Recently in Mental Health Category

Got those Thanksgiving blues? A sodden garden, overcast days and longer hours of darkness may lead to seasonal affective disorder. Can't get out of bed or off the couch? There are a few simple actions you can begin today to fight back and energize your life. They are totally free and can improve your relationship with the world and the people in your life.

A gratitude list is a celebration of the gifts already present in our lives that are often taken for granted or hidden. Like your garden -- once planted and established -- your gratitude gifts will grow.

All the situations in our lives, from the insignificant to the major, teach us exactly what we need to be learning.

We can help ourselves to remember this perfect teacher each day with a few simple words. Each morning we might find a moment to say, „I acknowledge and honor the teacher that is my life. May I be wise enough to recognize the teachers and lessons that I encounter today, and may I be open to receiving their wisdom.‰ We might also take some time each day to consider what our lives are trying to teach us at this time. A difficult phase in your relationship with your child may be teaching you to let go. The homeless person you see every day may be showing you the boundaries of your compassion and generosity. A spate of lost items may be asking you to be more present to physical reality. Trust your intuition on the nature of the lesson at hand, work at your own pace, and ask as many questions as you want. Your life has all the answers.

We do not need to suffer or live in poverty to be a spiritual person.

If you find that you are experiencing suffering in some area of your physical life, perhaps your spirit is asking you to look deeper in your search for what you want. For example, if you want money so that you can experience the feeling of security but money keeps eluding you, your spirit may be asking you to understand that security is not to be found through money. Security comes from an unshakable connection to your soul. Once you make that connection, money will probably flow more easily into your life. If relationships elude you, your spirit may be calling you to recognize that the love you seek is not to be found in another person. And yet, ironically, once you find the love, your true love may very well appear. If you feel stuck in suffering to live a spiritual life, try to spend some time writing about it. The root of the problem will appear and it may not be what you expected. Remember, the Universe wants you to be happy.

Emerson wrote about people's fear of trusting themselves. He saw that so much failure and misery in the world was a result of people failing to trust their own judgment. Yet the ironic thing is: We are always making our own decisions.

Either that or we make our own indecisions, which often lead to worse consequences than active decisions. In a way, not making a decision is a decision, too.

If we let others decide for us--then we've decided to let others decide for us, and that's also our own decision. And while it's fine to delegate decisions to others when they have more information or experience than we do, often we simply do it out of habit or out of fear that our own decision wouldn't be good enough.

Have you ever had a thought or idea but kept it to yourself or not acted on it because you didn't trust its worthiness? Have you ever then heard the same idea come out of someone else's mouth and suddenly felt a wave of emotion--justification, gratification, or even humiliation or resentment because you knew it was your idea first? Your ideas are just as good as anyone's! I've heard it said that everybody has at least two million-dollar ideas in a lifetime. What do you think separates the people who make the million dollars from the rest of us?

Action! Those people rely on themselves, trust themselves, and act! The rest of us have plenty of excuses, reasons why we don't trust ourselves, justifications for not acting--but in the end, we don't even get the chance to turn those great ideas into reality. Self-reliance means trusting ourselves to know what's important, casting aside excuses, and going for it!
If you don't trust yourself to know what's best for you because you're afraid you might be wrong, then whom or what do you trust? It's good to know--they'll be running your life until you change your mind. They'll have all your power, and they'll be the ones to decide whether you do something worthwhile with your life, or whether you simply pace off the minutes from here to the end of the line. And if you don't feel you are trustworthy--if you're living your life based on some kind of weighted average of all the advice you've been given from kindergarten until now--well, whose decision was it to do that?

It was yours. At least, it's yours now. If you've never thought about this before and therefore never had a chance to make the decision to trust yourself--why not make that decision right now?

You're always trusting yourself anyway, on some level; the final decision, or lack of one, always comes down to you. Why not cut through the confusion; the distortion; the doubt, resentment, and fear? Why not trust directly in your own inner sense of what is right and wrong, good and bad, worthwhile and worthless? This is your life. Why not rely on yourself?

The best part about therapy is that even after thirteen years, unlike your marriage, your relationship with your therapist will still be in the honeymoon stage.

Therapy isn't the real world. It's a fantasyland where you, the client, are the center of someone's undivided attention. But however seductive that is, it's a means to an end, not an end within itself.

Fantasyland is also where fantasies happen. And all of a sudden you find yourself wanting to be your therapist's best friend. This sort of attachment is beneficial as long as it never occurs.

In fact, for a long time I thought my therapist was only one-dimensional and didn't actually ever leave her office. In the evenings she just filed herself away and appeared like magic the next morning, bright, ready and alert.

You don't need to know that your therapist probably wanders around Target wearing a daggy Fleetwood Mac t-shirt, arguing with her overweight, chain-smoking husband and obnoxiously behaved children.

Seeing as I used to rank therapists slightly below used car salesmen, politicians and journalists on an integrity scale, I didn't hold out much hope.

The first psych I ever saw asked me if I was breast or bottle fed and the second one told me there were people far worse off than me. The third psych went psycho on me and I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

But my fourth psych seemed to be made of sterner stuff. She was nice enough, but it used to annoy me that all she ever wanted to talk about was my mother.

It wasn't until she told me a very lame fart joke that, in my eyes, she gained any street credibility. Up until that point I thought she was a bit of an Ice Queen, possibly based upon the fact that she was so competent at her job.

Most of my friends had therapists and we'd go out for lunch and compare and contrast. I was always smug because I KNEW I had the best therapist. What I didn't know was that I had a very transparent case of what the psychology world calls transference.

This means transferring a past relationship, usually but not always, your relationship with your parents, and projecting your positive (or negative) feelings about them onto a current relationship, usually with your therapist, who becomes the good (or bad) parent. So your therapist, in effect, is role-playing your fantasy parental figure for the sake of therapy. No matter how badly behaved you are, your therapist will still approve of you. The whole idea is to work out your childhood issues to your satisfaction.

