For many people, drugs and alcohol are a way to medicate deeper emotional wounds. Taking care of those wounds in therapy is a great way to improve your overall mental wellbeing and your relationship with drugs and alcohol.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has now lasted almost two whole years, and during that time it has had a huge impact on many areas of our lives. Many people have found their existing depression has gotten a lot worse over the pandemic, and other people have developed depression for the first time in their lives during Covid-19. In this article I’ll outline a couple of ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic has affected us all and could contribute to worsening depression symptoms.
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Major depressive disorder can be incredibly difficult to live with. If you have experienced depression yourself, then you have probably wondered what you can do to help alleviate it in your life. If you are struggling with major depressive disorder and you want to try to help your mental health without the support of medication, here are some ideas to help you get started.
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If you’re suffering from depression, or you’re not sure whether what you are experiencing is depression or just a temporary low mood, you might be looking for a quick way to assess how you are feeling from an outside objective perspective.
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If you are struggling with negative moods, feeling “off”, or having low self esteem, it might be hard to tell sometimes if what you are experiencing is just a temporary low point which is nothing serious, or if you are experiencing a depressive episode in your life. Understanding whether or not you are suffering from depression can be incredibly important in how you treat whatever mood you are in and whether or not you seek help.
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If you are struggling to resolve disagreements in your relationship then you might be wondering how to come to more connection and communication with your partner. If you look past the surface issue to take a look at what is really going on, you stand a better chance to resolve disagreement and come to resolution.
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Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are four common reactions we see when someone has endured a traumatic experience. In trauma healing, understanding and reconciling the reactions of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn is essential to heal post-traumatic stress.
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We all have parts of ourselves that are sometimes difficult to love. Learning to cope with and be with the difficult parts of ourselves is an essential step towards healing and self acceptance. Learning to accept these “difficult” parts is an important part of trauma healing, healing from depression, anxiety, or low self esteem.
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Harm reduction is a great way to help you assess and improve your relationship with drugs and alcohol so that you can avoid the negative effects of addiction and overuse. Harm reduction is a central part of my philosophy in drug and alcohol counseling and I find it very helpful for people struggling with their drinking or drug use.
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Learn to use “I statements” to improve your communication and increase intimacy with your partner. I statements are an extremely important part of a connective relationship and healthy communication habits.
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I want to talk about an acronym that I found really useful in working with some of my clients lately. This acronym is from some mindfulness meditation teachers, and they use it to describe a process of managing through thoughts when you're in meditation. It’s a way to deal with thought patterns that might be getting in the way of your focus. The acronym is R-A-I-N, and it stands for Recognize, Accept, Investigate and Nurture.
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Today I want talk a little bit about a couple of ways that you can ground yourself when you're feeling overwhelmed. So, when you have a lot of anxiety or a lot of overwhelm, as a lot of us are having during this pandemic, it's important that you have a couple of tools in your back pocket that you can use to help yourself calm down and ground. So, I'm going to go through a couple of different ways that you can quickly and hopefully, very easily, bring your activation level down and bring your anxiety level down a couple of notches.
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