Doorways of Opportunity
You’ve seen it, people moping around as if there is a dark cloud above their heads. As a therapist, I see it in body posture, overall energy, and the feeling of someone feeling defeated. I guess, when life becomes one disappointment after another you just expect it to continue this way. How do we stop this slow progression into the pit of despair? Why do all the negatives keep showing up?...Learn More
The Key to Getting through School
When I was 32 years old, I decided to go back to school and study something I was interested in – Psychology. It had been 10 or so years since I dropped out of Long Beach State, but wanted to get out of the construction trade and knew that I needed to finish my Bachelor’s degree. In my first class back, the teacher told us we needed to read something 10 times to memorize it. 10 times!...Learn More
Motivation – A Deeper Cut
As the exploration continues on improving motivation, one thing that needs to be emphasized is the importance to address a problem on all levels to get the maximum results. We took a good look into the physical level, now we will into getting our mindset into proper focus. The mental level will amaze you. When you realize how powerful you are and how to focus on this ability, it becomes...Learn More
Have Hope, Dare to Dream
If you have the opportunity, a great book to read is “Love, Miracles, and Medicine” by Dr. Bernie Segal. He helped people with advanced cases of cancer heal and sometimes without medical interventions. He advocated having the desire to live. There aren’t a lot of clinical books on the value of hope, but with hope, we can suffer through a lot and make it to the other side. In the book, “Man’s...Learn More
Tis’ the Season for Depression
Welcome to the holiday season. If you’ve had issues in the past, they tend to surface this period of time. Remembrances of family, relationships, friends can stir up a lot of difficult emotions and memories. In school, they would say, “If you think you are enlightened, wait till you go home for Thanksgiving.” Using the holiday season as a healing journey can be empowering. Avoiding these...Learn More
Are You a Doer or a Viewer?
An interesting topic popped up in a process group this week about being a doer or a viewer. How would you answer this? I often wonder if our tendency to explore our world or simply watch it stems from the family we grew up in. Did your family of origin tend to sit and watch the television or were they active? When I grew up, I played all the sports and went to baseball and basketball games...Learn More
The Start of a New Year
With the start of a new year our thoughts can go one of two ways: To grow, adapt, and be a better person, or to drag the familiar past with us. How do you envision your new year? Are you hopeless or hopeful? To me, life has always been a battle to remain positive. It seems as if there are so many forces in the world, trying to bring us down. It isn’t that hard to see the suffering, the anger,...Learn More
Getting Over Loss
Getting over the loss of somebody special is not an easy task. In graduate school, they taught us people have to feel their feelings during this period. Feeling your feelings for somebody that is not used to feeling emotions can be a difficult process. The intention of this article is to assist people who are struggling with loss to get through it. Loss can be as simple as the loss of a pet or...Learn More
Three Foot Tosses for Mindfulness
We play a basketball game in our program where people are asked to take three shots from a marker that is three, six, nine, twelve, or fifteen feet away from the basketball hoop. When you sink a basket, you make positive points, if you miss, you make negative points. The point of the game is to make the most positive points you can. Each marker is equivalent to the number of points you make....Learn More