Social Media and Suicide Among Teens

Social Media and Suicide Among Teens

Digital media, including social media, became a centerpiece of day to day life at a seemingly exponential rate. Before I graduated high school in 2006, I remember many evenings spent on ICQ (used to chat with friends), making simple websites with shout outs to my friends which included obnoxious lists of inside jokes, and playing The Sims Online. I whiled …

Couples Therapy Palo Alto: Relationships in the Tech World.

Couples Therapy Palo Alto

Being a Marriage and Family Therapist in the Bay Area specializing in Couples Therapy Palo Alto, means I have the privilege to meet clients from very diverse backgrounds. One of them is the Silicon Valley background which is a culture in and of itself. Clients and couples with this background share some distinct characteristics: high achieving, hard working, intelligent, ambitious, …

Family Stress Test

Counseling Plainfield Illinois

Family Stress Test Stress is a natural and normal “by-product” of every family’s life. In fact, family stress can bring out the best of us: as we stretch to meet the challenges we face, we become better parents, our children blossom and our families grow. But too much stress can spiral our families in the other direction. Take this Thriving …

Disorganized Attachment

Disorganized Attachment

Mary Ainsworth’s work on attachment identified three attachment categories (secure, insecure avoidant, and insecure ambivalent/resistant). The development of the disorganized/disoriented classification evolved as a part of Mary Main’s doctoral research in which she noticed that approximately 10% of infants in Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Procedure were difficult to classify.1 Disorganized attachment is an additional attachment category that was identified in 1986 …

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the most widely used evidence-based treatment for depression and anxiety. In CBT, the focus is on thoughts, and how they directly affect emotions, and behaviors. If you are having a lot of negative thoughts, you are likely to have a lot of negative feelings. During cognitive behavioral treatment, you and your therapist will work together …

How Well Are You Listening to Your Children and Others?

How Well Are You Listening to Your Children and Others?

When our children come to us with a problem, we usually want to help them. So we console, interpret, advise, distract or praise. Other times, we feel we must teach our children, and so we interrogate, lecture, moralize or order. And probably more often than we’d like, we respond angrily—blaming, criticizing, ridiculing, shaming or withdrawing. However, all of these responses …

A therapist near me or online counseling

A therapist near me or online counseling

Your Reaction to “The New Normal”: Are My Thoughts And Feelings Normal? How Are You? No, Really, How are you? The answer to this question is often a resounding, “Eh.” As therapists, we see the silver lining in this: emotional honesty (we can see your eye roll). We have found that because we are in a difficult common experience, we …

Psychology Articles, Therapy News, and Mental Health Topics

Psychology Articles, Therapy News, and Mental Health Topics

A great resource for Psychology Articles, Therapy News, and Mental Health Topics. The Panelist is valuable place to find articles on health and mental health as well as current events. A recent article that was featured spoke about flouride added to the water, and it’s negative effects. This article also spoke about the possible links of water flouridation to ADD …

What is Anxiety?

What is Anxiety?

(Wikipedia) Anxiety is an emotion characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behavior such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints, and rumination. It is the subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is a feeling of uneasiness and worry, usually generalized and unfocused as an overreaction to a situation that is only …

Are You Financially Avoidant?

Are You Financially Avoidant?

You come home and see the pile of unopened bills and bank statements, but instead of opening them, you move onto something else. Maybe you come up with a justification for passing that pile for the umpteenth time, or maybe you stuff the slight feeling of panic back down and ignore it. You have no idea what your credit score …

4 Money Disorders that Show Up in Couples Counseling

Couples Counseling Dallas-3

Money is one of the most common causes of conflict in a relationship. Therefore, it’s one of the most common things that people deal with together in couples’ therapy. Of course, oftentimes the issue turns out to be something other than money – such as issues related to trust, security, or even childhood trauma. But in some cases, there are …

How To Spot A Psychopath

Couples Counseling Dallas

Psychopaths have a reputation for cunning and ruthlessness. But they are more like you and me than we care to admit. Psychopath. The word conjures up the image of a cold-blooded killer, or perhaps a fiendishly clever but heartless egoist. There’s Ted Bundy, who in the 1970s abducted women, killed them, and had sex with their decomposing bodies. Or Hannibal …

What Is Solution-Focused Therapy?

Couples Counseling Pacific Heights

Solution-focused therapy, also called solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT), is a type of therapy that places far more importance on discussing solutions than problems (Berg, n.d.). Of course, you must discuss the problem to find a solution, but beyond understanding what the problem is and deciding how to address it, solution-focused therapy will not dwell on every detail of the problem …

Sex Addiction-Induced Trauma (SAIT) Among Partners and Spouses

Sex Addiction Counseling Houston

The Sex Addiction-Induced Trauma Model© (SAITM©) articulates thirteen dimensions of trauma relevant to the clinical impacts, injuries and symptoms among intimate partners of sex addicts, based on both qualitative research and clinical application with partners and spouses impacted by sex addiction and compulsivity. Each dimension is a cluster of traumatic impacts, traumatic processes, and post-traumatic symptom sequences. Not all clusters …

Psychology’s Five Revelations For Finding Your True Calling

Counseling Hartford

If, like many, you are searching for your calling in life – perhaps you are still unsure which profession aligns with what you most care about – here are five recent research findings worth taking into consideration. First, there’s a difference between having a harmonious passion and an obsessive passion. If you can find a career path or occupational goal …

