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Successful Goal Setting

January 25, 2021
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The start of a new year can bring out hope, excitement, and a resolve for personal growth. Often people will enter the year with goals or resolutions. Wellness goals are some of the more popular types of goals. You may want to begin a new fitness plan, lose weight, try to eat better, or work towards mental wellness. Setting goals can inspire you to focus on your future aspirations and work towards that. An important but often overlooked aspect of wellness has to do with setting appropriate, manageable, and attainable goals.

If you are considering coming to counseling, I would encourage you to think about one or two goals for your mental health that you are hoping to achieve from the counseling process. A common goal in the counseling realm is called “emotion regulation”. This is an all encompassing term for being able to control our reactions to situations around us, to display emotions appropriately, and to effectively handle the many stres ...

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Goals
Self-Care
Therapist

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Contribution
Control
Deep Breathing
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Weathering a Crisis

November 4, 2020
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Weariness is a word that I’ve heard many times in 2020. We are in the midst of a global pandemic, a divisive election and racial injustice and tenision. Those factors layer us with added stress, anxiety and pressure. In the midst of all that... life continues on. We get sick, lose loved ones, move, lose jobs, lose a baby, go through a relationship break up and have accidents. Due to the taxing nature of our country and world, we don’t have the energy reserves to deal with more. Recently my family experienced one of those big losses. The kind where you wake up and it hits you. You re-remember each morning the heartache and reality of your situation. You feel the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. You are weighed down by the grief over the reality of what happened. You experience a gripping panic over what life will be like. Life’s stressful events can have a detrimental impact to our current and future mental and physical health. In ti ...

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weariness

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Sleep
body care
counsel
movement
play

Parenting and Self-Care

October 20, 2020
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You board the flight, stow your carry-on luggage, and settle into your seat. Maybe it’s because you’re queueing up a few podcast episodes for the trip, taking care of a few last-minute emails that can’t wait, or distracted by your 3-year-old who is already making a valiant attempt to lick every surface within reach, but you’re only faintly aware of that worn-out phrase drifting over the cabin intercom: “In the event of a sudden drop in air pressure...secure your own oxygen mask first before assisting others.” If the announcement registers at all, it may even provoke a hint of annoyance!

To be fair, the oxygen mask phrase and the idea behind it is so commonplace that most of us have probably often heard it used as an analogy for responsible caregiving. “You can’t care for others if you don’t care for yourself.” On its face, it’s a pretty simple concept. Both on airplanes and in life, we assume we’ll have the presence of mind to secure our own ...

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Parenting

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coping
relationships
self-care
stress