What You Need to Know About Disenfranchised Grief
Everyone will experience the loss of a loved one. However, there are also times when people experience a different loss that others do not acknowledge as a loss. Whether or not others understand, losing someone or something important is real. The grief related to this type of loss is termed disenfranchised grief. When a person has been deprived of the right to grieve, they [...]
Helpful and Unhelpful Ways of Getting Over a Breakup
No one likes rejection, and no one enjoys experiencing the feeling of loss. A breakup, whether you initiated it or it just landed in your lap, is not a pleasant thing to endure or put someone else through. When a relationship ends, that reality happens for any number of reasons, and it will affect the parties involved in different ways. How one responds to [...]
Couples Counseling: When You Feel Unappreciated in Your Marriage
We all have expectations of others. For example, if we open a door for someone, we assume they will at least say thank you. Most of these expectations are pleasantries and dictated by our culture’s social norms. But when we start putting expectations on our romantic relationships that go beyond the confines of typical social niceties, it can become detrimental to those relationships and our [...]
Recognizing Abuse In Emotionally Abusive Parents
Thinking the best of your loved ones can allow you to overlook some of their rough edges. This is helpful because any given day can have many irritations that cause distress if they are all taken to heart. Distinguishing between mild irritations, and issues that are more significant and that require you to address them is an important skill. Patterns of abuse in a [...]
Take Every Thought Captive: Disrupting Anxious Thoughts
Have you ever found yourself feeling stuck, repeating the same thoughts, and working through the same scenarios over and over in your mind? Sometimes our minds can feel like they’re running in place. You might be sitting in a meeting, trying to get some sleep, or at your child’s school play and find yourself caught in a cycle of negative, anxious thoughts. Anxiety can [...]
Advice for Newlyweds: I Love You, But Stop Stealing My Fries
Now that you’re married, you’re supposed to become one flesh, a team, a unit – partners in everything, right? While that sounds beautiful in theory, effortless sharing in every aspect of your life isn’t a reality. When you first tie the knot, sharing a home, a bed, vacations, and decision-making sounds romantic. But if you’re like most couples, you’ve probably had a few moments [...]
Being Highly Sensitive Without Being Highly Sensitive
Some individuals are born with a personality trait related to emotional sensitivity. This trait is known as highly sensitive, or sensory processing sensitivity. A highly sensitive person (HSP) has an increased awareness of the social stimuli around them. They tend to notice the voice changes, facial expressions, and body language of other people. A highly sensitive person (HSP) can also be stimulated by side [...]
Signs of Low Self-Esteem in Your Marriage
Healthy relationships are places of safety and nurture. When you feel secure, loved, supported, seen, and heard, you will flourish. A marriage can be a place of safety, but it can also be an emotionally or physically inhospitable space. When two people get married, they bring their respective strengths and weaknesses into the relationship. Wherever the couple starts, there’s room for growth and overcoming [...]
5 ADHD Coping Strategies
Having ADHD often means that we have to adapt our behavior and routines to fit in with our neurotypical families, jobs, or friends. This can be exhausting and make us feel ashamed, frustrated, or hopeless. Most of the time we gravitate towards certain tasks or actions because they help us feel more centered, even when we can’t fully understand why. It’s helpful to know [...]
Couples Counseling: Finding Help for a Toxic Relationship
Romantic and other relationships exist on a spectrum that runs from healthy and functional, all the way to unhealthy and dysfunctional, or toxic. Each of us gets into relationships with a history that affects how we perceive ourselves and our partners and that history also shapes our expectations and fears about intimacy or communication. That means that in every relationship, there is always room [...]