Boosting Your Immunity
After recently traveling and being with a lot of people, it was a different experience from my familiar distancing, masking up, and isolating. For me, like many, the Covid experience was a lot of isolating and the social thing was an adjustment. It seems that the reports I was hearing was being around others was life-threatening, but after getting Covid and now having the antibodies has...Learn More
Breaking an Addiction
Beyond all the theoretical approaches, the social support networks, the medication, the paraprofessionals, friends, and family, the thing that will get you through addiction is your determination. Psychologists explain addiction as a hard-wired pattern that is hard to break. When a stimulus happens, for example the desire to use, it is hard-wired to respond by using. Any attempt to stop this...Learn More
Why Can’t I Just Fix This On My Own?
The answer to the question above is you can, given the know-how. When I graduated from High School, I was depressed, anxious, and didn’t know a thing about life. I did pretty well in school, with what was taught there, but nobody taught me about what was really important – how to keep myself emotionally stable. At that time, my family didn’t deal with my emotions. If you acted out you were...Learn More
Kissing the Boo Boo – Self Help
The aim of this organization is to teach people the skills to help themselves. At Basic Steps Mental Health, we understand that we cannot fix anybody, that that isn’t our job, the real fixing comes from each person. However, without the proper tools and mindset, any tools learned will fail. In the book “Self Helping” by myself, I step a person through many tools that help us on four levels:...Learn More
Self Help Tool | Free-Form Writing
Do people heal? This question was asked of me when I started working at a luxury treatment facility in Malibu. The nighttime supervisor only saw warehousing of clients and no recovery up to that point. My reply was, “Just watch.” Unfortunately, my clients were healing too quickly and this didn’t fit my boss’s treatment philosophy, so I was let go. I guess it is a bad business model to...Learn More
Befriending Anxiety
This is a subject I hold true to my heart. This is what brought me to therapy and this road I am currently on. Is anxiety bad? No, far from it. Anxiety alerts the system that something is wrong. Anxiety is a great teacher if you are willing to learn from it. Oh yes, our society tries to shut anxiety down. Drinking, other substances, and even Psychiatric medicine can numb its call, but if you...Learn More
Forced to Take Care of Myself
I am under the weather. Does the weather cast an evil spell, if so it got me. My body is a good guide to how I am treating myself and obviously, it is telling me to improve my efforts greatly. Oh, I kid myself believing that I get the exercise and proper diet each day, but deep down I know it is a lie. I love fast food and there are times I simply don’t work out. Now my lying to myself has...Learn More
Anxiety Friend or Foe?
When I graduated with my master’s degree at the University of Santa Monica, the famed surgeon Dr. Bernie Segal who wrote the book “Love, Medicine, and Miracles”, gave the commencement speech. He wished pain upon us all because with pain people are motivated to change. The same applies to anxiety. Anxiety is the mind’s way of getting our attention. Anxiety friend or foe? When you are in...Learn More
Virtual Therapy
In 1994 I began treating people with substance abuse and mental illness problems. From this time, I have always looked for that secret ingredient, that special something, that would “heal all”, as hopefully, most therapists are doing. Just because I’ve had amazing success, I guess that desire, to perfect what I am presenting, is still ingrained in me. Therefore, I am always tweaking my...Learn More