Now that the winter season is ending, there is much we can learn from it about factors that impact our emotional health. In the winter, the temperatures are (generally) low, there’s less sunlight and often people are required to stay inside for longer periods of time. As a result, we can sometimes find our emotions [...]
No, this isn’t about tween drama, but it is about something that can cause all sorts of drama in our lives; anxiety. Anxiety can be looked at as trying to control something beyond your control. By this explanation, it creates a very specific dynamic between itself and control. That is that anxiety and control become [...]
Transitions are something that can happen at any stage of your life, and often you look back on the last time you had to deal with a big change in order to get you through the next one. However, there is one year, in particular, that is typically the first transition of such significance that [...]
I often say that you have to have your whole bowl of ice cream before you have your cherry on top, referring to how it’s important to have a sense of yourself, who you are, and what you want before you introduce a relationship into your life. It’s a romantic notion to feel as though [...]
I think it's safe to say that most of us got that flurry of nervous excitement the few days before the start of the new school year. And perhaps many of us would have feelings of dread...after all, you now have to wake up very early and get into a routine that for about 2 [...]
It can be very easy as a therapist to get frustrated when you’ve been working with someone and you haven’t seen any real progress, even after week after week of offering several suggestions that you know would be helpful. Then one day, as sudden as a flip of a switch, something happens. This person has [...]
Anxiety disorders are the most common form of mental illness in America, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. The condition affects 40 million adults in the United States. That’s 18 percent of the U.S. population. Despite this, people with anxiety disorders still live with a stigma often associated with invisible conditions. Many people [...]
Many people enter therapy hoping to find a comfortable place to promote making positive changes in their lives. I feel that a part of my responsibility in encouraging this change involves making people as uncomfortable as possible, especially when so many people are comfortable with unhealthy things. We’ve all heard the expression, “Life begins outside [...]
The Power of Being Broken I’ve recently come across an article written by Julie Peters that introduced me to a very interesting figure that I wanted to pass on. Meet Akhilandeshvari, (pronounced ah-kee-LAN-desh-va-ree) we’ll call her Akhilanda for short. She is the Hindu goddess of Never-Not-Broken. She derives her power from always being broken; in [...]
Anxiety and stress can affect how we perceive reality. We all react to our “imagined reality” of a situation, not the “reality” of it. Imagined reality is our perception of something. If you think that people are thinking negatively about you, you react as if they are in fact thinking negatively about you. This is [...]