belonging, we were learning what relationships feel like. We were learning whether our tears would be met with comfort, whether our excitement would be shared, whether our needs would be welcomed or become burdens. These experiences become the architecture of the self. They shape not only how we see others, but how we come to see ourselves.

As adults, we often find ourselves living inside these old blueprints without realizing it. We may long for closeness while fearing it. We may expect rejection before it arrives. We may work tirelessly to earn a love that was never meant to be earned in the first place. The past has a remarkable way of introducing itself into the present, often disguised as anxiety, conflict, loneliness, or the feeling that something is missing.

Depth-oriented therapy offers an invitation to slow down and listen more carefully. Together, we begin to notice the patterns beneath the patterns. We become curious about the stories carried by our reactions, our relationships, our dreams, and our emotional wounds. Over time, what was once unconscious can become known. What was once repeated can become understood.

This is one reason I value multiple sessions per week when it is clinically appropriate. Human beings do not change simply because they gain insight. We change through relationship. More frequent contact creates space for the deeper layers of experience to emerge and be worked through as they unfold. The therapy room becomes more than a place to talk about life. It becomes a place where life itself is encountered, explored, and transformed.

The most beautiful part of this work is that the blueprints we inherited are not the final draft. They may explain us, but they do not define us. Healing often begins when we discover that we are allowed to build something new while honoring where we came from.

“We are all, in some way, trying to find our way home to ourselves.”

Address

Clarkston, MI

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 2pm
Saturday 10am - 1pm

Telephone

+15864537571

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