The Blog
Codependency and Enablers: Understanding and Changing the Relationship Dynamics
To understand codependency, you want to recognize the signs of this unhealthy dynamic in relationships. Codependent relationships can occur in the context of a romantic relationship, but these dynamics can also be present in family relationships or friendships as well.
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Hey Jealousy: Why we get jealous and what to do about it
Everyone experiences jealousy sometimes, but it’s important to keep it in check to make sure that jealousy doesn’t cause you undue distress or problems in your relationships.Combatting jealousy involves turning your focus back onto yourself so that you can stop wasting emotional energy on irrational jealousy.
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How to Build Emotional Resilience
Emotional resilience has to do with how well you cope with difficult emotions when they arise and how well you handle emotional challenges such as grief, anger, frustration, failure, or other problems. Strong emotional resilience can help you cope with challenging situations without becoming overwhelmed or wanting to give up.
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How to Identify Toxic Relationships
Toxic relationships tend to drain your energy, because the patterns of behavior from a toxic person can be confusing, hypocritical, and exhausting. You may not recognize how toxic the relationship has become until you take some time to really think about the patterns that have been established.
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The Psycho-Somatic Trauma Response: Understanding the Mind-Body Connection to Trauma
When a person experienced a trauma, such as life-threatening events, abusive relationships, sexual assault, or witnessing violence, they often experience physical responses and ailments that may last years after the traumatic experience is over. These kinds of responses in the body are known as psycho-somatic symptoms, and they are part of the mind-body connection to trauma.
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5 Things to Ditch When You’re Feeling Depressed
When you are in a depressive state, it can be a challenge to get out of, even when you’re tired of feeling bad all the time. Cutting some things out instead of adding more to your to-do list can be one strategy to combat depression and start to feel better, so that you actually have the energy to take care of yourself. Here are some things that you can safely ditch when you’re feeling depressed so that you have more time and energy to focus on yourself and get to feeling better:
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What to Expect from Trauma Recovery Therapy
There are several things to keep in mind when you are considering counseling for trauma recovery. Having the right expectations can help you get the most out of your counseling experience and hopefully make it a healing and therapeutic process.
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10 Tips to Manage Depression
Depression can feel like an overwhelming sadness that saps the joy out of your life and prevents you from taking even small steps forward. Depression is treatable, though, and there are many ways to manage the symptoms of depression.
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How to use the RAINBOW Method for Sensory Distraction to combat Panic and Anxiety
Using sensory distraction is one way of coping during a panic attack, and there are several ways to do this.The RAINBOW method involves the use of your visual senses. You can think of this practice as kind-of like a mantra that you can use during period of overwhelming anxiety to bring your attention back to present moment.
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4 Ways That Trauma Affects Memory
Trauma can affect your memory in significant ways that impact trauma recovery. There are 4 different kinds of memory, each associated with different parts of your brain, and each affected slightly differently after trauma.
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10 Ways Trauma Affects Your Relationships
Trauma disrupts your sense of safety and changes the way that you view the world. This also includes the effects that trauma has on your relationships with other people, whether romantic or platonic.
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How Trauma Affects Your Brain
Traumatic experiences can overwhelm the brain’s ability to cope using normal methods of stress relief, and thus alternative coping methods have to be developed, which can cause disruption in the lives of people trying to recover from trauma.When you have experienced trauma, your brain goes into a state of hyper-arousal, basically because your fight or flight response has been triggered and your brain reacts by trying to prepare you for potential danger.
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EI Series: Are You Using Selective Self Control?
Selective self-control refers to our ability to control ourselves in some circumstances, but not in others. Selective self-control tells you that you can’t control your reactions to certain circumstances, and then you feel helpless about your ability to exert power over your own behavior.
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EI Series: 4 Steps for Anger Management
Anger management can be a problem for some people, but there are definitely some skills that you can work on to help with this problem if you are one of those people. You want to be in control of your anger, not have your anger control you.The goal of anger management is not to never feel angry. The goal is to be able to express anger appropriately and without aggression towards other people.
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Emotional Intelligence Series: Setting Boundaries
Setting boundaries can be hard if you have struggled with being assertive and confident in your life.When you do not have strong boundaries with others, you can end up feeling taken advantage of, disrespected, or powerless. Learn how to set healthy boundaries in all your relationships and feel more confident when setting limits with others.
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10 Ways to Practice Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to your ability to understand and regulate your own emotions. Here are 10 ways that you can practice strengthening your emotional intelligence so that you can feel confident in your ability to handle your emotions and the emotions of others.
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Relationship Series: Sexual Compatibility and Your Partnership
Sex can and should be a fun and integral part of your relationship or marriage. It’s also one of the main reasons people break up and it’s a big source of conflict for some couples.
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Relationship Series: When Opposites Attract- How to Manage Personality Differences
Personality differences can complicate relationships. Communication and respect for your differences will help you use those personality traits to your advantage and build a stronger partnership along the way.
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Relationship Series: How to Stop Past Pain from Damaging Your Relationship
Sometimes the hardest thing to overcome in your relationship is not what’s happening right now, but what happened to you in the past and how that affects you today. Being aware of how your past has impacted you emotionally will help you to have a healthier approach to resolving conflict with your partner and build the relationship you really want.
