After two months full of beach trips, ice creams, pool days, drive-in movies, cookouts, and backyard campings, it is time to pack the backpacks and return to school. Fall is always a busy and stressful season for parents, students, and all school personnel. Although we are faced with different challenges, we all experience mixed feelings [...]
Tag: Change
About Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, is a therapeutic technique that allows your brain to reprocess a negative event, memory, or situation that has occurred in your life and gives you the ability to think about the event in a more adaptive way. Sometimes when an event like that occurs, the brain gets stuck [...]
Sometimes It’s Not Just One Thing That Can Help Us Maintain our Healing
Over the past few years, it has been both a personal and professional observation that the people who have been successful on their mental health wellness path utilize many different coping strategies and coping skills. Often, I think we all sometimes, in one form or another, look for the “quick fix” or the one thing [...]
The Holidays as an Opportunity to Grow
By Jennifer Drum, Resident in Counseling This time of year is as emotionally colorful as the lights we see in store windows. Holidays, like other yearly marked events, offer us an opportunity to look inside our hearts to see where we have arrived as of now. We may find ourselves not just reflecting on ourselves but also [...]
Grieving the Loss of a Pet
The loss of someone you care deeply for can feel absolutely devastating. The same goes for the death of a cat, dog, or any other pet you may have. The experiences and feelings we have with our pets are unique to our relationship with them. There is no one else that has experienced that relationship [...]
Break Through Resistance
It happens to all of us. We make a commitment to change, and then, resistance hits. Unexpected barriers, that we don’t know how to deal with, can be one of the biggest reasons that we don’t achieve our goals. Resistance can easily discourage us and give us reasons not to change. For some people, resistance [...]
Spoiler Alert: Comparative Suffering Helps No One
Comparison is the key part of comparative suffering. We try to rank suffering and privilege. Who has more? Who has it better or worse than me? What are they doing that I am not? In an attempt to create a hierarchy of feeling, we are actually impeding empathy and compassion. Comparative suffering can work in two insidious [...]
Three Ways to Improve your Mood
You’re doing the therapy thing but still feel some lingering depressive symptoms. Or perhaps, you just can’t seem to fit therapy into your calendar or budget but want to kick the familiar pings of overwhelm and exhaustion that are surfacing again. Whatever the reasons, if you are feeling a bit more run down and want [...]
How to Deal with Transition
With summer in full swing and the “hopeful” end to a global pandemic on the horizon, we are experiencing transitions of all kinds. Spending more time out, moving, starting a new job, entering higher education, engagements, weddings, having a baby, becoming an empty nester… All of these transitions can be exciting, scary, sad, and any [...]
Tips to Prevent Relapse
Identifying External and Internal Triggers Related to Addiction In early recovery or sobriety, it is important to identify external and internal triggers that may lead to relapse. Relapse is a return to prior behaviors after a period of remission. For example, a relapse is when a person returns to alcohol use after a period without alcohol use. Relapse and the Recovery [...]
Connecting On A Bridge
When you’re crossing a bridge, it is very difficult to avoid coming into contact with others. I found myself on a trail recently where I had to cross a bridge and thought about turning around when I encountered a group. There was worry about my dog who hasn’t been around other dogs in a long [...]
What Comes First, Motivation or Action? Part 1
I see many clients who battle with a lack of motivation. Lack of motivation can range from struggling to keep up with daily chores, to feeling unable to get out of bed in the morning. If you are feeling unmotivated to engage in activities you used to enjoy, this can be concerning to some people. Feeling [...]
An Open Letter from Alycia
Dear Healthy Minds Family, I sincerely hope as you read this email, you are in good health. I recognize your hearts and minds may be filled with fear and worry. As the world continues to change around us, I still walk alongside of you. The events going on around all of us are heartbreaking and [...]
Change is hard. But worth it.
By Jack Fox, M.A., Resident in Counseling Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash Are you healthy and well, or just comfortable? Comfort can be a tricky subject when dealing with health and wellness. Often times, individuals find themselves in poor health, either mentally or physically, because they are comfortable and unwilling to change. Humans are conditioned to seek the [...]
New Year, New You?
Photo by Danil Aksenov on Unsplash By Dr. Debra Rezendes, HMT Resident in Marriage and Family Therapy As one year closes and another begins, it is natural to think of what we hope the journey ahead entails. Certainly, New Year's resolutions can be guide posts to help us stay on track towards big goals. But often, we tend [...]