Dr. Gil Winkelman ND

Fixing it, helping someone else, staying busy: self abandonment often looks like strength. Dr. Gil Winkelman on how we leave ourselves, and what it means to stay. One afternoon, a patient I’ll call Larry sent a quarterly report to a client with a wrong number in it. A colleague caught it first and sent a […]

A patient I’ll call Naomi told me about a dinner. Partway through the meal her partner went quiet. She asked if he was okay, he said he was fine, and she asked again. He pulled back, and something in her went out. By the time they drove home, neither of them knew how to reconnect. […]

Transactional relationship are a part of life. But how can we identify our desire to give and receive as coming from a place of our heart as opposed to something else? A patient I’ll call Renee learned early that being useful was how she stayed wanted. At a dinner with close friends she noticed the […]

You’re on a good date and part of you is already explaining to friends why it didn’t work out. Dr. Gil Winkelman explains future tripping, anxious desire, and how to tell a possibility from a verdict. A patient I’ll call Simone was on a second date that was going genuinely well, and somewhere in the […]

Why do we get emotionally attached to an old sweater, worn at the cuffs, faded, torn at the collar — the kind of thing you’d grab in a fire before almost anything else in your closet? It belonged to someone you loved. That attachment isn’t a distortion of judgment about a piece of fabric. It’s […]

A patient I’ll call Eugene told me something a few weeks ago that stuck with me: “I keep telling myself I don’t need this. Then I check my phone every ten minutes hoping she texted back.” He wasn’t being dramatic. He was describing something a lot of people live with quietly — why do I […]

If you’ve searched for a therapist for people pleasing, you already know the pattern: saying yes when you mean no, anticipating what everyone else needs before they ask, feeling responsible for keeping things comfortable for people who never asked you to. What you might not know is why it’s so hard to stop, even once […]

Maya has a type — she’ll tell you this herself, laughing, like it’s a personality trait. Brilliant, funny, magnetic, a little unavailable, always in the middle of becoming something. She’s dated four of these types in the last six years, and each time, she’s felt the most alive she’s ever been. By the third one, […]

Why do I feel like I have to earn love? There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from giving constantly — anticipating what people need, making yourself useful, performing — and never quite feeling like you’ve done enough to rest. Underneath it, often, is a quiet sense that love is something you have to […]

How to overcome fear of intimacy is the wrong question. Fear of intimacy isn’t a malfunction. It’s a prediction. You want closeness. Someone safe comes toward you. And something in you wants to pull away. You understand the pattern. You might know exactly where it came from. You may even see it happening as it […]