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Relationship Series: Personal Confidence and Your Partnership
Confidence and self-esteem are all about you as an individual, but they also play an enormous role in your relationship.When you don’t feel confident in yourself this will come out in your relationship in one way or another.
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Relationship Series: Emotional Intimacy
Emotional intimacy brings us closer to one another and allows us to be vulnerable and build trust with our partners. Learn how to understand the power of vulnerability and build emotional intimacy in your partnership.
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Relationship Series: Shared Values
Values are important in your partnership because they help define what is important to you as individuals and as a couple. You can work on clarifying values with your partner by processing what your most important values are.
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Relationship Series: Couples’ Communication
For couples, communication problems are often at the heart of so many problems that couples face. When you learn to communicate well, then you can resolve conflicts in a healthy and productive way that nurtures and supports your relationship rather than in a way that tears down your bonds and causes pain and distress.
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Grief Is Happening, Holiday or Not
If you are someone in grief, holidays can be an interesting time of year.There are some seemingly universal truths that are experienced in grief but can also be profoundly misunderstood.
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The Mental Health Benefits of Holidays
We hear a lot these days about how holidays can be stressful and some people struggle with their mental health this time of year.However, holidays can also be a time to reflect on some other themes that can be truly beneficial to your mental health.
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The #1 Way to Manage a Panic Attack
Those who have experienced panic attacks know that they can be very upsetting and when they happen you need to take action or symptoms may worsen. The strategy I’m outlining here uses 3 coping methods in combination to combat an acute panic attack when you feel one coming on.
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5 Ways to Support Mental Health this Holiday
Many people struggle during the holidays for a lot of different reasons. The holiday season may coincide with anniversary of the loss of a loved one, or may be a reminder of the estrangement or difficulty of family relationships.Here are some things to keep in mind as you think about mental health awareness during the holiday season:
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How a Gratitude Practice Can Boost Your Mood
Cultivating gratitude is something that can improve your overall quality of life and boost your mood when you feel stuck in a cycle of negativity.
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5 Things Needed for Trauma Recovery
Trauma recovery is about stabilization, healing, and building back mental and emotional strength that may have been damaged by the trauma.
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The Therapeutic Benefits of Nature
Nature helps us disconnect from the stressors of our everyday lives, reminds us of our connection to the earth and the cycles of life, and facilitates spiritual connections by engaging our senses and quieting our minds.
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Do you Apologize Too Much?
When we over-apologize, it can have the effect making you feel responsible for things that you shouldn’t be responsible for, and this pattern can contribute to a lack of confidence in how you feel and how you come across to other people.
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Cognitive Distortions 5.0: Control Fallacies
Control Fallacies work in two ways: you either think that events in your life are totally beyond your control, or you feel that you are responsible for everything, even things you could not control.
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9 Tips To Deal With Difficult People
Difficult people can make it harder to stay positive and get things accomplished, and they can occupy more of your mental energy than they deserve. In order to combat these kinds of people, you need to first identify what kind of personality you are dealing with, and then have a strategy to cope with them when they come your way.
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Are you an Empath?
Empaths are people who are empathetic and sympathetic towards others, and also experience the world as a highly sensitive person.
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10 Non-Medical Ways to Cope with Anxiety and Panic
Anxiety is common mental health condition that affects millions of people every day. While many people use anti-anxiety medications to help manage their symptoms, I often hear from people who want to learn more about strategies to cope with anxiety and panic attacks without using medication.
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How to use Yoga for Depression
Many who have suffered from depression know that your body often responds to depression with symptoms such as fatigue, aches and pains, muscle tension, and sleeping difficulties. Yoga is an adjunct therapy that can be used to both promote and help sustain healing in these areas.
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ASMR: Are You a Tinglehead?
ASMR is a phenomenon known as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, and most people experience it as a tingling sensation that occurs in the area of the base of the neck and covers the head and sometimes the shoulders or spine. The tingly feeling usually produces a feeling of relaxation or pleasant warmth, and it is usually stimulated by some kind of auditory or visual trigger. It has also been referred to as having a “head orgasm”, “brain massage”, or “spine tingle”.
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How to Create a Sleep Hygiene Routine
Sleep is essential to good mental health. Use these tips to create a strategy that works for you so that your sleep is restorative enough to help you feel your best, physically and mentally.
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Mindfulness: Whack or Worth It?
What does the term mindfulness really encompass, and is it really something that could change your life? Or it is just another fad and buzzword in the self-improvement culture of today?
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How to Use Sensory Distraction to Stop Panic and Anxiety
When you are experiencing overwhelming anxiety, or even having a panic attack, sensory distraction can help you re-focus your energy somewhere other than the distress you are feeling. It’s a technique that involves using your senses to distract you long enough for you to calm down or regain your composure.
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Cognitive Distortions 4.0: Emotional Reasoning
Emotional reasoning refers to the mistaken belief that everything you feel must be true. In this way, we can sometimes trick ourselves into believing that our feelings are facts. To the contrary, sometimes our emotions cloud our judgement.
