How to Tell If You’re Depressed
How to tell if you are depressed. Go through the signs and symptoms.
Blog Archives
5 Common Signs of Depression
5 of the most common signs of depression. See if it’s depression or just sadness.
How to be a Good Sexual Partner to Someone Who’s Been Abused
What to do when your partner has been sexually abused.
What is Depression?
What is depression? Here’s signs of depression and how depression is treated.
How to Help a Loved One That Has Mental Health Problems
Want to know how to help a loved one with mental health problems? Here’s how.
4 Signs you may have PTSD
Here’s the four questions. Ask yourself these, and if you answered ‘yes’ to 3 or more, you may be suffering from PTSD
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love The Frown
Holding two conflicting emotions is actually important for your mental health.
How to Tell if Your Therapist is Effective
Setting up an initial consultation with a new therapist can be scary and intimating. It’s normal to wonder what you might talk about or what you should ask to determine if this is the right therapist for you. For my consultations, I always want you to leave the meeting knowing at least three things. If you are going to meet a therapist for the first time, keep these in mind and if the therapist doesn’t provide them, make sure you ask. The Therapist grasps my concerns and can verbalize them. I make sure to spend time asking a lot of nosy questions to really understand what brought you here in the first place. I also place emphasis on reflecting this back to you, making sure I got it right. This starts us out on the right foot, and leads to the second important piece of the consultation. The Therapist reflects realistic goals framed around my concerns and individualized to me. After I’ve done a quick assessment and made sure I understand your concerns, I talk with you about realistic and operational goals that therapy can help with. This could come from a conversation around symptom reduction or future directions you want to move in. Goals can be changed and revised as we work together, but you should know initially what can be accomplished in therapy and roughly how long this will take. The Therapist explained to me what working with them would be like. Finally, I spend time explaining what my approach is like, and how that will be individualized to you and your goals. I want you to have a good grasp of what to expect from me, and what kind of work will be expected of you to meet your goals. There are, of course, more things that are usually covered in a consultation. But these are the most important points to cover so you can decide if a therapist will work for you and help you meet your goals.
How To Move Through Emotions, Rather than Fighting Them
One of the reasons I love my role as trauma therapist, is witnessing and partaking in the growth and healing of my clients. I tell them I am a co-partner on their healing journey, I do not see myself as wiser than, or an expert, rather a trusted guide. I mentioned in my first blog, what is trauma therapy, how bearing witness to this phenomenon of healing is beautiful. My definition of beautiful may be different from most since it includes pain and suffering in addition to emotional ease, it does not shy away from raw, unbiased sorrow and grief. In a culture such as ours in the United States, which labels pain as “negative” and overmedicates our natural, healthy and even necessary emotions, it is my job as a trauma therapist to encourage my clients to move closer to their pain and suffering with acceptance of what they discover. True mental and emotional health does not decipher what feelings are “good” or “bad,” it allows all emotions to be seen, felt and expressed without judgment. Learning to trust that your emotions are nothing to fear is an essential part of reaching emotional health. This can be a difficult task, especially if one’s emotions are creating unbearable symptoms after a trauma. Often, symptoms such as panic, anxiety, or depression are increased by one’s fear of them, not the raw emotions themselves. If you believe your feelings are ugly and scary, then you’re really telling yourself that you are ugly and scary. By learning to accept your feelings in the instant you notice them, you can then be intentional with what you need, creating compassion for your emotions and overall self. For example, if I notice I am feeling sadness, I could allow it to be there without naming it “bad” and allow myself to cry. If I were to label my sadness as something negative and push it away, I will not allow myself to cry and thus stop the natural unfolding or release to occur. This can manifest later in anxiety or panic since my sadness became stuck and stagnant with no movement of release. In therapy, my clients discover which emotions they hold judgments for and which become stuck and increase their trauma symptoms. Slowly and with patience, clients learn to accept all of their feelings and thus, themselves, which create emotional freedom and decreased symptoms. Like anything challenging in life, this process takes practice and compassion, but it is worth it. You are worth it. “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”? Pema Chödrön
Depression? Maybe It’s Shame
There is a great article in the New York Times about the connection between negative early childhood experiences and chronic shame. Hilary Jacob Hendel writes about a patient who experienced an invalidating and cold environment in a child and points out that: “One innate response to this type of environment is for the child to develop chronic shame. He interprets his distress, which is caused by his emotional aloneness, as a personal flaw. He blames himself for what he is feeling and concludes that there must be something wrong with him. This all happens unconsciously. For the child, shaming himself is less terrifying than accepting that his caregivers can’t be counted on for comfort or connection.” The same is true for childhood trauma. In trauma therapy, I explain to my clients this devil’s bargain of exchanging shame for a sense of psychological security. This shame is internalized and usually persists into adulthood. For the trauma therapist, one major goal is to uncover this shame and work through it. Shame can manifest on the surface as anxiety, depression, avoidance, you name it. Often its roots lie in trauma, and when we tackle it head-on, we can be free of it to live a more authentic life.
