The Blog
Emotional Healing through Validation and Parts Work
Emotional healing through the art of validation and parts work, is one of the most effective approaches to therapy. One of the biggest obstacles in emotional healing often involves conflicts between different parts of ourselves.
How’s Your Pain?
It is estimated that over 50 million adults in the U.S. suffer from chronic pain. That’s over 20% of the adult population and a lot of pain (1). According to the CDC, “Chronic pain, one of the most common reasons adults seek medical care, has been linked to restrictions in mobility and daily activities, dependence on opioids, anxiety, and depression, and poor perceived health or reduced quality of life”
EMDR: A Talk Less, Process More, Approach to Healing Trauma
Imagine visiting a mental health professional for trauma symptoms after a car accident, sexual assault, robbery, job loss, return from military combat, or even an animal attack. Your counselor suggests that you may benefit from Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy (EMDR). You are desperate for relief and agree to the treatment without hesitation.
Believe and Overcoming the Impossible
Imagine all the positive and incredible things we can achieve in this life if we allow ourselves to work through and modify the negative limits and boundaries that we set on ourselves. Now, I’m not saying that having some of those limits and restrictions in life is always a bad thing, because I do know that they can help keep and maintain our lives in peace and order.
Owning your Emotions & Triggers
How many times have you heard someone say to you, ‘You made me feel ___ ?’ Or have you ever recognized yourself saying it to someone else? What’s wrong with this statement? Let’s identify the blame that inherently...
What Every Couple Needs to Know
“We’re not who we used to be… we’re just two ghosts standing in place of you and me,” sings Harry Styles, describing in aching tones what it’s like to be with your lover and feel as though you don’t even know them anymore.
Change Your Thoughts and Your Thoughts Will Change You
Have you ever sent a friend a text and didn’t hear back so you wondered if you were being snubbed or ignored? That’s your brain telling you a story, trying to make sense of your situation. Your brain could have said, They care about me, so they must be busy. But brains generally assume the worst. Why? Because over time our brains evolved to keep us safe by looking for danger. The second we catch a whiff of uncertainty or something triggers a….
Growth Edges—Difficult and Packed with Potential
That place right before growth happens is the hardest. It’s often gripped with fear, self-loathing, desperation, and/or hopelessness. It can feel like all is lost and you’ll be stuck forever, but this is when you are approaching your growth edge. It‘s the place where you get to wake up to the parts of yourself that are not so conscious so that you can be more fully present in the moment. It’s where are you get to heal wounded parts of yourself.
Stop Playing the Game of Relational Jumanji
Stop playing the game of relational Jumanji. Find more peace in your relationships with this solution! Recently I came across a book that changed the way I view relationships. It spoke of something called, The Drama Triangle. This concept was first described by...
It’s Not Just In Your Head. It’s In Your Body Too.
Anxiety and worry often get a bad rap for being “just in your head,” but research affirms that symptoms of anxiety reside in our body as well. To address worry or fear in our head without taking into consideration how it affects the body, would be missing half the...
Neurons That Fire Together Wire Together
Coined nearly 70 years ago by the Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, this clever phrase reminds us that every experience, thought, feeling, and physical sensation triggers thousands of neurons, forming a neural network. Messages traveling the same pathway in the...
How You Play Shows Some of Your Character
For most of us, our wins and losses are not so publicly displayed, but the heart wrenching truth is that growth edges are painful and hard. They usually don’t get celebrated on national news, however there is much to celebrate in working through these life challenges and acquiring new learning. It requires facing a growth edge and it often feels debilitating.
Tips to Improve Communication in Relationships
One of the most common reasons for couples to seek counseling is to improve communication. What most people really mean when they say they want to improve their communication, however, is that they want to understand and feel understood. They want a deeper connection…..
5 Steps to Reconnect to our Emotions and find Common Ground
Everyone is speaking about how divisive our country is right now. But why? And how do we reverse course to find common ground? I suggest looking more closely at our own emotions and how we are behaving towards each other. You see, there is a pattern that we can zoom in on. Every day we see chaos around us. We watch it on T.V., we see it on our social media, we see just about everything in our society being politically used….
Change is Inevitable, Fatigue is Not
Lately, Google has been getting a surge of fatigue-related searches. Questions such as “Why am I tired all the time?” or “Why do I feel so bad?” There seems to be a shared sense of exhaustion among many of us and the search for...