New Hope For Depression

ketamine-for-depression

Every week, when Ian Hanley sits down with his therapist, he goes through a list of depression treatments he’s been researching online. The best-known treatments at the top of the list–half a dozen antidepressants and known combinations of those drugs–are all crossed out. “My therapist says he’s never had this much difficulty with somebody,” says Hanley, “which is sort of …

Microdosing Medical Marijuana for Depression

Medical Marijuana-5

We can’t help but think sometimes that “more is better.” However, that is often not the case when it comes to medicine. For example, small daily doses of aspirin may help reduce stroke risk in some people. However, a whole bottle of aspirin is dangerous. Likewise, you don’t want to overdo it with medical marijuana for depression. People typically need …

High-Functioning Depression

Counselling Ottawa Nepean

High-functioning depression, or dysthymia. may be harder to detect than major depressive disorder (MDD) because the people living with it are often high achievers who make you think everything is all right all the time. I had a difficult time beginning this piece because the topic hit very close to home. I’ve suffered from depression pretty much my entire life. …

Hearing colors and tasting sounds

Counselling Ottawa

Can you taste sounds or visualize symphonies of color whenever you hear a song? If your answer to these is “yes,” you may have a wonderful condition known as synesthesia, which you share with many great artists, writers, and musicians. Writer Vladimir Nabokov had it, and he called it “color hearing.” By his own account, Nabokov saw each letter in …

How Your Mind, Under Stress, Gets Better at Processing Bad News

Couples Therapy Fort Lauderdale

Some of the most important decisions you will make in your lifetime will occur while you feel stressed and anxious. From medical decisions to financial and professional ones, we are often required to weigh up information under stressful conditions. Take for example expectant parents who need to make a series of important choices during pregnancy and labour – when many …

Where Does Happiness Reside in the Brain?

PTSD-trauma-therapy-long-beach

Neuroscience research points toward the role our brains play in our happiness, even if we don’t understand all the brain’s mysteries yet. Ever wonder why we get a warm feeling when we come home? Or why laughter makes us feel so good? Or why, even though exercise is good for us, so many of us tend to avoid it? If …

On Self-Loathing

Counselling-Ottawa

We are all our own worst critics. Truly, we beat ourselves up for things that others would never even think about, let alone berate us for, and we often hold ourselves up to damned near impossible standards. That’s all pretty normal. What can be a cause for concern is when several contributing factors all team up to make us truly …

Does Nature Shape Our Personalities More Than Nurture?

Newport-Beach Psychologist

The nature vs. nurture debate is nothing new. Simply put, it’s a question of whether genes or environment matter more when it comes to how our personalities are shaped. This is an ongoing debate and will likely continue to be because there are so many ways to look at it. It’s important to keep in mind that nature refers to …

Infantilization and What It Means to Infantilize

Newport-Beach-Psychologist

The simple definition of infantilization is treating a child much younger than their actual age. For some parents, this becomes their ‘normal’ way of child rearing, and it can lead to unhealthy development in the child. But, it’s usually an issue with the parent that triggers infantilization in the first place. It’s not uncommon to look at your little one …

The Complexities of Self Sabotage

Newport-Beach Psychologist

Learn more about what it means to self-sabotage and how you can overcome it. A behavior is said to be self-sabotaging when it interferes with long-standing goals and makes it harder for one to succeed. To put it another way, self-sabotage is the conflict between your conscious and unconscious desires that manifest in self-limiting patterns. Self-sabotage can be severely damaging …

Toxic Conversations & Objective Truth

Palo-Alto-Therapy-Counseling

In a key moment of the final Trump-Clinton presidential debate, Donald Trump turned to a question regarding Russian president Vladimir Putin: “He has no respect for her,” Trump said, pointing at Hillary Clinton. “Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.” The two debaters then drilled down to try and gain a more nuanced understanding of the …

What Happens to Creativity as We Age?

Palo-Alto-Therapy-Counseling

One day not long ago, Augie, a 4-year-old Gopnik grandchild, heard his grandfather wistfully say, “I wish I could be a kid again.” After a thoughtful pause, Augie came up with a suggestion: Grandpa should try not eating any vegetables. The logic was ingenious: Eating vegetables turns children into big strong adults, so not eating vegetables should reverse the process. …

Alexa, Are You Safe For My Kids?

Palo-Alto-Therapy-Counseling

Earlier this month, the toy-giant Mattel announced it had pulled the plug on plans to sell an interactive gadget for children. The device, called Aristotle, looked similar to a baby monitor with a camera. Critics called it creepy. Powered by artificial intelligence, Aristotle could get to know your child — at least that was how the device was being pitched. …

Do Cultural Differences Change What Depression Feels Like?

Palo-Alto-Therapy-Counseling

The contrasting ways Chinese people and Westerners express symptoms could point to distinct experiences of the same disorder. Just after lunchtime, on a blistering summer day in Washington, D.C., cultural psychologist Yulia Chentsova-Dutton is showing me the stars. They’re on her computer screen at Georgetown University, and labeled disturbingly: insomnia, anhedonia, headache, social withdrawal, chronic pain, and more. Each star …

When Anger is Your Go-To Emotion

Palo-Alto-Therapy-Counseling

Anger is my emotional factory setting. I inherited the trait from my father. He used to punch empty cardboard boxes in the grocery store, where he worked after school. His father had been angry too; Wilsons have been short-tempered for generations. It didn’t help that when I was a kid playing sports, over-aggression was prized. It was called being competitive. …