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When is the Right Time for Hospice Care?
There are some important considerations to think about if you have a family member or loved one that may benefit from hospice services. Overall you want to make sure that you know what hospice care is all about, who qualifies for hospice services, and when the right time is to ask about hospice services.
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Cognitive Distortions 3.0: Personalization
I am going to cover Personalization. This is a distortion that can include believing that you are responsible for things outside of your control, or it could also mean interpreting things in a way that always reflects back on you.
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The Power of a Personal Mantra
Having a personal mantra can help you when you begin to feel overwhelmed, anxious, frustrated or defeated.
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Why Gardening is Great for your Mental Health
Gardening is an easy recommendation for self-care for those who are so inclined. Science is increasingly finding support for the connection between our gut health and our mental health.
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Cognitive Distortions 2.0: Disqualifying the Positive
When you are in the habit of disqualifying the positive, it makes it hard to recognize the good things you have done, leaving you feeling inadequate, or sometimes even worthless or incompetent. Therapists sometimes refer to this as having a case of the “Yes, but…”s.
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Coping with Cognitive Distortions: Catastrophizing
Choosing to look at a situation and decide that it is a catastrophe will only increase your suffering, and doesn’t help you resolve the issue. How to cope with a catastrophe.
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Indie Film Director Kendall Brunson talks about her new film “Grab This!”, #MeToo, and Guerrilla Filmmaking
Grab This Film. Indie film director Kendall Brunson talks “Grab This”, #MeToo, and Guerrilla Filmmaking
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How to Know when Medication is Right for You
People experience mental health symptoms on a scale, which is to say that the severity of their symptoms vary widely amongst individuals.
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How to Take a Compliment
When someone gives you a compliment, you have a choice about how to receive it. I will say up front that this is a problem that I have personally struggled with at times in my life, but have worked to change over time. Most of us intend to be gracious and...
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“Work It Out” Is Here!
I am pleased and proud to announce the launch of my new book “Work It Out: A Survival Guide To The Modern Relationship”, out now and available on Amazon. This has been a project that I have been working on for some time now, and it is based on my work with couples in...
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Suicide Rising
In June, news broke of the suicides of both luxury handbag designer Kate Spade and international food celebrity Anthony Bourdain. Whenever high-profile celebrities complete suicide, we are reminded that depression and mental health conditions touch every class of...
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Balancing Internal and External Validation
Validation is a natural human need that comes from our origins as social beings. While some species are content to live most of their lives alone, humans have always lived in groups, and thus our need for social acceptance is deeply engrained in our consciousness. ...
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How To Build Your Frustration Tolerance
Many of us struggle from time to time with low frustration tolerance. Perhaps you find yourself fuming at small inconveniences, or a minor infraction by your partner, peers, or children. When our lives become overly stressful, it can be difficult to keep little...
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How to Un-friend and Still Be Friends
Social media has changed our lives in so many ways, including how we communicate with our friends. There have been many positive things that have come out of the rise of social media, such as reconnecting with old friends we haven’t seen or spoken to in many years,...
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This is Not a Drill
When I was in about 3rd or 4th grade, my classmates and I had all the standard safety drills in elementary school. Fire drills, tornado drills, and the like. There was one drill though, that I remember doing only once, which was the active shooter drill. I don’t...
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Are you Parenting your Partner?
The Parent/Adolescent Dynamic happens when one partner has taken on the role of the Parent, or Director, in the relationship, and the other partner is stuck in the role of the Child, or Adolescent. In these relationships, one person is basically in charge of knowing what needs to be done, and they end up having to ask, direct, or otherwise nag their partner to complete responsibilities that need to be handled. This is an unhealthy relationship pattern for many reasons.
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Self-Care: We’re Talking about it Wrong
As someone in a caregiving profession, I know all about “self-care”. Other people in caregiving professions and high stress jobs are frequently reminded that we need to take care of ourselves in order to ensure our long lasting ability to continue to perform our...
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Do you have to forgive an abusive parent?
Many people struggle with healing from an abusive childhood, and when the abuser was a parent, the healing process can be particularly complicated.
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Aly Raisman Speaks for Survivors, and Herself
This past Friday, Olympic Gold medalist Aly Raisman delivered a powerful victim impact statement at the sentencing portion of convicted sexual abuser Larry Nassar, former doctor to the USA Gymnastics team.
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The Benefits of Emotional Support Animals
Many people are familiar with the practice of pet therapy, as well as service animals, but I’ve noticed a rise in both the benefits and recognition of a newer category of animals known as emotional support animals (ESA). Emotional support animals are not trained to...
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Women at Werk Empowerment Conference
This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the first annual Women at Werk Empowerment Conference. This was an event that combined presentations from successful working professionals with vendors, information booths, and give-aways by women-owned and operated...
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Rebuilding Trust After Infidelity
Trust can be built back slowly as more of your emotional needs are met over time. However, it ultimately takes a decision that is made by the per son who has been hurt, to give that trust back when they are ready.
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The Emotional Costs of Hook-up Culture
Fear of being hurt or rejected causes people to limit access to their own emotions and avoid creating the bonds that actually bring emotional fulfillment in relationships.
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