What Is Trauma Therapy for PTSD?
What Is Trauma Therapy for PTSD? I say these words so often I forget they are a mystery to many. It sounds fairly scary and honestly, at times, it certainly is. Let’s first examine the definition of trauma before moving into the world of what it means to heal from it through therapy. Since you could read a definition on Wikipedia of trauma, here is my simple one. Trauma sucks. It hurts and it sucks. Trauma is inevitable for all human beings, but suffering does not have to be a part of the equation. Trauma is something our brains and bodies have not learned to process; it’s an unwanted visitor demanding all of our attention and we simply have none left to spare. It hijacks our nervous systems so strongly; it often manifests life-challenging symptoms and disorders such as PTSD. What is PTSD? PTSD stands for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. This disorder is common for anyone, but just because you have been traumatized, does not mean you will experience PTSD. PTSD must include various symptoms such as re-experiencing the trauma though nightmares and flashbacks or avoiding the trauma through feeling disconnected and disassociated to name just a few. These symptoms are not choices, just like the trauma experienced was not of your choosing. Trauma impacts every single aspect of our lives; our connection with ourselves, our bodies, our various relationships, and the world around us. Whether it’s a car accident, losing someone we love, a divorce, being psychically, sexually or verbally abused, trauma does not discriminate. It impacts us all. The good news? There’s a cure. And it is called therapy. Trauma focused therapy has been proven time and time again to help us reconnect with all which was once lost during or after the traumatic event occurred. I want to describe what I mean by cure. Therapy is not like a pill that makes all of the pain disappear. It is more like a weekly massage; bringing awareness and intention to the places that hurt and slowly, safely working it out of our being. Trauma therapists skilled in their knowledge of trauma’s impact on one’s whole self, help the survivor first understand their symptoms and then find tools and skills to decrease and hopefully, eliminate them; like finding the knot in our muscle and targeting it with treatment for release. Doing trauma therapy is vulnerable and very brave. Being in the role of trauma therapist, I have witnessed this bravery take place before my very eyes and let me tell you, it is beautiful. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
How to Know When You are Ready for Trauma Therapy
When I meet with people for the first time, they usually tell me they have been thinking about getting into therapy for a long time. They think about it. They research it. They find a list of trauma therapists in Denver and pore over their websites. Everyone wonders if they are ready for trauma therapy, and there is one big sign that the time is right for resolving past hurts. Your body and mind tells you it’s time. Trauma can lie buried for a very long time. Not forgotten, really, but just way back in our mental closets. Then it makes its way to the forefront of our minds. We find ourselves thinking or dreaming about things that we hadn’t thought about in a very long time. Sometimes these memories come screaming back in the form of a flashback, which is scary and unsettling. If old ‘stuff’ is coming up for you, it’s there for a reason. It wants your attention and needs some more processing before it can be laid to rest and you can move forward in your life. It’s important to trust your own body and mind’s wisdom.