Over time transference will fade and you realize that increment by increment therapy has actually worked and you can now hold your own in the real world.

Just as there is no such thing as the perfect parent, there is no such person as the perfect therapist, just the good enough one. And your mentoring therapist gets a big kick out of seeing you get better.

The same way a good enough parent can sit back at their child's high school graduation and think, "I didn't do such a bad job after all!"

What if you could snap your fingers and all your blocks, anxiety, and fears where no longer there? What would you be doing? How would you be feeling and in what direction would your life be going?

This is an exercise I do with my clients to help them become aware of what they want in their life and what is stopping them for achieving their dreams and goals.

Imagine yourself there for a moment. Hold that vision. What would be different about your life, if you no longer had obstacles in your way?

Having what you want does not have to be a fantasy. It can be a reality. What do you want to know and what needs to change in your life to get there?

That's where I come in. To guide you, lead you, push you, and help you develop the skills and tools you need to start down that path.

To heal, to grow, and to make changes, we all need help, support, and guidance to succeed in our lives. Reach out and find your team. Do something today that starts you on that journey. Take one small step toward your new life.

Good luck on your journey.

When we take ownership of our thoughts we are less likely to project our issues or disowned qualities onto others.

While we can try to avoid people we know who engage in projecting their stuff onto others, we can‚t always steer clear of such encounters. We can, however, deflect some projections through mindfulness and meditation. A useful visualization tool is to imagine wrapping ourselves in a protective light everyday. At other times, we may have to put up a protective shield when we feel a projection coming our way, reminding ourselves that someone else‚s issues are not ours. Although it‚s difficult not to react when we are the recipient of a projection, it is a good idea to try to remain calm and let the other person know if they are being unreasonable and disrespectful. We all know that it‚s not fun to be dumped on. Likewise, we should be mindful that we don‚t take our own frustrations out on others. When we take ownership of our thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings, we are less likely to project our issues or disowned qualities onto others.

"Whatever you are willing to put up with, is exactly what you will have."-Anonymous
It is never too late to learn about your boundaries. I am coming to believe that it is perhaps one of the aspects of living that most defines our maturity and facility for accomplishing our goals.

Boundary issues are common to most of us; in fact, our personal boundaries are the basic, yet often invisible rulebook that guides all of our relationships. Our boundaries define how and what we communicate, what we give and receive, and even, in the most basic sense, provide the parameters for what we expect from others and life itself.

Boundaries reflect how we love ourselves and what we value most deeply. They impact our capacity at work, with authority, with our money and our sexuality. Knowing when we want to say yes, when we want to say no, what feels like self-respect and where our own needs start and end are the foundations that build the sense of boundaries that control our lives.

An old friend once told me that our boundaries are the truest measure of how we love ourselves. I am not alone in my struggle for healthy boundaries. Learning to define our boundaries is challenging for many people because they are fluid and change with our sense of ourselves.

In order to not deal with the changing nature of creating a true relationship between our selves and the people we love, people often over commit to rigid boundaries or under commit to any boundaries at all. This explains why many relationships swing between the "doormat and bulldozer" syndromes.

On the one hand, we are accommodating to a fault, ever flexible and "nice," which both makes us the self sacrificing loser in most conflicts and the self righteous victim. On the other hand, the bulldozer is ever conscious of his needs, but frequently unaware of the needs of others. Characterized by a strong sense of entitlement, this rigid boundary style tends to win at conflicts but loses respect and intimacy in their relationships, often without recognizing what they are giving up.

Sadly these extremes characterize many relationships, from intimate partnerships to family bonding and work contracts. Establishing a true center for our personal boundaries is not an education that most of us get growing up; rather we are hardwired with our invisible boundary rulebook instilled in us as our sense of self worth and esteem. It has taken me half my life to realize that I am a better friend, mother and partner to others when I am a friend to myself first. Drawing the line in relationships that are dysfunctional and unhealthy is the only positive response you can generate.

The weakest link for most of us in setting boundaries is that we never learned that setting a boundary is equivalent to letting go of the outcome in a given situation. In fact, this is the key distinguishing feature between healthy boundaries and manipulative relationships. True boundaries, once set, release the outcome. It is a true letting go of what is not ours. Often the way that I have done them with my relationships is when my boundaries are perceived as threats. Not letting go, trying to control the outcome is a form of manipulation that often gets confused as boundary setting in many relationships.

Being Gentle With Ourselves

During those times when our lives are filled with what seems to be constant change and growth, it is important to remember that we need to be gentle with ourselves. Since it can be easy to use our energy to keep up with the momentum of our lives, we may not be aware of the fact that we are much more likely to run ourselves down. When things seem to be moving quickly, it is especially essential that we make a point to slow down and be gentle with ourselves. 



It might be difficult to notice what is happening to us for we may be so caught up in the whirlwind of our lives that we lose sight of the direction in which things are heading. Being gentle with ourselves doesn't mean that we don't accomplish things. Instead it means that we honor ourselves on an ongoing basis and take care of the needs of our bodies. 



This means different things to different people. For instance, it could mean having a session with a healer; taking a remedy, herbs, or vitamins; or getting extra sleep. Putting our energy into ourselves in this way helps create space for a more positive, loving, and accepting view of our lives. By setting the intention to do so, we will be more cognizant of our energy levels on a daily basis and more able to replenish them as needed. 



The more we are able to treat our bodies with gentleness, the more tenderness and compassion we will call forth into our lives. Learning to understand and pay attention to what our self needs will in turn allow us to fill our lives with unlimited loving and healing energy and to truly take care of the things that mean the most to us.