An extremely common issue I’m faced with in the treatment setting is depression, coupled with chronic pain. In my field, we reference these individuals as the co-morbid, meaning there are two or more illnesses occurring within an individual at the same time. This is important to note because often times, treating the issues simultaneously yields…
Purchase: Emotional Wound First Aid Kit If you answered YES to more than one of these questions, there is reason to suspect that an emotional injury, wound or pain is present in your life. I often suppress my feelings. I choose to keep hurtful events a secret. I hold anger or resentment. I have trouble trusting…
As we all know, puberty is a very stressful time. It’s a time of change in multiple facets of adolescent lives: physiological, physical, psychological and social as well. It takes some time to get used to all the turmoil. Some of the most shocking physical changes are the growth spurts, new growth of hair and…
The point of trying something new is to try something new. I frantically repeat this Radically Open DBT principle in my mind while standing with wobbly legs and then falling from my paddle board into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. This wasn’t even my idea! Embarrassment knocked at the door of my…
If you are like many people, the shift in time and “falling back” with our clocks the passing of day light savings time will mean a bonus hour of sleep and a progressive shift towards shorter and darker days as the sun sets earlier each night. It also means that you’ll likely experience changes in…
By Glyndora Condon MS MFT LPC Meaning in life seems to provide nurturing according to studies that measured health and life behaviors (Health Psychology Review, Vol. 11, Nov. 4, 2017), and over 90 percent of Americans appear to believe that their lives are meaningful according to several reviews provided by the University of Virginia,…
As a psychotherapist, I’m in the business of hearing how people, especially women, talk about their bodies using hateful and disparaging terms. They aren’t alone. I’ve done the same myself, and so I know how hard it can be to make peace with our imperfect bodies (are they ever anything else?) let alone feel loving…
Before we became parents, many of us had an ideal image of what that role would look like. This image is often based on our own experiences of being parented. Consequently, we might decide to parent our children similarly, or we might enter into parenthood with a determination to parent in a dramatically different way,…
Clients come to my office for a number of reasons. For example, when they’re feeling depressed, when they’re feeling anxious, and when they are experiencing conflict in their relationships, but also when they’ve become bored with their lives. For these people, meaning and engagement in life seemed to have disappeared without conscious awareness, and not…
As soon as I stole one glance in his direction, I knew I’d love him forever. He looked at me from the corner of his eye and I was sure he was feeling the same way. I was so excited because I didn’t know if I could ever feel that way again after my last experience.…